by Aleigha, college student by day and radical dreamer by night
The Dream is dead now. Buried there, somewhere within the parameter of that white picket fence. They came the other day, wielding the news that our dream had grown too large and too fast. We didn’t have the funds to feed it and ourselves. It would have to be put down. We’d known the day was coming, had heard the rumbling in its gut and its hungry cries. We knew that soon, the beast that had taken over our lives would have to be put out of its misery. That doesn’t mean we’d been ready. We still wept when the men placed a gun between the eyes of our Dream and pulled the trigger on everything we had worked so hard for. The Dream was dead, but at least the men who came to kill it were kind enough to dispose of it for us. They even marked its grave for us. A red and white sign with a single word written on it. Foreclosure.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” a nation of middle-class parents say to their children, “it was supposed to be better for you. You were supposed to have it easier than we did. From the fields to the mines to the cubicles, all of it was for you. All so that one day, you might be live a life that your forefathers — and your foremothers — could only dream of. You were supposed to make it big. You were supposed to have it all. Just when it started to look like you might be able to score a home among the elite, the gas prices and the food prices and the tuition prices and the everything prices, began to outgrow us. We should have known better, but we trusted their sweet talk and we fell into their trap, and now it looks like you’ll spend your life like us.”
Now you start to get angry. They promised you that if you worked hard and did well, you could have anything you dreamed of. They promised you could have it all, just as long as you worked hard, but the day you were ready to clock in, they told you to go home. There are no jobs to be found here, no money to be made, no Dream to claim as your own. Oh yes, you’re angry. You ask them for help and they turn you away. You’re sick and you’re hungry and you haven’t got a dime to your name, and they turn you away. They say look a little harder, go a little farther, but your eyes are tired and your feet are sore. You’re angry, oh so angry. You’ve watched your neighborhood go from a kingdom of suburban glory to a graveyard of Dreams grown too large to feed. You know that there’s only one job for every five out there searching. You know the truth, and you’re angry. You end up wandering to their front porches and camping out. You curse them for what they’ve done and what they haven’t. You yell and you scream, and you make a big ol’ fuss, you get on TV for it. You start a movement and it spreads across the nation, it spreads across the world. It spreads so quickly that you start to believe that it might just change the way things are done around here, you start to think that the big guys might just listen. They say they hear you – and maybe they actually do — but there are donors to please and campaigns to fund, and they have to keep the money coming in. They can’t help you in the way you ask them to. You’re angry, but you’re tired. You go home.
You return to the graveyard that you once called home and began to count the tombstones. So many corpses, so many homes, so many families that used to welcome you as a member of their community, so many Dreams. All of them buried here, a civilization full of people whose ambitions simply outgrew their resources. The growth has stopped and you begin to wonder if it will ever begin again. You can’t take the hopelessness of it all, you can’t stand to accept that the Dreams of your nation will simply lay here in the ground, forgotten like a long dead family pet. You grab a shovel. You start digging.
You dig as long as you can and as hard as you can. Blisters grow on you palms and sweat trickles down your neck. Even now that the Dream is dead, it manages to occupy every inch of your mind. You are obsessed with the idea of resuscitating it, of bringing it back to life so that it may grow again. Maybe you can restore it to its former glory. Maybe if you work hard enough, you can even make it bigger.
You look into the hole you’ve dug and you realize something. It’s not nearly as large as the Dream your ancestors have created for you, but it’s more than large enough to bury yourself in. You ask yourself: “is it worth it to keep digging?” Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s time to bury this Dream for good, and start looking for a new one.
December 31st, 2012 at 8:28 am
The middle class lifestyle was a mirage, plain and simple. It was created when we substituted muscle energy with fossil fuels. The resulting orgy of surplus allowed us to consume, borrow, and maintain the illusion long enough for us to destroy the only home we’ll ever know.
It’s time to pick up the shovel, and the hoe. It’s time to put aside our selfish fantasies and look into each others eyes. It is a time for humility and kindness, the likes of which are unknown to the living. Let us begin the journey together this new year.
Thanks, Aleigha and to Guy for offering us a way forward.
December 31st, 2012 at 8:31 am
I would like to suggest my community college students read this, but they already think I am crazy. Guess I will pass. What good might it accomplish at this late stage?
December 31st, 2012 at 9:11 am
.
Extinction’s an unforeseen quirk
Making us slightly berserk;
I’d mind a lot less
If building this mess
Hadn’t been so much damn work.
December 31st, 2012 at 9:35 am
Telling your community college students won’t make a difference. Some will nod in agreement and understand the dilemma. Others will tune you out and believe that their god or latest god (technologhy) will save us all. The last few will continue to think you’re old and bitter…which is true in my case. What do we expect though? Many of us had the “college experience.” Why shouldn’t they continue to pursue it as well? After all its part of the dream that in actuality has become a nightmare for those under the boot of civilization. So scrape off your boots and get to class kiddies because the world is your oyster…until they go extinct that is.
December 31st, 2012 at 10:05 am
K Klein Says: …they already think I am crazy….
If folks think you’re some crazy bloke,
Who cares, since we’re soon going to croak?
If they won’t go away,
You just simply say,
“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”
December 31st, 2012 at 11:06 am
I think that, instead of picking up the shovel and hoe, pick up the blacksmith’s tools.
The path of revolution does not lead through permaculture.
December 31st, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Aleigha, sounds like the dream needs to rot in place if you can’t dig a hole big enough to bury it. It will, eventually, rot. Might be better to get blisters on your hands for different reasons.
You have my full compassion.
December 31st, 2012 at 1:03 pm
The “American Dream” always was a nightmare even before anyone knew it would destroy the planet.
December 31st, 2012 at 1:20 pm
It’s much worse than you think Aleigha:
http://occupyamerica.crooksandliars.com/diane-sweet/fbi-docs-redact-threats-assassinate-ow
Even thinking about changing anything can get you killed. We’ve become a police state and most people don’t know it yet. If you thought the last two years were bad, wait til you see what 2013 has in store for us all.
Take pleasure where you can
Before the shit hits the fan.
Once it starts
The collapse will impart
Severe pain to both woman and man.
December 31st, 2012 at 1:20 pm
“The growth has stopped and you begin to wonder if it will ever begin again.”
Isn’t that the problem? We can’t have never-ending growth. It is ecologically impossible. We must learn to live with a sustainable equilibrium. The pendulum swings as far back as it swings forward.
December 31st, 2012 at 2:35 pm
Yes, I understand this cri de coeur.
I belong to the “old and bitter” group, I suppose. I have spent many years working hard, politically, to make a difference… to no avail.
I have been growing my own food since moving to a smallish community about 10 years ago. I think that I am considered to be that wierd woman in the run down house…. at http://kapundagarden.blogspot.com.au and now that it seems that the mainstream continues on its dead end path, I can only withdraw and live as Epicurus did for I still have to live my life. I don’t have any hope for the future at all. Life is still good in the garden.
December 31st, 2012 at 3:43 pm
“…but we trusted their sweet talk and we fell into their trap, and now it looks like you’ll spend your life like us.”
Hah. Ahahahah. HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!
**wipes laughter-induced tear away**
“Like us.” Oh honey, if only. Thanks for the laugh, though.
December 31st, 2012 at 5:10 pm
A crisis situation has developed at a gas and condensate production platform in the Elgin field in the North Sea. Gas is leaking out of a well near a offshore platform at a rate of approximately 2 kilograms per second (12 MMCF/day if gas), and a large sheen (assumed to be condensate) has been observed on the water. All workers on Total’s Elgin PUQ (production-utilities-quarters) Platform plus those on the Rowan Viking drilling rig, which had been working next to it, have been evacuated. On Monday, workers on a platform and drilling rig at the Shell-operated Shearwater field (4 miles / 6.4 km away) were also evacuated. There is currently a two-mile vessel exclusion zone around the site and a no-fly zone. As current winds are light, the most immediate concern is the potential for explosion both at the PUQ and elsewhere. While it is possible that the leak rate will lessen over time, the Rowan Gorilla V jack-up drilling rig is being provisioned by Total for a possible relief well that could take months to drill.
More at the link http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9746#more
December 31st, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Ooops the above story was one the Oil Drum was posting as a looking back story – it took the news headlines in March 2012. The leak was successfully plugged May 15, 2012, and a permanent plug was put in place in September.
Funny I never remember hearing about it then, perhaps because of Fukushima.
December 31st, 2012 at 8:48 pm
Mr./Ms Privileged and Mr. Donkey -
Thanks for your thoughts and advice.
There was an old TV show called “I’ve Got A Secret” where the panelist tried to guess what it was that I knew.
I just pretend I am one of the guests on that show and I smile a lot at what I know. Adds to the “crazy” personna, I think.
Ha ha.
KK
December 31st, 2012 at 9:09 pm
Now you start to get angry. They promised you that if you worked hard and did well, you could have anything you dreamed of.
Is that when you started to get angry? Because the empire lied to you when it told you that if you were a good little believer and acquired all the right titles then you could have all the toys you wanted and you would get to remain an infant in Candy Land for the rest of your life while the empire continued to murder invisible brown people in far away places (that, as far as you were concerned, didn’t even exist) so that the “good” soldiers could secure the resources to keep Candy Land buzzing with fun.
And when the man-babies with the sideways baseball caps (who were trying to hang on to their ludicrous adolescence by pretending that they were still frat boys) woke up one morning and learned that Matt Lauer was dragged from his Bentley by an angry mob and beaten to death and their debit cards didn’t work and the local food mart was looted and the iPhone couldn’t get a signal and the television was vomiting Orwellian pablum … they crapped their little undies, crawled up into a ball and quietly waited for the sans culottes to burst into their town homes and do what hungry, angry monkeys do.
December 31st, 2012 at 9:22 pm
Those suburbs will need to be transformed in the near future.
My rough estimae is that one in 7 or one in 8 suburban houses will remain standing and 4 families will adapt that dwelling to serve the 7 or 8 surrounding blocks, cleared for intensive small scale market farming/gardens, and water capture and storage.
A lot of geographic variability will lead to some areas being very suitable and some less so for the actual crops. Other areas will be used for woodlands, if trees grow at all, and to just let wildlife regenerate, and reestablish themselves if they can. Some small scale livestock and poultry agistments, that serve directly the local groups will aid in food, milk and composting recycling.
The materials that were recycled from the torn down dwellings can be traded or used to augment the single or double remaining dwelling.
The social fabric will change too. Nuclear family is dead by 20 years from now, if we all arn’t anyway. Street brothers and sisters will arise and 2-4 street parents will be largly responsible for family duties, as humans will not all be breeding due to intellegent and perhaps realistic understanding of what it takes to raise children, as opposed to supplying food and necessities.
A kind of suburban communal tribal system is all that will work in a free style way. All the adults who died in the transition will leave orphans who will need care and training, to be human again.
Guns and amo barricaded communities will last a short time but will give way to ‘smart and compassionate helping each other’ style communities, and cooperation will come back, as well as sharing and accross the board ‘work’ will be the norm.
If we correctly remember the things that set us up to fail we will never allow anyone to be exempt from work and effort, and no elite class will ever get to be again, and as guy has put out there, in the twilight years care and human dignity will allow the elders to pass on with some human support.
When one considers the link above from Tom, it will not come easy for those in countries with big urban and suburban populations. The transition to what comes after the fall-collapse-totalitarian-state will be the worst phase to endure. Law will be further used to oppress and set neighbour upon neighbour.
Doing it now may be smart if you can.
To the usual mantra of:
‘chop wood, carry water’ we may add…’intensivly grow vegies, husband poultry and get a big composting system going’….
Do ‘we’ have a chance?
Crikey! we’ve got to give it a crack.
December 31st, 2012 at 11:01 pm
so, aleigha, u’re pissed off that the so-called dream is coming to it’s inevitable disgraceful end before u had your turn at it, and that the promises u were once foolish enough to believe were lies, or at best delusions. how about being pissed off that this insane greed based ‘dream’ has been a leading global force for the destruction/desecration of nature? that it’s led the charge to the multiple disasters we now face from population overshoot, resource depletion, mass species extinction, etc. etc. and last but certainly not least, a runaway climate change which makes the prospects for human survival beyond this century not all that great?
January 1st, 2013 at 2:09 am
The start of This American Life for me on 1973.06.29 when the Pan Am flight from Heathrow landed at JFK very shortly before noon was not accompanied by any sense of foreboding of what has since come barreling down the pike. Past Hubbert’s peak by three years for the “lower 48″, neither resource depletion nor environmental degradation was heard of. “We’ve come a long way” – in hindsight, in a short time.
Yet an entire lifetime to those born and raised in this period, and so a most cruel hoax/delusion/dissemblance to them. For those unwitting cogs in the machine, it is easy to point the finger of blame away almost anywhere. But as is said in the eastern tradition, for one finger pointing at away, there are three fingers pointing at oneself.
January 1st, 2013 at 3:45 am
Aleigha – and all when I was 16 I started volunteering at a county nursing home that had not so long ago been a poor house and now was a nursing home for the more indigent people of the county (http://www.poorhousestory.com/ERIE.htm ). While there were mostly elderly living out their last years at the home, there were young too – a young man who at 17 had lost both is legs so far up that he couldn’t sit in a wheel chair – a 35 year old who had been in an accident and was paralysed from the neck down, a 50 year old rendered mute by a stroke. The world is full of people whose dreams have already been cut short and even more by about 2 billion who never dared to dream at all. Children are born and live their lives on garbage dumps in Brazil and elsewhere. Rich kids in Brazil hunt the kids on the dump with guns and no one cares.
There are plenty of opportunities in whatever short time we have left to bring a bit of good into the lives of people who never dared dream or who already lost the dream.
All in all, living in America I have had a good life, but my childhood was marred by a mentally ill mother. Going to the nursing home was a salvation for me, how could I mourn my crappy childhood when before me was the most cheerful man I had ever met – a man who couldn’t move anything but his head. I had it so good.
Americans will experience collapse and death having had full stomachs up to that time. 2 billion live on $2 a day or less, mostly because we in the first world have lived well. The will die never having had a full stomach.
Read Mirrors by Eduardo Galeano. Then forget the dream most in South America (and the rest of the world) never had, and use whatever time is left for humans to offer comfort and solace to someone else who never had a dream. Do this for yourself. I remember Pete Seeger years ago telling a crowd of young people that if they were really down, the thing to do was to go down to Mississippi and help people down there struggling just to have a bit of equality (and sometimes paying with their lives). He promised it would lift their spirits.
I had an activist once tell me wasting my time doing Hospice volunteering was no good – I had to do something to make the world better, not sit with someone who was dying. In fact I already knew the world was not going to be made better, so I chose Hospice volunteering precisely because I didn’t have to knock my head against the elites of this world, but just make the dying a little bit easier for one person.
January 1st, 2013 at 3:53 am
From the man I consider the Phil Ochs of our times – David Rovic – a reminder of a hero nobody knows
My New Year’s resolution is to write more songs. I just finished writing one this evening and it seemed appropriate to send it out. It’s about the reason we’re all alive today to experience 2013, a Russian Navy officer named Vasili Arkhipov. It was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, his sub was under attack by the US Navy, he was under orders to retaliate if attacked and everybody knew that, yet he refused to launch the nuclear torpedoes as ordered. Instead, they capitulated, and World War 3 didn’t happen, and here we are!
Here’s the YouTube broadside: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al8wgkJRA8Q&feature=youtu.be
per wiki Three officers on board the submarine – Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second-in-command Arkhipov – were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch Several other Russians at other times also took actions to save us from war. Saved us to die from war or climate change a bit later I guess. Anyone born after 1962 can thank this man, or if you wish blame him that you were born to die an untimely death.
January 1st, 2013 at 4:08 am
So you’re sad that your promised life of entitlement is spoiled for you? How many people have died to support that lifestyle? Do you even have the slightest idea? So go ahead, have your little tantrum. Personally you disgust me.
January 1st, 2013 at 5:46 am
Kathy C
It is a shame that that activist put down the thing you were doing for others.
Many could not go there, and look after very debilitated and dying humans, but you did and all I am pointing to is letting people contribute where they feel able is a good thing.
Some people are messed up with world fixing they cannot see the wood for the trees, (some just see fossil fuel!!).
All
This essay is just someone’s responses to realising their ‘dream’ world was a dream, and it is put here in part I suspect to indicate there is so many ways we all find out about the coming SHTF scenario, that it involves ‘us’, and to see how it ‘comes out’ as it is encountered.
The anger Aleigha confesses is what happens for a time, but I praise her/him for seeing the ‘dream’ part of the forclosure process, and beginning the journey to waking up, amidst the ‘pain’.
Funny how going down the economic curve, by normal reckoning, is often an awakenning time, but struggling upwrd to new economic heights is .. just what you do in a fucked uop shit for brains violent capitalist civilisation, and very few ever notice the ‘dream’ then.
January 1st, 2013 at 6:55 am
I think that Americans have been dreaming the wrong dream for a very long time. A lot of people have been trying to tell them that, but they have not been listening. They’ve been lied to, for a century, and now they learn that living inside a lie doesn’t work, and that waking up hurts. I hope they seek retribution from the evil liars who designed and caused this mess.
http://v-radioblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/v-radio-interview-with-scott-noble.html
January 1st, 2013 at 7:26 am
Never even had time to dream
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Agent-orange-dead-deformed-babies.jpg#file
January 1st, 2013 at 7:28 am
Also never able to dream
http://www.thelibertyclub.net/user/donnob/Depleted_Uranium.htm
January 1st, 2013 at 7:47 am
ulvfugl: i heard it, adapted somewhat (had to stay alive), and here i am, at the end of the line. It’s a global phenomenon, however. Everyone wanted to live like us. The whole “American exceptionalism” thing was a ruse to keep the corporations growing to the point they are now – in other words, the whole American Dream was engineered probably after the Great Depression and the start of the Federal Reserve Banking System (the secret organization whose membership no one can know, though i think most are dead by now – it’s their families that keep this going). After us they exported democracy (well, they actually exported capitalism) around the globe, at the end of a gun. Now we’re all in it together. Backed by the alphabet security agencies, this will go on until it can’t.
January 1st, 2013 at 8:15 am
superbug disease spread (norovirus):
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/31/us-norovirus-idUSBRE8BU05N20121231
(from above article): “It takes fewer than 20 virus particles to infect someone. So each droplet of vomit or gram of feces from an infected person can contain enough virus to infect more than 100,000 people.”
Preventable by correctly washing and drying ones hands.
January 1st, 2013 at 8:31 am
Yeah, Tom. I suppose it’s human nature. I can hear those ancient Celts around here, out in the rain and the mud, going on enviously about how great it must be to be a Roman, running water inside the luxurious villa, underfloor heating, hot baths, slaves, wine, salt, silk, glass, gold coins… not understanding it was all based on military brutality, conquest, blood, murder and pillage.
And I suppose it’s human nature for a handful of rich guys who get together to do deals, and one has a plan, ‘Hey, if we do this and this, we could rig the whole market, keep everyone else out, we’d get all the profits, funnel all the money up to us, and nobody would even know we were doing it, neat, eh ?’ So USA Inc. is just the latest and biggest iteration, and neo-liberal globalisation was the strategy to keep it going. But then it hits up against China and Russia, with their own ambitions. And none of these lunatics ever heard of ecology or carrying capacity or biodiversity or anything that really matters.
Yes, I read about the families who owned the Fed, but it was old info, and from what I could tell, Fed is mostly owned by other banks, so its all incestuous anyway, and probably those families are still big investors in those same banks and the other mega-corporations. I read somewhere, some of that big money goes way back, pulled out of France and Spain and Italy, centuries ago, and fought over through generations since. It all stinks. Robber baron mafioso thugs who get mega-rich and buy respectability by wearing smart suits and belonging to Bilderberg and the like.
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/25-9
January 1st, 2013 at 9:20 am
Kathy C Says: Never even had time to dream
Peak Animal
We are the ape so savant,
We transgress, yet remain nonchalant;
Just because we can
(Till TSHTF),
We do any damn thing we want.
==
We’re earth evolution’s peak—
Other animals can’t even speak!
But still things look bleak:
Many people will freak
When they find out that we’re up shit creek.
January 1st, 2013 at 10:43 am
If Guy was to give his talk to a group of energy CEO’s, they would react as if he were speaking ancient Greek. I read a story where a reporter went to talk to a CEO about environmental issues, and the CEO said it was just a fad that would go away. Like hula hoops. These are people who think a rainforest will grow back, as good as new, in a few years after they cut it down. For them, everything that exists, are merely things to be used either to generate wealth, or be dumping grounds for the aftermath of that wealth generation. If you’re not doing something to increase their wealth, you don’t exist, whether you’re a person or a planet. You see, there is no “ecosystem” no “living planet.” Only people, places, and things to be used up, and dumped on. There is no use talking to these people, they, and their government servants, are literally going to have to be physically removed from power. I doubt that even after firestorms burn their mansions to the ground, or cat 5 hurricanes blast their beach houses to rubble they would change their beliefs.
January 1st, 2013 at 10:45 am
@depressive lucidity
One of the all time great threads.
January 1st, 2013 at 11:24 am
Nature Bats Last implies that nature has rules, and if broken, there will be consequences. Is there any rule we didn’t break? It’s time to pay the piper, Earth. She says ENOUGH, END IT. It’s almost like a religion.
January 1st, 2013 at 12:08 pm
Ripley: agreed, but i feel that when things get bleak enough the masses will rise up and take over their mansions, burning them to the ground and killing anyone who emerges. We know where they live and if they have homes in multiple countries the same fate awaits. By this time what’s left of any police will look the other way (ala French Revolution). We have a long way to go until then, but it can happen rapidly (ie. when there’s no food and no electricity).
The way it’ll play out is what interests me at this point. i’m thinkin’ the economic situation will tank eventually, but the grid may fail first (like this summer) and precipitate the collapse we’ve been expecting. It could come from a Natural occurance (earthquake in New Madrid fault zone, eg.) What do you all think is the way it’ll go?
January 1st, 2013 at 1:15 pm
It is believed now that it was a radically changing and challenging environment which led to the evolutionary ascension of man necessitating a wickedly cunning intelligence and incredible adaptation characteristics (swimming, running, climbing, dexterity, throwing, etc etc).
It seems however, that this exigency came at the cost of man being a parasitic creature such that the entire environment is required to support his psychological and expansive needs. BUT, evolution did not code us for the proper response to the challenge of global environmental collapse itself. In prior times, when there were environmental challenges (brought on by man or otherwise), we simply moved to a new area and adapted. The problem now, is that our roots have reached the edge of the pot, have devoured every ounce of sustenance within, and are now circling helplessly around and girdling themselves.
There seems to be no other possibility now but a post human complete reboot of life itself. Even if we were to get knocked down several notches, we do not seem to have the evolutionary programming to live in symbiosis with other life. Perhaps though, a forceful retraining from higher brain oversight might eventually bring about such an innate modification – if only there were enough time!
January 1st, 2013 at 2:28 pm
Latest Arctic News:
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/
January 1st, 2013 at 2:42 pm
No need to be disgusted CJ…she understands the situation and she’s not necessarily always talking about herself. We’ve had long conversations about civ and I’ve never met another student who understands the dilemma better. Now that being said…moving forward is a challenge we all face, including Aleigha.
January 1st, 2013 at 3:18 pm
Tom asked:
“What do you all think is the way it’ll go?”
Right now, for me, the lowering of the temperature and pressure gradients effecting the Arctic and temperate jet streams, seems to be what will have the single greatest impact on most of humanity–at least in the Northern Hemisphere. While the climate is king, it’s the weather that’s the henchmen.
Erratic weather conditions become increasingly more persistent: cold spells, heat waves, flooding, prolonged snowfall and permanent drought year in and year out, will continue to take it’s collective toll on the world’s agriculture base, eventually leading to permanent staple shortages. This will first lead to disproportionate regional famine. For example, long after the hinterland of the south/mid-west of America has become uninhabitable, the maritime climate of the Pacific Northwest will be experimenting with growing bananas–we already are. But eventually, this will result in an impossible to predict cascade of deleterious geo-poloitical fall-out unto total or near extinction. In other words, intractable famine.
January 1st, 2013 at 3:40 pm
“…ascension of man necessitating a wickedly cunning intelligence and incredible adaptation characteristics (swimming, running, climbing, dexterity, throwing, etc etc).”
yeah…although just the other morning hideously early, I was thinking about how my cat can jump onto my bed (to torture me to feed him) from a sitting position, about 3x his height. We humans cannot do that. There are so many animals that can outrun us; we cannot fly. So, I was thinking how paltry are our physical abilities.
I think it’s our devious, gargantuan brains that give us the advantage – and also condemn us.
January 1st, 2013 at 4:09 pm
Ever since She was a child, when they sent away the boys from her neighborhood she’d always assumed it was ‘Our way of life’ the boys, her boys were killing and dying for, when all along it had been THEIRS.
Their ways, Their lives, Their Eminence and Their Domain.
A life such as hers, or her husband’s, or her son’s or daughter’s or great-grand-daughter’s is but a “paltry thing,” a dirty napkin on the scale beside Their gold.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/12/the-american-book-of-the-dead-sum-of-us/
January 1st, 2013 at 4:25 pm
Forgive my lateness, everyone, but CJ, what the HELL?!
You missed the point entirely. It’s not about the lifestyle, it’s about the fact that the author was repeatedly lied to her entire life and has only just realized this. That’s all.
That you called her disgusting and her article a tantrum was a completely unnecessary personal attack. A little empathy and understanding on your part would be nice.
Jeez Louise…
January 1st, 2013 at 4:38 pm
The transition from an arboreal lifestyle to a purely terrestrial one was never finished: some modern humans who live natural lifestyles in the forests of Earth still climb more or less like a chimpanzee, i.e. “walking” vertically.
http://forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/lucy-could-climb-like-chimps-some.html
January 1st, 2013 at 4:45 pm
Hey Gail! You got it – we wanted to fly so we figured out how, we wanted to be king of the animal kingdom and we figured that out. What we didn’t figure out (or ignored anyway) was that all our actions have consequences! Yeah, we can get in a machine of our design and go faster than a cheetah or fly and for a longer period of time than animals, but the by-product (unintended consequence) is that the weather then becomes unpredictable. This happens so often that it’s basically a design flaw of humanity – they (we) can’t conquer their (our) own desires! Well, nature loves to teach by giving the test first and then you learn the lesson – tough for mankind and any other species that doesn’t figure this out. So now we’re gonna wail and gnash our teeth at our coming demise – by our own hand.
Go figure, hunh?
Does anyone remember that film called Flowers for Algernon? i think that movie is a great “metaphor” (allegory?) for mankind’s situation regarding our minds.
(from wikipedia)
Short story
The story is told through a series of journal entries written by the story’s protagonist, Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68 who works a menial job as a janitor in a factory. He is selected to undergo an experimental surgical technique to increase his intelligence. The technique had already been successfully tested on Algernon, a laboratory mouse. The surgery on Charlie is also a success and his IQ triples.
Charlie falls in love with his former teacher, Miss Kinnian, but as his intelligence increases, he surpasses her intellectually and they become unable to relate to each other. He also realizes that his co-workers at the factory whom he thought were his friends, only liked him to be around so that they could make fun of him. His new intelligence scares his co-workers at his job; they start a petition to have him fired but when Charlie finds out about the petition, he quits. As Charlie’s intelligence peaks, Algernon suddenly declines — losing his increased intelligence and dying shortly afterward, to be buried in a cheese box in Charlie’s backyard. Charlie discovers that his intelligence increase is also only temporary. He starts to experiment to find out the cause of the flaw in the experiment, which he calls the “Algernon-Gordon Effect”. Just when he finishes his experiments, his intelligence begins to degenerate, to such an extent that he becomes equally as unintelligent as he was before the experiment. Charlie is aware of, and pained by, what is happening to him as he loses his knowledge and his ability to read and write. He tries to get his old job as a janitor back, and tries to revert back to normal but he cannot stand the pity from his co-workers, landlady, and Ms. Kinnian. Charlie states he plans to “go away” from New York and move to a new place. His last wish is that someone put flowers on Algernon’s grave.
(the film tore me up at the time)
January 1st, 2013 at 4:58 pm
Daniel: Nice. i said a while back that i thought the weather – continued drought/flood, cold/too hot at unpredictable times and for unusually long periods – would cause us one summer (perhaps the one coming) to be so hot for so many people for so long (starting in early spring) that we overload the electrical grid and it can’t be repaired in time which leads to the food shortage becoming a national dilemma resulting in chaos and that the police and homeland security are basically powerless to do anything about it, with the end result that the complete break-down of civilization occurs both here and abroad.
Any one else? Nobody thinks a natural disaster situation (like an EMP from the sun or the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting) will cause the precipitous decline in population and the complete dismantlement of humanity’s “dominion” over nature before the above scenario (which, admittedly, is also a natural phenomenon)?
Any other ideas? (not to highjack the thread, i’m just curious what we all think is the coming procession of events leading to permanent “lights out,” and all that it entails)
January 1st, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Tom how about this “Sun-Grazing Comets As Triggers For Electromagnetic Armageddon Large sun-grazing comets could bring on the sort of global electronics meltdown usually associated with electromagnetic pulse weapons or a full-scale nuclear exchange.” rest at http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2012/11/30/sun-grazing-comets-as-the-trigger-for-electromagnetic-armageddon/
And what did they just discover -
January 1st, 2013 at 5:54 pm
“Calculations show that the celestial visitor could be dazzlingly bright in November 2013 and be easily visible in broad daylight as it rounds the Sun. Comet ISON is so named because it was first spotted on photos taken by Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok from Russia using the International Scientific Optical Network telescope.
It is currently very faint because it is out in the depths of space near Jupiter’s orbit. But it will steadily brighten over the coming months until it passes less than two million km from the Sun on November 28.
That makes it a type of comet called a sungrazer, and there is a risk that the comet – essentially a giant ball of rock and ice, will break up when it makes that close approach.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9567598/Coming-to-the-night-sky-the-comet-fifteen-times-brighter-than-the-moon.html
Maybe the Mayan calendar was off by 11 months.
January 1st, 2013 at 5:56 pm
Tom, I read Flowers for Algernon way back when. Watched the movie recently. (5 stars) Yes a very good representation of what we have done to ourselves….
January 1st, 2013 at 6:50 pm
We kept going with help from our hope:
It’s the way we evolved to best cope;
But with doom now exposed,
We conclude we’ve been hosed,
And we feel like a bit of a dope.
January 1st, 2013 at 8:39 pm
The dream makers are getting ready for when the anesthesia wears off and the ignoranti start clamoring for their strip malls and electronic gadgets. Maybe when Aleigha goes out to occupy something or other and is struck hard on the head by a police baton he will realize that there are better things to do than write whining essays about having missed out on the planetary gang rape also known as the US economy.
The corporate state knows that the steady deterioration of the economy and the increasingly savage effects of climate change will create widespread social instability. It knows that rage will mount as the elites squander diminishing resources while the poor, as well as the working and middle classes, are driven into destitution. It wants to have the legal measures to keep us cowed, afraid and under control. It does not, I suspect, trust the police to maintain order. And this is why, contravening two centuries of domestic law, it has seized for itself the authority to place the military on city streets and citizens in military detention centers, where they cannot find redress in the courts. The shredding of our liberties is being done in the name of national security and the fight against terrorism. But the NDAA is not about protecting us. It is about protecting the state from us. That is why no one in the executive or legislative branch is going to restore our rights. The new version of the NDAA, like the old ones, provides our masters with the legal shackles to make our resistance impossible. And that is their intention.
Chris Hedges, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_final_battle_20121223/
January 1st, 2013 at 9:17 pm
Owned & operated
January 1st, 2013 at 9:43 pm
@depressive lucidity, nice post – C Hedges truly does rock.
I apologize for not responding to your reply on a previous post, but I did want to follow up, and the references Hedges makes to the corporate state provide an excellent segue.
Basically, what I question is the position where you appear to believe you command some kind of moral authority with your rejection of the pursuit of dominance.
Now, how do you imagine you came to hold these views? Were they created out of whole cloth, solely by your own education, experiences, observations & thoughts? Or, are you merely a (by) product of forceful evolution imposed by previous generations of rapacious states?
Did not these states, who applied the most cruel & terrifying punishments against those who would question their authority, in effect enforce certain traits that emerged as key selection criteria? If this is the case, are those who advocate compassion & understanding not really acting through their own free will, but are merely descendants of those who did **not** get drawn & quartered?
As such, are they really merely current expressions of the kinds of submissive traits that allowed previous generations to survive? My theory is that the sheep have been bred; indeed, it explains the huge chasm between those who govern and those who are governed. The elite certainly know the score – it’s only the sheep who are going to be surprised.
What I don’t understand about Hedges, et al is that they really seem to truly believe that the US was some kind of special place of individual liberty. IMO, it was just a more sophisticated means of control since the plebes had guns, so they used a very artful redirect in order to once more guide the fools.
The coming reversion to the mean ie back to the kind of forceful tyranny that has governed mankind ever since the first proto-human realized he could get more tail, eat better & sleep more if he simply scared the sh!t out of everyone else shouldn’t be a surprise.
What I suggest, however, is that you question your assumptions. Why do you think the way you do? Are they in fact significant competitive disadvantages in the coming storm or are they favorable traits that might help ensure your continuity?
January 1st, 2013 at 10:37 pm
Nature Bats Last implies that nature has rules, and if broken, there will be consequences.
Actually Nature Bats first, middle and last. From Big Bang through expansion to The Heat Death of the Universe. From spore to culture to sporulation. In another tradition, Brahma, Vishnu & Shiva. The species Homo sapiens, all its actions and interactions are part of the Cosmic (± Divine) Play or Cosmic (± Divine) Dream, depending on one’s reverence and much reality id ascribed to it. (But to most people neither dream nor play would be an adequate perception of reality).
Fermi paradox
Explaining the paradox theoretically:
It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
See also: Doomsday argument
This is the argument that technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or space flight technology. Possible means of annihilation include nuclear war, biological warfare or accidental contamination, climate change, nanotechnological catastrophe, ill-advised physics experiments, a badly programmed super-intelligence, or a Malthusian catastrophe after the deterioration of a planet’s ecosphere. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in mainstream scientific theorizing. Indeed, there are probabilistic arguments which suggest that human extinction may occur sooner rather than later. In 1966 Sagan and Shklovskii suggested that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales. Self-annihilation may also be viewed in terms of thermodynamics: insofar as life is an ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to disorder, the “external transmission” or interstellar communicative phase may be the point at which the system becomes unstable and self-destructs.
From a Darwinian perspective, self-destruction would be an ironic outcome of evolutionary success. The evolutionary psychology that developed during the competition for scarce resources over the course of human evolution has left the species subject to aggressive, instinctual drives. These compel humanity to consume resources, extend longevity, and to reproduce—in part, the very motives that led to the development of technological society. It seems likely that intelligent extraterrestrial life would evolve in a similar fashion and thus face the same possibility of self-destruction. And yet, to provide a good answer to Fermi’s Question, self-destruction by technological species would have to be a near universal occurrence.
This argument does not require the civilization to entirely self-destruct, only to become once again non-technological. In other ways it could persist and even thrive according to evolutionary standards, which postulate producing offspring as the sole goal of life—not “progress”, be it in terms of technology or even intelligence.
January 1st, 2013 at 11:03 pm
As such, are they really merely current expressions of the kinds of submissive traits that allowed previous generations to survive?
Submission is submission only when the submissive sanctions moral exemptions to the principle of non-initiation of force. If the other party – solitary robber, gang, state, empire, etc. – initiates force, one does not have to manufacture justifications to cloak their act in morality.
The corollary, non-violence is such only if it holds in thought, word and deed. Even unexpressed anger violates it. The cattle licks speak of sin in “thought, word and deed” for good reason.
January 2nd, 2013 at 12:12 am
That is why no one in the executive or legislative branch is going to restore our rights.
Rights to the crumbs from the master’s table. The constitution assured rights to the landed male gentry of european origin. As the feast got bigger, more servants were needed and accommodated. The feast is shrinking now.
Norwalk virus – winter vomiting disease, now known as norovirus has been around the block for a long time. Vomiting infants and small children in winter and early spring. Hydration does the trick and often can be done orally.
Full ankle dorsiflexion is innate to humans but since unused, is lost early. Part of the neonatal physical exam is to check that the entire top of each foot can contact the front of its leg. If it cannot, the neonate has to be referred to orthopaedics for evaluation and correction of clubfoot, much easier and more effective when identified early.
Another feature of our primate ancestry is abduction at the shoulder in the coronal plane (lifting the arm away from the body to the side). Most mammals have flexion-extension (as in lifting the arm forward). Brachiators (that swing from overhead tree branches) have abduction, an identifying characteristic in primates (monkeys, including apes and humans).
January 2nd, 2013 at 12:18 am
My theory is that the sheep have been bred; indeed, it explains the huge chasm between those who govern and those who are governed. The elite certainly know the score – it’s only the sheep who are going to be surprised.
I agree.
What I suggest, however, is that you question your assumptions. Why do you think the way you do? Are they in fact significant competitive disadvantages in the coming storm or are they favorable traits that might help ensure your continuity?
Believe me, I question my assumptions all the time and I do not pretend to know any of the answers. One of the assumptions I have questioned on this blog is the neoDarwinist social narrative which makes physical survival the only imperative and relegates morality to some kind of superstition. We have epistemological access to non-physical systems of objects (e.g. mathematics). I think that moral principles can be rationally and objectively justified. Just because moral principles are not made out of stuff does not make them any less real.
As for the materialists, they seem to be functioning in a Newtonian universe which has been bypassed by physics and computer science. A number of theoretical physicists are now starting to find that phenomena which were thought to be analog in nature are actually digital. They are starting to see that this “physical” universe is looking more and more like a virtual reality simulation. Dr. James Gates at the Univ. of Maryland and his colleagues have recently discovered computer codes deep in the equations of string theory … the same type of codes that are used in search engines … In fact, they are now questioning whether space-time is even fundamental.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLvXaclRlHs
So much for strict materialism, huh?
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:18 am
They are starting to see that this “physical” universe is looking more and more like a virtual reality simulation.
Indeed. And if a “simulation”, reality is entirely a phenomenon of consciousness, not the other way around. This has the implication that there is nothing “out there”. However, the “simulation” should be s addressed scientifically, not through pseudoscience or for that matter, superstition, the stowaway onboard religion.
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:38 am
Competitive advantages: truth is what works. Look at grasses. Some are tasty and nutritious and are desirable to be eaten. Others are tough, prickly, thorney, and are not desireable to be eaten. Each method has an advantage towards getting energy. Reproduction is just the means to change features to get energy better. Variation and selection. Evolution. There are many ways that work. Some are “moral” and most are not. Real life is tough. Humans didn’t like it that way and figured out ways to beat the system. It won’t work.
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:41 am
Anyone read ‘Topsoil and Civilisation’? It seems that mankind can build pyramids and create nano technology but cannot grow plants that hold the soil together, and hasnt grasped that mushrooms create humus, which rebuilds the soil.
The thing i notice is, Hemp has not been mass cultivated in human history, yet is the one plant that will serve the soil and mankind, If we are serious about staying still or progressing as a species, then we need to rebuild the soil fast or it will be a wipeout.
Grow hemp>Use the leaves to grow oyster mushrooms>repeat until you are food self sufficient.
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:44 am
Personally, I’m a long way from being convinced by the ‘virtual reality simulation’ and ‘string theory’ theories. Afaik, it’s all conjecture, no actual evidence in support, is there, or prediction that can be tested ?
Anyway, Robin said This has the implication that there is nothing “out there”.
How do you work that out ? What was ‘out there’ before was Shannon-Weaver information, wasn’t it ? That’s still what’s ‘out there’
However, the “simulation” should be s addressed scientifically, not through pseudoscience or for that matter, superstition, the stowaway onboard religion.
Strikes me that String Theory is pretty close to pseudoscience and superstition. I’d like to know how you define the boundary. Personally I’d say that science has to begin with gathering the observable evidence and then trying to build hypotheses to explain it. I don’t think M Theory ( String Theory ) does that, it starts from the numbers and tries to fit them to the evidence as an afterthought.
It may be internally consistent, but that’s the kind of ‘proof’ that Gödel ‘disproved’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_M-theory
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:48 am
One of many discussions of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to reality, this one being quite recent – the original text being only a little over 600 years old:
Panchadasi
By Sri Vidyaranya Swami
Translated by Swami Swahananda
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:02 am
Btd “We kept going with help from our hope:”
String theory – string enough words together and voila! there is something to us that is not material thus we don’t really die.
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:02 am
Personally I’d say that science has to begin with gathering the observable evidence and then trying to build hypotheses to explain it.
All current hypotheses have to be consistent with all observed evidence to date or they will be laughed out of academia. And the Large Hadron Collider is an attempt to test falsifiable aspects of the hypotheses.
Even conviction is inadequate. There is no substitute for actual experiece. Consciousness is always an individual experience, it cannot be tested in the Large Hadron Collider.
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:05 am
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/issue/
Nothing terribly new in the article, but great cartoons
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:47 am
Kathy C. ..there is something to us that is not material..
Therein lies your problem, Kathy. The physicists have not found anything to us that is actually ‘material’… you’re still living in the 19thC.
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:49 am
String theory – string enough words together and voila! there is something to us that is not material thus we don’t really die.
Yes, science may try to explain consciousness, but consciousness lies outside science. Acceptance of death is a part of many traditions.
Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta: The Shorter Instructions to Malunkya
January 2nd, 2013 at 5:19 am
@ Robin
All current hypotheses have to be consistent with all observed evidence to date or they will be laughed out of academia.
It’s been said that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory in the entire history of science, which is rather an impressive claim. But M theory is something different, and I gather that a lot of folk do find it laughable.
If, as Tom Campbell maintains, two individuals in separate isolated sensory deprivation tanks, experience the same experiences on – what shall we call them, their astral travels ? – then it would appear that consciousness is a distributed, shared, function, at some level, and can indeed be studied scientifically by such means.
January 2nd, 2013 at 6:18 am
Gazan farmers know how to chop wood, carry water. Well in their case keep on farming no matter what the Zionists do to them even if it means abandoning fields and growing on rooftops
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=powdUxu1IDU
January 2nd, 2013 at 6:19 am
Shell Alaska says a drifting drill ship that broke loose from tow vessels during a severe storm has run aground on the southeast side of Sitkalidak Island. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57561471/shell-drilling-ship-kulluk-grounded-on-alaska-island/
January 2nd, 2013 at 6:21 am
Despite answers “wise” and quite snappy
Its all a bunch of bullcrappy
We are mortal you see
We shit and we pee
And for that I am really quite happy
January 2nd, 2013 at 6:41 am
And for that I am really quite happy
Me too. I think one can rest in pure being, just as our ancestors did, tens of thousands of years ago, and accept that all is awesome mystery. But isn’t that what the myth of the Fall is about ? We left the Garden, and ate the Fruit of Knowledge, we opened Pandora’s Box, took out the toys…
Once we know E=MC2 how can we unknow it ? Even Fukuoka with his notion of natural farming, saying forget all about science, just sow vegetable seeds in clay balls, but the vegetables are not natural, they are the result of centuries of careful selection and breeding and interference with nature…
We’re all using these computers and the internet, which are the products of quantum physics. That’s your ‘bunch of bullcrappy’, Kathy.
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:13 am
then it would appear that consciousness is a distributed, shared, function, at some level,
It is not distributed. It is not within spacetime, the appearance of spacetime is dependent on it, but it has no within and no without. It is not shared, there is nothing besides it – the One without a second. It is not a function, it is the Sunyata, the Ein Sof – the Void. It has no levels. It is the Witness to all mind states everywhere, the awareness. Phenomena in spacetime do not demonstrate it. The “concept” of someone else’s consciousness is a concept comprehended by the mind: it is the awareness of one’s own comprehension of the concept.
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:24 am
@ Robin
But you said Consciousness is always an individual experience
And I pointed to a scientific investigation, experimental evidence, where two individual minds that are isolated, experience the same phenomena. So, I ask you, how can this consciousness, in this instance, be regarded as always an individual experience when, apparently, it is a shared experience ?
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:39 am
When a person’s brain is progressively destroyed by Alzheimers where does their extended consciousness go? Why did it leave if the body is still alive and functioning if the self aware consciousness isn’t manufactured by the cells of the brains and their connections?
This is what matters – real people losing themselves. It might happen to you….It doesn’t matter whether it is “matter” or something else, when the arrangement and connections of the neurons gets upended, the self goes. It either disappears or goes somewhere else. If you think it persists you are talking about a soul no matter how you try to pretend you are not. If it disappears then matter or not, our self is part of what at least appears to be matter and can be taken apart.
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:47 am
I think that is completely missing the point, Kathy. Nobody is denying a correlation between brain and consciousness. If the brain is damaged, that has effects. That’s not what we are talking about though, is it.
January 2nd, 2013 at 8:25 am
“Maybe when Aleigha goes out to occupy something or other and is struck hard on the head by a police baton he will realize that there are better things to do than write whining essays about having missed out on the planetary gang rape also known as the US economy.”
He is a she and the whining clearly seems to be mutual.
January 2nd, 2013 at 8:51 am
The problem with matter is it matters
Without it our world view’s in tatters
If it doesn’t exist
Why does it persist
At least until nature it batters
January 2nd, 2013 at 8:51 am
Consciousness to the experiencer is the experiencer’s own experience. A scientific investigator experiences comprehension of the concept of another’s consciousness or comprehension of the concept of similarity in the reports of other’s experiences. One individual may experience comprehension of the concept of thr similarity of the report of another’s reported experience to one’s own. No one experiences another’s experience.
The ability to discriminate between the real and the apparent is known as atma-anatma viveka.
January 2nd, 2013 at 8:55 am
Being lied to…
More information has surfaced which conclusively demonstrates the aircraft reportedly used on 9/11, were airborne well after their alleged crashes.
January 2nd, 2013 at 8:57 am
When a person’s brain is progressively destroyed by Alzheimers where does their extended consciousness go?
Consciousness neither comes nor goes. When a rain puddle that reflects the sun dries up, the sun does nor either come or go.
January 2nd, 2013 at 8:59 am
Kathy C Says: …voila! there is something to us that is not material thus we don’t really die.
Matter v. consciousness: why?
Re doom—how does it apply?
An avoidance run
Back to Stage 1
To deny that we’ll really die.
January 2nd, 2013 at 9:06 am
@ Robin
Consciousness… etc.
Imo, that is unnecessary mystification. There’s one guy in one room, completely isolated in a sensory deprivation flotation chamber, a second guy, likewise. No possible connection. Both have a radio link to a third guy who is recording their descriptions of their experiences. If one says, I feel I am falling, I feel I have landed, I see strange white figures on a beach… and the other guy gives an identical account… well, what is that telling us ? Something about consciousness ? Or not ?
Regarding what you said before …the One without a second. It is not a function, it is the Sunyata, the Ein Sof – the Void… I’m right with you on that, and grateful to have met someone who understands that. However, that knowledge is, in my understanding, the result of mythos, subjective, the fruit of meditation and intense introspection over many centuries, it’s phenomenological observation, prior to modern science. I don’t see any reason why consciousness should not be studied by modern sciences, logos, now that we have MRI and PET scanners and the like and knowledge of neurochemistry and so much else. I mean, it might prove impossible and get nowhere, as you suggest, but I don’t see why.
January 2nd, 2013 at 9:37 am
well, what is that telling us ? Something about consciousness ?
Consciousness is awareness, the awareness of the mind’s comprehension of a consept of “a thing”. Anything description referring to consciousness is a concept, to be comprehended by the mind. The awareness of that comprehension is a reflection of consciousness. Experiments can at best tell us that there are meat robots acting in an observed way. One may surmise that they are experiencing something and therefore the concept arises and is comprehended by the mind that they are like us. The awareness of this comprehension is a reflection of consciousness. But the only experiencing that one is aware of is one’s own. All the rest are concepts from surmises.
January 2nd, 2013 at 9:45 am
Kathy C. The problem with matter is it matters
Without it our world view’s in tatters
Not ‘our’, but ‘your’. It’s been in tatters since the 1920′s and the Copenhagen Interpretation, and yet you still cling to an obsolete 19thC materialism, just as Christian Fundamentalists cling to Genesis 150 years after Darwin.
I’ve been through this with you all before, several times. When it suits your cause you demand that science is the arbiter, and quote books by scientific authorities that you have read. And yet, when I point you toward what is the best established, most widely accepted of all theories, in all of science, as of today you just don’t get it. I mean, the only reason we have these computers is because of what the physicists learned about quantum physics over the last 70 or 80 years.
It turns the earlier worldview of Newtonian physics upside down and inside out. It says that ‘matter’, ‘particles’, can be in two places at the same time.
Last time I tried to explain this to you, I linked to the TED talk where this was demonstrated for everyone to see. It didn’t seem to make any difference to your ‘worldview’ though, did it ? You still think everything is ‘solid stuff’, and that’s all there is to it.
January 2nd, 2013 at 9:59 am
@ Robin
Sorry, Robin, you’ve lost me there, I don’t understand that….
One may surmise that they are experiencing something and therefore the concept arises and is comprehended by the mind that they are like us.
This can’t be right. You don’t need to ‘surmise’. The other person shouts out ‘Hey, I’ve reached the end of the tunnel, I can see daylight !’. You don’t need to surmise anything, you know exactly what they mean. A few moments later you reach the same place, have the same experience. Not theirs, of course. Yours. But close enough to be useful. Compare notes.
January 2nd, 2013 at 10:09 am
.
Consciousness Is Like A Tape Recorder
Encoded in neurons or tape,
Moving current makes patterns take shape:
Tape moves past read head,
Sound info gets read,
Et voila! You’ve got conscious ape.
January 2nd, 2013 at 10:18 am
You agreeing with Sam Harris then, BenjaminDonkey ?
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-mystery-of-consciousness/
January 2nd, 2013 at 10:26 am
One may know what concepts words convey, even if they are coming from a meat robot. Awareness of one’s comprehension of the concept conveyed by the words is not the experiencing of what the other experiences.
January 2nd, 2013 at 10:32 am
But that’s a different matter, to the matter of consciousness, Robin.
Everyone agrees that consciousness isbut nobody can agree upon what it is, or where it is, or even how to define, in words, a description of it….
I’m fairly sympathetic towards Robin’s view, in some respects. I don’t think it is ‘like’ anything, and I don’t think it is ‘produced’ by the brain.
January 2nd, 2013 at 10:40 am
Hi ulvfugl! I agree with Daniel Wegner:
http://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Conscious-Will-Bradford-Books/dp/0262731622
but the tape recorder analogy is my own AFAIK.
January 2nd, 2013 at 10:52 am
If you have not seen it, this Marcus du Sautoy clip is the spookiest thing, re free will
http://youtu.be/N6S9OidmNZM
January 2nd, 2013 at 11:01 am
ulvfugl, Libet redux:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet
But how is this helping us deal with doom?
January 2nd, 2013 at 11:10 am
A few moments later you reach the same place, have the same experience.
- have sensory inputs, construct them into a concept comprehended by the mind, compared to another concept, forming a new concept that the two concepts are alike. The new concept is comprehended by the mind. The awareness of the new concept is a reflection of consciousness. Comparing notes also produces a concept that is comprehended by the mind. The awareness of that comprehension is a reflection of the mind.
The difference between a meat machine and a person is a presumption of awareness in the latter, the presumption itself being a surmise derived from other concepts. Awareness is a matter of one’s experience. So too is the awareness of comprehension of a concept of awareness in others. Understanding the difference intellectually can be difficult.
Directly discerning the difference between the awareness of mental comprehension and mental comprehension does not come easy. Tradition has it that it can take 84,000,000 lifetimes. Even the intellectual understanding of the concept can be difficult.
In the Sufi tradition it is said that the difference between a realised man and a scholar who has read and understood many books, leading his donkey laden with those books is many times greater than that between the scholar carrying the books in his head and the donkey carrying those books on his back.
If neither intellectual understanding nor direct discernment seem forthcoming, other areas have to be addressed. When the person is ready, the discernment will be there. When the clouds blow away the sun does not have to be revealed.
January 2nd, 2013 at 11:22 am
Ulvfugl, you quote your scientists to make your case, I quote mine. In case you haven’t noticed, not all scientists agree. You just give the ones that prove your case greater merit, and I give the ones that prove my case greater merit. That doesn’t mean that either one of us rejects science.
you say “And yet, when I point you toward what is the best established, most widely accepted of all theories, in all of science, as of today you just don’t get it. I mean, the only reason we have these computers is because of what the physicists learned about quantum physics over the last 70 or 80 years.”
But I say “I point you to the best most widely accepted theories of neuroscientists who actually work with humans and their brains and you just don’t get it.” Quantum physics doesn’t explain Capgras syndrome, Cotard’s syndrome or all the other brain syndromes that cause people to have strongly held beliefs that the rest of us without brain damage feel are in error. Neuroscientists with brain surgery, brain imaging, and post mortems find out what is damaged that causes these syndromes. By investigating what goes wrong they begin to get an idea of how the brain creates consciousness and self awareness. The reason that Ramachandran has been able to help patients with phantom leg or hand pain is because he has made exceptional progress in understanding how our brain works.
I know about quantum physics, I know about the slit experiment, and I know dead is dead.
A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory provides the missing aspects. However, some physicists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be unconvincing.[1] Physicist Victor Stenger characterized quantum consciousness as a “myth” having “no scientific basis” that “should take its place along with gods, unicorns and dragons.” [2]
The main argument against the quantum mind proposition is that quantum states in the brain would decohere before they reached a spatial or temporal scale at which they could be useful for neural processing. This argument was elaborated by the physicist, Max Tegmark. Based on his calculations, Tegmark concluded that quantum systems in the brain decohere quickly and cannot control brain function.[3][4]
The philosopher David Chalmers has also argued against quantum consciousness. He speculated on a number of ways in which quantum mechanics might relate to consciousness.[5] However, Chalmers is also skeptical about the ability of any kind of New Physics to resolve the Hard Problem of Consciousness: [6] [7]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
January 2nd, 2013 at 11:29 am
Yes, I know it is Libet redux. How does anything help us deal with doom ?
I think once you’ve got through the heartache and sorrow and despair and anger and all the other stuff that comes along, you just laugh at the f****r, and do whatever your daily life requires, to keep the show on the road. The pain is still there, but it doesn’t break you, because you’re not dead yet…
http://whatmeditationreallyis.com/index.php/lang-en/home-blog/item/422-are-you-dead-yet?.html
January 2nd, 2013 at 11:32 am
Sorry, Robin, you’ve list me again, none of that makes sense to me.
January 2nd, 2013 at 11:51 am
Kathy C. we’re talking about two quite separate things. One is quantum physics. I don’t think that any reputable scientist in any scientific field disputes quantum physics. That’s what destroys your 19thC materialism.
The second part, the linkage between quantum stuff and consciousness is a separate issue. There is no consensus amongst neuroscientists or amongst philosophers, concerning consciousness. There’s an enormous range of views. Again there’s two separate things to consider, one is actual quantum effects occurring in the brain, as proposed by Hameroff and Penrose in the microtubules theory, which I like, but apparently has not found support, which seems to be what your Stenger reference points to ( I think he’s an idiot, he says the same about chi, which is demonstrated and used all around the world every day, so for him to deny it is as silly as to say that swimming is impossible just because he can’t. )
The other thing is quite separate again, which is the collapse of the wave function. I think the majority view is that it is proven that it is an interaction between ‘mind and matter’, i.e. it is the conscious observer which cause it to happen. I know there are other views, but I think the burden is upon them to come up with a better alternative explanation, which I don’t think they have so far.
None of this stuff about consciousness has any bearing upon the fact that physics has not found any of the ‘matter’ which you require to maintain your materialist worldview.
January 2nd, 2013 at 12:04 pm
50 Doomiest Stories of 2012:
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/01/50-doomiest-stories-of-2012.html
Some I haven’t seen before.
January 2nd, 2013 at 12:38 pm
A very simple but very difficult solution to the problem of consciousness, two millennia old: Matthew 5:8
January 2nd, 2013 at 1:18 pm
I may have linked to this before, but it is rather wonderful, The Scale of the Universe.
Gives an idea as to what we are a part of and where we are situated, in relationship to all else.
This apparently solid material reality which surrounds us, turns out to be nothing of the kind. It’s vibrating energy, fields, quarks, neutrinos, quantum entanglement, all kinds of weird stuff, all the way down to quantum foam, which comes out of nothing, returns to nothing, is and isn’t at the same time…
That’s what science has found out, for better or worse. We opened Pandora’s box.
http://htwins.net/scale2/
January 2nd, 2013 at 1:50 pm
New feedback loop to consider:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/light-absorption-speeding-arctic-ice-melt/
Arctic ocean water under first year ice absorbs more solar energy from the sun than water under multi-year ice.
January 2nd, 2013 at 1:51 pm
No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
January 2nd, 2013 at 2:22 pm
RD And if a “simulation”, reality is entirely a phenomenon of consciousness, not the other way around. This has the implication that there is nothing “out there”. However, the “simulation” should be s addressed scientifically, not through pseudoscience or for that matter, superstition, the stowaway onboard religion.
I agree, although I’m not suggesting that the simulation is a product of our consciousness, or consciousness as such. I also don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’m trying to sneak God into the auditorium through some pseudoscientific ruse by bringing up the simulation argument. Imo, god-talk creates the false impression that we know who or what corresponds to the word “god”. We don’t. There may not exist any entity, process, etc that meets our puny metaphysical speculations about such ultimate beings.
If the simulation argument as developed by Nick Bostrom is correct … and there are some enticing indications that our little universe might be a simulation … then we’re left with a lot of interesting and disturbing questions beginning with: (a) where’s the computer that’s running the simulation, and (b) who programmed it. Please note that I am not presupposing that the programmer(s) is Jehovah. Like Bostrom, I think that the programmers are probably a more technologically advanced civilization that has some reason for running these kinds of simulations. They might even be us in the future who have created a simulation of an alternative history in which we go extinct.
You can read Bostrom’s paper on the simulation argument which he published in the journal Philosophical Quarterly in 2003 at this link:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf
There’s a sim argument faq:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/faq.html
And even a simulation wiki:
http://simulism.org/Simulism_Home
I apologize for going off the deep end on this blog, but since we are facing NTE the question of what it is that is actually ending (real life on earth, or just the Memorex version) is an interesting and valuable one. If the Hindus and the Gnostics were right and the universe is a digital illusion created by software running on a super computer somewhere, then extinction means the discontinuation of data on the Archons’ hyperdimensional hard drive.
I hope these developments in physics and comp science motivate those who are positing a 19th Century version of materialism to rethink/question the concept of matter itself. I’ve noticed that the Dawkins thumping materialists tend to express themselves as though they are hard nosed purists who have cleansed their minds of silly fantasies. If we are trapped in a simulation, matter is just a digital construct that is no more solid, or foundational than the image on your screen. Ironically, matter might turn out to be phantasmagorical and spooky stuff, like information and mind, might be fundamental.
January 2nd, 2013 at 2:46 pm
ulvfugl, You have nicely summarized the current state of the discussion regarding the nature of consciousness. David Chalmers, imo, has written the best defense for dualism. My view is that consciousness is a fundamental reality that is not reducible to physical processes (which might be just digital-informational processes), although it can interact with physical processes. I also agree that there are subtle energies like chi, or prana, etc, which traditional cultures were aware of, but are not yet detectable by our techno-gadgets (or may not be detectable in the way electricity is) and are thus rejected… more modern hubris.
January 2nd, 2013 at 2:53 pm
I know about quantum physics, I know about the slit experiment, and I know dead is dead.
Kathy, I love your hardcore, ass kicking, no bullshit realism. In my next incarnation, hopefully on a better planet, I’m going to ask you out for a drink. I’ll take you to a nice slinky dinner club and then maybe we can go dancing. At some point in the evening I’m going to point out that you really don’t know “dead is dead.” Just cause you can’t see the other side, it don’t mean it ain’t there.
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:17 pm
Here is the key point to the link provided by BC Nurse:
….the ocean under newly formed ice (“first-year ice”) absorbs 50 percent more solar energy than the ocean beneath older ice (“multiyear ice”).
If I remember correctly, we are only a few years away before there is nothing in the Arctic but first year ice!!!
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:33 pm
@ depressive lucidity
You stated:
“….Just cause you can’t see the other side, it don’t mean it ain’t there.
Are you suggesting you have seen the other side, and that you know “it” is there?
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:33 pm
Thanks, depressive lucidity, it’s a big subject, I don’t really have command of it, e.g. I’m not up to date on latest neuroscience research, here’s a nice take, what it’s not, by Ray Tallis
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-consciousness-is-not
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:47 pm
LUCIDITY? SAID: « In my next incarnation, hopefully on a better planet, I’m going to ask you out for a drink.»
What was wrong with this planet?
January 2nd, 2013 at 3:52 pm
i guess the Chinese in this one particular spot think the source will last forever at the rate they’re going:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2256086/Shouldnt-fins-attached-shark-Horrific-images-TEN-THOUSAND-fins-dried-food-Hong-Kong.html
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:10 pm
depressive lucidity, I don’t like fancy restaurants, I no longer drink, I am a failure at dancing, I hate fancy clothes, and I wouldn’t ever go out with anyone other than the best man in the world, my husband and even if he weren’t around the only way you would get to first base with me is to help shovel out the chicken manure so it can be composted.
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:30 pm
Physics says there’s no matter
No matter how much you may natter
So no need to eat
Just absorb the sun’s heat
And see if you get any fatter
Something may not be matter on a physics level, but be matter on a level that counts for human life. Your brain counts, which is why we have such thick skulls. If our brain and our heart weren’t so important to our existence we would not have evolved thick heads and rib cages.
Whatever you might describe as consciousness on some quantum level is NOT the same thing as individual sense of self.
New years promise. This is the last time I will discuss this with you. Argue with someone else.
January 2nd, 2013 at 5:03 pm
Hahahaha. Okay, Kathy C., ignore physics, forget all about physics.
Gravity, time, the solar system, all the calculations that engineers use to build bridges and nuclear power stations, and computers, and all the rest, the solar flares that you warn will knock out the electricity grid, it’s all physics….
If you studied the subject, you’d find that it is rather interesting, imo, particularly, the strangeness of quantum mechanics, and the interaction between the observer and the particle/wave in the double slit dooda… which is mind boggling. You want to pretend that isn’t a challenge or a problem ? go ahead. Physicists find it interesting.
If it wasn’t for consciousness, nobody would know that any self, or anything else, existed. That’s why it’s of primary concern and interest. The fact is, nobody understands it. It remains up for grabs. It probably requires an entirely new paradigm of reality, imo.
Crikey, Kathy, I never asked you to argue with me about anything, it’s not my fault if you don’t understand physics, is it.
January 2nd, 2013 at 5:49 pm
Anyone who has raised children knows that the best way to end a pattern of temper tantrums is to ignore the behavior. Any sort of attention at all only prolongs the foot stamping and screaming, and encourages more episodes.
http://vimeo.com/5982412
January 2nd, 2013 at 6:19 pm
.
It’s fun to consider abstractions
(More relaxing than physical actions!),
But since time’s getting short,
We might want to sort
Out which ones are mostly distractions.
==
The faith fights are making me think
Even scientists, facing the brink,
Need some kind of belief;
As for me, I’ll be brief:
I believe I’ll go have a drink.
January 2nd, 2013 at 6:55 pm
ulvfugl; I think most of us are more interested in the physics that puts food on the table, that builds a house well and allows an instrument to make music. You know, the things that won’t drive us crazy.
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:24 pm
The topic, Aleigha’s topic, the end, the death, of a dream, is not something new, is it, it’s been happening throughout history, when people have been forced to revise their concept of their situation in the light of some unwelcome new information.
This is what happened to the Christians, in Britain, when Darwin returned from his voyage on the Beagle and published his theory. It was a shock. I mean, it was a shock for his wife, and for the poor captain of the Beagle, who committed suicide, a shock for the whole of soceity, pretty much. The whole British culture was built around biblical beliefs, even if many people didn’t take them very seriously and were not devout in any sense, nominally, the Origin Myth was the biblical one. Changing that was kinda radical, to say the least. Some people still can’t come to terms with it. And then it rippled out, and still ripples….
The Genesis 6 day thing was, well, not exactly ‘a lie’, but it was mythos, a poetic truth.
Einstein caused similar havoc to Newtonian physics. But the Einstein couldn’t believe where his own work lead, and wasted years and years trying to show that quantum physics was wrong, rather than adjust the story in his head.
The notion that what is ‘out there’ is ‘solid stuff’ made of ‘solid atoms’ like billiard balls, as it was conceived to be in 19thC physics, is totally wrong. If you kick a rock, it feels solid, because the pressure sensors in the nerves in your foot tell your brain, and your brain creates a sensation which your brain interprets as ‘hard’ and as ‘pain’.
However, when physicists zoom in on the structure of the rock, the atoms are mostly nothingness, just as the atoms in your body and brain are mostly nothingness.
Of course, the ‘truth’ we need to know, at different scales, or different levels, differs. But I think once you start going down the avenue of scientific knowledge, you can’t say ‘Stop there ! I don’t want to know any more, it’d damage my worldview’. That’s the problem with opening Pandora’s Box. First you take out the secret of Fire, and before you know it, you’ve got nuclear power, and nuclear bombs.
We’ve used our cunning and our knowledge and our inventiveness, and we created a Myth of Progress, and a Cornucopian Myth of Never-Ending Riches, and a Star trek Myth of Colonizing the Universe, and so on and on…
Cultures teach their children the prevailing mythology, the story of the times, the stories of the times, and that’s how people find meaning and make sense of their lives. It’s hard to change those stories. None of them are necessarily ‘true’, in any ultimate sense, but they are workable, in a rather arbitrary, messy way.
In our times, new information forces change. This happens all the time. Kuhn’s famous paradigm shift. But people’s egos get so attached to their world view, they’ll defend it, come what may, so we have usually have to wait for the old generation to physically die, before a new paradigm can be fully accepted, and nowadays, when everything moves so fast, paradigms soon become dated.
That’s what Daniel noticed, on this blog. NTE is a new paradigm, a new story, which shatters the older story, which was that, if we all pull together, make a huge effort, build green, resilient, transitional, permacultural, small-footprint, eco-friendly communities, we can somehow ‘save the planet’, blablabla… That was still quite a fresh, new paradigm, for many. Plenty were still living with the older one, two or three cars, flying to Thailand for weekend breaks, etc, etc…
Realising that that paradigm, worldview, story, is dead, hurts. I know it.
Facing NTE hurts. I know it.
So, where next ?
It’s maybe easier for me, because zen practice is a practice that eats worldviews.
It is the only teaching I know of that is designed to transcend itself, in that sense.
The map can never be the territory.
I think Donella Meadows hit it nicely :
The highest leverage of all is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to realize that NO paradigm is “true,” that even the one that sweetly shapes one’s comfortable worldview is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe.
It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing.
I don’t take that to mean being flippant and frivolous, I think the situation is deadly, deathly, serious. But still, amidst such awesome vastness, we are less than ants, to take ourselves too seriously is to be too vain and self-regarding…
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:33 pm
Back to the article. . . the author IMO does a good job summing up the “reality” of not only her/his generation but of most Americans as well; entitled, privileged, pampered and somewhat pissy. They are so unprepared for what is coming at us.
I currently work in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There due to the number of unwanted babies being thrown alive into the landfill outside of town that several NGO’s have set up surveillance operations. The situation was described to me as the “landfill is full of babies”. Brings to mind the quote I read somewhere to the effect of “the future has arrived, it just isn’t equitably distributed yet”.
Unless you are one of the lucky ones living is tough and idealism does not show it’s face on the edges of the empire.
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:36 pm
@ dairymandave
Maybe so, but you can only send me that message because the guys who designed and built your computer understand quantum physics, and if it’s using electricity from a nuclear power station, because the guys who designed and built that understand quantum physics, and if the link goes via satellite, because the guys who do that stuff understand quantum physics, and if you use a mobile phone…. etc, etc.
January 2nd, 2013 at 7:37 pm
“Divinity lies within.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
January 2nd, 2013 at 11:52 pm
<i<If the Hindus and the Gnostics were right and the universe is a digital illusion
An illusion is an illusion only from the reference of the source and sustenance of the illusion, as a dream is an illusion only in the context of the person dreaming: within the context of the dream it is real.
If we are trapped in a simulation,
The awareness of the simulation is not dependent on the simulation. The awareness of a dream is the awareness of the person dreaming, and is not created in the dream. The person dreaming may appear trapped in the dream.
I don’t really have command of it,
A spoon containing sugar, but a tongue tasties it.
What was wrong with this planet?
The story is told of a man of understanding who sat outside a town.
A traveller stopped to ask what kind of people lived in the town. The man asked the traveller what the people were like where the traveller had come from. The traveller said that they were hateful, cruel, crooks, etc. the man of understanding said that the people in this town were the same.
A second traveller came by and asked what kind of people were in the town. Again the man asked what the people were like where the traveller came from. The traveller said that they were loving, kind, honest, etc. the man of understanding said that the people in this town would be the same.
“Divinity lies within.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
And without. Concealed by lies it lies.
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:39 am
The latest and from those I have heard, the greatest C-Realm podcast.
The guest’s pointing to consciousness is consonant with the Kabbalistic, Buddhistic and Vedantic traditions:
343: The Great G
“KMO welcomes Lon Milo Duquette to the C-Realm Podcast to talk about magick, music, and the good so great and all-encompassing that it has no opposite. LMD is a stand-up occultist, a gnostic bishop, a singer/song-writer, and the author of 14 books on magick and esotericism. In spite of the content of the musical interlude on this week’s show, Lon wants the listeners all to know that he does not drink alcohol at all these days and certainly does not condone driving under the influence. Lon explains how Solomonic magicians raise demons and put them to work in the service of the Great G, how a demon, once transformed from a destructive and directionless force, can help the magician transform his or her consciousness. Magic is, when you get right down to it, all in your head. You just have no idea how big your head is.”
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:21 am
Tom mentioned something about the families who owned the Fed, and I said I had read it’s now owned by banks, which are themselves owned by other banks…
The US housing bubble which burst and the suffering Aleigha and many others suffer as a result, was a scam, consciously designed by the bankers, who knew exactly what the result would be, because the same trick has been pulled many times before, over the last couple of centuries, ever since the Dutch Tulip Bubble. The sophisticated minds in the finance industry know how these tricks work. It’s only the mass of the general public, who don’t understand money and how it works, who get caught every time. It’s all a con trick. Try and read David Graeber’s Debt, The First 5000 Years. It’ll blow your mind. It’s amazing how easily people are fooled, because they are NICE, they tend to be trusting, they think other people must also be nice, and they believe what they are told. If you want power, to control, exploit and enslave people, money is far more effective than a gun. People are afraid of men with guns, but men with money to loan are much, much, more dangerous. Anyway, some of ‘the families’…
http://deanhenderson.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/hsbc-skates/
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:29 am
Gail, YES
Back to the topic. Ok Aleigha, here is one thing you can do. Don’t create any new children who will find their dream just to stay alive (that is built in) cut short in likely unpleasant ways. Rape is common in societies that a collapsing and birth control will go with everything else, so please consider a tubal so that you don’t have to see your child look at you and ask why they were born into a world with no dreams.
Privileged if you have any other students who get it please tell them the same.
The last thing we need is a generation that instead of saying “why didn’t you tell me” says “why did you conceive of me”
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:35 am
Anthony thanks for sharing, your comment about unwanted babies in landfills of course backs up my comment above. Infanticide is the birth control of the future as it was of the past. One may think they would never do that, but if you already can barely feed the ones you have, keeping the baby means death to all.
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:36 am
BtD – Exactly.
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:37 am
ulvfugl; We should have left all that in the box. I wouldn’t be sending this post but my grandchildren would have food on the table, a house, and a fine instrument to play.
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:41 am
Once, very long ago, I briefly worked for a disreputable rich businessman, selling a luxury item to people in their homes, on credit. I asked him, what to do, if it was obvious they were not going to be able to pay ? He said that didn’t matter, just get the signature on the contract, nothing else mattered. So I asked how that worked out. He explained. The credit company paid him. So he didn’t care if the customer paid or not. Then, credit company took out insurance, so if the customer didn’t pay them, the insurance company paid them. So they didn’t care if the customer paid. Then the insurance company divided the risk and took out insurance with other insurance companies.
So, if the customer didn’t pay, those insurance companies paid. And again, those other insurance companies divided the risk, and passed it on to yet more insurance companies. So, everybody, made money, even if the customer didn’t pay at all… except, somebody, somewhere eventually lost. But that was going to be their problem, whenever they discovered it, and then they’d have to take legal action, which would make money for lawyers, and debt enforcers, and so forth… so most of the people in the chain were happy, just so long as I handed in a piece of paper with a signature on it… and for doing that, I got handed my lump of cash….
If you can follow that, it’s basically what happened in the USA housing market. Selling houses to people who it was known were likely to default, on the promise that house prices would always rise forever, which everyone knew was impossible. And then the banks divided up the mortgages as ‘investments’ and sold them on, and bundled and divided them again, and again, and rinse and repeat, all around the world. All the while knowing that it was a bubble that would burst, a con trick, a fraud, a rip off. And the Rating Agencies were in on the fraud, giving AAA+++ grades to what they knew was crap. Because they got paid, so they turned a blind eye.
And then the ‘foreclosure fraud’, which, if you are not familiar with it, has been investigated on Naked Capitalism for the last several years. The technicalities are different because the laws differ in each State, but as I understand it, the agent who wishes to repossess the property has to have the ‘note’ which states that they have legal ownership. Well, in most cases they do not have that ‘note’, because nobody knows where it is or where it went, because it was sold, as an investment, to someone, somewhere, and has vanished. Or, ownership is registered under MERS, electronically, which was a dodgy computer database, without established legal authority. And many other issues….
Basically, the banks ripped off the naive public, the first time around, selling loans to buy houses. Then they rip them off again, the second time, foreclosing on the loans. At the same time, they work the top end, blackmailing Gvt., by getting massive amount of money, by threatening that if they collapse, then the whole economy collapses.
But, if you study the matter, banks are unnecessary. They are parasites. All that people need is a form of currency, so they can trade and do business. If they need loans, these could be provided via credit unions, that were a not-for-profit service. The only reason there are banks at all, is because of history, very cunning greedy people have found out it is an incredibly easy to become incredibly wealthy and powerful, because you can create money from nothing, and the mass of the population does not even notice or understand. Once established, bankers have got so powerful that they control everything, including politics, military, every aspect. It is kind of insane, because money is actually less essential than bread, and people would think it was strange if bread bakers managed to get that sort of power over everything, but it would actually be more logical.
As Henry Ford said : “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:47 am
@dairymandave
We should have left all that in the box.
Sure. But what you gonna do ? Re-run history ? We are where we are….
January 3rd, 2013 at 5:29 am
Hey Gail (and all), watch this (~12 min. vid):
http://www.wimp.com/uniqueteacher/
January 3rd, 2013 at 5:34 am
gettin’ the word out any way he can:
http://freewayblogger.blogspot.com/2012/12/finishing-up-southern-california.html
January 3rd, 2013 at 8:39 am
Hey, where did everyone go?
http://enenews.com/japan-sees-its-largest-population-drop-ever-recorded-video
January 3rd, 2013 at 9:02 am
Tom, loved the Freeway blogger!! Especially the one “When this (the arctic ocean)turns blue that means we’re done. Thanks
Maybe if every country that has a nuclear reactor has a Fukushima type accident we will start reducing the world population. This probably helps
Japan blog author claims medical workers said malformed babies are being declared as stillbirths or miscarriages — Not included in statistics
http://enenews.com/japan-author-claims-medical-workers-malformed-babies-being-declared-stillbirth-miscarriage-included-statistics-video
Still it won’t be enough population reduction to matter, but each baby not conceived is one more human that won’t have their dreams cut short.
January 3rd, 2013 at 12:08 pm
I picked up a book called “Three Famines Starvation and Politics” by Thomas Keneally and can only read it in bite sized chunks since it is so sad and maddening. Bought it so that I might recognize what’s happening before the denial begins.
It looks at the famines in Ireland, Bengal and Ethiopia. All were aided and abetted by the “government”.
If you want to know what starvation looks like in unarmed countries, look no further than this book.
January 3rd, 2013 at 12:13 pm
@ Kathy: Why humans and all forms of life will never stop making babies:
1) It is way too easy to make babies (beleive me)
2) We do not make babies for themselves but for ourselves. We need them to justify our lives and it takes an incredible (almost impossible force) to resist the very complicated multifaceted “call” to reproduce at an age when we are, among other things, wired to reproduce and forced by our peers to do so (all the young women around me who choose to stay without child are CONSTANTLY harassed by almost everybody and their justifications only make them more monstruous in the eyes of the others)
3) Most humans will never “realize” what is happening globally on earth and babies will be born until the last minute
4) Babies are the one fresh and wonderful source of life, joy, beauty that every adult, family, society can get apparently for “free”, without remorse and HOPING everything will be ok
5) It is absolutely useless to invest energy in this direction
Many NBLers (I know ulgvful, not you)forget all the time that we are very very few to know the facts, and the feedbacks. All the others are consuming (cars, dishwahers, trips, cell phones, movies, medecines) and HOPING, HOPING, HOPING. Some, Syria is just one example, have already crossed the line and will never come back to what the medias will call «normal», or «new normal» until the end.
The environment is so fragmented and fragilized that there is no more time and capacity of recuperation between every storm, every nuclear accident, every anomaly. I think very soon we will experience “massive denudation”: no trees, no plancton, no vegetation and that will cause the whole living system to collapse (+ everything should be completely irradiated, of course) «The further 71% shift of d13C after the extinction has probably resulted from massive denudation of soil and sediment caused by the collapse of continental ecosystems as well as possible dissociation of methane hydrate at the end of the Permian (GVZ 5)»
I had some old paint (who doesn’t?)in the shed. So I painted a waterfall on the wall and a meandering river on the floor. I can lie down in the river, let the water flow, and dream (that I am under the 45 degree sun in australia maybe?). My most cherished memories of this life are surely my contacts with rivers. Today, I am waiting in the river, in the comfort of a city apartment that is entirely relying on electricity.
Lately, I also thought about eating less
but since then, I eat more…
wheighing too much
for my flying carpet
but hopping to catch up
January 3rd, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Once upon a time, not all that long ago–three years to be precise–John Michael Greer was clearly out on the furthest reaches of the radical fringe. His theory of a slow long decline was arguably well researched….at least in a historical context.
But that was three years ago. What’s interesting to watch, is how climate chaos, which is something he has paid very little attention to over the years, has slowly been eating away at his entire concept of collapse…….not unlike the rest of us. But what makes JMG so fascinating, aside from his cogent writing, is that he now finds himself trapped in the most peculiar way, between his own theory of “the long decline”, and the undeniable evidence of non-linear rates of climatic change. He has so actively demeaned those he accuses of living in apocalyptic fantasy by promoting a “fast crash”, that he has now, inadvertently relegated himself the status of the very false prophets he denigrates.
Here is his latest attempt, to work in just a few of the factors that he can no longer avoid, but which also contradict his own theory:
“I’d also encourage my readers to watch the climate. The tendency to focus on predicted apocalypses to come while ignoring the reality of ongoing collapse in the present is as evident here as in every other corner of contemporary culture; whether or not the planet gets fried to a crackly crunch by some more or less distant future date, it’s irrefutable that the cost of weather-related disasters across the world has been climbing year over year for decades, and this is placing an increasingly harsh burden on local and regional economies here in the US and elsewhere. It’s indicative that many coastal towns in Louisiana and Mississippi that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina have never been rebuilt, and it’s probably a safe bet that a similar fate waits for a fair number of the towns and poorer neighborhoods hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy. As global warming pumps more heat into the heat engine we call Earth’s climate, the inevitable result is more extreme weather—drier droughts, fiercer storms, more serious floods, and so on down a litany that’s become uncomfortably familiar in recent years…”.
“….whether or not the planet gets fried to a crackly crunch by some more or less distant future date….” This is a subtle way of admitting that his preoccupation with a gradual piecemeal decline, might just be yet another round of wishful thinking….all things considered.
I have yet to come across any writing of his that seriously looks at climate change. As far as I can tell, he tacitly at best, mentions the latest climate science of the last three years, even though he now regularly mentions arctic methane. Not unlike Guy once hoped, he has long thought energy scarcity would ameliorate the dire effects of global warming.
Point being, JMG’s story arc, in many ways mirrors our own. Very few of us are immune to the trappings of our vested interests, no matter where those interests lie. All of our perspectives are married in incalculable ways to the time invested in the spaces we currently inhabit, and these spaces are most likely, framing our individual concepts of NTE in ways still yet unknown to us.
When even the most radical among us, can no longer stay out ahead of evidence, then NTE is if anything, the end of secular wisdom.
January 3rd, 2013 at 1:39 pm
This short music clip comes from the movie Field of Dreams but is so ethereal that it conjures up something indescribably deep, mysterious, and wistful about life when i hear it. Please take 2 minutes out of your day and enjoy the sounds and let your mind wander (i usually end up with goosebumps and tears in my eyes by its conclusion – maybe it is all just a dream, and yet, and yet . . .):
The Drive Home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi5G3Wv5j6A
January 3rd, 2013 at 1:58 pm
@ Daniel
Yes, I noticed that, re JMG as well. I think we all have our blind spots. Re Guy’s marathon metaphor, someone is out in front, then they drop way back. Ten years ago, Ran Prieur seemed radical and visionary to me. Now, if he’ll forgive me, he just seems tired and boring. His latest view of the future amounts to ‘more high tech computer toys for the rich’ plus ‘more industrial human dog food for the poor’. And ‘the bottleneck’. He still thinks in those terms and J. Diamond, whom, imo, is discredited.
I mentioned bottleneck in DM. Since then I concluded it was a mistake. It’s a funnel, but there’s no hole at the other end. NTE. I think detailed predictions are pointless. It’ll arrive in its own way, own time.
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:06 pm
@ michele/montreal
….forget all the time that we are very very few to know the facts…
And look what we are up against, the most powerful, profitable, ruthless, unscrupulous, businesses that existed in all of history…
Third is the Big Oil-transport-military complex, which has put the US on the trajectory of heavy oil-imports dependence and a deepening military trap in the Middle East, he says.
”Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.”
Big Oil has consistently and successfully fought the intrusion of competition from non-oil energy sources, including nuclear, wind and solar power.
It has been at the side of the Pentagon in making sure that America defends the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf, in effect ensuring a $US100 billion-plus annual subsidy for a fuel that is otherwise dangerous for national security, Sachs says.
”And Big Oil has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda. Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries and others in the sector have underwritten a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.”
http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-four-business-gangs-that-run-the-us-20121230-2c1e2.html
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:14 pm
JMG wrote a book in March of 2009 called “Art and Practice of Geomancy, The: Divination, Magic, and Earth Wisdom of the Renaissance”
It is described thus where it is sold on Amazon
Have you ever lost an important object? Are you taking on a new job? Looking for buried treasure? The Art and Practice of Geomancy teaches readers how to divine the answers to life’s everyday questions about health, luck, new jobs, and love, as well as those less mundane tasks such as finding buried treasure, predicting the weather, being released from prison, and identifying secret enemies. Greer delivers to readers an ancient system of divination in an easy-to-use form requiring little more than a pen and a piece of paper. Using a system of counting odd and even numbers–from a deck of cards, a roll of the dice, or even by hitting sand or dirt with a stick to generate patterns–readers learn how to cast their own geomantic chart. And for those who wish to delve further, he offers exercises for geomantic meditation and ritual magic. The Art and Practice of Geomancy will appeal to pagans, followers of the Western Mystery tradition, scholars of folk magic and divination, and anyone who wants to take their past, present, and future into their own hands.
So someone needs to ask Mr. Greer why his geomancy didn’t tell him about climate change. In my opinion he sold snake oil before he started on Peak Oil and is still selling it. The scary thing is that some fool might have taken up this geomancy, identified someone they knew as their secret enemy and taken action against them.
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:21 pm
Michele I know that 5) It is absolutely useless to invest energy in this direction. However the energy I invest is pretty small, just an occasional post because it is seldom well received. If my words however cause one person to make the plunge and get the damn things cut, I may well save at least one human from the future we all dread. I was so freed from pills and their dangers and other forms of birth control that do sometimes dampen spontaneity when I got mine cut.
Hope you had a nice float in your river. My bathroom is covered with fish. Fun with paint. Maybe we should all get out our paints for pre extinction therapy. Finger paints, that would be fun…..
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:26 pm
Kathy C., JMG understands magic and he understands physics. You’ll be in a position to criticise him when you have an equivalent understanding.
The wisdom of grandmothers is in Dr Shiva’s words, “our capacity to love, unconditionally. In our society of competition, of insecurity and fear, that steadiness of love and compassion is brought to the next generation. Just because they are grandmothers, they have a long view. It’s called sustainability in today’s jargon. It’s really a thinking about future generations – not just of me, myself, today.”
http://www.gandhiforchildren.org/vandana-shiva-knowledge-biodiversity-sustainable/
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:38 pm
Isn’t this like the third or fourth year in a row that this has happened?
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/12/up-to-300-birds-mysteriously-fall-from-the-sky-in-seymour-tennessee-2526024.html
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:50 pm
The difference between a universal problem and a global problem and why it means we won’t do anything about climate change:
http://theautomaticearth.com/Earth/quote-of-the-year-and-the-next.html
January 3rd, 2013 at 2:55 pm
I think it keeps on happening, Tom, not just USA, many parts of the world. Question is, whether it’s always been so, like natural weather effects, or some human activity that causes it.
Was just thinking, another name in the marathon, J. Robb, who used to predict collapse and came up with the localised resilient community offering, but seems to have gone off at a mad tangent, to suit rich people with high tech business solutions, and this latest idea, for drone nets that can go and fetch your iPhone if you forgot it…. sigh…
Stuff the ‘living in a computer simulation with effing drones everywhere instead of birds’… i’m too old for it, I want to go back to the Iron Age and live in a thatched hut with no aeroplanes in the sky and hear the birds singing…
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2013/01/dronenet-the-next-big-thing.html
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:19 pm
JMG is a pompous egomaniac who makes money off of promising people that if they just buy his books and hang breathlessly on his every blog post they will be saved, because in his infinite wisdom he will extract magical wisdom from his wizard hat and teach them how to survive the long slow crash. Before I knew that, I posted some comments on his site and was promptly banned for suggesting that the crash is going to be very fast indeed, because we are killing all the life we depend upon for our own with pollution – never mind climate change.
He has marginalized himself. A more interesting writer is the blogger at 22 billion energy slaves but he has the same limitation, a vested interest in peak oil and a slow economic collapse.
When I first began understanding how serious and imminent the issues of climate, peak oil, over-extraction, overpopulation and pollution are, I was shocked at the enormous gaps between the various groups who subscribed to one or another of those converging catastrophes. To me they are all part of the same problem, but it is rare to find people who make the connection. Ecology was destroyed as a discipline long ago and specialization has reigned supreme, deflecting any comprehension or action.
…And then there are the professional greens who are using climate and saving endangered species and forests for personal gain or glory…plus there are those that the Unabomber despised as described here:
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2010/02/unabombers-writings-raise-uneasy-ethical-questions/
Kaczynski’s manifesto argues that the leftist liberals who present themselves as rebels are, in fact, obedient servants of the dominant society – a symptom of “oversocialization.” He singles out “university intellectuals” as prime examples.
Apostolidès, who says he wouldn’t kill a fly, finds the criticism “absolutely appropriate.”
‘Our words have no power’
“It’s the problem of scholars, even artists: Our words have no power. We think we are changing the world – particularly on the left,” he said, and paused. “You accept your symbolic castration – that your writing will take time to have a modest influence on your contemporaries.”
Now I have stopped worrying about all the flailing and blather. All our words have made zero difference, the pillage of the earth continues unabated.
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:32 pm
Gail, I agree about the nature of the “left” and have recently been reading Chris Hedges’ book, “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.” Hedges saves his worst criticism for the lefties and longs for the days of real revolutionaries who would lay down their lives for a cause. I can only read one of the dispatches at a time because it makes me so angry and so depressed I’m immobile for a few hours. I feel like I’ve wasted my life and now it’s too late.
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:46 pm
As for climate change, I think JMG’s position is that on January 1 of each year, roll one 10-sided die. The number that turns up is the number of percent worse (1-10%) the climate will be that year vs. the year before.
As for religion, JMG’s practice is fairly standard nature spirituality. Geomancy is pretty fundamental to it. I’m sure even the Nenets use some form of it.
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:47 pm
BC Nurse Prof,
How have you wasted your life?
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:50 pm
Heh, I admire Chris Hedges tremendously – he is a brilliant writer and has risked his life and been through brutal hardships to bring the truth to life. (I met him around this time last year at an Occupy Princeton talk he gave which I filmed and put on youtube.)
Perhaps most endearing is that he is as susceptible as any of us to delusional hope, as demonstrated (KathyC and Michele I think will both appreciate this) by the fact that he recently produced his fourth child and when asked why (given that he regularly predicts a horrendous future) he fell back on “faith”. Which has to be the most selfish thing ever…but he’s certainly not alone. You can add Naomi Klein to that list, she had a baby last summer.
BILL MOYERS: In one of your earlier books, you wrote that, quote, “We stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilization blink out, and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity.” Do you really think that’s ahead?
CHRIS HEDGES: If there’s not a radical change in the way we relate to the ecosystem that sustains life, yes. And I see, if you ask me to put my money down, I see nothing that indicates that we’re preparing to make that change.
BILL MOYERS: But here’s another paradox then, you present us with a lot of paradoxes. You just– you and your wife a year and a half ago had your fourth child. How can you introduce another life into so forlorn a future?
CHRIS HEDGES: That’s not an easy question to answer. I look at my youngest son, and his favorite book is “Out of the Blue,” which are pictures of narwhales and porpoises and dolphins. And I think, “It is most probable that within your lifetime, every single one of those sea creatures will be dead.” And in so many ways, I feel that I have to fight for them.
That even if I fail, they’ll say, “You know, at least my dad tried.” We’ve deeply betrayed this next generation on so many levels. And I can’t argue finally, you know, given the empirical facts in front of us that hope is rational. And I retreat, like so many people in my book, into faith. And a belief that resistance and fighting for life is meaningful even if all of the outward signs around us deny that possibility.
BILL MOYERS: That faith in human beings?
CHRIS HEDGES: Faith in that fighting for the sanctity of life is always worth it. Because you know, if we don’t fight, then we are finished. Then we signed our own death sentence. And Camus writes about this in “The Rebel,” that I think resistance becomes a kind of way of protecting our own worth as an individual, our own dignity, our own self-respect. And I think resistance does always leave open the possibility of change. And if we don’t resist, then we’ve essentially extinguished that hope.
January 3rd, 2013 at 3:56 pm
Whilst I agree with all those points, Gail, what is even more ridiculous, is when people like you and Kathy C.. (who complain about personal attacks) make personal attacks upon one of the LEAST harmful people on the entire effing internet. Just seems like the most petty meanness and spite to me.
I mean, how many JMGs are equivalent to the Koch Brothers, in terms of damage to the biosphere ?
I think you need to reassess your sense of proportion. There’s zillions of totally evil rabid lying c**ts out there. If you’ve got vitriol to spare, why not throw it at some of them ?
For all any of us know, JMGs and others slow crash scenario may turn out to be correct, there may be remnants of civilisation in 100 years time, just as remnants of the Maya survived the crash of their civilisation, and Rome staggered on for centuries. It all depends upon what happens, and there are too many variables to be certain.
If the global human population crashes by a billion or three or four, say, this year or next, that means the CO2 emissions drop. That changes the future. That could happen. It could happen by way of a global pandemic, or by way of financial meltdown, or by way of a natural disaster, such as volcanic activity, or nuclear war. Etc.
Anybody who says it definitely will, or it definitely won’t, is not to be taken seriously.
If we just project forward current likely trends, BAU, then I think Guy’s scenario, NTE, over the next few decades, is highly likely. I can’t see how it can be avoided. It’s not inevitable. People could act decisively, to change the future.
But it does not look as if they will, and with the alarming signs from the methane, etc, and so little time….
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:04 pm
Can’t say I’m a fan of C. Hedges. He wrote for NYT, which is a nasty propaganda rag. Was in favour of Bush’s Iraq invasion. Did a lot of damage to the Occupy movement by his unwarranted accusations against them of violence. Yes, he’s got a great gift with words. I don’t trust him. I see him as a valve for middle class indignation, to stop any real change. Just my personal opinion.
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:08 pm
ulvgugl,
Didn’t somebody say to ignore temper tantrums?
Oh well, here’s the thing. Don’t preach to me.
1. I spend a LOT more energy and time fighting the real assholes, such as the Koch brothers, than I do posting comments about sloppy minds like JMG.
see this: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/03/koch-victims-vindicated-in-weekly.html
and this
http://www.cardboardroses.org/
that’s me in there, going back to court Jan. 16 for the 5th time. oh, and then there’s this: http://grist.org/climate-energy/behind-the-scenes-at-a-big-mountaintop-mining-protest-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
I’m not just talking the talk.
2. We ARE going to have a fast crash, because in fact, we ARE IN a fast crash. It’s not only inevitable. It’s ALREADY HAPPENING! Very few people like to admit it, however.
Which, I meant to mention last comment, is why I really appreciate our host, Guy McPherson. He is one of the very few that doesn’t dance around our prognosis which is sort of like the earthly equivalent of pancreatic cancer.
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:19 pm
Gail, I don’t know if you saw that I did watch Sarah’s Key. The story of course is powerful, but it goes beyond the actual story to ask the question “who is responsible” over and over, just as The Grey Zone asks the question “what is moral”. Thanks for recommending it. A very thought provoking movie.
One that should also be watched by Chris Hedges is perhaps Sophie’s Choice. What do you do when circumstances or Nazi guards make you choose to lose this child, or that child and if you don’t you lose both children? Note above Anthony’s comment earlier I currently work in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There due to the number of unwanted babies being thrown alive into the landfill outside of town that several NGO’s have set up surveillance operations. The situation was described to me as the “landfill is full of babies”. Brings to mind the quote I read somewhere to the effect of “the future has arrived, it just isn’t equitably distributed yet”.
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:20 pm
@ Arthur Johnson …fairly standard nature spirituality…
Yes, indeed. You walk out of your hut/tent/cottage in the morning, three geese, high in a clear sky, call out, something inside you resonates, and it’s good, good to be alive and in the world, a good day to set out…
That’s magic, right brain, mythos. It has absolutely nothing to do with intellectual knowledge, reason, rationality, logic, left brain, logos, graphs, numbers, calculations, or any of that stuff, it’s of the heart, not of the head.
All little children understand magic, it makes them smile. Only stuffy boring foolish adults despise it and think they know better. Magic is therapeutic, it brings left and right hemispheres together, so that we become wiser, better integrated. The lovely video that Tom posted, of the teacher, was a great example. Although I have to say, I cringed at the ‘saying grace at the meal table’ bit. I can do without that. But there we are. if that’s where the guy find his thing, that’s okay imo, so long as he doesn’t impose it upon anyone else.
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:45 pm
Arthur, I suppose I feel guilt in larger measure than most, probably due to my mother, I don’t know. We’re all guilty of not stopping this when it could have been stopped. I was young then and smart and healthy and I could have done so much! But I was interested in boys and horses and having fun. I was thinking about this recently, and I thought that if I had had even ONE mentor, like Wade Davis had, a mentor who told me what was possible, and had faith in me, and told me that I could do something, I would have jumped at the chance. I think.
Maybe I say this because I don’t want it to be my own fault that I didn’t take up a research career in biology early in my life. I had all the credentials and didn’t do it.
Once I came home and excitedly told my mother that myself and one other student in 8th grade, a boy, were battling it out every week to outdo each other on the quizzes in algebra. I was so excited! I loved algebra and I loved competing with him for the highest mark. She looked horrified and said, “You don’t do that! You don’t get high marks! The boys won’t like you!” Well, I didn’t know what to say to that. I mean, it’s your mother, right? Is there something to this or not? It bothered me for a while, but eventually I went back to competing with him for marks. I don’t even remember if I got a better grade in the class or not, but I do remember the look on her face. Maybe stuff like this did something to me. As a child she used to dress me up in a one piece bathing suit and a home made sash across the front saying, “Miss Universe 1970″. I hated it. She took pictures. I went on to study philosophy. I bought a t-shirt that said, “Philosophy – I’m in it for the money.”
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:46 pm
hm, my earlier comment is mired in moderation, maybe too many links so here i the first half:
ulvgugl,
Didn’t somebody say to ignore temper tantrums?
Oh well, here’s the thing. Don’t preach to me.
1. I spend a LOT more energy and time fighting the real assholes, such as the Koch brothers, than I do posting comments about sloppy minds like JMG.
see this: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/03/koch-victims-vindicated-in-weekly.html
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:46 pm
2nd part:
and this
http://www.cardboardroses.org/
that’s me in there, going back to court Jan. 16 for the 5th time.
January 3rd, 2013 at 4:47 pm
3rd part:
oh, and then there’s this: http://grist.org/climate-energy/behind-the-scenes-at-a-big-mountaintop-mining-protest-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
I’m not just talking the talk.
2. We ARE going to have a fast crash, because in fact, we ARE IN a fast crash. It’s not only inevitable. It’s ALREADY HAPPENING! Very few people like to admit it, however.
Which, I meant to mention last comment, is why I really appreciate our host, Guy McPherson. He is one of the very few that doesn’t dance around our prognosis which is sort of like the earthly equivalent of pancreatic cancer.
January 3rd, 2013 at 5:03 pm
KathyC, I did see that you watched that, and Sophie’s choice was always a tough one for me, since I have a daughter named Sophie.
BC Nurse, don’t ever feel guilty. Michele/M is right – our genes dictate an overwhelming desire to multiply. My thought is that our fate was sealed when we discovered fire:
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/06/i-blame-prometheus.html
or as Lady Gaga said, You Were Born This Way, Baby!
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/06/god-makes-no-mistakes-you-were-born.html
January 3rd, 2013 at 5:16 pm
@ Ulvfugl
I’m a fan of Chris Hedges writing, but he like everyone, has his faults (failure to question 9/11, having four children, being associated with Christianity, being too vocal against the black block, etc) but I don’t believe he ever supported the Iraq invasion, unless you’re confusing him with Hitchens. However, the very criticism you are leveling against Gail and Kathy C in regards to JMG, are you not in turn, committing towards one of the staunchest proponents against corporatism in the wider public domain? I would get down on my knees and pray, for the day that his indignation represented middle class values….at least in America. I think that Hedges is a bit of late bloomer in regards to collapse, but his writing continues to evolve, and while I don’t agree with everything he stands for, I do trust his moral compass…….as I do yours.
January 3rd, 2013 at 5:21 pm
I know we are in the crash, Gail, I have said it many times, over and over again, for years and years. Fast or slow, depends upon how you define the words, and what you are pointing to at the time. The American economy ? The entire global economy ? Civilisation ? The human species ? The entire global ecosystem ?
When I talk about the crash, the collapse, what I mean is the Earth systems that sustain life, in other words, the biosphere, Lovelock’s Gaia, the kind of world that we found when we evolved, before we began wrecking it.
January 3rd, 2013 at 5:21 pm
@BC Nurse “I can only read one of the dispatches at a time because it makes me so angry and so depressed I’m immobile for a few hours. I feel like I’ve wasted my life and now it’s too late.”
I posed this question before: is this kind of reaction not really “your own”, but rather a manifestation of 10s, 100s, maybe 1000s of previous generations of slaves/serfs/sheep that came before us? That with active & brutal “herd management” from the reigning state, traits such as submission & depression may have conferred certain competitive advantages that provided a higher degree of survival?
Rather than become upset as I discovered the truth of how our world operates, I only wanted to learn more in order to master the con. In many ways, I typically have the same reaction as portrayed in the movie ‘Patton’: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”
This of course probably makes me an anomaly ie a sure target for the crown eager to perform a little hanging, drawing & quartering to show the rubes how it’s done when one questions state authority and isn’t exactly in the club. So how did this kind of trait survive such a ruthless winnowing? Who knows.
However, it should seem obvious that the kind of resignation demonstrated here on a daily basis clearly plays into the hands of the elite. After all, it’s part & parcel of their training in the art of human governance begun early in their lives: wear down the serfs, and back up your acts with violence. (All backed by the law, ‘natch, as the state is sole arbiter with respect to the critical monopoly of force.)
Lucid D gets what’s goin’ down. I’m just trying to probe a little bit to see if one can see beyond this age and see the pattern that has always existed.
January 3rd, 2013 at 5:44 pm
@ Daniel
Someone posted an article from him re support for Iraq invasion somewhere, couple of years ago, doesn’t matter, not important, who cares, it’s water under the bridge.
Yes, good point, Hedges and Chomsky are seen as representing the Left, in USA, but that’s because the whole spectrum is so distorted to the Far Right, they’d be considered mild, tame, mainstream centre in Europe, in my estimation.
As for Greer, people here have ‘accused’ me of being a fan, jeez, I see him as a rather sweet old hippy who enjoys reading history books, I don’t often read his blog, but when I do, he has good stuff to say, yes, he’s a bit stuffy and pompous, but he’s trying to be an Archdruid, ffs
It’s basically fake. Like setting up as a magician as Alan Moore has done. I don’t see any harm in that. It’s no different to what George Carlin did or what Billy Connolly does, as a comedian. Subvert the standard social persona, invent a new one. Be whatever you effing want to be.
Fwiw, the druids were invented in Wales, in the 19thc. Nobody knows what the REAL druids were into. They had to reinvent the whole thing. So what ? They make new stone circles and have poetry competitions and singing and dress up in fancy clothes and whatnot, and generally enjoy themselves. I don’t find anything objectionable or foolish about that.
The REAL druids must have invented their rituals, originally, way back, same as all human religions and cultural traditions must have been invented by someone at sometime. I just think it’s pathetic for people here to rubbish those people at JMGs blog, who are trying to grow vegetables and live a moral life, when they could be rubbishing the bastards who attend Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Skull and Bones, and all the rest, who really ARE evil…. anyway, hardly worth discussing, is it.
January 3rd, 2013 at 6:03 pm
Over on another blog I am arguing with Nate Hagens of The Oildrum fame. Some of Guy’s articles and lectures have been posted there. He thinks Guy and the AMEG are way off, telling me that he have friends who are climate scientists who submit stuff to IPCC and they think the AMEG analysis is just kooky. I have asked him several times how these scientists explain the sea ice loss this summer, the 1 km methane plumes, the Greenland melt and all the other facts on the ground that keep surprising climate scientists. Seems to me these prominent climate scientists as he calls them need to get back to work on their models and shut up unless they can prove these are anomalies not indications that climate change is going non-linear.
If geomancy works at predicting things why would JMG who writes a whole book on it not have a better fix on how the future is going to unfold?
Who is right about how dire things have become and the fact that we are heading into uncharted, unmodeled, unpredicted territory is presented by this chart http://neven1.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f03a1e37970b017744cf5360970d-pi
January 3rd, 2013 at 6:22 pm
Not exactly sure what you are getting at, B9K9, but I’ve been reading the comments following Kingsnorth’s essay, where one Lara is giving it some vigorous stick…
We’re trapped in this awful dilemma, wishy-washy green liberals, raised in the ideas of Ghandi, MLK, Mandela, violence breeds violence, as John Lennon said, ‘they’ want to goad you into violence, because that is ‘their’ speciality, that’s what ‘they’ are best at, the area where they know they can always win, because they have the best gear, the training, the resources, the laws, the prisons, everything, set up ready, all in their favour…. so it’s got to be a serious tactical error to go into battle, where the rules of the game make it inevitable that you will lose… which means you must select other circumstances, which give you the advantage…
So what do you do ? Are we justified, legally, morally, in fighting, to save ourselves, our planet, in the face of imminent extinction ? If so, is there actually anything effective that we can do ? I know D. Jensen has raised the question, and then kinda copped out, saying he’s only a writer, and not very healthy. I can use the same excuse, I’m unhealthy, and much too old to fight on the barricades. Anyway, where the f**k are the barricades these days ? In the old days, people knew what to do and where to go. March to Moscow or to Paris. How to locate the heart of the beast ? and then, as has been mentioned, most people don’t even understand wtf this is all about anyway….
Comment 36
The Rendulic Rule set the legal precedent for the importance of the subjective test in determining a case of Military Necessity.
In October 1944, Generaloberst Lothar Rendulic was Armed Forces Commander North, which included command of Nazi Forces in Norway. After World War II, he was prosecuted for, among other charges, issuing an order “for the complete destruction of all shelter and means of existence in, and the total evacuation of the entire civilian population of the northern Norwegian province of Finmark…” where entire villa villages were destroyed, bridges and highways bombed, and port installations wrecked, hundreds died from exposure or perished at sea, while still others were summarily shot for refusing to leave their homeland; which left some 61,000 men, women, and children homeless, starving and destitute. He plead to ‘Military Necessity’ at Nuremberg and was acquitted. He presented evidence that the Norwegian population would not voluntarily evacuate. (The Hostages Trial: Trial of Wilhelm List and Others; United States Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 8 July 1947 – 19 February 1948)
International law has justified, acquitted or given lenient sentences to violent and non-violent actions of civil disobedience, which included murder, kidnapping, arson, etc:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/discuss/7277/P32/
January 3rd, 2013 at 6:38 pm
@ kathy C
If you don’t mind, which blog are referring to, I would be interested in chiming in…….
January 3rd, 2013 at 7:09 pm
Daniel http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/America2Point0/ You will have to subscribe and be accepted – the list is not always open for new members but is currently last I heard.
January 3rd, 2013 at 7:35 pm
Completely off topic, re druids, this is the guy who started the revival, of whom, it must be said, JMG must always remain a somewhat dull, pale, although much more reputable and respectable, imitation.
Edward Williams, Ned of Glamorgan or Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) was the creator and father of the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain…He was a stonemason by craft and travelled throughout Wales and to London. There, he came into contact with the Gwyneddigion Society and began to move in cultural and radical circles. Iolo Morganwg was a genius – one of the founder members of the Unitarian movement in Wales, a political radical who supported the French Revolution, a pacifist, an antiquarian, a hymn-writer and an able lyrical poet who called himself ‘The Bard of Liberty’. But he was also a dreamer and a forger. He was addicted to the drug laudanum and this probably affected his perception of the world. The creation of the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain was part of his dream and vision for Wales and Glamorgan and he managed to convince the scholars of his own time that it was a totally authentic institution. But why did he go to such trouble? There are a number of possible reasons:…..
When Iolo died in 1826 Wales had scarcely begun to fathom the full nature and extent of his invention and deceit.
Hahaha, even today… I wonder if the readers of JMG’s blog appreciate the genealogy back to this rascal, who burned his dead son on a funeral pyre, and thus British law was changed to make cremation legal, amongst other extraordinary things….
http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/884/
January 3rd, 2013 at 7:59 pm
@ Kathy C
Thanks for the link. I had lost track of Jay Hansen after his war socialism site, but then again, I haven’t really paid all that much attention to his writing sense around 2005, but I have been curious what he’s been up to. Thanks again.
January 3rd, 2013 at 8:52 pm
@ Kathy C
As to why your voice along with all the rest, are being drowned out….
From David Spratt:
“The problem is now so big and action required is so far outside business- and politics-as-usual that for most of the climate movement the only way to be “relevant” is to not describe the problem as it is, and not describe the scale and urgency of the solutions. We have achieved a collective cognitive dissonance where the real challenge we face is excluded from discourse. This is our Climate Policy Paradigm.
Most eNGOs and activists consciously seek not to specifically engage about the scale of the problem and the urgency of the action required because it is not an immediately winnable goal or kosher inside the political beltway and in the daily news cycle. This Catch-22 means that what really needs to be done is rarely articulated. It’s pretty crazy when you know (on the present political and economic settings) that we are heading towards an apocalypse and the public discourse is so deluded that you are excluded or marginalised for saying so.”
Sound familiar………?
January 3rd, 2013 at 8:52 pm
Geomancy and such are foolish pursuits. Seeking them may bring some modicum of success in some instances, but such diversions – which they are – will distract one and lead one astray.
Such abilities have been described very long ago:
Srimad Bhagavatam
Canto 11, Mahâmantra 2, Chapter 15: Mystical Perfection: the Siddhis
(3) The Supreme Lord said: ‘The masters of yoga speak of eighteen mystic perfections [siddhis] and meditations [leading to them], with eight of them abiding primary in Me while ten manifest [as secondary] from the quality [of goodness]. (4-5) The ability to get, as for the form, into the smallest [animâ], the biggest [mahimâ] or the lightest [laghimâ relative to garimâ, the heaviest], to acquire whatever material object [prâpti], the ability to enjoy sensually whatever can be seen or heard [prâkâmya], to have the upperhand in employing the forces [îs'itâ or îs'itvâ], to be in control – unobstructed by the modes – by means of magic [vas'itvâ] and to answer to any desire that seeks [His] favor [kâmâvasâyitâ], are the eight mystical perfections, o gentle one. Know them as the ones that originally belong to Me. (6-7) In this body not to be plagued by hunger and thirst and such, to hear and see things far away, to be transported with the speed of mind, to assume any form at will, to enter into the bodies of others, to die at will, to witness the sporting [of the heavenly girls] with the gods, to be of perfect accomplishment as one likes, and to have one’s commands fulfilled unimpeded [are the ten secondary siddhis]. (8-9) To know the past, the present and the future, to be free from the dualities, to know the minds of others, to check the potency of fire, the sun, water, poison and so on and not to be conquered by others are the perfections that are described as the result of concentrating in yoga. Please learn now from Me by means of which type of meditation what perfection occurs.
January 3rd, 2013 at 9:06 pm
Additional bolded section
(3) The Supreme Lord said: ‘The masters of yoga speak of eighteen mystic perfections [siddhis] and meditations [leading to them], with eight of them abiding primary in Me while ten manifest [as secondary] from the quality [of goodness]. (4-5) The ability to get, as for the form, into the smallest [animâ], the biggest [mahimâ] or the lightest [laghimâ relative to garimâ, the heaviest], to acquire whatever material object [prâpti], the ability to enjoy sensually whatever can be seen or heard [prâkâmya], to have the upperhand in employing the forces [îs'itâ or îs'itvâ], to be in control – unobstructed by the modes – by means of magic [vas'itvâ] and to answer to any desire that seeks [His] favor [kâmâvasâyitâ], are the eight mystical perfections, o gentle one. Know them as the ones that originally belong to Me. (6-7) In this body not to be plagued by hunger and thirst and such, to hear and see things far away, to be transported with the speed of mind, to assume any form at will, to enter into the bodies of others, to die at will, to witness the sporting [of the heavenly girls] with the gods, to be of perfect accomplishment as one likes, and to have one’s commands fulfilled unimpeded [are the ten secondary siddhis]. (8-9) To know the past, the present and the future, to be free from the dualities, to know the minds of others, to check the potency of fire, the sun, water, poison and so on and not to be conquered by others are the perfections that are described as the result of concentrating in yoga. Please learn now from Me by means of which type of meditation what perfection occurs.
January 3rd, 2013 at 9:51 pm
B9K9 Says: However, it should seem obvious that the kind of resignation demonstrated here on a daily basis clearly plays into the hands of the elite.
Class war can take a back seat:
With the heat, and nothing to eat,
And the radiation,
That’s not resignation—
Extinction includes the elite.
January 4th, 2013 at 12:38 am
surreally beautiful funny intelligent talented freethinker talks about how ‘dog’ is funny as in a bad joke:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op0kJ0N0p0M
January 4th, 2013 at 1:01 am
Snip from KathyC post above:
“telling me that he have friends who are climate scientists who submit stuff to IPCC”
A: Fallacious reasoning as it is an appeal to authority.
B: These are the same scientists being published in Nature etc. . . for the last 20 years whose climate predictions for at least 5 years now been shown to be consistently very much incorrect. The more they admit to being in error the more these so-called experts are seen as
being the experts.
C. Scientists such as Hansen, Wadhams and Wasdell whose predictions have been proven to be accurate and who publicly call for drastic change are still being labeled alarmist.
D. Society and tptb won’t admit humans are going over the cliff until we hit bottom.
@kathyC: Thanks for commenting on my comment. Best, Anthony
January 4th, 2013 at 1:58 am
BtD…..Brilliant yet again
January 4th, 2013 at 3:35 am
Daniel, thanks for the words from Spratt, yes that does sound familiar and sounds like exactly what is going on
And yes, war is socialism wasn’t my bag either….things are better.
January 4th, 2013 at 4:21 am
Things get interesting
Mississippi River Could Close to Barge Traffic Within Days
By Josh SanburnJan. 04, 2013
Drought may cause traffic on the Mississippi River – which is used to transport everything from grain to petroleum to coal – to a halt as soon as this weekend. And the stoppage could last for months.
The lack of precipitation throughout much of the country has brought about drought conditions that the National Climatic Data Center has called the worst since the 1950s. Water levels on the river are lowest in a 180-mile stretch between St. Louis and Cairo, Ill., sometimes referred to as the Middle Mississippi. That’s where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been dredging to maintain a 9-foot channel to allow barges and boats to pass. Most vessels can’t travel in waters any shallower.
Read more: http://business.time.com/2013/01/04/mississippi-river-could-close-to-barge-traffic-within-days/#ixzz2H0LmIEB9
January 4th, 2013 at 4:35 am
Post on Naked Capitalism on how the banks cover up their illegal behaviour on mortgage foreclosures with all sorts of technical trickery that make it impossible for the ordinary person to understand what’s really going on.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/occ-foreclosure-file-reviewer-independent-reviews-were-controlled-by-banks-which-suppressed-any-findings-of-harm-to-foreclosed-homeowner.html
January 4th, 2013 at 6:15 am
Hahaha, for someone like myself, who takes an interest in the philosophy of consciousness, ontology, epistemology, and who suffers from CH, ( which has been described as the most painful condition it is possible for a human to have, not certain that is correct, not having endured them all
but wiki says it, so it must be true, eh )
and having spent four months of constant attacks, often hourly, trying different drugs that didn’t help, and only now having had four weeks of relief… believe me, I know precisely what it is like to ‘be’ in a state where nothing whatsoever exists except pure pain which has obliterated all other knowing, including the experiencer of the pain…
I cannot imagine how there could possibly be anything worse. Nothing could be more horrible. And after an hour, it stops, and then, after an hour or two of recovering, it starts again. So how does the ‘thing’ called an ‘I’, a ‘me’ cope with that ? I mean, the obvious is to attempt to avoid it by any means possible. But what means ? Suicide ?
Hahahaha….
‘Killing’ ‘me’…. does not solve the problem, does it. Not if you really look into it closely. The pain obliterates ‘me’, and leaves only ‘pain’, as the final reality….
What would happen, if I took an overdose, or cut my wrists, would that be a guarantee, that I would be released forever from suffering ? In Kathy C.’s simple reductionist materialist Universe, where she finds eternal peace in blissful annihilation, perhaps.
Personally, I think that’s just another Faith, a belief.
So I accept pain, as teacher, as being. No me, then nothing to be avoided.
Anyway, this is really most fascinating…
In his recently published book, Phi, Tononi narrates a literary tour of his theory of consciousness through a fictionalized protagonist: Galileo. In one of the last chapters, Galileo encounters a diabolical machine that surgically manipulates the brain to produce pure sensations of pain. Tononi calls it “the only real and eternal hell.” The creator of the machine asks: “What is the perfect pain? Can pain be made to last forever? Did pain exist, if it leaves no memory? And is there something worse than pain itself?”
For George Wilson, a Scottish chemist who had his foot amputated in 1843, before the dissemination of anesthesia, pain gave way to something seemingly beyond physical sensation, something articulable only in spiritual, nearly existential terms. Wilson described his experience in a letter several years after his surgery:
Of the agony it occasioned I will say nothing. Suffering so great as I underwent cannot be expressed in words, and fortunately cannot be recalled. The particular pangs are now forgotten, but the blank whirlwind of emotion, the horror of great darkness, and the sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close upon despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my heart, I can never forget, however gladly I would do so.
While subduing consciousness is the most urgent aspect of Tononi’s work, he is especially animated when discussing consciousness in its fullest, brightest state. In his office in Madison, he described a hypothetical device called a “qualiascope” that could visualize consciousness the same way telescopes visualize light waves, or thermal goggles visualize heat. The more integrated the information—that is, the more conscious the brain—the brighter the qualiascope would glow. Using the device in an operating room, you would watch a patient’s consciousness fade to a dull pulse. If he woke up mid-operation, you might see a flicker.
But if you turned your gaze away from the operating room, you would gain an astonishing perspective on the universe. “The galaxy would look like dust,” Tononi told me. “Within this empty, dusty universe, there would be true stars. And guess what? These stars would be every living consciousness. It’s really true. It’s not just a poetic image. The big things, like the sun, would be nothing compared to what we have.”
VISUALIZING CONSCIOUSNESS
In an experiment on vegetative patients, researchers pulsed one subject’s brain with electromagnetic waves on three different days as the subject emerged from a coma. The resulting EEG patterns reflected Giulio Tononi’s theory of consciousness: they became more complex and widespread as the patient became more conscious.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/awakening/309188/?single_page=true
January 4th, 2013 at 7:10 am
I have to applaud Guy for his decision to walk away from Empire. Guy was one of their academic stars and a fine, upstanding citizen of the Empire before he went good.
If this is the best the agents provocateur on this board can do then I choose to ignore them. You know who they are. Perhaps post limiting may help.
January 4th, 2013 at 7:16 am
Daniel, thanks!
January 4th, 2013 at 7:41 am
@ Robin
Geomancy and such are foolish pursuits. Seeking them may bring some modicum of success in some instances, but such diversions – which they are – will distract one and lead one astray…. and then quotes, re siddhis, etc
Don’t quite agree with that. All the ancient divination systems and traditions are really methods of tuning in to what, in more modern terminology, is called the Unconscious.
When Freud and Jung ( okay, there were earlier versions ) came up with what, in their view, was the scientific division of the mind into the Conscious and the Unconscious, the Unconscious ( with all its mysterious compelling forces, dreams, intuitions, etc ) was merely a replacement term for what had earlier been conceived of as the realm of the gods and spirits and various intangible entities and influences that people have been aware of since the beginning of time.
Everyone recognises that the Unconscious mind knows vastly more at any given moment that the Conscious. That’s so obvious it hardly needs saying. Conscious mind is a tiny bubble floating on something much greater. You try to remember someone’s name, and you can’t. Sometime later, it suddenly pops into consciousness. The Unconscious mind had worked on the problem and provides the answer for you.
All the methods of divination and magic are methods of probing the Unconscious. They are, in fact, psychology, but framed in the language and imagery of earlier times, long before modern psychology was invented. That does not make them, necessarily, either obsolete or lacking in effectiveness. Nor is it a guarantee of their merit. Imo, they can be viewed as of considerable interest, rather as herbal medicine from archaic traditions can be viewed likewise.
As for the siddhis, I think they prove that what I called above, the reductionist, materialist, view of consciousness is incorrect. But they come about as a result of long practice of meditation, which, modern neuroscience has shown, changes the structure and functioning of the brain. Also, they are investigated phenomenologically, by direct subjective experience.
So, for the case to be made, in modern scientific terms, the siddhis have to be demonstrated, via logos, with evidence. I believe that, to some extent, they have been. The covert US and USSR agencies did masses of classified research in that area, Remote Viewing, Telepathy, and so forth, and there’s plenty of stuff in the public domain as well. But, as we have seen on this blog, it’s not really the evidence that’s the problem. People have massive prejudice and difficulty when it comes to moving their mental paradigms and worldviews. Evidence hardly comes into it at all.
I find the insistence upon science, reason, logic, rationality, intellect, left brain, logos, as the only valid way of knowing, is incredibly BORING. It’s scientism. As tedious as biblical literalism. The best scientists recognise that fantasy, intuition, dreams, imagination, art, poetry, music, the mystical, mythos, right brain, the realm of the Unconscious where divination goes fishing, is important… not just for science, but for everyone, for completeness, as a human being…
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
January 4th, 2013 at 7:48 am
@ ogardener
You know who they are.
Please clarify. Who are the ‘you’ and who are the ‘they’ ? Dark opaque hints don’t help.
January 4th, 2013 at 8:03 am
Timothy Leary – How to Operate Your Brain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQq_XmhBTgg
January 4th, 2013 at 8:06 am
David Wasdell uses an Apollo-Gaia parable to explain how climate modelling can lead to results that are completely misleading.
http://youtu.be/RbY9Oyi2VW0
The Climate Cheetah – 5 1/2 minute allegory to explain why the IPCC keeps being so wrong.
January 4th, 2013 at 8:12 am
@ulvfugl “Not exactly sure what you are getting at B9K9″
My point is to allow yourself to be neither defeated nor goaded into action. As many have observed over the years, they have all the tools, expertise and resources at the ready to beat your ass till Tuesday.
IMO, the key is to follow your own path and try and keep as low a profile as possible. Know the score and avoid playing the game. If you find yourself questioning your past, it’s most likely because you’re finally closing in on the truth.
Academics are prime targets for this kind of introspection, because they are routed into ‘prestigious careers’ early on when first identified. It’s only later when they are firmly co-opted in the service of empire that many wake up only to realize what they are. Of course, by that time, they are too old to serve as any threat, so no one cares if they muddle along, contemplating the end.
It’s the younger ones who are the threat. If they aren’t part of the club, aren’t big/brutal enough to be hired as thugs (cops/military), aren’t charismatic enough to play the important ecclesiastical rites, aren’t smart enough to be academics/(finance)ministers, or submissive enough to be incorporated as drones into the bureaucracy, watch out.
January 4th, 2013 at 8:24 am
@ B9K9
For sure
January 4th, 2013 at 9:11 am
@ ogardener
erm, non sequitur ?
January 4th, 2013 at 9:34 am
Good quick read here:
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/
artwork depicting our dilemma, poignant photo and talking about the Achilles heel of civilization – the electrical grid.
January 4th, 2013 at 10:11 am
‘We do not make babies for themselves but for ourselves. We need them to justify our lives and it takes an incredible (almost impossible force) to resist the very complicated multifaceted “call” to reproduce at an age when we are, among other things, wired to reproduce and forced by our peers to do so (all the young women around me who choose to stay without child are CONSTANTLY harassed by almost everybody and their justifications only make them more monstruous in the eyes of the others)’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqKG-Djfk5w
January 4th, 2013 at 10:25 am
B9K9,
It’s only later when they [Academics] are firmly co-opted in the service of empire that many wake up only to realize what they are. Of course, by that time, they are too old to serve as any threat, so no one cares if they muddle along, contemplating the end.
This is so true, but it’s not only academics (though they are prominent members of this “club”). It’s not uncommon to hear people (particularly men) in their 60′s and 70′s ardently “telling it like it really is” because they don’t have to be afraid anymore, since “there isn’t much TPTB can do to me now; they can’t take away my Social Security and Medicare benefits”.
The problem is, because they remained silent until they’re old and all risk associated with speaking up disappears, nobody has any respect for them and so ignores them. The reason people often listen to, and respect, younger folks who do speak up is that it’s understood that they’re usually taking a risk, sometimes considerable risk, by doing so.
January 4th, 2013 at 11:33 am
Bushfires in Tasmania, record highs in Australia:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/man-feared-dead-at-least-80-properties-lost-in-tasmanian-bushfires-20130104-2c9c4.html
January 4th, 2013 at 11:46 am
Kathy C Says: Mississippi River Could Close to Barge Traffic Within Days
Ol’ Man River
Something has gone very wrong
Since so long ago in that song:
He once could deliver,
But now ol’ man river,
He’s no longer rolling along.
January 4th, 2013 at 12:56 pm
Teenagers take global warming to the courts:
http://technozoic.blogspot.ca/2012/05/inconvenient-lawsuit-teenagers-take.html
January 4th, 2013 at 1:21 pm
TVT – the vid covers a whole lot of territory on the conception question. With NTE looming the question becomes even more important.
January 4th, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Sometime later, it suddenly pops into consciousness.
It pops up to a certain level of the programming, into the mind. This information then modulates other aspects of the functioning of the mind in the meat robot. Consciousness illuminates minds with awareness. From the physical functioning of the meat robot one can deduce that its mind is functioning. Even the most complex of such functions do not imply that the meat robot has awareness. Neither telepathy, nor remote viewing nor predicting the future demonstrates that the meat robot has awareness. Any awareness that it has is only evident to the meat robot itself. Consciousness illuminates everything to the extent of the nature of the things, just as light illuminates a lump of dirt and an masterpiece of art.
A hardware brain with the complexity of a wetware brain is no different from the wetware brain in this regard. Thomas Warren Campbell and Raymond Kurzweil recognise this, and Kurzweil has written a book about it, The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Awareness is not characterisable and has no content, but by illuminating the programming structures in the mind – the concepts – is almost universally compellingly identified with the concepts and the process of their manipulation, the thought process. It cannot be observed or contemplated as an object, nor detected as an object: from the stance of an observer focusing on something outside oneself there is only a Void, the Sunyata, the Ein Sof. Even the idea that the meat robot has awareness is a concept. The observer has awareness of the concept, but does not experience the meat robot’s awareness. The ability to be aware of the difference between consciousness and its (apparent) content is one of the characteristics of the enlightened. It is not attained through intellection without first ditching the one’s baggage – including even every subtlest trace of baggage: reaching what in religious traditions call “purity of heart”.
January 4th, 2013 at 1:45 pm
Thanks for the lawsuit link, BC Nurse Prof, but it’s last May, couldn’t discover if it got anywhere, or what grounds of it got dismissed on, 2000+ comments, mostly idiotic, loading very slowly, so I never reached the end. I recall some children in Indonesia, I think, tried something similar. There must surely be some legal responsibility towards future generations, under national/international law ? But then enforcement is always another matter…
January 4th, 2013 at 1:49 pm
I came across this 2009 video http://ifyoulovethisplanet.org/?p=964. It brought back to my heart that after discovering Algalita and the Pacific garbage patch in 2008, I soon ended up taking anti-psychotic meds to sleep. I NEVER slept another night without meds after I started seeing the whales, the turtles and many many others entangled in tens of thousands of platic nets and all kinds of plastic (and metal, etc.) traps that are ending in the ocean. And after I saw all the mothers of so many species feeding their babies with toxic plastic debris. It was a STOP moment for this gal. I can go for days without sleeping. I think maybe some will die like that. They will stay awake until they fall. When our carbage overflows just a little bit more, we are in deep shit.
January 4th, 2013 at 1:55 pm
Hahahaha, Robin, you do come up with some convoluted nonsense, sometimes. But no wonder, if you take Kurzweil as an authority on the subject. I consider him to be a misguided crank.
Look, whether you’re an enlightened buddha, or an effing meat robot, (or whether they are the same thing), the conscious individual knows it can’t remember the name that it is trying to remember, and it knows, when later, that name pops into its conscious awareness. Nothing very complicated or hard to understand. Happens all the time, to everybody, every day. Just the way our minds work. Merely an example of the conscious mind sitting on top of the unconscious mind.
January 4th, 2013 at 2:19 pm
That’s enough to drive any sensitive person mad, m/m. The American Way, capitalism, selfishness, grab whatever you can, extract the profit, dump the mess onto everyone else, total obscene irresponsibility. And if they don’t like it, kill them….
Make everything into a commodity and mine it to destruction. Use the oceans as a sewer, use the atmosphere as a sewer, pollution and poisoning and environmental degradation don’t show up in neo-classical economics, they are invisible, just another aspect of the madness of a system that assumes infinite growth on a finite planet. They don’t show up in the accounts, they are ‘externalities’, somebody else’s problem.
The big ag and chem corporations make these chemicals and spread them around the land, and poison everybody, and corrupt the regulators and politicians, to escape controls, and the ordinary folk die unpleasant deaths from Parkinson’s disease.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130104101427.htm
January 4th, 2013 at 2:21 pm
Hey look – climate effects in the “mainstream” news!
http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-may-increase-volcanic-eruptions-144852255.htm
Maybe people are starting to get “it” (the information, i mean).
nah, just fillin’ ad space for the enviro crowd . . . (but “better late than never” i guess – now there’s a canard that no longer has relevance, eh?)
January 4th, 2013 at 2:30 pm
The above link is to a terribly written article where the so-called “expert” pulls the punch (here) just like the IPCC:
“Everybody knows that volcanoes have an impact on climate,” said study co-author Marion Jegen, a geophysicist at Geomar in Germany. “What we found was just the opposite.”
The findings were based only on natural changes in climate, so it’s not clear whether human-caused climate change would have the same impact, Jegen said. And if it did, she added, the effect wouldn’t be seen for centuries.
Note that “it’s not clear whether HUMAN-CAUSED climate change would have the same effect” – so i guess it depends on whether you’re cooking on an electric stove or one using propane or natural gas . . .
oh, and of course we won’t even see the effect since it’s a century or two out AND WE DON’T HAVE THAT LONG.
The article goes on and is worth the read nonetheless.
January 4th, 2013 at 3:04 pm
Here, this one is about the rampant spread of norovirus in Scotland:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-20903489
January 4th, 2013 at 3:58 pm
Tom, followed out the story on the Oak Ridge Gurus at the end of the article you linked to and found this.
http://www.powermag.com/business/The-Electric-Grid-Civilizations-Achilles-Heel_5252_p2.html
A fine read on the vulnerability of the grid
January 4th, 2013 at 4:33 pm
BC nurse thanks for the post on Tasmania. I have a nephew there but I don’t know what part he is in. Time to send him an e-mail …. Think of what fires are going to be like when we no longer have the fuel to fight them……
January 4th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
Yes, Kathy, the best place to move to would be right in the middle of where the latest fire swept through!
January 4th, 2013 at 4:41 pm
Glenn Greenwald : If you were a US leader, or an official of the National Security State, or a beneficiary of the private military and surveillance industries, why would you possibly want the war on terror to end? That would be the worst thing that could happen. It’s that war that generates limitless power, impenetrable secrecy, an unquestioning citizenry, and massive profit.
Just this week, a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration need not respond to the New York Times and the ACLU’s mere request to disclose the government’s legal rationale for why the President believes he can target US citizens for assassination without due process. Even while recognizing how perverse her own ruling was – “The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me” and it imposes “a veritable Catch-22″ – the federal judge nonetheless explained that federal courts have constructed such a protective shield around the US government in the name of terrorism that it amounts to an unfettered license to violate even the most basic rights: “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret“
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/war-on-terror-endless-johnson
January 4th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Went to an actual theatre to see a new movie and the trailers were really interesting. We went to see a romantic comedy, but the previews were for a science fiction type movie about a threat to human existence, and a witchy movie about the fight between good and evil for world domination, and another horror movie about a threat to a family. I thought, hmmmm, the masses won’t let themselves know what is coming, but they know it subconsciously.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the bread and circuses being offered to distract us from the horrors committed by the powers that be are so very substandard. I saw the stupidest movie that is getting rave reviews (from the New York Times!) and could only shake my head at how cheaply we’ve sold ourselves,
January 4th, 2013 at 5:59 pm
michele/montreal Says: …the Pacific garbage patch….
We’ll keep adding crap to this potion,
So I’m seeking support from this notion:
Since we know goddamn well
It’s all going to hell,
There’s no way we’re saving the ocean.
January 4th, 2013 at 6:06 pm
[michele/montreal don't follow this link]
Midway: Message from the Gyre
http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018×24
Use the arrows on the top right of the image or click the thumbnail images.
Bon Appétit
January 4th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
wildwoman Says: I thought, hmmmm, the masses won’t let themselves know what is coming, but they know it subconsciously.
A horror flick night once a week
Gives people the thrill that they seek,
But that’s not how they’ll feel
When it’s suddenly real—
They’ll probably totally freak.
January 4th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
past 2 weeks in upstate ny usa have been old time wicked winter weather, with frigid almost constantly below freezing temps, a good deal of wind and snow. i don’t buy guy’s dogmatic doom forecast of uninhabitability of large swaths of interior continents in a few years or extinction in less than 20 due to runaway agw. i buy the runaway agw, just not the timetable. i think it’s going to not be so quick. i don’t see it becoming the dominant force in collapse/extinction(?) for quite some time (which is not to say it won’t be getting worse and more alarming to those in need of a wake up call. it’s to say this fucked up american culture, global culture of dogmatic greed, delusion, and ignorance is not going to adapt well to coming to terms with natural limits and the surreality that a depleted and trashed gaia will be the main cause of the early phase of the die-off/back(?) from population overshoot. that along with the stupidity and insanity that currently rule our lives. wars i think may play a primary role in that early phase. too many fools with power playing a game of ‘last man standing’, blind unto the bitter end. no telling what might happen, if and when the next nuke takes out a big city.
i don’t believe tptb or ‘elites’ or whatever, as a whole, have that much more awareness than us ‘sheeple’. dogmatic ignorance respects no class boundaries. it’s not like ‘privileged’ children aren’t subjected to their own set of dogmatic limits on thought and behavior.
i wonder how such a foolish species came to be. likewise, how gaian life came to be. behind the beauty and awe and pleasure sometimes of life, is suffering and dying and then…. nothing more?
btd, i agree that free will is a delusion. genes and environment determine everything we ultimately do, it’s all reactionary. however, to fulfill our program/passion for life, we remain ever mindful to try to maximize happiness and minimize pain/trauma/loss. stuggling to survive and thrive to the bittersweet end. caught up in the delusion, being ‘meat robots’(dattadatta). life is struggle and paradox. it’s the most powerfully addictive drug, the way we struggle to survive and avoid dying. the delusion of free will is part of the addiction.
i can’t imagine any meaning in an existence without free will. i must buy into the delusion to perceive meaning and purpose in my life, to stay sane.
it’s all so very strange. it’s the curse of a big brain to perceive the absurdity. what kind of surreality is this when awareness makes a mockery of our lives, our ‘dreams’ and passions?
nature pulls all the strings, and we live macabre lives for no purpose??? fucking meat robots, alternately squealing/screaming in pleasure/pain, but mostly in-between, for some brief lifetime, a brief interlude of surreal consciousness in the midst of an eternity of blessed/cursed(?) nothingness. simply fucking surreal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe9kKf7SHco
January 4th, 2013 at 7:56 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOfkpu6749w
January 4th, 2013 at 9:06 pm
@ Kathy C and others
O.K…..apparently, I finally decided to pull my head out of my ass, and fully pay attention to the unbelievably absurd reality of the world’s 450 nuclear waste containment pools, which, will basically wipe humanity off the face of the earth, once the global power grid fails.
I know you (Kathy C) have been laboring to get this information out there, and I apologize for not truly heeding the warnings earlier, and frankly, I feel like an idiot for not having paid closer attention until now. Talk about cognitive dissonance, where in the hell have I been?
Holy effing shit!!!!!!!! I didn’t think it was possible to top non-linear rates of climatic change, eventually culminating in NTE. I thought we were staring down the greatest looming catastrophe on earth, but oh no…….it’s actually much worse than that.
Forgive me if this is old information for some of you.
Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without Us” came out in 2007, I just thumbed through it for the first time, where I came across an entire chapter dedicated to the potential threat of 450 (in 2007 it was 441) nuclear power plants inescapably going into meltdown once the power fails.
Every one of the world’s nuclear reactor waste containment pools are only “temporary”, and there is absolutely no Plan B for what to do with the decades of nuclear waste stored in them. They needed to be kept in their current state…….virtually forever.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around how this information has not been a primary factor in most people’s concept of collapse preparedness.
Was it Fukushima that finally put this on everyone’s radar, or are we just now seriously thinking about this in context to grid failure for the first time? Or have I just been a rube up to this point?
Essentially, this reality alone, completely undermines everyone’s preparedness plans, regardless of where or how we live.
I’m still in shock and disbelief that something of such dire significance has virtually flown under most of our radars for so long.
Basically, the world we’ve made for ourselves and the rest of life on earth, is one where as long as the power stays on, we basically cook the planet, and if and when the power goes out, we irradiate ourselves to death. Unbelievable, just…….unbelievable.
I’m going for a walk and scream into the night for awhile.
January 4th, 2013 at 9:10 pm
BtD,
Exactly. And they are armed.
January 4th, 2013 at 9:16 pm
Sorry, off topic.
Another reason to be proud of being a human being, Amerika’s finest protecting us.
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_22310417/mapleton-elk-boulder-police-shooting
January 4th, 2013 at 9:53 pm
Every one of the world’s nuclear reactor waste containment pools are only “temporary”
But of course they are. Until – well, that’s another story.
Grapple with the “until” and you run into NIMBY (not in my back yard), followed by BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything). Avert the gaze from the “until” and TPTB are in a comfort zone until the 400+ Fukes are cooked: then our goose is cooked.
January 4th, 2013 at 10:31 pm
the virgin terry Says
caught up in the delusion, being ‘meat robots’(dattadatta). life is struggle and paradox. it’s the most powerfully addictive drug, the way we struggle to survive and avoid dying. the delusion of free will is part of the addiction.
the virgin terry, you are closer to “enlightenment” than those around you. Because you have cast aside the hypocrisy of the crowd. A giraffe in a herd of wildebeest.
i can’t imagine any meaning in an existence without free will.
Indeed. But the delusion binds sentient beings every iota of their lives. Free will is not for the individual self. There is s the reason behind the prayer “Thy Will be done” that so many bleat sans understanding.
fucking meat robots, alternately squealing/screaming in pleasure/pain, but mostly in-between, for some brief lifetime, a brief interlude of surreal consciousness in the midst of an eternity of blessed/cursed(?) nothingness.
The nothingness is nothing new. The Kabbalistic tradition calls it the Ein Sof (Limitless – in space&time – Void), and the Buddhist tradition, consonant with its roots, also calls it Sunyata (the Void).
January 5th, 2013 at 3:48 am
OK Daniel, great. Now get a handle on this. And my big concern is diesel reliability and the fact that nuclear plants don’t have to cool their nuclear fuel pools off their diesels per NRC regulations. http://fairewinds.com/content/gundersen-democracy-now-discussing-hurricane-sandy
Boy have I been getting an education on nuclear power – Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds is an expert and a great source. Two diesel backups are required for the reactors (2 in case one is bad), I think about 1 weeks worth of fuel for that. No backup is required for the spent fuel pools because they would heat up less quickly if the cooling stops – about 1 week before they are in danger of boiling out and it is assumed that the power would be back on by then. It costs about 1 million to put the spent fuel rods into dry cask storage. I think they have to have them in the pools for about 5 years before they are cool enough for that. But they keep them in longer because if they wait until the plant is decommissioned it comes out of a fund they create for decomissioning (from user fees) not out of current bottom line. At Fukushima all the dry casks on the site were OK, obviously the spent fuel pools, especially unit 4 were not.
Another risk is the pumps that pump the cooling water. They could use submersibles which would make the risk of flooding not so dire for plants on rivers that flood (think Ft Calhoun last summer) or hurricanes (think Oyster Creek and several others during SandY). But they don’t use submersibles because…….
When it comes to bottom line
The cheapest things are fine
A plant may blow up
Sadly yup
We saved money, don’t you whine
January 5th, 2013 at 3:58 am
TvT “i wonder how such a foolish species came to be. likewise, how gaian life came to be. behind the beauty and awe and pleasure sometimes of life, is suffering and dying and then…. nothing more?”
Selective reproduction of self replicating species on a planet with limited resource – isn’t that better than looking for MEANING. If some ultimate meaning exists, where does it come from. The great MEANER in the sky. Look back down here on the ground and you have to conclude that such a MEANING giver has to be a MEANIE.
Meaning can be found tho, enjoy a sunrise, pet your kitty, etc. Just avoid the capital letters.
January 5th, 2013 at 4:28 am
@ Daniel
I’m going for a walk and scream into the night for awhile.
I hear you…
I say that most people are idiots, and I get flak in return, that I’m elitist, a snob, a misogynist, hate people, pessimist, negative, no faith in human creativity, blahblahbla, etcetera…
But how can humans not be idiots, to have got themselves and the Earth into such a comprehensive terminal mess ?
Yes, I know, lots of lovely, delightful, honest, kind, wonderful, genuine, bright, people, all doing their best to make the world a better place for everyone, and it’s mostly the decisions of a tiny minority of evil psychopaths with power who have caused the mess, layers and layers of karma, building over centuries… sigh…
When Abraham Darby had the idea to smelt iron with coke instead of charcoal, around 1700, it must have seemed like an excellent idea, genius, and nobody foresaw the oncoming Industrial Revolution, which, although it has been a wonderful adventure, is one of the greatest of all catastrophes, at the root of our present catastrophe.
And when Newton, at roughly the same time, discovered that he could break up a ray of light into a spectrum of colours, with a prism, which was an amazing wonder, that too, was a catastrophe, in the sense that it has lead to the scientific revolution that permitted modern physics and quantum physics and nuclear power stations and nuclear bombs…
As I understand it, the development of all those nuclear power stations was driven by the competition between nations for nuclear weapons. The USA, Russia, Britain and Germany ( during WW2 ) all understood that whoever had nuclear weapons would have superior power to dominate and control, and to avoid domination and control by their rivals.
Germany lost out, Britain was weakened, so then it was between USSR and USA, who went on a reckless pissing contest to demonstrate their superiority to each other and everyone else. The weapons needed lots of plutonium, which was a byproduct of the power stations. Soon they had enough nuclear warheads to blow the whole planet to pieces several times over. Why ? Because the politicians and generals, who were all old men, were all fucking insane. Still are all fucking insane.
The whole premise of warfare, the paradigm, the logic, as taught to young entrants, is based in history, goes right back to bows and arrows and spears, and chariots and armour, when fighting for your tribe, nation, actually did make some sense.
Once you’ve got weapons that can blow the whole fucking continent where you live to pieces, several times over, and irradiate it, so that it’s uninhabitable for centuries, and bring on a nuclear winter, that means all crops and animals die, then any sort of ‘war’ using those weapons, is insane. But the old men just carry on anyway, getting madder and madder, building deeper bunkers, and so forth, because all the while, the corporations that provide all the weapons and back up equipment, make enormous profits, and that’s where the mad old men go, when they retire, to sit in boardrooms, and keep the scams going.
They have to keep those corporations and factories running in peacetime, for when they need them in war time. Otherwise, they have to start from scratch, train people, build production lines, and be at a disadvantage until that was done. Best solution is to keep wars going all of the time, that keeps up the research and development, and the jobs. Nevermind all the dead people. Can’t be helped. Just another externality. Best do it far away, in some poor country nobody can find on a map.
Tony Benn, the Minister for Energy, during the 1960′s, admitted that Britain didn’t need any nuclear power stations, because was basically an island sitting on a coal seam, but they built them anyway, because of pressure from the USA, who wanted the plutonium, for the weapons. And they built them without anyone having any idea whatsoever as to what would be done with the radioactive waste. That was going to be someone else’s problem to solve, sometime in the future. And it still remains unsolved.
( Much like the boss of Exxon saying that CO2 emissions are an ‘engineering problem’ and the solution will be ‘an engineering solution’. Except that the living planet is NOT an ‘engineering problem’ and nobody has any idea what the ‘engineering solution’ could be, it’s all wishful thinking and arm waving, …and, hey, while you’re all thinking about it, we keep making a lot of money…)
Also, as I understand it, the power station designs used by Westinghouse and General Electric, in the best traditions of American capitalism, were not the safest, best, most failsafe, they were the cheapest that they could get away with, to maximise profits…
But to be fair, take a look at what happened in the USSR, where human life had even less value, and deceit and secrecy and corruption were built into every level of soceity, and vast areas are contaminated with radioactive material. It’s not like there are good guys and bad guys in the nuclear story. It’s bad everywhere.
We’re back to quantum physics here. It is only seventy years since Enrico Fermi first demonstrated a controlled nuclear chain reaction. That’s what happens, inside nuclear power stations and nuclear bombs. In one lifetime, one generation, being reckless and irresponsible, has managed to create the mess that Daniel describes above.
As Guy has noted in one of his lectures, all of my life I’ve been told how things are getting better all the time, this is the best of all possible times because ‘we’ ( WE ??) have ‘conquered’ ( eh ?) this and that and the other… you know, all those old ‘evils’, like smallpox, hunger, slavery, torture, etc, etc…
I’m SO SICK of the self-aggrandising bullshit propaganda, from the media, from the corporations, from the scientists, from the BBC, from the Gvt.,politicians and civil servants, from the academics, from the elite….
The people with power to make decisions, during my lifetime, have managed to fuck up just about every single thing it is possible to fuck up… Fucking self-serving ignorant idiots. They paper over the messes they make, with lies and propaganda, and now the ultimate catastrophe, wreck the whole fucking climate, so nobody has a future any more, ….and still they pretend, not to worry, ‘we’ll adapt’, ‘fracking’, ‘carbon capture’, ‘clean coal’, ‘GMOs’, ‘next gen nuclear’, all sorts of fantasies… whilst emissions keep on rising…
Quantum mechanics, timeline, 1900-1962
http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/quantum-mechanics-timelin.html
January 5th, 2013 at 5:50 am
ulvfugl: In this week’s New Scientist the cover story is about Quantum Shadows (No waves. No particles. Reality is even stranger than we thought) – which references the famous double slit experiment brought up to date. It seems that reality is way beyond anything scientists thought it to be (in terms of either wave or particle). Turns out, upon doing the most recent experiments that it comes down to human interaction (measurement/viewing) that decides which of those it is, no matter how we design the test – but it’s even stranger: ‘”Sometimes the photon looks like a wave, sometimes like a particle, or like anything in between,” says Ionicioiu. In reality, though, it is none of these things. What it is we do not have the words or concepts to express.’
tvt, KC, & others: So the allegory (?) of the “tasting of the fruit” in the Garden of Eden may have referred to “knowledge” like that which brought us agriculture, science, mathematics, and the above-mentioned Industrial Revolution and modernity. Perhaps we were not to know this and were supposed to stay in blissful ignorance letting nature guide us (though it’s admittedly a harsh teacher – giving us the test first and following with the lesson to be learned). That way, we would have stayed hunter-gatherers and limited in population (i’m not sure this would actually have been the case, we being so curious and clever and all). What do you think? [Personally i don't think we ever developed the wisdom that would have kept us in line, but that's another long story.]
Kathy C., Daniel (and all interested): Yeah, the nukes will be the final nail in the coffin, especially since Fukushima is still sending radiation all over the Northern hemisphere (i thought i posted this link to an article that says so here at NBL, well here it is again)
http://enenews.com/almost-entire-ground-level-northern-hemisphere-covered-radioactive-fission-product-after-311-study-impact-fukushima-radioxenon-releases-worldwide-xe-133-background-be-investigated-graphic
January 5th, 2013 at 6:02 am
Check this out:
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/01/04/america-a-banana-republic-with-nukes/
(from article)
In order to protect corporate interests, the exploiters will always use their wealth to bribe the political system (such as campaign contributions and promises of lucrative positions in the private sector after leaving government posts). We are all familiar with feedback loops in terms of climate change, but there also exists one within our socio-economic system which is extremely destructive.
(read the rest)
January 5th, 2013 at 6:40 am
Daniel, when I read Alan Weisman’s book, I too, realized just how hopeless is our situation. It’s not just the nuclear power plants, but all the other nasty chemical plants, and biological warfare facilities, and . . . the list seems to just keep going.
Perhaps that is why I have been so unreceptive to some of the more “hopeful” solutions that occasional posters offer here. I simply can’t see a way out of our real life Kobayashi Maru.
I think that’s why it’s not more prominent in people’s discussion. When there’s no way out, what’s the point?
William R. Forstchen’s book, One Second After, is a perfect example of this. It’s a great story about hemispere-wide collapse after several EMPs are detonated in space. He tells a really good story, however, he completely ignores the 150+ nuclear reactors in the U.S. If you think about it, though, he had to. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have had much of a story. It all would have been over in a week or two.
January 5th, 2013 at 7:08 am
Dr House, yes Forstchen’s book was a good look at what might happen if the power goes out in a significant portion of the US. Of course he tells of a community that manages with some central characters to hold together. On the outside he hints at complete chaos. So his book represents pretty much the best one could expect, and he leaves out the nuclear reactors.
Here is a world map of the nuclear reactors http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2011/03/16/the-nuclear-world-interactive-map/#axzz2H6qSxuDE it says 700 reactors, so the 400+ nuclear plants we read of elsewhere must represent a number of plants, some of which have multiple reactors.
When we think of power outages we mostly think of our own country and don’t think that outages elsewhere are as much of a concern to us. But when tsunami hit Japan car places were hurt for a while because many of the parts they got came only from Japan. India had a big outage last year. What products are only made in other countries? I know some drugs are no longer made in the US. What about medical supplies, gloves, masks.
There is a flow rate to production just as there is with oil. Unless there is spare capacity somewhere else, the flow rate of any production, if cut off, can have severe and lasting effects.
Looking at the Mississippi possibly being shut down, I found one article that said that the difference between loading barges to 9 feet draft from 12 feet draft and making the number towed (actually pushed) 30 instead of 45 is about 500 semi loads. Multiply that by the number of tows going down the Mississippi will tell you how many semi’s or railroad cars we need to keep the flow going. Betcha there aren’t that many spares. Thus the flow of corn and soy outbound is going to slow, and the upbound fertilizer as well. If the Miss gets water later, it still has a fixed number of barges and will take a long time to get the backlog going. Where is the corn and soy going – who will starve if it doesn’t come in time.
The interconnections once you start to become aware of them are staggering.
January 5th, 2013 at 7:22 am
Closing the Mississippi gives us a good excuse to not export food. We keep what we have here, prices drop, and the economy benefits. More smart phones sold.
January 5th, 2013 at 7:36 am
Kathy C, I suspect that, as you mention, there aren’t enough spare semi trailers and trucks to make up the difference – at least in any timely fashion. But even if there are, the shortage of drivers will surely limit any increase.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/31/truck-drivers-wanted-jobs_n_2048995.html
Truck Drivers Wanted: Jobs Hard To Fill Even In Bad Economy
. . . Even amid a struggling economy with high unemployment, trucking companies had a tough time hiring young drivers willing to hit the road for long hauls. Now the U.S. is speeding toward a critical shortage of truck drivers in the next few years as the economy recovers and demand for goods increases, an expert in the inner-workings of supply chains said in a report Tuesday. . . .
January 5th, 2013 at 7:52 am
Apologies if this was posted above, I haven’t been keeping up. Absolutely brilliant animation:
http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2013/01/welcome.html
January 5th, 2013 at 8:02 am
“Buenos Aires Swelters Amid Heat Wave, Power Outages
BUENOS AIRES – A blistering heat wave, power outages and a fuel shortage added up Tuesday to a second day of hellish conditions in Greater Buenos Aires, home to about a quarter of Argentina’s 40 million people.
Amid a plethora of recommendations by the authorities on how to deal with the soaring temperatures, which on Tuesday were expected to reach 36 C (97 F), people took refuge in any shade they could find to get out of the blazing heat of the Argentine summer….”
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=382538&CategoryId=14093
January 5th, 2013 at 8:06 am
Gail, yes brilliant!
January 5th, 2013 at 9:40 am
Daniel Says: the world’s 450 nuclear waste containment pools, which, will basically wipe humanity off the face of the earth, once the global power grid fails….there is absolutely no Plan B….this reality alone, completely undermines everyone’s preparedness plans, regardless of where or how we live.
To all those still unsure about
Our survival luck soon running out:
You won’t feel like such kooks
When hundreds of nukes
Explode, erasing all doubt.
January 5th, 2013 at 10:07 am
@ Tom.
Thanks.
Thing is, almost everyone believes, is taught, that there is ‘an objective reality’, out there, and, ‘a subjective mind’, ‘in here’, a separate consciousness inside a brain, inside a skull. That’s the general model.
If the objective reality out there isn’t an objective reality then the WHOLE of science, collapses. Of course, it won’t. Nobody will take any notice. They’ll just carry on regardless, as they have done for the last fifty years, disregarding this inconvenient truth. However, philosophically speaking, science can only work in the way that it does, by assuming, as it always has for the last four centuries, that here IS an objective reality, and that the observer is completely separate from that reality.
As for the rest, who are not scientists, they are clueless anyway, so it doesn’t make much difference at all.
What it means is that 99% are living in a dead paradigm.
But for anyone who is actually interested in truth which all scientists ought to be, then the fact that it has been demonstrated repeatedly, that the observer influences the experiment merely by observation – that is, the consciousness, the attention, the awareness, the mind, of the observer – this is of fundamental and extraordinary significance. Because it is telling us something about the deepest nature of ourselves and our reality.
This may seem extremely obscure and boring to many of you, but what it means is, that if you sit down anywhere, and look out at ‘the world’, you are, in effect, participating in its creation. Maybe even ‘creating’ it ? Possibly that’s too strong.
I’m not sure ‘participation’ is the suitable term. I don’t think there is anyone alive who can tell me what the right term is. Maybe you’re just distorting them, annoying them, irritating the wave, so it changes into particles, vice versa, or whatever these new shadow concept thingees are, hahaha.
What you see, when you look out at the beach, the street, the park, whatever, is actually photons hitting your eyeball, your retina. They are not just inert neutral ‘stuff’, because, somehow or other, there’s some sort of interaction, some sort of relationship, that occurs. I wish I knew where this interaction is supposed to happen. Nobody, in the various accounts I have read, seems to have a clue or even asks the question.
It’s well-established, shown experimentally beyond doubt, that these photon things get what is called ‘entangled’. A pair of them can spin left, or spin right, and will always know instantly what their partner does, even if the two are separated by the entire span of the whole Universe.
Of course, most of the photons that we see, are coming from the Sun, and arriving here, and bouncing about, and permitting photosynthesis and life on Earth. We’ve always had an intimate relationship with them. Just that we never knew they existed at all, until Einstein, et al.
And if you think it’s nothing to do with your life, well, it’s lasers and photons that let you watch movies on dvds, so if nobody understood this stuff, you’d have to go back to standing in the rain watching the real world, trees and birds and clouds and suchlike, which is still all photons….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon
January 5th, 2013 at 10:25 am
ulvfugl says: As I understand it, the development of all those nuclear power stations was driven by the competition between nations for nuclear weapons….The weapons needed lots of plutonium, which was a byproduct of the power stations.
Why didn’t we have any qualms
Despite nuclear’s magic phenoms?
Were people that dense?
No, now it makes sense:
We wanted plutonium for bombs.
January 5th, 2013 at 11:50 am
Ulvfugl “And if you think it’s nothing to do with your life, well, it’s lasers and photons that let you watch movies on dvds,…”
The 9 bacteria cells to 1 human cell that make up my body have something to do with my life. Knowing they are a part of me means that they may have something to do with my functioning. Knowing that I can choose to use antibiotics wisely or not at all.
Knowing that CO2 was causing our environment to become unfriendly means that some went on a quest to stop their release via UN negotiations or urgings to bring down industrial civ.
Knowing that NTE is a very real possibility leaves people searching for what to do with that knowledge, but advice is offered – chop wood, carry water. Or hug someone you love. Or prepare to at least make the near term until extinction be a bit easier for you and yours. Or make plans to exit early before all the chaos. Or follow my suggestion and make birth control permanent while you can.
How does knowing what you say is true about quantum theory, lasers and photons advise us on what is our future and how to live our lives? What way do you live differently because of this knowledge you have?
January 5th, 2013 at 11:51 am
Jan. 05 and already my new years pledge is broken
January 5th, 2013 at 12:14 pm
This may be old to this group but maybe not:
Climbing the Ladder of Awareness
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/
January 5th, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Kathy C.
So, you’re not interested in knowledge, unless you see some obvious practical advantage ? I’m interested in this stuff merely because I’m curious to know truth, or as much truth as I can. I couldn’t care less about the utility. I’m not aiming to exploit the knowledge to make a quick buck. Philosophy, you know, quest for wisdom, not necessarily very practical.
Have I not worked hard enough trying to explain concepts to you, which you find unacceptable, and reject, because they would undermine your outdated worldview ? I really don’t care what you believe. I’m sure you can figure out, for yourself, if you really want to.
Here’s a neat summary of some of the possible available options, although it’s a little dated and Bey is a bit of an anarchist nutter.
http://hermetic.com/bey/quantum.html
January 5th, 2013 at 3:15 pm
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277
a very nice piece
January 5th, 2013 at 3:20 pm
The mind is part of the meat robot. Consciousness is not a “part” – of anything. The meat robot’s mind apprehends and comprehends. Consciousness is reflected in the awareness of the comprehension. This includes comprehension of all concepts related to “meat robots”. There is no need to invoke consciousness in reference to mind, thought or concept. Non of these items need awareness. Few are the ones who understand this.
Matthew 5:8
January 5th, 2013 at 3:30 pm
Ha, interesting little snippet, if it is correct, explains why some people would have supported the Russian revolution, and why the Russians might not have felt very friendly towards USA.
After the Revolution of 1905, the Czar had prudently prepared for further outbreaks by transferring some $400 million in cash to the New York banks, Chase, National City, Guaranty Trust, J.P.Morgan Co., and Hanover Trust. In 1914, these same banks bought the controlling number of shares in the newly organized Federal Reserve Bank of New York, paying for the stock with the Czar’s sequestered funds. In November 1917, Red Guards drove a truck to the Imperial Bank and removed the Romanoff gold and jewels. The gold was later shipped directly to Kuhn, Loeb Co. in New York. Curse of Canaan
January 5th, 2013 at 4:01 pm
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” a nation of middle-class parents say to their children, “it was supposed to be better for you. You were supposed to have it easier than we did. From the fields to the mines to the cubicles, all of it was for you. All so that one day, you might be live a life that your forefathers — and your foremothers — could only dream of.
Some of us were disenfranchised from the beginning, and even if we had ever wanted it, the “dream” was not offered or available to us. Feels kind of like reverse fortune now, because there is no “dream” to bury.
January 5th, 2013 at 4:19 pm
@ Robin
I think the word consciousness is being used with differing meanings, which cause confusion. When you use it as an equivalent term to Sunyata or Ein Sof, you’re talking about consciousness as something like the Ground of Being, Cosmic Consciousness, God, which is not the same as the usage that people mean when they talk about people becoming conscious as they wake up after an anaesthetic, or sleep, or detection of consciousness by a scanner, or when someone says ‘Are you conscious of that sound ?’ and so forth.
Likewise, when a Freudian or Jungian talks about Conscious and Unconscious, and Collective Unconscious, etc, they are not using the words in the same sense as you do.
As for your term ‘meat robot’, I don’t think it is useful or makes sense.
January 5th, 2013 at 4:43 pm
when someone says ‘Are you conscious of that sound ?
A meat robot would answer “Yes”, even though it would have no awareness.
the usage that people mean when they talk about people becoming conscious
Is the usage referring to the mind, a property of the brain, not requiring consciousness.
The use of the term reflects the inability to discern the difference. The disability has origins well beyond the intellectual.
January 5th, 2013 at 5:19 pm
This seems to be some sort of original classification of your own, Robin. I don’t recognise it.
I know plenty of human being who are only vaguely awake most of the time, stumbling through their lives in a rather confused, dream-like condition, but I would not call that unconscious – it obviously isn’t. To make them unconscious, you hit them with a brick, or administer an anaesthetic – nor would I call them unaware. If you shout their name, they hear it and respond. So I really don’t know what you are talking about.
I contrast those people, who are the majority, with others, such as martial arts practitioners and the like, who train themselves to be highly alert, fully aware, and do introspective meditation, qi gong, kung fu, whatever. They are in a different category.
But I don’t think the ordinary folk are to be despised, they may have virtues and qualities in other areas. I mean, look at Zizek. He’s a bumbling nutcase, who doesn’t even know where he is half the time, but he has a most extraordinary intellect and grasp of philosophical issues, as he rubs his nose every two seconds.
January 5th, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Why be happy when you could be interesting ? Slavoj Žižek
http://youtu.be/U88jj6PSD7w
January 5th, 2013 at 5:52 pm
Ulvfugl, “Have I not worked hard enough trying to explain concepts to you”
Excuse me, but I NEVER asked you to try to explain these concepts to me. Please Stop.
New Year’s resolution begins again Right Now.
January 5th, 2013 at 6:16 pm
Kathy C. oh, pardon me, yes, you just kept telling me that what I said was wrong, and insisting that you knew better… so I did my best to explain where you were incorrect.
Nobody is compelling you to argue with me, are they. Except your own ego.
January 5th, 2013 at 6:19 pm
Ulvfugl breaking my resolution again (no free will) – what I did ask was for you to tell me what good was your endless posts on the subject to a bunch of people who are facing the much more pressing problem of shortened lifespans and extinction. You failed. So if it doesn’t promise some continued existence, or some way out of this mess, or some way to ride the slide, why not just drop it. In fact wouldn’t it be good if all the theoretical physicists on the planet just dropped their pondering and addressed this problem – maybe we can find an out by slipping into a parallel universe, or better yet if we all close our eyes at the same time perhaps the universe we are creating with our observing will wink out of existence when we stop observing. That would be a nicer end than the chaos that will be unleashed in the near future.
You wrote “Philosophy, you know, quest for wisdom, not necessarily very practical.” Wisdom – The quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise. The soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of such experience, knowledge, and good judgment. Good judgment is always practical.
The quest for knowledge of how the world works enabled us to blow up people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think we were better off when the only weapons and tools we had were made out of stone and knowing what was safe to eat was prime knowledge.
BTW my husband has his PhD in Philosophy. He taught logic – always useful.
January 5th, 2013 at 6:25 pm
This seems to be some sort of original classification of your own, Robin. I don’t recognise it.
Few will. For those ready for it, the message comes through loud and clear in the Kabbalah, Vedanta, Mahayana and Hinayana traditions, even though it seems foreign to even their formal adherents. Even Thomas Warren Campbell understands it: he refers to conscious hardware computers.
January 5th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
@ Kathy C. Ulvfugl breaking my resolution again (no free will)…
I think you mean ‘no self-control’. Free will is something rather different.
I see us all as standing on the beach with the tsunami of NTE on the far distant horizon. I don’t think it makes the slightest difference what we discuss here, because there is nothing I can do about it.
If anyone disagrees, tell me, what do I have the power to do, that will alter the course of future events ?
January 5th, 2013 at 6:55 pm
@ Robin
Well, if nobody can understand what you are saying, either it’s not worth saying at all, or you are not explaining it clearly, no ?
January 5th, 2013 at 7:52 pm
One Bluefin Tuna sells for £1 million… so as they get pushed to extinction and become ever rarer, they become even more valuable, and there’s greater incentive to fish them to extinction…
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/bluefin-tuna-sells-for-record-1m-in-tokyo-8439394.html
January 5th, 2013 at 8:46 pm
ulvfugl
Yuo asked:
“I see us all as standing on the beach with the tsunami of NTE on the far distant horizon. I don’t think it makes the slightest difference what we discuss here, because there is nothing I can do about it.
If anyone disagrees, tell me, what do I have the power to do, that will alter the course of future events ?”
My view from reading a lot of your posts is that you are not a complete rationalist, in that you and I have discussed manifesting things or agency in ways counter to the dogmatic ‘scientism’ POV. Yes?
That said I am going to put forward there is nothing your ego can do, I agree. Full stop, the only thing that ego can do is just consume less and reduce your personal carbon footprint. We all know that is insufficient unless EVERYONE does the same and INDUSTRY too etc…
So I am proposing we align our egos with the whole Earth, which includes all the spiritual dimensions and forces that inhabit and are the makeup of the earth.
AS I said not scientific, but that is not in my book also not real.
I have experienced a very small taste of the power of the local spirits her, and I am speaking of the weather spirits, and I believe it only take a real desire and gesture on the part of one who has Ego to surrender it and ask for help from the local spirits, by honouring them.
Using the moon cycle, of full moons, it is possible to engage these earth forces to help us.
At present they are alienated from us because of our hubris and apparent lack of understanding and ‘respect’ for them.
I think you can do this ulvfugl.
You of all people , who look after a woodland forrest, and have practiced a way of self understanding, I can’t believe you have not the ability to have a go at this. If you want I will email you some details of those small encounters I mentioned. Guy has my email.
I am not an advocate of Scientism, because to me it is a subset of what is real, and it excludes the subjective aspects of existance and even consciousness itself from reality.
So IMO you can do something…Ask the local spirits for help, but after acknowledging them as real and warrenting some respect.
I think we should neither underestimate these kinds of entities and energies, nor trivialise their potential in changing the biosphere.
Not that I would need to say this to you, but asking for help like praying to Dog or writing to Santa is not what I am advocating. I am advocating in working up your own form of connection to the local spiritual landscape, and respecting ‘them’ and asking for respect and help in return. I find it useful to contemplate the self-enquiry,
“How can I serve the biosphere…? and ask for help.
There is way more to it but you get my meaning. That is a form of Ego surrender, but you have to be prepared to act your portion of the ‘Walk’.
Individual egos can do little, but rightly disposed, we can have influence, garnering assistance from other powerful quarters, IMO.
January 5th, 2013 at 9:23 pm
While perts of Hobart Tasmainia have raging bush fires, destroying houses and wildlife, yesterday in North western NSW in a town called Hay, the temperature reached 48 degrees C, and overnight minimum was 29.7 Degrees C.
This link will progress for any day it is viewed, so look sooner rather than later. Find the box titled: ‘Hay Past 5 Days’
‘Hay Weather’
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/nsw/riverina/hay
And Hobart fires:
‘Tasmania engulfed by ‘catastrophic level’ fires’
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/tasmania-engulfed-by-catastrophic-level-fires-20130104-2c8j1.html
Some text:
”
AT LEAST 80 homes have been lost and one man is feared killed by a bushfire that swept down onto the eastern Tasmanian town of Dunalley in catastrophic conditions.
The bushfire sent hundreds fleeing and was on Friday night still burning down the Tasman Peninsula, taking more properties as it went…
Tasmania suffered its most severe fire day in years, with a record 41.8 degrees in Hobart and higher temperatures observed ahead of the fire front in Dunalley.
Tasmania’s chief fire officer, Mike Brown, said the conditions had reached the catastrophic level several times during the afternoon and 100 crews were working on about 25 fires.”
As an endnote I recieved a lift home today from a local man who is a JW.
When I mwntioned the fires in Hobart, the temps in Hay and that these may begin to turn some sceptics minds around he said:
“You know it also warming on Mars”
Where do these people get this stuff from.
When I told him how trees are dying because they cant feed, due to shutting off their gas exchange due to higher temps, and how crop yields are dropping around the world due to C02 increases, because the protein in the yield is in part the bonding site for atmospheric CO2, and as atmospheric CO2 increases so the plands decrease their bonding sites and less yield – and with those two facts he began to listen.
Anyway he and his wife have 9 kids, how about that!
January 5th, 2013 at 9:44 pm
Some useful looks at Australia wide Temperatures for this Summer so far:
‘Sydney to be spared worst of giant heat wave’
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/sydney-to-be-spared-worst-of-giant-heat-wave-20130104-2c7vf.html
Some quotes:
“A “quirk” of the weather combined with geography will spare residents of Sydney and regions along the NSW coast from the scorching temperatures searing much of the country.
Sydney and centres such as Newcastle and Wollongong will barely reach 30 degrees over the next week while most other state capitals face days of blistering heat closer to 40 degrees or higher between now and Monday.
National records, including the highest average temperature of 40.17 degrees hit on December 21, 1972, may tumble in coming days as the massive heatwave covers most of the continent. The all-time record of 50.7 degrees at Oodnadatta Airport in South Australia on January 2, 1960, may also be challenged.
During summer, temperatures in the high 30s or 40s are much less common in Sydney and Brisbane than they are in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne.
“Residents can be thankful for that, since the maritime climate of Sydney and Brisbane means it is generally humid as well, greatly increasing the discomfort factor, rather than the dry desert-baked heat in the southern capitals,” Dr Braganza said.
Adelaide is heading for 44 degrees today, Melbourne 41, Hobart 39 and Canberra 37, according the bureau’s latest forecasts.
And another link:
‘Heatwave adds burn to climb in temperatures’
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/heatwave-adds-burn-to-climb-in-temperatures-20130103-2c77q.html
“LONG-STANDING temperature records may be broken in coming days as a massive heatwave sizzles much of the country.
A huge swath of central and south-eastern Australia is poised to swelter on Friday with temperatures expected to peak at 41 degrees in Melbourne, 44 in Adelaide and even 39 in Hobart.
“We probably will get close to some of the really significant Australia-wide records,” said Aaron Coutts-Smith, the NSW climate services manager at the weather bureau. “The majority of Australia is suffering from extreme high temperatures….
Among the records to be challenged is the 40.17 degrees average maximum reached on December 21, 1972.
Advertisement The country notched up an average maximum of 39.21 degrees on Wednesday, as measured across more than 700 weather sites. That result was narrowly outside the top 10 days recorded since 1950, Dr Coutts-Smith said.
The new record could be reached on the weekend or even Monday, so prolonged is the heat spell. ”All three days are looking fairly intense with widespread heat,” he said.
Also within range could be the highest temperature recorded in Australia – 50.7 degrees at Oodnadatta in South Australia on January 2, 1960. Several sites in Western Australia reached 47.9 degrees on Thursday. But the hottest place has been Eucla, where it hit 48.1 degrees on Thursday afternoon, its hottest day on record and 22 degrees above the summer average, said Brett Dutschke, a senior meteorologist with Weatherzone.
While several towns in central Australia are tipped to hit 45 degrees or higher during the heatwave, Dr Coutts-Smith said it was not unheard of for these forecasts to be a little bit out. “We are watching it closely.”
Still some Summer downunder to go folks…!!
January 5th, 2013 at 10:02 pm
either it’s not worth saying at all, or you are not explaining it clearly, no ?
Not worth saying at all to those not ready to receive it. Not “explainable” clearly: not graspable by unready intellection. But some may benefit from it: those who have peeled off enough of the identifying labels that constitute the “I”.
January 5th, 2013 at 10:08 pm
OzMan,
Your mention of prayer strikes a powerful chord in me. I come from a background of scientism, and have only recently pried open the door of that stuffy little room to reveal the sun-filled world outside its walls.
As my previous self I denigrated the idea of prayer with full egoic ferocity. A few years ago I finally “got it” – that prayer is not about asking for what one does not have, but giving thanks for What Is.
As a result I’m looking for various ways to pray that will let the universe know that I hear, and that I will recognize help when it is offered. I feel that a powerful mode of prayer may arise from combining Gregg Braden’s “Lost Mode of Prayer” Chante Ishta, with the Hawaiian prayer Hoʻoponopono.
Chante Ishta
————
by Frithjof Schuon
A friend heard Black Elk, the visionary
Of the Lakota, mention the eye of the heart —
The Chante Ishta — which sees the True.
Blessèd is he who does not trust his senses alone —
The vision of the heart stills our deepest longing.
This also Black Elk has said:
The world — a dream, where one chases after shadows.
All that men tell of passes away —
In the Invisible is the true world.
Hoʻoponopono
————
I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.
January 5th, 2013 at 10:49 pm
I have experienced a very small taste of the power of the local spirits her(?e), and I am speaking of the weather spirits, and I believe it only take a real desire and gesture on the part of one who has Ego to surrender it and ask for help from the local spirits, by honouring them.
That is an ancient way of moving to the recognition that one’s “I” is the “I” of all, on the way to realising that there is no “I” after all – without ending up with a bunch of “meat robots”. Animism is still extant with the Vedic wind-god Vayu, the ocean-god Varuna (= Neptune), the fire-god Agni (cognate with “ignite”) etc.
That is a form of Ego surrender, but you have to be prepared to act your portion of the ‘Walk’.
Indeed. For those ready to receive this and realise that they are already somewhere in the “Walk”. Thank you.
January 5th, 2013 at 11:14 pm
ulvfugl
But for anyone who is actually interested in truth which all scientists ought to be, then the fact that it has been demonstrated repeatedly, that the observer influences the experiment merely by observation – that is, the consciousness, the attention, the awareness, the mind, of the observer – this is of fundamental and extraordinary significance. Because it is telling us something about the deepest nature of ourselves and our reality.
This may seem extremely obscure and boring to many of you, but what it means is, that if you sit down anywhere, and look out at ‘the world’, you are, in effect, participating in its creation. Maybe even ‘creating’ it ? Possibly that’s too strong.
At the level of particles, an observer influences an experiment by observing it because the tools necessary to do the observing are themselves particles and they must interact with that which is being observed before any observation is possible. Bouncing a photon off an electron has an effect on it, but I don’t see what the mind/consciousness have to do with it. Doesn’t an electron being struck by a photon still collapse the wave function in the absence of an observer? (I really don’t know the answer to this.)
I was going to ask if you thought the battle to save life on Earth could be a battle to save the Universe, but Kathy C kind of beat me to it.
On a less provocative note, thank you for the “Scale of the Universe” link. I found it amazing and it even distracted the kids from their computer games/youtube for a few minutes.
January 6th, 2013 at 4:58 am
@ Ozman
My view from reading a lot of your posts is that you are not a complete rationalist
Couple of days ago I was called an ‘egomaniacal jerk’….
I don’t think these labels carry much meaning, do they, unless it is to make the labeler more comfortable….Standing on the digital beach…
in that you and I have discussed manifesting things or agency in ways counter to the dogmatic ‘scientism’ POV. Yes?…..
I have tried to explain my position, both to myself and to everyone, in terms of mythos/logos, right brain/left brain, two ways of knowing which conflict, which are in us all, we need both, we cannot avoid having both, it’s not an either/or, they are an intrinsic part of our cultural and neuro-biological heritage.
Earlier in the thread I posted a link to Einstein’s thoughts on the relationship between science and religion, written prior, during, after WW2. It’s easy to demonise opponents. Supporters of Dawkins would happily exterminate religious fundamentalists, and vice versa. This is understandable, when you consider the bloody struggle for freedom of thought, through the French Revolution, against religious intolerance. A lot of people died so that people can express their ideas, as we are doing now. I’m with Bruno, Galileo, Diderot, Tom Paine, Voltaire. I think the suppression of dissident voices by the so-called Christian Right, in USA, and by the Islamic Fundamentalists, is terrifying, but also by what might be called the Scientistic Fundamentalists, who won’t tolerate any view that is not based on their version of Enlightenment rationalism ( according to Comte, sort of thing ).
The problem is, this is not just a war across soceities, is it, it’s built into each one of us, inside our own skulls, for unknown reasons that nobody has been able to propose any good explanation. We have those two hemispheres, the brain division, and we vacillate between mystical and logical, poetical and literal. When we wake at 3 a.m with the eerie primaeval Moon shining in through curtains, alone in bed after a strange dream, we are not the same person, as three in the afternoon talking to the boss at work about the accounts….
We all know, the human brain, the mind, our being, is immensely complex, incredibly hard to understand, a thing in flux. We tell ourselves stories, all the time, trying to make sense of our experiences, trying to integrate them into larger stories that make sense of our lives and ‘the world’. This is a very big problem, when bits of stories don’t ‘fit’ any more. You know, 60 million year old dinosaur skeletons don’t fit with Genesis. The classical concept of ‘soul’ does not fit with Cartesian-Newtonian materialism. If bits of story don’t fit, people ‘just don’t want to believe that’… and they may, or may not, be right. Perhaps the whole story is wrong.
As I tried to explain, zen eats worldviews. Throw them all out. Like Donella Meadows said, the very idea of paradigms, is itself a paradigm.
Science has a way of checking the rightness of stories. Keep measuring. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we have. I’m not arguing against science, rationality, logic, reason, or anything like that. We MUST retain that, at all costs. It’s absolutely essential. I really, really wish that everyone would be educated to a much higher standard in the sciences, myself included… but I am arguing against ‘scientism’, as an ideology, which doesn’t question dogma underlying science, and which denigrates other ways of knowing, and the potential for science to be corrupted and abused is frightening….
Anyway…
“How can I serve the biosphere…? and ask for help.
Yes, but I have done, am doing, all the things you say and suggest, Ozman…. I try to balance mythos and logos, I try to get a clear view…
I have said before, I do whatever I can, for the little patch where I do have some power, and some responsibility, to help all the species that live here, and, fortunately, that mostly means doing very little, which matches up with taoist philosophy, because nature is very good at looking after itself without human interference. In two weeks the frogs should spawn.
January 6th, 2013 at 5:11 am
@ Yorchichan
At the level of particles, an observer influences an experiment by observing it because the tools necessary to do the observing are themselves particles and they must interact with that which is being observed before any observation is possible. Bouncing a photon off an electron has an effect on it, but I don’t see what the mind/consciousness have to do with it. Doesn’t an electron being struck by a photon still collapse the wave function in the absence of an observer? (I really don’t know the answer to this.)
No, Y. If that was all, it would be simple to explain and not very interesting, it’s much, much weirder than that.
If I find a really GOOD explanation, I’ll post it.
I was going to ask if you thought the battle to save life on Earth could be a battle to save the Universe, but Kathy C kind of beat me to it.
Is that what she asked ? That wasn’t my interpretation, or else I missed it… anyway, it’s a hell of a question….
Wittgenstein seems to have believed, toward the end of his life, that when he dies, the whole Universe vanishes. Entirely. It’s not there any more. Or, not HERE any more.
When I read that, at the time, it made perfect sense to me. But it was followed by hundreds of comments by people, none of whom could understand it at all.
I took it as a sort of zen koan for a few months.
I suppose you could do the same ?
I mean, if we all go extinct, by Wittgenstein’s thought, I suppose the Universe vanishes. Forever.
Does it ?
January 6th, 2013 at 5:32 am
One thing interesting to ponder is the big bang itself – from which we can deduce cosmic expansion because of red shift, the increase of entropy, background microwave radiation etc. So the space-time manifold came about ‘after’ the big bang, and before that, it is impossible that space time existed because of an infinitesimally small and a supposed particle of infinite mass. Space and time are essentially linked because time is only the translation of mass in space – and thus entropy is a derivative of time.
A totally physical creation of our universe is not possible by reductionism – which is why strings, m-branes and so forth are contrived. Of course these are mathematical abstractions and impossible to experimentally prove because of impossible energy required for testing.
January 6th, 2013 at 5:47 am
@ Yorchichan
This is one approach ( from New Scientist, you have to subscribe to read the whole thing )
Clearly, the point where an object switches from being a probability wave, with its potential existence smeared out across space, and becomes an actual, spatially localised object is crucially important to understanding whether matter is real. What exactly happens when the wave function collapses – when among the countless possibilities where the particle could be at any moment, one is chosen, while all the others are rejected?
First of all, we have to ask ourselves when this choice is made. In the example described above, it seems to happen just before the flash on the phosphor screen. At this moment, a measurement of the electron’s position was made by a piece of phosphor glowing as the particle struck it, so there must have been an electron there, and not just a probability wave.
But assume we cannot be in the lab to observe the experiment, so we point a camera at the phosphor screen and have the result sent via a satellite link to a computer on our desktop. In this case, the flash of light emitted from the phosphor screen has to travel to the camera recording it, and the process is repeated: like the electrons, light also travels as a wave and arrives as a particle. What reason is there to believe that the switch from probability wave to particle actually occurred on the phosphor screen, and not in the camera?
At first, it seemed as if the phosphor screen was the measuring instrument, and the electron was the thing being measured. But now the measuring device is the camera and the phosphor screen is part of what is measured. Given that any physical object transmitting the measurement we can add on to this sequence – the camera, the computer, our eyes, our brain – is made up of particles with the same properties as the electron, how can we determine any particular step at which to place the cut between what is measured and what is doing the measuring?
This ever-expanding chain is called the von Neumann chain, after the physicist and mathematician John von Neumann. One of his Princeton University colleagues, Eugene Wigner, made a suggestion as to where to make the cut. As we follow the von Neumann chain upwards, the first entity we encounter that is not made up in any straightforward fashion out of pieces of matter is the consciousness of the observer. We might therefore want to say that when consciousness enters the picture, the wave function collapses and the probability wave turns into a particle.
The idea that consciousness brings everyday reality into existence is, of course, deeply strange; perhaps it is little wonder that it is a minority viewpoint.
There is another way of interpreting the measurement problem that does not involve consciousness – though it has peculiar ramifications of its own. But for now let’s explore Wigner’s idea in more depth.
If a conscious observer does not collapse the wave function, curious consequences follow. As more and more objects get sucked into the vortex of von Neumann’s chain by changing from being a measuring instrument to being part of what is measured, the “spread-out” structure of the probability wave becomes a property of these objects too. The “superposed” nature of the electron – its ability to be at various places at once – now also affects the measuring instruments.
It has been verified experimentally that not just the unobservably small, but objects large enough to be seen under a microscope, such as a 60-micrometre-long metal strip, can exhibit such superposition behaviour. Of course, we can’t look through a microscope and see the metal strip being at two places at once, as this would immediately collapse the wave function. Yet it is clear that the indeterminacy we found at the atomic level can spread to the macro level.
Yet if we accept that the wave function must collapse as soon as consciousness enters the measurement, the consequences are even more curious. If we decide to break off the chain at this point, it follows that, according to one of our definitions of reality, matter cannot be regarded as real. If consciousness is required to turn ghostly probability waves into things that are more or less like the objects we meet in everyday life, how can we say that matter is what would be there anyway, whether or not human minds were around?
But perhaps this is a bit too hasty. Even if we agree with the idea that consciousness is required to break the chain, all that follows is that the dynamic attributes of matter such as position, momentum and spin orientation are mind-dependent. It does not follow that its static attributes, including mass and charge, are dependent on in this. The static attributes are there whether we look or not.
Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves whether redefining matter as “a set of static attributes” preserves enough of its content to allow us to regard matter as real. In a world without minds, there would still be attributes such as mass and charge, but things would not be at any particular location or travel in any particular direction. Such a world has virtually nothing in common with the world as it appears to us. Werner Heisenberg observed that: “the ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible… Atoms are not things.”
It seems that the best we are going to get at this point is the claim that some things are there independent of whether we, as human observers, are there, even though they might have very little to do with our ordinary understanding of matter.
January 6th, 2013 at 5:51 am
Unlike the human dream in which the dreamer identifies with but one actor, in the Cosmic (±Divine) Dream the Dreamer identifies with each and every actor. This Dream seemingly ends for each individual actor, but a Few wake up in It and to each of Them It becomes a lucid Dream in which each of Them recognises that They are the Dreamer. For each of Them Their role in the Dream eventually ends, even though the Dreamer continues Dreaming.
January 6th, 2013 at 6:01 am
Hahahaha
“It may be somewhat dangerous to explain something one does not understand very well [the quantum measurement process] by invoking something [consciousness] one does not understand at all !- Anthony J. Leggett (Nobel Prize 2003)
January 6th, 2013 at 6:12 am
My humble thought on death:
When “i die,” the entirety will reabsorb me like a soap bubble in the mix and [i and it] will be indistinguishable (as it is now, but i keep getting distracted into thinking “i” exist separately when i “know” better).
January 6th, 2013 at 6:42 am
@ Tom
… but i keep getting distracted…
‘Without any ego, if you went into a restaurant, you wouldn’t know which mouth to put the food into..’ or something like.. T. McKenna
January 6th, 2013 at 6:54 am
ulvfugl:
Right – even the attempt to express a thought is ludicrous at best.
There’s really nothing to say
As we pass the time away
It just doesn’t matter
The way we all natter
About, since we’re not gonna stay.
Great quotes!
Everyone: mysterious diseases killing animals – watch for it in a town near you.
http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=189841
Thursday, January 03, 2013 – Following the outbreaks of cholera and measles which have claimed the lives of more than three hundred children and sickened several thousands in the northern Sindh districts, now the outbreak of one unknown mysterious diseases in the same region has killed more than 360 domestic animals including buffaloes, cows and goats.
Much to the horror of the animal bearers, the large number of deaths have been reported within a week in Ghotki, and Sukkur. According to the villagers buffaloes and cows feel congested in breathing and die in a short time span. The sudden death of buffaloes, cows and goats have forced the breeders to watch their means of livelihood die in front of their eyes. Moreover, some I.5 million domestic animals are believed to be suffering from this unknown disease.
January 6th, 2013 at 7:07 am
Guy, have you seen this?:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/03/1378431/contrary-to-contrarian-claims-ipcc-temperature-projections-have-been-exceptionally-accurate/
In this post we will evaluate this contrarian claim by comparing the global surface temperature projections from each of the first four IPCC reports to the subsequent observed temperature changes. We will see what the peer-reviewed scientific literature has to say on the subject, and show that not only have the IPCC surface temperature projections been remarkably accurate, but they have also performed much better than predictions made by climate contrarians (Figure 1).
(long, detailed article with lots of graphs and charts)
conclusion of article:
Not only has the IPCC done remarkably well in projecting future global surface temperature changes thus far, but it has also performed far better than the few climate contrarians who have put their money where their mouth is with their own predictions.
Conservative IPCC Errs on the Side of Least Drama
Although the IPCC climate models have performed remarkably well in projecting average global surface temperature warming thus far, Rahmstorf et al. (2012) found that the IPCC underestimated global average sea level rise since 1993 by 60%. Brysse et al. (2012) also found that the IPCC has tended to underestimate or failed to account for CO2 emissions, increased rainfall in already rainy areas, continental ice sheet melting, Arctic sea ice decline, and permafrost melting. Brysse et al. concludes that the on the whole the IPCC has been too conservative in its projections, “erring on the side of least drama” — in effect preferring to be wrong on the conservative side in order to avoid criticism.
The comments, especially by Superman, are worth the read – like on this site!
Thanks again Guy, keep up the good work!
January 6th, 2013 at 7:09 am
@ Tom
Yes. All is vanity. ‘I think, therefore I am’, invents an ‘I’. Therefore cease thinking. Take a break from the tyranny of the I. There’s lots of ways to do that, to achieve inner peace, a silent mind. I use mushin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin
January 6th, 2013 at 8:20 am
Tom, I did see the article in defense of the IPCC. I found it quite stunningly ludicrous. The essay I’ll post momentarily addresses the issue.
With thanks to Aleigha, I’ve posted a new essay. It’s here.
January 6th, 2013 at 10:43 am
@ Ozman
Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful.
I use no magic to extend my life;
Now, before me, the dead trees become alive.
http://www.expressionsofspirit.com/10bulls/tenbulls.htm
January 7th, 2013 at 8:09 am
‘I think the suppression of dissident voices by the so-called Christian Right, in USA, and by the Islamic Fundamentalists, is terrifying, but also by what might be called the Scientistic Fundamentalists, who won’t tolerate any view that is not based on their version of Enlightenment rationalism’ -ulvfugl
bullshit!, imo. religious fundies are infamous for their violent and cruel intolerance. when was the last time u ever heard of scientists or their ‘followers’ outlawing any belief system, persecuting anyone?
January 7th, 2013 at 8:33 am
You think that Dawkins and his followers are tolerant of any views other than his own bigoted neo-Darwinian fundamentalism ?
Any scientist, biologist, who objects to having life reduced to numbers is subjected to exactly the same type of abuse as scientists receive from religious fundamentalists.
The only reason that people who support e.g. Dawkins’ intolerant viewpoint don’t outlaw other views, is because they are in a minority, and don’t have the power to do so, not because they don’t have the desire. Just read what they say in their comments ! They HATE their opponents, every bit as much as their opponents hate them.
Indeed, anybody who raises the possibility that life may have a meaning is subjected to abuse and denigration from the believers in the religious dogma of scientism.
For example :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2013/jan/04/most-despised-science-book-2012
January 7th, 2013 at 9:09 am
@ tvtwhen was the last time u ever heard of scientists or their ‘followers’ outlawing any belief system, persecuting anyone?
Thinking about that, that the last example that comes to mind, is the confinement in mental hospitals of Falun Gong supporters in China, on the grounds that they are mentally ill, by scientifically trained psychiatrists. ( They are also imprisoned, pit into forced labour camps, tortured, executed, of course ). Another example would be various individuals in USA subjected to all sorts of horrendous treatments by scientifically trained psychiatrists, because they deviated from what is/was considered the social norm. Another example would be the same thing in the Soviet Union, where political dissent was classified as a medical disorder.
This is science, scientists, being used/abused as a tool to enforce secular ideological beliefs, in just the same way as the Spanish Inquisition was used to enforce religious conformity.
January 7th, 2013 at 3:38 pm
If anyone bothers to read this old thread, to reiterate, I’m not making a case for or against science, or for or against religion, I’m attempting to explain why the conflict arises, and why it is utterly stupid, because, it’s like trying to argue that up is better than down, or trying to have a world where there is only left but no right. For unknown reasons, we have two halves to our brains. We’re just peculiar beings that have evolved that way. Nobody knows why. The dominance of the hemispheres varies, and according to which one is prevailing, we’ll tend to see the world in this way or that way.
The eminent authority on this (imo) is Iain McGilchrist. He devotes a section of his book to imagining what soceity would be like, if only the left hemisphere was operational, and the right hemisphere was entirely excluded. It’s frightening, in how his vision resembles some aspects of the present day.
For example, harking back to Robin Datta’s ‘meat robots’ :
“It is significant that the ‘normal’ scientific materialist view of the body is similar to that found in schizophrenia. Schizophrenic subjects routinely see themselves as machines – often robots, computers, or cameras – and sometimes declare that parts of them have been replaced by metal or electronic components. This goes with a lack of transparency of the flesh. No spirit is seen there : ‘body and soul don’t belong together – there is no unity’, as one patient eloquently puts it. The result is the body becomes ‘mere’ matter. As a result, other human beings, too, appear no more than things, because they are walking bodies. Another patient described by R.D. Laing ‘perceived the actions of his wife – a lively and vivacious woman – as those of a kind of robot, an ‘it’, devoid of inner life. If he told his wife a joke and she ( “it” ) laughed, this showed no real feeling, but only her “conditioned” or mechanical nature’. It is not hard to think of Descartes, looking through his window on the world, and seeing not people, but walking machines.” – The Master and His Emissary p. 439
This is McGilchrist’s notion of humans with only left brain. That is, reason, logic, rationality, logos, but no right brain at all. They, we, lose our full humanity. We lose mythos, become soul-less, dis-enchanted, lose all the stuff that makes us fun, that makes kids giggle, that allows us to empathise with the feelings of others, to feel love, awe, mystery, wonder, delight, surprise, all that stuff is right brain, the stuff of emotion, poetic, mystic, art and magic, etc.
January 8th, 2013 at 12:44 am
Paul Chefurka
Your comments on prayer are cool with me, but i was not really speaking about prayer.
The term ‘spirits’ is all we have, perhaps the persian ‘Jin’ or ‘Gin’, from which we disney like derive ‘Genie’, is better suited.
I can’t see that the many indigenous cultures were all silly, stupid or just misguided fools. Many of them invoked, asked for favourable help, and asked wizdom from.
That is no proof, but it is good enough for me to know where to start .
January 8th, 2013 at 1:00 am
ulvfug
Thanks for your reply. I had a feeling you were doing those sorts of things, and I guess it will take a lot of humans to turn a tide in tese affairs.
BTW I wenr and walked a trail I haven’t walked for several months/Moons and there were usualy lots of frogs in a certain ‘soak area’ near the path.
There was only one frog calling, where usually many many were croaking. We have high temps, even at this altitude,(3300 ft, 1000 meters), and not much rqin for severqal months.
Hope the frogs keep frogging!
Cheers.