Anonymous Speaks: Operation Bohemian Grove, 7.13. 2011: "Fools! Fools! Fools To Dream You Conquer Care..."

ANONYMOUS SPEAKS:



"Weaving soldiers come not here." -  On Bohemian Grove Logo. 

The hackers’ collective Anonymous may have  obtained “literally explosive” information concerning Bohemian Grove, an annual  gathering of power brokers from the US and Europe set to meet this week in  California, which many see as a nefarious avenue through which elitists secretly manipulate world affairs.

Bohemian Grove is a privately owned 2,700 acre  compound in Monte Rio, California surrounded by giant old-growth redwood trees.  Once a year it plays host to a bizarre confab attended by some of the most  powerful people in the world, including many US politicians and government  officials, during which participants embroil themselves in a heady mixture of  plutocratic plotting and occult pagan ritual ceremonies.

The Anonymous hacking group, which has already  announced its intention to occupy the entrance to the Bohemian Grove compound as  a protest against the group’s secrecy, may also be about to leak a whole  treasure trove of information about the organization as part of what has been  dubbed “the biggest day in Anonymous’s history”.

As part of a series of hacks conducted to protest  the treatment of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, to whom Anonymous has  attached itself, the collective says it is about to unleash “literally  explosive” material on a number of organizations, including the London  Metropolitan Police and other agencies connected to the UK judicial system.

The hacks are timed to coincide with Assange’s  appeal hearing against extradition, which begins today.

“Speculation centres around material claimed to  have been obtained last week from contractors relating to security and secrecy  of “former world leaders”, or plans to target a senior leaders’ retreat at  Bohemian Grove, California,” write  the Guardian’s James Ball and Charles Arthur

Former Secretaries of State George Shultz and  James Baker are set to give lakeside talks at the event this year, which begins  Friday and runs for the next two weeks. But the details of what they say will  not be covered by any media outlet, the meeting is secret and any uninvited  guests are hastily dealt with by security guards and police.

Alex Jones became the first journalist to capture on video  the ‘Cremation of Care’ ceremony, where Grove members dressed in "Eyes Wide Shut" style hooded capes make a mock child sacrifice to Moloch, the pagan owl god,  represented as a 50-foot statue carved out of a hollowed redwood tree.

Presidents Nixon and Reagan  both attended the elitist get-together before they captured the Oval Office.  George  W. Bush was also introduced to Grove power brokers in 1995 by his father  five years before becoming President.

Nixon infamously later described the encampment as  the “most faggy  goddamned thing you could ever imagine,”perhaps in reference to the fact  that male prostitutes and porn stars are routinely transported to the facility  to “serve the moguls,” as  the New York Post reported in 2004. Few women are allowed to work at the  camp and those that do are prevented from accessing many areas of the site.  Young men of high school and college age make up most of the temporary employees  hired by Grove organizers.

Although the establishment media routinely claims  the event is little more than a holiday camp, in  1942 it was the setting for the birthplace of the Manhattan Project which  led to the creation of the atomic bomb, a story often retold by Grove members  who are proud of the fact that the most important scientific development of the  20th century was conceived there.

CREDITS:

-Paul Joseph Watson ( "Anonymous Could Unleash “Literally Explosive” Material on Bohemian Grove," Prison Planet.com, 7-12-2011.

 Image: The Bohemian Grove Deity - "Moloch" : Moloch was one  of the false gods that Israel would worship during its periods of apostasy.  This false deity is associated with Ammon in 1 Kings 11:7 "Then Solomon  built a high place for Chemosh the detestable idol of Moab, on the mountain  which is east of Jerusalem, and for Molech the detestable idol of the sons of  Ammon." One of the practices of the cult that worshiped Moloch was to sacrifice their children.

NEW REVELATIONS : Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex & The Absolute Psychosis Of Some.....

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." -President Dwight D. Eisenhower

THE SEEDS: ( 1st correspondence between President Eisenhower's assistants).

"The White House
Washington
April 5, 1960

Memorandum To: Mac Moos

As the time for the President’s (Eisenhower) retirement draws near, I recommend to your re-reading the “Farewell Address” of George Washington. It is a beautifully wise and modest piece by a faithful public servant who loved his country.

I was struck by its relevance to our day: the call for Constitutional obedience; the warnings about sectionalism; the dangers of “over grown military establishments” but the necessity of maintaining a “respectable defensive posture.” the realistic attitude “that the love of power and the proneness to abuse it which dominate the human heart”; the unhappy tendency of mankind “to seek security and repose in the absolute of power of an individual”; the necessity for an enlightened public opinion; the ungenerous habit of one generation to spend beyond its means and to throw “upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear”; the broad diplomatic advice. And much more.

This address could furnish some fine ammunition over the year and perhaps serve as a guide for a final statement in January 1961? "

Frederic Fox"

THE DISCOVERY:

A few months ago, Grant Moos was closing his boathouse, near Hackensack, Minnesota, as he does every summer, tying up loose ends, sweeping up debris. This year, though, his sister Kathy insisted that it was finally time to do something about six cardboard boxes that for decades had been stacked in a corner next to a 7.5-horsepower Evinrude engine.

The boxes belonged to their father, Malcolm Moos, a journalist and academic who was a speechwriter for President Dwight Eisenhower. When Moos left the White House, in 1961, he donated some of his papers to the Eisenhower Presidential Library, in Abilene, Kansas, but he kept some, too.

The boxes were full of pine needles, acorns, and mouse droppings, and smelled of campfires. As Moos looked through the contents, he came across a batch of folders marked “Farewell Address.” He looked up the Eisenhower Library, and sent the boxes off to Abilene.

At first, the library did not know what it had. As archivists began to go through the papers, however, they discovered a trove of drafts, memos, and research materials that had long been missing from the record of one of the twentieth century’s most important speeches. For fifty years, Americans have regarded Eisenhower’s Farewell Address with a mixture of awe and bewilderment.

Speaking three nights before the end of his Presidency, in 1961, Eisenhower warned of a “scientific-technological élite” that would dominate public policy, and of a “military-industrial complex” that would claim “our toil, resources, and livelihood.”

In the decades since, Eisenhower’s warning has seemed prescient. The convergence of American military might and a powerful arms industry has characterized wars from Vietnam to Iraq, and the web of power that he described seems present in American society today. Still, generations have wondered what prompted the most celebrated general of the Second World War to leave the White House with a warning about the military. Eisenhower’s grandson David writes in a new memoir that Ike “developed a kind of split personality about the most controversial speech of his life,” downplaying its significance to old military and business friends while professing pride in it to others.

Some historians have regarded the Farewell Address as an afterthought, hastily composed at the end of 1960 as an adjunct to the 1961 State of the Union. Others have regarded it as the soulful expression of an aging President who was determined to warn the American people of dangers ahead. But the Moos papers make clear that the address, far from being an afterthought, was among the most deliberate speeches of Eisenhower’s Presidency. Regarded in his day as inarticulate and detached, Eisenhower in these papers is fully engaged, grappling with the language of the text and the radical questions that it raised.

Contrary to what some historians have speculated, it was not Moos or his assistant, Ralph Williams, who suggested a farewell address. On May 20, 1959, Moos was meeting with the President, when Eisenhower proposed an idea for “one speech he would like very much to make.” It was to be, Moos recorded, “a ten-minute farewell address to the Congress and the American people.” Moos deemed the idea “brilliant” and began making notes.

Eisenhower was a rigorous editor. Major speeches such as the State of the Union might be refined ten or twelve times. Even by those standards, however, the Farewell Address was special. Eisenhower personally rewrote the opening passages, and his brother Milton overhauled the entire speech. It was batted back and forth for months; in the end, it underwent twenty-nine drafts (21 previously unknown drafts were found in the boathouse papers).

The papers also debunk a myth. Some historians have credited Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review, with helping to shape the speech, in December of 1960. It’s true that Cousins called the President on December 14th, but “the idea of trying to get anyone like Norman Cousins working on it would be dreadful,” Eisenhower’s secretary wrote to Moos. “How in the world do we diplomatically thank him, but say No?”

One core idea dominates every version: the first draft described “the conjunction of a large and permanent military establishment and a large and permanent arms industry.” Policing it would require “all the organizing genius we possess” to insure “that liberty and security are both well served.” It added:

“We must be especially careful to avoid measures which would enable any segment of this vast military-industrial complex to sharpen the focus of its power.”

Through scores of revisions, that idea persisted. As delivered, the speech memorably read, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

At the library, the staff is ecstatic about the find. Karl Weissenbach, the director, predicted that the new documents will “change the history and interpretation of the most famous farewell address in American history.”

It’s also a reminder of the contingency of historical research. Had Moos vacationed in Florida rather than in Minnesota, the documents might have disintegrated. Instead, the memos and drafts survived, snug in a boathouse corner, rejoining history just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s address.

THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS HERE

CREDITS:

- Memo from (Eisenhower's chief speech writer) Malcolm Moos to ( Staff Assistant to the President) Frederic Fox re: the content of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s future Farewell Address: " Military-Industrial Complex" Speech, 1960. Article: -Jim Newton, Ike’s Speech, New Yorker Magazine, 12.10.10. Image: President Dwight D. Eisenhower's handwritten edits of final speech, NARA, 1960).

A Passion For Justice: Divine For Some, Purely Human For Others...

"To my mind it is fundamental to our society to see that powers are not abused or misused. If they come into conflict with freedom of an individual or with any other of our fundamental freedoms, then it is the province of the Judge to hold the balance between the competing interests." - Lord Denning

Justice theory is one subsidiary of philosophy that never really suffers a bad century.

Back in Homeric times, life was simpler. Justice largely meant personal vengeance. Complications began when Plato famously pinned on Thrasymachus the view that justice is simply the will of the stronger, and on Glaucon and Callicles the idea that justice is conventional. Plato argued, through his familiar Socratic ventriloquy, that justice is divine, an ideal to which human justice can only haltingly aspire. Aristotle then introduced a formal criterion of justice that still wins the greatest agreement, perhaps because it's merely formal: Treat equals equally and unequals unequally.

From then on, follow the history of philosophers' sentences that begin "Justice is … " on and you hit so many diverse endings you wonder whether anyone, including the lady in the blindfold, knows what justice is.

To Aquinas, it's "a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in the circumstances confronting him." To Hume, it's "nothing but an artificial invention." To Sir Edward Coke, it's "the daughter of the law, for the law bringeth her forth." To 20th-century American jurist Learned Hand, it's "the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society." Do a survey, and about the only thinker who invites instant agreement is Belgian philosopher of law Chaim Perelman. According to Perelman, justice is simply "a confused concept."

One reason theories of justice abound is the range of the concept, applied to decisions, people, procedures, laws, actions, events. Justice is usually considered a positive thing, yet some rank it below mercy. It's divine for some, purely human for others. It's supposedly majestic, yet many complain of its quotidian banality and everyday scarcity. Recall the old lawyer's joke:

Petitioner: "Justice, justice, I demand justice!"

Judge: "Silence or I'll have you removed! This is a court of law!"

When Rawls declared justice "the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought," and began his painstaking probe of the conditions of just institutions, he re-established a modern tradition dating back to Hobbes: using social-contract theory to articulate ideal forms of social justice, sometimes in quasi-syllogistic form. But there was also a longstanding, skeptical, antisystematic tradition in justice theory.

Solomon wrote in A Passion for Justice that justice is "a complex set of passions to be cultivated, not an abstract set of principles to be formulated. … Justice begins with compassion and caring, not principles or opinions, but it also involves, right from the start, such 'negative' emotions as envy, jealousy, indignation, anger, and resentment, a keen sense of having been personally cheated or neglected, and the desire to get even." In time, suggested Solomon, "the sense of justice emerges as a generalization and, eventually, a rationalization of a personal sense of injustice."

Might our concept of justice arise when society's normal moral inertia, the tendency to accept traditions and status quo ethical procedures without challenge, is itself challenged?

Economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen inclines to that view. He begins An Idea of Justice by quoting Pip in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations:

"In the little world in which children have their existence, there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt, as injustice." Sen adds, "The identification of redressable injustice is not only what animates us to think about justice and injustice, it is also central … to the theory of justice."

"Justice is ultimately connected with the way people's lives go, and not merely with the nature of institutions surrounding them." Two concepts from early Indian jurisprudence, niti (strict organizational and behavioral rules of justice) and nyaya (the larger picture of how such rules affect ordinary lives), provide a better prism for justice than Rawls's obsession with the characterization of just institutions. Indeed, Sen writes in a killer sum-up:

"If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies, or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient."

It was Solomon, in A Passion for Justice, who voiced the problem that hangs over ostensibly rigorous justice theory, which Sen plainly finds unconvincing yet never quite denounces. Speaking of the enormous technical literature spawned by Rawls, Nozick, and their acolytes, Solomon wrote:

"The positions have been drawn, defined, refined, and redefined again. The qualifications have been qualified, the objections answered and answered again with more objections, and the ramifications further ramified. … But the hope for a single, neutral, rational position has been thwarted every time." Solomon complained that justice theory had "become so specialized and so academic and so utterly unreadable that it has become just another intellectual puzzle, a conceptual Gordian knot awaiting its academic Alexander."

Will Amartya Sen be that Alexander? In repeatedly bringing back into the discussion Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Sen signals the need for justice theory to reconnect to realistic human psychology, not the phony formal rationalism that infects modern economics or the for-sake-of-argument altruism that anchors Rawls's project. (In A Theory of Justice, Rawls writes that in his well-ordered society, "Everyone is presumed to act justly.") By declaring his desire "to address questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice, rather than to offer resolutions of questions about the nature of perfect justice," Sen sinks a knife into the heart of the latter utopian program.

On the other hand, Sen's own understanding of his aim in The Idea of Justice hardly dismisses formal resources or careful reasoning. He cites an alternative tradition to social-contract theory, one he identifies as extending from Smith to Mill and beyond and characterizes as "comparative" in its measuring of the justice actually experienced by individuals. That countertradition issued, Sen explains, in the "analytical—and rather mathematical—discipline of social-choice theory" developed by Kenneth Arrow in the mid-20th century.

"Reasoning," writes Sen early on, "is a robust source of hope and confidence in a world darkened by murky deeds." In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen provides us with a stunning model despite his eternally ambiguous and imperfectible subject. As he so winningly adds, "The remedy for bad reasoning is better reasoning."

- Carlin Romano, ("Amartya Sen Shakes Up Justice Theory," The Chronicle Review, 9.14.09. Image: "Blind Justice", Playboy Magazine Illustration, 1980s).

Women: Vicious Emissaries Of Hell...Sold, Pawned & Prostituted...

"A twitch of a woman's lip causes the fall of a nation. On the one hand she is sickeningly, destructively powerful. One the other hand she is a chattel, a beast, a commodity, she and her sisters are "human incubators."

In the Assyrian empire, which flourished from 1300 BCE, she could be impaled for aborting the child she is carrying. For lesser offenses she could be beaten or disfigured behind closed doors, but if her master wanted to mutilate her permanently—cut off her ears or nose, or tear out her breasts—he had to do it in public; though whether for the sake of example or for the general enjoyment. She could be punished at various times and places for going veiled, or not going veiled. She could be sold, pawned, or prostituted.

In Aristotle's thought, women were "deformed" men. In feudal Japan they were barred from climbing Mount Fuji because they would pollute it, and "unhappily married women were expected to commit suicide." A Buddhist text describes woman as the "emissary of hell." Her oppression is universal, her story cyclical; construed less as a human being than as an animal or force of nature, her place is outside history.

Even when historical records begin, most women have no names. At best they are just "wife of" or "daughter of" some illustrious man. A few stand out—they are famous for being almost erased, like Sappho, or startlingly wicked, like Messalina, or they perpetrate shocking violence on a man, like Jael killing Sisera by putting a nail through his head; or like Ruth the Moabite, they offer a pattern of exemplary gentleness, approved by men. If somehow a woman does manage to impose herself on the culture, her achievements will be appropriated by men or dismissed as freakish, a problem expressed pithily in the seventeenth century by Anne Bradstreet, the New England Puritan poet:

If what I do prove well,
it won't advance,
They'l say its stoln,
or else it was by chance.

In the nineteenth century, women's skulls were measured and their brains were weighed, and found wanting. For the criminologists Lombroso and Ferrero, women were big, vicious children. Through much of recorded history they have been slaves, though in some eras "rhetoric granted them the status of angels." Arguing for women's moral superiority can be a way of keeping them in their place—a way of removing them from the civil space, where power corrupts, to the supposed purity of the private sphere.

The home, French observes, is seen as women's natural territory, but is also "the primary site of female prosecution," the place where she is most unsafe. Sometimes the only power a woman has is to kill herself. In east African traditional societies women committed "cooking pot suicide," poisoning themselves and taking their children with them. Sometimes a woman is more powerful dead than alive. In the China of the Han dynasty, if an unhappy wife killed herself wearing her red bridal dress, she would haunt the husband's family and they would have to move house.

Men who read it might be put off by the depiction of the collective male as brutal psychopath, or puzzled by French's idea that men should "take responsibility for what their sex has done." (How responsible can you be for Sumerian monarchs, Egyptian pharaohs, or Napoleon Bonaparte?)

"Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men," but she also takes gender oppression to be the fundamental oppression, and "primary, whatever the agenda of a culture."

...Mothering was taken to be innate, an instinctive activity. In cases where mothers violate this instinct, they can be punished and their children taken away. Once the link between coitus and childbirth was understood, men began to regard children as their property. All patri-lineal societies stand condemned: "Naming children for fathers is intrinsically an act of force: it reverses natural mother-right." Sometime before the development of writing, the shift took place from matrilineal to patri-lineal societies, then to patriarchy. The war against women began, the long battle to control their sexuality, which necessitates control of their bodies and minds.

...The European appropriation of North America, highlighting Jesuit testimony to the gentle and egalitarian societies of Native Americans: "Indians never imagined rape until they saw Europeans perform it." If true, this challenges the assumptions to which the rest of her project leads us—assumptions not just about men and women, but about how the strong exert power over the weak. Was Abigail Adams wrong when she said: "Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.... That your sex is naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute"? It was the chosen task of the Church to suppress egalitarianism in Native American society and to teach men to be brutal to their women. The Catholic Church is one of the most effective misogyny machines ever devised.

The 19th Century was "the lowest point in women's history" but also "the most cheering period in female history, the moment the tide began to turn." In the rapidly industrializing West, women's capacities are proclaimed to be exactly what economic need requires them to be at any particular time. Oppression puts on a mask of concern. "The rhetoric of achieved revolution" conceals vast sexual and racial inequalities. Woman is no longer cast as diabolically sexy; now she is asexual, and responsible for regulating men's desire. In her, desire is abnormal; uterine function dominates mental function; too much thinking is bad for reproductive health; and "all exclusively female physical functions were considered inherently pathological."

Feminism is often misunderstood; people think it is about putting women where men are now, but "the ultimate goal of feminism is to change society." The design is to create a cooperative world, a task that will not be achieved in a few generations; to do it we will have to free ourselves from the grip of history, from the assumptions of the societies in which we have grown up. The task is to convince the world that "sexism brings men...emotional and biological loss. Quoting a Buddhist text: Her face resembles that of a saint; her heart is like that of a demon...A woman has no home in the three worlds." She does not exist in the past, present, or future. Her battle is just to become visible; to be accorded full humanity, not to be regarded as some transient natural phenomenon, or an animal created for male use.

-Hilary Mantel (Excerpt: "The War Against Women," The New York Review of Books, 4.30.2009. Image: "The Killers", Starring Ronald Reagan & Angie Dickinson, directed by Donald Siegel, 1964).

Rich White Men & The Bohemian Grove: "The Most Faggy Goddamned Thing..."

“Is this really what I want to be doing? Sneaking into the exclusive Bohemian Grove, on the Saturday night when roughly 2,500 of America’s richest, mostly right-wing Republicans are kicking off their annual July “encampment”? The members of the San Francisco–based Bohemian Club are mostly all here, partying boisterously in this primeval stand of gargantuan redwoods 75 miles north of the city, or will be during the next 16 days.

Over the years all the usual suspects have made appearances: Rumsfeld, Kissinger, two former C.I.A. directors (including Papa Bush), the masters of war and the oligarchs, the Bechtels and the Basses, the board members of top military contractors—such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the Carlyle Group—Rockefellers, Morgans, captains of industry and C.E.O.’s across the spectrum of American capitalism. The interlocking corporate web—cemented by prep-school, college, and golf-club affiliations, blood, marriage, and mutual self-interest—that makes up the American ruling class. Many of the guys, in other words, who have been running the country into the ground and ripping us off for decades.

The summer high jinks begin, as they have for more than 100 years, with a macabre, hokey ceremony—with Druidic, Masonic, Ku Klux Klan, and Aryan forest-worship overtones—called the Cremation of Care, which is starting in 40 minutes down by the lake. I squeeze through a hole in a chain-link fence onto the 2,700-acre property and follow an old overgrown railroad bed. To my left, below a dense tangle of California bay laurel, big-leaf maple, and understory shrubs, the muddy-green Russian River is sliding by. I didn’t see any posting on that side of the property, but I know I am trespassing.

While many in the world see this gathering of the military-industrial high command as the bad guys—a sort of rogue state operating outside the constraints of democratic institutions, a favorite watering hole for what Peter Phillips, a Sonoma State University sociologist who has published extensively on the Bohemian Club, calls “the global dominance group”—this is not how the members imagine themselves. They see themselves as the moral underpinnings of America’s greatness, whose central tenets are the Protestant work ethic: work hard and prosper and you’ll get into that great club in the sky. The Bohemian Club is like the Opus Dei of the Protestant American establishment. Very few Jews have made it in, and even fewer blacks.

The encampment is more of a drunken blowout and an opportunity for bonding than a serious roundtable like Davos, although there is a series of lakeside talks that are enlightening about what the government has up its sleeve for the upcoming year. Kissinger is a perennial favorite. His speech nine years ago, “Do We Need a Foreign Policy?,” was music to the ears of the Bush administration. In 1942, Edward Teller is said to have planned the Manhattan Project here. There’s a lot of dark history in this forest retreat. It’s rumored that during the presidency of Gerald Ford one Grove employee was a charming, impeccably mannered ex-Nazi, who used to drive around in a jeep that had the decal—a palm tree with a swastika on it—of Rommel’s Africa campaign, which he had served in. Ford made him take it off.

The majority of activities take place in the 109-acre main grove, in about 120 separate rustic camps nestled under the biggest, most ancient redwoods on the property. Each member is assigned to a camp. The fanciest one is Mandalay. Then Hill Billies. Other camps have names like Derelicts, Five Easy Pieces, Poison Oak, Rattlers. Herbert Hoover, an enthusiastic Grover, called it “the greatest men’s party on earth.” Aside from the prostitutes who are rumored to be visited by randy Grovers at local bars and motels, it’s a guys-only affair, and, historically, there’s always been talk of buggery in the dappled shadows under the redwoods, particularly at Highlanders, perhaps simply because members wear kilts and nothing underneath. Richard Nixon (a member of Cave Man camp), whose 1967 lakeside talk kicked off his successful run for the presidency, was caught on one of his Oval Office tapes describing the Grove as “the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine.”

Another hallmark of the encampment is the promiscuous micturition—guys standing up to the redwoods and relieving themselves everywhere you look. Maybe they’re trying to symbolically assert their primacy over nature. But the amount of drinking that goes on, plus the fact that many members are elderly and likely have prostate problems and can’t make it back to their camp fast enough, also plays a role in what has become, if not a formal ritual, a group-reinforcing collective activity. It must be said, to be fair to the old Wasp establishment, that the club has a rich history full of decent members with refined social graces. Mark Twain and the acerbic misanthrope Ambrose Bierce were early members. So was the socialist Jack London, who wrote a clairvoyant novel called "Before Adam", about a time when humanity was ruled by a small group of idiots who were destroying the world.”

- Alex Shoumatoff, (Excerpt: "Bohemian Tragedy," Vanity Fair Magazine, 5. 2009. Image: Bohemian Grove Dancer, 1927).

John Locke: The Tabula Rasa, An Exercise Of Power...

Of Practice And Habits:

"We are born with faculties and powers capable almost of anything, such at least as would carry us farther than can easily be imagined: but it is only the exercise of those powers which gives us ability and skill in anything, and leads us towards perfection.

The legs of a dancing- master and the fingers of a musician fall as it were naturally, without thought or pains, into regular and admirable motions. Bid them change their parts, and they will in vain endeavor to produce like motions in the members not used to them, and it will require length of time and long practice to attain but some degrees of a like ability. What incredible and astonishing actions do we find rope- dancers and tumblers bring their bodies to ! Not but that sundry in almost all manual arts are as wonderful; but I name those which the world takes notice of for such, because on that very account they give money to see them. All these admired motions, beyond the reach and almost conception of unpracticed spectators, are nothing but the mere effects of use and industry in men whose bodies have nothing peculiar in them from those of the amazed lookers-on.

As it is in the body, so it is in the mind: practice makes it what it is; and most even of those excellencies which are looked on as natural endowments, will be found, when examined into more narrowly, to be the product of exercise, and to be raised to that pitch only by repeated actions."

-John Locke (1632–1704: An English philosopher. Locke is considered the first of the British Empiricists, but is equally important to social contract theory. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of epistemology and political philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, classical republicans, and contributors to liberal theory. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. This influence is reflected in the American Declaration of Independence Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity and "the self", figuring prominently in the later works of philosophers such as David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first philosopher to define the self through a continuity of "consciousness". He also postulated that the mind was a "blank slate" or "tabula rasa"; that is, contrary to Cartesian or Christian philosophy, Locke maintained that people are born without innate ideas."

Excerpt: Of Practice And Habits from The Educational Writings of John Locke, "Of The Conduct Of The Understanding" published posthumously, 1706. Bio: -Carl Lotus Becker, "The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas,"1922. Forrest E. Baird & Walter Kaufmann, "Plato to Derrida," 2008. Image: Philippe Petite's foot on wire between Twin Towers 1 & 2, New York, NY, 8.7. 1974).