T-Day Arrives

Some time around midnight West Indonesia Time (WIB), Donald Trump will recite the time-honored and Constitutionally required Oath of Office and receive the keys to the White House.

To say that this will be a momentous occasion would not be hyperbole, nor would it be original, since a great many people have already said it intending a great many interpretations.  The spectrum of expectations range from Apocalypse to New Atlantis and the Second Renaissance.

I try to avoid expectations so as to not color my perceptions of what is actually happening in the world.  I am certainly excited to see history unfolding, since I have long anticipated the collapse of the post-WW2 World Order and the rise of Something Else.  What that "else" will be remains to be seen, though.  There are many competing forces trying to grab the wheel and steer the next century or so.

As if to mark the event, both George and Barbara Bush went into the hospital and an unexploded German bomb was found at the bottom of the Thames in central London - fitting metaphors for the changing of the guard.

A century ago, the world was transitioning to motor cars and electricity.  A radical new device called the "telephone" was in its infancy.  Wireless radio broadcasting was just six years old in public use.  That world was changing radically when Woodrow Wilson took his second Oath of Office as America's 28th president.

As Trump takes the helm of a fading empire, the world is transitioning from analog to digital communications, most people under 30 years old can't write a letter much less explain what a postage stamp is, humanity is pondering becoming a multi-planet species (if it isn't already), and Artificial Intelligence is quickly revolutionizing the very core of civilization.

That's quite a leap for a span of time where there are still a number of people who remember when telephones were an amazing contraption and not a vital part of daily life (not to mention a major pain in the ass).

At this point, I don't believe any leader, much less Donald Trump, has any idea where things are headed, any more than I believe Woodrow Wilson had any idea that the "War to End All Wars" would be the cause of a bigger and more devastating war.  Unfortunately, he died before he could taste the bitter fruits of his actions.

Wilson is a fine example of people having "future blindness."  They project their hopes and desires onto generations whose lives will be vastly different from their own.  This often leads to the now-infamous "unintended consequences' of myth and legend.  As any sailor or swimmer can tell you, it is far better to ride the currents than to try and change them.

Far too often, people with "visions" get into positions of influence who then proceed to change the currents.  When they do, they make two mistakes: 1) they establish lofty expectations that frequently end in disappointment and disaster, and 2) they rarely let the course of Nature find its native equilibrium.  As anyone who has studied history or chemistry knows, whenever systems get out of equilibrium, there is usually a violent backlash to the center, which is precisely what led us to today and the inauguration of Donald Trump.

The biggest question, at least in my admittedly muddled mind, is whether Trump will try to change the current, or will he wisely steer a course down the point of equilibrium?

A metaphor often applied to social currents is the pendulum.  There is one fundamental flaw with the common conception of this model, however.  Most people think of a pendulum as only swinging back and forth between two points - i.e. the left-right paradigm.

If you've ever observed a free-swinging pendulum, you know that within 24 hours, it will complete a full circle, having passed through 360 points along the way.  When I conceive of social currents, I don't limit them to just two points, I see a full spectrum of possibilities, which all will - at some point or another - express themselves in order to maintain the equilibrium, which for a pendulum is dead center of the circle.

True and effective leaders balance all the points, not just swing from one extreme to the other.  Unfortunately, I believe Trump is the latter.  He is the symptom, the result of having a very limited conception of the spectrum of possibilities.  Having suffered for decades under the left-wing side of the swing, the US is now violently shifting to the other.  If we envision this as a boat listing hard to one side, then everyone is running to the other to try and balance it.  The result, though, is for the ship to list hard to the opposite side, rather than righting itself.  The process repeats endlessly until either the passengers realize the balance is in the center, or until the ship capsizes to one side or the other.

It is a tedious and boring process because there is no progress, just a lot of running back and forth.  Balance is never achieved long enough to consider where the ship is headed.  Instead, the entire societal focus in on achieving an even keel through the use of imbalances, and it will never work.

One does not cure injustice with another injustice.  One does not end racism by offsetting it with a different flavor of racism.  Most importantly, one does not change things by beating everyone about the head and neck with a rubber truncheon until the world submits.

Balance is achieved by letting everyone do what it is that makes them happy, as long as they allow others the same courtesy and don't harm others in the process.  There are far too many competing interests in the world - a full 360 degrees of them - to allow any one group a bit more freedom than another.

If Trump is a wise leader, he will get rid of mass surveillance, put an end to "hate" laws, stop caving in to every whim of the LGBTQ mafia, and get folks to realize that murder is murder, assault is assault, and injury is injury, no matter what adjectives one strings in front of their personal noun.

Economic balance is achieved by reducing anti-competitive regulations and giving everyone a fair shot at the prize.

Harmony is when everyone agrees to the same set of rules and then abides by them.

The Sounds Of Our Lives

Today's soundtrack can be found by clicking here.

OK, I've figured out all the world's problems.  See?  You knew if you stuck around long enough, that I, your faithful correspondent, would eventually figure it all out.

The Problem Is (are you ready?)...

MUSIC

That's right...music.  Go ahead, turn on your radio to something other than talk shows.  See what I mean?

I don't know about your side of the world, but here on the Far Side, K-Pop is all the rage.  If you haven't been subjected this somewhat harmonized caterwauling, it's a bunch of Korean whatevers wearing make-up and flashy costumes sync-dancing to songs that remind me of the innards of a good-sized pimple.  In fact, I've had some pimple guts that were far more creative.

Over on the Near Side, the music scene took a belly-flop at the beginning of the Noughties and the demise of the Grunge Movement.  Lyrics became mantric repetitions of inane "hey babies" and the instrumentation bowed out and let the rhythm sections take over while the rest of the band went out in the alley to smoke a joint and talk about where to go from here.

Think about it...in the 40s, sweet pipes like Sinatra and Cosby crooned us into a stupor with grammatically understandable lyrics.  In the 50s, talents like Chuck, Elvis, Jerry Lee and Buddy brought R&B out of the smoky dens of dark inner cities and into the Rock & Roll revolution.  That movement blended with the wild explosion of creativity of the 60s, where folk met rock met gospel and they had an ecstatic orgy of sound and meaning.

In the 70s, we briefly saw the Disco Monster rear its horrible head, but it was eventually conquered by the Pettys and Springsteens of the world, and their harmonies inspired the Grunge Movement of the late 80s and 90s.

But, then a terrible thing happened.  Little did we realize that the Disco Monster, just before expiring, had thrown out an egg sac that fertilized with with another inner-city movement called "rap."  The offspring that emerged were horrific in their countenance.  The Pop Movement was born, and like any good bowel movement, it landed on the world with a resounding thud and immediately drew flies.

Lyrics have devolved into endlessly repeated catch-phrases - like diamonds in the sky - and the performers are all of the same pasty, limp noodle variety with little more than a well-placed sequin to distinguish them.  In fact, the most interesting product of this insipid movement are the videos, which are anathema to music, since music is intended to be (ahem) heard, not seen.

You can see the effect in the eyes of the Millennial Generation.  Their hollow haunted looks reflect that complete lack of creativity in their shared culture.  Like some warped Zen koan, they are forced to draw meaning from meaninglessness, and the result is a vacuous mentality that seeks nothing, because that is always the point of a good koan.

While pondering this article, I went and checked my own library.  My collection begins with the Dawn of Time and runs right up to the early 2000s, then abruptly stops.  The collection encompasses nearly every form of music ever recorded, even the sounds of planets and stars (oddly melodic by the way), but from the last 16 years, almost nothing, not even movie soundtracks or show tunes.  Creativity in music just died.

Music is one of those things we all take for granted, but is very important to humans.  Hearing is pretty much the strongest human sense. Our eyes aren't worth a damn, compared to the rest of the animal kingdom.  Our sense of smell is only a fraction of other beasts.  However, nearly half or more of our experience in the Universe comes through our hearing.

Music is vital to culture, can excite vivid memories and can unite radically diverse groups across physical distance and across generations.  Creating music is one of humanity's most primal instincts.  It is a language that all people understand instinctively.  Music, in fact, is embedded in the very nature of all we perceive, and that is not hyperbole.

At its core, music is just harmonious vibrations.  We are sensitive to the harmony, finding some vibrations pleasing, while others irritate or excite us in a wide variety of ways.  Music is the expression of time and mathematics, as music cannot exist without time and its very nature is wavelengths - sine waves of various lengths.

Who among us can listen to Wagner without feeling our pulse quicken?  Is not Beethoven the embodiment of joy?  Even the sounds of the gamelan evokes the endless and serene world of tropical Earth.  From humanity's earliest awakenings, music has been a vital and uniting force behind our civilizations.

Yet, here we are.  We have arrived at the empty and meaningless Age of Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, the vacuous noises of Psy and Lee Ji-Eun, and the violet arrhythmia of Dead Kennedys or Sex Pistols.

We have entered an era where art has devolved into something called "self-expression."  It has affected all media and forms, and it has laid waste to the very fabric of society.  It is hard to separate the devolution of music from the increasing courseness of society.  Whether art has followed the increasing destruction of harmonious culture, or led it, is of little consequence, but it is certain that a major change in music - a burst of creative force - would give great power to the restoration of peaceful and harmonious life.

If all life and existence is based on vibrations, then it stands to reason that the most powerful force we can unleash - for good or bad - is vibrations.  Meaningful and harmonious vibrations fill our lives with peace, while empty and vacuous ones cause strife.

We call upon the musicians of the world to return us to peace with your music!

Welcome To The Machine

Why would anyone in their right mind place their lives, or the lives of anyone they even remotely care about, in the hands of a computer?

I have never met, nor do I ever expect to meet, a piece of technology that functions perfectly at all times and in all places.  Oh sure, I have a number of decidedly low-tech machines, like A/C units, a refrigerator, a microwave, a washing machine, etc. - that do reasonably well, given regular cleaning and maintenance.  But I bought my first piece of major electronic gear - an IBM 8086 computer - back in 1986, and I have been pulling my hair out over every successive purchase ever since.

The fact of the matter is that electronics, and the software that controls them, are susceptible to all sorts of problems.  Random electrical spikes, buggy code and the notorious "ghost in the machine" that plagues complex networks mean that putting one's life in the hands of a computer is tantamount to suicide.

Of late, self-driving cars and robots have all been the rage.  Uber in Singapore has fielded a fleet of driverless taxis.  Robotic and robot-assisted surgery is coming online.  Autonomous aircraft and boats are quickly becoming the military toys of choice.  In fact, artificial intelligence is being built into nearly every kind of device and appliance you can think of.

I love technology.  It can be very entertaining and certainly I have had a long career using some of the most cutting-edge communications technology available.  I am by no means a Luddite.  I regularly use tablets, laptops, cell phones, work stations, and very complex networks for lighting and sound.

But if you ask me to put my life, or anyone else's, in the hands of a machine that doesn't have a trained human operator controlling it, then I politely but firmly decline.

Not only are machines subject to all sorts of subtle and random quirks, there is also the matter of government and corporate back doors, and the ever-enthusiastic hackers who find breaking and entering electronic locks an irresistible challenge.  It's bad enough that organizations can build eerily detailed profiles of individuals based on their internet activity, but to put one's physical self and well-being in the hands of those organizations is deeply disturbing.

There are two things we can say with a great degree of certainty: machines do not always work perfectly, and lust for power will always lead some people to try and control other people.

Not only have driverless car deaths started to rise in the very short period this technology has been in the wild, but there is even discussion of programming these vehicles to sacrifice the lives on-board if the vehicles programming determines it will save other lives.  I don't know about you, but the latter is one decision that only I want to make for myself and those in the car with me.  As for the former, one of the creepiest scenes in Minority Report is when the "authorities" take over Tom Cruise's car and attempt to bring him in.

It appears that the individual is increasingly being asked to forfeit not only the right and responsibility of making one's own decisions, but to hand that right over to machines whose only capacity for making those decisions is based entirely on algorithms designed by someone else.  Furthermore, those algorithms are in the control of organizations that historically cannot be trusted, or even worse, individuals who have hacked the system for either random or targeted malfeasance.

It seems to me that this trend represents a massive stride backward in the development of humanity.  While the technology is certainly amazing in itself, it represents a complete surrender of humans from the social, political and philosophical battle for free will and independence.  Our most basic rights of self-determination and liberty are being laid at the altar of our creations, so that we are no longer the masters of our creativity, but are becoming slaves to it.

Europe has probably the most sophisticated train system in the world.  It is run by massive automated hubs across well over a dozen countries, and has been developed over the past 50 years.  For the most part, it runs rather efficiently, moving thousands of people daily through multiple countries.  However, when a glitch occurs, it results in the deaths of dozens, even hundreds of people, and even more horrific injuries.  These glitches result from a simple error in any one of hundreds of sensors and variables that affect everything from track switches to acceleration and braking timing.  The computers have no way to check the validity of their choices and feel no weight of responsibility for the lives they control.

No matter how advanced the intelligence of the machines, they cannot feel or empathize, and at best can only simulate these things to a living observer, who might be fooled into interpreting them as genuine.  In reality, though, the machines are only running complex algorithms that project what the authors intend, and not what the machine actually experiences.

At the moment, large numbers of people are experiencing excitement and curiosity over the novelty of these technologies.  What is deeply concerning is that, through government regulation and corporate lobbying, there may be no choice once the novelty has worn off.  Once the technologies are ubiquitous and the systems of modern life are completely dependent on them, it will be very difficult to turn back, to say the least.  Even more disturbing is the possibility of being compelled to accept this surrender to the machine to satisfy the lust for power on the parts of a very few people, whether for the financial benefit of building the infrastructure, or the more nefarious need to enslave.

We must decide immediately, both individually and collectively, to resist the novelty and shun the technology.  Not only does it represent a significant threat to life and limb, but an even more grave long-term threat to the rights and dignity of the individual.  It is bad enough that we should lose our right to self-determination to other humans, but to the cold and insensitive calculations of a machine represents a wholly new and unique development in human history.  Should the machines prove capable enough, it may require the utter destruction of civilization to free ourselves, if it is at all possible.  I don't think it overstates the case to say that once installed, there may be no way to uninstall it.  The machines may well prove better capable of repairing and replicating, than humans are at tearing down and destroying, and certainly the machines could determine that we are enough of a bother to exterminate our species.

It would be ironic that humanity's long effort to get someone else to do the dirty work and take the blame may ultimately be the end of our brief and fragile existence.

A Modest Proposal, Part 2

In my previous article, I argued that the Political Correctness movement of the past few decades has resulted in irreparable damage to the culture and especially education.  Given that culture is like a chain that, once broken, cannot be repaired, there is no longer any way to "fix the system" and the aware human must now focus on saving what we can for the day when it can be revived, much as the Renaissance did in Europe at the end of the medieval period.

I used the secret societies as an example of organization designed to both hide and propagate forbidden knowledge - and certainly that is what classical education has become.  I concluded by saying that I would propose a new way of looking at "prepping" and "survival" in this current epoch of history.

The important thing to realize at this point is that survival of the individual is subordinate to the survival of the culture.  Without the culture, survival is nothing more than a loose group of hunter-gatherers foraging for food in a daily struggle to live one more day.  It is the culture that has defined our advancement as a species from mere beasts of the field to homo sapiens - the wise man - and which is the basis for our technology and mastery of our condition.

When I look at the modern "prepping" movement, I see a heavy focus on buying gold and silver, and storing food and water.  This is a non-sensical approach to survival that is doomed to fail.  Gold and silver only have value in a culture capable of abstract concepts, such as storing wealth.  Storing food and water is fine, as long as you think you can stay in one place, which again depends on culture to form self-organized and self-sustaining societies.

The wise "propper" must be flexible and mobile.  One must be ready to go at any time in order to escape natural and man-made disasters.  What good will all your stores be if a tornado scatters it all to the winds, or a fire reduces it all to ash?  And how mobile can you be with several pounds of gold and silver coins in your pocket?  Or how safe would you be with that kind of target on your back?  This default to normalcy is a serious flaw in the thinking of many people who adhere to the "hunker down" theory of survival.

Even if you have stored a year's worth of groceries, or months worth of water, it will run out eventually.  Do you have the skills to can food or purify water or make a fire without all the modern conveniences provided by society?  Even more important, can you read the sky to know the season and location?  After all, planting survival seeds in mid-September will be fruitless in many parts of the world if you can't look at the stars and know that it's mid-September.

Can you calculate height or distance using your position and the Sun angle?  It would help if you are confronted with a mountain range and want to know how far away it is and how high you will have to climb to get over them.

The most critical thing to consider is how will you educate future generations (or yourself for that matter) without books?  How will you teach art, science and math to future generations when the internet is gone and you have no reference materials?  Sure, your stores may last for a while, but what about the long-term collapse of society and the multi-generational effort to rebuild from those ashes?

But even books, for all their low-tech wonders, are vulnerable and must be replaced regularly.  Could you make paper or parchment?  Ink from lampblack?  Find and harvest bee's wax and make candles?  A manual printing press?  No?  Then how can you record weather patterns, growing techniques and other critical information beyond your ability to talk to someone or beyond your lifetime?

The part of survival that few people ever stop to consider is that our entire civilization is predicated on the ability to reason critically and then transmit the results through time and space to other people.  Almost everything I have ever read on prepping and survival forgets that it is dependent on the ability to tell others how to do it.  All most of these folks want to do is sell you boxes of food, seeds and water filters, but neglect the very foundation of finding food, seeding plants and building water filters out of found objects.  Furthermore, they all assume that the infrastructure to pass on knowledge is a given technology that will always be there.

Some readers may think this is a silly and pointless article, that "someone" will always be able to print books or transmit information.  They fail to consider that these technologies were radical in their day, or that civilization and culture are dependent on our ability to transmit information to other locations and beyond our lifetimes.

So what's my solution?

First, a true prepper must learn the necessary skills to make paper, ink and bindings.  The ability to observe and document our environment is the first critical step to understanding.  Knowing how to read the sky (astronomy) and create stores of food anywhere at any time.

Once these skills are learned, you must be able to document and transmit the information to future generations.  It is said that we have built our world on the shoulders of giants, but what happens when those giants stumble and fall?

Once you have the ability to transmit information, you need the information to transmit.  Thus, I propose that groups of like-minded folks get together to create private libraries.  One of the scourges of modern society is the destruction of the public library.  It is vital, therefore, to work together to create a neighborhood library, privately funded and stocked.  Perhaps you or a neighbor have an empty basement.  Build some shelves and start buying bulk used books (very cheap these days).  And by books, I don't mean pop fiction, I mean the classics of art, science and mathematics.  We cannot depend on our ability to transmit or read binary code, so physical books are the only sure means to store and propagate information that cannot be intercepted or edited by outside parties.

And that brings up the whole reason for this line of thought.  As I mentioned in the last article, the system cannot be fixed and it has entered the dangerous realm of protecting itself from change.  It has already infected the minds of generations of people, who are now incapable of critical thinking or even controlling their emotions.  The system is perpetuating itself on its ability to control the flow and content of electronic information.  The hard-won right of free speech is being dismantled, and what's worse, the minds of the next generation are being controlled to the point that they are physically repulsed by open and unfettered discourse.  They literally cannot distinguish a logical fallacy from a condomed phallus.

The control of education, the destruction of the public library and the censoring of electronic discourse has reached a critical phase.  If not the current generation, then certainly the next will - a la Orwell - no longer be able to conceive of natural rights nor defend the reasons for having them.  They are becoming the ultimate slaves, who not only have no desire for freedom, but cannot imagine any other way of living.

It is fast reaching the point that individual survival is subordinate to the need to preserve and transmit information.  Our culture is dying by design, and the system that is doing it cannot be fixed.  It doesn't want to be fixed.  It was never intended to be fixed, as it is doing exactly what it was intended to do.

The time is now to create underground cultures to preserve and disseminate information and knowledge, however one can do that.  We must look to the success and structure of secret societies, which have done just this sort of thing for centuries.  We must accept that in the current epoch real knowledge is becoming a bad thing, and that those of us who want to preserve it are bad people.

To chose another literary example, look to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Or perhaps my own experience will illuminate the issue.

Back in the 1980s, when I first began studying alternative history and "subversive" knowledge, there was no internet or digital revolution.  The only way to get this information was through hard work and persistence.  If you wanted a copy of Henry Ford's The International Jew, or to see for yourself what mysteries were contained in The Poor Man's James Bond or The Anarchist's Handbook, one really had to go far out of the way to find it.  In fact, in my case, I had to drive out to the remotest parts of West Texas, to a place called the Patriot Gas Station, where the owner sold fill-ups, oil changes, tire repair, military surplus, and underground literature.  It was a minimal two-day round trip just to obtain information that the system had deemed to dangerous - to itself.

Because I have stood on the shoulders of giants, I have concluded from their experience that we are perilously close to a new dark age for free inquiry and thought.  It also seems, from their experience, that the only way to survive this period in history is not by buying K-rations, water filters and gold coins, but by learning basic skills and protecting knowledge from those who would destroy the past to control the future.

Fixing what is, is not possible, and the sooner we acknowledge that fact the quicker we can get about saving our culture for a time when the winds are a bit more friendly to freedom.  We should be prepared for that time to take centuries, as history shows us that breaking the chain of culture means that it must be rebuilt one link at a time.

It is entirely possible that I am a complete nutter and all of this is some apocalyptic fear-mongering.  I freely admit the possiblity, but in the end, what have you lost by following this prescription, and what has been gained should this nutter be right?  A rational cost-benefit analysis says that it is a worthy investment.

Besides, think how cool you would look if you sent out your next batch of Christmas cards on handmade paper with handmade ink using hand-carved wood blocks.  That's something people would save for years.

Post Scriptum: Wouldn't it be handy to learn how to make a camera and photographic plates so you wuldn't have to hand-copy all those books?

MiniTrue Strikes Again

If you are one of the three people in the educated world that have not yet read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, then you should probably drop everything you are doing and rush out to get a copy and curl up this weekend with a good bottle of single-malt scotch and put it in your brain.

It is not just to finally grok the true meaning of Big Brother, MiniTrue, Newspeak, IngSoc, and other now-cultural terms, but to send shivers of recognition down your spine as you see words written in 1949, can seem so prescient in 2016.

There are hundreds of reasons to read this book, but the one that has always remained foremost for me is the look at "free speech" and manipulation of language.

If you are not in the know, then the protagonist, Winston Smith, is employed at the Ministry of Truth (MiniTrue), where he spends his days modifying historical records and dictionary entries.  The ultimate goal of this exercise is to completely eliminate factual history and to reduce the common vocabulary to the point where it is completely impossible to express ideas that are contrary to the ruling elites' interests.

Having absorbed this book in high school, I have watched the world march unceasingly towards those very goals.  We call them "political correctness" and other euphemisms, but the concepts and the results are the same.

We are often treated to a certain group of left wing polemicists harping on "free speech," while simultaneously ridiculing anyone expressing ideas and concepts that are outside their carefully crafted narrative. For instance, we might hear Noam Chomsky wax philosphical about linguistics and the control of language (or through language), but turn right around and attackurn  someone promoting a boycott of Israel for the Palestinian attrocities.  This is a textbook example of Double Think - holding two diametrically opposed ideas at the same time and believing both of them with fervor.

The thing about free speech is that it involves the right of everyone to say anything they believe, and even to try and convince you of the value of their position.  To repeat - ANYONE to say ANYTHING they believe, no matter what the topic or viewpoint.

There have been multiple legal boundaries put up over the centuries since the Enlightenment.  The US Supreme Court ruled that free speech does not include the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater when there isn't one.  The reasoning was that to incite a panic for no reason that can lead to grievous bodily harm is not permitted.  This makes sense, until you expand it to mean that someone advocating revolution is also outside the protection of free speech, when in fact, it is that person's speech that is the most protected.

The thing is that free speech protects the presentation and argumentation of ideas and concepts.  If one person is free to present the argument that the Nazis committed a racial holocaust against a certain segment of society, then someone else is must be allowed to present the opposing view.  The two sides battle it out on the basis of evidence and persuasion, not on who can slam the door the hardest on the opposition.

In fact, in the above example, laws have been passed in a number of countries making it a crime to question the "mainstream" narrative of the Nazi holocaust.  To my mind, any argument that requires that extreme to protect it is weak on its face.  If, in fact, the entirety of the story were true in every detail, there would be no need to use the deadly force of law to protect it, as it would stand on its own merits.

Another example is the recent banning by Amazon of a book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.  The fact that the book had to be banned shows the weakness in the "mainstream" narrative and the fear on the part of the elite that their carefully woven fabric might be undone by pulling on the wrong strings.

At this point, some readers will accuse me of being a "conspiracy theorist," and I admit that I am open to reinterpretations of history.  It is a fact that history is created by conspiracies and that historical events and persons are open to new data.  Even in the "mainstream," history is being rewritten all the time.  A new discovery at CERN or the publication of Planned Parenthood videos allows the public to reconsider their understanding of things.  If respected researchers build documented arguments that turn common beliefs on their ears, I am all for a fair listen and reserve the right to change my own opinions based on that information if I so choose.

In other words, if I have to choose between a protected species and the survival of me and my family, the protected species loses.  End of story.  In the same way, if a protected story deeply affects the ability of me and my family to function because the narrative has come at a social price, then I am all for re-examining that story to ensure what I have been asked to give up is worth the price.  The Nazi holocaust being used to jail and shame people, Sandy Hook being used to limit my right to self-defense, 911 being used to rein in civil liberties, and religion being used to fence my right to reason mean that these things (and so much more) are open to review and criticism and revision until we are all satisfied that the truth is known and it justifies the sacrifices being foisted on us.

The moment someone wants to take something from you based on some event or argument is the moment that free speech is most valuable and necessary.  If the food safety board declares that cherries are no longer healthy and must be eradicated from my diet, then I want to see the evidence and arguments to the contrary before I surrender my warm slice of pie with a heap of vanilla ice cream on top.

In criminal law in most Western countries, a person must be proved guilty beyond a "reasonable doubt" before being convicted of a crime.  To remove ANY of my liberties and freedoms is effectively the same as convicting me of a crime beyond a "reasonable doubt."  Therefore, I want to examine the evidence from all sides.  I want to hear all the witnesses.  I want to see all the forensic research.  I want to question every detail before I surrender my freedom.  To abridge my right to free speech and access to information, to limit what and how much I can ingest of any substance, to hide any facts or alternatives is to convict me (or anyone) without trial.

So, what does all this mean?  What is "free speech?"

Does it mean we can question the right of Jews to claim a "homeland" called Israel?  Absolutely.  Despite 150 years of feverish digging in the Sinai and Egypt, there is yet to come to light any hard evidence to support the Biblical narrative of Exodus, and thus the claim of ancient homeland is suspect.  That the holocaust has been used to justify the political state of Israel, even with the paucity of evidence for the claim, and the use of lethal force (government and law) to enforce it, makes the entire thing suspect and open to critical review.  If the facts later support it, no problem.  But...

Does this mean we have the right to question 911, 77, and other acts of terrorism?  Absolutely.  Because those events have been used to justify indicting and convicting (removing civil rights) from the entire populace of nations, then we have the right to investigate thoroughly and ensure that the foundations of our collective conviction is justified and factual.

Does this mean we have the inalienable (in-a-LIEN-able) right to say whatever we want, no matter how offensive to others or the elite.  Absolutely.  We must be allowed to speak our minds and cast our opinions into the marketplace to allow others to judge their worthiness.  If we abridge a single word, then we have opened the floodgate, no matter how small, to further incursions on our liberty, and even the wholesale editing and control of history and what/how we think (a la Nineteen Eighty-Four).  None of us has a "right" to not be offended, but we all have the right to change the channel or move to another seat.

Does this mean there is an inalienable right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater?  Absolutely. It is not the act of yelling "fire," but the reaction of the crowd.  If anyone is injured or property destroyed, there are remedies under the law if the intent of the person yelling "fire" can be shown to have been less than honorable.

Free speech is a huge right, and one that all other rights are founded on.  It is also the foundation of a republican (not the party) form of government to preserve and protect fundamental rights for all members of society, no matter how many heads can be counted in each camp.  It is the classic case of two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, and lamb is off the menu.

"I disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it," is often attributed to Voltaire, but it was more likely expressed by Evelyn Beatrice Hall.  Thank goodness for historical revisionists.  It is not that Voltaire did not think this way, or even say something quite like it, but rather the fact that it was his biographer who expressed it in those particular words.

There is always room for new information, new ideas and revision of old concepts.  To limit any speech or deny anyone the right to put forth an argument on any topic is to set back human advancement if even an imperceptible amount.  It is vital that we protect the right of ALL people to express ANY argument, no matter how offensive we may personally find it.  If the argument has no merit (some genders/races are inferior to others), it is easily dismissed and eventually the speaker will have no audience.  If the argument is valid, then no matter how ridiculous or offensive it may seem, it deserves to be examined by a free society.  Any idea that requires deadly force (government and law) to enforce it is by definition unworthy of publication.  QED

A 1,000 Words

Kurt Wenner, "Flying Carpet"

Few people, even artists, stop to realize that art is the highest form of mathematics.  Just as language has informal and formal forms, mathematics has formulae and aesthetics.  Language has grammar and vocabulary, art has principles and elements.  Mathematics is to art what language is to poetry.  Mathematics are the tools by which we create beauty and harmony.

In language, we arrange words in a meaningful ways.  The writer's job is to make that arrangement the most pleasing and harmonious composition possible.  In mathematics, we arrange numbers in meaningful ways.  The artist's job is to arrange the numbers in ways that we want to hang on our wall or go to a museum to see.

Music is nothing but mathematics.  It is the science of vibration and harmonics massaged into glorious sound.  Music uses time, sine waves and vibrations in order to create individual sounds that are then blended into deeply moving compositions.

Art uses light, shadow, perspective, and spacial relationships.  It uses shape, form and function.  It blends these geometric and physical concepts into images that evoke emotional responses in the viewer.  Art is numbers given voice, because the greatest art speaks to us in a voice that we intuitively know is that of the Universe itself.

How many of us analyze the way we perceive the Universe?  How do we know what something feels like by looking at a photo of it?  How do we know something is further or higher than another?  You may think these are elementary questions, but try closing one eye for a day and going about your normal routine.  Without stereo vision, what clues are you using to navigate the world?

Here's a fun and easy experiment.  Take a friend or family member and sit them in a dark room.  Take a portable light source, say a flashlight, and move the flashlight around their head.  Try every position - up, down, sides, back, dead on.  How do you feel when you see their head lit from different positions?  Which ones "feel" right and which "feel" wrong?  Which frighten you and which attract you?  Which ones are boring and which exciting?

Now ask yourself, "Why do I feel these things?"

It is not an easy question and the answer requires many hours of deep reflection.  That is art.

We all know the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is why.  It is easier to show artistic principles than it is to describe them because the language we need is visual.  Try describing a shadow to a blind person.  Try telling them the difference between red and green.  Better yet, take your blind friend to the Louvre, stand them in front of the Mona Lisa and tell them why everyone marvels at that picture.  It can be done, but it will take a long time and the right vocabulary.

How many of us stop to consider that a trapezoid is just a square viewed from one edge?  That means that pyramids are cubes viewed from a certain perspective.

Art is a rabbit hole that causes us to turn our Universes upside down and start thinking about what our senses are telling us.  This is the primary difference between great art and crap.  Art that doesn't clarify some universal secret or take us out of our complacent lives is NOT art.  It is just noise, and the world is full of noise.

Art is the glory of silence.  As anyone who has ever tried to record silence knows, there is no such thing.  But, there is the control of noise to create softness and harmony, and that is art.

Control of noise is done through mathematics, and when that control rises to its highest expression, that is art.  Regardless of which sense is receiving the noise, we can mathematically organize the noise to make it pleasing to our senses.  That is the artist's job.

The more we observe our Universe, the more we appreciate the great works of art.  And if you need proof that art exists beyond the senses, then remember that one of the greatest painters (Claude Monet) was blind, and one of the greatest composers (Ludwig von Beethoven) was deaf.

INTERVIEW: Santos Bonacci on Radio Far Side

For our long-time listener and supporter Linda, who's waited a long time for this one.  Thanks for your patience.

Welcome to another thought-provoking installment of Radio Far Side.

Today we’ll explore questions of religion, history, something called astrotheology, and what it means to be human, with one of the stars of alternative research.  It’s a fascinating hour with a remarkable thinker, so stay tuned.

Santos Bonacci joins us from Melbourne, Australia, where he has spent the last 30 years researching what he calls Astrotheology.  Santos has been studying the ancient works, compiling and translating them into more accessible terms.  He is a prolific producer of video lectures and special DVDs, he hosts a weekly radio show on American Freedom Radio and presents regular Seminars and webinars on demand.

Please welcome Santos Bonacci…
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Addional Links:

Santos Bonacci website
AstroTheology search page

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We hope you enjoy this installment, and look for many more interesting guests and topics to come!

Sampai jumpa!

Buddy, Can You Spare A Paradigm?

Few people take time to realize it, but we - as a species - are on the verge of a Great Shift.  All the bitching and hollering about this problem or that change are myopically focused on symptoms, but missing the cause.

Western civilization, at least for the past 3,000 years, has been predicated on two competing weltanschauungs (literally: world views).  All of our philosophy, science and art can be summed up in two basic camps of thought: Aristotelian and Platonic.  The former is also called the materialist view, meaning that the entire Universe can be directly measured and sensed with the human body.  The latter understands that there are unseen and unsee-able forces at work that can not be measured, but only felt or implied.

These two competing lines of inquiry have battled it out, with science sitting in the materialist camp and religion staking bivouacking in the esoteric camp.  They have divided the Universe into mutually exclusive beliefs that have been heretofore irreconcilable.

The problems began in earnest around the time of Galileo.  The Church (Platonic) insisted that the Universe revolved around the Earth, while the materialists (Aristotelian) insisted that it did not.  Poor old Galileo looked and Jupiter one night and noticed that four bright objects were circling something other than Earth.

Well, we just couldn't have that, could we?  So the Church excommunicated Galileo, forced a public retraction out of him and kept him under house arrest until he died.

Along came Janssen, Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur who discovered an entire new Universe that was undetectable with the five senses, yet measurable with instruments and controllable with technology.  Suddenly, we were confronted with something that crossed the lines of Aristotelian and Platonic.  A shaky peace was negotiated and humanity (at least the Western half) managed to limp out of the battle intact.

However, the truce was short-lived and bombs soon began falling anew until the subatomic nukes began popping off all over the place.  The quantum world put our safe zones into a tail spin.  We could neither sense nor measure directly this strange new realm, yet we could engineer horrible devices of destruction, take pictures of bones inside the living body, cause horrible burns and diseases all with things that had no apparent substance.

We were now firmly straddled across two disparate belief systems, both of which were simultaneously true and false.  We learned how to measure these things (Aristotelian), yet they were invisible to our senses (Platonic).  The phenomena permeated the Universe and underpinned its functions, but in the case of quantum mechanics, the very act of measuring them changed their nature.  They could also act instantly across vast distances of time and space, making the physical world of the materialists just the skin and bones of the esotericists.

And so here we languish at the threshold of the 21st century.  Those two all-encompassing world views that had served us so well for 3,000 years, though they were as oil and water to each other, have blurred into something that is both a blend of the two, and neither of them.

Here lies our conundrum and our opportunity.  We are in a position to merge all of our previous learning of the past three millennia and add great new purviews to them, as well.  We are on the cusp of a Great Awakening in which we will have amazing new insights and thoughts based on our new ruling paradigm.

The problem is, as with all new things (especially those which completely undermine all that has come before), there are those who have their entire lives invested in the old way of doing things.  Whether it's as simple as making a living, or as complex as trying to rule the world, a great number of people are unprepared and unwilling to change.  They are and will continue to fight it with every fiber of their being.

We have seen these things on a micro-scale.  The automobile put a lot of people out of work who had invested in the horse paradigm.  TeeVee put the fear of God into the film establishment,  Digital scared the hell out of the analogue folks.  The internet is killing print and libraries.

All new things require the death of old things.  It is the nature of Universe.  As Genghis Khan once said, "Every man should kill at least one other man to make room for himself."

The Western world, and to great extent the Eastern, is faced with the death of two very old and dear friends: our weltanschauungs.  Because the Buddha straddled these two worlds 2,500 years ago, the East is less susceptible, but not immune.  There is still the nature of political force and control to be dealt with.

Billions of lives have been spent in building our current models of Universe.  Though they competed, they fed on each other giving impetus to many folks to carry on the fight.  It is very hard to simply release our grasp and let them go, especially since we are entirely unsure of what will replace them

And that is the crux of our challenge at this juncture in history.  We are witnessing the death of the very roots of our culture and civilization, and we can see the sprouts of the new, but until it bears fruit, no one is really sure what's growing.  For this reason, they cling tenatiously to what they know, even if they are fully cognizant that what they know is wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

Religion, science, governments and economics all have their reasons to stay put.  All have served their paradigmatic masters well, and they have prospered because of it.  But that world is dying and they want to stake out new territory to preserve their privileged ranks.  They are no more useful now than blacksmiths and wainwrights.  But where do we go without them?  This is uncharted territory.

The challenge before us is to craft an entirely new way of looking at the Universe.  It is inevitable and necessary and a task that will require introspection on a massive scale.  This is not choosing which shirt to wear in the morning.  This is choosing whether the shirt exists at all and what form it will take.  It is that profound.

We have to rethink every single aspect of our world, from toilets to towers, from floor tiles to flying things, from universities to Universe.  Things like the internet, 3-D printers and quantum computing are set to tear our world views asunder and leave us morally, ethically and cognitively dangling in the breeze.  The imperative nature of our task could not be more emphatic.  We literally must begin from scratch and create new institutions and philosophies.  It's taken 3,000 years to build the current world and we're only a couple of hundred years into the change-over.  There's a long way to go.

On the one hand, it is very exciting, like waiting for Mom and Dad to wake up on Christmas morning so we can run down and see what St. Nick left behind.  On the other hand, it is terrifying, like the thought that ol' Nick gave us a pass this year for our various misdemeanors.  That very self-related conflict is, on a mass scale, what we are faced with in the realm of civilization itself.

It is high time we threw off the gloves and started wrestling with our problems in a very personal way.  We must question all of our assumptions.  We must examine all of our institutions.  We must re-evaluate all the ways we do anything.

It's that big.

As Douglas Adams might say, it involves Life, the Universe and Everything.  There's precious little outside of that.

Real Hope, Real Change

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Or so said the ads that used to run on American TeeVee back in the 70s.  The ads were so effective that the entire world has since embarked on a multi-decade effort to completely eliminate education from schools and replace it with indoctrination.

Indonesia is not immune.  In the past several months, there has been an effort to 'reform' the elementary curriculum to achieve the goal of eliminating the sciences in favor of more religion.

"Specifically, the reform efforts that were suggested indicated that science and social science classes were to be merged, and that more time would be spent on religious education and on classes that instill a greater sense of nationalist fervor. The linkage between removing and or minimizing science and improving student character remains unclear."

As usual, government-sponsored 'education' involves little more than reinforcing those things which reinforce the state power.

It should be noted that the 'religion' content mentioned is strictly Islam, and does not include the other three religions officially recognized in the nation's constitution.  One must assume that morality is the sole province of only one belief system.

It should further be noted that "nationalist fervor" has historically not come to any good.  In fact, it usually ends in violent upheavals as the fervent individuals seek to eradicate those they deem less or differently fervent, not unlike religious cataclysms.

I am not singling out Indonesia.  It is a global phenomenon and one that has afflicted Mankind since dense population centers have existed.  In fact, the only thing more manipulated than the female form throughout history is the mind of a child.

As an example, children are not taught why humans consider certain people and things beautiful.  They are not educated on concepts like balance, rhythm, harmony, context, and other aesthetics.  They are not given explanation about phi (the Golden Ratio) or how lighting and perspective can change beautiful things and reveal more detail.

If they were, they would have the power to observe the Universe and determine for themselves what is beautiful, and to be able to explain why and possibly convince others of their point of view.  They would learn to appreciate the world as they find it, rather than work tirelessly to conform nature to some artificial, politicized ideal.

Instead, they are taught what to consider beautiful.  They are shown models and photos and representations of what they are supposed to find attractive.  Then they are expected to conform the world around them to these implanted and commercialized ideals.  Thus, young women starve themselves.  Young men inject steroids.  Mountains are carved with political images.  Cities become concrete and glass abysses.

By the same token, children are taught political slogans and agendas carefully formulated to keep them controllable and incapable of free thought.  They are implanted with 2-dimensional choices of left and right, completely ignoring the infinitely more creative 3-dimensional approach to problem-solving.

Education is about reading and discussing multiple disciplines and applying a large body of historic, scientific and artistic information to novel solutions.  In the absence of such ability, civilization has advanced very little in the past century.  We've been recycling the same old ideas, adding little more than ring tones to things already conceived and designed in the late 1880s.  The lack of innovation mirrors the stultifying atmosphere of the modern classroom.

We treat our children like cattle and expect innovative thinking from this environment.  They are herded from room to room, seated in rank and file, and spend priceless hours cramming 'correct' answers in their heads so that they have a fighting chance of selecting those answers while regurgitating on standardized national exams.  They don't need to express well-formulated arguments in whole language, just get lucky enough to guess the 'correct' fact from a list of four - 25% random chance per question.

These products of bovine inculcation then go on to be teachers, though they have no clue what to teach.  They have degrees in 'education' - the ultimate triumph of style over substance.  They have no expertise or authority in any subject, only the skills to slide whatever message they are told into the unsuspecting mind of the child.  In other words, teachers are but empty vessels to be fill and disgorged as the political class sees fit.

Being incapable of expounding on any real topic, the teachers have little choice than to demonstrate proper condom use and repeat commercial and political rhetoric.  They know nothing other than a few selected techniques for softening young minds, and so are incapable of teaching anything.

Education, as it is practiced today, is nothing more than a control mechanism for those who believe they are in control.  It serves their immediate goal of remaining employed to produce nothing while being paid money stolen from those who do produce.  As such, 'education' is a social poison pill.  At some point, it will destroy all of human civilization.

As the political class die off, they are replaced with the unthinking, uncritical bovine class.  The bovines eventually invade every level of society so that there are no longer any people capable of creative thought.  Thus, at some point there is no longer a group capable of formulating the slogans and paradigms of indoctrination.  Finally, the whole system collapses as no one is capable of innovation and even the knowledge to maintain the system is lost.

We continue this practice at the peril of our species.  By tolerating the current system, we tacitly approve of a parasite class indulging their lust for power and greed for possessions, while sacrificing the long-term survival of humanity.  We allow the lowest of our kind to dictate culture to satisfy their immediate desires by encouraging (forcing) our children to conform to their wishes and ideals.

Religion and nationalism are not solutions to educational problems.  They require only rote memorization and actuate regurgitation, which are both antithetical to real education.  All they produce are compliant and unquestioning masses, which serves the purposes of the ruling and merchant classes, but does little to advance our species or even guarantee our long-term survival.

The only real solution is broad exposure to a wide range of ideas and disciplines, with exercises in applying them to creative thinking and novel ideas.  Obviously, this kind of mind-set is not conducive to submission  and obedience, and thus is not likely to be used by the leaching classes.  However, it is conducive to innovation, creation and advancement - all of which promote growth and survival.

But first, we must overcome our own indoctrination.  We must not be susceptible to peer pressure and group think.  Just because we were herded room to room and bored stiff with empty lectures on non-topics does not mean we must settle for the same treatment of our children.  Change can begin with little more than lively discussions around the dinner table and reading classic books aloud at bedtime.

Most importantly, fostering a desire for life-long education both in one's self and in one's children can change the world.  Too often, people forget that education does not occur in classrooms.

Real education comes from travel (not tourism).  Real education comes from reading great books - made even easier with the advent of tablets and e-books.  Real education is gained by experiencing the world.  Real education is patiently listening to well-constructed arguments, even when the point is diametrically opposed to one's own.

In other words, even the classroom itself stifles education.

We need to rethink the whole process and quickly.  After nearly a century of the Prussian/Merchant style of education, we are fast approaching the point of no return, at which time there will be no one left capable of real teaching.  Those afraid of this change will complain loudly and fight wildly, but only because they benefit from ignorance.  They should be ignored.

At the core of all the world's current crises is nothing more - and nothing less - than education.  It starts by changing ourselves.  Reading, engaging in debate, learning new skills, and traveling widely are habits that encourage our own growth, and will be picked up by our children, as well.  Leaving the political/commercial schools and pursuing more fruitful systems of learning is key to breaking the chain of stupidity.

Finally, trusting our own ability to reason and formulate conclusions is very important.  As long as we rely on 'authorities' to confirm or deny what we believe, we will be slaves to oppression and destruction.  We must be confident in our ability to think and reason, and that confidence comes from open discussions and intelligent criticism.

Most people are aware there are profound problems with our society, but few are looking in the right place for answers because we take education so much for granted.  Many people have home offices (commercial activity), but few have home education centers, even though our technology can deliver all of human civilization to our doorstep.

To paraphrase a somewhat trite proverb, it is time we learned how to fish, so we can quit begging for our next meal from those who attach far too many strings to their largess.

Over One Billion Served

If there's one thing that has remained consistent in human history, it's slavery.  Nearly every civilization ever conceived by humans has involved involuntary servitude, whether by conquest or debt.  Even most of the gods we have conceived require absolute obedience and submission.

Things haven't changed much, despite an effort over the last couple of hundred years to become more enlightened.  Those who think their nation is so enlightened as to have eradicated slavery need only ask how long it's been since the last military draft.

In fact, submission to government is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of slavery today.  An legal code of behavior that is enforced by the use of deadly force and incarceration is an institutional form of slavery, whether you adhere to it voluntarily or not.

Even more insidious is the bondage of debt, and considering nearly all world currencies are a form of monetized debt, slavery would seem to be more rampant than ever.  By this measure, nearly every human on Earth is a slave.  Even those who issue the currencies are slaves to their own greed and avarice and desire to dominate others.

Slavery, despite our self-deceptions, exists today in many overt forms.  The human trade for domestic servants runs unabated throughout much of the world.  Young women in Indonesia are frequently sold out to wealthy Arabs, Chinese and other groups.

If you need another example, ask anyone at the BBC about the sex slave trade taking place backstage of your favorite sit-com or drama.  The Euro elite have been trading lives for sexual gratification for centuries with no sign of abating, and that is hardly an isolated example.

Slavery expresses itself in certain 'lifestyle' choices, such as Master/slave or Dom/sub, which is a large and growing form of power play in the West, where women have been granted carte blanche to run rampant over men as retaliation for the perceived ills of past generations.  In this case, powerless and ineffectual men (usually) seek out meek and even more powerless women (usually) in order to have someone to lord it over.

There are even institutionalized forms of covert slavery.  The intern system, which most college graduates will have to endure, involves a powerless student working long, arduous hours for little or no money in order to prove their worth to the employment masters.  For their part, the students submit both for the letter grade and hours, and in the hopes of securing a wage slave position in the future.

No matter who you are or where you live, you are a slave of one sort or another.  In most cases, we are products of slave indoctrination from the cradle.  We are taught to submit to churches/mosques/temples run by self-appointed elites who feel they have every right to slide a hand into your pocket in exchange for some future glory of serving a vengeful god for all eternity.

For those less inclined to that form of slavery, there is a government over us who also feels empowered to slide a hand into our pocket and rob us of our labor and productivity in exchange for...well, for nothing, really.  The governments set up systems of controls on humans and then charge them for the priviledge.  None of it is really useful to anyone but the life-long bureaucrats who leech off society in general.

Ultimately, it makes one take pause and wonder if humans weren't indeed created to be a slave race.  There is a growing body of scholarship pointing to the possibility that humans were genetically modified from some base animal in order to serve a master race.  Could it be that embedded in our genetic codes there is an unavoidable impulse to enslave ourselves to those we perceive as able to supply our needs in exchange for our undying subservience?

In an era when science is finding 'gay' genes, and 'fat' genes, and even 'crime' genes, has anyone noticed that there doesn't seem to be any effort whatsoever to find a 'slave' gene?  Perhaps no one is looking because no one wants to find it.  The basic impulse of humans to bond themselves is a handy device for those aware of it and wiling to exploit it for their own gain.

Slavery is embedded at such profound levels of our psyches that we hardly even notice it.  Our love songs and poetry celebrate the complete submission of one person to another.  Our literature, such as Pygmalion, Frankenstein, golems, and zombies, is suffused with the creation of slaves.

Even now, the elite are working feverishly to create a new class of slaves that we commonly call 'robots'.  Slaves have this annoying habit of requiring food and care, and at some point, they always awaken en mass and throw off their old shackles to look for new.

But if the masters could create a slave of steel and cable that would work tirelessly 'round the clock, without pay, holidays or benefits.  If they could build for themselves an army of unquestioning 'doers' that obeyed every whim.  If they could finally free themselves from their own slavery of having to care, no matter how little, for the fact that the slave is in some part human.  What a grand life they would have.

Short of eradicating religion, government and elitism of every kind, there seems to be no way out of the slave mentality.  We are steeped in this culture of servitude from birth and from all angles.  We spend our lives slaving away at 'jobs' in the hopes of gaining enough wealth and position to be able to control slaves, rather than be one.  We create 'lifestyles' that allow us to feel some amount of control in our lives, no matter how illusory it is.  We even domesticate animals in order to have something around us that obeys our wishes.

We submit our work for approval.  We submit payment for services.  We demand good service for our money.  We build service economies.  Indeed, it would seem that to rid the world of slavery would imply tearing down all that has come before and starting from scratch, and even then could we conceive of a world in which one group did not submit to another, whether by force or positive action?

It would seem that those who scream the loudest for the end of slavery in all forms are the most clueless.  They have not stopped to consider that our entire Universe is built on the premise that someone must serve another.  Slavery is, in fact, endemic in human affairs.  It is our own feelings of powerlessness that lead us to strive for a position in which we can force others to submit their power to us.

If we are serious about ending slavery, then the concept must be opened up to include slavery in all its forms.  We must further ask the question that never seems to be expressed: are we in fact a slave race?  Is slavery so deeply ingrained in our constitutions that we cannot perceive a world without it?  Indeed, could humanity honestly survive without the submission of one group to another?  Are we capable of not only conceiving, but building such a world?

Or are we doomed for our brief turn on the stage of history to seek out an exploit the labor of others because we know no other way?

Perhaps the only way to proceed is to control the expression of slavery in an open and honest forum, rather than try to extract the very heart or humanity.  The first step is to admit that we are all slaves of one stripe or another.  Then we can move forward with effectual efforts to slow the pace of exploitation.

Until then, get back to work, slave!