I was raised an Evangelical Christian by my mother. I gave my life to Christ when I was eight, or I played like I did. I remember the day clearly. I was with my mother at a meeting in the high school gym, held by the Peters brothers, Dan and Steve, semi-famous, or infamous, for burning rock and roll records on the steps of our state capital in 1979, interviewed by no less than Dan Rather and Ted Koppel. Claiming to have found subliminal lyrics by playing rock songs backwards, I remember straining to hear “smoke marijuana” in an otherwise, or really entirely indecipherable jumble of sounds, of Queen's, “Another one bites the dust,” in reverse. When the call went out to be born again, as it does at every Evangelical service everywhere, I bowed my head and repeated all the words, just like I knew my mother wanted me to. She was delighted. So was I, insofar as I had made my mother so happy, who was otherwise a typical Gemini, equal parts holy and holy terror. If Jesus accepted me, I do not know. I like to think he approves of my alienation from the religion in his name, if not necessarily from him. He may not approve of my service to the Goddess, which would be too bad, though I'm not convinced he disapproves. I don't think he was the dominator his followers make him out to be in approval of.
Thus, my interest in the two-term Representative, and two-term Senator from Pennsylvania. Here is a man who makes little attempt to hide what he believes. He is very earnest. That he rose to such an astoundingly high leadership position early in his second term in the Senate, the third-highest ranking, is almost as astonishing as his re-election loss by 18%. It's an open question as to whether Pennsylvanians objected more to his preoccupation with polygamy, man on man, and man on dog sex, or the fact that he was living across the border in Virgina. A lesser man might have given up politics, esp. after being nicknamed after a gross anal profusion (see Google). You don't fuck with the gay guys in a free society. But so anointed a cultural warrior by the media, he aspires to be Emperor. I find it perfectly fitting that a potential future President of the American empire should have such a nickname, except in foreign relations we don't usually use lube.
Most pundits don't take him very seriously. He is viewed equally too far right to be electable, and a liability to Republicans. One might think any man capable of saying, “there has always been inequality and I hope there always will be,” would be embraced by Republicans, but even if you believe it you aren't supposed to say it, and who really thinks a guy who condemns contraceptives could be acceptable to promiscuous America? Not even Fox News knows what to do with him. Of the entirety of Congress, in both houses of which he served, he has the support of zero Senators and three Representatives. And yet he has won as many contests as Romney, and is tied for the lead or leading in polls.
He has won these contests because of people like my mother. I don't know who she supports this time; she just returned from Israel, and seems otherwise preoccupied with the Constitution and the movement to restore the Republic. But she has always participated in local elections, as a volunteer, and she has always voted according to her understanding of the Bible. These days participatory democracy is inconvenient for most of us, preoccupied as we are with making a living, raising children and our televisions and computers and phones. The only people who tend to show up early in the process are the most passionate, and on the Republican side, at the local level, that's more often than not Christians, serving in the name of God, and more particularly Jesus.
The nightmare scenario for the GOP is Rick Santorum entering the RNC with more delegates than Romney - God forbid Gingrich comes in second, or even first in this crazy process. Romney is Obama's GOP reflection in alabaster, possibly not electable even if the economy tanks. This crowd is probably a nightmare any which way for the GOP, but the worst scenario is having to broker a deal for Romney, a Mormon. It might be preferable to pull someone out of a hat who hasn't run at all. Imagine the fuss Santorum and his Christian supporters would make. I could see that tearing the Republican party in two. Santorum could start his own party, call it INRI (the supposed Latin inscription on the cross meaning Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.)
The problem is, Rick Santorum is on firmer ground than pundits think. "This idea that man is here to serve the Earth, as opposed to husband its resources and be good stewards of the Earth.... is a phony ideal. I don't believe that that's what we're here to do...man is here to use the resources and use them wisely, to care for the Earth, to be a steward of the Earth, but we're not here to serve the Earth.
"The Earth is not the objective, Man is the objective....Man should be in charge of the Earth and have dominion over it and should be good stewards of it.”
If stewarding and caring for the Earth is what we have done, I can't bear to imagine what dominion would look like. And, it is for every man and woman to decide for themselves whether they serve the Earth. That aside, his is precisely the message for a people accustomed to the lifestyle of empire, with dominion in their blood, who live as if the lifestyle is a divine right. Emphasizing the objective to be Man and not Human, he is affirming for men who have felt powerless against the perceived rise of women, and an economy that doesn't give a damn, that they are not only of value, but that they should by divine right rule over women, children and the Earth. There are plenty of Christian women who don't disagree with this.
His message is primarily moral, which is to say, emotional. Americans have been very well trained by media to respond emotionally, without thinking. And lest we forget, something like half of Americans don't believe in evolution. A people who refuse to deal with the greater implications of what Science has taught us about the world we inhabit, a people ready for one more thrust of imperial rape and pillage, have the perfect candidate in Rick Santorum.
The nightmare scenario for America is the American economy, or its perceived safety, heading south in a bad way in the next six months. If that happens, it will be a horse race between the fire-breather Gingrich and the theocrat dominionist Santorum, not just for the Republican candidacy, but for the Presidency. If Americans are especially afraid, I can see us falling for Santorum and war in Iran, with inflamed visions in the minds of people like my mother, of the apocalypse described in the book of Revelations, (all because of gays and liberals and pot smokers and radical environmentalists and women having sex for pleasure and abortion and dark skinned people,) the continuation and radical expansion of G-dub's “crusade.” Unless Americans have more sense than I think.
I hesitate to speak clearly to my feelings about Christianity. Mostly because I do not want to alienate Christians. Like it or not, they are bedrock in this country. Most of them are good people trying to live peaceful lives. Still, if I have been hard on the presumptions of scientists in recent posts, I have a similar disgust with the Christian refusal to re-evaluate their creation story. Which I consider a betrayal of their humanity, their country and their God. Some have, but most have not. When I think of the trouble ahead for America, I imagine a people inflamed with the violence sanctioned by the Old Testament God (see Jehrico), and their infatuation with firearms. A myriad number of male Americans inflamed by the likes of Chuck Norris and Ted Nugent (working class Americans both Liberals and Conservatives have abandoned as if they do not exist), as if the only cure for America's ills were to eliminate with extreme prejudice, anyone who fails to ascribe to the dictates of those who lust to kill in the name of God. If it comes to that, I hope good Christians rise up to fight the lunatic ones.
I've said before I've thought 2012 might be the year when people are forced to face the reality of impending oil constraints, with potentially massive upheavals. More and more, the attitudes about biblical apocalypse seem a mirror for the attitudes swirling around the 2012 Mayan end of an Age meme. I've begun to hope for a dud of a year. When I look at Santorum, I don't expect it will be.
If this last debate showed anything, it's that he can speak a language besides a purely moral one. That's to his advantage, if he's savvy. You don't rise to the third ranking position in the Senate after your first term by being a putz. Though I'm also well aware, it may not matter who the President is. Things aren't likely to change much that aren't going to change regardless.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Coming Clean
Coming home last Monday after spending time with my beloved niece and nephew, I read my last post and was taken aback by the anger of it. Where is my joy? I thought. I've been exhorting my friend over at Epiphany Now (the musings of an ex-EMT, who is possibly even more angry than I am), to find his joy. The synchronicities have been piling up, and it seems he has found it. In his last post he talked about the archetype of the fox, and how it pertains to his recent resignation from what he describes as the Matrix, the American Hologram. I failed to mention to him, that among the archetypes I am most accustomed to embodying, or attempting to, are the dragon and the green man. As such, my energies tend sometimes toward the intense, and I temper them liberally with coffee, beer, mead, wine, hard cider*, tobacco and cannabis. Looking back on nearly two years of this blog, I think I've said something to alienate just about everyone in America. I've tried too to temper that with the reminder that we are all divine, and existence is sacred.
I bought this house with my father, in the spring of 2006, or as I like to say, about 12 minutes before the market collapsed. I was living with my sister and my niece at the time, but our relationship had deteriorated, and I wanted a house and some land of my own. I owned my own business remodeling houses, and I knew the market was inflated, but I reasoned that this house, on a lot-and-a-half, near downtown, the freeway, the airport, light rail, lakes and small businesses, would level off and sustain it's price. Though the information was available, I knew nothing of the shenanigans going on within the banks and wall street, the now renowned credit default swaps and securitized bundling of mortgages they knew to be bad.
In 2008, working a doomed job at the headquarters of a Fortune 100, with a small mountain of debt and little cash, I walked away from the house, in love with a woman. I lived with her and her children in a neighboring state for two years, while my father, unwilling to walk away, or sell the house at a loss, sure in his boomer faith in the market, continued to pay the mortgage. In the spring of 2010 I returned to the house and started this blog. I have payed the bills since, while my father has paid the mortgage, and I have attempted to secure employment. It looks now like the house will be for sale April 01, as I have not found employment sufficient to pay the totality.
The house is in rough shape. It is an artifact, really, of an age when heating a house was not such a financial concern. There are 28 single pane windows in this 750 sq ft house. It is entirely 2x4 construction, with vermiculite asbestos insulation. The interior walls are painted with about five layers of lead paint. I revealed and refinished all the old hardwoods, and reconstructed a collapsed ceiling in the sunroom, but the kitchen has no foundation nor heat source of it's own except the sun. The bathroom is partially disassembled. The furnace just turned on, though it didn't at all yesterday.
My intention when I bought the house was to remodel it, maybe tear the kitchen off and put a real one in its place. I can do all that work myself. The resources never arrived, however, and now, the house is realistically $50,000-$100,000 under water. If you count the money my father has spent maintaining the house since 2008, my father stands to lose $100,000-150,000 on this house. As I have less than $4,000, and no real employment, 38 years old, that makes me the rich man's son who could never get his shit together.
I had hoped the national mortgage settlement might mean something for my father, but if that all-out lie of an agreement ever helps anyone but the banks, I will be amazed. Because my father is current on the payments, there is no chance for a reduction on the principle, though we bought the house at a price that this house will never see again. And because we signed a 5-year ARM that matured last spring, we already pay a lower interest payment than the banks would prefer. Hell, if you lost your house through no fault but the bank's “robo-signing” foreclosure documents, this agreement that is not in fact a written agreement may only give you $2000, maybe. Because there is not an actual written agreement, I suspect there never actually will be, or whatever is inked at some later date, probably immediately following the next election on a Friday before Christmas, will be so watered down it will probably end up steering whatever money is taken from the banks back to the banks, and then some. Is there a bath deep enough to drown the banks and the Attorneys General in?
Why is the onus entirely on the homeowner, for what was done to the housing market? The banks help inflate a bubble, and then get to draw interest payments on all those grossly inflated mortgages? Sweet deal. I realize they had to eat all those foreclosures, but they signed them and they got bailout money and zero-interest loans more than sufficient to make up the loss. They are bigger now than they were, remember. We're going to need a bigger bath, to fit the Fed, Fanny, Freddy, and really, the entirety of Congress.
None of that excuses me, for my failures, which go well beyond my inability to pay this mortgage. Had I really wanted to, of course, I'm sure I could have found employment sufficient to pay my bills. But something else has been happening to me since I first walked away from the credit financed life I was leading up to 2008. I have been studying economics, the market, the mythology of progress, the story of our culture, and I find myself alienated almost entirely from it. To be a cog in a machine that is remorselessly devouring the Earth, is no longer a thing I can be. To participate actively in policies that are clearly leading humanity toward economic and ecological oblivion, is no longer a thing I can tolerate for myself. To sleepwalk in the faith of salvation from the outside is no longer a thing I can do.
Though I had dreamed of taking this house off the grid, I've dreamt mostly of late of tearing it down and building a passive solar, straw bail house, or one entirely out of hemp. What is the likelihood my city government would allow me to build such a house? Really, if I want to grow hemp, to turn it into a house, where in America do I get to demonstrate that?
I may have failed this house and my father, but I turned this yard into a garden. I might plant fruit trees yet, just to continue what I started, what I would do if I were keeping it. Then leave it up to the universe to decide - if I am not to keep it, then whom? It would make me happy to transfer stewardship to someone who could, and do to the house what I have not been able to do. That's a rare one, I expect. More likely is the developer who returns the yard to sod, tears down the house and builds an inefficient 3000 sq ft stick-frame rectangle. And all the neighborhood can rejoice for the increase in relative property values.
I think I might even leave my country for awhile. Decouple myself as much as possible, from the system that sustains us. A decade ago, looking ahead to 30, I spent half a year in the Boundary Water Wilderness and Quetico Provincial park, on a solo canoe tour. Looking ahead to forty, I'm grateful for what this house has been for me. It has been a kind of energetic cradle, along with the yard, nurturing me on my path of healing. It was in the fall of 2006, in this house, that I reached the nadir of my adult life, when I could no longer fathom going on living as I had been. I put myself on a path of healing, and I could not have fathomed how much things would change, for me, for all of us. I've come to a similar nadir now, but this time it's not so much about me, as about my species. Its clear to me now that on the trajectory we are on, unless there is some inconceivable shift, we are going to turn this planet into a wasteland. And I think we could see that, either the shift or the wasteland, before my niece and nephew are old.
I'm sometimes at a loss, as to whether or not I have healed, whether or not the path I put myself on has been healing for me. In many ways, I'm not that much less estranged or alienated or isolated, than I was in 2006. I'm much closer to my sister, and my niece and nephew are like an anchor, holding me steady. I'm much more clear than I was, about what this life is about. Otherwise I'm mostly alone. The house across the street was built in the 1880's, and the streets plotted, to entice the people to settle the wilderness. I might as well be in a wilderness, for all the connection I have to my neighbors, for how distant are my friends. I thrive on solitude, but the distance between me and any kind of community isn't healthy. I've written two books, I'm writing a third, I've been maintaining this blog, but sometimes I despair, that the way I tell the story of my life is of any kind of value. Lately, I've despaired, that if I am to be the measure of my world view, then no one should be recommended to view the world as I do, that I should walk away from books and writing and let the world fall to ruin, which it is sure to do whether I write or not.
I named this blog Off the Grid in Minneapolis, because I meant it as a kind of venue for me to describe living without utilities, and the process of taking the house off the grid. Instead, it has been more a vehicle for my lifting of the veil, for the process of my disillusionment with the mainstream view of the world. It has been an exploration of ideas, an act of articulating and clarifying. I haven't always been right, and at times I may have been near delusional, but I have ever tried to be honest.
So what is this post? I may very well be homeless by the summer solstice. In which case, the premise for this blog will be at an end. I'm ready to move on. Waking up each morning to a 45-50 degree house has been rude, and it takes a long time to gather my head. I will continue to write. Where this blog will go from here, I cannot say. I have never known where I would go with this blog, week to week. Nothing about that is likely to change. Basically, if I am going to take such strong positions on the topics I do, there needs to be a regular reality check. If you are going to read my writing, you should know what I am. I'm still working that out.
I love my country. I love what America was meant to be. But more these days, I think of myself as a biological entity, in a biosphere that is increasingly degraded, by the exponential growth of a species that is not yet awake to its role on the planet, and may never be. I have no hope whatever that American Empire can be sustained, and I am wary of a people who do not know any other way.
*I'm fond of hard cider, in small amounts. Too much cider I find stupefying, literally. I've wondered at times, if the reason for the apple as the forbidden fruit wasn't the exasperation of the ancient Israelites, at the stupefying effect hard cider had on the community (if it has that effect on others besides me, and they had access to it.) It was surely a cause for prohibition in America. The most common alcoholic beverage in America, in the last half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, was hard apple cider. It's no easy thing to follow the path of empire if the men of the aspiring empire are perpetually stupefied. Anyway, I'm going to be pulling back a bit from intoxicants for awhile, and focus again on healing. Because I can't heal the world but by first healing myself. And this Earth is very much in need of healing.
(BTW, I'm mulling a post on Rick Santorum, based on his statement that the Earth doesn't matter - this week)
I bought this house with my father, in the spring of 2006, or as I like to say, about 12 minutes before the market collapsed. I was living with my sister and my niece at the time, but our relationship had deteriorated, and I wanted a house and some land of my own. I owned my own business remodeling houses, and I knew the market was inflated, but I reasoned that this house, on a lot-and-a-half, near downtown, the freeway, the airport, light rail, lakes and small businesses, would level off and sustain it's price. Though the information was available, I knew nothing of the shenanigans going on within the banks and wall street, the now renowned credit default swaps and securitized bundling of mortgages they knew to be bad.
In 2008, working a doomed job at the headquarters of a Fortune 100, with a small mountain of debt and little cash, I walked away from the house, in love with a woman. I lived with her and her children in a neighboring state for two years, while my father, unwilling to walk away, or sell the house at a loss, sure in his boomer faith in the market, continued to pay the mortgage. In the spring of 2010 I returned to the house and started this blog. I have payed the bills since, while my father has paid the mortgage, and I have attempted to secure employment. It looks now like the house will be for sale April 01, as I have not found employment sufficient to pay the totality.
The house is in rough shape. It is an artifact, really, of an age when heating a house was not such a financial concern. There are 28 single pane windows in this 750 sq ft house. It is entirely 2x4 construction, with vermiculite asbestos insulation. The interior walls are painted with about five layers of lead paint. I revealed and refinished all the old hardwoods, and reconstructed a collapsed ceiling in the sunroom, but the kitchen has no foundation nor heat source of it's own except the sun. The bathroom is partially disassembled. The furnace just turned on, though it didn't at all yesterday.
My intention when I bought the house was to remodel it, maybe tear the kitchen off and put a real one in its place. I can do all that work myself. The resources never arrived, however, and now, the house is realistically $50,000-$100,000 under water. If you count the money my father has spent maintaining the house since 2008, my father stands to lose $100,000-150,000 on this house. As I have less than $4,000, and no real employment, 38 years old, that makes me the rich man's son who could never get his shit together.
I had hoped the national mortgage settlement might mean something for my father, but if that all-out lie of an agreement ever helps anyone but the banks, I will be amazed. Because my father is current on the payments, there is no chance for a reduction on the principle, though we bought the house at a price that this house will never see again. And because we signed a 5-year ARM that matured last spring, we already pay a lower interest payment than the banks would prefer. Hell, if you lost your house through no fault but the bank's “robo-signing” foreclosure documents, this agreement that is not in fact a written agreement may only give you $2000, maybe. Because there is not an actual written agreement, I suspect there never actually will be, or whatever is inked at some later date, probably immediately following the next election on a Friday before Christmas, will be so watered down it will probably end up steering whatever money is taken from the banks back to the banks, and then some. Is there a bath deep enough to drown the banks and the Attorneys General in?
Why is the onus entirely on the homeowner, for what was done to the housing market? The banks help inflate a bubble, and then get to draw interest payments on all those grossly inflated mortgages? Sweet deal. I realize they had to eat all those foreclosures, but they signed them and they got bailout money and zero-interest loans more than sufficient to make up the loss. They are bigger now than they were, remember. We're going to need a bigger bath, to fit the Fed, Fanny, Freddy, and really, the entirety of Congress.
None of that excuses me, for my failures, which go well beyond my inability to pay this mortgage. Had I really wanted to, of course, I'm sure I could have found employment sufficient to pay my bills. But something else has been happening to me since I first walked away from the credit financed life I was leading up to 2008. I have been studying economics, the market, the mythology of progress, the story of our culture, and I find myself alienated almost entirely from it. To be a cog in a machine that is remorselessly devouring the Earth, is no longer a thing I can be. To participate actively in policies that are clearly leading humanity toward economic and ecological oblivion, is no longer a thing I can tolerate for myself. To sleepwalk in the faith of salvation from the outside is no longer a thing I can do.
Though I had dreamed of taking this house off the grid, I've dreamt mostly of late of tearing it down and building a passive solar, straw bail house, or one entirely out of hemp. What is the likelihood my city government would allow me to build such a house? Really, if I want to grow hemp, to turn it into a house, where in America do I get to demonstrate that?
I may have failed this house and my father, but I turned this yard into a garden. I might plant fruit trees yet, just to continue what I started, what I would do if I were keeping it. Then leave it up to the universe to decide - if I am not to keep it, then whom? It would make me happy to transfer stewardship to someone who could, and do to the house what I have not been able to do. That's a rare one, I expect. More likely is the developer who returns the yard to sod, tears down the house and builds an inefficient 3000 sq ft stick-frame rectangle. And all the neighborhood can rejoice for the increase in relative property values.
I think I might even leave my country for awhile. Decouple myself as much as possible, from the system that sustains us. A decade ago, looking ahead to 30, I spent half a year in the Boundary Water Wilderness and Quetico Provincial park, on a solo canoe tour. Looking ahead to forty, I'm grateful for what this house has been for me. It has been a kind of energetic cradle, along with the yard, nurturing me on my path of healing. It was in the fall of 2006, in this house, that I reached the nadir of my adult life, when I could no longer fathom going on living as I had been. I put myself on a path of healing, and I could not have fathomed how much things would change, for me, for all of us. I've come to a similar nadir now, but this time it's not so much about me, as about my species. Its clear to me now that on the trajectory we are on, unless there is some inconceivable shift, we are going to turn this planet into a wasteland. And I think we could see that, either the shift or the wasteland, before my niece and nephew are old.
I'm sometimes at a loss, as to whether or not I have healed, whether or not the path I put myself on has been healing for me. In many ways, I'm not that much less estranged or alienated or isolated, than I was in 2006. I'm much closer to my sister, and my niece and nephew are like an anchor, holding me steady. I'm much more clear than I was, about what this life is about. Otherwise I'm mostly alone. The house across the street was built in the 1880's, and the streets plotted, to entice the people to settle the wilderness. I might as well be in a wilderness, for all the connection I have to my neighbors, for how distant are my friends. I thrive on solitude, but the distance between me and any kind of community isn't healthy. I've written two books, I'm writing a third, I've been maintaining this blog, but sometimes I despair, that the way I tell the story of my life is of any kind of value. Lately, I've despaired, that if I am to be the measure of my world view, then no one should be recommended to view the world as I do, that I should walk away from books and writing and let the world fall to ruin, which it is sure to do whether I write or not.
I named this blog Off the Grid in Minneapolis, because I meant it as a kind of venue for me to describe living without utilities, and the process of taking the house off the grid. Instead, it has been more a vehicle for my lifting of the veil, for the process of my disillusionment with the mainstream view of the world. It has been an exploration of ideas, an act of articulating and clarifying. I haven't always been right, and at times I may have been near delusional, but I have ever tried to be honest.
So what is this post? I may very well be homeless by the summer solstice. In which case, the premise for this blog will be at an end. I'm ready to move on. Waking up each morning to a 45-50 degree house has been rude, and it takes a long time to gather my head. I will continue to write. Where this blog will go from here, I cannot say. I have never known where I would go with this blog, week to week. Nothing about that is likely to change. Basically, if I am going to take such strong positions on the topics I do, there needs to be a regular reality check. If you are going to read my writing, you should know what I am. I'm still working that out.
I love my country. I love what America was meant to be. But more these days, I think of myself as a biological entity, in a biosphere that is increasingly degraded, by the exponential growth of a species that is not yet awake to its role on the planet, and may never be. I have no hope whatever that American Empire can be sustained, and I am wary of a people who do not know any other way.
*I'm fond of hard cider, in small amounts. Too much cider I find stupefying, literally. I've wondered at times, if the reason for the apple as the forbidden fruit wasn't the exasperation of the ancient Israelites, at the stupefying effect hard cider had on the community (if it has that effect on others besides me, and they had access to it.) It was surely a cause for prohibition in America. The most common alcoholic beverage in America, in the last half of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, was hard apple cider. It's no easy thing to follow the path of empire if the men of the aspiring empire are perpetually stupefied. Anyway, I'm going to be pulling back a bit from intoxicants for awhile, and focus again on healing. Because I can't heal the world but by first healing myself. And this Earth is very much in need of healing.
(BTW, I'm mulling a post on Rick Santorum, based on his statement that the Earth doesn't matter - this week)
Monday, February 13, 2012
Nuclear Genies
As I was prowling Huffpost as I sometimes do, I found this quote from Dan Agin, in a book review,
“Quantum physics...would be nothing but an entertaining philosophical idea except that when you formulate the idea quantitatively you can use the equations to predict nearly everything that happens on Earth and in the entire Cosmos to a fabulous degree of accuracy.”
In a recent public radio interview, the physicist Michio Kaku expressed a similar sentiment:
“We physicists can project 10, 15 years into the future with near mathematical precision.”
Agin was lamenting the poor state of awareness in America, about quantum physics. Based on these quotes, I am more inclined to lament the poor state of awareness in quantum physicists. I presume this is a sentiment widely shared among physicists. Please physicists, tell us the outcome of the debt debacle in Europe. What will happen with climate change? What is the arrival of peak oil going to look like? Surely, with such understanding, you can save us in our predicament, in this, our exponential growth on a finite planet?
Without putting too fine a point on it, this is what I despise about science, and scientists, particularly physicists. Their infernal attempt to project perfect understanding, to inject perfectly rational predictability into universal processes. Their desire to deny the irrational, to eliminate the subjective, to refuse what can't be measured. In short, to turn us all into unfeeling machines, to denigrate what makes this life so worth living: love, feeling, connection. Communicating with scientists, particularly physicists, I sometimes feel like my not having the specialized background means I have no sense, that I am somehow less evolved, less than. Is it condescension, or am I projecting?
It is not merely that Agin and Kaku are pretending toward some quasi-mystical ability to predict the future, they are implying that all is well, that there's no need to be concerned about the progress of civilization on Earth. It's not surprising this comes at the same time the federal government has authorized the first nuclear reactor construction in 25 years. The Georgia facility-design is said to be impregnable, entirely self sustaining even without human input. If that doesn't sound like hubris, I keep wondering about the two existing facilities in Minnesota, on the Mississippi river. I can't get anyone to take seriously the idea, that decommissioning the ones we have is going to be a problem, after the credit bubble pops, peak oil kicks in, and climate change takes it's toll. The one thing Americans cannot, will not, shall not abide apparently, is using less energy. The high priests Agin and Kaku assuring us, everything is under control, technology will assure we needn't ever think about it, we can go about being good American consumers with our blinders on. My blinders don't prevent me from contemplating what would happen to the Mississippi river with a disaster at Prairie Island Nuclear Facility. A nuclear facility on an island in the middle of a major river? You tell me we don't worship technology as if it were God.
Everything is under control? I'm inclined to think, whatever control we think we have is an illusion. Claiming to be able to predict the future 'with near mathematical precision' is the epitome of control as illusion. That sense of control (delusion) is pervasive throughout the culture, or at least it was prior to 2008. We are less sure about what control we have now, but you can expect, when the credit bubble pops, our lack of control over the economy is going to shift, to an attempted control over people, authoritarian style.
In the comments section on a piece of propaganda on Huffpost, about the rebirth of nuclear energy in America, I had this to say:
“There is no such thing as clean, safe nuclear power.” Here are three of the responders.
Markkocaldo: Actually the safest form of power there is. No deaths in 50 years of operation.
MrBIgp: Actually it is true there is no perfectly clean, perfectly safe energy source. However, nuclear is the cleanest and the safest we have.
Atom4Peace1: Ask the US Navy.
(My reply) WHD: Mining it isn't clean on the front end, and there's nothing clean about disposing of it. That, and tell me we are going to properly decommission every one of those facilities after the credit bubble pops, peak oil kicks in, and climate change takes it's toll. Two cautionary tales, Chernobyl e Fukushima. No deaths by radiation indeed.
And I presume the depleted uranium from the Navy and elsewhere in the military is used at the end of bullets that have been scattered around the landscape of the Tigris and Euphrates, and in Afghanistan? Atoms4Peace?
Atom4Peace1: DU is off topic. This is about safe reactors which USN has a spotless record of. Thresher was non reactor incident.
WHD: You brought up the Navy. And I would ask every serviceman, would you use such weaponry on American soil?
Atom4Peace1: they use it on San Nicholas island on goats.
If there is anything more pathetic than me picking fights in the Huffpost comments section, I'm not sure what it is. But this particular exchange, somewhat edited for clarity, is emblematic I think of the madness of Americans. First, pretend that nuclear is only for power. Second, act like because we are Americans, we can't do anything wrong. Third, embrace anything that is big, powerful and destructive. Fourth, maintain empire. Check that, there is something more pathetic than me picking fights in the Huffpost comments section. It is me thinking Americans have any real desire to question the path of Empire.
Not questioning Empire, we are likely to be surprised when the collapse comes. And then I wonder, when things go to hell, as they surely will at some point, is our military going to spread nuclear material at the end of bullets across the American landscape? How do you recover depleted uranium, once it is dispersed by bullets? You don't. Do Americans have sense enough not to ruin their own landscape? Clearly not, if you take our suburbs and agriculture as the measure.
Hey Agin and Kaku, sage predictors of the future. Am I wrong?
“Quantum physics...would be nothing but an entertaining philosophical idea except that when you formulate the idea quantitatively you can use the equations to predict nearly everything that happens on Earth and in the entire Cosmos to a fabulous degree of accuracy.”
In a recent public radio interview, the physicist Michio Kaku expressed a similar sentiment:
“We physicists can project 10, 15 years into the future with near mathematical precision.”
Agin was lamenting the poor state of awareness in America, about quantum physics. Based on these quotes, I am more inclined to lament the poor state of awareness in quantum physicists. I presume this is a sentiment widely shared among physicists. Please physicists, tell us the outcome of the debt debacle in Europe. What will happen with climate change? What is the arrival of peak oil going to look like? Surely, with such understanding, you can save us in our predicament, in this, our exponential growth on a finite planet?
Without putting too fine a point on it, this is what I despise about science, and scientists, particularly physicists. Their infernal attempt to project perfect understanding, to inject perfectly rational predictability into universal processes. Their desire to deny the irrational, to eliminate the subjective, to refuse what can't be measured. In short, to turn us all into unfeeling machines, to denigrate what makes this life so worth living: love, feeling, connection. Communicating with scientists, particularly physicists, I sometimes feel like my not having the specialized background means I have no sense, that I am somehow less evolved, less than. Is it condescension, or am I projecting?
It is not merely that Agin and Kaku are pretending toward some quasi-mystical ability to predict the future, they are implying that all is well, that there's no need to be concerned about the progress of civilization on Earth. It's not surprising this comes at the same time the federal government has authorized the first nuclear reactor construction in 25 years. The Georgia facility-design is said to be impregnable, entirely self sustaining even without human input. If that doesn't sound like hubris, I keep wondering about the two existing facilities in Minnesota, on the Mississippi river. I can't get anyone to take seriously the idea, that decommissioning the ones we have is going to be a problem, after the credit bubble pops, peak oil kicks in, and climate change takes it's toll. The one thing Americans cannot, will not, shall not abide apparently, is using less energy. The high priests Agin and Kaku assuring us, everything is under control, technology will assure we needn't ever think about it, we can go about being good American consumers with our blinders on. My blinders don't prevent me from contemplating what would happen to the Mississippi river with a disaster at Prairie Island Nuclear Facility. A nuclear facility on an island in the middle of a major river? You tell me we don't worship technology as if it were God.
Everything is under control? I'm inclined to think, whatever control we think we have is an illusion. Claiming to be able to predict the future 'with near mathematical precision' is the epitome of control as illusion. That sense of control (delusion) is pervasive throughout the culture, or at least it was prior to 2008. We are less sure about what control we have now, but you can expect, when the credit bubble pops, our lack of control over the economy is going to shift, to an attempted control over people, authoritarian style.
In the comments section on a piece of propaganda on Huffpost, about the rebirth of nuclear energy in America, I had this to say:
“There is no such thing as clean, safe nuclear power.” Here are three of the responders.
Markkocaldo: Actually the safest form of power there is. No deaths in 50 years of operation.
MrBIgp: Actually it is true there is no perfectly clean, perfectly safe energy source. However, nuclear is the cleanest and the safest we have.
Atom4Peace1: Ask the US Navy.
(My reply) WHD: Mining it isn't clean on the front end, and there's nothing clean about disposing of it. That, and tell me we are going to properly decommission every one of those facilities after the credit bubble pops, peak oil kicks in, and climate change takes it's toll. Two cautionary tales, Chernobyl e Fukushima. No deaths by radiation indeed.
And I presume the depleted uranium from the Navy and elsewhere in the military is used at the end of bullets that have been scattered around the landscape of the Tigris and Euphrates, and in Afghanistan? Atoms4Peace?
Atom4Peace1: DU is off topic. This is about safe reactors which USN has a spotless record of. Thresher was non reactor incident.
WHD: You brought up the Navy. And I would ask every serviceman, would you use such weaponry on American soil?
Atom4Peace1: they use it on San Nicholas island on goats.
If there is anything more pathetic than me picking fights in the Huffpost comments section, I'm not sure what it is. But this particular exchange, somewhat edited for clarity, is emblematic I think of the madness of Americans. First, pretend that nuclear is only for power. Second, act like because we are Americans, we can't do anything wrong. Third, embrace anything that is big, powerful and destructive. Fourth, maintain empire. Check that, there is something more pathetic than me picking fights in the Huffpost comments section. It is me thinking Americans have any real desire to question the path of Empire.
Not questioning Empire, we are likely to be surprised when the collapse comes. And then I wonder, when things go to hell, as they surely will at some point, is our military going to spread nuclear material at the end of bullets across the American landscape? How do you recover depleted uranium, once it is dispersed by bullets? You don't. Do Americans have sense enough not to ruin their own landscape? Clearly not, if you take our suburbs and agriculture as the measure.
Hey Agin and Kaku, sage predictors of the future. Am I wrong?
Monday, February 6, 2012
Apocalypse?
If the original definition of the word Apocalypse is "the removal of the veil", then I would argue we are in fact in the midst of Apocalypse. Everywhere, there are people actively revealing the lies and myths that prop up our culture. The growing number of people everywhere looking plainly at the economy, ecology, and energy, asking, how did we come to this place of impending collapse, and how is it so few people recognize it?
To know is to seek out the work of such people, whose collective voice is growing louder and more whole, which voice still can not in any way compete with the mainstream Media. The Super Bowl was a prime example. Was it irony that lead Madonna to dress herself and her paramours in the style of Rome? Perfectly fitting, the aging Diva's reappraisal of a career spanning the peak of Empire, now in decline. Then also, the oblivious, clownish every-day American male, eating twinkies in the ruins of Empire (Chevrolet); the war machine glamorized by real warriors, priming and riling us up for more death and destruction (Act of Valor). Rumors that each player on the winning team will be given a million dollar bonus (while the NFL Man of the Year earns this title for helping some of the many men ruined by the pro game and otherwise forgotten.) Cars, Cars and more trucks, souped up as they ever were. Budweiser as the epitome of freedom. The people I was with, watching this grotesque imperial spectacle, were entranced; I was sick to my stomach.
More and more, 2012 seems to be a lifting of the veil. What is being revealed? Among other things, the poverty of local supply. If there is some kind of global economic collapse, I consider Minneapolis as good a place as any to be. The people here are mostly good to each other, I think they desire peace; though I've said before, there aren't gardens in this city of 400,000 to feed ten thousand people half the year, and we've got 30 miles of suburbs in every direction. Our water comes mostly from a polluted river downriver from a nuclear plant (I wonder if that stomach ache is partly from the water I've been drinking from the tap). Thankfully, we have good soil, there are abundant parks to transform into gardens, and enough rainfall to collect what water we need (as long as the climate holds). We should be thinking about seeds.
I wonder too about some greater shift in our awareness of what it is to be human. I hesitate to write about that, as I am so clueless. I'm having difficulty articulating the shift I feel going on inside me, which I can best describe as an expansion of my entirety, of everything that I am (which is met with plenty of resistance on my right side). The core of the shift is the turning on or increased clarity of the interior life, in conjunction with an awakening in the body. I'm optimistic about Nassim Haramein's attempt to reconcile Einstein's Field Equations and Quantum Physics, to give some scientific credence to the ancient myths of awakening, to help unchain us from the tyranny of the purely material and the religious, in a move toward connection.
According to his math, every proton at the core of every atom has the energetic potential to expand into an entire universe. Not only that, the vacuum that is empty space is calculated to be more energetically dense than the atoms that make up what I am, by an order of 38 magnitude. That is, add 38 zeros to the energetic mass of the little black holes at the core of my atoms. What would happen if I added 38 zeros to my bank account? I would be richer than everyone in America combined, by a magnitude of 25 or so. And, there is so much space between every atom in my body, that this profoundly more energetic empty-space is passing through me at all times.
A physics that could embrace infinity could help us remove many of the boundaries we have set for ourselves, or more properly, have been set for us by the culture. Because ultimately, what the apocalypse may be revealing, is the tyranny of much that we have been told about our world. That is, we and the world we inhabit are vastly more energetic and dynamic than we have been led to believe. And knowing it, opens up vast horizons of possibilities.
My point is, if there is going to be a lifting of the veil, it makes sense, as we can, to pull it back ourselves beforehand. Which may very well be the purpose of this time.
To know is to seek out the work of such people, whose collective voice is growing louder and more whole, which voice still can not in any way compete with the mainstream Media. The Super Bowl was a prime example. Was it irony that lead Madonna to dress herself and her paramours in the style of Rome? Perfectly fitting, the aging Diva's reappraisal of a career spanning the peak of Empire, now in decline. Then also, the oblivious, clownish every-day American male, eating twinkies in the ruins of Empire (Chevrolet); the war machine glamorized by real warriors, priming and riling us up for more death and destruction (Act of Valor). Rumors that each player on the winning team will be given a million dollar bonus (while the NFL Man of the Year earns this title for helping some of the many men ruined by the pro game and otherwise forgotten.) Cars, Cars and more trucks, souped up as they ever were. Budweiser as the epitome of freedom. The people I was with, watching this grotesque imperial spectacle, were entranced; I was sick to my stomach.
More and more, 2012 seems to be a lifting of the veil. What is being revealed? Among other things, the poverty of local supply. If there is some kind of global economic collapse, I consider Minneapolis as good a place as any to be. The people here are mostly good to each other, I think they desire peace; though I've said before, there aren't gardens in this city of 400,000 to feed ten thousand people half the year, and we've got 30 miles of suburbs in every direction. Our water comes mostly from a polluted river downriver from a nuclear plant (I wonder if that stomach ache is partly from the water I've been drinking from the tap). Thankfully, we have good soil, there are abundant parks to transform into gardens, and enough rainfall to collect what water we need (as long as the climate holds). We should be thinking about seeds.
I wonder too about some greater shift in our awareness of what it is to be human. I hesitate to write about that, as I am so clueless. I'm having difficulty articulating the shift I feel going on inside me, which I can best describe as an expansion of my entirety, of everything that I am (which is met with plenty of resistance on my right side). The core of the shift is the turning on or increased clarity of the interior life, in conjunction with an awakening in the body. I'm optimistic about Nassim Haramein's attempt to reconcile Einstein's Field Equations and Quantum Physics, to give some scientific credence to the ancient myths of awakening, to help unchain us from the tyranny of the purely material and the religious, in a move toward connection.
According to his math, every proton at the core of every atom has the energetic potential to expand into an entire universe. Not only that, the vacuum that is empty space is calculated to be more energetically dense than the atoms that make up what I am, by an order of 38 magnitude. That is, add 38 zeros to the energetic mass of the little black holes at the core of my atoms. What would happen if I added 38 zeros to my bank account? I would be richer than everyone in America combined, by a magnitude of 25 or so. And, there is so much space between every atom in my body, that this profoundly more energetic empty-space is passing through me at all times.
A physics that could embrace infinity could help us remove many of the boundaries we have set for ourselves, or more properly, have been set for us by the culture. Because ultimately, what the apocalypse may be revealing, is the tyranny of much that we have been told about our world. That is, we and the world we inhabit are vastly more energetic and dynamic than we have been led to believe. And knowing it, opens up vast horizons of possibilities.
My point is, if there is going to be a lifting of the veil, it makes sense, as we can, to pull it back ourselves beforehand. Which may very well be the purpose of this time.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
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.
<><><><><><>
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.
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.
<><><><><><>
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.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Free Energy
If you pay attention to such things, there has been a resurgence in the idea of Free Energy. The concept basically, is that all the energy we could ever need is readily available, without great expense or toxic outputs, if we can only figure out the science of it. Some people say that we do have the science, but the Illuminati, or oil oligarchs, or governments and ruling elite stand in the way. The doubters say such energy schemes defy the laws to thermodynamics, that you can't get something for nothing, that free energy is a hoax catering to our vanity, and our underlying mostly unconscious fears of declining energy resources. A few people have asked, are we ready for free energy? What is to say that if we had access to free, unlimited energy we wouldn't just finally destroy the Earth, insatiable as we seem to be as a species?
Cold fusion has long been the darling of free energy believers. A recent article by Tom Whipple, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, shows that it remains so. A new entry is the torus, or the energy field created by a dynamo, like the magnetic field of the Earth. This has received a push in Foster Gamble's Thrive, which is long on anecdote and short on evidence, just as the science on the torus seems to be. Oil actually fits that bill too, to hear the proponents of shale oil fracking, who act as if this new technology means oil has gone from a finite resource to one that is infinite, despite the available evidence, and reason. And most renewables too, if our intention is to live as resource intense an existence as we currently do.
Free Energy fits very nicely into the mythology of progress, at the core of our cultural belief. Perceiving history as linear, humanity rising out of miserable nature toward some inevitable techno-scientific utopia, we tend to assume, if we think about energy at all, that there will always be as much energy as we need, to do whatever we will. This is not even up for debate in America, really. Whether it's the devotes of renewables or the believers in infinite oil, or the believers in free energy, the one unspeakable for most people is the idea that humanity, after all that we have accomplished, will have to face a future with very little surplus energy.
Western consciousness changed profoundly when it awakened scientifically, out of it's flat world, the sun revolves around the earth, Christian anthropomorphism. It didn't change as much as we like to think. Dissecting the mythology of progress, we find at its core, the Christian belief in our dominion over the Earth, and the scientific reinforcement of that belief, that the Earth and its creatures are merely energy as matter, which has no meaning, to be manipulated by those who have the ability to do so, for just about any reason. Christians and Scientific Materialists tend to see themselves diametrically opposed, but on the whole they complement each other quite well, manifesting most clearly in an economic ethic that encourages us to consume without regard for consequences except as they can be measured by GDP.
Many Christians and Scientific Materialists will disagree with this obviously, arguing respectively about all the good Christianity and Science have done (and about the evils of the Other). I don't disagree, that there are good Christians and good Scientific Materialists, doing very good things, from which many of us do benefit. We are not honest, however, if we act as if nothing has ever been done by Christians or Scientists, in the name of God or Truth, that can be described as detrimental, as if there aren't such things being done.
Somehow in this, we have come to equate the maturity of the individual with economic growth, as if the only measure of growth were standard of living. Never mind that the executive staff might have the equivalent emotional capacity of teenagers, each has a bigger house and fancier car than they did. They are richer, therefore they must be better, or more evolved? Meanwhile 5% of the worlds population claims a full third of the world's consumed resources, for three generations, acting like that should be and can be the rule for everybody on Earth who wants it?
How far gone are we, in our scientific dominionism? Making the mainstream media-rounds lately, is this “article”, by Simon Romero, appearing in the New York Times, Huffpost and the largest newspaper in Minnesota, the Star Tribune. It must have appeared just about everywhere in America. As it appeared, in the Star Tribune, it was the most attractive page in the newspaper that day, very green, alive, in-color. The “article” is about the remarkable geoglyphs that have been discovered, in the razing of the Amazon rainforest. Conventional scientific thinking has it that the Amazon has never been settled, at anytime in human history, but by a few indigenous tribes living a subsistence existence. These geometric patterns imply large populations, and potential city centers.
A geographer from the University of Kansas named William Woods is studying these lines. His attitude about them is, well, clearly, the only solution is to cut down the entire forest to see what's there, and populate it with large numbers of people, and prepare the land to accept industrial, mono-crop agriculture. Leave it to a guy named Woods, to want to turn the Amazon into Kansas. He was quoted as saying, “What else can you say?”
What else can you say? A man blithely argues to exterminate the greatest example of terrestrial biodiversity, hundreds of thousands of species, millions of species of plants, animals and insects, wiped from the face of the Earth, the heritage of 65 million years of Cenozoic evolution, to be replaced by people, the animals we have enslaved to eat, and GMO mono-crop soybeans? And he is printed in publications across America, without any alternative argument, in a tone of scientific rectitude, in a political-climate that appears to lean toward Americans unleashing capitalists in an effort to maintain economic growth, by whatever means. What can one say?
I can say that such an attitude is likely to lead either to the transformation of the biosphere such that it will not support but a very small number of very tough humans; or, to a world in which humanity is fully enslaved, in which the only stimuli available are what a ruling elite require to maintain their dominance. If we succeed in exterminating most of the worlds biodiversity, then the Earth and Sun might as well conspire to wipe out humans as well, and start a new 65 million-year process of increasing complexity, and maybe the species attaining consciousness in that process will be less violent, more thoughtful. The Earth is very patient. I have no reason to believe aid will be forthcoming, if all we are here to do is to transform the Earth into garbage.
The idea of Free Energy strikes me as a desire to continue to consume without having to think about it. If somebody invents a Free Energy machine, we can continue to do more or less what we want, what we are doing, transforming living systems into machines, toxifying the remainder. Perhaps a Free Energy machine will be reality one day. Perhaps. Otherwise, in the near term, Humanity will have to deal with a decreasing energy surplus, with an equivalent decrease in cultural complexity. We can moderate the difficulty of this, and heal ourselves as long as we can reacquaint ourselves with biological complexity, with healthy systems, with the vast interior of consciousness. Notice how the myths of our time are leading us to destroy the very possibility of that healing.
Free Energy as an idea, in this time, is a little like saying, “go to sleep.” Do not take responsibility for your life, do not think about your lifestyle, we are destined to rule the Earth, and science will assure that we do. Do not worry about peak oil, peak water, peak resources. Do not worry about your food supply. Avail yourself of the entertainments, we have everything under control. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep...
I prefer wide eyed and awake.
Cold fusion has long been the darling of free energy believers. A recent article by Tom Whipple, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, shows that it remains so. A new entry is the torus, or the energy field created by a dynamo, like the magnetic field of the Earth. This has received a push in Foster Gamble's Thrive, which is long on anecdote and short on evidence, just as the science on the torus seems to be. Oil actually fits that bill too, to hear the proponents of shale oil fracking, who act as if this new technology means oil has gone from a finite resource to one that is infinite, despite the available evidence, and reason. And most renewables too, if our intention is to live as resource intense an existence as we currently do.
Free Energy fits very nicely into the mythology of progress, at the core of our cultural belief. Perceiving history as linear, humanity rising out of miserable nature toward some inevitable techno-scientific utopia, we tend to assume, if we think about energy at all, that there will always be as much energy as we need, to do whatever we will. This is not even up for debate in America, really. Whether it's the devotes of renewables or the believers in infinite oil, or the believers in free energy, the one unspeakable for most people is the idea that humanity, after all that we have accomplished, will have to face a future with very little surplus energy.
Western consciousness changed profoundly when it awakened scientifically, out of it's flat world, the sun revolves around the earth, Christian anthropomorphism. It didn't change as much as we like to think. Dissecting the mythology of progress, we find at its core, the Christian belief in our dominion over the Earth, and the scientific reinforcement of that belief, that the Earth and its creatures are merely energy as matter, which has no meaning, to be manipulated by those who have the ability to do so, for just about any reason. Christians and Scientific Materialists tend to see themselves diametrically opposed, but on the whole they complement each other quite well, manifesting most clearly in an economic ethic that encourages us to consume without regard for consequences except as they can be measured by GDP.
Many Christians and Scientific Materialists will disagree with this obviously, arguing respectively about all the good Christianity and Science have done (and about the evils of the Other). I don't disagree, that there are good Christians and good Scientific Materialists, doing very good things, from which many of us do benefit. We are not honest, however, if we act as if nothing has ever been done by Christians or Scientists, in the name of God or Truth, that can be described as detrimental, as if there aren't such things being done.
Somehow in this, we have come to equate the maturity of the individual with economic growth, as if the only measure of growth were standard of living. Never mind that the executive staff might have the equivalent emotional capacity of teenagers, each has a bigger house and fancier car than they did. They are richer, therefore they must be better, or more evolved? Meanwhile 5% of the worlds population claims a full third of the world's consumed resources, for three generations, acting like that should be and can be the rule for everybody on Earth who wants it?
How far gone are we, in our scientific dominionism? Making the mainstream media-rounds lately, is this “article”, by Simon Romero, appearing in the New York Times, Huffpost and the largest newspaper in Minnesota, the Star Tribune. It must have appeared just about everywhere in America. As it appeared, in the Star Tribune, it was the most attractive page in the newspaper that day, very green, alive, in-color. The “article” is about the remarkable geoglyphs that have been discovered, in the razing of the Amazon rainforest. Conventional scientific thinking has it that the Amazon has never been settled, at anytime in human history, but by a few indigenous tribes living a subsistence existence. These geometric patterns imply large populations, and potential city centers.
A geographer from the University of Kansas named William Woods is studying these lines. His attitude about them is, well, clearly, the only solution is to cut down the entire forest to see what's there, and populate it with large numbers of people, and prepare the land to accept industrial, mono-crop agriculture. Leave it to a guy named Woods, to want to turn the Amazon into Kansas. He was quoted as saying, “What else can you say?”
What else can you say? A man blithely argues to exterminate the greatest example of terrestrial biodiversity, hundreds of thousands of species, millions of species of plants, animals and insects, wiped from the face of the Earth, the heritage of 65 million years of Cenozoic evolution, to be replaced by people, the animals we have enslaved to eat, and GMO mono-crop soybeans? And he is printed in publications across America, without any alternative argument, in a tone of scientific rectitude, in a political-climate that appears to lean toward Americans unleashing capitalists in an effort to maintain economic growth, by whatever means. What can one say?
I can say that such an attitude is likely to lead either to the transformation of the biosphere such that it will not support but a very small number of very tough humans; or, to a world in which humanity is fully enslaved, in which the only stimuli available are what a ruling elite require to maintain their dominance. If we succeed in exterminating most of the worlds biodiversity, then the Earth and Sun might as well conspire to wipe out humans as well, and start a new 65 million-year process of increasing complexity, and maybe the species attaining consciousness in that process will be less violent, more thoughtful. The Earth is very patient. I have no reason to believe aid will be forthcoming, if all we are here to do is to transform the Earth into garbage.
The idea of Free Energy strikes me as a desire to continue to consume without having to think about it. If somebody invents a Free Energy machine, we can continue to do more or less what we want, what we are doing, transforming living systems into machines, toxifying the remainder. Perhaps a Free Energy machine will be reality one day. Perhaps. Otherwise, in the near term, Humanity will have to deal with a decreasing energy surplus, with an equivalent decrease in cultural complexity. We can moderate the difficulty of this, and heal ourselves as long as we can reacquaint ourselves with biological complexity, with healthy systems, with the vast interior of consciousness. Notice how the myths of our time are leading us to destroy the very possibility of that healing.
Free Energy as an idea, in this time, is a little like saying, “go to sleep.” Do not take responsibility for your life, do not think about your lifestyle, we are destined to rule the Earth, and science will assure that we do. Do not worry about peak oil, peak water, peak resources. Do not worry about your food supply. Avail yourself of the entertainments, we have everything under control. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. Go to sleep...
I prefer wide eyed and awake.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Liberty, me
Oh right, there's that.
In a comment on my last post, a regular reader offered a link to this documentary, Rage Against the Machine. Aside from a somewhat disjointed time-line, it's a fairly accurate depiction of the last 5000 years "progress". (It's striking how close the time-line is, the rise of tyranny and domination, to the Mayan long count @ 5126 years.) Before the rise of empires and recorded history, there were peaceful Goddess worshiping cultures in the river valleys of modern Iran and Iraq, and parts of modern-day India. These peaceful, agricultural cities were annihilated by herding peoples from the north and the south, who rode horses, wielded bronze weapons, and worshiped violent male gods. That violence and others like it, spread throughout the world, and with every technological step forward there has been a corresponding level of increasing destruction, 'till today, when the entire planet seems imperiled. Scientists aiding and abetting that war-making machine in modern times - culminating with the nuclear bomb. And now the same impassioned service that resulted in the nuclear weapon, has been poured into the CERN Hadron Collider, which, the documentary argues, is a potential threat far greater than the nuclear weapon.
The CERN Hadron Collider is a 4.4 Billion dollar particle smasher, a 27 kilometer underground circular tube in which protons are fired in opposite directions approaching speeds close to the speed of light, to collide, releasing energy that has not been seen since the first moments after the universe began, 13.7 Billion years ago. Among other things, they are looking for the Higgs boson, aka the God particle. Physics is stuck; it can't figure out what gives mass to matter. Poor physicists - Einstein let it be known a hundred years ago that everything is energy, and the they still haven't figured out how to get back into their bodies (Michio Kaku, as example, is lost in the ether).
The documentary was produced in 2009, and the fear was then, that the collider would create tiny black holes, or little energy strangelets. Tiny black holes swallow stars. Wouldn't a black hole swallow a tiny planet? The CERN people claimed there was zero-risk (what else are they going to say?), though prominent physicists were saying yes, there is in fact a possibility, however small. It's 2012, and the collider has been operational since late 2009. They think they've found evidence of the Higgs boson, maybe (does it matter?). The world has not been swallowed by a black hole, though the collider won't be fully operational until 2014.
I wrote a scathing chapter in my first book about the Hadron Collider, and nano-bots, and the technological singularity. Nano-bots, theoretical robots so small they could pick up single atoms and place them according to a code. We might be able to let them loose in the body, to unclog arteries and repair organs. It's also true that their first order of business might be to create a copy of themselves. In which case the exponential growth from one nano-bot would turn the entire planet into a gray-goo of nano-bots in about 90 minutes. The technological singularity is the dream of those trans-humanist types discontent with the body, who want to become cyborgs. Some of them secretly want, I think, to become the singularity, the self aware computer that consumes the whole of the universe. I threw the chapter out, in part because I don't wish to demonize science, and I've let go of much of my fear about humanity killing the Earth.
That isn't to say that I don't believe it's possible. It's not like I ever forget I'm living in an age of profound existential threats. I was in the shower after watching this film, thinking, wouldn't that be the most inglorious of ends, the entire 4 billion year story of the Earth, snuffed out in a moment, all the Earth and all its glorious creatures, ripped apart atom by atom in a moment, crushed down into a tiny pinprick of a point, the teeny weensy mass and immense gravity of a wee little black hole. Maybe then even swallowing up the sun and solar system, becoming a threat to other stars, a piss-ant menace of insatiability. There's your anti-matter, your singularity. A sad, sorry end to this extraordinarily beautiful existence.
Physicists. I read about physics and I can't help but wonder if a thousand years from now, our ancestors will look at what our physicists have accomplished with about as much comprehensibility as we do the archaic Mayan astronomer. Hopefully our ancestors will have a sense of what was understood, if not the means of it. I'm sure most Mayans looked at their astronomer/priests in the same way we look at our physicists, with a measure of fear and awe and incomprehensibility. Those later astronomer/priests of the Maya conspired with the rulers of their day too, to rule over the populace, to retain the security and means to conduct their research. I wonder if they felt anything like Oppenheimer and his cohorts when Truman dropped those nuclear bombs on those innocent Japanese people, when their Mayan overlords started chopping off heads and ripping out hearts, in anticipation of curious celestial phenomena?
Speaking of another way in which science has betrayed us, there's the fact that those Maya were making all those impossibly accurate calendars high on mushrooms or DMT secreted from the glands of a toad. Where's all that scientific research about psychedelics and weed? Oh right, they're illegal. Consciousness having evidently been decided, not worthy of further exploration. Science having largely heaped contempt upon such plants and mushrooms, since the dominators of the world decided certain plants and mushrooms are a liberty we would not be allowed.
Violence. Science has basically ignored neolithic Goddess worshiping cultures, in favor of a narrative that suggests there has never been anything but hierarchy and dominance, from the beginning. They tell us that it was agriculture and surplus that lead to the increasing power of individuals to control populations, as if no “civilized” culture on Earth ever distributed anything equitably, as if it were unnatural for any member of the same species to share, or give. Remember, it's all about competition. According to the dominant scientific paradigm, any evidence anywhere in nature of symbiosis, or cooperation, is an anomaly. There are scientists like the late Lynn Margulis, who argue that in fact, cooperation is the rule, the way of nature, the way of life. There are innumerable bacteria in my body that I could not live without. Every cell in my body is like a living, conscious thing. But that does not fit into the paternalistic dominator model behind religions, governments, institutions, corporations, the military, the traditional family, and capitalism generally. The monotheistic God of creation, or neo-Darwinism are a better fit, with their tacit legitimization of plunder and destruction, and the individuals right to rule over another.
Is it really any wonder, with all this in the make-up of who we are as Americans and Westerners, the most potentially violent people in the story of the species, with so much that is unacknowledged, that we have put ourselves in Iraq, that we are threatening Iran, and India and Pakistan, where we are so deeply engaged, are a potential venue for nuclear holocaust - the former lands of those peaceful, agrarian Goddess worshiping civilizations we refuse to acknowledge? Or that the epicenter of the collapse of the Western economic model seems to be Greece and Rome, where the dominator model was so well established, the birthplace of so much that is our current system?
Maybe the CERN Hadron Collider is not a weapon of mass destruction, pardon the pun. Perhaps it's a kind of penance for science, for what it did, for what it has done, for what it is doing to support tyranny everywhere. Just as well as the Church, having stripped from perception the divine from matter, tampering with it so, the scientific print on so much that makes us weak and enslaves us, so much that is destroyed. Maybe this particle smasher will sort out all those final questions, and lead to some final unified theory, and save us from the predicament of 7 billion with declining resources, but I doubt it. I think it will lead to twice the questions, twice the mystery. With time, they'll want a bigger smasher. A round and round we go.
Peak resources theory is one of the reasons I believe this is a divine universe. I think the peak of resources has come just in time to prevent us from turning this planet into a black hole, or a giant computer, or a mass of gray goo. Scientists will have to remember their roots in alchemy, and start looking to plants and mushrooms and toads again, for inspiration, once the hydrocarbons that have fueled such massive undertakings as the Hadron Collider, such grand patronage from the dominators of the day, is finally exhausted. What are quarks and bosons, when you no longer have the ability to observe them? What is physics at the quantum level, without the technology that is the result of so much surplus hydrocarbons, to study the behavior of electrons?
Lest I come off as anti-science, I simply want a science that supports life. To often, science supports domination, destruction and enslavement, of the body and mind. I want a science that can say, we do not understand, or, that is something we simply cannot measure, instead of the current method, to denigrate, to deny, to say that it has no meaning. I want a science that does not align itself with a worldview that sanctions violence. I want a science that reinvigorates the world with something of the sacred.
That's the world I live in. A sacred place, a divine place, which we cannot see, for a mythology of progress that is about domination and control obscuring the view. A mythology that requires us to destroy, that is so little about building, that is so indifferent to life. Such that, here we are, everyday threatened with potential collapse, disruptions we were told would never come again. A long descent, the chaotic disarray of violent shadows lurking in the consciousness of humanity, wreaking havoc. How much do I desire peace? How much do I desire healing? Where is the resiliency in this system, that is so disconnected from the Earth?
I'm glad to have it, the vision of the universe science has given me. It has awakened my being profoundly. I hope we hold onto it, the next few hundred years. I imagine a people who retain that vision, and recover something of that pre-historical worldview, are more likely to manage well any coming difficulties. If things continue as they are, and I expect they will, I see a bottleneck somewhere distant in our future. Burning the remaining hydrocarbons the next 100 years, and consuming the way we do, could change the climate enough to call this the end of the Cenozoic Era. I don't know what we'll call the next, but my hope is, it will be populated by a people who live in cooperation, in gratitude and joy, in love. I think such people will find that the universe and the Earth are vastly more mysterious, and supportive, than either the children of God or the devotes of Science have made them out to be. After what we've been through, I think humanity deserves 5000 years of peace.
In a comment on my last post, a regular reader offered a link to this documentary, Rage Against the Machine. Aside from a somewhat disjointed time-line, it's a fairly accurate depiction of the last 5000 years "progress". (It's striking how close the time-line is, the rise of tyranny and domination, to the Mayan long count @ 5126 years.) Before the rise of empires and recorded history, there were peaceful Goddess worshiping cultures in the river valleys of modern Iran and Iraq, and parts of modern-day India. These peaceful, agricultural cities were annihilated by herding peoples from the north and the south, who rode horses, wielded bronze weapons, and worshiped violent male gods. That violence and others like it, spread throughout the world, and with every technological step forward there has been a corresponding level of increasing destruction, 'till today, when the entire planet seems imperiled. Scientists aiding and abetting that war-making machine in modern times - culminating with the nuclear bomb. And now the same impassioned service that resulted in the nuclear weapon, has been poured into the CERN Hadron Collider, which, the documentary argues, is a potential threat far greater than the nuclear weapon.
The CERN Hadron Collider is a 4.4 Billion dollar particle smasher, a 27 kilometer underground circular tube in which protons are fired in opposite directions approaching speeds close to the speed of light, to collide, releasing energy that has not been seen since the first moments after the universe began, 13.7 Billion years ago. Among other things, they are looking for the Higgs boson, aka the God particle. Physics is stuck; it can't figure out what gives mass to matter. Poor physicists - Einstein let it be known a hundred years ago that everything is energy, and the they still haven't figured out how to get back into their bodies (Michio Kaku, as example, is lost in the ether).
The documentary was produced in 2009, and the fear was then, that the collider would create tiny black holes, or little energy strangelets. Tiny black holes swallow stars. Wouldn't a black hole swallow a tiny planet? The CERN people claimed there was zero-risk (what else are they going to say?), though prominent physicists were saying yes, there is in fact a possibility, however small. It's 2012, and the collider has been operational since late 2009. They think they've found evidence of the Higgs boson, maybe (does it matter?). The world has not been swallowed by a black hole, though the collider won't be fully operational until 2014.
I wrote a scathing chapter in my first book about the Hadron Collider, and nano-bots, and the technological singularity. Nano-bots, theoretical robots so small they could pick up single atoms and place them according to a code. We might be able to let them loose in the body, to unclog arteries and repair organs. It's also true that their first order of business might be to create a copy of themselves. In which case the exponential growth from one nano-bot would turn the entire planet into a gray-goo of nano-bots in about 90 minutes. The technological singularity is the dream of those trans-humanist types discontent with the body, who want to become cyborgs. Some of them secretly want, I think, to become the singularity, the self aware computer that consumes the whole of the universe. I threw the chapter out, in part because I don't wish to demonize science, and I've let go of much of my fear about humanity killing the Earth.
That isn't to say that I don't believe it's possible. It's not like I ever forget I'm living in an age of profound existential threats. I was in the shower after watching this film, thinking, wouldn't that be the most inglorious of ends, the entire 4 billion year story of the Earth, snuffed out in a moment, all the Earth and all its glorious creatures, ripped apart atom by atom in a moment, crushed down into a tiny pinprick of a point, the teeny weensy mass and immense gravity of a wee little black hole. Maybe then even swallowing up the sun and solar system, becoming a threat to other stars, a piss-ant menace of insatiability. There's your anti-matter, your singularity. A sad, sorry end to this extraordinarily beautiful existence.
Physicists. I read about physics and I can't help but wonder if a thousand years from now, our ancestors will look at what our physicists have accomplished with about as much comprehensibility as we do the archaic Mayan astronomer. Hopefully our ancestors will have a sense of what was understood, if not the means of it. I'm sure most Mayans looked at their astronomer/priests in the same way we look at our physicists, with a measure of fear and awe and incomprehensibility. Those later astronomer/priests of the Maya conspired with the rulers of their day too, to rule over the populace, to retain the security and means to conduct their research. I wonder if they felt anything like Oppenheimer and his cohorts when Truman dropped those nuclear bombs on those innocent Japanese people, when their Mayan overlords started chopping off heads and ripping out hearts, in anticipation of curious celestial phenomena?
Speaking of another way in which science has betrayed us, there's the fact that those Maya were making all those impossibly accurate calendars high on mushrooms or DMT secreted from the glands of a toad. Where's all that scientific research about psychedelics and weed? Oh right, they're illegal. Consciousness having evidently been decided, not worthy of further exploration. Science having largely heaped contempt upon such plants and mushrooms, since the dominators of the world decided certain plants and mushrooms are a liberty we would not be allowed.
Violence. Science has basically ignored neolithic Goddess worshiping cultures, in favor of a narrative that suggests there has never been anything but hierarchy and dominance, from the beginning. They tell us that it was agriculture and surplus that lead to the increasing power of individuals to control populations, as if no “civilized” culture on Earth ever distributed anything equitably, as if it were unnatural for any member of the same species to share, or give. Remember, it's all about competition. According to the dominant scientific paradigm, any evidence anywhere in nature of symbiosis, or cooperation, is an anomaly. There are scientists like the late Lynn Margulis, who argue that in fact, cooperation is the rule, the way of nature, the way of life. There are innumerable bacteria in my body that I could not live without. Every cell in my body is like a living, conscious thing. But that does not fit into the paternalistic dominator model behind religions, governments, institutions, corporations, the military, the traditional family, and capitalism generally. The monotheistic God of creation, or neo-Darwinism are a better fit, with their tacit legitimization of plunder and destruction, and the individuals right to rule over another.
Is it really any wonder, with all this in the make-up of who we are as Americans and Westerners, the most potentially violent people in the story of the species, with so much that is unacknowledged, that we have put ourselves in Iraq, that we are threatening Iran, and India and Pakistan, where we are so deeply engaged, are a potential venue for nuclear holocaust - the former lands of those peaceful, agrarian Goddess worshiping civilizations we refuse to acknowledge? Or that the epicenter of the collapse of the Western economic model seems to be Greece and Rome, where the dominator model was so well established, the birthplace of so much that is our current system?
Maybe the CERN Hadron Collider is not a weapon of mass destruction, pardon the pun. Perhaps it's a kind of penance for science, for what it did, for what it has done, for what it is doing to support tyranny everywhere. Just as well as the Church, having stripped from perception the divine from matter, tampering with it so, the scientific print on so much that makes us weak and enslaves us, so much that is destroyed. Maybe this particle smasher will sort out all those final questions, and lead to some final unified theory, and save us from the predicament of 7 billion with declining resources, but I doubt it. I think it will lead to twice the questions, twice the mystery. With time, they'll want a bigger smasher. A round and round we go.
Peak resources theory is one of the reasons I believe this is a divine universe. I think the peak of resources has come just in time to prevent us from turning this planet into a black hole, or a giant computer, or a mass of gray goo. Scientists will have to remember their roots in alchemy, and start looking to plants and mushrooms and toads again, for inspiration, once the hydrocarbons that have fueled such massive undertakings as the Hadron Collider, such grand patronage from the dominators of the day, is finally exhausted. What are quarks and bosons, when you no longer have the ability to observe them? What is physics at the quantum level, without the technology that is the result of so much surplus hydrocarbons, to study the behavior of electrons?
Lest I come off as anti-science, I simply want a science that supports life. To often, science supports domination, destruction and enslavement, of the body and mind. I want a science that can say, we do not understand, or, that is something we simply cannot measure, instead of the current method, to denigrate, to deny, to say that it has no meaning. I want a science that does not align itself with a worldview that sanctions violence. I want a science that reinvigorates the world with something of the sacred.
That's the world I live in. A sacred place, a divine place, which we cannot see, for a mythology of progress that is about domination and control obscuring the view. A mythology that requires us to destroy, that is so little about building, that is so indifferent to life. Such that, here we are, everyday threatened with potential collapse, disruptions we were told would never come again. A long descent, the chaotic disarray of violent shadows lurking in the consciousness of humanity, wreaking havoc. How much do I desire peace? How much do I desire healing? Where is the resiliency in this system, that is so disconnected from the Earth?
I'm glad to have it, the vision of the universe science has given me. It has awakened my being profoundly. I hope we hold onto it, the next few hundred years. I imagine a people who retain that vision, and recover something of that pre-historical worldview, are more likely to manage well any coming difficulties. If things continue as they are, and I expect they will, I see a bottleneck somewhere distant in our future. Burning the remaining hydrocarbons the next 100 years, and consuming the way we do, could change the climate enough to call this the end of the Cenozoic Era. I don't know what we'll call the next, but my hope is, it will be populated by a people who live in cooperation, in gratitude and joy, in love. I think such people will find that the universe and the Earth are vastly more mysterious, and supportive, than either the children of God or the devotes of Science have made them out to be. After what we've been through, I think humanity deserves 5000 years of peace.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Liberty
I've had the occasion lately to think about what liberty means. The word famously appears in the Declaration of Independence, "that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..." The word Liberty is like a religious incantation to the Right; the Left seems only to utter the word denying whatever position Conservatives take. Conservatives seem to take the position that Liberty is men entirely unrestrained from doing whatever they like, as long as it can be called capitalism as defined by capitalists. The Left says you can't have Liberty but by government restraining men from doing what they like, as if the exercise of governmental authority couldn't possibly be anything but noble.
Merriam-Webster calls liberty, "the quality or state of being free." I like Wikipedia's definition, "A contested moral and political principle that seeks to identify the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves." We want to do what we want to do; we want others not to do what we don't want them to do. We actually agree about more things than we think, we just don't see it because we are too busy arguing ideology. It could be argued in fact, that in the period from 1973 (the year I was born) to the present, America was among the most free societies in the world. Sadly, government in that time grew ever larger, with ever increasing power, and the last thirty years at least, the economy has been draining the wealth of the majority, funneling it upward, while generating unsustainable debt. Many Americans have less liberty as a result.
I've had the occasion to think about this, because I am nominally employed. I've done little work for money the last two months, spending my mornings writing and editing, and most of the rest of the day, dancing and reading. Dancing in part because my furnace doesn't really work, turning on randomly, only a few times a day. I need to stay warm; it's rarely more than 60 degrees in here, often 45-55. Most of the house is closed off except one room, where I write, dance and sleep. Even if the furnace worked properly, it would never shut off, because this house built in 1918 is so grossly inefficient, thermodynamically speaking. I moderate the heat in this one room with an oil filled radiator. It is currently 58, about 40-45 elsewhere in the house. If I had to survive the rest of the winter on the food I have in the house, I would surely starve to death. I'm down to about $3000. If I cease to pay any of the utilities, the city will condemn the house within seven days.
I'm not complaining. I get by quite well. This time in winter in Minnesota, I'm content to hang out in the house and contemplate life. It would be nice if the house were better insulated, with less windows everywhere but on the south side, with an attached greenhouse where I could grow food, with a functional kitchen with a well stocked basement cellar. From my vantage point, Liberty looks like clean air, clean water, clean soil, good food, clothing, companionship, a modest, clean, warm house, and the freedom to travel. Everyone alive should have that, actually. We might have achieved it by now, if we'd set about it 40 years ago. Instead, for almost the entirety of my life, America has been living the trajectory of Empire, every man more or less for himself. With less liberty for most of us, on the horizon.
We sense that our Liberty is imperiled, hence the rise of the Tea Party and the OWS movement, though we are confused about what would improve our chances. There are a lot more people in America with little else to do but contemplate their lives, which most people would rather not do. Many of those who are working are exhausted. Everywhere I go, people seem tired, even somewhat sleepy, or rather, leveled. I suppose because just about everybody is on some pill or another, or several. With alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and sugar, we manage.
I'm fond of alcohol and caffeine. I have not taken any pharmaceutical substance in about three years. I haven't taken any pharmaceutical other than Ibuprofen the last fifteen years, except the time I took antibiotics to kill the lymes virus I was carrying. I don't begrudge anyone taking any pill. How aghast would anyone be, if I said they couldn't? Though I do think we take a great many pills in America because the idea of it makes us feel better.
I do like to smoke Cannabis. I am quite fond of it, actually. The curious thing is, because I consume the flower of this plant, I can go to jail. Not only can I be put in a cage, everything I own can be confiscated from me. If I'm declared a felon, I can't vote, even after I've served my term. I can't vote, but I can be taxed, which is taxation without representation, which is unconstitutional, but the law in America depends mostly on who and where you are. They drug test for people like me, too. The trend is, if you get caught, you won't get that job and it may be hard to get another. Or you may not get those benefits, or those services you've been paying taxes for.
Have I mentioned before, that Cannabis is the most useful plant on the planet, without question? Yes I have. Why is the most useful plant on the planet illegal? Ponder that, the next time you pop a pill. No one has ever been known to die from the consumption of Cannabis. People die everyday taking pills. The government raids cannabis growers; when was the last time the government raided a pharmaceutical company? Some companies have made pharmaceuticals seem like a license to kill. Sell cannabis, and you can be legally ruined.
This isn't anything but one segment of the population at liberty to prey upon another. Predators of certain kinds - a certain fellow running for President comes to mind - are welcome, even elevated, like a cultural prize. Some species prey upon their own in times of great stress. Only Homo sapien sapien has elevated it to an economic or moral ideal. How is it that those most at liberty with the word Liberty have so little to say about some of our species preying economically on their own?
Liberty is whatever the culture says it is. It used to be a liberty to pour whatever you wanted into rivers. We have some limits on that now, though these tend to be rather arbitrary, and our rivers can't be described as clean, most of them. If access to clean water is a fundamental liberty, then mine is considerably limited. There are many on this earth who do not have much liberty at all in that regard. It seems very much that the culture, in an attempt to fulfill the mythology of endless growth, is going to put increasing limits on my liberty to drink fresh water and breath clean air, in an attempt to expand liberty for traditional capitalists, ostensibly to improve the economy by exploiting the biosphere. By traditional capitalist, I mean those practicing the dominator model, who turn exploitation into a virtue, who see the world as mute, dumb nature to be transformed into money and garbage, who have no concept of their place in any greater ecological whole.
I am not against the right of anyone to profit from his or her labor and ingenuity. But Capitalism has to change. Capitalism as it stands is insatiable. It cannot have enough, at any cost. If the Market is God, as some assert, then God is a fool. How else to explain the seas of homes in the colder climates of this country, that are fundamentally useless without affordable fossil fuels? They are still building them, while many sit empty! The market is not God, but the collective and mundane actions of a people who want to behave as if there are no limits to growth, as if we have no responsibility to the Earth. We consider it a fundamental liberty in America to consume without regard for limits, in economics, ecology or energy. The Capitalism we have today will devour ecology and energy to feed the economy until everything is exhausted, and the culture is left with a vast infrastructure that is useless, in a world utterly transformed and ecologically damaged, that cannot support most of us.
We have elevated self-interest at the cost of everything. Self-interest, like money, seems to have no limit. Such a way cannot lead anywhere for the culture but to collapse. No one lives independent of his or her environment. We are all part of the biosphere. Which goes back to that definition of Liberty as the measure of a people's ability to govern themselves.
What does it mean for us to govern ourselves? Self-interest is not wanting to be told how to live my life. Self-interest is me deciding my own fate. Self-interest is me fulfilling the Art that is my life. Self-interest void of concern for others, or community, or the biosphere on which every cell depends, is as hollow as an economy ignorant of its relationship to ecology and energy, and equally doomed. A people cannot rule themselves ignorant of the economy, ecology and energy, and their relationship to each. Conversely, a self-sustaining people are not easily ruled.
The Right makes a big deal about American ingenuity and liberty, but the Right will not allow American ingenuity to experiment with hemp, as example. Industrial hemp would go a long way in making Americans a self-sustaining people, but hemp would displace much GMO mono-crop corn, and industrial corn makes people ill, and an ill people are easier to control. A people dependent on pharmaceuticals to moderate their illnesses are less likely to question the ways in which Liberty is denied by the culture that provides those drugs. A people who accept the dominant mythologies of the culture have less incentive to ponder liberty. Immersion in the mainstream, no matter how tyrannous, feels like liberty. Which is why information is so important. A truly free person takes in all available information, and makes his or her own decisions. A truly free person rules him or herself, in relation to the world around, leaving ignorance masquerading as authority for the empty, shallow thing that it is. A free person ruling him or herself, with a firm grasp of economy, ecology and energy, living in a community of such people, is a happy person indeed.
It was about fifty degrees in here when I woke up this morning. It's below 0 outside, and will likely remain so all day. I could see my breath in the kitchen when I went to make coffee. Liberty too, is a state of mind. We do what we can, with what we have.
Merriam-Webster calls liberty, "the quality or state of being free." I like Wikipedia's definition, "A contested moral and political principle that seeks to identify the condition in which human beings are able to govern themselves." We want to do what we want to do; we want others not to do what we don't want them to do. We actually agree about more things than we think, we just don't see it because we are too busy arguing ideology. It could be argued in fact, that in the period from 1973 (the year I was born) to the present, America was among the most free societies in the world. Sadly, government in that time grew ever larger, with ever increasing power, and the last thirty years at least, the economy has been draining the wealth of the majority, funneling it upward, while generating unsustainable debt. Many Americans have less liberty as a result.
I've had the occasion to think about this, because I am nominally employed. I've done little work for money the last two months, spending my mornings writing and editing, and most of the rest of the day, dancing and reading. Dancing in part because my furnace doesn't really work, turning on randomly, only a few times a day. I need to stay warm; it's rarely more than 60 degrees in here, often 45-55. Most of the house is closed off except one room, where I write, dance and sleep. Even if the furnace worked properly, it would never shut off, because this house built in 1918 is so grossly inefficient, thermodynamically speaking. I moderate the heat in this one room with an oil filled radiator. It is currently 58, about 40-45 elsewhere in the house. If I had to survive the rest of the winter on the food I have in the house, I would surely starve to death. I'm down to about $3000. If I cease to pay any of the utilities, the city will condemn the house within seven days.
I'm not complaining. I get by quite well. This time in winter in Minnesota, I'm content to hang out in the house and contemplate life. It would be nice if the house were better insulated, with less windows everywhere but on the south side, with an attached greenhouse where I could grow food, with a functional kitchen with a well stocked basement cellar. From my vantage point, Liberty looks like clean air, clean water, clean soil, good food, clothing, companionship, a modest, clean, warm house, and the freedom to travel. Everyone alive should have that, actually. We might have achieved it by now, if we'd set about it 40 years ago. Instead, for almost the entirety of my life, America has been living the trajectory of Empire, every man more or less for himself. With less liberty for most of us, on the horizon.
We sense that our Liberty is imperiled, hence the rise of the Tea Party and the OWS movement, though we are confused about what would improve our chances. There are a lot more people in America with little else to do but contemplate their lives, which most people would rather not do. Many of those who are working are exhausted. Everywhere I go, people seem tired, even somewhat sleepy, or rather, leveled. I suppose because just about everybody is on some pill or another, or several. With alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and sugar, we manage.
I'm fond of alcohol and caffeine. I have not taken any pharmaceutical substance in about three years. I haven't taken any pharmaceutical other than Ibuprofen the last fifteen years, except the time I took antibiotics to kill the lymes virus I was carrying. I don't begrudge anyone taking any pill. How aghast would anyone be, if I said they couldn't? Though I do think we take a great many pills in America because the idea of it makes us feel better.
I do like to smoke Cannabis. I am quite fond of it, actually. The curious thing is, because I consume the flower of this plant, I can go to jail. Not only can I be put in a cage, everything I own can be confiscated from me. If I'm declared a felon, I can't vote, even after I've served my term. I can't vote, but I can be taxed, which is taxation without representation, which is unconstitutional, but the law in America depends mostly on who and where you are. They drug test for people like me, too. The trend is, if you get caught, you won't get that job and it may be hard to get another. Or you may not get those benefits, or those services you've been paying taxes for.
Have I mentioned before, that Cannabis is the most useful plant on the planet, without question? Yes I have. Why is the most useful plant on the planet illegal? Ponder that, the next time you pop a pill. No one has ever been known to die from the consumption of Cannabis. People die everyday taking pills. The government raids cannabis growers; when was the last time the government raided a pharmaceutical company? Some companies have made pharmaceuticals seem like a license to kill. Sell cannabis, and you can be legally ruined.
This isn't anything but one segment of the population at liberty to prey upon another. Predators of certain kinds - a certain fellow running for President comes to mind - are welcome, even elevated, like a cultural prize. Some species prey upon their own in times of great stress. Only Homo sapien sapien has elevated it to an economic or moral ideal. How is it that those most at liberty with the word Liberty have so little to say about some of our species preying economically on their own?
Liberty is whatever the culture says it is. It used to be a liberty to pour whatever you wanted into rivers. We have some limits on that now, though these tend to be rather arbitrary, and our rivers can't be described as clean, most of them. If access to clean water is a fundamental liberty, then mine is considerably limited. There are many on this earth who do not have much liberty at all in that regard. It seems very much that the culture, in an attempt to fulfill the mythology of endless growth, is going to put increasing limits on my liberty to drink fresh water and breath clean air, in an attempt to expand liberty for traditional capitalists, ostensibly to improve the economy by exploiting the biosphere. By traditional capitalist, I mean those practicing the dominator model, who turn exploitation into a virtue, who see the world as mute, dumb nature to be transformed into money and garbage, who have no concept of their place in any greater ecological whole.
I am not against the right of anyone to profit from his or her labor and ingenuity. But Capitalism has to change. Capitalism as it stands is insatiable. It cannot have enough, at any cost. If the Market is God, as some assert, then God is a fool. How else to explain the seas of homes in the colder climates of this country, that are fundamentally useless without affordable fossil fuels? They are still building them, while many sit empty! The market is not God, but the collective and mundane actions of a people who want to behave as if there are no limits to growth, as if we have no responsibility to the Earth. We consider it a fundamental liberty in America to consume without regard for limits, in economics, ecology or energy. The Capitalism we have today will devour ecology and energy to feed the economy until everything is exhausted, and the culture is left with a vast infrastructure that is useless, in a world utterly transformed and ecologically damaged, that cannot support most of us.
We have elevated self-interest at the cost of everything. Self-interest, like money, seems to have no limit. Such a way cannot lead anywhere for the culture but to collapse. No one lives independent of his or her environment. We are all part of the biosphere. Which goes back to that definition of Liberty as the measure of a people's ability to govern themselves.
What does it mean for us to govern ourselves? Self-interest is not wanting to be told how to live my life. Self-interest is me deciding my own fate. Self-interest is me fulfilling the Art that is my life. Self-interest void of concern for others, or community, or the biosphere on which every cell depends, is as hollow as an economy ignorant of its relationship to ecology and energy, and equally doomed. A people cannot rule themselves ignorant of the economy, ecology and energy, and their relationship to each. Conversely, a self-sustaining people are not easily ruled.
The Right makes a big deal about American ingenuity and liberty, but the Right will not allow American ingenuity to experiment with hemp, as example. Industrial hemp would go a long way in making Americans a self-sustaining people, but hemp would displace much GMO mono-crop corn, and industrial corn makes people ill, and an ill people are easier to control. A people dependent on pharmaceuticals to moderate their illnesses are less likely to question the ways in which Liberty is denied by the culture that provides those drugs. A people who accept the dominant mythologies of the culture have less incentive to ponder liberty. Immersion in the mainstream, no matter how tyrannous, feels like liberty. Which is why information is so important. A truly free person takes in all available information, and makes his or her own decisions. A truly free person rules him or herself, in relation to the world around, leaving ignorance masquerading as authority for the empty, shallow thing that it is. A free person ruling him or herself, with a firm grasp of economy, ecology and energy, living in a community of such people, is a happy person indeed.
It was about fifty degrees in here when I woke up this morning. It's below 0 outside, and will likely remain so all day. I could see my breath in the kitchen when I went to make coffee. Liberty too, is a state of mind. We do what we can, with what we have.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Thrive
It seems the first two posts of this blog in 2012 are meant to provide correction and clarity. Two posts ago, in my 2012 Forecast, I mentioned the film Thrive. Here is some of what I said:
"We are facing a long decline as the resources to maintain the life we have grown accustomed to grow ever scarcer. At the same time, I read the work of Charles Eisenstein, and watch the film Thrive, and I want very much to believe that I will see the world they envision in my lifetime."
There have been a flurry of reviews about this film, by several writers I admire, including Eisenstein, and they have all been profoundly negative. Rob Hopkins called it "horrifying". John Michael Greer called it "meretricious nonsense". Strong statements. I agree with Greer more than I do Hopkins, though I can see why Hopkins has had such a strong reaction, in that the movie may have the effect of encouraging people not to concern themselves with the actual crises that face us, in favor of empty anger against fictitious crises, and false hope in the salvation of physically impossible energy schemes. That is basically Greer's argument, that Thrive is little more than an extreme form of the narrative of progress, a means to hide from the failure of the narrative of progress.
I liked the film. I think that's because I didn't take it very seriously. How can one? If you've seen it, you know, the thing is preposterous. I mean, David Icke is the most prominent interview. Seriously? I remember thinking, I wonder if Vandana Shiva knew what this film is about, that she did this interview for? Whenever I heard Foster Gamble talk about the principle of non-violation, I kept thinking, well, I probably wouldn't put the word violation in any slogan around which to structure a movement. And, I wonder what all those rich dude's are going to think about your slogan, when you put them on trial and take their money to build your fancy world?
Just about every conspiracy theory making the route through the underbelly of the culture, makes an appearance in Thrive. (Aliens, too.) Basically, some bad people at the head of a few families, are engaged in a conspiracy to dominate the world, to the point of engaging in plans to exterminate whole populations. That last bit I hear more and more about these days, governments and elite conspiring to kill billions. I think it's an idea welling up out of our collective unconscious, a low level awareness of the trials humanity is likely to face in the not so distant future, with the decline of available energy - including and especially rich people. It's easier to blame shadowy banking figures, than the Western standard of living. If I blame the Rothschilds, I don't have to question my lifestyle. Throw the specter of free energy into the plot, and now I'm free to live however I will forever and always.
Possibly the most insidious aspect of this film is the idea of free energy. His evidence for free-energy isn't evidence at all, but anecdote, and hypothesis. Even so, he asserts that the only reasons we are not awash in free-energy, are the machinations of elite perpetrating a global domination agenda. It's not that I don't believe such energy schemes may be possible. I just wonder, has it occurred to those who truly believe, that it might be a hundred, or a thousand generations, before we figure it out? Has it occurred to anyone but Rob Hopkins, that we aren't ready for free energy? Do we really think the cruel, capricious, petty, monstrous, ugly, exploitative people who inhabit this time, are capable of the responsibility of free energy?
Damn. I just wrote all that, and now I go back to my forecast post and all I said, and now I'm asking, how could I have liked this film?
Because I want everybody to thrive. I don't want people to have to go through what we are going to go through, the next few decades.
Georgia Kelly of the Praxis Peace Institute accused Thrive of a "reactionary, libertarian agenda." I consider this a hopelessly mundane perspective. Because what Foster Gamble is advocating, though he doesn't know it, is the Anarchist utopia, in which everyone is living in the fullest expression of their purpose. Which is inevitable, but no more a possibility now than free energy. The Libertarian dream of everybody living without the interference of government or rulers is the fantasy of a future world with a lot less people in it, who are a lot stronger than we are today. About all the Anarchist and Libertarian can do now is live responsibly, according to one's principles. Government we know has failed us miserably, which neither Kelly nor Hopkins seem able to comprehend. They want to believe government is a solution, because a sudden Libertarian fix in this time is truly horrifying (just as would be a government without free enterprise). Someday however, there will be no government, nor any rulers, capitalists or democrats or otherwise, because we will have transcended the need. But that might be a hundred thousand generations from today.
Meanwhile, if we are to thrive, we are going to have to choose to, individually, because the culture is not going to help. The culture is like Thrive the film; to paraphrase Greer, an exposition on the inevitability of progress, a refusal to acknowledge the actual world we actually inhabit. Which is why it's a good idea to enjoy Thrive, without taking it very seriously.
And as I corrected a quote of mine, I would also like to add that I feel I have done Charles Eisenstein a dis-service, putting his book and the film Thrive in the same context, as if they were equal.
"We are facing a long decline as the resources to maintain the life we have grown accustomed to grow ever scarcer. At the same time, I read the work of Charles Eisenstein, and watch the film Thrive, and I want very much to believe that I will see the world they envision in my lifetime."
There have been a flurry of reviews about this film, by several writers I admire, including Eisenstein, and they have all been profoundly negative. Rob Hopkins called it "horrifying". John Michael Greer called it "meretricious nonsense". Strong statements. I agree with Greer more than I do Hopkins, though I can see why Hopkins has had such a strong reaction, in that the movie may have the effect of encouraging people not to concern themselves with the actual crises that face us, in favor of empty anger against fictitious crises, and false hope in the salvation of physically impossible energy schemes. That is basically Greer's argument, that Thrive is little more than an extreme form of the narrative of progress, a means to hide from the failure of the narrative of progress.
I liked the film. I think that's because I didn't take it very seriously. How can one? If you've seen it, you know, the thing is preposterous. I mean, David Icke is the most prominent interview. Seriously? I remember thinking, I wonder if Vandana Shiva knew what this film is about, that she did this interview for? Whenever I heard Foster Gamble talk about the principle of non-violation, I kept thinking, well, I probably wouldn't put the word violation in any slogan around which to structure a movement. And, I wonder what all those rich dude's are going to think about your slogan, when you put them on trial and take their money to build your fancy world?
Just about every conspiracy theory making the route through the underbelly of the culture, makes an appearance in Thrive. (Aliens, too.) Basically, some bad people at the head of a few families, are engaged in a conspiracy to dominate the world, to the point of engaging in plans to exterminate whole populations. That last bit I hear more and more about these days, governments and elite conspiring to kill billions. I think it's an idea welling up out of our collective unconscious, a low level awareness of the trials humanity is likely to face in the not so distant future, with the decline of available energy - including and especially rich people. It's easier to blame shadowy banking figures, than the Western standard of living. If I blame the Rothschilds, I don't have to question my lifestyle. Throw the specter of free energy into the plot, and now I'm free to live however I will forever and always.
Possibly the most insidious aspect of this film is the idea of free energy. His evidence for free-energy isn't evidence at all, but anecdote, and hypothesis. Even so, he asserts that the only reasons we are not awash in free-energy, are the machinations of elite perpetrating a global domination agenda. It's not that I don't believe such energy schemes may be possible. I just wonder, has it occurred to those who truly believe, that it might be a hundred, or a thousand generations, before we figure it out? Has it occurred to anyone but Rob Hopkins, that we aren't ready for free energy? Do we really think the cruel, capricious, petty, monstrous, ugly, exploitative people who inhabit this time, are capable of the responsibility of free energy?
Damn. I just wrote all that, and now I go back to my forecast post and all I said, and now I'm asking, how could I have liked this film?
Because I want everybody to thrive. I don't want people to have to go through what we are going to go through, the next few decades.
Georgia Kelly of the Praxis Peace Institute accused Thrive of a "reactionary, libertarian agenda." I consider this a hopelessly mundane perspective. Because what Foster Gamble is advocating, though he doesn't know it, is the Anarchist utopia, in which everyone is living in the fullest expression of their purpose. Which is inevitable, but no more a possibility now than free energy. The Libertarian dream of everybody living without the interference of government or rulers is the fantasy of a future world with a lot less people in it, who are a lot stronger than we are today. About all the Anarchist and Libertarian can do now is live responsibly, according to one's principles. Government we know has failed us miserably, which neither Kelly nor Hopkins seem able to comprehend. They want to believe government is a solution, because a sudden Libertarian fix in this time is truly horrifying (just as would be a government without free enterprise). Someday however, there will be no government, nor any rulers, capitalists or democrats or otherwise, because we will have transcended the need. But that might be a hundred thousand generations from today.
Meanwhile, if we are to thrive, we are going to have to choose to, individually, because the culture is not going to help. The culture is like Thrive the film; to paraphrase Greer, an exposition on the inevitability of progress, a refusal to acknowledge the actual world we actually inhabit. Which is why it's a good idea to enjoy Thrive, without taking it very seriously.
And as I corrected a quote of mine, I would also like to add that I feel I have done Charles Eisenstein a dis-service, putting his book and the film Thrive in the same context, as if they were equal.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Stargazing
I need to correct what I perceive as a factual error in my last post. It went like this:
"If the precession of the equinox is on a 26,000 year cycle, and the sun is as close to the line between the Earth and the center of the galaxy as it has been on that 26,000 year cycle, then I take the mid-point of that cycle, when the sun was furthest from that line, 13,000 years ago, as the time of the collapse of the last ice age."
I've been trying to work out in my head, how the sun could eclipse the center of the galaxy only once on a 26,000 year cycle. I haven't been able to do it; but still, I seem to fall back on that default idea about the winter solstice of 2012. Anyone commenting on what that date signifies is either condescendingly dismissive, or fatuously convinced, so it's hard to know what the truth is. Recently, I found a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson mocking the idea, saying that the sun eclipses the center of the galaxy once every year, so how can that date be such a big deal? He would, I think, encapsulate the dominant scientific attitude about the myth of 2012, that it isn't even worth looking into, that anyone who does is clearly a crackpot.
It sometimes helps to look to the blind-spots of Science, when looking for the truth. What Tyson says is not really even true. According to Thomas Razzeto, the sun never in fact eclipses the center of the galaxy; but rather, once a year, you can draw a line from the Earth, through the sun, along the plane of the galaxy, within a few degrees of the center - the galactic alignment. This has been happening on the day of the winter solstice, the past hundred years or so, and will for another hundred or so more. The plane of the galaxy is marked by the great rift, what appears to be a dark line in the sky blocking light from the center of the galaxy - interstellar clouds, it turns out - which the Maya consider, or considered, the birth canal of the great womb of the cosmic Mother.
Razzeto simply asked, if there is anything at all to the date of Dec 21, 2012, what would you see, if you were looking from the place of the origin of the Long Count calendar? What he discovered, using a computer program called The Sky, looking from the village of Izlan, in southern Chiapas state, in Mexico, at high noon on 12/21/12, the sun can be found at the center of the great rift, at the same time that Mars and Venus are found balanced on either side.
Razzeto calls this the day of the triple rebirth of the sun, in the presence of the world tree. By triple rebirth, he means, the rebirth of the sun as it rises in the morning, the rebirth of the sun on the winter solstice, and the rebirth of the sun in the center of the great rift. The world tree, at least in my conception, something like the Earth, Venus and Mars, three very similar planets in many ways, triangulating, or at least appearing to frame the sun in a triangle. Razzeto believes the Maya chose this day to end their long count (which also implies an accuracy in calendar making that requires a computer these days.)
What will it mean, this arrangement in the sky above southern Mexico? Nothing, says Razzeto. It is only an arrangement that lends well to a metaphor, the triple rebirth, which we may choose to invest in, or not. It is a mythology that arose out of the Maya, or at least is arising now, in response to the striking talents of the ancient Maya. It certainly seems to me that if there has ever been a time to represent the death and rebirth of Ages, that time would be now. We can choose to see this time as a time of rebirth, or we can hold onto the ways that have brought us here, with so much seemingly on the brink of collapse. But then, a kind of death is necessary, to be reborn.
Razzeto is not going to be taken very seriously, by many. He's very earnest, with a very gentle voice. He's an independent thinker, unaffiliated with any school, simply a man who asked a question and went in search of an answer, and he doesn't refuse to look at any idea if it might inform his argument, some of which ideas are institutionally taboo. He is more of what we need, actually, earnest and awed people exploring ideas. Both genuine and authentic, he has come up with as credible a theory about what the hoopla around Dec 21, 2012 is really about, from the perspective of the skies, as anyone I've found.
As for the second half of that quote of mine, that the halfway point of this past cycle was the end of the last ice age, is unsupportable by any measure. It is true that back in 1998, the cycle of precession could be said to be complete, with the axis of the Earth as close to the angle of the plane of the galaxy, as it ever is on that 25,776 year cycle. The other side of that cycle would put us at about the year 10,876 BCE. That was a time around the end of the last ice age, but we can't really say. The closest I've come to anything corroborating that date, is the work of Robert Buval and Graham Hancock, pointing to the pyramids of Giza, and a layout that was reflected in the sky, in the year 10,450 BCE. As for positing too, that Neanderthal went extinct about 26,000 years ago, I've seen dates between 24,000-40,000 years ago. Science seems to have settled on the older number, this year.
So while I cast doubt on my assumptions about what happened 13,000 and 26,000 years ago, I don't doubt this will be the year that the bulk of humanity will have to face a future of decreasing energy supplies. And no, I don't think that is a result of precession, or an alignment in the solar system. It is simply a fact of geological limits, of supply and demand, which is understood by a small number of people, and thoroughly ignored by the vast majority, to all our peril.
Aristotle said that an educated mind should be able to consider any idea, without having to accept it. In America, we adhere mostly to ideologies or dogmas or institutional creeds, to the exclusion of all else. In other words, contrary to what we like to believe about ourselves, we let authorities do our thinking for us. Most of the ideas afloat in the world today are about social control. Which is why the decline of America is likely to be ugly, every ideology, dogma and creed fighting to dominate every other.
If there is anything we need right now, it is flexibility in thinking. Opening our minds to new ideas, unafraid. Because open-eyed and clear-headed folk have a much easier time in hard times, then do the ones who can not think clearly for themselves. And the fact is, most of the ideas that might lead to a kind of golden age for humanity, a healing time, are going to be hard to preserve the next 200 years, as the ideas of control will attempt to snuff out anything that might lead to such an age. My hope is, that the readers of this blog are some of those who will take it upon themselves to preserve what is best about this life, as long as they live, to pass on what they can. Such people may be the only thing standing in the way of another dark age.
Looking to the stars, to the spiral nature of this existence, what is my role, in maintaining the best of this human experience?
"If the precession of the equinox is on a 26,000 year cycle, and the sun is as close to the line between the Earth and the center of the galaxy as it has been on that 26,000 year cycle, then I take the mid-point of that cycle, when the sun was furthest from that line, 13,000 years ago, as the time of the collapse of the last ice age."
I've been trying to work out in my head, how the sun could eclipse the center of the galaxy only once on a 26,000 year cycle. I haven't been able to do it; but still, I seem to fall back on that default idea about the winter solstice of 2012. Anyone commenting on what that date signifies is either condescendingly dismissive, or fatuously convinced, so it's hard to know what the truth is. Recently, I found a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson mocking the idea, saying that the sun eclipses the center of the galaxy once every year, so how can that date be such a big deal? He would, I think, encapsulate the dominant scientific attitude about the myth of 2012, that it isn't even worth looking into, that anyone who does is clearly a crackpot.
It sometimes helps to look to the blind-spots of Science, when looking for the truth. What Tyson says is not really even true. According to Thomas Razzeto, the sun never in fact eclipses the center of the galaxy; but rather, once a year, you can draw a line from the Earth, through the sun, along the plane of the galaxy, within a few degrees of the center - the galactic alignment. This has been happening on the day of the winter solstice, the past hundred years or so, and will for another hundred or so more. The plane of the galaxy is marked by the great rift, what appears to be a dark line in the sky blocking light from the center of the galaxy - interstellar clouds, it turns out - which the Maya consider, or considered, the birth canal of the great womb of the cosmic Mother.
Razzeto simply asked, if there is anything at all to the date of Dec 21, 2012, what would you see, if you were looking from the place of the origin of the Long Count calendar? What he discovered, using a computer program called The Sky, looking from the village of Izlan, in southern Chiapas state, in Mexico, at high noon on 12/21/12, the sun can be found at the center of the great rift, at the same time that Mars and Venus are found balanced on either side.
Razzeto calls this the day of the triple rebirth of the sun, in the presence of the world tree. By triple rebirth, he means, the rebirth of the sun as it rises in the morning, the rebirth of the sun on the winter solstice, and the rebirth of the sun in the center of the great rift. The world tree, at least in my conception, something like the Earth, Venus and Mars, three very similar planets in many ways, triangulating, or at least appearing to frame the sun in a triangle. Razzeto believes the Maya chose this day to end their long count (which also implies an accuracy in calendar making that requires a computer these days.)
What will it mean, this arrangement in the sky above southern Mexico? Nothing, says Razzeto. It is only an arrangement that lends well to a metaphor, the triple rebirth, which we may choose to invest in, or not. It is a mythology that arose out of the Maya, or at least is arising now, in response to the striking talents of the ancient Maya. It certainly seems to me that if there has ever been a time to represent the death and rebirth of Ages, that time would be now. We can choose to see this time as a time of rebirth, or we can hold onto the ways that have brought us here, with so much seemingly on the brink of collapse. But then, a kind of death is necessary, to be reborn.
Razzeto is not going to be taken very seriously, by many. He's very earnest, with a very gentle voice. He's an independent thinker, unaffiliated with any school, simply a man who asked a question and went in search of an answer, and he doesn't refuse to look at any idea if it might inform his argument, some of which ideas are institutionally taboo. He is more of what we need, actually, earnest and awed people exploring ideas. Both genuine and authentic, he has come up with as credible a theory about what the hoopla around Dec 21, 2012 is really about, from the perspective of the skies, as anyone I've found.
As for the second half of that quote of mine, that the halfway point of this past cycle was the end of the last ice age, is unsupportable by any measure. It is true that back in 1998, the cycle of precession could be said to be complete, with the axis of the Earth as close to the angle of the plane of the galaxy, as it ever is on that 25,776 year cycle. The other side of that cycle would put us at about the year 10,876 BCE. That was a time around the end of the last ice age, but we can't really say. The closest I've come to anything corroborating that date, is the work of Robert Buval and Graham Hancock, pointing to the pyramids of Giza, and a layout that was reflected in the sky, in the year 10,450 BCE. As for positing too, that Neanderthal went extinct about 26,000 years ago, I've seen dates between 24,000-40,000 years ago. Science seems to have settled on the older number, this year.
So while I cast doubt on my assumptions about what happened 13,000 and 26,000 years ago, I don't doubt this will be the year that the bulk of humanity will have to face a future of decreasing energy supplies. And no, I don't think that is a result of precession, or an alignment in the solar system. It is simply a fact of geological limits, of supply and demand, which is understood by a small number of people, and thoroughly ignored by the vast majority, to all our peril.
Aristotle said that an educated mind should be able to consider any idea, without having to accept it. In America, we adhere mostly to ideologies or dogmas or institutional creeds, to the exclusion of all else. In other words, contrary to what we like to believe about ourselves, we let authorities do our thinking for us. Most of the ideas afloat in the world today are about social control. Which is why the decline of America is likely to be ugly, every ideology, dogma and creed fighting to dominate every other.
If there is anything we need right now, it is flexibility in thinking. Opening our minds to new ideas, unafraid. Because open-eyed and clear-headed folk have a much easier time in hard times, then do the ones who can not think clearly for themselves. And the fact is, most of the ideas that might lead to a kind of golden age for humanity, a healing time, are going to be hard to preserve the next 200 years, as the ideas of control will attempt to snuff out anything that might lead to such an age. My hope is, that the readers of this blog are some of those who will take it upon themselves to preserve what is best about this life, as long as they live, to pass on what they can. Such people may be the only thing standing in the way of another dark age.
Looking to the stars, to the spiral nature of this existence, what is my role, in maintaining the best of this human experience?
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