Last night Robert Kraft, who up unto that point was considered to be the owner of the Kraft Group, waived his claim that the company constituted private property.  Mr. Kraft finally agreed to the generous offer on behalf of representatives of labor whereby he would be relocated to a city of his choice and benefit from living support payments from the state for the remainder of his life.  His four sons declined the option of taking production line positions in the Kraft Group’s paper and pulpwood industries, and will register with their local Labor Board for reassignment.  In accepting the offer Mr. Kraft expressed that he had done so with reluctance but that, at his age, he could no longer resist the inevitable march of history.

Mr. Shia LaBeouf, 2015

Mr. Kraft was previously the owner of the football team once known as the New England Patriots.  A People’s Regional Council determined two years ago that the team’s reactionary name must be altered.  In a popular ballot the team was renamed “The Street Sweepers” in recognition of the vital job fulfilled by this particularly hardy group of workers.  This momentous event led to a string of further name changes across the country, including cities such as San Francisco, where the people decided they no longer wanted their teams to be associated with a lust for gold, as in the 49ers, and New Orleans, where “Saints” was likewise judged to be an anachronism.

In the news on the West Coast, a group of protesters gathered in Los Angeles protesting the revolutionary content of recent film productions commissioned by the People’s Arts Council.  When protesters began hurling objects at a statue of revolutionary leader Bruno Fournier they were quickly dispersed by police.  A representative of the capitalist protesters, Mr. Shia LaBeouf, claimed that films commissioned by the People’s Arts Council were not consistent with public wants.  He claimed that there was still a great longing for romantic comedies that promoted hetero-normative behavior and relationships within one’s own race, arguing that these were among the most popular films made earlier this century.  He added that recent productions were failing to promote the status quo.

Mr. Shia LaBeouf, 2025

A spokeswoman from the People’s Arts Council, Ms. Courtney Connor, responded that Mr. LaBeouf’s allegations were unfounded and pointed out that he and many who formerly worked in the film industry were resentful at having been assigned to a two-year shift harvesting fruit and vegetables on a collective farm in the San Joaquin Valley.  This came on the back of the recent imprisonment of the formerly popular actor Will Smith.  Mr. Smith had refused to work and was reportedly violent in his assignment packing batteries, claiming it was in protest at what had previously been his mansion and abode being converted into a public museum.

In researching and writing an article yesterday on the latest Star Trek film I stumbled across a blog, hosted by WordPress.com.  The web address seemed to make clear the intent of its founder: socialismdoesnotwork.wordpress.com (SDNW).  This short-lived but spirited website was primarily concerned with warning Americans of the danger posed by Barack Obama, whom it repeatedly referred to as both a Socialist and a Marxist.

I had very much hoped to write in further detail on this website today, exploring some of the perspectives offered by this sage “tax-paying American”.  His concern for social, cultural, and economic issues was indeed broad.  The blog wrote extensively on a wide array of contemporary issues.

On the subject of gay marriage, he was an outspoken critic: “gays are perverts and deviants,” and “Jason Collins is a cocksucker.”  Thus SDNW supported a more traditional interpretation of the marital institution.  On issues of race, he was equally clear about his feelings: “the blacks should shut up and stop complaining. What racism?”  Meanwhile SDNW was convinced that Obamacare presented a clear threat to American freedom and was part of a socialist plot.

The blogger responsible for SDNW was profoundly concerned about the implications of socialism and the way, he feared, it would lead to a process of homogenization whereby all distinct identities and personalities would be erased by the state.  In the previous article I quoted the following: “Marxists [sic] utopia is a collective society where everyone is exactly the same and has the same things.  No gender, no religion, no sexual identity, no race.  Just one big muddled race of sheep.”

Besides reading the blog, I added @SocialismDNW on Twitter, a profile presumably created by the same person.  @SocialismDNW tweeted prolifically over the last six months, time and again expressing his concerns in that democratic way that we all like to celebrate.  In spite of having tweeted over five-hundred times, SDNW only had six followers.  When I started following him, and the scientific editors of Selecting Stones did likewise, his following spiked precipitously, an increase of a third to eight.

How would he respond to our interest?  As a testy political force one might have thought that he would relish the challenge, that he would see himself as a natural rival of a blog such as this and would wear our efforts to discredit him as a badge of pride.  He was welcome to this badge: the product of my labor and a gift freely given.

Yet upon visiting my new favorite blog today I found that SDNW has disappeared.  “The authors have deleted this site.”  I went to Twitter, only to find that @SocialismDNW had been closed down as well.  What happened?  We can theorize.

SDNW pluckily challenged the rich and famous on a frequent basis.  On February 24th he told Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City, that he was a “limosuine [sic] liberal piece of shit.”  On April 17th he demonstrated that he was concerned not simply about socialism, but also about fascism, when he told CNN’s Piers Morgan that “Joseph Goebbels would be proud of your propaganda.”  And on April 2nd he expressed slightly more ambiguous feelings towards Kanye West’s firstborn when he observed “hopefully Kim Khardasians [sic] baby is still born. [sic??]”

Yet it may be the tweets concerning Barack and Michelle Obama that led to Twitter closing SDNW down.  The legality of these messages is questionable, and our close attention to his activities may have precipitated his descent:

So what conclusions can we draw?  A reactionary blog and Twitter handle was discovered and studied on the oft-frequented pages of Selecting Stones.  Within hours of our perspicacious examinations this errant blogger retreated back into his hole in the ground.  This website is still running, hence your reading of this article.  Socialismdoesnotwork.wordpress.com isn’t, hence the fact that this link doesn’t work.  One can only conclude that socialism won again.

Star Trek: Into Darkness is released in cinemas this weekend and the resulting spike in Google searches on the subject perhaps warrants some consideration of the question of whether this franchise presents anything more than a highly marketable product.  The pictures embedded in this article will give some indication as to my conclusions, that Starfleet logos are now as marketable as the insignia for the New York Yankees, with the cast of characters not quite as worn out as those you’ll see in the Bronx.

Promotional materials for the new film Star Trek: Into Darkness

Amidst the Converse shoes, underwear, socks, phone covers, and coffins it is hard to believe that Star Trek was ever any more than a commercial endeavor, as is the nature of the overwhelming bulk of what we tend to refer to as “arts”.  I do not mean to say that all blockbuster films are identical in creative merit to a Big Mac; rather, they merely serve the same purpose.  Besides, there have been some inventive variations in countries with large Hindu populations where beef is unpopular.  But J. J. Abrams is no Herbert Biberman, nor a Gene Roddenberry.

At times the early Star Trek, made in the midst of the Cold War, presented a challenge to American conceptions of race, and to some degree capitalism.  The diversity of the original cast presented a challenge to not only televisual norms but notions of a natural antagonism with Russia and assumptions about male superiority in all things technological.  Subsequent televisual offerings would not develop this challenge a step further but introduce black characters as nods to political correctness, rarely in the model of Mr. T.  It was no coincidence that the leading officer after the captain was Mr. Spock, not the weapons officer but the science officer.  The show was always more interested in exploration and discovery than in war.  In this and later incarnations of the show it is explained that humanity has advanced beyond want and need, resulting in lives of learning and leisure.

A Star Trek coffin, modeled on a photon torpedo

Browsing through online discussions concerning the question of whether Star Trek presents a socialist depiction of the future returns few signs of intelligent life.  Comments are, as one might expect, more indicative of popular conceptions of socialism than anything else.  One blogger, the maestro responsible for socialismdoesnotwork.wordpress.com, writes in some detail on the subject.  He explains that the Borg — a force that assimilates the technologies and bodies of different races into a collective hive mind, and a feature of the later Star Trek series — “are just an honest version of Marxists.”  This self-identified tax-payer goes on to explain: “Marxists [sic] utopia is a collective society where everyone is exactly the same and has the same things.  No gender, no religion, no sexual identity, no race.  Just one big muddled race of sheep controlled by the hive.”  How perceptive!  The argument is somewhat undermined shortly afterwards when a subsequent sentence begins with the words, “If Marxists like Barack Obama…”  I’m unclear as to whether the scientific editors of Selecting Stones wish to add this straw man to the favorites or even friends, or if that would be too much like Fox News inviting Evan Bayh to a discussion panel to present a view from the Left.  Yet further reading presents creative gems such as: “the Republican side can offer a fresh message of freedom, of protecting the Constitution, lower taxes.”

A nice Star Trek corset

There are of course more sophisticated discussions of the subject than this.  The majority of viewpoints on the subject are a reflection of whether the author likes or dislikes socialism because those who dislike Star Trek tend not to feel a sense of investment.  Assertions that Star Trek represents a socialist future largely hinge upon the elimination of private property.  While this would be a feature of a socialist society, the absence of private property does not in itself make socialism.  (Native North American peoples, for example, did not have private property prior to their contact with Europeans, but they were not what we would call socialists.)  Attempts to make sense of online discussions of this subject are futile and without conclusion.  At one point Star Trek presented a vision that was clearly utopian and of a persuasion that located Gene Roddenberry, the original show’s creator, on the broader left of the 1960s.  Yet it really left many questions unanswered, given that the perspective was invariably given from a spaceship light years from Earth.  It is indicated in Star Trek: The Next Generation that energy can be transformed into matter.  Has technology eliminated the human aspects of extractive industries?  Should we conclude that there is no need for manufacturing or processing, that everything comes down to the creation of energy?  The potential dark sides of this human utopia were rarely explored; such judgments were reserved for the alien societies that the Enterprise discovered.

What is Star Trek now?  It is a pair of socks.  It is a thong to be worn prior to some awkward sex.  It is a key chain.  It is a brand that doesn’t answer — or even ask — interesting philosophical questions, but instead shills coffee mugs and t-shirts.

So, this year on May 1, we must confess that we simply don’t have the energy at the moment to make as grandiose of a statement as we did on May 1, 2011, and May 1, 2012.  Instead, let us just reiterate one point from our May Day statement last year:

No matter how good your argument might be, you will never convince the Pope to become an atheist.  All you can do is raise an army and prepare for an attack on Rome.

Though we grow weary from time to time, the Year of Work continues forward.  Tense as our muscles may be, we must press ahead.  And you can always expect more from your scientific editors than you ever can from something like the Baltimore Free School.

In other words, we’re ruthless proletarian scientists, working on the world-historical stage, who make tactical decisions under given circumstances.

One more brief reminder.  We already talked about the tenth anniversary of “Shock and Awe” so we’d also like to reiterate that it was exactly ten years ago today that the following event occurred:

Happy International Workers’ Day!

The PFLP on May 1

Oh, and let’s give a shout out to the good folks over at the Communist Party of Oklahoma and the Prole Center!

There exists in Baltimore City a project called the Baltimore Free School.  In a nutshell, the idea is to set up a non-traditional and somewhat informal school where volunteers teach courses on whatever it is that they may have special knowledge about, and anyone remotely interested in any of the available topics is free to come as a student.  All free of charge.  Any school, naturally, needs a physical space in which to hold classes, and indeed one does exist, at 516 W. Franklin St., Baltimore, MD.  The school is loosely associated with a well known (at least locally) anarcho-syndaicalist-leaning bookstore and coffee house called Red Emma’s, which is located about a 15 minute walk away at 800 Saint Paul St.  (Northwest corner of St. Paul and Madison, ground floor, for those familiar with the area.)  Red Emma’s itself is affiliated with the IWW, which — mirabile dictu — does still exist, although in its present form the IWW (at least on a U.S.-wide level) is full of just as many far-right-wing anarchists as it is of left-leaning anarchists.  The IWW, in fact, itself played a shadowy but nevertheless observable role in turning the local Occupy movement in Tulsa, Oklahoma into little more than a Ron Paul front organization.  This story, back in 2011 and 2012, was covered in great detail by Selecting Stones here, here, and here.

But back to Baltimore.  The Free School began in 2009, and at the time the City Paper [Baltimore] did an article on the project.  One of the school’s initial organizers, Kate Khatib, was quoted, “The idea behind this thing would be that it would be open for all those people to come in and share the knowledge that they have, be it something very broad or something very small and very artsy, a real range of stuff.”  Let us just say, first and all, that this sounds like a wonderful idea.  Start small, and try to grow: It’s a tried-and-true method.  However, the scientific editors of Selecting Stones have recently discovered that, four years later (i.e., 80% of the way through a normal Five Year Plan), the Baltimore Free School has consistently failed to perform any of its duties.

To protect the innocent and those who wish to remain on the good side of those involved with Red Emma’s and the Baltimore Free School, no names will be mentioned here.  This is also the reason why, for this particular article, we took the extraordinary step of having three separate members of our scientific editorial team put the piece together.  It protects our unusual pledge to anonymity on this particular matter.

So, with all that said, allow us to state a few facts, and to explain why we are writing this article in the first place, and why we have chosen to ruthlessly criticize the Baltimore Free School.  On March 27 at 7:00pm EDT, the Free School was supposed to host an event called the “Marxist-Labor Forum”.  One of the scientific editors of Selecting Stones (who shall remain unnamed) attempted to attend this event.  She or he arrived precisely on time only to discover that the building was locked and the event was, in fact, non-existent.  Others were also present, standing on Franklin St., attempting to attend this event, and through a contact we learned that, in fact, the previous instance of the “Marxist-Labor Forum” announced for February 27, 2013, had also simply not taken place.  The building was locked, and the lights were off, even though the people who truly wanted to be there were standing there, in the right place, just off of Paca St.  No notice had been placed on the door, nor on the website.  Nothing at all.  Everyone went home, disappointed.

Additionally, it has come to our attention through an anonymous source that such occurrences — or, rather, non-occurrences — are, in truth, the defining feature of the Baltimore Free School, both for those who are trying to give up their own time to teach a class, and for those who simply want to play the role of student.  What a pathetic waste of time for everyone involved (or not-involved, as seems to be more commonly the case)!

The scientific editors of Selecting Stones are well known for our propensity to ruthlessly diss our enemies when the time and circumstances call for it.  We honestly do not want the Baltimore Free School to become yet another one of our countless enemies, but come on, people!  Get your shit together!  The idea behind the Baltimore Free School has so much potential, and yet it all goes completely to waste.  Why?  We honestly can’t say with absolute 100% empirical certainty, but — to use a popular number these days — we’re 99% sure that it’s because the whole operation is run by a bunch of lazy Faux-Leftists.

The only existing photographs of the surface of Venus come to us courtesy of Soviet space and computer technology, through their Venera program. Above is a famous image transmitted to Earth (specifically, the U.S.S.R.) by Venera 13. We of course know that, at the tail end of the twentieth century, capitalism won a temporary victory over socialism, and that the accomplishments of the Mars Science Laboratory have been incredible nonetheless, even if the Martian atmosphere is a piece of cake compared to the Venetian one. All that withstanding, though, isn’t it still Yuri Gagarin who deserves all the credit? Wouldn’t this be a good topic for a free class in Charm City? And if all these scientific advances are possible, then why is it so hard to get someone to bring the key to 516 W. Franklin Street when a meeting is scheduled?

Really, we mean it: We don’t want to be enemies with you folks over at the Baltimore Free School.  We want to be friends.  Give us a holler sometime.  Contact information is on our “About” link.  And frankly, if scheduling is really the crux of your problem, then we’d just like to say that, here at Selecting Stones, we’ve had great success with the free Windows Calendar application that came with the pirated Russian version of Windows Vista that we use for most of our work.  Still works like a charm, even on a seven-year-old AMD Athlon64 processor (that, incidentally, was created under the capitalist mode of production, believe it or not).

Trust us, here at Selecting Stones, we definitely know what it’s like to work with the absolute minimum resources possible, and we respect the fact that the Baltimore Free School is in an analogous situation.  However, we scientific editors still manage to produce Superhuman Feats of Work and Labor on a relatively routine basis, even though we’ll be the first to admit that our output comes in severe ebbs and flows at times.  There is a simple reason for our regrettable inconsistency: The scientific editors of Selecting Stones are wage laborers who are forced at threat of starvation to give up most of their labor-time and surplus-value to their respective employers.

In other words, Selecting Stones is produced entirely with the small amount of labor-power leftover at the end of its scientific editors’ and other writers’ limited 24-hour days.  Nevertheless, amidst these terrible conditions, we announced the Year of Work for 2013, which — we will freely say — could have been going better than it is.  But look back at our output since we announced the Year of Work, and we dare anyone to call us “lazy” or “armchair leftists” or whatever the fuck any self-described “anarcho-syndacalists” are saying about those of us who are in it for real.  And no, we’re not fooled by your pleas to “direct action”.  (Upon what are you acting?  If that question remains unanswered, then how can there be a unity of subject and object?)

World-Historical 24/7, bitches!

In the third presidential debate between Barack H. Obama and W. Mitt Romney sometime last autumn, an Internet meme popped up within minutes after Obama casually mentioned that the current budget of the Department of Defense for “horses and bayonets” is lower than it has been in the past.  If you want to see World-Spirit on Horseback, specifically, then don’t come to Selecting Stones.  But if you want the concrete totality of all material relations of production in society as a whole to ruthlessly smack you over the head, leaving you with nothing left but raw, vicious class-consciousness, then you’re in the right place.

Fuckin’ hippies!  Y’all know it’s true: Ruthless Communism Is Necessary.

As the manhunt for the FBI’s most wanted criminal finally came to an end Friday evening, the free press inevitably began asking questions – not really in order to get to the bottom of things (sadly this has increasingly become the duty and responsibility of Twitter) – but to remind us that freedom, the wicked feature of the freedom of press, creates the possibility of evil, and is therefore evil.

What motivated the Tsarnaev brothers to bomb the Boston Marathon?  Was it just an amateurish job committed by disaffected immigrants or was it part of a larger international conspiracy?  Was it Islamic fundamentalism or Chechen anarchism?  Was poor Dzhokhar (age 19) under the manipulative powers of his older brother Tamerlan (age 26) or were they both heartless anti-American killers to the core?  What, if anything, was their end game in all this madness?  Now in custody, how many fingernails does Dzhokhar have left?  Why did American intelligence agents fail to heed the warning supposedly issued two years ago by an unspecified foreign ally about Tamerlan’s burgeoning radicalism?  Why does the whole world continue to simultaneously both love and hate America so much?

“What a fine time that was when the earth, like a respectable townsman, still sat in the centre of the universe, calmly smoked its clay pipe, and did not even have to put on the light for itself, since the sun, moon and stars like so many obedient night lamps and ‘fine things’ revolved around it.”

In the wise and simple language of the preface to one of his lesser known works, Studies in European Realism, György Lukács reminds both author and reader alike why the teachings of Marx and Engels still confront us with such a clear, sharp light which in the eyes of so many people seems cold and harsh, a point of view in violent “totalitarian” opposition to the literary and philosophical trends which are still very much at the fore in the irrational and mystic fog of today’s world.  For the driving force behind Marxism – the worldview proudly and unapologetically espoused by the scientific editors of Selecting Stones – is the ongoing search for the material roots of every phenomenon, the attempt to regard them in their historical connections and movement and to ascertain the laws of such movement in order to demonstrate its development from root to flower.  Why does the transition to a rational (i.e., humane) understanding of world history necessarily and inevitably begin with disillusionment and failure to accept the truth (i.e., to refuse to live and act in accordance with science)?

According to prevailing standards, the good press is impotent, while the bad press, on the other hand, is omnipotent, which amounts to saying nothing more except that life ends with death.

Be vigilant.  If you’re concerned with the proletariat, stay the hell away from marathons.  If you happen to live in the great city of Boston, please keep your eyes open for other conspiracies that may be currently under operation.

In the general atmosphere of this prevailing reign of stupidity itself that we are now witnessing everywhere around us on a universal scale, the clouds of mysticism have once again surrounded all phenomena of art and culture with a poetic color and warmth, supposedly creating an “interesting” aura around them. As many of our readers are undoubtedly already aware, the scientific editors here at Selecting Stones are ruthlessly opposed to every variety and manifestation of any kind of myth of the illusory good, especially the myth of a contradictionless, smoothly evolutionary advance towards “enlightened awareness”. Originally sprouting from the “countercultural” castration of the 1960s which spread across the lands of the western puppet democracies like syphilis once spread from the tribes of Native Americans back in the sixteenth century, this illusory New Age myth of a magical evolutionary advancement towards “enlightened awareness” is now reaching absolutely feverish proportions in such magnetic poles of world-historical confusion as Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, California, Boulder, Colorado, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the entire state of Vermont. But in fact, the growing western fascination with eastern mysticism is fundamentally no different than the historical evolution once justly derided by Hegel in his analysis of the weak form of argumentation found in Diderot’s masterpiece, The Nephew of Rameau, which also speculatively postulated the existence of another and a better truth poetically opposed to the squalid reality of capitalist development, back when capitalism was still merely a rising world-historical force struggling to overcome the vestiges of feudalism. Hegel in particular was able to see with especial clarity that the voice of historical evolution is heard not in the isolated portrayal of what is good, but in the negative, i.e., in what is evil and perverse. To quote the great proletarian philosopher György Lukács, who unlike the cowards of the Frankfurt School sought refuge from fascism in Moscow, as opposed to places like London and New York, which became the new Berlins following the military defeat of Hitler and his henchmen: “The content of what the spirit says of and about itself is thus a complete inversion of all concepts and realities, a general deception of itself and all others and hence the shamelessness with which the deception is proclaimed is the greatest truth.”

Thankfully, here in the west, only a very select few are audacious, stupid, and egotistical enough to openly proclaim themselves to be living godmen, on account of their Catholic upbringings (which only a ruthless communist can totally escape without any residual traces), or on account of the inescapable sinfulness and badness that they secretly (and therefore all the more stubbornly) believe to be natural and inherent to anyone who is born with white skin and European facial features. Nevertheless, the New Age myth of enlightened awareness is still continuing to gain momentum amongst the bottom ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie thanks to criminally pompous and deviant imposters like Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen, who theorize enlightenment as something which no longer finds realization only amongst a very unique and select handful of reincarnated yogis and swamis who have gradually achieved nirvana over the course of many lifetimes on the Indian subcontinent (a subcontinent most commonly known for its infamously inhumane caste system and indescribable wretchedness such that clever banana-stealing monkeys typically enjoy much higher living standards than the entire class of “untouchable” human beings!). Yet even as these imposters tend to theorize enlightenment as something achieved collectively, rather than individually, the tendency is very much still alive and strong amongst westerners with no self-esteem or pride – people who are ashamed to be human beings! – to view the supposedly enlightened states of consciousness of Hindu swamis and gurus as altogether unattainable achievements for lowly white-skinned westerners, who mistakenly see themselves as having been reared from birth in the philosophy of materialism, when in fact they’ve actually been profoundly steeped all along in various forms of idealism (even the investment bankers are idealists!), as if a white person’s uncontrollable fetishism for Louis Vuitton purses and flashy cars and other things that make poor people jealous and envious means that for some reason that they don’t nevertheless subscribe to a worldview that is profoundly idealist in every conceivable sense.

Of course, the new irrational mysticism that is currently being espoused by self-proclaimed New Age godmen such as Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen does represent a marked departure from the oriental feudalistic order, in which enlightenment used to be a very special form of property monopolized by a tight-knit caste of gurus, lamas, and monks situated at the top of the social hierarchy. Shaving their heads bald and presenting themselves as clean-cut and financially successful Americans so as to pose as real scientists, Wilber, Cohen, and other hack authors oftentimes like to cite some pseudoscientific research published a few decades ago about an experiment involving monkeys forced to live on some small island, who over time reached some tipping point at which knowledge that initially belonged to only a small number of monkeys suddenly reached a magical threshold and then metaphysically became universally shared knowledge – in other words, once enough monkeys achieve enlightenment, then suddenly everything else in the world somehow magically falls into place, and every monkey becomes enlightened. This of course is why nearly every state of the United States of America is now littered with meditation centers where someone is responsible for meditating in special guard towers every hour of the day, in addition to their 24/7 Christianized knockoffs such as the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri. It goes without saying that Wilber, Cohen, and other New Age godmen all pretend to be too humble to actually call themselves godmen. Instead, they write dozens of books regurgitating the same two or three ideas in a million different ways, heavily insinuating on page after page that they are in fact godmen, or at least something roughly equivalent to godmen. Then, in public appearances, they passive-aggressively encourage their devotees to shower them with such compliments, which they will admit is flattering but then transparently pretend to dismiss with a playful laugh, thereby sending the message loud and clear to their slavish devotees that such silly complements are not technically necessary, but are nevertheless entirely welcome. But actually such fawning worship is in fact very much technically necessary for the biological subsistence of these godmen, because whenever the flattery stops flowing from the lips of their devotees, the godmen immediately crumble into a million pieces and then start to publicly attack their ex-devotees with letters proclaiming their own enlightenment and integrity, as seen in Andrew Cohen’s letter to his critics, “A Declaration of Integrity”.

Ken Wilber is either free-balling it, or possibly wearing a thong. Thankfully, according to famed Indian spiritual guide Baba Ramdev, homosexuality can be cured with yoga. (See below.)

The forces of modern irrationalism in the United States have reached such a point that now entire communities of enlightened New Age hippies, with “old souls” of course, openly and proudly believe that they have been called to election (i.e., ensured of their eternal salvation) as “indigo children” and “crystal children”. These chosen spiritual warriors make it their metaphysical mission on this planet to save a hopelessly evil world from the impending doom of World War Three, and indeed this “mission” is taken to be so immensely important that the word “epic” does not even begin to describe it – there is simply no word for it! They intend to prevent the complete and total destruction of the world and all consciousness primarily by means of such ridiculous excuses for tactics as mass meditation, yoga, peyote vision quests, and mystical emissions of “positive vibrations” achieved by listening to reggae music. Other methods include magical acts of balancing bad karma and good karma (i.e., driving Toyota Priuses, buying carbon offsets, or making mandala sand decorations), tree hugging (both literal and figurative), and engaging in sacred rituals involving chanting and dancing around fires (occurring both in the suburbs and in the very same woods of Virginia where locals are still engaged in making top-notch moonshine … trust your scientific editors, it’ll really get you fucked up!). In other words, they do anything their imagination allows, so long as instructions are clearly printed in the endless tomes of sheer nonsense that pass for literature just because they’re being sold in New Age bookstores.

Specifically, these hallucinogenic rituals, group orgies, and sacred chants are said to have been passed down for sometimes even hundreds of thousands of years in sacred lineages of white and black magic shamans whose spiritual authenticity as enlightened beings whom we should bow down before and blindly worship as unquestioning devotees depends entirely on the color of their skin and the shape of their eyes (namely, they must be either Siberian, Native American, Peruvian, or Amazonian jungle tribesmen). In fact, this basically Vedantic philosophy – a prime example of which is Andrew Cohen’s blurred and essentially Heiddegarian theory of “Evolutionary Enlightenment” (a path that leads directly to Hitler, just as Nietzsche’s philosophy once did, although Cohen himself is obviously too enlightened to understand how or why this is true) – is very much reminiscent of the Calvinist theology currently being practiced by the Westboro Baptist Church, except that Calvinists are at least humble and intelligent enough, and have enough integrity, to frankly admit that their own personal calling in election is uncertain and unknowable by man. Unlike Calvinists, however, New Age believers, whose pomposity knows no bounds, make no secret of the fact that they stand to inherit the entire world, indeed the entire universe. They are indeed pompous enough to believe that the genocide on a global scale that will have to take place before this New Age Garden of Eden can become a concrete possibility will be committed for them by armies of supernatural beings – maybe God, maybe Krishna, maybe a swarm of bodhisattvas both in the form of living flesh and in the form of invisible wrathful deities (such as the eight dharmapalas of the bon religion upon which much of Tibetan Buddhism is based).

Buddhism and Hinduism in particular, as we have argued before, are guilty of the crime of deluding the masses into believing that there is indeed such a thing a spiritual enlightenment, and that it is attained in degrees of ever-higher stages of consciousness. Their cheap New Age knockoffs are also guilty of shamelessly maintaining the bald-faced lie that an enlightened civilization can indeed be attained in the realm of practice here on earth if only the rapaciousness of capitalism, which not even the commodity-producer known as the 14^th Dalai Lama can escape or resist, could somehow be fused together and synthesized with the enlightened spiritual teachings of eastern civilization. The theory goes that the capitalist mode of production, in order to restore that civilization which once existed in the lost city of Atlantis, needs only those same esoteric teachings of those same swamis, gurus, lamas, and bodhisattvas that once transformed that silly little boy band known as the Beatles into the most pompous and insufferable musical group of all times. But these, of course, are groundless illusions.

For the simple fact of the matter is that the great masses of individuals who belong to the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois classes simply cannot and will not accept the cold hard truth of the fact that life under monopoly capitalism has absolutely no meaning at all, none whatsoever beyond the endless accumulation of personal property and wealth which constitute the universal foundation of not just family life, but also indeed the very foundation of modern spirituality in every form. (According to our sources, pilgrimages to enlightened Shangri La’s such as India, Bhutan, Nepal and the so-called shamanistic villages of the Amazonian rainforests currently cost western enlightenment-seekers somewhere in the range of many thousands of US dollars). While the orthodox Marxist theory and practice espoused by the scientific editors here at Selecting Stones (which costs our readers nothing) does not pretend to comprise a cookery book providing recipes for literally every phenomenon and historical period – as, for instance, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the rest of the world religions claim to do – it does indeed afford our readers with this one final certainty: The development of mankind does not and cannot finally lead to nothing and nowhere.

On that note, then, we would like to now turn our attention to the following list of the world’s richest Hindu gurus who are still incarnated in the living flesh on this hopelessly upside down and crisis-prone planet of ours, which sooner or later could very well become the next Easter Island (except on a much larger scale) unless the working class as a whole finally decides to do away with the reactionary plagues of idealism and religion, and instead finally starts to organize itself, to take matters into its own hands, and to make sure that future generations of happy children will one day be able to live in harmony not only with nature, but much more importantly, in harmony with Reason, i.e., in harmony with their species-being.

After Selecting Stones officially came into being as a minor internet phenomenon two years ago in February 2011, the entire committee of scientific editors, speaking as a whole, formally announced that it would be the primary task of this blog to enable the world to clarify its own consciousness and awaken it from the recurring dreams that it has been having about itself.  (We say “recurring” because 99% of the time these dreams are found to be nothing more than new theatrical reenactments of the heroic and seemingly other-worldly historical actions of monotheism’s fire and brimstone law-givers: specifically Moses, Muhammad, and Martin Luther).  Pleading guilty to ruthless Marxism (i.e., to Science and Reason), we promised to explain to the world the root meanings of its actions and desires.  In the beginning, many of our readers, especially the servile academic ones with whom we were unfortunately still acquainted in various personal and professional capacities, found our language to be grandiose and off-putting, which of course they did not hesitate to take great pleasure in attacking and sometimes even ridiculing, as if an expensive Ivy League education is honestly something to be proud of.  Others, admittedly just a very small handful of individuals at first, somehow managed to appreciate that we do for the most part deliver exactly what we promise — of course with some empirical and theoretical mistakes being inevitably committed here and there along the way.  This of course is why we place so much emphasis on self-criticism and revolutionary integrity, even if it means reevaluating where we stand in our ambitious five-year plans, and even if it forces us to completely change our personal opinions regarding our own progress.  The Soviet Union and its people once accomplished some of the most truly mind-boggling and impressive achievements in the entire history of human civilization (i.e., overthrowing the tsar only to find themselves faced with a war against the whole world, which they then in turn somehow proceeded to win; becoming an unstoppable industrial force in just twenty years; sending human beings into space for the very first time; introducing the world to class conscious symphonies trained to perform without any superfluous conductors who just stand at the head and waive their arms around like money-grabbing factory owners eager to get their hands on the surplus-value produced by the workers — even when conductors returned, compare Mravinsky’s dutiful management of Shostakovich’s 8th with the Leningrad Philharmonic to any of the ridiculous bullshit taking place in front of the orchestras of capitalist North America or Japan).  But now Russia is nothing but a tragic wasteland of the purest forms of human exploitation, almost an entire country reduced to alcoholism and krokodil addiction, a place where a relatively small handful of men exercising political power for some reason just can’t seem to find enough ways to flex their muscles (men who take steroids are left in the end with shriveled testicles, after all), so they must constantly remind all their slaves that they are no better than yesterday’s serfs (i.e., that they are totally expendable; that their lives have absolutely no value or worth … and that they therefore can and will be recklessly squandered in whatever ways the leaders see fit).

With two years of ruthlessly criticizing everything that exists under our belts, we now find ourselves in the unfortunate position of speaking to you as if we were reciting some eulogy at a funeral, because in fact we might as well be lamenting the deaths of those two rising stars who in a very different time and in a very different place once came up with the lyrics and music video for “They Schools,” which used to both impress and inspire us with its sheer intellectual brilliance and unconquerable revolutionary spirit.  Did you honestly think that the scientific editors of Selecting Stones didn’t also have to go through awkward adolescent phases of feverishly studying Malcolm (as told by Alex Haley) in hopes that it might somehow magically clean out certain parts of our brains (namely, the parts conditioned by the white devil)?  It is therefore with an utterly sincere and profound sense of sadness deep within our breasts that we now report to you the downright horrifying (but very much long-awaited) news that the hip-hop duo known as Dead Prez has officially given up on everything that it once claimed to stand for and represent.  No longer interested in dirtying their hands with the tireless and thankless grunt work of trying to somehow make sense out of all the endless complexities and confusing contradictions lying at the heart of the most pressing political questions haunting every single one of us (issues that haunt anyone who plans to still be alive twenty years from now), the rappers who call themselves Stic.man and M-1 have now formally announced to the rest of the world that they are now no longer willing (or even strong enough) to stand on the side of social progress and revolutionary change.  In other words, they have stabbed the proletariat directly in the back, but thankfully the proletarian class is already very much used to being stabbed in the back with the knives of petty-bourgeois pseudo-revolutionaries and opportunistic anarchists coming from every direction.  Instead of performing their duties, the duo are now choosing to prostitute themselves as spiritual warriors, the worst kind of peace lovers:

• people who can’t even really be described as truly knowing what peace is or what it means or why it’s desirable;
• people with egos so enormous that they actually dare to imagine themselves as being enlightened bodhisattvas who could have simply decided to cash in on all their lifetimes of pure innocence and sheer good-heartedness;
• people who do indeed believe that they’ve already earned their places in nirvana (whatever the fuck that is), but who instead pretend that they’ve selflessly chosen to come back to earth one more time in order to fight (in some ill-defined spiritual sense) for everything that’s good;
• people who claim to teach the rest of us sufferers how to no longer care about anything at all, least of all human life;
• people who, all the while, imagine the rest of us mere mortals to be so stupid that we cannot even begin to comprehend our own inescapable state of misery;
• that is all to say, people who come to teach us how to be nihilists, which, as far as we’re concerned here at Selecting Stones, is one barely discernible shade of gray away from being a card-holding member of the Nazi Party.

Should we forgive them for the fact that they know not what they do, like Jesus supposedly would have done?  Absolutely not!

In a recently released music video for a song called “No Way As The Way” (a phrase which quite revealingly makes absolutely no sense whatsoever), Stic.man pompously brags that his mind is now a Buddhist temple, which of course would perfectly explain why he’s descended all the way down to the level of wearing a cutoff t-shirt (these of course being much better suited for exercise than regular t-shirts) adorned with what is an almost perfectly identical replica of the official war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War.  Apparently Stic.man never had to learn about the fascist union between the Nazis and the Japanese during World War Two on account of his “principled” rejection of white man lies.  But seriously, what kind of sick political message is this dimwitted vegetarian even trying to send out here with what amounts by any stretch of the imagination to an undeniably fascist fashion statement?  Of course, since he has opted not to surround himself with people who will provide him with honest feedback, we can only assume that Stic.man probably indulges himself in the belief that this utterly vacuous metaphor about his mind which is now a Buddhist temple somehow manages to convey a thought or sentiment that is meaningful and profound — such is the spiritual mystery of blindly irrational leaps into the metaphysical illusions of monopoly capitalism.  At what exact point in their artistic development degeneration did Dead Prez officially become a confused little sheep who mistakes himself and is thus mistaken for a wolf?  Did Dead Prez ever actually have anything truly important or revolutionary to say, or have they always just been two hopelessly confused rappers lost in the labyrinth of hip-hop’s philosophical struggles against the shadows of reality?  From the very beginning of this blog, the scientific editors of Selecting Stones have exhibited a keen critical interest in the music of Dead Prez, not because we’ve been especially impressed by two non-combatants who won’t stop writing songs about how they’re always training and preparing themselves for combat, but simply because, as Joseph Dietzgen once put it, “Sometimes in order to follow the true path, without being led astray by all the religious and philosophical gibberish, it is necessary to study the falsest of all false paths, philosophy.”  But now the products of these two “socially conscious” brains have really gotten out of their hands: an ironic ending for a musical group that used to stress how a mind is a terrible thing to waste (perhaps they should consider going back to high school for a year or two in order to see if they can’t manage to distill a revolutionary lesson or two from all those bald-faced white men’s lies… they really aren’t the worst teachers when you get right down to it).  Yet as much as the scientific editors of Selecting Stones would love to start mercilessly beating M-1 and Stic.man over the head with hours upon hours of scientifically arranged lectures on world history beginning with the first Stone Age man’s primitive selection of tools, the committee of scientific editors has officially finished convening for the purpose of deciding what needs to be done in response to the evolving Dead Prez menace, and the votes of the board members have already been tabulated.  Because Dead Prez has become so profoundly and undeniably conservative (there’s simply no other way to put this), we consider it our duty as ruthless communists to declare their existence as human beings null and void.  This isn’t exactly the same thing as issuing a death-fatwa, but it does mean that Dead Prez has officially become as American as apple pie.  At least the Westboro Baptist Church was clever enough to perceive that the New Testament is full of people who start out on the right path, but then fall away.  Although it might be considered a shame that M-1 and Stic.man never managed to positively identify what exactly they were “training” so hard to defeat during all those years of training for a civil war that never actually materialized, there is simply no other choice but to start monitoring their activities and artistic creations like we do with every other enemy.  M-1 and Stic.man have shamelessly duped themselves into believing that what was once a “revolutionary but gangster” struggle for African liberation and freedom was really just an internal spiritual struggle against their own human natures.  At least there was some underlying kernel of historical truth in Malcolm’s brash tendency to simply blame everything on the white devil.  A conversion to Buddhism as naive and juvenile as this one can only be described as another noteworthy victory for monopoly capitalism, whose ideologists can only offer a purely negative answer to all present-day questions: “At all costs no communism, anything but that; and if we have no positive ideal with which to oppose it, then let nothingness be the ideal.”  Nothingness is apparently the only thing that matters to Dead Prez anymore.

Why is it so difficult for human beings to just accept the fact that they are not and simply cannot be immortal?

The scientific editors of Selecting Stones, had they been scientific editors at the time in 2003, would have said, “This unchecked aggression will not stand!”  But remember the Ledeen Doctrine: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

For your viewing pleasure, this is what was happening on NBC News exactly one decade ago:

Click to be redirected to YouTube

So what are people saying today, on the tenth anniversary of this unforgivable tragedy that the Americans unleashed on the people of Iraq simply because, twenty years before, their dictator had been a Cold War flip-flopper?  Nothing, absolutely nothing.  Is it not a bit shocking and indeed awe-inspiring that Americans seem to have already forgotten about the Iraq War?  Really?!?  Does this not even deserve a tweet?  The war, after all, only ended a couple of years ago, well into the Obama era.

Indeed, the 2000s were a throwaway decade like no other, a topic already explored by the scientific editors of Selecting Stones in a recent experiment in video.  But, come on!  Are you really that keen to believe that nothing existed prior to the release of Kim Kardashian’s sex tape?

In spite of the massive quantities of Adderall and Ritalin that they are known to consume, it is nonetheless still true that Americans have notoriously short attention spans.  Maybe, for the sake of their thinking caps, the Americans really do need the Chinese to come and liberate them, just as the Americans supposedly liberated the Iraqis, except that with the Chinese in charge, it would actually mean something.  Now, that would be some Change We Can Believe In™!

Coming up on International Workers’ Day 2013, the tenth anniversary of this: