speakable words, unspeakable thoughts

... And I know you're shining down on me from heaven, Like so many friends we've lost along the way ...
by M. Carey, One Sweet Day

Another one down and more to come we hear. Keeping score yet? Our ruined cities, our ruined seas, our ruined coasts, our over-indebted population, our controlled societies ... force fed on crisis management PR while Rome burns and Nero fiddles. Perfect timing Dennis. We'll miss you, but would never plead you stick around for more.

This is what the end of the Industrial Revolution looks like, which is exactly the same as what Peak Oil looks like as we enter into Climate Chaos. Moreover, it looks a lot like this and this.

I am grateful to Su for bringing this quote to our attention:

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life
and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions,
it uses the same old basic principles over and over again.
There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.
Albert Szent-Györgyi

When whole economies are devastated, what else can people do but migrate? And they will migrate based on hope, as they always do, but I don't hold any hope, we've gone too far down the road of cruelty leading the multitudes into a permanent state of hopelessness. There are seemingly unrelated signs and omens pointing directly to the futility of hope, which is only wishful thinking, the busywork of hell on earth. I've seen things, from time to time, as an accidental passerby, that when you think about them later on make no sense in the larger scheme of what it is we are supposed to be doing here. Traveling through the corridors of an office building, huddled to the side of the elevators, an African American woman writhing to escape a band of steroidal law enforcement employees determined to cuff her and get her into the cage of a squad car, what had she done? She'd said she wanted to end her life is what she'd done. Alarmed co-workers called the authorities. Next, Between page downloads I ran across the Lindsey Lohan debacle where she is now court ordered to wear an alcohol monitoring bracelet. It must be an ungainly, chunky metal thing since she'd like it redesigned more fashionably. Who are these people who go into business principally to create and market such things as monitors and restraints? Now, let's just stop here and digest those two relatively minor situations and all they imply about our bizarre New World where you are definitely not in charge of your own life. While you think that over, are you seated at your desk? The one where you spend as much time prioritizing bills (for the price of living) as you do sleeping at night? Are we sleeping at night anymore? Its not so easy to sleep with the huge black weight of the plumes (denied to exist) wrapping the Gulf wetlands, is it. The more thought put into it, the more questions come up, the more nightsweats and alarm. They would like us to take our every breath in a never ending state of emergency.

We see a lot of strange things when surfing, arguable, debatable reports, they don't seem to fit at all with what you thought was happening. We like to discard them, they make no sense with everything else we hear. At some point, we tire of the noise and hang back to peer at the bigger meaning behind what is displayed to us and tie in all those dangling ends to see how they might complete the image. Just for the mental exercise of course. War Zone? Clear the lands/waterfront for development? Impossible you say. I don't know. These things were reported during Katrina as well, indeed they came to pass. Everyday is another education in areas of expertise we never thought much about: It appears this is also the experience of our community organizer and his agencies as well. Unfortunately for the population, this means our leaders are learning as they go along because governing responsibly is not the priority. Maximizing profits is the only game in town. As we slide down the the Bell curve, they appear to us as evermore desperate because doing something realistically helpful obviously isn't maximizing enough profit to please, thus, AMAZING - take your breath away, murderous disasters are commonplace. As each day rolls forward, all of this is only exacerbated. It is the innocence of hope (false belief) that the little people have control over any of the increasingly dire spectacles of corruption taking place that keep these issues from being resolved. Your confusion partnering with your hope is just another profit vehicle, although a very successful one, that prevents the dawn of a brighter day. It is why we vote, if we vote at all. It is why we bend and conform, if we bend and conform. It is why we become angry and sad, we don't get what we think we were promised because we have spent the majority of this lifetime under the hopeful illusion of false altruism disguising the maximizing of profits. Nothing is going to change that. The transition away from of pan-petro-reliance that could have been smooth and an honorable example to the rest of the western world, is squandered in paranoia and cheap deceit.

We like to think there is justice in this life, but again, as the events bubble to the surface, there is no justice coming. What we never wanted to know and never imagined is now what is. We do not have to wonder where this is going, it has been made repeatedly clear the only changes we will see are changes that one way or another maximize profit. You might even say, its always been this way and you would be right. The only battle you've been fighting all of your life is a classic deficiency (desirable trait) among decent people, is mental, it is the failure to pick up on a hustle when its going down. As long as you don't get it, you remain vulnerable. Things happen to the vulnerable. For example, Haiti remains vulnerable. Guatemala is vulnerable. Greece is vulnerable. All who suffer under the ambient threats of corruption extreme are vulnerable. And yet, even while the Earth is trawled and protest silenced, the corrupt thrive, pushing the envelope, creating disasters, lying to cover sloppy corner cutting resulting in innumerable screw ups, and its all whited out with the next silly press release and all of it for the sole purpose of ... maximizing profits.

We've been watching some of the C-Span hearings and found the usual incongruity among what passes for professional expertise in our weirdo world lately. Each interrogator is outshined in sheer absurdity by each specialist witness. Mindful of the secrecy schemes at large, we took to fantasizing alternate vocations for the interogees as potential cannon fodder (In Another Life) replaced by perhaps un-registered sex offenders (IAL) replaced by transgender lookalikes (IAL), all of whom dutifully relate their personal versions to apparently deaf and blind information gathering experts completely ignorant of the terminology and cultural dialects employed in transacting with each-other. This discrepancy is no doubt due to the accident of birth in a house of mirrors where nothing is as it seems and yet, after reaching maturity, everyone adjusts to the noxious circumstance where life choices include shifting the joystick or watching traffic camera monitors while gulping cheeesburgers and slurping supersized slushies.

When you see these BP spokespeople, you know in addition to the settlements and fines, headline divorces of which there are not as many financial limits, are lying at the bottom of their teacups exactly as the Deepwater rig lies sideways on the sea floor. What shall they do with these rigs in a drilling moratorium? Perhaps we are looking at prisons of the future, huge, multi-storied metal structures miles from land, ready made Alcatrazes for the New World, just add cell bars and a few Latino gangs. The hookers can parachute their way onto the decks since we are in part one of Apocalypse Now. I can't wait for intermission.

We will never know what really happened on that fateful day aboard the DH rig just as we will never know what BP is doing. There are many more where they came from, thousands lining the coasts of the continents. We will only know what crisis management wants us to know, which changes on an hourly basis. It is not that we are allowed any truths here, mind you, all we get is what they give, nothing more. In conjunction with the WH PR machine, surely they have stacks of press releases ready for anything, predated and awaiting dissemination depending on the momentary whims of drug dealer BP et al who might as well be Countrywide or Goldman Sacks at this point. Sometimes they get caught in deceit, but it passes with the next press release. You know when you see it, you are seeing the definition of real corruption, plumes of bs so thick, so deep and wide and growing, a firing here and there, fall guys, patsies, the children of no child left behind doing the whistleblowing, we cannot heal.

There is only one true and sustaining place to turn in such times and that is to the God within you, to that which you value in this journey and towards the healing and nurturing you alone are able to provide and especially to the love you share with your family members and animals - even if your family is not in any way traditional since whatever we held as tradition was just another method of torture and division, both of which are among the most popular products designed to maximize profit through coerced ignorance = prejudice.

If you somehow (impossibly) missed Waves on the Ocean Worlds in the Sea, I end this post with a timely, soul searing Visible masterwork.

photos: Google Images

"Valdez goes Cajun" on the way to the home of Atlantic Triangular Trade

If you read nothing else today, read this. Steve Lendeman is simply all facts, all the time:

"... According to Washington Post writer Juliet Eilperin (on May 20) in her article titled, "EPA demands less-toxic dispersant:"
An unnamed administration official said "Dispersants have never been used in this volume before," let alone ones as toxic as Nalco's Corexit 9500A and 9527A.

Nalco is well-connected, having formed a joint venture with Exxon Chemical in 1994, has oil-industry insiders on its board, including an 11-year BP board member. No wonder Defenders of Wildlife's senior policy advisor, Richard Charter, calls Corexit "a chemical that the oil industry makes to sell to itself, basically." ...

and more:

"...No doubt to prevent his congressional testimony, MMS associate director of Offshore Energy and Minerals Management, Chris Oynes, will take an accelerated retirement May 31. He got his position despite being key to an offshore leasing foul-up, costing taxpayers an estimated $10 billion in lost revenue - the Interior Department's inspector general calling his mismanagement "a jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling." ..."

And still more:

"...For a company with the worst safety and environmental record in the industry "here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun" with contagion enough to contaminate vast parts of the Gulf, Florida Keys, fragile ecosystems, and the entire US East coast and beyond. ..."

And still there is more at the link. The criminal implications and cozy relationships are detailed with more coming out every day/several times a day. Get ready East Africa, the loop flows in your direction after decimating the Southern and Atlantic coasts of North America. As Lendeman reminds us, "regular large and smaller spills are assured". I have no doubt he is right. To date, nothing has shown itself to stand in the way of this eventuality. Even if the wellhead and leaks were sealed today, the damage is already done. Dead is dead, it can't be brought back no matter how many tears are shed. Once the floodgates are open, its all over. For this event, there is no bailout, no relief, no turning back the clock. Wherever they go from here, it is already too little, too late. Its almost as if the Creator took all marine life, eco-vegetation and cellular structures of the sea (birthplace of life itself) saying "Come to me for refuge, you need not be here any longer to suffer what is coming."

People will always find something to do, even when it appears there is nothing, no jobs, no means, but think for a moment what it IS (vs. "will be" or "might be") for the oil soaked Sperm Whale, already endangered to the extreme, tar-glued and gasping for oxygen when there is none.

Never have we witnessed such outrageous, total and complete psychopathic lack of respect for life. We have not heard one single apology, one single oath to make it right or prevent this genocide from ever happening again from those responsible of which there are too many to name. Even a white collar prison will only make them more determined to continue the slaughter of our once perfect planet. No financial penalty is enough. They will walk away as always to continue their Satanic missions watered down into BAU (business as usual) wrist slaps by whatever grand commission whitewashes genocide under the guise of the Official Word on such subjects for whatever history remains for this Earth. ...

Our title for this entry is a Lendeman line coupled with a reference to the newly revised textbooks for Texan public schools where "Slavery" was deliberately excluded and now, to be known forever after as the "Atlantic Triangular Trade".

"...changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favoured separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the "significant contributions" of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.

The new curriculum asserts that "the right to keep and bear arms" is an important element of a democratic society. Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favour of examining scientific advances through military technology.

There is also a suggestion that the anti-communist witch-hunt by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s may have been justified.

The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous "Atlantic triangular trade", and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism. ..."

PS: Before I sign off, Steve Clemons has a remarkable entry on his blog today also: What Will the World Look Like in 100 Years? Do check out the comments and visit Pissed Off American's links. I was unable to open this one: http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20100512/TRO-Deepwater.Horizon.BOP.Assurance.Analysis.March.2001.pdf, but it shows up on another computer here. It appears to have been given a strange "half-scrub" job. A must read, that is if you can open it.

to what advantage?

I am in the strangest place with this blog, it seems to extend indefinitely and there is no statistician to guide where it might go in times to come. I've written a number of essays and deleted them all. If I wait a day or two, the events of our times change, magnify and worsen actually, like a terminal disease, and there is little point in saying something that becomes past tense before you can articulate your thoughts or even realistically define our fluid situation. My chief concern since last month has been the genocide taking place in the area Shock Doctrined during Katrina, as if we are witness to the Postmortem Monsters' Ball of Peak Carpetbagging. If you are as busy surfing for information as I am, let me offer a few sites that are doing a great job of discussing said genocide:
ClubOrlov
Desdemona Despair
The Oil Drum
and more below ...

After all, what is mass death on such an incomprehensible scale but genocide? My general feeling about this is very simple, stop all attempts to recover what is gushing from the geysers, seal it off and go home. Face charges and do your time. Show all the corrupt and greedy you are just ordinary men and offer up your one good example as final testimony to having passed through this Earthly journey. As long as you insist on profit from the enterprise of genocide, you will fail. Oh, you didn't realize it was going to be so ghastly? That is no excuse in the eyes of the Divine, you participated, designed, connived, shaved off every detail you could get away with, all along. Oh, everyone else does it? That is a worse excuse. If you truly desire to seal the pipes, instead of golf balls and tires I suggest you make a clay mold as dentists do in our mouths and fill it with melted plastic shopping bags and Styrofoam cups which you will give to the robot and have your geysers stuffed never to break down for tens of thousands of years.

I am really disgusted this oil eruption happened. It was entirely predictable. If you do not walk away from the profit angle and fix your mess, it will happen again and again. Look into your heart and see the answer.

It will not escape the astute reader that what is happening on the peak energy front is analogous to everything else seeking obscene material wealth in 2010 plus. Now we are going to witness who comes forth as human and who is the real monster. Make that plural, who the real monsters are. What do you bet ecosystems don't qualify for a bailout? No, all these things qualify for after such disasters have generationally destroyed entire geographies, is anthropogenic destabilization of Earth's balance in the Universe, be it Ozone holes or holes drilled into the Earth's crust. This brings up the question, specifically, what is the goal? To be more powerful than God?

If these monsters don't do the right thing right now, you know more is on the way. Anytime, anywhere. We cannot prepare for or consider surviving that which we do not know. And what pray tell is this emerging whisper concerning small nukes to control deepwater drilling "leaks"? Is this how it all goes down?

cruelty: power from the grave

One of the things happening in this experience we call the state of being "online", besides a fantastic increase in time wasted wading through simulacra in order to get to where your true intentions reside, is a broadening of illumination. It is what might happen if you found yourself in a snowstorm in the forest, lost, verging on giving up and pondering your next move, each move having used precious energy, your reserves are running low and there isn't much time now, it must be the right move or salvation, if it still exists at all, could vanish if your next move is another futile decent into the very real possibility of hypothermia. You can see a light filtering between the branches and investigate. And then, right on time, there is Arthur Silber, meaningfully connecting, talking about the exact thing I spoke to you about last year in the post Deja Vu. Suddenly, it comes together and there is no "lost" anymore, its what you perceived and yet, so large and ungainly we fail to grasp its significance until we catch ourselves repeating patterns again, the same story written by new authors referencing even more authors and it keeps growing until it is undeniably - a sad truth.

"If you are watching others, as we cannot help but do, you are amazed how much punishment they can take and remarkably, the suicide rate is relatively low for these ongoing horrors. Of course, suicide takes many forms, the most common aside from actually jumping off a tall building is substance abuse in which every act and breath is slow death. Another and likely even more common is the fallback into your pattern suicide. This is where one reverts to autopilot behavior learned from childhood success with the method, the one where you infinitely repeat your scenes, good and bad, in different geographies, employments or social situations meaning they are always disguised from the performers as if something new was taking place requiring a brand new solution every time. This is especially common to repeat victims in domestic violence and repeat offenders of crimes, they fail to note the overall picture of their life is unchanging due to a change of costume and the variance in script."

On the Mainstreet level we are talking about why it is that horrible crimes are committed in our name every hour of every day and do nothing to end it. The excuse used to be you didn't really know enough to voice a serious opinion. Later, as you began to recognize the inconsistencies and facts went a lot deeper than you'd imagined, you couldn't see an opening where you might contribute to make a difference, as if you found yourself staring at a monumental glass bubble, with no entry, everyone can see inside and everyone inside can see out, but the two never meet.

Horrific decisions are made inside the bubble affecting millions worldwide, but you can only look on, mostly dumbfounded as to how such a thing is taking place. Every now and then it looks as if its going to burst, but it remains and - its growing exactly as the oil slick is spreading through the Gulf into the bayous and inlets and mangroves and the multitude of wildlife reserves (reservations). Just as Charles said in The Art of Survival: Taoism and the Warring States, the point of which is to know your enemy if you intend to be the victor, we must know ourselves if we plan on surviving in spite of the bubble's ruthless appetite for destruction. We are not here to gawk incredulously at the bubble, nor are we here only to be subjected to relentless, indefatigable cruelty.

We have seen the bubble and it is us. It is not literally me or literally you, maybe, it is OF us, IN us, who can deny we assisted in its creation? We have gone along with it, complied with it, argued for our candidates and freely offer up alms. What most of us have not done, in spite of the daily monstrosities, is recognized exactly what part of us makes up the bubble and what to do about it, if anything.

The belief it is going to crash is not valid since on the very day the bubble claims to be in recovery be it slack show trials or lack of finale in war and conflict or partners in crime or innocents made foolish by a spreading of the global debt or incongruous solutions that only worsen the condition, that IS what the bubble becomes as a self-propelling shape-shifter. You have already seen those inside create their own reality at the drop of a press release, which affect us regardless, and never well. Until we dig to the root, we will remain stuck, staring, questioning without knowing, confused and jerked around as we are ostracized and cruelly humiliated by anyone who pleases, anyone oblivious to what is happening here.

We can end it whenever we want. All we must do us recognize the cruelty stops with ourselves. How it inserted itself into the human character is not as important as possessing the awareness to allow it to extinguish itself through your own power by opting out of the cycle. In the learning process, you'll figure out how it happened anyway. WE are where change takes place by walking away, boycotting, refusing to participate, living above the noise, the threats and punishments. Everyone must come to this conclusion by themselves. It you hold serious convictions, allow nothing and no one to dissuade them. Every step back depletes your power until you are again at the mercy of cruelty and hatred.

How we began doesn't have to be how we end this particular trip. Everything we've learned in our relatively recent learning leap turns out to be false, thus false is where we began, at birth, and literally at the birth of domination supported in full by cruelty costumed as the greater good, costumed as political correctness, faking altruism.

Its more than possible the first cruelty was an early reaction to cruelty from outside predation thousands of years ago during colonization. As an interbred population grew in number, cruelty successfully served a multitude of objectives from self-survival to enforcement of obedience under cruel rulers to creating examples of those who refused to accept cruelty's ambient violence. Behind it all is nothing more than the demand one submit and surrender. What are we doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, Haiti, Somalia, what did we do during Katrina? Why is torture condoned and what is it that sets off the actual perpetrators extending the rack? The list of crimes encompasses the entire planet and still it grows. We are doing two things, stealing resources and replacing objectors to the thefts with starry-eyed and weakened submissives who will supposedly duplicate western behaviors, amplifying the prevalence of cruelty. What goes on in relationships riddled with domestic violence? Demand under pressure to transform the human region into that of complete surrender and submission is what goes on. It only works as long as the pressure is present, i.e.; it does not work, and it is never sustainable. In the long term, cruelty is a complete failure. It is a truth that domestic violence almost always results in death - as in war, as at home. It is all one longstanding, learned pattern. Mainstreet is your household hallway.

It is my firm understanding we have life in order to move higher into the realm of total awareness as we pass though Earth's portal. If we don't get it on the first try, we die to live again and very often recycle many times following each journey until we achieve true awareness which is not death at all. Along the way, suffering - and understanding why we suffer - is key.

I don't fault, fault being merely acknowledgement of cause, the common man for being intractable, determined to avoid awareness of himself and what he does at any cost, I fault him for failing to recognize his own learned patterns of abuse and cruelty as personal survival mechanisms, keeps everyone else tethered to an imaginary premise having no foundation with which to advance into the higher realm.

How good can the so dearly desired "good life" be if all around everyone and everything else is suffering, collapsing, depleting, extincting, going without, robbed of respect and dignity chiefly because of the requirements necessary to preserve the "good life"? The cruel and clueless will never invite the pain of the truth.

Although I recognized the expanse of patterns of cruelty and submission on my own long ago, my sincere thanks and gratitude go to Visible for his honesty and ever fearless voice and Arthur Silber for his Apocalyptic insights, each of whom confirm these truths I bring to your attention with their healing, heartfelt and inspiring works. If you are not already reading their blogs, I suggest you start anywhere and then ... take a look at what kind of world we are living in.

photo: google images