These are things that I think we've lost, Prime Minister. That Britain has lost. And ever since Space Fleet and the UN fell apart, and the very idea of international cooperation went under, that's exactly what our nation has done: lost.

I first encountered the British space comic icon Dan Dare briefly and late in its Eagle incarnation, the 1967 and 68 Eagle Annuals to be exact, when the stories were atypically short and both the writing and artwork poor quality (the 1968 Annual has one of the worst storylines ever committed to paper: space microbes destroy Earth's entire space fleet with invisible ships. They're invisible because they're so tiny! buttheyhavefullsizelaserbeamsohnevermind.) I never read either the 1950s Frank Hampton version, with the long storylines and the Mekon, or the 1977 2000AD version, or the 1980s Eagle version, or the 1990 Grant Morrison political spoof or ...

(Warning: spoilers for the Garth Ennis 2008 Dan Dare graphic novel)

But I was always fascinated with the character because of those brief glimpses, so when I saw the trade paperback for the 2008 Garth Ennis reboot of the series, I figured I had to get it just to see how they pulled off the update. I'm already reading the Dynamite Comics Buck Rogers and loving it; Dan Dare seemed like a logical companion.

And it turns out I'm glad I did. I'm not generally a fan of Ennis' other work - like most of the rest of the Gen-X comic writers now running the big studios, there's a bleakness and ultraviolence that I just can't get into. But it seems he does have a human side and shows it in this story.

The 1950s Dan Dare was a fairly generic British 'space hero', an Air Force-ish pilot (sort of Biggles in space), leading exploration teams for the 'Interplanet Space Fleet' answerable to the United Nations, and generally doing whatever needed done to save the day. The Ennis Dare is a retired war hero in a Navy story somewhere between Conrad, Kipling, and WW2. It's a very different genre of space opera, but for what it is, it works brilliantly.

Ennis has a brilliant touch for natural dialogue, and almost all of the supporting characters are human and likeable (he even gives Digby dignity, possibly a first ever for Dan Dare). It's complimented with Gary Erskine's wonderfully nuanced and emotive line drawings of characters usually showing multiple conflicted emotions: the beautiful Professor Jocelyn Peabody, now Home Secretary to a world-dominating Britain, but privately anguished and torn by the amoral Prime Minister she serves; the PM himself radiating an inner horror at the secrets and lies he conceals; a young ship's sub-lieutenant abruptly promoted to acting Captain, uncertain of herself and forced to make lightning ethical decisions that could doom a whole fleet unless she disobeys orders; the Mekon, by turns proud, emotionless and full of rage; and Dare himself, calm and focused in the heat of battle yet quietly grieving a lost age; only losing his composure when he suffers a terrible personal loss. It's all there on the page and works like a novel.

It's clear that to Ennis, Dan Dare represents the lost heroic spirit of Britain (coming reverently at the 1950s material by way of Morrison's bleak dystopian punk take) - almost an Arthur figure, the exiled warrior waiting to return when called upon. The whole book is a hymn to militaries everywhere. We cheer when the heroes stand firm against impossible odds, and boo at the sneering civilians who have no faith in their military and keep undercutting and betraying them in every way. Dare shrugs at the military hierarchy, jumps into the first place in combat, stares down Admirals and gives on-the-spot promotions to junior officers who he's seen 'at the sharp end' and trusts. These are not just people we like - these are people we want to be like.

And yet. Turn the picture sideways, and suddenly things get a bit scarier. Because what Ennis has written is also, if you look at it again, pretty much entirely a piece of propaganda in a rather nasty vein - and one that doesn't even actually make sense when you put it into today's political context, in which it's very clearly meant to be read.

The Prime Minister, as all high-ranking civilians must be in this kind of epic war-poem, is evil. Of course he's evil, he's a civilian who does not trust the military. He's sold out the world to the Mekon, out of sheer fear and cowardice (mixed with the reasonable logic that the world could be saved much bloodshed if we just went along with the invasion rather than uselessly fighting it.) He literally sends the fleet to their doom and plans to rule Earth as an alien subordinate. He's simultaneously a Quisling, a Chamberlain, and on the other side of the WW2 propaganda line, he embodies the German Dolchstoss legend - the civilian who 'stabs the military in the back' even as they are victorious. Three in one! Ticking all the boxes.

There are subtleties to this, of course; Britain is actually the sole world hyperpower (China and America having destroyed themselves) and the dream of a united world is long past. So the Prime Minister betrays from a position of strength, not weakness. But his treachery is still primarily against the military. It's the Navy - and Dare - who he has to destroy to pave the way for the Mekon. He's a pacifist at heart because he does not dare to fight, seeks a negotiated solution which is always and only weakness and failure of nerve - ultimately, negotiation in this type of story (unless you're using it as a trick to smuggle a weapon aboard the enemy's ship) is always a moral evil.

This is where I get that weird tingle of propaganda deja vu: the evil pacifist caricature, verging on blood libel (pacifists literally want to kill people - yes, it makes no sense, but that's how the meme goes) which surfaces again and again in right-wing literature. This is what Ennis is doing. Never trust anyone who talks peace, because they want to betray you to the enemy.

This is a hoary old rip-roaring war-propaganda-story cliche, and in a story which is about celebrating cliches from the past, perhaps it's not surprising. But Ennis is too good a writer for this to be accidental. So why is he doing this?

The weirder thing is, Ennis is a staunchly left wing writer, not shy about his political views, and he goes out of his way - in the script - to blame Dan Dare's absence in the world of future Britain on the rise of the modern political hard right - the National Front. By name.

Oh, they were appalling, nasty, piggy little men. They contacted him under false pretenses. It was at the decommissioning of the Anastasia, we were still together at this stage. They wanted Dan to be a figurehead for their movement into mainstream politics. Keeping Britain British, that sort of thing, although you knew immediately that what they meant was white.... But it wasn't that these thugs would think he'd want anything to do with them, that wasn't what was so awful for him. It was what the rise of such monsters meant. Because once they began identifying their cause with men like Dan, they'd taint the very notion of being British. They'd wrap themselves in the flag, and an entire generation of immigrant people would look at the Union Jack -- and see a swastika.

Two pages are devoted to this methinks-she-protests-too-much scene. It serves nicely to give a plausible reason for why a former war hero would choose to exile himself rather than save his country from moral disaster, yet jump at the chance to fight for it... but when you think about it a little closer, not only does it not make any sense at all, it's weird that a story notionally about the need to confront fascism would use the Dolchstoss - fascism's founding myth - as its own moral backbone.

We could have won. We did win, but politics - civilians - took our country away from us. Only the military has the true right to power. Only those who've served in battle should be promoted to rule. Combat is the true test of a man's (or woman's) honour. Villainy must be confronted and destroyed - physically - and that villainy often wears a civilian face. Confidence comes from an inner trust in one's own gut instinct, and decisions should be made on the spot. Never trust a politician. Never trust a peacemaker. Never trust a negotiator.

This is the moral DNA of fascism. This is what a story about anti-fascism also believes.

So far so weird. We fight fascism with the myths and tools of fascism. But here's the twist:

The evil Prime Minister (evil, remember, because he seeks to avoid a devastating war he sees as a no-win situation; evil because of his moral cowardice, lack of daring and faith in the military) is clearly modelled on Tony Blair, in appearance and personality. The in-script references rub it in:

Dare: You've been having trouble resigning, haven't you? You're on your -- what, third or fourth attempt, is that right? You keep promising, but you just can't seem to pull it off.

PM: Well, I mean -- we've -- we've begun that conversation, we're looking at --

Dare: Having a debate, no doubt. So long as we're using phrases that have almost lost all meaning, let me work closely with you to reach a conclusion: your problem's the Mekon. Isn't it?

So here's the kicker: The Prime Minister, who is to be seen as a future Tony Blair, is evil because he doesn't want to start a war, doesn't trust the military to get the job done. He'd rather sacrifice the entire military to aliens to avoid a war - and does. He's the classic 'appeaser'.

But the real Tony Blair - the one in our universe - the one on which this guy is based - remember him?

He's the guy who was all gung-ho about sending the military in to start a war when we didn't need to! He's the guy who said we had to face down tyrants and not be an appeaser! He's the guy who lied, who sweated, who manipulated, who was the lapdog of a more powerful nation -- not to avoid a war, but to START one under false pretenses! To send in the Space Marines to kill the Mekon. He's the guy who's squirming in an official enquiry about his lies right now!

There's a fundamental disconnect from reality here so powerful, it creates its own event horizon and sucks everything in around it. It's like the Dolchstosslegende underlying every good war story - heroic strong honourable fighter, evil weak betraying civilian master - is so deeply engraved into our consciousness that when it's patently obvious that the EXACT OPPOSITE happened in reality - that the liars and schemers were PRO war rather than fearful of fighting - that the myth still chugs happily along under its own steam, bending space and truth around it. So Tony 'Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!' Blair becomes 'I'd sell my soul to the Mekons to avoid a war!' Prime Minister without raising a beat.

And this is a left-wing writer, who presumably opposes Blair's part in creating the Iraq war - or at least opposes Tony Blair's Labour for being insufficiently left. But at some point, probably around 1917, 'left-wing' stopped meaning 'opposed to war' and started becoming... what?

Certainly not 'opposed to fascism', though Ennis obviously is opposed to the symbols and some specific platforms (like racism) of historical fascism. He'll spit that bone out. But the whole rest of the fish - salvation through glorious violence, the military as the model of all good citizenship, pacifism as the index of a society's depravity - swallow it whole.

There's something very scary here, and it bugs me, because Ennis isn't by any means alone in these views; they're uncomfortably mainstream, on left and right both. Ennis, only a year older than me, is a child of the punks; not one of the first late-70s wave of punk writers, he describes growing up reading 2000AD. (2nd generation punk?) In any case, punk sensibilities - which politically generally mean a left-anarchist slant, distrust of authority, combined with a sort of desparing, nihilist embrace of violence - inform most of my generation of comic writers (who are now running the asylum at DC and Marvel). There's a lot more too them, of course, than just the anger and the despair and the glib ultraviolence; and I think 'Dan Dare' shows Ennis at his best. But the fascist love of hardcore violence as an aesthetic is there, as it's been all the way since punk. And it scares me.

The punks self-described as fighting fascism, usually seen as the right wing and corporate privatisation - but in spirit, they embodied it. Or did they fight it because they loved it, because it scared them? The image of the street fight, the revolutionary, the burning cars. All posturing, but still the artistic ideal. Take Green Day's "21st Century Breakdown" as an example. The spirit, the dream, is still the war against the state, the collapse of oppressive order, the glorious riot. The anarchist logo of the raised fist. The leather and boots. Why does this still inspire us?

I missed punk the first time - I missed the zines and the music, the flurry of all-media do-it-yourself, though I caught part of that flame in the microcomputer revolution. I don't mind that part. There was an honest outburst of creativity there, it seems.

Then we had the 1990s; X-Files and Seattle grunge was in, but it was also a sort of slick corporate neo-punk fetish, more sheen than substance. The Web saved the 90s; rebooted the microchip dreams of 1982. Now we're in the age of Google Earth and the iPad and the lockdown is upon us again. Punk's fears of a world-striding electronic machine of total control, total despair are closer now than ever before. Google and Apple in 2010 have made possible what was laughable in 1996, but seemed inevitable in 1969: an Internet with one central hub and non-user-serviceable terminals. IBM and Ma Bell reborn. The new age of the mainframe is upon us. We are going to need new creative heroes to rise to break the system again.

But when the next revolution in underground literature comes - and it has to - where will it point? When will we stop being inspired by dreams of violence and destruction, and start doing something creative about creativity?

Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? Remember how pushing the Soviets for German reunification was one of the top planks of the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher Cold War policy axis?

Remember how happy everyone was when the impossible happened and the Wall fell?

Yeah now it turns out - not so much actually, at least if you were that bastion of freedom and democracy, Margaret Thatcher.

"The Prime Minister's view is... we do not want to wake up one morning and find that events have moved entirely beyond our control and that German reunification is to all intents and purposes on us"

Wtf, Maggie. Just wtf.

And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.

-- Genesis 15

Monday finds you like a bomb
That's been left ticking there too long
You're bleeding
Somedays there's nothing left to learn
From the point of no return
You're leaving

-- Eurythmics, "I Saved The World Today"

Sustainability workshop today at work.

The Shorter Millennium Ecosystem Assesment: We're all screwed.

Five years ago, we had ten years to save the Earth. Assuming we had the political and economic will to even begin to try to do what is necessary - and assuming we agreed in the first place on just what *is* necessary - none of which we have.

Now it's 2009, we haven't fixed any of the big problems, we didn't succeed in stopping the war in Iraq, electing Obama didn't drawdown the military in Afghanistan, Peak Oil is upon us, we've heard two clicks from the Russian Roulette revolver of pandemic flu and we're still spinning the barrel, and deep ocean fish stocks are still being depleted. We're *really* screwed.

And I'm personally, physically and emotionally, exhausted just from trying to do the tiny, ineffectual things I've tried to do for the past two decades to try to fight this planetary death machine - or at least even just to acknowledge its existence and stay sane.

The magnitudes of the global problems we seem by any reasonable interpretation of science to face here at the dawn of the 21st century are so huge that it's really hard to even fit them into my brain. Except as a series of Dante-esque images: mass extinction, mass starvation, a world reduced to smoking desert. The drought in Australia feels like the harbinger of the dragon's breath, coming ever closer.

Visiting Brazil in January-February brought the depression further home. How the rest of the world lives is intolerable by Western standards, and yet still over the carrying capacity of the Earth by ecological standards.

The equations are simple. The world has a finite amount of stuff. The human race is on an exponential growth curve. Something has to give. We might be able to change, but it's probably too late and things have already broken beyond repair in the basement. We're locked into the internal combustion engine, into fossil fuels, sprawling suburbia, electric grids, fertiliser and pesticide dependent farming, strip mining and deforestation, a global food transport grid.

Compared with the ecological crisis, nuclear war seems trivial. At least to stop that we just had to get two superpowers to agree to not pull the trigger. To stop the death of the planet... we have to change our way of life. We have to choose to destroy everything we've spent the last century building. In the face of an economic system which rewards cutthroat competition and mercilessly slaughters anyone who achieves less than total productivity. At the same time as the entire Third World is climbing aboard, and we're trying to get off, but we don't want to lose our place in the sun either.

Common sense says it can't be done. We've built a death machine. What is there left except to decide the manner of our planet's burial?

How can you build any kind of movement on the assumption that our civilisation and probably our whole biosphere is already doomed and all we can do is accept our fate?

And yet. Against this is the spiritual view which says 'this world is actually only a shadow of a much more real world in which there is no limitation'.

How do these two apparent irreducible truths - the absoluteness of finite planetary resources, and the reality of an unlimited dimension of mind and spirit - go together?

How can we possibly fix things when we still don't agree as a society that they're broken? But if we do agree that they're broken - how do we bear the guilt, pain and anger?

How can I get up and go to work in the morning knowing that just by living, I'm bringing the Apocalypse one step closer?

How do you un-fuck a planet?

A big rightward swing: National displaces Labour as main party, ACT (effectively Libertarians for any Americans following the game at home) goes from one to five seats, Greens up two to eight seats. Maori Party goes to five seats, and Winston Peters' New Zealand First flames out entirely, game over. No tears there I'm afraid - poor Winnie has been a slick operator and told one too many outright lie to the press, as well as flirting with outright racism, and got justly burned for it.

I can quite understand why people might have voted against Helen Clark since she's pulled a few too many slick ones herself (such as ramming through prostitution decriminalisation with the slimmest of margins, I think it came down to one vote) and retroactively legalising illegal acts done by her MPs -- but given how National were fawning all over George W a few years ago and chomping at the bit to go bomb some Iraqis, as well as slavering at the chance to strip and sell off what remains of our country's infrastructure, I personally couldn't bring myself to vote for them for the rest of my lifetime. I guess it comes down to a matter of juggling priorities of evil; for me, war ranks at the top of the list, and trusting proven untrustworthy market forces right next to it. Other people presumably have different moral calculi.

But it's the people who voted ACT -- the hard-core Ayn Rand acolytes -- who I find it hardest to forgive. Surely the world financial crisis has demonstrated for all to see that bankers are not to be trusted with anything more real than a Monopoly set? How is it possible to NOT see that 'economics as usual' has brought the earth to the brink of destruction, and is pushing us beyond? I can't understand the kind of wilful blindness to reality which would make people say 'give us more of that good stuff'.

On social issues, yes, I can understand being torn. I personally vote with the Greens because they are the only party that values nonviolence and peacemaking, which seem to me to be at the core fo the Christian attitude to life. But I cannot yet bring myself to actively campaign for them, because they are also the party that fights hardest to 1) decriminalise prostitution, 2) keep on-demand abortion legal, and 3) make smacking illegal. I cannot understand that trio of stances as philosophically coherent.

I can understand being in favour of decriminalising everything, on principle, even acts I don't personally agree with. But in that case, smacking should remain legal. How can it conceivably be legally consistent to *kill* an embryo but not to *smack* a child? Only, it seems to me, if you have a definition of human life which is false, and which believes that the point of restraining family violence is to protect *society* rather than the individual - a dead baby won't grow up to be a child abuser, but a smacked baby might. Which is too much like pragmatic ends-justifies-means thinking -- and far too much, in its own mirror-image way, like the hard Right's 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' stance on crime -- for me to accept in a minority, consciously values-based party.

But of course I can't really argue, and don't particularly want to, that abortion should be *recriminalised*, since using state violence in that way also seems an anti-Christian way of approaching things, let alone the whole complexity of feminism and women's rights which would suggest that as a male, I should have no voice in what is ultimately a woman's choice, and to a point I can respect that. I believe I *can* make a principled argument that abortion can be best seen as a horribly misguided modernist medical procedure, like electroshock and lobotomy, which has massive consequences to the mother which the medical profession has not yet addressed, and that a more enlightened future society will view it with distaste. And the flip side of seeing abortion as an evil is also that I should be in favour of policies that support as much as possible unmarried mothers who choose to raise children, since it's a huge sacrifice being asked of them; and for that reason, the Labour and Green stance in favour of state funds for families with children seems like both a moral and just use of my tax money, and as a single person myself, not really doing much to further the human race, it seems like part of my income is justly owed to those who do have children.

So I have no problem with taxes, and in fact I'm very suspicious of any party offering tax *cuts* since it seems like that's the government asking me to turn *my* back on those who Christ is asking me to support. I'd much rather have higher taxes, as long as I knew they were being used wisely to purchase collective services at a fair price and supporting those who need them, than higher discretionary income, and then a casino-like maze of lying private hucksters that I have to waste *my* valuable time deciphering in order to work out where to best spend my money. Some things are best left to the individual; but buying large-scale services like national healthcare and housing and infrastructure, where I don't have any personal expertise, are probably not among them, and further privatisation will most likely hurt me rather than improve my life.

I'm frankly terrified of all the right-wing rhetoric about 'making our streets safe' and 'three strikes and you're out', because again, this seems like it will do nothing but increase the violence level in our society, and I'm definitely against that.

If the Green party asks me to agree philosophically with a wider agenda of absolute sexual permissivism, and claim that all consensual sex acts are by definition *moral* and must be described as such, no, sorry, I can't agree with that, due to a fundamental conflict with my understanding of Christian values; however, that same Christian value system as I understand it tells me that society should be less violent, and to the extent that criminalising *any* activity adds to social violence, we should probably make more immoral things legal rather than less; and while I don't agree that morality is completely relative (that's a contradiction in terms to me - if something is *moral* it is by definition an *absolute*, otherwise it's just a *preference* or a local *adaptation* and talk of morals does not apply), I'm not in favour of *imposing* morality by law, since I don't believe it can be.

So I end up coming to a similar voting position to Greens on many social issues, except for starting from completely different axioms and not really being able to share a common language - which is why campaigning and discussing policy becomes hugely emotionally painful, because the religiously-based moral framework I come from is considered backward and frankly evil to many of my Left friends, and their moral system on sexuality is equally alien to me. (But I feel equally alienated not just from the Left, but from most of society today, even the Right.)

On the other hand, I'm deeply in favour of caring for the Earth, and working to make our society more energy efficient and locally-based, and the Greens are again about the only party which takes localisation, fair trade, ethical purchasing, animal welfare, and climate change seriously.

So that's my labryinthine internal anguish which leads me to my voting decision, ill-fitting as it often seems, and I assume other people make similar complex choices. At least I hope they do; sometimes I ungraciously suspect my fellow citizens of doing the equivalent of tossing darts at a dartboard and saying 'I'll vote for John Key because he has a nice honest face and a clean tie, and you can always trust a banker, can't you?

Well, I can't, and I fear for the next three years, because it seems like the same people who got the world into its current mess are going to be the ones trying to get us out; that doesn't seem like a recipe for success.

And in any case, I'm not sure that we necessarily *want* the economy to be 'functioning' again just like before, because even at full power it's still just a frighteningly efficient planet-wrecking machine. We need an economy based on *reality* -- ecology and spirituality, the things that underly all our social inventions -- rather than self-referential 'economics'.

Nevertheless, we've made our national political bed and are going to be stuck with it, and I'm no particular fan of violent insurrection, so the next question is how to reconcile my fears for the future and my distrust of the present and my bitterness toward those people whose choices of governance seem to me to be utterly without serious thought and moral merit -- how to reconcile all this with a theology that says 'actually, when it comes down to it, God is present everywhere in everything and even mistakes work out for good, and nothing is ever actually broken forever'. And love those with whom I disagree, on all sides of the political spectrum.

There's a black man in the White House. I don't think I ever quite believed it could actually happen. But it did. Martin Luther King's dream is vindicated. This day will go down in history.

They're dancing on Daily Kos and someone posted a quote from the 19th century Sioux leader Black Elk It resonates with an image I've felt since 1999.

From Black Elk Speaks, the first vision when he was nine (around 1872). The imagery is similar to that of Revelation:

Then I heard the white wind blowing gently through the tree and singing there, and from the east the sacred pipe came flying on its eagle wings, and stopped before me there beneath the tree, spreading deep peace around it.

Then the daybreak star was rising, and a Voice said: "It shall be a relative to them; and who shall see it, shall see much more, for thence comes wisdom; and those who do not see it shall be dark." And all the people raised their faces to the east, and the star's light fell upon them, and all the dogs barked loudly and the horses whinnied.

Then when the many little voices ceased, the great Voice said: "Behold the circle of the nation's hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus all powers shall be one power in the people without end. Now they shall break camp and go forth upon the red road, and your Grandfathers shall walk with them."

The 'morning star' is often a term associated with Jesus, and the phrase 'who shall see it shall see much more' is reminiscient of the Gospel phrase 'to those who have, more shall be given'.

And a Voice said: "All over the universe they have finished a day of happiness." And looking down I saw that the whole wide circle of the day was beautiful and green, with all fruits growing and all things kind and happy.

Then a Voice said: "Behold this day, for it is yours to make. Now you shall stand upon the center of the earth to see, for there they are taking you."

I was still on my bay horse, and once more I felt the riders of the west, the north, the east, the south, behind me in formation, as before, and we were going east. I looked ahead and saw the mountains there with rocks and forests on them, and from the mountains flashed all colors upward to the heavens. Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

The word 'hoop' jumps out at me, because the image that's been in my mind since 1999, since reading about the Seattle WTO protests, and that guided me through the 2001-2003 anti-war protests in Christchurch, is of overlapping circles: each circle being an identity group, and where they overlap being where we can join together.

But Black Elk himself fascinates me, again because of those spirit visions. He converted to Catholicism later in life and there are aspects of his visions that ring huge bells with me in relation to accounts of near-death experiences, the afterlife and who I believe Jesus to be, such as this one late in life:

There was a ridge right in front of me, and I thought I was going to run into it, but I went right over it. On the other side of the ridge I could see a beautiful land where many, many people were camping in a great circle. I could see that they were happy and had plenty. Everywhere there were drying racks full of meat. The air was clear and beautiful with a living light that was everywhere. All around the circle, feeding on the green, green grass, were fat and happy horses; and animals of all kinds were scattered all over the green hills, and singing hunters were returning with their meat.

I floated over the tepees and began to come down feet first at the center of the hoop where I could see a beautiful tree all green and full of flowers. When I touched the ground, two men were coming toward me, and they wore holy shirts made and painted in a certain way. They came to me and said: "It is not yet time to see your father, who is happy. You have work to do. We will give you something that you shall carry back to your people, and with it they shall come to see their loved ones.

Because of my vision and the power they knew I had, I was asked to lead the dance next morning. We all stood in a straight line, facing the west, and I prayed: "Father, Great Spirit, behold me! The nation that I have is in despair. The new earth you promised you have shown me. Let my nation also behold it."

After the prayer we stood with our right hands raised to the west, and we all began to weep, and right there, as they wept, some of them fainted before the dance began.

As we were dancing I had the same queer feeling I had before, as though my feet were off the earth and swinging. Kicking Bear and Good Thunder were holding my arms. Afterwhile it seemed they let go of me, and once more I floated head first, face down, with arms extended, and the spotted eagle was dancing there ahead of me again, and I could hear his shrill whistle and his scream.

I saw the ridge again, and as I neared it there was a deep, rumbling sound, and out of it there leaped a flame. But I glided right over it. There were six villages ahead of me in the beautiful land that was all clear and green in living light. Over these in turn I glided, coming down on the south side of the sixth village. And as I touched the ground, twelve men were coming towards me, and they said: "Our Father, the two-legged chief, you shall see!"

Then they led me to the center of the circle where once more I saw the holy tree all full of leaves and blooming.

But that was not all I saw. Against the tree there was a man standing with arms held wide in front of him. I looked hard at him, and I could not tell what people he came from. He was not a Wasichu and he was not an Indian. His hair was long and hanging loose, and on the left side of his head he wore an eagle feather. His body was strong and good to see, and it was painted red. I tried to recognize him, but I could not make him out. He was a very fine-looking man. While I was staring hard at him, his body began to change and became very beautiful with all colors of light, and around him there was light. He spoke like singing: "My life is such that all earthly beings and growing things belong to me. Your father, the Great Spirit, has said this. You too must say this."

Then he went out like a light in a wind.

The twelve men who were there spoke: "Behold them! Your nation's life shall be such!"

I saw again how beautiful the day was - the sky all blue and full of yellow light above the greening earth. And I saw that all the people were beautiful and young. There were no old ones there, nor children either - just people of about one age, and beautiful.

And I can't help but think of Don Francisco's song Vision of the Valley, which has been with me since the early 1990s.

I saw a man come walking, and his heart glowed like a flame
All the sheep began to run to him, he called each one by name
He spoke to them with gentle words, and soothed their fearful minds
He healed the broken hearted, the crippled lame and blind

And many others like him, all with hearts that glowed the same
That before I hadn't recognised, from the farms and fields they came
They weren't famous, wise or noble but they spoke a common word
A word the flock could recognise, and follow when they heard

And the news went out around the world, in every street and town
That something wonderful was here, that heaven had come down
And millions gave their hearts in trust that long had been betrayed
And the Bride at last was ready and the trumpet call was made.

(Edit: Video clip from National Geographic.)

Via the TT Brown forum, the Boundary Institute has a very interesting collection of papers on logic- and computer-science approaches to a view of physics which would include psi.

Also via TT Brown, Wilbert Smith is a key figure in the Canadian UFO scene who deserves more attention, particularly on the intersection of the 'contactee' phenomenon and psychic phenomena.

And finally: yay to the Ploughshares team who deflated one of the Waihopai domes.

Pop!

I met Valerie in 2003, I think, at the Social Forum Aotearoa when she was heading up Peace Action Wellington. I don't know her well but my impression was that she was sensible, level-headed, and dedicated to antiwar causes.

I can't really picture her with rifles and napalm calling for bloody revolution.

I move through the day in the rhythms that I've known.
I've got this crazy dream of stripping down to truth and bone.
-- Heather Nova

When trying to write honestly about one's personal views on science, politics, religion, philosophy - but especially those last two - it is hard to avoid offending people. I have insulted a friend in the last week and that hurts. Another friend asked me in some bafflement 'you write about a lot of different things, but where are you going with it; how does it all tie together?' I was also baffled, since to me it's perfectly obvious: I write about who I am and what is going through my mind, and if what is in my mind doesn't eventually fit together, then I will explode or go insane; this weblog is my attempt to document part of the long process of slowly crawling toward sanity. And I try to avoid offending people, but I'm not always sure how to do that.

It's probably time that I tried to explain what I'm trying to do on this weblog, at least the general theme of my interests. There is a point to what I write about, of sorts. Less of a point perhaps, and more of a gently tapered ellipsoid curve. A kind of rounded blob you can wave in an overall direction.

There are several categories of posts here. Ones which begin with 'Dreamlog:' are probably the most confusing. They are exactly what they seem, which is documentation of actual dreams I have, or at least the fragments I can recall. Mostly verbatim, sometimes edited for PG rating. I write them for two reasons, one as a sort of vague spiritual discipline, two because it seems like good practice for creative writing and I've been in a creative writing block for about seven years, and three, because dreams amuse me and Slow Wave is one of my favourite webcomics. Possibly they don't really belong on the front page, but so far I haven't hacked WordPress to do anything else.

Some posts are marked 'Poem:' - these are original poems, generally ones I have written previously and have had up on the web elsewhere. I'm slowly migrating them over to WordPress, and when I do I tend to backdate them to a (usually fictitious) date in the year in which they were written, so they don't spam the front page.

One of my narrow interests is Interactive Fiction, a retro-hobbyist gaming genre with roots in the old-school days of 1970s Artificial Intelligence research. It's an interest increasingly honoured in the breach rather than the observance, but a frightening amount of my social life revolves around friendship with fans of this genre, and of board and videogame designed in general.

For the rest, they are generally responses to media or materials I have been reading lately, or to current incidents. I read insane amounts of the Web; I play video games; I watch movies and very occasionally TV; often things jump out of pop culture at me. These posts may be serious or unserious. I don't always make that much distinction.

I also read books of a spiritual or philosophical character, following my own personal reading track which mostly consists of following up ideas that jump up and wave at me saying RESEARCH THIS. I try to write reasonably serious posts about these, because what I am trying to piece together in this research feels something like a spiritual/philosophical archeology project: tracing the course of a cluster of interesting ideas which have emerged over about the last 150 years, and which center (for me) around a version of Christianity that I find appealing.

But although I say Christianity - and I consider myself to be a Christian of a fairly orthodox stripe - I am finding overlap with some of these core ideas in various religions, sciences, and political streams of thought. I very explicitly don't make a distinction between groups or disciplines: I believe fragmentation and the building of artificial walls between disciplines and organisations to be a curse, and I don't believe any human being needs any kind of formal theological or academic licence to practice study and free thinking. I go where I see the ideas going, or I try to. Sometimes I get scared and have to back off for a bit. Sometimes I don't have the academic skills to follow the path of an idea completely. But I'm trying for an overall, birds-eye, gonzo-philosophy approach here. I feel sometimes like I'm jumping from idea to idea like a frog across lilypads; if I stop too long I'll bog down. The important part is to get an outline of connections where they seem to have been hidden, and try to get what I think are maybe-useful insights down in text before I forget them.

If you want some words to describe my main themes, I could give you these: truth, peace, unity, love, Christ.

The search for truth is always important to me. I am possibly a little on the Aspergers spectrum there. I want to know and speak the true idea more than anything; sometimes this means I don't bite my lip when I should, and people get hurt. I don't always notice this.

The search for peace started in 2001. I got involved in the peace movement; it was the most fractious bunch of misfits ever in one room together; we just barely avoided fistfights. I loved it, and it nearly killed me. And I realised I had to seriously reexamine all my ideas, political and spiritual and scientific, to get a grasp on what I wanted to do with my life.

Unity is a true idea (possibly the One True Idea) which I have fought for a long time, but find myself drawn towards again and again. All things are connected. It is scary to me because a large part of my personal and religious identity has been invested in the idea of separation, holiness-through-withdrawal. But I looked for peace, and peace led me to unity, and unity is leading me to some fairly radical philosophical ideas in domains I had closed off as unscientific and occult. I'm opening those boxes and letting whatever is in, jump out. I'm trusting that everything will eventually fit together, even the bits that don't.

Love is a nice word that has scary consequences - at least for me. In the Christian tradition - or at least in some of the more fundamentalist sects - love is deeply associated with suffering. I'm not sure that that's intentional, but whenever I hear that word I have imagery of crosses, graves, violent death by torture. It is perhaps no concidence that I am single. I want to try to get past this deep fear of the kind of unconditional love described by the Christian faith - but the fact remains that an innocent guy who'd die staked out on Death Row and still love his enemies - and who says 'do what I do' - is deeply, deeply troubling, and if this doesn't bug you, it should.

Christ is a word burned into my brain from my childhood. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. Not all of these people can stand to live on the same planet as each other, let alone enter the same room without wearing explosives. Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Buddhists, we've all heard of Jesus, and some of us (maybe not the Buddhists) are willing to kill each other over that name. But what do the formulas and rituals of the Christian faith actually mean? Is this Christ person... entity... force... thing... something real? If He is, what does that do to science, to religion, to politics?

(I've probably offended a dozen people just in that paragraph alone. See what I mean?)

Why do I call this blog 'Life in the Cultlane'?

Well, for one it's an anagram. For another: I grew up in a church that by most rational standards was a cult. Now I'm opening the doors to exploring philosophies which are also associated with groups which could be called cults. It's where I am, it's my patch, I'm claiming it. The word 'cult' means 'group of worshippers'. It's not irrational to worship, the important thing is what you worship and how well it matches reality. Not all cults are necessarily wrong; not all wrong things are necessarily called cults. We need to investigate with our eyes, our minds and our hearts, find the bits that fit, discard the rest.

Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Of course. So can a whole lot of bogus messiahs. But that doesn't mean we don't go looking.

Comments are welcomed, though I would prefer that they are on-topic to the post at hand. You will almost certainly disagree with me on a number of subjects. I'm okay with that. If I contradict what you say, I'm not mad at you. I'd like it if you agreed, obviously. But I'm almost certainly wrong on some things and I reserve the right to make my own way to truth.

I generally won't delete comments, though I will point out if I think you're not on-topic. If you post comment spam however - by which I mean obviously automated content-free 'visit my site' messages - you *will* be deleted, rapidly and with extreme prejudice.