Tide Rising

A very welcome (and timely) donation from Charles (France) of $400 was received! Thank you Charles!

I was planning on closing down the blog and shutting off the Internet at the end of this month, but this has made it possible for me to keep the lights on here for a while longer.
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Two books were passed into my hands to read, which I’d like to recommend:

“Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself”, by Rich Roll, is along the lines of “Born to Run”, and reveals the indomitable human spirit (and a lot of huge mistakes along the way). I’ve read through both titles and definitely recommend them both. Ultra is also about food and how we’ve got it really messed up on what we eat.

I’m also borrowing a copy of “Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat”, by Howard Lyman, which is the story of a factory Big Ag farmer feedlot operator in Montana and how he came to reject the entire concept (and no longer eats meat either). What he reveals about cattle operations will sicken you, unless of course you’re just someone who doesn’t give a damn and think your pride matters more then health, cruelty or the total destruction of the biosphere.

I’ve met more then a few people who are like that. They’re damned proud to be stupid and refuse facts, science and evidence. As I recently shared, they’re extinctionists, hell-bent on ensuring we wipe everything else out first and then ourselves. They’re arrogant and quite stupid people. They also go by other names too.

What we are doing to the Earth (our only home) is totally unforgivable. It’s also inescapable now – there is no place on Earth you can go, not even to the deepest parts of the oceans and not find the destructive pollution and poisons of mankind. It’s absolutely everywhere now.

The quest to find health, happiness and safe, edible food isn’t as popular as it should be. Too many people are still enamored with fast living and faster dying, taking no thought for what they put into their bodies or the sicknesses that are inherently found with eating pure poison. I’ve managed to cut out a lot of garbage from my own life and continue to work on this constantly. I’m pretty happy with the progress I’ve made, but the more that I come to know and understand the food industry, the more disgusted and shocked I am.

People that eat badly should consider their habits far more carefully then they do, otherwise a bullet to the brain would be less costly and less painful. It’s hard to watch someone you love die because they simply didn’t give a damn about what they put into their bodies, but that’s a private matter that I’m dealing with right now. Don’t take my word on this, read the books for yourself.

Our species seems to be only concerned with itself and daily gratification of self. Long term focus is pretty difficult for the species, even though we supposedly have agencies and institutions that are tasked with this kind of objective. They’re staffed with humans however, and all humans seem to find it it difficult to take information, process it down into daily activities and habits that are beneficial and non-harmful. Instead, the easy way is usually the path most followed. The latte at Starbucks, the quick lunch off the food truck, the late-night snacking, hours and hours of semi-comatose television exposure, the easy adoption of endless propaganda and programming, the corporate policy of coercion and compliance to company objectives (none which are healthy and non-harmful to anyone or anything), and I’m not just referencing food and diet either, but all aspects of our supposedly “civilized” society.

It is our civilization, and our society, and our ways of conducting “business”, and how we live in our homes each and every day, and what we find ourselves doing, 24/7 to “survive” on this world, and how we’ve built this wall of indifference, callousness and apathy to all the astonishingly high levels of harm we are causing, even going so far as to convince ourselves that it is all necessary.

Which is bullshit of course, but it’s part of the propaganda found throughout our entire lives as human beings. It’s necessary to destroy the environment because humans need the resources. It’s necessary to expand our civilization to accommodate more humans. It’s necessary for more growth to support more economic activity. This is all translated into a billion different tiny actions, all working in concert to overcome, overpower and dominate the entire biosphere for exclusive human use, monetizing virtually everything. We’ve grown ourselves (by depletion and destruction of course) from a few hundred, to a few thousand, to a few million, to billions and billions spread out all over the planet, but not without a terrifying cost to ourselves and to the only place humans can ever call home. And we don’t care, not really. We’re surrounded by the evidence that we really don’t give a damn.

We’re surviving (for now), but nothing else really is. And our survival looks increasingly threatened when you take an honest assessment of what we’ve done and where this is all going. It’s a topic that I’ve spent a long, long time talking about here. But recent studies have suggested that humans really don’t want to know what the future holds, we’re not wired to cope with this knowledge. We’d much rather be uninformed (and unmoved) by what hard times may lie ahead. So this helps explain why we take so little real interest in tomorrow and so much more interest in today. What is happening right now is of much more concern to us, and we have a hard time adding up what it will mean for tomorrow.

I don’t know if you need to be of a particular personality or persuasion or whatever it is to be like that (or not like that), but I’ve always had an interest in assessing the future. It could be because I’ve overcome some astounding obstacles myself, much more so then the ones you will read about in these two books I’m recommending. Having to look ahead when you’ve been so far down to the very point of death and defeat is probably a choice – but what choice is that, really? Do we / I just give up and quit, abandon all hope and desire, dreams and ambitions and the ones you love? Or do you rise above “the impossible” and rejoin the fight and struggle to survive?

It depends on who you are, in the end. And where you are in your life, in your head. Quitting is a choice, just as much as living is. Everything else springs from there, in a daily cascading domino effect of tiny, cumulative choices resulting in individual actions and activities, which in turn, multiplied by over 7 billion humans, has tremendous impact upon what the “future” really is. In other words, the future is what we make it. We will most certainly have to accept the future we’ve already created, but we still have opportunity to influence the outcome.

The problem then it seems, is to get enough people making informed decisions and individual choices about themselves, without rejecting knowledge. It isn’t so much a “mass movement” that I’m advocating here, which is damned hard to do, but individuals who consciously choose what is better for them, and what is also better for others – and not just our own species either. That choice comes from knowledge and awareness, which today is being widely denigrated and denied. Which is ironic when you think about it – none of us would be here today – not a single one of us, if our parents and grandparents had accepted this kind of foolishness, rejecting knowledge. But there is a huge and growing meme that knowledge, science, facts and evidence should be routinely rejected now in favor of opinions and bias, which is utterly ridiculous and ultimately self-destructive.

Of course, it is also ironic that so many humans will pick-and-choose which knowledge they deem acceptable and what knowledge they won’t. It is evident that they lack the ability to even understand a lot of the knowledge, facts, science and evidence that make up the world. But they benefit from this nonetheless, while counter-intuitively rejecting it (hypocrites comes to mind). What this means is the species is capricious in many ways, having the capacity to learn and adapt to learning but then refusing to do so.

This does not bode well for the future, it indicates to me at least, that this “rising tide of stupid” will drown out everything else in the end, even our ability to survive on this planet. Despite being a “half-empty” glass kind of guy, I’m still hoping to see my fellow humans rise about bias, opinion and “stupid” before this self-destructive attitudes and beliefs destroy everything for everybody. I find it totally unacceptable that one species could be so uncaring, so insensitive and so blind, yet so incredibly bright, capable and intelligent at the same time that they would allow themselves to be overtaken by propaganda and “stupid” in favor of self-destruction.

But that is most definitely, the path we are still firmly on.