Welcome All!
I feel a bit like the Rolling Stones must have after their umpteenth farewell tour and subsequent comebacks. I had tickets, as a matter of fact, to the first farewell tour back in 1979 but at the tender age of twelve, I had not the means to attend and sold them.
Why would I feel that way? Well, over the past eleven or so years I have been in and out of the blogosphere and other activist related arenas so many times, complete with real life dramas and intrigue of a decidedly disturbing nature, that some, I am sure, tire of my retirements and returns. To tell you the truth, I tire of my own roller coaster and can relate. However, something has changed and I may now be in a position to maintain a permanent online presence. For the first time in eleven years, I have my own computer.
From 1997 up until the summer of 2004, I was houseless. I ate at soup kitchens, camped under bridges, and travelled to and fro, bouncing from one community to another as local populaces would tire of my destitute presence. I never had the taste for the big cities and the small ones that I frequented were of a more liberal nature. Towns like Santa Cruz, California and Missoula, Montana afforded me a little breathing room from intolerant populaces as I walked the earth in a personal quest for enlightenment, freedom, and my earthly inheritance. I had long since dropped out of mainstream society in search of something more sane but what I found out was that in a shrinking world whose boundaries grew ever more fuzzy, there was no escape. Change would have to happen from within because there was no loner a viable without for most of us, at least. Oh, to be a wanderer in certain parts of Asia or South America!
During this pilgrimage to awareness, I frequented university libraries, and others, as I tried to keep abreast of some of what was going on in the world. I tried to stay away from infotainment and pseudo-news designed to coerce and propagandize the public but discerning the difference would be something it would take a very long time to learn. Even today, and probably until the day I die, the learning will continue as behavior modification techniques and psychologies continue to be advanced and employed by individuals, groups, companies, and the national security state.
I spent a good deal of time staring at the soft grey underbelly of the juggernaut that is American capitalism, not to be confused with a free market (for that matter, free trade agreements ought not to be thought of as something that facilitates a free market) and I have seen much. I have been all over the demographic map from office worker to naval sailor to ice cream truck driver to restaurant worker to activist and houseless traveler. In that time, and during the process of taking my observations and case to the American public via electronic media, I have been targeted by all manner of efforts at disuasion from direct, in-person death threats to strange unfortunate devastations being visited upon loved ones to having been the target of thousands of attempts at virus infection, sometimes to the tune of a thousand in a week. As well, I have had at least fifty listservs and webmail addresses hacked and rendered useless to me.
This all was the result of having been in certain places and certain times to witness certain things and then to have the will and ability to disseminate my reporting in a moderately eloquent manner directly to the populace.
Below, I provide a small list of websites where one may plow a bit more through my background and previous efforts at parapolitical (thanks to Kenn Thomas for coining that term) research. It is unfortunate and it is a pattern that my most recent blog is no longer able to be referenced online. The Enlightenment Engine, it seems, is in limbo. Nevertheless, its URL is cited. My most recent efforts are listed first.
Welcome back, brother.
Watch out, world….