the gift that keeps on giving

You can't always get what you want, But if you try sometimes you just might find, You just might find, You get what you need, ah yes ... The Rolling Stones

The weather in my region has been all over the charts, I'd almost expect summer next week, except snow is predicted and the temps are way down, but lush green grass carpets the canyons and fallen leaves blanket the drive and deck.  Spring and autumn have come together to welcome winter, officially on the 21st of this month.  Cullen would have loved these grasses and I cannot help but think of him while I'm walking Bernie when we always bagged genuine organic grass for The Little Guy.  Normally, I couldn't do that until early spring, like March.  Is this how its going to be from here on out?  Seasons interwoven with each other, the more painful aspects of each dominating?  Its getting very interesting.  My latest theory on twirling chemtrails (definitely not art) is they are contracted to disperse industrial smog aka hiding the ugly secret we may be far worse off than we think ... Of course you are aware that no one denies Climate Chaos anymore unless its in the comment section of a tinseltown website appealing to IQs under 80: "Why is it so cold in global warming?"  Heh. 

Our beloved Scrappy Scrapwood turned me onto the following which could have been written for each of us, answering the old question of why so many Americans are self-unaware, emotionally stunted and in a near constant state of denial undertowed by sleepless anxieties.  Short answer is because they are force taught the wrong thing at the wrong time, the very time they should be exploring, using their imaginations and developing their creativity.  Here is some of Scrap's borrowed wisdom which he reminded me [...] its not for us, its for our children and our grandchildren:

From: The Wisdom of Hands Blog

Member Whole

Froebel's concept of Gliedganzes or "member-whole" was an important part of his educational philosophy. It means that a child is not merely a child but also a member of a family, a community, a state and a nation. Aristotle and Hegel both discussed the same notion, and for Froebel the idea helped to explain what he had observed in nature.

"The fundamental law of vegetable life is that each successive stage of development is a higher growth of the preceding one--e.g., the petals are transformed ordinary leaves, the stamens and pistils transformed petals. Each successive formation present the essential nature of the plant in a more subtle garb, until at last it seems clothed only in a delicate perfume."

Consistent with this thought, Froebel believed that "to become conscious of self is the first business of the child and the whole business of man."

What if we as teachers, parents, guardians and promoters of wisdom and growth were to see children in their full dimensions, not as mere children, but as growing into membership of family, community, state and nation, and more? Assisting that unfolding of consciousness is the most important goal of education. The following is from Susan E. Blow who founded the first public school kindergarten in the US.

The greatest mistakes in education are rooted in the failure to recognize and conform to the different stages of natural development. Educational theorists are constantly pointing out this error; educational practice is constantly repeating it. Notwithstanding all that has been said and written, we still make knowledge our idol, and continue to fill the child's mind with foreign material, under the gratuitous assumption that at a later age he will be able, through some magic transubstantiation, to make it a vital part of his own thought. This is like loading his stomach with food which he can not digest, under the delusive hope that he may be able to digest it when he is a man. It is forcing the mind to move painfully forward under a heavy weight, instead of running, leaping and flying under the incitement of its own energy and the allurement of its own perceived ideal. The attempt to force a premature activity of reason can result only in repulsion of his sympathies and the stultification of his mind.

There have been a number of articles recently about how desperately misinformed people are, how little they know about science, geography, and/or any other subject. They have a huge number of deeply held opinions about everything, nonetheless. Much of what we see in the media regarding moronic political discourse, anger toward academia and science, the calling of names like leftist and socialist, the fixation in the media with characters like balloon boy, Joe the plumber and Sarah Palin are the direct consequences of the schooling that Susan E. Blow describes. Her words were written in 1894. Can it be that by neglecting the education of our children's hands, we are turning their minds to mush? There is a direct one-to-one correlation between the decline of the manual arts in education and the rapid rise of the American pinhead.

Froebel, like other German educators of the time, was influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who said, "“Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstaking”

I will harp on a point I have made many times in the blog that relates to Ms. Blow's point of conforming to natural stages of development. In Finland students become better readers in 37 1/2 percent less time by beginning at age 8. Here in the US, we seem desperate to reside in idiocy. [...]

Got that? Now, here we are in the holidays which in addition to the prototypical holiday behaviors, always brings up a few tattered memories of Christmas past.  Confession: I admit to a slight sadness the one thing I really wanted I never got, realizing what I wanted I would have to give myself in my own way.  As the years rolled along I did just that, but it was too late.  You must begin ballet training very early, between three and five, no older than eight, if you are going to dance professionally with a successful company.  All those childhood nights after school, the tears, the anguish, the cruel words and ambiance of abuse permeated the dining room homework sessions as I sweated out memorizing multiplication tables hating the deal that was my setup for failure.  If I made an A+ in math I would get ballet lessons, which never happened.  To see the variations of the Nutcracker now, I see what I could have been doing and am not.  Instead, in art school, I supplemented my course work with dance training, I loved every minute, was a natural, made "A"s effortlessly, every time, but even then it was far too late.  Don't get me wrong, art IS my raison d'etre, but it always existed alongside my other gift, the one I was denied until I could earn the means and the scholarships to do it myself.

Did something like this happen to Edward Degas?

One day helping out in the principal's office I peeked at my file.  I saw my IQ score.  There are nonsense rules against seeing it, if I been caught, I'd have been punished.  Detentions or notes home, something ghastly and embarrassing, but the deed was done and life suddenly much improved.  I suppose it was hard for my teachers to reconcile how such a child could not memorize multiplication tables, but they didn't know about the deals being made over homework when I longed with all my being to be doing arabesques and petite burrees on point. My longing obliterated the value of whatever lay before me.

The truth was, and I figured this out early too, dancers were thought of as fallen women, burlesque performers, at least as my parent's zeitgeist trained them.  I must have been raised to be rich, even though we were not rich that I could see by any means, have servants, nannies for the children, spend summers sailing at a family compound, perhaps they imagined me a surgeon's wife, provided he was well educated and from a good family, mostly I think I was supposed to be off to lunch with other rich ladies and write checks to popular charities at society balls.  I know a lot of women who were raised to be exactly the same thing, unconsciously transmitted to them by equally well-intentioned mothers and fathers.  Sometimes we joke with one another at our mutual reversals of fortune and the myths we were born into which fell drastically apart once we were on our own, because nothing we learned in school gave us skills to deal with real life.  It was as if we had been raised to do nothing while appearing to be doing something beneficial.  Everything I really needed to know I've learned by the seat of my jeans.

We cannot change the past, we can only move on and make the best of what we've got.  I don't blame my parents for their child rearing practices, my father abroad for months, my mother sliding down the social ladder from socialite to department store saleslady, repeatedly relocated far from anything she'd ever known, they were only operating within the sole system available in their gradually diminishing circumstances, however, the next generation and the generations following need our help right now as they enter their journey into a new world with new systems and options previously unheard of or lock into lifestyles previously demeaned.  Here is another very important and helpful persuader.  When you really think about the system as it exists today, anything healthy about the typical American education is being slashed from state budgets, so why even bother?  I have much praise for homeschooling and even more for children who are comfortable in their own skin, free to go all the way into their areas of interest as far as they want.  Is there a problem with that?  The only problem is the same problem unacknowledged inside the preoccupied din of the ever-creative errand boys operating as delivery men for the gnashing beast demanding obedience.

As recessions rose and laid dormant only to reoccur, what one person once snubbed as beneath them, i.e.; not good enough, became another person's valued employment as the little people en masse are at last forced back against the wall to accept total loss as normal everyday phenomena. Conversely, what was once refined and respected is now uniformly trashed as FUBAR and vice versa: any job will do, flip burgers, push mops, greet consumers, scrub toilet stalls, who cares, everyone has to eat.  The people who perform those jobs that Americans wouldn't do, deserve our sincere respect for doing them now. Thus, looking around, you'll see the revolution is already in full swing.  It is also violent, but not what we were taught a violent revolution was in world history class.  Now  violence takes place in protests, pitted against masked Darths and their thuggish, brutal street tortures, it takes place in undeclared wars far away from our vision, it happens in the too-frequent and violent crimes discussed in my last post, the kind of crime people resort to committing when they simply explode from a lifetime of abuse via suppression, backwards and upside down to the needs of the authentic self - that real self deep inside us who reaches out unthinkingly to carry a crying baby dolphin to shore as happened in the active phase of the BP debacle.  The kind of crimes that are a release from and attack against the abusive, often religious morality imposed from birth that denied whomever else it was the criminal could have been had he/she been treated with respect, insight to interest and encouragement of those interests, exemplified by the tragic fate of Shaquan Duley and her young sons:

[...] What is it that makes one child oblivious to abuse and another cower and fall ill at the moment its shadow appears over the horizon? What is it that allows one person to be unfeeling towards someones suffering but another experience compassion? [...]

As with everything else, if we want something to happen we have to do it ourselves.  Its too late for many of us reading here, our pasts are already yesterday's tire treads petroglyphed along forgotten trails, a permanent reminder those who inhabit our future might someday find themselves travelling the same destructive paths.  We can make it easier for them if homo sapiens are to survive.  And should they survive, which I am not exactly confident they will, we can at least allow them to possess peace of mind and meaningful lives free of irresponsible value judgements and at all times fully aware of self-worth and skilled in the creation and stewardship required for sustaining life on Earth.  If we cannot leave them material things, as used to be and still is for a certain minority, a yardstick for some kind of unearned accomplishment, we can give them a better trip.  That is the only gift that matters.

Coincidentally, from Visible's essay today, A Transmission from the Visible Planes:

If your idea of loving someone is to give them things in place of the love, you’re going to have a front row seat through the years to what that policy accomplishes. [...]

Photo: Degas oil c. Google Images

crime and consumption inside the pyramid of limited growth

Welcome to the end of 2010 AD, the hottest year on record where climate catastrophe expresses itself in ice storms, blizzards, tornadoes, droughts, massive displacement from record floods, the unleashing of the Gulf Stream, the death of our oceans and slaughter of sea life, as the manipulators of the markets trawl the planet for hidden treasure.  The wars and threats, the sly turns of phrase concealing nefarious intent, the untying of entire social fabrics into homelessness and penury, human against human, the survival of the most unfit with imitation mullahs, Jesus theme parks, the celebrated Sarah Palin gaffing with the stars ...  Next?

I had to get into town yesterday, prepare my mind, stagger my lists of our most dire needs, the idea was a quick turn around, the vision: brief inconveniences, but a zoom-thru. I was wrong. Every day is Black Friday now, every retailer anticipating the every need of the breathless consumer, too consumed in consuming to gift wrap the items being purchased. Thus, gift wrapping service is back, restructured in prototypical style for today's overworked workers - such as men's plaid pajama pants prewrapped for your convenience in a matching plaid flannel, gold-corded drawstring bag. "Just throw it under the tree".  Many people will.  (Then why bother to wrap anything at all?) I looked at them briefly, in sideways glances appearing to look beyond them, wondering what their lives must be like.  I wondered now that unemployment benefits are on hiatus again, WHAT were they thinking standing between the cashier and the card reader, ashen-faced, waiting for approval.  Approval.  And believe you me, this place was not Neiman's.  No, this prefab aluminum freestanding HVAC'd energy whale was only one of millions dotting the face of our tortured planet providing an all under one roof multi-aisled mall.  You may call them by their brand names, but they bear little separation from their engineering department's prototype illustrated in the engineering manual belonging to the mother ship.  That is why they all look alike and feel alike.  The little guys just can't get on board unless they are too absorbable to fail, meaning they statistically clocked-in with a profitable niche and bear AAA rated potential for mass consumption suitable for whichever targeted age and income demographic is most available for pocket picking.  Enter the Marketeers. This too is all in the manual as a No Child Left Behind sort of thing.

Everything out there has its place in someones shopping cart, maybe not ours, but someone who doesn't know when enough is enough.  Oh, I'm sure they mean well, but they have no, not even a basic low-level unacknowledged passing concern, self-awareness or grasp of free will to hold themselves back from dubious decisions.  You could surmise they've operated on auto-pilot throughout eternity. Such is the round scripted lifestyle of which the human being is but a square peg on which minute-by-minute the chisels work to make us fit the prototype.  The model. I passed children's dresses trying to find an exit and overheard the clerk tell a customer, "I'm taking this off the model because I have to have it, but come back later, we're restocking tonight."  Actually, I was amazed I heard anything above the roar of gnashing consumption.  It has a sound of its own like a sports stadium filled with puking migraine sufferers and crying babies.


Since it is impossible to shape us any more than we already shape ourselves, it chafes - some a great deal more than others (those in particular who go along to get along, the incurious) as we see in the almost daily, once  infrequent, bizarre crimes against other people they inflict as if their actions are fully justified by helpless lapses into sheer irrationality.  I hate to say this, but these home grown crimes are becoming commonly more gruesome as they unfold.  Fact: Too many rats in a cage will fight to the death.  We now expect stealth plotting, preplanned multiples of misleading illogical excuses, gang rape, death and dismemberment as another extension of WWT (worldwide terror).


For this many people populating our dying planet squeezed under unbearable restrictions growing stricter, like a house where the windowless rooms grow smaller, tighter, in every dimension, the unbalanced, the beaten-down, the confused, well, somethings gotta blow and many are blowing now.  In the Culture of Extinction (Charles' title), the tight lids "always-misfits" hide under are coming unglued.  They seem to arrive from diseased (dis-eased) roots, early on find solace in imitation, but poisoned by BGH and weed killer, never fitting into any mold whatsoever.  They grew misanthropic over time except for what survival for themselves could be appropriated through innocent others, whether in a volcanic release of roiling under the surface pent-up energies or a pure expression of hatred of humanity manifesting through acting-out a perceived satanic part in the great comedy.  Couple this stark void of self-awareness and lack of free will with all else happening environmentally and politically throughout the globe, sprinkle on stubborn chemtrails, the unpunished crimes of political criminals, increasing indebtedness and a representative-self dictating survival by any means within immediate reach and you get deformed, crippled behaviors that by their very grossness, further infect and upend everything surrounding them never to return to anything resembling even remote stability. Prison and programs are mere placeholders because the thing unrecognized is the healing required to eliminate these crimes against the innocent comes only from within.  As long as everyone going along to get along appears to survive in the Culture of Extinction, the example from on high set in stone and widely approved, the crippled mannequin, the failed prototype, still imitating, sees himself as deserving his role in that culture.   Giving vent to his rage is just a small part of an evolving malevolent philosophy likely glimpsed during the formative years with self-inflicted unhealthy and repetitive doses of pcp tranched with speed.

Ambient abuse turned to domestic violence is always wildly exacerbated by money issues.  Its like cremating a simmering pot. The slightest and most unexpected thing sets them off.  Thus, sitting directly under our noses we have a huge violent domestic crisis drowned out by apples and androids and yet, why this is so is rarely questioned. Every cultural trigger still exists.  The safety remains on off.


Somehow, in the immediate aftermath of 911, I came across a plastic flag pin and wore it.  I participated in the lights on all night solidarity of the masses.   I stayed online, seeking information while the TV alternated between hurricane warnings and Bushisms.  This went on for about two days, soundtracked by hammers slamming up storm shutters until hurricane pundits were all that was on 24 hours straight, drowning out the bullhorns and crazy pilots.  And then the power went out.  The winds howled, the foundations shook, the trees were breaking, sheets of rain beat its way into every crevice, the animals racing around the interior, horrified.  It came to me our present was all that mattered and would always be all that matters.  Everything else is extraneous manufactured prototypical stuffing except for the fundamental basics, our loved ones peace of mind which means of course, we have to be there for them in whatever way is possible.  This is why, especially in these harsh times, we dutifully get up every day and square off with dragons so that our loved ones will not have the same struggle.


We know just by observing the direction daily drastic events are heading, things are going to get worse.  Again, adjusting your program in support of your loved ones is priority.  Some of us do it naturally as we've always done and some of us will need to force the effort.  If you should find yourself feeling like rusty brillo, short and abrasive, swallow your pride.  A great love of my life, a brilliant orphaned, highschool dropout with a remarkable sensitivity to the complex nuances of jazz once said "Revolution begins at home..."  I would only add that revolution first begins with self-awareness.

I am thoroughly depleted by the bickering, contradictory Sopranos and their spiteful, worshiping errand boys so we won't even go there this week.  There are other more helpful and compassionate places to be.

from dust to dust: broken and breaking

... The first U.S. census, in 1790, recorded four million Americans. By 2000, this number had grown to 281 million. It is expected to reach 310 million by 2010 and 439 million^[17] by 2050. ...  Demographics of the United States


 By the time my homesteading chores for the day are done, the light is gone and evening wrapup chores require my presence.  I've been keeping up in moments grabbed between one thing and another and the mood for something more stimulating vanishes behind everything that is broken.  My news for you in general is nothing will change, what you see is what you get and worse, what we don't know is already playing out and not yet sugar-coated sufficiently to enact at full throttle, but give it time.  The days are like an old calendar from early cartoons, flying off the pages, one after another, faster and faster, D day for change has come and gone so many times and still nothing changes for the better.  The wars are never ending.  The monetary crises, world wide, continue, falter and stand again for repeats until everyone forgot how it got this way in the first place.  If you read the items on my blog list over there on the right, daily, you're seeing things much the same way I am.

Among the things that are backwards and upside down, we do not know when we have it good and we also do not know when we have it bad or recognize in all its totality every step down into the cellar of life where choice and simple contentment don't exist.  How many foreclosees do you think are saying to themselves on this very day "Gee, we never should have left that little apartment with the low rent."  Too many human beings are simply unable to read the tea leaves, pay attention, interpret the omens, trust what they see with their own eyes.  Certainly, that would free up evil to do exactly as it pleases without interference as is happening in full color 3-D wherever you look or don't look because who really wants to believe the situation will never get any better before our time is up?  That's where religion comes in, candidates and celebrities, the political and the powerful - as a diversion, a grasping at hope, the heroin of placebos and as John Micheal Greer points out "lullabies" sung to us while evil plots to rule the Universe.  He was speaking of green self-help books, but of course, those are only profit-venued substitutes applying themselves to the popularity of mass paranoia.  When the situation began to crack, most of you reading here today were already aware of it and what did you do?  Vote?  Made a drive-thru deposit into your bank account?  Filled your sheath of prescriptions? Waited in the Wal*Mart cashier lines? Even as the black boxes did what they wanted, still you secretly hoped, following the dictates of your representative-self?  Even though you'd read the tea leaves seemingly accurately, even though you'd been online well over a decade or more ... searching, reading, commenting, obviously little if anything you thought you'd learned stuck.  Maybe you said to yourself "Something is missing, there must be something else?"

We have a few FYI items that I have not seen on the news Lullabies & Possibilities pages.  And, by the way, going to the news sites is more than surreal, it isn't news, its suggestion -  "likelihoods" or "possibilities" that will never happen such as the administration considering the public's outrage over body scanners (How is it there are no scanners at the DC or Miami airports?) or Tom Delay spending a century behind prison bars or else its just more mergers and takeovers acquisitions of the small swallowed alive by the big.  Possibility, the iffy preposterous proposition, is what we read and call news.  Not even your everyday little people thug crimes are genuinely newsworthy because the officials in charge refuse to divulge what they know fearing damage to their case.  Where in the news is there any mention the deadly Cholera epidemic in Haiti is rumored among the Haitian people to have been brought to their disaster-aftermath suffering by peacekeepers when the bacteria never existed previously in Haiti?  The rumor grew legs through official investigation of damaged waste pipes delivered into Haiti's water supply and a sometimes contractor who made cleanups once, when tents were erected and once again, after the rumor broke.  And another, especially weird item rarely brought before newsreaders' eyes, equally unfathomable and disturbing in its implications, political and otherwise, Afghanistan is one of a tiny handful of countries with the highest fertility rates on the planet, matched by Niger.  Watch out Niger.  We are to surmise, none of the above matters now.  If it was not on the news, it isn't real. 

Since we started looking, its always been obvious we have too many people on this planet.  It reminds me of what can occur when you are caught in a stampeding crowd, anything can happen.  Sure, you are fortunate to escape with your life intact, but later on you begin to perceive that everything changed and it isn't going back to anything you ever knew.  We are now literally strangers in a strange land.  This is not helped by certain bloggers who put up scare links that lead you to stories that mention only a vague possibility referring to the original scare headline you followed.  It is worsened faster than the situation worsens by itself to have some think one thing, others think another until there is no cohesion to what we know or don't know.  Doing that is abetting evil.  For what?  To increase readership who will buy into their blog ads?  Well, hey, then say so up front so we stop wasting our time.  There is not much left that has not been tainted.  Maybe a few uninhabitable spots somewhere on the globe where no profit is available, but will be when a technology comes along that mines money from frozen dirt.  Although, there is now a start up attempting to bottle glacier melt.  Note I say "attempting", as in "possibility".  Yet, what is really happening is hidden in plain sight.  If we go back in time, how many know where Karzai came from?  How can these world leaders allow themselves to be jerked around while their countries are bulldozed by drones and Abrams tanks and 99% of their already indigent population has no idea why?  Meanwhile in the superpower, everyone you speak to hasn't any better grasp on the situation, either.  You have to wonder how the meetings between these leaders unfold.   Do they speak to each other daily?  Hang out together during the off times? Who is working for whom?  This is ludicrous, isn't it.  A fake leader shows up three times at peace talks and vanishes with his personal appearance cash.  Little people like us (and the victims) cannot understand what passes for leadership now.  Its too ugly, too cheap, too far-fetched and always morphing into lame paperbacks with cumbersome finales.  All of it a monumental waste of humanity, an erasure of all that came before such world leaders egotistically make their mark only to see that mark liquidated under the next generation of world leaders.

Honestly, how can we count our blessings on Thanksgiving as the annihilation of humanity/animalia/natural resources/environmental catastrophe escalates on the bloodiest, most unimaginably brutal scale ever while financial wars take down what remains standing through globewide economic shock?  What blessings?  Piece by piece, brick by brick our lives are being intentionally dismantled as has happened throughout history it is happening now in the centrifugal force carny ride of overpopulation and growing ever larger by the minute.  This much is easily recognizable in spite of lullabies. 

We are, for the most part, good people, well-intentioned and ineffectual against the tides.  Our flaw is our goodness. History was his/her story, not ours, but examine the parallels to your own existence and that of how our planet is disintegrating and it begins to form something solid verging on truth.  You can spend the remainder of your journey seeking an answer, but the truth will hide until you are ready to understand.  There is something bigger that we can't see now. We are too easily distracted and the distractions are incessantly increasing by design.  We get in the way of that which we seek.  If the reality of what is happening suddenly came upon us, we would be unable to hold the thought, perhaps we are not supposed to know because such understanding is too cruel, too cold and holds no lasting appeal.

Everyone likes to have something to look forward to, but what happens when there is nothing but exponential evil to come and you know it?  What then?  You simply continue exactly as you are, priced out of existence, elbowing for breath, lost in a sea of threats and dire possibilities, but at least you are alive, or are you?  At some point, you will consider that issue, the severity and rapidity of the worsening crises demands you examine everything.  At this point in the revealing, what else will present itself?

I don't expect everyone to read all the links, but if you do not visit them, you do your intellect disservice.

come rain or come shine: updated

For the update, please scroll to end of post.
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Winter is hard upon us now.  Snow predicted but hasn't shown up ... yet.  I know when the fog clears later this week, the mountain tops will be white, ah, make that light brown as Big Agra knows no season.  The animals housed out of doors have been thickening their coats, except for Bernie who is now the proud owner of a black turtleneck sweater for serious winter weather.  He reminds me of a flying ace with his flap ears and back rings around his eyes.  I promise I will not get him boots.  Gawd.  Basset paws ARE all-weather boots.  Now, Jake, the Aussie-Shepard, already grew his organic outerwear an Eskimo would envy.  He's not a sweater guy.

All the talk about hyperinflation going around must be scaring the heebeejeebies out of more than a few Internet enthusiasts.  I don't really think about it, maybe I should, but it seems as if I've been living in a hyperinflated economy for a while now and we regularly scrape bottom.  When someone starts up the hand wringing over "What shall we do?  Eeeek!", I can't feel all that sympathetic or even empathetic, not when the Iraqis probably wish that's all they had to face from us, a devastated economy is rather different than warships appearing out of nowhere during your wedding party.  I don't want to understate what will happen to our population however.  As in Palestine, our obese classes are being put on a diet, by mandate.  The figure I quoted a few posts ago about 3 in 4 Americans will be obese by 2020 can now be rewritten (it always was rewritten, we just weren't in on it) to no one will be obese by 2020, period, since the effects of a failed system according the various charts show the top tiers being affected somewhat as well. By now we should have learned to enjoy rice with veggies and carnivores satisfied with rice, veggies and minuscule meat morsels.  Last time I dined in Haiti, where every menu is the same because you get what they have, despite the menus, we ate fried rice.  "I'll have the snapper creole." And out came fried rice.  One thing I have not seen are the charts from our statistic-crazed statisticians concerning exactly how financial world war is expected to appear in third world nations.  I think they don't want to talk about it because that would put some truth to the recovery story.  Following the Mumbai hotel crisis, I came to find Mumbai was formerly known as Bombay.  And you will recall what Bombay meant before outsourcing ... I'm sure that part is still there, its more that we never hear about because we're well on our way to becoming the new Bombay, while sliding farther and farther away from Mumbai, the new Wall Street, the new arms purchaser to the tune of sixth largest weapons buy from us, as usual.  You will recall when Pakistan held sway in that arena, of all the countries, fer cryin' out loud, Bush via Colin Powell rewarded Musharraf's homeland with Honorary Major Non-NATO Ally status.  Reading further, you come to the part where it reads "for the purpose of weapons purchasing". They never veer off the course, do they.

... Major non-NATO allies are eligible for priority delivery of defense material and the purchase, for instance, of depleted uranium anti-tank rounds.
They can stockpile US military hardware, participate in defense research and development programs and benefit from a US government loan guarantee program, which backs up loans issued by private banks to finance arms exports. ...

So that's what it takes to be an ally.  As if you didn't know.  It takes a lot of skin, a lot of moxy and a lot of dining and dancing.  Too bad our Peace Laureate couldn't take Condoleezza along to play (poorly) some piano during the dancing girls part, but you know, he's got his lawful dancing girl already and three is not a good mixer at these occasions, occasions which could be done on the cheap with their Blackberries since all that is happening is another deal going down.  It is a big deal.  It will some day not long from now change the borders of the entire ME. I ask you now, how is this going to improve the crisis in our own homeland?  Will this deal provide lower costs for nutritious food, medical care and shelter from the elements for our peeps?  Are we, the little people, going on a diet so that India can fly wing on wing formations with the Nevada gamers over Afpak?  And the people of India, what return on this deal do they get?  Clue: its not a bargain with Monsanto backing off.  More like another helping of fried rice, if there is any rice available in India anymore.  I would rather have seen our Peace Laureate pack a C130 with antibiotics and sandbags, tents, blankets and Sterno along with Doctors Without Borders and land in Pakistan's Cholera country handing out survival supplies mending the misery and loss.  Since that requires humility and love, we will never see that come to be.  We will see a lot of suffering here, too. 

Concealment on any scale creates suffering.  Give me a scale and I will give you suffering, even when it appears no suffering is taking place.  There are also those who suffer that have no idea they are suffering with all manner of excuse why they are safe and satisfied going along to get along.  I think you have to be alone, away from it all, for awhile in America to learn suffering.  In a group, its too easy to get shot down and shown ridiculous time wasting dogma supporting a belief in mass happiness, in which case you will be shown hate, prejudice, religious nonsense, your Constitutional rights and so forth.  Do ask them "What rights?"  Yet, it is these people exactly who fight internal wars with their friends, coworkers, partners, families and pastors, floating the lie, worshipping at the alter of myths that never were.  Mrs. So and So down the block passed away in her own bed last winter from hypothermia.  And Mr. So and So passed away from starvation shorty thereafter whereupon their little house was immediately and legally hoovered by the bank to be resold under the abusive program known as Reverse Mortgage.  This winter, we will see a radical leap in the death statistics of all those Mr. and Mrs. So and Sos, everything from alcohol poisoning to fire to suicide. Will the corporatocracy realize they are endangering a dedicated purchasing block?  No.  They are beyond control.  Once the decree has come through the ranks, it is simply too time consuming to spend money on any revisions, and time costs money.  Time.

 What is time?


 I had the unusual experience driving through the heart of Big Agra this past Saturday evening as the earth rotated away from the sun and was a little surprised, only a little, to see the illegals and harvesting apparatus out in full.  How silly of me to think they observe night or Sundays or weekends or holidays at all.  Do they take off Cinco de Mayo?   I'll let you know next spring.  Of course, you know already the trains, those double decker livestock moving louvered cars and refrigerated boxcars, high in the air on tires, chained to a movable platform linking to seventy five or more of the same tottering structures moving along at 35 mph, were running back and forth, one after another, heading in to pick up, heading out to deliver.  All this has to be an inevitable, but necessary part of feeding the masses and sponsored by the little people.   They soon will find, if all the terror talk about hyperinflation has any merit, which of course it does as all that wilting greenery in clamshells has now split into half size clamshells for the same price as the full size, they-can't-afford-any-of-it.  What's worse, they will find the means to afford slushies and chili cheeseburgers on gluey sesame seed buns.  I guess it doesn't matter, its all roundup ready for the tables of the ignorant and the latch-on window trays of the obedient.

The real heart breaker here is that nothing is going to stop the Onward Christian Soldiers Crusade of Madness. Nothing.  One can almost forget about it out here in the middle of nowhere, except there is always something to remind you, something like the holiday season and to whom and what you wanted to gift with presents.  I am beginning to think this whole Christmas present sideshow was created by retailers to draw us into spending which drew us into overspending which was temporarily resolved by credit and then karma came along and their seasons are statistically lackluster while the mall landlords are foreclosed.  If you see a person selling matches in the snow with a pup in a turtleneck sweater outside Wal*Mart this year, it will be me.  Although, I might try a complaint booth of the lemonade stand variety in order to honor your comments.

If we become ill, hurt, maimed, we are on our own.  If we lose our way, go crazy, break down or are attacked, again, we are on our own.  Did you even think 911 would translate into complete disconnection from life as you'd always known it?  You will recall that those buses that finally grabbed Katrina survivors out of the stadium at gunpoint left for parts unknown where they were still unwanted guests in their own country.  They were an unwelcome burden. You are free to tell me I am looking at the glass half empty but there will be no golden twilight years ever again.  All that is left now are ads for elite pleasures still running on old contracts.


Is there an up side to any of this?  Only the upside down and backwards recently mentioned by Visible.  I'm sorry to say that if we are ever going to get a breather, one: it won't be here and two: the slate will have to be wiped clean as we are already seeing happening to the life of species extincted by the day.

Let me get this straight, why isn't India happy with having our jobs and western lifestyle, isn't that enough?  Maybe it wasn't, maybe we ran through everything already and need more?  You'll hear that question which is a partial truth, its more like dealer sees a market, dealer moves in.

UPDATE:  Beyond the ending statement in the above essay concerning dealer sees a market, dealer moves in, we have the head twist which is First, dealer creates the market.  That's right, the whole game is based on identification and development of vulnerability, creating a space in which that vulnerability becomes insatiably addicted while appearing strong, but the hidden weakness has been chronicled and remains.  Then the dealer moves in, everybody plays nice until someone/something crosses the line and all hell breaks loose with the goods we supplied.  Its an old, tired story.  Of course there is a better way, but we will never see it as long as the old story still works for the easy money crowd.

fever in the funk house

... Work and work for love and sex
Ain't you hungry for success, success, success, success
Does it matter? (Shattered) Does it matter?...
M. Jagger | K. Richards

It may be the wrong time to make a new entry here, or not.  Comments are still rolling along on the last one, I'm enjoying them, but we hardly talk about the posts, we always stray.  Therefore, I appreciate it when someone refers to the post in their comment, although that in no way negates the amazing things passing across our horizon having little to do with anything posted on this page that come around on each post's comment page.  I know I am just as guilty of going off topic as you are.  Our interests are remarkably varied and who can deny the abundance of things that require group discussion, especially in the Revealing?  A perfect example of what I mean would be Susanah's "home school or unschool" dilemma, or our Rasta's mastery of survival on his rain-riddled Jamaican property. This so called "blog" in more than a few ways is a mystery to me.  It almost self-sustains.  In the past, when comments slowed to a halt, I took it as a sign it was time to speak up.  Now, I don't know.  It is just a feeling that those who lurk and never break into the conversation would like to see something in this space, more than links to other blogs, more than changing art and photos.  And by this time, the other feeling that interferes with the first, I've learned that this is the wrong time of day to do what I find myself doing.  I have routines, like taking Bernie out, taking a treat to Chip the Appaloosa, bringing wheelbarrows of logs to the deck for easy reach as evening temperature drop and drop ... however, that gets solved in the same manner as always, I'm going to skip and jump around.  It may all turn out incomprehensibly off the wall as each new paragraph has nothing to do with the last, since I will likely recall  something important while pulling Bernie the Basset, translated bred  to be a bunny hunter, away from his intended prey.  I usually come to you late at night after the house is sleeping.  Today, I'm taking advantage of the last few mild days of fall before the snow descends and Arctic parkas must be snapped and zipped before stepping into the fog.  Besides, there is just too much to nail down in one post.  Its too much.  Overkill kills.  Life is now some low budget late night Halloween horror flick where the dude's head spins and his eyeballs fall in and out on springs as Darth inflicts perfectly legal steroidal blows drawing blood, prolapsing organs.

Charles is right again when he says what we have here is special.  Do you know how comfy it is to be able to say "my hard drive meltdown" and have everyone know what I mean?  BTW, our beloved bolanath is in that Vanilla Sky free fall at this time as well, but he assures me he has it under control for a soft landing.  Techology has its flaws.  Every now and then one of us crashes hard and it disrupts everything in our routines.  Then we gotta scramble and think and rework our values - again.  I still have not completely recovered having lost my very tidy painting system by way of the dog chewed printer cord, the loss of photoshop, hundreds of important links and only the Creator knows how many people's email addresses were fried.  But when we want something badly enough, we make do.  We workaround.  All of life is a workaround.  Tedious, laughable, infuriating, but bolstered by a barrier I refuse to cross which is that of regret over our personal tragedies, losses, unfortuate circumstances which are usually unfortunate only to us.  When that waste of energy creeps up, its best to concentrate on Haiti and Pakistan and earthquakes and floods and cholera and the idiocy of abundant medical supplies locked up only released to victims by having an official review of the paperwork generated by a healthy caseworker who takes no for an answer.  Lunacy.  Heartbreaking.  Are these things by design?  I don't know.  I only know from a few experiences with people who do casework and all of them were amazingly negligent personalities who resolved nothing.

The local and distant voting brawls are in crescendo this week.  I'm getting at least two pounds of glossy coated stock squeezed into the rural gangbox daily.  The printers and paper manufacturers and shippers are making a killing off this stuff.  My tip to them in order to further enrich themselves would be to haunt municipal dumps and recycle the trash. 

The only one I actually opened was one from the Meg Whitman circular file stack because she included photos of herself as a youth.  She was actually a beautiful young woman, you could see dreams in her eyes portrayed as a person of high integrity and inviolate truths.  And now, look what happened.  It is beyond sad that someone running for office is so desperate they resort to advertising their gubanatorial potential through depictions of a blond bombshell representative-self that no longer exists.  Is that how we got Arnold?  Mister muscle moviestar?  Is that how we got Obama?  When its all said and done is it just all (secretly) about physical appearances?  This is too gauche to mention, isn't it.  And Sarah Palin, murderer of wildlife?  This is what I meant about politicians being celebrities, they've managed to edge over the celebrities of tinseltown, it is fairly recent, likely by way of course, with shows like the repulsive, loud and painful Cops and broke municipalities scarfing at the stockyard auctions.  Rulers must rule or they are not rulers at all and will be subject, like everyone else, including wealthy actors/actresses, to the rules.  Sorry to bring that up, all the pillars of our old social order crumbled.  Every once in a while a ruler crosses the line into being ruled as a show there isn't really any discrimination to it, but you'll notice these marks victims are all back in action in the semi-elusive time frame of the short memory media as if no one really toe-tapped in the men's room or made love to someone not his lawful wife on a powerboat gliding over Bahamian waters.  Such Monkey Business is just another part of the new normal.  If you pay attention you'll see what I mean.  In the days of real rulers, people were drawn and quartered for less.  Now, in the new normal, astounding heights of real wrongdoing are on display every single day and the rulers of every stripe show themselves affected fundamentally with a necrotic case of double standards.  Why would anybody want to be a ruler?  Why would anyone spend billions on becoming a ruler?  It means they have completely lost their humility which explains a lot about the rules and the new rules they so love to create in showing their possession of ruling power.  Rules which change Nothing for the incessant flow of our collective humanity funneled into the pockets of those rulers breathing-in that rarified oxygen wafting across the pinnacle of civilization's most magnificent achievements.  No my friends, we live in Nancy Grace world these days, our new normal sponsored by Mussolini's nightmares and Jim Jones final hours.  I predict a drug will be introduced at some time in the not too distant future that wipes out memory, although the overload of media might well be that drug.  It bears all the hallmarks ... one trick to overcome the soma (In "Brave New World" (1932), the name of a state-dispensed narcotic producing euphoria and hallucination.) is go right to the last paragraph where it says something like the informant-turned-criminal cooperated with instructions.  Another would be to ask yourself "Does it physically hurt your own head when a protester's head is smashed by boot-stompings against the pavement?" 

A particularly irksome flaw in technology's short lifespan beyond the breakability of plastic parts and overheating CPU fans is the immediacy with which it outdates itself.  In spite of all the claims and rave reviews and beta tests and glowing comparisons to competitor products, it still isn't enough.  It must spawn new versions or become obsolete as unrealistic growth projections demand more - even though targeted consumer blocks are broke and looking towards hyperinflation.  We saw this interestingly with the extinction of XP (gone for good alert), replaced by Vista replaced by WIN7 while Chrome advertises on our websearches.  We saw this with the VCR.  We see this with cell phones as videocams and qwerty keyboards for those who can't text fast enough before their thoughts evaporate.  You might notice that the people associated with these advances are morphing into celebrity personalities worthy of headlines and entire sections in the media.  HP boss come lately caught in sexual harrassment allegations, oh, Meg Whitman would never do that.  We are to think she is the rare irreplaceable, ruler in waiting.

Its all too much to cast the Indigenous Grandmother's healing Net of Light over all of them and our remaining resources, although its certainly worth trying.  I have found through various efforts the best time to do it is when you begin meditation.  Actually, it takes you  into meditation as you are in tune with one love, one heart, relaxed in limb and wide open in mind.  Its best to do it in darkness, moonlight is good as are stars whether you are outdoors or inside.  There is something about the dark that allows the trillions of tiny lights within the net you are envisioning that illuminates and throws down negative forces, falseness, paltry and petty cancers of the soul, the growing void of living, loving, innocent bounty thriving on this planet.  The Net seems to work for everything you direct it toward, healing, compassion and overstanding.

And now, I hear the beginning of rumblings as the males ask in their various approaches, guinea pig wheeks, dog paws, nosings at the ankle, the Fireteacher peering into the fridge, "What's for dinner?"  I say a grace tonight for all those who have nothing to eat.

... end transmission ...

Post title from Exile on Main Street, Jagger | Richards

As the world implodes

First up, I read that the mood swinging BofA has decided to go ahead and displace more families swaggeringly confident they are in the right to do so. Their long legal arms must have assured them they've got it covered. We'll soon find out how as this latest 911 works its way through the courts. Between you and me, I've known all along there was something fishy going on because there was a chart published in the LA Times made by Realtytrac that showed all the homes in foreclosure with the typically horizontal red line zigging up a little and zagging down a little until year 2007 where that red line went straight up through the top of the chart - off the charts indeed. I saved it and looked for it many times since, but it was lost in the hard drive meltdown from last year and appears to be deleted from media archives. The past week's staggering revelations about the legalities of the paperwork on property ownership renewed my study of the situation and discovered the problems coincide with the advent of MERS. Shocking. Not. Of course you know about MERS.

From Wiki:
... MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) ... is a privately held company that operates an electronic registry designed to track servicing rights and ownership of mortgage loans in the United States.[1]

MERS role in facilitating mortgage trading was relatively uncontroversial in its early days a decade ago but continued fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis has put MERS at the center of several legal challenges disputing the company's right to initiate foreclosures. Should these challenges succeed, the US banking industry could face a renewed need for capitalization.[4] ...

Right away, you get the picture, technology (progress, growth, electronic TRACKING) eavesdrops again, without warrants. Corporations don't need warrants? When personhood doesn't need a warrant, perhaps they can just make some citizens arrests? Hey, its not really spying, naw. An elephantine disaster has re-emerged that We the People must be responsible for cleaning up, no one has said this but that is the only way it will ever be resolved exactly as everything else is resolved, the burden of proof and the burdens of the poor pitted against huge could-care-less giants require WE have to stand over their shoulders and physically point out what is wrong with this and what to do about it and do it. We the People do not have an in house crack legal team waiting in our backyard sheds. Now all these human beings affected by this disaster are on the bandwidth all the time desperately looking for answers when the answer was there all along. While MERS is not Angelo Mozilo, MERS part in this crisis is telling: Suddenly there rose on the horizon a roster of all the humans in houses and malls. Now when you want to be very, very wealthy, all you have to do is buy the lists and pick a few obvious marks. Start with unemployed, non-English speakers and so forth. And when that kind of marksmanship runs dry, why you can switch right over to CRE of which the entire landscape of North America has been filled-in as convenience services for all the barrel-tiled gated communities with central vacs in every room.

Does anyone recall how excited the real estate industry was when they'd been trawling the populace for more potential home purchasers and proudly announced their new targets were to be single mothers and illegal immigrants? For so many, it was love at first site.

While I'm at it, I credit Charles for his introduction to MERS. Its so perfect a tool for the Bankers it could go down in history as important as the Pasteurization of cows' milk. It is where we are going with everything, and in this I include the preferred customer discount card readers, credit card records, electronic medical records, etc., all of which give rise to yes, identity theft because as nice an employee as Joe Schmoe appears, you never really know who you are dealing with until its too late and as with Robo Signers, former burger flippers, it was too late on the grandest scale ever. And you thought Choicepoint was something. Wake up. Ice Nine time.

Many blogs and real news sites are working this one, so visit them and get informed. I'm not a news site really and the whole thing tends to nauseate me. When are they going to bloody knock off this shit? It is a miracle of God I am not in that world at all. What l've read and seen is replayed over and over every bi-monthly trip into a tiny, but densely populated area for supplies and still it brings on nausea. I see it live playing out among the people, many of whom think problem solving consists of forgetting about the problem and driving faster and more dangerously to get nowhere.The weirdest are usually in front of the box store which has taken to putting a quick-sale section in their oversize and empty parking lot. There wandering in a daze, are the snaggle toothed in flip flops with curlers and their daughters and vacuous husbands arms loaded with dollar plastic junk and family size bags of potato chips. Guess they're not cutting back. For people who have been poor all their lives, nothing has changed, however, inflation followed by hyperinflation will change all that. Where will they go? Some of the farmers sold their livestock because they could no longer afford the feed. When people get raw to the bone, when there is nothing left to sell, then we are in Migrant Mother territory with a company store where you can owe your soul. Yes, I will paint it. Now these new Okies, formerly home owning innocents caught in someones idea of oneupsmanship, could be anybody from anywhere so all the rules still apply. I.e.; some still won't get it. Order will have to be maintained, so Darth and Erik will have their people on the scene just in case you were romanticizing about freedom at last.

What is going on in France, in its 6th day, are some very angry human beings gathering and holding signs in large numbers because the retirement age is being raised meaning delayed expectations. It is interesting these protesters are being labeled as dock and refinery workers and any article you read soothingly explains in the ending paragraphs they have many ships waiting to offload plenty of fuel oil, yet, planes are diverted from landing and many gas stations dry. Hmmmm. It wouldn't be that some of the protesters are fuel oil people and some of them are everybody else that sees trying to survive on reduced pensions with severely limited fuel supplies spells the end of any creature comfort no matter how small?

... Fuel shortage fears

Since September 27, strikes against pension and port reforms at oil depots in the south of the country have left 63 oil, gas and chemical tankers waiting off the Mediterranean coast, Marseille port authorities said. ...
Strikes put pressure on petrol and diesel supplies across the country, notably when supplies to Paris's regional and international airports were cut on Friday, but the pipelines running south from Le Havre were reportedly working again by late on Saturday. ...
Christine Lagarde, the economy minister, urged people not to panic over petrol supplies, as the country had ample stocks for now. ..."We have reserves," she told France's RTL radio, adding supply problems had affected 230 petrol stations out of a total 13,000 in the country. "People mustn't panic."...
Police were able to break up blockades at three fuel depots in southern France, easing some of the pressure at petrol stations, but that has not eased fears of a fuel shortage.
"People are panic buying. We’ve seen long lines of motorists queuing at filling stations," Al Jazeera's Harry Smith, reporting from Paris, said. ...
Lorry drivers are heavyweights in the realm of French protest movements and have announced their intention to join the protests. ...
Maxime Dumont, the head of the CFDT union's lorry drivers' section, said drivers could block fuel depots and food warehouses and clog roads by driving slowly.
Trash collectors in Marseille have also joined in the strikes, burning rubbish in the streets. ...

They could be us. In the not too distant future. One thing we do not have in common with the Great Depression is the end of easy oil. I am convinced everything that is a crisis and the reason it is mushrooming is because we are past peak, which some would compare to our Saigon moment, but again, it is not comparable as we are witness to the slow death of humanity/integrity, lost in an electronic detour on the way to self-extinction. Worse, all along we knew it did not have to be that way. There was a better way, just not corrupt enough to satisfy the representative-selves of the courtiers currying the King's favor, the King's representative-self, of course, being under the delusion he was high born. High-born. Heh. That will make lots of difference when we're all gone.

... These are the big fish

Who always try to eat down the small fish,

just the small fish.
I tell you what: they would do anything
To materialize their every wish....

from Guiltiness by Bob Marley | Exodus LP

an evening in the Revealing

It is disturbing to see what is happening with the elections coming up on my geographic horizon.  The subscription TV which the fireteacher pays good money for out of his hard-earned chipster cheque is showing Arnie Terminator/Twins flicks through the night, every night.  Hey dudes, where's my Battle of Algiers, my Wild Pacific, my Spike Lee post-Katrina documentary?  No question over which side the satellite hovers.  How much did THAT cost?

And just where was Arnold while Georgio Armani Angelo Mozilo displaced the citizenry of our nation, quickly bleeding across the oceans destroying the peace of mind of westernized peoples worldwide?  (Think on that name: country-wide for a minute, ah such grandiose fantasies of pre-Elizabethan professional executioners have nothing on what heights are reached in our new millennium. (In fact, the Elizabethan age was one followed by many years of peace and prosperity, it is well known the Virgin Queen loved her people more than herself.)  It wasn't so long ago we had Gray Davis as governor who apparently bombed with the populace despite Enron's miserable  meatless ending.  The press ran Gray through the shredder under pressure from the you-know-whos. The press runs everybody through the shredder now since its their job to shred regardless of pressure. You see, they learned their lessons well.  For shame.  The truth is nobody can run this place, or any place, definitely not Meg Whitman, heh, just wait till she meets up with the local fruits & nuts overpopulating the west coast or worse, has to balance the state budget, the classic gubernatorial demise.  As soon as budget time rolls around, the shredder starts humming and it hums along through years and years of tears.  And, yes, Whitman's already denying her personal nannygate, exposed by none other than her X'd illegal immigrant housekeeper, but what really got me was something she said quite a while ago which was "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman."  She really said it.  Everything that came after that might as well have fallen on deaf ears, the blow was struck, the character naked for all to see and mind you, do we really want more X or "on leave to serve at the pleasure" CEOs in government?  No thanks, Meg, I won't be voting.  I will be among the millions all of you and yours lost with your expensive press-released, personhooded campaigns blessed by our highest court.  We have been burned so many times in state and national elections why ask for it outright?  Hey, gimme more idyllic penury huh?  And a little less room to just be, why don't ya? Fruits and nuts don't eat.  Yes, I know, voting is my Constitutional right to exercise so I exercise my right to protest by withholding.  The question is:  Do we prefer a candidate who lies all through the campaign or one who lies all though his/her tenure in office?  That's like saying we have a choice, isn't it, paper or plastic...
Oh well, nina, you could vote for Brown, right?  No.  His aide (um hmm) called Meg a whore.  I guess its the dirty politicking, the displays of concealed corruption and vast amounts of money spent on self promotion all the while attempting to hide one's true character.  All that money could be put to SUCH good use on improvement of the state and country and our species' survival.  For shame, again.  Are these people human beings or holograms or socio-hybrid aliens?  You tell me.

On my sojourns through God's Kingdom lately, the landscape is littered with peeling, weather-beaten campaign signs.  I try to get away from it and go deeper, farther and leave it behind where the neighboring mountains appear grey-green at the base, a lighter green-grey behind it and a higher, pale lavender grey-green ridge in the far distance.  Mist rises from the base of the far lavender ridge graduating to deeper grey at the top where it meets the clouds.  The mist means fog is coming on which means summer is over, winter opened its window and frost lies on the ground at dawn.  Its just a quick slide into wood gathering, stacking, hauling into the fireplace from there, although we never got started so early before.  I keep my eye on it.  First snow is always on Thanksgiving, but this year it could happen any day.  The Elk began bugling at the end of August.  That never happened so early before either.  Actually, this is a wonderful thing because the cold, wet night air (humidity) limits the probability of wildfires.  Lastly, as was the case in 2009, the Juncos are late by many weeks. The weather conditions must be just right for them to make the journey south and apparently, it is not.  I think in my mind its the air quality.  The belching filth of big agra is easily mistaken for fog coming through the passes.  Indeed, it is that surreal.  It was not always that way.  I remember.  I made notes in my Smithsonian guides.

The housing, foreclosure, low - if any - new home sales crisis reminds me of the GOM crisis.  The blowout preventer was broken as it was broken in the market crisis, or the credit crisis, or the ... etc..  Sort of like 911 too, each crisis militarily industrializes afterwards.  We keep having 911 disasters with eternal effects upending the previous story.  We know from reading stories there must be an ending somewhere, but there isn't.  Most everyone is still living the old story whether they are an unrepentant shopaholic or a Nigerian child selling sodapop in the mud to the pipeline police.  Even when attempts are made to reform corruption, the corrupt make the new story instantly throwing everyone and everything into deeper, darker, more terrifying and uncertain futures and still the story goes on.  The ever-changing, ever-enlarging story is a way of life now, as if the anomalies of the present are all that ever was or will be.

The courts are already backlogged, imagine what sheaths of complaint are hitting the desks today from all those who were foreclosed and evicted or threatened with the process, and all those who bought those foreclosed dwellings, ahem, illegally?  What a scene: the angry millions forcing their ways through the McMansion doors demanding their homes back from alarmed young couples feeding baby number one in the breakfast nook?  What are they gonna do in this economy, double up? Oh why not, they'll learn to get along just like we do, but they won't be happy about it until they win their lawsuits.  As we watch an entire new industry is being born, the graduation of Robo Signers to Paper Seekers tasked with unwrapping all the CDOs and sifting through xeroxes of xeroxes to find something that is probably lying under the mattress in Polanski's chalet if it actually exists, legitimate titles of home ownership and legitimate titles to commercial properties that is, not the mattress.  We only know one thing for sure at this point and that is: Everyone has again stepped on yet another rung of the Apocalypse ladder where nothing is what it seemed and all hell is breaking loose from the shylocks to the cowboys on bar stools looking for love in all the wrong places. There's a big range in between consisting of the colorful variety of Planetary Citizens.

There are many things I can handle as weird and strange as some things are, because I am not in that world. It does not concern me or the immediate members of this existence.  The man, me, the Guinea Pig, the Dogs, these are the beings whose interests are my interests.  The relatives and our children are the collective ribbons that complete the package.

Have you ever thought about being a survivor from a shipwreck, floating on a very small section of what is left of the lifeboat's hull, whom out of all those faces treading water would you reach for? 

On the other hand, when it comes to causing deliberate pain to our people in the larger sense, it burns, it scathes, it maims for life and kills as it does all victims whether they know what is happening or not and this is not acceptable.  One day its a feeling, then its a blurb at a news site, by evening the blurbs have their own wiki page.  And then, like the dark season, suddenly its upon us full steam ahead and we rearrange our existence again.  Suffering can be very good when you can, if you can, compare it to other states yet that also is being denied wherever possible.


Cufflinks photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images N.A.: Angelo Mozilo, founder and former CEO, Countrywide Financial Corporation, testifying during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing ... examining the compensation and retirement packages granted to the CEOs of corporations deeply involved in the current mortgage crisis.

What's goin on

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today ...
1971 | Marvin Gaye | Obie Benson

Finally, it has come to this we think and yet, its not over, not by a long shot. The mess, the turmoil, has a long way to go. A few things need attention while the thunderstorm and hail are flung across the passes and traffic slows to a dead halt on the interstates ...

Browsing the welcome news (we all have welcome news, you might have seen this), I was amused by an article dated today concerning a GOP senate candidate's statement made four years ago and wondered as you will too, why bring up this paranoid's delusion now? Of course, its election dirt, but its more. It reads as a thinly disguised attempt to take us further into 1984 where we are always at war. If this is so, it needs to be nipped in the bud immediately because we are going to need strong friends and soon. The paranoid's delusion is just that, a delusion, and a rather perfect illustration of reactionary thinking. What's wrong with these people, anyway? We wouldn't be reluctant witness to provocateurs' antics if our Laureate community organizer and his handlers could organize their way to real solutions, but alas ... personalities earn fame and fortune spotlit by media's public relations-compliant analysis, pressing and pushing to no avail. Economic relationships are stuck for life regardless of who occupies what office, and where, unless (there's always an unless) one party is suspected to be profiting more than the other. Profiting greatly.  In the end, in our bottom line, in our litmus test, it means nothing we don't already know. Tit for tat. Where's the change, dude? The whole place is still sliding on thin ice.

You'll want to follow up that piece, whichever one you chose among the roster of corporate feeds, with something of genuine substance, although its the blog author who provides great insight to the ironies contained in certain documents which are purportedly the agenda for the upcoming G-20. You will find the opinions fascinating. You may even find confirmation for your secret thoughts on this issue contained within. Gonzalo's take on his material is most entertaining. It would make a great film. Someday, I would like to see a dream roundtable discussion between Charles Hugh Smith, James Kunstler and Gonzalo Lira on just about anything. If wishes grew on trees ... Oh, the poor public. They have no idea. The new statistic for our beleaguered livestock is three out of four Americans will be obese (not merely overweight) by 2020. Do I need to repeat that? Has it sunk in? Good. The cattle would rather scrape lemon drops off the bottom of the BGH-GMO barrel than figure out what's going on.

None of the above will mean anything to you if you don't see the links.

The cattle better figure it out soon because it is no longer in the hands of some mythical great overseer. Mentally repeat the past and ask yourself what are you going to do when disaster snarls its way into your living room? Who is prepared when they don't know what is brewing in the witch's den? Personally, I have a prejudice against knowing too much because MSM details generally obscure the point, among other travesties. What has happened is we have no one looking out for us, we are viewed as too shallow, too spoiled through over-abundance, too oblivious and too corrupt for salvation. The humanity has been wrung out of the human. Where does one begin to repair all that has happened and all that is to come? How can we heal while wallowing in a national cesspool of denial? Yes, it is shocking. It is an impasse like none other, ever.

Mister Kunstler's essay today is his best one since I've been reading him, easily a few years by now. Oh, I know, he doesn't keep his house all that clean, there are plenty of repeat trolls nosing around, but once in a while there will be a comment so worthy of a larger audience it is like a rainbow breaking the storm. (I've taken the liberty  to correct punctuation where I find it and understand in the heat of the moment how such things happen.)

This one is from conchscooter:

"Can you spell quitclaim? The reason those famous "23 states" keeps getting brought up on this issue is that these are judicial foreclosure states. That would be states that require a judge to sign off on a foreclosure order.
However if challenged (and the title companies are doing just that)the banks not only can't produce the pen-and-ink mortgage agreement, they have had those lackeys sign off that the original documents were "lost." They weren't lost they were transferred without the benefit of being properly recorded to investment trusts.
That means the mortgages are not properly recorded and can therefore be challenged.
If you buy a foreclosed property you will not get title insurance because in those judicial foreclosure states the banks had no legal right to sell a property in which they had no legal standing.
This is a state issue and is going to have a more revolutionary impact on this lawless state of ours than any number of survivalists with guns.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself why banks are stopping foreclosure in judicial foreclosure states...No one else has asked themselves why and what happens next. Not even Jim Kunstler, which is disappointing, but he got closer than most."

And here's one from eightm: 

Another AX: WORK
Take a look at all of those skyscrapers in New York City, Tokyo, Seoul, etc. What do you think all of those office workers actually "do" ? Do you really think they are actually producing anything ? Are they needed for anything except being a place holder - a figment of imaginary labor - work, to justify billions of dollars of money transfers amongst the already and only ever going to be rich ? The truth is work in general is no longer needed, is destined to become obsolete no matter what anyone says or thinks or desires.

The calculation is easy to do: there are 200 million office workers worldwide, information workers, "knowledge" workers, research workers, "innovation", and research and development and all of the other mega Bull Shit terms and expressions the modern economist love to talk about. So exactly what are they discovering - improving - creating ? Absolutely nothing except billions of dollars being robbed from the poor. But let's look at it for what it really is: out of 200 million workers I would fathom that only 1 out of 1,000 are creating anything, are really producing anything of lasting value, any real optimization, any real improvement, any real result, any real serialization of work as something that accumulates. But this is OK, the other 199 million are just running around in circles, they are essentially spinning their wheels, they are mostly just killing time and creating and solving imaginary problems, and playing the status game, office politics game, and creating useless meetings and every conceivable way to pretend to actually be working and doing something.
But those 200,000 that are actually optimizing, that are improving the little work processes that are left to do, those guys there are setting the stage to eliminate at least each 100 jobs as a minimum. For what is all of this research, optimization, innovation worth if it doesn't cut costs, which in the end really means cut jobs ? And cut costs they will, no matter how inefficient they are because it is only natural that processes can slowly be improved and optimized. So 200,000 workers (the only ones that are actually serializing work, accumulating lasting results) will eventually each cut 100 jobs, so another 200 million unemployed workers will appear in the near future.
So the future of work is actually no work, hundreds of millions of unemployed, mass poverty, eventually starvation, thanks to the capitalists, success model of rich robbing everything from the poor. We need free salaries, and cheap rents since there will no longer be any possible work in the future. We need to get rid of the competition mentality, the me better than you idea, the idea of "earning" what you need, we need equality and everything must be furnished for free since automation and technology have essentially killed all possible work and will kill all work in the future.
You don't understand: you won't be choosing "capitalism" or whatever, the forces at play are going all in the same direction no matter what you or anyone wants. Optimization, automation, Chinese or South Korean scientists - engineers automating factories, creating production shortcuts, etc. etc. This will trickle through and translate into less costs which means somewhere and somehow less money to workers or less work. No matter what, this world is going towards the end of work, work is no longer needed, I know many people for one reason or another have no work, have nothing to do, even if they wanted to, because the modern production process is all geared towards the elimination of work. We better get this straight and not buy all the BS justifications of the economists that say more productivity, more research etc. will create new jobs. And in fact these are exactly the items that are eliminating work. More productivity and more research will kill jobs, not create new jobs, unless you consider dog walking a new "kind of job", a new "service job"...
No matter where and how many people can build houses or cut the lawns (valid only in the US, most countries don't have houses with lawns to cut, etc.) there is not enough work for too many people. We have huge excess capacity in all productive endeavors, Spain and the US, just to name 2 even very different countries built way too many homes and now have a glut of homes, the US may have 15 million empty homes, all of Europe from Lisbon to Moscow may have even more, they did all the right things, they built all the homes they could, but the system cannot support them without free salaries to millions of families that could use them.
The right wing thugs like to pretend there are these magical solutions, "technology destroys jobs but creates more jobs than destroyed", or "go somewhere else where they are looking for your manpower", etc to put the blame on the unemployed, to put the blame on the victim and not on the system: we live in automatic economies, work is disappearing at an alarming rate, there is no magical solution. We need free salaries and cheap rents, government owned, because the government is the people, the government is the nation as a whole, is the only real value, the collectivity, the individual is an egotistical criminal that wants to rob from the poor, wants to beat up the weak and kick them out of work. A central government that gives what the people need, and a progressive government that will use all the excess productive capacity for progress, the future, like space exploration, millions of skyscrapers, a society where the common good, and not the individual good is cherished. Exploration of the solar system and then the stars and planets, thousands of rockets, the future of humanity, a future of science and discovery, of an advanced civilization that puts all of its energy to use for progress, for the advancement of everyone, to share with everyone, to go higher and higher and further and further. Capitalism is a stone age system for violent - ancient apes that like to fight and have huge egos.
But this is exactly how the system is being set up to be ... (Please see link above for the rest of eightm's comment.)

Shall we ask eightm where the free salaries will come from?  Ah, sweetheart, don't even think about Treasury's presses.

What does all this say as a whole picture? It means we are fubar and need to either pull up stakes or batten down the hatches for our remaining lifetimes. That's right, sail under bare poles from this moment forward.

Who remembers the ISG, the Iraq Study Group, asking for solutions from the American citizens?  And did not BP ask for the public's solutions to the blowout?  And was Saudi Arabia's' offer of assistance not refused? Of course, Bush strummed his three chord riff, his only riff, during Katrina at a California's power photo-op rather than ask for solutions because he just didn't give a damn.  All along the signs and omens were blinking neon truths which for the most part have been taken for granted.  You saw it. The Fema trailers for those who qualified were reported to be cancer incubators.  And now there's Corexit - a solution not supplied by the public who was cluesless as to what on Earth could be done short of a walking evacuation, but where to?  With what?

Nothing is like it was and will never be like it was again. We've outgrown our childhoods and cannot go back. The people are unhappy and complaining and running into brick walls with every action they attempt to accomplish seemingly simple tasks. Simultaneously, it is a continuing joy to communicate with each other in our small, caring communities. I know lots of readers are worried about Visible this week, but he will survive his situation and resurrect into more than he already is. Tell me who among us has not been there? Let us trust each others' journeys through our own power to survive these times with our love and understanding. We ARE on our own, but we are not alone.  I will pass along a secret I shared with a friend just this morning: When your broken heart needs repair and you find yourself in the dark, swirling abyss, falling, falling, faster and faster, do-something-good-for-someone-else.   It is amazing how one small good deed turns it around.  This is where we are, just taking it day by day, usually hour by hour.  Baby steps and good deeds.

Art: 
L.A. Postcard | 18" x 24" watercolor on Arches
Woof!  Woof! Creole translation: Oua! Oua! | 18* x 24* watercolor on Arches

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