Colonialism, Empire and Neo-Darwinism (repost)

For years the Orang Asli Affairs Department has gone around to the indigenous communities warning them about the "dangerous and subversive NGOs" and human rights activists who have been using the Orang Asli to promote their own covert leftwing political agendas.

Speaking to some Jabatan Orang Asli officers, I can tell they fervently believe the official line about assimilating the Orang Asli into the mainstream, modernizing their attitudes, and eventually bringing them up to economic and academic par with other ethnic communities.

Okay, so they think the Orang Asli are best served by embracing Islam and regarding themselves culturally as Malays - after all, Islam is the ONLY valid belief system (as any "good" Muslim will attest) - but they never doubt for a moment that the government they serve has only the best interests of the Orang Asli at heart. They're moral troopers, brave and selfless missionaries bringing Progress and Development to the rural areas - and they're facing an uphill task because Orang Asli are just so... recalcitrant... so resistant to change... to all the benefits of the consumer culture and cash economy!


Well, Orang Asli are certainly happy to be given loads of cash that they can spend without a thought for tomorrow (they must be natural "Christians" who totally believe in living as the sparrows do and the lilies of the field) - but they are well aware that Orang Asli Affairs personnel have for the most part profited greatly from their role as intermediaries between Orang Asli communities and loggers, miners, developers, and other wannabe ecocidal entrepreneurs. As the official "protectors" of Orang Asli interests, the JOA is well placed to collect "commissions" while facilitating logging licences and so on in Orang Asli reserves.

It all boils down to the issue of CONTROL. Every bureaucrat views CONTROL as his or her god- or government- sanctioned right - nay, sacred duty! The opposite of CONTROL is... ANARCHY! CHAOS! THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT!


Well, that's how the majority of humans view the Anglo-American Empire's behavior in Afghanistan and Iraq - indeed the behavior of all monster corporations whether their shareholders be American, Jewish, British, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese or Reptoids. The US of A operates as a corporate entity with an ultimate agenda of global dominance, so can you not see that it is doing to the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq (just to mention the most recent atrocities, without bringing up Vietnam, Chile, Ecuador, Salvador, Argentina, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama, and so on) precisely what the Orang Asli Affairs Department has been doing to the Orang Asli for more than 50 years?

Mainly COLONIZING them in their own homelands! You say it's "survival of the fittest" - it's a dog-eat-dog world and so on. Hey, that's only a belief system used to justify cold-blooded predator programming as "natural." That's how it goes, kiddo, how the cookie crumbles, human nature... ABSOLUTE AND UTTER NONSENSE!


That's hoodlum talk. Only those with strong pirate, robber baron, Jehovian-Anunnaki genetics feel that way about life in general. That only the streetsmart and savvy are fit to rule - it's a cosmic law that the "strong" will always bully, exploit, suppress, devour the "weak."

Well, who's "strong" and who's "weak"? If you use money as a gauge - then of course YOU are "stronger" than ME. And the US is "stronger" than, say, Bangladesh.


But how do you rank when you replace purely financial measurements with, say, capacity for empathy, love and understanding? Perhaps you'd then find yourself near the bottom of the list.

Isn't that what fat cats fear most? That values will abruptly change and that they'll find their mountains of US dollars worth less than Monopoly money? Isn't that why denial becomes more vigorous and violent?


In any case, we're all still rooting for you, no matter how hideous your moral condition - hoping to see you experience a major shift, an opening of the heart to greater truth - beyond your own silly outmoded survival programming!

Antares
2 August 2003

[Reposted 25 March 2011 & 26 August 2015]

Doomsday or Bloomsday? It's Up To Us! (repost)

Just before Christmas in 2009 I was admitted to the intensive care unit of Sungai Buloh Hospital in a semi-delirious state. Blood tests indicated an extraordinary amount of plasmodia from two different strains of malaria. My body was on the verge of total shutdown, so the doctors induced a 5-day coma while they put me on life support.

I have no memory whatsoever of my artificial state of suspended animation. It was perhaps the closest to death I have ever been. Yet for me it was a truly valuable experience: a close encounter with my own mortality that left me with vivid intimations of immortality.

It took me at least two weeks to regain my strength after I was discharged from the hospital, but during my convalescence I became acutely aware of the poignant fragility of living things - and the ephemerality of the physical world. I saw how easily continents can rise and sink, along with cities, nations, entire species.

What brought me crashing down from my usual state of perfect health was a mere mosquito bite. On a planetary scale, that compares with an oil company's attempt to drill a hole seven miles deep below the sea. To Mother Earth, that's no more than a mosquito bite - but it could prove equally lethal to all life on earth.

Nobody really knows the size of the petroleum deposit beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Unless some ingenious method is devised to plug the undersea borehole, crude oil could be gushing into the Gulf Stream for months, even years. Right now Mother Earth appears to be hemorrhaging unstoppably. Alas, her mineralized blood is extremely toxic to all life-forms - except perhaps a few strains of oleaphagic microbes.

Already, doomsday prophets have made their appearance on YouTube, pointing at Revelation 16:3 ["The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became blood like that of a dead man; and every living thing in the sea died."]

No matter how you look at it, BP has screwed up big time. As usual, there are many who believe this colossal disaster wasn't just an unfortunate byproduct of insatiable corporate greed and hubris - but that it was deliberately engineered by a consortium of oil interests (read Halliburton and cronies) in a byzantine maneuver to secure some devious advantage. I find that really difficult to believe - that anybody could be so irredeemably evil and absolutely irresponsible. But we've already witnessed how some arrogant entities who enjoy playing god are perfectly capable of culling their livestock, and this is precisely how the ruling elite views the masses, as livestock.

Even as this potentially terminal eco-apocalypse unfolds, humans continue to be obsessed with their own petty games of ego-driven competition, oneupmanship and sibling rivalry.

Just look at the knee-jerk reactions of those who have bought into UMNO's repugnant doctrine of Malay Supremacy (which, ironically, is almost identical with the Zionist notion that the God of Abraham hand-picked the Jews as the Chosen People who shall rule over all other tribes). In suffering electoral defeat, rather than concede that their political rivals have earned themselves a turn at the wheel, these modified primates have opted to stir up racial and religious tensions in a futile attempt to scare voters into returning them to power.

While two stags lock antlers over a doe in heat, a grinning hunter with a double-barreled shotgun creeps up stealthily through the bushes and begins to take aim. In the animal kingdom as in the human, hormones and pheromones continue to rule. However, there is one significant difference: we humans supposedly have the intellectual capacity to transcend our biological and psychological drives, thereby attaining transcendental awareness - and, ultimately, cosmic consciousness.

The thrust of evolution has taken Homo sapiens sapiens to the point where we must make a conscious choice: to carry on behaving like destructive caterpillars, devouring the leaves of the very plant that supports our existence... or to accept the temporary ego death of pupation, wherein we become willing pupals/pupils of the greatest teacher of them all, Mother Nature, who will lovingly guide us to glorious butterflyhood - and galactic citizenship as mature and sentient beings.
 
As one who has long taken counsel from the natural world, I have come to appreciate a pile of moss-covered rocks far more than a $15,000 designer couch or even a $15 million gilded throne studded with rubies, emeralds and sapphires. Simplicity is indeed the mark of true mastery. All spiritual guides say the same thing - and have done so for thousands of years - but we still don't seem to get it. With billions in research grants at the disposal of leading edge scientists, no human laboratory can claim to have created an edible replica of a humble banana - what more a living, breathing, thinking, feeling creature - and I'm not talking about cloning. And yet our arrogant anthropocentrism and pathological egomania have convinced us that some almighty deity has granted us dominion over the beasts of the field and fowls of the air - indeed all the domains of nature, right down to microbes and viruses. When an outcry was raised over an animal-testing laboratory to be constructed in Melaka, the chief minister told reporters in all seriousness that God gave men the right to do as we will with animals.

The benightedness of that monotheistic and tyrannical viewpoint struck me as the very epitome of what has gone so terribly wrong with the human experiment. This spiritually retarded chief minister was really just a victim of a crude and barbaric religious doctrine designed to minimize empathy and maximize antipathy - so that rigid boundaries could be drawn between a fictitious Us and an imaginary Them. A fanatical adherence to notions of Us versus Them inevitably leads to perpetual conflict and warfare. Which, of course, sits perfectly well with weapons manufacturers and their shareholders.

Some folks who have seen James Cameron's latest blockbuster, Avatar, take cynical pride in criticizing his unabashed didacticism. I've read straightfaced putdowns of the movie by Christian apologists who accuse Cameron of depicting Mother Nature as God and corporate adventurism as the Devil. These days, whenever I see talking-head PR execs on TV trying to excuse the inexcusable, they all remind me of the corporate creep Parker Selfridge and the gung-ho killer droid Colonel Quaritch in Avatar who end up destroying the Sacred Tree in their frenzied pursuit of Unobtanium. Only goes to show how beautifully James Cameron succeeded in his mission to alert humanity to what's ultimately at stake.
    While a part of me shares the acute anxiety of those in the US (particularly folks living around the Gulf Coast) as to the eventual outcome of BP's monstrously catastrophic blowout, another part actually welcomes the disaster as perhaps the gigantic kick-in-the-butt we need to finally wean ourselves off fossil fuels that poison our habitat. Nope, going nuclear is NOT the answer either! Most so-called energy experts parrot the erroneous belief that "we are currently in an energy crisis."

There is absolutely no energy crisis. If there appears to be one it's only because we have been way too prodigal in the way we misuse energy.

Like fish swimming around in a saltwater aquarium, we have forgotten the open sea. Our myopic get-rich-quick schemes benefit nobody - least of all ourselves - and yet we won't hesitate to kill anyone who attempts to stop us.

That's right, folks, we humans will defend our lavish lifestyles to the death - even if it's the last thing we ever do. Some distant day an Aldebaranian anthropologist will describe the demise of our species thus:

"The humanoid Earthians perished as a result of their obstinate addiction to MSG-flavored snacks, fizzy drinks, toxic fumes, and loud noises."

[First posted 19 December 2017]

The Holy Trinity of My Mental Health (revisited)

Mr Wong, Booboots and my beloved Bunyip have an immense therapeutic effect on me, thank heaven!

Today was one of those days when I went to bed as Vishnu (the Preserver) and woke up as Shiva (the Destroyer). What happened? NOTHING! But the silly season approaches and, as usual, it brings out the worst in me. If I had my finger on a Red Button I'd be sorely tempted to press it and let the whole shebang be blown to smithereens like some unnamed Mongolian woman (who, Imigresen insists, never visited Malaysia). On days like this I tend to view the entire human experiment as an abysmal failure - Homo sapiens, my foot! More like a nest of contentious lice with all their stupid conflicts over primitive belief systems.

This year (2007) it was compounded by the fact that yesterday was a public holiday (Hari Raya Haji) and the banks were closed - which meant some money deposited in my account on Thursday won't clear till Christmas Eve or maybe even after Boxing Day, leaving me with exactly RM111.70 in my wallet plus a residue of RM9.12 in my Maybank account. Of course, I wouldn't be quite so cheesed off if this pathetic country called Bolehland believed in paying freelancers on time.

Wrote a feature for a national daily back in August and I'm still waiting for the measly payment of - what, RM250? It's absolutely indefensible and outrageous - and Malaysians have the gall to publicly lament the dearth of full-time writers. Where are all the great novelists? Well, you'll find a pile of skeletal remains on Desolation Row with notably large skulls who all perished waiting for checks in the post.

What is it about Christmas - or Kerismas (as Dean Johns recently called it in a barbed piece he wrote for Malaysiakini) - that brings out the Beast, if not the Scrooge, in me? When I asked myself many, many years ago why people living in the tropics would send each other greeting cards with images of reindeer, wintry landscapes, pine forests, and white-bearded fat men in red suits, I realized that most folks are totally unoriginal - and, what's more alarming, they hardly ever think, except perhaps in pre-programmed loops with default settings. After 130 years of British rule, many Anglophile middle-class Malaysians have adopted "Xmas" as their own celebration, without researching the origins of what once was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. December 21 or 22 marks the longest night of the year in the north and the mid-point of winter (in the southern hemisphere it would be the peak of summer). To cheer themselves up after weeks of dreary weather, folks celebrated the symbolic renewal of life after a period of hibernation with a big feast and lots of wine. Sometimes these parties would get a little orgiastic, especially with guys carrying mistletoe sprigs around just so they could kiss any girl they chanced upon. People sure knew how to have fun back then.

Then the reptilian Roman Church came along and co-opted the pagan festival, declaring it to be a celebration of the birth of Christ Jesus (whose actual birthday, according to some scholars, was October 4th). It was all a matter of political expediency and mass mind control. Centuries later, December 25th was hijacked by the retail business and turned into a paean to gross consumerism.

Flashing lights, sparkly baubles, and plastic pine trees became a billion-dollar industry - along with gift wrapping, fancy ribbons, frozen turkeys and imported Christmas pudding. Knowing all this, I found it hard to go along with the fake jolliness and greed-driven bonhomie of this aggressively marketed consumerist festival. Okay, so it was an excuse for far-flung families to get together - well and fine - but the pressure of exchanging gifts invariably gets to me. I enjoy giving presents spontaneously, when so inspired - not because it's expected. Five decades after I discovered the truth about Christmas, the tradition rages on undiminished - with the same old mindless carols and silly Santa songs blaring from every department store p.a. and vaguely Christian household.

Most folks say they love the cheery atmosphere around Christmas. Something must be wrong with me, I'm more likely to feel depressed. But then I've always been one of those misfits who absolutely detests campfire songs. Guess I'd never make the grade as a populist politico. I despise the Lowest Common Denominator far too much. People who subscribe to the Lowest Common Denominator know how to write hit tunes according to formulas decreed by market surveys; they know precisely what the public wants - and unabashedly dish it to them. Sensational tabloid headlines, mindless slogans like "Malaysia Boleh!"... wrestling videos... T-shirts emblazoned with popular football club insignia... great stuff, it sells like hot cakes!

Well, I allow myself to rant and rave and turn my nose up at the great unwashed one day out of every year - the other 364 days I'm a pretty upbeat and positive-thinking sort of fellow. In any case, those who spout idiocies like the Bottom Line and capitalize on the Lowest Common Denominator will probably end up in the Lowest Consciousness Domains come Non-Judgment Day.

Anyway, Happy Solstice, folks! I'm okay now. My mood lifted as soon as I saw Mr Wong smiling at me like the Dog of Dogs he truly is. Then I went down to the river with Ahau and Anoora (escorted by the canine corps) and after a minute under the best jacuzzi in the universe, my grumpy feelings were washed clean away. There was an Indian family picnicking at our usual spot and I felt my heart chakra expand as I silently blessed them all on this sacred day - and I realized I don't have what it takes to be a Great Dictator or Evil Emperor, since I can't stay angry with humans for more than a few minutes.

[First posted 21 December 2007, reposted 25 December 2016]

The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet ~ Dweezil Zappa Plays Zappa!

Published on 12 Oct 2013
by Mentor1954

Tracklist:
01. Cosmik Debris
02. I'm The Slime
03. Pound For A Brown
04. Don't Eat The Yellow Snow
05. St. Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast
06. Father O'blivion
07. Inca Roads
08. Peaches En Regalia
09. Montana
10. Village Of The Sun
11. Echidna's Art (Of You)
12. Zombie Woof (unbelievable showcase for Steve Vai)
13. Black Napkins
14. The Torture Never Stops
15. Oh No
16. Son Of Orange County
17. Trouble Every Day
18. Sofa

DVD Left Outs:
- Andy
- Call Any Vegetable
- Florentine Pogen
- Eat That Question
- I'm So Cute
- Tryin' To Grow Chin
- Punky's Whips
- Black Page #1 & #2
- Regyptian Strut
- Cheepnis

Cast:
Dweezil Zappa - lead guitar, vocals (http://youtu.be/aDKYLDRUTpY)
Napoleon Murphy Brock - vocals, saxophone, flute
Scheila Gonzalez - saxophone, flute, keyboards, vocals
Aaron Arntz - trumpet, keyboards, vocals
Pete Griffin - bass
Billy Hulting - marimba, mallets, percussions
Jamie Kime - (mostly) rhythm guitar
Joe Travers - drums, vocals (http://youtu.be/LxZE5GdpwUo)

Special Guests:
Terry Bozzio - drums, vocals (sings only on some left outs)
Steve Vai - guitar

Please check out my other channel too:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Mentor1954

THANK YOU, Mentor1954... you did a fucking grrrrrreat job!

[First posted 29 March 2014, reposted 21 December 2014]