The Road To Hell

 

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I have always advocated the Great American Road Trip, even before I read a book called Blue Highways, by a guy with a really run name.

I have fond memories taking family vacations in the old Ford Country Squire breeder wagon with the fake wood panelling all over it.  My father was a die-hard interstate hater, declaring regularly that he could make better time on the back roads.  Of course, he was always wrong, because among other things, he was a history teacher.  That meant that we had to stop at e.v.e.r.y s.i.n.g.l.e historical marker for an extended roadside lesson in Texas history.

I could go on for hours about those trips, but we're here for a different purpose.

I've spent a significant portion of my life taking leisurely blue highway tours of the world.  While the interstates and autobahns of the world whisk you quickly from origin to destination, they do so in a completely sanitized envelope populated with rubber-stamped franchises and commercial oases, by-passing the truly unique and insightful parts of the world.

Two of my favorite journeys involve driving through Europe, purposefully avoiding big cities and multi-laned concrete arteries.  While these journeys could fill at least one book of unusual and even strange experiences, there was a theme that ran through the trips that inspired me to do a photo journal, where like my father, I stopped at every opportunity to appreciate the historical nuances that mark blue highway art.

When you drive through the back country of Europe, you quickly begin to notice a recurring phenomenon.  On the edge of nearly every village, there is a grotto with either the Virgin Mary or the Crucified Christ, and many of t hem are surrounded with fresh flowers much of the time.  Some bear inscriptions, while others require an inquiry of locals when you reach the gasthaus.

These grottos are memorials to the survivors and the victims of the Black Death.

Hundreds of centuries-old grottos pepper the entire continent and serve as ancient reminders of the terrors of the bubonic pandemic.  Not only these memorials, but a number of communities perform passion plays every decade, the most famous of which is the Passion Play at Oberammagau.  

These rituals and monuments have survived nearly 400 years to remind the future of an event so terrifying that it has left an imprint in our languages, like the English "bless you" or the German "Gott sund heit" when someone sneezes.  It's even memorialized in the children's rhyme "Ring Around the Rosie".

Imagine a natural plague so horrible that it scarred our collective memories across time and place.  Imagine the fearsome inevitability that in any family of four, odds were good that at least one of you would die a painful death.  Imagine death rates so dreadful that the only burial solution was to dig large pits and stack the corpses like cord wood in them.

Now look around at our current situation.

In the first iteration of this so-called pandemic, there were no bodies littering the streets.  The vast majority of people did not go to bed wondering who in their house would be dead by morning.  There were no enormous pits at the edge of town with gruesome piles of death.

In  the second iteration, great numbers of people have begun dying of heart attacks and strokes, wholly unrelated to a respiratory virus, but rather self-induced by avaricious mega-corporations seeking to dominate the globe and soak us of our scant and hard-fought wealth, aided and abetted by corrupt and demonic politicians seeking to elevate their status by yanking our out from under us.

If this shared experience leaves a mark on our culture - indeed if our culture survives this event - it will not be to memorialize the horrors of Nature, but of the bottomless abyss of evil into which Humanity can fall.  The grottos, children's rhymes and passion plays of the distant future will mark our generation's descent into cowardice and psychosis so profound that it nearly destroyed civilization itself.

Slowly it seems the masses are awakening, from this delusion.  It appears that folks are realizing just how clueless and self-absorbed we have all been for the last 100 years, but we have a long way to go.  

We must resolve to punish those who brought this on us, while confessing that it would not have been possible without our consent and sloth.  We must resolve to educate ourselves and take full responsibility for the quality and nature of our lives.

Finally, we must, as a species, come to realize that dogma, decrees and demands are not science.  We must castigate en masse anyone who uses the terms "settle science" or "consensus science"  Science is the systematic questioning of the status quo, not the capitulation to it.

Our birthright is the state of individual and sovereign moral agent, and our collective duty is to jealously defend that birthright, for all living souls, from any infringement by any entity.  This self-imposed crisis must be the final battle for our true and lasting freedom.

If we erect monuments to this period in history, then let them be reminders to the future that we finally ended slavery in all its evil and pernicious forms in our lifetimes.

Now is the time for heroes and legends.

The Week That Was

 

At the tender age of 58, and having worked in mass media across several continents and languages pretty much all my life, I must confess that this past week was likely the most unusual I have experienced.  Keep in mind that I became politically aware in 1972, during the second Nixon campaign, and sat for hours in the summer of 1974, absorbing the Watergate hearings.

The week began with an amazing two-and-a-half hour live discussion with Catherine Austin Fitts and Joseph P. Farrell, examining the Q Phenomenon.  If you have not heard this video and listening to two vast intellects bring sweeping wisdom and experience to bear on an issue, then this conversation should be on your to-do list.

Not only did I marvel at the information the two guests brought to bear, but I was also enamored of the technology we employed to do it.  Having grown up with black-and-white TeeVee, reel-to-reel audio tape, and only three networks, plus having set up trans-global live streams back in the Dark Ages, the fact that I could point-and-click my way to a live interview with participants almost perfectly 120 degrees separated across the globe, in three time zones, four hemispheres, and literally two different days, boggled my mind.

We take so much for granted, especially when it comes to the power we have sitting on our tables and desks, and even in the palms of our hands.

When I was 18, I backpacked around the world.  It took a year and a half, and I lived in, visited, or barely escaped from I think it was 42 countries.  If I wanted to get a message home, I had to buy postcards and stamps, set off an afternoon in a cafe, then find a post office to drop off the results.  If I wanted to call home, in most countries I had to find a telegraph office, schedule a time, then sit in a tiny booth with a meter counting off the cost as I spoke. I also had to speak, wait for the sound to reach the other end, wait for the reply to reach me, and then answer - up to several seconds between sentences.  One can imagine the fun that became as questions and answers quickly started overlapping.  The typical 3-minute call cost $5-$10, depending on where I was.

But I digress.

Within hours of the live stream, every Q commentator I knew of vanished from YouTube.  I'm not talking about locked accounts or blocked videos, I mean Unpersonned - saved or embedded videos, comments, years worth of people's hard work gone with the flip of a switch.

Imagine living the Caveman Days, when I grew up, and going to the library to find that every encyclopaedia ever printed had suddenly vanished, and even the cards had been removed from the card catalog - for the Younglings, card catalogs were the Google of the ancient analog world.

I may have my disagreements with the Qniverse, but to vanish people's entire channels, some with incredible amounts of work put into them that, in many cases, predated or was tangential to their Q work, is unforgivable.

The blog you are reading right now is over 10 years old, with over 1,000 articles averaging 800 words each, and many with hours of hunting and linking sources and resources.  If it vanished without a trace in the next hour, I would be crushed if not livid (fortunately I regularly back it up).

This mass Unpersonning is nothing short of digital book burning.  It is exactly equal to what totalitarian regimes have done for centuries, to hide unfavorable information.  If you need to know who the Enemy is, look no further, and if you agree with it, then you ARE the enemy.  There is no justification for this kind of censorship.  The only crime those people committed was publishing ideas and opinions that threatened or embarrassed the Ruling Elite.  That kind of speech is the very definition of the Right to Free Speech.

While all of the above was going on, the Hunter Biden story began breaking.  I use the Continuous aspect of the verb, because I am quite sure we have only just started to see this one bear fruit.

This time, it was Tweezer and Farcebook who stepped up to the censorship plate.  Both entities blocked access to the New York Post story - for our protection, of course.  A story with severe political implications about the doings of a presidential candidate in an election year put out by one of the longest operations and most widely circulated news sources in America was blocked.

Let's pause for a moment to consider those facts.

One cannot overstate the implications here.  This is unprecedented in American history.  This is burying Teapot Dome, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, all in one.  And what the heck, let's throw New York Times v. Sullivan on top for good measure.  The scope and scale of this censorship is unimaginable to me.  If it occurred in any other country or with any other political wing than the American left, the howls would be deafening - and has been in the deep past, like when I was a kid.

I am not really sure what is more disturbing to me - the censorship or the fact that public corporations are acting as State entities.  I can't call it Orwellian, because he couldn't envision a world run by corporations.  In fact, I am hard=pressed to think of a dystopian novel in which non-State entities are the true evil.  At least with State power, the Laws are a process and everyone can see the usurpation of power in process.  The insidious nature of corporate control and the hidden Board Room debates over Terms & Conditions is opaque to even the most arduous investigations.

What is more frightening, these corporations are legal "persons," with a "corporate viel" that grants virtual immunity to the officers and agents within them.  Since the corporate persons cannot be jailed, about the worst that can happen is a stiff fine, for which the actual perpetrators are not liable, and from which the officers, directors and shareholders are protected.

Combine the above with the immunity these corporations have enjoyed since the mid-1990s under Section 230 of the Communications Act, and they are free to do what no American administration would ever dare to do - not from any idealistic fear of Constitutional limits, but from the virulent political blowback.

We see this not only in the realm of communications, but in the broad immunity pharmaceutical companies have almost globally against liability from vaccines, another issue that will soon raise its ugly head.

If one were a conspiracy theorist, one might see all this as part of some Grand Design to circumvent legal protections, while delivering copious profits to political shareholders, who in many cases enjoy deep ties to the regulatory agencies that oversee their activities.

So glad I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

Regardless of whether this is all by design, it is certainly the result of decades of public apathy.  We are all guilty of having delegated our responsibilities and failure to closely manage our servants and employees at every level.  We happily chased our geegaws and lounged on our pit groups in our houses we no longer own, while driving to corporate-drone jobs in cars we no longer own, while allowing our governments to farm out their responsibilities to private interests so they could reap financial rewards.

And here we are.

Now we all must face a choice, and fast.

Do we continue to allow ourselves and that of anyone we care about to be leached away at an ever-increasing pace?  Or do we put the popcorn down, roll ourselves off the rented pit group in our rented houses and pay the price for our lack of diligence?

The choice is crystal clear.  We surrender ownership of everything, including our very bodies and the dialog between our ears, for which we will receive non-stop entertainment until the day we realize it's all gone.  Or we - us, here, now - decide that we will pay the price for our sloth by shedding sweat, blood and tears to regain what we surrendered of our birthright.

Make no mistake.  There is no middle ground.  Any hole unplugged will allow the swarm to come back in even greater numbers.  This isn't a game.  We don't get to save our position and reset if we are wrong.  We don't get multiple lives and there aren't enough coins in existence to buy another chance.

This is the time, and we are the generation who must make this choice for all generations to come.  Freedom is not a thing that is possesses, it is a process - a series of decisions - that is undertaken in every individual and in every generation.

And that's the week that was.

Bubble Heads And Bubble Matrices

Most people tend to buy the Establishment model of the world, which states that you must adhere to a one-dimensional view of the world, in which there are only left and right views, and on that spectrum, we are only allowed to be center-left or center-right. Outside of that narrow range, folks are called Far-Left or Far-Right.

More complex thinkers allow a second dimension - a Y-axis if you will, where people can be up or down, depending on the intensity with which they hold their views.

This comes up because I have this secret hobby. I like to troll politically charged groups who fall solidly into the Left-Right Paradigm. The easy pickin's are the Progressive Left. They whine like spoilt children when folks don't just give up and believe in everything they espouse, without reason, argument or any mentation at all.

The Conservative Right are nearly as much fun, though occasionally they will pipe up with an argument or two, flimsy as they may be.

At some point, some one is bound to ask, "What DO you believe?" This question usually comes after I have spent some time trashing all members of the Generally Accepted Left-Right Paradigm.

My answer almost always flummoxes them: "I am an anarcho- crypto-captialist-social libertarian-fiscal conservative." And yes, I've noticed that isn't an option on most social media profiles.

If you want to visualize the world the way I do, then you need to think in three-dimensional bubble graphs. I see the world as a matrix of left-right, up-down, and in-out. Within that matrix, people have views that can fall anywhere within a given space, where some of the views overlap, while others lie will outside the spheres of other groups.

I believe that government should be almost non-existent and that what little trickle of money we allow them to have must be spent with annual GAAP-compliant annual reports and severe penalties for failure to comply, including the death penalty for government employees who fail to maintain the strict rules applied to them.

Outside of that one area, I do not believe the government should have the right to incarcerate or kill anyone. That is the people's job. If, after a fair and comprehensive trial by their peers, and a fair appeals process, a criminal is found guilty of a capital crime, they should be turned over to the mob and dealt with in a public and highly visible way.

I believe that folks should be allowed to do pretty much whatever the hell they want, provided they don't murder, steal, destroy other's property or lie about other people. This is contingent on everyone behaving in public with manners and etiquette and decency, as proscribed by the larger community.

I believe that companies, including corporations, should be able to do whatever it takes to make a decent profit and benefit their employees, provided that the registered officers of said companies are completely, wholly and individually responsible for the actions of the company, up to and including the above-described process for those convicted of capital crimes.

I especially believe that any company responsible for fouling the environment should have its officers marched out and forced to wallow in their own filth.

I believe that nations should encompass the physical area representing the dominant social, religious, traditional, and racial norms of any given group of people. Immigration would only be allowed insofar as the individual was willing to fully and completely assimilate into the dominant culture of a nation.

Places without any substantial human presence would be unincorporated and exist outside the bounds of any nations. This would include Antarctica and most of the world's great deserts. Within these unincorporated areas, anyone wishing to challenge themselves against the elements is free to do whatever they want, and if they are successful and eventually create a community of like-minded individuals, then they can incorporate and become a nation.

I believe the UN should exist, but have exactly zero political power. It should be a large, air-conditioned space with a few chairs and a stage and some basic A/V equipment maintained by donations only (as are any staff). Here, anyone from anywhere and come and say anything about any topic they so please, and the speeches should be streamed on the internet 24/7.

I believe there should be no compulsory education, especially that is mandated by government. Parents should be free to choose whatever course of education they want for their children, and buy whatever services they can afford to further their goals.

I believe there should be NO mandatory health care or government-operated scheme to distribute narrowly sanctioned care. Folks should be free to buy and use whatever treatments they damn well please, and join insurance pools (if any exist) that will assist in payment for those treatments.

Related to the health care issue, if folks want to kill themselves with drugs, that is their prerogative and the only people who have the right to interfere are their families and friends, and any experts they care to jointly employ for that purpose.

I believe there should be NO welfare. Either family groups bind together for their mutual benefit, or individuals can strike out on their own. In either care, they are fully and personally responsible for their own welfare. Any attempt to force others to donate to them should be treated as stealing.

I could go on, but the dear reader probably gets the idea that my views don't fall within the Left-Right Paradigm chosen for us by the Establishment. Nor do most people, when pressed on the matter.

If one could get the Average Joe into a serious conversation, they would likely find themselves espousing beliefs that in some part fall outside the bounds of allowed thought. At some level, we are all thought criminals, which is why fascist regimes are so brutally effective - everyone is guilty of something sometime, the rest is just choosing when to prosecute.

The world is far more complex than most of us are willing to contemplate on a regular basis. In fact, the reason we tend to buy into the Establishment boundaries is because it reduced the burden of thinking we are faced with. If everything is left-right, black-white, rich-poor, then we can make decisions with coin tosses and move on with our business.

True freedom, real liberty, is a lot of work, just like those great marriages we all envy. Sure, to the world they are a happy, bubbly couple full of life and love, but behind the scenes, there is a lot of discussion, pondering and compromise.

One -dimensional thinkers are easy targets and deserve to be trolled. If they are so willfully blind and eager to wear their hearts on their sleeves, then let the games begin!

i prefer to revel in the glorious complexities that are human existence.

Sunday In The Park

Have no fear! It will get much worse before it gets better, and you and I are not likely to see the better part, if history is any judge.

This is one of those rare moments in time when everything collapses and starts afresh. It happens roughly every 500 years. The last one was the Age of Exploration, when suddenly the entire world became accessible and no longer the sole purview of the elite few. The world was mapped in its entirely and the information made available to the masses through the printing press.

Tourism was born and suddenly humans were able to see more of the world in a year than their ancestors had seen in many lifetimes.

The press led to telecommunications and the internet. One no longer had to go to the library, if one's neighborhood even had a library, but the sum total of the world's knowledge could be brought to your handheld device almost anywhere in the world.

We are on the verge of something just as magnificent and profound, though for those of us in the midst of it, it looks frightening, chaotic and dangerous.

To a villager 600 years ago, anything more than a day or two walk from home must have seemed terrifying - a realm full of monsters and spirits that only heroes and fools dared to go. Now a man born in Texas and living in Indonesia can clack away on a device and reach a global audience.

In a sense, we humans are just finishing our teenage years. As toddlers, we rarely left our backyards. As teens, we suddenly discovered a wider world and pushed our boundaries. Now we, as a species, have reached young adulthood and must leave our nest and enter the larger Universe. Those mature individuals among us remember those first tenuous steps outside the protective shell and the fear and trepidation we felt. That moment is what we are experiencing now as a species.

To a certain extent, globalism is winning, but it is not the kind the elites have been trying to foist on us. They have plotted for centuries to control and direct this inevitable movement for their benefit, but they are losing control and failing miserably. They will continue to fight and exert their errors, as they recently did in Ireland, but that is a tiny victory in a massive wave of change.

If one stands too close to a painting, one only sees the brush strokes and loses the glory of the image. Put another way, individual stitches in a tapestry are meaningless without the overall context.

From the level of the stitches, things are and will continue to get more chaotic, but from the view of the tapestry, it is an exciting time to be alive and see this natural and organic process in action. From our current perspective within the tapestry, we cannot imagine what the outcome will be, but using history as our camera, we can get a glimpse of the Big Picture and know that humanity is finally entering its long-awaited adulthood.

This is a perfectly normal and expected phase, just as parents plot and track a child's development. Just as a child comes to adulthood and no longer relies on the parents, but rather achieves independence, so too is humanity outgrowing the grasp of our controllers and expanding into a realm they (and we) have long feared.

We have outgrown the institutions of our childhood - religion, government - and must now create new institutions that serve us as adults. We are no longer told to go to bed at a certain time, or that we can't have dessert until our dinner is finished. We must make those choices for ourselves, and we are learning (even now) the consequences of making the wrong choices. At some point, we will learn the wisdom of our parents/institutions, even as we reject their foibles.

Yes, it is a time of chaos. We are going through profound changes in our collective body, mind and spirit. We are realizing that we must internalize our control structure and not depend on our parents for it.

On the plus side, we are free. We can do anything and go anywhere we choose, as long as we are willing to put in the effort to achieve it.

It is not an easy transition, but it is a necessary one. Like our metaphorical tapestry, some stitches will get dropped; it is inevitable as much as it is painful. However, from the perspective of the overall image, it is invisible and does not affect the result. Yes, the institutions of control will deceive, fight and even kill to maintain their control, but they are as doomed to fail as we are destined to grow beyond them.

Don't give up and keep working on an individual level to change things for the better. It is the death of winter that makes the spring possible.

Onward through the fog!

A note about the image at top. It is a painting called, "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatter," by Georges Seurat. It is a massive painting with the foreground characters being far larger than an average human. Up close, it is nothing but a million dots of color, a style called Pointillism pioneered by Seurat. You have to stand at least 10 meters away to see the entire picture. If you are ever in Paris, I highly recommend having a look at it. Quite amazing in its copious detail and overall simplicity.

In Search Of A River

Well, it's been an eventful week.  Started off with a massive web virus attack initiated by the NSA and targeting specifically Russia and China, and ended up with special council being appointed to get to the bottom of the Trump-Russia issue, which of course is entirely fabricated to keep eyes away from Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

I've made it abundantly clear I don't care much for Donald Trump.  I think he's a self-aggrandizing circus barker who happens to be a marketing genius, but he's only as good as the people he surrounds himself with, since he's not much of an intellect, just a bundle of impulses that appear to have coherency.  I must admit, though, I miss him using "bigly" all the time.  Great adverb that no one, even the late night blabber-mouths picked up on.

In any event, it's all very exciting and makes for hours of knee-slapping entertainment.  The Russians are certainly bemused, though we must keep in mind that Russians are second only to Germans in their lack of a sense of humor.  The Chinese and North Koreans are completely nonplussed, given that Trump sailed half the US fleet over to the South China Sea to deliver the message that he was ready to talk.  A nice note delivered by the ambassadors would have been more than sufficient.

Given the global circus currently playing on a Fake News channel near you, it seems that humans should try something we haven't done in a long, long time - try life without governments.

Just imagine: no taxes, no police brutality, no wars, no corporations, just folks going about their business pursuing happiness, however one defines that.

One of the greatest books in English literature is Huckleberry Finn.  No one is allowed to read it anymore, because one of the main characters is named Nigger Jim, but its demise is a loss to all humanity.  Here's a link to a free copy.

This book has had a profound effect on my life.  It was one of the first books that I critically analyzed in school, meaning it was instrumental in my revelation that great literature had multiple layers of meaning.  More importantly was its message that civilization was often less civilized than living the free life of pure, unadulterated anarchy.

The story is about Huck Finn and Nigger Jim taking a rafting trip down the Mississippi River in the early 1800s.  The river, of course, is a metaphor for life and freedom.  However, whenever the two characters stopped off on the banks, they were immediately burdened with the authoritarian world, where people and institutions began imposing civilization upon the two hapless travelers.

In one adventure, Huck is adopted by a godly woman, forced to bathe and dress "appropriately," and bundled off the church on a regular basis.  Huck is like a fish out of his element, as he lies on the beach of law and order, gasping for freedom, even though he thought he was supposed to meet these expectations as part of the "good life".

In another adventure, Nigger Jim is captured and labelled as a runaway slave.  Again, the assumptions and prejudices of "civilized" society entrap our heroes and force them to flee in fear and disgust.

It is a brilliant book and one which every conscious mind should take in.

For my own experience, some of the best times of my life have been when I had hardly a coin in my pocket, no schedule and thousands of miles from "civilization".  One of my most memorable adventures was backpacking from Morocco to Egypt, through Algeria and Libya, in 1980.

I had undertaken the journey after a run through Morocco to see Casablanca and El Fez.  Wanting to see the pyramids, but finding it rather out of the way to go through Spain, Monaco, Italy, and Greece to go from North Africa to North Africa, I decided to take buses across the Mediterranean coast.

On the first leg of the journey from Tangiers to the Algerian border, I was packed into the barely road-worthy bus with all manner of humans and livestock.  The lack of A/C meant that there was more dust swirling around the inside of the bus than could possibly be found in the entire Sahara desert.  For the remainder of the trip, I opted to sit on the luggage rack welded precariously to the back of the bus, and with a towel wrapped around my head and face, proceeded to watch the unfolding of where I had been.

I had maybe $100 in my pocket at the outset, and roughly $85 when I arrived at the foot of the Great Pyramid.  It took four days of rib-cracking, kidney splitting rides and it was among the best weeks of my life.  No bosses, no one to talk to (my French was pretty limited back then) and nowhere to be in any particular hurry.  Other than the occasional passport stamping routines, I had no authority over me at all, and needed none.

Oh sure, a number of folks tried to rob me or scam me out of my money, but I managed to get through those events relatively unscathed, and they only occurred when I entered cities.  On the open road, life was blissful, quiet and safe.  I imagined myself as Huck Finn at that time, minus the abundant water, which would have been nice for the occasional bath.

The point of all this rambling is this: how much of what we assume is necessary for life to go on do we really need?  And how much of it is just a scam that we have been raised to believe is a critical part of life?

When you really contemplate the unholy mess we call "civilization", almost all of the bad things are CAUSED by authority, not solved by it.  Honestly, outside of "don't cheat, don't steal, don't lie, and don't murder", how many laws actually do us individuals any good?  Most simply protect corporate, government or religious interests, not you and me.  The bulk of civilization benefits a handful of folks at the top of the pile, and the rest of us be damned.

When you look at all the crap going on right now with governments around the world, how much of it actually affects you and me?  Does it really matter that Kim Jong-un is playing with rockets (like a couple dozen other countries that aren't being threatened)?  Does it really matter that Ahok had an opinion about a couple of lines of text?  Does it really make a difference what Trump told Lavrov?  Will Macron or Brexit or the entire EU make damn bit of difference in a thousand years?

How much of the truly important things would still be there without governments?  I'm willing to bet that demand would mean someone would supply electricity, water, housing, and the internet out of sheer self-interest.  In fact, I'm willing to bet all of it would be much better without all the "authority" fingers in those pies.

I would love for some country to take the first step.  Imagine Iceland or Switzerland or even Venezuela declaring an end to government and free, happy living.  I would bet that in 50 years' time, nearly every country on Earth did the same thing.  What would the governments do about it?  After all, there are only a few million "public servants" to us billions of real people.  Not like they'd have much choice.

But, oh, ain't there a whole lot of conditioning and mind control to overcome.

Apotheosis A La Mode

The Buddha used sea foam as a metaphor for the Universe.  All existing things rise like a bubble through the water, float for a time on the surface, then subside back into the Great Medium.  Nothing, he posited, was ever "created" or "destroyed," it simply changed into different states of existence.

I tell to agree with this view and find that quantum physics particularly confirms this idea.  I further add to the quantum view the Electric Universe hypothesis that the Universe is suffused with and operates via an all-pervasive and infinite electro-magnetic force.  Since the Universe appears to have rules and follow certain formulae, I conclude that the Universe is on the whole a Rational Individual, which some may choose to call God or Allah or the Great Nothingness.  All things exist because the Universe's rules make them not only possible, but probable.

Life exists because the Universe exists.  Life is sentient because the Universe is sentient.  Life is self-aware because the Universe is self-aware.  In a sense, there is no "individual," there is only the Universe extant in various forms that are created by the rules.

What gets me on this track is the rather large number of articles, discoveries and inspirations of late that seem to be infusing all media.  There appears, to my mind at least, a growing awareness of something much larger than our comparatively minuscule existence.

It is not so much of a single idea or discovery that is changing things, as much as it is an overall adjustment to the Collective Point Of View.  From the individual up to the global, we all seem to be changing perspectives, particularly about what we find important and meaningful.

This Change is currently showing up in our common culture as a Populist Wave, aided and abetted by what appears to be a substantial change in the revelation of scientific discovery.  I choose the word "revelation" advisedly, since I firmly believe that much of what is leaking into the Popular Mind has been known at some level for a long time, not the least of which was Buddha's ancient observations.

One should note that I am not talking about shifts between political or religious ideologies.  Rather, I am referring to the Common Culture rising above those ideologies to something more profound and...well, Universal.

People are not usually aware of great changes when they are in the midst of them.  We generally recognize the profundity of events after they have passed and we can assess the effect they have had on the future.  I would say, though, that most people are aware of something big when it happens, though we are generally incapable of knowing just how big they are without perspective.

What I perceive is a collective move away from "leaders" and "authority," to a more holistic definition of "freedom" and "liberty."

When I watch the videos of Social Justice Warriors (SJW), I sense that these are people incapable of dealing with personal freedom and liberty.  They have a burning desire to follow, and to force others to do the same.  They have herd minds and are horrified at the idea of being a herd of one.  If every individual is a "leader" and "authority," they panic because they don't know whom to follow.  To them, a world of individuals is unacceptable chaos and they are truly terrified by the prospect.

We see the same phenomenon on large scales, too.  I believe that the current lashing-out of Islam, among others, is similar on a group scale to the angry, wailing SJW.  Not only is the institution of Islam itself afraid to give up control, its adherents are afraid to be uncontrolled.  The violent reaction is an attempt to re-establish authority because both the group and the individuals define themselves by controlling and being controlled.

I only single out Islam because it is the most visible.  The Vatican has been trying to reassert itself and people like Vladimir Putin has been trying to regain control for the Orthodoxy.

Governments, too, have been desperately raking followers back into the fold.  The EU and US have been in desperation mode, trying to lock down control over their perceived empires.  China is in a sheer panic because its entire raison d'être is in danger of collapsing.

What is happening - and has been for centuries - is an apotheosis.  Individuals are slowly realizing that God is not "out there" with a set of codified "Thou Shants" that control our every movement.  Rather, we exist as constructs of Universe's Rules.  We are not separate; we are manifestations.  There is no God "out there; we and all we perceive are God.

Granted, this process of apotheosis has been long and arduous.  It is a clash of the most fundamental aspects of Weltanschauungs.  It is an ultimate battle between Esoteric and Exoteric forces.  It is the collision of Gnostic and Agnostic.  The division is so profound, so fundamental, that it is now beginning to affect macroscopic organizations across the planet.

This concept is so large that I am only beginning to express it as more than just a feeling.  I can now see large-scale effects in the global society, as I think most people can now do.  The Populist Wave is not a new form of "leadership" or "authority," it is a complete rejection of those concepts and a desire to pursue one's own direction.

We now have the most powerful tool ever devised by our species at our fingertips.  We have the collected sum of Humanity's experiences and ideas within seconds of having a thought or idea.  We can instantly connect with about half of the human species in moments, and the number is growing daily.  From Buddha to Berdyaev, we can each stand on the shoulders of giants while moving little more than our fingers and eyeballs.

The question is not whether this movement will fail.  It is far too late for that.  Rather, how fast will it begin to move?  It is quite obvious that the Controllers and the Authorities are losing, and the pace is rapidly accelerating.  It's as if Humanity is stepping into the daylight after years of living in a prison of our own making.

What will we do with our freedom?

The Fifth Of July

Now that all that silly American chatter about 4th of July, freedom and independence is over and done with, I thought I pop up with my take on things.

First of all, anyone who still celebrates the 4th of July is either, 1) a hypocrite, 2) an Orwellian mind-control slave, or 3) lost in a maze of wishful thinking.

See, that thing that everyone calls, or rather called America is dead.  It died back around Kent State or so, though really it started dying about the time the Constitution's ink was drying.  Thomas Jefferson himself hauled off and bought the Louisiana territories, though for the life of me I can't find the power to do so anywhere in that document.

Abraham Lincoln put a stake in the heart of that thing called America when he issued General Order 100, suspended Habeas Corpus and muzzled the press.

The last tattered shreds of the Constitution blew away in the wind with the combined efforts of Woodrow Wilson and his Federal Reserve and IRS, and Harry S Truman entered the Korean War without a Congressional declaration of war.

The was a brief flicker of life under John F. Kennedy, but they shot him and the American people bought the Warren Report hook, line and sinker.  There was nothing left to do but start the 4th Reich.

In fact, that is the real 4th being celebrated yesterday.  It wasn't the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but rather the birth of the neo-Nazi 4th Reich.  Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't have their eyes open, whether willfully or out of ignorance.  The America of Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau and Norman Rockwell never existed, but even the dream (hallucination?) died a long time ago.  What we see today is the resurrection of something much darker and horrific.  It is the continuation of a line in history that keeps popping up like Frankenstein's monster.  It refused to die, though it often doesn't quite look like it did the last time it was destroyed.

The 4th Reich looks quite a bit different than the 3rd.  The brown shirts are now cops in blue.  All the technologies the Nazis were trying desperately to develop are now realities: jet planes, nuclear weapons, mass chemical/biological/radiation weapons.  The Gestapo is largely replaced by rooms full of faceless technicians punching buttons and pulling levers on a vast surveillance machine that would have sent Goebbels into ecstatic fits.  He could even wipe out entire ethnic groups with tailor-made viruses that would have given him plausible deniability.  Think about that question coming up at Nuernberg.

Hell, even Hitler's little toy project, the Volkswagen Beetle, has staged a come-back, and how many Mitsubishis do you see driving down the road next to your BMW or Mercedes?

Yep, the 4th Reich is alive and well, and that is what folks celebrated yesterday.  It certainly wasn't American independence.  That country hasn't been free or independent for decades now.  It was taken over by corporations and secret agencies and hidden systems of finance.  The only vestige of that old country is the English language, and that is fading fast, as well.

If the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, and the Second was Bismark's United Germany, then Hitler's Third would segue nicely into the American Fourth, since so many Nazis were brought to America after the war, bringing their technology and philosophy, the latter of which was really already strongly rooted in much of America even before WW2.  The CIA and NASA were more or less started by Nazis, and those two agencies alone account for much of the rise of the Fourth Reich.  In fact, future historians may well see the Third and Fourth Reichs as little more than continuations of the Second.

If you find that a bit startling, then you have to look no further than America's public school system.  It is deeply rooted in Prussia, which was, of course, part of the German unification of 1871.  The Prussian educational system and philosophy is virtually mirrored by the American public school system and Prussian influence in the US has a long and vital history.  The emphasis on sports and 'citizenship' alone is one obvious connection, but there are many that merit deep and protracted study on the part of us arm-chair researchers.

At any rate, I think it's safe to say that the Fourth Reich has arisen in North America and that the sheer number of ties to not only Nazi Germany and Prussia are self-evident, but that the NSA's apparent fixation with spying on Germany would seem to imply quite a bit of ongoing interest in all things German.

Heck, old Ben Franklin himself, besides recommending that the US adopt the turkey as the national bird, also suggested adopting German as the official language in order to sever all ties with English.  Perhaps if he had won the argument, things would look quite a bit different today.  The Anglo-American Empire would likely not exist and Germany probably would have won WW2...at least more obviously won it, I should say.

If you are American and you are enjoying a bit of "free" time this weekend, you might want to spend a little time investigating the ties and commonalities between the Third and Fourth Reichs, and throw the Prussian educational system in there, while you're at it.

Perhaps you too, will agree that yesterday was the Fourth Reich of July.

Fortunately, I've never been an American.  I was born a Texan and never had much truck with those folks north of the border, and we celebrate independence on the 2nd of March.  Of course, that was from the tyrannical Mexican government.  We are still fighting the US takeover in 1863.

Happy Hot Dogs!

Suicide By Avarice

Greed is such a pernicious and fatalistic thing.  It is the ultimate denial of the future and of hope.  Greed is the determination that our wants (not needs) today far outweigh those of anyone else tomorrow, or even years from now.  In fact, greed is a kind of suicide and it is killing our species as surely as poison.

In the 1950s, Japanese - and to lesser extent European - demand for wood for lumber led to the near denuding of Kalimantan (Borneo).  Huge swaths of the island were mowed down because a few people wanted to make some fast money.  And they did, becoming fabulously rich in the process.

Later, it was the coal rush.  Demand for fuel across Asia once again caused a handful of people to lay waste to large parts of the jungle in Kalimantan, opening enormous pits to extract coal and then abandoning them once the financial wealth had been extracted.  This has left massive scars full of reeking runoff water across the island.  The fertile soil lost and the usefulness of the land for future generations destroyed.

But, a small number of
people got fabulously rich.

Today, it's palm oil plantations.  Across Sumatera, large areas of jungle are being leveled and burned in order to make way for palm oil growers who are getting quite rich off the product.  In the wake of the plantations are large swaths of land where ancient forests and habitats have vanished, and who knows what hidden treasures along with them.

A great number of medical discoveries were made in Indonesia's forests.  A bacteria in the soil of Kalimantan led to the development of a new class of antibiotics that includes Vancomicin.  However, greed on the part of the pharmaceutical companies has led to overuse of antibiotics, which has given the world incredibly strong infectious agents.  But a few people became fabulously rich.

Greed is the overwhelming feeling that your desires outweigh those of any future people at any time, and the willingness to destroy anything to get what you want.  The gross accumulation of wealth for its own sake is such a pointless and wasteful exercise, yet the desire affects most of us at some time or another.  For some, it becomes a way of life.

I have seen it destroy so many lives - people hell-bent on accumulating wealth to the point that they cease to care about anyone or anything but themselves.  They are willing to destroy vast areas of natural beauty, endure the animosity and disrespect of family and friends, and forego any enjoyment of their own lives in order to add more zeros to their bank accounts.

I met one Indonesian woman in Texas 30 years ago, the wife of a friend of mine.  At the time, she was a pleasant and decent human being, though she spent an inordinate amount of time fretting over the family's money.  One day, she got the idea to come back here and go into the coal trading business.  Today, she is fabulously wealthy.  If she quit today and spent a million dollars a year, her fortune would likely outlast her.  Still, she works night and day, ignoring or at least being bothered by family concerns.  She has become a sour, empty person who suspects everyone around her is after her money.  If her mining operations make any effort to be "green", it is nothing more than a PR stunt.  She has no concern for the lives or land she destroys in the pursuit of wealth.

I know an Indonesian man who illegally imports and sells nutritional supplements at a fabulous profit.  He owns a massive house, has hot and cold running servants and 15 cars all for a family of four.  He treats his employees only slightly better than slaves, working them long hours for virtually no pay.  When they outperform expectations, he doesn't offer bonuses, even when contractually bound to do so.  He spends inordinate amounts of his life running from revenuers and police, hiding his office location, changing his phone number constantly and suspecting everyone around him will steal him blind at the first opportunity.

Neither of these people has a life as most of us would define it.  They don't enjoy anything, are always suspicious and paranoid, and can't take the time to enjoy simple pleasures like children or grandchildren, or a relaxing week in the country.  For them, a vacation is hiding from the life they have created for themselves, rather than an extended rest.

For all their wealth, they have no peace.  Both of them spend their lives counting pennies and worrying that someone will steal them blind.  They have no qualms about throwing others in front of them to avoid losing their precious money.  They expend tremendous amounts of energy accumulating their pile of goodies and everything, including their own families, are expendable in the battle to keep their goods.

On the other hand, some of the happiest people I know have nothing that we would consider valuable.  In my own life, the times when I felt most free and unburdened were when I had nothing.  The year I spent in a monastery, I had no property and never had a penny in my pocket, and I felt completely free.  When one of my wives twisted off and took the family fortune to presumably trade up, I was left completely free to change the course of my life without worrying about someone else or protecting/disposing of property to do it.  In fact, my move to Indonesia was just such a time when I had nothing to protect, nothing to lose and an entire world of choices to consider.

Real freedom, as the Buddha and the Christ taught, is owning nothing and wanting nothing.  You can not be controlled if there is nothing you want or possess.  The whole world operates on a small group creating demand for useless gee-gaws and then controlling us through them, and all to feed their insatiable desire for more zeros in their bank accounts.

If you stand far enough back and look at the global situation, it all seems so petty and useless.  People climbing over each other, destroying our planet, fighting and hating all for more zeros.  It couldn't be more absurd, really.  All the evil we can muster for, literally, nothing.  The worst part is that there seems to be no solution to it, since the human animal seems so fixated on sparkly things.

What's worse is that things seem to be devolving, rather than improving.  As a species, we don't appear to be moving away from feeding our base desires, but rather becoming even more callous in their acquisition.  All the religion, morals, ethics, philosophy and experience have done nothing to quell the hunger.  Instead, the more humans there are, the more we are willing to dispose of to get just a little further ahead that the rest.

Our consumer culture has not lived up to the promises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Back then, we were to be living lives of leisure with machines performing our most mundane tasks.  When I was a kid, the World Book encyclopaedia said that we would all be zipping around in flying cars.  Science fiction writers speculated that humans would be living and working in space and on other planets.  Only the Huxleys and Orwells and Kafkas saw humanity living in prisons of greed and avarice at the mercy of an elite whose boundless desire for wealth would enslave the world.

Do you ever consider how many people suffer horrible lives so that you can enjoy Nike shoes or iPads?  When you turn on the light, do you think about what amount of natural beauty was destroyed to bring it to you?    When you eat a fruit or vegetable, does it ever occur to you that it was likely harvested by itinerant laborers on subsistence wages?  How many people suffer and die to bring you the useless gee-gaws you consider as status items?  How much of the pain and suffering in your life is the cost of the comforts and status of those above you?

If the ends do not justify the means, then can all the suffering and death in the world be justified by the comfort and convenience of the next layer of humans?

The culture we live under now is only a couple of hundred years old, yet it has caused more death and destruction than all of human history before it.  Our consumer society is wasteful and dangerous to most humans on the planet and most of us tend to forget what actually went into giving us our pittance.  All we concern ourselves with is what indignation we suffer to make the next layer up more comfortable, and because we suffer for an elite, we have no problem with making the next layer down suffer for us.  Kind of like hazing...we had to go through it, so the next class does to, in order to justify our humiliation.

An entire civilization built on suffering and destruction can't last long.  Two hundred years may seem like a long time in the context of a lifetime, but in the Grand Scheme of Things, it is hardly a blip.  Eventually, all of it will end.  Nature will only tolerate so much of it and then She kicks back, and humans are products of that Nature.

Greed, like a poker game, only lasts until one player has all the chips, then the other players gang up and take them away by hook or crook.  Then the process repeats until enough folks wise up to the that there is no winning in the end.  Greed is a self-defeating trap.  The more you have, the more you suffer to keep it.  Just take a close look at the faces of billionaires.  Look hard at their eyes.  All the toothy grins can't hide the hollow, hunted look deep in their souls.

It is axiomatic that money can't buy you happiness, but neither can it buy you freedom.  It is a prison of paranoia that increasingly narrows the people you trust and the places you go until there is no one and nowhere suitable for a person of your wealth and possessions.  Ultimately, all those zeros is exactly what you have, and as a civilization, we are well on our way to have plenty of nothing.

The last remaining Big Question is, what will it take for us to realize this as a species?  The answer is rather unsettling.

The Great Escape

As the old saw goes, "'Merica, love it er leave it!"

I live in Indonesia.  That should give a fair answer.

I chose to live in Indonesia.  I considered my move carefully for the better part of 20 years.  I knew by the mid-80s, after having lived and traveled abroad for two years, that things were seriously wrong back in good ole 'Merica.

Being being born a Texan and raised by an historian and politician, I had a bit more perspective than most.  I knew what the Constitution said and that it was not open for interpretation.  My mother the English teacher gave me the ability to read plain, clear language, such as that used to write the founding document of the US feral gummint.  The part of me that was a seventh generation Texan just wanted to be left the hell alone to make a little money and raise a family.

Alas, that is not the direction the US has taken.  In fact, instead of leaving folks the hell alone, they are all up in everyone's business and the boundaries are shrinking by the moment.  It is to the point that the feral gummint feels perfectly comfortable telling the people what they can eat, drink and smoke, what activities can take place in their homes, and of course leaving the home subjects the individual to endless prying.  Hell, just to get and keep a job, they can legally require you to surrender bodily fluids and violate a number of rights established as far back as the Magna Charta.

The worst part?  The people just roll over and take it, then go so far as to put social pressure on others to do the same thinking, "If I gave up my right to privacy, then everyone else should have to, as well."  This mentality is akin to the lemming plummeting to his death looking back and saying, "Those bastards better jump too!"

It's a sad thing to see one's home country taken over by fascists.  Those of us who read history books saw the warning signs years ago.  Some of us tried to change things, while others bugged out early.  I gave up in 2008, and left for more favorable climes.

Since coming to Indonesia, I have had contact with police twice and both times were rather innocuous.  At home, twice a day was more the norm, and each encounter carried a 50-50 chance of going to jail for no particular reason other than out-of-control cops waving their night-sticks around.

In parts of Asia, you can still walk out on the tarmac, board a plane and pay the ticket from your seat, just like the States back in the 60s and early 70s.  The airport doesn't have metal detectors and little more than a handful of uniformed officials running around.  I feel safer there than with Homeland Security climbing up my posterior with a flashlight.

Yet Mericans don't seem to realize that they have lost more to their own 'authorities' than any 'terrorist' could ever have taken from them.  What kind of insanity is this?

There was no point in trying to change it.  The dead, vacuous stares in the eyes of the average Merican as they tell you about safety and security is enough to chase any reasoning person as far out of the borders as one can get.  I went as far as I could go without actually beginning the journey back again.

In all honesty, it's more comfortable to live in a neo-socialist country than to watch my native country devolve into Huxley-an nightmare around me.  At least here, I know what the rules are and I can avoid the pitfalls.  In Merica, there were some 50,000 laws governing my every waking moment, which meant that I could not step out of bed in the morning without becoming a criminal and subject to arbitrary arrest on the whim of some 'authority'.  At least Indonesians have the good sense to ignore innane and ridiculous laws...both the citizenry and the enforcers.

I used to get asked all the time by the folks back home why I left Merica.  Why would I choose to get out of such a haven of peace, love and freedom?  They don't ask anymore.  More often, I get asked to offer advice on how to get out.  "What should I do?"  "Where should I go?"  "What's it like?"  "Is it difficult?"

Honestly, how and where to go is as individual and the person making the choice to leave.

Is it difficult?  Absolutely.

It's not easy leaving lifelong friends and family.  It's not easy learning new languages and cultures.  It's not easy setting up house in a foreign environment.  It's not easy making all-new friends.  It's not easy breaking into the local business networks.

Locals tend to exclude you because you are a foreigner.  The ex-pats tend to exclude you because they were here first and want to protect their turf.  You have no idea who to trust and who is out to 'get ya'.  You have no idea where to go to buy basic necessities and you have to learn the numbers and names for things so you can find them and buy them.  Even then, you are likely to pay much higher prices because the locals mark you as ignorant and gullible, and they are right.

So why do it?  Because the risks and rewards are far greater than what you left behind.  Because it's a challenge that makes you feel more alive than you have in years.  Because living on the edge is what life is really about.  We are here to learn, to experience and to grow.  Moving to a foreign country is about as far into all three of those things as one can get.

Ex-patriotism is not for everyone.  There are plenty of home-bodies that abhor change and challenges.  They will go along with just about anything to get along.  Ex-patriotism turns your entire life on its head.  The most basic assumptions you make about your daily routine suddenly become the greatest challenges.  A great many people can't handle it.  One sees two types of ex-pats come here: those who run screaming for the exit after about two weeks, and the ones who stick it out and end up staying for years.  A few even become citizens after a while.

Ex-patriotism rewards those who stick it out.  You learn a completely different view of the world.  You pick up habits you thought were so foreign when you arrived.  You develop a taste for foods you couldn't even find at the market back home, if you even knew to look for them.  The unusual and outrageous become daily events.  You gain knowledge, experience and insight that would have been impossible to get even watching the NatGeo channel 24/7.

Best of all, you learn to rely on yourself and to trust that you are capable of meeting broad new challenges and adapting to new environments.  Ex-patriotism is a crash course in Self.  When it comes to self-exploration, there is no finer teacher than to remove yourself from all comfort zones and confront your fears and insecurities.

In all, ex-patriotism is a complex issue.  It is as much a running from as a running to.  The people who are willing to try it are as much escaping bad situations at home, as they are exploring new realms, both inside and outside.

At some point, most people think about what it would be like to live in another country.  Few actually try it.  But as the situation devolves in Merica, one finds more and more folks willing to take the leap.  It is not an easy choice to make and usually requires a strong push from the local situation to force one to consider it, much less actually do it.  But there are rewards equal to the risks involved, not the least of which is escaping intolerable socio-political environments at home.

Real freedom is not the choice between yellow mustard and Dijon.  It is the ability to change your situation in life and explore the inner and outer worlds.  Real freedom comes with a lot of risks, not the least of which the possibility of failure and losing it all.  The question is, how much are you willing to give up to keep it all?  Safety and security are elusive things and unobtainable without sacrificing most of what we use to define being human.

Ex-patriotism is a very real option for those finally tired of tyranny.  No place is perfect, but it is surprising how free much of the world is compared to places such as Merica.  Imagine going through a full day without once appearing on a surveillance camera.  And that's only the beginning.

It's something to consider the next time you feel panic at seeing a cop car behind you.

Etemenanki

Ya know, this whole Supreme Corpse thing in the States really has me fired up.  It goes straight to the heart of one of my pet peeves, which I can lay directly at the feet of the Roman Empire (aka Catholic Church), and which has so screwed up Western history and, by extension, the world.

Here's the deal....

Once upon a time, Humans were viewed as the pinnacle of Creation.  We were Masters of our domain (Seinfeld excepted) and the individual was a sacred being capable of achieving god-like characteristics.  Buddhism, which predates both Christianity and Judaism, speaks to the whole idea that humans are perfectable to the point of deification.  Each of us, given enough time and effort, are capable of achieving apotheosis.  As Robert Heinlein put it in 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' "Thou art god."

That whole concept is as foreign to us now as snorting Moon-dust.  We folks today can't imagine such an idea as individual human beings becoming gods in their own right.  That's some quaint idea reserved for Caesars and Japanese Emperors.  Us little people are but worms to be trod upon for the greater glory of someone else.

It shows up in so many subtle ways in our thinking and social discourse.  The concept of our baseness and unworthy-ness is built into our language.  We speak it and don't even think about it.  If we only paused for a moment and pondered what we say on a daily basis, we would (should) be shocked.

The other day, in my Business Conversation class, we took up the topic of 'jargon'.  Jargon is slang that is meant to exclude others from the inner sanctum of any given profession.  Jargon separates us into guilds and professions.  It allows us to exclude the uninitiated, but it also excludes us from other groups.  Slang divides generations, jargon divides disciplines.

Some of the terms we took up were 'core competency', 'corporate values', and 'human resources'.  If you are a corporate drone, then these terms are branded on your soul.  And chances are, you've probably never really thought them through.  So let's do that, because it's part of the Big Picture here on the Far Side.

First of all, 'core competency'.  This is a gem of bullshit.  Here, we've taken a horse turd and shined it up into an object of veneration and desire.  We are using 'core', which means the center, heart or penultimate, as an adjective to describe 'competency', which means average achievement, mediocrity and unenlightened.  So, when your boss talks about your company's 'core competency', he's asking you to buy into the idea that at your organization's heart is nothing more than mediocre ability.  A competent surgeon means he likely won't kill you, but all the effort and money likely won't cure you, either.  There's no art or substance, just following directions, boss.

The next term, 'corporate values', really goads me.  It is the assumption that a collection of humans, working in concert, constitute a 'person' that, in itself, has values, judgement and morals.  In other words, the collective hive becomes an 'individual' with a soul and independent existence.  We are no longer a collection of individuals working in concert, we are cells in a body corporate, where the body is supreme over the cells that make it up.  This should be classified as a psychiatric pathology, but of course psychiatry is part of the problem and definitely NOT part of the solution.

Finally, we come to 'human resources'.  This is particularly egregious.  Earth, wind, fire, and water are resources.  Humans are not.  Paper is a resource.  Ink is a resource.  Electricity is a resource.  Time is a resource.  But humans are humans.  We are not raw materials to be thrown at any given situation, along with whatever lumps of shit we have to hand.  I have skills and talents that are available to my employer for a fee, but I am not cord wood to be thrown on the fire on a cold night.

Now, I think we have sufficiently built a framework to show that the whole core of modern society is sick and dying.  That we humans has surrendered our basic value as individuals who are capable of apotheosis, in order to become cells in artificial golems of mystical construct, in order to receive remuneration and pay taxes is, in a word, sick.

We are a sick society, and perhaps that is why apocolyptism has become so prevalent.  We know we are sick and admit that we have no way to cure this sickness, and so we hope for some deus ex machina to come along and take care of the situation for us.

It doesn't matter what stripe you hail from.  Whether it's neopagan, Christian, Muslim, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even atheism...everyone is looking for some outside force to come in and clean up our dirty thinking.

This is the way mass murderers think.  They know they are 'broken'.  They can't figure out a way to cure themselves.  So they start killing people hoping to be caught so that someone else will take responsibility for their sickness.

This is the origin of the 'war on drugs'.  The elite don't want the individual to figure out how to cure their illness.

We, as a society-culture-civilization, are doing all we can to deny the problem at the core of our existence.  We ARE gods.  We are spiritual beings who are capable of things far beyond what we are achieving on a daily basis right now.  We are in the throes of evil beings trying to harness our power for their personal gain.  We  are the cocoon denying the worm the ability to become a butterfly.

It's time.

It's time to release ourselves.  Only we, as individuals, can open the cocoon and allow ourselves to soar where we belong.  All the legalisms and jingoisms and jargonisms serve only to keep us in the shell, when we should be fighting with all our might to break free of this morass of limits and horizons.

To come full circle, the Supreme Corpse decision on Obamacare serves only the shell, not the 'becoming'.  Those who are doomed to believe that we are nothing without the collective are doomed to spend eternity inside the cocoon.

In Asian thought, an individual is created by hard work.  One must spend a lifetime drawing the elements together to form a unique being.  If you fail, then you must return to the 'soup' from which you came, so that your energy can be recycled into another effort, commonly called reincarnation.  Once you achieve 'self', then you can perfect that thing into an eternal being.

Is the 'self' you are trying to create a part of some 'corporate' being?  Or are you strong enough to create a real 'individual'?  Therein lies our common dilemma in this day and age.

The root of the problem lies in language.  Take control of your language, and you take control of your life...your REAL life.

The lesson of the Tower of Babel was that the gods confused human language to keep them from achieving their true status.  Language is the key.  Learn your own language to the roots.  Then learn as many other languages as you can.  Then, at some point, it will all congeal to show the Big Picture.

Don't let anyone control your language.  If they control your language, they control your thoughts.  That was the whole point of the Great Light called George Carlin.  That is the point that I am trying to make.  Learn all languages.  Use language with great care and control.  It is the most powerful weapon that we, as Individual Human Beings, have at our command.  By controlling our language, we are setting ourselves free to exit the cocoon.

In other words, fuck the Supreme Corpse.

Where's Your Pair?

Thomas Jefferson

Wasn't all that long ago that someone was crazy as a loon if they spouted off about the coming martial law in America.  Now they've got armed TnA agents frisking old ladies at the Social Security office.  And that's OK.

Not even a decade ago, you were a tin foiler if you dared to mention the evil black helicopters.  I was, even though I had a sworn statement from an air traffic controller at Miami-Dade who had seen them and knew that they had the required N-numbers painted in IR paint on the tails.  Now there's black helicopters in the movies and drones over the house.  And that's OK.

It was just a while back that a guy was completely 'round the bend for suggesting the US government was building stalags all over the freakin' place.  I even had photos of one in Hockley, TX that I posted on the internet.  But I was half-a-dozen sandwiches short of a picnic.  Now they're posting bid tenders on fed websites for vendors to build and staff them in five regions around the country.  And that's OK.

Chemtrails?  No problem.  Police gunning down grade schoolers?  Go for it.  Assassinating American citizens without trial or conviction?  Yee-haw!  Indefinite detention because they don't like the way you smile and kiss ass?  Yeah baby!  That's the way I like it!  Waco?  Love it!  Ruby Ridge?  More more!  Elian Gonzales?  He deserved it!  Murder...mayhem...utter disregard for the rule of law and centuries of jurisprudence?  YES YES YES!!!

I wasn't the only one out there blowing the whistle on this stuff.  There were thousands of us.  We wrote.  We protested.  We fought in court.  We went to jail.  A lot.  Think Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.

Jesse Ventura's gone to Mexico, along with a lot of other folks I know.  Several people have moved to Panama.  I'm in Indonesia.  Others are scattered across the globe.  We gave up and got out.

After they impoverish you, destroy your family, kill your wife, and shit-can anything that's left, ain't no use sticking around.  All those good folks who laughed and ridiculed and ostracized...now they are the ones complaining.  No sympathy here, folks.  Sorry.

This is what people do when they are serious about changing things.  They fight.  I don't mean shooting, I mean filing paper, running the courts in circles.  Making them fight for ever inch they take.  You sandbag.  You drag your heels.  You absolutely wear them out with passive resistance.  It's called, "herding cats."

I went to jail for contempt of court because I brought my copy of Civil Procedures and dared to tell the judge she was wrong and show her the proof.  I went to jail for refusing to follow unconstitutional laws (see Thomas Jefferson).  I went to jail for exercising my rights, as clearly defined and delineated in the Texas and US Code (they call it a Code because you aren't supposed to figure it out).  I went to jail for refusing to identify myself to cops when I was in my house doing dishes and not bothering a soul.  They were illegally sweeping for warrants and I turned the tables on them.

I filed lawsuits.  I demanded they follow their own laws and regulations.  I filed aggravated kidnapping charges for false arrest.

This is what people do when they are serious about defending their freedom and their country from invasion, whether internal or external.

Living in fear, hoping you won't draw their attention, is the coward's way out.  Eventually, they come after you, no matter what.  Not fighting for your family and your freedom because you might miss the playoffs is the slave's chorus.  Not fighting because you don't know the law is the lazy man's excuse.  It's all at your fingertips right here on the internet.

I know guys who will invest inordinate numbers of hours studying stats for their favorite steroid abusers.  They'll spend their bottom dollar on a bigger TeeVee, but not a penny for their right to free information to watch on it.  Some guys will spend half their life buying, pimping and caring for their car, but not one second on learning that they don't have to have a license, or inspection, or insurance, or plates.  They know their car inside and out, but they don't know the law regarding travel and transportation.

American definition of freedom

What are your afraid of?  Losing your stuff?  It's not yours to begin with.  You just rent it from the government, and in any event, it's gone when you die.  You afraid of being uncomfortable, or spending a night in jail, or talking back to a judge who bought the chair?  Think of what the people did who bought your freedom.  What did they lose so you could sit on your ass and watch mindless garbage for a third of your life?

Everything costs something.  It's a fact of life.  Freedom has a cost too.  You can't skate through life stuffing your face, swilling beer and watching football without paying some price for the freedom to make those choices.

Americans have become a race of 'free lunchers.'  They want all the cream and none of the teat-squeezing.

You want the right to privacy?  Then learn where that concept comes from.  How did it appear in our law?  How can you defend it by investing a few hours each week to keep and expand it?

You like the freedom to travel?  Then learn the difference between travel and transport, between a car and a vehicle, between going about your business on your roads, and engaging in commerce on them.

You want free speach?  Then start speaking freely.  You want to keep and bear arms?  Then start keepng AND bearing them.  You want a free press?  Then stop watching the freaking mass media and start supporting real, steely-eyed reporting.

Most of all, don't ever be afraid to go to jail for what's right.  It makes the right all the sweeter when you fight for it, and it makes you a real soldier.  You are on the front lines of the War on Liberty.  You can hold your head up and say you've fought for your family, like a real man does.

Men used to say, "It's better to die standing than live on my knees."  Now they just say, "Honey, bring me another beer wouldja?  I don't wanna miss this play."

Real men in the Ukraine

What have you achieved with your life?  What have you done that will outlive you, besides breed?  What have you taught your children about the world and how to keep their rights?

If you have to think about it, then the answer is, "Not much."

Want to change the world?  Then start with yourself.  Get over your fear and stop cowering.  Then stand up like a real man and defend your family.  You don't have to fire a shot, or even throw a punch.  This war is for the mind.  It's a battle of wits and their only weapons are shadows and fog.

Learn.  Grow.  Fight.  Educate.  And for God's sake, turn off the TeeVee!

If Thine Eye Offends Thee

Yup, still here, just as I suspected.  But that only means we dodged the collision bullet.  Still plenty of fun to be had right here on good ol' Earth.

Today was interesting in that the Asian markets were hammered.  The Hang Seng lost 5.25% alone.  At the same time, Europe was all green.  Now go figure that?  Europe is falling into a black hole of debt, while Asia is doing fair to middlin', and our markets get trashed.  When I looked, US futures were up near 100, which puts a little cream on the burn yesterday, but the underlying infection ain't going away until we do some serious surgery.

With the demise of Libya, the number of countries with natural resources that don't bow to the fascist empire is dwindling fast.  Still have little ol' Cuba and North Korea.  Cuba doesn't appear to be in any immediate threat, since all they have is good cigars, rum and a submerged ancient city off the coast.  North Korea is fine, as long as they don't try to join the nuclear club.  That's a position only doled out to court jesters at the Vatican.

Iran, of course, is in major danger.  The Saudi king, who owes his wealth and priviledge to Lawrence of Arabia and his kow-towing to THEY, wants to put the kaibosh on Iran because it makes them look bad.  

The left-over Nazis, aka Israel, don't want ANY challenge to their nuclear hegemony in the Middle East.  They want to have one-button veto over everything that happens in the region.  Considering the way they treat anyone and everyone around them, can't says i blame 'em.  If I were the neighborhood bully, I'd want the biggest stick on the block, too.  I just wish they'd quit calling themselves Jews.  Makes it sound like they have some morals, which quite obviously they don't.

But why all this debt?  How did/do the banksters manage to get everyone in debt without anyone questioning it?  Today is not new.  They've been doing it, at least in Europe, for centuries  Eventually, folks wake up and lamp-post the whole damn lot of 'em, but for some reason, neither side ever learns.  Obviously, there's some deep trigger THEY use to fool people into buying into the Ponzi scheme again and again and again...

What could possibly be buried in the psyches of masses of people, that crosses all cultural barriers, and fosters a mind-set of debt, slavery and master worship?

Could it be...religion?  Hmmm...let's see.

First, you teach everyone that God is this hateful, vengeful being who demands utter obedience or He will torture and burn you in Hell for all eternity.  But He loves you.  Then you teach everyone that because some mythical ancestor ate an apple, we owe a huge, unpayable debt to this God.  We are to spend our entire lives lamenting and supplicating ourselves to this God for the apple-eating incident.  Furthermore, we are to offer the blood of goats and sheep to keep this God from getting angry and wiping us all out for what the mythical ancestors did under the apple tree that day.

That's right, this God loves the smell of death and burning flesh.  Cain's fruits and veggies just piss Him off.  He needs real death and destruction to make Him feel happy and needed.

All this blood and death was enough to create a story about the Son of this God, who comes around to teach us that we should love and share and that He will die to pay the debt, so we don't have to keep doing all this killing to make God happy.  Yup, that's right.  God Himself is the only Being capable of paying off the debt we owe for eating apples!  So now, we humans have to slaughter our own God and hang Him on a tree to pay off this debt.

But what happened?  To hear the Catholic church tell it, we still owe a debt!  We are born in Original Sin and baptism cleans that mess up, but we STILL owe a debt, because (God forbid) someone might masturbate, or not finish her Wheaties, or tell his wife she looks great when her belly is hanging over the waistband.  We are hopeless, corrupt, worthless sinners who can never repent enough to make God happy, even though He supposedly created us in His Own Image.

Wait a minute.  If we are in His Own Image, then killing, lusting, destroying, and masturbating are all good things, right?  After all, He does it!  He knocked up Mary without marriage ceremonies or anything.  He even abandoned her as soon as she got knocked up, which means He owes back support, doesn't it?  OK, so it was Gabriel who did the deed, but still...

Here we have slavery, debt and bloodlust, sewn into our collective psyches from birth, etched into our culture and civilization, and what do we get?  Empire, slavery, debt, bloodlust, war...everything we see God doing in The Book!  In fact, we can pretty much blame God for all the war and misery on Earth today!

So where did Christianity go astray?  After all, the central message is peace, love and no debt, right?  Instead, we ritually slaughter God every Sunday and eat His Flesh and drink His Blood.  And this is a good example for a bunch of unruly creations?  It would seem we got completely derailed!

And it's not the first time.  The Aztecs had a God of peace and love, but He was kicked out by a demon, and the Aztecs actually called him that, and started human sacrifice in order to what?  Why, pay a debt of course. The Maya did the same thing.  The Hindu had it for a long time, but then Buddha came along and reformed it. Makes it one of the few religions without debt and bloodlust at the heart of its philosophy.

We just had Idul Adha here, and across the Muslim world.  Guess what?  The Day of Atonement (debt) is marked by none other than slaughtering goats and cows.  The Zionists (note I didn't say Jews) have their Day of Atonement, in which they go out and slaughter their neighboring countries to atone for all the evil they bring into the world.

With all these fundamental beliefs at the cores of our societies, is it any wonder that banksters enslave us with debt, governments become tyrannical and churches dole out guilt and low self-esteem?  The whole damn thing is based on a fundamentally flawed and perverted view of the world, and that view is institutionalized at the deepest levels of our societies.

We are worthless, wretched sinners who need caretakers to whip us into shape and make us work our tails off in order to repay an unpayable debt to a murderous and evil God who loves the smell of burning flesh.

You see, the problem here is not the banksters (OWS), and it's not governments (Tea Baggers), it's the churches.  They are preaching hate and death and debt to us from the minute we spring into the world all steaming fresh.  They have so perverted what amounts to a Buddhist message from some guy named Jesus that was trying to reform Judaism and all the other debt-based, brutal religions of the day.

This problem is like a mesquite tree.  You can whack that booger right down flish with the dirt, and in three months you'll have a bigger mesquite tree.  This will continue to go one until you drag out the chain, hook it to the tractor, and yank the damn root ball out and burn it (preferably in a slow-cooker with some tender aged beef).  We will never free ourselves until we see what the real problem is, and fix it.

We can tear down the banks, revoke corporate licenses, erase all the police state apparatus, but as long as we believe in this religious guilt, slavery and debt, we will never be free.  All that will happen is that it grows back bigger, stronger and with nastier thorns, until the root is dug up and utterly destroyed.

Honestly, for all we know, Lucifer really is the Light Bearer, but we've been so snowed by BS that we can't see it anymore.  And don't get your religious panties all in a bunch, I'm just making the point that we have been so throroughly bamboozled that we have to assume everythng is a lie, at this point.  In other words...

The Matrix

Really, it's time for people to start taking a fresh and honest look at what they believe and where those beliefs come from.  We can no longer take anything for granted.  Our entire civilization and all our future generations depend on it.  But we need to move fast.

We are all Winston Smiths.  We are all the last of those who remember, and who can remember.  Our kids have been so thoroughly TeeVeed and public schooled that they wouldn't know there was something else to think and believe, much less where to find it.  Our parents helped create this empire of blood, and through our sloth and thoughtlessness, we have allowed it to continue.  It's up to us to clean it up, or it may be centuries before the next opportunity comes.

Start bartering and stop using the slave bux.  Pay off your debt and get free of it.  And for God's sake, stop going to the mega-churches and giving them money.  Starve all the Beasts at once.  Get out of banks and find alternative forms of payment wherever possible.  This is not something that needs to be gotten around to, it is an immediate and desperate need.  Gold and silver are one means, but not the only one.

Most importantly, question everything.  Harbor no sacred cows.  Open you mind to everything.  The Truth is always apparent, when you hear it.  Remember what Jesus said, "If your eye offends you, pluck it out.  If your hand is false, cut it off."  We have to be willing to jettison everything false and untrue, which is the meaning of that statement, no matter how dear and sacred it is to us.

Truth demands nothing less, and the reward is real, blissful and lasting freedom...of the heart, the mind and the soul.

Our children deserve nothing less.