h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello LeKZ,

I use that name because I want to speak to your system as a whole, this largely because I don't know any of you at all well yet. I have been through a significant portion of your site and I am impressed, horrified, ammused, fascinated, curious, and a lot of other attractive/repulsive concepts. Largely, though, I am drawn to what you are talking about and very interested in what is happening there.

First of all, let me say that I started reading my way through your site looking for flaws that would indicate that this was a hoax of some kind, basically just starting from a skeptical view point. After all that I have read, I have decided that you are either exactly what you claim to be or you are a genius, master craftsperson, immensely beyond my ability to discredit. Not that I want to discredit what you present, but rather out of a kind of side-show shock. My fascination howeever does not stem from that kind of curiosity, rather, as you have read my page, I am interested in understanding more about you.

I should add, that as an actor in the theatre, one of my principal tricks io creating a character is to essentially generate the personality of the character and duplicate the sounds, and movements that he/she shows me. I don't believe that I have ever gone so far as to allow that 'person' control of my body, but as an actor, I am so busy on stage keeping track of everything that affects my performance, which is literaly everything within range of my senses, that I can't say that it hasn't happened. So, on an artistic level, I have to admit that I want to learn all about you, ask very personal and impertinent questions and go through all the motions short of breaking your bones and sucking out the marrow. (Be afraid, be very afraid? I hope not.)

Now, as to the matter you left me your message about, I have read through (most of -- I may have missed some things)the littluns section, left and right, and I can't see any reason why any responsible adult would object to what I read.

I started to state an exception, but I realize that given a responsible adult, there is no objection.

You used the word 'grok' and I am enough of a Jubal Harshaw to be willing to admit that while I understand that word intellectually I still have major reservations on the emotional and instinctive levels. To be able to grok one must be able to fully place his understanding within the mind and personal world of the other person. I am very good at empathy, in fact, I am very good at telempathy (well, that's the only way I have found of describing it.) But, there is a very real boundary over which I cannot step. That location of that boundary allows me to understand but not to grok. (But I have never found anyone who could do better consistently than I can -- I'm not THAT conceited, but I am being very straight forward with you in response to the honesty (I'm using my definition here) that I found on your site.

I would very much like to see the contents of that dispicable letter if you care to show it to me. Don't post it here unless you are willing for the world to see it , now and forever. Feel free to use the email address on my 'space' (why couldn't they have just called it our 'home' or 'page' but 'space'? Phooie!) The reason I want to see it is to allow me to better refute and, if appropriate, interpret it to you. I suspect it needs to be analyzed before it can be really understood.

To the littluns, I don't see anything out there to be objected to except for how difficult it is for us biguns to remember how hard it was to learn to do what it is we do when we get big. Sure you're not spelling yuur words, you're sounding them out. But it's clear to see that you are very special littluns, whatever age you are, you are still very experienced littluns and what you write shows that. I'm sure that a lot of that experience you wish you had never had, but there it is, it happened. Go on and have fun doing what it is that you are doing whenever you can do it. Is that too confusing?

To the biguns, I am amazed at the interface between your auditory expression and the written page. If you will permit me, I would like to suggest something that I don't think you have noticed about yourselves but which I would not blurt out without some invitation.

You see you asked me to come because I understand. I did come and I do understand. If you have ever visted a plam reader or a tarot reader and left scared, I promise you that I can do that to you but unless we get to be very good and trusting friends, I will not do that. And I most certainly will not do it sitting here at a keyboard with you unknown hours away from reading a message you can't really shield from everyone's eyes.

Besides, having set myself up to be called a charlatan and liar. I don't plan on allowing you to put me to the test till I have a better understand of you than reading through your website with a definite theme in mind can give me.

I also, I hope understandably, want to talk to you about MMC and some details about what you wrote and what you obviously couldn't bring yourself to write. AFter all, you are the one who approached me, out of nowhere. All my life, at times of my most expressive outpouring, I have found myself friends with 'retired' people from the Intelligence community. Having been a 'hippie' in the '60s, I think you will allow me a a bit of memory of the paranoia of those days. (No, I don't expect to see an ID card marked expired nor do I care if the whole world reads what I write here.

More later, or email me not to.

Barton

Well, Barton, we cannot begin to say how gratifying it was to read your response. You're in the States, right? Otherwise, you were up all night reading our pages. It is now 11:55, Rocky Mountain Time, and we just finished writing to NYC Student and friends, to Explain It All For them. Naww, we're never didactic, or wordy, either.

The letter was simply an autoresponse from Yahoo!WebRing, saying the kids' site submission had been denied. The only grounds for this denial was the single word 'unreadable'. They spent a few hours, earlier, getting Jared(7) and Penny(10) to 'fix' the spelling on a few of the pages, to make them more 'reeder-frendly, sinc the reeders arnt kid-frendly'.

You (and anyone) may always address us as 'LeKZ'. We all answer to it. It is our nom de plume, nom d'étage (more on stage acting shortly), nom d'Internet, and most importantly, our auto-nomy.

We find ourself both amused and pleased that you approached our site with a hermeneutic of suspicion (the only hermeneutic we ever use), looking for where we fell out of 'character', or where the pieces did not add-up. As it happens, we are honest in an unflinching way which tends to make others flinch. Our life was such an intricate tapestry of lies, misdirection, fraud, and manipulation, that we find all falsehood repulsive. Marilyn Singer is one of our two or three Designated Liars. She can do it because she is an actor. If socially acceptable behaviour calls for us to behave in a way that is not true to ourself, Marilyn (or Auntie, or I, Arpeggio) takes over and puts the shine on. We are exactly what we claim to be. It would take an imagination much more twisted than ours, to have made up our life story. We have an excellent imagination, but it doesn't tend towards morbidity.

We are a genius, as it happens. That is not meant as a brag. It's just a Thing. Multiplicity does not occur, cannot occur in any child with an IQ potential >135. Most of the mps we know are closer to 180. We are good at anything we turn our hand to. Whether the car needs repair, something imaginative needs to be done with the only food in the house, which is a half-package of spaghetti, some pimientos, and a box of frozen tofu burgers, or a stranger needs to be talked down off a bad acid trip and a roof, we can do it. We suffered a brain-injury in 1994, and can no longer extract cube-roots in our head. Needless to say, we did not try to sue. Juries are notoriously unsympathetic about problems like 'I occasionally misplace things, and I never did before'. Also, since our head-trauma, our absolute pitch sometimes is not available when we reach for it, like a pen you just put down and now it isn't anywhere.

We have been doing all varieties of arts all our life. We paint and draw, write, compose unsalable rock oratorios for six voices, act, and sing. The singing is especially important. I, Arpeggio, was deliberately created when the body was in its early 1s, to sing to us. So long as we could sing, and hear ourself, we knew we were alive. So long as we could sing, we could breathe. So long as we could sing, all the other noise we could never make did not choke us.

Public speaking, stand-up comedy, and acting came as naturally to us as breathing. This is probably a function of the programmer personality we were trained to have: keep people at arm's length, and keep them enchanted/amused/entertained/distracted. If we'd turned into a sociopath, instead of mp, we would probably be as famous as Madonna, now. We really enjoy stage acting. We figured out that it was not all, but only some of us who were the big 'performers'. Performing was a constant, a feature of daily-life existence. Stage performance, however, was just outrageous good fun. Also, theatre bohemians tend to be less judgmental about weirdness in other people, and we have always been weird. Theatre provided a social life, in High School and College. Rehearsals also provided an excuse for not being at home. But when Marilyn acts, she does just what you do when you act. She puts the character on like a suit, only from the inside out. We don't 'switch' to act. And nobody can act to 'switch', consistently, undetectably, without falling down. We never get the accent of whoever is speaking wrong. We each know who we are, and how we speak. Duh. You are certainly welcome to ask questions, personal and intrusive ones, even. Would we post a website like that and then turn SHY? Not bloomin' likely. We are here to tell the world, and part of that telling is answering questions. If you ask something about which we would prefer to talk privately, we can email you. If you ask something which we prefer not to answer, we'll tell you. So, fire away!

Us kids wanna say thank you to Mr Barton for looken at our site. We were sur mad. We dont think most grown-ups are dopes, but there is such a thing as a Stupid Adult Trick and were riting our Manifesto of childerns rights to post cos of we diserv respect to. Wat you sed about us maks us fel much beter. Its true were difernt from Outsid kids cos of we remember lotsa bad bad things. But wed much rather no then not no. And we dono how its like to be anyone els, so we dono wat were missen I gess. Were mostly hapy now and want it to stay that way. By by, Pat for the People's Republic of Children

Telepathy, eh? Well, it's a word. We don't like to use words like that because they're loaded. People start looking at one oddly, and wondering whether one is going to tell them about the UFO, next. We actually don't believe that most 'paranormal' phenomena are anything except perceptions people have, and for whatever reasons, do not know how to interpret. We were a very good psychotherapist. In addition to having nearly perfect auditory memory, so we never had to take notes during sessions, we pick up on subconscious cues so instinctively that we have been accused of 'reading minds'. Naah. We read body language, voice timbre, personal electro-magnetic fields (the mystifiers call them 'auras'), faces, degree of dryness of mouth, etc. without having to try. So we are absurdly empathic, and people have called us 'telepathic'.

We went through a period in college where we did Tarot readings for people. Even we found the accuracy a little unnerving. Many of us are logical positivists, and some of the funky things we 'perceive' defy logic. When that happens, we 'roll with it'. You probably have the same sign, invisible to you, but burning neon over your head, that says 'Tell Me Your Story'. We've been Mother Confessor since we could sit by ourself.

Okay, so what did you notice about our auditory thinking and how it translates into a visual medium? And what's your suggestion? Enquiring minds want to know. Consider this an invitation.

We've been the scary Tarot card reader. We've been the medium who made all the little girls wish we'd never started the seance. We scare the spit out of most people, because we look at them, and they feel as though we have parsed them. That's only because we have. We like it when other people can do that, to/for/with us. We've been a party trick ever since the organisation, which was hoping espionage by ESP was possible, helped us learn how to interpret much, much more of the information available than most people can even detect. We deliberately flunked out of the 'psi' track -- a very dangerous course of action -- at the age of 3, because that track was notorious for leaving people with scrambled eggs where their brains used to be. Nobody, to our knowledge, flunked any track and lived. Probably our father, Herr Doktor, made sure we just got moved.

We asked you to understand, if you could, because we were intrigued by what you said of yourself, and the manner in which you said it. We have found that there are, in the lives of mps in general, no coincidences. We were browsing through 'Who's Online', and the title of your article caught our eye. (We're in the beginning phases of a book on 'Bad Therapy Language', most of which is Jargon.) So the first person we looked up, since we joined here day before yesterday, was you. There was your message. We figured, okay, find out if it's for real. The things this person is saying are not things people say when they want to be impressive, or even liked. Most people find unrepentant honesty about one's own good qualities offensive. So, you and we offend people. This is not news to you, and it is not news to us. It's nice to know other people do it too.

Certainly, we'll talk about the MMC. If it's in a public forum, we may have to be periphrastic, but we are accustomed to that. No, we will not say Where, When, Who. If you ask a question and we get a panic attack, it's only because it's the RIGHT question. We'll do everything we can to choke out an answer. So, you collect former Agency operatives? It could be worse. It could be barnacles. On the other hand, barnacles are significantly safer to collect. You probably have very few coincidences too.

Hmm, something we haven't noticed about ourself? We've spent the past nine years turning ourself upside-in and outside-down to make sure we knew everything there was to know. We're very intrigued...

Looking forward to hearing from you again.

Arpeggio for LeKZ
and me to Pat

I'm outside of Chicago -- as far outside as I can manage to stay.

Alright, as I was reading through your site, particularly during my initial skeptic stage. I observered several things about what each of you had written. First of all, and qualifying for a plus on the doubt scale was the fact that all of you with the possible exception of the littluns (I haven't seen enough of you kids writing yet, to be sure) write with very much the same style, once you discount the conversational quirks and subject matter and with much the same vocabulary choices. As an actor, this seems very obvious to me. It's not the structure of the sentences or the words themselves, its nature of the word choice or the emotional progression behind the words, I'd have to study you're stuff much longer to be sure. (I'm talking off the top of my head here and most of this is an attempt to justify what is ultimately an intuitive perception at this point.)

The second thing that struck me is that the idea of each of you speaking in a distinct way that is portrayed as if transcribed from a tape machine which recorded the speakers. Yet, this is clearly not the way it was done. Sumwun hoo speayks with uh Suthrn draawl stiuhl speaylz hiz wuudz thuh raht way. (There is no way I could do this as consistently as all of you do unless I retrained my ears and used the phonetic alphabet.!) Yes, littluns this goes for you too. How do I know? Well, I guess its from subconcious analysis of all of your typing styles because I can't think of much else except that someone with that good an ear would have unconciously corrected some of the 'mistakes' in dialect that I detect, or seem to detect. This is clearly explained by your statement that LeKZ is auditorily oriented or approximately that. Frankly, you all are too much the precisionists for me not to take that remark in the most literal way. In fact, what really distinguishes each of you for me is MY perception of the *manner* in which your individual voices vary. Your attacks and the characteristic metre of what was on the page. (It sounds more and more like I must have been wrong on my first distinction, but I am not.)

The third thing that struck me happened about the third or fourth time you referred to 'the' body or 'the' hand or some other part. That was when things began to fall in place for me and all the pluses fell off the doubt scoreboard and the minus' sort of covered it up and pushed it aside.

By the time I finished reading after setting aside my doubt I had come to the conclusion I mentioned in my last post. So now, we come to that observation about the interface. It is and must be intelligent. She, for so I suspect she may be, may be totally subservient or she may simply wish not to be involved, but she watches everything all of you do and 'processes' your access to the outside world.

Now this may be no different than when I turn something over to my muscles while I think about something else (and sh*t yes, I have speculated that there may be more than one personality in my head and what his/her their sex is, but I don't have the necessary minimum IQ so far as I know, so if it's there, it's something different. (I'm sure I was tested for IQ but I have never seen the results [Though I am very good at fooling the MPPT, its a simple trick after all.] I have found that I can think/intuit circles around most MENSA geeks, but that's because they are MENSA geeks, so I don't worry about it. 180 you say, I have no hope of competing with that sort of a score. That's out in the region where the scores start to make no sense for the lack of standardization.)

The mental image I get of all of you is as if as you come forward to speak into a kind of microphone, you sit, lounge, or stand by it and say whatever it is you say. This 'microphone,' of course, is no such thing, it is more like her inner ear, and I visualize that her's is the hand that types and transcribes allowing you to think that you have traded off control.

If I were to go any further, what I would offer would simply be logical extensions and expansions of this possibility. More importantly, I know of no way that you could verify that I am right or wrong, if she does not wish to confirm it. It would be like a fish being blind to the water it swims in. (Remember the scientific maxim that a microscope cannot examine itself and generalize a little bit.)

If it is a she, and I am trying very hard now to sense all of you (I haven't done this in years -- it feels about right but I don't know. How could I possibly know?) I get a sense of protection and mother-like emotions, but that's quite possibly the projection of my own expectations.

My wife just came in an totally distracted me. I really don't know why I am throwing myself open in this way except that if *you* are going to make yourself that open, (though in a sense you are thrusting things out so violently that its like keep everyone away) then *I* feel the need to expose myself to potential ridicule without having even begun to test the waters as 'gypsy magic' clearly teaches me to have done first.

Okay, I'm going to set that aside and give your laughter a chance to die down (or your superstitious awe to abate.) and pass on to some of the many questions that I have. (I really am generally more protective of my dignity than this. Well, there it is.)

I take it from reading through your site that when one of you is not in front, the others still enjoy a full interior life metaphorically equivalent to owning your own little town where you each have your own place and can visit among yourselves or not as you choose. To what extent are you aware of the outside world when you are inside? Is it by hearsay or by direct experience or not at all?

Having just recently done some reading about the uses of children in warfare, I was not that surprised by what you wrote. But, I am very interested in the programming process and why the splintering is desireable or is it simply an inevitable part of the psyche protecting itself.

I have long suspected that genius level children are trained by our society not to reveal and even to destroy their talents rather than face the ridicule that the merely superior can heap upon their younger betters and with which the average inevitably pommel both groups aided and abetted by our assembly line educational system which has no place for more than fast, slow, and normal children and d*mn few of any but the normal kids, thank you.

Incidently, this thought, consider the amount of money that Yahoo has spent on perfecting it's child safety software and what the littluns spelling must do to it and that, more likely than not, is why you got the incredibly friendly heave ho.

As far as my 'I understand' manifesto, people very quickly figure it out anyway, I may hide it from my friends and aquaintances but I see no point in hiding it on line. Besides, it tends to bring out the intellectual gunslingers who occasionally can give em a run for my money once they stop trying to use the tricks they have got by on all their lives.

I am tempted to tell you that I, too, am a logical positivist but what I am is a logical relativist. While I love Wittgenstein's work. the positivists made the fundamental mistake of asserting a Truth about reality. (If you follow my writings around this place you can find a converation I started about "The Death of Truth" which someone picks up from time to time, but mostly teenagers feeling their Cliff oats. Take what I wrote there with my concept of Truth, Reality, and Honesty and you are most of the way to logical relativism -- most of the way because *I* am still figuring out what I mean.)

Please note, I did not say telepathy, I said telempathy. And it isn't reliable but it isn't tied to auras either. (I can't see them or I can't notice that I see them.) It does work through closed doors and I can, with a little bit of 'gypsy magic,' make people believe it is telepathy. The principal problems related to this ability, is that I seldom look at a person's eyes, I don't need to, and I have one heck of a time recognizing someone from a photograph if I haven't met them before. It may well be that I do see auras and they are simply the emotional structure of the person and I don't use my 'eyes,' physical or spiritual, to see them with.

I often use the Tarot to help me prepare a part I'm acting. I regard the tarot deck as a superlative collection of images and symbols refined through philosophy and art that help me to focus, bringing my intuition into a place where my intellect can work on it. I will often let my character pick the deck that he or she likes.

I stopped doing readings about 15 years ago because I was scaring too many people and beginning to like it. I knew precisely what I was doing though I really tried to be honest about what cards were actually turning up, but it was just too easy to twist things and people are far too easy to read when they're sitting in front of me. Over the phone is a bit more of a challenge but if I knew them at all then I could easily take things where I wanted to go (here's the really scary part) for their own good. I could hand them a list of the cards and they could study the books and see where I had read the cards 'correctly,' but I shut that off before I was addicted to it.

It just occured to me that when I saw the heading Military Mind Control, I said to myself, Oh God! Not another paranoid idiot wearing an aluminum collandar to protect himself from the Q-Rays! It's somewhat sickening to me that I was 'happy' to discover that you were from another school altogether.

I'm going to stop here for now and see if I still have any credit left in my wonder account or if you want to just close the door and slip silently away. Of course, the first thing I am going to do is to go back through your site and see if what I wrote here breaks *me* into gales of laughter.

Take care, all of you.

Barton

Phew, Barton!

Where to start? Point for point, we s'pose. Stage actor, Chicago, judging by spelling, you're a British expat too. 'Gypsy magic'. You're an interesting character. Decent of you to stop 'helping' people with your Tarot readings. Same reason we quit doing them. We were being intrusive and helping 'shape' people and they were letting us, and they were awestruck and we kinda liked, kinda hated that. Our best friend in grad school was a bloke who made fun of our (mostly female) groupies: 'Ohh, you're so DEEP. You're so INSIGHTFUL. You're sooo much braver than me [sic]. You're just what I want to be when I realise self-actualisation.' - NOT It was rubbish, and we always told them they could do it too, if they weren't so well-trained to be 'nice ladies'. That wasn't strictly true, but we found all those gushy women rather sticky, and couldn't (at the time) just tell them to rent themselves a spine and quit borrowing ours -- it was a maternal-parent Thing -- so we tried to compliment them away.

Yeah, we know we present everything in such a forthright manner as to be off-putting. It's a question of style, and stage of recovery. We and, say, Gentle Touch (link on our linkz page) are doing the same thing, in very, very different ways. We respect them, but we don't DO pastels. We got so tired of the 'nice' veneer, imposed from without at home, school, college, seminary, jobs, etc. It was thin to start with, and chipped readily. When we decided to create a website, we decided to just be who/how we are. Some of the material, particularly from the mid-90s, is much angrier than we are now. It is true to who/how we were. That is part of why we've been adding little epilogues to some of the writings.

So, you seem to be saying that you detect the presence of a 'switchboard operator' alter. Many mps have such a person. Among the combat vets, Katie MacGillivray (now civilian by choice) had precisely that job. If such a person exists, as you say, we would not necessarily know -- or not know. You seem to be, if we understood you correctly, suggesting that the underlying style of how we write, and its fundamental similarity across persons, is suggestive of such a presence.

To that, we must point out, those of us who went to school went to the *same* school. We learnt to write from the *same* teachers. Style is, especially when it comes to nonfiction writing, very much a learnt thing. It follows that we would, especially when writing non-fiction, tend to have similar vocabularies, use the same or similar choices of words, syntax, etc. Furthermore, we have, over the last nine years, *worked* at evening out some of the rough edges, and creating a 'standard' style in which most of us would be comfortable expressing ourselves, to avoid the otherwise ragged prose-style we would necessarily have. We have also intentionally standardised our handwriting, which differs wildly from alter to alter. Our 'Schoolies' use miniscule, incredibly neat print. Auntie's writing is, of course, big and ornate. Guido writes in all caps. Arpeggio's handwriting is very, very messy. Tex writes backhand. The kids much prefer typing to printing, which is much more time-consuming. Ya the puter maks the leters all the sam siz its hard to draw um that way plus al yu gotsa do is pres the butin for the leter yu want so its ez to do it I dont lik printen it taks al day. Me Flora Im for. Mine (I'm J Louise) is a bit on the old-fashioned British lady style. That, of course, does not communicate itself over the computer. We have worked to standardise, but if anyone is in a hurry, the handwriting immediately devolves to that person's own. Anything we post in writing on the Internet, or indeed anything we write, is subject to editorial revisions by the writer and anyone s/he/it asks to help. I do a lot of Internal editing, because I'm the English Teacher from He!l, and the World's Biggest Precision B*tch, barring Sara, who also does editing.

Sara did, at one time, have the 'switchboard operator' job-description. Delphi occasionally does. I occasionally do. Guido, Auntie, and Arpeggio all do. Mathilde certainly does. Mathilde and I are early-life Protectors from the mind-control (I from body age 1 3/4, she from body age 3) and we had to make sure, between us, that the controllers didn't own too many of us. We did, in childhood, push people Out, or yank them In, or dive in front of them so whatever it was would not affect *them*. There was a loosely organised 'Committee' of us, at body age 3, who worked together to flunk the psi track. The Stop.Watch. people are a product of that enterprise. (They are not quite human; many of us are not. Inhuman torture calls for nonhuman abilities to survive.) We still depend on the Stop.Watch. people to know exactly what is going on around us at any given time. They can, and would intervene if the *wrong* person tried to be Out. Any Protector would. As for Dispatching people, we are inclined to think there is not such a person. It's a collective sort of decision, when we write, who says what. We each personally know what poetry we wrote. We can and do 'ask' each other for information, so that one person can keep writing. But, as I write this, I have the sense of Sara, Arpeggio, and Kassandra looking over my shoulder. Any one of them is likely to make a suggestion at any time, and I might or might not take her up on it. If she feels it is something she has to say, she'll take over the hands and say it.

Many other people are paying a trivial amount of attention to what I am writing, in case I mention them or their group, because the fact is, we all prefer to speak for ourselves. Most of the kids are not at school yet (they will be after 9 am) but are not terribly interested. The teens, like all teens, specialise in being uninterested. (Not all of us - Jill). {You're different, and not a proper teen, Jill - Harry} Oh, crikey, don't get started you two! I'm your adoptive Ma, and I have the ability to sit on you both, at once, so just drop it. (We're being oppressed - Jill and Harry) Yes, you are.

One of the Protectors' necessary abilities is Keeping People Inside. When the self-injurers are feeling like cutting or burning the body, we take rotations 'sitting on' them. IF the person is strong enough to get Out anyway, Bad Things happen. They have happened, though not in several months, which suggests that there is no 'switchboard operator'. We have looked, and do look, for just such a person, and have yet to find solid evidence of her. We are not going to dismiss your hunch, however. If your 'hunches' are anything like as accurate as ours (and they might be -- Elektra and Delphi have no trouble 'sensing' you) then you may well be right.

Certainly, someone has always looked after the body's safety and welfare. One of Those Multiple Things, for which there is miles of anecdotal evidence, and which many doctors dismiss as 'medically impossible' (and a few really good ones understand) is that when many, or most of the adults are puking drunk, the children are annoyed because the body has an upset tummy, and some of the adults, particularly Sara and nonhumans, are sober enough to drive safely -- *and* pass a breathalyzer. Someone (Sara claims it was she) decided, when we used to abuse alcohol, that only the ones who got drunk would have hangovers. We've amused and amazed our friends by how hung over we have not been, after a night of heavy drinking. Also, Marilyn drank a great deal in college, and almost NO one remembers doing any homework, except Sara, Kassandra, and Leah who say they did most of it while the rest of the adults there were passed out. There were not a lot of alters in the batch who went to college. I, personally, having started protecting the system before body age two, decided to go 'dormant' and not deal any more, directly they left home to go to Summer School at Yale. Once we were 'safe' from him, and the incest, etc. was over, I took off. I 'resurfaced' (that is very much what it feels like, for a lot of people: coming up and seeing the world after having been deep under water for a long time) in mid '98. They were not ready to know what I knew about the Agency before then. Once they became ready, I was able to surface. That IS suggestive of a 'switchboard operator'. Well, perhaps we do have one, though it's hard to explain and would take more time than I care to spend right now... remind us to tell you about Tek. They ARE the infrastructure. They are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, and will do so at some point.

Couldn't agree more about Mensa geeks. We were invited to join Mensa by default, because of our SAT scores (Scholastic Aptitude Test -- a racially, culturally biased, standardised multiple-guess exam that tests how good people are at taking multiple-guess exams -- a joke, really) at 16. We joined, went to a (count it, one) meeting, were bored stiff, and never went back except once. Seems some of the Mensa geeks had devised a variant of the IQ test, but moved the median of the bell-curve up to 150. We took the thing on a lark, and tested out at 187. We don't know (or care) how legitimate the thing was. Omni ran a 'Hardest IQ Test in Existence', put out by the Four-Sigma Society (for 4 standard deviations above normal intelligence), and we posted it to them after working at it awhile (it *was* hard). They apologised, but we were two questions shy of meeting their criteria for membership. What is ironic is that after our head-injury, we had a neuropsychological workup, using the usual tests, which we can (and have) faked out. We were hurting, and could *feel* the cognitive damage. The neuropsych said: 'I don't see how you can say that. You test in the top 1% of people in this country'. What were we supposed to say? 'You don't get it; I used to test in the top .01%'? Juries wouldn't sympathise. Nobody cared. WE and our then partner could see and feel the difference.

Tek are now scratching their heads, thinking 'how would anyone sense US?' Well, there are a lot of them, for one thing. They've been with us, looking after us, since the body was little tiny, for another. Between them and the Stop.Watch. people, you have easily 3000 individuals, whose presence would, even though they do not 'broadcast', be detectable to someone who can. 'Telempathy' Okay. Grok that -- not me personally -- I'm way too linear to 'grok' anything, but Kassandra and Arpeggio do, Delphi does, on her plane of existence, which is *different*, because she maintains a 'thread' of contact with absolutely everysingleone of us original, trauma (or daily-life) created alters. Elektra is strongly of the opinion that you probably are mp, because she can 'see' you quite clearly from here. Elektra has not been wrong yet, though there could certainly be a first time.

Hey, this is Elektra, and I just have a couple of things to say: 'superstitious awe'? Don't flatter yourself, buddy! More of us have been doing more of what you can do, and were trained to understand it better, than you can imagine. No, I don't think you're any kind of charlatan. I do think you're not used to people who are at least as perceptive as yourself. We go looking for people like you. You may or may not do that; I couldn't tell. Let me stick my neck out and tell you some things about you:
a) No watch that has anything other than a quartz movement has ever kept correct time on you. You owned and killed more watches, before quartz came out, than anyone you knew. You may have become so disgusted that you don't wear a watch.
b) Compasses occasionally mistake you for Magnetic North -- or possibly always. If you were female, it would definitely be always.
c) Since they have raised the sensitivity of the machines, you nearly always set off the alarm in those walk-through gizmos at airports. It's not your keys. It's purely personal.
d) One of the things you like about acting is the hours. You really can't take the 'noise' during the daytime. The overstimulation makes you nuts.
e) Fluorescent lights are too loud. Supermarkets make you very anxious to leave, and/or put you into a sort of trance.
f) If you're in a really lousy mood, you know better than to get on the computer. You've fried a few motherboards in your time. You can't use 'touchpad' mice on laptop computers if you're even slightly tense. The computer's boot sequence scrambles itself.
g) You're the person everyone asks: mind if I turn on a light? You don't notice that the light is dim. You use your physio-eyes much less than most people.
h) You can sober up instantly in an emergency. You know/sense/feel exactly how the alcohol/other drug has affected you, and can reverse the effects at need. (In our case, blood-tests reveal no presence of drugs we've deliberately burnt off -- we convinced a psychiatrist to try this so he'd understand why we needed chemical ICBMs to hold us down.)
i) People know better than to let you play with their newest, sensitive electronic gizmos.
j) The light-bulb at your desk/chair/side of the bed burns out three times as fast as the one your wife uses.
h) When you are driving, you occasionally notice street lights going out as you drive by. This happens particularly when you are in a bad mood.
i) As much as the sun is too loud in the daytime, and you are sensitive to light, stage lights have never bothered you. Their presence is a comfortable blanket between you and all those people.
j) You had to learn, in childhood, that adults (especially teachers) hate it when you finish their sentences. They hate it more when you anticipate their next topic by a week or so.
k) Sometimes, just before you fall asleep, or if you are overtired, you think you hear people talking just outside your threshhold of hearing, which is, incidentally, much more acute than that of most people.
l) You do much, much better with old, metal cars with no computerised nothing, than with shiny new plastic cars with computerised everything. You *can* talk your car into 'getting better'.
m) You know how to take physical pain out of other people's bodies, and into your own. The hard part is getting rid of it. Your own threshhold of pain is preternaturally high.

There. Now I've gone way out on a limb. You can tell me how I did. Lemme add one more item: Those VR things with the glasses and earphones give you the screaming willies. You'd rather have a nice root-canal than have a virtual-reality go directly into your head like that. We'll be very interested to see what your response is. As a reality-test, you might consider running that list by your wife, to see whether she's noticed things you have not. Curious to hear back -- Elektra (Chief Surgeon, Medical Div)

J Louise again, and wow, I don't have that kind of nerve. Elektra doesn't mind being wrong, on occasion, but I get the impression she is dead certain she is not. Arpeggio, who naturally thinks in song-lyrics about half the time, flashed to the Eagles' 'Victim of Love', you know, from the Hotel California album 'I could be wrong, but I'm not...and you've got your stories to tell...it's such an easy part, and you know how to play it so well.' You can probably understand the 'I could be wrong, but I'm not' sensation very well. We have a phrase we use, picked up from Performance Artist Laurie Anderson, to express that vindicated/sinking feeling when we wish we were wrong, but we are not (like about the psychiatrist -- we told our therapist she treated us as if she were a corrections officer and we were an offender in need of correction, a couple of months later, our partner looked her up on a whim, on the 'net, and she's the defendant in a civil rights violation suit brought by an inmate of the Denver County Jails, whom she dangerously overmedicated at her last job...), we say 'Oh boy, right again' in a particular tone of voice. Laurie Anderson's routine is: 'I met this guy, and he looked like he might have been a hat-check clerk at an ice rink, which, in fact, he turned out to be. And I said to myself, "Oh boy, right again".' No need to say more.

On to your questions.
This is Auntie butting in here for a minute. Whaddya mean, like our own little town? There's a reason we call it 'LeKZWorld'! It's a whole lot more than a town. Country would be more accurate. We've even got a King, because the kids -- who are basically socialist -- decided we adults should provide a Monarchy for their entertainment and protection. The King's job, apart from throwing parties, is maintaining treaties with the various sub-governments and self-governing outfits the system as a whole comprises... and when you think of the system as a whole, 20,000 doesn't begin to touch it... that is just known and counted noses of specific trauma-created alters from specific times/places/abuses (though some of them don't have 'noses', as such, and some of them are elfinks). Yes, everybody has a place to be, and a thing to do, and the structure Inside is pretty rigid, because if it were not, we'd be 'switchy, twitchy, and b*tchy' all the time -- which is a phenomenally unpleasant feeling. Most Inside people (fortunately) don't want anything to do with Outside. They saw Outside when the body was little, and were forever unimpressed. We make it our business to make sure they can lead safe, productive, peaceful, and love-filled lives, Inside. We've got clergy from the Vicar to a couple Mullahs, to the Radical Feminist Quasi-Christian Clergydyke (who has a penchant for flowered dresses that gives Kurtis seizures), to a bunch Rabbis, to sundry Gaelic gals who are Neo-Druids, yadda, yadda. The Psych Dept are booked round the clock working out PTS issues with Schoolies, Home-SA kids, Agency toddlers-teens, Homies, Ex-working-girls, etc, etc. We got inpatient units for everything you can imagine, from 'brainwashed Agency hardcore' to 'zombied out gang-raped teens'. Medical is big, here. No currency: from all according to their abilities, to all according to their needs, because the moral imperative left by the Baby Who Was Born is: if you *can* help, you MUST help. -- that's all from me for now, the One and Only Auntie

Didja maybe push a buton or sumpen?- me Pat And peples observen wat gos on Owtsid dipends wats interesten to um. Litles alwys notic birdys and squirils and any animals and we notic wen the body gets to hungry if the angerexics ar forgeten to eet. Us kids espeshuly the hom incest kids whos hol lif was bein wakd up and rapd by the f****er in the midl of the nite well they lov looken at prity senery and they com owt if we go for a driv in the mountins or sumpen. The babys lik to be snugled but the bodys all rong and they cant reech the toes to suck um owtsid an thats scary so they mostly only peek somtims also ther not shur how to let biguns go on doen wat ther doen the way biger kids ar lik I cood com owt and tawk wen ther driven cos of wat Im doen dont hafta be in Madrileñas way she drivs lik a NYC cabby. Us kids never lik to com owt wen the biguns ar smoken yuk ptooy tho I kinda hadta get usta it. If ther drinken alkohol ferget it weer outa ther. *PPTTHBBT* thats wat Opus the Pengwin alwys sed. If ther wachen a scary movy or reeden a scary buk we dont wanna no but if its PG shur we wach to and evn the litlests lov to heer storys so wen its not a bigun buk they tell us it mabe in difernt wurds evryon understans. Mak sens? Hop so. by by for now Pat

Again, J Louise, and as regards why multiplicity is desirable for programming, it's really rather obvious: the things involved in programming, and the things people are programmed to do, either cause psychosis, or require sociopathy. Psychotics, however, are unreliable, because their perceptions deviate widely from conventionally accepted 'reality' (and we are not, repeat NOT, going into ontology here). Sociopaths can't really be made subordinate. Antisocial Personality Disorder is fundamentally uncooperative. They are looking out for number one, and so long as your agenda matches theirs (which is total control of everything and everyone), they'll do what you say. Then, they'll stop, and more likely than not, turn on you. Multiples are SANE. By reaching in and generating alters through trauma, and then conditioning them, they can be made to believe things, and behave in ways totally inconsistent with how the rest of the mp's mind works. The right-brain doesn't know what the left-brain is doing, literally. (You've seen some references to the Wall, or the Mirror Wall -- that is SOP in most MMC, to divide the right and left brains metaphorically. In the '50s, they tried severing the Corpus Collossum, but that created too many physiological and cognitive complications. So they went for a very sturdy -- supposedly untraveseable -- fictitious Wall. We tore ours down in '98. It was messy.) Mps are designed to appear 'normal' to themselves and the world at large, and when 'accessed' (see 'The Manchurian Candidate') to be able to do things that run totally contrary to everything they think they believe, and then totally forget. No one but mps can do those things. Trouble is, the programmers do it (or did it, in the '60s) by the Book. The Book is static, and ultimately predictable. Mps are all different, and not static, and not predictable. There are things held in common by most mps, but those who survive, get *out*, and continue to survive, simply by doing so, change enough of their thinking that the programmes, which are not very flexible, can come loose. I was going to say more, but I shall not turn this symposium into a how-to manual for would-be programmers.

Yes, the multiplicity starts as a way for the psyche to defend itself. Organised abusers know all about it, however, and have done for a few hundred years, though their language about it was very different than ours. Masons and whatnot were 'employing' the 'daemons' who inhabited the children back in the 1600s. We are very, very fortunate. The male parent accidentally botched his attempt to programme Mathilde, who was supposed to act as him, his eyes, his agent, Inside. She was then able to start unravelling programming as fast as it was happening to us. This is not to say that most of us were not chock full of the stuff, but they never *really* owned us. The some of us whom we collectively decided were 'losers' any way, we let do their dirtiest work, and then consciously and deliberately deleted. (Mps aren't supposed to know that's possible, but of course, in a metaphorical reality, just about anything is.)

Hi. My name is Mira von Mars. I'm spokesperson for the Schoolies -- alters who had virtually nothing to do with any part of life other than school, which was more than a little terrifying. We were skipped ahead two grades. Socially, we were a newcomer to the States, a small fat kid with an accent and a funny name, who didn't know the rules of baseball, but did know how to read, write, and do logarithms in base eight in her head. So they put us in with the slow third-graders and accelerated second-graders when the body was about to turn six. (We'd asked for 'Hamlet', 'Romeo&Juliet', 'Othello' and 'MacBeth' for the body's birthday.) We have a *lot* of early Schoolies. School was unbelievably awful. Being gifted-and-talented is a handicapping condition, and never let anyone tell you otherwise!

Ye Gods! I just looked at the time. We have to go to our once every six weeks desultory therapy appointment in half an hour. And this is at least as long as Moby Dick (and twice as dull) - dry up, Auntie - so gotta go, like, now.

Will try to get to your other questions later, and make it less lengthy. (For that, J Louise, you born pedant, you gotta let someone else write.) Okay by me.

Ciao,
Us

First of all and always, when it comes to my preferencs, the longer the better.

A. It's harder to lie to me when I have more of your words to read.
B. The more detail the better an idea I have of your reality. Words are only approximations of thoughts so every conversation is an extended metaphor for what you really are saying. The more you say the more of your postulates I understand. If I want to be understood, and I usually do, I write till I feel the person I'm writing to has all the info necessary to understand and hopefully somewhere in there, there is the key that makes it all make sense.
Somewhere near the end of this I'll describe my theory of art and why it matters here.
C. I really enjoy reading (I keep writing 'hearing' and then correcting it.)
D. You represent a totally new experience to me, do any of you over there recognize the term 'kvel?' I'm kveling/
E. Write the way you want to write, even if I didn't like it (and I do) I'm a big boy and there's certainly no reason for you to change the way you do things just to satisfy the fact that most people don't enjoy in depth conversations and would never think of answering "How are you?" with something that started with "Well, let me see . . ." What's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah! Superficial. (most people are what I call agressively ingnorant, they don't know and they'll fight to stay that way. I try to avoid them. It's hard, but I try. On the other hand, I try to never turn down an genuine request for information -- though sometimes I will point them at the reference stack of the library,)
F. As long as we are writing this here in a moderately public place, we might as well make sure the record is complete.

Enough.

Elektra,

'superstitious awe': Can't a fellah stick his tongue in his cheek without having it bitten off?

We go looking for people like you. Of course, you do. How can you avoid it. Who else can you talk to? I, at least, get tired of holding back all the time.

a) No watch that has anything other than a quartz movement . . .Yes. And I do wear a watch, I'm addicted to it. It's digital and still gains about 30 seconds every week. I just reset it when I think about it to the NOAH website.
b) Compasses occasionally mistake you for Magnetic North . . . Not necessarily north but they never work reliably. Interesting observation, I knew that it couldn't just be because they were cheap. How much technology is there in a magnetized needle on a float or pivot? The electronic ones seem to work okay though.
c) . . . you nearly always set off the alarm in those walk-through gizmos . . . I have never got through one on the first try unless I can talk the attendant into accepting everything from my pockets and compose myself first. I really hate those hand held jobs.
d) One of the things you like about acting is the hours. Yes, but I haven't noticed that it was for that reason. My natural clock wakes me at 3:00PM and I go to bed when I'm tired. That is when I'm allowed to live that way. Most of the time I try to do the important stuff after 4:00PM and cope the rest of the time.
e) Fluorescent lights are too loud . . . not *too* loud, but I think I've lost alot of my high frequency hearing and I never really heard well below 40 Hz. I've learned to ignore them and my monitor as well -- most of the time.
f) If you're in a really lousy mood, you know better than to get on the computer. Not that I've ever noticed. I generally like computers and of course they do tend to work better when I have been called to fix them. Still, I have to wonder, there have been times.
g) . . . mind if I turn on a light . . .only when I'm very intesely involved in what I'm doing, so I'll give that a no. Generally, I see well enough but I have had bad eyes since my youth. Very good close up but corrected vision has never been more than adequate. Dark vision is purely average. Still as you suggest, I do manage to get around anyway.
h) You can sober up instantly in an emergency . . I suppose so when it comes to cannabis but I really don't know. I never allow myself to become really drunk or stoned. Certainly, when I was doing LSD and psilicybin (mescaline doesn't work on me) in the 60's, I enjoyed the self awareness and interesting mental states but I have never experienced hallucinations or got really drunk. So sobering was not a real issue. And sometimes it wasn't necessary because the officer seemed inclined to do what I wanted. (I try not to investigate that one too deeply, it scares me. It's NOT mind control so much as MY mind control, an acting skill or, perhaps, mp. I've never thought about actually metabolizing the chemicals faster, I went to all that trouble to put them in me. I did enjoy playing with a lie detector once for a job interview -- I used the spurious over reaction to an insignificant incident trick. I wasn't interested in trying for neutral. If I had the chance to play with one alone, I'd give it a try. I seem to be reasonably good at bio-feedback.)
i) People know better than to let you play with their newest, sensitive electronic gizmos -- I don't break them! I understand them. I like them. It's the cheaply made stuff that I can't keep working but that's because they're cheap -- sometimes.
j) The light-bulb at your desk/chair/side of the bed burns out three times as fast as the one your wife uses. Yes.
h) When you are driving, you occasionally notice street lights going out as you drive by. Occasionally but so what? Such a vague prediction. When I'm in a bad mood, I don't notice much of anything.
i) . . . stage lights have never bothered you . . . Yes, and I'd never put it in those words, but they do make it easier for me to sense and work the audience, which I do shamelessly.
j) . . . adults (especially teachers) hate it when you finish their sentences . . . True, but I was so eager I generally had my hand up before the sentence was finished. After a few, school yard incidents i learned to stop that. I picked it up again in college till I realized that the teachers really weren't interested in debating during their classes. One English teacher got really pissed when I kept demonstrating that Shakespeare's plays were unfinished till performed. He gave me a C. That's life.
k) Sometimes, just before you fall asleep . . . I've never noticed but I could convince my self that some of my lucid dreaming fit that category.
. . . much more acute than that of most people . . . seems to be, but I've also noticed that they lack my ability to lock out sounds around me when I'm really focused.
l) . . . old, metal cars with no computerised nothing . . . when it comes to repairing them yes. Otherwise,no. Talk them into 'getting better' never happens with my own car, but other peoples, sometimes.
m) . . . take physical pain out of other people's bodies . . . yes, but only certain kinds. I do know more about massage and relaxation than I have any right to.
Your own threshhold of pain is preternaturally high. Yes.

I've not tried VR yet, I can't say but I'm inclined to speculate that I will like it where you would not by virtue of your life experiences but it's just a guess at this point.

LeKZ,

Thank you for the pretty complinent about British expatriot. I'm American by birth and experience. But when I'm on the h2g2 I try to stay in British mode. Summers I work at the Bristol Renaissance Faire and spend the whole weekend in British mode when I tend to 'sound like Richard Burton,' which is to say Welsh with a polish. Spelling, well I am just now breaking myself of spelling theatre that way. It grows out of the way I treat theatre as the nearest thing I have to a real religion. I don't want it confused with a cinema house. But, its an affectation so I set it aside. On h2g2, of course, its proper. Here, I try to use British spelling when I know it and when I can force myself. Most of the time I'm happy to be able to type and have the words come out the way I intended. In the last few years, that's grown more difficult since I injured my right forefinger in an accident with a sword.

And to clarify, I am and always shall be a theatre artist, but I am working and earning a living as a computer programmer/computer person. It's a different mindset and I manage okay. I gave up theatre due to an illness that is only now beginning to be diagnosed.
The main effect, as far as I was concerned, was poor sleep/sleep deprivation and the effect it had on my ability to learn my lines. Besides, I really do enjoy eating and my family does as well.

Switchboard operator: I, of course, have to accept your answer, but the transcription character of your dialectical writing style still makes me want to find some intermediary in charge of the body. What do I know about it after all? More information will bring more insights.

Obviously, in a society such as you live in, where you must pass around the metaphorical eye, by which I mean the issue of who's out, yet you all can still sense what is sensed by the body, you must ineveitably have someone staring over your shoulder at all times and I had not fully visualized that. But . . . well understanding will come, probably without an logical meaning attached to it.

What postponed earlier is this observation. As far as I can tell, from a more or less logical positivistic viewpoint, communication consists of the 'facts' conveyed deliberately, and the 'facts' conveyed, deliberately or otherwise, by the order and manor that the other facts were conveyed. Abraham Moles calls the first 'semantic' information and the second, 'esthetic' information. Setting aside for the moment whether his esthetic information corresponds with anyone's artistic content, this means that esthetic information is destroyed by translation but semantic information passes through just fine. Facts are facts no matter what order they are received. Moles managed to destroy the semantic content through electronic manipulation of the facts of music yet mainatain the esthetic content demonstrating that the two are fundamentatlly independant. This led me to suggest that an art object is something that has been designed to teach you the language needed to understand its message. This, I generalize to say that every message has semantic and esthetic content and the purpose of the esthectic content is to teach the person receiving it how to understand what is being said from the senders point of view. This is largely an involuntary process in our society. I would imagine that for you, this is not involuntary and has not been involuntary since the body was 3 years or younger. It does not seem possible to manipulate someones reality without fully understanding how to control the reality that is presented even if the terms used to describe the process are different.

I am prepared at this point to say that you are precisely what you say you are by virtue of what I have read, or you are simply the programmer you claim to have been and consumate actor, which I infer as being possible, dangling two pieces of the most seductive bait I can conceive of.

I continue because I reject the second option and because I'm enjoying this immensely

Barton
J

All righty then.

i gots a qwestchun isnt it overacten to cut yr finger off wif yor sord? - Trinka

Muffled giggling in background. Trinka is 3, and something of a wit among the Littles.

J Louise, back into the fray -- probably to be continued in the morning; it was a looong day.

What you *didn't* say was your reaction to Elektra's accuracy; she was right on most of her statements. You're the one who does that to other people. She turned the tables. All you did was give a scorecard. Your silence could be interpreted a number of ways, but rather than assuming, we prefer to ask: so, what do you make of that?

Perhaps it's our fatigue, but we found your 'semantic' v. 'aesthetic' paragraph quite convoluted, and since we are not sure we understood what you were trying to say, we are not willing to say we disagree, yet. How about we fire back with *our* theory on 'art', vis-a-vis meaning and understanding, and you work out the compare and contrast part?

Our theory of art involves three disparate elements: a) the creator (along with his/her intended meaning, inspiration, etc.), b) the created (in and of itself, separate from its creator), and c) the interpreter (viewer/listener, whatever, and her/his personal interpretive framework). A can hope that B reflects A sufficiently to communicate A to C. B may contain more or less or entirely different things from the ones A intended, not necessarily because A lacks skill, but because art has a way of making itself. C is a completely unknown quantity. C may think like A, in which case, C will see in B more or less what A meant. C may have personal reasons for perceiving B more superficially, more broadly, or entirely differently from the way A intended, without reading anything into B that is not present. C may read things into B that are not present. A may have missed the mark in creating B, but since A knows what A meant, to A, B is that thing. B is not value-neutral, and can be almost anything, once it is out of A's hands. If art is meant to be a means of communication, A can only hope all possible Cs think like A, or that B is dead on target, you can't miss it, hit you on the head with a hammer obvious. That would make B not art. The art is in the ambiguity, and variable interpretations and levels of analysis at which B can be understood. C has to interpret B as C understands the world, and there's the rub. C might say things which outrage A, and which are nevertheless quite true of B.

Simple example: in 10th grade, we had a Creative Writing class. The topic of the assignment was 'All happy families are the same, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. We wrote of a family who shared a home, but nothing else -- every person isolated. We placed Mom in the kitchen chopping celery, which the younger child (girl) hates. (We hate cooked celery). Mom has spaced, or doesn't care that her daughter hates celery, was our point. The teacher wrote in the margin 'Chopping celery -- how cold! how crunchy! how castrating!'. We were, at first, appalled. (Ms Knox had a tendency to sexualise things unnecessarily, we thought any way.) Slowly it dawned on us that just because we did not think those things when we wrote those words did not mean those things were not there to be seen. The Dad was a worry-wart wimp workaholic, and Mom was definitely passive-aggressive (she was banging pots and pans more loudly than necessary, knowing it would distract him at his desk, knowing he wouldn't complain, as a way of getting back at him for not paying more attention to her). So Ms Knox was not, in fact, off base. She saw what was in there, even though we never put it there. To us, the celery was about Mom and daughter. Another reader might have seen something in the loud pots and pans, and loud music from son's room, and silent at desk Dad, and sulking doing homework daughter. We can see it now, looking back. (It was a much better story than we realised at the time, in that it had many levels of analysis, and was not the straightforward alienation story we thought we were writing). B had its own momentum. C sees how C sees (don't read that aloud, fast).

Now, can you please apply your 'semantic' v. 'aesthetic' philosophy to the above and help us understand your point? We really missed it, we're afraid. Perhaps it is just a matter of not associating 'facts' and 'art'? Yes, there is what is there, and what is there too, but less obviously. Um. We're going to give this up for tonight. Our brain's too mushy to do anything philosophical, and that is what this is.

Actually, we took up the study of religion, because we dislike philosophy. It all boils down to epistomology, and you can chase your tail indefinitely, with epistomology. It does no one any good, and wastes a great many people's time. We studied ethics, under the umbrella of religion, because they were talking about social justice. Moral philosophers mush around talking about anything, so long as it has no real life, practical application. Philosophers, we've always thought, are fine as long as they don't have to separate an egg, or fix a stuck zipper. Heads. Clouds. Save a tree and don't write it. We make exceptions for existentialists, Nietsche, Wittgenstein, and Origen (who could also be fairly called a theologian). Also Lao Tsu, Confucius, and other Eastern philosophers.

Now, back to your posting. Uh, why would we lie to you? We don't lie. We said that. We especially do not lie in writing. We more particularly never put our name to anything we write that we do not believe to be the truth insofar as we are able to discern it. It got to the point, with one therapist, who wanted us to sign a no-self-injury contract, where Guido told her flatly: I ain't signing nutt'n I don't know is true, and while there's nobody around here gonna get away with self-injury now, I don' know that there ain't gonna be tomorrow. If we got new people comin' outta the woodwork, how'n he!l you expect me to put my name to any kinda contract? She threatened to quit if we didn't sign. We said fine, but we will not compromise our sense of honour that way. Ultimately, we signed a 'we promise to do our best to prevent...' contract. That was fair, and those of us who were around then knew we could truthfully say that.

Top three ways to make us really, really angry:
1) Accuse us of lying.
2) Lie to others about us, misquote us, misinterpret us instead of asking US.
3) Imply we *would* lie.

When the body was 13, Mathilde managed a bit of a coup with the maternal parent by telling her, 'NEVER ask me anything unless you're sure you want to know the answer, because I won't lie.' *That* sure kept the woman out of our business!

So, strike item a.
b. Sounds like us. Our theme song 'Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' is probably the root of our wordiness. We try to be as precise in our choice of words as possible (which leads to problems when we use the *right* word, which also happens to be the *obscure* one, but in your case, we'll assume you have no fear of dictionaries, should it come to that). We talk, not as long as we feel is necessary to get the point across, because we would never shut up, but as long as we feel is necessary given certain generous assumptions about our readers' literacy. The only complaint we've had about our website has been about the 'hard words', hence the glossary Kassandra is one day going to have time to actually write out. Words are a tool. The written word is a tool we have honed to a fairly fine edge, but they are still, at best, a clumsy way of conveying something as nonlinear and substantive as, say, the gestalt of our life. I, J Louise, am one of the more linear thinkers here (think of me this way: I began my military career at the age of 1 3/4). Even I am discursive, but not the way Auntie, or Arpeggio, or some of these loopy thinkers are.

Auntie thinks like a Chaos Theory 'butterfly' probablity pattern, only more improbably. Arpeggio is not in the least flighty, but likes to move about restlessly from topic to concept to orange to Jupiter via Pougkeepsie (I wrote that last bit, JL doesn't have it in her - Arp). Sara and I are writers of stuffy, detailed, precise (hand gramma'ically correct -- 'arry), and what Harry said, treatises. I cut loose with my poetry (not 'ardly, what wif all tha' 'aiku you write, an' bloomin' sonnets! -- 'arry)... right.

c. 'Corse yer 'earin', no' 'readin''. We dun wroi' hin haccents fer fun, yer know. Hit's 'ow we is. Sound. We're a singer fr'eavens' soike! (hand yer, Oi'm Co'ney -- 'arry hawff to bed now. Noite, Bar'on. Noite Mar).
Good night, Harry. No, no one 'transcribes'. People prefer to spell the way they sound. It's part of the 'gestalt', given a visual medium. Harry is thoroughly Cockney. I'm rather 'RP'. Arpeggio is slightly Americanised. Diana more so. Stann is thoroughly RP, and we've teased the marbles out of his mouth, mercilessly. The Gals are Irish, Scots, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, and Norman. The Breton and Norman Gals speak an entirely different dialect of French from the Swiss children, who speak an entirely different dialect from those of us who learnt it at the Agency. Then there are the 'Homies', like Kassandra, who learnt French at school. To be 'real' we have to write as we speak. Guido usually uses American spelling and punctuation. Alice always does. Debbi Hansen (pronounced 'Dibbi') is from Texas. She only learnt to write recently (wasn't part of her job-description) and uses American spellings and punctuation, but hates 'trying to write normal-like'.

He-uck ye-uh. Ah don' sahnd lahk the way the wurds luk, aind it gits awn mah nerves, pritindin' Ah do. Bein' Tixan is a bag parta who Ah ayum. Ah fail fewlish spellin' lahk Jay Leways. 'Sahds, mah grewp wurn't litrit tell jest a few munths agow. Ah kin pritind Ah don' know no bitter. -- Dibbi

d) He wants to know do we understand from 'kvelling'? Whaddya think, Rabbi, what should we know from Yiddish, growing up in Manhattan going to school with all those Jewish American Princesses? Would we maybe have learned some of the langwich? -- Auntie
Aah, maybe bissel here and there, but more from the family of that nice boy we didn't marry, who were much more Ashkenazi than thou. And Steve? All those kosher restaurants we went? We wouldn't pick up a word here or there? -- Reb. Miriam
Oy! Listen to youse two. You don't know from Yiddish unless you've lived out awn LawnGisland, where I grew up. You want Yiddish, my relatives you can have, and keep, if you'd maybe be so nice -- Clatter
We can kvell and kvetch with the best of 'em.

e) 'Aggressively ignorant' = our definition of 'stupid'. But there is another kind of ignorant, that we discovered in ourself a long time ago. We never, ever understood that everyone was not on the same page (or in the same book, or perhaps in the library at all) as we. We were amazingly insensitive to other people's lack of genius, because it never crossed our mind that everyone couldn't see/hear/know things as we did. We were 22, and ran dead-on into 'Statistics for Social Scientists' before we ever experienced the feeling of being lost in a class at school. *That* opened our eyes a bit. Those blank, muddled expressions people had (especially around us) started to make sense. It dawned on us, at that advanced age, that we had never had to *try* before. Statistics was, and still is, very counter-intuitive for us. We had tutored learning-disabled kids, and helped them, but we could not grasp the simple concept that reading was counter-intuitive for them. (I'm going to butt in and say, we did, but not on a cognitive level. We couldn't have helped them, otherwise -- Kassandra) Okay, but we didn't know how thick we were about how most of the world thinks/learns, etc. You lot drove everyone at Wellesley crazy, because no one at the school knew anyone who did less work than you, and you graduated with just under a B average. You would have had to *try* to do worse. It freaked people out, and you couldn't see it. (I don't remember. I was really drunk at the time -- Marilyn ) See what I mean?
Yah, we don't turn down genuine requests for info either. It's funny, though, how much we hated teaching. We taught English as a Second Language, and French as a Foreign Language, and we rode ourself so hard, we burnt out really badly. We are too much of a perfectionist to teach. If one of our students had trouble, we tore our hair out trying to figure out how to restructure things to fit that student's way of learning. We never let a dumb student be a dumb student. We refused to believe there was such a thing. It took until college to get that particular clue.

There's a story, possibly true, about Charles Darwin's daughter. Seems the family had moved, and she was about five, and was trying to make friends with another little girl. 'So,' she asked her new playmate, 'where does your father keep *his* barnacles?' Every child believes that their family is 'normal', until s/he/they learn otherwise. The male parent was an off-the-scale genius (we'd guess his IQ was around 230). Our ex-brother was smarter than we (200 or so). The female parent was well-educated, spoke six Indian languages, read Sanskrit, did her Master's degree in England (in a foreign language), and was NOT a genius. We did not realise that she really honestly could not keep up until we were 15 or so, and didn't want to believe it then. She was also one of those women with a target painted on her forehead, that sociopaths like the male parent find and take full advantage of: gullible, naive, slightly dim, sees 'the good' in people...

Okay, so this is Elektra, and to your first question to me, are you sure that was your tongue you bit, and not your foot?

Yes, and we're quite pleased to have bumbled into you, only, since there are no coincidences, we didn't bumble.

K, compasses, the electronic ones *would* work, unless the Moon was in Toilet, or you were on the r.. or anything else that would fry the little suckers. Electronic ones are not as sensitive to really bigass personal E-M fields as the ordinary kind. That's what messes up the watches, too, and causes most of the other problems I mentioned.

With the airport gizmos, it's the self-composure part that lets you get through. You have to psych yourself 'down' to not set it off.

Ahh, but WHY does your natural clock want to be asleep during the day? (Side note: nocturnal insomnia is very typical of abuse survivors. The moment the sun rises, we feel just ducky about going to sleep. Otherwise, it's drugs, biofeedback, pranayama, self-hypnosis, and maybe no sleep anyway.) We also have a 'noise' problem in the daytime, and I don't mean traffic -- though that doesn't help. We grew up in NYC, which is loud. It's louder in the daytime, and that is when we slept.

Yah, but you can 'hear' them, even though they don't technically make noise that falls within the usual human auditory range. Until our head injury, we could 'hear' dog whistles and radio signals. -- we'll tell you that story another time. Subsonics get into our brain like itching powder. Hypersonics either hurt, or put us into a trance.
Fluorescent lights that buzz on an ordinary auditory frequency actually annoy us less than the others. 'Monitor'? Like and electronic heart monitor? Yeeks. I didn't know those made 'noise'. How totally unpleasant. (They need a little face for 'feh!')

Oh, well, if electronics are your *friends* it's a bit different. Still, you might want to track this. We once stormed through Power Alley (Administration Hallway) in high dudgeon about something, and every door we passed, the secretary started cursing at the computer. We must have crashed 18 of them in rapid sequence. It was weird, at the time... now we're used to that sort of thing. We also produce static on telephone lines, to the point of losing the connexion, if we're agitated. If you lay hands on a faltering computer, it probably starts behaving -- unless it's yours. Our partner does that with ours, and with our stereo. We know, it's just us.

Not seeing in the dark, ok. Didn't know about the physical impairment. But when you look at people, it isn't your optic nerves that are registering the info -- especially if your eyesight is not that good. Other senses fill in.

Why have you never, especially given the 60s, chosen to 'let go' enough to get really massively drunk or stoned? We hated pot. It made us boring, to us. Alcohol turned the 'noise' down. We do not understand people who would do speed recreationally. We're so hypervigilant naturally, that speed just makes us paranoid. We loved hallucinogens. They made the jagged discontinuity that was our life feel like *sense*. We had some very intense trips (never tried psilocybin, mescaline was very mild) and lots of wild hallucinations, but never even a flicker of 'bad trip'. Our last trip, our friend made the mistake of trying to take her contacts out, and flipped. We came down from the Outer Ozoid in 90 seconds flat, and talked her down for the next six hours. This was some of the strongest acid we'd ever bought. We threw it out on our way back to our dorm, and never did it again. She scared us... whew.

Veddy INteresting... about the officers. Okay, Obi-Wan. We're not even slightly surprised. I was not one of the Programmer trainees. My job was behind the scenes, undoing whatever drug they gave us, so we'd be able to see through their programming better. J Louise, or Debbi, or Mathilde or lots of others have had similar experiences. Don't be scared. It's just a subtly dominating personality thing. Coppers have handles. You see, you handle 'em. What exactly did your dad do for a living? If you're a military brat, you *know* why we found you. Acting, schmacting. This is an altogether more sophisticated proposition.

Oh, yeah, any reasonably self-disciplined mp can fake out a lie-detector. You don't even have to be trained. We were, but it isn't hard. The Galvanic Skin Response is seriously overrated as a testing tool. What we don't get is why it actually catches so many people. Sociopaths could slick by, if they knew they could, but... we are not going to tell them how. Bio-feedback is interesting. Me personally, I do not care for electrodes. The electro-torture was also my job. I'm basically a nervous system with a person around it. I understand bio-feedback, and don't mind telling other people how to do it, but it ain't going to be me in the body!

Electronic gadgets... you affixed a 'sometimes' there, too. So maybe it's not always because they're cheap? You might want to track this, too.

Light-Bulb Blowers Anonymous. It's a support-group waiting to happen. We were in the ER, having a heart-attack like adverse reaction to a psych med, and had this conversation with the EKG tech. She had these same issues. Funniest thing, she also had an anxiety disorder, and there was this insomnia thing, and no, she didn't really remember her childhood..... Light-bulbs we do not use up. How do you suppose I knew you do?

So pay more attention, if one street light blows. Do you leave a trail of darkness? (ooo that sounds sinister )

You can't see the audience, so it's easier to 'sense' them, and work them... to quote the Psych Dept: say more about that, Barton.

Your denial of sufficient IQ for mp stands disproven. You with the hand up, knowing what was going to happen. You were doing what any genius does: losing friends and alienating people. We start young, so we get lots of practice! The good teachers remember students like us fondly, and forever. The insecure ones wish they'd never met us. We were their worst nightmares. Deranged gifted-and-talented children at large: take cover! (nobody tired or punchy here )

We have what Kassandra calls 'Dreams for the Incredibly Stupid'. We've always had incredibly intense, 'real' dreams, so much so that it takes us a few moments to get oriented and remember who/where/when we are. The dreams that have a repetetive theme, or seem to keep whacking away at us with heavy-handed symbolism, (and the recurring dreams we had as a child and adolescent) have all been our subconscious mind (which we define as: everybody else is any given alter's subconscious) knocking on our skull from the inside, saying 'Yo! Dipstick! Notice this!'. We've had utterly terrifying periods of nightmares that were gory violent makeyousick shocking appalling I-refuse-to-believe-my-mind-could-DO-that where we went 96 hours at a time not sleeping out of sheer fear. When we did fall asleep, we'd wake soaked in sweat, sure we were screaming our head off, and find out we hadn't whimpered. We've dissociated the contents of those nightmares, but the fear is worse than any fear of any external person or thing any of us has ever felt. Trapped in here, with THAT. Although we're a chronic insomniac, and need meds to sleep, we simply will not take anything that oversedates us, because if we can't wake up... we'd really rather die. We never attempted suicide, because we knew we'd do it right. During those nightmare periods, we were suicidal, because How Did THAT Get In MY MIND??? And if I can dream THAT, what mightn't I be capable of doing?

((Shudder))

Who wouldn't prefer to fix a mechanical car? But you can fix Other People's cars by laying hands on them and speaking the magic words. How do you figure that works?

Eating? O yah, that goes with the regular income deal. We wouldn't know. Uncle sends us enough money to live really well in a 'fridge carton under a bridge. D supports us, which is unbelievably nice of them. We support them in other ways, so I suppose it's mutual. We don't mind being on the dole. We mind that the dole is supposed to be so lousy as to be incentive to get off, and that we can't, because we need Medicare/Medicaid so badly. Double binds are revictimising, and if Health and Human Services really believe that being broke is conducive to healing... o never flippin mind... the government don't give a teaspoon of warm spit.

People learn to have high threshholds of pain. I don't need to go into how. We're the same people who are the most understanding about how to relieve pain in others. What exactly do you mean by know more than you have any right to? I ask for a very specific reason, so I need to know precisely what you meant by that choice of words.

J Louise again -- Elektra's right. That caught everyone's attention.

Transcription? We write it down as people say it, and don't edit or revise it. The people who say do the writing. OK lik now I tuk over and I dont type so fast and I gotta wach my fingers. And I, J Louise, type reasonably well, but I'm not one of the ones who went to college and madly typed 30 page papers for the Soc Department who evidently graded by the pound.
This is Sara, and actually, I did most of the physical typing part, back in college. None of us is fast, but I am by far the fastest touch-typist in the system. We really do butt in on each other.
Yah - Elektra again It keeps life interesting. Especially because that nudzh of a Leah is forever over everyone's shoulder. Don't put a quarter in her! (Amen - Auntie) (duble amen- kids)

This is Leah. No quarter, no long boring socio-political polemic. They want me to have a t-shirt that says 'Stop Plate-Tectonics' because I'm the local conscience.

I thought Alice was - JL

Hey! Y'all wanna leave me OUT of thishya foolishness? -- Alice

No. We wanna go bed. It's 2:30 in the morning and weve ben up sinc afor sunrise. If you dont kwit well eat junk food.

OOOO, that is a serious threat. Quitting now.

Bah the way, we are naht, iyun fa-uct, programmers. We're de-programmers. It's the only way to make thangs raht. Yew shore knew yew were slangin' sum mud there, mister. - D Hansen, Delta (Deprogrammers Division)

TTYS,
Us

Trinka,

I collect swords, mostly reproduction but a few historical. I admire them as tools and as art -- and, I admit as a weapon that doesn't need to be reloaded. I keep them on the wall without sharp edges but when I get a new sword, I sharpen it if it needs it and test it, once, to confirm my sense of its balance, during a cut. This is generally done on a tree limb about 3/8" in diameter laid on a block of wood. Then I take the edge off, mostly, and hang it. This particular sword, I had been unhappy about the balance so I added a counter weight and sharpened it to test it the next day. It was about 0330 and as I was testing the balance I lost control and, instead of doing what I normally do, which is stepping back out of the way, I reached out my hand to catch the grip. The sword blade walked around my index finger very nicely. I still remember watching exactly what happened. The cut severed a tendon and the one major nerve. Five surgeries later (which taught me a lot about the state of the art) my finger stays at approximately 90 degrees with about 8 degrees of flex. I don't have useful feeling on the inside edge of the finger above the second knuckle where it bends. I can still fire a bow, but my guitar picking now lacks good control of dynamics which drives me crazy. This has lead to a certain amount of depression which I am prone to anyway, as part of my sleep issues.

Had I been on stage with a dull edged weapon, I would have been wearing gloves and I would not have been injured in that way. No, it's nearly always stupid acts that lead to injuries.

ReKZ,
I should say that when Electra announced that she was going to make a prediction, I was certain that it would be accurate. So, in my typical fashion, I read down the list looking for misses and looking for the nature of the predictions with an eye toward 'gypsy magic.' Somehow, when I saw the accuracy, my immediate response was on the order of "Am I that 'typical?'" Followed shortly by, "Typical of what?" Sorry, Electra, no superstious awe here, either. ReKZ, I have already accepted so much from what you have written on your site that something like this is really nothing surprising. (There was a time when I wanted to study para-psychology, but I couldn't hack learning all the other stuff that went with it -- spending all that time in classes being taught how to recognize and understand what I already knew (I was really arrogant when I was 19 . . . Okay, I still am, but I'm much better at it than I was then.)

When I started that last post, I had already accepted you as at least my equal, what kind of a response did you expect? N-RQ

My theory of aesthetics (I prefer this spelling to that used in the translation of Mole's book) speaks about ideal situations. Yours is more pratical, but let me try again. A makes B experienced by C. If B carries nothing but a semantic message (and a sematic message represents simply the data transmitted -- Moles talks about information which is *new* data, old data is simply filler there for the purpose of redundancy which aids in overcomeing noise) then that data is completely subject to the life expericnce of C. What is new data to A may be old to C and vice versa. The aestheic message is carried by the arrangement of the data which also includes the fact that that data was chosen to be sent. That is, C is invited to consider all the data and the order it is arranged in as being significant. The more skilled that A is the better that C is brought into the world that is B. Heinlein said it well when he was discussing "La Belle Heaulmiere" (I most definitely do not speak French), "She Who (Once) Was (Once)the Helmetmaker's (Once) Beautiful Wife" by Rodin, A good artist will look at the old lady and sculpt her exactly as she is; a better artist will see her and sculpt the young beauty she once was; a great artist will sculpt her exactly as she is but make you see the beauty she once was.

In this sense, the artist presents the elements and substances of his craft and arranges them in such a way that you share the experience of the artist when he was seeing what it was that made the art worth doing. In this way the particularly personal truth of the artists life is made your truth within the context of the art object. The greatness of the artist lies in being able to select only those experiences from his life that are required to validate the artistic vision. Anything more is too much, the vision is mudied, anything less is not enough, the vision is ambiguous or lost entirely. In short, its not just what you say, it's the way that you say it.

Since everyday communication also partakes of the personal relativity that make words ambiguous, it is imporant to accept the aesthetic portion of a persons communication to beter understand what that person really means when he says what he says. Most people are lousy artists because they are not trained to understand the craft and they do not understand how relative perceptions are.

From a logical positivistic view point, simply analyzing the semantic content is not sufficient to grasp the entirety of the communcation. An analysis of the manner of communication may greatly reduce the number of possiblities to be considered in order to grasp what is being communicated.

When you say the art is in the ambiguity, I would translate that as saying that the art is revealed through analysis of the choices the artist made within the scope of those available to her/him. I differ though because the greatest art is understood intuitively and analysis simply reveals why it is significant.

Of course the artist puts more into the art than he/she realaizes because the creation of art, which speaks to the intuition, must be spoken in intuitive terms. Intuition is not logical, it is not rational. I would suspect that it is arational even though it's validity may be understood through a rational analysis. after but not before it is transmitted. The artist may prepare rationally.The outpouring of vision originates from the entire experience of the artist so the preparation is valid, but the vision is also intuitive. So, in this sense we can say that intuition is a function of the perception of order and pattern.

C's analysis of B is necessarily based in C's life experience and viewpoint. Despite the fact that everyone experiences the same art objec and has the opportunity to receive the same intuitive message. They will succeed to a greater or lesser extent depending on their receptivity and attention, and will interpret the significance of what they received based on their own relative value system. Thus, the audience is united in the moment of the play but departs immediately on their own journey.

I hope that is clearer.

It is not your fault if you do not understand what I wrote, I am still trying to move my understanding of this process out of my personally significant metaphor and into more discursive formats. It will be a while before it becomes so easy that I will be able to lay it out for everyone. And, I am forced to recognize that while it answers all the questions I have put to it so far, it has not been properly tested by anyone else.

Having been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, you can easily imagine the base of my moral structure. To me, however, religion is *not* an escape from philosophy but rather a retreat from epistomology into metaphysics. From the nature of your population which has already been revealed, you must recognize the relativity of religious bias in terms of theology. I have essentially abandoned theology as being to personal to deal with and too dangerous to discuss, and embraced morality and ethics as defining the society which I am forced to deal with. Incidentally, I define morality and ethics as distinct categories where morality deals with personal value structures and ethics with public shared value structures. Ethics is therefore far more maleable than morality. The nature of morality is to speak in absolutes while ethics speaks in values along a continuum. Don't feel like you need to argue, those are personal definitions, I don't proselityze in this area.

I admire Judaism for its moral and ethical values and their effect on society. Though I may still seek answers in Jewish interpretations, I do so with a critical point of view.

All of this leads me to ask, having been through a theological course of study, what is your system's view about religion in general and what part does the question of 'God?' play in your lives? Is it still a question? I would expect differing views, and I respect them and am interested in them. I am also interested in the lack of such views.

When I spoke of lying, I am sorry if I offended you. I live in the midst of lies and prevarications as do you. I have already made a judgment that you are not lying but you have admitted that you have been subjected to programming. I believe you when you say that you pride yourself on your honesty, but I cannot and would not choose to turn off my carefully cultivated reflexes to do so would be contra-survival. That is all that was meant by that clause. It's honest and I will certainly tell you if I have doubts. Perhaps, if we should ever meet or over time I might come to think of our relataionship as completely honest. Then that aspect drops out of our communication. And please note, and I hope I will not offend you again, I said honest, not truthful. So, if I question something, please understand that I am not questioning your honesty. It will mean that I don't understand or I don't accept the truth of your honest belief. My request in that last case, no matter how it might phrased should be taken to mean, "How can we verify this information?" That is certainly how I would hope you would approach the same situation with me.

I also always try to be honest and most often you can get suspicious when I say nothing. There are times when I might push the truth aside or lead someone to believe something by taking advantage of his prejudices. I consider both to be dishonest. I will never out and out lie though I may be found to have been mistaken.

I'll say no more about transcription, I certainly didn't mean it the second time the way I meant the first.

You mentioned having a rabbi or two in your community so I really expected that you would understand, kvel.

. . . another kind of ignorant . . . I have nothing against ignorance it's curable as long as one is willing to be cured. I have nothing against stupidity, though it is frustrating to be balked by it. It can't be cured and that is that. However, it is always frightening to be out numbered. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is institutionalized, so find yourself a stick and remember, color doesn't matter.

My particular road block was discovering that I had been crippled by being taught to understand calculus. In second year calc, I couldn't keep up with the others who had been taught by rote. They answered 50 questions in the time that I was solving 10. The instructor knew I understood particularly since he didn't. On the few times a student would ask to have something explained, the instructor called on me to demonstrate. But, I couldn't make myself stop proving the answers and simply learn the rote techniques that he taught. The only F, I can remember getting with the possible exception of Hebrew school which I loathed and have pretty much locked out of my memory. The funny part of my math experience was that I had fought hard to get into the Special Math Study Group. It seems that no one really believed how bored I was.

My family wasn't normal either, or so I discovered. We were actually almost TV perfect, happy, loving, and caring. It wasn't till I got to college that I discovered how much toward the triple sigma or more we were. And it was only after all of the five children were married that we slipped a bit more toward the soap opera end of the scale. I can't say that I'm sorry

My sister may be smarter than me, but she's so conventional most of the time that it's hard to tell, psychologist specializing in child mensuration. The other brothers are all high normal, lawyer, landscape architect, and executive in the grounds maintenance business. I can't rank my parents, I don't choose to alienate myself far enough from my affection from them to loose the rosy glow of love. They all stuck by me during that part of my life when I was clearly closer to the bozo side of the rationality scale -- undiagnosed sleep disorder, who knew?

I'm afraid that I discovered what it was to be surrounded by mediocrity early on and my coping with it was so much a part of my early personality that I was really amazed when I went to Jr. College half a day during my senior year of high school when I was the only one who was interested in discussing the day's topic in psych and philosopky. It took me nearly a week to be willing to put up my hand in class. It wasn't long after that, that I discovered that if I watched the instructor for cues, I could just speak up, that he wanted me to speak up.

As far as your female parent goes, it never ceases to amaze me what truly organized people can accomplish. I am too lazy to get organized. Society has been arranged to best suit the average; I don't understand why this observation always surprises me or why I keep forgetting it.

. . . there are no coincidences . . . Predestination or guiding/controlling/manipulating force?

. . . but WHY does your natural clock want to be asleep . . . if its daytime static, I have backgrounded it to thoroughly to be able to say. I do not react to sunset or sunrise other than to the 'neat' colors. If it's anything that's bothering me it's active brains and I established my natural rhythm while acting at in a show at a dinner theatre so far out in the boonies I was surprised we got an audience. Maybe it was the cows.

Yah, but you can 'hear' them . . . I don't see the connection. High frequency hearing is reasonably common up to 20,000 Hz. Dogs hear up to 35,000. I could hear dog whistles, too, but my hearing never tested higher than 19,500. I doubt I can hear that high now, hf hearing falls away very rapidly after 50, but I know it's still better than average.

Monitor as in computer monitor - da ting wit da picher onit dat hooks onta da computa. Sheesh!

. . . it isn't your optic nerves . . . I figured that out a while ago.

Why have you never, especially given the 60s, chosen to 'let go' enough to get really massively drunk or stoned? I don't give up control unless forced to. When I drink, I don't drink past the buzz stage. But, I do remember, one Passover when I was 10 or 11, the wine got me 'schicker,' not plowed, just woozy. I laid down on the couch and went to 'sleep.' I listened to the conversation the rest of the night, interesting experience. Canabis was pleasant and the dreams were vivid. I was one of those people who could tell you what side of the mountain the weed was grown on. (That's one of the things I really miss. My dreams, normal dreams not drug dreams, were fully scored, in technicolor, literally, and had credits. With this apnea, if I'm aware of my dreams, I probably forgot my medication.) Speed was stupid all buzz and no pleasure, one time only and then regretted that the acid was cut with it. LSD messed up my wiring enough for me to get some interesting kinesthesia the first couple of times and then just the convenience of a six to 8 hour high. Mescaline: it was too expensive to really experiment, but I seemed to be totally immune. Psilocybin let me play very interesting games with my logic. I remember spending several nights chasing "the thought that couldn't be thought." Very mystical. Never a hallucination, never a bad trip. I was always there, inventing interesting hypnotisim like head games for my friends and inventing the art of the DJ before anyone knew about such things. (Single cuts are too easy, I did it with sides of albums but only in my own home.) I couldn't do it any more, the music is too far away and people don't seem to listen anymore.

. . . about the officers . . . of course people have handles. I don't like how much I like to use them. And I have to admit it didn't feel as much like acting as it could have. My father is an architect, no military since before I was born and he was a mechanic then. He had a dog named Major, hated officers. Dad liked that dog.

Light-bulbs we do not use up. How do you suppose I knew you do? No guess.

You can't see the audience, so it's easier to 'sense' them, and work them... to quote the Psych Dept: say more about that, Barton. First of all, I can see them, the light seldom blinds me totally but until I was 20, I worked half blind anyway, no contact lenses. (Yet, another reason why I drove a few other actors crazy, not looking them in the eyes.) I'm 6'5" and most often a lighting designer has a woman as an assistant so the lights are never focused correctly for me unless I ask for a re-adjust (or force one.) Mostly, I use my ears to work an audience. I have to hear myself coming back from the back wall anyway. I never understood how others could fail to hear what was going on. The coughs and seat creaks always came much too late to be useful. You had to hear them breathing and failing to breathe before you could start to manage an audience. Just like you can read body movements, you can cause body movements to invoke emotional affect. You can do it with the tension in a single set of muscles. Using my voice was almost too easy. What more do you want? If you can read muscles and understand focus, you know what I did.

On the subject of dreams, does each of you dream individually or do you have many dreams all at once? Part of what you say suggests that at least part of the time you all share the same dream or nightmare.

. . . laying hands on them and speaking the magic words . . . I worked as a mechanic for a while and in a non-computerized car, the problems really do only fall in three categories, but, again, I use my ears a lot and when I don't hear the problem I can generally use my mind to deduce the problem. On those occasions when, it seems to fix itself it's very hard for me to point at whether I really did tweek the framus or if I just finally found the right position to hold my mouth in. Of course, every machine beyond a certain degree of sophistication has a distinct personality and you need to allow for that, too.To little data, no guess.

D supports us, which is unbelievably nice of them . . . ???

What exactly do you mean by know more than you have any right to? It means that I haven't the training or the experience to be able to know as much as I do about how to relieve or give pain. Part of is body awareness, which I have in copious amounts. Part of it is theatre training of which I have 20+ years. Part of it is empathy. And part of it may be the one book I skimmed in the library on (military judo -- How to remove your opponents eyeball: Insert right index finger against the bridge of you opponents nose. Crook finger and yank -- interesting reading for a 14 year-old. But that doesn't explain all of it. Sure I could have simply been aware of chi but how is it, the first time that I saw the unbending arm demonstrated that I knew exactly how to do it and what was happening inside that made it work. Actually, I didn't need to see it demonstrated, I heard the word chi and the name of the demonstration, then I watched to see that I had understood. That is what I mean by more than I have any right to know. Incidentally, most ai kido controlling holds don't work on me. For me, use jujitsu. Even there, I'm not sure, go for the break (Not the kill please). As you say, high level of pain tolerance.

And, no, the information doesn't suddenly appear, I've always known, I just haven't always known, I've known. It's part of my understanding, not sudden knowledge.

Stop Plate-Tectonics. Possibly the funniest line/situation/concept I have ever heard. I don't wear T-shirts but I'm going to have one made up with that. I want to see who breaks up.

Programmers: I understand and respect the difference.

Tell me please about triggers, kinds of triggers and their effect on you individually and as a whole, intended effects as well as incidental. Not what yours are, what they are. It would seem that there must be at least three distinct kinds, activating, deactivating, and incapacitating. Or am I specuclating in entirely too rational a direction? If one doesn't know what they are, can they be disarmed, disabled?

Barton

Note: this is being posted publicly, rather than emailed, for two reasons
1. Sending an email could be interpreted as inviting same.
2. The post to which this is a response is public.
If you have a BIG problem with this, Barton, I shall instruct h2g2 to remove both posts.

_________

Yo! Signor "Understanding" This is Guido. I didn't think anyone could be such a friggin moron, but obviously, yous can. What kind of idiot describes the severing of his finger in intimate gory detail to a three year old child? Huh? What kind of freakin maniac, knowing our little children were forced to witness and perform vivisections on animals and humans, addresses a small child by name, and then tells her a story like that? You "understand" ? We want displays of "understanding" like that, we'll call the body's mother!

She sawr it was addressed to her, and started to read. It didn' take more than half a second, because you used "hard words", for the adults to see this was not your G-rated material. We blocked her, and when she asked why, and what "her letter" said, we had to tell her "you don' wanna know, Trinka" She is a *not happy* child. Why did yous do such a f---ed-up dumbass thing? To find out what 'trigger' means, like, by experience? Well if you haven't read my pages, Mister Understanding, or even if you have, deliberate triggering is ABUSE. Don't DO it.

Yous led Trinka to think you were being a friend, and then wrote something to her that nobody who cares about or understands kids would EVER tell to an Outside three year old. Maybe you would... in which case you are one sick SOB and we don't got nutt'n to say to yous.
________

This is Pat and Im riten on behaf of the hol Peples Republic of Children and all the Protecters to. How dum can a smart persin get? It is reely hard to beleive that wasnt onpurpos. *Reely*. You and yor telempathy can take a flyen dive and land on one or yor preshus sharps, for riten sumpin lik that to a 3 year old who only made a joke! Insensetive. I call this yor first and only riten warnen. Dont adres non of us litles less we speke to you first, here on. Got that? Jerk. Youve just ben given the PRC Criminal lable 'Child-Threat' wich will not mak you any points with our biguns, eether. Grownups are supose to be the grownups. Yor acountibl for how you act speshuly to kids! We use consesus in PRC, and this was instant unanimus. His Majisty gona take over now, and if Guido and I didnt, he ull tell you.

___________

Sir, I am Dyan-Ynnes, Regis Magister. The Crown is the ultimate authority in our Internal Civil Government and is particularly responsible for the enforcement of treaties with independent, self-governing bodies within the Realm known Externally as LeKZ. You have placed the adults in this system, and the Crown, in the unacceptable position of possibly violating treaty with the People's Republic of Children. 'Child-Threat' is a Criminal designation. You are one of three people, External, to have earnt that highly undesirable label, in seven years. The PRC submitted a formal grievance, last night, while the adults were still reading the rest of your post and trying to work out what might have gone wrong with you.

The only legally permissible interaction between adults of the Realm, and persons designated as 'Child-Threat', is to ensure that whatever words or deeds resulted in the application of that Criminal designation does not happen again. You do not mean so much to us, Sir, that we need to expend time or effort in discussing why you said what you did. In any case, we have a fairly good idea of what happened; something of the sort was expected, though not quite so soon. It would, however, behoove you to do so yourself. In the interests of resolving the conflict precipitated by your actions, and in particular, of preventing any repetition of your misbehaviour, we shall answer your final question, about 'triggers'. There will not be any other chit-chat in this post. Your wildly incorrect long-distance conclusion-jump about us will not be addressed. Only Sara Barnes, Internal Protector and external educator, shall write. I speak on behalf of us all when I say how astonished, and disappointed we are by your callous carelessness. You did not present yourself as a careless person. An honest written apology, if you feel apologetic, may be directed to the People's Republic of Children, either publicly or privately. Any explanation you choose to give, for your inexcusable behaviour, will not be considered mitigating. It may, however, be constructive insofar as your self-understanding goes. In the unfortunate event that this matter cannot be resolved to the point where the PRC overturn their designation of you as a 'Child-Threat', our interaction will be permanently terminated. This is our law, these are our values. The Crown is sworn to uphold them.

For the sake of all involved, I sincerely hope that a resolution of this issue is possible in short order. The burden of accountability and responsibility lie with you, Sir.

His Majesty
Dyan-Ynnes

The Realm Internal of LeKZ
_______________________________________________________________

All right. I am Sara Barnes. My nasty letters have been known to give people paper-cuts on their brains. I am not here to express my personal opinions. His Majesty asked me merely to provide you with factual information, much of which is clearly explained on Guido's Page for Partners, which you have apparently not read, or not understood.

You asked:
Tell me please about triggers, kinds of triggers and their effect on you individually and as a whole, intended effects as well as incidental. Not what yours are, what they are. It would seem that there must be at least three distinct kinds, activating, deactivating, and incapacitating. Or am I specuclating in entirely too rational a direction? If one doesn't know what they are, can they be disarmed, disabled?

In response:

What you are asking for would effectively be an online instruction manual on how to do mind control. You are using the word 'triggers' to mean programmes. I will probably say very little, ever, about the specifics of programmes. Even about actual triggers, I am not going to answer your questions, precisely. I shall respond in ways that will, if you can discern it, give you much of the information you want, while failing to provide you, or anyone else, with specific necessary details. If you do not understand this, then all our conversation to date has been meaningless. If you do not agree with the ethical and moral imperative behind this position, then you are not the sort of person we would tell the time, lest you misuse that information.

However, I was instructed to answer your question, so I shall, to the extent I find possible.

A trigger can be anything: object, event, action, word, person, location, or odour which has the effect of producing a reaction (deliberately implanted, or purely unintentional) in a trauma survivor, such that one or more alters is transported from here/now, to another place/time. Triggers fall into two categories: intentional/implanted, and unintentional. The purpose of the mechanism of intentional/implanted triggers is to use an object or phrase to trip an implanted programme in a multiple person. When the programme is tripped, the appropriate alter/s take over the body -- unbeknownst to the System -- and perform actions per instructions. When the mission is accomplished, or they are dismissed, those alters switch In again. The rest of the System is supposed to be unaware of what happened during the lost time. To forestall awkward questions, programmers try to make the subject mps as unaware of time-loss as possible. I shall not discuss how this is done.

In 'The Manchurian Candidate', the trigger is a combination of a phrase and an image: 'Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?', and then the Queen of Diamonds. The phrase induced a light trance, in which Raymond Shaw played the cards, until he saw the Queen of Diamonds. The image switched Raymond Shaw 'normal' away, and brought Out a programmed assassin. When the assassin was dismissed, and/or the mission accomplished, Raymond Shaw 'normal' returned, with no awareness of anything having happened. The book is somewhat simplistic, but it was accurate enough that both it, and the film, were suppressed in the States from publication in the 1950s until after the declassification, in 1996, of CIA Mind-Control Operation MKUltra. (See also the excellent film, 'Conspiracy Theory', made in 1997 or 98.)

Unintentional triggers are things that 1) accidentally trip programmes, or, much more likely, 2) remind an alter or alters of some situation, and make them feel as though it is happening again. This can take the form of full-scale flashbacks, where here/now disappears, called 'abreactions', or any lesser degree of flashback. Often, the best way to know one/s have been triggered is because one/s respond wholly out of proportion to what is actually happening, here/now.

You did not ask about our triggers, or want to know what they are. Nevertheless, we are going to tell you, because that way, you will not be as likely to trigger us inadvertently. They are also good basic examples. So far as the associated programmes go, we will probably say less than you want to know. Most of our major triggers have been de-fused, and we do not discuss the others publicly, for obvious reasons.

If one does not have a fairly good idea of how a trigger is designed, it is downright dangerous to try to de-fuse it. The concept is roughly analogous to taking out one's appendix with a few kitchen tools and a power-drill. Programmes designed by professionals can and do have features that make amateur efforts to remove them literally fatal to the body. Do X, and you will suffer a massive coronary arrest. Do Y, and you will have an anyeurism. When one does not know, is is never safe to mess with the programme itself. One can only work on reducing its *effects*. If it causes distraction, or paranoia, or tangles up one's logic, one can develop internal tools to handle those things. This calls for a lot of imagination, willpower, and a stubborn determination to be the Sole Owner and Operator of one's own mind. Deprogramming only comes naturally to people who were *trained* to programme. It is neither safe nor smart to try to make it up as as one goes along. We were warned, early on, by another MMC survivor, to not take risks, and to only ever work with professional deprogrammers. Since there are not very many such people around, and since we could become one, we did. (One psychiatrist told us, back in '96, that we are one of the top 5 experts in the US, of whom he had heard or read, on the subject. In '96, we did not know a twentieth of what we know now.) We have successfully taught several mind-control mp survivors the basic skills they needed to learn (it took approximately two years of very constant work with one of them, before they caught on, and only a few months with another... some others self-sabotaged [foundational programme] out of working with us, as soon as they started to make progress.)

The triggers for self-sabotage are success, health, independance, mutually supportive relationships, trust, and of course remembering/telling. Self-sabotage takes any number of forms, usually depending on how well the person was doing. Our ex was ABD in two PhD programs, and each time, something made her up and leave the State, and decide 'never mind the dissertation', or suddenly decide she hated the school... She got one of the most difficult Graduate Fellowships in the country to receive, to be *paid* to do a PhD at BIG name University, East Coast, and lasted two months before a depressive episode of epic proportions had her locked up in a suicide-watch unit at the local hospital. If you leave the Cult, if you defy the Agency, if you walk out on the Name Organisation Here, there is a seemingly infinite series of self-destruct programmes lined up like dominoes to dog you, your whole life. They are not infinite, and the first step in beating them is knowing they are there. They are actually fairly predictable, once you learn which 'book' they programmed you by. That does not make them any less problematic.

The trigger was '25th birthday'. We had always said we were not going to live past our 25th birthday (thereby reinforcing the programme), and one would think parents would *react* if a child of theirs had been saying that, like a mantra, since she was seven. You would react, right? It would strike you as an odd thing for your 10 year old to say? Of course, *she* didn't notice, and he *knew* what was going on. We knew, at the time, that we are lethally allergic to blue cheese. We'd had a minor incident with some gorgonzola once and that was plenty... sick for two days, and we had not *swallowed* any. We went out to lunch on our 25th birthday, abour 4 weeks after starting graduate school. If anyone had asked, we would have said we we ordered ranch dressing on our salad. What we got was blue cheese. We KNEW we were eating poison. It started closing up our throat at once. We managed to eat the whole thing, anyway. We had a meeting later in the afternoon, so we found a sofa in the lounge and took a nap. By the time we arrived at the meeting, the anaphylaxis was pretty severe. In about 15 minutes, the woman who was chairing the meeting said, 'Do you want me to drive you to the Infirmary?'. We said no, thanks, but we did feel a bit under the weather, and would appreciate a lift home after the meeting. Ten minutes passed, and someone said (we had met those women that day) 'She really doesn't look well. Beka, why don't you take her down to the Infirmary?' Over our vigorous protests, that we'd be FINE, and all we needed to do was go HOME, we were dragged by two women out to Beka's car. The Infirmary had just closed, but Beka hailed two nurses on their way out and asked them to have a look at us. They said 'There isn't time to get an ambulance. Drive her to the hospital and speed! It's 12 blocks. You have 3 minutes.' Beka did. The ER docs were all over the body for 5 hours. 15 minutes more, and the body would have gone into respiratory arrest. (Everyone said the body would have died, but mps are notoriously hard to kill; still anaphylactic shock is nasty when it isn't fatal, too). ALL we wanted to do was go home. We *were* supposed to die.

The male parent was amazingly unsurprised or affected by the story, we thought at the time. The female parent actually sent Beka a thank-you card, though she only said 'for taking care of...' because, she told us, 'saving her life' was melodramatic. Um. We were lucky.

In recovering multiples, who are products of organised violence, there are both intentional and unintentional triggers present. We know the French words meaning 'Efficient and Effective' were a trigger-phase, linked to a 'do things' programme, and a 'think what we want you to think' programme. We can write it, in English, and say it aloud. We are uncomfortable writing it in French, and really do not like to say it aloud in French. If we heard another person speak that phrase, it would certainly fail to put us in a trance that would be useful to that person. The person who said those words to us, however, might get hurt. We are not sure we would not overreact self-defensively.

We worked to make ourself immune to them, but white roses were a trigger for suicide, and red roses for suicide by homicide (you understand that without explanation, right?). At one time, possibly, if we had received a bouquet of one or the other, probably with some specific word or phrase on a card, we might have acted as our programmers intended. Or possibly not. We did everything possible to interfere with the programming while it was taking place. When we found out about the 'Rose' programmes, we spent a lot of time very uncomfortably examining white and red roses, to render them powerless. When we started, we experienced spasticity, inexplicable numbnesses and tingling, and Headaches. The Headaches are universal among all mind-control survivors, when we defeat programmes. The Headaches, along with many other things (which could include self-sabotage and self-destruct) fall into a class of Punishment Programmes. The trigger for these is do something towards healing yourself, recovery, memory, deprogramming. So, unspeakable headaches are information that we are doing something *Right*. (The pain, in Punishments that are pain-based is utterly incomprehensible to nonmultiples. It is meant, obviously, to be negative reinforcement for whatever you are doing good for yourself. It also interferes with cognition, vision, sometimes physical mobility, sometimes speech. If medical help is sought, they find nothing wrong. Analgesics are no help, or minimal. If one is cussed enough to just keep going, it does not let up. Body pain programmes are horrendous. We have a threshhold of pain that starts where other people lose consciousness, and in the last six years of deprogramming ourself, it has had to get higher, and higher. There is nothing analogous in 'normal' people. But since giving up makes the pain go away, giving up is obviously what They want. F--- that.)

Staring them down, writing about them, talking about them -- aloud to each other if necessary -- the aloud part is significant, drawing them, are the best ways we know to neutralise implanted triggers. One of our foundational Think What We Want You to Think programmes had, as its trigger, an item so ubiquitous as to be almost unavoidable. We got rid of all of them from the house, and didn't go places, for the six or so agonising months it took to reduce that object to a mere *thing*. Not only do these objects no longer refer to that programme, but also, Dephi implanted the suggestion, under autohypnosis, that our ability to be unaffected by *that* item would reinforce our ability to defeat other programmes. That programme was implanted when the body was barely toddling. In 1995, we had no experience with deprogramming. It took all of everyone's imagination to work out how to defeat it. Now, it would still not be *easy*, but it would take a day or two, not six months.

If, as a child, you have seen extreme acts of intentional violence, and been made to perpetrate them, there are obviously images, sounds, and smells that will produce flashbacks. That is true of non mps, who have experienced only one major trauma, if it was severe enough. We knew a man who had, at the age of three, been run over by a car. Round vertical objects, that revolved, always triggered him. He did not like fans. He did not watch Wheel of Fortune. He didn't go to Circuses. Veterans with PTS try, but do not always succeed in failing to duck, cover, and roll when a truck backfires. A friend who worked in a factory with a lot of Viet Nam vets said one day something on the other side of the factory smashed to the ground, and four men about his age and he all got up sheepishly off the floor. That is an example of an intentional trigger, taught in Basic Training to help the troops stay alive, which becomes maladaptive when unintentionally tripped outside of a war zone.

Some triggers are phobias. The wind was bad when the Gals did their combat stint. Howling wind has a tendency to make us want to get foetal. A few years ago, we did just crawl into bed and pull the covers over our head. Now we grit our teeth and ignore it to the best of our ability. People coming up behind us, sudden loud noises, and certain very soft noises bother us. For reasons unknown, we have a terrible moth phobia. They're harmless. This body could die from a bee-sting, and bees do not bother us in the least, compared to moths. And don't ask about butterflies; they're just moths in drag. ! We do not know for certain whether this trigger was associated, at some point with one or another Fear Programme, or whether it is just a trigger related to some unremembered horrid experience involving moths.

When some of the Level III (also age 3) kids first came out, our ex' cat triggered and terrified them, because they 'knew' they were going to have to vivisect her, or watch it happen. It took them a *long* time to relax, and they checked on her constantly, for the first year, to make sure nothing had happened to her since the last time they checked, fifteen minutes earlier. The programming was gone, but the memory was still very real, for them.

Watching people eat a banana out of the peel has *enraged* us since childhood. If you read '5-8', you know why. We literally have to leave the room if someone eats a banana that way. Cut up, or otherwise altered, we have nothing against banana eating. Again, this trigger is only a visceral memory of violence, not a programme.

We don't do well with anything to do with fires. No movies, no news stories, no books, not at all. Too many saw too much. It all comes back in a wave, and though I am blocking people as I write this, I feel a certain amount of nausea at the concept, and it didn't involve me directly at all. We also had programmes specifically triggered by fire, but those seem not to have 'taken' very well... The behind-the-scenes deprogramming efforts worked, in that case.

We, like all Satanic Ritual Abuse survivors, and many other different mind-control survivors, were forced to engage in Ritualised Cannibalism (RC -- I hate euphemising, but this is very rough material. Trigger Warnings to you, Barton, and anyone else who's reading. BE CAREFUL). This was particularly insane for us, as we were raised strictly vegetarian. Because the body *never* ate any animal products, other than that, we inevitably got terrible diarrhoea immediately after this experience. We find that digestive disorder acutely triggering. The Agency survivors, especially the kids, cry and cry when that happens to the body. We always keep Immodium and other remedies in the house. We also go off our food fairly frequently. Do you wonder we're anorexic? How can anyone who went through THAT feel clean, when the body is full of food? There are those who are Internally locked down, because they really might decide that drinking ammonia would be a good way to clean the body out. That is not a suicide programme. It is pure horror.

Why do they do Ritual Cannibalism? Numerous reasons, and I am not going to enumerate many of them. Use your intuition and imagination, if you can bring yourself to do it. Here are some of the reasons that I do not feel it is a Bad Idea to post publicly:
1) People do not believe anyone does that. Report after report after report of this, from all over the country (and the world) reaches therapists, the FBI, etc. The stories all tend to match. People who hear one report after another from sources from Manchester to Melbourne to Milwaukee, have no choice other than to believe it, intellectually, any way. But sane people want to *not* believe in RC so much, that they end up choosing to disbelieve everything survivors claim, rather than accepting this degree of abomination as possible. It is a good way to get the world to keep the cults' and Organisations' secrets *for* them.
2) The intense taboo, and the shame/shock/horror/self-horror of breaking it, generates a sense of moral desperation in the people who are forced to participate. That moral desperation is a handle, and it can be used to install a You Are Not Like Outsiders; Outsiders Would Reject You If They Knew; You Know; We Know And We Do Not Reject You; You Are Like Us; Nobody Else Is Like Us; We Understand You programme, which has many uses, all of them nasty.
3) The self-horror is an easy hook for Self-Destruct, Self-Sabotage programmes.
4) People who do RC are Dangerous. If any of their membership is not abjectly terrified of them already, this *proves* they can and will do absolutely *anything*. This reinforces all of the We Are Omnipotent programmes.
5) Different cults, Agencies, etc put different spins on the *meaning* of this ritual. Ours was something along the lines of We Are Allowed to Do This Because We do not Answer to Ordinary Human Morality: We Are Superior. (The male parent sneered at what he liked to call 'bourgeois morality' -- by which he meant, as near as we can figure, Basic Human Values. For all we know, he was one of the instigators of this practise in that Agency.)
6) It is a way of disposing of a lot of incriminating evidence.
There is much more that I could say, and choose not to say, involved in this practise. I hope you are as nauseated as I. -very The only 'good' news is that some (especially teen and older) people who join cults realise that it was the Worst Possible Idea, when they find out about RC. If they are lucky, they manage to get wind of it *before* they have been officially initiated into the practise. If they are even luckier, they manage to leave the country before they are found out. Anyone who balks, at the point of actually doing the act, ends up as the final product instead. Personally, I am not sure that is not better, assuming the person to be an adult, than going along with the action out of fear. Mp children do not have the same options. Leaving is impossible, rather than merely almost impossible.
There are children here who remember other kids at the Agency, who said 'I don't care what you do to me; I can't do this.' They were ridiculed, as weaklings. Internally, we prayed for their souls, and knew they would go straight to the arms of their G-d for their choice.
Our sense of self-preservation made us go through with it.... We cannot honestly say, as far as this particular element of our history goes, that we are sure we prefer to have lived. This subject is very deeply emotionally destructive, and those who were there *have* to stay quite dissociated from it, in order to stay sane. I am not a product of the Agency. I am not inclined to get emotional about things. I know my already level affect is flatlined as I write this.

When we or other people post 'Trigger Warnings', it is to let others know that we are going to talk about a subject which will potentially -- or probably -- cause extreme emotional distress. It does not mean we think the material will necessarily trip programmes. No subject gets discussed less, among survivors, though it is a foregone conclusion with Satanic Ritual Abuse survivors, and used by plenty of other outfits. No subject is more triggering. Nothing was as traumatic. Merely thinking about it is too retraumatising for most people. Writing these paragraphs has been one of the hardest things I, Sara, have ever done.

I must move on. I must come back. 'Triggered into Outer Space' is not just a phrase. I have never been triggered into outer space before. Now I know. And our Littles go through this every time the body gets diarrhoea.

Triggers can also take the form of surprises, like knowing things, and not knowing how or why you know. There is not usually any direct link to programmes here. Rather, the trigger opens a window of memory that was previously closed. There are programmes that can be discovered this way. Any memory work, for mind-controlled mp survivors, provides access to information necessary for the removal of programmes.

When, to our conscious, continuous memory, we believed we had never seen a handgun up close, and a friend showed us one of his handguns, (he's an MMC mp who WAS NOT in Cambodia, in around '75. VA has no record of him, nor is he an acknowledged veteran. We've seen his dogtags. He's a little gun-crazy, like a lot of vets.) out of the mouth in our face came the words 'That's the cutest .38 I've ever seen', in the voice of a child who was struggling to say it in English. The friend said 'How did you know it was a .38?' and the kid said, 'From the diameter of the hole in the barrel, silly'. Then, hefting a different gun, a revolver, the same child said 'No, no. The balance is all wrong. And the shape. The barrel should be about,' she gestured 'so long. And the grip, it is rectangular, and you have to be able to shoot with one hand, so in your other hand you can hold extra...' she didn't know the word, so he supplied 'clip'. He said, 'I thought you said you had never seen a gun before. You just described a semiautomatic.' The rest of us were completely flabbergasted, but for the kid it was 'ah, that is English name.'

As a test, because this was only a few months after the Gals emerged, we went to a gun show with him. No one here knew how even to hold a shotgun. Nor did anyone know much about hunting rifles. But three separate dealers, at three separate counters, watching the Gals heft military rifles and semi-autos asked 'Are you in the Reserves? You sure know how to handle a gun.' The body remembers, when it is taught young, and taught the hard way. This is not *quite* the same as a trigger, but some of the memory-mechanisms are similar.

We have always known how to start an IV. Kassandra realised this, when she still thought she was 'I', at body age 28, when one day the hand actually reached impatiently, to take the needle away from a fumbling nurse. Then she realised, it looks like I know how to start and IV on *my own body*. But... why would *anyone* know how to start an IV on her own body? Kassandra was very puzzled, but ultimately wrote it off, along with all the other jagged inconsistencies and paradoxes she lived with all the time. (Like that she is lesbian, and Marilyn is straight, and Kassandra woke up many a time, in college, with men she had never met, let alone...). Now we know, of course, because the kids remember. And of course it was in our left hand, since nearly all of us are right-handed and it takes more coordination than most 3 year olds have, to start an IV inside your own elbow-joint.

Now you know why Elektra and J Louise jumped on your 'known more than I have any right to' comment. Now you start assembling the pieces, especially the martial arts holds that 'don't work' on you. Why/how do you suppose that is?

Another, much more dangerous trigger is a phenomenon we call 'Face of the Enemy'. It is potentially lethal, though probably not to *us*. Presented with a real threat, that reminds someone/s enough of a similar/related situation, that alter/s might flash back to there/then. At that point, it is *possible* for the alter to fall into a violently defensive mode. A reaction like this, which we are 99+% sure would only come to violence if the body were in imminent physical danger, could, in a less functional mp, cause fatalities.

We suspect the possibility that a programme, intended to get us locked up for dangerous, crazy, or both, might have been linked to Face of the Enemy. It is not one that *took*.

A VERY BAD therapist missed having his septum jammed into his brain by about two heartbeats and some lightning-fast reflexed on the part of Guido and Kassandra. This was in '95, when the MMC alters had *just* been found. Guido told him, 'Do NOT use any type of hypnosis on us. Do not even consider doing visualisations or whatever. Don't DO it. It could be really dangerous.' This so-called 'helping-professiona' was an arrogant so-and-so. He also did not believe most of what we had told him, which was not much. He started in with 'You seem very tense...' in a *soothing* voice that has always made us want to punch people, and the next thing we knew, he was trying to be clever and induce a trance without us noticing. Right...Delphi would not notice hypnosis. Some then *very* recently emerged Agency kids saw a Herr Doktor, trying to mess with our head, with no armed guard standing by. They were *going* to wait until he'd convinced himself we were 'relaxed', and then kill him before he knew what hit him. We felt his condescending *soothe* trip the Face of the Enemy trigger. Kassandra, who hated this doc from day one, but she's precog in a big way -- hence the name -- had the wits to scream a the top of the body's lungs. While Guido grabbed our coat and was in the process of walking out the door, he was yelling at this fool, 'another 60 seconds, you'd have been a dead man. I SAID don't DO that. You are so f..... fired you should be in flames!' and we were out of there. From Dr Arrogant's first *soothing* words, to out the door probably took under a minute. (Those kids also were promptly and thoroughly locked-down, Inside.)

We now warn people: if Guido says 'don't do that', there is a REASON. Barton, please be more careful about what you say, to whom, and how. You have a fair amount of natural talent and have messed around with the occult. You aware that you engage in mindf--ks, don't much like yourself for it, find it a bit scary even, but have not said anything to us about *stopping*. If you slip, and accidentally try that around us, it would be really a Bad Thing. If you were arrogant or foolish/reckless/self-destructive enough to try to do that to us intentionally, things could get uglier than you can imagine. Even an unintentional attempt at messing with our head could trigger Face of the Enemy. We do NOT want to hurt you, and ourself. (Hurting anyone would hurt us worse, probably, at this stage, unless we were dealing with a rapist.) I am trying to alert you, because some of us think you might (quite without planning to) find yourself doing that very thing, and that is cause for alarm. If you are not alarmed, you have some illusions about yourself that you *need* to examine, NOW. Please, do not make any damfool mistakes like the one with Trinka again. THINK about what you say, carefully. You are not a stream-of-consciousness writer, any more than we. I suggest you not write online, but use Notebook to create a text file, reread, think, consider the various ways we might take things, and then paste.

==> EXCEPTION: If you trip a trigger about which we have *told* you, Barton, we will consider it an intentional act of abuse. We do not let anyone abuse us, any more, ever. No one shall make a liar out of all of us who have told the children 'no one is ever going to do anything to hurt us, on purpose, ever again.' We are not a vengeful person. Vengeance is usually a waste of time, and those of us who are religious believe God/s take care of that, in any case. Nonetheless, if you, knowing what you do about us, would intetionally abuse us, we would consider you a menace to society. I am NOT saying any of us believes *this* to be likely. Many of us believe *unintentional* efforts to sabotage either our trust in you, or yours in us, or ideally both, are not only likely, but entirely to be expected. The puzzle pieces are falling together, and we know a fair amount about you, at this point, that we need to let you figure out for yourself. In the interim, you should be on the lookout for any impulse you have (the stronger, the more you need to examine it) to say/do something that would make us very angry with you. or make us walk away permanently.

We live by rule of law, here, Internally. We cannot (nor does anyone want to, at the moment) try to get the PRC to lift the label 'Child-Threat'. We ask you to think about it, as much as possible from our point of view. Observe your thought-processes carefully. If you encounter mental fog, smoke, tricks where your logic is suddenly Looking-Glass Logic, you are in some trouble. If you read this and decide you hate us, never intend to speak to us again, and wish we were dead, you are in very deep trouble, and not our problem. If, upon due consideration, the only conclusion you can reach is that we overreacted wildly, and the problem is us, you are in trouble over your head, and we are grateful you are not our problem. If you try to figure it out, and get the worst headache no one ever imagined, you are in trouble, but you're looking in the right direction.

Even I, and I am neither patient, nor do I suffer fools, believe you do not *want* to be 'Child-Threat'. If you can work out a way to repair the mess that arose from your *amazingly uncharacteristic* insensitivity and stupidity, we will be here. We'll be here even if you can only meet us halfway, though we will be less exuberant. Arpeggio, Kassandra, and some of the other highly empathic people wish we could say more. They know, however, that the PRC do not use that particular designation at ALL lightly. We all wrote the laws and treaties together. This issue is primary, and anything/everything else is secondary to the emotional/psychological security of the kids.

Good luck, and write back as soon as you have triple-checked what you have to say. I would prefer not to have something that seemed like a positive experience for us all just exit with a BANG, like a terrorist bomb on an aeroplane.

Sincerely,

Sara Barnes by request and with permission of His Magesty
for all of us who are LeKZ

I have read all that wrote. Please convey my immediate apology to all the children and to all the rest of you. I will write tomorrow after I have throughly examined what I did and why I did it.

Barton

LeKz,

I need to begin, first, by asking that you do exactly as you said you would and have insured that I can not say anything that could be heard by the children. I do not intend to say anything that they should not hear at this point, but I have obviously shown that my judgement in that area is not to be trusted.

I obviously have no excuse for having posted that first section, no matter in what mode I wrote it. I wrote it offline and pasted it here, so I had plenty of time to read and consider what I wrote. Obviously, despite that opportunity, I didn't do that.

For now, no matter what, I have made a firm decision not to directly address any of the children for the forseeable future. So, if you see that I have done so, please stop immediately and take what ever action seems appropriate.

When T made that cute comment about overacting. I felt that I should say something to acknowlege my being allowed to know T. was watching.

When I talk to children, no matter what their age, I try to address them as I would speak to adults. I do not generally need to reach for precise concepts so I do not generally need to modify my vocabulary until I hear a question or see a bewildered face. Most children respond well to this, because they know perfectly well when they are being talked down to and don't like it.

That is by way of background.

Also by way of background, I have been through a significant portion (I believe) of your website and have read, understood, and reacted to all that I saw. This includes the childrens areas as I said before. There is a certain amount of desensitization that follows from some of that and that is regretable, but it happens.

Additionally, I have commented in the past postings how the children have vocabularies and express concepts that are consonant with experience but not with their ages.

Most, significantly of all, to me, at least, it has only been 4 days since I first answered your challenge to try to understand the issue relating to the rejection of the children's pages. And that was the first time in my life, that I know of, that I have ever been in communication with anything like an mp community/world.

So, as near as I can reconstruct, here's what actually happened. I set out to do two things at the start of that posting. One was to acknowlege T's comment and the other was to truthfully and accurately relate what I consider to be one of the most stupid events on my life.

For some unknown, as of yet, reason it did not cross my mind that the two were not compatible. I understand that you have your speculations and you have made pretty clear what you think they are. I have to admit a certain amount of fear even though I don't agree with them. But, that doesn't matter here and now. I could easily speculate that what I did was some sort of un/sub-concious impulse to test you. But, I don't believe it was.

What I believe is that I simply didn't stop to think my way into the mind of someone I couldn't see. I got arrogantly sloppy and careless while I was busy choosing words for the maximum effect on the rest of you.

There is one more thing that I need to say, I can specifically remember looking at the section I wrote to T and having the beginning of a thought about the advisability of addressing T. directly before I rejected it. I pasted the message into the window and then at the last minute I decided that I could ask you about triggers. I remember trying very hard and going back over the phrasing a couple of times in an attempt to say that I did *not* want the information that you ultimately gave me. I only wanted to know about the nature of triggers as they might have been implemented. It's now clear that I had no idea of the scope of that term's significance to you. (I am very familiar with the film "Manchurean Candidate" but I have always been somewhat impatient/unconvinced with how pretty and neat the programming sessions were. I have never read the book.)

Feeling, somewhat uncomfortable as I always do when I post to you, I hit the post button and went on with whatever else I had to do on line.

When there was no reply for so long a time, I began to worry that my asking about triggers had in fact either upset you, or had itself been a trigger. I set that concern aside and possibly speculated that I wasn't necesarily entitled to a response at the frequency that I am online. Possibly, I can't say now.

When I came on line again later and saw that you had posted I felt better and went to read.

After the initial disclaimer, I was puzzled again. Then I scrolled up and realized what a stupid mistake I had made.

I read down through the whole posting and then I composed myself and wrote my brief immediate reply, just to let you know I had seen the message.

My next step, was to read back over what I had written to T.

Then I sat for a while. After about 5 minutes, I started to write this.

Now I need to tell you a story from my life. I met my wife online while she was still married to someone whom I have characterized in the past as a sociopath. I'm not sure, anymore, that he was, but he was/is certainly out of touch with human emotions and conventional ethics/morality. Candy and he had a son who was about 11 when Candy and her husband, Steve, first came down to Indianapolis from the Chicago suburbs to meet me. We had been playing bridge online for some time. I had started out as his partner but eventually he found someone else. He was an ex-bridge shark and he couldn't stand my personal style of play which was more intuitional than scientific. Candy and I became partners. I had been counseling Candy about her emotional issues with Steve and her life. She had fallen in love with me long distance and when she decided to come down, he came down with her. He and I fenced around intellectually, he was no match, while Candy crept closer and closer to me thoughout the night, till she ended up at my feet puppy-like with a frightening look of rapture on her face while I played guitar. It was d*mn embarassing. Time passed, it turned out that Candy had been on the verge of leaving Steve for several years, but he had so broken any sense of self-worth she had that she often needed to be told to get dressed and what to wear. At one point, I spent a night in their apartment after a visit. He insisted that I sleep in the same bed with him and her. If Candy had not been the one who asked me up I would have walked and that would have been the end of it. I don't believe I could ever have come back. More time passed and Candy decided she could leave Steve. She announced her decision. Steve woke their son, it was 10:30PM or a bit more, and announced that they are getting a divorce then told the boy that he needs to make up his mind who he is going to live with. Time passed while Candy was getting out, during this time Steve moved another woman into the same bed the two of them were sharing. Candy left. The son started with us then decided to try with his father. We were in Indianapolis and Steve was still in the Chicago suburbs. We got a phone call from Steve's new lady telling us that Steve had thrown her and his son out on the street. She was just *telling* us about it, she thought we ought to know that no one was watching out for Candy's son. The month was late August or early September. I don't remember exactly, I can't remember stuff like that since the apnea thing started. We were 4 hours away from Chicago, it was more cold than cool, and her son had on shortsleeves and a jeans jacket. We arranged emergency supervision for the boy between Candy's two relatively ditzy sisters and drove straight there and then back to Indy the next day. When we got back, we got a phone call from Steve, please send the boy back, it was all a mistake. Candy's remark, "You're not allowed to make that kind of mistake,"

I'm not allowed to make that kind of mistake.

Please don't leave me alone with the children.

I hope we can continue to talk and become better acquainted till it becomes utterly impossible for me to do something like that again, but it is clear that, right now, I could.

Best wishes and my most sincere apologies again.

I'm sending this right now rather than waiting. Contrary to what you said, I generally do write stream-of-conciousness though sometimes the stream is slower than others. This time I re-read and made the few corrections I caught and I'm going to send so that whatever is in this is what was in me now. If this suggests that I am insincere, then Kasandra had better rethink what she got from me. It would take a month before I would have enough perspective to reconsider more than a superficial phrasing.

Barton

In addition to what I have already written and acting in as politically correct fashion as I can through my ignorance, I recognize now from what His Majesty, Dyan-Ynnes was kind enoigh to write under trying circumstances, more completely the nature of the People's Republic of Children. I see now, what I did not recognize sooner that that Republic has a dimension that I had simply overlooked. I hope this happened, largely, out of inexperience and not out of any permanent defect in my self. Where before I had spoken in general to LeKZ, I now ask that this message be passed to the People's Republic of Children.

Peoples Republic of Children,

Please accept my direct and complete apology for the unthinking way that I exposed one of you directly and all of you indirectly to the details of an event in my life that I should not have even tried to share.

I, as an adult, should have known better, normally I do. I did not think before I started and for some reason, which I do not understand, my judgement, during and after I wrote, did not catch my mistake. I am very sorry that I harmed any one of you through my thoughtlessness. I know that your adults protected you from my mistake while not from the knowledge that I had done something very bad. I am am greatful that they were able to do what they did.

I would like to offer you an excuse, but I don't believe that there is or could be one. It should not have happened and I should not have allowed it to happen.

I am hopeful that this experience will insure that I will never make such a mistake again. I will certainly try very hard to be careful that it doesn't

I understand and accept your designation of me as a Child-Threat and I understand and accept that it is a criminal charge handed down from all of you to me. All I can say at this point is that I respect the concern that caused you to make that decision. I share that concern and that outrage. All I can do at this point is to try not to ever allow such a thing to happen again.

I hope that some time in the future you will see fit to lift this charge against me and that I will be worthy of that consideration.

I sign myself, with deepest humbleness and contrition,

Barton Lynn Rolsky

Since our Internal laws as regards anyone the PRC call a 'Child-Threat' are very specific, naturally, we are blocking, though they also have no interest in reading.

We were grateful to see your apology immediately. We did pass it along to the PRC, and everyone. It helped.

'I am not allowed to make that kind of mistake'. Yes. You understand. You are not. No one is.

We are not feeling well today, and were considerably worse yesterday. May is the combat Gals' anniversary, and some other time, we'll explain 'anniversary syndrome' in detail if necessary... but you probably know what that means. It happens to monos about the death of loved ones and other traumas, too.

Seems you scared you. That's good. Startled He1l out of us!

We need to know if we are that unclear in our pages on the quite different meanings of, and relationship between the concept of 'triggers', and the concept of 'programmes'. This could be a case of we know what we mean, so we don't know that what we wrote does not make that clear. Please inform whether it was we who did not make it clear, or you who did not 'get it', or more likely both, and how we could clarify, if you have ideas or suggestions. It is precisely *this* sort of confusion from which we can learn where we've assumed a level of knowledge the reader doesn't necessarily have.

We're not sure we understand why you specifically did *not* want to know about *our* triggers/programmes. We *want* the people who interact with us to know what is and is not triggering to us, so you don't accidentally send us into orbit. Could you please explain what exactly it was that you did not want to know, and why?

Where did you get the idea that we were raised Orthodox Jewish?? That was a belly-laugh, but how on Earth did you arrive at that amazing long-distance conclusion-jump? We went to a classmate's Bat-Mitzvah. That's how many times we've been inside an External Temple. We think it's hilarious, but what combination of things did you put together to arrive at... ?

We will be happy to talk about our Internal, peacefully co-existing multitude of religions another day. We're running some kind of Pain Programme (oetiology unknown, or we'd fix) and our left arm is really, like, useless. Pain at neck-shoulder, numb at fingertips. We've had it before, and we can't make sense of it this time. Sara putting all of that into writing yesterday made it worse, of course, and added Headache, but that was expected. It's puzzling us and we need to take a hot bath, lie the body down, and try to work out what's doing this to the body, with D's help.

It is very hard not address all the myriad statements/questions, etc you made in your last 3 posts, but we just can't. Physically .

Please write as much as you like, but try to take it easy on the questions until we get caught up . Oh, and we've decided if Mole works for you, great, but it still doesn't make sense, and we aren't specially dim, so it probably is just a Philosophical Difference, or whatever Philosophers have.

Don't beat yourself up; Guido, Pat, and His Majesty already did that. Just figure it out. We are grateful and pleased to know you think it is as important as we do. It *isn't* like you. Of course, don't talk down to kids. We remember telling patronising adults off, before the body could stand by itself. But you know what is not appropriate. So, this is Another Effin' Learning Experience. It could be worse. You could have started stagnating in your late 30s like most of the world, and be totally fetid by now.

Kassandra York and Psych Department
for LeKZ

"Having been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, you can easily imagine the base of my moral structure. "

*I* was the one raised in an Orthodox Jewish home! I never for one moment thought that you had been. It was a sloppy structure, sorry. More evidence of
a) how I *do* write in a stream-of-consciousness mode which leads to
b) really poor proof reading because the stream just seems to keep streaming in circles (and assuming that I have time to take the time to proof) and also
c)a fairly deep and probably useless clue to the way my mind parses its thoughts (I undoubtedly made the transition with two or three sentences that I wrote in my head but never typed.)

I'm sorry you're not well and even more sorry that it may have been my questions that forced you to go through that.

I didn't want to know your triggers because when I asked I had not made the connection between programmed triggers and environmental triggers nor had I anticipated the depth of the restrictive concepts behind programming. Before I was thinking in terms only of the kind of trigger shown in "Manchurian Candidate" so I didn't want to have that sort of information about you and I didn't want to move into areas that might be intrusive. Since that kind of programming appears to start with the idea of the operative being essentially a disposable commodity, as is the case in other 'sleeper' type scenarios, I never extrapolated into the concept of such operatives being reusable. But, in retrospect I can see that such tactics as you mention would make sense even for a one-shot sleeper, it would actually seem to be mandatory. In any case, the whole issue for me falls into the category of 'know your enemy.' That is the main reason why I asked.

Since I just re-read Guido's pages on your site, I can tell you that I simply did not make the connection of programmed triggers with environmental/incidental triggers related to your individual experiences. To my mind they fall in the same category but are not the same things. I don't know that it was your failure so much as mine. I will look at them again with your question in mind.

I felt the need to tell you another story a while back

(Break for a moment, I will forget this one, too, it I don't tell you. I never did mindf**ks, I constructed mind games in the sense of a pleasant romp playing tag. You may well find one too close to the other to be comfortable, and since you, for obvious reasons, would react badly to my taking advantage of the enhanced suggestibility of cannabis highs, I would not dream of doing them to you. One of my ex-spy friends enjoyed and complimented me on the two little 'trips' or 'enhancements' I showed him. He was far more susceptible than others had been or I was much better than I thought I was.

In any case, I no longer do recreational drugs (to many possible interactions with my medications though from time to time I could really use a 4-6 hour vacation) and I stopped playing head games thirty years ago, largely because when I started pot was a kind or sacrament of the sixties, it was precious and it was a shared experience. By 1972, it was just a way 'to get a buzz on' or to get 'blasted.' It was a personal not a group experience. The last time I invented a game, I was at a party where there was so much pot that I really didn't want any more, but my experience said, you don't waste the stuff by letting it just burn away, and it isn't safe to leave a roach lying around. As I looked across the room I saw that a friend of mine was having the same thought. Almost without thinking I examined the way that people were sprawled out and I passed the j in a way would bring it to my friend. When she got it, I caught her eye and smiled. She understood and selected a path that would send it back to me. The game got harder as more and more people passed out or crawled away and as we set ourselves challenges of more and more complex routes. We managed to play till the roach was completely gone, enjoying the challenge and helping to burn off the effects of the drug. It was the only really exciting thing that happened at that party and it was the last time that I ever smoked at a party.

This is not the story I was going to tell you. )

I was working on my doctorate at Kansas University and I had been presenting one of a report from notes in a small class that met in the professor's office. There were, maybe, six of us and the professor all sitting on available flat surfaces in an office that opened into the Green Room. As I was finishing up, I made eye contact with someone across from me. What I saw in that face can only be described as horror. I very quickly looked at all the other people, finally the professor whom I still greatly respect. All of them showed similar versions and degrees of that same emotion. I thought back in my mind over what I had just been saying and I realized that I must have been speaking complete gibberish for most of my presentation. That was when I first realized exactly how frightening it is to loose control of the one instrument I had always had complete faith in, my mind.

In retrospect, it was the result of my apnea, but at that point in time, the condition was not even suspected to exist.

That, of course, started me on a round of psychologists and psychiatrists each with his pet approach and pet diagnosis. But, I had been changed much more intensely than when I first decided to take my persona into direct control. I could no longer trust my mind.

And, as I grew to better understand and to be better able to be aware of my problems, I understood that I had to leave the theatre. Obviously, I never finished my PhD.

So, since that time, any time I do something like I am doing right now or when I enter into a conversation on line, of any kind, there is that moment's hesitation before I hit the button that posts whatever it is that is going to stand for me in the public eye.

End of the other story.


In Sara's answer about triggers, she said I was using triggers to mean programmes. I program computers for a living these days. In my jargon, a programme is what is activated when a trigger is tripped. I was asking about tripping mechanisms and their general or specific types and classifications. I did not mean to ask about programmes that might be activated by the triggers. To me, what I was asking was roughly equivalent to having just been assigned to a bomb squad. I'm standing by the edge of a mine field and about to go in. I ask, "Sarge, what should I be looking for, little sticks, buttons, strings, or what?" After your reply, I can imagine Sarge's answer, "Yes . . . and let me remind you if you make a mistake here are just some of the things that could happen to you." Okay, I'm scared -- again.

I don't want to be taught how to make the bombs. I just want to get to the other side of the field in one piece. (Though in depths of the cold war and the depressive writing of many speculative authors, I made a point of understanding how to make explosives and other survivalist information -- there is no such thing as a diabetic survivalist. Under those conditions, the technical term is 'dead.')

The complete control of the body with corresponding blackout is what I had originally understood to be the case with mp's (the Dr. Jeckel-Mr.Hyde thing.) Obviously not the whole story.

If you had not stressed how crucial age is to success in programming. I would have suggested the need for a list/manual on how to resist programming, hopefully without losing ones mind.

==========================================================
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Possible Trigger Here.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

. . . martial arts holds that 'don't work' on you. Why/how do you suppose that is?

The Ai Ki Do moves do not work on me because the Ai Ki Do technique is a deliberately gentle technique which achieves control by bending joints in the direction they are designed to move and then a bit more. Typically, controlling the wrist is key to the holds.

I can have some one put their full weight on my wrists and most other joints with no discomfort whatsoever. Hence, most Ai Ki Do controlling holds do not control me. Moves based on momentum, of course, would work.

Jujitsu, however, flexes joints against the direction they were designed to move, it is not gentle. Since I, also, have a high threshold of pain, ignoring any berserk issues, going that extra distance for the broken joint in a crucial situation would be advisable.

That was all I was saying.

I am not a martial arts master or even a student. I understand, intellectually and through some small experimentation, the advantages of the concepts of chi or ki. I became interested in that when I helped some friends to lift the rear end of a car out of bad situation. One of my friends commented that when I lifted it had been as if the others weren't necessary. I am not now nor have I ever been a particularly strong person in the sense of lots of muscles. I have always been able to focus what I understand is called chi.

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I *am* seriously considering the thing you are suggesting about me. I will say again that I don't agree. However, it would only make sense that if I had been programmed that I would not be able to consider that as a possibility so long as the programming held. (What's a person supposed to do? Run out and get myself locked up as a paranoid schizophrenic? Doc, you've got to help me! I'm out to get them! -- Not this week, I hope!)

I have certainly been in situations in the sixties that would enhance any natural paranoid (? self-preservational?) attitudes. I have already mentioned how I seem to find myself around/near/in contact with people associated with intelligence too many times to not to have come to the conclusion that there are either FAR too many ex-spooks out there or I am coincidentally at the center of FAR too many operations. I have invariably enjoyed the company and conversation of these people.

(Please don't be upset! I have accepted that you are not lying. This is just an observation to let you know that I *am* thinking. I *have* observed that you fall into that ex-sppok category as well, particularly since you contacted me -- no accusations, just plain old, garden variety, extrapolative paranoia.)

Being as self-important as I am (and given that I never have quite gotten over the time I accidentally exposed an unmistakable tail when there was no reason for me to have been under that sort of surveillance,) it would not be hard for me to think that there was some reason I was being watched/engaged.

But for now, at least, I am 'postponing' serious consideration of the whole idea. Thank you for your concern and keep on picking away at me till something changes your mind (you'll should forgive the expression!) or I decide to go that way myself.

Barton

I have marked a section of item 13 with a trigger warning. Obviously I can't be sure that that is necessary.

The section deals with descriptions of martial arts techniques and why they don't work on me, which I do not believe would bother you, but I have marked it in any case.

Barton

Item 1:

From Dyan-Ynnes, Regis Magister:

Sir, your apology to the PRC was gracious and well spoken. The contents have been passed along to them, and they have said they will submit any revisions to their earlier grievance come morning, or early afternoon at the latest. On behalf of the society that I have been entrusted to govern, your sincerity is very much appreciated.

Until or unless the PRC arrive at consensus to change the current designation, it is the responsibility of all of the adults here to remain within our laws, and not engage with you for any purpose other than to arrive at a mutually accepted understanding of why your judgment so escaped you, and how to prevent any such event from occurring in future. I can see that you are endeavouring to do this, and your efforts will be met with such help, suggestions, or advice as the Psych Dept have to offer.

We have no intention of leading you to arrive at conclusions, and are hoping that the collective hunch of the Realm is wrong, for many reasons. Not least of those is that the implications for you would be devastating.

Good luck and G-d be with you, Sir.

His Majesty

Dyan-Ynnes

_____________________________________

Yes. Thank you. That really was a gentleman's apology.

To other matters:

1) In the case of intentional triggers, yes, the triggers trip the programmes. It is very closely analogous to a computer.

2) *Very* few people know anything about the triggers that we have not, for the most part, de-fused. What? You think we'd give a person we've known on the 'net for 5 days information like *that*?

3) YOU were raised Orthodox Jewish . Well, that explains that! It's a pronoun reference problem. This is good. We couldn't make sense of that one at all! About those sequiturs, it's a good idea to actually write them down, in an effort at creating a Communication Experience.

4) One of the things wrong with the film (we haven't been able to *find* the book) 'Manchurian Candidate' is that it does imply this is a one-gig deal. No, they invest way too much time in designing and training, refining, etc their Agents-Operative, to throw them away readily. As-O are a fairly valuable commodity. For a cheap hit, hire a merc.

5) The Pain Programme we're running is quite separate. Sara's writing yesterday did make it worse, but that is only to be expected. We are looking for the 'what is it for', 'where is it vested' information, so we can take it out. Not to worry on that score. May sucks rocks.

6)'Know Your Enemy' is vitally important. We are assuming here it was not *us* you were identifying as 'enemy'. Since were were trained to *be* the enemy, we can turn around and use that knowledge against them. They underestimated us. Underestimating us is a Bad Idea.

7) Programme triggers and incidental triggers *can* be the same, but usually are not. Most of what people in recovery have to deal with over the long haul are the latter. People who do *not* get out, spend the rest of their lives being shoved about by their programming.

8) Sara here. The comment about mind-f***s was my temper (which is a nasty thing and of which I am not proud) talking. I could have chosen one of any number of less obnoxious ways of saying that. I apologise. 'Nice' was never in my job-description, and for a long time, 'civil' was not either. I am not the most stable person here, by a long stretch. Under extreme stress, I'm afraid I reverted to type. This has been noted.

9) We have not tested it in 33 years now, but They taught us Ninjitsu. You know, 'Art of the Assassin', Everything is a Weapon? The trivialisation of the concept 'Ninja', and the little kids in black gis at Hallowe'en trigger and disturb us.

10) All the media sensationalists go in heavily for that black-out stuff. Because we were undoing as they were doing, we have had virtually *none* of that. We know many people who do, but most of our MMC friends *don't*. We're supposed to 'seem' like really, normal, y'know? Pity mp is so highly correlated with intellect, and gifted-and-talented kids seldom come out 'normal'. What they *wanted*, but it is well nigh impossible, was the Walking Human Bomb, who could join anywhere unnoticed, and 'blend'. I suppose, if we had cooperated with them, we might have been able to do that. As it is, we can spot a Special Forces Vet at 100 yards, a Marine at 200, a plain-clothes cop, a G-man, etc without trying.

11) Yah, we contacted you. Ex-proto-spook. We refused 'activation'. Contacting you was a 'hunch'. It takes some to know some? Dunno. It would probably be a useful, helpful thing for you to do, for *yourself* to make a list of the times/places, etc where you have encountered these maybe not so retired spies, and how your memories are, around these events. We never, ever worked for the US. In fact, our trainers used to insult people with 'you hold a rifle like a CIA agent!' -- don't know if that's reassuring or not.

12) Just remember, anything you remember will be used against you, but anything you don't, could be used against other people without your consent or permission. One of these days, the 34 will tell you exactly how they said 'no', and why. It's both grim, and very inspiring.

Kurtis Armand, Psych Dept
Too tired to write another w

Your Majesty,

My thanks for your kind communication. I will wait for whatever decision is arrived at.

Barton Lynn Rolsky

Hi Barton,

This is J Louise. The PRC have (without much discussion, and they operate on a Consensus model, and there are about 8000 kids under 7 --PRC is through age 13) changed the label to 'Potential Child-Threat', which considerably loosens the restrictions on the adults, insofar as what we may or may not discuss with you. It is one of our Core Values, probably original to the Baby Who Was Born, that those who lead, serve, and that the best interests of the youngest/weakest are the most important interests there are.

I occasionally get in rows, and once or twice into shoving matches, with parents who yell at tired children in supermarkets. The yelling is not going to make the child less tired. The 'I'll *give* you something to cry about' is so downright mean-spirited and selfish.... It does no good with the parents, who just tell me to 'f--- off and mind my own business', but at least the kid knows *someone* thought s/he was important enough to tell off his/her parent. Some of the slightly older kids have given me such distinct 'thank you' looks that it is worth it. So many parents are such unthinking brutes. And these are the 'nice', 'average', parents.

I know we do things like that, because we wish someone had thought to do anything like that for us. Our parents, of course were the epitome of reason and perfection in public . It was such a clever, glossy, sickening veneer of 'nice'. We have become more tolerant as we've grown older, but in our twenties, we viciously set about deconstructing the 'nice' out of 'nice' people. They offended us by their determination to be inoffensive.

Do you remember the folk-and-protest singer Phil Ochs? We're a BIG admirer of his songs. 'Love Me, I'm a Liberal' is one of the best political songs ever written. We almost prefer the company of Conservatives and Fundamentalists, because with them, at least you know where you stand. Liberals are the people at seminary who were so Tolerant, that they even tolerated Us. Mighty white of 'em. We are and probably always will be a political radical. Yeah, Martin Luther King was effective, because he used Middle-American values to point out what was wrong with Jim Crow laws. Malcolm X said: we don't have any place *in* Middle-American values, so we have to *change* them. They both were shot, probably both by the government. We'd rather be Malcolm, and not compromise with the Enemy.

Speaking of which, there is going to be a very nasty war in the Middle-East pretty soon. With Dubya in the Oval Office, the US is not going to sit on their feral Israeli 'watchdog'. On the contrary, the US might get involved, on the Israeli side. That would be a Bad Thing. You were raised Orthodox Jewish. Liberal Reform Jews in the US tend to fall into two categories: tend to support Israel, but wish they were not so hawkish, or tend to think Israel's been unnecessarily obnoxious and even occasionally express pro-Palestinian sentiments. Reform Jews we have known are universally supporters of Israel, and only vary in opinion on whether Israel should be more or less aggressive. UltraOrthodox Jewish people like the Chasidim think the Nation/State of Israel is a blasphemy, and won't have anything to do with it. We seem to remember Meyer Kahane (insane person and terrorist, by almost any standards) was Orthodox?

We'll tell you our position, briefly, in a minute, but we would like to know how you feel about the whole situation in the Middle East -- both how you were brought up, and what you think now.

Our position is based, in large part, on an analogy made by a friend of ours whose ancestry is Scottish. She said: Suppose some other countries, like France, Russia, and Finland, decided the Scots of the world should have a Homeland. It should be in our Ancestral Homeland. Then they went into Edinborough and Bannockburn and Argyll and started explaining to the locals that their country was going to be divided in half, so the Scottish Diaspora could return 'home'. They'd give the locals the option to stay in their clans' historical homes, provided they agreed to become citizens of, and follow the laws of 'Scothome', which were being written in France, Russia, and Finland. Alternatively, they could relocate to the Outer Hebrides, or be detained in border 'refugee camps' until some agreement had been reached as to who would take them in.

Put like that, it seems fairly preposterous.

The other thing we have always, always said about Israel is: 'From the same people who brought you Pakistan....'

Even the male parent, most of whose family had moved to Israel, said, with an absolutely ashen face, in 1980 (after some Israeli soldiers had shot a few Palestinians, by then into their third generation as 'refugees'), 'Fascists. They have become Fascists. After everything that happened, they have become the worst thing they ever saw. I repudiate them all.' THIS was a VERY big deal. He was truly, deeply shattered by what he saw. After that, he occasionally said things (in summer 1981, we moved out, and didn't hear much more), but we heard him say once, scornfully 'I knew Menachem Begin when he was an adolescent terrorist. He is more brutal than intelligent.' And, fairly tellingly 'Of course there will never be peace there. The country was designed to be constantly at war.'

The 'best' thing we know about the male parent was his deep seated abhorrence of Fascism. He held a Spanish passport, as a young man. He was 22 when Generalissimo Francisco Franco started the Spanish Civil War. I think he may already have been married and living in France. He went to the Spanish Consulate, threw his passport at the Consul General, and said 'If Spain is Fascist, I am no longer a Spaniard'. He went on to travel about Europe without a passport (possible in those days) from 1934 until some time in the early '50s.

A brother of his died at Auschwitz. Specifically, the only one of his (many) siblings for whom he had any respect. He was not sane, ever, but that definitely put more kinks in the corkscrew. No, he was not sane, ever. His first child was the product of a he-claimed-seduction-she-claimed-rape on a housemaid when he was 14. (Heard this through female parent, as his deepest, darkest secret, after he was long dead. He had more illegitimate children than he had teeth. We were one. The only reason we didn't stay that way was that his wife at the time was Roman Catholic, and didn't want any more of his children to be stigmatised by their illegitimacy, and her children were adults, and married. She gave him an annulment and he legally adopted us at around body age one and a half or two. *He* for some reason decided to share information about that, and the fact that the mother refused his offers to take her to Sweden for an abortion, when the body was 23. That letter was his last Big Try with us. It *did* mess up our head, but not badly enough for us to suicide, which we think was the original intent -- we had just moved to CO, too far away for him to tamper directly. And a phone call from a man who had consistently refused our collect-calls from college would have been laughable.

I'm not sure why I'm saying any of this. It's a stream-of-consciousness sort of flow, from earlier work to remove the source of the Pain Programme. (The removal of the source is going to take several weeks, but we'll be *lots* better when it's gone ).

I'm going to stop now. It's one in the morning, your time, so you'll probably be looking for a note about now.

Talk to you soon,
J Louise for LeKZ

Dear LeKZ,

Please, convey my personal thanks to the Peoples Republic Of Children and tell them that I understand that they have been very forgiving when forgiveness was not, in the least, required of them. I will do the best I know how to make certain that I will never endanger any one or all of them again. Thank you.

LeKZ, please remember that I do not understand the limitation this classification places on me and have no hesitation to let me know if I am close to offending.

Phil Ochs! Talk about pleasant surprises. I've been a fan of his since I started singing in the '60s. That was back when I used to have very earnest discussions about how Dylan was alright but Ochs was a folk singer. I have all his studio albums and maybe one of his concert albums. I never bought the concert albums because the quality was so bad and I couldn't hear his lyrics. Now, of course, I wish I had them all. One of the high points of my early college days was when I joined the March on Washington, largely because someone told me there was room on the bus. I remember standing next to the Reflecting Pond halfway down from the Lincoln Memorial and hearing him sing, for the first time ever, "I Declare the War Is Over." It wasn't that much later in the day when we all marched off to the Pentagon and tried to levitate it to the full height that the permit someone had talked the city into giving us would permit.

Shortly, after that failure, I realized exactly how stupid some people could be when I watched a 'flower child' shove the stem of a daisy down the muzzle of the M-something rifle held at port arms of what must have been an 18 year-old soldier with terror in his eyes and only his discipline keeping him sane. There were well over 300,000 of the 750,000 or so at the Mall 'dirty, drug crazed, commie, pinko, hippies' piled up against a very temporary fence around the Pentagon stretching as far as I could see to either direction. And those children in their Army drab and combat boots listened to their sergeants and never broke formation. I was only a year older myself, if that, but I realized that I no longer wanted to be there and started the walk back to the bus, singing as much as I could remember of Phil's wonderful song working out the chords on a ballilaika I had brought with me which my uncle had brought with him from the Old Country where they hadn't seemed to care that he was a devout scientific communist just that he was a Jew.

American Jews of my generation have always been torn about Israel. First of all, we can't really decide which is more important being American or being Jewish. Hardly any of us, were really interested in being Israeli. Those that were, pretty much are. And for an Israeli, it's no problem the two are defined as being equivalent.

Obviously, being Jewish, whatever you get from me is not going to be objective. Whatever they are, they are still Jews, unless you ask an Orthodox Jewish Israeli. A lot of *them* just aren't sure.

My Bar Mitzvah speech was all about the fact that I and Israel were the same age. The rabbi wrote it, he didn't trust any of us to have anything to say to *his* congregation. He died sometime ago, in Israel.

Being an American, I'm more than a little put out by the typical Israeli attitude that is expressed in a very simple question, "Why aren't you here?" Any Jewish tourist gets asked that question many times before he/she leaves. I've never been there, but I have a very simple answer, "I'm a Jew, I'm not an Israeli."

I don't know that the Jews deserved a homeland after the Holocaust. But the US, largely out of guilt, I think, bullied England into promising them Palestine. "Oh, I say, chaps. We've just recalled that we had promised the place to the bloody Arabs." "What! Half of them were for the Nazis?" "Well . . . yes. When you put it that way." "Good! 'Cause the first shipments should be there already and we sure don't want them here."

Here's my biased Jewish version of the story. You really need to start back during the First World War when the British more or less promised to give Palestine back to the Arabs in return for support against the Turks. Then after the war, in order to curry favor from American Jews, England more or less promised to provide for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The whole place was internationalized by the League of Nations which formally put the British in control and charged them with establishing a Jewish homeland.

From then to the time of the establishment of the State of Israel, events were a pretty boring repetition of Jews trying to immigrate, the Arabs (and sometimes the Christians) trying to keep them out, and England bouncing back and forth between the Jews and the Arabs and finally allowing a few more Jews in while the Arabs screamed.

To solve these problems, England kept proposing smaller and smaller partitions for the Jews and planning to move the Arabs out. During WWII, both Arabs and Jews fought with British forces, though the Jewish civilians, being more urbanized contributed more to the war effort than the Arabs, who were largely farmers could..

After the war England wanted to maintain its trade status with the Arab states and made conciliatory noises at the Arabs which the US echoed. The Arabs were already making plans to push the Jews anywhere else.

That's when Harry Truman made getting the Jews into Palestine a world issue. No one could decide what to do, except for the Zionists who kept smuggling Jews in. All of this culminated in the moderately romanticized events in the film "Exodus" which was, of course, told from a biased Jewish viewpoint.

England decided it wanted out and passed the buck to the UN. The UN voted for partition, poorly organized Arab fighting and vicious Jewish counter-attacks ensued, the British left, the State of Israel was formed, and the Arabs attacked. They lost. The result was that Israel had most of Palestine, Egypt and Jordan had the rest, and, of course, it was all the Jews fault.

What happened to the Palestinians? They fought against Israel, so Israel didn't want them and they lost against Israel so the Arabs didn't want them. The proportionately small number that left Israel, the Arabs put in relocation camps, they were mostly farmers, after all, the Arabs didn't need more dumb farmers. The ones that stayed in Israel, became citizens though they tended to congregate on the West Bank. As citizens they are allowed full part in the government as long as they don't try to keep Jews out or alter the basically Jewish nature of Israel.

After the disastrous Arab attacks in the '60s, the Israelis captured land around all it's borders including the West Bank that had originally been intended to be international but which no one seemed to notice Jordan claiming as its own. Jerusalem was reunited and, with the exception of Jerusalem all of that captured territory has not been formally integrated into Israel though it is being settled by Israelis.

During this time the Jews have really ruined Palestine. The country is now hopelessly urbanized, revoltingly technologically advanced, and suffers from the lowest mortality rate in the world. While the surrounding Arab countries have steadfastly maintained their pristine and charming native customs and livelihoods with the exception of the tremendous monies they are forced to spend on armaments to protect themselves from the hideous Jewish aggressors.

In those 53 years since the creation of Israel, the Arab countries have steadfastly refused to allow the memory of their lost homeland to fade from the grieving souls of the displaced Palestinians by reverently allowing them to maintain their national customs and economy within specially designed Palestinian Enclaves. It would have been criminal to have simply dispersed this long suffering people into their populace as if they were Jews worthy of no better fate than the loss of their homeland.

Now from the midst of these poor homeless refugees are rising up a dedicate group of patriots who slipped away from their Enclaves to better suffer for their cause and to obtain weapons and car bombs with which to punish the hideous Jew who have so devastated their ancestral lands. All they want is to return and help the Palestinian ecology recover from its abuse.

Somewhere in here, the Palestinians managed a few victories. I know because there are now Palestinian villages in the midst of Israel as well as on its borders. I know this because the ever impartial press has told me that the Israelis fired on a Palestinian police barracks after hardly any provocation at all. I know this because CNN recently fired their Jerusalem stringer and I'm sure they would have told me if it was because he was staging incidents of Palestinian patriotic sniper fire to correspond with convenient times for the CNN camera crews. I know this because . . .

I'm going to surprise you. I don't think the Jews should have a state of Israel. You see when I asked my rabbi, who is also on the Chicago Board of Rabbis, Vice President in charge of inter-faith relationships, about why the Jews were being so moderate in their reactions to years of provocation and killings, he told me something that an American Jew probably wouldn't think of. He told me that the only real solution to this problem would be for the Jews to kill the Palestinians but that "there was no way that the State of Israel would commit the sin of genocide." That made my jaw drop. That made me understand why the Jews will not be able to keep Israel. So, long as there is a Palestinian people, and the Arab states are making certain of that in their quaint little barbed wire breeding tanks, the Jews cannot win, because they will not fight to win. And if they will not fight to win, how can any American think they deserve to have a country.

But how can any Jew wish for them to loose?

Yes, I agree with you there will be a war in the Middle East again. And even though Israel has full nuclear capability and its neighbors do not, Israel cannot win because only in desperation would they consider using it and then only to keep themselves from being taken as a final mark of despair, and, maybe, not even then because there might someday come a time when the Messiah would walk to the edge of the crater and shake his/her head in disgust.

There is only one hope for peace in the Middle East and that would be for some country like the US to go in there with excavation equipment and huge transports and move everything Jewish out of the country and set it and all the Jews down on some permanently ceded piece of land and leave the rubble for the Arabs. Of course, first they would have to fight the Israelis, who don't want to go, and the Arabs, who don't want anything of value to leave, and, probably, all the Christians, who don't want 'their' Holy Land despoiled, and, undoubtedly, the Native Americans, who are the only people the US government would consider pushing out of the way to make room for the Jews.

This is the reason why I don't usually answer political questions. I hate politics, because it is based on the idea that my way is right and all I have to do is find a way to force it on you. Politics is not government. Politics is the canker sore on the rear end of the people. Unfortunately, I gave up, years ago, hoping that someone would find a better way. I sure haven't been able to find one. And . . . it . . . really . . . gets . . . me . . . p****d!

Pretty darn dramatic right? It's amazing what a little frustration can do.

At the end of his term, Dubya won't have done anything, his advisors will have told him what to do, and he told the American people that he would get good advisors and follow their advice, that's what a good administrator does. And we all signed off on his advisors through the democratic process of electing politicians to do the dirty work for us. (No, I still don't know a better way.) So, if anything goes right or wrong, don't thank/blame Dubya except to say, "Ya did your job, George. Your Daddy's proud of ya." You gave him a good kvel.

What do I really think will happen in Israel? There'll be some fighting, the US will go in, there'll be some more fighting, the US will leave, and, except for a few more bodies, nothing much will have changed. I'm not going to take out my Tarot Deck (it would have to be the Thoth Deck) and try a reading? "Gypsy magic!"

Do you understand that any country with nuclear capability can kill the whole world with one bomb that doesn't even need to hit anything, just blow up? Short of that, how far away, really, are the oil fields? I really wish I believed that prayer could help.

The man your sperm donor characterized as an adolescent terrorist managed to win half of a Nobel Peace prize for finding *some* peace and come to an accord with Egypt. (I really am surprised given all that you have to say against your 'fatherperp,' that you credit him with judgement in this matter, but I didn't know him and I have no right to judge what parameters apply.)

I can don't know if there is anyone left in Israel who can save the situation, but it doesn't matter because I didn't get to vote in that election. The current incumbent's plans, last I heard, called for walling off the Arab cities and building them roadway system that doesn't intersect with the Israeli roads. I guess when you're desperate, you'll try anything, like, maybe, giving away your most sacred treasure, and that of all your people, for the sake of peace and having it refused for the sake of hatred or greed or both.

We have a minimum of a generation more to wait while all the old b******s die and the new ones grow up. So, tell those poor pawns in the relocation camps to hunker down. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

I'm glad you've got that program on the run.

Just let me know if I can solve any more of the world's problems.

Barton

The 'politics' question, and why we credit the sperm donor with any knowledge on the subject can only be discussed in a very roundabout way publicly, and it ain't worth it. We'll send you an email. Then you can puzzle the thing over some more and see what you think.

Your reply was funny, in and American-Jewish-Person-Talks-Drily-of-Israel way. We laughed. We disagreed, but we laughed. We do understand that perspective... lots of exposure. Our school was nearly all Nice Jewish Goils by 9th grade, because the WASPS send their kids to boarding-school, but Jewish families do not do that to their sweet little darlings.

Most of us, Inside, identify themselves most with Judaism... because, or in spite of... see email to be sent later. A sizeable number identify with Islam, because....

There is a Chaplaincy, with eight or so Rabbis, only one of whom is male, (and some who do part-time as Rabbi, part-time a Psych Dept, or other Departments). We have a Church of England Vicar (male), and a Roman Catholic Priest (female, and she says if His Holiness can get Inside our head, he's welcome to defrock her, but otherwise, she's a Priest). Dorothea, the Radical Feminist Quasi-Christian Clergydyke, (who wears flowered dresses that the rest of us really don't like -- where did she get this taste?) who's kind of on the Christian side of new-age Goddess-gals, offers worship under a tree any old time. Alice Sojourner is African-American, and a *serious* evangelical. She's also a fairly serious Christian, but what she evangelises is usually not Christianity. She and Leah started the Ethics Dept, which is sort of an advisory ministry to the Crown. Rabbi Miriam Altshul, and the Vicar, and one or two other clergy are on it, as well as representatives from all the myriad subgroups. Alice is primarily one heckuva good preacher. She even writes prose like a preacher. She's the holy rolling polemicist who could talk your grandmother into supporting gay and lesbian rights before she (the grandmother) quite knew what it was she had suddenly realised was so important. Leah Abarbinel is the political pedant. She knows, she has all the Charismatic leadership of the average intellectual Jewish nebbish. 'Nebbish' isn't quite the right word, for females, but we don't know what is, for the thick-glasses-and-ankles variety of smart, but not interesting Jewish female.

Alice also has the unexpected secondary job of being married to the King, though no one ever calls her 'Your Highness' twice. You see, for the most part, we have a King to provide entertainment. His recent exercise of his authority has left him moaning in bed, while his assistant rubs Ben-Gay on it -- his authority, I mean. His Frivolous Majesty is there to throw Faahbulous parties, dress well, cut a dashing figure while fencing, be a handsome person for people to have paintings of, and enforce treaties. Alice does the actual running the Realm work, most of the time. His Majesty is *only* involved when there are breaches, or potential breaches, of treaties. Then, he does his best imitation of Lordly, which is very good, and pretends not to be a figurehead for a while. He's as queer as a plaid rabbit, and extremely vain. Apart from that, no one really knows what he's about, because we deliberately made sure we wouldn't be. Alice and he get along, which is interesting, because they couldn't be more different. An African-American woman who started life as a 9 year old prostitute in the East Village, and an intentionally designed (by the System) British King who traces his bloodlines (speciously, of course) back to Llwellyn of Wales could not be more different. He probably asked her to be Queen Consort, just to be weird. She probably agreed, because she knew she'd have the authority to Get Things Done if she had that position.

We have a couple of Muslim Mullahs (both Shi'a) one female and the other male. There's a Presbyterian Deacon (she's Scottish, and decided someone had to represent God's Frozen People) who comprises the entirety of the Presbyterian population. Lots of the smallest children are Hindu, on principle if not in practise. Hindu is part of Basic Core Values. It just is there. We don't 'observe' Hinduism, but Hinduism doesn't require much by way of 'observance'.

Racially, we have every variety of human except Indigenous American, and Far-East Asian. We also have a huge number of human+, or altogether nonhuman people. The definition of 'people' Inside, is 'sentient'. The definition of 'people', Outside is definitely all mammals, probably all birds, some fish, all trees, some flowers, many rocks, and no shrubs. 'Shrubbery' and 'pond-scum' are insults among the sentient Plants, Inside. No fungi or insects/arachnids either. We eat nonsentient vegetables and vegetable-products Outside, and Inside. Yeast is too dumb to count as alive. No, of course we don't eat anything with gelatine in. The kids like Ko-jel, which we have to drive 30 miles to the other end of the metro, to find a decent selection of Jewish food.

We gotta post this and get to that email, quickly.

SO glad you're a Phil Ochs fan. We think he was the real genius of the genre... though his later music reflects his deteriorating mental health. Still, Pleasures of the Harbor is late, long, and brilliant. And Outside of a Small Circle of Friends... we'd *just* arrived in the states when that stabbing murder happened in New York (Harlan Ellison, probably our favourite writer, wrote 'Whimper of Whipped Dogs' about it). It had a terrifying impact on a small child. That boppity honky-tonk piano Ochs plays... genius.

Whoa. Gotta go find your address and send that email. You might want to read that first? or read that before responding? or respond to that by email?

Mostly Auntie and Arpeggio, both wired and weird

I'm glad I could make you laugh. I was trying when the irony wasn't to deeply rooted in the early life of a Jewish boy trying to be the man that they told him he was.

That is a question that intrigues me. You studied religion and you have all these clergy. I really can't speak for any of the other faiths, because while my understanding is broad in those matters it is rather shallow except in the area of Judaism. There I have a rather huge respect for the amount of study that goes into making an ordained rabbi. I understand that the opportunity may not have presented itself to have been formally ordained and there's more than one way shake a lulav. I'm fascinated by the mind set of a devout educated person. I have no faith in God. I can't conceive of having one. Yet my wife and I just finished a tour of duty as Ritual Chairperson/VP of our congregation. (She needs it, I don't) Candy or I was obliged to write an article for the Congregation News Letter in which, when it was my turn, I tried to discuss the issues that were important to me while not offending our tiny little congregation who aren't sure what kinds of Jews they are (but are pretty sure what kind they aren't,) but they feel like they should have a (part-time) Rabbi, a (lay) Kantor and (volunteer) choir for the High Holy Days, and services once every Shabbat or so. They, like most American Jews, are woefully ignorant of their own faith and even more so for all the others. They barely understand the different and common sects of Juaism. But our current rabbi, who is leaving us to be a part-time rabbi for a congregation with children and a full time diplomat for the Chicago Board of Rabbis -- a remarkable person who has always been helpfull and listened to me carefully before he said, "No. Your wrong." I want to discuss the logic and lack of same along with the contradictions to modern American Jewish practice and he hears it all and answers from his faith.

I can understand and sympathise with many things that other people can't fathom. but I cannot put myself in the position of a person of true faith. There was a series of specials on the religions of the world on PBS some years back, and there was one section on the Eastern Orthodox Church. The crew followed along as this one priest who was generally talked about as being next in line to head the faith went about his business. At one point he was returning to his old home village in Serbian, I think, to perform a wedding for some childhood friends. He walked into the village in the traditional fashion proclaming the traditional 'Truth,' "He is arisen!: He spoke in the native tongue and every time he cried out, I got chills down my spine. It was as though, he himself had just that moment witnessed the miracle and been bathed in glory. There was a profound faith (or complete madness -- or a master actor) speaking there. I wish I had seen him before the two or three times I have had to play a priest. I can still 'hear' the wonder in his voice and see the tension in his body as he strode along.

The same series had a show on a Zen master. I had no problem understanding what was happening as he worked with his desciples. That I understood.

How do you rabbis react to things like these or do you? I know a few Labobovitcher Chasids who can glow that way? But I can't talk with them about this. They try but it's like asking a fish about water.

As for you Mullahs, when was it that the Muslims grew away from the Jews who used to be welcome throughout the Muslim world. Or is it the Israeli not the Jews the Arab world reacts too? I don't question your faith at all? (Or any other person's faith for that matter)

You Christan clergy, how do you react to born-agains like Dubya who think it's proper to gather in intense circles and pray for God to give them all the other fellows money and to make their businesses the most powerful around?

The States are going through an intense resurgence of 'Faith' or maybe it is Faith without the qualifying quotes. I tend to credit the general fear and confusion of the times, but I could be wrong. As I say, I am without faith, forced to fall back on morals and ethics to guide my choices.

Oh, I can write a pretty good sermon, from a Christian or Jewish viewpoint. I understand the philosophy and the doctrine. I just can't say "Amen!" or "Hallelujah!" without calling on all my acting powers. Unless I'm doing a caricature, I feel silly.

People never seem to understand that it is very hard for an actor to lie.

Something else to notice about Phil Ochs studio albums. I have never been able to make people understand that I see this but maybe you can. The album titles follow a classic pattern of a folk artist. He starts out with a couple of traditional folk albums, then he goes heavily studio then there's the Best of followed by Rehearsals for Retirement and the with "No More Songs", I'm not taking the time to pull them all out, but it's like Ochs was deliberately shaping the titles, at least, to follow the pattern of the rock singer who matures away or simply looses his audience followed by a desperate attempt to win back his fans (40 Phil Ochs Fans Can't Be Wrong!) I think I still can't really explain the pattern I saw well before his career took the dump that led to his suicide. It may have been his own fantasy of being a big star and never recognizing that he was one of the worlds finest singing poets.

Any time, and every time I think about Ochs or Harry Chapin both dead in ways that were their own fault because they valued themselves far less than their audience did. We wuz amall but we wuz cherce. It's such a selfish sorrow.

Barton