Spaceship of Fools

As I was saying, anything can happen and also mentioned the exponential feature of disaster. By now, you know how it goes and have reacted according to your Nature and situation in this life, considering too, the proximity of the Disaster/s-of-the Day to you and yours.  Media loves disasters.  Recently I visited the east coast region of Winter Storm Jonas and was told time and again, it was not nearly what the media made of it.  In fact, everyone bore up extremely well during that, ah, epic event.  "It was just a big snowstorm, we get that every winter here".

Too often lately, if you want to read a story on the news pages, you are requested through a pop-up to open an account with your email address and make up yet another password. Who among us is not irritated and fatigued with this practice?  That seemingly small trick is designed to 1) soothe us into fantasies of privacy and 2) what one does, they all must do, an important and widespread law in the personal constitution of ladder-climbing scribes of code.   Corporate media's screeching news stories advertise themselves wherever page space permits as well as report the same stories everyone else is putting out, usually with same, lame deviations from fact. Facts which they eventually, equally, iron out to resemble what they were supposed to say.  I've been clicking them off as soon as I sense the ploy, no further proof of intent required.  It makes readers feel like ducks bred for foie gras.

What they are doing has always been their ultimate goal from the time "news" transitioned from gossip to paid for with money, printed gossip.  We do not get the same news unilaterally, we get tailored news.  We are given the option to further the tailoring to fit a personality type their bots have decided we possess if they are so fortunate to have us actually subscribe.  Imagine Scrooge McDuck rolling in his golden coin coffers while  bots haul in the daily take.  Heh, but while there are many McDucks, there are seven billion more quacking people, swallowing whole what is being stuffed down their throats.

People could easily fill up their most productive time online lost in the maze of this nonsense.   It is just another effect of overpopulation, that social problem that has no remedy.  The more Humans, the more everything.  Its Present Shock. Hungry people vying for recognition and redemption, multiplying at an astonishing rate, regardless of happy talk statistics.  What, are we not supposed to realize the greatest rape in the history of the Universe is going down as we continue as we are?  And where we are has long moved beyond crazy.   Makes you wanna weep. 

Recall how you feel when someone tells you a lie.  The trust is broken.  And yet, they continue on as if you are stupid. Which is even worse... sometimes.   Because when you are thought of as stupid, the truth is staring you in the gut.  It is impossible to not see it.  However, at the point of obvious over-saturation, they move on to something else, like junkies, ever seeking more and more powerful ladders to inflate their peer recognition. 

By that time we also will have moved on.  Its already happening.  The history of Man is proof of the pudding.  The lifeless, so-called dead planets, in whatever form life took, went down the same roads we travel, so very long ago we can't possibly imagine.  We're just the latest kids on the block relearning the universal meaning of mortality.

belief & hope

Good Evening Friends.  Here we are again, it hasn't been that long really, only two weeks as opposed to a real hiatus.  I prefer to call it a sabbatical because the word itself conjures something much closer to what I do offline.  I'm not sweetening it, actually sweet is too weak a word when you live in the continuous state of Present Shock where every twenty-four hour cycle is Halloween combined with April's Fool's Day.  The changes just keep coming, never think anything is static. Anything.  The energy fields have been bent to ramp it up. This week's watchword is BELIEVE. 

Last night, directly on the heels of our past few weeks into the fall semester, during which we were inundated, drip fed, rudely awakened from our physically and mentally restorative safe havens of creative vesselship, we were taught, in black and white, beyond all shadow of doubt, how foolish and irresponsible are the designers of spaceman hazmat suits, medical caregivers, mass transportation screeners and military scribes when it comes to pandemic preparedness.  Kinda like if western medical personnel and those just following orders have turned into the Malaysian Airlines copywriting staff for this one.  Why are we supposed to think that? 
I'd like to know what the military thinks it can accomplish by exposing its forces to Ebola, which brings me to Dublin Mick's bombshell post where he quotes Jim Stone on the massive wolf cry of Ebola.  I read it last night and noted the conversation in the comments on my previous post are quickly turning in that direction and feel probably a lot like everyone else which is:
I don't know what to believe. 

Only Jah know what going down.
Of course, I've been over it again and again and unfortunately we have some precedents for this kind of thing, enough so the boy who cries wolf appears to be typical of perhaps, a whining toddler trying to get
his/her way.  But we don't really know, do we.  There is a progressive negative aftermath to all that we've witnessed on our devices.  And for everything we've been thrown, really, there is no other way to think about it.  but still ... hope and belief come creepin' round.  run...

Things come across the internet that intend to produce an effect.  Through this medium, we are taught and shown examples of what is good and what is bad, regardless that these "things" are very often contradictory. 

Perhaps we need to stop believing in belief.  There is only one thing we can be sure of and that is ourselves, but even personal faith is sometimes unreliable.  When it is unreliable to us, we seek opinions from those we "believe" to be wiser than ourselves.   In Present Shock, this crazy, ruthless, over-intense, mind and body destroying avalanche of information can debilitate even the most trusted of our vanishing advisers. 

Because Hope is belief's accomplice.  Together, they are old habits of cowardice in concentration.  Delusional U-turns on a circular beltway.
We need neither to survive.  We never did and still don't.  I shouldn't have to point that out.

Real fact is helpful where you can find it.  Connected to our devices, the device on which you are reading this text, there is unfortunately little, perhaps none, to be found.  Thus, the marketing, development and continuous upgrading of these devices becomes the only way to manage seven billion hopeful believers while the planet is shredded into a million, quadrillion, tiny pieces. 

we can do this now

The Trout Clan's Murph and Freeacre, have had a disastrous fire wiping out their formerly exquisite property made by holding hands with Nature.  I don't know the details of how it began, but they are in the midst of starting over which has been held back as usual by the ARGHHHH insurance industry.  Please see their new post and offer what you can by way of assistance in any and all areas to speed healing.  We know them to be an incredibly hard working and resilient couple and I have no doubt they will, at some point in the future, discover this disaster as a blessing in disguise. 

Let's help them however we can, even if it is only through your good words, I am sure it will help.  Thank you.

Sorry about your loss ...

So they got Gaddafi. The hunted, haunted giant Moose in Buddy Holly glasses. Erasure phase seven hundred and thirty one, or whatever, accomplished on the Wetiko to-do list.  One of the most serious, if not the most serious, barriers to looting the African continent for precious metals, Black Gold, water and jewels has been stealth undermined and viciously dismantled so the great global SuperCorps earthmovers can move in across the region and freely take without impediment while their errand clerks across the latitudes complain about entitlements. Now those protesting in Arab Spring Libya will be just like everyone else on the planet, without hope, without a future, without looking forward to anything, hey, welcome to reality.  Don't get sick, don't complain, don't demand because your cries will absolutely go unheard.  You will live out your days among what is left of your families, forever hungry, in the dark, freezing or sweltering, sicknesses and injuries untended until there is no more life left in you to breathe the fetid air from Big Everything's toxic processing plants.   


Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.
I am very sorry this is happening to you, we all are very sorry, our finite Earth has been flattened into one endless, lifeless, hardpan platform stretching beyond a fool's golden horizon of impossibly infinte growth, squeezing out every last coin from every last pocket and camel bag and body of water and gravel desert while we blogged online, connected through social networking sites and watched TV, all of which happen to be the weapons of first choice to use on the unaware until they are made aware by some creeping sense of imminent danger at which time, maybe the first time, you will notice the cameras and jackboots lingering beyond your garden wall.  We no longer know who is in charge, who serves at  who's pleasure, or where the money goes. You have already been slammed with the bloodthirst of star wars weaponry and explosives, all assets lost, whole cities annihilated dispossessing hundreds of thousands, the next stage will be civil wars based on whom is on whom's side, i.e.; what is and what is not OK to steal, regardless that everyone everywhere knows stealing is never OK. Expect gang wars in the palm groves. Expect the unexpected. 

It matters none with what side you are on, contracts will be let and contractors you shall have - parading around sealed inside the latest advancements in protection vehicles, equipped to mow you down instantly if you should accidentally get in their way, do watch out, especially the innocent, all of you are regarded as dangerous to the mission and subject to immediate vaporization.  


No home, no friends or family left alive, no food, no money, no reason to be anywhere, primarily not there.  This is when life becomes impossible, I know, we've been there more than a few times and yet, as you will see, there will be signs that a wonderful highlife is happening behind closed doors, you will get word, you will sense it by the revelry and off-limits clubs and hotels where you are not welcome.  You will gawk at the imbalance of life, you will be furious what began as something good has come to this.  You will go over it in your mind again and again, wondering how it came to be, you will remember it wasn't billed as it has turned out and you will have thoughts about why it happened the way it did and is, and you will never ever stop trying to overcome your new station in life because it is fundamentally unsupportable of any life at all, except a tiny handful of agents to agents somewhere else that are agents to somewhere else again and then again.  

What has happened to you and what will continue to happen is happening everywhere in the world, the humans have awoken from their slavehood and want real freedom just like you thought you saw as obtainable on daytime TV news and soaps.  The news is that kind of freedom does not exist anywhere.  Actors, elaborate film sets and commercial sponsors do not make a free people.  I realize you have no means to leave, but leaving is worth your consideration and leaving for another westernized geography is not recommened.  You are not important enough to the mission to be forced to stay, so grab only that which you value dearly and start walking, from now on think of yourselves as a nomadic tribe, seeking a place to plant your people for a better life, much like the Conestoga wagons of the 1850's old west, creaky and slow, but sure.   Stay clean, stay away from conflicts, stay out of cities, stay solitary except for loved ones.  Keep moving until you are sure you have found a safe spot to hold you and your children's children for a long time.  That will be very hard to find, I know, so you will be a traveler seemingly forever, expect it, relish it, pray for it.  Trust nothing but the God inside you as your Guide and Guardian Angel in all matters.  

The alternative is what the wastelands of Iraq and Afghanistan have become, massive obliterations of history, geneaology and culture and  worse, the sudden absence of everything that functioned, that kept you grounded in soceity, your whole sense of any identity has literally gone up in smoke.

By some incredible miracle you have been spared, it is this miracle now that awaits you if you can pull yourself up out of hiding, come out from under the rubble, despite injuries and trauma to your mind and your soul, there is more to life than you have been allowed to think and the time to discover it is right now.   You have been miraculously given another opportunity to open your heart to enlightenment and it does exist on Earth but only for those whose suffering matches yours.  You will make multitudes of new friends along the way.  Just look for the Light.  That is all you need to do, now and forever after.  Godspeed, Jah Guide and hang tough.

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.

postcard from Planet Backwards

We may have been transported to another planet while we slept.  A planet where everything appears as it was when you went to bed, but the rules are different.  The certainty is gone, nothing can be counted on to be what you thought it was, including mirrors which show only your preening representative-self, but these mirrors now imported from somewhere gawd only knows, are part of the new, New World lifestyles we all lead helplessly where right is wrong and black is white.  I've said it before and will say it again, no one is immune.  I'm quite sure you know how it goes, these sudden spring days give us a nostalgia, a screen door barefoot kind of summery happy sadness, something deep within the heart wants to go home again, but we don't really know where home is anymore.  Perhaps it never was real considering how much is being revealed in the present, perhaps it was only a lyric in a song you resonated with or an artwork that spoke to you in a way that touched you and you reminisced about something hazy that was just a dream on your way to partake in continuing the dream as if it was endless.  And then, BRRRRIIING BRRRRIIING, the cell woke you up with a scam call, an 800 number announcing BofA was here to help.  As if anyone needs that kind of help.  "Your social please."

I'm thinking about the recent events trying to separate my own conclusions from everyone else's observations.  The problem seems to be that so many windup clacking dental jaws make their definitive pronouncements on these situations which muddles us and it takes a lot of silence and a good amount of disgust before strange new worldie ideas come creepin' round.  In the midst of this jibber jabber, we forge on with our normal routines, so following my own advice, I make a point to remember fleeting thoughts no matter how absurd because after all, absurdity is rational on Planet Backwards.

To begin with, I labored for years upon years under one set of inviolate basics and as I matured, I took it for granted everyone else matured mentally and spiritually as well. Oh, ho ho.  I blew off the Clinton years as a single parent which takes up a lot of attention and time leaving one somewhat ill-equipped to peer into the mysterious direction our world is taking, so when 2001 came along, and the bullhorner kept harping on attacks, I was stunned.  Did he mean war?  Had we not grown beyond that?  What?  That's video game nonsense, comics, sandbox bullying.  He couldn't be serious! However, obviously we had already been transported and 2001 was the wake-up year we debarked as unwilling hostages, searched and tagged into Planet Backwards.  Was it AD, BC, or NWO time?  We can't know for sure, that's one of the chief hallmarks of this joint, nothing is what you are forced into pretending it is.  Let's take this BP hit for example, didn't they used to be that gas station outfit with Swiss-style greenie graphics?  On Planet Backwards, they are a ludicrously wealthy and universally powerful energy provider which appears to possess enough chutzpah to claw a hole in the tectonic plates holding our previous planet in place.  And you know what that means, well the plates kept a movin' and a shiftin' until all those tender, flaming tectonic platters overlapped on top of each other and BOOM, there went Japan. Tragedy of all tragedies, Japan proved itself just as ill-equipped as I was to peer into the direction the wonderful wheels of progress had taken them.  During all the years they should have known better, they were desperately balancing non-existent yen from a bone dry piggy bank rather than thinking about their rice paper villages despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocols on Climate Change.  You have to imagine those very intelligent people that studiously researched the issues got an education that may well have saved their once exquisite paradise given the opportunity to speak truthfully where it counts.  Somewhere there are some sad human beings, disoriented and displaced to shelters asking themselves why they took no for an answer.

Then I think about us, what an unholy mess was made of that sweet dream, guaranteed to get messier.  Where does it end, you'll notice it is not even paring off, not in the slightest.  Is everyone supposed to be homeless?  They say this year is a bad one for housing, the word is foreclosures this year will beat all the previous years.  Our economy is still in the toilet and the cowardly laureate only worsens the wound with a little altruistic interventionism which when you think about it, isn't this exactly what ignites the bubble bath?  Well, around the hallowed dinner tables where pundits are not allowed, a big fat dose of grisly war is just the right prescription for an ailing economy.  From Planet Backwards where war is peace, our telescopic star gazers hint stubborn Col. Qaddafi may have given the interventionists (ridiculous label alert) the gift of continuing consumptive prosperity.  Does slave labor in China make those gilded plastic coffins for export?

Maybe it would have been more clever to save this entry for April Fools' Day, but many bloggers actually write posts in advance, and with the never ending advent of technology one simply clicks the mouse and posts appear at some exact time and date of their choice.  I always wondered on every April 1st, who is the fool?

the Kids are alright

Amos keeps an eye on his family from the big house

Mother Scarlett watches too

The sheep are doing very well.  All the kids are behaving like human children, busy, curious, enchanted, hungry, frolicking, joyous.  They never just walk, they leap and hop.  These particular sheep really have it good on Planet Backwards.  If we just had wool coats and three-chambered stomachs, we could graze our hearts away too, never having to worry about anything other than staying dry in rainy weather.  Although, with their extreme super-coats, rain water bounces right off.  The day pen was moved much closer this morning and they are practically grazing at our door.  I moved my drawing table right up to the corner windows for some gesture drawings of these guys.  Gesture drawings are quick, (one minute is too long) rough pencil sketches for the purpose of loosening one's hand as well as improving the eye's understanding of anatomy so that you learn to see what IS and how it feels, rather than what you thought it was or surmised how it felt.  Any art school worth its tuition fees spends the entire foundation year on Nicolaides gesture drawing techniques with live, nude models.  This is known as Life Drawing 101.  If you don't get to do this, you are condemned to spend your years on Planet Earth doing scritchy scratch on ruled notebook paper.  Heh, I am a purist. not.

Allow me to close this post with sincere condolences, comfort and love to the Beageant family and to our brilliant and talented friends, Brian and Chickory, on their recent losses.  Joe and those adored Mothers (great women who raised great people) are free at last.  Praise Jah and His compassionate benevolence, when we have finally had enough He is there.

tomorrow and tomorrow

Another day, another spill, blowout, umm tanker explosion in the Straits, a pouring in the Midwestern rivers, creeks and the Great Lakes and hey while we at it, why not the Niger Delta and whew, word even comes from hell itself, there is a repeat just down the leased Louisiana sea lane of yes, another resource sucker gone bad. The market for Nalco's Corexit seem unlimited.

Indeed this is one way to quell the Asian Carp who managed to glide through whatever agility course was propped up for them, that is if they got around to it with a little more effort than jawboning the people's plight. That would be rather unusual, a surprise side benefit from anthropogenic disaster as seen in the beady eyes of the perps or in the dunkin doughnut eyes of the dazed and glazed. Although, if the Carp came through and there had been no "spill' shortly thereafter, in time the Carp would have eventually settled down to some quiet grounds and done their thing along with all the other lake life schools and everything would be okay. Nature can handle anything, I have yet to see a situation that it cannot. It is only our meddling that makes something a disaster, as I said in an earlier post. Nature does what it does. For example, Nature is fully capable of performing a cleaner, kinder, quicker job at reining in overpopulation - without chemicals, dispersants, never ending wars of conquest, undersea nukes, targeted executions and the like.

The Carp however, would have only been okay until they were met by the World's Dirtiest Jobs, the Trawlers which would have braved the distance from the icy Bering Straits contracted by Big Seafood - we'll call them Big Aqua. Suddenly, the barren seafood counter would be packed with Carp Cakes, Carp filled Crab, Carp fillet, Carp sausage and patties, shrinkwrapped packages with colorful Oriental graphics would appear in the meats' department freezers, two for one, Carp Sushi, fake lobster made from processed Carp, imitation crab Carp, Carp tacos, Marie Callendar Carp with friend rice and dim sum. Perhaps we've been spared or ... perhaps Carp thrives on Corexit. This remains to be seen, if we're still around to see it. We might catch it on the Discovery Channel weeknights in the mess hall.

I think we will be around to see it as general punishment. As noxious as the situation appears at this time, what could be worse? Being there, unable to get out, being unable to act without extending the tortures and violence, the threats and the incessant disparities and indignities as far into the future as you go. Perhaps it is set up that way, that wherever there are anthropogenic disasters a certain amount of the population is eliminated and the rest are survivors. Those who survive think themselves fortunate, but allowing you the freedom of good fortune is not on the certified and notarized Survivors to-do List. Rather, their lives will be lived out cleaning up the disasters, big and small, in the process being blown this way or that, everyday is the same as the day before and the next. The little people as NWO prisoners, in corporate hazmat outfits with rubber boots and football jackets in the winters. All of it bearing the logo of whomever is getting the magnificent tax break calling you into service. Maybe you will be assigned a location with some diversity so that your freelancing provides some highlights, but I think not. If you are assigned beach duty, it stays beach duty because your prison doesn't finance transfers to the Manhattan Dump or the Yucca Mountain work tent honeywagons.

Okay, let's get it on. Its been a grim week. The stars must be out of favor with me lately, I don't know how its gone for you, you are free to articulate it in a comment, but the reality of blowing the rockbuggy's engine has made itself known. Sometimes it appears I go through collapse earlier than what we generally speak of when we speak of collapse. Its always been that way. I speak from experience. This is absolutely not what was intended by the parents, my ancestors, and not what we intend for our offspring. Whatever we have to go through is unique not only to our zeitgeist, but more realistically to ourselves. Knowing this makes it difficult to be consoled because what is consolation if it is not truth? The truth needs no consolation. But, empathy works. Awareness works. The beauty in awareness and truth is the lesson part. Ah, yes, there is a lesson here, it feels good when it is realized, very good.

I am aware of the Wikileaks praises, denouncings, huffings and puffings taking place. We who know everything while knowing nothing can tell you it will have no impact on the big picture despite the big picture people squawking and justifying and threatening the leakers-in-hiding. It would be nice if someone could raise pen to paper and say, Look, let's make some amends here. But that opportunity came round recently through the worst disaster in American history and no amends were made, not even a pipsqueak, not even a shuck and jive worth the time a shuck and jive takes. Do you honestly think the snakes are going to shed their skins now? Its a little late for molting. We're in for it but good now. Entire generations of humans have come to age in the middle of this nonsense never having known what the hippies were all about, never having and never will hear of the Great Jack Kerouac or even Kurt Vonnegut. The Beatles? Didn't they do the Vegas show for Cirque De Soliel? Ain't it sad they never heard of Django Reinhardt or Slim Harpo? Only sad if you don't know, what they don't know is sad because they cannot know the real thing. If they are exceptionally curious and dedicated, they can run a web search and come up with something digitized on their cell provided they purchased the correct ap for the correct version modified for legal purposes.

Surely one day we will wake up and find this will all have been a long, drawn out dream in which it appears that we were awake, but we were not.

MY friend, the things that do attain

The happy life be these, I find:

The riches left, not got with pain;

The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;

The equal friend; no grudge; no strife;

No charge of rule, nor governance;

Without disease, the healthy life;

The household of continuance;

The mean diet, no dainty fare;

Wisdom joined with simpleness;

The night discharged of all care,

Where wine the wit may not oppress:

The faithful wife, without debate;

Such sleeps as may beguile the night;

Content thyself with thine estate,

Neither wish death, nor fear his might.




Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

(1517 - 1547)

quakin' blues

Is there enough money in the world to relieve all the disasters when they occur simultaneously? Will there be enough money to pay firefighters when lightening strikes again? Do governments set a little liquidity aside in a secret column, (it should be secret now or someone will figure out a way to use it for something else like an infinity pool overlooking the Aegean) just in case all hell breaks loose? Or do they take out loans. Do they like to rebuild their mammoth beachfront resort hotels over and over? Wouldn't that be good for BAU to have a constant need with a constant flow of sequestered funds, new hires, new contractors, new designers, new tourists, new airports and hospitals and new high-tech security enhancements for all? Sure. And what if these disasters could be pumped into twofers or threefers, oh, that will happen, not if, but when and where and not too long from now at the rate its progressing. I sensed a little disappointment among the desperate shrieking pundits today, so primed for Hilo to be disastered on location on live TV, see it first, here and now as they quickly turned to Japan's coast with smatterings of the scene in Chile, a disaster on the scale of the fifth highest in magnitude in the history of all recorded earthquakes. The Chileans interviewed have a calm to them, realistic and resigned, fully disconnected intellectually to Haiti. Obviously this is because they are not descendants of African slaves, made malleable by debt poverty and dependent on the international shylocks, homeless, hopeless and shackled into sweatshop submission, ridiculed and starving: a true to life profound disaster unfolding at any time. No, Chileans appear confident their damages will be repaired without having to look elsewhere to the bondage of helping hands. The loss of life is a tragedy, but for the most part the damage to the infrastructure is an inconvenience, a workaround, to be managed by themselves. They are at this time reluctant to request intervention, shock of all shocks, because as they say, they have not been able to assess what aid they might require, if any. Of course, the road to the the other half of their country, the wild, untamed half, lies in ruins, they don't have a real body count yet. That body count might be impossible to assess. Lots of people out there don't want to be found: tribal people and such.

Don't take my word for these things, my information has come largely from TV. The frothing pundits get in the way of real facts, cutting off leading seismologists in the middle of explaining enlightening tecto/tsunamo-fact to interview a tourist evacuating a Hilo resort or taking a break for the sponsors. Hawaii is a US state you know and thus what happens in the US stays focused on the US by supreme decree.

Japan has not seen a tsunami warning coming their way for over fifteen years. In one and a half decades you can imagine how many people forgot the lesson and built right up to the sea's permissible edge, but they say they are well prepared unlike California who harbors replicating fast buck developers, building into the foothills and difficult to reach canyons so the inevitable wildfires consume any vegetation holding the earth in place (like trees) which then turns into mudslides with the heavy rains of winter. They prepare themselves with huge nets holding dirt in place. If you've never seen the sheer size of these nets, and ponder whatever they could possibly do to prevent a mudslide, you would not believe it. However, helpful of not, they can't net the whole state or the whole planet if it ever came to that. Nor can the tectonic plates sit still forever. The Earth does what it does and we are mere Gumby lookyloos picking up a geography lesson along the way. Common sense tells us Japan is a lot farther away from Chile than Hilo and not to expect much except these colorful computerized graphics of water rippling out from where the stone was dropped.

The worst that Hilo and Japan will see are the terrors of so many people evacuating at once. Reblowing the sirens WW2-style, incessantly doesn't help. The hospitals closed to evacuate their staff meaning going to the ER for treatment of the thousands of panic attacks taking place is not an option. There will be a lot of car accidents and likely a few vehicles careening into panicked crowds hauling their most precious heirlooms seeking escape. It could get very messy.

I've written often recently about the disasters one is required to experience in this adventure we call life. They have always been with us, personally and externally in the larger world. I've also mentioned the Forces that divine our journey - if you pay attention to them. It is clear the Earth has its own plan for survival and the Forces tell us we are irrelevant to this plan. We can invent technologies and predictors and evacuation plans until we are blue in the face but until we stop abusing the Earth's resources we remain irrelevant, a bothersome, tiresome, annoying destructive species stealing what never belonged to us and never will. We must be the joke of the Universe. Lovely, perfect Earth rotating on its axis with all the other magnificent heavenly bodies except she has this fatal flaw, those quarreling, relentless thieving humans squandering her bounty, intent on blowing up the whole sphere with materials cobbled together from her stunning body. In this way, the perps are organ harvesters.

But it appears she won't have to live as a joke for long. The humans will kill each other off and then she will calm down. There are more worthy species that help instead of harm the system. When the Homo Sapien species began to see itself as too big to fail, too clever and too invincible to be intimidated by the natural forces, we were marked for extinction and its happening now, in real time, in living color. Its even happening to you, as they bring the rest of us down with them.

When all has vanished that one needs to survive including materials to make a lean-to on the riverbank and edible forages are lost to the complete trashing of our food chain, we are cooked. Forget losing everything else, your possessions, your money, your transportation, your golden years, films, TV and the web, whatever place you call your home and all of its contents, its all drowning in the infinity pools as the violent seas ride roughshod over the globe.

We have seen the future, nothing is left to the imagination, and now it is here.

All images clickable, taken onsite 02.20.10, ccc. 2010

Its alright, we're only bleeding

"... Every day, every night, someone's blood is being offered up on the imperial altars. That's what empire is. That's what empire does.

See Rome

While you were dreaming
While you wrapped your mind in silks
Bronze Steel Stone
Did their work

While you breathed the fumes
Of the oracle's fissure
Deranged the senses
Settled in soft beds

Rome
Sent agents into the streets
Hard men pinched men
Bronze Steel Stone

To eliminate execute
Discredit and destroy

See Rome

While you stood in the forum
Declaimed high words
Filled temples with fragrant smoke
Scrawled millions of learned disquisitions

Rome marched
Somewhere, in your name
Fired the village
In your name
Put steel to the belly

While you were wrapped in silks
While you grubbed
While you drank degraded waters
Drank dark, brilliant wine
While you sang, while you dreamed

Rome was
Rome hammered the real

Your silks
Your songs
Are dreams

See Rome ..."
Chris Floyd | Empire Burlesque

In this dream of the everyday, while our heightened senses speak in conundrum, one event becomes many and a portrait is born. I alluded to this portrait last summer bearing a title in part selected for historical comparison: Red Planet Blue. We are past that now, the plateau in our daydream stretching into infinity, a more permanent firmament. It seems recent, relatively, but time is moving faster, something wants to release itself, something that is tired of its show of patience. It is sad in the way one might feel to have married their perfect soul mate and be told he keeps several mistresses and all of them are coming to live with you. Or worse, not be told and they come to live with you anyway so you are forced to figure it out a little bit at a time because you were under a different impression, a created impression. For months, in some cases many years, you argue with yourself often convinced what you are seeing is not really what it appears to be. Surely, you were somehow deficient in your perceptions, if in fact your wildest fantasies have any credibility and you catch yourself and put it away, it brings you down, you remove yourself from your manifest paranoia and re-enter the dream of the everyday.

It takes about, oh, an hour before you are reminded again and the cycle repeats. Is there a problem? Your problem is very simple, easily resolved, you are merely contending against reality. That's okay, you're not alone. Everyone does it and everyone does it differently. We have a variety of choices we can make, its making a choice at all that is hard because our hearts are in one place and our minds are literally in another. Perhaps by procrastinating on choice we arrive where we need to be anyway, on autopilot, going with the flow until the flow becomes a river of lifestyle and you are floating along with the current, gazing at the sky from your raft, listening to Nature's concerto, just you, nothing to impede your bliss and suddenly the word bliss acts as a hypnotist snapping his fingers, Wake up now. See Rome.

It is a huge exercise in imagination to look into the near future. Some will scoff, but scoffers are not imagining hard enough. Start over, look again. Read the tea leaves. See those satellites? Billboards of tomorrow, advertising yesterday, an annoyance at best, but legal. They have rights, they have personhood. They are normal. Everything that is happening to our world is normal. Is it normal to lose a nuke? If you don't think it is, you are not thinking hard enough. The guards fell asleep or maybe the inventory was incorrect, "how" is not as important as it being normal. How normal is a 7.0 earthquake demolishing the poorest nation in the western hemisphere? Its growing more normal every day. So normal, we now have other recent catastrophic disasters followed by catastrophic marathon telethons to align with it all in the same sentence. Why this is just like ___, and ____, and wasn't there something on that scale in ____? ...

It is time we got on with our lives. Make some kind of serious commitment to God. If you can create your own personal salvation scenario, it will stick, you will need it and rely on it, not if but when you slip. We'll need it to keep going, the avalanche is breaking, its rugged granite all the way down and you will need a life jacket. I found God outdoors, overlooking clouds below where I stood, spreading into a distant valley, mule deer grazing unafraid, honey yellow, lapis lazuli , lavender wildflowers cascading into the wash far below the wooden bench someone unknown put there for just such a purpose. Tiny Oaks in full bloom made a green carpet up and down the scene, Ravens played above waiting on a thermal. People gravitate to God, the little people, the good and innocent and courteous little people, because everything else will hurt you and what you think about when you think about God will not leave you and is not, by your own design, designed to fail you.

I didn't see the telethon. They are Orwellian now in their commonality. Just as all else now, the filler up? attendant who actually performed a service was erased. He was helpful, but a drain on the Exxon bottom line. You have to fill the tank yourself if you want to see anything go right and even then there are plenty of grey areas where it could go wrong. And there is always that possibility going wrong will have exponentially wrong after-effects. Instead, I tended the fire for a few minutes until the movie unfolding on HBO sucked me in. Revolutionary Road. There were a few cheesy moments, an intentional flashback to Titanic's sex scene on the auto deck, but beyond that worst of the cheesy moments the situation the protagonists find themselves in is one you are probably familiar with, concerning choice, concerning the way things are and how they might continue if they continued further. One of them chooses life and fails, the other chooses death because he was already dead.

The film would like to tell us that everyone has within them a breaking point, but that is not true according to the nightmare of the everyday dream. It drones on. And on. There is one thing to remember, for the nightmare makers to sleep with, everything changes completely every few hundred thousand years or so. That fabulous tweakers' multi-unit development overlooking billion dollar 360 degree views of Lotus hammock paradise as far as the eye can behold will someday be another Atlantis. See Rome.

*********************************

One last item, windows 7 is vista updated in lockstep with the way things are, yet another bailout to yet another industry. That means less art, less photography, less visual stimulation, more hype, more baloney tech reviews, more disappointing faux journalism, more gouging, more drag, less movement. If you have not crashed your XP yet, you might underestimate what I am saying, but it is guaranteed not too far from today you will be introduced to the truth. You will be crushed, but its alright, you're only bleeding.

Mon Dieu

Lax codes, no steel reinforcements, likely plenty of seawater was used in cement mixing, has very seldom experienced any earthquake activity, it rains there everyday... meaning the dirt roads passing as main roads, the floor of the communities is mud, all the time, everyday. The scent of rotten mangoes permeates the atmosphere. In every home and small "whatever is being served regardless of the menu its fried rice" cafe hangs a poster portrait of Baby Doc. Probably illegal, but that doesn't mean much. Now, this place is not like anywhere else in the world. Obiah, dirty hands runs through the streams where water used to flow. After hours the donkeys scream over the walls. Ever heard a donkey scream? The winds rise, the seas roll, moorings slip free, things happen with no logical explanation. You'd have to be accustomed to Voodoo audio to get a night's sleep.

There are so many of more of them then Haitian Barack Obamas. Although there are people from everywhere camping out until something else somewhere else beckons. Jacmel - which is a town just over the mountain, a day's jitney to Port Au Prince (beautifully creative artworks with wheels and seats you share, sound systems tuned with high bass, squeeze your white person body in between boxes for suitcases wrapped with twine) is known for the damage done by Hurricane David. My friends there happen to be a Belgian couple (there is always a European couple in these places that have lived there seemingly forever) whose original reason for travel was a sail around the world. Their craft lies beached, keel even with the horizon, a 50 ft. rusting hulk of ribs, a memory of David and the reason they linger in Jacmel. I would tell you they are amazing people, but the last time I saw them it looked like they were well on their way into alcoholism. Harmless, genteel, soulful people in a very long drawn out painless suicide, after all, what future would they have in Jacmel in their condition. I have much love for them. Everyone they ever knew before the yacht was trashed must have been to visit them by now. Perhaps they have achieved a certain kind of fame, I wouldn't know, but I have met people in the US that know them and stayed with them. Not a coincidence. They have enough money to live richly in the poorest section of a decrepit and decadent slaveholder's town Papa Doc is reported to having said "would be forgotten" while visiting Jacmel to dedicate the new concrete dock because an onlooker spat on him. The people came to learn there was truth to those words as medical and dental services, eventually, all services passed them by, repeatedly. It may or may not be true, but it was explained to me by various people as if it were common knowledge. Undoubtedly, Jacmel is now in more serious trouble. I cannot imagine the horror unfolding, I know it is beyond our capacity to understand unless maybe you were caught under the rubble of the WTC. Think of an entire destitute country, clawed apart by big ag and panties manufacturers, women and children eating mud cookies, galvanized shacks abutting more galvanized separated by curtains of colored plastic strips, squatting because chairs are too precious, chickens and sick dogs roaming about the dwellings, potties spilled and broken, think of ground zero in Manhattan spread across French terraced mountains from the Caribbean to the Bay of Gonaives rippling out to Santo Domingo, to Kingston, to Havana, to the Grenadines, a 7.0 may well have been felt very far away. The aftershocks, 24 at this count, are registering 5.0 mag.

What are we going to do about it? Oh, the usual despite the adjective catastrophic proceeding disaster. Our grave media delivery men are vying for selection to do an on-location. We'll probably see Xe over there with AK47's and various microwave weaponry to maintain (maintain?) order because there is no order and there was so little, if any, to begin with. The victims will accidentally be referred to as insurgents by Harry Reid. Haiti will be observed to be comparable to a war zone. The missionaries have already landed.

You cannot say this is worse than Katrina. In the same way you wouldn't compare Banda Aceh with Pompeii, if you were not present at all of them.

They say the buildings that house the officials that would normally be in contact with the US State Department are lying in ruins. Rubble and dust. What could possibly lie ahead for Haiti now? How do people rebuild from nothing? Everyone living in daily catastrophic disaster before this morning will now live in the decaying rubble of catastrophic disaster for the remainder of their lives. They are a highly emotional people in general, they hold nothing back, if they cry, they wail, if they are happy, they dance in the muddy streets. Surely there are human cries tonight, swimming in fact in a vast sea of tears and for everyone, wretched conditions totally unimaginable to most Americans, from today forward.

The Americans will want to do something, they will be told to donate to the cause. There will be disaster relief movements and there will be carpetbaggers. If we were smart, instead of public relations celebrities, we would refrain from handling this disaster in the typical fashion. We should get food and medical supplies and experienced search and rescue workers over there. We should use Predator drones with thermal imaging to find the people under the rubble. We should get earth-moving equipment sent in now on C-130s. But already Hillary says its too difficult. Well, why Hillary? We do it for war, don't we? We made the world's largest luxury embassy city in Iraq and its too difficult to hop on down to Haiti? Our idle freighters can't spare a convoy? What is it, the fuel expense? If you are going to keep up appearances, you'd better reserve a little extra fuel for disaster aid.

It isn't cash this place needs now. I fear the corrupted will inhale any money appearing as aid and the Haitians will be left with debt in the quadrillions, possibly well into infinity. We must not put ANY restrictions on anything we should be giving freely as one people to another, no abortion restrictions, no medical trials on the desperate, no political fomenting dependent on aid. Give the gift of help without strings attached, is that possible? We need to stop this phony holier than thou superstar boss act now. This is the perfect time to put aside political posturing and do something good for someone else without taking back. However, the world being what it is, operating as it does, a lot of people will make a lot of money because disaster always brings the cockroaches out of hiding. This situation isn't an American situation, its a CARICOM situation, but the US has to meddle because as you will hear at any moment now, its the Christian thing to do. What about the real thing to do? That is a question you won't hear.

For the Haitians, if they are not deluged with more corruption than they already live amidst, they are used to working hard, inventive and imaginative and capable of evolving into a stronger country provided the corporatists of the econo-agro-ocracy back off.

At this moment a TV newscaster is saying Haiti is not capable of dealing with a disaster on this scale. We'll hear a lot about that in the coming weeks. I ask you, what did the early inhabitants of Planet Earth do when disaster struck? And what did the early peoples in faraway locations do? And we are still here, I think.

Now I'm going to relight the fire in the fireplace and sit on the hearth and send healing thoughts far south. Tonight I will sleep in a bed in a house while Haitians have nowhere at all to sleep or pee or gather their thoughts or just take a break. What else do we have they don't? We have a cowardice they lack. They do not hesitate to speak up and they speak from their hearts. They will go on because they have always gone on, all of life has always been unbearable suffering and its a hard, raw lifestyle that claws its living out of nothing yet lives. In comparison, we are marshmallows talking about survival. It is to weep.

all at once and then more

Right on cue, our friend Su is in the heart of an endurance test the likes of which bring out the true character of the mortal undergoing this particular moment on Planet Earth. If you have ever been through anything similar to the wildfires raging in South Africa today, you would know how it feels. Its natural terror, raw, incontrovertible, heinous, you are forced to live up to all your claims or wuss out, or worse, take advantage, but the remarkable thing is how rare are the wusses and the deviants. Not until natural disaster takes hold of the community do we get to see how small and local is not only the answer, but in reality, all that matters.

I thought as I greeted this day that it held very different avenues for attention, but I can't get Su's predicament out of my mind. That's a good thing because she asked for our good intentions earlier this morning.

It is always deeply troubling when our buddies of the web undergo the test of disaster. There is so little we can do, our natural inclination is assistance, somehow, but the anonymity of the web required because we exist alongside sickos, spammers, trackers and gangsters makes it generally impossible to even do something small such as track a wildfire. South Africa is a big place. What can we really do when someone we care about is in danger? Yes, this is the care-less world provided by terror-fied corporate governance grown small while living large. Technology is no redemption for this problem. All we can do is wait and pray. We can send healing thoughts. We can post hope on blogs. But in reality it is not about us at all. That we take it upon ourselves to be concerned is usually the only role we'll get to play, which isn't saying much. Its the rare disaster victim who is able to communicate online or check their email during the unfolding of each moment therefore I don't expect to receive updates on Su's situation until she's safe and sound.

It is inevitable we experience a number of tests and trails during our journey in this life. I have absolutely no doubt Su will shine her way through, we know only this much, but that is a lot to know. In the interim, we revisit our own disasters, personal or public, and empathize. Look around, does Utopia exist anywhere anymore, did it ever? Utopia is in the moment wherever you are. Su has shown us many times she is Utopia-walking which is why she will come out of this improved, just when we thought she was excellent as she is. I so look forward to her tale, truly, I long to read the relief and myriad side stories of the Unschool, the villagers and the animals' foibles. May that day come soon, like instantly.

May it come for all of us in this march forward into full-stress apocalypse. You know what I mean, the collapse panorama stretching across the planet, the unexpected twists and turns so frequently it almost seems mundane, everyday there is a disaster going on somewhere, sometimes its your turn. The trick, if your want peace of mind, is to refrain from it wherever possible, but when its costumed as something other than what it is that can be difficult even to the most insightful souls. Worse than difficult is using disaster as a lifetime crutch for character deficiencies when you are intelligent enough to know better but make a conscious choice to ignore your behavior. You can build an entire existence out of falsehoods and come to believe in it all completely even as the results grow in ongoing catastrophe. I've seen enough of that to recognize it, even though I don't want to recognize it, there are enough similarities in the general progression of events that are undeniable. Perhaps this is how apocalypse works its magic? "The revealing" means we are paying attention (whether we want to or not) to the root causes behind exponential disaster and learning how to survive more effectively in spite of western junk food attention spans. It is no small detail that Su is on record saying she is a better person for having survived the total loss of material possessions in an earlier fire. When you use those words as a metaphor for civilization's progress, you are on a higher plane already.

UPDATE: Su is okay. One wonders what official routes and permission levels she must have gone through that she was able to post a very brief message on her blog? I'm impressed. Honored, actually.

deja vu

Its been a while since Joe Bageant published the Zombie Food Court piece, I would have thought that revelation alone would have changed some of us forever, but it did not. Some of us think such knowledge are just words arranged in a particularly appealing manner, maybe as appealing as Classic Comics, better than the average Mickey Mouse, but just cartoons after all is said and done. Joe's work was followed up, by me anyway, into Arthur Silber's Once Upon a Time blog, I'd liken it to post grad studies for those of us who majored in Zombie Food Courts during the undergrad phase in the Honors section and which head-master Visible rules the entire university, humorously, but indisputably. I can offer but small details, little subvariations on the theme, sociological anthropology I understand its called. Readership has nothing to do with anything after a point, the point being a moment in time where you pause to reflect on everything happening before rejoining your normal life, the one where you do laundry, collect firewood, buy milk at the convenience store gas pump fried chicken stripmall add-on. Sometimes I wish I'd never started blogging, its always there, waiting for more food, an open yaw like a comma in the day. Shall we talk about this week and last? Dinnergate? Tigergate? Huckabeegate? Ohhhhh, Climategate? No, how bout Moretroopsgate? We will not talk about healthgate. I am flat out never in the mood to discuss the health reform bill, why that's just talking trash and we don't want do that now, do we? In fact, there is nothing the Illusion does that is worth talking about unless we're talking real and since there is nothing real about the Illusion, we'd be talking about things that are said to be happening that are the opposite of what is and will be happening. Is there any point in talking about activities that do not exist and never have?

I am far more interested in real things. Then it gets good. Then my ears perk up, finally, we've been waiting for this. Why things are the way they are, our patterns, cycles, how we traverse this journey on this planet in this era. What we do for our survival, the graduating extremes we allow ourselves to experience and how we feel about our experience, that's the hot area. For example, at this stage of the miseducation of the born outcast, at this level of understanding where we admit to knowing nothing, but know something indescribable is taking place, you know things out there are impacting your trip ... severely. You know it is on the increase and you have no idea when it will change for the better or what to do to help that change along. If you are watching others, as we cannot help but do, you are amazed how much punishment they can take and remarkably, the suicide rate is relatively low for these ongoing horrors. Of course, suicide takes many forms, the most common aside from actually jumping off a tall building is substance abuse in which every act and breath is slow death. Another and likely even more common is the fallback into your pattern suicide. This is where one reverts to autopilot behavior learned from childhood success with the method, the one where you infinitely repeat your scenes, good and bad, in different geographies, employments or social situations meaning they are always disguised from the performers as if something new was taking place requiring a brand new solution every time. This is especially common to repeat victims in domestic violence and repeat offenders of crimes, they fail to note the overall picture of their life is unchanging due to a change of costume and the variance in script. When you understand the stakes in the game, you run as fast as possible to the most comfortable outlet, which is your own pattern, its always been there, there must be huge comfort in its familiarity - but none of that is noticed. Not noticing is what keeps the pattern happy. It does not have to deal with any Zombie Food Courts or petty emotional drama. Mostly, its the least embarrassing of all choices because you think its not noticed by anyone and its probably not since everyone else is busy patterning as well.
At some horrible point the pattern is broken and personal change is inevitable. It always happens, no one gets out of here alive. For some of us there are a series of pivotal moments which have the cumulative effect of powerful adjustment and we can see ourselves as we are, at least briefly. If only we had done this, or that, then. Its a very individual thing, the one mind is made up of humans carrying damaged baggage packed with individualized memories. Its only fair to see ourselves as the sum combination of inherited biological traits and anthropogenic experience. Patterns in plots we could say, all of us protagonists and all of us behind the Super 8 working toward that Fellini moment. We won't get there because that is just the pattern working in which the same old solutions are applied to the same old situations that brought you to where you are at this moment in time, typing, puffing, reading bad news, procrastinating on possibility, the broken record going round and round repeating a David Crosby lyric:

...And I feel
Like I've been here before
Feel
Like I've been here before
And you know
It makes me wonder
What's going on...

I'm just going to say this one time, we are already in the predicted disaster. The reason it isn't better known is things appear visually to be the same as always, when you look out there. We mustn't acknowledge disaster because that would incite real civil war the likes of which have never been imagined or exist in any pattern anywhere with this amount of people in this amount of misery. What is of constant amazement to me personally is that we are alive on Earth in this time to see it if we are looking. I want no part of it, just as I want no part of terrorgate, greenshootgate and deficitgate, but we both know peace of mind and tranquility is extremely rare as of late, don't we. One must make the effort, in spite of circumstance, to do something good for oneself and others as often as possible. Its the only thing that works. Trust me, I know.

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.

waiting for it to pass

Is it true? Am I getting the vibe we need a new post today? Have patience, maybe tonight or tomorrow. I'm working my way slowly through the results of proven stupidity as if we lived in the olden days when summer meant swimming and nothing could ever, ever harm us. We so badly want to go back there, we will subject ourselves brazenly to schizophrenia by jumping blind and deaf into icy water chlorinated and teeming with the germs of the new reptilian unknown. Weeks after the fact the truth comes home to roost. Is there any place untainted anymore? From Austria to Antioch, from the southern plantation doublewide to the Aylesbeare Commons to Little Big Horn, karma tells the story laying out the future in ways not even Tinseltown dare broadcast on our entertainment dishes. The legions of empty dwellings, flat colorless discs with bulging eyes, hanging sideways off the barbecue decks, are all that is left behind after recent human occupation, the family swansong, the dishes, pointing aimlessly at firesmoke skies reflecting orange on tumbleweed carried by the winds of these New World days. Beauty shields the beast within.
We nailed it down. My brother, his elegant adolescent daughter and I took the community plunge. The others lagged under a sunbrella browsing magazines. We got a nasty gift that keeps on giving, the control group remains healthy. It comes and goes with dizziness, getting-off-a-boat dizziness, and posting focus is weak at best.
Reading focus is remarkably intense. Is this the Vista flu I wondered? Where every effort to say something is blocked by security pop ups? Regardless, looking at art is redeeming. Looking at other people looking at art is almost as sweet as falling in love. We can still love, can't we, even though love is sorely lacking from the very hearts that need it most? I will recover from pool germs in a relatively short time, but I am convinced our love of culture is gravely ill.
Nurse, shake the shoulders of the former Veep and tell him he is without love, gravely misguided, lost and rasping hollow on the airwaves, no one believes a word, he speaks to whom?
And cleverly, AP wants to break our shattered piggybanks into shards of porcelain stuck between the fibers in the Berber, thus no links, its all smarting on your welcome pages anyway, headline after headline calling out, torturing a people chemicaled into homogenized, pasteurized, chlorinated and fluoridated, gum cracking, hip-hopping, ear-pieced, twittering, unnatural representatives of the dizzied body politic.

the end of the broken toy empire

Its that special time again, cleaning up the dinner dishes. Our dishwasher, and everyone else's around this hood, is spreading permanent white film on everything I put inside of it. The tap water is foamy. I came to find by reading a flagrag from a faraway county that our immediate area suffered a watermain break in the not too distant past, um, just about the time our problem showed itself.

When these things happen, and they happen with increasing frequency, things like NO SERVICE showing on the cellphone screen or calling into the corporatocracy about my promised Windows 7 upgrade and being told by an obviously outsourced and disinterested voice to call back in around 2 days since they were "in reset" at the moment, or the major artery into and out of a midwest hub has crumbled from the overweight of homebound commuters and everybody drove into the river, or the commuter trains in head-on collisions because the computerized traffic signals MALFUNCTIONED crushing at least 25 people to smithereens while the engineer twittered, we who are watching have little alternative but to weep in anguish that the world we thought was genuine is just a broken toy.

What did the plastics pushers think would happen when plastic breaks? Did they think at all? What did the mechanical engineers think when they put the rolls of plans into the hands of the Soprano's construction manager? What did the construction inspector think when he ran across entire regions of over-valued roach motels infected with lazy errors, bandaids, beerbottles, buckets of cheap labors' urine and Elmers glue-all? What is the community tax collector thinking when he outlaws wells and grazing animals, who is he in league with to declare self-defeating regulations and piles on surcharges and service fees to afford to send out meter bills on postcards anyone curious can read and will? We found one from the property tax assessors recently on a postcard declaring the value of the house. Everyone got one. Everyone knows everything, its their job. Puts food on the table for those outsourced by the corporatocracy too busy "creating" to handle the volume of eligible laptop users trying to sidle out of Vista's clutches. You don't "qualify" without active x going though your underwear drawer.

Oh, these tests and trials, they are the brillo pads of these times. Scrubbing bubbles foaming up the mores of our peeps. Little seratonin smileys leaving the station, gathering sweetly on the platform for their turn on the theme park's uptake inhibitor. We're not supposed to know the world is a box in the garage filled with broken toys that has come alive and threatens to consume the house, the neighborhood, the Interstates, the municipalities, the banks, the food chain, the great institutions of the great urban centers, the health of every living being who inhabits the gross intentional juxtaposition we find ourselves trapped inside today. Even our correctional institutions are privatized sleep away camps. No longer the private cells for two, heh, its bunkbeds dorm-style so everyone does as everyone else will. Cheaper to construct and faster, but when its feuding time its everyone's riot.

...Corrections officers got word that violence was brewing at the prison, prompting a lockdown imposed Thursday night. Tensions between Latino and black prisoners flared two days later, according to officers here.

But in the end, inmates of every race were involved, leaving the cause of the clash unclear...

At the end of the day, all these self-destructing tchatchke and their plastic parts and soldered chips and shims and safety pins are human waste for urban landfills upon which monster doziers glide atop pressing, flattening until the next delivery repeats the overflowing toybox history of superpower legoland in the 21st Century on Planet Earth.

This brings me to to dispel a common belief concerning the popular Fema Camps story. The riot pictures above will have you thinking about that. There will be no internment of dissidents, no meals, no bunks in dorms, no hour of outdoors because it will be all outdoors unless you've managed to squeeze your family into a tent city until they are outlawed and you end up hobos in the underbrush huddling in a lean-to. There is no money for camps, there will be ... nothing. At least imprisoned felons are earning their way through the system, but you? Nada. Its all broken anyway, yes, it says Built to Last right here on the cornerstone, but that's silly, isn't it. Its another logoslogan printed on a removable sticker. The joke's on you. Have another Kleenex. We're all going to be brushing our teeth with leaf paste and eating bark until Darth Vader arrives with his citations pad and leashed collection agents.

Let's say you could play that one out all the way - comforting yourself that later on by Obamagic you'll qualify for some kind of relief. Homecare perhaps (I don't think so) or one of those Adult Living Facilities (no, again)? I seriously doubt the luxury of a nursing home in your golden years will exist anywhere unless Satan is running the personnel department.

The truth is we're in a trap with the lid padlocked and the keycode lost in a fedex breakdown on the Ventura Freeway. Passwords and plastic toy parts and desperate resumes flying every which way into the never-ending wildfires and plastic netting holding back the mudslides until there's no more netting to be found, no matter the price. We are facing no escape, no bunkbeds in government camps, no waiting in meal lines, no place to rest your body and just be. From here on out. After we're lost in the demands of the elements long enough, we could easily forget how it was we ever got there.

Red suspenders holding up the energy wars

Well, well, we meet again. Fancy that. I tried to get away, really, I did, but it appears I've attached myself to this drafting stool with superglue, even as its doing its BAU falling apart. This forces me to look up and grin sheepishly, at least I'm shrugging my shoulders, palms up, cuz this is a weird position to be in, isn't it. Gentlemen, ladies, its coming at us from all angles now. The smart ones got away. Yes, I know, we thought we were smart, but you see we are not. No, we are idiots. About every 20 minutes or so I achieve another insight as to how it is exactly that we find ourselves in this position. I'd put them all up for you, but I suspect you're having them too. The only way I would sum it up at this point is to acknowledge that we all-know-now. Idiots who know. Doesn't that make us credible? Nope, something is going on, it has a thousand faces, it enacts and re-enacts itself over and over, every day, in thousands of costumes so we usually don't recognize its continuing presence - because we are idiots falling for it every time. We've been led to believe we must indulge it.

What is it?

It is Greed. It lives in our mailboxes screeching for attention. If you open the flap it will explode into seven billion hands running over your body, your clothing, your mind and throttle you into immediate insanity, sometimes even death. But death is not where it stops. Not even the cessation of your existence on Planet Earth amounts to a hill of beans to Greed. Greed survives off the pyramid of normal human experience. The memorial coming up for Jocko, for example, is a panorama of Greed slavering at the trough. Where is Jocko? He won't be around for that big tour, will he. How many bets went south on that one? They have to make up those losses somehow and it is through classic, vintage BAU that is exactly the way Greed is working its magic moonwalk this time, and every time, walking on the idiots.

Like a return to the FM payola days, the hits just keep on coming.

Why Greed? Haven't we advanced beyond it by now? Greed is what you see when two Crows fight over one dead squirrel. We're supposed to be a higher, sentient species, at least that's what we've been led to believe.

How about this, nothing is what it appears. It very well may be that everything we've been led to believe is well, a lie. And why not? When someone does something they've been led to believe is wrong, they were also led to believe they must present themselves in the most flattering light in order to avoid retribution. That lovely pink light they show upon their behavior is a lie. This would mean that the very words they use to define what has taken place are at best, inappropriate words. These are words that have taken on new meaning known only to the Liar Class. Blinded by the light and the waterfall of meaningless drivel, the average listener misinterprets Liar words. When this situation occurs at the pace it is now happening, textbooks, encyclopedias and dictionaries have to be rewritten. If you are working with an outdated understanding of language, you'll think you are in-sane.

When the population of our planet was half its present count, Greed was manageable to the extent that it did not get in your face as often as it does when exponentially multiplied. If you are thinking Greed is out of control now, just wait until the next stats are out. How many Nadya Sulemans are out there birthing neonatals and decide, unknown to those of us who are presently losing our minds, arms and legs to Greed, that having eight embryos implanted will perfect their collagen cloned, faux celeb lifestyles? How many of these secret creatures live among us, designing themselves to look like someone else with fantasies a bankrupt state will supply pampers for fourteen infants on a student grant?

Why are we in Afghanistan? It wouldn't be to build and protect pipelines or anything, would it. What is an insurgent anyway? That couldn't be someone furious their home was eminent domained because they happened to live where the pipelines snake through their land, naaaaw...

Greed works to redefine intention and reactions. They'll need to rewrite the laws now. Obviously, what was once criminal is now legal. What was legal is now criminal. We could do the rewrite for them. Just turn it all inside out and you have it. A toxic asset is now a desirable purchase. Foreclosure is redistribution. Torture is no and no is yes. Death is a winning credit default swap. Greed is good.