Emergency Broadcast System

Abandon Ship!

Here's the link to our new, temporary home.

Time for an appeal, here

If you've found this and it's not on the main page, can I ask a favour? Please submit a problem report to Blogger. Maybe adding some voices to my own may get their attention. You could also reference this thread on Google's Blogger Support Group.

A problem report should generate an emailed bot response within a couple of days, and Blogger then expects an emailed reply if the problem is persisting.

Thanks.

The Revolution Will Not Be Webcast

Broken pipes, broken tools, people bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking - Everything is broken. - Bob Dylan

If Nazi Germany had been wired with fibre optics, I doubt whether the White Rose would have distributed a single leaflet. Perhaps, rather than cranking them out on a hand press, Hans, Sophie and the rest would have spammed Hitler Youth forums from cyber cafes across southern Germany. That is, if they had first evaded the Gestapo's Carnivore, sifting every email and seemingly anonymous web comment for anti-Fuhrer sentiment. (A headline today: "Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites".)

Freedom of expression is often regarded as America's distinguishing liberty. "That's what's great about this country and all free countries: freedom of speech," Neil Young told CNN six weeks ago. "That's what makes us different from everybody else." Though it's suffered multiple paper cuts from the Patriot Act, it's still the go-to characteristic for those who choke on Nazi analogies. (Bush isn't Hitler, runs the argument, because you have the right to call him Hitler.) But it's also the cheapest freedom rulers can afford, when popular expression is cut off from the means of effecting popular change. Nothing is risked by allowing people to say what they feel, so long as it's understood they cannot act upon it outside of the unresponsive and compromised political system. But when the elections are rigged, and most politicians of prominence are beholden to the same security apparatus, what do you do then?

America is a free-speech zone, and Americans remain fenced within it so long as they mistake risk-averse expression with direct yet non-violent action. It's the difference between shouting slogans on a sunny afternoon and Tiananmen Square. And so much of the ineffectual sloganeering now takes place only in the cocooned and virtual America, where the empire obligingly hosts its chat rooms of dissent for political deviants. It has no worries, so long as everyone keeps talking.

I don't think I like paperless revolutions anymore. It seems the more sophisticated our means of communication, the more illusory our ownership of the media, and the greater the disconnect between our words and our words' implications. Under the Nazis, hand-cranking the press in the basement took courage. Under the NSA, posting online may take nothing more than naivité.


By the way, I'm still trying to get Blogger to address my broglem of the non-updating home page, though I'm increasingly pessimistic. So I'm beginning to consider alternatives. In the event Blogger is finished with me, I've registered rigorousintution.ca, and am starting to scout about for hosts and publishing options. (WordPress or Movable Type?) If I move - and I'd rather not, because the thought gives me a sick headache - I would want to leave this blog standing as an additional archive, but copy everything over, including comments. (I'd also like to consolidate the discussion board, bringing over the posts into a php forum.) I've received some good tips already, and would be happy for more. And thanks for your patience.

Mephistopheles

No kingdom made of human hands can stand
Too bad about MacBeth
In order to possess that corruptible crown
Gotta make a deal with Mr Death - Bob Dylan

Faust was a doctor, and it was for knowledge that he signed his contract with the Devil. According to Goethe, modern science - Carl Sagan's "candle in the dark" of a demon-haunted world - is ignorantly under the patronage of the demon Mephistopheles.

Rupert Sheldrake brushes against Faust and our own lousy bargains in his trialogue with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham entitled Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness:

How seriously do we need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization is under the possession of such a spirit.... How much are fallen angels actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology? Is a great war between the good and evil angels being acted out on Earth? We hardly know how to think or talk about such possibilities since they are so alien to the official, standard models of Western history.

Like Faust, the original sin of intelligence agencies is the appetite for unbound knowledge. The death-dealing, the drugs and guns, the fellowship of gangsters and terrorists all follow upon this seemingly benign desire.

The CIA damned itself at its birth by sheltering and shepherding the devils of Nazi Germany into the United States, and casting them as seeds across the western world. And it was all for knowledge. For knowledge of camp experiments, of anti-Soviet espionage, of rocket science. Like a medieval magician invoking demons to do his bidding while binding them in the name of God, Allen Dulles recruited Nazis into the service of America. But America is a changeable god, and Dulles and his Nazis helped change it.

Yesterday it was revealed the CIA knew the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann, but withheld the information because it might have led to exposing the Nazi pedigree of the anti-communist intelligence efforts in West Germany. It would seem that Intelligence, and the protection of even relatively trivial knowledge, can be reason enough to overlook holocausts.

We too, rightly, want to know. But if that's all we want we'll slip into error ourselves, amassing data which won't change a thing but will leave us alternately thrilled and depressed. Knowledge must be the servant of justice, or we're just more clients for the devil.

Suspicious Minds

Answer me this, I won’t take you to court
Did you go crazy, or did you report
On that day they wounded New York? - Leonard Cohen

Blogger's been giving me serious grief the last few weeks and I haven't been able to publish for days, so since you may not even see this for a while, I won't make it a long post.

I'd had only a Discovery Channel-like familiarity with the work of Rupert Sheldrake when I began considering issues here such as the mysteries of consciousness, DNA and holographic fields, and I've since received much encouragement from readers to get better acquainted. So I'm binging. And I'm thinking how sooner, and wiser, I'd have gotten to where I am now, if I'd done this years ago.

In The Sense of Being Stared At, Sheldrake devotes a chapter to human forebodings and presentiments of disaster. Soon after 9/11, he began gathering dreams and premonitions of the event, 57 in total, many which had been described to friends and family before the attack.

Five nights before 9/11, Manhattan forensic scientist Mike Cherni had "an unusually vivid dream":

I dreamt that I was a passenger on a commercial jet, seated at a window seat on the left-hand side. The cabin was filled with sunlight, and outside visibility was excellent. I don't remember the beginning of the dream, but I remember a pervasive sense of dread. The passengers and I were deeply concerned about the flight path we were taking; we were flying very low over Manhattan's buildings. I have flown into New York City's three major airports many times and am familiar with the normal approach routes, and this approach was quite out of the ordinary. I also love flying and had had no bad experiences as a passenger or any bad dreams about flying. Yet in this dream I was very frightened about how close we were to the buildings. Many of the passengers were very vocal and shared my concern. I recognized buildings as we flew over them, and it was clear that we were flying directly south over the southern tip of the island. Then there was a tremendous impact and I woke up. This dream disturbed me for days afterward, enough that I described the dream to my wife.

On the morning of Sept 11, Steven Brown dreamed he was "in the stairwell of the World Trade Center with a lot of people trying to get out," while Gina Vigo dreamt "Manhattan was hit by an incredible blizzard. People were running for cover from the fierce gusts of snow and everything was white. Later on, when I saw footage of the falling ash, it was strangely reminiscent." Audry Parrish dreamed she was in one of the towers when it caught on fire. She escaped by crawling across a glass bridge halfway up into the second tower, "when it too caught fire and burned."

This isn't the boneyard of Ripley's Believe It or Not. The stories aren't fabulist amusements which have no bearing on where we find ourselves today. They speak to our deeper nature buried beneath generations of fear-bred ignorance, and reveal intuitive capacities we're expected to deny.

Regarding 9/11 synchronicities such as The Lone Gunmen's March, 2001 pilot episode (hijacked, remote-controlled airliners target the World Trade Center to trigger a war for profit), and the Coup's June 2001 cover art, (the towers explode near the floors of impact), I contended the artists were not somehow tipped off to the plot, but rather they tapped into the dark frequencies which soon after began troubling the dreams of so many. I'm beginning to wonder whether it will be by recovering our ability to astonish ourselves that we will save ourselves. If we become fully human, then our executioners are finished. (I mean to explore this more later, when Blogger is more dependable.)

In another case from The Sense of Being Stared At, Amanda Bernsohn didn't dream of crashing planes or a burning World Trade Center: "I was walking down a street that was covered in swastikas that were spray painted on the building walls. The Nazis had invaded New York, but I wasn't able to find any people at all."

Sheldrake notes that Bernsohn's dream was of "horror in Manhattan," though it "was not at all like the WTC disaster."

About that, perhaps, Sheldrake is wrong.

Freewheelin'

And it's hard times in the city,
Livin' down in New York town. - Bob Dylan

Remember, they only want you to think they're out of their heads.

And many people will be so inclined, and receive that lie's sad comfort, now the Department of Homeland Security has cut anti-terror funding to New York City and Washington DC by 40%, and slashed in half New Orleans' grants for security and disaster preparedness on the day that marked the beginning of hurricane season. (New York, according to the DHS risk assessment, boasts zero "national monuments and icons," and only four banking and finanacial assets.) Meanwhile, huge increases in DHS dollars were won by company towns such as Jacksonville, Florida, Charlotte, North Carolina and Omaha, Nebraska. (Omaha might be justified, if the money were to be spent to liberate Boys Town from black ops' sexual predation.)

Are these bizarre choices? Is it incompetence? We may think so, if we mistake Chertoff's Homeland for the United States. Even with holes punched in its skyline, New York City stubbornly retains its listing in the latter. To those tasked with securing the Homeland, which exists as a High Concept, self-regulating prison rather than as common real estate, New York and every high-value target with a disproportionate population of intellectuals, free thinkers and dark faces remain its greatest threat. So what's to be done with them?

Somewhere there are 10-year old photos of me atop the World Trade Center, looking scared shitless. I'm not making claims of premonition, but I had a horrible, irrational impression that the tower was insubstantial, almost like a ghost, and could collapse at any moment. I've never had such a feeling on any other structure, and I've been on taller. My then-girlfriend had to reassure me we were safe; that nothing bad was going to happen to us, and we weren't about to all fall down.

And now when so many of us feel as though everything's about to fall down, what are we to do with that? Especially now such impressions don't seem so irrational?

Americans should know by this late date that those allegedly charged with their security are meant to be their executioners, and that duck and cover won't be enough to save them. Such knowledge can be bracing.

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

And it's a gut check of what you believe - Anti-Flag

I don't have time this morning to post, but here's something to chew on.

Tomorrow, Rolling Stone tries to get its groove back by publishing a 10-page "damning and detailed feature article" by Robert F Kennedy Jr on the theft of the 2004 election. Bradblog, the electronic bulldog of voter fraud, is all over it. Kennedy will be promoting his story hard this month in a number of appearances, including a spot on The Colbert Report June 12.

I'm trying not to write something dithering, like time will tell whether America's peripatetic culture finally takes to this story. But it's tough. If it ever will, this is the window for it. With Bush's depressed numbers, editors who are neither backwash nor Mockingbirds may seize the moment, if for no more honourable reason than the consumers of their product are now more than ever likely to believe the worst of their government, and perhaps better of themselves. (We, the People, did not choose this man.)

The window won't remain open for long. Showdown: Iran looms, hastened by the hollow gesture of an offer of talks if Iran first abandons - well, just about everything. But it had to be done, so Washington can later shrug and say military action was, once more, the last choice. And when the next front opens in ernest, perhaps as soon as this month, don't be caught unaware in the stampede to "support the president in time of war."

Still, while the window's open a crack, it's encouraging to see pollster Lou Harris say that Ohio was "as dirty an election as America has ever seen." But what may come after that, I don't find so heartening. Do enough Americans really lack for knowledge of their government's crimes? Are there not already millions who, to the Bush laundry list of bloody obscenity, would wearily nod their heads, I know?

Maybe it's not awareness that needs raising, so much as American fists.

The Red, White and Gray (Part Two)

I can't forget but I don't remember what - Leonard Cohen

Weird didn't begin with America, though its been advantageous for some to presume otherwise. Still, America has been weird since before its beginnings.

Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 manuscript, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of the America, describes his conquestador voyage up the Mississppi. Near the Ozarks his party encountered the Avavares tribe, who warned de Vaca that the area is home to a little man with indistinct features whom they called "Badthing." Badthing, de Vaca was told, terrorized the people by entering their homes unbidden at night and performing various surgeries upon them:

He would thrust his hand through the gashes, draw out the entrails, cut a palm's length from one, and throw it on the embers. Then he would gash an arm three times, the second cut on the inside of the. elbow, and would sever the limb. A little later he would begin to rejoin it, and the touch of his hands would instantly heal the wounds.

De Vaca and his men laughed off the stories of "Mr Badthing," which caused some indignation in the tribe, who then produced for De Vaca's examination many subjects who had reputedly been seized and operated upon by the entity, and bore the corresponding scars. De Vaca then launched into a pitch for Christendom, explaining that Badthing was a demon, and "that if they would believe in God our Lord and become Christians like us they need never fear him, nor would he dare come and inflict those wounds." He promised that Badthing would not return while he was in the land, which "delighted them and they lost much of their dread."

Whatever the truth of "Badthing" - a rationalist editor has interpolated "self inflicted?" following the description of the wounds - the story shares much with modern-day abduction accounts. Well, that's America, and it always has been. But it's never been only America. With different cultural presupositions, Zanzibar's sodomizing demon "Popo Bawa" would likely be called an anal probing extraterrestrial. (The disingenuous skeptics of CSICOP explain him away with the same wave of the hand they reserve for abduction accounts: sleep paralysis.)

And yet some alleged cases of sleep paralysis also manifest themselves as waking nightmares. One such story is told by Nick Redfern in On the Trail of the Saucer Spies. "Tammy," a 57-year old grandmother and manager of a restaurant in El Paso, fell down a now-familar rabbit hole more than 30 years ago. And if she'd been sleepwalking at the time, she was wide-awake for the aftermath.

About two in the morning on March 6, 1973, Tammy was returning to her Waco apartment from her waitressing job at a diner 30 miles out of town. About halfway home she began to "feel strange" - dizzy, lightheaded and overcome with vertigo - as the car was engulfed in a bright glow, and the headlights and engine cut out. In a field maybe two hundred feet to Tammy's right she noticed a pale pink dome-shaped object, and from it, two small humanoids were approaching. Panicking, she meant to flee, but her arms and legs were unresponsive. "The next thing she knew," writes Redfern, "dawn was breaking, and she was sitting in the front passenger seat of her car."

After arriving home groggy and scared, and sleeping the entire day, Tammy chose to keep the imprecise though terrifying incident to herself. But she began having vivid dreams of surgical examinations on cold surfaces, conducted by small figures with "thin faces and cheeks," and a "deep, continuous, resonating hum" emanating from a large mechanical "eye" hoving over the examination table. She dreamt of being dressed and carried to her car, and placed in the passenger seat, and "a man in military uniform sitting in the driver's seat looking intently at her."

Over the next several weeks her dreams changed, becoming nightmarish and apocalyptic, resembling the "warning" transmissions contactees often report. Tammy saw "Earth in the near future reduced to ruins" from a combination of environment and military crises, including a manufactured virus that devastates the Middle East and was now "spiraling out of control." Most ominous, she saw visions of a "disturbing afterlife in which various gray-like entities of several types fed - vampire-style - on human souls."

Certainly a disturbing episode for Tammy, but if that was it then she probably should have sought a referral to a good sleep disorder clinic. But three weeks following there was a knock on her apartment door, and a man in a brown suit whom she said "could have passed for a marine - a big guy, very short hair" - announced he was conducting a police "survey." Standing in her doorway he began to fire off questions relating to vehicular crime, and when he asked "Are you concerned about being kidnapped from your car?" she slammed the door in his face and shouted she was going to call the police.

In the following weeks, she was visited on three occasions by two military men out of uniform. "They were real friendly with me," she tells Redfern, "and identified who they were and where they were from - Kirkland Air Force Base." Acknowledging Tammy's previous caller had been "with us," they apologized for his aggressiveness, then admitted that they knew about her abduction experience (though "they never mentioned the word abductions like you hear today - just kidnappings") and asked if she could discuss it with them, as it was a matter of national security.

The pair told Tammy that since 1971, such incidents were seeing an alarming increase in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, and as a result, the military had established a project to monitor contactees. Once she consented to participate, the two "reeled off a number of truly strange questions":

Since the "kidnapping" had Tammy felt the urge to become vegetarian? Was she an adherent of Buddhist teachings? Did she believe in life after death, or had her views on the subject changed or been modified "since the kidnapping"? And most disturbing of all: Was she of the opinion that after death "we would all be judged by a higher power?"

Tammy then began to share with them her apocalyptic dreams, and the two "expressed deep concern" as they told her that other contactees were having similar dreams. They also confided that while some on the project believed the kidnappers to be extraterrestrials, others had concluded they were "demonic beings whose point of origin was somehow connected with the realm of the dead and the afterlife, and that the creatures derived sustenance from the human life force - namely, the soul."

The men asked Tammy if she would consent to a physical examination at Kirkland, and she agreed. And though they met twice more, probing her thoughts on "life after death, and - notably - her views on life after death in the animal kingdom," the examination never happened. (Or at least, not to a conscious Tammy.) After their visits stopped, she never heard from them again, though for several more weeks she experienced unnerving "countless interruptions" on her telephone line from "strange, rapid, and unintelligible voices."

What sense can we make of this? First, as Redfern also notes, Tammy's two men and their disturbing inquiries and revelations are quite similar to that of the two DoD scientists who approached theologian and Fortean researcher Ray Boeche 20 years later (discussed here). Boeche wrote that they informed him of an "obsessive effort" to contact and control non-human intelligences, and the methods "had grown to encompass the use of...satanic rituals/ritual magic along the lines of that espoused by Aleister Crowley, including human sacrifices." And though my hypothesis is virtually identical, it's always important to question the integrity of "whistleblowers," especially when they appear to blow your own whistle. "Since the best disinformation is mostly truth," I wrote last August, "if this communication were disinformative, could this addition [an unconvincing list of victims of psychotronic weapons experiments] have been the poison pill to misdirect a researcher already sniffing around the Military Occult Complex?"

Red flags should rise whenever a military official or contractor confides much more than someone needs to know. From Tammy's account, it seems at least as important to her two visitors that she hear them out as it was that they hear her. And could their anticipation of her apocalyptic dreams be due to her dreams having been imprinted upon her hypnotically during the abduction event?

While I'm persuaded UFOs represent a genuine phenomenon of occult provenance and are of critical interest to certain institutions of Earthly power, I also think their facsimile has been employed as a screen to pursue other work in the deep black under cover of absurdity and "alien" misdirection. I think it's significant that numerous abductees since the mid-sixties have reported being subjected to mind control devices similar to Skinner boxes and John Lilly's isolation tanks onboard "alien craft." Lilly claimed that, as his isolation tank research became known, he was approached by military personnel who sought to use it "to coerce a change in belief systems" (according to Dr Helmut Lammers' MILABS: Mind Control and Alien Abduction). Lilly's ethics forbade him from testing his tank on anyone but himself and colleague Craig Enright. But since immersion in the tank dramatically increased suggestibility, it's easy to imagine the military taking up the work covertly when reading the words of "Delora,"daughter of a career Naval officer, who's had flashbacks of what she takes to be an underground alien/human facility: "I saw steel doors of elevators leading to underground areas. I saw 'capsules' with people in them, in a suspended state, both vertical and horizontal, in gas and also in liquid" (from MILABS).

Redfern also describes the case of "Alison," a 36-year old native of Arizona, who was subjected to at least five abductions between 27 and 31. Each event began with her pet dogs acting distressed, a deep humming, loss of electricity and a bright light enveloping her room. Then, semiconscious, she would sense "small shadowy figures" carry her onto a small craft for a gynechological exam, before returning her to another part of the house.

The final event was a significant departure:

On what Alison believes to have been the fifth abduction, however, the mysterious humming sound abruptly came to a halt only a few seconds after her cosmic visitors had entered the room. At that point, Alison recalled - not in a later dream on this occasion but in real time - she began to slowly regain her senses and the feeling of disorientation eventually eased and finally vanished. And so did the aliens. In their place were not a group of frail-looking alien "Grays," but a number of large and burly men in what looked like black fatigues.

According to Alison, one of the men screamed into a microphone something like: "What's happened?" Suddenly, the men backed away slowly and, as Alison began to regain her senses, one of them held his hand up "as if to say 'stay where you are,'" and uttered the word "sorry" in her direction. Alison made her way to the window in time to see the men jump into not a state-of-the-art alien spacecraft but a very terrestrial-looking black unmarked helicopter. At a height of several hundred feet, a powerful lamp was suddenly turned on that lit up the dark sky around her property.

Some may happily seize upon stories like Alison's to contend that all UFO sightings and entity encounters must be similar masquerades. But to do so requires a disservice to the volume of cases around the world, most of which were recorded long before any of us had the means to effect such magic. And still, there's the matter of motive. "Mind control" isn't an answer; rather, it's another question: control of whom, and for what? What's the purpose of implanting apocalyptic visions in abductees, probing Tammy for her thoughts on the afterlife, and conducting invasive gynecological and genetic work?

Even when the close encounters are with covert American power, there's nothing happy here. Because the dead intelligence at work appears as alien to us as though it were in sunken R'lyeh, dreaming.

Or can they even know what they do, and why, walking like ghosts in the skin of Mr Badthing?

Pattern of Force

I'm leaving, Captain, I must go
There's blood upon your hand
But tell me, Captain, if you know
Of a decent place to stand - Leonard Cohen

Only time right now for some quick thoughts on Haditha. Or rather, Haditha's elevation as Iraq's official, bad apple atrocity.

Even for those who try to pay attention to what filters through the fog of war crimes, these things tend to run together. Haditha isn't Abu Sifa where, according to Iraqi police, US forces "on a rampage" executed a family of 11, then bombed their house, burned their cars and slaughtered their animals. What more will we hear of Abu Sifa, now Haditha has become the representative and inevitable example of honour's exception?

Because along with Haditha comes Jesse Macbeth, allegedly a former Army Ranger and Iraq war veteran, whose claims that massacre was method rather than madness rapidly went viral on the Net. His story was unsubstantiated and exteme, yet plausible because it was extreme, and provided a template to the pattern of force on exhibit in Iraq. A pattern rarely admitted by the West's institutional media.

But Macbeth, it now appears, is the Pentagon's timely strawman to buttress its case for Haditha's exceptionalism, and to discredit influential anti-war voices such as Iraq Veterans Against the War. Whether unaware or not of his status as a COINTELPRO asset, it doesn't matter, because regardless, Macbeth became a lucky charm for those who refuse to believe the program of horror in which US troops are engaged, and there are many. Similar stories may now be said to have been "debunked," without examination or a straining of battlefield ethics.

It was a scandal 20 years ago when Ronald Reagan - the Bush family's post-Hinkley Zombie-in-Chief - honoured the SS dead at Bitburg, and by turn paid homage to the old fascist "anti-communist" front of the Republican Heritage Groups Council. It was, perhaps, merely a prefigurement of the Nazi stain in America's own blood cult, and what should be a crisis of conscience on Memorial Day.

On supposedly progressive forums I've seen many apologies for Haditha, and for the other Hadithas still cloaked in denial. Don't judge the troops too quickly, or too harshly, some write, because "Hell is full of heroes." Heaven, meanwhile, fills with children.

There is no decent place to stand, not in a massacre.

It's all in the game

"North America's getting soft, patron, and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times, and we're going to have to be pure and direct and strong, if we're going to survive them." - Videodrome

Perhaps you've seen this:

Venezuela lawmakers blast video game

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- A U.S. company's video game simulating an invasion of Venezuela is supposed to hit the shelves next year, but it's already raising the ire of lawmakers loyal to President Hugo Chavez.

...

Pandemic describes Mercenaries 2: World in Flames as "an explosive open-world action game" in which "a power-hungry tyrant messes with Venezuela's oil supply, sparking an invasion that turns the country into a war zone." The company says players take on the role of well-armed mercenaries.

...

Lawmaker Gabriela Ramirez said "Mercenaries 2" gives a false vision of Chavez as a tyrant and Venezuela as being on the verge of chaos. She said the game could be banned under a proposed law aimed at protecting Venezuelan children from violent video games.

"Pandemic has no ties to the US government," says Greg Richardson, the firm's vice president of commercial operations. That's the sound of hairs splitting. Pandemic Studios is a Pentagon subcontractor through the aegis of the "Institute for Creative Technologies," launched by the US Army in 1998 with $45 million as a go-between with the entertainment and gaming industries. Pandemic is the developer of military training simulations such as Full Spectrum Command, commercially available as Full Spectrum Warrior for gaming on Playstation and XBox. ("A quantum-leap forward in battlefield simulation" says Game Informer. "Enlist Now" for updates.) "Within days of its release" in 2004, "gamers figured out the cheat code to unlock the Army-only version hidden on the commercial discs, featuring less flashy graphics but smarter opponents." (Gee, how careless can the Army get?)

The Pentagon is co-parenting Pandemic with its unlikely - or possibly inevitable - same sex sugar daddy: U2's Bono. His Elevation Partners spent $300 million last November to bring the Studio together with Bioware "to create the world's best funded and largest independent game development house." Now there's a cause.

America's New Flesh is machine-scarred from its generational incubation in immersive battlefields which are, like Bono sings, even better than the real thing. Meanwhile, the real thing becomes just another level of play, until you play it, survive it, and return with the Home Version. Diplomacy is never on the table, except as a a board game that fewer young people have the patience to engage. So it has to be Grand Theft Oil, when some "power-hungry tyrant" in Venezuela "messes" with America's petroleum. War is the last option. Play is the first.

Defending World in Flames, Pandemic publicist Chuck Norris says "although a conflict doesn't necessarily have to be happening, it's realistic enough to believe that it could eventually happen." Or, as in the words of Brian O'blivion, "The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena." It's been fought, and maybe decided, for this generation.