Michael Langston

Who I'd like to meet:

To My Unseen Love

I've never looked upon your face;
   I do not know your name;
And in some unseen distant place,
   I know you will remain
Forever kept apart from me
   Across both space and time;
I hope someday these words you'll see,
   By chance that you will find
Within this old and worn-out book
   The fact so plain and true:
That all my life in vain I looked...
   In vain I searched for you.

I'd sit beneath the moonlit skies
   In summer's warm night air
And dream of looking in your eyes,
   Of you beside me there;
And as I walked, in fantasy
   I gently held your hand,
But in the moonlight next to me:
   No one there did stand;
And if I could, I would have flown
   Across all time and space
And left behind my world I'd known...
   And you, my love, embrace.

Michael Langston

The Wind Speaks Your Name

How is it I know that you are the one,
That heaven-sent love and you are the same?
I feel your touch in the warm autumn sun
And hear the wind softly whisper your name.
I sense your sweet presence around me like air
And breath your dear spirit into my lost heart
Where it has now become such a part of me there
That no earthly distance can keep us apart.
Every soft breeze that now brushes my face,
Every warm ray that now shines from above
Brings with it your loving and caring embrace
And tells of your precious and undying love.
   The wind, the sunlight, and air all agree!
   There is no one on earth but you for me.

Michael Langston

art-music-poetry.com
911verses.com
911underground.com

Natural Eating

When was the last time you thought seriously about your diet? If you're like most busy people in our harried society, you probably don't have time to give it much thought. We tend to read the morning paper as we crunch on our cereal, chat with our friends while nibbling french fries for lunch, and watch TV in the evening while gobbling our pizza. It seems that our food is the last thing we think about in the midst of all of life's other distractions.

But are we overlooking a fundamental truth about the nature of our diet that could enhance our life beyond our wildest expectations? Sometimes the hardest thing to see is the thing that's most obvious, and so it is with the truth about our diet.

Cultural conditioning, more than any other factor, is the force that determines the foods that we eat. We eat as we do primarily because we've grown up eating that way, and when we see others in our society eating a certain way, we tend to eat as they do. We eat cereal for breakfast because we were given it as children and we saw it advertised while watching our Saturday morning cartoons. We eat french fries for lunch because that's what we saw all our teenage friends eating. We eat pizza for dinner because it's easy to have it delivered and we grew up eating and liking it. We have no better reasons than these for eating as we do. In making all these important nutritional choices, we simply follow the lead of our popular culture.

But in the process of thoughtlessly swallowing what the food industry provides us and failing to make our own true decisions, is it possible that we're being dangerously led astray by forces that are acting against our best interest?

Consider for a moment the purpose of food and consider as well what we're commonly eating. The purpose of food is not merely to provide pleasure, although eating can certainly be a pleasurable experience and there is nothing wrong with that pleasure if it's enjoyed in the right context (in the context of good nutrition). Although too easily forgotten in our hedonistic culture, food's principal purpose is to provide nourishment and sustenance.

But are the foods that we're commonly eating performing this function? Is that breakfast cereal, french fries, and pizza doing its job of nourishing the body, or is it only supplying us with a transient dose of nutritionless pleasure?

To answer this question and to assess the quality of the food we are eating, we need to think about the fundamental nature of food itself. What exactly is food, anyway? We must look to the natural world for the answer.

Food is the tissue of living organisms that animals (and some plants) ingest in order to acquire raw materials or energy for survival. This ingested tissue can be of either plant or animal origin, depending on whether the ingesting organism is a herbivore or a carnivore. The fact that this ingested tissue was once itself alive implies that all the substances needed for life are present in precisely the right amounts. This ensures that the organism ingesting this tissue will be properly nourished.

This is an extremely critical point and bears repeating. Plant and animal tissue (as food), because it was once alive, contains all the substances necessary to sustain and nourish other life. It is inherently nutritious and life-giving. This is what is meant when we say that a food is natural. It is derived from nature in an unaltered state.

There's another aspect of the ideal of "naturalness" as it relates to our food that's equally important. One must also consider the type of food most appropriate for any given species. Grass, for example, though natural in one sense, is not a natural food for a lion, just as meat is not natural for cattle. In order to determine what's natural for humans, we must look back in time to our hunter-gatherer past.

The term "hunter-gatherer" tells us a lot about what our ancient ancestors ate over millions of years, and thus tells us which foods are natural for humans. Ancient hunter-gatherers were omnivores, in the sense that they ate foods from both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. They both hunted wild animals and gathered wild plants.

But they were not omnivores in the sense that they ate absolutely everything. Hunter-gatherers ate meats, fruits, and vegetables, but they had no grains, beans, or dairy products, which were introduced into our diet after the invention of agriculture. And, even more significantly, they ate none of our modern-day processed foods.

Do the foods that we commonly eat today meet these criteria of being natural and appropriate for the human species? Some of them do (such as meat and vegetables), but, sadly, most of them do not. Lets look at perhaps the most egregious example of a "processed" food (which is really not a food at all) and examine how it differs from a food that is natural.

Recall that a "natural" food, because it was once living tissue, is a complex mixture of all the various substances that are required for life: amino acids, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, etc. Then imagine, if you will, its total antithesis, a pure chemical compound providing none of these essential nutrients, only empty calories to fatten us like cattle. Unfortunately, this nutritional nightmare (called refined sugar) is all too real in our "civilized" culture and makes up a substantial portion of the average person's diet: over one hundred pounds per person per year.

Other processed foods are similar to sugar in that they are devoid of nutrition and extremely prevalent in the modern diet. Refined white flour, polished white rice, packaged breakfast cereals, refined vegetable oils, margarine, and other hydrogenated, man-altered fats are major examples. Refined white flour, though unable to sustain even rats in the laboratory, has become the dominant staple in the human diet. Why, you may wonder?

It makes absolutely no sense that we would feed ourselves food that is unfit even for animal consumption, but, shockingly, that's just how crazy that our world has become. If rats can't live on refined white flour, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in laboratory experiments, how can humans be expected to thrive on it as a staple? If it's so nutritionally bankrupt that it has to be fortified with synthetic vitamins to prevent gross vitamin deficiency diseases, how is it that it is fit to be eaten in the first place? Even though it makes no sense nutritionally for the human race to be eating it, it makes great sense economically for the food industry to be selling it. And that is the reason for this continuing insanity!

The shocking truth that most people fail to consider is that these unnatural disease-causing foods, introduced for purely profit-seeking motives by an industry that is acting against our best interest, have largely displaced natural health-promoting foods in our diet. No one seems to care or to even take notice that foods such as sugary breakfast cereals, french fries, and pizza, which are in reality nutritional perversions, have stealthily replaced the meats, fruits, and vegetables that we desperately need to maintain our health. And what is even more appalling than this senseless indifference to the fundamentals of nutrition is that the awful consequences of this nutritional madness go largely unrecognized.

We tend to look at degenerative disease as an unavoidable fact of life or as an inevitable consequence of just growing older. We see so much heart disease, cancer, and other debilitating diseases around us that this pathetic infirmity is all that we know. We tend to regard such disease states as normal and inextricably linked to the human condition. What we think we can do nothing about, we prefer not to think about, like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand.

But think about this, if you will, for a moment. Heart attacks, which presently kill millions, were a medical oddity before the turn of the twentieth century. Degenerative diseases such as diabetes and cancer, which are now escalating at an exponential rate, were much less prevalent then as well. In primitive and traditional cultures, tooth decay and other such "diseases of civilization" were rare or nonexistent until "civilized" foods were introduced in their diet, and then such conditions began to run rampant.

It seems that good health is our natural birthright if we'll only make an effort to obey nature's laws. And one of the most important of nature's laws is that we should eat nature's food. We needn't eliminate foods of animal origin, as the vegans would have us do. What we must do instead, in order to be healthy, is to eliminate processed foods of HUMAN origin, through a program of natural eating as recommended in this article.

Yes, we can do something about the modern-day plagues that confront us, so aptly described as "diseases of civilization." Degenerative disease is not inextricably linked to the human condition. It is instead inexorably connected to a degenerate diet, imposed on unthinking people by cultural conditioning and by the self-serving practices of a corrupt food industry. What we desperately need is treatment for this insanity, and a sensible program of natural eating is just what the doctor should have ordered.

Michael Langston

Know-Nothing Neocons

Though written a few years ago when Bush was in office, this still applies to so-called "conservatives" today. If you're truly "patriotic," as you claim to be, prove it by taking a stand against the corruption and criminality running rampant in your own lousy government.

Don't be a mindless supporter of government evil and of immoral wars America should not be involved in. Be like the true patriots of the American Revolution who opposed government tyranny. Don't be like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other phony "conservative patriots." These are warmongering wolves in sheep's clothing, whose primary loyalty is not to America, but to a corrupt "American" government controlled by a foreign power. These are loyalist traitors, not patriots.

It's amazing how little the neocons know about 9-11. A neocon is basically a phony conservative, someone who foolishly supports George Bush and the Iraq war, and who receives most, if not all, of their "information" from mainstream news sources such as Fox News. They tend to idolize such people as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly, and while they may THINK they are conservative, in reality they are something entirely different because the Bush Administration is not really conservative.

Actually, the Bush Administration could more properly be termed a "liberal" administration - like that of Bill Clinton - but that's a different story, and such labels have long since outlived their usefulness. I don't often call myself a conservative anymore because the disgraceful neocons have given conservatism such a bad name, even though my conservative beliefs haven't changed one bit. What we need to be concerned with, instead of these divisive and outmoded "liberal" and "conservative" labels, is simply what's TRUE and what's FALSE and what's RIGHT and what's WRONG. That's what matters. The truth and what's right matter.

Since there is almost no reporting of the true facts of 9-11 in such corporate-controlled news venues as Fox News, the people who depend on them for news and information are appallingly ignorant, especially ignorant of the facts of 9-11. Yet they THINK they know everything, while trusting in Fox to keep them "fair and balanced."

Most, I suspect, have never even heard of Building 7, the 47-story WTC skyscraper that mysteriously collapsed on the afternoon of September 11 for no apparent reason, and that wasn't even hit by a plane. Dan Rather remarked that the inexplicable collapse looked exactly like those caused by "well-placed dynamite" in a controlled demolition. But following the initial report of the collapse of this building, which aired on live television, very little else was ever said about it in the media.

So, given the almost complete news blackout on this subject, when asked to explain why this building fell, some neocons will tell you, "A plane flew into it. I watched the whole thing on TV," making it perfectly clear that they know next to nothing about what truly happened that fateful day.

But can one really blame them for such ignorance, when this major news story of the collapse of this building has barely been reported at all in the mainstream media? It's not so much the fault of the neocons that they know so little about the collapse of this building, and about 9-11 in general. Rather, it's mostly the fault of the mainstream media, which has simply failed in its duty to properly inform them.

Sometimes it's impossible to reason with such people, because they refuse to even so much as LOOK at the facts, and when confronted with factual evidence that conflicts with their viewpoint, quite often they will simply attempt to deny it, preferring to keep their heads in the sand. Such people have a blind, unquestioning faith in GOVERNMENT itself, the kind of faith one should have only in God. They think government can do no wrong, and they fail to understand that the country and its government are two separate entities.

Our Founding Fathers knew this. They weren't foolish enough to put blind faith in government, they acknowledged the possibility of criminality and corruption in government, and they wrote our Constitution specifically for the purpose of keeping government in check and under the control of the people, creating all manner of "checks and balances."

Although some foolish people, and especially the neocons, may think that criticizing government or contemplating the possibility that there could be evil or wrongdoing in government is "unpatriotic," they couldn't be further from the truth. It is our patriotic DUTY to question and to criticize and to weed out corruption and criminality in government. It is our patriotic obligation to ask these hard, painful questions.

Did you know, for example, that firefighters reached the 78th floor of the South Tower (the impact zone where the fire would have been hottest) minutes before the terrible collapse and radioed back that there were only two small isolated pockets of fire and that these could easily be managed and put out with two lines?

So if the fire was hot enough to melt or weaken the steel as we've been told by the government, how did those firefighters manage to survive there? Wouldn't a fire that hot also have melted their bodies?

Also, if the fire was that hot, hot enough to melt or weaken structural steel in a widespread, symmetrical pattern causing a symmetrical collapse, how did people above and in the impact zone of the South Tower manage to survive and escape from the building? Some did, unlike in the North Tower, where everyone above the impact zone died. How did people in the South Tower ABOVE the impact zone and the fire manage to escape from the burning building if it was a fire intense enough and widespread enough on those floors to cause the building to eventually collapse? Did they simply walk directly through a raging inferno that was hot enough to melt or weaken steel?

Obviously, the fire in the South Tower was not as intense nor as widespread as we've been led to believe, much less intense than the fire in the North Tower. Most of the jet fuel exploded OUTSIDE the building in that massive fireball that we all saw on TV. Yet given this fact that the fire was LESS intense than the fire in the North Tower, the South Tower collapsed FIRST, even though it was the SECOND tower to be hit, after being on fire for less than an hour. These facts are strange, to say the least, and have never been satisfactorily explained by the government, or even reported adequately in the media.

There's also a photo of a woman standing in the hole created by the impact of the plane that hit the North Tower. Now that would have been the location where most of the jet fuel was spilled and ignited, and thus where the fire would have been hottest. Yet there was a woman photographed standing in the hole in the side of the building. So obviously there were living human beings on the very floors where the planes had struck in both buildings and where the fires would have been hottest.

So my question for the neocons is simply this: Could a human being survive in a location only a few feet away from a raging inferno that is supposedly hot enough and extensive enough to melt or weaken structural steel? The fact that there were living human beings in and around the impact zone of the two towers where the fires would have been hottest clearly demonstrates that the fires were NOT as severe or as widespread on those floors as we've been led to believe.

In actuality, the fires in the World Trade Center towers and Building 7 were not nearly as intense as what we've been told, and nowhere near as severe or long lasting as many OTHER high-rise fires in our history. Some of these have burned for hours or even days, have been much more intense, and NOT ONE has ever resulted in the total collapse of a building.

Also, what is the maximum temperature for jet fuel fires under optimum conditions? That is a question that we should all be asking. And what is the temperature required to melt steel? If you'll research those two figures, you'll find that there's a thousand degree difference. The fires produced from burning jet fuel (a form of kerosene) could not possibly have melted or significantly weakened the steel of those buildings. That is a scientific fact that no one can argue with.

Do the steel grates in our fireplaces and woodstoves ever just suddenly melt and collapse, even if kerosene is added to the fire? Do the metal parts of gas cookstoves and gas grills ever do likewise? What about the steel parts of jet aircraft engines? They're exposed to burning jet fuel on a continuous and routine basis, yet they never weaken, melt, or collapse into rubble.

Indeed, no steel-frame building in all of the world's history has ever collapsed due to fire, and there was no plane impact or burning jet fuel in Building 7 either. If we are to believe the official story, it would have been the very first instance of a steel building - in all of history - to collapse solely because of fire. Shouldn't such a strange and unusual event be regarded as significant and be thoroughly investigated by both the government and the media? Shouldn't such a story be talked about and reported on incessantly on Fox? Yet we don't hear so much as a peep out of them about it. And - what's even more shocking - the 9-11 Commission never once even MENTIONED the collapse of Building 7 in its final report. I find that bizarre and appalling.

This massive building, constructed of exceptionally think steel beams, could only have sustained superficial damage from the collapse of the two towers. I've been there myself and have seen how far away from the North Tower location it once stood. It was quite a distance away, about a city block. Photographs exist showing that the fires were relatively small and confined to only two floors. How could such small fires, confined as they were to only isolated pockets on just two separate floors, cause the total, symmetrical collapse of this building, a collapse that appeared to Dan Rather to look EXACTLY like that of a controlled demolition?

This bears repeating again and again: Even massive, intense fires in steel-frame buildings that have lasted for many, many hours have NEVER in all of our history caused a steel-frame building to totally collapse. That is also a fact that no one can dispute. Yet three such buildings, for some odd reason, all inexplicably collapsed on 9-11, and we're supposed to just not ask any questions?

Yet these are only a few of the many questions for which there are NO satisfactory answers - at least from our government or from the mainstream media.

Why was the rubble at the World Trade Center so quickly carted away and disposed of before it was subjected to rigorous scientific analysis? This was quite clearly the destruction of evidence relating to one of the worst crimes in our history. Why weren't a great number of those steel beams preserved as evidence, instead of being quickly hauled off as scrap to China?

Why was there such an enormous quantity of residual heat energy contained in the rubble pile, more heat energy than could possibly have resulted from burning jet fuel or the fall of the building? Molten steel was actually found beneath the World Trade Center rubble, something that burning jet fuel cannot possibly have caused. Jet fuel fires cannot produce such temperatures. There had to be some OTHER source of this energy. That is a fact that can be scientifically proven.

Why was all the concrete and everything else in the Twin Towers (except for the steel) pulverized into fine powder? This would also have required an enormous amount of energy, and cannot be explained by a gravitational collapse. There just wasn't enough potential gravitational energy contained in the buildings to account for such a massive pulverization of the concrete. Again, there had to be ANOTHER source of this energy - something other than burning jet fuel and the potential energy of the falling buildings.

Why did the towers collapse so quickly - in almost ten seconds - the speed of free fall? Shouldn't the lower, intact floors have provided a massive resistance to the falling debris, and shouldn't that rate of fall have been much slower than an object falling through air? The falling debris fell through the massive BUILDINGS themselves almost as fast as it could have fallen through air! Could someone from the government or from the media please explain this? No adequate explanation has ever been given.

We don't really know exactly what happened. Bush-supporting neocons just THINK that they know, when in actuality, they know next to nothing. President Bush and Fox News have provided no credible answers about September 11, but the dumb neocons don't know this and sit glued mindlessly to their televisions tuned in to Fox believing that "war President" Bush is "protecting" their "freedom." But what did Bush do on the morning of September 11, 2001 after being informed that the second plane had struck the South Tower?

The answer to this question may astound and surprise you. He did absolutely nothing! He just sat there motionless reading a pet goat story with a bunch of school children in a Florida classroom while people were jumping to their deaths from the towers. Don't you think that he should have immediately arisen and took charge of the situation as our Commander in Chief? Some Commander in Chief! On the morning of 9-11, after being informed that our nation was under attack, President Bush sat idle for many minutes afterward reading a miserable pet goat story in a classroom with children. And this bears repeating: when our nation was quite clearly under attack and he knew it!

Is this a President with "balls," as some neocons believe? What a disgrace he was! What a coward he was! And what a disgrace he is now, for he's still the very same person that he was five years ago! And then we're supposed to believe that this PHONY, liberal, cowardly neocon masquerading as a conservative is doing a great job of "protecting" America from terrorists? Give me a break! We don't even know for sure what happened on 9-11 and who exactly was responsible. But one thing's for certain: We know we've been lied to and that there's valid questions they refuse to answer.

Won't someone please explain this to me? If he didn't do anything on the morning of 9-11 to protect us from a terrorist threat by taking charge as Commander in Chief, if he just sat there in a classroom with kids doing nothing, what makes you think he's doing such a great job of protecting us from "terrorism" now?

Why weren't those airplanes intercepted or shot down that morning, when it's standard operating procedure of our military for such interceptions to take place? Why wasn't the Pentagon adequately defended? Don't you realize that they had the capability of shooting that aircraft down if they'd really wanted to? Why do you people refuse to think?

He's not protecting us from potential terrorists crossing the southern border or from illegal immigration either, now is he? Yet we're supposed to believe that he's "defending" America - by getting us involved in unnecessary wars fought for bogus and nefarious reasons, and getting brave, young American men and women killed for no good reason, when he doesn't even defend our own nation's border!

Can't you blind neocons see what's happening to our country? Our traitorous "leaders" are not defending America. This phony "war on terror" is not being waged in America's best interest or in the interest of our people. We're losing our country. America is being flushed down the toilet. We're losing our jobs and our industry. We're being invaded by a horde of illegal immigrants. We're teetering on the brink of an economic catastrophe. Gas is almost three dollars a gallon. They're deliberately turning our country into a third-world nation and destroying the middle class. They're systematically dismantling America and forfeiting our sovereignty. And who is it who's doing this? Our nation's "leaders." How could anyone be foolish enough to blindly trust such obvious traitors and condone what's now happening to our once-great America? Where is your patriotism? Why do you refuse to acknowledge what's happening to your country, and how we're being betrayed and sold down the river by these traitorous leaders?

It's time for all true conservatives to wake up to these facts, to relearn once again what true patriotism is, and stop embracing and defending the very EVIL in government we should all be opposing.

There's a word for such neocons. You're not true patriots in any sense of the word. If neocons had lived at the time of the American Revolution, they would have been called "loyalists" or "Tories," but certainly not patriots.

Michael Langston