Lyme Disease

I was in my local public library, looking through the health section for anything on herbals, when a book called Healing Lyme Disease the Natural Way, by Wolf-Dieter Storl, caught my attention. I had Lyme disease in the late summer and fall of 2008, while I was working for a Fortune 100 at their world headquarters. I had terrible rashes, my neck and shoulders were so tight I could hardly turn my head or lift my arms above my shoulders; I blacked out three times, once on the freeway while passing a semi, once in the shower where I was out long enough for the water to go cold, and a third time in my living room, when I woke up in the middle of a seizure, my face bouncing off the hardwood floor. I was given a broad spectrum antibiotic for three weeks and the problem went away.

I looked at the book, and the name Wolf, and I thought, 'He's probably a clean shaven guy who wears makeup, with feathers in his hair every day and lives in Santa Barbara.' As I'm interested in the healing properties of plants, however, and there being nothing else comparable on the shelf, I found a chair and started reading, regardless of my suspicions. What I found in that book instead, was a true healer speaking directly to the core of my being.

Wolf-Dieter Storl is a German born, American and Swiss educated anthropologist, who has traveled the world studying with native healers who work with plants in traditional ways. Author of 28 books, he has the intellect of a true academic, without the pompous superiority so common in the West, one of the few I've encountered who sees western Health Care for what it is mostly, a method of social control and a means to generate economic growth. A bulbous man with a great beard, who lives close to the earth, and cares deeply for people.

According to Storl, the Lyme bacteria is a biological marvel. It is of the genus Borellia, a spiral shaped spirochete like a cork screw, which can actually contract it's form into a sphere, as if you took a rubberband, stretched it out and released it, it would take the shape of a marble – so that it will be “featureless” and so unrecognizable to the host immune system. It can barrel it's way into a host cell, killing the cell and wearing it like a costume. Like a chameleon it can take on the appearance of a host cell, such that if the immune system recognizes it as an invader, it attacks the spirochete as well as the native tissue. It can insinuate itself into tissue so that it can't be found by the immune system, antibiotics, or tested for accurately by any modern method. It has 150 genes in the outer of its three cell walls (most bacteria have three), which can communicate to the bacteria information about the immune defenses of the host, and of any antibiotic, allowing the bacteria to change it's appearance in response. It can encapsulate and go dormant in a matter of minutes, for up to ten months, that neither the immune defenses of the host, or antibiotics can effect it. It can swim so fast through the system that it will colonize the entire body including passing the blood-brain barrier, in as little as ten days.

Yet, so many people have Borellia spirochetes in their body, some scientists are not even convinced Lyme is a real disease. The symptoms of it are so similar to so many other diseases including MS, that doctors often claim one when it's the other. No one knows if the disease even existed before 1975. Some people are debilitated by it, and yet others never know they have it.

Lyme has reached epidemic proportions the last several decades, particularly in the upper Midwest, and the Northeast, spread by the tiny deer tick, Ixodes scapularis. Many doctors are convinced, that antibiotics have no effect on it, even as some doctors go so far as to proffer antibiotics intravenously. It is a true mystery disease, tweaking Western assumptions about what disease even is, and what science is capable of doing about it.

Wolf Storl contracted Lyme, but having had a terrible experience prior with antibiotics, nearly dying not from the sickness he contracted, but the cure, and believing the old shamanic saying that there's a plant to heal every sickness, he chose instead to focus on strengthening his immune system, and searching in the records for a plant that might be of use. Antibiotics of course, act to suppress and weaken the immune system. Here was his plan, in the basics:

• Plenty of sleep
• Fresh air and sunshine
• Exercise
• Healthy eating habits
• Immune system strengthening herbs
• Joy of life and sense of purpose
• Setting time aside for himself

In addition, he took daily hot baths and saunas, and also, for three weeks, a tincture of the root of Dipsacus sativa (D. fullonum, D. sylvestris), Teasel.

When I look back at my experience with Lyme, I'm no longer convinced that the antibiotics did anything to fix the problem. I think my body healed itself, adapted. Because at the time, not only was I taking the antibiotic, I quit my corporate job, I hoped in a 1979 Dasher running on waste vegetable oil, with the woman I loved, took a rambling, two week tour across the northern half of the Western states (in the fall), and then convalesced among the redwoods of Mendcino for two months, eating organic all the while, and berries and mushrooms I gathered myself. That's what healed me.

And I'm not even convinced that the spirochete isn't still active in my body, though an ally now somehow, rather than a threat. Consider, that spirals are fundamental constructs of universal processes. Our DNA is spiraled, the earth spirals through the galaxy as it revolves around the sun and the sun around the center of the galaxy, the galaxy is spiraled. Now consider what I have accomplished in the four years since I had Lyme – I wrote two books, I'm working on two others, I have danced like a whirling dervish in front of tens of thousands of people, I've maintained this blog, I managed a Halloween store twice, I've sung in a way I had no idea that I could. I no longer think of Lyme as a disease, I think of it as a kind of shamanic initiation.*

Consider too, when I woke up in my tent, in the middle of that meadow, and discovered that strange bite on the inside of my left thigh, I was camped next to a stand of teasel, which despite that I am an inveterate observer of plants, I had not seen before, and have not seen since (I didn't use the plant to heal, but the synchronicity is significant to me.) Consider too, that I haven't been in that library but once before, there are only two copies of Wolf's book in the whole 42 library Hennepin County system, and I happened to be looking for information that might spur myself to rededicate myself to healing, and a more earnest study of plants.

All of this fits nicely into the context of the current Health Care debate. All of the criticism and support I've heard misses the point entirely, about the Affordable Care Act. Western Health Care encourages us to think that we need not take any responsibility for our own health, that a technological, magic fix will be there for whatever problems we have, when we need it, no matter how we treat ourselves. In addition, everything about Western civilization is about separating us from nature, from plants and their gifts, from the rhythms and cycles of the biosphere, from each other. Industrial culture in fact, assures that most of us remain unhealthy. I'm convinced, most of what we know of disease is not endemic to the human condition at all, it is a result of the stress, the pace, the disconnection, and the myriad pollutants inherent to industrialism.

This nation is already insolvent, spending about 35% more than we generate. And now we are going to expand Health Care, when it is already 20% of the economy? While doing nothing to address the roots of ill health. It is a recipe for bankruptcy. And this argument does not even yet address the degree to which this Affordable Care Act is a massive boon to insurance and pharmaceutical companies, or the fact that it forces someone who knows how to heal themselves and keep themselves healthy naturally, to pay the same as someone of comparable income who subsists on industrial junk food and sits on their fat ass all day. This is not a health care act as much as it is a broad expansion in social control. You will pay to feed the system, whether you like it or not. Nor have I yet addressed the possibility that all this is just a political ploy to distract us from the very real steps the architects of national health care are taking toward martial law. There may not even be much of a functioning economy by the time the mandate, er, tax takes effect. If there's little in the way of a functioning economy, those institutions aren't going to be there for you.

The point of this essay is to encourage you not to depend on institutions for your heath care. Institutions cannot and do not care for your health, they function mostly to encourage your ill health and apply temporary remedies to the symptoms, for profit. Good for setting broken bones, and invasive surgery if needed, but not much else. Consider that encouraging health is in fact contrary, nay, antithetical, to a profit driven economic health care model. Agricultural subsidies to the most polluting players, making the most unhealthy food the cheapest, being a fine case in point. Keep em sick, and keep the money rolling in.

Well, there comes a time when the people are just too plain ill to sustain economic growth. We're about there, I'm guessing. More on this theme, to come.

* That is not to say, go out and get Lyme disease so you can have a shamanic initiation. I'm just speculating, and besides, there is nothing pleasant about Lyme disease. It's not like it has been a financial boon either. I'm broke, in an untenable situation with this house, and I'm feeling more weak and run down than I've felt in a long time. So as always, I'm just reporting my experience in this life.

Tyranny in the State of Minnesota

I know I said I was going to wait a month before I would publish another blog post, but something has come up, and I'll feel better if there is a public record of it.

In early 2010, I made a $100 accounting error in my checking account. In the course of a week, not yet accustomed to using cash, working a plumbing job for a friend, I made ten small purchases using my debit card, for a total of $80, all of it for plumbing materials. US Bank charged me $375 in fees. I called the branch, and told them I would be willing to pay the equivalent of two overdraft fees, $75. Looked at another way, I said, that is effectively 100% interest on the $80 dollars they "loaned" me for a week. They said no. I called corporate, and they said I would be charged $8 a day every day until I paid the total. I told them, under those terms, I would pay them nothing.

US Bank let the total in fees and penalties rise to $800, or 1000% interest in two months, sold the debt to a credit agency (for probably about the same amount as I was willing to pay them), and then had the temerity to leave the account open with a negative balance.

This past winter, I received a call from a man claiming to be a lawyer, with Bradstreet and Associates LLC, who said a judgment for $1200 had been rendered against me in a Hennepin County court. He wanted to know how I wanted to arrange payment. I told him I had no idea there was such a hearing, and I asked him if he even knew what the original debt was for. He did not. I said as much to him as I said to US Bank, I will never pay a dollar.

I called the county then, and after 45 minutes navigating the phone tree, a woman told me she could tell me nothing about the judgment over the phone, that I would have to go to the county offices. I asked her, how was it, that I had no idea I was even supposed to be in court for the original hearing. She said the county sent a letter - to an address I haven't lived at in six years, though I own a house in Hennepin County, and I've paid Hennepin County property taxes for that current address all those six years! She seemed unfazed. I told her I didn't want to go to the county offices, because I was afraid of being arrested.

Yesterday, it became know to me that there was another letter from the county, at that old address. I retrieved it, an Order for [financial] Disclosure. I had ten days to fill out the form and return it to the county. At the time, it was 14 days since the filing of the order. "The Judgment Creditor may ask the Court to hold you in 'civil contempt of court.' If the Court decides that you intentionally disobeyed this Order, the Court may fine you, put you in jail, or both."

I though about taking the train downtown today, to the county offices, to try and straighten this out, but I did a little research first. Our local newspaper, The Star Tribune, published a nice series on debt collection in Minnesota recently, which convinced me that if I present myself to the county, I will face potential indefinite detention in county lock up, until I sign the form, or someone pays the debt.

The story of the debt will not matter. The only thing that matters to the county, at this point, is that I fill out that financial disclosure form. Which would open up a mainline from my checking account to Bradstreet and Associates, LLC. There's nothing in the account, but it stands to reason at some point there will be. In other words, I would be acknowledging the debt is legitimate. I would tell them instead, no, I will not fill out that disclosure form, that debt is not legitimate, they made that debt nearly out of thin air. In which case, I would likely be arrested and put in jail until I did fill out the form - with bail set at the amount of, to twice the $1200 judgment (with the Hennepin County taxpayers spending $200 a day to house me.)

I thought, hey, I'll call Bradstreet and Associates LLC, and tell them if I go to jail, I'm going to sue them, with the county as co-conspirators, for a very large amount of money, and do you really think any jury is going to side with you? They can't just sell the debt to some other agency now that there's a judgment on it, right? Just take it as a loss and let it go, I'd say. But I can't call them, or find them, because they don't apparently have a phone or an address, not listed anywhere. I tried to call the county too, but gave up after 45 minutes on the automated phone tree.

The county at this point, and the Sherrif's department, are acting as henchmen, or mercenary's for a business that buys up debt other creditors can't collect on, a business likely as not full of established criminals. Pull back the thin veneer of civilized governance, and what this is isn't anything but extortion. Confront any one in Hennepin County governance, and every one will claim ignorance. Hannah Arendt said:

"[Of] the forms of government as the rule of man over man...we aught to add the latest and perhaps the most formidable form of such domination: bureaucracy or the rule of an intricate system of bureaus in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few or the many, can be held responsible, and which could properly be called the rule of Nobody. If, in accord with traditional political thought, we identify tyranny as government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done." [my italics; the link is about extending the logic here in Minnesota, globally]

No one at the county has any idea what the debt they are prosecuting me for, is from. Nor do they care to know. The are only fulfilling the law. Doing their jobs.

Which puts me in a profoundly vulnerable place, as there is no institution, public or private, that I am a direct part of, protecting me. And the vast majority of Americans, like the people at the county or at Bradstreet $ Assoc. LLC, think if there is a debt and the government is after me, then I must be guilty and whatever happens is just - unless they themselves have been prey. As to the argument that I signed a contract when I opened that bank account, I say, try and get by in this culture without one. What is a contract, if the terms of that contract are purely defined by the one providing it, there is hardly any choice, and the provider is a corrupt bureaucracy of it's own kind? As to my financial foolishness, I plead no contest, as my Federal government has set the example, spending 300 billion a month while taking in 200 billion. But just pay the bill, I hear someone saying. First, I don't have the money. Second, third and fourth, you may be fine with the institutional fleecing of Americans, I prefer not to be fleeced.

It has been said, the wheels of fate grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. I have never been arrested, and I have no desire to be ground up by the wheels of Hennepin County bureaucracy. In fact, I would like to flee. But nor, do I want to leave my garden, or walk away from this house and my family. Mostly, when I think of what could happen to me in that county lock up, how incarceration has come to seem an almost inevitability, knowing that I have become more and more like the American that Thomas Jefferson wished for us to be, capable of self-governing, independent, free thinking, I get to feeling like Samuel Adams in 1776:

"If ye love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom...crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains rest lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

But I look around me, here in the corrupt, calloused, complacent Heartland of America, and I know not one other who shares that sentiment.

           

Fear

Reading those last two paragraphs this morning over coffee, of the post I wrote last night in a tizzy, in about an hour, they feel hollow. I suppose that's what they call shadow, my own fears of the world projected out at the world.

The truth is, I am afraid. I'm afraid that humanity is driving itself inexorably toward the sterilization of the biosphere, and the extinction of the species, all species, pretty much. I'm afraid of my government, and my President, who has claimed Absolute Power, the President and the State escalating violence across the globe in the name of commerce, empire, and yet I'm the one who could go to jail for talking about spray paint, or smoking pot? I'm afraid that the world could fall into a Great Depression-like liquidity freeze any day now, from which we will never recover, and more likely descend into a frenzy of barbarism, with the four horseman of the apocalypse - war, famine, pestilence, death - reducing the population by several billion at least. I'm afraid the economy is going to crash, and those two aging nuclear facilities on either side of me are going to melt down in short order. I'm afraid people like the Rockefellers and the Obamas are going to wall themselves off, and rain drone hellfire on the rest of us. I'm afraid the good is doomed and sociopath dominators, controllers and defilers are going to reign enslaving us in a dessicated landscape for many thousands of years. Have I forgotten anything? That is but a brief list of my fears, if you can imagine. 

The truth is too, I'm a mess. I'm broke again, so broke I'm not going to be able to keep my phone from getting shut off, and yet I don't seem to care. I feel paralyzed to do anything about it. My glasses are a mess, and I'm like, I had the money at one time, why didn't I get my eyes fixed? and now I feel like I might lose that opportunity. I've been drinking too much and hardly eating anything. I am consumed daily by visions of mayhem, of my own manufacture, based on the compendium of bad news pouring in from around the globe, which I devour insatiably. What is the thought of getting a job, when the world as you know it is about to end, and I'm such a fucking downer anyway? What is worse than knowing the world as we know it is coming to an end, while almost everyone around me is denying the information readily available for anyone to look at, in an effort to maintain an utterly doomed status quo, that is leading us toward oblivion? I guess, being oblivious?

Meanwhile, I have this toxic mortgage hanging over my head, and all my dreams of what I had hoped to do to this house in the way of taking it off the grid, are no more. I'm finding, if the culture as we know it is coming to an end, I have a powerful urge to return to the place of my birth. That would be a far safer place to ride out the troubles than here.

So I don't know what you should do. I'm not even taking care of myself; where do I get off, recommending behavior, especially behavior that could get you in trouble with sadists who have the force of law and cultural agreement behind them? Better to just be. To find a nook somewhere more or less out of the way of the sadists, sociopaths, psychos and slaves this culture manufactures by the hundred million, and make friends with plants, and good people doing the same.

I'm afraid, and I'm weary. And I'm mostly alone. It's not a healthy combination. I can't even seem to draw up the joy, dancing and singing anymore, or even writing. I remember, the goal of this blog originally, was to be a model of ecologically responsible behavior, and joyous wonder at the mystery of it all. I've strayed a long way.

So I think I might take a break from blogging for awhile, until such time as I feel like I'm not just transposing my fear from me to you, until such time as I feel like a model with something worth saying again. To let go of the doom and just work on my house and garden, to offer it up for sale to someone who wants to live in a cute little house in the midst of an urban food forest, who is not so pessimistic about the future of this city. So I can be free to move. I don't mean to say I'm done blogging, I just need a break from the madness. I just need to let go, and start living again. 'Cause it's just too fuckin' much, and I don't see why I have to bear the weight of it all, if that means my ruination. Anyway, thanks for reading.

Happy Summer Solstice 2012

Would you like to see the modern face of fascism? Here you go.

If you link to the page, scroll all the way to the bottom. The Breakthrough Institute is a front organization, environmental in name only, soft-pedaling environmental and economic concerns, using the language of ecology. They just released a major report, that is likely to receive heavy play in the media. What are they saying? Paraphrased, 'The destruction of the biosphere has been good for humanity! Species extinction? No problem! The solution to climate change? Charge straight ahead just as we are. Everything is fine, don't worry about it, it's all under control.' If you look closely at the very bottom of that page, and notice the affiliation, you will see the words Philanthropy and Inc. behind that name. Right, philanthropy as a business.

 I've never been much in favor of the word Illuminati. Most of the information out there is raving paranoia, fantasies of seriously disturbed people. The folks over at the Doomstead Diner are about the only ones I know of, who use the word and are otherwise talking sense. I still don't care much for the word, but what do you call uber-billionaires and uber-billionaire families that have their fingers in oil, chemicals, logging, coal, big ag, security states, weapons systems, information surveillance etc? Regular people?

The two guys who started the Breakthrough Institute, wrote a book called The Death of Environmentalism. How appropriate. It is dead, in the sense that America's environmentalists are mostly empirical shills for consumerism, yuppies who want to live like yuppies, who have sacrificed protecting the earth for doomed and utterly useless CO2 controls and a vision, or rather a fantasy, of an America exactly as empirical/consumer as it is, except run on green energy. Their evident delusion and hypocrisy has made it possible for the Right to demonize the word environmentalist, as though anyone who cares about the earth or their local ecosystem is somehow hostile to people. The former Sheriff of my hometown who is now a state senator, is fond of using the word as a pejorative, in defense of a foreign multinational, extracting copper from Minnesota and taking most of the wealth generated overseas - as example.

What has to happen here? Here is what is happening. You see, multinational institutions are denuding the last of the biosphere's resources, ratcheting up that rate of extraction and exploitation, the leveling of forests, mining, drilling, the hollowing out of the seas, etc, and increasingly, wherever people are standing up in defiance, they are being shuttled aside, beaten, ruined, raped and killed.

What is pacifism? Jesus talked about turning the other cheek, but Jesus seems mostly to have resulted in Christians justifying military adventurism and empire, or otherwise acting like obedient sheep. Ghandi? How many times have you heard lately, "Be the change you wish to see in the world?" Are Hindus better off than they were under the Brits? Have you heard about the estimated 200,000 poor Indian farmers who have killed themselves in the last decade because industrial agriculture has taken over farming in India, and ruined them? Martin Luther King? Black folk got the vote, and now 40% of black men are at some time incarcerated and disenfranchised, increasingly for profit. The memory of all three of these men has been subsumed by the empirical consumer culture, acting mostly as propaganda to keep people thinking that their empirical lifestyles are justified.

As the industrial world begins it's collapse, do you suppose all those people who think the meaning of life is to consume and control as much as possible, are going to stop and say, "I guess we were wrong, let's dismantle the system and start over in a way that is ecologically responsible?" No, they are going to scapegoat the people who are saying that is what we should do, throwing them in cages, beating them up, ostracizing them, even raping and killing them.

Where are the warriors of the earth, is what I'm wondering?

Now, I'm not advocating going out and being violent. That will only result in blowback ten or a thousand fold, and it will likely ruin you and possibly the people closest to you. The American military, intelligence and police are the most fearsome, intimidating and powerful fighting machine ever devised. Any serious movement in the name of defending the earth is going to be crushed with prejudice, in the way of brutalizers. That doesn't mean, that at some point in your life, the playing field won't be leveled. Are you going to be ready for that day? There's a difference between being violent, and knowing one is capable of violence when necessity calls.

Meanwhile you can undermine. That is most effectively done by stealth. Psychological warfare, so to speak. Like, the next time you happen to be standing behind an oil tanker, or a Wal-Mart truck or whatever, scrawl in the dust, GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN - FAMINE + CONSUMERISM = CANNIBALISM, or some such variation. Maybe THE EARTH WILL BE AVENGED. Write it on walls. Spray paint works good too, in prominent locales. You might spray your local Fed, or chemical or weapons or big ag contractor (building) with pigs blood, or maybe just red paintballs. Monkeywrenching works too. Use your imagination. Have fun with it. Just don't get caught. The worst of them will treat you worse than the pedophiles - they will attempt to destroy you, in the way of making examples.

Happy Solstice.

Population Control

Where does one begin?

Well, from the moment of first consciousness, at least, when we are assailed above all else here in the West, with the virtue of obedience - the command and control of the parent/adult/authority - no matter how irrational the command might be, even contrary to any honest measure of justice. That has long manifested in the West, in the ideal of the nuclear family, the command of the father, the subservience of the mother and child. From there, we are immersed in the institutional school, where we are taught to sit for long periods of time and pay attention, where we are taught value judgments about our gifts and how to react properly to directives. We are immersed in religious dogma, and political and economic ideologies denigrating the body, often diminishing us, making us small, inconsequential, weak. Subservience to the State, the goal in such training.

As adults, we are almost entirely dependent upon, and subject to institutions, to provide us with the basic necessities of life, including food, water and security; as I see it, many people simply parroting what institutions tell us to think about this world. The institutional directive, the most effective method of social control ever devised. Lucrative in a few cases, beyond conception.

That message, what to think and how to act, is most effectively reinforced by media. What is that message, simplified for clarity? Consume, fear and despise the Other, support the troops.

Who is the evil Other these days? Terrorists, of course. Conservatives to Liberals, Liberals to Conservatives. Romney, the dominator, is trying to to elicit fear and hostility toward the Chinese, as well as the Russians. It's going to be an all-out-war, globally, for the last of resources, no matter who the president is. So do your duty, and keep consuming, because God says you can't derail that train, no matter how you might like to.

Of course, it's all a losing game. Is there a more pernicious certainty, than the idea of control? Thinking we control nature, allowing us to inflate our numbers to seven billion. Ten billion people would have nothing left to consume, but each other probably. I wouldn't worry about that too much. There are all sorts of concerns about population, all sorts of ideas, about what should be done, what could be done. Nothing, is the only proper answer to that question, insofar as control is concerned. Nature, if I know anything about peak resources, climate change, systemic toxicity and species extinction, is going to deal with that, with prejudice, very likely. No need to meddle. The only thing keeping most people alive, are institutions, and hardly a one of those “persons” especially, gives a damn about people except as consumers. If there's a liquidity freeze world-wide, a collapse in supply chains of everything from food to fuel, it wouldn't take but the cycle of a year to reduce global population by a billion or more.

Speaking of hell on earth, that might cause a little unrest. Don't think that isn't being contemplated, at the highest levels of governance. I know at least one writer who is logically convinced, our government is preparing to exterminate us - not consciously, but the actions of the state are leading the nation inexorably in that direction, he believes. I didn't think there was anyone out there who had a lower opinion of Obama than I do, legitimately, but I was wrong. I hadn't let Obama's kill list fully penetrate my consciousness, until I read Arthur Silber's thought's on the subject.

“Although the NYT article did not disclose new information with regard to the essentials of the State's program of death, its length, detail and prominence constitute a significant ratcheting up of the State's claim of absolute power. Most crucial is the statement in the article that much of the content is derived from interviews with "three dozen of [Obama's] current and former advisers." As I pointed out in Part I, this in effect announces the identity of the article's true author: the author is the U.S. government, the State itself. Through these "advisers," the highest levels of the U.S. government have told the story they want to tell. And what is that story? It is simply this:

The State is become death. Our target can be anyone we choose. Yes, this means you. No, there is nowhere to run.

It is not every day that the State announces in the august pages of "the paper of record" that its primary program, the central mission to which it patiently and carefully devotes its vast resources, is the elimination of human life, wherever, whenever and to whatever extent it wishes....

These people are monsters. This is profoundly evil. All these people, all those who collaborate and assist in such a program, have placed themselves far beyond any limit of what can be designated as civilization.”



Yeah, that's about right. And Americans didn't utter a peep, least of all the Left, Republicans only complaining jealously, that they didn't look so good, testing their “principles and will” so. A morally corrupt nation incapable of even reacting to the news that their President is a cold blooded, methodical agent of death dealing. That he has lifted himself above all law. It is as if history has been wiped away completely, and we are condemning ourselves to repeat it, with here-to-fore unimaginable vengeance.

If death-dealing Austerity comes to America, and we have 25% official unemployment like Spain, more like 35-40% real unemployment, I see this President, or Romney, simply commissioning a legal memorandum justifying drone assassinations on American soil, of Americans, Moslem to Tea Party. Terrorist defined as anyone the state defines as a threat to the institution of the state. That, and full on military intervention, check points and internment camps, and even that logical end. Americans are free to prove me wrong, of course. That's not what I want for America. Nobody I know deserves that fate. I want to believe Americans are better than that.

But then, it could be argued by some in this world that Americans are the most passively banal, efficient death dealers the world has ever known. Almost everything about our lives in America, is dependent upon American empire, the funneling of wealth and resources from poor dictatorial countries to America, channels of commerce monitored and controlled by our military, the most splendid killing machine ever devised. There has never been a dictator so vile that we would not deal with, if we deemed it in our vested interest. Do we Americans truly deserve a better fate than what we have meted out, through our government, in the name of commerce, a better fate meted out to us by that state, that government of our imperial dominion? Are we capable of better?

My takeaway from that New York Times article is, I feel bad for those two girls, because their father is a monster. And Americans, both the Left and the Right ideologically, are complicit, indifferently, obliviously. And I seriously wonder if we would deny the existence of domestic internment death camps and drone assassinations, as easily as we deny that America is an empire, let alone one on the downslope side of collapse, seriously vulnerable to global economic meltdown.

Aquinas

In a recent post, I said something about Thomas Aquinas, that he fused theology and rationalism in a fundamental way, in the Western mind. I might have been more accurate to say Theology and Logic, maybe. As with most theological expositions and exposition-ers, reading about his life, and some of his words, I feel very much like Aquinas is reported to have felt, toward the end of his life. He is said to have found himself in the presence of Jesus, who asked him, “What do you desire?” Aquinas replied, “Only you.” That might have been a mistake, because he went into a deep funk then, and never wrote again. He is reported to have said, “Mihi veditur ut paleam,” attributed, “All that I have written is like straw to me.” He died a little more than a year after, giving a commentary on the Song of Songs. It is not reported, what that commentary was.

I'm not anything like an expert on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. I'm more like an orderer of symbols, as words, and so Thomas Aquinas is more a symbol to me, just as he is to many Catholics. I know there were various setbacks in his life, various attacks against his theology and character. But I believe he was sincere, genuine. Indeed, for most of his adult life he influenced Catholic theology considerably, and by the end of his life he was revered. To this day, the Catholic Church takes the theology of Aquinas as its theology, required reading in all the apostolic schools.

When I contemplate the life of Thomas Aquinas, I'm most interested in that late insight. What did he see, that made the whole of his life-work like straw to him? Indeed, there are few in the history of humanity, who have as broad or influential a life work, influential more than seven centuries after his death. The Catholic Church ignores the consequences of this late revelation, as a kind of God-influenced discombobulation, but what could they say? That straw is a cornerstone of their institutional/intellectual foundation. He couldn't have meant it!

My idea, and it is only an idea, is that on asking Jesus, only to know Him, Aquinas saw how far his life's work had been from a recovery of the garden, and he saw how the whole of it would be taken very seriously, for a very long time. That, and there was nothing to do to prevent it, nothing he could say, nothing he could write to take it back, only cast off as the raving of an old man gone mad. Dante suggested in the Paradisio, Aquinas was poisoned. It makes sense, if he was attempting, as perhaps – conceivably - in his commentary on the Song of Songs, to take it back, to renounce, to return to the garden?

In the context of the perniciousness of institutions, and their inherent drive to control, the Catholic Church is a kind of preeminent example. In a way, the Catholic Church is like the template of the enduring institution. Even after split in half, that other half splintering into seemingly endless variety, it endures. Even after it has been revealed time and again to be inherently corrupt, incapable of not being corrupt, it endures. Now, it is one institution among many under the arc of Christianity. Perhaps the most powerful though, still.

Christianity itself may not have survived, but for the institutional structure the early Catholics built.

I look at Christianity now, in the twilight of American empire, and I am full of contempt for it's leadership, and to a lesser degree for Christians generally. The early Catholics survived and built their Religion with a capital R, in part by taking control of the Roman Empire. Christian's in America today, have not shown any less comfort with imperialist pursuits. Christian leaders have never much quibbled with their congregates conception of the American dream. It has proved very lucrative. Then there have been the calls to war. Worst of all, is a refusal to accept the full implications of science, while partaking insatiably of the fruit.

Why can Christians accept the fruit but not the full implications of science? Because faith in the institution would collapse. The Christian gnostic may not have any problem accepting the revelation of science, or the gnostic scriptures, because a gnostic doesn't depend on any institutional authority to establish his or her relationship to the divine. The typical, institutional Christian, Catholic or otherwise, would not likely be a Christian, but for the hierarchical power structure, providing strength by association, telling him what to do, how to act, justifying his willful ignorance, and so perceives any threat to the mythology that sustains that hierarchy, a threat to his soul, her salvation. In the time of Aquinas, you paid the local ecclesiastical elite to grant you indulgences, that you might be saved. These days, the institution panders to your indulgence. It's a lucrative co-dependency, and virulently defended by both dependents. Never mind what science has revealed about the depth of the cosmos; let us embrace ignorance; and we shall demand it from all! The people shall bow down before God! Tyrannical, very Islamic like mytho-fascism. 

Thomas Aquinas. I wonder what his intellect would have done with a true knowledge of the working cosmos - and global resource limits? Who knows? Would he remain tied to the one God monotheism of his fathers? Could he allow that the masculine is like a divine energy embedded in universal processes, and could he see the feminine the ethos of Western Civilization is designed to dominate and subdue? I find it deeply gratifying that he died, giving a commentary on the Song of Songs, that one erotic book in the bible. I like that he took refuge there, at the end of his life, the great man who never lay with a woman. And it seems to me, if he lived a whole year after his conversation with Jesus, maybe he was headed on a whole new path. If he transformed the Catholic Church in a fundamental way, he might have turned it another. What Dante said is perfectly in keeping with institutional motive. A good Catholic can't have Thomas Aquinas advocating for a return to the garden (if you'll beg my indulgence.)

As for Christianity, I was raised Lutheran, and then evangelical. Little of the gross hypocrisy, crass materialism and willful ignorance that drove me from the faith, has abated; indeed, I see it now mixed with a belligerent quasi-nationalism, with gay-bashing, anti-female, militaristic, fascist overtones. I'm starting to sense a kind of rabidness, an urge to internal violence. With most guys, Christian and non-Christian alike, I think they're just bored, mostly, and angry, full of rage, and aiming it at what they know to aim at, what they've been told, pretty much. It's not like critical thinking is truly encouraged, by any of our institutions.

Good Christ, our soldiers are killing themselves in record numbers. Just wars, Aquinas, Augustine? If I could talk to such a soldier in such a place, I would say, offer yourself up in service to the Goddess, and see what happens.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I published the third chapter of Progress Interrupted. I apologize beforehand for the scrolling necessary to get there, if you've read the first two chapters; I'm working on making it more user-friendly with my webmaster. There's also a blog entry, recently published, about where I'm at with the garden and the house. I know I've been on a curious path lately, rather harsh, radical in the extreme. I'm reevaluating everything. Everything has changed, and I'm not sure what to do or where to go from here. No regrets, but I feel a little like the wild man howling into an echo chamber. If anybody out there has any opinion, I'd love to hear it, and if you don't want your comment published, say so and it won't be.

That last post, Dum and Dee, was my 200th on this blog. I think it would have been better served, to have been a post of gratitude. Thank you for reading. Thank you for taking a chance with me. About a hundred people a day, lately. Not so long ago, it was 35. That's a lot of responsibility, more than I've ever had. I'm honored. I'm trying to make sense of this world I inhabit. Your checking in tells me, I'm making some.      

Dum and Dee

Before I skewer Catholic and Christian Institutions, I just wanted to comment on recent trade revelations. So a multinational corporation could come to America, violate American laws, as in pollute my neighborhood, and it would be accountable only to an International tribunal? Am I missing something, or is conspiring to compromise the sovereignty of the American people and America not a treasonable offense? Question: how do you accuse the black President of the Affordable Care Act, of treason? The American people don't give a damn about trade agreements. If you are an international financier, you couldn't ask for a better President. 

In light of these trade documents, it's like the Affordable Care Act is a bribe to distract the people from the astoundingly bipartisan erosion of their civil liberties, and even to compromise the sovereignty of the United States. And what would Romney be but a full frontal embrace of the security state, and international finance? Tweedle dum and tweedle dee, tipping back and forth before their financial masters, in the on-going drama of global domination.

I can totally see Obama's reward, sitting on that tribunal. Worth a few hundred million, at least. With the American people continually manipulated into denying the US military is engaged in support of elite international financial domination.

No wonder the guy got so worked up about leaks, earlier this week.

Suckers

I was surprised to see last week, though not really surprised, nobody pinned Scott Walker's win in Wisconsin on Obama. And not just win, but a resounding triumph, as far as the Right is concerned. Like a death knell for the Dem's this cycle. Americans are such suckers. Obama, the constitutional law professor who has signed some of the most unconstitutional law this nation has ever seen, as if preparing to invade his own country, killer drones like his personal play things, which the Democratic party is morally and ethically incapable of calling him on, if they can even see it. And then there's the Right. It would be comical, if not so sad, when all those tea partiers lose their middle class jobs, medicare, social security and 401K etc when the Austerity they seem so to desire comes to America (and resource constraints and climate changes they so resolutely deny, kick in ever harder), and America's elite start heading for their off-shore compounds in greater droves than they already are. Comical, except I'm sure more than a few will continue to blame it on gay people, foreigners, dark skinned and poor and weak people, the devil, and women generally.

Did you hear about James Cameron, the mogul movie maker. He's getting together with Eric Schmidt and Larry Page of Google, and a bunch of other hot shot billionaires, to invest in off-site mining, which is to say, beyond the terrestrial: asteroids and the moon and such. I mean, if you wrote the screenplay, you'd have to make it a farce, because otherwise it would seem too preposterous. Wasn't Avatar against off-earth mining? I thought that movie was about not going to other places in the universe, in the way of the rape-pillage-plunder, command-control-dominate-destroy of our present treatment of the earth and each other? What precisely is the meaning of evil genius? Are they reserved for fiction only? Perhaps we are waiting for the Avengers to save us from our gullibility? Or is that, culpability? What about learning to tailor the economy like an ecosystem? That might be worth sharing, cosmically. Hey James, Eric, Larry, et al? Will you gift me with a few million dollars, to buy a thousand acres with a spring, to build a mostly off the grid village with my closest friends and their kids? Some of my friends are techie geeks too. I have the feeling the shit's commin' down hard, and I'd like a safe place for myself and the people I care about most, to model a post-collapse lifestyle. We'll plant fruit trees and big gardens, ferment wine and beer, make music. We'll keep chickens. You can come and hang out. We'll all dance with the kids. It'll be fun.

Meanwhile, high gas prices are destroying demand, while falling oil prices make all that fracking and tar sands removal uneconomic, which happens to be the only thing preventing a decline in supply: aka Peak Oil.

What about John Maynard Keynes? He's that guru intellectual economist so dear to liberals everywhere. Not only was the guy sure his economic policies were perfectly tailored to maintaining totalitarian control, he was Director of the British Society of Eugenics – during WWII, no less. Eugenics – that's population control, and men like Keynes deciding who gets to make babies, and maybe with whom. If you have any experience at all with government bureaucrats, that might give you pause for a moment, if you think about seven billion people, resource constraints, petty and not-so-petty bureaucratic control issues, and the profound separation between government policy and the actual effects of those policies. (It's not like those devotees of the Chicago or Austrian schools are any less fond of control, it's just their idea of eugenics is more about handing control from bureaucrats to plutocrats and oligarchs, population control by attrition, so to speak.) Paul Krugman, that great Keynesian polemicist, may or may not be a eugenicist, but he was given the Nobel by those bureaucratic Keynesian Europeans who are doing such a fine job leading Europe toward peace and prosperity, just like they gave that war mongering, Imperial hegemon Obama, the ultimate institutional peace prize*.  It's so perfectly appropriate I feel like I'm living in a novel.

How about Bernanke? The Bernank. Did you hear about Basel III? New rules for banks about capital requirements. Liberals jumped on it like he was giving the big banks da bizness – finally! Except, it isn't any different than any other policy that has come from the Fed, or our government, the last thirty years at least, insofar as favoring elite control at the expense of everybody. I don't know much about Basel III (see aforementioned Europeans), but I know enough to expect it to result in many small banks being consumed by the biggest five, in the name of limiting the systemic threat of global economic meltdown. If that sounds like a mind-****, It's exactly analogous to federal farm policy. Hand most of the largess to the biggest, most polluting players, and then apply all regulations evenly across the board. Blind devotion to faux free-market imperialism on the Right, chicken shit liberal devotion to do-gooding, like giving all the kids the same prize, except this prize prevents most small farmers from raising, slaughtering and selling their own chickens, for want or fear of the $100,000 in capital requirements demanded by the USDA, in the name of making food safe. Like our treatment of “lesser” nations generally, debt bondage as a means to pillage and plunder. Now, instead of small, isolated outbreaks of food-borne illness, we have 34 state-wide, increasingly anti-biotic defying e-coli, cryptosporidium and staphylococcus outbreaks, there is fire retardant and ammonium in your kid's sandwich meat, real, healthy, local organic food is the most expensive on the shelf, if you can find it, and most of the food is coming from a long way away. I don't think The Bernank, or the policy makers at the USDA are malicious, necessarily, just consider Hannah Arendt's description of the great evil of Nazi fascism, that it's practitioners were in the main, utterly banal.

How about all those prisons we are building, here in America, particularly in Arizona. Most are ostensibly to be filled with illegal aliens, otherwise known as Central and South American people looking for a better life, often running from the capital-infused pillaging, plundering and tyranny where they live. If America's economy goes into full-on Seneca-style collapse mode, or even the catabolic, it's hard to imagine Latinos continuing to cross the border looking for jobs, particularly if the military is repositioned domestically (anyone remember the NDAA?) But once you build it, your creditors and investors are going to make you fill it – all around good for the economy, you know. Parts of Arizona would make an excellent gulag archipelago, for, say, those “terrorists” who talk and write about conspiracy theories like peak resources, industrial decline, and advocate for things like local economic autonomy and the health of ecosystems. But this isn't Soviet Communist Russia; America is the light of the world, the city on the hill, the home of the free and the brave. Arizona isn't Siberia, either, but it might as well be, if you are a political prisoner. It would be perfectly in keeping with conservative America's obsession with hell. Half the people in the penal system now, are non-violent drug offenders – it's not like we haven't set a precedent for the sadistic, in the name of security, for profit. We already have the largest prison population per-capita on earth. But why worry about a domestic gulag when Obama says the military can ship you to any one of our thousands of military and detention facilities across the globe, and never tell anyone where you are, why you were taken, or even that you were?

I check in to the Huffpost every day, for a key barometer of American crazy. I could go to other mainstream news sites, but most of them are like falling into a black hole, and the Huffpost is at least capable of pushing some boundaries, however slight, and mostly inconsequential. I like the three column structure: the column on the left, social and political punditry, most of it trapped in the dualism of Liberal/Conservative, most of it oblivious to resource constraints; The middle column, mostly news, much of it slanted to favor the idea of government control, and in no way designed to seriously question Western habits of consumption, American's especially; The column on the right, side boobs, fashion fawning and faux-pas', links to the myriad entertainments, endless examples of gruesome, ugly behavior. Cannibalism has been popular lately, in all three columns. Consumerism, coming to it's logical conclusion.

Western Civilization as a paradigm is like a psychological assault, from the moment of first consciousness, demanding I participate in a system that makes some multi-billionaires, leaving billions in abject poverty. It encourages some appetites - the pursuit of money, the accumulation of wealth, the consumption of resources and the exercise of power - while condemning or subsuming into the greater consumer culture, any appetite that might advocate for a simpler, more harmonious approach to living, tailoring the economy to ecosystems, as example. The Western mind is instead tailored for control, to administer or to yield, and every institution operates according to that Western ethos, obfuscating information in a way tailored to maintain the power of said institutions. None has the true intent, nor are they in any way capable of making this world a better place for everything in it, but only exist to maintain whatever control they have, and to acquire more. The institution exists to maintain control of resources, to be consumed and controlled by the people dependent on that institution. And just about every one institution is hostile to the existence of every other, the vast majority are hopelessly corrupt, often in the most banal sort of way, and they are equally, hopelessly intertwined, domestically and globally.

I'm going to pick on the Catholic Church and Christianity, in the next post, because the Catholic Church and Christianity as institutions are easy targets, and I was raised evangelical. But I reiterate, they are all, every institution in the West, hopelessly corrupt, because they are hopelessly and inextricably dependent upon hostile dominator/dominated dualism, as a defining paradigm. Humans as dominator, nature as the dominated, and it all pretty well efficiently trickles down from there, into just about every relationship, into our very worldview - and the vast majority don't have a clue. 

* The Nobel; the ultimate institutional peace prize, with the possible exception of the office of the Pope.

Hierarchy

“Civilization is inherently hierarchical and so, totalitarian, and cannot be any other way.”

I said this in the comments section of my post, Treason. A long-time reader, the blogger over at Epiphany Now, challenged me to speak more directly about that. First, I'll say, the quote should have referenced Western Civilization, which dominates the world, and of which I and probably all of my readers are inheritors of. But to get there, we need to run through the story of Homo sapien, briefly.

The genus Homo* is approximately two million years old. Homo sapien is approximately 200,000 years old. For about 190,000 years, we lived an edenic kind of life, gathering and hunting food, living tight, community lives, quite literally at one with the world around us, and with each other. It was a simple life, and difficult in some ways, and not difficult at all in others, and it was sweet. (Which is not the story we are taught about that time. That time doesn't exist for most of the monotheistic religious, and for just about everybody else in the West, it's the hard, vicious, brutal time of Thomas Hobbes' conception, if they have ever thought of it at all. There are a few tribes left who continue to live something like that edenic life, but we're busy exterminating them with our capital pursuits, that we might be certain in the condemnation of our origins.)

,

About ten thousand years ago, approximately, we started planting seeds. This is sometime after the great inundation, when sea levels rose approximately 400 ft, with the collapse of the glaciers covering most of Europe and North America. It was a global catastrophe, and there might have been some kind of high civilization prior to this, but that is not part of the Western curriculum, and you will be condemned for going there. Whatever the case, it was a fundamental shift, away from hunting and gathering, a process of establishing increasingly agricultural settlements, eventually growing grains and beans that could be stored. Most of this time, about 3000 years, we lived peaceful, egalitarian lives with a kind of balance between the masculine and feminine, often Goddess worshiping, not yet separate either from community or the land – though it was a culture that was becoming increasingly masculine.

The more grains and beans stored, the more we grew in number. The more people there were in any community, the more likely those grains and beans came under the control of a smaller number of people. The larger the community, the more rigid the social hierarchy, and the more ruthless the actions of those who acquire(d) the most. At the same time, violent gods began to be conceived, who justified violence. Thereafter, men of violence had a self-justifying license to acquire and wield power, to dominate, to plunder, to rape and to kill. Cities grew, war became the rule.

This was about a 4500 year process of increasingly adept and savage technological warfare, in the rise of cities and kings. In response to which we embarked on a path of civil governance (which makes war making more efficient.) This civil governance was entirely patriarchal, inherently dominating, the feminine subdued, and in Athens, the rule of those few men who were crafty enough to maintain control of sufficient capital. This time can be characterized as the rise of the rational, most efficiently described in the person of Aristotle. Separating us officially from nature.

At the same time, Monotheism arose as a world force. Christianity coming to subdue the civil governance and empire of Rome, eventually subsuming Aristotelian rationality, in the person's of Augustine and Aquinas. Science stepped in in the person of Bacon, Descartes scientifically and rationally amputated the mind from the body and the self from nature, Newton made the cosmos mechanical, Hobbes turned the whole affair into one long horror show, and then Smith tied capitalism to theology, and here we are. It's a rough but accurate enough calculus. As I pointed out earlier this week, Harris and Stenger have now amputated us even from mind. Meanwhile, theology is inextricably intertwined with free market ideology, science is a primary tool of the merchants of domination, destruction and death, and God seems to be on the side of plutocrats and oligarchs.

It might be pointed out by any biologist, that hierarchies are inherent to the group structure of all social mammals. There is always the Alpha, and the omega. Yes, and in many such a community, of small number, the Alpha mourns the loss of the omega, and likewise. It is only when we become acquisitive, when that hierarchy turns toward domination, command and control, the pursuit of power over others - and that primarily because there is capital to exploit - that the Alpha and omega no longer have a meaningful connection, and the one comes to dominate the many, in a way that is oppressive to all.

Our institutions here in America arose out of that progression, a greater and greater disconnection between the Alphas who make decisions and the omegas and everybody else who have to abide by them - and all of us, from the biological systems that support us. In the twentieth century it was a popular conception that government institutions were a cure for the depredations of religious, private, and military institutions. Only recently have we begun to realize, they are one in the same, the great head to the hydra of Western Civilization. Which is what OWS doesn't get (or maybe they do). It's not about a shift in who controls institutions (unless you want to become the tyrant); it's about a shift in consciousness.

We tend to believe loosely, and the idea is truly enforced, that we in the West, especially in America, are more evolved. That couldn't be further from the truth. As Darwin said, it isn't strength or intelligence that defines evolution, it's adaptability to change. The changes that are coming are hostile to the continued existence of institutions everywhere, while you can be certain those Institutions will assert their dominance, and the heads of those institutions will craftily maintain their control in increasingly totalitarian fashion; and those dependent upon institutions are sure to defend them, and it cannot be any other way. That is institutional, hierarchical, patriarchal, empirical mind, and it dominates the world. The nut of which, is our separation from and abhorrence of nature, our refusal to accept that we are in any way dependent upon the earth. That is the consciousness we have to shift out of, if we hope to survive the coming changes - I think, if we hope to survive as a species. That shift is happening for some, which is nothing short of evolutionary. Which is a lot like hearkening back to the consciousness of that first 195,000 years, at least, and those most connected to that time, while remaining grounded in the present, are in my conception the most advantaged evolutionarily, facing the coming changes.

* If you've ever wondered why homo is a pejorative for a gay guy, it's just that most straight guys are unconsciously or outright ashamed of their animal origins, which also happens to be why most straight guys are more like domesticated, or feral or mangy dogs, and not more like farm dogs or wolves.

Venus

In the interest of love and beauty, and today's transit, I posted on my blog, at my website; Venus

Free Will

Victor Stenger is a physicist, and a grand old intellect in the scientific and atheist communities. I don't generally pay much attention to the ongoing scientific/atheist dialogue, but Victor is occasionally published in the Huffpost. He often discusses what he sees as a conflict between science and religion. I always enjoy his columns. In his latest, he confronts the idea of free will.

Stenger argues, taking a cue from Sam Harris' recent book, that free will is an illusion, that scans show, all the decisions we make have antecedent material action in the brain, implying all our decisions originate in the unconscious, and so our conscious selves are not truly responsible for our actions. If that sounds a little odd, it is more or less in keeping with the idea of the ego. Victor is going a little further, suggesting the ego doesn't have any say in what we do or how we act. He ends the piece by suggesting that because we are not entirely aware of the origin of our actions, our justice system needs to change: “Given that we don't have libertarian free will that sets us above causal laws, it would seem that our largely retributive moral and justice systems need to be re-evaluated, and maybe even drastically revamped.” If that sounds like an honest but tortured argument to you, it is entirely in keeping with logic. Logic being not necessarily on unfriendly terms with torture. If you don't believe that, then you don't know anything about the battle between determinism and indeterminism.

If that battle has a ring of fascism to it, well, you might then wonder too, about the vision of Sam Harris and Victor Stenger. Not that they are fascists, not at all. Good men, I have no doubt. But their vision orphans us in a very cold, hard, empty universe, and not only that, it makes us hapless actors directed by unknowable forces, and not just unknowable forces, entirely material (as if it wasn't bad enough when the gods controlled our actions.) And if you know anything about science, then maybe you know, as science as an institution teaches, this material universe originated accidentally, for no reason, without meaning. And so, material is basically dead matter, open to manipulation. And then you just might ask yourself, if that is the case, then that would make this culture one vast manipulation, wouldn't it? People capitalizing on the manipulation of consumers...unto...ecological...oblivion.

As if it wasn't bad enough that science separated mind from body, now they've gone and separated us even from mind (with no spirit to cling to). It's like the final preparation for total enslavement. The lobotomy before the final fall; to become gristle, for techno-fascist mills.

If it seems like I'm being a little harsh on Victor Stenger, and Sam Harris, it's only that I don't see much of a difference between scientific atheism and religion, both equally separating us from our bodies, and the earth we inhabit. As if we are only mind, or spirit, as if the body hardly mattered. That, and reading Sam, I can't help feel like he embraces Hobbes conception of the brutality of nature, and the mythology of Progress without question, and so he is blind to how well science and institutional religion, and fiat currency and empire and militarism, have co-existed. And I have the sense that Scientists have betrayed quantum physics, not being able to conceive of the true implications, and so dismissing them.

Quantum physics has taught us many things, but most of what it has to offer, after one hundred years, has not yet trickled down to the general consciousness. Imagine for a moment: the atoms that are the fundamental structure of your bones, making them as hard as they are – if you inflated one of the quadrillions of atoms in your bones, to the size of an apple, the next bone-atom closest to it, would be a couple of city blocks away. Everything in between is empty space – as is most of the interior of the atom. We conceive of matter as dense. Matter is energy, at it's core. Quantum physics tells us, the void, empty space, is denser energetically than matter, by an infinitude. Ponder that for a moment - energy vastly denser than what you are, flowing through you now, in every moment...and now read Victor Stenger's conception of the quantum interaction at the core of your being: “It is easy to demonstrate quantitatively that quantum effects in the brain are not significant.” If that has a ring of autocratic command and control, you would not be mistaken.

Science has not yet accounted for angular momentum. Which is to say, we do not know why the earth spins, or the sun, or the motion of the earth and all the planets revolving around the sun, or the galaxy spinning, or any of the spiral phenomena throughout the universe. Circles, spirals, a fundamental construct of cosmic, material forces - look to the DNA! - and science cannot account for it, effectively dismissing it as unimportant. That is the square world you live in.

You are profoundly more energetic than either science or religion as institutions dictating, would allow. Because science, and religion, as institutions, depend on debt bondage and wage slavery to exist. A truly free people, alive and awake to the world they inhabit, would put up with neither. So I guess the question is, how can we keep hold of what science has wrought, that we might live well on this earth, without putting up with institutional debt bondage and wage slavery? As for religion as an institution, I could pretty well dispense with it. Monotheism especially is inherently tyrannical. Call it extinct.

P.S. You know you've struck a chord, when this comment on Huffpost, on Stenger's article,

Victor,

With due respect to you and Sam Harris, your vision leaves us orphaned in a cold, hard, dead universe, and not only that, hapless actors defined by unconscious forces, entirely material. Existential, fertile thought, for the devious actors you allude to. And, if what you say is true, then that would make this culture fundamentally manipulated. People capitalizing on the manipulation of consumers...unto...ecological...oblivion.

results in this:

SecularAdvocate

Search "The God Trick" on youtube

"With due respect" always precedes an insult, don't you find?

And with due respect to you, William, if you cannot contemplate the spiritual thrill of the understanding of the truth and would rather marinade yourself in a sad little saccharine of lies, do us all a favour and keep your poisonous views to yourself. Don't try and infect other people with the dysfunction that's eroding your spiritual nature. It's not nice, it's not big, and when you make every effort to make it look clever by weaving a lot of big words in to your little injection of poison to the zeitgeist, it's not just not clever, it's a little bit evil. [the emphasis in italics is mine]

Cassandra (a poem inspired by Facebook)

Like the sod plied with poison

and cut, burning more fuel

than whole nations of people consume

for sustenance,

your words are tyranny,

a consensus

of silence.

What do you know about this world?

What raging rivers of thought

flow untold, major rivers

not reaching society?

Your world will come undone,

the river of Progress shall cease.

There is nothing that can be done,

to make it flow again,

but to cease to control.

Platitudes and homilies will not suffice.

To know thyself is not

to rely on another's word;

To be skeptical of all

who claim Authority,

is first, foremost.

False media prophets proliferating, especially those

speaking of Economy

and God.

The separate, orphaned children 

of Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes and Hobbes,

the purveyors of shall not, think not, question not

merchants of domination, destruction and death,

boogeymen making boogeymen

for you to rail at,

gnashing your teeth,

those insatiable, all consuming.

There is hardly a man or woman alive

who believes they have enough,

that there are limits. The many,

every one,

shall visit upon this earth, and witness,

horror unimaginable.

Just know,

those who see,

despised, ignored

reviled, who know beauty,

who know abundance -

they are blessed among the gods.

[These words shall not be understood by many,

it is decreed.]