If This Be Terror...

Do Nothing (To)Day: A Manifesto of "Irresponsibility"

2010-11-11T15:08:00.000-08:00

"Don't just do something! Sit there." (Sylvia Boorstein)

It is thirty-five years later, and we are worried. Thirty five years later, everything is changed, and nothing has changed. We--the vast majority of us--cannot feel like we are waiting on the cusp of change for anything good anymore, nationally or locally, or that things are about to break in our direction. (The next national phase will be another war on something. The next local development will be another box store that shuts down a half-dozen local businesses.) Even as our technology, our science and our practical arts have caused us--for those paying attention--to know much more about who we are as a species and a culture, our institutions and our commerce apply what we've learned to our daily experience far, far less. The ideology of Capitalist Individualism rides taller in the saddle than ever before in recent memory.

In our day--unlike in those ancient and heady former times, standing even then at the beginning of the present slide--little out of the ordinary is seen in taking off from a successful stockbroker's career to pursue a program of personal growth like we read about in Powers of Mind (by "Adam Smith")--as long as one has enough of the good stuff, of course, chiefly money. Like high storm-waves that have reached far up the beach to rearrange the flotsam and jetsam for another season, the social revolution has touched the well-to-do, then, for the "stepping out" retreat happens all the time, now, for those who want and can afford that particular version of the success story. In the very same moment, though, the storm having passed, and the seas all calm again, ordinary people, doing ordinary, time- and life-stealing, soul-destroying, repetitive jobs live with levels of stress and dietary lapse that would have been common only to those at the very center of pill-popping uncertainty (in finance or combat) at the start of the last quarter of the 20th century, when the late-20th-century writer going by the nom-de-plume Adam Smith penned his screed.

A growing number of people alive now--mostly those for whom success within the status quo hasn't become a thick blanket of reassuring insulation--fully expect to be killed by drought, flood, earthquake, famine or by the consequences of social unrest following upon region-wide breakdown. The remainder pretend they don't know what they know, as they pour into and out of the latest release of the next big zombie or apocalyptic disaster movie. What point now, is there, for a renewed interest in self-exploration, meditation, mind-expanding experiences, except for something to read about as toys for the very rich, or to laugh at, pointing at the people wearing the funny clothes, or to sneer at as something the "hippys" do? (Or to be afraid: Those dark people dress different. Don't that mean they're some kinda terrorist?)

The rich and the very rich, and their toys... how could we ever forget to mention them? In the past 35 years, not just in the US, we've seen a massive upward movement of wealth into the rarified air of the very well-to-do, while the average person, who works longer, and harder, and is required to be paid less for it, has seen his or her wages stagnate, or even his or her job simply vanish. (For example, the richest percent of Americans now take home 24 percent of aggregate income, up from just under 9 percent in the 1970s.) Of course, these are not the rules for the 10 percent at the top who own 71 percent of the nation's wealth, or the 1 percent globally who own 40 percent of everything. These people manage to find lots of time. They manage to buy property where encroaching sprawl or strip development isn't the defining character of the landscape. They can afford to surround themselves with healthy greenery and immerse themselves in the challenge of arcane pursuits, concupiscent connoisseurship, Ultimate Athleticism, meditative retreat and experimental therapy.

Even if a person or ordinary means wanted step off, "tune in, turn on", and see where the adventure might go, what one among the mainstream middle-middle and lower classes would have the time to do it? (Sure, they can go out on the weekend to the nearest ski slope or amusement park, but that's not the same thing at all, is it? Nor is it meant to be.) The one asset everyone theoretically owns--the time that makes up his or her life--escapes, even for the upper-middle-class, by design, to-wit:

"Does the law say that you can only be required to work for 40 hours in a week without compensation for overtime? WE say to keep this high-status and well-paid job you will work for 50 hours or more, or you won't have it long…"

"Tired of the same old TV? With this plan--only $59.99 a month--you will enjoy high speed broadband internet and cable access to 600 channels of exciting programming…"

Yet, the hunger remains for something very different; for a different way of living (as much for active play, or something heard about from stories out of the lost past about community celebrations, as for a new way of working). Unlike the social scene three and a half decades ago, the bookstores, the internet and the broadcast media are full of stories about personal triumph over stultifying adversity (ending usually in a financially remunerative denouement) and advice about how anyone who really wants to change his or her life and circumstances, can. The hunger, expressed in books and services available for purchase, is there. Many feel called. Few go. Who is to blame the many who don't? They're being kept quite busy. Far easier it is to consider the successful break by the few as a consequence of special circumstances--which too often, once the full story is told, it is, for behind many an independent adventure stands a legacy, and inherited advantages that aren't just anyone's. (Again, who is to offer blame for this? At least when called, these were people who went.)

THE ubiquitous form of dissent for most of us at work is theft, mostly of time. In its rare and pure form, it would be to simply steal back all one's time by refusing to work all those assigned hours and choose to do something other than remain employed full time--and to pay the social and economic consequences for this choice of refusing to "work hard" after the acceptable fashion to those who feel they must choose to stay with the Plan in the coin of permanently living on the receiving end of social disdain and economic disadvantage. (The ones who most ardently enforce the "rule of work," inevitably come, to a man or woman, from either the blue-collar working class, who, having made a bad bargain, and having wasted the best years of their lives enriching someone else, know to their very core that, by god, no one else is going to be making a better deal, if they have anything to say about it, or from the ranks of the small businessperson: "What gives you the right to shirk, or to protest, or to have time?") The lesser rebellion, manifest in the working days of those too afraid to embrace this dissent in its greater form, is found in a hundred little acts against the requirements of routine--the email- and social network-checking or the cell-phone texting during working hours, the at-work internet shopping, the full participation in Steal Something From Work Day, the escapes to the privacy of the washroom to masturbate, the extended coffee-break posing as a meeting...

Of course, in its lesser form, such a rebellion remains mostly acquiescence. It affords little scope for a person to examine the metes and bounds of his or her own life, or to limn the depths and heights of conscious awareness. Or, to simply take a break and do nothing. Or, again, to stop and play with one's child, or a dog, at first with edgy impatience that Important Things Aren't Getting Done, but (if not given up on), with increasing interest in the experience of the here and the now that nearly all children or dogs know. THAT break--potentially the most revolutionary move of all, and the most threatening of all to society's governors and the behind-the-throne-standing representatives of the established social and economic order--remains out of reach. And seeing this, there has to be a slight revision in the notion of blame, mentioned before. Events have shown that it is possible to get Americans (this free people) to do almost anything, to put up with almost anything, as long as they can be made to feel afraid. Any blame in that, though certainly starting with the rot at the top, can be spread around to almost everyone. (So-called "mind work" might have something to interject, here, shedding light: Where resides the fear, the terror? Is it "out there" someplace, or is it inside the breast of each one of the fearful? If one refuses to act afraid, is one terrorized? What about the other way 'round?)

That's how we are different, now, from the heady days of the early 1970s.

How we are the same is much more simply said: We desperately need to change the course we are on. If anything, the urgency for this grows even more acute. The warnings on the fringe, back then, largely unheeded, are the problems, now, at the forefront of attention. What is to be done, certainly has political, and economic and social components, but the classic double-bind in which we seem to find ourselves, collectively, calls out for necessary personal change--what was once called, by the 'way-before' Victorians, a change of heart. (Of course what would be meant by a needed change of heart now would only somewhat overlap what was meant then, and would be much different than what would be meant by present-day authoritarian religious movements.)

There's a ethical principle which might be brought to bear, here, in choosing how to forge a different path, or to strike off in an unfamiliar direction: Those who can are the ones who ought. The ones who are able to make the break (or take a break), ought to lead the way, even at some cost, particularly if by doing so they are able to show an example as to how it is possible for a person of ordinary means to go about calling back what is missing. Certainly, the ones who can, ought to, in order to open and invite and to nourish a discussion of what is possible and how to go about the work and play of taking back our lives from the forces that would oppress us out of living them.

Obviously, a living has to be made, but the original idea has to have been (perhaps coming to us from before the advent of the agricultural surplus and the city, and along with these, slavery, aristocracy, and the permanent warrior class) that making a living is subordinate to actually living... An insight which goes back to the fear that the ones who rule would have us feel, the terror we are intended to respond to in characteristic ways (Save Us! O, Save Us!).

Perhaps if we were to make a round turn toward an old question again, with fresh experience, "How little might it be possible to get by on and stay healthy and content?" we might find the beginning of a solution to our problems.

Don't just do something. Sit there.

Why Stop At 10?

2010-03-10T21:03:00.000-08:00

One of my very favorite bloggers, who I just learned--reading through "back issues" of her blog--lives in Alaska not far from where I do, wrote out the following annotated list:

http://f-ckingc-nts.com/society/10-things-every-adult-should-know/comment-page-12/#comment-9203

That's 10 Things Every Adult Should Know

Why Stop At 10?

I have lots more:

#11
It's not about you.

Though a strong case can be made for promoting maximum scope for individual action in any society, the dogma of Individualism, so dear to the American zeitgeist these days, is just that, a dogma. The world doesn't revolve around your needs or wants, and there are deeply important matters that transcend your personal goals and your fucking career. A strong case can be made that identity itself is not an individual 'thing', but arises out of the network of associations of which a person is a part. Let's test this notion with a little observational thought experiment in looking at the wealthy, specifically, the wealthy in the USofA. The rich who've "earned" their wealth (we do not speak here those who inherited it), got rich, mostly, no matter how hard they worked, first of all, because they were lucky to be at the right place at the right time, and second, because they had lots of help (acknowledged and compensated, or not) from many people who worked as hard as they did. American folklore notwithstanding, the rich don't do it all themselves. Even the most avid entrepreneur inherits a vast legacy. There are countless other examples that might be cited to show how the dogma of Individualism is a hallmark of shallow thinking.

#12
Prayer consists of intention in action, and not of begging.

Whether or not there is some kind of All-Being (or Beings) concerned with human destiny, even a casual look at human history strongly suggests that petitionary prayer is as useful for changing things as a fart in a windstorm. Again, to take an obvious example--taken here because we find it so often resorted to by right wingers of a certain kind--do you think for a moment that as the Nazis hauled Jews and other 'different' folk off to the execution camps that petitionary prayer after prayer didn't go up to whatever god there is? We know the result. Are you one of those holocaust deniers? Ok then, pick your favorite genocide. Do you think for a moment that in a world where up to 90% of the people polled claim a belief in god, that prayer after prayer didn't go 'up there' for help in moments of deathly crisis? To what effect? On the other hand, we find in the history of the US, through the actions of the Society of Friends (the "Quakers"), a sect who were among the first to stand strong against slavery, and some 180 years later, in the actions of Civil Rights leaders, the sort of prayer that did have effective and welcome results. Intention in action made it possible for a people who were oppressed by bitter injustice to move in the direction of freedom.

#13
If you eat poison, you'll get sick.

Chronic ingestion of lots of sugar in the form of sucrose (table sugar) and high fructose corn syrup (the sweetening in your 48 oz quick stop soda) has for a long time been known to cause a host of ills. (For those who wish to know more, check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=dBnniua6-oM .) Even a casual look across the internet at the discussion of food, agriculture, and the industrial food system, suggests that something goes seriously wrong when food and agribusiness manufacturers are free to add more or less whatever they choose to our food, when and where they like. Again: IF YOU EAT POISON, YOU'LL GET SICK. Go ahead, though, eat that shit 'cause you have been conditioned to think it tastes good. And, for those of you who don't eat that shit, and who think that the presence of the few alternatives out there are guaranteed, by all means, don't agitate against agribizz monopolists like Monsanto, who want to take every alternative away. Just go on your merry way, then, feeling virtuous in your "organic" diet, shaking your head at the "paranoid conspiracy theorists." If you find yourself having to choose, not between well labeled, organically grown food and food with junk in it, but between unlabeled foods with more junk or with less junk in them, you'll have plenty of time, then, to change things, you betcha.

#14
Following upon #13… You are partly animal--flesh and blood--and animals need exercise or they'll get sick. (That, along with nutritionally wholesome food, is health care. Going to the doctor is sick care.)

Moving around to do stuff--moderate physical labor--is healthy. Walking is healthy. Hello!

#15
Mistakes are not stupid. (Mistakes and stupidity are not the same thing.)

Mistake and error is the way we learn and the way we grow. (We have to try, and err, to have "trial and error." Doh.) Let's not forget in saying this, though, that error is not the end of the matter. To learn from mistakes we have to… ummm… PROFIT from them in the lesson learned by changing our course of action. Several insights arise from understanding the importance of mistakes: Children should not be taught to be afraid to err in school and at home. Informed risk-taking is worthy and honorable. Changing course and changing minds according to what happens is worthy and honorable. The hallmark of foolishness and stupidity is the refusal to be instructed by experience.

The opposite of profiting from error by changing course is found in the current approach to so many of the political and social problems facing us: "What? The things we are doing aren't working? Well then, we must do exactly the same things, staunchly "staying the course," only harder and more extreme!" In short, stupid.

#16
Children educated in authoritarian institutions don't learn how to govern themselves--either personally or in their future role as citizens.

For 80 years US public schools have been teaching students these lessons:

"Shut up and do as you're told."
"Before doing anything, wait for instructions."
"To question or to object is to disobey."
"The answer to every question or problem can be supplied by a person in authority."
"Your time is not your own."
"You are only as good as we say you are."
"It is just for the many to be punished for the sins of the few."
"Working according to instruction in institutions are the only way to get anything done."
"Might is right."

Does this sound like a curriculum to prepare participatory citizens in a democratic republic, or the rules for an authoritarian regime? In which direction is the US evolving, then, towards greater scope for citizen action, or away?

#17
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a bad profit.

That this simple fact appears to have escaped an overwhelming majority of people speaks volumes to the efficient and effective sales job done by the commercial message machine. The corporation has been allowed to become little more than an "externalizing machine."--projecting what economists call "externalities" onto the general population--which means that someone else pays for messes made by concerns who've made it their business to profit from activities that make messes. We are surrounded by examples of this, usually couched in the familiar saw, "Well, y'cain't stop progress." Our water becomes increasingly fouled because it was decided that the solution to pollution is dilution in a mixing zone. Plastic floats in a state-sized island in the middle of the Pacific because coastal areas and sea-going craft have been free to dump refuse into the sea as though doing that would make the trash invisible. The rise of antibiotic resistant pathogens are the direct result of feedlot meat production in which commercial operators are allowed to feed tons of antibiotics to animals living in filth. The list could go on and on and on. A lot of this stuff would have had to find a much more difficult path to happening if the grownups who ought to know better ("development" friendly or not), were able to distinguish between a good profit and a bad one.

#18
Your children are not:

a) Your toys,
b) Your pets,
c) Little versions of you,
d) Extensions of your ego.

'Nuff said. On a related note...

#19
Children are still growing up.

Children are in the process of making big changes every few months. That's why they aren't like grownups.

This would be one good reason to pay attention to what they are doing and saying instead of looking at everything through grownup eyes.

This would be one good reason not to discard them.

It would be fair to say that how a society treats its young is an accurate measure of its level of cultural and social development. Effective education (or its lack) for children who come from all income levels, a willingness to try juveniles (or not) for crimes as adults, the effectiveness of a safety net for disadvantaged children, the quality and worth of foster care for orphaned and abused children... all go into this measurement. (What DOES that say about the American Standard Plan?)

#20
Sincerity is a measure of… sincerity.

A person can be sincerely mistaken. Just because it feels real, real true don't necessarily make it so. Are you listening True Believers? (You know who you are, Capitalist Ideologues, Birthers, Religious Fundamentalists, Global Warming Deniers…) Perhaps a course correction is called for.

#21
Data is not the same as information. Information is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge is not the same as Wisdom.

The act of measurement--paying formal, repeatable attention to some aspect of the arrangement of things--gives us data. Data intentionally processed by the application of quantitative and qualitative analysis gives us information. Information compared, contrasted, described, discussed, criticized, etc. provides those who are willing to do the work with knowledge. (In other words, the application of educated insight converts diverse streams of information into knowledge.) Knowledge laboriously carried across time and culture, borne up through collective and individual experience, tested, challenged by events and the like, provides some few of our kind--the ones paying attention--with wisdom. (Awareness and attention of knowledge in its many contexts, and in its consequences gives some few of our kind wisdom--or can.)

#22
Belief matters (for ill, or for good), but no matter what you believe, in this life, you are still going to die.

Your threat response to those who question your cherished religious faith is a fight-or-flight response to something that you feel tells you that you are in danger. This is only because you've convinced yourself (with your faith) that you are not really going to die. You are. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.

Belief is about living and how to live, and not about not dying or escaping mortal destiny. Any one of us, including the one sitting here writing these words, or the one sitting there reading them, might well be completely wrong in our understanding of what happens AFTER death (in fact, we're probably almost all of us in for a big surprise), but that does not suggest anything about the escapability of death. We are mortal men and women. "Whatever is begotten, born… dies."

#23
People who believe in the technological convergence of nanotech, biological science and computers in THE SINGULARITY are religious nuts trying to convince themselves that they can escape death--at least in theory.

As nuts, perhaps they are less dangerous to themselves and others than the Heaven's Gate or Scientology, or Christian Fundamentalists or advocates of Radical Islam, but they are nuts just the same.

#24
Hitting children teaches them it is ok to hit people. Could this be any more obvious?

#25
Making heroes out of people trained to kill other people on command, simply because they have been trained to do that, teaches children that it is ok to kill people as long as someone in power says it is ok.

If we wish to honor the soldiers and sailors who serve (formerly I was one), we might first choose to NOT send our soldiers and sailors perpetually out on wars on wars of foreign conquest couched as "defending our nation," and second, on the rare occasions we'd need to call on them, we could choose instead to honor them for doing a difficult, dirty and dangerous job without glamorizing or sanitizing it--and providing, in the process of expressing our gratitude and honor, for their re-integration into the human brother- and sisterhood as people who have had to bear the sacrifice of leaving it for a time to kill.

All the buckles are very firm. What is to be done?

"Industrial Society and Its Future"

2010-02-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

Sometime ago, I read part of "Industrial Society and Its Future", by T. Kaczynski (herein and subsequently to be designated TK). Of late I've been feeling reason to return to a closer reading.

The essay bears close reading well, and its reading, along with the context in which it appeared, explicitly and implicitly raises important questions (which can accurately be taken on any number of levels): How far is too far? Is murder the worst crime that an individual can commit? How about an organization? When an institutional evil defines what is good, and what it is doing as the good, what, rightly, is the correct response by people of conscience?

My own ideal path might be more found in a book like: Open Secrets by Walt Anderson, but the difficult questions raised by TK's life, choices and experiences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski) remain for me real and vital.

There is a growing suspicion, even in the mainstream, that the system is irreparably broken. The problems to which TK points, have, if anything, gotten worse. Right or Left, either path goes down.

If one is not to cast bombs about in rage, or immolate oneself in suicide-murder, is there still an effective response toward total dissent?

Perhaps there is--in this: Enough people simply doing all they can to ignore the system.

People refusing to go along are refusing to go along. Enough of that, and who knows what changes are possible?

People refusing to go along are: refusing to participate any longer in the debt-for-life pattern (whatever it takes to do that); forming their own networks of shared meaning, of community and socio-economic connection; working as much as possible 'under the table' and in the gray market; working hard to do as much for themselves, by themselves and with like-minded folk as possible; sourcing basic materials (such as medicines) 'illegally' and showing others how to do the same; forgoing the 'latest and greatest' in new gadgets; turning away from the blandishments of media, even fervid participation in the internet… In short, they've hit upon the notion that the way forward is in not playing by the rules of THEIR game, that THEY'VE defined the rules for---THEM being those who can be counted upon to relentlessly support and defend a status quo which is increasingly constrained to reward the insiders and those at the top, and their trusted middle-class servers.

If we must sacrifice some comfort, in exchange, we will take our freedom. (They are not going to give it.) The sacrifice we must make, and the path toward our freedom is in letting go of the handles driving the machinery of dependency.

This points to, incidentally, my biggest beef with the Teabaggers. Their entire complaint is made as though what has happened is something someone put over on them against their will, as though they haven't chosen each and every day to acquiesce and fully participate. What do they think all those costly promises made on TV are there for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski
http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
http://www.newshare.com/Newshare/Common/News/manifesto.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_by_deed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Anarchy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zerzan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber_for_President
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Netz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Moore_%28anarchist%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Moore_%28anarchist%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredy_Perlman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Jensen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Goodman_%28writer%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_future_doesn%27t_need_us
http://www.primitivism.com/future.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mkultra

What We (Darkly) Need

2009-11-30T02:32:00.000-08:00

What is needed is an event that will succeed in stunning the North American moneyed and powerful classes--the arrogant upper socio-economic tier--along with a good part of Europe's elite. What is needed is to stun them long enough that other ideas now gaining currency "at the edges"... of peace; of ecological awareness; of communal sharing and mutual care; of rising, non-exclusive, non-fundamentalist spirituality; of the end of the West's strict subjective-objective divide; of discernment-driven situational ethical insight replacing authority-enforced categorical moral imperative; of nurturing life rather than making war; of the competitive spirit tempered by cooperation replacing the elevation of competition to the highest virtue; of flattening hierarchies; etc., etc.... as I say, we need an event lasting long enough so that different sets of ideas and practices than those which built the edifice of banditry characterizing the Euro-American success story (now being aggressively adopted by former colony nation-states around the globe) will have a chance to obtain sufficient scope to change the human world before it is too late to prevent its destruction (along with up to half the earth's species now alive). Our need is to stun the vested powerful interests who will insist upon resisting any significant change to the status quo from which they derive everything they hold dear long enough so that other ways of thinking gain sufficient currency and momentum, so that when they, these "elites," wake up, as they will, and come out of their stunned reveries, they will be forced to "catch up" and go along with decisions, policy directions and events they otherwise would have had no part of, and forcefully resisted.

What sort of event might do this? One might have thought that the events of 11 September 2001, or the recent banking-industry-mediated economic and financial meltdown, or (more positively), even the election in 2008 of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States of America would have accomplished at least a part of what is needed, as described above, but as we are all able to see, each of these is proving to be successfully "managed."

Certainly, if for nothing else, out of justice toward the poor nations upon which catastrophe typically falls, and who suffer so much when it does, such an event as the event we need, has to fall exclusively or primarily upon the USA, particularly, east-coast, Old Money USA (but reaching the entire nation), with spill-over effects falling on Western Europe, too, and possibly the Mediterranean.

What can do this? At first, I would have been tempted to advocate that a nation like Russia, Pakistan or Israel arrange to detonate a series of strategically located nuclear weapons in low earth orbit above the US. Blast, fallout and thermal effects of low earth orbit nuclear explosions such as these would not reach the surface, sparing surface inhabitants the typical carnage that follows nuclear attack. The only effect which would reach the surface is the vitally important Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), which would, ideally, fry most North American electronic devices, and bring down most or all of the nation's electrical grid. That would be an example of the kind of event we need. As I say, at first I would have been tempted to suggest this as a possible solution. The problem is with the USA's likely response. It would be extremely difficult to hide the origin of such an attack, and the US still would have all those ocean-shielded, working nuclear submarines. Whatever nation that was determined to have made the attack would be nuclear bombed--and likely not in low earth orbit. No, the psyche of the US is much too unstable for something like this scenario to unfold with much of any positive outcome.

What then, can we honestly hope for? It turns out that we might be able to turn toward the sun. A sufficiently large solar "mega-flare" that erupted at just the right moment might direct the full force of its effects upon the continental US just fine, with EMP-like consequences for the North American electrical grid.

Certainly, ordinary American folk would feel the effects of such a catastrophe. It is hard to imagine anything of sufficient power to do what needs to be done which would avoid that, but with cooperation and help from abroad, relief efforts might mitigate much of the worst for most people, in the early days and weeks. (Furthermore, it is only fair that the people who up to now have enjoyed taking sixty percent of the world's resources with something like five percent of the world's population feel the full brunt of a disaster to fall precisely upon the way of life that is a direct cause of this inequity.) Meanwhile, the necessity for the power elite to go about by ordinary means like everyone else, and to have to go before the world, hands out, asking for relief, would do much to reverse the here-to-fore tendency toward Ugly American Arrogance. The mighty will have been brought low, and stunningly so. Because a mega solar flare would destroy nearly all the highly specialized equipment that constitutes the US inter-tied electrical grid as it now exists, it is estimated that the US would take years to fully recover from such an event. (With sufficient power in the flare, even many cars and trucks would "go down"--at least until clever mechanics could get to them with fixes.) In the days and weeks (and even years) following the initial turmoil of catastrophe, the people of this nation would have to discover different, more local, more cooperative, more energy-efficient, more life-centered ways for doing almost everything. Ideas having to do with how this might happen that operate presently only on the socioeconomic periphery would necessarily rise into the mainstream of the new American culture. (The Chicago School of Economics would come to be understood for the intellectual fraud that it is, for example.)

So, assuming that intention consciously set affects the cosmos in some fashion, here is what we must aim for. Here is the intent we must set. Between summer solstice and fall equinox of 2012 or 2013 (the years of the projected upcoming solar maximum), at which point the sun is at an ideal seasonal declination for maximum impact upon the United States of America, we must "ask the sun" for an extremely large solar flare and/or coronal mass ejection 10,000 times the energy of the 1989 solar flare which brought down the electrical grid in Quebec, Canada--a flare of sufficient power to destroy the US electrical grid, and most of its unprotected business and consumer electronics.

Admittedly, this is a huge disaster, but it is the gentlest one I am able to think of, coming short of the one we are presently making, promising to end everything we ever knew, or are capable of knowing--the entire world in which our species evolved (and, likely, ourselves as well). Do you honestly think, without something unpredictable "coming from outside" that the Principalities and Powers that Be who rule the status quo will allow the kinds of changes we need to happen in time to avoid runaway, six degree global warming? I am a person with financially privileged friends who consider themselves enlightened, and admittedly, in some things, they are, but even so, they don't believe that human extinction is a real possibility, or that our present circumstances require any urgent action. Magnify that outlook by a hundred-thousand-fold (or taking in the entire human "globalized" world, a million-fold), and it is quite easy to see that without "help", They. Will. Do. Nothing.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma

http://www.srrb.noaa.gov/highlights/sunrise/glossary.html

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/celsph.html

http://www.physorg.com/news162653480.html

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1206

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse

http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/emp-terror.htm

http://www.myfootprint.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_basics_overview/

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/television/2004169908_lookout10.html

http://www.marklynas.org/

http://www.celsias.com/article/six-degrees-examines-global-warmings-impact/

© ITBT 2009

2009-11-14T20:50:00.000-08:00

No longer knowing where I was,
From a beige study I awoke
To the sound far off like falling ice
Or water autumn driven, or blown fog through pines,
But was the morning rush of auto traffic;
Thereupon, spiked, stunned dumb and numbly slack
From my flowering heart turned and fell through fumes
Retching, dizzy, confused, and eyeshot black.

copyright © ITBT

What is Missing from the Quote

2009-03-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

"...So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that's this: which is the most universal human characteristic, fear, or laziness?"

We would have to add selfishness to the list, asking: which is the most universal human characteristic, fear, selfishness or laziness?

It would seem that the more particularly bloody-minded forms of stupidity arise from an abundance of two or more of these in strong interaction.

By including selfishness, we are able to include the lust for power in our understanding of why we so often fall so far short.

Here's a little list, illustrating the point:

Fear and Laziness: "It can't happen to me."

Selfishness and Laziness: "No one should get anything for free."

Fear and Selfishness: "Don't be different. You're being different. That bothers me. You'd better change."

Fear and Laziness: "God is coming. Look busy."

Selfishness and Laziness: "There is no such thing as a bad profit."

Fear or Laziness

2009-03-08T18:41:00.000-07:00

"There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life, and those who suffer from an overabundance of life... When you come to think of it, almost all human activity and behavior is not essentially different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap, between, say, Plato, or Nietzche, and the average human, is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress, but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes? No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks, 3000 years ago, were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that's this: which is the most universal human characteristic, fear, or laziness? (From the film by Richard Linklater Waking Life)

IT is precisely here that religions make their living: through fear and laziness---the exploitation of fear and laziness. Congregants and believers are induced to be afraid, "be very afraid," of a wrong outcome, of falling short of the mark, of not being included in some manner, of missing paradise, or worse, of eternal agony---or more accurately, they are made to be afraid of an outcome falling upon them for even their most honest actions and ways of seeing, falling upon them out of punishing retribution. Congregants and believers are induced to laziness out of encouragement toward the natural human propensity for inertia. They become exploited by the demands for uncritical acceptance of assumptions and dogma that are not labeled before them as assumptions and dogma, but as truth.

There is enough nastiness in the world, yes, to go around. Some claim religion is our only check upon that. Look around you. Does that view honestly seem to hold up? People behave well, when they behave well, for reasons entirely other than whatever religious views they hold, whether they justify their good behavior in terms of religion or not. People behave badly for reasons entirely other, too, often justifying their bad behavior in terms of their religious convictions.

Fear how? In letting the real or imagined perils of uncertainty immobilize the will; in allowing some real or imagined displaced event in space or time make one afraid of doing work of "deciding these things" for oneself. Fear and Laziness how? In letting another person or group define what is the good, what is the right, what life is to be lived for. Laziness how? In the moment that a person lets another's view prevail without thinking about it---without thinking and feeling through the reasons for accepting or rejecting the insistence that another's view prevail... that is the moment one relinquishes one's own responsibility out of inertia and laziness. (These are NOT grownup matters better left to someone else, however qualified.)

We should note that many institutions, chief among these, the religions, are perfectly willing to collect a fee for making the fear and the necessity for spiritual work all go away.

Contrary to what they say, this is what they do.

The question is asked, then: Is it possible for certainty about the right way to go to arise from outside religion? The answer to that question is found in another question: When is it ever possible for a person to live outside themselves, outside of their own point of view, outside their own choices?

2009-02-24T14:38:00.000-08:00

“We have a choice between the physician that we know or a physician that is awake. Up to now, we have chosen the physician that we know. The data suggests we are better off choosing the physician that is awake.” (Reference Lost)

"Never argue with the data." (Sheen in Jimmy Neutron )

I see how the principle might be extended. We have had a choice between the deity that we know and the deity that is awake. Up to now, we have chosen the deity that we know. The data suggest we are better off choosing the deity that is awake.

I mean, if we are going to be regularly throwing a Surprise Party for our Invisible Friend, we might as well choose wisely, starting, perhaps, with an Invisible Friend who actually likes us---maybe laughing at us, not particularly careful of us, and being way, way brighter than we could ever hope to be, but still, more on our side than interested in controlling us, brutalizing us, and tormenting us for minor infractions. (Isn't it remarkable that most characterizations of god by 'his children' are of a kind that if we observed the same behaviors in an actual human parent, we would run and not walk to rescue their children from them, forever? Why do we tolerate in our gods behavior we do not praise in our own kind?)

The principle that starts this posting, with appropriate substitutions, could turn out to apply to so very much: Politicians, Planners, Prophets, Profiteers, Pundits, Philosophers, Pilots (Sky and Terrestrial), Potters, and finally, People Who List Vocations And Avocations Starting With The Letter “P”...

We have a choice between the _______ that we know, or a _______ that is awake. Up to now, we have chosen the _______ that we know. The data suggests we are better off choosing the _______ that is awake.

Black Poem

2009-02-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

'Silently or LOUD,'
The poetry of liberation goes bigfooting along,
crying out against the injustice it sees,
With lake-making footsteps as it marches
across the fading cityscape...
Crying against the injustice it SEES.

The tall tale giant of old who stepped through clearcut ground,
steps now block after block
Over pothole, failing bridge, eroding dike and the other
cracked and crooked concrete things
Built for a thousand years of empire and of art
Where were once displaced fields and rows
That themselves drained and felled and burned
and ploughed what was there before.

Even the most miserable tale of human horror--
The bodies of slain mothers stacked for burning with their children;
Which becomes for us a tale or scene
from which we recoil because we see it for what it is,
What it says about human beings and our unkind,
And the depths of shadow we are capable of denying
and therefore displaying--
Even that is but the gentlest of caresses
When held up before the actinic desert
sunlight of close examination of our
Work upon the land from which---and no where else
---it is possible for us to spring.

Shortgrass prairie, Hardwood forest, Savannah,
Tallgrass prairie, Woodland, Wetland...
Abstract words for acres of ground more particular
than the tiniest points upon a map,
Each one mottled and articulate as any person;
(that too, an abstract word capable of displacing
or distancing from our awareness
the expressions and tones of voice and manners
of the people we call our friends and neighbors)
Each one a fractal rose---living beings encompassing
living beings, composing living beings---
Invisible to us in our acts of commerce, settlement,
of going to, of coming from,
Or even of picnicking on an idle weekend afternoon
under a sun we hardly see.

It was, it is, an execration conducted
without one clear moment of seeing
What was to be sentenced to the pit, the leachfield, the pyre.
The garden from which we have
told ourselves we have been ejected,
Even as our kind has cast about looking for valuables to take
Remains for us an empty shell or vessel to fill up with ourselves,
with schemes of power,
Flickering drama and jingle about anything and everything
except what is there to be seen and heard.
Our surroundings have been made so much in our own image
there is no room for other.
Even our most vivid pictures or stories
of the animals and plants we admire
Become exercises in technical mastery
There for adulation and little more
---or are moments of fleeting diversion.

Not one in a thousand of us,
seeing the leaping sealion trying to shake off the pursing orca
Cry out "brother! sister!" silently or LOUD.

===

Off: Amiri Baraka

"we want poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons...

"We want a Black Poem. And a Black
World.

"Let the world be a Black Poem.

"And Let All Black People Speak This
Poem

"Silently

"Or LOUD."

THE GAME IS SET AND THESE ARE THE CONDITIONS

2009-02-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

He said: 'You know the last scene in the movie Fight Club? When the set charges go off in the night and the cleared financial towers drop into the darkening city where the night sky is newly able to be seen for the first time in decades? That is the promised land to me. That is the promised land.'

To what
Should we liken you, autumn's taper
Fireweed
Flourishing upon scarified ground
Upon which we ought
Remove our shoes to stand?

"It does not do to approach the sacred without care. Perhaps I brought to bear too much care, as it took me a lifetime of listening to music to seriously pick up an instrument and start to learn to play."

Sounds themselves---their texture, and to the quieted ear, not well-used to the nattering of radio and TV, their implicit passionate intensity---bespeak of the sacred, are themselves sacred voices. I know that I am most right in the head as I go along when I am listening and I am hearing.

The scrape of the sagging outer door in going outside to get a sledload of firewood... the jingling arpeggio of the windchimes on the porch as the breeze thrown in the wake of my passage moves them... the crunch, crunch, crunch of boots on the hard subzero snow as I carry the empty sled down the short trail toward the firewood ricks... the song of a sled dog from the yard next door... the hoo-call of a Great Horned Owl... the click of the snaps as I fasten my coat to the collar in the deep cold...The whoozing hum of one or two vehicles on the highway passing by, after which the no-sound of the road silence once the vehicles have gone out of earshot... The drum-like thump of the splits and small rounds as I load them into the orange plastic toboggan... The rustlely scraping sound of the full sled sliding on the packed snow of the trail on the way back toward the house...

"I have just come inside and have said to you, 'I don't know how to be, anymore, but I know that you'll always be there. It is a daily comfort wherever I go to know you are in the world and are there.' You just stand there looking at me with an expression of profound puzzlement on your face, even shock. Finally, you speak. "Where have you been? Where'd you go? You can't just vanish for days without saying anything to anyone!'

YOUR TURN.

Excerpt from a Letter to a Friend

2009-02-19T20:34:00.000-08:00

"You wondered at my claim that we can blame the operation of the public school system throughout most of the 20th century for much of the death of liberty in America. Did you wonder that I asserted a death of liberty? Did you wonder that I assigned much of the blame to the public school system? Let me explain.

"In public school, they don't tell you that you don't have to---in fact they instruct you in quite the opposite lesson, that you do, that you must. They don’t tell you that you can simply refuse. They don’t tell you that refusal, and cogent articulation of refusal's basis, is the cornerstone of liberty.

"Care is taken to assure that Father and Mother at home don't learn what is really going on within the walls of fear---an accidental conspiracy of silence reinforced by all sides of the subculture---students, cliques, teachers, administrators. (Oh, occasionally, parents are invited for the ritual of the parent-teacher conference, sure, but is anyone looking into the faces of the children? Is anyone looking into their eyes? )

"The results are much as any thinking outsider would expect: Pupils---no longer students---afraid to speak out, reluctant to persevere in any but carefully sanctioned ways and directions, afraid to act without permit, afraid to reach out and take hold of the intellectual tools and nonviolent weapons which would allow them to constructively create, effectively resist or refuse. In this we have the twentieth century American-style public school to thank for the slowly encroaching informer-state tyranny in which we are finding ourselves entangled. Even the inner city schools that are academically failing their student populations manage to teach these, the main, lessons. The more I learn about the schools, the more my objection and dissent becomes total. Did I tell you that K is now working for the local public school, and M is a classroom teacher there? Yes. I am well informed on a day-to-day basis, because I ask to be...

'Wait until we tell you what to do.'
'You are only as good as we say you are.'
'The many shall be justly punished for the sins of the few.'
'To question those in power is to rebel.'
'The answer to every question can be marked right or wrong.'

"I know the criticism here sounds harsh, and it is. Perhaps it would be less so, except for the 30% of the students the public schools fail to serve, and the 30% who manage to get through to High School graduation, but are repelled forever after by education. That leaves, optimistically, some 40% of those who pass through the halls of the public schools positively served in some fashion. Are we to consider the 60% majority an acceptable cost for empowering a system of public schools that appears more and more to feed upon power, particularly in our state, rather than fostering hope and creating opportunity?

"When are we going to learn that schooling and education aren't the same thing?"

2009-02-18T16:24:00.000-08:00

On the day of judgment, when all stand before the throne of Grace, each one will hear a joke--perhaps upon him- or herself---the punchline and the point of which the hearer standing in judgment is certain to understand. If the hearer laughs, he or she is welcomed 'further up and further in.' If, however, the person reacts in outrage or becomes insulted, thinking a mere joke is beneath the dignity of such an august proceeding as his or her own judgment, or is otherwise of such mind as not to laugh, he or she must go to the end of the very long line to wait until everyone ahead goes through, to be called again. If the subject is the sort who gets pissed-off waiting in lines, well...

There Is An Eye In the Sky (A Polemic)

2009-02-17T17:49:00.000-08:00

There is an eye in the sky looking down like the Angel of the Lord... There’s an electronic eye in the sky right now, like the Angel of the Lord, looking down, scanning back and forth in multiple bands, going up and down, back and forth, measuring the worth...

Here countless numbers of us are to be found. Here we are... but apparently still far fewer than the standard demographic for which so much is prepared; upon which so much power concentrates its attention; for whom so much awaits... Here we are, here and there dying from starvation of place; of longing; of grief; of failure of lock between ourselves and the wild that speaks to us of the Holy. What is proffered in its place---dedication to tricksy baubles and sleight of artifice formulated to distract and benumb---are either fleeting shadows of satisfaction, florescent in video, or the shadowed whited sepulchres of once vital faith: the unofficial churches of Christ, Mormon, Yahweh, Allah, Meaninglessness, Pleasure, Science, Mammon, and the murky hopes of unchannelled ‘noetic’ mysticism, or worse, the state-sponsored Church of Money First and Commerce Assembled. Here countless numbers of us are, drawn and faded, dying or aware of the dying, while friends and coworkers inquire and suggest: “You look a bit tired, today. Why don’t you lie down and take a nap?” Any explanation offered to those to which we are bound by love or respect often, and unfortunately finds its expression in angry and inarticulate grouchiness, sub-verbal moodiness, overt sarcasm and scorn (and for that, so often superficially understood), or loud, outraged objection which is received as ingratitude and trouble-making. It is not as though the blessings of life, or the joy-filled moment do go, or would have to go, unnoticed.

Here countless numbers of us are to be found, and we see. Only the terminally busy, the responsibly committed, the organized and efficient, those with the persistence of their own agenda, and those with the persistence to see only how and what they have long ago decided to see, see nothing different while miracle after miracle unfolds around them without schedule or according to a schedule too slow or too complex to fit neatly into the daily planner. Here countless numbers of us are. We quickly learn to exercise our right to remain silent, letting those who would busily sleep, sleep busily on. From time to time, though, we see them, as we sometimes see ourselves do, sitting bolt upright in sheer terror, realizing that the eaters of the earth and world---those with the agenda and the means to achieve it---aren’t sleeping at all, at all. If we are fortunate enough to enjoy contact with the wild, the natural, even a small part of it, our presence, and our relationship with it is unsettled by survey flagging and other signs of encroachment, or by the noise of machines and the presence of devices always looking for new commodities, new uses. This objection wants to be our objection: “The Grail, is it? Don't be so confounded specific. It's not meant to be 'put to use.' The world is full of things that aren't useful, Heloise.” (James P. Blaylock, The Paper Grail.)

There’s an eye in the sky looking down. There’s an electronic eye in the sky right now, like the Angel of the Lord, looking down, scanning back and forth in multiple bands, going up and down, back and forth, measuring the worth... (Who is all this information for?)

Admonition From List of Vocabulary as Assigned

2009-02-16T22:08:00.000-08:00

bindle
brigand
confusion
debris
dissent
dusk
dwelt
fell
disfigure
elaborate
frontier
grizzle
imperium
industrious
invisible
limb
locust
lynch
migration
oak
occupant
pantomime
passersby
perilous
refugee
repose
scoff
sluggish
sycamore
venture

The Pines are all felled.

The Elms are all disfigured.

The fell builders have become like locusts.

Wood and earth are industriously disappeared
from every direction we are able to look and the
water is undrinkable.

What are we going to do about this dusk
falling among the sycamores and the oaks?

Where are we to remain in repose or reluctantly
set down our bindle in all this debris?

What is at stake for us, the grizzled occupants
of this limb of the world as we
rotate in confusion among the scoffing crowds?

That they are temporarily sluggish does not
mean we cannot be lynched.

We are presently invisible because we do not pantomime
our heresy in the face of convention,
or elaborate in dance and song our total
dissent with the demands of the imperium.

If we, who once dwelt in calm and happy houses
ourselves are refugees, how long can it be
until these city dweller passersby
will be forced or driven to follow us
along this perilous migration?

By then we will have moved from this busy
and settled place of strangers.

Toward what country can we hope to venture?

Toward what home do we lead the way?

In what frontier is it possible for us
to stake a legitimate claim?

How are we to avoid becoming the
brigands and displacers we are fleeing?