Governing Ourselves

Last Friday, I turned on the radio to NPR, and heard CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer asking Newt Gingrich about the Moon. It was a repeat of that Thursday's Republican debate, the first of any of the debates I've heard. (I don't own a television, and if I'm listening to the radio it's usually The Current.) I found most of the candidates to be charming, in a way, in that I do see them believing that what they are doing is best for the country. I found Gingrich to be the most tactical, Romney would benefit from some dancing lessons, or yoga, Ron Paul is disassemblingly naive, and Rick Santorum aggressively disingenuous, aka desperate. Gingrich is a wild-card; potentially electable, and as likely as any of them to turn into a despot, should the opportunity arise. The advantage to Romney would be that he's not as likely as Santorum or Gingrich to initiate some semblance of martial law. It's hard to imagine a Mormon despot in this Christian nation. Assuming we make it to the election without a Greek default and/or oil shock, and a theoretical chain reactionary world-wide economic collapse - elect any of them with a Republican Majority in Congress and welcome to austerity, about 13-15% official unemployment, goodbye Social Security and Medicare, and hello the increased polluting and destruction of our ecological birthright. I've begun to wonder if that is a foregone conclusion no matter who we elect.

Mostly, I was reminded that we are not so much electing a President, as we are electing someone to lie to us about the severity of the situation. One hundred years of natural gas reserves? How is it the President of the United States of America is not as well informed as I am? But really, are we capable of hearing the truth? I've had the occasion to be reading Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus. I wish he were still around. He'd be having fun with all this talk from Santorum and his fellow Republicans about the lack of class - I mean, the fact that there are no classes in America, that we are all Americans. We are all Americans, indeed. I'm just thinking about that 50-60% of Americans who don't vote, in this, um, classless society.

Are we capable of governing ourselves? There's something about that, at the core of who we are as Americans (and humans). Are we ready for that? It's looking like the Established powers are very weak. I certainly don't fantasize about any Marxian anti-solution, so what do we do now that Capitalism seems to be failing us? I heard someone on NPR, talking about how the US might ride out the storm of a European Union collapse. Really? I'm sort of anticipating the possibility of a collapse epic beyond anything hinted at. I find it astounding that I have to look to the blogs to find the truth about resources and the economy. I sometimes feel like I'm watching a movie, when I see people in the mainstream proclaim something in the full faith of the mythology of progress, like they were filmed at some earlier point, oblivious to the storm looming just over the horizon, like the fall of 2008, only worse. Much worse.

A beautiful woman came to my door this morning, the most beautiful Jehovah's Witness I have ever seen. I just read last night, about the Watchtower, in John Michael Greer's Apocalypse Not. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the imminent transition into a life of divine perfection is at hand, the wiping away of all that is evil and the elevation of all that is good and of God. I wanted to ask her if she'd like to come in for coffee, but my house is a little like the collapse has already come, not really fit for company. Which house might be for sale by the way, April 01 (I'm still conspiring to plant fruit trees. There's a little pond, and lots of berries). I might have asked her to meet me for coffee, but I was still in the yoga pants, cashmere sweater and hat, and synthetic hoody I sleep in, looking indigent. I wanted to ask her, what if the world you envision is only possible if we create it, and what if a long period of tribulation is more likely than peace?

Are we capable of governing ourselves? That's what I think about when I think about anarchism (when I think about anarchism at all), governing myself. I'm willing to take direction; I will not be ruled. Which sentiment I find quintessentially American. To what degree my fellow Americans have a sense of what it is to be American, I'm not so certain. How dependent have we the American Consumer become on Government? What would happen if credit dried up for everybody, including the government? Anyone want to take bets about what the absence of law and order would look like, in America? Do you remember the cheering at that one debate about the 234 executions by Rick Perry's Texas Administration? For God and Country. I'm hoping for a more civilized arrangement here in Minneapolis.

I'm profoundly disillusioned with my Federal Government. I see it mostly as a vehicle for extracting wealth from Americans, to distribute in a way increasingly beneficent to a Corporate/Military/Industrial/Financial empire. It is the pax-official economic driver, making the world a safer place for an increasingly trans-national global elite to consolidate wealth and power, feeding the ever increasing demand, demanding the growth required by fiat currency and debt bondage.

What choice does this Empirical nation have now, but to send the mother-ship to the Persian gulf? Can you imagine Americans getting by on what we produce domestically? American hegemony will be sustained to its logical end, as long as there is fuel to feed it. Obama and his 100 years of natural gas. What exactly do you do with a President actively engaged in the inflation of an economic bubble? And then there's that pesky language in the latest defense bill about detaining Americans indefinitely without trial; which our founders would have found appaling. But then, we'd have to have a Congress that defends the Constitution, or a people who cared. (Notice how those Americans who most treat the Constitution as if it were holy, are the most willing to support legislation that undermines that document.) If this is a Republic, it is one profoundly off the rails. If I were a cartoonist, I'd picture America as the train on a wooden bridge, the pylons labeled Peak Oil, Peak Water, Synthetic anti-biotics, Health Care, Federal Reserve, one for each of the big banks and investment houses, the Euro, Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, climate change, Industrial mono-crop agriculture, etc. The train might as well be humanity, on the rails that have no destination, and every bridge is constructed of the same materials.

I'm not really on that train. I'm down here by the creek, watching. There are others with me, and we are waiting to help the survivors.

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It seems I cannot write an entry (Free Energy) since the Solstice that I do not have to back-track on. I found this video of Nassim Haramein on youtube, Sacred Geometry and Unified Fields. I've used some harsh language in reference to physicists; Nassim is a physicist I can appreciate. Not only does he have a fairly convincing argument for the unification of Einstein's Field Equations and Quantum Physics, he argues well that physics as we know it is deeply and fundamentally flawed. Standing outside the mainstream, he is able to see the ways in which physicists lie to themselves, in order to be accepted by the mainstream (Dark Matter, renormalization, Strong Force). Most physicists don't live in their van for five years, looking for answers to physics problems; they find comfortable positions in institutions public or private, which is very comfortable, which also constrains one's thinking, as there are any number of ideas that if you cop to, you'll be relieved of that job, out of any job having to do with physics – which pretty much goes for any scientific position anywhere. Tow the line, stay within the boundaries of the story, or be exiled.

Nassim is free to let his mind wander where it will. There is always the possibility of madness in that, drifting off into inexorable absurdity, but it can also be very lucrative, insofar as consciousness is concerned (his strength as a physicist is in part that he's not allergic to either the word consciousness or God). I can't follow his math, but I can understand intuitively the idea that every proton at the core of every atom is a black hole, with a gravitational intensity that would explain the electrons spinning around it at near the speed of light. Or dual protons in close proximity spinning around each other at the speed of light. And the vast relative distance between atoms in the structure of the hardest materials (his example: diamond has one of the highest structural densities of any known substance, and yet if you inflate the atoms of a diamond to the size of an orange, the closest atoms would be two football fields apart – that is serious gravitational intensity). Nassim is also willing to consider ideas that no mainstream scientist could utter for fear of being forever ostracized – that there is evidence to suggest ours is not the first nor even the most technologically advanced culture on Earth; the existence of aliens; the relevance of ancient myth. It is going to be very inconvenient for science at every level, if Nassim's math works out. I can imagine most scientists ignoring the math and Nassim, so they do not have to question their own assumptions, thereby betraying the purpose of science.

Basically, Nassim is saying we are beings of light. If you consider too that the DNA strand is an emitter of photons, then it is perfectly in keeping with physics to say so. Listening to Nassim, I'm reminded how much there is in Science and Religion, to tell us that we are not very worthy, that we are small and insignificant, that we are deeply flawed and weak. Nassim argues that we are in fact a transmitter of information traveling back and forth from the infinitesimally small to the infinitesimally big, from the atom to the whole of the universe, and back again. Nassim illuminates the atom and the cell with profundity; In his conception of the universe, every atom contains the makings of an entire universe. We are much heavier than we think.

So is free energy possible? Nassim is showing us that the universe is a profoundly energetic place, that the problem is not energy, but engineering. Engineering that is destroying the world, but to change engineering, we have to change our worldview. We have to start thinking about the space that contains us, the energy revealed to be infinite in empty space. He says (in a different video) that he's reducing his theory to a very simple formula. If he succeeds, that may indeed be a paradigm shift. Will it save us from the predicament that is the end of fossil fuels? I don't know. Is it going to take collapse for us to appreciate what energy means, to change our assumptions about what it is to be human?

I encourage you to watch the video. Though Nassim is a physicist, he is also very much more charming and fun to listen to than most people, let alone physicists.