Sustainable Living & Common Sense Blog

Surviving Civilization

Everyone should be keenly aware of how difficult it is to live these days.  The demands that society places upon us all are onerous and burdensome, increasingly expensive and difficult to overcome — all of it occurring in varying degrees to you in a direct relationship to your financial ability (to pay).

The young and the elderly have a particularly hard time of surviving today.  Young people are faced with the daunting task of high rents, low-paying menial jobs (or no jobs at all), and even higher education costs in the hopes of a “career” or future.

A higher education doesn’t mean much of anything anymore, as competition from all ages in increasing, with the most desperate willing to take the lowest pay.  Qualified nurses, lawyers, architects, machinists, steel workers and trained persons from all walks of life are being forced to work at menial positions in order to survive.

Many people are getting very angry at this, with this guy going to some extensive lengths to get even. The great sadness here is not what the man did (in 2004), as he destroyed the town with his bulldozer, but how he had been treated and the absolute ignorance to this injustice.

“I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable”, Heemeyer wrote. “Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.”^[7]

Nothing has changed since this time, and nothing will either. Instead of rebuilding the town, they should have left it as it was, as a memorial of injustice.

The rage we all feel from time to time (or all the time, as the case may be) is justified.  But we must be careful to discard any sense of ‘entitlement’ as this is misplaced.  We are not actually entitled to anything, the world that our parents had is NOT the same world we have today.  And it will be radically different for our kids, their world in particular as the next generation to inherit what we have done (or failed to do), they are going to experience things that no human has ever experienced before.

I write these articles in this newsletter with the general idea that we need to “see clearly”, or as clearly as we possibly can. The volume of disinformation and misinformation, much of it deliberate makes seeing clearly a challenging task.  At issue is our belief systems and what we think we know and how these things relate to our experiences.  Connecting the dots between today’s news and tomorrows events is helpful towards our understanding of trends, themes and outcomes and what we can expect.

Civilization, as we know it today, has become (imo) very burdensome.  It’s like a giant weight pressing down upon us, we’re expected to carry this load upon our shoulders day in and day out, handing this onerous burdened down when we are too exhausted to continue to our progeny, who are then expected to carry the same load.

I find this entire notion basically “bull” because I disagree with much of what civilization demands of us, and what little it actually really offers us.  I see no point in perpetuating this fraudulent existence any longer then necessary.  The answer to this begins with our refusal – refuse to go along with the parts that do not make any sense, that do not support you and yours, that do not offer you relief from your daily burden and that only support the mythical notions of “progress” in a society that is clearly insane.

Not all aspects of civilization or our society are all bad of course, but frankly, enough of it is actually quite bad and misguided enough that rejecting the whole instead of the parts can be more successful then trying to make accommodations.

It is very hard to navigate the two realities of what this means.  On one hand, we are part of society, dependent upon what society produces and even offers us in order to exist, but on the other, we find ourselves making contributions, usually unwillingly to things we know that are actually destroying us.  We are in fact exhibiting a duality of existence, a dichotomy of opposing tensions which in turn is creating cognitive dissonance in all of us.

Some people simply give up, finding this just too hard to hold in tension (balance) and not go insane.  But I’ve never yet found anyone that can simply forget what they now know, unless it’s being drowned out with alcohol or drugs.  Most of us just choose to forget as best we can, or withdraw, leaving little room left in our lives to be forced to interact too much and deal with the opposing forces.

This is probably unavoidable for the majority of us I suspect, but I’m no psychologist and can only write about what I observe.  I do know that many people are having quite a bit of trouble with this issue, usually exhibited in more obvious ways such as job dissatisfaction, spousal problems, even drug or drinking problems.  The “futility of civilization” seems to drag us down into the depths of despair if we are not careful.

I do not think any of these things are healthy of course, and can only suggest a few things to help you “survive civilization” and what this has come to mean today.  These are the things that have helped me:

1) Stay focused. It is important to not lose sight of your goals, whatever they might be.  There is a reason you came to be the way you are — and why you are persuaded to these viewpoints that you hold.  If they remain true, then so should you, so stay focused.

2) Weed out the disinformation and misinformation. This is a pet subject of mine, as too much of what passes for news is just unadulterated bullshit today.  Shut it out of your life if it causes too much tension.  Sometimes I’ll do just that, but most of the time it doesn’t bother me as I recognize it for what it is.  The b.s. is never going to go away, it’s how they manipulate people and get them to do what they want against their own best interest (like borrow money, fight in wars, support corrupt government and such like).  Remember that it takes an awful lot of propaganda to get people to do stupid things, you’re literally wallowing in it and so is everyone else.

3) Pick your confidents carefully.  We’re at the point in human history where trying to persuade the masses to their folly is hardly productive.  Sharing your latest revelation, insight, news source, opinion or discovery is often disappointing because it falls on deaf ears.  One of the many reasons I closed the blog is I often felt this way.  What you know is often not what people want to hear, so don’t waste your time or your breath on trying to convince the world.  This fits in with #1 of course.

Talk with those that are open and interested, but don’t beat your head against the wall on those that aren’t.  Don’t believe the myth that “people want the truth”, when it’s obvious that they don’t.  Never forget, if they wanted the truth, they’d have it already, and this is true for most other things too. There is actually nothing really stopping us all from having the truth except our own disinterest.

The truth is most of humanity is probably already doomed (yes, it is as bad as that) because of their refusal to “get it”.  And this is actually what they really want too.  They’ve had ample opportunity to get with the program so to speak, especially within the developed world, but their actions reveal their real choices.  Recognize that fact and don’t waste your time any further.

4) It is a myth (urban legend kind of thing) that if more people “understood” or “participated” or “joined in” or any such similar thing, that we could stop what is now happening, so don’t fall for this and don’t try to participate in these kinds of activities and efforts either.

The reason it is a myth is because even very large groups (millions of people) now have near-negligible impact on events, and they are almost always failing to apply the proper pressure (and they are very easily and often manipulated themselves).  Groups operate on “group think” principles, which are generally useless and very ineffective and are almost always co-opted by external interests (and infiltrated).  Their dynamic is to work within very well defined vertical disciplines and response modes that accomplish very little, even if the group is very large.

Therefore, don’t bother with these things. You are much more powerful by not participating in the group and remaining independent and autonomous.  It is also a lot safer by the way for you.  You also don’t get caught up in a lot of wasted and expended energy, time and money.

5) Think for yourself.  Don’t get caught up in the latest hype, fear or scare mongering.  It’s pelting us all from all sides these days, a never ending constant barrage coming from even the most “trusted” sources.  Most of it, if not all of it, is pure crap.  Blow it off.  Believe it when you see it.  Pessimism is not negative here.  Don’t fall for the hype and propaganda, I don’t care who it’s coming from.  You will breath much easier, having far less stress and will be able to stay focused on your original goals.

Moreover, you don’t have any control over these things anyway — even if they came true.  Realize this very important point and don’t get caught up, think for yourself and just move ahead, each day, bit by bit, step by step.  Learn to live your life and no other, especially not one that is being “programmed” for you.

6) Turn off the media inputs.  Start with television, Internet, magazines, shortwave (especially shortwave) and any other “broadcast” that is seeking to persuade you to anything (including this newsletter).  Going back to #5, think for yourself.  How much of what you are hearing affects you?  How much is true?  How much is false? How much is just hype and b.s. to get you to believe something?  Always watch your pocket here too, because that is usually what they’re really after.

7)  Read. If you don’t read books, start.  They’re wonderful for enlightening your mind and you can absorb the information as fast as you can read, or as slowly as you may desire.  If needed, read word by word and let it be absorbed in your mind one word at a time.  Good authors can explain their points, or tell their stories or convey the information that they are seeking to share with you without having to subject you to a ten-second media sound byte that you are supposed to swallow hook, line and sinker.

Reading is an incredibly valuable skill and will help you immensely throughout your entire life.

What you read is just as important. I do not allow trash magazines in my house unless my wife sneaks one in, which she does do sometimes!  I let it lay around for a week or two then throw it out, because it’s just crap and she and I both know it.  Instead, we both read a lot of books and almost everyday, we have spent an hour or two at a minimum reading, even if it’s late at night.

Develop a good library of titles that you like.  I don’t much care what they are, what matters here is if they are important to you.  I loved Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Hash Mistress, a fictional story nonetheless, but informative and educational.  I’ve got a copy of this and many other fiction books around here somewhere.

My main library contains quite a few non-fiction titles that I pull down from time to time.  Jared Diamond’s How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed was fascinating (to me), as is the latest title I’m still reading, Omni-Science and the Human Destiny.

Books are immensely valuable sources of intelligent thinking, pools of resources and will help sharpen your mind to new concepts and new ideas, even discarding old ones and developing new ones.   Read whatever you can get your hands on, it’s one of the reasons Americans are so dumbed-down today, they don’t read.

8) Unplug.  Take time to just sit and let your mind and your body to relax.  I have the most trouble with this one as I work 7 days a week.  But sometimes I just can’t take it anymore and I unplug.  Get away from all noise, all sounds even if you can (turn off the radio and the idiot box) and go sit quietly and observe all things.  I mean observe nature and your surroundings, examine the grass and look at the sky, and observe within your own mind and body what you are experiencing, feeling, sensing.  Call this meditation if you like, but take the time to unplug, unwind and disconnect from this artificial existence of glass and steel, asphalt and concrete and constant noise and reconnect to yourself, to nature and to your surroundings.  This is immensely helpful and satisfying and can create peace and tranquility where there was none.

9) Finally, go do something fun.  Take a walk, ride a bike, drive a car, go eat, run, play, swim, hike, see a movie even.  Whatever your idea of “fun” is, go do it.  You need to do this to relax, to also help you unwind and to realize that life is not all about work, money, toil, sweat and tears.  Life “happens” with you plugged in or not, whether you’re constantly attentive or not, and you need to learn to let go from time to time.  It’s very important to not be so wound up tight that you can’t learn to exist and simply “be”.

Learn to have fun, and learn to “be”.  You are who you are and there really isn’t much that is going to change this.  Be yourself, be honest, be true, practice your life with integrity and honor and have some fun from time to time.  Life was not intended for us to be miserable, laughter is fantastic medicine and so is good company, good food and good times.

Civilization will do whatever it is going to do without our help, involvement, protest, dissent or participation.  That is reality.  That is what you can all expect.  In the meanwhile, we have our own lives to live and there is no point in squandering this precious gift upon the anvils of anxiety and worry.

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The Terrorist That Wouldn’t Die – Yet another bogus recording from Bin Laden.  These things are laughable and far, far past the point where there is even a shred of credibility from the “intelligence community”.  Talk about an oxymoron.

Cops Beat the Hell Out of The Wrong Man (again). Must be the umpteenth thousandth time this has now happened.  Of course, there is no clear pattern to this, these things are just “accidental”.

Israel Claims Ownership of West Bank Forever – Eternity is a long time, especially for a man who is going to die soon.

Zoey sent me this video link, which fits in exactly with my arguments against Empire in the last issue and the total domination efforts by the US military.  There is also this video which also fits in exactly with what I’ve been trying to convey in these newsletters.

Non-compliance, refusal to go along, think for yourself, act responsibly, disconnect.  Do these things to empower yourself, your life and stop contributing to the gears of Empire.

Empire Stupidly Marches Ahead

Despite our failing economy, millions homeless, ongoing home foreclosures and even more bank closures, the expansion of Empire via military domination continues as usual.  Promising even more military growth, this is clear evidence that essential change within Empire is impossible.

This is a strong reason why I do not believe that contraction will defeat the practice of domination, even here at home.

Venezuela Has The World’s Largest Oil Fields – A new report with sobering news: A new USGS report reveals that Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves, over twice the size of Saudi Arabia.  This has staggeringly huge implications (and why I believe war in the South America will happen).

Thank God Osama Is Dead! – His recent video from the grave reveals however, that the CIA, NSA and AAA are busy resurrecting the dude to provide more scare-mongering from the shadows.

Lobbyist For Foreign Corporations Seek to Use Foreign Money To Influence American Elections – The only thing “new” here is that they are now coming out in the open on this issue. They’ve been doing this illegally for decades, but the Supreme Court has now ruled on the issue.

Corporations do not (should not) have the same rights as natural persons (especially foreign corporations). I’ve written on this topic before.  It is exceedingly dangerous to give artificial entities that same status as natural persons, who in turn are never held personally accountable for their actions (and inactions, which have also caused a lot of death and destruction).

The Island of Doubt has a Minority Report on this topic too.

I have a major bone to pick with corporations in general, but that’s not news or any secret either. Corporations are the driving engines behind government mandates and legislation, they’re also the world’s worst polluters and destroyers of the planetary environment. They receive special protected status and privileged position from nations all over the world due to their influence and control.  They manipulate markets, control economies and essentially are “the force” behind most of what is wrong on this planet.  The other part of this equation is that many of us actually work for them, making this all possible.

And now they want to come out of the closet and directly rule over our (s)election process.  Why don’t we just pick the corporation we like best and let them rule the planet?  How about Monsanto?  Or Archer-Daniels?  Or who is your favorite?  Halliburton?  General Dynamics? Pick one!  We could have a McHappening Day where everybody is a corporate employee, guaranteed a job and meat-flavored veggie burger!

Thought for the Day (or week) – There has to be altruism in the universe: Physicist

What we don’t know is far more then what we think we know. Alien life is but one thing we probably don’t know how to recognize yet.  I thought we would have figured this out with the reptilian nature of our government, but guess we haven’t.

This is very bad news.  Methane levels in the Arctic have jumped 33% in just five years.

This is more doom on a global scale and very, very serious. It is an indicator of runaway greenhouse effect (global warming), and impossible to stop or even slow down.  Giant releases of methane will accelerate warming considerably faster then any previous models predicted.

Check out CO₂ Now, plenty of links there to understand the science of measuring CO₂, and what it means for the future.

I’ve written about scientific reticence a number of times, and I’m still seeing statements like this:

The reasons for tree mortality in a warmer, drier world have been narrowed down to three main scenarios — greater prevalence of insects and diseases in a warmer world, the drying out of plants, and a third mechanism where water-stressed trees stop photosynthesizing, called carbon starvation.

While researchers are still debating the relative merits of the three, scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory have pointed to the last scenario as the most relevant for tree mortality. Carbon Starvation Killing Trees Globally

Climate science is not exact, as there are still too many unknowns.  It is however, close enough to make reasonably accurate predictions and understand the cause and effects.  All of the denialists claims with regards to climate science have been repeatedly disproven for example.  That leaves us with “what we do know” and what we do know is actually quite a lot.  It is not complete, but it is enough and it is growing every day as more analysis and measurements are made, verified and provably demonstrated.

So why the scientific reticence? It’s important that we understand what this does mean, and what it doesn’t mean.  For instance, while science knows that trees are dying from three main factors, they’re not willing to predict (in a big way) what this means for our forests.

I have no such limitations placed on me and neither do you.  We can make reasonably accurate predictions just by using some common sense.

Let’s try this then: forest are dying from dehydration, insects and diseases and failure to photosythensize (create food for themselves).  Three rather big “dots” of a global picture of the world’s forests that each, by themselves indicate that we are going to lose a lot more trees.

Billions of trees in fact, billions and billions, entire forests.  With it, we will lose many other species of life that depend upon these forests for their existence. We will also have disrupted rain patterns, which will lead to dry and drought, fewer fish in the rivers, more forest fires, and even an increase in grass and shrub lands.  Some areas will even turn into deserts.

It’s all connected, and it leads in the same general direction, but we’re only rarely being told how interconnected it is and what the future outcome is likely to be.

In addition to human caused deforestation by logging (as opposed to trees simply dying from other causes) which continues to increase globally, the other effects of climate change are going to wipe out a huge portion of the world’s trees.  Wit’s End has been privately documenting the tree deaths in her area for some time now.  She’s received little to no response from raising her concerns to officials.

We can see if we but look at what is happening. Science looks but only reluctantly predicts future effects. This is because science itself is a rigorous discipline of measurements, which take place from historical and empirical data.

The future is a wide number of variables of unknown proportions, quantity, quality and many other factors.  These “unknowns” are variables that cannot be accurately measured today, only estimated.  If they are taken on, each variable is subject to many other future variables, causing complex interactions and probable outcomes, which makes future predictions by scientists a form of professional suicide.  Some scientist do engage in these scenarios, with cautious caveats that they do not really know what may actually happen.

But we non-scientists do not need to wait for science and the slow-plod of data collection and analysis of “after the fact” effects, before making our own non-scientific predictions.  We can even be reasonably accurate while doing this, if we are careful how we begin, and what data we have taken into consideration in the process.

At some point, with enough consideration and study, we can reasonably predict for ourselves what the future holds, based upon the data we already know.  Science does this too, but because of professional standards and the very real risk of professional ridicule (death to a scientist) they are very unwilling to claim too much, even if they privately think that the future is very bleak indeed.

My own future predictions are based upon what I know, what science has already told us, what science expects to happen (as far as it goes), what is already “built in” as cause and effects can take decades to show up, what human nature really is and our propensity to ignore clear warnings, thus continuing to do what is obviously not in our best interests, and finally, what my intuition is telling me when I assess it all.

It is not scientific, but it is based upon clear, measurable trends in earth systems, human nature and behavior and the accumulated results.  The “future” as I see it combines all of these effects and activities into a sum total of what I think will happen.  While admittedly unscientific, it has already proven to be very accurate, even surpassing what science itself is claiming.  Notably, science continues to update their own assessments, coming closer and closer to my own. But this is only because many areas of science are verticle disciplines, which require such updates, whereas I’m trying to be much more open to others issues that are effecting the future today.

There are a handful of scientists and authors who are stepping far out onto a limb and making their own future predictions and scenarios.  They’re worth reading, as they can help anyone understand from a professional science viewpoint what they expect in the future.  One of the most know is James Lovelock (who is not a scientist), and James Hansen (who is).  There are many others, I do not keep a list handy, so you’ll need to assess your own.

I do suggest everyone read everything that they can, unless it’s pure trash and drivel from the unwashed crowd of the denialisphere.  I used to read their screed and outrage until I abandoned them due to faked data sets, psuedo-science and outright lies.  They’re still slinging the same swill around as ever, hoping you’ll swallow it and supress your automatic gag reflex.  Every so often some do-gooder tries to “convince me” of one of these dated lies.  Please don’t bother, been there, done that and it’s the same crap as always.

Check out Greenman’s videos on “It’s so cold there can’t be Global Warming” and “32,000 Scientists“.  He’s doing a great job of debunking the so-called debunkers.  But there are many, many more that are doing this too, such as AGW Observers section on the “anti” crowd.

It’s a lot of data to absorb if you’re even half-serious (and I’m deadly serious, so I’ve spent thousands of hours on this now), but I’ve had a particular interest in this for some time now, as the future continues to be diminished.

For a more scientific discussion of this very topic, check out Climate Sight’s Manufacturing Doubt.

Internet Safety

The advent of the Internet has been considered a gigantic boost in personal freedom and information sharing.  While I only agree with the latter (we are no more free then before), there are many dangers to using the Internet that your momma probably never told you about.

Anything ever recorded anywhere on the Internet can be later dredged up and found.  There are many websites and resources dedicated to this archival feature. Imagine you posted a negative comment about your boss on an obscure forum, “safe” in the knowledge that nobody you know would ever read it anyway.  Wrong. Using archival retrieval software, many of these sites are automatically indexed and stored away.

There are programs and protocols that are supposed to stop bots and archival services from “reading” and storing, searching or finding information posted, but they often do not work.  Robots.txt for example is a poor “firewall” that is supposed to stop search engines and other bots (automatted programs) from reading certain files or directories, but are often and widely ignored.

Directories and even files on servers can be password protected or denied public access through simple settings, but even this is not really secure against determined hackers.  These techniques will usually work for stopping bots, but then again, you just never know.  My own WordPress directories for the old blog have had their protection levels mysteriously “reset” to open public access on more then one occasion.  Usually when this happens, I find that the WordPress files were also corrupted by some unscrupulous company that is embedding pornographic links in the WordPress files.  I never have figured out how the directory level protections can be overrode, and neither did my ISP.

I don’t Twitter and never will.  Twitter is a dangerous ‘social practice’ that will be used against people in time. Too much personal information / activities is being revealed by twits, a veritable gold mine of information for anyone (not just the feds) that wants to know anything about you.

I feel exactly the same way about Facebook, Myspace and any other ‘social’ website, including Digg, Reddit and others. They all are used to coax you into revealing personal details about your life.  It is very easy to dig stuff up on almost anybody these days as a result.  What you post there, reveals an awful lot about you, your beliefs, activities, what you support, what you don’t support.

For example, I’ve had several people try to cheat my business with either stolen credit cards or “borrowed” credit cards.  In just a few minutes, I have been able to figure out who they really are, where they really live, what they do for a living, where they work, what their wife’s name is, where she works, and other personal details (and I’ve ruthlessly gone after them, as I truly hate thieves).

This is all possible because these websites and many, many others, such as forums, blog comments, email addresses and such like are all encouraging us to leave little “crumbs” behind, where we post our two-cents about things we like and things we don’t like, things we do, things we don’t do, where we work, how much money we might make and so on.

It is pretty easy to learn about your spending habits, what websites you visit (even rarely), what your opinions are, what your voting registation probably is, religion, who you like, who you don’t like and on and on.  In fact, there is so much information now being posted to the Internet by people about their private lives that it is truly overwhelming.

Data Mining

The NSA and other federal agencies have long been data mining these sources of information, including using bogus encryption software sold to the public, and sweeping up gigantic volumes of information for archival and reference.  Don’t think for a minute that this has not been going on since the inception of the Internet, because it has.

Despite the alleged “illegality” of this, it matters not.  The United States has long had cooperative agreements with other countries, such as England to permit them to spy on the American people, and we spy on the English.  This is no joke, they’ve been caught doing this a number of times.  Furthermore, I have absolutely lost track of the number of times the US government and its agencies have engaged in illegal activities.  Even when they’ve been “shut down” such as Carnivore, they’re not.  Like Blackwater, they just morph themselves under a new label and go right on killing people, err, back to business (as usual).

Any electronic information that you share should be done with deliberation and consideration for its necessity and need.  Do you really need to share online, to the entire browsing / snooping / indexing world that your brother in law is a drunk?  Or that your boss is having an affair with your sister?  While it may make you feel a little better by getting this muck off your chest, the harm that this can do is nearly incalcuable.

Many Internet predators and stalkers have used the resources of the Internet to commit murder, rape, stalking, theft, bribery and blackmail, the list here is nearly endless.  But the staggering truth is, this is only possible because people have stupidly posted tidbits of information about themselves (or someone else) online, never thinking for a moment that it might come back to bite them in the ass.

It is not only the predators you have to watch out for, and the swindlers and email marketers and the government themselves, but the corporate “collectors”, who are paying billions of dollars now for data mining.  These are your insurance companies, medical providers, even grocery stores and doctors who are finding out everything that there is to know about you by the crumbs you have left behind.

The FBI has long boasted that there are least 57 “files” on every man, woman and child in the United States.  These records are available to other agencies of course, with none of them actually looking out for your best interest.  You want to adopt a child?  What about that post where you bragged about taking those drugs when you were a teenager?

These kinds of tidbits we innocuously post about our lives, our activities, our beliefs can and are being used against us.  It does not matter one bit that these may be events that took place decades ago — whatever you are revealing about yourself online is quite literally the same thing as writing it up in the sky for all to see.

This is by the way, how many groups have been surrepitiously infiltrated, because one or more of the members got stupid and said something online somewhere.  Bingo! Now they know that there is a group forming or dissent fomenting or whatever the mention was.  Vast resources have been dedicated to monitoring the Internet for these kinds of things, including in chat rooms, forums, blogs, readers comments on websites, anywhere where personal crumbs are being left behind.

True Privacy

There is a simple “rule” that everyone should follow.  Do not use the Internet (at all) for anything you do not want everyone to know about.  This would include browsing, buying, reading, visiting, commenting or sharing anything that you do not feel comfortable announcing to the whole world, because that is actually what you are doing when engaging in these activites.  It may not be available to the average person, but there are many, many people who are professionaly employed and highly skilled that know exactly how to make this available and to whom.

Knowing that, here are a few other comments and observations.  Lately, there has been a very noticable trend in published comments by alleged “readers” of main stream news articles.  Most of these sites require pre-registration before you can post comments.  Some of these can be bypassed with password sites such as BugMeNot.com where you can “borrow” a password and login.  Sometimes this works, but you’re still leaving a breadcrumb with your comments and your IP.  There are browsers that will attempt to hide your IP too, but if you’ve gone to that length, then you’re already aware of everything I’ve already said.

The trend that I have noticed lately is the clear tendency to filter comments that are largely favorable to the article (in many cases).  But the inverse is just as true, an outrageous article will be published, which appears to be deliberately designed to elicit published dissent.

I do not think either of these are ‘accidents’, but spiked stories to a) persuade public opinion; b) root out the IP addresses of people who disagree with the status quo.

It would be very easy to imagine that a map of the United States probably exist in several somewheres, where tiny warning flags are placed showing where the most troublesome and potentially problematic people / areas are.  Hell, I could develop this myself in truth, creating tracking profiles of people that “stand out”, cross-referencing them with their posting history, personal information and even buying habits.  It’s just not that hard in truth, and the Internet actually makes this so damned easy.

Chip Me, Please

There’s more.  There is a clear trend to microchip humans, to control literally everything in their lives, what they earn, where they live, who they know, what they do, what they buy, what they sell, what they eat and even track their movements.  This is no joke — the technology already exists and is in trials in many parts of the world today.  The US military has used these chips to track shipments, from factory to battlefield or to warehouse.  Human trials have been underway for some years now.

The technology is being further advanced with chip-enabled computers that can only function for the right operator who has been personally chipped to interface with them.  While this may be a data miners wet dream, it bodes ill for privacy advocates and personal freedoms.

It is a very easy thing to couple tracking chips with data mining and vast databases that will profile everybody. We are making this draconian task much easier for them by our love and embracement of technology, and by innocuously posting information about ourselves, our wives, our families or our friends, or even information about those people that we do not like or support.  Complain about the government?  It’s not going unnoticed, it’s going into a file that ties it directly to you.  Think you’ve got a disease and want to see a doctor?  Keep it to yourself, or your insurance company may find out and use this information against you one day.

Privacy Equals Freedom

Freedom can only exist where there is personal privacy.  Anybody that knows everything about you or your life is very prone to start making rules (or laws) against you, or certainly to take advantage of what they do know.  Why do you think that there is such a clear agenda to collect everything possible about you?  Where there is no privacy, there is no freedom, and there is only a prison.  You become either a victim or a market, where you are targetted to buy stuff, or taken advantage of.

There is a clear agenda at work with the Census taken every decade for example. They are now using GPS (global position satellite) to locate you and your home right down to the inch.  They’re “reasons” for doing this makes no sense at all, but what makes even less sense is the crap that they are asking from you on the Census.

First off, you do not have to answer those questions being asked.  There is no law that states that you do.  Nor has anyone ever been fined by refusing.  The threat of fine is there, so you decide.

Here is a simple rule to follow: if you want freedom, then stop revealing information about yourself, about your opinions, about your dissent, about your approvals, about everything.  We no longer live in a society where freedom of speech is protected.  Get that fact through your head.  It is not protected, it will be and is being used against you on a daily basis.  We lost that battle.  All we have left is the illusion that our practice of free speech is protected.

Technology, as “enabling” as it seems, is being used against us, especially in the area of information.  Your telephone calls, faxes, email and Internet activities are all “wonderful freedoms” that are being vacuumed into gigantic archives by our plantation owners, because of one simple fact: they don’t trust you and never have.

Everyone is suspect, everything you do is suspicious. The damnable Patriot Act saw to that, but this suspicion and distrust predates this abomination by decades.  Some of you remember McCarthyism and the lynch mobs taking place even then.  It’s only gotten worse since that time, and technology has made it unbelievably easy to do this.  The GPS chip in your phone, your car, soon to be in you and in your money proves this beyond any possible doubt.

You should find it very odd that we are not allowed to know what goes on in the closed door sessions and back room meetings of Congress and their ilk, but they want to know exactly what color of underwear you buy and how much you drink and who you got this from and how much you paid.  There is a one-way street of totalitarianism going on here, when it should be exactly the opposite.  We have become the servants to the masters, instead of the other way around.

Don’t forget that this is actually all coming from corporate slaveowners in reality. Government is jumping at their beck and call, even our politicians come from corporate as part of the (s)election process.

The true plantation masters are private / corporate businesses that are seeking to make merchandise of everything: men, women, children, information, resources, land, animals, water, even the very air we breathe.

They’re the ones after you and are the driving force behind the invasion of privacy in your life.  You are nothing more then an economic unit in their mind, bred and born to work, buy and die in accordance to your position in life.  If you ever wanted to know why we cannot break the social class / racial class barriers, it is because we are not being allowed to.  They’ve got us almost exactly where they want us in truth and the “business as usual” paradigm we can’t seem to shake off and break is coming directly from them.

Disinformation As A Weapon

I have only barely scratched the surface of what is really going on here, but it starts with you and your level of awareness and understanding.  You are in a position to control much of this still, and here is how:

You must learn to walk softly and with wisdom.  Do not reveal anything about yourself online.  Do not fill out any forms where you don’t have to.  On those that you do “have to”, simply lie about everything you possibly can.  None of this information is being used to help you anyway and it is actually illegal to collect it in many cases, but that obviously is not stopping anybody from demanding this information from you, so you have to wise up and deal with the hand you’ve been dealt.

It can be great fun to mess up the databases and collection efforts by feeding them bogus information.  During the public heyday of Project Carnivore, many people smartened up and started embedding their emails and posted comments with trigger words to cause this giant computerized vacuum to flag anything and everything as “suspicious”.  While this probably didn’t work, it did help people to wake up to what was going on by their own government and the surveillance society that was being built.  It is a relatively simple thing to program software to ignore these kinds of “baits”.

Stay offline with your comments.  Stop posting them.  But if you do, post wisely.  Keep in mind that you’re not posting in secret.  There is every reason to believe that you are typing in a dangerous minefield.

A New Cyber Army Is Called For

Online, Covert Agents Promoted By Obama Administration

There are literally thousands more references to snooping, spying, investigating, collating, analysing and the collection of stupendous volumes of information about all electronic activity (Internet, phone, fax, microwave, email, satellite, literally everything).  If you are not aware of this, it behooves you to immediately smarten up about what has been going on for decades now.

The collection of information is an incredibly powerful weapon, and has long been used to tightly couple the media output of news, even controlling public opinion, perception, belief, and issues like trust, calm, fear, support, racism, xenophobia, consumption and of course, our ever-present materialism.  Put a little more clearly, you, me, everyone is being programmed for behavior, belief, reaction and response just like a computer, since birth. The more information / data collection they have on us, the easier this task is for them.

This is a type of passive programming, which gives you something that they don’t have (yet).  You can unprogram yourself by decoupling from these programming sources as much as possible.  You do this by unplugging yourself from their inputs into how you are supposed to think, act, buy, believe.  The entire scope of how to do this is going to be beyond this newsletter.  For now, realize that you can take personal authority over all of this if you want to.

In addition to this, what media sources you read, watch and listen to need to carefully considered for their accuracy, completeness, honesty, integrity and usefulness.  The American media in particular is some of the worst sources in the world for these criteria.  If you don’t already know why this is, I won’t try to explain this right now, so that this post isn’t too long.

Propaganda As A Weapon

There are a LOT of so-called news sources and media outlets that are pure propaganda mouthpieces, and even within the so-called “movements” (patriot, right-wing, left-wing, dissent, anti-war, you name it) media sources, a great deal of this information is propaganda and disinformation too.  Just because a group or news outlet fits your worldviews, doesn’t make them right, accurate or truthful.  Their data sources and facts must be checked for accuracy and completeness and any propaganda that they spew forth simply rejected.

Almost all, if not all, news stories are deliberately “spiked”.  They’re ALL vetted by editors and reviewers to toe the party line and push a particular agenda.  They’re spiked with seemingly innoccous statements to plant particular viewpoints and opinions in your mind.  If you look for them, you can find them everywhere, here is an example.

Did you spot it?  It’s the last statement in the article (there are several others too).

While the Pakistani government publicly condemns the strikes as violations of its sovereignty, it is thought to have a secret deal with Washington allowing them.

You are left with the impressions that they want you to believe, without providing any proof or evidence that this is true.  This is a very common tactic and accomplishes exactly what they want it to accomplish: to lull you into meek acceptance.  The message is clear, if our government is doing it, then it must be okay, especially if they’ve brokered a “deal” with another government.

There are many other spiked messags in this same story by the way, see if you can’t pick them out yourself.

They’re intended to desensitize you to what is really going on here.  Here are just a few things you are being lulled into acceptance on this particular article:

that “they” are bad, and we are (somehow) good; that they are protecting us (somehow) from “enemies” thousands of miles away; that an entire American industry is very busy at work building highly technical and complex devices to kill total strangers to us and that this is all well and good and must be okay; that we can meekly trust our government in these matters; that they are acting on our behalf (somehow) and to our benefit in some mysterious but not fully explained way; that all of the people that they kill in our behalf are all our true enemies and they are all deserving of death without trial; that any collateral damage of civilians, bystanders, women, children, men and property is necessary; that repeated actions of this type are still condoned; and that we should just shut up and go along with it all.

There is a real problem with this type of propaganda, but we see this sort of thing all of the time.  The many hidden messages contained within are fully intended to create your acceptance, questioning nothing, accepting everything.  It is even considered “unpatriotic” to question any of it!

The Bush Administration took this type of propaganda to unbelievable levels, claiming that “anyone who isn’t with us is with the terrorists”.  Terrorists, by this definition, was every single person in the entire world that George and his kind did not like or that did not support the actions of his administration.

George W. Bush and all of his ilk made it very clear — do not think for yourself, question nothing, object not and accept whatever we tell you as the unvarnished truth — and that is all you need to know.  Ignore our lies, our manufactured “evidence”, even our corrupt activities, including blowing up some rather big buildings.  Just go with it people!!  We’re here for you!

My gag reflex was so bad during his corrupt Administration that I developed constant heartburn.  But Obama is no better, this man has taken lying and propaganda to entirely new levels.  I suspect that they take lessons on how to do this.  But I know where the real power is coming from, and I hope most of you are catching on to this.

The Unvarnished Truth

New sources are generally pretty bad for presenting biased information.  I can’t provide anyone with a list of trusted sources, as they probably don’t actually exist.  You’ll have to learn to filter out what news is valid and true and what isn’t.  This is a learned skill, in truth, and you must learn to practice this daily, as your world and your worldviews are what is at risk here.

There is a gigantic battle taking place for the minds of men, all over the world, obviously including yours. If they can control what you see, hear, believe, buy, accept, support, condone or even what you are told to be disinterested in, then they have in fact, turned you into a zombie.  If you ever wanted to know why so many Americans are so apathetic, unlearned, disinterested and self-serving, there you have it.  They have been programmed since birth through ten million sources to be exactly that way.

A few pointer then are called for: if you don’t read, start. Reading will open your mind up to many possibilities and sources of information.  It takes a large volume of reading to learn to unlearn the propaganda and myths we’ve all come to believe and accept as truth.  One book won’t do it, ten books won’t do it either.

I buy a lot of books and I read them all.  I spend many hours each day reading, my bookmarks is huge for sites I prefer, but I still have to be very careful.  There are sites that are pretty good but spike their stories with absolute bullshit, stuff I know isn’t true, because I’ve taken the time to learn from qualified experts and researchers on that particular subject.

A few subjects to simply prove a point is the history of the Founding Fathers of this nation and what they actually wrote and believed.  Other such subjects is the US Constitution, Articles of Confederation and the Bill of Rights.  Others that once held great interest to me was the creation of the Federal Reserve, the Holocaust, American history, 911, the Armenian genocide, the history of the bible, even the known facts surrounding the year 2012 and Mayan prophecies.  But there are many, many more, areas of interest that I’ve undertaken to the point of saturation, until such time as I come to exhaust my own personal interest and understand the true history of these things.

Not everybody will do this of course, which is why you really do need to be pretty careful and don’t let your mind become “one of theirs”.  This is after all, what the propagandist are after, since if they can get you to believe what they claim, then they can also get you to obey what they want.

A Free Mind

A free mind is a very powerful weapon.  This is why so much information is deliberately hidden from people, they do not want people to have the ability to truly think for themselves and learn.  One reason why indegenious groups were so easily controlled is that they withheld very important and critical information from them, and then they took advantage of that.  They also withheld education (another form of information), resources and money, but that’s sort of beside the point here.

It IS what you don’t know that can and probably will kill you in the end.  Your lack of knowledge will also help enslave you, just as much as your embracement of false information and myths.  Never forget that there are chess pieces being plotted out several moves in advance by our controllers.  What information we have that is being regurgitated for public consumption is no accident, it is deliberate, methodical and diabolically planned out to always gain the advantage and to leverage control over the public.  It is how they are still overlording over the people and keeping us almost entirely ignorant of what they are really doing.

Ever wonder why the law was so complex and full of legalese and hard to understand language?  It’s an old trick, going back thousands of years.  They did this too when they developed religion, making it hard for people to speak the language, read the words or even understand the full significance of the rituals and rites.  We have that same situation today in our courts, our laws, our corporations and the so-called rules of governance over them and throughout our governments of the world today. Let’s admit it — we barely know what they are doing, and this is absolutely no accident at all.

There is no such thing as “open government”.  This is a myth, and is meant to deflect you from serious inquiry.

Only the highly trained, versed, studied and educated lay (qualified) claims to understanding what is that they do, and try as they might, they’ve only been able to share just a little of what is really going on.

There are protective barriers, walls deliberately erected to keep the people from revolting. There have been a number of highly placed people throughout history that have made exactly this claim — that if the people really understood what was going on, we’d burn their houses down.

So read, learn, watch and listen.  Self-educating is always better then vegetating anyway.  What you learn may just save your life one day, or that of someone else.  It’ll certainly make you a better person, with a stronger intellect and a stronger sense of intuition, understanding and capabilities.

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This is interesting, Secrecy News just sent me this in time for this publication, definitely related to the points I raised above:

DOD “CLARIFIES” DOCTRINE ON PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS

The Department of Defense has issued a new publication (pdf) to update and clarify its doctrine on “psychological operations.”

Psychological operations, or PSYOP, are intended to “convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives.”

PSYOP is among the oldest of military disciplines, but the new DoD doctrine continues to wrestle with basic definitional issues.

It endorses a new, negative definition of the term “propaganda,” which had formerly been used in a neutral sense to refer to “Any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.” From now on, propaganda will refer only to what the enemy does:  “Any form of adversary communication, especially of a biased or misleading nature, designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.”

The new doctrine also dictates that the term “perception management” shall be eliminated from the DoD lexicon (pdf).

DoD acknowledges that PSYOP is limited by legal constraints, including statutes, international agreements, and national policies. Among other things, the DoD doctrine states, there is a “requirement that US PSYOP forces will not target US citizens at any time, in any location globally, or under any circumstances.”  Yet in a near contradiction, the doctrine also states that “When authorized, PSYOP forces may be used domestically to assist lead federal agencies during disaster relief and crisis management by informing the domestic population.”  Perhaps the PSYOP forces are supposed to inform the domestic population without “targeting” them.

Fundamentally, psychological operations are tethered to the reality of U.S. government actions, for good or for ill.  As the new doctrine notes, “Every activity of the force has potential psychological implications that may be leveraged to influence foreign targets.”  But PSYOP cannot no substitute for an incoherent policy or rescue a poorly executed plan.

See “Psychological Operations,” Joint Publication 3-13.2, Joint Chiefs of Staff, January 7, 2010.

Don’t buy into the propaganda of “legal constraints”, it has never stopped them before, they just go underground and do it anway.  You remain the “foreign objective”, PSYOP’s has long been known to be practiced by corporations and government throughout the world.

Never forget, if we’re being told about this in “disclosure”, that in itself is an admission that there is much, much more going on.  Even disclosure is part of an agenda, and is part of both damage control and propaganda in itself.

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Trijicon, maker of rifle scopes and weapons sights, just got found out, they’ve been putting Bible passages on their weapon sights sold to the US Military (and probably others).

Apparently, they’ve been doing this for a rather long time, I’ve got one sitting right here next to me (attached to you-know-what) and yep, it’s got this on it.  I’ve had this one for years too.  Guess I need to remember who I’m serving as I send that bullet down range into the head of my enemy.

Nothing like proselytizing for Christ with the business end of a gun.  That’ll get the message across, albeit a bit late I’d think.

Unbelievable. Trijicon must be the stupidest company on earth to try this.  I’ve always known that Iraq and now Afghanistan is a holy jihad for Christ (look it up if you don’t believe me), but this takes the cake, mostly because I got taken myself.

Plenty of other places to spend your dollars on quality sights.  Recommended: Aimpoint, Eotech, NightForce and Schmidt & Bender for starters.

Food Price Increase

I took the time to calculate out the cost of food from 2006 to 2009.  The bad news is prices have gone up steadily and substantially, some of the 4 year plans have jumped over one thousand dollars since 2006.  It’s not going to get any better either.

If, and I say “if” so that there is no mistake, the 2010 harvests turns out just as bad as others have claimed will happen, then everyone can expect this to be reflected in the grocery stores and on places like my own food website.

Food as a weapon is no joke and is being used in many stricken areas of the world.  If you’ve been following the Haiti story, food and water is in critical short supply right now.  This will probably continue long after the earthquake “relief” stops too.  Strangely (or not, Haiti is as corrupt as any nation gets), some people are being turned away already and there is still a great deal of search and rescue to do.

Haiti

I saw a review of the “mass graves” a few days ago, where they were already claiming of having buried 70,000 people (by hand) and the opinion there was “not possible”, and that this was mostly just media disinformation, likely planted by Haiti and perhaps a few others, all hoping to get their hands into the cookie jar at a time when world attention was on the nation.

This is unbelievably tragic, but possible for sure.  Haiti has had US help for a very long time, but remained one of the most impoverished and corrupt places on earth (hint: I just told you why). That hasn’t changed, even in crisis.  Images of looting, burning and crime are what we’re being shown, but images of coordinated relief and recovery (in the early days) and mass graves on the scale they were claiming were almost entirely absent.  We saw people using sticks and hammers and their hands to rescue survivors, but no heavy equipment.

Everyday that passes now for this stricken country will undoubtedly worsen their real and imagined need.  However, the problems Haiti has remain as acute as ever.  Deep corruption contributed to staggering levels of poverty.  Over ten thousand organizations have sought to bring help to Haiti, which remained the poorest place in the northern hemisphere.

The underlying tragedy of Haiti remains the same as ever, even if there had been no earthquake.  The real and accurate count of Haiti’s loss will probably never be known.

Someone sent me this Youtube video link of how to get even with an airline that screws you over.

I think it’s great that we can exact our revenge upon the indifferent corporations (sometimes), and always cheer when it works (as it did in this case, but the damage was done).

When it works I should say.  My own position against American Express and Discover has resulted in many lost sales to me (and to them I’m sure) over the years, but these two credit card companies grind on, screwing over customer and merchant alike to this day.

We don’t often win, but when we do, we get to celebrate the victory.  And here’s a tiny one.

But these victories are a hollow.  These things shouldn’t happen in the first place and when they do, we should not be forced to go to such lengths to get restitution.  After the fact “victories” can never be considered complete or sufficient.

And sadly, they are always too few, too little and too far in-between to actually accomplish much except those momentary feelings of satisfaction that are quickly replaced with growing despair.  If we the people were “winning”, we’d have ample evidence of this already, but we don’t. It’s been one losing battle after another against large and small, again and again.

This is an essay well worth reading.  It’s a bit long, but elequently states why civilization is our true enemy, and how the proponents of civilization (including some of you) are working against us all.  You don’t have to be in the educational system either, you just need to be one of those tiny little cogs in the machine that is grinding everything to powder in the insatiable voracious quest for “more”.

More money, more growth, more resources, more people, more power, more everything, leaving behind a planet-sized wasteland of discarded bits of dust — you, me, the air, water, soil, fish, animals, minerals, literally everything, swallowed up, ground down, spit out and fashioned into human-shaped temporal morsels of connedsumptive ‘feasts’, soon to be discarded away and left to rot.

I think this essay makes a great case for homesteaders by the way, where the abandonment of civilization is our only possible hope for a living future.  We could just abandon the planet to the cockroaches and rats, who remain quite adept at proliferating on our wastes and discards, but I’d rather not.  There is something deeply troubling about omnicide and the human apathy behind it that I just can’t shake.

This essay did give me a moments inspiration — only a single generation is necessary to shut it all down for good, if they could all just “quit” their slavery and walk away.

A fine fantasy, but one that would never be permitted as insect-sized drones with lethal loads would pour forth from militarized cookie factories to kill the global walkout — and act which would be justified as being for “our own good”.  There is no doubt that we are considered better off dead then departed, it would do well for everyone to keep this in mind.

However, a boycott of all that is wrong, evil, and self-perpetuating of civilization is necessary and long overdue.  But why do I get the sense that it is also futile?

Is it because we worship at the gnashing altar of technology and progress? Or because the gods of war who decide the “right to life” are utterly indifferent to common sense, compassion and sensibilities?  Or because my fellow Americans remain with rootly transfixed into meek submission with infotainment and sports scores?

Still bored?  Then try the sex robot, a little makeup and bad lighting would probably do wonders for most of these beer-swilling gut busters.

Walk Out

We need to honestly ask ourselves — are we EVER going to willingly walk away from it all? Or are we not in fact, going to keep pursuing it all, even if it kills us?

Introspectively, I suspect that we can’t walkout.  We’d have a revolt on our hands in short order.  But then again, we’d have a revolt on our hands by any other means too, such as “designed collapse”, which is a sure sign of our addiction and dependency.  But we don’t need any “sign” or evidence now do we? This isn’t the issue.

The issue is us, it’s always us and how we live, how we act, how we respond and how we go about our lives on this world.  Too many of us are completely immune from the earthly connections that supports us and how and why this is even possible today.

Our approach to land stewardship and use is a science of measurements, we know if we provide these kinds of inputs x, y and z, we can properly expect these kinds of outputs, 1, 2 and 3.  We’ve become pretty good at this too, but it is this very act of scientific analysis that has helped disconnect us from the larger reality.

Our connection to the life itself in the land and throughout the earth has received a divorce decree by domination and control. Since then, we have been whoremongering with technology and technowizardy, making a witches brew with DNA and genetic manipulation, ever-coaxing just a little bit more from the already strained earth life support systems.

Enveloping it all, right down to our petroleum produced plastic buttons and rubber plantation clad feet, is our throbbing civilization powered by ten trillion sacrifices. When we say omnicide, we mean to kill it all, microbes, bacteria, mold, slime, jellyfish, vertabrates, invertebrates, birds, fish, reptiles, human, fauna, even the very atmosphere we breathe and the soil beneath our feet.

This is no joke.  This is happening all over the planet. It is deadly serious and growing worse each day.

I still contend that it is nearly pointless to read more words, any words including mine, about these things.  Mere words, essays and informative articles will never be enough.  We need something else entirely.

Total Liberation

Thomas Paine’s corner has another good essay on Total Liberation which I recommend you read.  Of course the environmental movement is intimately connected with the animal rights movement, neither can exist in a vertical vacuum one from the other, as both are entirely dependent upon the same fundamental principles and values.

Total liberation to me means many things, and there have been some excellent authors who have penned their thoughts on this that are similar to mine.  But I am most interested in what happens beyond the words.  What is actually being done, now — here — there — everywhere.

In the end, I came to realize it was entirely up to me to do what needed to be done.  I have no control over anyone else, and cannot even directly or efficiently influence anyone else.  There are billions of words now available for anyone who would self-educate themselves to the truth, no matter what the subject, and billions more words available to motive you / them to do so.  But the choice and the decision remains yours and theirs and nothing and nobody is really able to make this happen any faster or even better then what each of us decides.

Life is after all, a series of choices, provided to us by opportunities and circumstances. If some outside agency were to force change upon us all, then we would still explore all the available opportunites given the circumstances.  And this is fundamental to my original question — are we ever going to willingly walk away from it all?

The answer is no.  Not unless we have been offered some functioning alternatives.  Even the primitivist today knows this — if the land won’t directly support them, they won’t try to live off the land, they’ll do something else.  The Amish know this, the farmer knows this, everyone fundamentally knows this.  Those emeshed within confines of civilizations lulling embrace are comfortable (for now) where they are, and they won’t willingly leave unless they are offered some functioning alternatives.

It may be forced upon them through collapse — but that isn’t the point of this discussion for now. The question was, could we do it as a matter of choice?

Even though we can now understand the terrible effects of our lifestyles and how our militarized and industrialized civilization is creating self-destruction, I suspect that this answer is still a resounding “No”.

More education and more awareness is not making us change in sufficient numbers or more practically speaking, in sufficient ways, even on an individual basis, for us to embrace the new ethics and modes of living that are absolutely necessary.  I think this is a critical point by the way, because it reveals our propensity to be self-deluding and self-destructive.

The truth be known — we know enough now, already to create change in dramatic and essential ways.  But we’re simply not willing to do it, not while civilization continues to seductively charm us into apathy and indifference.  We’re addicted to our lifestyles in truth, especially here in the West, unable to willingly wean ourselves off this sugar-coated tit of stylized living.

The alternatives needed (and long overdue) are almost entirely absent, and they offer most of us nothing but fantasy and illusion right now, a certain romanticized notion of “how it could / should be” if we truly had lives worth living, and lives that were consciencious, truly sustainable, autonomous, democratic and meaningful.

This then poses both a particular problem and a much-needed solution.  It is not a connundrum however, but an opportunity.  But one that is neither forced upon us (just yet), but one that can be willingly, if but by by sheer force of will (effort) made a reality.

Can it be done?  Of this, I have no doubt at all, as there are functioning societies today that are already doing it.  They are almost entirely alien to us, but that isn’t even relevant — they’re doing it and they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.  I am of course talking about indigenous tribes and bands that are presently living and alive today.

I admit that nobody in the western world would hardly consider “joining in” with them to live as they do — even if they are entirely self-sufficient and sustainable.  Nor would we even be much interested in modeling ourselves close to them.  We are always exploring our other alternatives and opportunities as I’ve already said.  We expect and even demand much, much more then they do.  At issue here is our unqualified demands and what we think we need to exist.  They are neither reasonable or sustainable, but nevertheless, they exist and are very real to us, multiplied by billions of humans, and thus the “problem” and predicament we have today.

It is clear that we must by sheer force of will, choose what we will actually do.  More words will never be sufficient, we must now act, individually and in unison.  We must choose to leave the coal in the ground, to stop commerical fishing, to stop logging, to stop deforestation, to stop industrialized agriculture, to stop driving, to stop flying, to stop eating fast foods, to stop eating factory farmed meat, to stop burning petroleum, to stop voting, to stop giving our consent, and to stop our addiction of the corporate culture of “connedsumerism” in all its forms and practices.

And that’s just for starters.  But there is no doubt that none of this can happen unless we categorically stop examining our “preferred alternatives” as being even remotely beneficial to humanity or the life on this planet.  Stopping the above activities is only barest minimums necessary to ensure that we will even have life on this planet in a hundred years.

But perhaps most important, a point that I would like to drive home is that we must in fact, learn to stop.  Stop by choice.  Stop by necessity.  But the message from industry, the media and the government is just the opposite.  We’re not supposed to stop.  They will use anything, coercion or force or illusion or misrepresentation or any such thing that tells us that we cannot just “stop”.  Of course we can, by sheer force of will.  It is a choice.

Stopping is an action that you can do.  It is a choice that you can make.  And it is a necessary action to free your mind from corpocracy and the life support dependency that they have forced upon you.

This is the path of total liberation (to me) and it means all of this and so much more then this.  I can easily envision a world where there are no laws, no businesses, no corporations, no jails, no prisons, no police, no airlines, no cars, no buildings, no roads, no … well, now I’m off in fantasy land and I’ve completely missed the boat here.  Where are the alternatives that I spoke of?  If I stop, what then do I do that I might live?

The alternative action is for us to learn to live in cooperation with the land, from the natural abundance of the land and what it can locally support, instead of from the constant depradation of the land and its continual decrease. 

We CAN do this — if we so choose.  And we can do this right now, without asking for anybody’s permission or waiting for corporate “leadership” (deception) or government alliances or any such thing.

Land that is damaged like where I live can be restored bit by bit.  I don’t / didn’t have the luxury of living where the land is pristine, but then again, there isn’t much pristine land available anywhere.  I’m homesteading here, learning to let the land be and only take what I need to exist.  I will do some intensive gardening as there is nothing much in the surrounding forests for me to eat.  This is both a compromise and an “alternative”.

In turn, I will (have) stopped driving, stopped flying, stopped supporting corporate culture (employment and box stores), stopped hunting, stopped fishing, stopped eating fast food, stopped eating fish, stopped voting and a bunch of other little steps to “stop” my willing and even unwilling participation into what is killing us all.

Also in turn, I will coax the land into providing me my actual and real living, in terms of food, heat, water, and shelter.  My own “generational plan” encompasses 100 years here, about the limit of what I think I can reasonably do and plan ahead for.

Long term, I hope that this entire area will revert back to the wild, several thousand people lived here in perfect health long before my civilization came and destroyed them.  Ironically, several thousand people live here now, about the double the same number, but every single one of them requires massive inputs of food, water, energy, oil, materials and of course, money.  Obviously, this cannot last, not here, not anywhere on the planet, and planning ahead now for how to live here in the future makes good sense.

So, returning briefly to opportunities and circumstances and choices.  Make it happen in your life.  Create the opportunity.  Choose wisely as I am fond of saying.  Choose with consideration what your future could be and even should be.  It is up to you to create functioning alternatives to your present lifestyle.  They do not have to be the same (and shouldn’t be).

Start Your Tribe

The future requires humans to develop cooperative communities within their land base / resource area.  This is the past repeating itself again, as long trial and error of human existence has shown that tribes are the only sustainable societal structures humans have ever developed.

I hope to create a tribe here — once my neighbors get a clue, hopefully before collapse in their life sweeps them away.  Deek recently wrote to me about a global proposal for ‘landocracy’ and the right to return to living on the local land base without all of the damaging restrictions being demanded of us now.

I think this is a great idea, one which I would fully support.  I will in fact support almost anything that will destroy the world powers that be and reduce them to rubble and ashes, because these agencies and institutions and vested interests are not even remotely helping me and mine or any of you, but they are definitely behind our common destruction.

I hope to write more on the landocracy ideas as I learn more, but the restoration of the people back to the land is the essence of the human future on this planet.  It MUST happen, otherwise we will remain their slaves and connedsumers enlisted in our own destruction.

Must watch – developed by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Scientific Visualization Studio, this is a visualization of carbon dioxide distribution over the entire planet (taken from NASA’s Aqua Spacecraft).

Holy cow! Talk about getting hammered!

Hollow Happenings – I found this link by accident, and know nothing about this site, but the pictures there are amazing and say all that needs to be said.

Three Gorges Dam Review – and why it’s such an environmental disaster. 18 million people have already been displaced with more to come. China Environmental Review has some pretty good stuff on what’s happening there in China.

Dated, but then again, it’s not.  Youtube video on how we are (still) cooking the planet.

This is scary (VERY) –

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels may have been lower in warm eras of the Earth’s distant past than once believed, scientists reported this week.

The finding raises concern that carbon dioxide levels from fossil fuel burning may, in the near future, be closer to those associated with ancient hothouse climates.

More immediately, the work brings one line of palaeoclimate evidence “” that deduced from ancient soils “” into agreement with other techniques for studying past climate.

“It makes a major revision to one of the most popular methods for reconstructing palaeo-CO2,” says Dana Royer, a palaeobotanist at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, who was not involved in the work. “This increases our confidence that we have a decent understanding of palaeo-CO2 patterns.”  Soils Give Clean Look At Past Carbon Dioxide

Arctic Ocean’s Ice-Free Past May Shed Light on 2100, Study Says:

Evidence that the Arctic Ocean was ice-free 3 million years ago, when average global temperatures were similar to projections for 2100, may shed light on how the far north will change as the Earth warms, a U.S. scientist said.

Fossilized shells recovered from the seabed show the Arctic Ocean was ice-free for at least part of the year during the mid- Pliocene era about 3 million to 3.3 million years ago, U.S. Geological Survey researcher Marci Robinson said in the journal Stratigraphy. The average temperature globally was about 3 degrees Celsius (5.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today, in line with United Nations forecasts for 2100, she said.

Robinson also found that during the mid-Pliocene, the Arctic warmed more than the global average. The summer sea surface temperature in parts of the Arctic Ocean ranged from 10 to 18 degrees Celsius compared with about 0 degrees now. Warmer parts were further north, a “counterintuitive” effect that may be due to altered surface currents, the researcher wrote.

The findings provide a possible comparison “to future climate conditions if the current rate of Arctic sea-ice reduction continues,” Robinson said.

So”¦ the evidence suggests that [1] we get more warming from a given amount of atmospheric CO2 than previously thought, and [2] we get a huge shift in Arctic ice (with all the implied ramifications) for not unreasonable projections of warming. Of course, that level of ice loss contributes significantly to the warming; the albedo flip feedback isn’t as attention-getting as the potential destabilizing many gigatons of carbon in permafrost and methane hydrate deposits, but it’s already happening, and it’s virtually certain to keep making its contribution to warming well beyond the year 2100.

Combine these effects and you get an uncomfortably large multiplier on an already very uncomfortable situation.

Worth reading – An Apology.  He’s saying the same things I’m saying about the forthcoming collapse with a nicer way of saying it. But I think everyone should read this apology and pass it on to their kids, friends and family members.

Video of James Hansen – Storms Of My Grandchildren “In Storms of My Grandchildren, Dr. James Hansen””the nation’s leading scientist on climate issues””speaks out for the first time with the full truth about global warming: The planet is hurtling even more rapidly than previously acknowledged to a climatic point of no return.”  There is a website dedicated to this new book here.

Quote from Peter Goodchild:

The greatest danger of fossil-fuel depletion, on the other hand, is that human life itself will come to an end. This is not a topic to stir the patriotism of the sheltered souls of Middle America. It is a nightmare. The simplest arithmetic shows that 7 billion humans cannot be fed with the products of pre-industrial agriculture. We can try to hide from that reality by planting a few rows of tomatoes and lettuce up at the cottage on a summer weekend, but deep in our hearts we know that human life requires far more than tomatoes and lettuce.

Even more frightening is the thought that those doomed human beings will not float up into the sky and enter some other dimension. Their deaths will not be anesthetized. Death by famine is slow and painful. It is not just hunger, and it is not just fasting. After a few weeks without food, the entire body starts to fall apart. Not a very nice topic for a high-school essay. It is far better that we allow our teenagers to continue their air-conditioned lives, to dwell in what Ibsen called a doll’s house. Oil & The Environment

Peter Goodchild got the above right, but he errs greatly when he claims that our oil addiction / collapse will “make our environmental problems go away”. That is absolute bullshit. We will rape and pillage and plunder with an intensity the world has NEVER seen before when this happens, and that destructive force by nearly 7 BILLION humans (a number which will probably be even higher then this) will cause such environmental havoc that even I fail to comprehend.

In other words, we’re going to burn it all, anyway we can.  We’re definitely not just going to lay down and go quietly into the night.  Eventually, as our human numbers are reduced, the environment stands a slim chance to restore itself, but we’re still a long ways away from that time frame.  By then, I honestly do not expect there to be much left.

Time Warp

I think it is actually possible to leap-frog ahead in thought (and action) on what it means to have a destabilized climate.  The climate we have been accustomed to, and the one in which we built and adapted our entire civilization around, is changing in unpredictable ways.

But we do know enough about these changes and variations to understand that we can no longer count on what we’ve experienced in our past.  This would included all of our assumptions about fresh water, agriculture and crop production, population stability, industrial and economic activity, even things like the nature of warfare.

The point is, we know that we are facing some very terrifying scenarios, which is why we must be doing everything we can right now to attempt to mitigate these effects.  How we do this, and what we do have long been a point of bitter contention.

I’m going to leap ahead and give you the answer to all of this.  Local sustainable living is the only possible solution. It is simply too bad that this is a message and a lifestyle that is being resoundly rejected, since it represents the near-death of industry, the economy, governmental control and global domination.

The oil industry and indeed, all of capitalistic society demands that we continue with our business as usual approach and will do absolutely everything that they possibly can to ensure that you are bamboozled into believing that this is “for the best”.

I should also add, that they want you to believe that this is “the best for everyone”, but that’s not true of course either, because there are only a relative few that are being benefitted, while everyone else on a planetary scale, including all future human generations and all living species is going to be paying for this exclusiveness.

These industries and pillars of our society care absolutely nothing about your children or grandchildren (or you), all they care about is the money in your pocket, today.  We cannot look to these agencies for any solutions or answers at all, and in point of fact, all that they have offered us so far is more greenwash, whitewash and hogwash.  Hybrid cars and solar panels and wind turbine and algae biofuel production — so we can keep doing what we’ve been doing, which is consume more energy, use up more resources, continue to overpopulate the planet and make these bastards even richer. They’re trying to profit at huge increases from our growing peril.

I say fuck ’em all.  I reject the notion that we are going to be able to continue life as we know it by greenwashing our lifestyles. A switch to a new form of energy production / consumption will most definitely not save the planet or stabilize the climate.  How could it? This is a pipe dream and a lie. The lie is much deeper then this however, because it continues to embrace everything that has led to our declining planet.  Even if we could make this switch — should we?  Or are we just doing the same kinds of damage and destructive behavior as ever?  None of these technologies address our lifestyles sufficiently enough to change the outcome of anything.

I’ve long written about future generations in past articles, it is irresponsible for us to be so damnably self-centered about our lifestyles that we’re willing to sacrifice future generations like we are.  There is plenty of evidence that we’re not even mildly concerned for our own kids!!

This is a terrible indictement of our the real nature of our “humanity” and why I’m am truly appalled at how apathetic and indifferent we have become.  It is no wonder was can stand in silence and watch Gaza turned into the largest open air prison ghetto in the world, we simply do not care what happens to someone else.

The worst case scenarios projections have humanity going nearly extinct in a very short span of time (less then 100 years) as climate feedbacks and the collapsing dominoes of resource destruction fall.  That’s pretty serious issue.  So why are most of us still naively pretending that we don’t have a rather major problem on our hands?  Even if this were only mildly true or had a small percentage of happening, risk assessment teaches us that we simply cannot afford the risk — at all.

I know I rant on this a lot, but we cannot fix what we cannot honestly admit to.  When we lie to ourselves, we lie about any possible response we might be able to come up with.  We engage in a self-deluding path of egregarious behaviors that can only result in furthering our risk and dangers.  The truth must be acknowledged, no matter how painful or discomforting it is.

We cannot adapt to what we pretend isn’t happening.  We can’t pretend either that it will only take some of us to get involved to take corrective actions either. If a few thousand or even a few million people all by themselves were left to try to fix or adapt to these things, what good could it possibly do?  It would do absolutely no good at all, it would be as if they had done nothing at all despite all of their efforts.

I honestly hold zero hope (ZERO) that our best intentions and efforts will effectively forestall our collapse. We will collapse inevitably because we cannot stop what we are doing and because there are always going to be too few who will do enough and finally, because we have already done too much damage. We’re simply too vested in the status quo and all that this means — and we’ve done such incredible levels of damage already that we have already “built in” our forthcoming collapse.

I know that not a lot of people see that, but they’re also working within verticle disciplines and viewpoints. That prevents them from connecting the growing dots from all over the world and seeing the bigger picture.  That, and an unwillingness to accept the facts as they really are.  The decades leading up to this one have taken a terrible toll upon the natural environment and earth systems, we are being unbelievably obtuse to think that we are simply going to rectify this damage overnight.  There are still too many industries and human activities (read: people) still robbing the earth for sustanance and energy.  Until that problem goes away, all else will utterly fail.

If the image below doesn’t show up, here is the direct video link, Stealing Our Reality.

You really MUST watch this video.  What I’m seeing is a “consensus” of doom is forming that is in alignment with my own expectations.