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.

Parades of hope against the backdrop of fear

While I read the blogs linked in the blog list, I read a lot more that there isn't room left to link here.  That's a given experience, a daily occurrence, facts and fiction of life in the internet age of which we are all doing the same thing more or less at varying times.  What is not an ordinary experience is visiting these "stories" in real life which is why I went along with the group to a candidate's rally.  I'll synthesize it for you briefly: the appearance of this candidate was exactly as we've seen him on TV with the exception of the crowds, crowds numerically rivaling a Stones concert at Madison Square Garden, for example.  What was originally presented as a speech, likely under an hour or less, turned out to be an all day affair in order to get a "good" seat which meant a faraway glimpse of what it was you agreed to attend at all.  Actually, I agreed to go because it was something I would normally never do, such as ride in a giant Cat garbage compactor gliding over the L.A. city dump.  Further, if I was going to continue to blog about our bizarre lives on Planet Earth in 2012, seeing up close in 3D just how the appointed Earth leaders do whatever it is they do, in person, seemed worthwhile. 

From where we connived our seats, connived because only a mere hundred or so people were able to occupy them, thousands upon thousands stood, the angle of the setting sun made photography impossible.  After dark it remained impossible as the stage lights (think Woodstock-style scaffolding) acted as more Suns.  The real show was sneaking peeks at the well-armed, military uniformed security squad on the roof of the adjacent building.  If there was anything to walk away with after such a show, it was the demographics of the crowd on the ground and the roars of approval.  The content was nothing we have not heard before.  The sad part was seeing the sheer numbers of true believers, the shabby and rundown, the confused and uncomfortable, the disabled and the aisle dancing, placard holding families with strollers, the obvious poverty of beleaguered persons and congregational fellowship of unbridled patriotism under the media spell that their immediate future will change everything wrong with today for a better tomorrow if one just manages to climb aboard the magic Diebold bus.  I liken it to a tent revival, the cultists, having lost everything, still filled with worship and couch change as if nothing, no matter how goofy, can shake that faith in the snake handlers' snake oil cure-all.  Too bad the show organizers overlooked the inspirational Bondo of a good gospel choir.

Thus, the first of the candidates' debates was a rehash of the same impossible shuck 'n jive we know all too well because we've read it, seen it and we live with it in one fashion or another every day, like it or not.  Nowhere present in any of these "entertainments" was there discussion of any real plan to survive climate change or what we are going to do when our own municipalities declare States of Emergency (emerge and see), leading to full bankruptcy which means contractual obligations will not be met.  Who will fight the wildfires then?  Will it all become so unweildy they will eventually sit back and let it just burn until there is nothing left to fuel the flames?  And don't even think about calling 911.  It seems as if all the candidates are doing at their meetups and globally televised "debates" is to trade inaccurate statistics on how the health insurance industry will continue to gorge on whomever's version of healthcare is forced down our throats, mandated under a tax penalty - a penalty tax actually of which those very funds could have been paid, and in many cases probably will, to see your doctor.  Now tell me, is it not stupid that one must pay just about the same amount of money to the IRS, if that money were available to the individual, to receive immediate medical attention?  Imagine how it works - law abiding citizen, churchgoing, college educated, but unemployed, deeply in debt, children and more on the way, home in foreclosure, suddenly notes tax scofflaw on his lifetime list of unplanned mile markers.  You better believe these folk were also in attendance at the rally, cheering.


And then the day came last week, at some point, there was yet another negative Monsanto mention on some site out of the hundreds visited so that nothing really stuck, but the thought, which according to all we know about what it is they do, came together in such a way it overwhelmed the latest evil reports and took on the solid form of the answer we've sought for how many years now?  Everything since that insightful moment unfortunately fits.  The birthrate in the US is down for the fourth year.   We are to think this is because of the economy, the 2nd Great Depression, ah, the recent recession which we are also to think is well along the road to recovery. Maybe we're not thinking too well, maybe the steady diet of pesticides in GMO seeds, the massive romance with convenience foods pushed at low prices or free with ubiquitous government food stamps, maybe this has something more to the point to do with low birth rates?  And maybe Monsanto is in league with a certain global agenda and everyone including the suicided farmers and new moms, even the journalists offering implausible justifications are oblivious?  They want us to think an under-performing economy does not translate into something as basic as increased sexual activity.  Hey, when you have no money to go out, what are your plans for the evening?  And what do we know for sure anyway, maybe legitimate rape is on the rise and women's bodies just sort of magically shut down all those mysterious female secretions that make babies?  My friends, I will not insult your intelligence, you and I know the global population needs to be lowered asap, there simply is not enough of anything to go around. All the media's trending growth reports are growth only in their clever manipulation of tragic facts.


The debate of my dreams will come on the day these Charlie McCarthys lay out realistic repairs granting every man the right to choose and construct plans of his own making wherever his vision of survival appears most possible.  That the candidates admit to being powerless over Nature and throw off the reins of the personhoods that train them, promote them, pay them and mold their agenda and allegiances. The candidates are their spokespeople, testing consumer enthusiasm, allowing them to statisticize response and thus reach further.  As long as there are so many populations stuck inside ridiculous beliefs they are free, better, smarter humans than all other humans existing outside their country's borders and and will always be safe and prosperous thanks to the benevolent all-seeing government, everything is heading on a perfectly linear course towards cruel, unnecessary and absolute chaos worsened by the accelerating effects of climate change and its revolving disasters.  We know how that came around too, don't we.

Truly, posting on this subject is not pleasant, nor particularly deep.  In between the rare moments when we are not under the cloud of the enforcers, I have many other things to be said here.  Perhaps the pain of life itself is on hiatus in those hours of system anguish in which case there are too many who welcome the intellectual exercise.  However, the epidemic of re-election fever, simply in its overabundance, is making us ill, queasy and becomes cause for strange and unlikely interactions pitting us against our fellows as if the clock was turned back to the Civil Rights Movement.  In reference to our last post on Fear of Being Real, it appears no one is willing to experience the consumerless lead-up to authentic change.  As Charles Hugh Smith says  Crisis is a Positive Force, I've said as much myself, for it brings out the innate compassion and self-reliance of every human being, but to get there we have to be fully willing to rely on our own creativity in survival and that requires we put fear on the far back burner.  Of course we have that creativity in our makeup, its just been dulled like the useless appendix so that we live inoffensively on the chain gang.  Few escape successfully, no one apparently has ever been successful enough to live to tell about it.

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Last but definitely not least, somehow I missed this on Property from Ran Prieur last April and today is a good time to bring it into your thought process. 

"April 24. I've written before that we could define the "owner" of a place as whoever lives there, and factor out the whole concept of "property". Last month I discovered that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had the same idea in 1840, in his book What Is Property? Specifically, Proudhon noticed that our word "property" blurs together two opposite concepts: the rights of someone who actually works with a piece of land, a house, a sum of money, a tool; and the rights of someone who does not work with it, who might never see it, but who is said to "own" it because, well, the rules say so, and we don't question them.

Looking just at land, where do pieces of "bought" land originally come from? Usually they are violently stolen from indigenous people, or in the case of unoccupied wilderness, some central authority simply declares "ownership" out of thin air. Tribal people have the concept of territory, but they would think it's insane for one tribe to "own" the land that another tribe occupies. Even neolithic farmers, who have already carved fields out of the forest, would not understand how one family could work a field "owned" by another -- unless they were slaves.

The concept of non-occupying ownership is like a magic spell that makes violent conquest and near-slavery seem natural. It enables ecological destruction, because people actually living on land, seeing the effects of their actions, are less willing to cut down forests and deplete topsoil than remote commanders seeing only numbers. And it enables positive feedback in wealth distribution: the two big ways the rich get richer are rent and interest, one where you pay a fee to the "owner" of land you're occupying, and the other where you pay a fee to the "owner" of money you're using...."

darkness before the dawn

There used to be an amusement park ride called the Mad Mouse. There were bright colored two person mouse cars, someone belted in front and someone belted in back, on a roller coaster-style track, high up, sliding waaay down, the whole experience at breakneck speed. The Apocalypse kind of reminds me of this ride. We paid with our lives and we can't get off once it's started. This ride will jerk you around, take you to the top and dump you on a downhill race to the bottom only to careen sideways into a detour where the track abruptly ends, you back up and then you're gone again, faster, higher, twirling into a downward spiral, slamming into another detour, yanking back suddenly to the main track and so forth. It made a lot of people sick and sometimes pretty angry. I didn't really care for it either and went once to see what all the shouting was about and again, to confirm it was as bad as I remembered.

We are in a little lull right now, while one Apocalyptic disaster unfolds planet wide another is brewing, poised to shrink Fukushima as we exhaust ourselves racing ahead of simultaneous eruptions, i.e.; the crises of corruptions gone wrong, miscalculated, underestimated, excused, weakly justified, but lucrative and layered with complex levels of extreme profit. I am shell shocked, not about anything you would assume, but about the stunning, spectacular, overwhelming stupidity and lack of foresight which has created a world of in your face greeeeeeeeed. The hypocrisy knows no bounds and Iran has a lot of oil.

Who in their right mind celebrates the 150 year anniversary of the Civil War for example? Oh, yes, let's make a parade, bring on the fireworks, let's tear down the drapes and make velvet frocks with corsets laced tightly by our beaten, whipped, raped and Stockholm syndromed human possessions and then let's drink the fruited wines they made us and lie in rows upon the railroad tracks of ancient Terminus, now a gentrified shopping mall turned tourist attraction. A century and a half after the ugly facts, we come to find the same Wetikos hangin' round, still, working the same old stories of hate and paranoia. Its all too much for the love people, I can't imagine how the rest of you are handling the latest developments. I can barely open the plastic box anymore. To visit news sites or hear the pundits screeching in the background between grotesque, high pressure come-ons must be what it is to be insane, all of it mashed together as one long monotonous vision of obsequious fakery. Who do they think they're fooling? The burger set? Maybe as that set gorges its way to the recruitment hooks and perhaps a short half-life is a better life than the life of victims, children, elders, ordinary shack dwellers who never knew the land upon which the dust twists daily is Terminus all over again. At some point, lies backfire bringing on karma, Bring it on. The wait for love people is agonizing because we feel it coming, in spite of the decrees and altruistic covers designed to keep us in rags so our pockets have irreparable holes through which every penny dribbles out as if the single copper cent lying in our tracks is a sign around our necks "Take it, take it all, and take me too." Whenever I check in with the little box, its amazing to see everyone at it still. I ask why? What are you looking for that you don't already know? Perhaps you are looking for something you don't know, something impossible and suddenly, sigh, there it is. Hmmm.

How many nuke plants exist on Planet Earth? And is each a foil for Earth shattering weaponry too? Or just some of them? Like the allies. How would we know? We would not. Especially when every headline is about prostitutes' skeletons and sports doping or Charlie Sheen or heh, the movements taking place on the campaign trail. Or the budget deficit. That's a favorite, hunh. That'll keep all those nosy armchair economists glued to their screens, keep their noses out of things that really matter cuz we down here in Loveville don't have any economy left at all. When the Wetiko plan finally comes into full bloom, we'll go first because our entire lives have been gradually stripmined to make room for the gargantuan wallets of Monopoly (tm) money. Don't look now, but the little people everywhere, the love people, the love people in-training, the good and the innocent have either lost everything held dear to them or they are in the process of having it forced away through torture, radiation, disease, through lack of awareness, empty pockets and various interesting schemes in which the person victimized is not a consideration, never was and never will be.

Frankly, I confess to holding out some exceptionally small sliver of faint desire that there would be some vague turnaround of humanity by now, as in a general collective-unconscious looking for the bright side, oh, how foolish of me. In fact, what has been our collective life since the awakening of the Bu-ad godzilla is now our zeitgeist-in-full, rounded out, obtuse and obese. This is the way it is. Today and evermore until no more. And being that it is this way, what, I ask you, is there to look forward to? Ah, yes, at last, the plantation overseers are back in the saddle whipping the steed faster this time aided by monster technology and mushroom clouds. Dare you let on your anguish unless you want to see the new evaporation tool microwave your entire existence into instant ash and minuscule sprays of blood and mucus running in rivulets down that velvet dress.

Every single time the Wetikos turn on their campaign shows, I've always thought, hey, its too soon. You might have noticed its never too soon. Decades before the actual festivals begin, the presidential hologramed hopefuls are plotting four, eight, twelve years ahead. In between the vast, colorful ,nauseating, corporate-funded, chain-linked urban takeovers, we get to see our falling rock stars show themselves to never have been worthy of all that adulation. Is big business to be adulated? Must they leave us too early like Stevie Ray and Bob Marley in order to get out from under the giant Earthmover's dirt dripping claws? Leaving us to stand alone in shock and awe cherishing their memory, we point still to their example, how is that different than martyrdom? Surely there are secrets there too, better we do not know. We have too much already bringing us down and deeper. Why has no one come forward to state unequivocally we are in the thick of the energy wars, which are different than the turf wars of old in that those wars ended, why hide the motivation now, everyone knows what's up. Ten days ago I bought cheap gas for $4.09 pg. If that isn't a dead giveaway, I don't know what is. Who knew so many multitudes of so-called humans are pigs. Lipsticked. Armed to the teeth. Sporting comb overs resembling wet, used mops upside down over their skulls, perhaps that is a Wetiko thing to the tune of here today, gone tomorrow. Dancing with the stars, falling off the stage, who will Lady Gaga sue? What do you think Bristol pays in property taxes? Out of who's pocket? Do these ahem, people have underground bunkers equipped for twenty four thousand-years worth of privileged living? Listen, if you don't, you'd better think about what you're doing.

Often I ask myself who is driving this ship and what happened to them that they grew up with SFbrains, why would they parade and preen before media portraying themselves in possession of expert opinion, a deluxe opinion, the opinion of better, more skillful, superior, more worthy persons? That somehow they were finely crafted human Bentleys of excellence with extra-prescient perception where everyone apart from them is unworthy, evil, atheistic, witches and warlocks, to be feared and eliminated, out of sight, out of mind? Are they all abused children acting out, finally in position to "get their's"? That they were so ill-treated in youth ruined any possibility for the existence of compassion or clarity of values? No, it isn't that. I've known personally too many people with horrible back stories and lingering scars of abuse and found them to put truth to the idea suffering creates enlightenment, so deeply feeling, so deeply understanding of the plight of others for abuse to be a core reason. More likely it is obsessive power corrupting, creating laws by the minute overriding other laws created by competing powers, all of it designed to enrich and self-sustain while creating even more control, always selectively blind to the consequences because once tainted it turns to permanent stain out of all proportion to the original act - like Ponzi schemes, like serial killing. There can be no turnaround from here, its gone too far. It is illogical to trust planting a garden and going small and local as a means of fending off nuclear winter lying not too far in the future. Its not us driving this ship my friends, unfortunately the Captain rammed the iceberg out of choice and should the ship right itself, who is to say the first mate won't attempt to complete the effort? When you see these Wetikos making their Wetiko claims inspiring hatred, prejudice and egging on the Gods of war, you see a frightened little freak worried they will run out of gas in the dark on an unlit overpass crumbling into a swift moving river, wide and deep.

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

This is how its going to be, will you be there?

Last year I wrote something similar for the deleted Deep Into Artlife West Stories blog and let it go when managing too many blogs became unwieldy. I am so glad to see John's work today, he says it all, as always. You will find his brand new short story in its entirety below. Many of you will have already seen it, however you must be a subscriber to his newsletter and if you want to see his new serial of works, Fade to Black, you'll have to subscribe to that as well. This is the only time I will put it up on this site, all the subscribing information lives on Survival Acres. But if you lose the link, which happens in a crash, I will be glad to share it. It is exciting to see how John easily switches to first person after so long publishing facts. I'm really looking forward to more. We do tire of nonsense, don't we? Denial and cover ups, like hey, just spill it. You see, they think we cannot handle the truth of their corruption, ah but we've been conditioned well during these recent Lost Decades of Lies.
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Short Story

I've got to get these words down before it's too late. I don't know how much time I have, they may have seen me come in here and I know if the find me, it's all over. For good this time.

I wish I had more time, but I don't, so bear with me, I'll try to get it all down as best I remember it.

The Thirty-Years war was finally over. Actually, it didn't last that long and some say it wasn't just a single war. Well, it wasn't, not really, but one war led to another with no break in between and it wasn't long before everyone was involved. It only stopped long enough for the nations to rearm themselves, so we never really did catch a break.

It doesn't matter anyway how long it lasted or what it's called, it happened, and it destroyed everything. By that, I mean EVERYTHING. There is nothing left. There's no water, no soil, no food, no cities, nothing. Not here. Maybe not anywhere, I don't know. It's all gone, dismantled and taken apart or blown to bits. Many areas are radioactive now, but you should know that, everybody knows that.

As far as the planet goes, well, we're fucked. Royally. I'm alive only because I got very, very lucky and because somebody else saw all this coming and he made it possible for me to be here today. But my time is running out. I'm sick now and the strompers are after me, I'm pretty sure they saw me head in this direction.

Sorry, I'll stick to the story. The year was 2010. This was the year we, I mean the planet broke all temperature records, at least it was hotter then it was before. It got worse later, like last year, it was really bad. The crop losses were huge then and the world plunged towards hunger and starvation. It was the poor countries that suffered the most. The rich countries continued to hoard food and energy resources (oil in those days) for themselves. Those that didn't have enough didn't get enough from anyone, anywhere.

The United Nations was still in existence back then, before they were taken over by the Global Legion. But they weren't able to do anything anyway. 2010 was bad, but this was only the beginning of the troubles we endured.

I wasn't even here then, not yet. My dad didn't buy into the promises the government was making and back then, you could still have as many kids as you wanted. Even though by now a lot of people knew that overpopulation would only make things worse then they already were.

I had two sisters and one brother. They're all dead now, both my sisters died from the Red Plague that killed those millions in the 20's. My brother was killed fighting in Angola. God only knows why he was stupid enough to go, although I don't suppose he had any real choice. Everyone was drafted back then, didn't matter who you were or where you lived, you fought. The Global Legion saw to that, everybody was "enlisted".

My dad called this conscription and slavery. I didn't go, because as far as the government was concerned, I never existed. That was hard, living and hiding and pretending I was one of "them", but I wasn't anybody. I worked at home with my dad, and when he died, well I just kept myself going, but I had my dad's library and research.

Our neighbors thought I was unable to fight, but they never asked either. My dad told me once that he'd fixed it for me somehow, and that they'd leave me alone. For that, I am eternally grateful, as I'm sure I'd be among the millions of dead that have been lost.

But I wasn't prepared for what came after my dad's death. It was his books, the ones he wrote himself and the other ones I found. And his journal. That was the most amazing piece of writing I have ever seen anywhere. It changed my life and my thinking and I became what my dad said I would. This was before I even knew what he was talking about. I became a "gojun", the word has several definitions. I like that one that means "fight from the spirit". I think my dad might even be the one who invented this word, but I'm not sure.

He died hard, but I think he knew that he would. The blood was everywhere, but he'd killed the three who killed him. I found him too late to do anything about it, and buried him up on our hill, at night when it was really dark and nobody could see. There wasn't anybody else there and I didn't know who I could trust back then, so it was just me and him in the cold ground. I cried a lot, I couldn't help myself, but I was glad I was able to do this for him. A lot of people had died, and nobody buried them. Entire cities had been destroyed in an instant and entire generations of families were instantly wiped out. By then, I was fourteen and it was 2028.

I didn't know what to say to the neighbors when they eventually asked, so I simply told them the truth. That's something else I learned from my dad, the truth was always better then a lie. They were sympathetic, and a couple had even come by to check up on me since, but I haven't seen anybody now for a long time. George told me that my father was a good man and had made a hell of a difference in the world. It wasn't until I had read my dad's books and his journal did I finally figure out what George meant by that. To me, he was just my dad, and then he was gone.

I didn't know what to do with myself for a long time, but I managed to stay alive. One reason that happened is my dad had made sure I'd have what I needed to do that. I won't tell you everything, 'cause he also said it's not a good idea to blab about everything, but he made sure that there would be the basic things I needed to stay alive and that's what I did.

By 2030, things were getting really bad. A lot of people that were still left had disappeared or died from one thing or another. The Red Plague took a lot of them, but others were killed by the strompers. They were forcing people to talk about all their neighbors then, back when they still thought some of us might have something still worth taking. It didn't matter what you might have, they'd take it. They'd even take the young boys and girls when they found them.

That's why they're after me, somebody talked, but I don't blame them, whoever it might have been. The strompers were brutal, I saw what they'd done to Kevin's family, back when he still had one.

This is where I got lucky. Something, I not sure what it was, told me it was time to clear out. I'd been pretty much planning on doing this anyway, knowing that if others were disappearing near here, it would be my turn soon too. So I'd been moving my stuff, just the essentials to my hidden spot, at night when I could get it done and nobody could see. It wasn't too far, but it was still hard work.

That's when they'd come looking for me, I could tell by the signs they left that they'd been there. But I'd been gone then and like usual, they came at night. They didn't find me, but they'd found some of my dad's guns and some of the food stash that I'd still had left behind. All these things were gone now and I knew they'd be back. But they didn't find the cellar and the hidden door, where my dad and I had hid all the really important things we needed to survive.

But I was out of time, there was no way I could move this stuff fast enough by myself. And there wasn't anybody I could ask to help either, almost everyone around here was gone now. So I decided to just move everything I could and hide it close by, and then try and get that all moved to my hidden spot where I was planning to live.

It took me all night to do it, but I got it done. There was a dense stand of trees still alive back then nearby, where my dad had planted them years before. He told me that this was our future firewood supply and it wasn't far away at all. So I made dozens of trips with a wheelbarrow and taking everything out of the cellar, I got it all stashed in the trees. By dawn, I was exhausted and I managed to drag myself away someplace where I could see if the strompers would come back.

They did too, but they didn't bother to look around much. They just checked the old house and crashed around breaking things, looking for more food and weapons. There wasn't much there, part of my dad's strategy had been to never appear to have too much. They left empty handed this time, having already taken everything that they wanted.

That night, I started making the trips to the hidden spot and getting everything moved. The weather turned cold by the time I was done, I could only do one trip a night loaded down. But nobody found that stash, which was a damned good thing, or I'd have long since been dead.

And this is where I stayed for the next seven years, hiding here, coming out only at night and never in the day. But now everything is dead, it happened so fast, you can see the gray ashes everywhere. And I'm sick, so I broke my own rule and tried to find some help. There's blood when I cough now and I don't know how to treat whatever it is that I've got. And that's how the strompers found me again. I'd left to see if I could find help, I didn't want to to die up here all alone.

I'd gone in the direction of town, but I hadn't been there now in many years. It took me two days of walking to get near, and I didn't see anybody. But when I got there, I realized I had made a mistake. There was nothing there, just some burned out hulks of buildings, but no sign of any people. The town had burned to the ground apparently, and was abandoned.

I decided to take another route back, but it was slow going. What had used to be a verdant forest way back now was now just a wasteland, but there was a great many downed dead trees I had to cross, and this is where they spotted me. I had just cleared the top of a ridge, the only living thing moving for miles around, or so I thought. But I'd skylined myself and the movement caught their eye.

They were down below me in a clearing, there was a camp of some sort with huge piles of junk piled up all around. They saw me about the same time I saw them. I disappeared back over the ridge before they could shoot. If they could shoot, I didn't know if they had any weapons still or any ammunition for them, but I recognized their uniforms or what passed for them. They were strompers alright, and I was certain that they'd kill me if they could find me.

I ran, jumped, leaped and crawled until my lungs tore through my chest, and then I ran some more. Once I thought I might have a little distance away from them, I started back tracking very carefully to hide my path. This was hard to do now, as the land was so badly damaged that going any direction, even backwards was slow going. And I was still coughing up blood, more now that I was exerting myself so hard.

I decided to not go directly back to my hidden spot. If they were able to track me, I'd lead them right to me. But I made another mistake, I didn't count on them not giving up. I was probably the only living thing they'd seen in a long time, I certainly hadn't seen anything alive.

It took me three days of hiding and evading to make it back here, but I'm pretty sure they're not far away now. I still need to tell you about what happened to the rest of the planet, as far as I know it to be. I'm not sure if anybody will ever find this, but I've got to try.

Well, I said we're fucked, and we are. I don't know how many people are still alive, but if they're like me, they didn't move far enough north to survive. Everything is dying around here and that means I can't grow any food or hunt any animals or even drink the water like before. I have to triple filter the water now and it might even be why I'm sick, but I don't know.

The war took everything and whatever was left, was destined to die from hordes of desperate people eating everything. Nothing was preserved. The forest and trees were cut down and what survived eventually died from the gray ash falling from the sky. The streams were choked with this stuff. The plants died, the animals died or migrated someplace else, but here, now -- there's nothing.

I heard the seas rose and flooded entire countries and all the low lying islands. My dad wrote about this in his journal, but I've never seen the ocean. He'd written that there were nearly two billion refugees before I was born, I can't even imagine that number. Where did those people go? My dad wrote about them only a little more, most of them disappeared into other lands and refugee camps, but almost all of them died in the wars that followed.

I didn't know where to go. I stayed hidden all those years, but leaving really didn't seem like an option. If I left, I'd probably have been caught, because by then you couldn't survive off in the woods by living on the land. They'd already wiped out almost every living thing that could be eaten and even though the gray ash hadn't come yet, there wasn't anything left to keep you alive. I survived this long only because I had food. I was one of the few, maybe even the only one who did. The strompers simply took their food from whoever they could, I heard that they had even eaten people after the animals disappeared.

But what I don't know, and I still don't know is if everybody is dead and dying everywhere else. My dad told me that there would be groups up north, far, far away up near the pole. He said they might live, if they were smart, and if they didn't kill everything off. He said it was possible and that's why I'm writing this all down. Maybe they'd like to know what happened down here as much as I'd like to have known what happened up there.

The radio quit working almost four years ago, so I have no idea what's happened elsewhere since then. But even then it was all propaganda like my dad said. They were still trying to force their rules and regulations on everyone, even though there were far fewer of us still around and everything was either dead or dying. But the radio fell and broke and I haven't heard another voice until a few days ago when the strompers tried to catch me. I've been very lonely, but I've been alone so long that I guess I'm pretty used to it by now.

But my story -- I watched everything die, all around me. It was gradual at first, but then it was faster and faster. It was almost as if someone had taken an eraser and was rubbing everything out. It was very sad to see. I loved the forest and the wilds but it became a harsh, bitter place with things dying everywhere. There wasn't enough rain and the forest fires were terrific. This accounted for the grey ash at first, but later there was more as the bombs fell.

The dying continued and it was a dark period for me. I couldn't help it, so I began to read more and more. I'd managed to save my dads book and his journal. It was his journal that saved me. I memorized every word. He had written about this time, predicting it all as he saw it in his own words and in his own time. He had felt that mankind would not learn from his mistakes and would push the entire planet past the breaking point. They called these "tipping points" and he was right.

All I ever saw was death and destruction. It didn't seem to even matter anymore, death was everywhere and humans were behind it. I'd learned to kill, from my father, but only when it was necessary and I'd never killed another human. But I didn't think humans were sacred, there was much too much death in them for me to believe that. I just never had cause to kill another human, but I was always armed for the occasion if it occurred.

My dad had lots of guns and he'd made sure I knew how to use them, clean them and make each shot count. Ammunition was absolutely priceless, even when I was young. Now, ammunition is probably worth a month's supply of food, but I bet you nobody would trade that kind of food for a bullet or even for a whole box of shells. Food is gone now, nobody has any food and what good is ammunition really going to do you if there is no food?

My dad said the same thing about gold and silver. People were hoarding this stuff, believing it was going to help them when things got bad. They found out that this wasn't true, people that had the stuff they needed weren't willing to trade it for useless metal. They'd only trade their stuff for important stuff, like medicine, sometimes liquor (which nobody really needs either, but it was something people in those days still seemed to want) and stuff like boots and warm clothing. Some people got stupid and got drunk and it got them dead pretty fast. My dad had a little of this, but I didn't bother to take it, it's probably still in the cellar.

I did take the guns though, but I don't see how they're going to help me much now. I need help, I'm weak and sick now and there's nobody around now that could help. If the strompers catch me, it won't matter anyway and then I'll use my guns on them. This place is pretty good, if I'm awake when they come, I'll see them first and these guns are pretty good, I can probably kill a dozen before they make it up here.

But I'll be honest, I don't see the point. Why are we still tearing each other apart? Why are we still fighting over the last scraps like this? Haven't we done enough damage? My dad said it would come to this. He saw this coming. He said that the last human would be surrounded by empty shell casing as he killed off the last surviving animals on earth -- which would be another human. I don't know if he thought that that man would be me, but if he did, he never said it.

I don't want this to be me. What a terrible legacy this is! I can't believe it's come to this now, this is too horrible to bear. I think I'm glad that I'm sick, I don't want this to be me. If I die here and nobody comes, at least I will die without that.

But I hope that somebody finds this letter. I really do. I want them to see if they can, that some of us finally understood that there has to be a better way. There was no need for all this fighting, even though I didn't fight, I still feel like I was a part of it. I hid, and I ran, and I stayed away as much as I could, but I didn't have any choice. That's fighting, isn't it? Isn't it really the same thing? We're not working together, we're not trying to make things better, we're still working against each other, tearing it all apart.

This is terrible, but I don't see how it could have turned out any other way. My dad said so too --- he said that we'd keep doing this to each other until we finally destroyed it all because we were stubborn and foolish and stupid and we'd not even believe the evidence before our own eyes. He wrote about that -- a lot. Back then, when he started his journal, they'd not believe anything it seemed, even if they were standing right over it looking at it. I found that hard to believe, but not anymore. I seen it, in the eyes of others and in what my dad had wrote. Nobody would believe it could happen to them.

I wish my dad was here, but it's probably better that he's not. I don't think he'd have known what do now anymore then I do, but I don't know. I sure do miss him though.

I think I hear them coming now, there's a sound down there that that shouldn't be there. I need to stop writing now and get ready. I hope someone finds this -- tell whoever is left that I didn't want it to end this way. Tell them that even in all this death and agony and gray and ash that I believe we could have done it better -- a lot better. Tell that that if we had embraced life and all things living, this place would still be here for us. This was our home. Our only home.

Tell them, if there are anyone else out there alive to still tell -- to never, EVER forget what we did.

Tell them that if they get to live -- to live it right.

And tell them to take my dad's books and his journal. You'll understand why when you read them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fade To Black

I've written a few chapters of a fictional book, "Fade To Black", that subscribers can sign up for. It's a free e-book of course, you will need to sign up to receive this.

Admin, Survival Acres

weekend brief

I am sorry to report on my web travels today, what is the matter with these people anyway? When are they going to come to their senses. Can it be that corruption on such a scale, even after only brief exposure, is irreversible? The Bu-ad stacked the courts, blew off the DAs who didn't agree with them and now, we live in hologram land. I have always held the weirdest feeling about candidate Greeting Card. It was as if he existed only because we dreamed him up? Have you met him, seen him in person? The vast majority of Americans have not and never will. And this thing about the voter's choice, heh, again, somehow it always comes down to a lesser of two evils and yet, those evils are cut from the same cloth. The old invisible robes ploy again. How dare they put someone in the oval and call him Osama Hussein. Let me lay it on you, that was not a synchronicity. Nor was it a coincidence.

The real-time technology used to make the film Avatar is prime for many applications beyond those of tinseltown. I'm not talking theme parks here. You'd have to have seen the filmmakers demonstrating the creation of characters and landscape, its an instant Photoshop in a sort of tablet camera/monitor that cranks out a semi-animation of what it is filming. The actors can wear what they normally wear, jeans, they just are the models to which Photoshop then applies native dress, colors, exaggerated features and movement. Same with the animals, foliage, a whole planet ... its incredible because the animation is so slight, yes, they do appear as if they are that planet's version of our species. Got it? Good.
It is said the technology was invented specifically for this film. In any brainstorming session, how long does it take for someone to appropriate the concept and share it with potential investors? About as long as a Twitter. This technology may be responsible for more than a few strange situations taking place on Earth. Nothing should surprise us by now.

Certainly you saw the Copenhagen climate talks amounted to a nonbinding resolution to allow China to smog and the Health Bill has been one long boring argument and dilly dallying producing nothing but higher prices even before any executive ink touches paper. Been to your pharmacy lately? Stand forewarned.

We know that Illinois sold a maximum security prison to the Feds. The local rurals are happy, surely it will bring them prosperity. We know 100 - 200 detainees will be transferred to this facility from Guantanamo which isn't being closed because they have plenty more sticking around to order rum punches from their chaise lounges at the Tropicana Banana.

The question was, Cuba was chosen because it was not on US soil therefore the US Constitution did not apply. Obviously, the detainees landing here despite lifer status, will want to see the insides of a courtroom and have a perfect right to do so. It didn't make sense. That is, until this morning. Now the pieces fall into place. 911 was our red alert. Within mere hours the atmosphere went from blue sky to a fog of danger. Everything changed. You have to learn to think like them if you want to anticipate them. Apparently, that is not easy. I'm not sure how one misses what is being laid out so clearly, after all, the pattern is long established by now. If you had reason to enmesh yourself in history and the arts (the eyes and voices) then you would have noted the parallels quickly and reel from all the little suspicions crowding out your worldview.

You know, human beings haven't really changed at all from the Dark Ages. Language evolves as the Alta Report proves so well. Costumes change. Styles go and return in retro. But the darkness was always there, sometimes it reigns like this era, maybe its the last era for real, if it is real. I am not kidding when I say I have my doubts. There is a sort of heebee jeebee torture going on with this chain yanking group of reptiles, a growing pressing down, it is most disturbing. It is hard to pinpoint what is exactly the most disturbing feature, the ones who know better but do it for position and fortune, another form of celebrity, or the ones who are evil beyond redemption, or those in it for secret reasons unfathomable to mere mortals.

Timeless mindsets moodsetting the scenery of calamity

Before calling it a night, it is my long standing habit to read. I've mentioned my most recent score of the used literary anthology packed with enlightening material, some of which is often taken from larger bodies of authorship, as is the case with Medieval historian, Barbara Tuchman's chapter from A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978). The particular chapter which fell out from the tissued pages onto the blankie was none other than "This Is the End of the World": The Black Death. Somehow, I'm thinking this wasn't a coincidence. Neither is it coincidental Steve Lendman's essay today takes us deeper into the situation unfolding under apparent martial law in Western Ukraine.

"... On November 4, in a nationwide address, Yushchenko cited:

-- an "emergency epidemic situation in the country," caused by "infections of viral origin, including A/H1N1 flu (that are) rapidly spreading across Ukraine;"

-- "People are dying; the epidemic is killing doctors;"

-- "three pathogens of viral infections came to Ukraine at the same time: two of them are seasonal flu and the third is the A/H1N1; according to virologists, such a combination of infections due to mutation may produce a new, even more aggressive virus;" ... "

As always, our vain question remains, can it happen here? As with good and evil being the two faces of one overarching force, the question has two answers. No, we are too fluid, diverse, practically lawless in certain regions, separate units of thought and geography, loathe to mingle, loathe to trust. Or, Yessiree, we are easy to find, track, document, label and our needs have made us known, the system exists because of us.

Adding to the mix, important input is provided from genuine voices of real science, past and present, offering another timely glimpse into cause thanks to Rick's extremely interesting presentation, Our Evolving Solar System: Plasma, Polar Reversals, and 2012 which considers the very real possibility of activities within the Universe beyond our control as creation of numerous Earth calamities throughout all history, recorded and discovered.

Again, here is the link to Tuchman's Chapter 15. It continues into the next chapter which is optional since my anthology closed the work at the end of the first full paragraph on the google page 105, equal to a mere 12 pages in my little anthology. Its enough to get us going making connections as we will.

Consider this required reading. Test tomorrow - Not. The previous and unknown owner of the anthology made notes in the margin. Obviously "he", male handwriting, would be tested. "Test, many questions", he wrote. "Inhumanity caused by fear" and "Neighbors preying on less fortunate" are other scribbles along with "Generally, people blamed God", "Doing penitence to chase away disease" and "Plague because of sin" with a final note at the closing "People so feared the Plague they did not record events."

I would have suggested to "him" we honor Barbara Tuchman's tireless perseverance in the face of enormous obstacles, especially those she notes in her introduction to The Distant Mirror ... , "uncertain and contradictory data with regard to dates, numbers and hard facts ... the changing prejudices and points of view of past historians ... the disproportionate survival of the bad side, producing an overload of the negative ... the difficulty of empathy, genuinely entering into the mental and emotional values of the Middle Ages"...

Still, western capitalistic citizens remain as Aborigines post-walkabout grouped under low flying planes dropping CARE packages, seeing God.

war and shelf life

It used to be a mystery. That there was a sea change underway was certain, but we were hard pressed to narrow it down and define it as we were experiencing it. When exactly did it start, who was responsible, how long would it last? If we tried to explain this to other people, we got funny looks "what exactly are you saying?" That was then.

This is now. Almost a decade later, or is it milleniums, and nothing has reversed the course of madness. The welcome screens are overflowing with contrary headlines we won't quote on blogs anymore in order to budget for food. Something about Obama wants summer breaks in the school year abolished. What was that about no stone left unturned ... or something about an ownership society?

Uh hunh. And where do you think the money to make real the recovery story will come from, because the people are going to get the idea pretty soon a jobless recovery is a little shaky? How about from this comment written by a JSmith:

...The object is to destroy Iran's industrial and civil infrastructure, shatter its economy, destroy any self-defense capability, poison its environment, assassinate its scientists and engineers, and subvert its political system; i.e., to create a failed state incapable of exerting any influence in the region...

Let's consider in carrying out the above, how vastly the endeavor enriches the already obesely rewarded carpetbaggers salivating at the prospects of another boom. Let us no more eye pop at those reports of the oil giants' record profits. Bubbles and booms are the age old survival choice of leading western nations. What do they know that you don't? They know big, big money soon fill the piggy bank again. Right on schedule covering for the recovery story. This is how they do the Foxtrot, step kick, step kick, back step and repeat.

We used to think we were not supposed to know things. We supposed what we saw of the come lately leadership was some awful deviation from a norm and came to find it is the norm. We used to think they cared how they appeared and cared about their oaths and offices and the global reputation of a reputed global ideal. All that aid going to impoverished nations, remember collecting items for your Care Box? The toothbrush and toothpaste tucked inside, you were certain someone, somewhere depended on your gift? We were raised to love the world. Some of us still do.

You know what is coming next. I can't stand to see it. We know what has happened to Iraq. We know Mesopotamia was jackbooted off the pages of history. We know the noose awaits. We know there will be many assisting and cheering it along and the blood money will flow as the blood flowed in the gutters in Jenin.

In addition to the anguish and sadness this brings on when they Bring it On, the secret question lingers, when are these victims going to have had enough? Retaliate? Oh, never! No one retaliates against superpowers, are you kidding? Not with this air power, this technology, not with the cohesive, coordinated back-up super powers of our friends and allies. That's suicide. Whatz a matter with you?

The victims are erased and converted before retaliation. When you can wipe the rest of world off the face of the map, there isn't anybody left to argue.

We have known this chapter was coming since Condoleeza received a written response from Mahmoud and soundly denounced it. The translation was pure poetry. For whatever political copywriters that may have assisted him, it read as the writings of a well intentioned, wrongly accused, humble scholar. You cannot help but get the idea that is who he is - absent the propaganda. Westerners have difficulty listening to him speak because he speaks thoughtfully and softly. We must have missed the part about babies on the floor and gassing his people. Who is being groomed to replace him? Have roles been promised to relatives of his successor the same way Ahmed Chalabi's nephew, sharing the same office floor as arch-neocon palm-greasers Feith and Zell, was contracted for $75 million to arrange Saddam's trial?

After all is said and done and the dead are laid to rest, Gitmo will remain open for business, the same ancient business of the stretching rack, under the repackaged product line. The boxed convenience of prepared mixes under a sparkling new theme, Organic Carpetbagging, it sells so well. Down the road apiece, the masses online in front of the tube lose interest, max out their credit and go into depression and the whole joint comes unhinged. Then the music changes, everybody moves out to the dance floor and the Foxtrot repeats like a broken needle on a scratched '78. Step kick, backstep.

The only mystery that remains is the oldest mystery of all. Is there really such thing as the devil? Our ancestors thought so. They burned people at the stake and are striking the match all over again. Time - seconds, years, centuries - is just a hologram.

Sherlocking in qwerty

Sometimes we get messages mixed into the mass confusion, that further unravel what can be referred to as The Mystery. Below, I'm quoting a few of these *recent messages, numbered so we can read into each one individually:

1. ...while what we do here in cyberspace has a valuable function in terms of education, support, and founding of virtual communities, the heavy lifting that creates real change can probably only be done outside the digital realm. ... It is for this reason I believe much is allowed to be circulated that otherwise would never be tolerated...

2. ...There are those small voices of reason and then there is a great wasteland of confusion moving toward irrevocable adjustment.

Seek out the concentrations of light. Move away from the centers of darkness. I can think of no other advice. That rough beast is on the move.

3. ...Missing from this equation is the entire real world of life and death, the suffering and struggling that goes on each and every single day to simply retain the most basic right of all, applied to all things on planet Earth — the right to exist. This is a basic right to all things, the right to exist without coercion or exploitation. But it is not a right that is recognized, honored or respected — or even acknowledged.

4. ...If you want to go on thinking that you're the ONLY person your (insert: bank, insurance company, doctor, credit card holder, home builder, employer, etc., etc, etc,) is ripping off you are entitled to that opinion. You are probably wrong and a quick Google search will show you how you are wrong. Corporations hold no goal more dearly than eliminating easy anonymity on the internet. So they can attack those who snitch on their bullshit.
If you want to keep believing that your problems are all your fault go for it. Get off the internet and sulk in your corner. Make a CEO happy.

5. ...in one instance at Philadelphia's Franklin Mall there was protest. If you can call it that. A group of masked protestors delivered a "symbolic complaint," in a brief and scripted "protest rally." They pre-designated a few persons among them to be arrested (for refusal to disperse). Delivering the arrestees to the police upon arrival, everybody then quietly left the mall. "It was a symbolic action," explained one of the protestors, who added, "Oh god, I'm not supposed to speak without permission of the group!"

6. ...There's something happenin' here What it is ain't exactly clear....-- Buffalo Springfield One of main reasons behind the vast confusion now reigning in the USA, our failure to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us (or what to do about it), is our foolish obsession with econometrics -- viewing the world solely through the "lens" of mathematical models. ...

First, in order to solve any crime, we'll need to be in agreement illegal activity has taken place vs. a natural evolution of BAU (business as usual). Some of you might want to say "Its always been this way." or "It was bound to happen and just gets worse." We'll need to microscope what "it" is and what exactly occurred, that is if you think something out of the ordinary occurred. When I say something out of the ordinary I am saying beyond the pale, nefarious, systematically working to envelop and dismantle simultaneously. I want to know what we've got here and where its leading, and why. I want to know who or what is responsible. I want to know what we think about our present situation.

By a miracle over which I have no control, very smart, insightful people come here. For this reason, today and over the next few days, I invite you to try to explain your take. I've seen a lot of takes, we all have, its fine if you subscribe to a take we've already heard. Some of you have already stated your piece, feel free to expand. I'm all ears. I realize there might be some paranoia, but it is this paranoia that keeps the mystery in place. If it helps, I don't read code, but I'm not bad at metaphors.

While you're formulating your comments, it will clarify your thoughts to visit Of Two Minds Weblog essay, Charles Hugh Smith's Are Empire and Democracy Compatible?

*The people making the comments quoted at the beginning of this post can be linked to through my bloglist. Some of the comments were created in this blog's comment pages and others in their own blog posts. It is impossible to link to the quote in an original context without minimizing the impact of the message. Quotes were taken from the following excellent writers: 1. Zoner, 2. Visible, 3. John, 4. Pangolin, 5. Joe Bageant and 6. J.H. Kunstler.

"Life is about loss."

Mia Farrow, speaking in a documentary about her life, after divorcing Woody Allen who then married their adopted daughter.

The President's remark concerning the stupid behavior of law enforcement is certainly one anybody, even without paying close attention to the incident prompting it, might have made offhandedly in recent times. The incident itself nearly pales in relation to Obama's statement, mirroring the times we now endure, times of deep turmoil and troubling questions in which one misstep leads to lock-up or worse, permanent public condemnation, as if we had somehow rolled back into the days of burning people alive who were suspected of witchery. As if the Jim Crow laws were back in effect in the courts and the court of public opinion hung people from trees for
consorting with those ones of darker skin. God help us for we have lost our way

... although that way keeps showing itself to have been a matter of decisions of the moment that distorted into a permanency of parasitical political correctness. It is exactly what results when a traveler, faced with various possibilities, takes a wrong turn, certain the detour on which he travels leads to his destination only to discover, too late, he's wound up in a cul de sac inside a gated, barrel-tiled maze where everything looks the same. He'd have to spend his dying days pressing the perimeters, being too threatened by his unconscious version of lockup to simply knock at one of the many locked doors and ask "Where am I? How do I get out of here?" Do you honestly think one or two beers in the Rose Garden at that stately mansion built by slaves can turn back the sands of time?

In this recent incident, we ask Cui Bono? Perhaps the Health Care industry breathing a small sigh of relief the ever-extending deadline for reform permits them unbridled opportunity to continue denial of care and keep charging obscene fees for a hospital administered tablet of acetaminophen?

Or perhaps the benefit belongs to second-generation Neocon followers of 4th generation warfare by halting the budget war over further F22 manufacturing while sliding those funds over to the unmanned aerial drone column. In this way, the other Gates, the Secdef, not the Harvard professor, can say the coalition troops are better protected.

Another noteworthy side benefit of "stupid remarks" is of course, viewer ratings of primetime TV news, vastly important to program sponsors who are the public screech of the corporatocracy. While Jocko News fades to chasing prescription providers, racism is a live body, always available for pundits' dissection offering a lifetime warranty of ratings borne from the bottomless well of correspondents, analysts, former and retired bottom-rung political-beat staffers, eager to expound on the expoundings of others who came before them, expounding on race since the Dutch slave ships kidnapped human beings from the dark continent to sell to other human beings, providing themselves with evolutionary financial evidence of New World progress.

All of which is backwards and upside down to the rest of this entry.

Let's not lose ourselves in despair over that which we have no control, rather, today, as on many days in these new strange days of our lives, consider all of life as learning to live with loss, to swim in its rivers, to survive when you are impacted behind its cascade of related damages as generally happens as naturally as breathing, one thing leading to another. We instead put the right foot ahead of the left, moving away from, moving to something more, awkwardly at first, testing the appetite of the Piranha, attempting success if for no other reason than revival of the self though understanding why these things have to happen at all. This is what we do and this is how we do it. If we do nothing, we will be eaten alive, or burned alive or noosed as Strange Fruit ...

Scientifically, biologically, philosophically, literally, figuratively and spiritually, the genesis of the matrix itself encompassing all of life, leads in one direction, always to its polar opposite, from birth towards death. That is our present phase within the cycle. We inhabit one above-ground, beneath-the-stars portion of space within the Universe. We are very small, indeed, we are nothing, but we dream we are something. We are in a dream that we matter. This we support through memory, we remember our feelings, events, other places, other people, different times, different from this day. We've seen the furniture of our collective pasts dissolve into the Now. We think it wasn't supposed to be this way, but that's just false desire speaking, taking us into the cul de sac of continued suffering. We've passed, unknown to ourselves, through the portal where elements of what we thought made us matter no longer exist. There is enough of the appearance of a familiar landscape to create the illusion nothing happened, but again, its
false desire at work. Stop looking at it. Loss and change goes on no matter what we do, who we think ourselves to be, what insurance we thought we possessed preventing the cycle's incessant movement towards the next phase.

If you have so far grokked what this is about, the negativity preventing your personal flow should vanish. Let it go. Maybe you are one of the fortunate who has understood this all along whatever your personal situation? That would be very rare, more realistically, you and I are in a state of readiness-to-know rather than all-knowing. If we really knew all of life is about loss, our's would be a drastically different, genuinely compassionate world. It could have been, all the tools were there and instead maligned. How far back it really goes are only general estimates, mankind appears today as satisfied to live with the malignment rather than work towards sustainability within the Universe. Yes, we hear they are working on it, sometimes, but that's usually just a grab for moral high ground - also known as ground for furthering someone else's suffering. When someone wins, someone else always loses.

The smallest kindness, those "here now, gone tomorrow" joys are easily attainable growth spurts achieved by our understanding the human being's natural state is that of suffering. Suffering is all we really have left, our losses, our foibles, our missteps, our uncertainties, our representative-selves making arrangements with the representative-selves of everyone else, this is all we have to withstand the backhoes of our time on Earth.

We should be doing everything we do with this knowledge at the root of our every action. This is why we hear "Love is the answer", because contained within each passing second exists the opportunity to fill the glass rather than ignore it.

Page one again, how did we get here?

Taken individually, and individuals we are, each Internet user is able to come up with enough justifications to justify being online. On an individual basis. Let's assume whole nations as tribes of individuals, the ones making up these nations that are in a position to afford it - are online. Let's say everyone with a bank account jumped on the bandwagon and into the conversation, whatever was being discussed. Got that image? Good. Let's enlarge it. When the cat's away the mice will play. We're the cats.

I wonder why it is Jimmy Carter doesn't just come right out and say it. Maybe he doesn't use the Internet. Who is out there who will risk it?

I remember those days, we were still reading newspapers and watching TV. Our Internet use was intermittent, mostly scholarly then. There were still stores in the malls, places to go, films, theater, concerts, dinners and events. In retrospect, we were too busy to care a whole hell of a lot about politics. We voted if we remembered to vote. The TV determined our vote. Everything beyond the TV seemed to be unfolding normally ... until ... very suddenly too, there was a commotion in the headlines about vote recounts and hanging chads, a lot of peoples' votes were not counted, a general confusion rocked the nation, something big was happening and only the thieves knew where it would lead. The momentum of normalcy and the illusion of progress held us as firmly as if we were lobotomized and lassoed to our chairs. Months after 911 our welcome pages asked questions for us and supplied the answers. "When can we be happy again?" "Is it okay to go shopping yet?" Do you remember that part? You'll note the Internet played a large role then which ballooned over the Earth as the days and nights following September Eleventh wore on.

It is important now and will always be important to unravel the knot. The position we are in requires complete transparency of every detail contributing to our demise. Our demise is worsening, of course you see it too, some want us to know its too late. It isn't too late. To say it is too late is to allow our situation to continue to worsen. Some of the blubber absolutely needed to be lost, like the prices the medical/pharmaceutical industry jacked up beyond reach, although instead of shrinking to being within reason, you know what happened. What DO you think they have in mind while they debate Health Care for All? Ho ho. And another, more snakes swallowing their tails, the corporations have used up everything we used to buy and have nothing to sell now, no one to sell them to, a fine howda ya do. Just like the Illusion, grabbing, shoving, to get the last easy oil, jackbooting over all the dead bodies and not getting it. What can the Illusion get now that they sold everything they needed to sustain this nation? They ate themselves alive.

The hollow state we find ourselves in today is that of trivialization. The governor's tryst I'm afraid, is another slant on Blaggy's last stand, it runs together on the monitor, the media is giving them names to separate these trivias. This is only another wall of cover. As we look at the stones making up that wall, we see it was many years in the making, but will last centuries if allowed to exist. These stones, piled upon each other like the stones in the Pyramids and Machu Picchu are the tombstones of history. We are remembered by our tombstones.

Does it make you question your sanity? When something outside of yourself has you asking that question, you know there is great trouble at hand. This is not a position a thinking person will tolerate for very long. To suppose we'd all just shut up and go away is the assumption of people thinking about their next move, not what they did to you by the last one. Oh, they do not care, What me worry? Why should they, they see we are Occupado. To them, the evil magicians of white phosphorus waving taser wands, we're still pussycats busy licking the catnip.

It doesn't matter what we talk about anymore, who we are or what interesting things we do with our lives as long as the Nine Eleven Wall is in place. Almost a decade has passed and it is growing higher, sturdier still. Are we going to just accept it and trivialize our way through the bloody aftermath?

Haven't you imagined what the planning behind the scenes must have been like, the meetings, the money and sweat? The secret Energy collusion, the crimes committed in advance of the big crime? To go there, to really work it out in your mind is nearly impossible. Their thinking went like this: When something appears as impossible to understand, we generally take it for granted no one would willingly take on the work or the risk of being a spokesperson for the ugly truth.

Now, here we are, watching the Planet self-destruct and knowing it did not have to happen the way it did. But the cats were away, no one was minding the store.

Every time we talk about it, and we talk about it all the time in different words with different mental pictures connected to different experiences, I am more firm in my opinion 911 did not have to happen. All that has followed was going to happen anyway. However, if it did not include the shameless smarmy event of 911, the trail would be cleaner, but we would still know everything we now know without muddy water in the way. In other words, today we know, but it doesn't change the rest.

Dimitri Orlav was right when he suggested it will keep happening,

... Now that the reality of Peak Oil has started to sink in, one commonly hears that "The age of cheap oil is over". But does that mean that the age of expensive oil is upon us? Not necessarily. We now know (or should have learnt by now) that once oil rises to over 6% of global GDP, the world's industrial economy stalls out, and as soon as that happens, oil ceases to be particularly valuable, so much so that investment in maintaining oil production is curtailed. The next time industry tries to stage a comeback (if it ever does) it hits the wall much sooner and stalls again. I doubt that it would take more than just a couple of cycles of this market whiplash for all the participants to have two realisations: that they cannot get enough oil no matter how much they pay for it, and that nobody wants to take their money even for the oil they do have. Those who still have it will see it as too valuable to part with for mere money...

playing itself out in serial crises and catastrophes. We will see it again and then, again. There is no prevention mechanism in place. There are no punishments. They Live.

Add on to your thought process the Twilight Zone episode where Earth steadily moves away from the sun in a dream, but awake we discover its really the Earth slowly moving toward the sun and you have the poison frosting lathered into black roses as the last word in interior design beneath which all these crimes are enacted. No one will be able to survive in the latitudes of the Equator. Simultaneously the return of the Pleistocene in the Northern regions makes survival impossible there as well. Living species will attempt to squeeze in between these regions, elbow to elbow amidst desertification over here, ruined soils, toxic water, impossible winters over there, filthy air, animals and forests long-depleted. Rising sea levels. Again, rising-sea-levels ... This is Climate Chaos. Tell me you're not already seeing it. Tell me this very month of June was not three weeks of hoodies and today, tank tops and bare feet?

And now, UNDULATING clouds. Yeah, I saw them too, last winter, 2,000 miles and 6 months away from June in the midwest. They looked like cities forming in the skies. Above them, whatever activities took place, I don't know.