before, the walrus was Paul. but now Dr. Software has taken up the call. i received the following from him early this week:

> Subject: sgi.general postings
> 
> Well, Dave, it looks like the time has come. I think it
> would be a good idea to move the POLI postings to 
> sgi.politics.  To keep posting them to sgi.general may 
> invite corporate censorhip, which I (for one) wouldn't 
> like to see.  When I read messages where someone is 
> even afraid to post a message arguing with the articles, 
> it says to me that we have a censorship problem - only 
> this time it is being done in reverse.
> 
> > i'm sure i'll be flamed for weeks and weeks for this, 
> > but would it be possible to limit the "Poli" posting 
> > to sgi.politics?
> > 
> > laura
> 
> Do you have a problem with this, or can we just do it?  
> Thanks in advance ...
> 
> -- jmb

obviously my point of view in all of this is something of an anachronism. you see, i am basing my conduct here on the days (sadly and inevitably gone forever at SGI) when the precursor to sgi.general was the "all" company-wide e-mail alias. of course this place was much smaller then. and i guess i'm just an eccentric young coot for wanting to retain some of the magic and the outlandishly uncommon quality of what it was like to be able to post anything to that mail alias, and now and then, create a wondrously vital and dynamic stirring discussion that might draw in tens of differing voices covering a wide-ranging area of opinion and dialogue. it was a very heady time and i felt very stimulated and charged by the whole process and how this was such demonstrable proof-positive that SGI was simply one-EXTREMELY-RARE-of-a-kind in the world of business and enterprising industry. the opportunity to experience first-hand such an invigorating forum of debate and discussion--uncensored by any call by those who did argue that politics has no place in the business setting and that this kind of discussion was completely inappropriate--well, it just turned me on to witness it being able to happen in such an unfettered and uninhibited a way.

i don't really subscribe to the reality of either form of censorship that Jim alludes above as taking place in my case here. rather i attribute it to the inevitable clamping on of more and more rules that tend to accompany the growth of almost any kind of business organization or enterprise. i certainly cud have refused to accept Jim's suggestion and tried to fight it, and in the end, wud have lost. i know i'm in a minority here in a host of different ways. so be it. believe it or not, it gave me great pleasure to be able to exercise my "ascii-voice" in such an unhindered and wide-open way. the experience of being able to send out articles and analysis of current events that offered differing points of view from the staid and virtually uniform kind of slop dished up by the mainstream media really has made me feel very connected to and engaged in life and involved with what is happening at this time on this planet. i know that's not what's "supposed" to (and rarely does) transpire at one's place of employment. but there was a time at this place when this conventionalism didn't apply. i was endeavoring in my own singular way to maintain a tenuous hold on this realm of experience and communication.

i certainly do feel very disturbed with what is happening in our life and times at this most critical juncture in our planet's evolution. as a species, we are truly the curators and the ones absolutely responsible for what the future of life on earth may or may not produce. in a nutshell i feel there is a rampant widespread lack of owning up to this enormous mantle of responsibility by the currently most militarily powerful nation on Earth, the United States and its collective citizenry. obviously there are many factors that go into this bubbling brew.

a tribe of native people's of this land--i can't remember which--lived by a fundamental rule included in their collective decision-making processes, which decreed that the validity of any project they engaged in was first considered in terms of what wud be its impact on their descendants, seven generations hence. that's an enormously powerful idea when one holds it up to the kind of quarterly time-measuring lens we all witness being practiced in this time and place. as i listened to Ed McCracken speak last week re: the current state of SGI's health, i thought about how this sort of basis of perceptual reality is so completely fundamental to the kind of society we find ourselves living out our lives within. if we are indeed to honestly dream about our children's children's future, we cannot continue to make the decisions that will be so fundamental to whatever future they will inhabit, in so short-sighted and limiting a way. Terence McKenna, a man i find compellingly provocative, recently spoke of how "we are looting our children's future," and i absolutely agree with his enunciation of this dilemma.

so anyways, as some of you know, i cud go on and on and on about this kind of thing. and i will. in spite of the fact that i deeply regret retiring my energy from sgi.general--i really appreciated the opportunity to have the widest possible bandwidth of access to people which this alias provided me with--i do recognize that the inevitable momentum of SGI as an up-and-coming heavy player in the New Yawk Stock Exchange will make such non-conformist attempts to "bend the rules" less and less possible and acceptable in terms of the rules of the game. anyways, with the invaluably trivial help of Vernon (an authentic anarchist dear to own heart) i hereby announce the creation of two new news groups:

i created these as an alternative to sgi.talk.politics because i wanted an "archive" of posts, now to be created in sgi.talk.ratical, that devotes itself entirely to the tenor of the kind of things i used to send out here. it's description is "reproductions, reprints and analysis of current events". sgi.talk.ratical.d is the discussion arm of this pair. i request that all feedback/responses/debate/diatribes/flames/etc be directed into this discussion group. if you ever wish to place an initial posting into sgi.talk.ratical, please change the line

Followup-To:

to read

Followup-To: sgi.talk.ratical.d

so that all responses will find their way into ratcial.d


the kind of areas i particularly wish to focus on encompass topics such as:

• looting our children's future
  a tribe of native people's of this land--i can't remember which--lived by a fundamental rule included in their collective decision-making processes, which decreed that the validity of any project they engaged in was first considered in terms of what wud be its impact on their descendants, seven generations hence. that's an enormously powerful idea when one holds it up to the kind of quarterly time-measuring lens we all witness being practiced in this time and place. as i listened to Ed McCracken speak last week re: the current state of SGI's health, i thought about how this sort of basis of perceptual reality is so completely fundamental to the kind of society we find ourselves living out our lives within. if we are indeed to honestly dream about our children's children's future, we cannot continue to make the decisions that will be so fundamental to whatever future they will inhabit, in so short-sighted and limiting a way. Terence McKenna, a man i find compellingly provocative, recently spoke of how "we are looting our children's future." we have to learn how to grow beyond this short-sighted way of structuring our lives and values.

• endemic denial
  the single most important practice that enables the continuation of the ever increasing numbers of homeless, people with aids, nuclear waste which will not "go away", continued impossibly useless military spending and procurement and world-wide sales, more traffic and more smog, raping and destruction of the environment at large--all these kinds of visible signs of neglect and avoidance are perpetuated thru denial. it is this endemic quality of denial--that things really are every bit as bad as they appear to be across the board--throughout this society which breeds more and more disintegration and continued resistance to serving the true needs of all people.

• trading our liberty for security
  drug war escapades that focus on the casual user rather than going up against the big seam in the guise of the international distributors, building more prisons while simultaneously cutting back more and more on educational spending, artificial art-officials practicing their own righteous brand of censorship--all these things inevitably will lead to the kind of book burning (where people themselves will not be far behind) practiced by the National Socialist German Worker's Party.

• the great nation robbery
  the Suckers & Losers scam is THE GREATEST heist ever perpetrated, and all the taxpayers in the United States will foot the bill for this. current estimates are that it will easily surpass 1 TRILLION dollars with the figure of approximately $2,500 being owed to the IRS by every man woman and child in this country to pay for the party hosted by ronnie and georgie during the 80's. why isn't this being rigorously investigated by the legislature? they like everything else in this consumer-based society are for sale to the highest bidder and who bid higher in the 80's than those people who were able to loot an entire monied industry with implicit government connivance?

• 500 years of genocide and pathological lying
  next year we're going to be subjected to the ruling class re-enactment of Columbus' "discovery" of a land already inhabited from coast to coast. they're going to sail 3 replicas of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria from Europe to the U.S. which will visit something like 500 different cities along the coast. this perpetuation of the myth of the European discovery of a continent that was already populated with a multitude of cultures is being challenged by indigenous groups that seek to take this opportunity to come together and offer an alternative voice to the kind of official mythologies that this nation has always tried to maintain as being "factual".

• breeding ignorance in the guise of being informed--the maturation of the U.S. state press.
  in a recent poll, it was found that with those people who watched more and more TV coverage on the Persian gulf conflict, their level of awareness of the facts of the situation--as well as the events leading up to its inception--was more and more lacking and misinformed. more and more we see the merging of news corporations into massive conglomerates. these are of course just like any other business--they're in it to make a profit. more and more we're seeing a "what's good for the New York Times is good for America" kind of sham like what was practiced by General Motors earlier this century.

• elected careerists
  these people manage the empire, not the needs of the people. whatever happened to the civil servants who wud participate in the legislative process for one or at the most 2 terms, and then return to their civilian pursuits? iran contra was a classic example of how congress abrogated its constitutional duty to confront the executive with the evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors--impeachable offenses--of which Bill Moyers spent an hour and a half exploring on PBS earlier this year. why did the elected legislatures violate their own oaths to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States by covering up big grand-daddy's incompetence or criminal behavior? they didn't want another Watergate--another failed administration--another undeniable indicator of how out of balance our system of government is.

• new world nightmare
  the new world dysfunctionalism has as its latest "success" the wholesale forced relocation of an entire country back to its pre-industrial age status. what gave us the right to orchestrate and dictate the genocidal destruction that we rained down on the people of iraq for 43 days in the guise of 100,000 sorties including 88 tons of explosive force? abraham lincoln is quoted as saying:

  "Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right--a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world."

  i suppose the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of this country made his own unilateral decision that he would extend the above to include "any leader ... having the military power, has the right to destroy the industrial base of a society whose leader he loves to hate..."

• national security state junkies
  communism clearly cannot be maintained as the kind of revered enemy we have been taught to hate. what "group" will now be nominated to occupy the hot seat? there has to be an enemy. without it, the state cannot sustain its legitimacy. The following points are provocatively discussed by author Leonard Lewin, in his book Report From Iron Mountain On the Possibility And Desirability Of Peace, published by Dial Press in 1967:
  "War is virtually synonymous with nationhood."

  "The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state."

  "The war system not only has been essential to the existence of nations as independent political entities, but has been equally indispensable to their stable internal political structure. Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain acquiescence in its legitimacy, or right to rule its society."

  "The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power."

  "The organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer. It is ironic that this primary function of war has been generally recognized by historians only where it has been expressly acknowledged--in the pirate societies of the great conquerors."

  "The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers."

in all of this i seek one thing: to stir people up--to get people to exercise their own analytical powers and focus them on what the hell is happening to our world that we all share. which opinion do you value more--your own or Ted Koppel's??? the kind of numbing paralysis that the seduction of consumerism engenders in this culture is truly earth- shattering and new to the human experience. it seems to more and more be replacing our penchant for honestly acknowledging the true state of consensus reality and seek to improve and regenerate it when called for. mass market culture has almost completely replaced past generation's experiences of "roots" and local stories and myths. we cannot just sit back and try to "buy off" on the bill of goods being sold to us as a sort of permanent Miller Time. if we do, then there is no future for our children's children's children. i hope many more of you than i can imagine will at least every once in a short while tune in to sgi.talk.ratical to feel the breeze of a different point of view than the one we are all constantly ever more being bombarded by like a commercial scud attack for more and more and more of anything we could possibly imagine wanting to possess and have but which we don't really need.

Know that the people who are the richest
are not those who have the most,
        but those who need the least.

                                                                                          yer friendly neighborhood ratman