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