OK, Now What?

Got a note from one of my faithful readers in Pennsylvania, in response to my article, "See Ya And Raise Ya:"

We are on the same wave length, it is almost scary, like being into someone elses mind.

I posted a think about the Catholic church and got a response that shows "people hear what they want to hear", so I guess you have to save your breath. So much is happening so fast that it is getting hard to keep up. I don't think the masses want a world bank, they want a fair shake and know that the banks are the ones that are preventing it. Then you get all the "political invaders" in there, stirring them up.  Most people don't want to face the facts, that is a truth.

My reply, in part, was along the lines of: we have to give up trying to wake folks up, and start discussing what we're going to do once the whole damn thing collapses.

From the way things look over here on the Far Side, the complete and utter cave-in of the New World Order (i.e. what we got now).  And we shouldn't be thinking about what scraps we can save.  It's better to utterly destroy the whole thing, lest it rise again from the ashes.

It's like that scene at the end of 'Time Bandits,' after they've completely baked Evil.  The Supreme Being tells the boys to be careful and get every bit cleaned up, or Evil will just rise again.

Another metaphor is bamboo, which is rather apt for our current surroundings.  If you cut down a bamboo stalk, two grow back in its place.  If you don't dig down about two feet and make a wall around the roots, then it will spread like wildfire.  The only way to stop it is to uproot every bit of the plant and burn the whole thing, or you'll be cutting bamboo again in about two months.

Let's look at the situation this way.  Not too long ago, you were a kook if you:

• believed in black helicopters - now everyone knows about them and many know that the N-numbers and insignia are painted in infrared colors;
• refused to believe the official song and dance about 9/11;
• you said the Iraq/Afghanistan wars were about oil;
• if you thought the next president would be worse than Reagan/Clinton/both Bushes;
• believed in the existence of the New World Order;
• didn't genuflect and cross yourself every time you said the name Obama.

This is all common knowledge now and it's hard to find someone to disagree with you for an entertaining argument.  Frankly, if anyone still believes that America is the savior of the world and that Obama is a Man of Peace, there's no hope for them.  Heck, it's even hard to find someone who admits voting for the slimeball these days.  I actually hear some folks say they wish they had voted for Hillary, though I daresay that's like wishing you had Satan while Mephistopheles is poking you with his trident.

The proper way to go about this, is to wish that Obama would go hunting with Cheney.  Now we're getting somewhere.

The point to all this is that we should start turning our thoughts and efforts to deciding what to do AFTER the collapse.  What do we replace The System with?  How do we handle banking and finance?  How about governments in a post-centralized world?  And should banksters and lawyers become the new N-word and F-word...unspeakable and unthinkable?

To begin the argument, I think it's obvious we can not go back to centralized anything.  With the state of technology, there's no reason to have mega-cities.  Most cost-center jobs can be done from the living room, while manufacturing is quickly moving towards mass-customization, meaning small, multi-purpose assembly lines scattered around in various strategic locations would allow anyone with come up with an idea and make it nearby.  A prime example is the car built with a 3-D printer that hit the headlines a while back.

The guy who discovered Comet Elenin was using a rent-a-telescope in New Mexico while he sat in his house in Russia.  Why can't we do that with factories?

As for banking and finance?  No reason why we can't use digi-bux, as long as it's backed by something real.  Each geographic location could produce their own accounting and statistics, auditable by any other geographic location.  Based on the total output of a given area, they could issue a certain amount of digi-bux, which the locals would earn for goods and services, and then spend in the open markets.

If a certain region didn't want to join the world, and wanted to live like the Amish, they could.  If another region wanted to become trans-human and turn themselves into cyborgs, they could.  But no region would be allowed to dictate to any other region.  And people traveling would have to abide by the rules of the region they were in.  If they didn't like it, they could move on.

Each region would be limited to a certain physical size, say 500,000 square kilometers.  No region could annex or take over another.  Each would be completely autonomous and could form whatever governance it wanted, or go completely without.  There would be no passports or ID cards.  You are who you say you are until someone says different.

The upshot of this little discussion is that everyone gets into revolutionary fits and wants to tear down the existing regime.  But no one sits around and thinks about what they're going to do afterwards.  Look at Libya and Egypt right now.  Just a bunch of folks wandering around picking their noses asking, "What now?"  A successful revolution is NOT kicking the bad guys out, it's putting something better in their place.

There's no reason why we can't have a global set of Rights and a global integrated system.  The secret is to keep it from getting centralized and sucking up all the power, wealth and resources.  A good start would be to ban corporations and lawyers and banksters forever and a day.

All laws must be written in plain language, address only one issue, and can not be any longer than 10 pages.  There can be individuals and groups of individuals, and groups of groups, but no entity can have individual rights except an individual.  All companies and associations must have officers who are personally liable for the actions of the group under their control.  Most importantly, all banks can only operate within the confines of their home region, and may never have branches or allegiances outside of it.  

Finally, all trials must be jury trials, no one may hire themselves out as a 'lawyer' or 'attorney,' and judges only exist to answer questions of law and keep order.  Basically, a referee.  In fact, they can't wear black robes, only striped shirts.  Juries are selected by randomly picking the first 12 people you find outside.  No voir dire.  

One last biggie.  No public schools operated by a government entity.  All schools must be privately owned and operated.  They can teach any curriculum in any manner they see fit, and the market will choose the ones with the best track records for turning out smart people.

That's it.  See how simple that was?  Now all we have to do is implement it.  We;ll get the chance, because revolution or not, the system is collapsing.  The situation boils down to making sure we get off on the right foot after the mess is cleaned up.  If we continue to do what we've always done, then we'll always get what we've always had: serfdom and poverty.

Now's the time to be thinking about what to replace the current mess with, and even starting to build on it, so that when the other leg gets kicked out from under the stool, we'll have a running start for the exits.

How can we act on this now?  Well, while you're stocking up, why not think about tools you'll need.  How about books?  Think about what 10 books you'd want in civilization collapsed and you needed to rebuild.  "The Way Things Work" would be a great start.  Maybe a chemistry book or two.  Some philosophy and classical discourse.  Physics?  Why not?  Put them in your safe storage with your rice and beans and water filters.

Communications are vitally important for rebuilding.  How about some radio gear and a book on electro-magnetic propagation?

Telescopes and microscopes, definitely.  A good book on astronomy would help you predict the seasons.  Heck, if you know the stars well enough, you can puzzle out your exact location on Earth by the declination and right ascention of key stars.

Storing away some bricks and mortar BEFORE the earthquake can never be a bad idea, both literally and metaphically.

Chances like the one we are in the middle of now only come along once every few hundred years.  With some careful thought and planning, we can make a pretty good stab at doing it right this time.  It's all just a matter of thinking and acting, instead of veging and watching.  No one ever solved a major global issue watching football and soap operas.

By the way, has it occurred to anyone else to save old vinyl recordings?  You can play them with a styrofome cup and a sewing needle, without electricity.  Just a thought when you really need that Mozart fix and the CD/DVD players don't work.

How many 'survival' sites have you seen THAT on?

Irishman On A Barstool

While the title of this column may seem redundant, it comes from the old saying: Put two Irishmen on barstools and they'll solve the world's problems in a night.


Being Irish AND Texan makes us imminently qualified to save the world.  Certainly, those two groups are the only being on the planet with a point of view big enough to even consider the task.  With that said, it falls once again on our shoulders to straighten out this mess we ironically call Western Civilization.


Like any farmer will tell you, you can't kill the weed unless you kill the root.  Many folks will tell you that money is the root of all evil.  We beg to differ, seeing more clearly than most.  Actually, the Root of All Evil is Matthew 18:20.  In case your New Testament is a bit rusty, this line says, "For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them."


We know what you're thinking: "How could one line in an ancient work of fiction be the cause of all problems in the world today?"  We hear you.  Took us a while to figure this out, as well.  It just doesn't seem possible, right?


Well, follow along here...


The Roman Church (the Eastern churches are a little more sane) read this line as saying, when people gather at church, it constitutes a Body in Christ, or Corpus Christi.  Remember that word "corpus," it will come back to haunt us.


As a Body, this group therefore acted in concert as one being for the greater glory of God, and could not be separated into its individual components, or human being.  As the theological reasoning goes, this Body became the spiritually purified Corpus Christi, fed by his Flesh and Blood.  It acted as a single Mind, ultimately uniting the katholikos, or Universe, under the single banner of God (which gets into Law of Flags pretty darned fast).


This concept was incorporated (see? there's that word again) into the Ecclesiastical and Canonical Law, which was basically Roman Administrative Law inherited from the Law of Hammurabi via the (Holy) Roman Empire.  The Law of Hammurabi is the first known codification of contract, which is the foundation for all that follows from it.


So, the Roman Church decided that any group of its members constituted a Body, and was therefore incorporated, or 'within the Body'.  


By applying the Law of Contract, the Church decided that each member of the corporation (embodiment) was essentially under contract with the Body as a whole.  Thus, they were required to perform certain duties to ensure the health of the Body, such as pay taxes (donate money, tithing), observe certain rules and rites, and so forth.  If one failed to do this, he or she could be ex communicare, or 'out of communication' with the rest of the Body.


Now, since the (Holy) Roman Empire pretty much dominated the Western Hemispere for 1,000 years, it stands to reason that the Ecclesiastical and Canonical Law would underpin pretty much all other law in the nations subject to it.


Almost every voyage of 'discovery', such as Columbus', were invasions of conquest to claim the world for the Body of Christ.  If you didn't 'volunteer' to convert to Catholicism, you were summarily slaughtered.  If the color of your skin was anything less than the pearly white color of Jay-zus, then you were a lesser Creation and needed extra purifying (by whatever means were most painful).


What's that?  You don't think Jay-zus was white?  Just look at a thousand years of art throughout Europe.  He looks pretty danged white to me.


Back to the topic at hand...


When you were baptized, and later just by being born and 'registered', you became a part of the Corpus.  The modern nation-state operates almost identically to the (Holy) Roman Empire and its official church.  As a means of control, you are made fealty to the State, which is turn pays fealty to Rome.  It's just a hierarchical structure ultimately leading to the ruling God-head.  In other words, it's a pyramid with God at the top and His Ambassador (the pope) His designated ruler until He gets back from wherever it is He goes in times like these.

Pyramid?  With an All-Seeing All-Knowing God at the top?  Hmmm...where have we seen that image before?


Thus, we come to the modern situation.  We have groups of people acting in unison to effect change in the world.  They are united in purpose and vision, and thus constitute a Body under the law.  Since they are corporate, they are called a person without distinction for individuals within that Body.  Therefore, they enjoy a 'corporate veil' that shields the individual 'cells' of the Body from personal liability for the actions of the Body, since the Body is groups of cells acting together in common cause.


Now, with all that lined up, we can clearly see that the mega-corporations that run our lives and have more rights than individual human beings are nothing more than an extension of one line in one gospel in one book written back in the 300s.  Since these corporations are probably 90% of the problem with current society, we have a clear and defined means to change the world.  It requires three steps:


1) Immediately stop the requirement to 'register' (tell the king) the details of every birth, and all the documents and IDs based on that registration.


2) Strip corporations of their veils and legal status as 'persons', and limit the term 'person' to mean a single, solitary, natural human being.


3) Strip the Roman Church of its sovereign legal status, and forbid all churches everywhere from owning property of any kind, and take away their tax-free status.  They may only hold property as individuals, and the individuals are liable for the actions of the organizations they run.


You could write the law on a single sheet of paper, double-spaced for clarity.  Once passed and signed into law, it would take all of about three months to bring the world to a New Age of Liberty and Freedom, the likes of which have seldom been seen throughout history.

So, true to our Irish-Texan heritage, we have solved pretty much all of the world's problems in 1,000 words or less.  We think that anyone who deeply ponders the broad implications of both the status quo, and the beauty of the world without artificial 'persons', will have to agree with us.  In fact, you have to agree with us just because we're Irish-Texan and infallible in our reasoning.  Heck, the world should band together as a single body and declare us pope!


Ugh!  What are we saying?  Letting our power run away with us again...


Oh, and one other little change.  How about making politicians joinly and severally liable for any damages caused by laws that they pass?  Maybe that would get them to actually read the dam nthings before they vote on them.  Or maybe not....