4 Clinamen 130 - 2:23 p.m.

I yet live

Frothing at the mouth and falling over backwards. Did he froth at the mouth, or fall over backwards, or fall over backwards to froth at the mouth? Tonight on Spectrum, we examine the whole phenomenon of frothing and falling, coughing and calling, screaming and bawling, walling and stalling and zawling. Zawling. Is there a word 'zawling'? If there is, what does it mean? If there isn't, what does it mean? Perhaps both, maybe neither. Good night.
-- some TV presenter

And now for something much more cheerful: my discovery that Piro and Largo don't know how to write Nihonjin speaking phonetic English. (If you disagree, I invite you to go read the strip, then decide how you would render Great Teacher Largo's statements if you had to use katakana.)

That strip came out while I was working on our main feature, the result of my latest way to waste perfectly good time. I'll never be even as good at this stuff as Ken Hite is, let alone as good as Badger. I mean, anyone who can end the first part of his Tunguska piece by promising that
Next time, I�ll be exploring the connection between H.G. Wells, Nikola Tesla, the Russian Firebird and Arisia and Eddore.
has forgotten more about how to do High Weirdness than I'll ever know. Personally, I suspect that his absorbed twin has a lot to do with it. (I'm not making this up; he gets headaches which he probably wouldn't get if he didn't have the bones of an infant skeleton interpenetrating his brain.)

Skinny-dipping in the waters of the paranormal can be CREEPY and you'd best pick a sunny day so that you don't panic when your feet brush the nameless slimey things on the bottom.
--J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, The Book of the SubGenius

I, on the other hand, have little or no imagination. I can put facts datapoints together in surprising ways, but I have to have those datapoints to work with. They needn't necessarily be strictly related to consensus reality, either, hence my decision not to use "facts," which for most people is a term referring to the true rather than to the provable. In the same elementary school English classes where I learned the names and styles of many popular advertising techniques (so I could spot and hopefully resist them), I was taught that a "fact" is something which can be proven, while an "opinion" is something dictated only by the individual's mind. The difference, in Korzybskian terms, equates to the difference between events locatable in space-time versus subjective interpretations of those events or imagined others.

Anyway, it helps to have a solid foundation on which to set your ladder before you climb up and start building castles in the air. That's why I find Devon Jackson's Conspiranoia!: the mother of all conspiracy theories almost unspeakably handy.

I had a strict rule, which I think secret services follow, too: No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them. [...] It was a little like that game where you have to go from sausage to Plato in five steps, by association of ideas. Let's see: sausage, pig-bristle, paintbrush, Mannerism, Idea, Plato. Easy.
-- Casaubon, in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, quoted by Ken Hite in Six Degrees of Sir Francis Bacon

What I did was, I sat down with the first of its 21 theory-webs ("The Master Plan," listing players who appear over and over as key figures) and noted which of the other 20 includes each of these. I then noted which of the non-Master Plan entities appear in which theory-webs, which Planners so appear, and thus was able to determine who's intimately connected to whom.

I found one main web with two centers, one on Adam (to whom God, the Rosicrucians and the fabled "International Zionist Conspiracy" are all intimate), and the other on those nefarious Aquarians (the puppets of just about everybody, but mostly of the Zionists and the International Bankers, who are not the same thing). I found that the Zionists and the Aliens are the only ones to connect to both the Adamite and Aquarian tangles. (Nimrod is linked to the Zionists, which implies to me that their ultimate goal is to rebuild the Tower of Babel. Whether you think this is a good thing depends on whose interpretation of the Tower you believe -- Zechariah Sitchin's or Neal Stephenson's.)

All things begin and end in Albion's ancient Druid rocky shore
But now the starry heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of Albion.
-- William Blake, "Milton"

I concluded that the "Adam" involved is actually Adam Qadmon, the Ymir-like "perfect man" who contained all creation. William Blake calls this figure the Giant Albion, who was originally fourfold. The three entities that converge on Adam represent the three surviving Zoas (the Zionists the strong Urthona, the Rosicrucians the beautiful and passionate Luvah, and "God" [Jehovah] is Urizen Demiurgus), while the Aquarian Conspiracy seeks to resurrect the lost Fourth, Tharmas of the waters. (At least, that's what it set out to do, but ten other entities are using it as a cover for, or a distraction from, their own aims.)

In a separate web, the CIA and FBI are intimately linked to the multinational corporations, and the FBI also has links to the transnationals (the corporations with more power than any mere nation-state). L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, and Sun Myung Moon were (or are) all CIA assets. (My dad points out that those three aren't assets to any member of the human race. I point out in return that the CIA is tied into the "DNAlien" conspiracy-web, along with the Aliens, the FBI, and God.)

Everything is a conspiracy.
Everything is.
JFK and LBJ,
RFK and Edgar J...
-- Richard Belzer, "The Paranoia Rap," UFOs, JFK, and Elvis: conspiracies you don't have to be crazy to believe

This sort of thing leads to interesting conclusions. If I ever get to be in danger of taking this seriously, I can just remind myself that the logic I followed, carried to its conclusion, implied that the UFOs are from the Vatican (or maybe the MIBs are).

Similar logic comes from excessive use of Robert Anton Wilson's Everything is Under Control. Particularly the way I decided to use it, which involved starting with the first entry, then following each link from that entry (including links that aren't actually labelled as links, but whose referents get their own entries). Here's what I got:

Knights Templar, Illuminati Copies or Revivals, History of Secret Societies, Abbe Barruel, Christians Awake AIDs Theory, Freemasons

Face it, the elected government is in control. Actually that's quite scary.
-- Temple ov [sic] thee [sicer] Lemur, explaining how to disinfect yourself of the Conspiracy Theory meme

-30-

(The answer I got was "Biitodaunzu sakusoru!" But, as I said, maybe that's just me.)

�

last time, on The Slack Shack - our next inciting exstallment