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Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 7:55 pm
by admin
Fake News, Self-Censorship and the Three Stupid Monkeys
by Charles Carreon
December 10, 2016

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“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” This formulation was first declared to me by some peer at the age of three or four – a veritable wise man he seemed to me – revealing the meaning of the mysterious three-monkey tableux so often encountered among the knick knacks adults accumulated in those days. It was a big revelation: the three monkeys, the first covering his eyes, the second his ears, and the third, his mouth – were a visual representation of the concept. Oh, now that I understood, how wise and virtuous those monkeys seemed. I understood in a flash why they were venerated by so many of the great and powerful big people. They were not taking in, or spreading “evil.” These monkeys were definitely on the right side of the game, since everybody knew “evil” was the worst thing of all.

So I was really surprised when I told my dad that I’d realized how important the wisdom of the three monkeys was, and he told me it was a bunch of crap. Nobody, he explained, should keep their mouth shut about evil. If there was evil going on, we needed to find out about it. We needed to see it, hear it, talk about it, and put an end to it. My namby-pamby see-no, hear-no, speak-no-evil pose went up in flames that day, and I’ve held a grudge against those cowardly monkeys ever since for leading me to make an ass out of myself in front of my dad.

Recently, I heard that an anonymous website had just come up with a list of suspect websites proliferating “fake news” to advance a Russian agenda, and the Washington Post elevated this website to the status of a genuine news-origin certifying authority. I did not bother to be concerned. People who will avoid the blacklisted news outlets are engaged in proactive self-censorship. By supporting the list, they tell everyone in earshot that they aren’t hearing or seeing fake news, so it’s impossible that they will speak it. Their minds won’t be contaminated by fake news, and no one can blame them for spreading it. If the thought police look in their heads, they will find them empty.

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Three-monkey relief carving (hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil) on Shinkyusha. Nikko, Japan

Fake News (To the tune of “Downtown”)
by Charles Carreon
12/10/16

Turn on the TV
Hear the things that they’re saying
Well it sounds a lot
Like News

Pick up the paper
Read the things that are written
Well it surely looks
Like News

But now the “Prop or Not” List
Has landed in my Twitter
And Huff-po, WaPo, Daily Beast
They all are in a flutter –
What to Believe?
The Rooskies are under the Bed
The Chinese are here to be fed
This is
Fake News!
Let’s see if it’s on the list
Oh dear, Look at it right here,
Fake News!
Straight from the Kremlin, they say!

Power’s corrupting
And media has power
To sell Fake News!
Now who do you think
Might be in a position
To buy Fake News?

I mean the news is spozed to
Give you all the skinny
The straight dope and the lowdown
And the truly on the level.
Good luck with that!
Citizens United took over your head
Now the screaming liberals
Say Conservatives are Red
This is Fake News
Don’t try to sell me this
Fake News
I know this shit’s on the list
Fake News
Just stick this right up your ass.

Truth is expensive,
So they use it quite sparingly in
Fake News
Like the sun’s in the sky
And there’s a base on the moon
You call that Fake News?
Your mind is just a playground
For thoughts of other’s making
Your choices like a baby’s candy
Right there for the taking.

They have to lie, too
The Rooskies are under the Bed
The Chinese are here to be fed
This is
Fake News!
Let’s see if it’s on the list
Oh dear, Look at it right here,
Fake News!
Straight from the Kremlin, they say!

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Sun Jan 22, 2017 4:55 am
by admin
The Royal Hunt of Donald the Terrible
by Charles Carreon
January 21, 2017

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THE PLEASURES OF SHOOTING. AFTER LUNCHEON THE "BEATING" IS A LITTLE WILD.
[Michael J. Morell, Michael V. Hayden, James Clapper, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Hunters; Donald Trump, Tiger]


Washington loves nothing so much as a hunt, and the hunt started by the CIA, that set CNN and the rest of the press to croaking like a swamp full of bullfrogs, has been a Royal Hunt, indeed. Built of purest innuendo, the “intelligence dossier” that gave room for full-bore accusations of treason against the President Elect, has been elevated to the level of “credibility” by circuitous statements that hang from nothing but their own brazen assertions. Take this sampling of tautological statements that attempt to turn the “intelligence dossier” into something other than naked slander:

Jesus fucking Christ. This gun isn't smoking. It's burst into flame. "The memos describe several purported meetings during the 2016 presidential campaign between Trump representatives and Russian officials to discuss matters of mutual interest, including the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton's campaign chairman, John D. Podesta." This is the evidence that the election was corrupted by the Trump team's collusion with a foreign power, and it seems very very very likely Trump knew. Treason.
-- Rebecca Solnit (Tweet), The New York Times

“Look, don't take anything in this dossier as gospel. But it's definitely evidence in favor of some pretty extraordinary claims.”
-- Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp

Stunning and believable narrative in leaked docs describing alleged rift in Kremlin over meddling in US elections … Bombshell if true: Trump lawyer @MichaelCohen212 & Kremlin reps allegedly held clandestine August meeting in Prague
-- Borzou Daragahi @borzou

With CNN confirming that intelligence chiefs consider this report credible, it's about time to start using the word "treason."
-- Markos Moulitsas @markos

The evidence is questionable, but the idea looks entirely plausibleUnverifiable sensational details aside, the Trump dossier is a good reflection of how things are run in the Kremlin … with methods borrowed from the KGB … [so] whatever the truth of Putin’s connections with Trump, [it’s all] pretty scary.
-- Andrei Soldatov, The Guardian

Regardless of truth or falsity, I can see why they thought the president-elect should know.
-- Former CIA Director Michael Hayden


The New Journalism: Believing Double-talk From People Who Lie for A Living

Using weasel-words like “alleged,” “purported,” and “not-Gospel,” to describe the “intelligence dossier,” while simultaneously citing it as “evidence of treason” is just doubletalk. Journalists used to help us make the distinction between allegations and evidence, but that’s not the approach they’re taking here – urging readers to believe for the sake of believing whenever the story is good enough to believe. That a narrative is “stunning and believable” is a description of good fiction, not an indication of its accuracy. That an idea is “plausible” does not commend it to the wise for acceptance, but merely for consideration. That intelligence agents sometimes pass on information “regardless of truth or falsity” does not suggest that, by being passed along, false information becomes true.

But the authors of these words are all urging us to jump to another conclusion, not so tediously weighed down with logic: “When an ‘intelligence agent’ says something, even without a witness or anything more than their own words to support it, we must all stand up and salute it as ‘evidence’”. Well, for those of us with a memory longer than, say, 18 months, we can remember all the way back to when a spook was a spook, and his word, without evidence, was the worthless doubletalk of people who would have to kill you if they told you the truth. How times have changed.

“Less Here Than Meets the Eye”

Americans have been given a choice: to believe that Russia has its hand up Trump’s butt, and is running him like a puppet, or to deny that this is a proven fact. Those of us who are less than convinced that we are facing a commie takeover by Donald the Terrible don’t get a second chance to believe. We’re out of the discussion, exiled from “liberal” society, that has somehow decided to believe whatever the CIA has to say about the guy who was headed for, and now is sitting in, the White House. When we try to run down the facts behind the “intelligence dossier” that has been adopted as true by the same crowd that told us to watch out for “fake news,” we discover there are none. It’s all conjecture. As Tallula Bankhead famously observed, “There is less here than meets the eye.”

The Goal? To Imprison the President in Failed Policies

But the lack of evidence never sways the faith of believers. The beaters in this Royal Hunt have dedicated all of their firepower and noisemaking ability at flushing the President out of his lair and straight into the policy prison where the entire Establishment is now wailing that all Presidents must reside. Or what? There is a possibility of what? A rupture with past policies? An overturning of existing relationships? The reordering of relationships?

All those briefing books Trump refuses to read – they’re full of catechism, not knowledge. They are the latest advice from a cadre of pinheads who haven’t done anything particularly right in US foreign policy as far back as they’ve been an influence. Their catechism teaches that military expansionism is good foreign policy, and their dominance of all Washington thinking has now metastasized into the giant boil of pissed-off spies erupting on the forehead of official Washington in a grotesque, pulsing tumor. The only thing more grotesque than the CIA's resort to McCarthy-era propaganda tactics is the convulsive Seig-Heiling of the media lackeys as one body, thrilled at last to be part of the "liberal agenda."

Mistake me not for a Trumper, on this day or any of the remaining days of his administration. Nevertheless, the McCarthyite clamor now resonating the echo-chambers of the media regarding Donald Trump and the “Russian hacking scandal” is mere journalistic flatulence occasioned by gluttonous consumption of fact-free propaganda. What effect it will have on the policies of a man who seems to be hell bent on driving his motorcade through the front yard of the approved political habitation has yet to be seen.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2017 5:24 am
by admin
A Brief Introduction to Jaynesian Bicameralism
by Charles Carreon
January 22, 2017

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Julian Jaynes didn’t quite convince Richard Dawkins that the theory of mind proposed in his 1976 psych-classic, “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” was correct – Dawkins remains on the fence about whether it’s pure bullshit or pure genius – but Jaynes certainly won first prize for Most Provoking Title for A Serious Book. Jaynes was competing in the burgeoning post-Freudian psych-theory market where Szasz, Laing, Leary and Lilly had already pitched their tents, so he undoubtedly wanted to cut through clutter and get people to hear his idea. The only drawback to his strategy is that, to the pedestrian ear, Jaynes’ dramatic declaration sounds a little like, “We Come From Crazy Ancestors Who Had A Breakdown, and Became Us.”

Bicameralism, Split-Brain Syndrome in Pre-Iliadic Humanity

Jaynes argues that our ability to cognize ourselves as human beings results from the linguistic integration of the two hemispheres of our brain. Jaynes further argues that for millennia, our human ancestors possessed a “bicameral mind,” in which the two brain hemispheres collaborated without the medium of self-conscious awareness, before the activity of naming events, objects and living beings blossomed into the magic of individual consciousness. If you were equipped with a bicameral mind living in the Indian subcontinent in 4000 BC, according to Jaynes, you literally could not think “I,” much less, “I should pick these mangos to eat later.” You’d just pick the mangos, eat as many as you could, and save some for later, because of learned responses generated by your nervous system, that he calls “aptic” systems, i.e., systems that make us apt at performing certain actions, what used to be called “instinct.”

The above illustration presumes that mangos are familiar, and thus no stress is created when they are seen. The person sees the mango, knows it is food, eats and stores it. But suppose the same person discovers an unfamiliar fruit outside of their usual domain. Now the bicameral mind might kick into action. The right brain might manifest as a voice, emanating from a haze around the fruit tree, and that voice might say, “Eat of this tree, for it is good.” Why? Since the idea of the self does not exist in the bicameral mind, the idea of aiding the self to survive cannot arise. Jaynes’ vision of these type of people includes even the heroes of the Iliad, such as Achilles, Hector, and Menelaus, all of whom ascribe what seem like rash, passionate actions to the irresistible power of the gods, whose voices drive them to act in ways that modern humans would call intemperate.

The bicameral condition of pre-Iliadic man, is therefore one of unconscious action, directed by forces either automatic or hallucinated. The automatic forces are the “aptic systems,” and the “divine” hallucinations are provoked by the untethered right hemisphere. Jaynes supports his interesting theory with evidence derived from split-brain research that proves that, in cases where the physical mechanism of hemispheric interconnection is physically damaged, the right brain and the left brain fail to integrate two things: perceptions and concepts. The integration of perceptions and concepts is a metaphor-fueled activity that occurs due to the interaction of brain hemispheres and the speech centers of the brain. Self-awareness and self-interest then supplants the visionary hallucinations.

Bicameralism in Westworld

A modern Jaynes fan, Marcel Kuijsten, head of an Institute dedicated to his theory, was recently interviewed on the topic of bicameralism after the term was uttered on the current TV series, “Westworld.” Kuijsten described the bicameral mind as what humans have “after language develops, but before we learn consciousness [so that instead] of an introspective mind-space, we’re hearing a commanding voice when we have decisions to make [until eventually humans] develop the ability to have introspection and little by little, the hallucinations are suppressed.”

“The hallucinations” that are associated with the “voices of the gods” must be understood to be quite different from something like “the voice of conscience,” which is a conscious structure constructed of concepts, that couldn’t exist in a bicameral mind. Unlike Jehovah, these “gods” perform no miracles, command no one to do the impossible, and exert a pure authority. By “pure authority,” I mean that when their inner voices speak, the bicameral people act. Bicameral minds cannot ponder the “influence of the divine” upon the “self,” nor can they choose by an act of “free will” to behave as “a sinner” or “a saint.”

Submission, Not Anarchy, Is the Bicameral Condition

So far, so good, but without a coordinating authority, would not all of these “gods,” shooting off their mouths in everyone’s head, create chaos? How can it be that, as Jaynes argues, bicameral minds operated the first agrarian societies, managing vast irrigated fields and timed harvests, gathering all the grain into central granaries, and operating complex administrative systems? As Kuijsten helpfully explains, summarizing Jaynes’ idea – bicameral people tended to hear the boss’ voice:

“You would hear the voice of the chief of the tribe, or the king, and then as the leader died, what would happen was that followers would still hear his commanding voice. So that’s why you see all around the world, the dead are treated as living, and fed, and propped up, and worshiped. So in the death of the leader, we see the birth of the concept of the gods. In ancient Egypt, for example, each king that dies becomes the God of Osiris.”


Thus, argues Jaynes, when the Chief died, people continued to get advice from him, a lot like the Clooney character showing up to help out the Sandra Bullock character in Gravity, described in this review:[1]

“[T]he scene in question involves the return of Clooney’s veteran astronaut, Matt Kowalski. Late in the game, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) has reached her breaking point. She thinks that she has exhausted every possible opportunity to return home. She shuts down the oxygen the capsule that contains her, and prepares to asphyxiate. But she’s woken out of her stupor by her supervisor (Clooney), who reminds her of one last option she hadn’t explored. Only the catch is, Kowalski’s still dead, and Stone was – what? Imagining him? Envisioning him? Conjuring his essence? The scene is open to multiple interpretations.”


Well, if you were about to pull the plug on your ventilator because you couldn’t figure out how to save yourself, it might push you right back into a bicameral condition. Note the Bullock character has exhausted all of her conscious resources. This is a situation that, however good it is for the rest of her life, is just not being adequately addressed by “consciousness,” and so, she reverts to bicamerality long enough to get that “aha” experience, and rediscover what is beyond the known. But how would she explain it to the folks back at home? So she would quickly revert from bicamerality to consciousness, as soon as the danger was over.

Brain Plasticity and Post-Conscious Humanity

How did humans graduate from bicameralism to “consciousness?” As best I can tell at this stage of the reading, through language. By learning to attach names to perceptions, to discrete objects, to persons, and then, to the self. Having cognized the self, we can begin to experience it, to use it, and to recognize it in others.

Because Jaynes was arguing that human brains now operate differently from those of our ancestors with the same cerebral hardware, he also had to argue that this change in function was possible, thus throwing in his lot with the newly-emerging paradigm of brain plasticity. Today, we have plenty of evidence that the brain repurposes its neural resources with great flexibility, and can thus agree that the functioning of the brain has evolved as linguistic capacities developed, causing newer brains to be wired more efficiently as generations have grown up with ever-more sophisticated speech resources, including of course, the Internet.

So one must ask: if our consciousness arose from the “breakdown” of the bicameral mind, due toits inability to handle the stress of ambiguous situations as efficiently as a “conscious” interface, what could lead to the “breakdown” of consciousness? Could it be the labor of keeping up with machine intelligence? Could it be the overtaxing of consciousness by loading it with too many alternatives for a single mind to process? And if so, what would the next evolutionary stage be?

_______________

Notes:

[1] http://www.cinemablend.com/new/George-C ... 39723.html

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 6:25 am
by admin
Has It Happened Here?
by Charles Carreon
February 15, 2017

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Each Night & Day I Pray for the Fall of the U.S.A.
[Trump] SWAMP … TOO BIG. TRUMPTHOR DESTROY EVERYTHING!
— by Tara Carreon


The nation’s self-image has suffered a blow from which it will never recover – the President’s weird hair flip is the new logo for “USA” on every TV in the world, pushing aside the Stars and Stripes. Trump’s flip is as recognizable as a Coke can, and far more menacing to the world’s governing elite. President Donald has put the world on notice that the U.S. Presidency is his job to do as he pleases.

Campaign slogans like “drain the swamp” have been traded for “buy Ivanka’s stuff.” What swamp? Damn Nordstrom! Of course the Goldman guys are in charge of the gold! Must we talk about women again? Look, the good old days at Studio 54 are forgotten – abortions are verboten. Energy? The national parks are being carved up for immediate exploitation in a big way. Criticism? Those who don’t like our program will be acquainted with the business end of a pitchfork. None of this is what you’d expect from a man who ran as the sworn enemy of Washington corruption. He seems born to it.

Who’da thunk it? He lied. But I don’t hear a swelling rebellion from the trailer parks, the suburbs, the Walmart parking lots. Those angry white guys wanting a fair shake aren’t worried about the swarm of Wall Street bankers pouring into the Trump Administration. Why?

The entire ship of state is listing backwards into the past, the far past, like Reconstruction. Under Republican rule, realities can change very quickly. A little nudge with controlled demolitions, and the dominoes started falling after 9/11: Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, NSA domestic spying, all metastasized during the Cheney Years. Now, thanks to the incredibly stupid children’s crusade that passed for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the USA is once again trussed up like a submissive at a BDSM party, ready to provide complete satisfaction for plutocrats now dressing without shame as total Nazis.

A lot of people are sure that there’s going to be a great big rebellion. Kathleen Parker gives Trump’s impeachment an ETA of 2018, at the latest, when she predicts a protest vote more powerful than a soccer mom’s backhand will give Democrats a Congressional majority in both houses, and remove all vestiges of Trump from the Oval Office, if the occupant is not by then already President Pence.

I’m not so sure. I note that sales of “It Can’t Happen Here” have surged 12,000% since Trump took office. Sinclair Lewis’ demagogue is Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a homespun, straight-talking politician with the confidence of a carnival barker, who rises to power on a populist platform, and implements a corpocratic dictatorship with brownshirts, clubs, and all the good stuff. There are uncannily close parallels between Buzz Windrip and Donald Trump, and many of us have been waiting all of our lives to see how it would play if an economically devastated white, male voting public were given the chance to vote for Buzz – or Donald. Since we now have the answer to that question, we move to the next one.

Might it be possible to organize all the bigots now polishing rifles in anticipation of defending their homes against rampaging hordes of illegals? Perhaps they could be offered jobs policing and transporting illegals and other undesirables out to the border wall? And running the internment camps that will have to be set up in every community to manage the outbound migration. Since there are large numbers of Americans who believe that the country is under threat, and who are familiar with the use of weapons and security equipment, they actually stand ready to be recruited to imprison their fellows.

In a relatively plausible scenario, these people could be recruited anonymously and secretly, and organized into neighborhood cells. Before launch day, their neighbors wouldn’t know what was being already prepared. One day, the neighborhood cell would all get emails, and in unison, begin patrolling the neighborhood as a security force, and assist in the immediate arrest and deportation of illegals and other undesirables.

If this scenario were in force, it would be logical to take it all the way up the chain of command, and take over power stations, government offices, and transportation facilities. It would be a flash Blitzkrieg. Hitler would be impressed with the efficiency, at how the communication system could be used to take over the system it was intended to serve.

Anyone can see that implementing these scenarios is well within the realm of the possible, and could be used to establish paramilitary, dictatorial rule with the active participation of a minority of citizens to procure the surrender of the majority. We tend to think that so long as a majority of the people would not approve of such a shift in power, it could not happen, but that is not correct. All it requires is for people with strong, malevolent intent to work diligently to spring the trap, using the power of surprise and state-sanctioned lethal force.

I can hear the huffing and puffing from people who reject all such scenarios as utterly absurd, an impossibility. One question? Did you predict that Hillary would win?


Burn
by Rancid

13 red and white stripes flying
White for skin and red for dying
Why can't i
Walk on through
And not feel like
One is in hell
We don't need no water
Let the motherfucker burn

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Sun Feb 19, 2017 7:15 am
by admin
The Art of War: How Will Team Trump Fare on the Field of Battle?
by Charles Carreon
February 18, 2017

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Sun Tzu, author of the Chinese strategy classic, The Art of War, observed that if you take a proper accounting of the strengths and weaknesses of an army, you can forecast how it will fare in armed conflict. Five factors must be assessed to determine which army will win an armed engagement: philosophy, climate, terrain, leadership, and military methods. Sun Tzu commends those who would engage in armed conflict to the consideration of these factors:

“Which government has the right philosophy?”
“Which season and place have the advantage?”
“Which commander has the skill?”
“Which system has strong incentives and effective punishments?”
“Which forces are strongest?”


Analyzing the Factors That Lead to Victory

The most effective organizational philosophy unites owners, managers and workers behind a common goal. The best managers promote the right philosophy, choose the right season for action, and fight only when it makes sense. When does fighting make sense? Only when, after having made the assessment, they know they will win. Indeed, the first step in successful warriorship is analyzing one’s own forces and those of the adversary before engaging in war. As Sun Tzu observes:

“Some commanders perform this analysis.
If you use these commanders, you will win.
Keep them.
Some commanders ignore this analysis.
If you use these commanders, you will lose.
Get rid of them.”


Like military commanders, business leaders should take stock of their chances in the market by performing a similar analysis. A business will thrive if its workers share a group purpose, are coordinated, have the equipment needed to do their work, apply sound business methods, and enjoy good leadership. Looking at the Trump administration’s first actions, we can see that this organization does not score well in this analysis.

Philosophies That Lead to Victory

First, let us consider the administration’s stated philosophy -- to make America great, as it once was, before terrible things began happening sometime after Reagan left office, and the nation’s spirit was darkened by an evil emanating from the liberal media. Trump’s philosophy blames outsiders for America’s lost greatness, and seeks to restore it by erecting protective barriers. He will build a wall to keep out job-stealing immigrants entering from the south. He enacted the now-defunct travel ban to keep out terrorists from seven Islamic countries. He wants to tax imports to keep out cheap goods from China and elsewhere.

This philosophy has the capacity to unite only what is, on a good day, a slim majority of white male voters to preserve their advantages as against encroaching “minorities” that are rapidly moving into the majority. This union of disaffected white men was sufficient to win one election against a very poorly-chosen Democratic candidate who withered in the heat of Trump’s white-hot incitements. Whether this narrow philosophy can carry Trump farther will depend on what the other factors contribute to his administration’s performance, because Trump’s plan to Make America Great appeals only to a small portion of the electorate, and negatively motivates a wide swath of opposition.

Consider the Climate

Second, let’s consider the climate in which the Trump administration is operating. Climate is driven by timing, seasonal changes, and weather, that can be hostile or accommodating to one’s military or business plans. Even the Wehrmacht could not defeat a Stalingrad winter while dressed in summer clothes. Consider the significance of the numerous indications that climate catastrophe is much closer than previously predicted. Trump’s “drill, baby drill” approach to energy policy is poorly-timed, and his rejection of renewables -- wind, solar, conservation, and the smart grid -- pivots the nation away from technological strategies that will bring the most value to the nation during the impending planetary heat wave. Trump’s plans for the nation would be better suited to that time when the USA seemed to have limitless resources from which to draw and endless room in which to discharge waste. Those times are gone, and enshrining wasteful technology as “American” will not make it economically viable.

Now let us consider the economic climate. Trump rode in on a wave of discontent among the formerly middle-class, who have watched their advantages swept away by economic devastation due to financial excesses, governmental disinterest, and the all-devouring thinking machines. Trump made promises to the emerging underclass, and is now expected to deliver. Many people will give Trump a few years to deliver the bacon to their front door, but they won’t wait forever. Eventually, unless of course an actual war blows up to distract us from our domestic poverty, Trump will be judged by those holding bags of student loan debt that they are unable to service due to lack of gainful employment. At that point, the climate could turn truly nasty.

Skillful This Is Not

Third, let us consider what kind of skill the President has demonstrated, which I define as the ability to accomplish your purpose. Trump’s first act of authority was to enact the travel ban. On the plus side, it was bold, decisive, and a lot of people thought it would be successful. Putting it into sales-speak, Trump treated his Executive Order banning immigration from seven countries as a new product that would sell well with his target market, and he was right. It was a hit with Trump’s base. Encouraged by what he knew would be mass approval from his adulating crowds, Trump was confident, and therefore he thought he was ready to launch.

Trump believes that launching the product tells the public you’re confident of success, and since confidence breeds success, you must launch quickly. Trump was in such a hurry to launch that no one had time to review the constitutionality of his Executive Order. Trump’s team didn’t call anyone to play “Devil’s Advocate,” and went to market with a vulnerable product. Then the competition pounced.

The opposing team highlighted all of the travel ban’s bad consumer features: people locked out of the country, people stranded in foreign airports, people blocking airports in support of detained foreign nationals locked in the TSA offices, and lawyers besieging the courts with the assistance of two state governments – Washington and Minnesota -- that claimed their sovereign interests, their state educational institutions, and their citizens, were injured by the travel ban. Trump is not intimidated by judges -- perhaps in the course of filing 3,000 lawsuits, he has come to view them as mere functionaries whose will is usually an extension of his own. And it’s not been long since Trump impugned the impartiality of the Hispanic Federal District Judge presiding over the Trump University lawsuit. So when the travel ban was held unconstitutional by Seattle Federal Judge Robart, Trump’s caustic tweet was hardly surprising:

The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!


Bad enough, you say, but a day later, the President had focused his 140-character assassination weapon directly on Judge Robart, proactively making him the fall-guy for the terrorist attacks that Trump is trying to prevent:

Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!


A few days later, the Ninth Circuit panel agreed with Judge Robart, putting the Executive Order on hold indefinitely, turning Trump’s predictions of victory into a further source of embarrassment, and fueling further Twitter attacks on the judiciary, as the President tweeted his defiance:

SEE YOU IN COURT!


The phrasing was not inspired, but his meaning was clear. Screw that liberal Ninth Circuit panel, he was marching right up the street to visit SCOTUS and straighten this out. But a few days later, Trump’s Department of Justice announced it would not appeal the President’s loss to the 8-member Supreme Court. Instead, Trump would issue a new, improved Executive Order to accomplish the same purpose that had already been found unconstitutional. None of this was skillful.

Trump should have at least been advised not to tweet his final brazen boast. He should have listened to someone who could have told him that the 8-member Supreme Court hasn’t delivered a right-wing win since the conservative majority lost its enfant terrible, Justice Scalia. Surely someone could have told Trump that the evenly-balanced Court would probably not overrule this Ninth Circuit decision in a month of Sundays, especially after all the anti-judicial hate-tweets emanating from the White House. Instead, he didn’t get this news until he’d already stuck his foot in it.

“Sad!” as the President is fond of tweeting. If Trump’s legal team had just waited for Congress to approve Trump’s ninth Supreme Court Justice, the grateful new appointee would have swung the decision over to Trump’s side. Through bad timing, Trump logged a loss where he could have notched a victory. To head straight for a judicial conflict without suitably establishing favorable conditions at SCOTUS was a dunderhead move.

To translate this sad tale into marketing-speak – after the product was rejected by consumers, retailers, and wholesalers, team Trump pulled the defective travel ban off the market with the promise to release a new, improved version really soon! Unfortunately for Team Trump, when a product fails, the market remains ready to reject all similar products from the same manufacturer, unless it can roll out something like “Classic Coke.” Unfortunately, “Classic Bigotry” doesn’t have that type of built-in market appeal, even with those prone to nostalgia.

A Slack System of Discipline

Fourth, we should consider whether the the Trump administration is improving team performance with proper rewards and punishments. Looking at the rewards, they appear to be distributed despite bad performance. Kelly Conway goes out and plugs “Ivanka’s stuff,” ends up looking like an ethics dunce, and is rewarded for her ethical gaffes with continued praise. Trump is apparently the kind of leader who doesn’t care if his players play by the rules, which assures they will not.

However, this slackness seems to be motivating “whistleblowers,” as national-intelligence leakers are now known, to subject Team Trump to a little discipline of their own. Many DC spooks are unfriendly to the Trump team, and this is producing dangerous fruit. It must have been very disturbing news to the President that the FBI had tapped General Flynn’s phone and was accusing him of breaking the law by talking to Putin’s man about Obama’s sanctions against Russia.

General Flynn is receiving swift punishment for activity that, in past administrations, would have been swept under the rug by an accommodating national security state. After all, both Nixon and Reagan had secret communications with North Vietnam and Iran, respectively, signaling the enemy that they’d get better deals from incoming Republicans than they would from outgoing Democrats. That didn’t get anybody fired!

These modern “intelligence agencies” seem to have a mind of their own. Trump and his team are wrapped in a Laocoön with fractious government agencies that bodes ill for him. If Trump doesn’t have control over the covert security apparatus of government, and cannot prevent it from striking at his minions, he is going to wield considerably less power than Presidents who can. Just imagine if someone at the FBI had tried to pull a similar number on Dick Cheney. A faceful of buckshot, literal or figurative, would have certainly been the upshot.

Mistaking the Source of Presidential Strength

Fifth, let us ask ourselves, how strong is Team Trump? In a group enterprise like representative government, strength comes from the ability to aggregate power to your position. Momentum takes a long time to build, moves swiftly when it is finally engaged, and makes things look inevitable once it has worked its magic. Strength must be cultivated in such an environment. It cannot be exercised before its basis has been established.

Trump may have most miscalculated in this area. He appears to believe that the office of the President comes with an inherent grant of authority, an illusion created by the skill that we call “looking Presidential.” Looking Presidential means never over-investing yourself in a single gesture, like the travel ban, so your prestige will not suffer if the gesture is rejected. Looking Presidential means not giving orders if there is any doubt they will be obeyed, because the appearance of impotence corrodes the mystique of power. Looking Presidential means showing grace when things do not go your way, acknowledging that being sporting means losing a hand now and then.

Prognosis: More of the Same, At Higher Speed

If Team Trump were a startup, I would have to give it next to no chances of survival as a profitable entity. This doesn’t mean that the entire Trump Administration will be ineffective in accomplishing desirable results for the clique of billionaires who have the President’s ear. Tremendous things could occur, because of course, the US government is not a startup. It does not operate under economic imperatives that demand that its products provide some saleable benefit. It can operate at a deficit, generating more credit to avoid making cost-benefit decisions, while carrying on with sentimental policies that provide psychological comfort to a shrinking cohort of backward-looking voters.

Ironically, the President most identified with the “businessman” mind-set in our entire history is now sitting in the Oval Office, pursuing policies that business leaders who turn a daily profit would instantly recognize as a sure path to failure. In a further irony, Trumps’ policies will blend well with the wasteful, failure-rewarding culture that dominates the military establishment, to which the largest proportion of national revenue is allocated. The revolving doors that enrich private persons and corporations at the expense of the nation will likely begin to rotate at speeds sufficient to generate turbine power and gale-force winds. Hold on to your hat.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 6:12 am
by admin
A Short Review of “The Water Knife” by Paolo Bacigalupi
by Charles Carreon
June 12, 2017

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


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I live in Tucson, Arizona, a town that has basically already dried up and blown away by the time the action goes down in this Climate-Catastrophe dystopian thriller. The action kicks off in the lush arcology of Las Vegas, where the protagonist, Angel Velasquez, works for the Southern Nevada Water Authority as a “water knife,” a hit man who works to keep himself living in an air conditioned Vegas arcology. A cool drink of water he’s not.

Angel works for Catherine Case, whose job it is to keep Vegas supplied with the water it needs to continue its existence in the parched American Southwest. Angel’s first mission is to lead a Blackhawk raid on the little town of Carver City, Arizona, a misbegotten burg that Case has targeted for annihilation by water-deprivation. Angel gets his score, and moves on down to Phoenix in his yellow Tesla roadster to investigate why his fellow-assassin, Julio, has gone silent when he’s supposed to be destroying lives and acquiring water rights.

Angel finds Julio, and they head down to the Phoenix morgue to look over the corpse of a man name of Vosovic. We don’t know it at this point, and neither does Angel, but Vosovic has been hideously tortured to death by Julio, who is pretending to be scared out of his wits, but is actually colder than a can of Coors, ready to get back to work on anyone who might be able to answer those difficult questions that water knives always have to be asking – who’s got the water rights? Torture for fun and profit is a topic that Bacigalupi enjoys exploring. He gets into the details, the modus operandi, and it may not make good bedtime reading if your sleep is easily disturbed.

At the morgue, Angel meets Lucy, a journalist who is always a little too curious for her health. Lucy is at the morgue looking for the corpse of one of her sources, James, a water-rights lawyer who thought he had found his ticket out of Phoenix somewhere in a stack of old paperwork. Digging through old, dusty water rights on an Indian reservation, James found some rights so old they’d been forgotten by everyone, so senior that only God could assert a claim of priority. Not surprisingly, James has been tortured to death in a manner identical to Vosovic – so relentlessly that he’s bitten off his tongue in an effort to end the ordeal.

Like a negative Grail, James’ water rights are deadly to anyone who touches them, and the bodies keep piling up. Amidst a landscape crowded with Texans dying of thirst, paying whatever the market will bear for water, we meet street trash like Maria and Sarah, whose daily existence is to be stalked by gangsters working for "the Vet," a psycho who keeps jackals as pets and feeds them people – people like Maria and Sarah, or anybody who doesn’t pay rent to him for the privilege of selling water or skin on his dusty gang turf.

You can guess that Angel and Lucy are going to get hooked up, and that either Sarah or Maria, or both, will get dispatched by the Vet’s gangsters, but you’ll never anticipate all of the twists and turns as these characters orbit the black hole of greed that surrounds the water rights James died for. Embedded in the book is another book – Mark Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert,” a serious work about the feckless exploitation of the rivers and aquifers of the Southwest by rapacious farmers and bureaucrats, the ancestors of Angel’s boss, Catherine Case. A first edition of Cadillac Desert is found on the bookshelf of every educated person who has the misfortune to inhabit the pages of Bacigalupi’s sad and prescient tome. I think he is suggesting that it’s high time we all read it. But I must admit, I started Cadillac Desert a few years back, and never finished it, opting to watch a rental copy of the multi-part PBS series that, somehow, hasn’t yet made it into DVD format.

I don’t know if The Water Knife will get turned into a movie, but it would be educational if it didn’t just devolve into a splatter-fest. After all the blood and the dust settles, the lesson that Bacigalupi is trying to get across is simple: there are two types of people. The first group of people see the ugly truth that humans have badly fucked up, and we are all going to pay the price. The second, much larger group, keeps believing the happy horseshit shoveled our way by the politicians and the media. I’m not sure we have a choice in what group we are in, but you could always kill your TV if you don’t want to be in the second group.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Fri Oct 20, 2017 9:39 am
by admin
Spy vs. Spy: Pan Am 103 -- To Be Onboard Was Not to Be Onboard
by Charles Carreon
August 30, 2009

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.




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Do spies kill spies? The answer seems self-evident -- spies killing spies is the raison d'etre of spy fiction and spy movies, from 007 to the Good Shepherd. However, what is readily believed when cast as fiction, seems just as readily rejected when proposed as an explanation for real-life events. Take the Pan Am 103 bombing -- can the fact that five secret agents were on board, accompanying a DEA drug mule, on a flight that was mysteriously half-full, a mere four days before Christmas -- be devoid of significance? When the Soviets downed KAL 007 in 1984, the presence of Larry McDonald, President of the John Birch Society, among the dead, was considered to have great significance. But five dead spies aboard Pan Am 103 provoked no similar concern. When Pan Am was sued for "willful misconduct" by the families of their dead passengers, its lawyer James M. Shaughnessy subpoenaed the CIA and DEA to obtain information relevant to the case, but never obtained a single page of evidence or a word of testimony, because the Department of Justice argued, and the trial judge agreed, that disclosing the information would endanger national security. The official investigators thus had no access to those sources of information either, and completely ignored the presence of these five international intelligence and security agents, i.e., spies, in attempting to determine the purpose, method, and perpetrators of the bombing. Here are their names and occupations:

Gannon, Matthew Kevin, foreign service officer, 34 years, born August 11, 1954, Los Angeles, California, seat number 14J. (Beirut CIA Station Chief)

McKee, Charles Dennis, army major, 40 years, born December 3, 1948, Arlington, Virginia, seat number 15F. (Defense Intelligence Agency)

LaRiviere, Ronald Albert, 33 years, born November 19, 1955, Alexandria, Virginia, seat number 20H. (Special Agent, U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Security Service)

O'Connor, Daniel Emmett, U.S. diplomatic service, 31 years, born September 22, 1957, Dorchester, Massachusetts, seat number 25H. (Special Agent, U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Security Service)

Curry, Joseph Patrick, army captain, 31 years, born March 21, 1957, Fort Devens, Massachusetts, seat number 44K. (Captain, U.S. Army Special Forces)


The presence of these five men aboard a doomed aircraft becomes more puzzling when we know that several other apparently better connected spies and diplomats, and their children, had canceled or "missed" the flight. These people were:

Steven Green, Acting Administrator of the DEA, had a reservation on the flight. Green has described being on the Heathrow tarmac, watching the doomed plane take off. Green later testified falsely before Congress, denying under oath that there were any controlled drug deliveries through Frankfurt Airport in 1988, even though Virginia court records document the deliveries, and a DEA agent has testified being at Frankfurt Airport in 1989, by which time drug traffic was so heavy, DEA liaison agent, Thomas Slovenky, was permanently posted at the airport.

Tom McCarthy, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, who, like Gannon, was returning from Lebanon to the U.S., and was booked on Pan Am 103, cancelled his flight.

Pik Botha, South African Foreign Minister, Gen. Mallon, Defense Minister, and Gen. Van Tonda, head of the South African Secret Service, and another twenty (20) delegates on their way to New York to sign the tripartite peace pact between Angola, Cuba, and South Africa, cancelled and took an earlier flight. South African Secret Service had close ties to the Israeli service and also to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The son of Oliver "Buck Revell," FBI Head of Lockerbie Investigation, "missed" the flight. Mr. Revell stated, "My son was in the army stationed in Germany and was due to come back to the United States on that particular flight."


If, unlike the official investigators, you are curious about these "coincidences," you will want to be aware of what the spies were doing on board, and who had booked their flights. One person who is curious, to the point of entertaining deep suspicions, is McKee's mother, Beulah McKee, who told Time Magazine in 1992, "For three years, I’ve had a feeling that if Chuck hadn’t been on that plane, it wouldn’t have been bombed. I know that’s not what our President wants me to say. I’ve never been satisfied at all by what the people in Washington told me.” Lest you think grief has twisted her perspective, consider another curious person, who has a more professional interest. The following quote is from the same article, entitled, "Did the Secret Team Bring Down Pan Am 103 to Silence Heroin Trade Whistleblower?" in April 1992. "Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director and co-author of 'The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,' believes that the presence of the [five-man intelligence] team on Flight 103 is a clue that should not be ignored. His contacts at Langley agree. 'It's like the loose thread of a sweater,' he says. 'Pull on it, and the whole thing may unravel.'"

So let's give that string a tug, and see what unravels. Gannon and McKee were aboard a connecting flight in Frankfurt, as the personal companions of Nazzie Jafaar. He needed to be watched, because his personal companion was a load of pure Lebanese heroin, that he was delivering to Detroit for the DEA, per the long-standing arrangement between the Agency and his family, whose fine product had been killing Americans for 50 years. In utilizing the Jafaars to procure heroin for use in "sting operations," the DEA had followed the example of Lucky Luciano, the Mafioso who had established an exclusive dealing relationship between the Sicilian and Lebanese criminal families. Gannon's body was found next to Jafaar's, even though Gannon's official seat was in First Class, and Jafaar's assigned seat was in row 53 at the very rear of the plane. A large quantity of heroin and $500,000 cash was found in the wreckage, as were six pistols, which even in 1988, could only be carried aboard commercial aircraft by special authorization, i.e., as the personal sidearm of a spy.

Now, assuming that you were a spy wanting to kill Gannon and McKee, what would your motive be? To answer that question, it helps to know what Gannon and McKee had been doing prior to the bombing, and what they were intending to do had they not been blown out of the sky. Gannon and McKee were working on the unending Lebanese hostage crisis that continued all through the 80's, as a series of Americans and other foreigners were kidnapped and held by Syrian and Palestinian forces in Beirut safehouses. The attempt to recover these hostages led to several U.S. foreign policy disasters, including Carter's failed commando raid and Oliver North's drugs for weapons for hostages deal, that encompassed bartering missiles from the Israelis, hostages from the Syrians and Palestinians, cocaine from Central America, and heroin from Lebanon. North's main man in the middle east was Monzer al-Kassar, a dealer in drugs, weapons, and counterfeit money whose wife was the sister of the Syrian Intelligence Chief, and whose mistresses were the daughter of Syria's president Rifat Assad, and a former Miss Lebanon who had previously been serially married to notorious terrorists, one an associate of Abu Nidal. When Gannon and McKee discovered that the CIA was in bed with an omnivorous snake like al-Kassar, they were furious and bound for Washington with the intent to blow the whistle on what they considered a rogue operation that had put their lives and official rescue mission at risk. Little did they know how right they might have been.

Assuming that the foregoing scenario provides a basis for concluding that other spies wanted to kill McKee and Gannon, who would have had the power to direct them into harm's way? That would have been Micheal T. Hurley, the DEA agent in charge of the Nicosia Cyprus operation, who coordinated his activities with the CIA Special Action Group in Weisbaden, Germany. Despite the fact that the itinerary was communicated through a secure link, Hurley revealed McKee and Gannon's itinerary to the CIA Directorate of Operations in Washington, to MI-6, the British Secret Service, and to SPAG, the CIA Special Action Group. That's a lot of potential enemies knowing the whereabouts of two men who had conceived objections to a plan that, as we know from the Iran-Contra hearings, was planned at the highest levels of U.S. government, in blatant violation of U.S. law.

Next we must ask whether anyone has ever asked Hurley if he targeted McKee and Gannon, and if so, whether he denied it? The answer to the first question is, "yes," because Hurley, apparently not under any secrecy restrictions, posed the question to himself in his book, "I Solemnly Swear." The answer to the second question is, "no," he does not deny it, and merely blusters that those who have questioned his role in the bombing "have a lot of gall." In support of his vitriolic non-denial, Hurley claims that the drugs-for-weapons-for-hostages deal with al-Kassar never existed. Since that claim is a lie, his statement stands as what we call, in the law, a "tacit admission."

One man who knew Hurley, and was well-positioned to judge his professional acumen because he worked for all three of the U.S. intelligence agencies -- the DEA, CIA and DIA -- was Lester Coleman, Defense Intelligence Agent, fluent Arabic speaker, and longtime handler for numerous middle eastern intelligence assets. Coleman, who lived with his family in Cyprus, was so disturbed by Hurley's willingness to traffic in information with virtually anyone, regardless of their lack of trustworthiness, that he withdrew from the operation in May, 1988. The death of Gannon, McKee, and Jafaar on the same airplane also put Coleman on guard for his own safety, because as is recounted in his book, "Trail of the Octopus -- From Beirut to Lockerbie -- Inside the DIA," Coleman knew Gannon and McKee had "switched to Flight 103 through RA Travel Masters of Nicosia, the DEA's travel agents on Cyprus." For making this, and similar observations, Hurley sued Coleman in England, and got "Trail of The Octopus" suppressed by settling with his publishers, who agreed to take the book off the shelves.

"Trail of the Octopus" was recently published for the first time in the United States in August 2009. In the book, Coleman wondered whether his supervisor Bill Donleavy, whose true name he had never known, might in fact have been Matthew "Kevin" Gannon, because his password/countersign combination had always been to tell his contact "Hello, I'm a friend of Bill Donleavy's," which would be reciprocated with "I don't know any Bill Donleavy," whereupon he would reply, "His friends know him as Kevin." Then after an old-time spook walk involving trips on random subways, double-backs, and trips through hotel laundry rooms, he would be ushered into Donleavy's presence. These charming routines were disrupted forever after the downing of Pan Am 103. The next time DIA "control" reached out to him was after Coleman appeared on the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, talking about the bombing. It wasn't Donleavy calling, but a new contact who called himself "Miller," who reprimanded him for speaking out of school, and gave no explanation for why Donleavy hadn't made the call.

Finally, in addition to Hurley, another spy has been identified who passed information about Gannon and McKee's itinerary to persons who shouldn't have had it. That was David Lovejoy, an arms-dealing CIA-agent with many other aliases, who might also have been an Iranian double-agent, and was definitely an associate of Monzer al-Kassar, and aided Oliver North's efforts to supply illegal arms to the Contras. James M. Shaughnessy, Pan Am's defense lawyer, has said that four investigative journalists told him they had listened to surveillance tapes garnered from phone taps on the Iranian embassy in which Lovejoy gave the Iranian charge d'affaires details on the movement of the five-man CIA/DIA team that planned to fly home on Pan Am 103. Lovejoy's status within the CIA, and the damning events, cannot be doubted. He was a member of the CIA Special Action Group, and in that capacity, met Nazzie Jafaar upon his arrival in Germany, and transferred him to other CIA Special Action Group agents, who shepherded him through Frankfurt airport security and delivered him to Gannon's custody.

In summary, several spies were killed on Pan Am 103, and a large number of people with connections to the security establishment caught other flights, after being initially booked on 103. Can you imagine if Gannon, McKee, LaRiviere, O'Connor and Curry had known that Green, McCarthy, Pik Botha and his entire entourage, had changed their reservations at the last moment, that they would have flown on that half-empty plane, three days before Christmas?

One final question you might want answered -- were there any warnings that a bomb would be placed aboard an airliner during the winter of 1988? The answer is "yes." There were at least eight. The Pan Am 103 plaintiffs submitted proof of several warnings as evidence that Pan Am was negligent in failing to take greater care when inspecting luggage. You may surmise that if the generalized warnings were that obvious, that many in the "intelligence community," especially those steeped in the eighties milieu of middle eastern guns, drugs, hostages and terrorism, would have known about the plot. If Hurley and his cohorts knew of the plan, then pushing McKee and Gannon aboard the doomed aircraft would just be a "twofer." Since a plane loaded with innocents was going to go down anyway, they might as well put a few troublemakers aboard. "Trail of the Octopus" recounts many exchanges with Donleavy and others in which it became clear that the DEA/CIA's careless style of operation had come in for criticism, and that higher-ups in the DIA wanted them shut down. These are quoted below.

"Trail of the Octopus -- From Beirut to Lockerbie -- Inside the DIA, by Donald Goddard and Lester Coleman" wrote:

'This CBN thing is getting to be a real pain in the ass.' Donleavy said. 'So is Ollie North and that whole damn bunch of kooks and weirdoes. We got this lightbird colonel running around loose, telling two and three-star generals what to do, and they're getting pissed off about it. So don't be surprised if we pull his plug. Starting with this cockeyed deal with the Hoobaka bunch. We want you to close 'em out, old buddy. Nothing sudden, nothing dramatic -- we don't want to make waves. Just let it die from natural causes, okay? Let 'em get on with it, but from now on, things should start to go wrong.'

***

Donleavy's strictures about keeping away from the embassy had focused particularly on the risks of associating with the Drug Enforcement Administration's 'cowboys', the DIA's contempt for the CIA under William Casey being exceeded only by its detestation of the DEA.

***

If Hurley asks you again if you can do something for him,' he said, 'tell him, okay. Otherwise he's going to get suspicious. But you don't tell him Condor is a DIA operation or let him think you're with DIA HUMINT. And under no circumstances do you tell him about any assets we have in place in Lebanon. If he wants to know who your contacts are over there, make 'em up.' 'Just string him along until we get things squared away. There could be a positive spin to it because now you can keep an eye on Hurley for us. We've been picking up some bad vibes on that guy. But watch yourself. That whole bunch is into cowboys and Indians. Just don't get too close.'

***

'You know, buddy, you don't have to do this if you don't want to,' Donleavy said. 'Those guys are bad news. Anything goes wrong, they'll just leave you face down in the shit.' 'The DEA, hell -- it's just one big mistake. Which is why we want you out there. To keep an eye on 'em.'

***

They WERE cowboys. Rock'n' roll cowboys, with beards, long hair, leather boots and jeans -- the embassy people couldn't stand them. Not their sort of bridge partners at all. And to see 'em hanging out upstairs with the spooks in their tennis shorts -- God, what a picture. America in action overseas.

***

But nobody could tell Hurley what to do. Not Connie, not me and certainly not anybody in Washington. They were all assholes at DEA headquarters, according to Hurley. They'd never understood him or what he was trying to do, he once told me.

***

'Okay,' said Donleavy, putting the pad away in his briefcase. 'You're all set. Now here's the national emergency.'

He produced a Mattel Speak 'n' Spell toy computer, and Coleman sat down slowly.

'What the fuck is this? Some kind of joke?'

'No joke, buddy.' Donleavy was deadly serious. 'I want you to take this out to Tony Asmar.'

'Come on, Bill. Are you kidding me? I'm risking my marriage for this?'

'Remember a year ago?' Donleavy said. 'When you pulled the plug on CBN and the Contra deal? Well, this is it. The bottom line. This is where you get to wrap the whole thing up.'

'With that?'

'Yep.' He patted the toy. 'You got a little something extra in there.'

'Great.' Coleman weighed it in his hand suspiciously. 'It's not going to blow up on me, is it?'

'Nothing like that. We put in an extra chip, that's all. When you sit down with Tony, punch in your code word, he'll punch in his, and you'll retrieve the data we loaded in. He'll know what to do with it.'

'Oh, God. Suppose I forget the code word. You know what I'm like with those things.'

'You won't forget this one. You're from the South. What's the Southern slang word for peanut?'

'You mean, goober?'

Donleavy beamed.

Next day, Coleman flew to Heathrow with the camera equipment and the Mattel Speak 'n' Spell, arriving on the morning of 6 September. From there, he took a direct flight to Larnaca, Cyprus, and after four hours' sleep, caught the midnight ferry to Jounieh. Asmar's fiancee, Giselle, Mary-Claude's sister, met him off the boat, and as it was now Sunday, they joined the family for lunch at their house in Sarba.

On Monday, 8 September, Coleman got to work with Asmar in his office at Karintina. After testing the video equipment, they sent Asmar's volunteer cameramen off to start shooting the locations Control had specified in the western sectors of Beirut, places where, Coleman assumed, the hostages were being held. They then put the Speak 'n' Spell on Asmar's desk, set it up in accordance with the maker's instructions, and punched in their code words.

Out poured a detailed account of visits made by Robert McFarlane and Lt-Col. Oliver North to Iran, traveling on Irish passports, to organize the sale of TOW missiles and launchers to the Iranian government in exchange for the release of American hostages; details of money transfers and bank accounts, with dates and places -- most of it based on incidents and conversations that could only have been known to the Iranian or American negotiators.

'My God,' said Coleman. He had known North was seriously out of favour at the Pentagon, but here was another glimpse into the pit. 'What are you supposed to do with this stuff?'

Asmar looked at him soberly, and Coleman did not press the point.

He left Beirut with the camera equipment and videotapes on 11 September, arriving back in Cyprus on the 12th. Next day, he flew to Heathrow, and after an overnight stop in London, traveled on to Montreal, and from there, as Thomas Leavy, to Baltimore Washington International airport, where he checked in, as instructed, at the Ramada Inn. Donleavy, accompanied this time by another agent, arrived there early next morning, the 15th, for a full day's debriefing, and that night Coleman headed south for Alabama to rejoin Mary-Claude at the Lake Martin cottage.

On the 23rd, he began his postgraduate studies as a teaching assistant at Auburn University, and on 2 October, also on schedule, Mary-Claude presented him with a daughter, Sarah.

Meanwhile, one of Asmar's operatives had delivered the Speak 'n' Spell material to a relative who worked for Al Shiraa, Beirut's pro-Syrian Arabic-language news magazine. When the story ran on 3 November, it was picked up at once by the Western media, touching off an international scandal of such embarrassing proportions that President Reagan was forced to act. On 25 November 1986, he fired North, accepted the resignation of Rear-Admiral John Poindexter, McFarlane's successor as National Security Adviser, and spent the rest of his administration trying to dodge the political fallout from Irangate.

'Most people assumed it was the Iranians who blew the whistle on North, McFarlane and Poindexter,' Coleman says. 'Some even said it was the Russians who leaked the story after the failure of the Reykjavik summit. But it wasn't. It was the Pentagon. It was the DIA. It was me, with my little Speak 'n' Spell.'

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Fri Feb 02, 2018 3:49 am
by admin
Politics and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act Make Strange Bedfellows: A Leisurely Discussion of Jeff Sessions’ Memo to Federal Prosecutors on How to Protect the Religious Freedoms of Americans
by Charles Carreon
February 1, 2018

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


The Legal Frontier

The legal frontier in American law is always expanding, breaking new ground, at times spasmodically, opening new areas for legal decision, giving judges and lawyers more work. Most of the big moving and shaking in the legal arena is done by corporations and government. Corporate desires drive Congressional priorities. Corporate litigation drives Supreme Court decisions. In this environment, First Amendment protections for Freedom of Religion provide fertile ground for the expansion of corporate privilege.

With this as backdrop, we will examine the significance of Executive Order # 13798 signed May 4, 2017, entitled “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty,” and the Attorney General’s Memorandum on “Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty” (the “Memo”), issued October 6, 2017. The Memo gives the DOJ the job of enforcing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and tasks the nation’s federal prosecutors with making the world more legally secure for churches, religiously-tinged corporations, and believing citizens who come armed with sincere religious persuasions and capable counsel. After discussing where we are and how we got here, we’ll look at what the Memo means for the ceremonial use of Ayahuasca and other visionary substances in the USA.

The Bill of Rights for Corporations

Lawyers in multinational corporate firms look at the Bill of Rights and see something like a butcher examining a side of beef, and everywhere they look, there are good cuts. They see every legal right made available to “persons,” and seek to apply it to corporations, regardless of how tortured the fit. Because when the Constitution is on your side, other laws and policies have to bend to your will. A Constitutional argument, when correct, is essentially unbeatable, except by an argument based on an international treaty. The First Amendment, for example, provided all the muscle behind the Citizens United case, that effected the total destruction of existing campaign finance law by granting First Amendment rights of free speech to corporations, and equating corporate speech with money. Thus, to limit a corporation’s spending on speech was to silence it. Constitutional earthquakes often cause spasmodic shifts in the legal landscape.

RFRA – Corporate Religion on Steroids

The next corporate First Amendment earthquake happened in the Hobby Lobby case. The Hobby Lobby plaintiff was a company that told the Court that, because it had religious scruples, it should be exempt from the general law that requires bosses to buy insurance that covers birth control. Hobby Lobby won by strapping on RFRA like a jetpack, and soaring above the earth and the constraints of general law. The RFRA jetpack proved to be amazingly effective, defying even the gravitational pull of scientific facts, because the Court decided that only the sincerity, and not the accuracy of Hobby Lobby's belief, was subject to judicial examination.

A Strange Law that Trump and the Religious Right Love Anyway

RFRA is an unusual statute, because it basically says that anyone who sincerely, religiously, believes that a law is wrong, has a defense to the violation of that law, and can sue to protect the right to break the law. If you think about it, there’s something very strange about the President telling the prosecutor to get right to work protecting the rights of the religious to violate general laws without consequence. If it weren’t the religious benefiting, it would seem unfair and counterproductive to pass laws and then encourage people to ignore them if they can come up with a religious reason why they should be able to do that.

Although many would say that the President’s zeal for RFRA arises from questionable motives, RFRA is a good law that exists for two reasons: (1) because religion can give something back to society so valuable that the law must bend to allow that bestowal of benefit, and (2) because there once was a cruel old Supreme Court Justice who loved to commit mischief and get the last, nasty word, and he twisted First Amendment law so badly that Congress had to fix it.

RFRA was enacted to Congressionally overrule Oregon Employment Division v. Smith, a scurrilous opinion authored by “Exterminating Angel” Antonin Scalia that trampled Supreme Court jurisprudence, abrogating decades of precedent establishing when the judiciary should allow the restrictions of general law [1] to give way to religious beliefs. Scalia’s blithe and inconsiderate opinion jeopardized the long-recognized right of the Native American Church to eat peyote ceremonially, and Congress was moved to alleviate that hardship.

It’s unlikely that Congress would be capable of finding its arse with both hands these days, much less pull together the political will to poke Scalia in the eye and enact a statute like RFRA. And in these innovative days of federal governance, when anything and everything goes, the Trump Administration has decided to expand the rights of religious entities to practice free of the constraints of general law.

Why is the government taking this direction? It would appear to be a simple exercise in feeding the President’s political base the red meat they crave – an Executive Order to make the religious more free than ever! Rumor has it the President was resting his thumbs after a heavy tweet session when he noticed Sessions sitting there. Sessions had not pissed him off at all that day, so the President said to him in a brotherly way, “You are a good Christian, and you know a lot of Christian people. I want Christians to be my people forever. What gift should I give them that will keep them loyal always?”

Quick as the Devil, Sessions answered, “You know Mr. President, religious freedom does not actually cost any money, but it is prized above all other things. Our nation was founded on religious liberty. If you would issue an Executive Order directing me to expand upon this theme and make it government policy, I would be happy to comply. When the President heard that Christians could be made happy with nothing more than an Executive Order, he was delighted, said it was a no-brainer, and that Sessions really was good people. He signed Executive Order # 13798 immediately and took the rest of the day off.

Some persons, doubtful about the President’s agenda, might say Sessions prepared the Executive Order for Trump’s signature precisely to give him license to redirect the Department of Justice away from enforcing laws against race and sex discrimination, investigating police departments that kill people they are paid to protect, and locking up “legal” opiate distributors who are killing off the last of the working class. Skeptics might say that the primary beneficiaries of the Memorandum are (1) Christian dressmakers and cake-makers presently in fear of being compelled to sew lesbian bridal dresses and bake gay wedding cakes, (2) the nation’s elementary schools, uncertain about whether to accommodate the bathroom needs of students who have gender issues; and of course, (3) corporations like Hobby Lobby crying to be free of the obnoxious duty to pay for their employees to engage in sex without consequence, and other irreligious practices yet to be named.

Descent Into Nonsense at the Supreme Court

Skeptics might further say that RFRA has elevated the act of shunning a gay couple by refusing to bake their wedding cake into a debate over religious freedom, and the purpose of the Memo is to encourage the filing of more such cases. It would be hard to rebut their contention, because these kooky cases are picking up a hell of a head of steam. The Supreme Court argument in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission thus hosted an absurd debate with giddy solemnity, focusing on a soundbite so clever it could make the Cooking Channel: Is food speech? Does requiring a baker to bake a cake for a gay wedding force the baker to speak in favor of gay marriage? These arcane issues are exactly the type of weird legal debates that RFRA is going to spark more of, because religious corporations and individuals are going to raise objections to all kinds of laws. Further, under the RFRA analysis, the Court has no business asking whether those beliefs make sense, but only whether they are sincere. In the Hobby Lobby case, this meant that the Court didn’t even consider whether Hobby Lobby was relying on bad science when it claimed that certain birth control procedures violated its religious scruples. It didn’t matter, said the Court, because the belief didn’t need to be accurate, just sincere.

Just the Facts, Ma’am, Just the Facts

After enjoying the loopy scenery visible from the heights to which RFRA allows the religious to soar, let’s come back to earth and take a close look at the document to see what it offers the adherents of psychedelic religion. The Memo sets forth 20 principles of religious liberty, beginning with the statement that religious liberty is a fundamental right that extends to all people and organizations, including religious denominations, organizations, schools, private associations, and businesses. The negative “right to abstain from action,” i.e., to refuse to bake gay wedding cakes, is given plenty of attention. The Memo makes the point that even though religious organizations may take government money in the form of grants, that doesn’t allow the government to demand that an organization relinquish its religious freedom in order to receive the funds. [2]

Notwithstanding the intentions of the Memo, that I’m afraid don’t go far beyond the vindication of the biases of the many, it contains plenty of good news for entheogenic churches, shamanic practicioners who use visionary herbs, and solitary followers of psychedelic wisdom. Let’s try and identify some of those.

A Tutorial For Prosecutors on When Not to Enforce a General Law Against Sincere Religious Believers Who Object to Its Provisions

First, the Memo explains for the DOJ prosecutors (most of whom have never given a thought to RFRA) how RFRA works. Sessions tells his lawyers that RFRA prohibits the federal government from “substantially burdening religious observance or practice” by (1) banning a religious observance or practice; (2) compelling an act inconsistent with religious observance or practice; or (3) pressuring a church, person or business to modify its religious observance or practice. The government can only be allowed to “substantially burden religious observance or practice” to satisfy a “compelling government interest” by using the “least restrictive means.” This is called "applying the strict scrutiny test" to determine whether the law substantially burdens religious observance or practice.

The Memo tells prosecutors that in order to satisfy RFRA’s limitations on burdening religion, the government may have to spend more money, modify existing federal exemptions, or create new programs. RFRA applies to “all actions” by federal agencies, including rulemaking, enforcement, grantmaking, and contracting.

The Memo tells government agencies that when a general law fails to pass RFRA’s “strict scrutiny” test, a test that Sessions calls “exceptionally demanding," a religious exemption must be granted, even when it requires reduction of the rights of third persons. So Hobby Lobby’s employees lost their legally-protected right to get insurance coverage for birth control because their boss objected to the provision in religious language.

This principle could be helpful for psychedelic churches if they faced zoning objections or burdensome restrictions to conducting ceremonies in particular locations. The rather surprising lesson of the Memo on this point is that religious expression increases the allocation of rights that citizens hold, even when the rights of others are reduced thereby.

Belief Trumps Reason – And Don’t Ask Why

Second, the Memo forbids the government from “second-guessing” the reasonableness of a sincerely-held religious belief. As I mentioned previously, the Hobby Lobby plaintiff took advantage of that to claim that its corporate belief in the evil of contraception was not subject to judicial scrutiny, and the Supreme Court agreed.

For psychedelic churches, it’s important to know that their beliefs shouldn’t be scrutinized by the Courts for anything but the sincerity of the church’s congregants. This is good, because there’s no empirical basis for a religious principle like the belief that Ayahuasca is of divine origin, or that people who drink it have divine experiences.

So let’s think briefly about where that puts Ayahuasca churches that are trying to get RFRA exemptions to consume Ayahuasca. Those churches don’t have to prove their doctrines make sense, but they will have to prove that they have a doctrine. And the church will have to show that the congregants coming to drink together share those religious beliefs regarding the sacred value of drinking Ayahuasca. To satisfy the demands of a RFRA exemption application, it would be desirable to assert something more than that “those who drink Ayahuasca at our church have a general sacred intention.” So if you are thinking in terms of seeking a RFRA exemption for an Ayahuasca or other psychedelic church, you need to build a sense of communal belief and understanding in your congregation, so that when congregants are asked, “What do you believe about Ayahuasca?” their answers are congruent, not of course identical, but recognizably drawn from the same body of belief.

Let My People Get That Cash!

Third, the Memo tells DOJ lawyers that religious entities can’t be denied funds or resources that secular groups are entitled to receive, so that provides a protection for psychedelic churches that seek to use public facilities or receive public funding for an educational arm. The Memo thus tries to open an avenue for more religions to seek government funding for their activities, while protecting the right of religious people to make “faith-based decisions” about issues like whether women can join the priesthood, or for that matter, whether to drink Ayahuasca to see the Divine Mother. While it may seem a far stretch to imagine the day when an Ayahuasca church gets a government grant, one unintended effect of the Memo could be to bring that day closer.

Government Agencies Urged to Proactively Provide Tailored Law-Enforcement to Protect the Beliefs and Practices of the Religious

Fourth, the Memo advises all federal agencies to consider how to avoid burdening religious practice, and indeed, to attempt to proactively accommodate religious beliefs. The Memo tells government employees to be responsive to publicly-expressed concerns about religious liberty, and empowers agencies to engage in religious accommodation on a case-by-case basis. Although it doesn’t require it, the Memo suggests that federal agencies “appoint an officer” to review proposed rules with religious accommodation in mind.

This fourth point is important, because if the “Guidance” to those submitting exemption applications to allow use of psychedelics for religious purposes posted on the DEA website is any indication, the DEA has not yet staffed up to that job. Currently, the Guidance still directs applicants to submit their applications to “Joseph T. Rannazzisi, Deputy Assistant Administrator, Office of Diversion Control, Drug Enforcement Administration, 8701 Morrissette Drive, Springfield, Virginia 22152.” Actually, Mr. Rannazzisi doesn’t work for the DEA anymore. He was forced out of the DEA in 2015 for busting too many pill-mills while making manful efforts to contain the opiate epidemic, according to the Chicago Tribune article entitled “The drug industry’s triumph over the DEA.” Probably not the ideal person to be reviewing applications for religious exemptions, actually, but an honest man at least. Whoever has the job now hasn’t bothered to update the “Guidance” in almost three years. The DEA should take a lesson from the Memo, and “appoint an officer” with some knowledge in the field of religion and spiritual psychopharmacology to review RFRA applications for exemption from the Controlled Substances Act. Additionally, it should update the Guidance and provide more substantive guidance on the procedure, plus some idea of how the proceedings are scheduled, and how long one can expect to wait to get a response. If the Attorney General’s word means anything to the DEA, it should take a much more proactive approach to providing service to the religious organizations seeking religious exemptions from the Controlled Substances Act, laying out a procedural roadmap, being transparent about who will evaluate the submission, and what the followup contact will be from the Agency.

Government Agency Must Not Target Religions for Enforcement Actions

Fifth, the Memo states that, “agencies may not target or single out religious organizations or religious conduct for disadvantageous treatment in enforcement priorities or actions.” Additionally, “agencies considering potential enforcement actions should consider whether such actions are consistent with federal protections for religious liberty.” These provisions of the Memo may help to dispel the concerns of those who believe that a wave of enforcement actions may be about to descend on the Ayahuasca church community because of the change of administrations. Indeed, I think quite the reverse – the Memo should give serious pause to hyperactive prosecutors eager to put out a press release trumpeting the arrest of “participants in a fake religious ceremony where DMT was being consumed for purposes of abuse.” That might turn out to be a career-limiting move.

All In All – Better Than A Poke In The Eye With A Sharp Stick

In summary, while the Memo wasn’t written to make the Ayahuasca churches of the United States happy, it provides some reason for optimism. Given the uses that RFRA has been put to by the religio-corporate complex, it’s hard to imagine that the plan to use religion to justify discriminatory conduct against minorities wasn’t “baked in.” But it’s also the case that the UDV Decision remains the single, strongest judicial assertion of the power of RFRA since the statute was adopted, and no one who is a fan of RFRA, for whatever reason, would want to see that decision weakened. The social conservatives will, obviously, make much use of RFRA’s negative potential. It is the job of psychedelic churches to fulfill the positive potential of the statute by using it to bend the Controlled Substances Act into a shape more consistent with the religious needs of humanity.

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Notes:

1 "General Law" is the term of art used in RFRA jurisprudence to describe the entire U.S. Code and the statutes of the 50 states, as well as the judicial interpretations that have been applied to these legislative enactments.

2. In other words, if a parochial school applied for grant funding to operate an after-school program for students, the government should not require that "no religious instruction may be provided during the after-school program that is funded by the grant." Such restrictions have been applied in the past in order to preserve separation between Church and State and avoid the appearance that the government is paying for religious instruction.

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Tue May 07, 2019 5:53 am
by admin
The Myth of the Killer Bodhisattva
by Charles Carreon
February 24, 2019

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Buddhists Don’t Know What They Believe

There is no single answer to the question, "What do Buddhists believe?" The most cautious response is that Buddhists have many different belief systems, and they do not agree with each other. Indeed, many people who think themselves Buddhists have very vague doctrinal concepts, and get by with a handful of projections that they rarely subject to deep consideration. For example, many recently-minted Western Buddhists would be at a loss to tell you whether their religion forbids them from going to war, or compels them to claim conscientious objector status. No Jehovah's Witness would have this problem -- they know that their tradition has embraced nonviolence at the practical level, and that the right thing when faced with a call to military conscription is to decline to take up arms against "the enemy."

Buddhist Militarism — A Long-Standing Tradition

Buddhists from countries where the religion has existed for hundreds of years would be equally clear on the point -- Buddhists can be soldiers. Buddhists have fought each other with weapons, for the sake of their monastic orders; Buddhists have fought wars on behalf of their nations; Buddhists have fought wars with the adherents of other religions. The Indian Emperor Ashoka (304-232 BCE), who established Buddhism as the state religion of the Mauryan Empire that controlled a vast expanse of the Indian subcontinent, killed all three of his brothers in internecine warfare, and is said to have converted to Buddhism only after having conquered the Kingdom of Kalinga at a cost of 350,000 human lives, an astronomical number of victims in those days of pre-mechanized warfare.[1] Ashoka is also said to have constructed a torture facility in the deceptive form of a beautiful palace that would lure unsuspecting victims, who would then fall under the control of Ashoka's chief torturer, who would subject them to tortures drawn from Buddhist depictions of hell. In some versions of this tale, Ashoka is converted to Buddhism when his efforts to torture a Buddhist saint are thwarted by miraculous power.

The Dark Side of Zen

Zen Buddhism was brought to the United States by D.T. Suzuki, an unabashed Japanese nationalist who preached Buddhism as a religion of glorious military death to Japanese soldiers:

“Let us then shuffle off this mortal coil whenever it becomes necessary, and not raise a grunting voice against the fates. . . . Resting in this conviction, Buddhists carry the banner of Dharma over the dead and dying until they gain final victory.”[2]


Japanese Buddhists fanned the flames of nationalism and fascist allegiance to the Emperor as the island nation battled with Russia, conquered Korea and portions of China, and launched itself headlong into the alliance with Hitler's Germany.[3] Furthermore, Japanese Buddhists concealed their war-guilt until 2001, when the Japanese translation of Zen At War by Brian Daizen Victoria, that documented the unholy melding of religious nihilism and nationalist triumphalism, finally broke through the wall of silence, provoking apologies from some of the Rinzai Zen sects who had been culpable in damning the nation's youth to death on the battlefield and at sea, including thousands who were packed off in battered aircraft to annihilate themselves in kamikaze flights.[4]

Anti-Muslim Prejudice in Myanmar & Shambhala

Buddhists in Myanmar at this very moment are pursuing violent campaigns against Muslim people, and being exhorted to racial hatred by robe-wearing bigots who blend violent intentions with Buddhist religious language.[5] When Myanmar's famous Buddhist political leader Aung Suu Kyi was criticized for being complicit in the ethnic cleansing campaign against Muslims, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who claims to be a reincarnated enlightened being wrote her "a letter of support," in which he derided human rights advocates as agents of neo-colonialist oppression.[6] The Shambhala cult that has colonized the United States worships its own God-King, the "Sakyong Mipham," who is said to be a reincarnation of "Gesar of Ling," a Tibetan warlord who, according to Shambhala "prophecy" will ultimately conquer the Muslims and set up a Buddhist theocracy that will last "20,000 years."[7] Although Shambhalians are taught that Gesar is a purely Tibetan hero, historical research reveals that "Gesar" is actually identical with "Guandi," the Chinese god of war, whose temples in Tibet were gradually converted to the worship of Gesar as a political move to Tibetanize the cult.[8]

Bridging the Gap Between “Non-Killing” and Militarism

Thus, the dogma of Buddhism and organized killing have mutually supported each other for millennia, with very few efforts to explain the apparent disjunct between the Buddhist embrace of warlike conduct and a doctrine that espouses "non-killing" as a foundational virtue. When pressed for an explanation that might resolve the dissonance between the ideal and the real, the favorite traditional story given out by Buddhists of the Mahayana sect is that of the Killer Bodhisattva, rendered in this form by Chagdud Tulku:

"A Buddhist story tells of a ferry captain whose boat was carrying 500 bodhisattvas in the guise of merchants. A robber on board planned to kill everyone and pirate the ship's cargo. The captain, a bodhisattva himself, saw the man's murderous intention and realized this crime would result in eons of torment for the murderer. In his compassion, the captain was willing to take hellish torment upon himself by killing the man to prevent karmic suffering that would be infinitely greater than the suffering of the murdered victims. The captain's compassion was impartial; his motivation was utterly selfless."


Bodhisattva Values

Who was this compassionate killer, this "bodhisattva?" A bodhisattva is a human being who has been transformed into a being of transcendent virtue by mastery of the "Six Paramitas" -- transcendental Generosity, Morality, Patience, Diligence, Meditation, and Wisdom. Discussions of these transcendental virtues have filled many books, from which quotes like these can easily be harvested: "The true practice of the paramitas is to be free from self-attachment and self cherishing. Based on this definition, the Four Noble Truths and the Thirty-Seven Aids to Enlightenment can also be considered paramitas, because they accord with the teachings of non-attachment and no self-cherishing. All Buddhist practices can thus be viewed as paramitas as long as they accord with the above principles."[9]

The Buddha Was a Beggar

To unearth some basic Buddhist practices that can be viewed as paramitas, let's first look at how the Buddha is depicted in the first chapter of the Diamond Sutra:

"One day, at the time for breaking fast, the World-Honoured One enrobed and, carrying his bowl, made his way into the great city of Shravasti to beg for his food. In the midst of the city he begged from door to door according to rule. This done, he returned to his retreat and took his meal. When he had finished, he put away his robe and begging bowl, washed his feet, arranged his seat, and sat down."


What comes across in this depiction is the Buddha's simple humanity. He used a begging bowl to get his food for the day. He did not wait for students to bring him offerings of food. He himself went "from door to door according to rule" to collect whatever people would give him, and when he got his food, he went back to his retreat and ate the food he'd been given. He was, quite simply, a beggar.

A beggar is the humblest of people. A beggar is distinguished from a thief by his lack of aggression. An old Spanish saying humorously describes a thief as "a beggar with a weapon." Most people here in the USA have never begged, and becoming a beggar is considered such a personal tragedy that many of us would prefer to commit suicide before adopting the role. To beg is to lose the last shred of pride. It is the very opposite of "making one's way in the world." It is an attack on commercial activity and a repudiation of the aspirations of the moneyed class. But the Buddha adopted this lifestyle voluntarily, making beggarhood the foundation of all of his virtue. St. Francis, who enjoined his followers to voluntary poverty, followed the same path. And in this, Francis was simply emulating Jesus of Nazareth, who taught his disciples to "make no provision for tomorrow."

The Monarchical Buddha

Although Buddhists around the world buy, sell, and bow before images of the Buddha holding a bowl in his lap, they don't think it significant that he's holding this piece of kitchenware as his only possession. Small wonder. This oblivious attitude has been engendered in the faithful by depicting the Buddha wearing silken robes, sitting on a throne, often surrounded by servitors offering him all manner of delights. Which brings us to the second irony of traditional depictions of the Buddha -- his depiction as a spiritual monarch. This is ironic because the Buddha's first act of renunciation was to escape from the palace where his father, the King, had expected him to take over the reins of governance. His father had received a prophecy before the Buddha was born that his son would become either a conqueror of men or an enlightened sage. Since his father preferred that his son be a conqueror of men, he tried to shelter the young prince from the dark side of life, a strategy that failed when the prince learned that all people must suffer sickness, old age and death. Given that even a king would have to suffer and die, the farsighted young prince decided to seek a solution to these universal afflictions, and abandoned the path of worldly rulership.

Thus, although the Buddha's conduct rejected an acquisitive lifestyle, rejected placing oneself above others, and rejected monarchy, his purported followers have taken pains to represent him as a privileged, exalted ruler of the spiritual realm. Rulers, of course, always enforce their edicts by means of coercion. The entire point of having a king is to bring the noncompliant forces into line with the royal will. By turning the Buddha's begging bowl into a meaningless ornament and elevating him to the level of a king, Buddhists open the door to infecting their religion with martial propaganda, like this macho miracle of Tibetan origin:

"At one time, when [the Buddha] was taking part in an archery contest, he declared, 'With the bow of meditative concentration I will fire the arrow of wisdom and kill the tiger of ignorance in living beings.' He then released the arrow and it flew straight through five iron tigers and seven trees before disappearing into the earth! By witnessing demonstrations such as this, thousands of people developed faith in the prince." [10]


These types of stories turn the original life story of the Buddha on its head. Reimagined in this way, the Buddha is conceived as a preternaturally talented divine being who "took birth" in a royal family because only that elevated position was suitable to his divine personage. This Buddha is ready for a career in the highest levels of society, and his ascension to the role of hierophant is a foregone conclusion. This Buddha goes through the motions of discovering the truth of suffering and its causes, disseminates his wisdom to a noble company, and establishes a doctrine that can provide the heavy timber to build an enduring religion that future kings will be happy to endow with all the worldly riches at their command. The only thing necessary to achieve this transaction is to completely disregard the meaning of the Buddha's teaching.

Mercantile Bodhisattvas and Karmic Bookkeeping

With this background, we can return to the story of the Killer Bodhisattva. What's the crux of the Killer Bodhisattva's motivation? Compassion. He wants to save the thief from the terrible karma of killing 500 bodhisattvas "disguised as merchants." Note that the mercantile class has returned to its position of authority. These 500 bodhisattvas are not carrying begging bowls; they're loaded with cash, which is why the thief wants to kill them. If these merchants were ordinary people, not bodhisattvas in disguise, the karma of killing them would not be so grave, and there would be no need for the Killer Bodhisattva to intercede. The robber would just be an ordinary mass-murderer of trivial people, unworthy of particular attention. But since he's targeting the upper-upper-crust of the divine population, the consequences of his action will be mind-bogglingly awful. The Killer Bodhisattva sees what's about to go down, and swallows all of the bad karma -- killing the robber and nipping a karmic cataclysm in the bud. Yes, the Killer Bodhisattva himself will have to suffer in hell for this act of compassion ("the captain was willing to take hellish torment upon himself by killing the man"), but it's like nothing to what the robber would have brought upon himself by killing so many uber-beings. So the Killer Bodhisattva is basically very good with figures, a cosmic bean-counter who manages risk with godlike prescience, so the house always wins.

Spy Story: Agent Dharma vs. The Terrorists

What kind of story is this? It's a spy thriller. Agent Dharma, working for the Ministry of All That's Right & Good, gets "actionable information" about a terrorist plot to kill hundreds of people that can only be prevented by an act of justifiable homicide. Even though it's usually a bad thing to kill people, since the terrorists are going to kill hundreds of people, the utilitarian equation is easily satisfied, and Agent Dharma's license to kill will insulate him from any real negative consequences. If you look for deeper moral lessons here, you're a dupe of simplistic notions. If you're ready to be duped, just open another tab on your browser and search for "bodhisattva killing." You will find dozens of pious, scholarly articles providing just the flavor of KoolAid for which you are hankering. If you are looking for really exotic KoolAid, you can find a scholarly discussion of the ultimate ironic twist on Buddhist virtue -- the Tibetan doctrine of "liberation killing," used to justify the killing of an anti-Buddhist king by a monk who assassinates skillfully to "facilitate a better rebirth" for the wayward monarch. In this story, instead of going to hell for committing regicide, the assassin-monk loses his monastic status.[11] Small price to pay for saving the Buddhist doctrine from destruction at the hands of a malevolent king.

Why No Adventures in Babysitting?

So, as the heavy, we have a robber with a mind so poisoned he's ready to kill 500 people to steal their stuff. Do you think he'll be healed of his moral perversity by being prevented from committing his intended crime? No, and in the world-view implied by this entire tale, this intended mass murderer will surely be reborn as a super-villain like Lex Luthor, Dr. Evil, or Mark Zuckerberg. A serial killer engaged in stalking his next victim, if interrupted while pursuing his plot, doesn't give up his serial killer career. Even if he goes to prison, if he gets out, he finds a new victim, and resumes his evil ways. A really kind Bodhisattva would babysit the guy for a few thousand lifetimes. He would be that guy's constant companion, lifetime after lifetime, reborn as the killer's brother, sister, schoolteacher, probation officer, and keep an eye on him. Talk him out of putting death rays in orbit, poke holes in his evil plots, get him a date so he won't create Facebook. This kind of thinking would be considered frivolous. How presumptuous to tell Bodhisattvas how to schedule their incarnations! Babysitting! For thousands of lifetimes. Sure, Patience is a Paramita, but that is way too time consuming. Yeah, we got a movie to make here -- all hail the hero who risks all, kills one, and saves many!

Buddha's Begging Bowl Symbolizes Humility and Courage

Better than a Hollywood Dharma CIA assassin is the real Buddha as an actual beggar -- a man with courage to which most of us can only aspire. Courage to give up all possessions and the power to rule a kingdom, and face the world alone. To put aside all hope of making himself a comfortable abode, career, or family life, and devote himself to finding the cure for the sufferings of sickness, old age and death. A person with such courage is humble about what one person can accomplish against the real causes of human suffering. He will not undertake lethal machinations to reorder worldly events. He will not justify violence by invoking desirable ends. Buddha gave up the opportunity to be the judge of who should live and die when he left the castle, because he was the prince, just waiting to become king, when it would be his job to protect innocent lives by imprisoning, judging and punishing criminals. But the Buddha didn't want that job. He could have had a mace and a crown; instead, he carried a begging bowl. Just think about where that puts you, sometime. Kind of interesting, when you take a symbol like that, and actually pay attention to it, as if it meant something.
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Notes:

[1] https://www.ancient.eu/Ashoka_the_Great/
[2] https://apjjf.org/2013/11/30/Brian-Vict ... ticle.html
[3] https://aeon.co/essays/the-zen-ideas-th ... aze-pilots
[4] https://apjjf.org/2013/11/30/Brian-Vict ... ticle.html
[5] https://theconversation.com/militant-bu ... from-86632
[6] https://www.tilogaard.dk/english/Dzongs ... r_2018.pdf
[7] http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Part-1-10.htm
[8] http://www.chinabuddhismencyclopedia.co ... nchen_Lama
[9] http://chancenter.org/cmc/wp-content/up ... amitas.pdf
[10] http://www.aboutbuddha.org/english/life-of-buddha-2.htm
[11] https://info-buddhism.com/Tibetan_Buddh ... lieter.htm

Re: Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

PostPosted: Thu May 09, 2019 10:09 pm
by admin
Part 1 of 5

Against Hell: A Refutation of the Buddhist Hell Realms, Based on Their Historic Origins, Political Purpose, Psychological Destructiveness, Irrationality, and Demonstrable Inconsistency With the Original Buddhist Teachings, Framed as A Searching Review of Sam Bercholz’s After-Death Memoir, "A Guided Tour of Hell"
by Charles Carreon[1]
May 6, 2019

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• THE PREMISE OF “A GUIDED TOUR OF HELL”
• A GUIDED TOUR OF WHAT'S IN THIS REVIEW
• BERCHOLZ FALLS ILL AFTER A LIFETIME OF GOOD LIVING
• WELCOME TO SAM'S NIGHTMARE
• THE VEDIC ORIGIN OF BUDDHIST HELLS IN HINDU LITERATURE
• BERCHOLZ'S MODERN DELOK STORY ADAPTS AN ANCIENT TIBETAN MYTHIC FORM
• THE BUDDHA'S NON-POSITION ON ETERNAL LIFE
• ASHOKA, ARCHITECT OF BUDDHIST HELLS
• "FEAR CONDITIONING" AS A MEANS OF BEHAVIORAL CONTROL
• REINCARNATION, KARMIC DNA, ATMAN AND TATHAGHATAGARBA: THE MERGER OF UPANISHADIC & BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY
• ALTRUISTIC INCARNATIONS, TIBETAN FEUDALISM AND COMPULSORY GURU DEVOTION
• BERCHOLZ: COMPLICITOUS IN THE THEFT OF THE TRUNGPA LINEAGE AND THE CREATION OF THE SHAMBHALA EMPIRE
• FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE KALAPA KINGDOM
• SHANGRI LUST — THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF RIGPA
• TIBETAN BUDDHIST DUALISM MIRRORS MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY RATHER CLOSELY
• THE CALCULUS OF HELL LEADS TO RELIANCE ON RITUALS & SACRIFICE
• THE POMPOUS LEADING THE CREDULOUS: VAJRA HELL ON THE INTERNET
• BELIEF IN HELL, FONDNESS FOR VIOLENT SOLUTIONS, CORPORAL PUNISHMENT, AND CHILD ABUSE
• EVERYBODY'S GOT THEIR OWN HELL — THEY SHOULD KEEP IT TO THEMSELVES
• THE MYTH OF KINDNESS
• HELL: FOR SUCKERS ONLY
• THE BUDDHA'S PHILOSOPHY OF LEARNING THAT LEADS TO DIRECT KNOWLEDGE
• HOW TO DECONSTRUCT HELL & FEAR OF DAMNATION IN YOUR OWN MIND
• NOTES

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THE PREMISE OF “A GUIDED TOUR OF HELL”

We're all familiar with fire and brimstone preachers, and most of us associate that brand of religion with fundamentalist Christianity that still percolates with aggressive heat down in the Bible Belt. But fire and brimstone Buddhism? Who's into that? Well, there comes a time in the development of every religion when some dark and difficult secrets have to be revealed, and for Tibetan Buddhism, that time came in 2016, when Sam Bercholz decided to publish an account of his near-death experience ("NDE") of ten years before.

While it may come as a shock to American Buddhists weaned on the sweetened pap of the Dalai Lama’s message, that carefully avoids revealing the medieval roots of his religion, Buddhists have been notably aggressive about systematizing, concretizing, and inculcating the belief in hell in their followers. The most shocking example accessible online is the Thai Buddhist Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden, built in 1986. Two twenty-foot statues, a man and a woman, tower over the garden, their tongues protruding to below their waists, surrounded by twenty-one animal-headed demons. These are surrounded by a great number of life-sized torture scenes depicting naked men and women being disemboweled, having their tongues pulled out with pincers, being force-fed boiling liquids, having heads and limbs hacked off, being penetrated genitally with huge, bloody implements, being boiled, sawed in half, and in all too many other ways, having their bodies used as vehicles for the infliction of inconceivably severe pain.[2] Chinese Buddhists have created equally ghastly sculptures to terrorize the faithful.[3]  By comparison with the Thai and Chinese depictions, Japanese hells are tasteful; however, the motivation behind their creation, and their ultimate effects, are equally disturbing.[4] 

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Hell Detail from Wheel of Life Thangka, Nechung Oracle Temple

Old Tibet was stuffed with grisly depictions of beings suffering in hell, like this one taken from a wheel-of-life thangka at the monastery of the state oracle at Nechung, that depicts the crushing, disembowelment, impalement, and boiling of the damned, finely adorned with gleaming gold leaf.[5] But until Bercholz recruited an artist to supercharge the traditional Buddhist descriptions of hell with a series of terrifying, surrealistic acrylic paintings, and fired up his printing press to disseminate those lurid visions around the globe, Tibetan Buddhists here in America had gotten by almost entirely without any visual depictions of hell. Now that we have received this questionable gift, however, we have to deal with it.

Who is Bercholz? He's the founder and owner of the world's largest publisher of Buddhist literature -- Boulder-based Shambhala Publishing.[6] It's no coincidence that Shambhala Publishing shares a name, personnel, and agenda with Shambhala International, the Tibetan Buddhist group founded by Bercholz's lama, Chogyam Trungpa. Shambhala International was originally named "Vajradhatu," but changed its corporate name to Shambhala after Trungpa's Vajra Regent, Thomas Rich, brought the name into disrepute by infecting two people with the AIDS virus before dying of the disease himself. Shambhala International is now a spiritual monarchy, led by its "spiritual king," the Sakyong Mipham, who recently fled to Nepal after becoming the focus of a wide-ranging sex scandal. The Sakyong's sexual misdeeds range from drunken groping of party guests, to serial one-night stands with hundreds of willing and unwilling devotees, to rape and child abuse. These facts have been documented in three investigations conducted by his own disciples and attorneys, that strive to avoid revealing unsavory facts, but nonetheless ooze sleaze.

While the revelations of the Sakyong's gross clerical malpractice are only now reaching the ears of the public, his transgressions have been an open secret within the Shambhala community for many years, dating back to the 90s in Colorado, when he admits that he began drinking heavily, in an attempt to deal with his ascent to Masterhood at a young age. It is likely only because of the emergence of the #MeToo movement that the softball investigations[7] conducted by the Buddhist Project Sunshine,[8] the Wickwire Holm law firm[9] and Olive Branch[10] were initiated. Thus, Shambhala’s inner circle, of which Bercholz is a founding member, has for many years known of the need to reinforce discipline to discourage insiders from leaking news of the Sakyong's misdeeds to investigators, reporters, and the public.

Bercholz certainly didn’t publish A Guided Tour of Hell because he thought it would be a big seller. After all, who needs a glossy coffee-table book about semi-eternal damnation, illustrated with gruesome acrylic paintings? To receive it as a gift would be the equivalent of receiving a bullet in the mail. Not a big Christmas seller. This book was published to remind Shambhala insiders, who are, as we shall learn in this essay, subject to strict loyalty oaths and vows of secrecy, of the consequences of careless tongue-wagging.

Bercholz says it's not his intention to scare anyone with his story, but I have a saying -- "If they say they're not doing it, they're doing it!" This is a rule of near-universal application, because nobody tells you what they're "not doing" unless they want to deflect your attention from what they are, in fact, doing. For example, no one tells you where they're not going this weekend, what they won't eat for lunch, or who they're not seeing after work.

To figure out the purpose of something, it helps to see it at work – like a roller coaster, for example. Once you’ve heard the passengers screaming, you know why it was built. Similarly, fear is a common reaction among those who read A Guided Tour. Check the reviews on Amazon, where the faithful are giving it four stars for scaring the dickens out of them. That's what Bercholz intended, and as this review explores, he follows in the time-honored tradition of Buddhist-hell propagandists going back to the time of King Ashoka, who had been fond of terrorizing victims in torture dens until he converted to Buddhism. As we will discuss, when Ashoka adopted Buddhism as his state religion, he closed the torture chambers, but maintained his authoritarian grip on the population by sponsoring a Buddhist cosmology with hells as a central feature.

In A Guided Tour, Bercholz warns his fellow-Buddhists that, if they disobey their lamas, their own minds will become inescapable torture chambers where they will suffer insane torments for near-endless epochs. This demonic vision, honed to razor-sharpness for over a thousand years, was used in Tibet to control generations of believers, who were taught that malevolent forces dominate the universe, and that only reliance upon the lamas could protect them from suffering unspeakable agony in the afterlife. In modern times, scientific studies into the biology of fear have helped military trainers to exercise a wide range of behavioral control over their soldiers and enemy captives. Similarly, Tibetan lamas have used fear to acquire and assert authority over believers and doubters alike.

A GUIDED TOUR OF WHAT'S IN THIS REVIEW

To understand how Tibetan Buddhism uses the fear of Buddhist hells to exert control over its followers, we begin by establishing that the hells Bercholz claims to have visited in A Guided Tour parallel stock Tibetan Buddhist depictions of hell. A brief review of Indian history establishes that the writings of Vedic scribes designed what became the Buddhist hells approximately a thousand years before they were assimilated into Buddhist doctrine during the reign of Ashoka, the royal sponsor of the Third Buddhist Council, in the Third Century BCE.

Tibet had a substantial oral and written tradition of afterlife stories told by “deloks,” i.e., people who died and returned to tell what they saw, so we study examples of the genre, compare them with Bercholz’s story, and make critical observations. We review some of the Gautama Buddha’s early sermons to establish that he refused to answer questions about the afterlife, and exhorted students to seek “direct knowledge” that leads to “self-awakening and unbinding.” We then review scientific studies of the brain networks that give rise to fear as an evolutionary-designed system for protection of the organism, and learn how "fear conditioning" is used to assert social control.

To understand the cosmological theories that support the Tibetan belief in hells, we learn how Tibetan Buddhism claims to resolve the conflict between the Buddhist belief in “no-self” and the necessity for some “karmic DNA” to drive the reincarnation process. Having understood the Tibetan concept of the mechanism for reincarnation, we learn that Tibetan Buddhists believe that very high lamas, the “tulkus,” have gained control over the “rebirth process,” and are reincarnating not from karmic compulsion, but rather from the pure altruistic motivation to aid living beings reach enlightenment. We then discuss how the Tibetan adoption of the Hindu tradition of guru worship was applied to turn tulkus into theocratic rulers whose decrees were enforced by the threat of “vajra hell.”

We turn from Tibet’s feudal politics to the machinations of Tibetan Buddhists in the present day, considering two major Tibetan Buddhist scandals to consider whether Bercholz would have an interest in strengthening discipline among believers by trumpeting the doctrine of hell from his bully pulpit at Shambhala Publishing. We find that Bercholz would have ample personal motivation to enforce silence in the Shambhala spiritual organization that is imploding as the reign of the Sakyong Mipham is consumed in a conflagration of shame and betrayal, because Bercholz is a founding member of Shambhala, a senior teacher, and through various organizational ties, a major donor to the Sakyong’s collapsing “Kalapa Kingdom.” For an example of how threats of vajra hell can be used to curtail inquiry into the criminal misconduct of Tibetan lamas, we examine the shocking details of the Rigpa / Sogyal Lakar scandal as revealed in an investigation conducted by Rigpa’s attorneys, quoting from legal findings that Sogyal habitually engaged in brutal sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of students, and threatened them with vajra hell if they dared to refuse his commands, question his authority, or speak about his criminal misconduct.

Because many Tibetan Buddhists mistakenly pride themselves on the purportedly “modern” character of their religion, we reveal the religion’s truly medieval character by examining parallels between medieval Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism, including: belief in the eternal existence of living beings; belief that the destiny of living beings is determined by judgment in the afterlife, and may result in eternal damnation; belief that afterlife judgment is determined by merits accumulated in earthly life; belief that spiritual merit can be accumulated by making monetary payments to people who perform virtuous acts under contract; and, belief that priests and lamas serve as bankers in a spiritual economy of merit that determines the destiny of human souls.

Returning to the present day, we visit a popular Buddhist bulletin board and read posts from people who think they are 21st Century Tibetan Buddhists, struggling to fit vajra hell into their belief systems. We then examine the results of several psychological studies indicating that belief in hell, the Devil, and “pure evil” predisposes believers to express confidence in violent solutions and reject peaceful solutions to relationship problems, to apply corporal punishment to their children, and to engage in child abuse. We conclude that section with a review of evidence that Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are dangerous places for children, including a transcript of a video taped by the reincarnation of Kalu Rinpoche in 2011,[11] disclosing that he had been repeatedly raped by monks.

We then consider the reality that the mind can produce experiences of transcendent terror, examining the psychological impact of terrifying psychedelic experiences that may induce traumatic fears of the inner world, and discuss how psychological fears can be overcome through rational reflection, rather than generalizing from them to draw frightening inferences about the afterlife.

We then consider ancient Tibetan traditions of blood sacrifice that underlie the pervasive practice of propitiating supernatural spirits with simulated blood offerings, and explain how the extremely punitive calculus of Buddhist hells disposes believers to rely on magical rituals to expiate bad karma. Because this irrational, ritualistic behavior has taken root in American soil, we report on magical practices currently popular with American students: using diviners to prescribe a panoply of magical activities that they claim will eliminate obstacles to health, long-life and liberation; propitiating “local” spirits with simulated blood sacrifice; and, hiring lamas to perform lengthy rituals, prayers, and mantra recitations. We also return to the Buddha’s original advice to eschew reliance on magical rituals, to see how far the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine has strayed from the original.

Having established that lamas threaten students with vajra hell to conceal institutional iniquity, we consider the likelihood that the non-virtuous conduct of some of the lamas who preach the doctrine of the hells indicates that they do not, themselves, believe the doctrine. The final sections are devoted to eliminating the causes for belief in hell, first by affirming the correctness of Gautama Buddha’s advice to eschew reliance on faith-based knowledge of the unseen, and seek the confidence of direct knowledge through the use of our sensory faculties, aided by reason and good sense; second, by considering the proper limits of rational inference based on scientific and technical knowledge, and third, by recollecting that hell is a conceptual creation, a cosmological postulate, that was formulated for authoritarian purposes in the minds of human beings who sought to control the behavior of others through fear, and should therefore be rejected by rational people who wish to be free of unwholesome influence.

BERCHOLZ FALLS ILL AFTER A LIFETIME OF GOOD LIVING

The action starts at the Palm Springs Airport, where Bercholz is about to board a plane with his Tibetan Buddhist lama Thinley Norbu and a group of students, bound for an exclusive spiritual retreat for well-funded Buddhists. Walking through the broiling heat of the airport parking lot, Bercholz suffers a massive heart attack brought on by sixty years of good living. He's picked the right place to suffer a near-lethal cardiac dysfunction, because Palm Springs is filled with people who've eaten steak and potatoes every night for their whole life, and keel over routinely, just like Bercholz. The surgeons slice him open, scrape out the arterial plaque, give him a sextuple bypass, and stitch his thoracic cavity shut. After receiving this top-level care, Bercholz is alive, but feeling more like a steer hanging in a meat locker than a human being. Numbed by massive doses of pain medications, seeing halos, hearing the groans of rich people in their last agonies, trudging through the ward with the help of two orderlies, Bercholz's vitals plummet, he goes into a coma, and the weirdness begins. His NDE kicks off in classic Tibetan style –- he feels a lasso whipped around his feet, and is hauled straight down to the nether regions.

Bercholz doesn't say he experienced actual brain death. He may have simply descended into coma, while continuing to have measurable brain activity.[12] Regardless, if you credit that it happened, Bercholz had a nasty run-in with the universe's dark side, which is statistically unusual, since most people who experience NDEs recount positive experiences. From an objective viewpoint, it's easy to understand that Bercholz had an experience that was conditioned by his life, his study of Tibetan Buddhism, and the physical circumstances of the hospital, where people were suffering grievously, and physicians were working frantically to resuscitate him. He did not record the experience immediately after its occurrence, which he explains by saying he was embarrassed he'd gone to hell.

A Guided Tour presents Bercholz as the ultimate authority on life after death, one who "went there and saw it." And while Bercholz acknowledges that some people might say that his awful visions were merely subjective experiences, he rejects that explanation. He presents his experience as a cosmological fact, and many Buddhists will take it as a grisly truth that they cannot reject. After all, his biography on a Shambhala website[13] says that "both Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Thinley Norbu Rinpoche ... empowered him to teach dharma." And as we'll see further on, it's very dangerous to doubt your teacher.

Although he is selling his story as fact, Bercholz carelessly muddles the border between experience and imagination. He cuts himself a large measure of artistic license by admitting that, while writing and illustrating A Guided Tour, he and the graphic artist re-read Patrul Rinpoche's 19th-century Dharma classic, Words of My Perfect Teacher, with its blood-curdling account of the hells. Bercholz enlivens the traditional description by assuming the role of a reporter who travels the labyrinth of damnation interviewing tormented beings who, lo and behold, are suffering exactly the consequences Patrul Rinpoche predicted for sinners of their type. For Tibetan Buddhists, the similarity between Bercholz's tale and Patrul Rinpoche's teachings might well chill the blood with the horror of recognition, but those less given to habitual reverence may find the correspondence suspicious.

Ironically, given how sick Bercholz was from self-inflicted heart-disease, he never stops to consider that the real heroes in his drama are the surgical teams that know how to do open heart surgery, excising chunks of cholesterol-choked veins and arteries that Sam filled up with fatty gunk, pulling veins out of other parts of the body to replace them, and stitching those veins and arteries back together with instruments so small they need to wear magnifying lenses to see what they're doing. Although his doctors refurbished his damaged heart with consummate skill, Bercholz doesn't give them so much as a tip of the hat. Focused as he is on the realm of the spirit, Bercholz doesn't realize that the only reason he had a near-death experience instead of an actual death experience, was because he received superb medical care. All the veneration goes to his spiritual teachers, whose knowledge of cardiology would fit on a postage stamp, with room to spare.

A further irony may be inferred from Bercholz’s neglect of his “Precious Human Body, difficult to obtain with the eight freedoms and ten endowments.” [14] All Tibetan Buddhists are taught that it takes more than luck to be born as human beings in a Universe where there are countless other life forms.[15] Only good karma from past lives can secure a human incarnation in a healthy body free from disabilities, in a civilized land, where the Dharma is taught, and one has the opportunity to make progress on the spiritual path. Because achieving the goal of Dharma practice takes a long time, the best way to use this precious opportunity is to care for your body, live as long as possible, and practice Dharma earnestly. As Lama Zopa said in a teaching on the ultimate meaning of life, “You should live each day, each hour, each minute, in order to accomplish this ultimate purpose. This is why you try to be healthy and to have a long life.”[16] Bercholz’s massive heart attack at age sixty was almost certainly the result of bad eating habits, a sedentary lifestyle, stress, high blood pressure, and abdominal obesity.[17] However, he does not spend one inch of typespace in A Guided Tour considering how his self-indulgent lifestyle almost terminated his opportunities for practicing the Dharma. This is consistent with the behavior of his guru Chogyam Trungpa, who destroyed his own health aggressively, paralyzing himself in a drunken car accident, descending into alcoholism, cocaine addiction, and habitual bulimic purging, coughing up blood, and dying in a coma.

Bercholz tells us that upon hearing his story, one lama burst out laughing, and said, "So you are the first American delok!" “Deloks” are what are called “revenants” in the European tradition –- people who have died and returned to tell the tale of their sojourn in the afterlife. We will consider the significance of this comment later in this review, when we discuss the history of deloks in their native Tibet, and how they fit into the uniquely Tibetan view of a world where consensual reality routinely gave place to the supernatural in many aspects of daily life.

WELCOME TO SAM'S NIGHTMARE

Bercholz doesn't suffer much in hell, because he's quickly reassured that he's a guest of "the Buddha of Hell," a vaguely anthropomorphic divine presence who shields Bercholz from the intense heat and cold pervading the hells. He's also accompanied by an angelic being that he calls "Janna Sophia," an interesting name, since "jhana" is Sanskrit for "meditation," and "Sophia" is Greek for "wisdom." These two beings don't take a major role in the story, though. We hear that the Buddha of Hell is always present, ready to help any of the suffering beings in his domain to escape their agonies, and every now and then, Janna Sophia does some minor thing or another, but essentially, they only provide a comforting backdrop to explain how Bercholz can be in a blazing hell and not melt like the proverbial snowball, or remain unfrozen in the uniquely-Tibetan cold hells. The Buddha of Hell is thus a depressingly impotent jailer, unlike Buddha Vajrasattva, who “harrows the hells,” Yamantaka, who “destroys death,” and Arya Tara, who “shatters the seven underworlds,” and “destroys the hosts of evil spirits, yakshas, and the walking dead.”

I received my personal introduction to the Tibetan hells in the winter of 1979, at a retreat in the snowy mountains of Southern Oregon where the Tashi Choling Nyingmapa temple now stands. Gyatrul Rinpoche taught us the Long Chen Nyingthik ngondro for three days, including a three-hour teaching on the hot and cold hells. Gyatrul Rinpoche prefaced the teaching by conceding that western students never liked hearing about the hells, and that therefore he wasn't going to go on too long about them, but that this was a very important teaching, and we should try not to reject them. When I read through Bercholz's account of the hot and cold hells, I was struck by how closely they followed Gyatrul Rinpoche's descriptions.

Bercholz presents the story as a series of biographical sketches in which each person tells him their life story, and Bercholz explains how their earthly conduct led to their damnation. Because these hell realms are very physical, and merely magnify the agonies to which physical bodies are subject, several of these damned souls haven’t even realized that they are dead. They transitioned from life to death without noticing the change, and are still involved in replaying endless cycles of anger, hatred, retaliation, abuse, killing, death, and frustration. One of the strange things about Bercholz’s hell is that all of the damned he interviews have Asian or otherwise foreign-sounding names, and none are American or Western European. Apparently there are no New York investment bankers, Boulder-based publishers, or Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeons in hell -– a notion that strains credulity.

Bercholz's hell is a claustrophobic group experience that echoes Sartre’s declaration that "hell is other people." Beings are packed together in misery, radiating anger, heat, resentment and hatred. This emotional overload generates a mounting crescendo of pain that intensifies the agony of each and all, which is relieved by occasional, brief moments of unconsciousness. This depiction channels the classic Tibetan image of innumerable beings boiling in a cauldron of molten metal, for whom relief occurs only when demons smack them on the head with red-hot hammers, and they pass out from the impact, only to awaken again in the boiling pot.

Bercholz begins by exploring the fate of those who commit suicide, and discover that they've failed to end their consciousness, and now must wallow in a muck-filled sewer of human excrement, blood and pus. He interviews a tycoon who engineered sophisticated artificial intelligence robots, creating a world filled with pollution and grinding inhumanity. He elicits the life story of an eastern-bloc scientist who developed a doomsday device and pushed the button that would destroy all life on earth. From there he moves on to a bloodthirsty killer from an African nation who was killed in the same type of coup he executed to unseat his own enemies. Each of these beings is a victim of their own speed and aggression. Bewildered by their inability to control the forces that engulf them in the afterlife, they are blown to pieces by sudden impacts that they cannot anticipate, they explode in rage, they are killed in the act of killing.

In the cold hell, we meet a wealthy man who has lived mechanically, without human feeling, and now trudges the icy streets of an empty, frozen, wind-whipped city on feet that gradually become covered with agonizing blisters until he can no longer move. Another cold-hell denizen is a Japanese woman who lived an affluent lifestyle in an art-filled home, but could not show the smallest kindness when it was asked of her. She suffers the classic Tibetan cold-hell pain of developing a cold blister that increases in complexity, splitting into two blisters, then four, then eight, all the way up into the hundreds, at each point increasing in painfulness. She is so focused on her pain that even when the Buddha of Hell heals her blister, she brings it immediately back into existence and starts counting the splits as the pain mounts, reassuring herself that her monotonous agony will continue without interruption.

In the Tibetan cosmology, the damned suffer in these extreme hot and cold hells for unbelievably long periods of time, emerging only by way of a long, slow journey through "trivial hells" that the damned trudge through for hundreds or thousands of years on their way to the final exit. To choose just one trivial hell for an example, those who were magnetized by lust during their earthly lives now hear their lovers calling from the top of a tree, begging for rescue. When the victim of this illusion tries to climb the tree, it turns out to be covered with razors. Fighting their way to the top, they arrive, self-lacerated and covered in their own blood, only to discover that a nasty, iron-beaked parrot has been simulating their lover's voice, and rewards them for climbing the tree by pecking out their eyes. Bercholz’s recounting of these trivial hell stories, in which mirages promising relief dissolve and reveal new torments, closely follow the classic doctrinal formula, and lack originality, leading the informed reader to suspect that they were included for the sake of completeness.

One thing that seems strange, then, is Bercholz's omission of any description of the worst hell, the Avici hell, reserved for heretics who have broken their Buddhist vows, killed their parents, shed the blood of a Buddha, or committed other doctrinally-proscribed actions. The Avici hell has two characteristics -- the agony is uninterrupted by the briefest respite, and continues until the Universe itself expires. Given the close parallel with the classic accounts of hell in Tibetan scriptures, it's clear that Bercholz is affirming the whole ball of blazing wax, so we are left to wonder why he backed off before administering the final, terrifying blow. Perhaps because those to whom this dread volume is directed don't need to have it all spelled out in letters of flame. As a cruel Catholic priest once told me with a soft smile as he delivered an understated threat -- "A word to the wise is sufficient."

THE VEDIC ORIGIN OF BUDDHIST HELLS IN HINDU LITERATURE

Where did Patrul Rinpoche get the concept of hells that he put into Words of My Perfect Teacher?  Gautama Buddha did not assert the existence of hell in any of the sermons reliably attributed to him. Hell is not an element of Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path, nor does it feature in his explication of the Twelvefold Wheel of Dependent Origination, the wheel we must stop turning to experience freedom.

The Sanskrit term for hell is "naraka," the same term Tibetan Buddhists use. Naraka originated in Vedic mythology, as recorded in the Vedas and Puranas in 1500 BCE,[18] a thousand years before the birth of the historical Buddha, who is thought to have lived in India from 563 BCE to 483 BCE.[19]

The Tibetan Buddhist naraka has features identical to those of the Vedic/Puranic hells: (1) the hells are segmented into various different types,[20] (2) many of the Buddhist hells have the same names as Hindu hells: Raurava (lamentation), Maharaurava (great lamentation), Kalasutra (hell of black wire), Avici (uninterrupted pain),[21] (3) both the Hindu and Buddhist hells are surrounded by the river Vaitarani,[22] that is filled with blood, dung and all sorts of filth,[23] (4) the Vedic and Buddhist hells are ovens with metal grates for floors, radiating the full spectrum of heat from red to blue, and (5) Yama is the Lord of both the Buddhist and Hindu hells.

As we shall discuss further below, Buddhists also borrowed the doctrines of reincarnation, guru worship, and mantra practices from Hindu religion. Shiva-worshipping tantrics (Śaivists) and Tantric Buddhists emulated each other extensively, so the two schools mirror each other in numerous ways. “Tantric Śaivism and Tantric Buddhism borrowed freely from one another, creating marked parallelisms primarily in practice, and sometimes in thought as well. They even have synonymous names: the emic name for Tantric Śaivism is Mantramārga, a parallel with Tantric Buddhism’s Mantrayāna as well as the earlier Mantranaya.”[24]

The Vedic/Puranic hells were invented to enforce Brahmanical social norms. As Eileen Gardner observes in her "Hell-on-Line" website, that provides excellent histories of various hells from a wide sampling of cultures: "It would be difficult to call many of these deeds sins in a Western sense, since they often include actions that would simply be considered impolite, rude or unhygienic. For urinating in front of a cow, a brahman, the sun or fire, for example, crows would rip the intestines out through the anus of the offender."[25] Similarly, women who drink alcohol are forced to drink molten iron in hell, while male drinkers are force-fed hot molten lava.[26] Another clever Hindu hell is the "river of semen," in which men who force others to swallow their semen are drowned, "feeding upon semen alone until his period of punishment" is exhausted.[27]

Hells are born of sadistic control fantasies, but to be effective they must take into account the fears of the audience. For example, Chinese hells are controlled by nitpicking bureaucratic functionaries whose records are mixed up, resulting in souls being placed in the wrong realms due to cases of mistaken identity, so even the best of efforts to save the damned collapse under the weight of excessive paperwork.[28] When the lore of the Buddhist hells went to the Land of Snows, the Tibetans added cold hells to terrify the natives, who were well acquainted with the pain of freezing to death, and easily terrorized with the notion that the afterlife could be a frozen wasteland without a hot stove or a cup of butter chai. In these perpetually frozen domains, the damned suffer from agonizing blisters that split and split yet again and yet again, ad infinitum. Only people who have suffered the agony of the freezing cold would be responsive to such threats, so that is exactly what their compassionate clergy gave them.[29]

BERCHOLZ'S MODERN DELOK STORY ADAPTS AN ANCIENT TIBETAN MYTHIC FORM

Bercholz’s suggestion that he is an American delok invites investigation of the delok tradition. Delok stories have a historical beginning as a literary genre, and follow certain conventions. The delok stories began to appear in Tibetan written literature in the fifteenth century.[30] The stories began as oral recounting, were transcribed by religious writers, infused with some common doctrinal elements, and retold by traveling bards who entertained crowds in villages and towns, illustrating their tales with large thangka-paintings. This tradition resembles the manner in which folktales were disseminated in medieval Europe and gradually evolved into the mystery and morality plays that were used to teach religious doctrine to the illiterate European serfs of the middle ages, whose rough lives and scant intellectual development parallels that of the Tibetan populace well into the twentieth century.

Delok stories became subplots in larger narratives, providing a redemptive ending to an otherwise tragic story, as in the popular tale of Nangsa Obum, a romance of star-crossed lovers. After being beaten to death by her father-in-law, Nangsa Obum descends to hell, passes through judgment by Shinje Yamaraja, the Lord of Hell, who returns her to the world of the living, where she passes the remainder of her days as a nun, teaching others the path to redemption.

Delok stories begin by recounting the painful emotional experience of dying of an incurable illness. The dying process is recounted according to the Bardo Thodol teachings, wherein “the elements” of the body -- earth, water, fire, air and ether –- dissolve one into the next, prompting a series of extrasensory experiences that culminate in death. Although evicted from the physical body, the dead person inhabits a gandharva body, a life-form that “eats odors” and can travel with the speed of thought. The dead person looks back on their corpse, but instead of their own cadaver, they see an animal’s corpse, dressed in their own clothes. “In every case, the dead person’s body is seen not as a human corpse but as the cadaver of some specific animal -- a pig, a frog, a snake, or a dog. The delok never recognizes it as his or her own body, even though in many instances the animal corpse lies in the delok’s bed dressed in his or her own clothes.”[31]

Because the dead person is alienated from their own corpse, they don’t realize they’re dead, and try to participate in human society. They try to talk with people who cannot see them, asking to be served food, water, beer, and tea, and they get angry with their relatives for ignoring them. Whenever the dead encounter weeping mourners, they are pelted with egg-sized hailstones composed of blood and pus that materialize from the sky and cause them grievous pain.

Eventually they notice that their body isn’t casting a shadow, and realize they’re dead. Then they get agitated, lose connection with their physical surroundings, and begin wandering in an eerie landscape: “[T]hey travel over earth of molten iron, long and empty stretches of road, over rocky mountains and mountains composed of fire, mountains of copper, mountains of molten bronze, valleys and open plains, through magic forests with trees of iron and trees with razor-sharp leaves, along the edges of ravines and pits of burning embers, inside houses of molten iron, across the shores of immense rivers and oceans, inside palaces of lotus flowers, temples … a nightmarish distortion of the everyday world the delok left behind.”[32]

This is the journey through the “bardo,” the intermediate space between life and death. On this journey, the delok is accompanied by a companion, sometimes a celestial being, who explains some of what they’re seeing. Jangchup Senge, a lama-delok whose experiences we discuss further below, was accompanied by a handsome young man who was an emanation of Avalokiteshvara. They eventually come to a large bridge and see a big town on the other side, where the recently-deceased abide in their ghandharva bodies. In the famous story of Lingza Chokyi, the dead woman’s companion tells her that the bridge is the border between the living and the dead, where people wait up to 49 days, a time period prescribed by the Bardo Thodol, waiting to be brought up before Shinje Yamaraja, the Lord of the Dead, who will judge their karma and determine their destiny. Awaiting judgment, the dead remain in a familiar social milieu. Those whose relatives sponsor generous funeral ceremonies with abundant offerings for the lamas enjoy comfortable accommodations, while those whose relatives make stingy funeral offerings, or omit them altogether, must suffer in poverty. The Tibetan mechanism for transmitting food to the dead is simple -– food and drink are simply burned up in a fire, and the smoke nourishes them in their ghandharva form.[33] Physical and social landmarks keep the dead psychologically close to home. They may run into people they’ve known during their lifetime, or hear news of how people who died before they did have been faring in the afterlife.

The delok has a chance to observe a number of trials, where Shinje Yamaraja passes judgment on the dead. Shinje is assisted by two spirits who were born simultaneously with every human being, and accompany them throughout their life, and keep account of their bad and good actions with bags of black and white stones. Shinje weighs the stones in his scale, and takes testimony from the dead person, checking their story against the “mirror of karma,” that replays videos of all past events at his command. Occasionally, Shinje will discover that there’s been an error in demonic bookkeeping, for example, the demons have snatched a person with the same last name. These erroneously damned people get sent back to the land of the living with a stern reminder to tell everyone about what they learned in the bardo, i.e., that they should make a lot more offerings to the lamas so they’ll have a happy landing when they die. Karma Wangzin, a noble young woman, was sent back with specific directions from the Lord of Death: “Encourage the people of Dzambuling to follow virtue and give them a message about what happens in the bardo between death and the next life. The reason you’re doing this is that in your former life you met with Dorje Pakmo (a female deity) and you received initiations, reading-transmissions, and oral instructions from her.” Shinje provided her with details of her past incarnations to further put her in touch with her elevated destiny, that made her a fit candidate to “return to your body in the human world and work extensively for the welfare of beings….”[34]

After a negative judgment is passed, demons step forward like bailiffs to take the damned to hell, but the delok tradition does not place a heavy emphasis on the grisly depictions of hell that chill the blood of those who read Patrul Rinpoche’s Words of My Perfect Teacher and other traditional lamaist renderings of the precisely-detailed hells. There is a greater emphasis on the sense of the individual spirit being lost, deprived, driven about by “the winds of karma,” beguiled by illusory appearance, and terrified of the possibility of being sent to hell by Shinje Yamaraja’s final judgment.

There can even be saving graces in the after-death state. Janchup Senge, the lama whose companion was Avalokiteshvara, found the temple that Maugdalayana built when he rescued his mother from hell, and gives us this description: “That temple has the capacity to remove suffering just by being seen … a four-sided celestial palace with four ornamental gates, a series of archways, and dharma wheels [where] the harmonious music of gods and goddesses” was playing. After this auspicious experience, Jangchup Senge answered Shinje’s questions satisfactorily, reciting his birth to noble parents, education in the Dharma, and recognition of the nature of the mind “as it exists in the bardo realm.” Shinje then conversed with him congenially about the virtues of Avalokiteshvara’s six-syllable mantra, and how people should prepare for the moment of death. Shinje also suggested a new design for prayer-flags that Jangchup Senge popularized throughout Tibet, after his return to the land of the living.[35]

When the delok is returned to the place where their corpse lies, they still see it as an animal form, but must re-enter it to come back to life. When Lingza Chokyi looked at the pig carcass dressed in her clothes, she reached out and grabbed them to pull them off, and then found herself back in her body, reviving. Jangchup Senge simply realized, “That dog’s corpse is my own corpse!” and received a bit of advice from Avalokiteshvara to exercise “a little will power” to recover his “precious human body.” Thereupon, he found himself back in his body.

Once back in their body, the delok may have more problems. When Karma Wangzin returned to her body, the person who was keeping watch over her wanted to be sure she wasn’t a zombie. “Removing the veil he smacked my head many times and then placed his hands on my bosom.”[36] The fear that corpses might become reanimated by demonic spirits was common in Tibet. “To guard against [this] the corpse must be watched continuously throughout the day and night. *** [There are] dramatic tales of monks engaged in hand-to-hand combat with possessed corpses, of entire villages contaminated by ‘zombie madness,’ and even comical stories of young, inexperienced lamas beating corpses over the head with the thick wooden book covers of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.”[37] “Once the corpse is animated, it walks about with tongue wagging and arms outstretched, intending to spread its ‘zombie sickness’ … by touching victims with the palm of its hand [but] they move slowly, are unable to speak, and cannot bend at the waist [which is why] the main doorways of Tibetan homes are often cut low to keep [zombies] from entering.”[38]

The delok stories are part and parcel of “a world overpopulated by evil forces threatening defenseless human beings *** a world haunted by fear of death and disease, terrified of dark demonic powers, and suspicious of destructive forces that are able to appear deceptively normal and harmless to the untrained eye. This view of such an uneasy world had a popular basis in Tibetan society and was widely shared among all categories of people, whether they were scholar-monks or illiterate lamas, pious [laypersons], wandering evangelists or accomplished yogis. In reading through the Tibetan literature on demons, rising corpses, and people who return from the world of the dead, one cannot help but come away with the sense that fear and paranoia must have struck a constant chord in the lives of Tibetans everywhere, or at the very least in the imaginations of those Tibetans such works were most likely to impress.”[39]

Comparing the classic delok tale with Bercholz’s, we find some differences. He doesn’t see his corpse as that of a pig, although given the way he treated his body, that would hardly have been an unjust fate. He doesn’t experience the confusion of being ignored by his relatives, nor does he see people mourning his death while failing to perceive him. Nor does he suffer the slight of not being offered food and drink while others quaff and dine before him. He doesn’t see any mourners, and is not pelted with pus and blood. He has a spiritual companion, but he doesn’t cross a bridge, wander lost through desolate landscapes, or spend time in the town where people await the determination of their fates while the lamas chant over their bodies for forty-nine days. Because Americans don’t have the tradition of paying lamas to sit with the body of the decedent while chanting the Bardo Thodol and burning food and drink offerings for the purpose of nourishing the departed in their ghandharva form, this was of course omitted.

Bercholz completely leaves out the climactic judgment scene, where Shinje Yamaraja determines the fates of the dead by summoning the surveillance spirits, weighing their black and white stones, questioning the dead, and testing their statements against the images appearing in the mirror of karma. One might ask why Bercholz couldn’t have updated the legend by giving the Lord of Hell a computer, a database of surveillance videos, and access to everyone’s social media passwords, emails accounts, Netflix, Steam, and porn-site memberships. The answer might well be that such an evocation would certainly provoke some wag to remark on the death-lord’s resemblance to Mark Zuckerberg, a man Bercholz would be loathe to place in an unfavorable light, given Facebook’s vital role in disseminating spiritual fictions worldwide. Finally, avoiding a pop-culture reference that might invite a humorous sendup, Bercholz was not mistaken for a zombie when he returned from his trip to hell.

In the traditional delok story, the focus is on the individual’s struggle with karmic destiny, that culminates with redemption and realization that it is an error to live for worldly purposes, while neglecting spiritual opportunities. Departing from the delok narrative style, Bercholz skips the bardo and goes straight to hell, where he updates and personalizes the suffering promised by the traditional Tibetan Buddhist hells. His claustrophobic visions, crammed with suffering beings who enhance each other’s pain in a collective orgy of all-encompassing, ever-increasing suffering, imbues the story with a depressing sense that this mass disaster is inescapable. Where the delok stories placed Tibetans in a familiar cultural context, making the bardo a magical extension of the physical realm, Bercholz’s hell, populated by beings with strange names, absorbed in a gang-bang of endless violence or numbing isolation in mechanized, urban environments, reflects the sterility and anomie of modern life, effusing a mood of existential dread like a toxic cloud.