decisions, and decisions, and decisions, creeps in this petty pace ...

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

If sticking with blogger translates to censorship, a further dumbing-down of the greater dumbdown which incidentally is a major whiplash into absolute slavedom, then the idea of packing up and moving one's blog somewhere else is unnerving to say the least.  Who is to say which is worse, staying or leaving?  Of course, moving elsewhere can be done, supposedly easily if you buy the hype, but the downside is finding yourself spending infinitely MORE time online than you already do, without the interaction, the discoveries, the visuals and the building on each others spiritual foundations.  Moving the blog technically is demanding enough for non-geeks, but the rearrangement of visuals is an unnecessary chore because we've already done it and can't imagine anything more potentially irritating than revising a finished work without the tools we trained ourselves to use developed over many years and through many "supposedly" more efficient ways of doing what we do here.   There is a  lot more to it than we are being led to believe, deleting the photos Picasa has accumulated in disregard to the fact we have already have offline photo storage and of course, the very big issue of starting all over again with a different email service.  I've tried a number of them over the years and found g-mail a lot faster to use, although you don't have any of the graphics choices other email systems provide.  And then there is the search feature, too, etc.

I've had a hunch from the beginning of this blog D day was coming because once you sign on to the blogger experience, you are encouraged to open a lot of strange doors, all of them leading back inside the grand spider web.  If you don't want to be eaten alive, you'll need to find the exit.  If you are uncomfortable with google's widely posted changes to come, don't let it turn into the procrastinator's indecisive wait and see. 

If we leave things as they are, after March 1st or 12th, I'm not exactly sure of the date, it appears we automatically turn into a Facebooky social networking situation, an all-inclusive, systematically tracked and profiled, total void of privacy; whatever is said in blogs, comments and emails will be scrutinized for the stated purpose of personalized advertisements popping up apparently whenever we connect to the web.  And where we go, we are advised, will be linked with where we've been, where we go next and how they classify the individual user, all wrapped in one tidy package to improve our overall individual internet experience.  Really!  Then count on whomever else comes into the mix up the road apiece, someone with the innovative moxie of the moment, as pretty much a guarantee to take it even further and deeper into previously unknown dimensions of connectivity and hog snorting glee as the anticipated profits rain down.  You will have to decide for yourself what those dimensions of the future could mean and how they could affect you.  It may suddenly take on new weight in your thoughts concerning your participation in the program. 

I am of two minds on this.  One mind, not my better, higher mind, says "So what, I'm okay with things as they are." The other mind sees this situation as dangerous, dangerous because anything anyone says is open to interpretation by technology, how reliable is that?  There certainly is no logical reason to be lackadaisical since whatever is going on today is already racing to change itself towards superseding unlimited growth, imagine that, infinite mutations of pituitary gigantism also known as Launois syndrome; downgrades and bankruptcy likely being the feared classic consequences they probably envision lie ahead without immediately monetizing every cluster of binary numbers.  Do note this change comes directly on the heels of Facebook's IPO filing.  If this gives you the chills, try to remember we're talking about personhoods here, not flesh and blood. 

Try telling them it isn't necessary, stop fiddling with what isn't broken.  Ah, but you know you cannot argue with machines armed with computer generated stats promising profit for economic innovation.  Have you ever tried to contact blogger for tech support?  Where are the people, the human beings wearing ear pieces and mouth mics, to fix your foibles?  We shouldn't wonder what happened to the human personality that used to be so gracious.  Once autobots replaced the human being your query into tech support in ANY situation no longer encouraged or required courtesy.  Once you figured out you could pay your bills by cellphone, online or just by authorizing creditors to trawl your bank account, you didn't have to write legibly either.  Mostly we learned to check boxes and copy/paste the rest.  How encouraging are conversations with other voices where you respond with only "yes" or "no" and hang up on them?  Every one of us is at least guilty of that.  That is what they want.  These antisocial actions only create more of the same antisocial behaviors.  If we are willing to cooperate this much, how much more will we cooperate with before signing out for the last time?  Are we even close?  Remotely close?  Some will be more than happy to go away and do something else, something real, something that does not lead to ennui.  Believe it or not, there is still a beautiful world out there, we will never find it the longer we stay glued to this unnatural relationship.

By the time it takes to deliver munitions over Iran, internet use will stampede, that is if it has not already reached everyone its going to reach.  We all have our own personalized arguments against this medium of communications, small or large, and it is strange to see ourselves continuing to take the beating all the while knowing we pay a heavy price to play.  I feel like the last person on the planet sometimes, hanging on to dial-up.  Every time I investigate the range of high speed options, I walk away disgusted, they think we use our laptops to watch TV!  Yes, that is always the first thing asked by DSL sales reps, "How much television viewing do you do online?"  When I say "None", there is a blank pause as if some alien broke into the connection.  And fer cryin' out loud, who in their right mind would want to pay more for something we already have and really, really don't want or need more?  If you read this blog's previous posts you might have come across a brilliant comment from someone who has been through it all and was at a complete loss to say what he's gained personally over the past decade from his internet experience.  I agree.  How about ah, less than nothing?  Nothing we didn't already know or would have discerned anyway or found at the local library if we were so moved.  Somehow, out of all these years of living we share, we have arrived here today intact, did we really need keyboards and autobots to ease us inside the corral?  Isn't this easing simply another avenue of humiliation and diminishment on the way to the ultimate goal? That the citizen animal is of no more worth to this planet than a useless eater taking up space that could be mangled into profitability with a little shift in perception accomplished though the multitaskers' attention deficit hyperactivity disorder information storm pulsating with blazing personalized come-ons?  See cryptogon's take.

My decision is made, seriously, is there any decision?  I'm merely looking for some unlikely argument for the other side in case I missed something.  I've been through this before with an earlier blog hosted on our former ISP and it turned out badly making blogger seem such a good find.  I was shut out of my original blog because the visitor limit was exceeded, which was, ahem, a shock.  Just a few minutes ago I tried to access that blog and the message reads forbidden access on their server which says only their ISP customers are allowed to visit, provided those visitors remain under whatever viewing limit is being imposed.  Its no great loss, but typical of the surprises you come across in these strange days.  If we go by recent history, it can only become more of what it already is.

In closing, I have to say, it does appear another long term relationship is in the throes of crashing.  It did not have to be this way fellas.

Bondye se gade

It takes a keen mind to perceive that what we have here is a conundrum, a riddle with a joke as the punchline.  It doesn't have to be funny, especially when the joke is on us.  The joke is how far away we've veered from what IS.  Oh, we've veered far.  Maybe on your first visit to a shrink you might have stated your reason for undergoing shrinking was not being able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy.  And maybe he/she asked in nonthreatening tones that you define, as best you were able, reality.  Even then you could have realized how such a question is not very different than trying to define normal.

 ... science acquires a certain comical swagger for making things you can squeeze out of tubes, in order to process the contents through other tubes that process the contents into waste products. ...  Love in the Time of the Hadron Collider, by Visible

Not a day goes by I don't think about how toyish and absurd the present has become and like you, examine the reasons why this happened and more, what can we do about it?  Maybe our complaint has something subliminal to do with a lack of communication between the past and the present, as if our ancestors would please step forward now and show us how they lived without constant nonsense.  Surely they would find our convenience and comfort inventions, such as a tie-on shearling toilet seat cover, insane. Perhaps they would be glad they didn't stick around longer.

The Internet is a another conundrum for all of us who labor in creation sharing online be it words, art, information, poetry, music, because we've learned the net has some kind of master off switch accessible to heads of state and more, in a post Apocalyptic world (The Road alert, The Book of Eli alert) all of our published efforts will vanish into that nebulous place they call Cyberspace, perhaps the Yucca Mountain of moons, never to be recovered, just hidden behind planets and overlaid with dust rings.  You can say that's impossible, the Internet is here to stay, but we all know its just another one of those technological variations made of petroleum derivatives and precious metals, it might as well have been made of whatever is squeezed out of those tubes Visible brought to our attention, all of which will no doubt disrupt the rediscovery of reality again and again until reality liquidates your personal space. 

Not that there is any such thing as heh, personal space anymore.  Yes, there once was, but that was only more of the lunacy much like This is mine, that is yours, except if it comes from the Earth, its not either of ours and since Everything comes from Earth, well ... Only if you'd bought into the entire fantasy would you think you possessed anything other than your own mind/body and even those are up for question.  It remains another chapter in the universal conundrum why people can't see the immensely evil violations committed through false possession.  And yet, the excuses for doing so are specifically designed to point out the vacancy in an intellect you actually possess.  This is one of the hard parts of being a love person, we are easy to take advantage of and this feature is not lost on those who love to hate, use, take advantage, ridicule, lie to and steal from.  It thrills them to convince themselves they are smarter than you to whomever they desire to impress, mostly themselves, with their quickness of mind and attache of predictable criticisms.

... Alyosha was convinced that there was not a man in the world who would wish to offend him or, for that matter, could offend him.  He had accepted that once and for all as a self-evident truth, and so he had no misgivings ... The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Love people simply cannot be offended.  They may experience a brief confusion during attack since any attack worthy of your attention contains truth upended, as in a full polar shift, but the fundamental mind/body of a love person always understands from where and why any attack comes.  It comes from buried pain experienced somehow, somewhere in vague flickers of the past belonging to an attacker, deep, unrealized and covered over with layer upon layer of dirt and drivel burying any hope reality could possibly surface as long as this thing we call western civilization with all of its ridiculous trappings exists.  In order for a departure in reality to prevail, you need a military industrial economy with attack personalities designated, among themselves, as official pack leaders.  You need a common mindset of Possession, a sort of me only wrongheaded survival tactic writ large, very, very large, large enough to present an overall appearance of total agreement that by necessity black is white and vice versa.

It was never a good plan to purchase control of human lives, translated for the incurious as "aid" when the real strategy all along has been funneling Earth's resources to distant locations where there are slim to none.  It was a guarantee that given enough time, the plan would self-destruct.  Everything not borne from reality destructs with enough latitude - which is where we find ourselves today.  When virtual reality falls, everything goes with it into the Black Hole, there is no discrimination.  So few, perhaps no one at all, have any idea how to replace the social order of corruption with a mutually beneficial cooperation between ourselves and the planet, i.e.; reality.  We think we know, but reality will prove us wrong. We don't actually know anything for certain. Leadership authorizing possession of entire peoples is a tried and true impossibility.  Fairness and cooperation with Nature could have only been possible starting from the day the composition of the Earth spawned life, not now.  Reality has been made silly, vulnerable to ridicule and punishment, punishments insisting on your allegiance and dependence on what mankind has made of itself, a bloated monster killing machine looting, thieving, possessing and controlling, incessantly reproducing variants on the theme with petroleum-based, easily breakable and lost, tiny, seemingly insignificant plastic parts and variations of zeitgeist languages and mores that have lost any semblance of reality whatsoever, the more reality attempts emergence, the more omnipresent the tubes, tubed band aids on top of soul gashing wounds fracking through the globe. 

The categorization of phenotypes, skin colors and nationalities, the fiction of borders and property divisions, credit ratings, purchasing power and the swarms of fantasy industries and localized dictatorships that arise in the crevices like roach infestations, feeding off the primary illusory elements, only lead us deeper into make-believe. Tinseltown's red carpet, high style, creative direction, sports figure idolatry, bargain bonanzas, tweeting, political partisanship, speeches, anthems and invocations, amazing stuff, isn't it?  And all of it beholden to boardroom charts.  Love people could definitely waver in this never-ending torrent of idiocy emulated throughout the globe, but it won't last indefinitely.  The stagelights are dimming under the heat generated by their bizarre creations, oversexed-over-population and over-consumption.  At this moment we're seeing a glistening thick Roy G. Biv climate chaos rainbow breaking over the horizon through the once impenetrable fog of sheer nonsense.  Something is downloading as we speak and its not what it initially appears, it is impossible to define until it shows itself in full.

We do not need psychedelics to understand this.  We only need quiet thoughts, and we need to remain aware of those thoughts so they are not fleeting.  The co-opted psychedelia, the personalities, the raves and the newer, evermore powerful reality alterations have been reigning down upon our culture in phosphorescent colors, stealing our attentions and robbing all under the influence, further distorting lives in a distorted, disoriented world.  While we were entertained with sumptuous pleasures, we inadvertently added to the foolishness, only in this way can we bear some responsibility.  Little did we realize or care we were being taken advantage of in broad daylight as dawn rose in the west and the appearance of normalcy still stood even though we knew it couldn't possibly be so, but it was.  As the years passed and keeping up with the insanity "culture" continued enlarged, the vulnerability of the little people was ripe for the take.  If they could get away with it here and there, why not do it again! Its happened so many times we cannot count them all or ever know of most of them, they are excluded from "education" and media, but this time it is different.  Through massive overpopulation we have exceeded the planet's carrying capacity yet the pillars of extreme possession stand firmly in place to ensure the continuity of over-consumption. This is the new reality.  The kinds of deviations and concealments practiced now will never have an opportunity to reoccur after they self-extinct and as you have noticed, they are self-extincting at this very moment and for some reason known only to the Forces, we are in the middle of it all. 

I'm not so sure there is any cause to celebrate or inch towards optimism.  What I'm seeing in the sudden protests in so many locations suggests foment by an entity behind them all desirous of removing less cooperative, leeching dictators and replacing them with younger, less expensive, fresh puppetry ready to acquiesce to their masters in a fashion similar to Wall Street rotating its heavy muscle from private enterprise to the halls of the superpower.   The repeating irony of these revolutons in the hearts and minds of the participants are pitted against what people think they want (or what they've been tutored to demand) and what people actually need. Added to this irony is the gross reversal of the people's real primary needs into leaderships' agenda, always helped along through behind-the-scenes finagling, with foreign policies coming at them from all sides, creating an untenable situation because again, they are not based in reality.

They are based in obsequious transference of wealth and finite resources.  Reality is health, reality is enough nutritious food to sustain the body, clean air, fresh unadulterated water, the fruits of Mother Earth for all species on the planet, trusting relationships with family, friends, the world at large including animals, sea creatures and bird life, legal stewardship of Nature, moderation in all things and the God given freedom to live in a peaceful state without interference and love, in all the ways that matter to you, loving the Earth, loving mankind, loving your activities, loving the land enough to refrain from overbuilding, love of our fellows enough to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, love of our offspring enough to leave them a lovable world so they too may love life enough as it is without costuming it or dividing it or trampling it according to the dictates of possession and its abusive dangling participles, fear and punishment.

So blind and far along in the madness, exponentially encouraging the Culture of Extinction (thanks, Charles) with vanity and pompous over-consumption, reduced to never ending war for the survival of the fantasy in the very face of undeniable climate chaos, our battle appears futile, but while we won't see much progress, it is of huge consequence. Even if the planet doesn't make it, Bondye se gade, Creole for God is watching, as are his other inhabitants of the Universe.

Let's say for discussion purposes, that God isn't watching.  If you are an authentic love person grounded in the reality of what IS, it would not change anything for you, because the power is your own, within, to love, to nurture, to understand, to feel for others, to care and to give whatever you have in any way you can.  You would have long ago accepted your own strength of character, once and for all time, as self-evident truth.

the gift that keeps on giving

You can't always get what you want, But if you try sometimes you just might find, You just might find, You get what you need, ah yes ... The Rolling Stones

The weather in my region has been all over the charts, I'd almost expect summer next week, except snow is predicted and the temps are way down, but lush green grass carpets the canyons and fallen leaves blanket the drive and deck.  Spring and autumn have come together to welcome winter, officially on the 21st of this month.  Cullen would have loved these grasses and I cannot help but think of him while I'm walking Bernie when we always bagged genuine organic grass for The Little Guy.  Normally, I couldn't do that until early spring, like March.  Is this how its going to be from here on out?  Seasons interwoven with each other, the more painful aspects of each dominating?  Its getting very interesting.  My latest theory on twirling chemtrails (definitely not art) is they are contracted to disperse industrial smog aka hiding the ugly secret we may be far worse off than we think ... Of course you are aware that no one denies Climate Chaos anymore unless its in the comment section of a tinseltown website appealing to IQs under 80: "Why is it so cold in global warming?"  Heh. 

Our beloved Scrappy Scrapwood turned me onto the following which could have been written for each of us, answering the old question of why so many Americans are self-unaware, emotionally stunted and in a near constant state of denial undertowed by sleepless anxieties.  Short answer is because they are force taught the wrong thing at the wrong time, the very time they should be exploring, using their imaginations and developing their creativity.  Here is some of Scrap's borrowed wisdom which he reminded me [...] its not for us, its for our children and our grandchildren:

From: The Wisdom of Hands Blog

Member Whole

Froebel's concept of Gliedganzes or "member-whole" was an important part of his educational philosophy. It means that a child is not merely a child but also a member of a family, a community, a state and a nation. Aristotle and Hegel both discussed the same notion, and for Froebel the idea helped to explain what he had observed in nature.

"The fundamental law of vegetable life is that each successive stage of development is a higher growth of the preceding one--e.g., the petals are transformed ordinary leaves, the stamens and pistils transformed petals. Each successive formation present the essential nature of the plant in a more subtle garb, until at last it seems clothed only in a delicate perfume."

Consistent with this thought, Froebel believed that "to become conscious of self is the first business of the child and the whole business of man."

What if we as teachers, parents, guardians and promoters of wisdom and growth were to see children in their full dimensions, not as mere children, but as growing into membership of family, community, state and nation, and more? Assisting that unfolding of consciousness is the most important goal of education. The following is from Susan E. Blow who founded the first public school kindergarten in the US.

The greatest mistakes in education are rooted in the failure to recognize and conform to the different stages of natural development. Educational theorists are constantly pointing out this error; educational practice is constantly repeating it. Notwithstanding all that has been said and written, we still make knowledge our idol, and continue to fill the child's mind with foreign material, under the gratuitous assumption that at a later age he will be able, through some magic transubstantiation, to make it a vital part of his own thought. This is like loading his stomach with food which he can not digest, under the delusive hope that he may be able to digest it when he is a man. It is forcing the mind to move painfully forward under a heavy weight, instead of running, leaping and flying under the incitement of its own energy and the allurement of its own perceived ideal. The attempt to force a premature activity of reason can result only in repulsion of his sympathies and the stultification of his mind.

There have been a number of articles recently about how desperately misinformed people are, how little they know about science, geography, and/or any other subject. They have a huge number of deeply held opinions about everything, nonetheless. Much of what we see in the media regarding moronic political discourse, anger toward academia and science, the calling of names like leftist and socialist, the fixation in the media with characters like balloon boy, Joe the plumber and Sarah Palin are the direct consequences of the schooling that Susan E. Blow describes. Her words were written in 1894. Can it be that by neglecting the education of our children's hands, we are turning their minds to mush? There is a direct one-to-one correlation between the decline of the manual arts in education and the rapid rise of the American pinhead.

Froebel, like other German educators of the time, was influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who said, "“Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstaking”

I will harp on a point I have made many times in the blog that relates to Ms. Blow's point of conforming to natural stages of development. In Finland students become better readers in 37 1/2 percent less time by beginning at age 8. Here in the US, we seem desperate to reside in idiocy. [...]

Got that? Now, here we are in the holidays which in addition to the prototypical holiday behaviors, always brings up a few tattered memories of Christmas past.  Confession: I admit to a slight sadness the one thing I really wanted I never got, realizing what I wanted I would have to give myself in my own way.  As the years rolled along I did just that, but it was too late.  You must begin ballet training very early, between three and five, no older than eight, if you are going to dance professionally with a successful company.  All those childhood nights after school, the tears, the anguish, the cruel words and ambiance of abuse permeated the dining room homework sessions as I sweated out memorizing multiplication tables hating the deal that was my setup for failure.  If I made an A+ in math I would get ballet lessons, which never happened.  To see the variations of the Nutcracker now, I see what I could have been doing and am not.  Instead, in art school, I supplemented my course work with dance training, I loved every minute, was a natural, made "A"s effortlessly, every time, but even then it was far too late.  Don't get me wrong, art IS my raison d'etre, but it always existed alongside my other gift, the one I was denied until I could earn the means and the scholarships to do it myself.

Did something like this happen to Edward Degas?

One day helping out in the principal's office I peeked at my file.  I saw my IQ score.  There are nonsense rules against seeing it, if I been caught, I'd have been punished.  Detentions or notes home, something ghastly and embarrassing, but the deed was done and life suddenly much improved.  I suppose it was hard for my teachers to reconcile how such a child could not memorize multiplication tables, but they didn't know about the deals being made over homework when I longed with all my being to be doing arabesques and petite burrees on point. My longing obliterated the value of whatever lay before me.

The truth was, and I figured this out early too, dancers were thought of as fallen women, burlesque performers, at least as my parent's zeitgeist trained them.  I must have been raised to be rich, even though we were not rich that I could see by any means, have servants, nannies for the children, spend summers sailing at a family compound, perhaps they imagined me a surgeon's wife, provided he was well educated and from a good family, mostly I think I was supposed to be off to lunch with other rich ladies and write checks to popular charities at society balls.  I know a lot of women who were raised to be exactly the same thing, unconsciously transmitted to them by equally well-intentioned mothers and fathers.  Sometimes we joke with one another at our mutual reversals of fortune and the myths we were born into which fell drastically apart once we were on our own, because nothing we learned in school gave us skills to deal with real life.  It was as if we had been raised to do nothing while appearing to be doing something beneficial.  Everything I really needed to know I've learned by the seat of my jeans.

We cannot change the past, we can only move on and make the best of what we've got.  I don't blame my parents for their child rearing practices, my father abroad for months, my mother sliding down the social ladder from socialite to department store saleslady, repeatedly relocated far from anything she'd ever known, they were only operating within the sole system available in their gradually diminishing circumstances, however, the next generation and the generations following need our help right now as they enter their journey into a new world with new systems and options previously unheard of or lock into lifestyles previously demeaned.  Here is another very important and helpful persuader.  When you really think about the system as it exists today, anything healthy about the typical American education is being slashed from state budgets, so why even bother?  I have much praise for homeschooling and even more for children who are comfortable in their own skin, free to go all the way into their areas of interest as far as they want.  Is there a problem with that?  The only problem is the same problem unacknowledged inside the preoccupied din of the ever-creative errand boys operating as delivery men for the gnashing beast demanding obedience.

As recessions rose and laid dormant only to reoccur, what one person once snubbed as beneath them, i.e.; not good enough, became another person's valued employment as the little people en masse are at last forced back against the wall to accept total loss as normal everyday phenomena. Conversely, what was once refined and respected is now uniformly trashed as FUBAR and vice versa: any job will do, flip burgers, push mops, greet consumers, scrub toilet stalls, who cares, everyone has to eat.  The people who perform those jobs that Americans wouldn't do, deserve our sincere respect for doing them now. Thus, looking around, you'll see the revolution is already in full swing.  It is also violent, but not what we were taught a violent revolution was in world history class.  Now  violence takes place in protests, pitted against masked Darths and their thuggish, brutal street tortures, it takes place in undeclared wars far away from our vision, it happens in the too-frequent and violent crimes discussed in my last post, the kind of crime people resort to committing when they simply explode from a lifetime of abuse via suppression, backwards and upside down to the needs of the authentic self - that real self deep inside us who reaches out unthinkingly to carry a crying baby dolphin to shore as happened in the active phase of the BP debacle.  The kind of crimes that are a release from and attack against the abusive, often religious morality imposed from birth that denied whomever else it was the criminal could have been had he/she been treated with respect, insight to interest and encouragement of those interests, exemplified by the tragic fate of Shaquan Duley and her young sons:

[...] What is it that makes one child oblivious to abuse and another cower and fall ill at the moment its shadow appears over the horizon? What is it that allows one person to be unfeeling towards someones suffering but another experience compassion? [...]

As with everything else, if we want something to happen we have to do it ourselves.  Its too late for many of us reading here, our pasts are already yesterday's tire treads petroglyphed along forgotten trails, a permanent reminder those who inhabit our future might someday find themselves travelling the same destructive paths.  We can make it easier for them if homo sapiens are to survive.  And should they survive, which I am not exactly confident they will, we can at least allow them to possess peace of mind and meaningful lives free of irresponsible value judgements and at all times fully aware of self-worth and skilled in the creation and stewardship required for sustaining life on Earth.  If we cannot leave them material things, as used to be and still is for a certain minority, a yardstick for some kind of unearned accomplishment, we can give them a better trip.  That is the only gift that matters.

Coincidentally, from Visible's essay today, A Transmission from the Visible Planes:

If your idea of loving someone is to give them things in place of the love, you’re going to have a front row seat through the years to what that policy accomplishes. [...]

Photo: Degas oil c. Google Images

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

What are we doing?

One day I just won't do this anymore. Call me a self-hating blogger. Considering the amount of time spent surfing during a typical week, my headstone will read "nina, Blogger", that is if I get a headstone vs. an Amadeus paupers' crater. And yet, that would not be a bad thing. It would be a terrible thing to be buried in steel and gilded plastic. AGHHHHH. The contents of such expensive, claustrophobic casing doesn't allow the body to break down naturally into the process required to complete the journey above ground as one rejoins with Mother Earth's system. How thrilling it would be to have memory during the process and find myself a lucky acorn fallen into some undisturbed pasture in wet weather. And equally as wonderful, to be carted away in a horse drawn wagon, clip clops in the mud on a dark rainy day. I hope to watch it pass in the mist.

We're right where they want us and we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, at home, with our valued family values and spoiled pets which have a cute way of being beloved boats with holes. We're watching a million channels of all corporate marketing models - all the time TV and pouring our angst into blogs on our breaks from the blitz. The calm before the storm? Not if you actually read entertainment newslinks as if the protagonist was your next door neighbor. You reported him, huh? Who goes to theaters anymore? The convenience culture has squeezed itself into a home appliance. An electric wok. Ah, you might put away that electric can opener sitting over there on your granite countertop (cough cough). Its a little much for more than a few fragile megachurch enthusiasts.

After a post has been up say, around four days, I'm doing something else - and why not? I know and you know there is something terribly unnatural with the totality of life consisting of technology. When I get busy with the new horse down the road, making friends and feeding carrots, its ludicrous to break away just to open up the plastic box again. There is no end to the things I can do around here, like pondering the sage.

I found out tonight that horse is named Chip. nice. He could have been my consort in a past life. An older Appie, his spots moved to his face and trunk as he matured. We'd been calling him Freckles. Those spots are Dalmation-like, my favorite pattern. This is a guy I can talk to. I am quite serious, he pulls the angry whinny thing if I don't visit daily. Here is how I got him on my friend list: I brought him some 3rd cut Timothy hay I keep around for my elder Guinea Pig. Its hot stuff, Alfalfa hay is about as exciting as it gets for horses, the hay I brought appears to have affected him like fresh Coconut water and herb would effect us.

There's been a lot of talk about California legalizing pot. Its made it to the voting ballot. Heh. You are free to interpret that cynical Heh any way you want. Prediction: In less than one decade, it will be as common as viagra ads, with similar concerns tranched inside the romance scene.

A few years ago, some officially sponsored hikers found what was officially claimed to be the official original sage in one of our biggest official southwest deserts, apparently it was massive and did what sages do, spawned seeds in a circle around itself which prompted all the spawned little sage-lings to sprout in the same fashion until a mammoth circular ocean of sage spread into the foothills and up and down the mountainsides. Now, millenia later, we have sage canyons and sage flanks. Sage is THE moisture stealer par excellence, more brittle and hardy than competing species, and usually wins the competition for water unless a bulldozer comes along and flattens the land for development which is known as disturbing the land. Disturbed land can be good, as in dozers carving out firebreaks in grassland, evacuation routes and encircling wildfires as parts of containment strategy. However, disturbed land also creates habitat for unwanted species, such as fire ants who have taken to building underground tunnels floating a pavement ceiling, curbs and man-made structures, i.e.; home slabs, barns and outbuildings, strip malls, whole towns, extended cities underneath cities and suburbs, exurbs all the way into out there, deep into fallow pastures and rugged terrain far from the elbowing crowds.

The squirrels enjoy every area where the ants haven't built, employing a similar system of underground connections including personal sleeping pods connected to the great room. They are equally as industrious as the ants. There is life moving around, building, foraging and populating just underneath a thin layer of dirt and vegetation, all of it in competition with each other for survival. We're not really counting the birds' nests in the grasses, but we are counting prairie dogs, moles, voles, mice and gophers, centipedes and other underground/burrowing species.

Peak oil and the financial collapse don't really matter to survival. Throughout the world there are some cultures who have never experienced the glories of the industrial revolution and at the rate they are being eliminated, they never will. Surely the Yanamano tribes of Rio Amazona and its tributaries are on the to-do list. Anyone and everything not enamored with debtors' fever and petro sludge and its by-products, is being annihilated if not by spills and blowouts, by takeover, or as in COIN, counter insurgency i.e.; merger/hostile takeover. If the Earth hangs on another century, Saudi Arabia has potential to be the last standing superpower running this show (perhaps they already possess that distinction? There are many good arguments for thinking that) with backup from Russia's and Bolivia's fresh water resources. So who are WE? What ARE we? These are bold, sweeping questions, but as usual, I'm not concerned with the day to day, tomorrow and tomorrow creeps at this petty pace political details, rather a bigger picture taking into account what really matters for humanity's survival, beyond convenience and the remote control weeding out of everything standing in the way of the reach of Corporatocracy. What happens on the ground is how it is, that much we're forced to divine on our own. Obviously, there is nothing we can do about it either, no matter how many online links to anthropogenic mass destruction, extinctions, slow death, displacement, loss of livelihood and morality's demise. As many of you have commented, "What can we do?" The Earth is never still, cycling through stages of development on a timetable of its own, of course this latest turn of events would come about, and we, along with all life, will adapt as we are doing without realizing it. We are not conscious of the movement of the Earth as we live upon it, either. Learning creates change, educated change and because we have so much occupying our minds, it seems barely noticeable, if at all. Try to keep in mind we are still coming out from under having our brains malfunctioned in Bizarro World. Nothing happens all at once - and something is always happening.

I didn't read the news today, oh boy. I don't feel like messing up the morning with catastrophic horrors and scary tea parties. The news is just more torture, designed to threaten and phobiatize readers. You get the feeling its a softening up the target as if EVERY ONE in a decision making capacity knows exactly what you know and manipulates fact to fit agenda so that fact is falsehood. Try justifying your way through that. Its not easy unless you are Thomas Cromwell, First Earl of Essex, or fortunate to have some out-of-the-blue, blessed sartorial moment of truth in which clarity of thought prevails. Until such a moment occurs, all of us live in a subliminally depressed state of partial awareness knowing some things, the remainder elusive. That we do not know more is guilt inducing in having placed trust in beliefs that show themselves to be wishful thinking. In times like this, it is comforting to bathe one's being in bolanath's grandmothers' healing Net of Light.

While pondering sage oceans it came to me the reason we fail as a species is buried guilt. "So what?" we say, guilt is for criminals who deserve and receive justice, end of story. This gets confusing because media's definition of guilt is reserved for those who commit acts of wrongdoing. Our language partnering with pundits has co-opted depth of analysis, for example, the concepts of justice and wrongdoing. When I think of those words, it always brings Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery (p. 1948) to mind. As long as white people harbor guilt, the lotteries of life continue, suspended in wait are the crowd pleasing stone throwers eager to bury their bredren. The Wahabbi stonings are just us, or the former us before self-education, out in front of the frosting and lace put on justice and wrongdoing. Since the western world carries mountains of buried guilt for having massacred, executed, tortured, threatened, renditioned, lied and stolen property throughout recorded history, the western majority cannot and will not tolerate the weight of that guilt and must dispose of those free from denial of stoning or distortion of intent and action. In other words, if you speak what you see, you are not tolerated because you are naming blame, not owning blame. The real blame then remains stuck in denial aka defense of imaginary concepts such as states, borders, rules on movement, being in love with ideas of division which have no basis in reality. One Love.

Into this world we are born, little sagelings thirsting for survival, spawning and sprouting our ways though time, a blink in the eye of our planet which somehow survives us, minimalizes us, we are Aborigines looking into the sky waiting for God's care package to this day.

Behind each seed a string of seemingly small, but meaningful actions taken, involuntarily, and worse, actions not taken at all, guilt builds for participation in the competition for survival in nothing more than an ego construct. It would help if we just dropped the pretense and spoke in semi-monosyllables, to ourselves and to the Universe. I'm sorry. I love you. I never wanted to hurt anything, nothing! The real wrongdoing here is how few get that AND live it. You think the SCOTUS can fix that with justice?

... All language is a system of symbology, that is, sounds strung together that mean something relating to the external reality we experience.

This symbology is unique to the individual person due to the fact that all of our individual experiences are normally unique events relating to the individual, with same exceptions. But, in almost all cases, the interpretation of those events will be different than other individuals sharing the event. This has been tested over and over again to the same conclusion. .... murph

The list of ego constructs grows in perfect proportion to humanity's helplessness. To acknowledge disingenuously or not to acknowledge at all is the greatest wrongdoing throughout history, our existence predefined for us, soap operatic in scope and lack of something real, where does one draw the line? Is anyone angry? Or, are our laptops the epitome of the addicts' compromise? Slowly, ever so gradually, we arrive at this point each in his own time. Tattered, torn, straddling the the chasm between the real and the great lie, we participate in slowing adaptation which spreads the guilt around enough to keep the big lie going, and growing, a little longer.

artwork: Fritz in Hibernation
transparent watercolor inks on Arches
18" x 24" | 2005
concept c. Helga Sermat

Love War Four

Feverish perhaps, but I am cool. Weather: fog/cold. Did we not just leave August? WTH? This is why I never say Global Warming if I can help it because here its plain old climate chaos. Suddenly, the month we thought we had left to wear our tank tops has us ripping the closets apart to find our favorite hoodie. No easy feat since 7/10ths of the closet is piled neatly with thrift store 3rd hand, maybe 4th, maybe ... who knows in the depressing circumstances of Doom Gone Wild anyway, items of seasonal need.

This Qur'an burning issue, yesterday the preacher in the snake handlers cult called it OFF. Heh. Do you think he has ANY idea how ridiculous he appears, ON or OFF? That he reveals incredibly low intelligence and possible illiteracy for herding his 50 member cult straight into the same pits of extreme kool aid mental instability we've seen happen again and again? At least its a small group. It could be worse. They could be rich and then it would definitely be worse. We have to wonder, could such a man, purportedly a small (but timely) cult leader, hold such a standoff as he did against the pressures of political, media and social opposition, have even dreamt of taking a stand against power? If he truly believes with the totality of his serpentine soul that Islam's bible need go up in flames, it stands to reason he would never have attempted to say no, nor would his cultees. His programming doesn't make divisive stands, he's only a vessel. He believes story A from source A. He does not believe story B from Source A? However, that's neither here nor there now, the result of which will be a large paying increase in devotees equally as skilled in snake husbandry, not the brightest bulbs, but bright isn't their concern. Their concerns are to hang with others of like mind, confused and making homilies about their confusion, "Oh its a funny old world outside my window, at least I gotta window". You have to wonder what they think Islam is. Or where. Is it a weapon, a humanoid baby sheep or something? Geeze.

Do they value their own bible? I feel sorry for them because if we think we've got it tough, in their world, they can't think about it at all because it is their Operating System, like Safari.

When I was a little nina we moved to the rural south. Other than the leftover elite from the Civil War, the place was fairly uninhabited, we were among the early soon to become unstoppable flow of exurbanites, but preceded apparently by a strange and unusual inbred culture of white sharecroppers turned gas station attendants. My mother just could not understand their language. It wasn't anything resembling a classic southern accent. Whole portions of words were clipped in rapid succession with a lilt of threat somehow woven into what appeared to be sentences as there were quizzical looks when what passed for communication paused. It took her about a year to figure out he was asking her if she wanted him to wash the windshield. You can count on it, that language is still there and has advanced to enjoy an increase in the ranks. And preachers.

Whenever you see a film about a preacher, there is a mental checklist he meets. He has to have scammed the congregants. He has to have an ongoing motelroom affair though happily married with several children and a slightly austere, comfortably over-adequate home. He has to get caught in the scam and the outside woman must dump him. In no particular order. That's probably a step away from snake handling, and neither version of the cultist bears any realistic basis to relate to the larger cultures existing throughout the globe, such as Islam. Perhaps the idea came to him while they were speaking in tongues and he misunderstood the original message which may well have been Burn the corn, possibly something related to biofuels, you think? I don't know. Perhaps someone gave him the idea. Perhaps it was all of reptilitan origin. Perhaps its a movement tied into the Ground Zero commemorations meant to increase the emptying of our pocketbooks for wider and more obese/obtuse war. You get to where you can read these thing just by a headline such as Why Drones? Because the Brits lost a batch of troops and Mister (Seal the) Gates decided war must be fought without accountability if he wants to have any supporters at all.

Between the rubble rousing and the snakes in the basket, our deciders diminish our safety. We don't have a lot left, those of us still inhabiting the land of the lost. The Laureate community organizer makes it perfectly clear his allegiance is to Bush, remarking in his televised speech today something close to The thing I admire most about Bush was his ability to bring us together over 911. And there we have it. Invoking that thing again. Re-bullhorning. It makes you want to weep. Well, weep away because you cannot do anything else. Behind the dabbing of tissue, there are mobs awaiting with all sorts of weirdness planned, events and situations so obnoxious and ludicrous you cannot imagine them, things so self-defeating and preposterous all in support of sheer nonsense. There are those who know exactly what they do and then there are the multitudes, flocks, Octomoms birthing evermore implanted enbryos skipping and singing behind them creating vast wakes of material excess all the while chanting against ... love. This is profoundly tragic.

You understand these "people" mean well overall, however, really, I don't want them speaking for me on any subject or issue anytime, anywhere. Do you? Are we a nation now of whitewater banjos or something? Yes, we have been paupered into backwoods snakery little by little, but if you look up you will see that is what has happened. Next, we'll see Alaskan moosekillers running the still. Do steel yourself.

Now, let's look at it from another angle. Think corporatocracy. How does diminishing humanity at large sell anything? Oh, it sells well indeed. It shuts down the arrogant and independent thinkers. It makes you appear a lone nutcase to back off from spewing hatred and targets love as some weirdo predator. Imagine that? You are to feel guilty and wrong for your love. Love was co-opted in the last century anyway, it may even be outlawed now according to the unwritten secret rules of executive privilege. I don't know, none of us sheared loving little sheep can know. Not even Julian Assange can help us now.

Breaking: Uh oh, the book burning looks like its back ON. For tonight.

the song remains the same

Communication Breakdown, It's always the same. I'm having a nervous breakdown, Drive me insane. (Page, Jones, Bonham)

Here's an MSM headline from today, "Experts say cold snap doesn't disprove global warming". As if to subliminally suggest well, hey, we were right all along. Then you go with their flow and payment schedules and voila, they gotcha. What the headline actually says is cap and traders are civilization's heroes. Whatever programs they've agreed upon at this early (too late) date, programs that stripmine the global poor for the benefit of the waddling rich and whatever parts were shelved for later and whatever parts will never be acknowledged even among themselves, none of it addresses the issue the way the issue demands. However, we've come a long way - relatively. Something (the usual) is being allowed to surface. It appeared for a while it was not going to be addressed at all. (It still isn't.) That it is being tossed about like a bolo ball, always returning to the paddle held by the richest (and domineering) nations, is just another bailout in disguise, and there are many - such as the body scanning machine subsidiary waiting patiently under the same no-bid manufacturing umbrella as Abu Ghraib's shackles and waterboards. What is wrong with bailouts? As I understand the movement, the money window provides loans with a large and ominous ball of string attached from which dangles the requirement to "retrofit western or else". We could say, the lenders at the bailout window double duty as the nation's and the world's largest collection agency who's ability to collect rides herd on the sovereigns' ability to grovel penniless while mouthing platitudes and opening up their airspace, obviously a shabby reality subhead under the banner of World Economics aka Foreign Policy in which the global map is being redrawn at gunpoint extincting nice people like the Bedouins.

Retrofitting western means pony up while the pony is collapsing from an extreme overdose of lucrative, but finite, natural resources. When you're out walking and you see an SUV with a pony up bumpersticker you'd know the driver has been driven insane. I saw one parked at the post office last month. Try to stay out of his lane ...

What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to write complimentary emails to our representatives in congress? Are we supposed to disrupt protests and report on our neighbors comings and goings? No, we are supposed to send donations. That's all they want. Don't expect any return on the invesment. Nothing will buy us any truth. They are not, under any circumstances, including natural disaster and public condemnation, coming clean. Chris Floyd pointed out in his recent and excellent essay, Blowback On the Border: The Purpose of the Terror War System:

...And so, as I wrote the day after 9/11 (and quoted again recently, in this piece about Obama's surging Terror War):

"Blood will have blood; that's certain. But blood will not end it. For murder is fertile: it breeds more death, like a spider laden with a thousand eggs. And who now can break this cycle, which has been going on for generations?"

The cycle will go on -- because that is what is wanted. The purpose of the system is what it does...

Indigenous poverty, poor health and ignorance is policy within the system. In similar style, our friend Publius is being pressured to memorize his employer's corporate mission statement, the peoples of the western world are supposed to memorize and live, to the best of their abilities, the mission statement of the terror system. This is why it is unfailing, repeated in endless reruns, serialized, from top tier to the bottom rung, always with us, in our food, our water, our entertainments, our travels within the permissible minuscule radius. Its like living on a giant sheet of flypaper. Our wings are beating but our bodies stuck.

The facts and questions presented by The Oil Drum come in the format of eloquent essays, painstakingly researched, if you want to know anything about peak, that's ground zero to start. Yesterday's question was Why doesn't government talk about peak oil? I'd judge that question equally as thrilling as Led Zep's Houses of the Holy. We know why they don't, dont we. Today's Oil Drum roll, as you can see in my sidebar, concerns Iraq delaying peak for another decade or so due to massive supply. It shows a chart of deals made per oil field. The US is not on the list. Oops, after all that ongoing carnage? The disclaimer is a new Iraqi administration could revise all the deals when and if it pleases. If I was going to comment over there, I would ask, loudly, why in the hell would they ever give us any deals? Maliki, the current Howdy Doody, has his breaking point as we have seen before, whatever else he may be, can't be pleased to be forever cast in a patsy role and I suspect it won't hold for the long run. Just wait until he's forced to deal with Iran. Bad scene on the horizon... he will be forced against Amindenejad, a man known for making decisions on his own without any outside interlocutors.

We envision the neocon vampires in their midnight office of special plans toiling away at distasteful arrangements laboring to achieve a nefarious goal while bullhorning the goal (the system and its policies) as altruistic. Whenever it became too complicated and might possibly give away its corrupt intent, the items too noxious to speak of were snuck into secret files labeled classified on which a decal was pasted saying executive privileged. In other words, the system and its policies have their own designated language which is the language of True Blood. All the lawyers had to go back to continuing professional education seminars to learn True Blood. Some even managed to lobby for TV courses successfully as evidenced by Dexter and the Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy and the Tudors which they download and watch on their Blackberries between show trials between the hours of daylight and dawn lest they turn to ancient ash.

I wonder if anyone in Yemen (rhymes with lemon) is having an "Oh my God, what have we done?" moment? Likely, but in the spirit of The Vulcans, you'd better keep it to yourself because its all over now.

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.