Anything can happen

So much trouble in the world
So much trouble in the world

Bless my eyes this morning
Jah sun is on the rise once again
The way earthly thin's are goin'
Anything can happen.

You see men sailing on their ego trip,
Blast off on their spaceship,
Million miles from reality:
No care for you, no care for me.

So much trouble in the world;
So much trouble in the world...

Yes I.  Indeed.  Anything can happen ... and will and does.  As you know well, by now, at this time in this form in this particular go around on this spectacular Earthly plane.

Imagine, for example, what the next leaders of the multitudes of lives and lifestyles within our geography will be doing at their polished desks among all the rare antiquities surrounded by their special chosen Cabinet. Think about how they think of you - and then think about the generations to come.

Are we in agreement that it is absurd that the legal personhoods continue to flood coastal cities with waterfront development?  We wonder if the Blonde vs. Blonde voting populations also find it absurd.  I think not.  With one, we get to be subjects of the Roman Empire on Steroids, with the other, slave gladiators.  As in anything can happen perhaps nothing like what I've just described will happen. Judging by the American experience since WW2, a good bet would be no positive change, but an exponential growth of what we already have and see now - which will, naturally, unfold rapidly since this is how they already do it, momentum is increased at every opportunity and the opportunities are unlimited.  My friends, we are in uncharted territory. 

UNLESS

You see it for what you always saw it, lodged in buildings built by slaves housing the slickest of the slick, where they do what they think are slick things.  These things are rarely in and nowhere near our favor because people who make rules always make rules in their favor whether they know it or not.  Their favor means anything further separating them from those who are disfavored, be it status, power, visibility or loyalties favoring all whom they perceive to be just like themselves.

To live a happy life, forget about them and enjoy JAH suns and moons. Teach the children love and compassion.  Stay with your own creativity, it never fails to keep you high and away, above the BS and free.  Keep your mind open and learning.  Stay away from judgements, instead look for the overview. 

Surely there are many who sacrifice enjoying a happy life out of sheer gluttony for status, power and visibility.  They made their choices long ago and we should not expect them to change now, therefore, it is up to us to live our happy lives as best we can.  By using the term "happy life", I mean living a life in which you respect your own existence and everyone else's also.  If you have love for yourself, it radiates into everything you do, everyone you see, all species you come across, not just those with whom you are already close, but the "strangers" you frequently meet in your journey. More often than not, I am a little shocked and pleased to find new like minds where I never thought I would.  For Izzy who commented on our last post he wished it was easier to find like minds off line as it is for him online, I would think the more time you can spend offline, the more you give of yourself, you come across like minds.  Another thing that must be stated about happy lives isn't exactly Izzy's issue as he stated it, rather it is a common trait among human beings to create a pattern in the unconscious mind of just how a stranger must appear and sound in order to communicate with them.  It is extraordinarily beneficial to recognize that trait is a survival throwback to the dawn of Humankind and has virtually no basis in your mission on Earth within the Heavens.  All uncharted territory is opportunity.





Verse: So Much Trouble In The World
Bob Marley & The Wailers, from Songs of Freedom

Raining in My Heart

And now, my dearest allies, those people who visit and leave a multitude of feelings, inspirations and personal thoughts and connections - for which I am always so grateful, people from near and far who read here for whatever reasons and leave without commenting, but take away something helpful or consoling with them on their journeys, we come together again because its time.

We are weak and on our knees simply trying to comprehend the accelerating suffering from coast to coast and country to country which, as we have known has been simmering for centuries and now reaches the boiling point. 

Since I was a little yout, I never got the "why" part. Why beat down the downtrodden? Why create circumstances to deliberately divide us? Why make hard that which is naturally easy, what was it, what is it, they can't see?  It follows, of course, that those early years would not have been smooth.  But still, they formed me and were imbedded more deeply every  single day in one way or another. My crime was holding ideals that differed radically from too many others' ideals, that is, if they held any genuine ideals at all.

I can't say I've changed much in that category. Truth always mattered more, although it commonly comes at a high price.  One must be able to convince the medium from which truth comes to you that you will accept it with no repercussions, an impossible feat. The first repercussion is your normal curiosity for truth.  And curiosity makes you think which makes you feel a way.  It can not be helped.

I am sure anyone reading here already knew the repulsive truth about torture many years back. They thought we would forget it with the passing of time, our attention long diverted with school shootings, cyber hackings, privacy leaks and abject consumerism as if "all that was so then" in the same way Bill Cosby might think about his past behaviors. Only now we are presented with a damning report years after the fact and already its  being run through the dairy queen dispener. Yes, its Christmas under the tree for the damage control industry which are as you know, ruthless professionals in Timing is Everything whose hands are permanently stained with the stigmata of global misery.  Instead of apology they race to deny.  They threw this report at us to get those criminal, lippy protestors to knock it off by shifting the spotlight. We're in Present Shock, remember?  Where everything happens at once?

I can't breathe.

I want to speak to them directly and let them know WE can't breathe.  We can't eat, we can't speak. We can't live, we can't weep because we know their stock in trade and brace ourselves while inside our tortured hearts we are praying they get hip.

But you know, they don't see it that way.  They have a vision that they are untouchable, a uniquely superior example of our species, a more perfect person.  So remarkably special, revered and powerful, so right, so clean in conscience, communication of any sort with the slightest potential truth might accidentally slip out is not allowed.  It appears truth was made illegal and the ruling kept secret because damage management was on vacation in some private blackjack suite high above the golden avenues of Fat City. 

The divide is wider than the distance between Mother Earth and Uranus which means it is extremely unlikely we will see any of these white face Ken dolls fess up and get with the program.

The program, (you know the program, you are the program)  is and always has been DO NO HARM.  There are a million, billion, trillion subheads under that title, including all sizes and manner of beautiful, truly Godly acts of compassion and seva.

I will make it simple for them by saying truthfully,  all they have to do is recognize we are all one. Yes! Pan Species Diversity. Without the game, we're all the same. We breathe as one.

There is nothing, NOTHING, less than  absolute ZERO, ever to be gained by allowing ignorant prejudice, vanity and testosterone fueled anguish to dictate action.


Raining in My Heart:
Post title from The Best of Slim Harpo
Excello Records, recorded: Crowley, Louisiana, 
November 1960
Photo c. Yahoo/Pinterest

picking up where we left off...

On the same page as our beloved and insightful, tell-it-like-it-is friend, Bho, I ask you who among us who does not feel the craziest days and nights of all time past and to come, are heaving themselves in front of us - so that we are forced against our will to feel the hot, foul breath of the beast, the stink of his burnt tongue from slurping the fires of Hell?  We are just simple people, never asking for, never imagining, never looking for the House of Horrors on a bright, sunny afternoon kicking back in essex green Adirondack chairs on the deck overlooking the perfect beauty of Nature.  I began to count concurrent events before my hiatus, but the events rolled themselves into what began as a series of global news stories, each international, previously unheard of www.slime.rag on overtime pushing details regardless how insignificant, or false, designed purely to inspire fear and loathing, and quickly grew into a Ripley's Believe it or Not, including immediate placement in the Guinness Book of Gargantuan, Stupid and Hypocritical Earth Shattering Records.  Now, today, and for evermore, in our remaining times among the living, a monster ball of dung trails the slouching beast, growing larger and heavier, squatting on our sad blue planet, surely she, blameless, is weeping tonight. 

But her wrath is sly, her rope unlimited and she allows the Hominid species to simply hang themselves. 

If you been readin' the news pages on your device of choice, you know what I'm sayin'.
 
It goes without question, life is about learning.  We who are aware we are always learning and accept what we experience as a teaching moment, good or bad, are able to draw on those lessons because these lessons are integral (our nature) and lifelong.  If those experiences are perceived without overstanding, or fleeting, or just never acknowledged at all, where would you be now?  Probably in a maximum security prison of your own making, certain you are innocent of whatever crime that put you there, you were just going along, caught up in your materialist fantasy, accepting of your entire current life situation on the Great Plantation when WHAM.  Something happened, could be anything, you know, but you don't know what happened because responsibility of any sort was never in your vernacular.

I didn't come into this observation recently.  It seems to grow in league with population stats so that everything strongly disagreeable, ridiculous, backwards, tragic, corrupt and evil multiplied exponentially, which should mean the antithesis multiplied exponentially also, but no, it did not happen as the TAO explains the natural balance of beauty and ugliness.  It meant instead, the heinous acts of the Yang overlapped its boundary into the Yin, in doing so, the balance undone, quaked, the axis spins wildly out of control.  One could, if mathematically inclined, actually calculate where all of this is going since it continues, unabated, nothing at all on the horizon impeding its excesses. 

Sometimes we wonder how it came to be this way in the spare moments between events.  Is it genetic imbecility or is it unabated narcissism?  Or is it both and more?  I don't completely count out otherworldly.  Are we merely a proving ground, a coliseum for hostile aliens?
 
... Intermission for Meditation ...

Far away, in another land, a tropical dream where the overseers are right on the edge of legalizing weed for religious purposes, our Rasta continues to build his paradise where on warm, silvery nights you can see the moon looking into his door.

Snowjob

I can’t tell you for sure if the Snowden incident actually happened, I can tell you only vague highlights (think headlights in a thick fog - at night), that you already know and I can also tell you whatever happened didn’t happen in the way it is being presented.  Really now, where’d they get this guy?  Was he cloned and trained just for this moment in time or lured off death row by the promise of a holiday in Hong Kong?  The same applies to nearly everything, maybe all, that has been cultivated, packaged and consumed without having any factual information on what it is exactly that you are ingesting, as if reader content is just more pink slime, as if sand men running around the dunes carried out … well you know, as if that was the beginning of the end of happier days which it was not, impossibly so, from any angle.  The point being we have become inured to these stories because we‘ve been around this block before, it’s the same old song lip synched by the same lame band, pseudo vocalists who appear to us as simple minded in that they repeat themselves ad nauseam.  Have they never heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?  However, each time the wolf snarls, it could very well be a real wolf, except, well, as I said, we’re inured.  How long has this been going on?  Surely you haven’t forgotten Choicepoint?  So why are we being subjected again to threats upon our sacred secrecy policies that are not exactly secret at all?  There could only be one explanation which is, apparently, we are not yet completely in lockstep with created reality.   To the masterminds of heroic murder fiction and spy thrillers, we appear disinterested.  YES!  I realize its hard to grasp such a thing, but no one in their right mind wants to pick up the same book over and over again, unless it’s a Henry James or Chinua Achebe work of exquisite art where every word in every sentence conjures revelation and imagery both good and evil and invites ardent study in order to grasp the full poignancy and utter foolishness of the human species.   Certainly this is yet another good reason to wear earplugs and blinders, the self-styled masters behind these phenomena have to be unable to hire better writers at any price and to any literate person, appear oblivious, which means they like it that way in the same way they like their Chateaubriand.  Perhaps they fell for slick presentations from the slickest of the slick PR/Damage control/Crisis Management consultants all of whom turned out to be duds when what is perceived as an exciting, lucrative, all time best selling crisis by our death-match secret keepers is casually treated with recycled product messages such as Swine Flu at the Podium, Bin Laden Deepsix or Bush Drops From the Sky as Jesus in Flackwear.  Besides, there is so much else going on, every day, wonderful and atrocious, we no longer have the time, interest or desire to freak out.  It is a fact of life in our overproduced and counterproductive environment, the human being’s natural defense mechanism is activated to turn away from that which causes anguish, suffering, harm and pain. Our lives are local and in local territory there are unwritten rules of genial conformity tempered with much compassion largely adhered to with an exception here and there.  Normal people don’t speak in acronyms or define whatever it is they’re pushing with MIC-speak.  Normal people have no way to translate journalists’ dialogue filled with words and statements such as breached, intelligence and leak and the overused unclear, "It remains unclear due to ongoing..."  The meaning behind this language is completely lost on vast numbers of citizens, it simply is not in their vernacular.

What is truth for locals are hourly wages, food on the table and their children.  As much as I detest this city, its dirt and its ubiquitous evil, equally I love the diversity.  From my observation, the US born white guy is the minority here.  Of course, it is that very diversity that is the spinal cord buttressing the local monoculture of obscene wealth in wanton ignorance to the outside world and its ongoing disasters just as blood circulation is to the heart.  As far as that monoculture is concerned why should they care either?  They, too, are busy with their own version of local.  They care only to the extent of returns on the dollar.

It seems the only people(?) that are having hissies over the current revival, Its Snowing in Snowden, are the producers and their agents.  There is a point, of that we can be sure, why such events take place and are, as you have noticed, escalating and that point is M-o-n-e-y.  You might disagree, but power and control are expensive products to maintain and to insure their viability into the far future. 

If you haven’t been keeping up with Arthur Silber’s takes on this issue, you are missing the best thinking and writing available anywhere. 
* * *

Bulletin: The Trout Clan will shortly be making public, visually, their astounding recovery progress.  It’s a mighty thing to behold.  Stay tuned for their next post.  I will be linking to them onblog to make sure all of you have the opportunity to see what hard work, love of the land and love of life itself can do.   Residents of Tornado Alley and regions prone to wildland fire will be especially interested.

Do No Harm

This past week's community slanderfest is probably not over, just in remission until someone else picks it up.  Therefore, the following lesson is particularly appropriate when considering New World Thug Behavior and Carelessness.  Much gratitude goes to Scrapwood for sending in the 59 Lojongs.  It will go on the left sidebar in the Free NeverOverdue Library shortly so you will have immediate access to all 59 teachings and the preliminaries.


"... The Mind-Training Slogans, #31 

Each Friday, Acharya Judy Lief, teacher in the Shambhala tradition of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, comments on one of Atisha's 59 mind-training (Tib. lojong) slogans, which serve as the basis for a complete practice. 

Atisha (980-1052 CE) was an Indian adept who brought to Tibet a systematized approach to bodhicitta (the desire to awaken for the sake of all sentient beings) and loving-kindness, through working with these slogans. Judy edited Chogyam Trungpa's Training the Mind (Shambhala, 1993), which contains Trungpa Rinpoche's commentaries on the lojong ("mind-training") teachings.

#31. Don't malign others

When we malign someone, our intention is to cause harm. Our words are spiteful and ill-spirited. There is a saying that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” But in fact words do have power and they certainly can hurt.

In working with the slogans, we are working not only with our actions, but with what is behind them. For instance, when we say something, we should ask ourselves why we are saying it, and for what purpose. Will what we say help the situation or not? Are we trying to connect with someone or get rid of them? Are we trying to help them or to destroy them? Or maybe we are talking just to talk, to fill the space because we are uneasy with the silence.

If we need to malign others to make us feel good about ourselves by comparison, we will never feel all that great. And at the other extreme, when we encounter people who are exceptional, that approach will make us feel pathetic in comparison. According to this slogan we should stop that whole destructive approach.

Not maligning does not mean that we do not notice differences in people. It does not mean that we should not recognize people’s hateful or destructive attitudes and weaknesses when we encounter them or that we should not speak up. Everything does not just become a mush. But when we see other people’s problems without encumbering our perception by the need to prop up our own insecure ego, we can respond more directly and appropriately. By stopping the habit of maligning, not only will we do less harm to others, but we will also begin to free ourselves from the need for such props.

Today’s practice
Pay attention to your speech and to how you talk about and to other people.  What is the difference between speaking critically and using speech to harm or to destroy? ..."


***


I  would rather, any day, be thought naive rather than publicly slander another, especially when that person is already down, battling demons no one can dispel but themselves.  I wish I were naive sometimes, ignorant of the viciousness that can arise when expectation and motive are shredded in the bright light of reality.  Naive to the increasing overtone of violence rocking our world off its axis every single day, every hour, somewhere, blind to the immediate flare of tempers feeling wronged by whomever, wanting whatever.  If you look at these situations closely, you would find there are always two elements at the root of conflict, one is of course, money, the other, credibility. The belief systems accompanying our existence in western culture encourages the value of those two elements exponentially to the point that all most people are exposed to is violent in its nature and always disastrous in result.  It does not have to be this way, it never did.  As Ran Prieur quoted on the idiocy of property ownership and John of Survival Acres presented in his essay on food production being at the root of all civilizations, both break down the walls of perception of why vicious conflict, bloodletting, enslavement, abject penury, injustice and arsenals of weaponry never had to be the roadmap to food security, peace, satisfaction and freedom.  In fact, we should be aware by now, our quickly depleting world seems to be composed of frivolous thug-appeal, violent "advancements" against humanity at large principally for the expansion of wealth among the already wealthy, i.e.; more food and property than can possibly be consumed by offspring of offspring.  In the present, it is trusted more than ever, violence is the only means to continue the atrocious, hideous charade.  As it stands now, this ongoing tragedy ends only when we die.  There has always been a better way for mankind to survive.  The reason Thug World thrives is violence is expedient, lacking clarity of thought and convenient, whereas exercising  intelligence and compassion for all beings requires love, that inconvenient marvel that always gets in the way of false desire.


We who seek awareness are on the right track for the most part, but it is evident the violence all around us is a highly contagious disease which is immunized against and blown away entirely with LOVE.

the inevitability of limited vision

The thing I like the most about the west is not something usually listed in travel advertisements such as accommodations and exclusivity.  It is the Cecil B. Demille skies at just about any given moment on any given day.  They appear unusually panoramic in comparison to skies in other geographies, with heightened cloud activity and weather complexities you would see elsewhere only over the open ocean where on the brightest sunny day, running wing on wing, you can study a distant squall off the port bow or rains falling from one cloud bank into another below it.  At this moment, a dark thunder storm is approaching from the southwest while overhead it is clear blue with Old Masters-style Cumulonimbus bordered with watercolor blends of soft Ultramarine graduating to crisp Titanium White.  You would think standing on the coast of say, Florida, you would see the same things, but it isn't so.  The Eastern Coast of this continent, especially in flat Florida, the adventures of Cowboy Clouds Gone Wild does not present itself in Cinerama, being quickly battened down by low lying landscapes: uninterrupted stretches of Mangroves and Sawgrass, beauties in themselves, but nothing like the lost fogs who become trapped in the passes and canyons hugging the California Transmontane as they also do in the Nevada Sheep's Range.  It is the appearance of white wool-like fluff that gathers through the striated peaks and crags that gives that region its name. This phenomena shows up often after rainstorms and on high humidity winter mornings.

What is peculiar about the cities of the western territories is the overkill to sell every man his castle.  In doing so, most homes built after the middle of the last century have high walls dividing them from their neighbors' houses.  Even strip malls employ a sort of semi permanent fencing arrangement utilizing metal posts and barbed wire.  It appears the McMansion development communities, squeezed by the thousands into formerly trash riddled vacant lots, each dwelling erected on individual tiny parcels, as small as the builder can get away with, are especially subject to high walls and ostentatious iron gates.  The walls are made of painted cinder blocks in multitudes of varieties of beige aka sand tones as if tight enclosure of the castle was something natural.  Is it natural to exit the kitchen door and meet with a wall extending to the second story?  These walls dividing homes from one another are typically fourteen or more cinder blocks tall. Even in ungated residential neighborhoods, the homes are walled off from passersby and sidewalks as if the presence of human habitation must be a secret kept far from tourists.  Existing behind walls limits sky viewing in the same way the web is seen on cell phones or news on TV with too many banners and blinking gadgets.  Who are these dickwads anyway,  blocking out our views?  Is anybody home there?  It is difficult to know what they're doing overhead, you can hear a lot of noise, seemingly close, but you don't know what it is.  It brings an air of gnawing mystery to whatever you are doing.  Naturally, it doesn't bother the locals at all.  Have they never lain in the grass with a friend watching clouds?  Actually, there is very little grass and grasses used for energy- intensive landscaping are poisoned.

There's more.  Most of the intrusive alerts and crackling static warnings that I mentioned in the last post are centered around flash floods.  They caution you to stay indoors, go nowhere, lay low until the all clear is given by "your" TV weather forecaster.   Do we have primary care weather-people now?    I have visited this same location off and on throughout the years, mostly seasonal layovers, mostly during this same season when these freak flash floods were definitely not happening, at least not happening to the extent they are this time.  Nature had not yet caught up with what the city planning board had in mind. Certainly, uninhabitable desert regions have always had flash floods since dry grit and creosote making up the floor of western deserts are not porous enough to soak up heavy water flow, in many foothhill regions you will see evidence of man's hand in redirecting the flow for human use.  But here, in the city, what seems to have happened is in the overbuilding, they covered the valley floor with wall to wall cement and asphalt, there is no other place for the water to go except into various dips of road and unfortunate properties cheaply bought and sold in less unpredictable seasons which we know are becoming more rare by the day.   It is exactly in those places flash floods take take their worst toll.  They have aqueducts, but not nearly enough and were never built to reign in the increasing summer overflow which always claimed victims even before superstorms.  This same situation also occurs in the high desert suburbs bordering the Mojave northwest of Los Angeles.  It happens where there are heavily traveled, ground level, high speed multilane asphalt highways bordered on both sides with non-porous ground and subject to increasingly extreme rainfall.  Of course, in the urban planning room, surely there are solutions to eliminate the fallout of flash floods, but the general story goes something like lack of funding, which is not the real story.  The real story is funding has been funneled into the show-off channel, an American Idol of the tallest, most absurd architectural atrocities designed specifically to lure huge convention crowds and international families bored with Disneyland.  Local citizens attempting survival in a state with the nation's highest foreclosure rate are actually a population of servicers to the illusion, working round the clock, racing over the curbs of flash flooded roadways to maintain the playground of a non-local 1% to whom the most important feature and most desirable and memorable adventure is blowing wads of dough at the altars of the Backjack gods.  Whatever weird, inexplicable interactions one may encounter in this city always have a common root.   It may take a lot of standing back and mental synthesis to make it out, but it never fails to arrive at the same vainglorious destination.  It is the same root for every destination mankind has worked over.  It is always all about the money.

In reference to the saying sex and money make the world go round, sex is only included in the partnership as the offspring of money, not the well spring.

I respect your right to debate, indeed there are millions of examples why this just isn't so.  Look at all the wonderful foundations that assist humankind ... the money that is diverted to charity would otherwise be taxable income.  This is how our system operates.  Regardless of who receives the funds, be it government or charitable foundation, the gaping flaw is owned by the earmarks directing the contribution. Do you read me?  So that developers of gated properties, in order to market the concept of One Man's Castle,  an updated version of retirees purchasing unseen sandlots in Arizona, get rollercoaster bangs for their buck as sponsoring members of the razor's edge fraternity, lobby for permissions to build and lobby against building codes they can legally ignore and those lobbies have been very successful, as you can see for yourself, but those lobbies and lobbyists are serving whom?  Not the clueless end-user who has been raked over the coals by the mortgage mills and employment classifieds and their children locked into lifetimes of education debt-servitude.  Not the women who were electrocuted in fire hydrant water spilling over a downed power line while attempting to rescue victims of the car accident that ended up on their sidewalk causing a chain of horrific events in the San Fernando Valley this week. Development is often a give and take business, they must contractually agree to include something for humanity at large such as public access to park benches and shade trees, but only if they are given free reign to short the construction codes.

Enough of that, all of THAT which now appears to be one long, curcuitous, converging zenith of mythical progress.  Much of which we all bear some small measure of guilt for some distantly related participation during the journey, even if that participation was nothing more than checking it out for the sheer curiosity or perhaps just going along for the ride.  The interesting part is how some of us have NOT become enured, none of what I am saying is new to you, I don't have stupid readers, Praise Jah, we keep on looking and keep on finding more interesting wonders daily, nightly and in those thoughtful hours inbetween, to fill our visual field and broaden spiritual development in spite of the many who give up and cave due to lack of encouragement, inspiration or example, life is so much more than what mankind has made of it.  It would be amusing if so many lives were not lost because of intentionally misdirected over-achievement and its coatail disciples.  Amusing in the similarity to standing on the beach watching the foam lap away your sandcastle, wave by wave, ever so gradually diminishing the dams, moats, towers, bridges and walls until there is nothing left but a clean smooth expanse, beautiful and perfect just as it always was.  Amusing as in building with toy blocks which fall and have to be put away in the blocksbox.  It seems it is inevitable, the persuasions of mankind always fall apart.

There is no good to be had from comparisons of your dream of lifestyle from that of childhood memory.  It only makes it worse.  Better for your personal well-being through which your own positive existence adds to the Overall Well Being, we ask what else is out there that can capture our compassion and expand our awareness in the Universal community?

***

Department of extracurricular observations and interpretations:

How long have we been reading Visible Origami?  Maybe forever.  All those years where Visible writes "Everything is under control" somehow entered the perceptive brain differently while reading a recent essay.  We've been under the mis-impression the phrase meant the Divine wouldn't actually take our beloved Earth away from us, that planetary calamity is unholy, extreme and intensifying, but ultimately a passing problem and we would be wise to not take it too seriously because change for the better is guaranteed regardless of Humanity's survival.  However, re-reading the phrase again a few days ago, in a somewhat different context, I realized and perhaps you did too, what he has been saying all along is that the ENTIRE show, journey, lifetime, dream, appearance/s, events, non-events, is controlled.  And as always, he backs it up with the qualifying statement, "for the purposes of demonstration".  This is much clearer now and I agree completely.

we interrupt your enheeeeeeeeee attention for an impor zzzzzzzzzzzzz

"...Looking towards the year 2100, models forecast that pressures on biota will continue to increase. The co-opting of resources and energy use by humans will continue to increase as the global population reaches 9,500,000,000 people (by 2050), and effects will be greatly exacerbated if per capita resource use also increases. Projections for 2100 range from a population low of 6,200,000,000 (requiring a substantial decline in fertility rates) to 10,100,000,000 (requiring continued decline of fertility in countries that still have fertility above replacement level) to 27,000,000,000 (if fertility remains at 2005–2010 levels; this population size is not thought to be supportable .... Rapid climate change shows no signs of slowing. Modelling suggests that for 30% of Earth, the speed at which plant species will have to migrate to keep pace with projected climate change is greater than their dispersal rate when Earth last shifted from a glacial to an interglacial climate ... and that dispersal will be thwarted by highly fragmented landscapes. Climates found at present on 10–48% of the planet are projected to disappear within a century, and climates that contemporary organisms have never experienced are likely to cover 12–39% of Earth... . The mean global temperature by 2070 (or possibly a few decades earlier) will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved. ..."   Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere via Cryptogon

We have no time or interest in playing "I told you so".  We are in deep trouble of the worst kind. Only genuine think tanks, not the political byproducts generating press releases, are talking about the obvious.  We are hearing classic Nero violin compositions while all hell is breaking loose.  Its a switch from the previous position of serious science, that body of experts who dared not speak up or face loss of funding and public ridicule.  How will it be handled now?


It won't be.  For those who gain through others' loss, it doesn't call for action, in spite of the fact all around them the evidence is undeniable, they've had warning, they've experienced the realities first hand, but to take action, to this day, is to lose the vote and be shuffled off to the peanut clinic (or worse).  When disaster strikes, if you can pay attention, those affected make up two distinct types, the type who permanently leaves the region having born witness to the chaos and destruction caused by overloading Nature and those who rally around whichever political celebrity visits the aftermath of same, declaring citizens' heroism and patriotic unity in rebuilding over their loss.  Oh, rebuild by any means, the more the better.  The cameras are on.  In fact, if you happen to look upward while looking at the hopeless tsunamis of debris, the snarl of downed power lines, collapsed interstates, smoke and cinders, drought ravaged croplands and melted plastic, you'll see seven football fields of blimp droning overhead insuring compliance.  You might ask, "Um, compliance with what?"

"... in the optimal case, averting a planetary-scale critical transition demands global cooperation to stem current global-scale anthropogenic forcings ... . This will require reducing world population growth ...and per-capita resource use; rapidly increasing the proportion of the world’s energy budget that is supplied by sources other than fossil fuels while also becoming more efficient in using fossil fuels when they provide THE ONLY OPTION ...  increasing the efficiency of existing means of food production and distribution instead of converting new areas ... or relying on wild species ... to feed people; and enhancing efforts to manage as reservoirs of biodiversity and ecosystem services, both in the terrestrial ...
and marine realms ..."
*caps, mine

Now for those who leave, walking away from everything they ever knew, we might ask where on Earth are they expected to go?  You might recall the people bused away from Katrina often landed in places they'd never been.  We don't know what became of that group other than most of them did not return having nothing to return to, evident by the population drop, that was in any way reminiscent of going home.  Some were bused to stadiums elsewhere and reports of their unfortunate welcome status as intruding unwanteds shortly surfaced.  Some who survived and stayed were assigned (gasp, choke) Fema trailers.  But a larger group has never been heard from at all.  I suggest, to this day they are still wandering, a month here, two or three weeks there, essentially permanently homeless, perhaps dead, perhaps squatting under an interchange toughing it out with veterans of dispossession who long ago made their peace with nowhere to simply be, foraging out of dumpsters, praying to rest undisturbed.  You can't go where you want to go without the funds to get there.  It is the same story with people who walked away from their mortgages, if they couldn't meet the unmeetable expense of The Dream then, how are they doing in their new digs - unemployed with zero credit?  And we hear that multitudes of Haitians are still tenting, sometimes twelve or more related souls crammed under disintegrating tiny tarps designed for short term shelter from the blistering sun and daily tropic downpours.


I don't think many readers actually believe the totality of the darkness we have entered.  Of course, its even more absurd offline.  The general attitude I run into "out there" varies from "What's that?" to outright anger unprocessable information interferes with the blissful state of whomever's rocky little house of cards is showing cracks.  People of all flavors run their personal mental scans over everything they fall into, silently searching for the false element behind the spoken/written word of others.  Be my guest, its the latest rage.  More surprises unfold every day and many more are ripening for your awareness.  I've not seen a more apt description of these times than that of Visible's mention of the film, Memento. While it is difficult to categorize, if you are looking for it, you'd look among neo noir classics such as Blue Velvet, also highly recommended, but be sure to study up on Director, David Lynch before viewing or you might mistake this film for a precursor to Pulp Fiction, as if there were any basis for comparison between Dennis Hopper and John Travolta.  Memento is a remarkably applicable metaphor for 2012, day-by-freaky-day.  I suggest you try to see it if you have not, chances are you are already living it in the timeless, graceless, out of sequence evolution of modern civilization, repeating in reverse your personal movie starring your personal acquaintances,  underscoring all the unsolvable mystery accumulated through lifetimes of radiation exposure, mandatory vaccines, silent plagues and steady diets of pesticides resulting in the disguise of your recollection vs somebody else's bizarre interpretation of current events.  It truly is inexplicable that the incredible fallout could be curbed, the most dire impacts minimized, the dangers ahead clear and certain and yet those who are managing the movement of the muppets continue to freely encourage, profit from and pass egregious legislation guaranteeing maximum damage. The science goes unheeded, bless them, teaching us this important lesson: Just because it is Fact changes nothing.  You might wonder why on God's Earth with an overarching situation so obvious, so bleak, so final, already showing its claws, the Rough Beast here and gnashing, that politicians are the very fruitcake figures who could make the appropriate arrangements to knock it back.  We know they know.  We also know they compromised themselves out of any possibility something could be done, that it is the very nature of tawdry liars, flunkies and thieves to compromise for their personal survival, just how is it they are able to continue unabated AND even deny some of us the vote?  To deny the vote is another goofball trick to make something without value appear to have great value.  Indeed, those who are angrily disqualified from voting are lost in Memento, no short term memory, early conditioning urges them on, its all they know to do lacking any other modus operandi, while recent memory fails them in the present making them completely unable to differentiate between casting their allegiance to kill teams OR to vulture capitalism (another kill team in itself).  The climate change denial dilemma, mutually assured destruction, guarantees all of these things are brought to the forefront because you know it can't go on like this as Nature bears down harder slamming her point home with every new out of season tightening of the screws.  We've passed the tipping point so many times, the phrase "something evil comes this way" has lost its meaning, just like the little boy who cried Wolf, the populations are fully enured.  The most blase among them especially enjoy spouting in your face talking points: "This is just like 1993" or "We had snow in July when I was .... blah, blah, blah".


I would post more frequently, there is a lot happening, however my immediate lifestyle (by no means long term, if there is such a thing as heh, long term anymore) doesn't actually permit much time for composition.  It is very Memento-like in its backups and fast forwards, lacking chronological order.  I remember I came to this environment from somewhere with some baggage, but whatever it was has been buried under the pudge and sludge of the city-experience where everything you heard might or might not be coming soon, is already sealed in place to observe in silent shock and horror and to artfully resist impaction as much as possible in order to avert situational disaster.  Huge populations jammed into outrageously expensive, faux mission-style stucco tenements have resulted in the literal upending of society, where the underbelly of urgent need and craven depravity spills over into broad daylight.  The initial curiosity has of course, vanished, it is what it is making our second important lesson: They-want-it-this-way. When a society knits itself together inside a cacophony of sirens, revving engines, helicopters, wheezing buses, ambulances, alarms, startling dingdong bells, alerts, incessant interruptions, theatrical warnings bursting through every technological amplificaation appliance, nonstop paranoia and inane illegalities, the human voice cannot compete.  The individual has been reduced to a mere numerical sector where invoices and junk advertisements heralding go along to get along are submitted for processing upon receipt. Perhaps it is only a temporary perception problem due to sensory overload?  We wish.  If it were such, how does it end?

Let your mind function freely without abiding anywhere or in anything. Hui-Neng