I'm afraid I must agree with those who feel Salon is pandering to some amorphous Big Brother out there in what's left of the independent media.

I will repeat myself because I have great conviction of the necessity of getting this information out into the public domain.

Our intelligence agencies, and the intelligence agencies of other countries, use child sex and child pornography to blackmail influential individuals both inside and outside of government. The objective is to control the behavior of the target, or to identify the target as someone who can not be blackmailed.

If you can't be blackmailed, you can't get high enough clearance to be a mover and a shaker in a world turned upside down.

Bush Sr. has been accused by the victims in the Nebraska child porn scandal as a pedofile.

Is it any wonder that Bush Jr. is so messed up in the head? Ever wonder why your local Congressperson or Senator repeatedly rolls over for seemingly no good reason at all on issues that favor the present administration?

Look no further. Children are easily traumatized and easily manipulated by pedofiles and pimps who are skilled in basic child psychology. Want a perfect weapon for your country? Train an orphan to jump into someone's lap and then photograph what happens next.

Grow up, America. The people you have allowed to take over your government are scumbags.

I have a friend who was a thorasic surgeon. And a very good one. Arguably a very well-educated man.

At retirement, his need to continue teaching, garnering attention, and a host of other human needs to be sure, lead him into multilevel marketing pursuits. I've heard my friend speak about his spiritual beliefs in the past and I watched him take the bait offered by people who want financial success to be some sort of indicator of spiritual health and well-being.

My friend dodged a bullet from these folks. Their shadow pyramid finally came into focus and the facts of basic marketing had their day.

Then my friend found himself fascinated by the notion of mining gold out of the sewage of major metropolitan cities. His "connection" into this cutting edge technological achievement fleeced him for the rest of his retirement before my friend realized just how ridiculous and foolish an idea this investment "opportunity" was.

My contention is that if my friend had not been raised in an environment that encouraged and nurtured magical thinking as a major component of daily life he would have kept his critical thinking skills engaged long enough to walk away from people who meant him no good.

Magical thinking? But isn't it fun to watch children enjoy our faery tales about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus? Where's the harm in any of this?

Not alot of harm in these myths because eventually we teach our children the truth about these stories. The harm comes from respected authorities in the community who actually believe (and proudly trumpet) that dead people walk around in physical form post-mortem. That somehow a God who has quite obviously gone to some trouble to point out the temporary nature of our tenure here would construct a reality where the thing which often separates us from Him would be His reward to us for engaging in saintly, or highly desireable, behavior.

"That's right my beloved children; I love you so much that I am going to torment you with more limitation, more death and more conflict than you could ever wish for in a thousand life times." This is the God that contemporary Christians get away with teaching innocent, naive children. And one of the "benefits" of this knee-buckling adherrence to utter crap is that a significant percentage of worthy people will continue to be vulnerable to one con or another that relates to cause and associated effects.

There can be great beauty in rituals and in the ethical systems those rituals are intended to support. But there is something terribly rotten about encouraging a large number of one's fellows to believe that wine becomes blood and wafers become the actual body of someone who was brutally assassinated by a cadre of amoral rich people 2,000 years ago. In fact, it's quite hateful. Dress up your hatred if you want to, if you must, but don't expect, rely, or insist that the human species needs to be significantly or even partially lead by individuals who have been hypnotized into buying into this baloney.

The ACTUAL effect of this sublimated hatred has been the wars and rumors of wars fought in defense of our culturally selected version of the Easter Bunny. Drone on and on about how wunnerful contemporary Christianity's promise is...but it is just another Easter Bunny, a myth made dangerous because we are expecting sane adults to believe in its literal truth.

What things REALLY are are a function of where they come from; causes are known by their effects. If Christianity in any form was ever about more than the ingratiating of one set of human egoes over another, we would be able to see that in its history. Instead, we see that very quickly after the revelation of the gospels took place, those who tried to capture the actual quality of the information provided were declared "heretics" by those who wanted to "organize" their new religion, and rewrite that religion in their own image and likeness.

Christianity is just one example of this very human process of self deception and self destruction. No spiritual tradition engaged in by humans is immune from it and most of them suffer because of it.

Reality is about finding a map of truth that matches the data and explains more about humankind's relationship to itself and its environment. The truth will set us all free.

But first the truth is really going to piss us all off.