I was interviewed by Rob Daven at Conspiracy HQ a few days ago. The video failed, but the audio worked and is embedded at this link. The interview with me begins at 17:15.
The topic: climate chaos.
The approach: address the standard “denier” issues.
Tue, Jan 15, 2013
I was interviewed by Rob Daven at Conspiracy HQ a few days ago. The video failed, but the audio worked and is embedded at this link. The interview with me begins at 17:15.
The topic: climate chaos.
The approach: address the standard “denier” issues.
January 15th, 2013 at 9:18 pm
Off topic…just fuckin with ya. Next post should take care of that.
January 15th, 2013 at 9:38 pm
The podcast keeps stopping with me. I have to keep reloading the page and setting the dial to the last time mark etc.
January 16th, 2013 at 12:26 am
This is a worthwhile interview, it ranges into how we humans have difficulty with accepting any changes from IMO World-Scale-Adolescent- Attitudes-Towards-What-Keeps-Me-Alive.
Conversations that are long enough and wide ranging are the best way to get the message across IMO.
I am disposed towards surviving, just call me selfish, but no need to exit before term,IMO…
So, I have come to a similar conclusion of what is optimal to ‘do’ with my time and energy before the turbulence hits where I am.
That action consists of:
1. Re-initiate the human Gift Community
A first community project is to establish a gift community garden, and share everything. This is for me a research and teaching about shared effort and giving, through demonstrating what grows well in a local area, and that will rapidly change from season to season, year to year, due to catastrophic climate changes. Some locations will be abandoned, but some will be viable, and I believe the one I am in is viable. I will be inviting 4 well established local organic gardeners, some who have community garden experience, others are already supplying local restraunts and cafes with their produce, to help me develop gardens of their systems, or approaches, and work with what grows well. Over time this will be a valuable collective experience that demonstrates what grows in this location, and how the gift community can supply the needs of a community that presently most think can only come from centralised big fossil fueled subsidised corporations etc. Seeds will be kept and distributed for anyone to grow their own food.
2. Emphasise the local systems and connections both economic and interactive, and social in all aspects of work and leisure, family and friends.
3. Engage with people as complete equals, not accepting any attempt at superiority, or inferiority. Humans will only keep surviving not only if they can physically survive, however they adapt and behave differently, e.g. live underground etc.,but only if they achieve social equality and drop all the hierarchic ‘I represent your interests’ blow. Everyone can contribute something, and inclusion will be the main thing.
4. Develop direct agreements with individuals about community action. This translates into just keeping one’s word when agreeing to do something. Avoiding committee meetings, is my intention. In line with the modern activists credo, ‘You do it and others will come’, I will do stuff, and make agreements with others to help, or support those actions.
5. Start today!!!if not already.
As guy says,
Water, Food, Thermo-regulation, and Decent Human Community.
Something tells me the last one on the list is definitely going to be the hardest to accomplish.
No illusions about the difficulty factors for survival
January 16th, 2013 at 1:12 am
For those who have difficulty with the podcast here is the link to mp3 file for playing or downloading
January 16th, 2013 at 1:46 am
Perhaps the commentary section at Nature Bats Last is (one of the few) / (the only) place for Conversations Understanding Near Term Extinction. The ultimate in what some might disparagingly classify as Doomer Porn!
But for those tired of euphemisms, understatements and downplaying, this is the place to mainline an uncut fix.
January 16th, 2013 at 4:19 am
Just another in a long series of evidence that the oceans are dying:
http://www.wltx.com/news/article/216791/2/Thousands-of-Dead-Fish-Wash-Up-On-Pawleys-Island-
PAWLEYS ISLAND, SC (WLTX) –There is a mystery along the South Carolina coast.
Thousands of dead fish washed up on the beach at the south end of Pawleys Island Tuesday afternoon.
The fish are menhaden, and the SC Department of Natural Resources have been notified of the incident.
Menhaden fish are a small, oily fish that are used for fish oil and it’s oil is also an ingredient in lipstick and they are also used for livestock feed.
January 16th, 2013 at 5:03 am
Keeping the Empire going requires massive investment in managing geopolitical events, and getting the desired outcome. Warfare is far easier to transact when your own troops are out of harm’s way. No testimony is needed when the active combatant logs off, goes home to wife or hubby and kids to watch Fox news and see his/her handywork on the news with the rider;
“A bomb blast believed to be a drone strike on a village in Blah-blah-astan today killed 30 civilians believed to be A_q_d_ militia, was reported to come from unknown forces in the region.”
‘Foreign complicity in the drone war’
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/2013114103153393705.html
A snippet:
“On March 17, 2011 a US drone fired several missiles at the Pakistani town of Datta Khel in an attack which killed an estimated 42 people and wounded at least a dozen more. The strike hit a council of tribal elders and local businessmen who had come to discuss a dispute over a nearby chromite mine – a meeting about which they had given prior documented notice to local government officials. Around 10:45AM several missiles struck the two circles of people seated for the commencement of the meeting, sending shrapnel and shards of rock tearing into the crowd. Idris Farid, one of the first responders to the scene, described the aftermath: “Everything was devastated. There were pieces – body pieces – lying around. There was lots of flesh and blood.”
Another man, Khalil Khan, whose father was among those attending the meeting, said that he was informed in plain terms that none of the elders had survived the attack and that “they were all destroyed, all finished”. Unable to even identify the body parts of those who were only hours ago the leaders of their community, the people of Datta Khel were forced to “collect pieces of flesh and put them in a coffin” so that the relatives of those killed might be reasonably satisfied that the body they are burying truly belonged to their departed loved one….
Recent investigations by Reprieve have revealed that the depth of official complicity potentially extends beyond intelligence co-operation but to the provision of lethal equipment as well. The UK government’s Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) has been found to have granted General Electric, a company better known in the popular imagination for manufacturing home appliances than for deadly weapons components, export licenses for products integral to the production of the Predator drones which terrorise the inhabitants of towns such as Datta Khel. A particular subsidiary company, General Electric Intelligence Platforms (GEIP) which sells components for drones in 2012 published a brochure boasting of the military applicability of its products. As part of the brochure states:
There is no doubt that the presence of UAV platforms will continue to grow as military, security and emergency response forces continue to extoll [its]merits…
Contravening law
The granting of licenses for the export of these products in support of the CIA’s extrajudicial drone war comes in complete contravention to the EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports which prohibits member states from issuing export licenses if “there is a clear risk that the intended recipient would use the proposed export aggressively against another country”. By continuing to issue these licenses with the knowledge of their applicability to a campaign of extrajudicial executions which continues to operate without legal oversight in several countries around the world, the British government has added another layer of complicity to its involvement with the CIA in this effort….
The new year has seen a rapid uptick in the frequency of drone strikes by the Obama administration, hitting targets in Pakistan as well as in Yemen. Some accounts have indicated that the ongoing drone war has now claimed more civilian lives than all those killed in the 9/11 attacks. The example of clandestine and surreptitious British support for CIA’s drone campaign, conducted away from public and legal scrutiny, raises troubling questions about the ability of governments to circumvent the law and elude popular accountability in the pursuit of foreign military adventurism.
For Noor Khan and others who have lost family members in drone attacks the question of culpability colours perceptions of countries which they had scarcely heard of before their lives were altered by them forever. In the words of one relative of a victim describing life before drone strikes ravaged his hometown, “We did not know that America existed. We did not know what its geographical location was, how its government operated, what its government was like, we don’t know how they treat their citizens or anything about them. We didn’t know how they treated a common man. Now we know how they treat a common man, what they’re doing to us.”
Given the depth of complicity of governments in the UK and potentially other countries as well, it bears reflection as to how broadly the moral and legally culpability for these attacks truly lies.”
Drone warfare, coming to a suburb near you.
January 16th, 2013 at 5:39 am
Good points OzMan.
Everyone, here’s a good take on what’s happening planet-wide (including pics) with trees (tip of the hat to Gail):
Drought, Fires and Tree Death: Ignoring Die-Offs Until It’s Our Own
(closes with)
Does ‘industrial-capitalist carbon man’ give a fuck about trees? Certainly not if they get in the way of profit and ‘development’.
“Forest precedes Man and desert follows him.”
Francois Rene Chateaubriand
The one word in the title the really rankles me is IGNORING – what we humans do best when it gets in the way of making money, getting laid, or doing what we want. It’s also the best descriptor of humanity – IGNORANT!
Now that our vaunted educational system has been hi-jacked by industry and “best practices” (what a sick joke), we’ve dumbed down the population here to the point that we’ve just graduated the first generation of children who are less informed and less educated than their parents (who weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer either).
Yeah, they can fiddle around with their i-phones and get answers to their deepest questions like “What are the Kardashians up to?” or “What team is looking to sign La Bron?” while Obama signs laws eviscerating the Constitution on New Year’s Day. [and now i can be wisked away by the goon squad and tortured or killed by a hovering drone without any charge if he says i'm a threat to the country by making these statements or for any reason - even whim]
So the collapse has been on-going for decades, maybe even half a century – as it was “engineered” to do (slowly over time, just like in Germany before WWII), with media control, a corporate agenda, and complete disregard for anyone or anything that isn’t in “the plan.”
They’ve rigged the schools, the laws and the money while plundering the environment and flooding it with pollution and toxic crap.
The hubris behind all this would be stunning if i had any belief in human kind as anything other than idiotic jerks running around trying to grab as much as they can for themselves while IGNORING everyone and everything else. This is why, when OzMan says that forming a decent community will be the toughest part, he’s hitting the nail on the head. We can’t even get people to agree that our situation is dire in spite of the facts! No matter how small or large ones community may be they’ll always be subject to threat by those outside it who either want what they have or disagree with their plan. Human history is the biggest farce there is – a long series of repeated mistakes and ignorance parading as CIVILIZATION. Well, i for one can’t wait til it’s over. We’ve gotta be the biggest joke in the universe.
Have a nice day.
January 16th, 2013 at 6:13 am
I hope nobody objects if I refer back to the previous thread, Lidia’s comment, “…many parallels between the ecosystem that is the human body and the ecosystem that we live in on earth..”.
There are many obvious parallels, but that could be very misleading. There are superficial similarities between many things. Biologists have a more or less rigorous definition of ecosystem. I’m not certain that there is a consensus among scientists that the entire biosphere should be seen as an ecosystem, although it seems obvious to me that it is.
But can the term be transferred comfortably to the human body without distorting its meaning ? There can be the ecosystem of the microbes in the gut, or on the skin surface, but is the human body in toto an ecosystem ?
We could try it the other way, and transfer medical terminology onto the planet, and have the physiology, the metabolism, the vascular system, etc, of the biosphere… ?
This has already occurred, in popular vernacular language, with industry as disease, and humans as pathology, etc, similar to bacteria rotting an apple, but that’s more mythos than logos, poetic than logic, in my view.
We can see the same fractal patterns in leaves, ice, and in photos of Earth from Space, there are similarities between rail transport systems and patterns of fungal mycelia, but to get deeper insight needs understanding of the underlying principles, imo.
I think we’re jumping categories, by comparing the biosphere and the human body. Human body is a discrete entity that replicates, with a developmental trajectory, all that embryology. Earth, the biosphere, has nothing similar. Lovelock’s Daisy World is a wonderful insight, Peter Ward’s insights likewise. There does seem to be some sort of pattern to discern, but we only have the one single sample to look at, that makes it very difficult.
But we have plenty of examples of real ecosystems, plenty of data and observation, woodlands, coral reefs, prairies, lakes, so much that it is overwhelming, physics is easy by comparison.
The ‘thing’ we are living in, the biosphere, is really quite small and easy to grasp. Going up, three quarters of the atmosphere is in the first seven miles, and there’s not a lot living there. Going down seven miles, and you’re past the lower limit. So, imagine, you can peel the whole thing off the round rocky core and lay it out flat like a table cloth. That’s ALL we have. You can walk from one end to the other, just about.
What is it ? Nobody knows. Most are not even interested in knowing much about it at all. Isn’t THAT sad and incredible. Depresses me, anyway.
January 16th, 2013 at 6:22 am
Was there a link intended, Tom ?
Nevermind, I can guess what it’d be like, same old same old…
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/01/extinction-looms-as-indonesia-opens.html
January 16th, 2013 at 6:37 am
Cutting down trees will continue to happen, until there are no more trees.
The world industrial economy knows no limits. So much wood is wasted – approximately 60% of landfill in urban municipal areas is dumped pallet wood.
Wood was our first help in surviving in difficult to settle zones, and trees were almost everywhere.
What a place the Earth must have been!!
Easter Island, here we come.
January 16th, 2013 at 7:23 am
Yes, the link i forgot (thanks ulvfugl) is here (too busy ranting):
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/01/15/drought-fires-and-tree-death-ignoring-die-offs-until-its-our-own/
and below another fact it’s taken me years to discover.
January 16th, 2013 at 7:23 am
Everyone forgets to mention sinkhole!
Short vid of a car disappearing into a sink hole http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JkUvm4KcV7g
January 16th, 2013 at 7:25 am
China seems to be running a lead in sink holes – maybe even taking over Florida?
Residents in the village of Lianyuan in southern China’s Hunan Province have been treading rather gingerly these last few months.
Over 20 sinkholes have opened up in the ground since last September.
The cave-ins, which range in size, have seen houses collapse and rivers run dry. And there is never any warning as to where and when the sinkhole occur.
According to local authorities, the main reason for the cave-ins is the number of coalmines in the area.
It is not clear what steps are being taken to prevent further sinkholes from appearing.
http://news.uk.msn.com/blog/trending-blogpost.aspx?post=00b820d1-9133-4eac-8c01-ad6f95f66d0e
January 16th, 2013 at 7:27 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44W8LxzLbnM&list=FLHE92x768p8h-fMrqhsnE1Q&index=3
The Act of 1871 makes us all slaves, before we’re even born here, and makes us responsible for a debt we never incurred because the Congress back then committed wholesale treason and sold us out to international bankers.
Please listen to the 26 min video to become informed (if you haven’t heard this before – and it isn’t taught in school)
January 16th, 2013 at 7:30 am
Kathy – i saw that! Yes sinkholes are popping up (actually down) all over the world, probably as the result of flooding and increased rainfall washing out the foundation under roads and the surface we inhabit. i don’t think “prevention” is even possible especially since we aren’t addressing the climate that’s causing it.
January 16th, 2013 at 7:44 am
I think farmers are more aware that nature bats last than the other parts of the industrial economy. We use machinery to save labor, we use chemicals to save labor and enhance growth, knowing that recycling organic matter is what we should be doing. We know that frost kills plalnts, we know we need rain. We know the aquifers are going low, we know fertilizer is running out. We know that nature is what causes things to grow and we still must work around that fact. We still tend to work with nature.
Having said that, the latest issue of Dairy Herd Management (dairyherd.com) is all about the weather. They are concerned. Weather tends to repeat only 20% of the time but things look like it will repeat in 2013.
I haven’t heard of any projects of geoengineering the Arctic to cool it down. Non-farm industrial economy is, in my opinion, more arrogant. They want the arctic to warm up so they can drill. They want Greenland to warm up so they can mine it. They are not about to admit that nature bats last. They will fight and conquer nature…and win. Such arrogance. Trying to cool the arctic would be an admission that nature wins. Men don’t do that.
David
January 16th, 2013 at 8:15 am
Hi everyone,
I just came across this, I suppose it could have a small impact on the population overshoot problem. No more corn chips?
“Fortified by Global Warming, Deadly Fungus Poisons Corn Crops, Causes Cancer”
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) estimate more than five billion people worldwide are at risk for chronic exposure through contaminated foods, according to a March 2012 study published in PLoS One.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=deadly-fungus-poisons-corn-crops
January 16th, 2013 at 8:25 am
dairymandave: Why lookie here, even the mainstream news is finally gettin’ in on the act (though i think it’s about selling ad space rather than the subject matter meaning anything to most people) -
http://news.yahoo.com/end-near-doomsday-clock-holds-5-til-midnight-232147095.html
“The hands of the infamous “Doomsday Clock” will remain firmly in their place at five minutes to midnight — symbolizing humans’ destruction — for the year 2013, scientists announced today (Jan. 14).
Keeping their outlook for the future of humanity quite dim, the group of scientists also wrote an open letter to President Barack Obama, urging him to partner with other global leaders to act on climate change.
The clock is a symbol of the threat of humanity’s imminent destruction from nuclear or biological weapons, climate change and other human-caused disasters. In making their deliberations about how to update the clock’s time this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists considered the current state of nuclear arsenals around the globe, the slow and costly recovery from events like Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and extreme weather events that fit in with a pattern of global warming.”
(there’s more)
i would put the clock at about 30 seconds to midnight – but that’s just me. 5 minutes til makes it seem like we still have time to “fix” what’s wrong with the world.
Wishful thinking – just like with the IPCC! Or, as Obama would say:
Give ‘em hope! (but don’t do anything about it)
Ignorant humanity has no idea how complex systems interact and influence each other (that’s about 99% of humanity) or about tipping points so i wouldn’t expect a big outcry over this. Like i said above, so many people are just trying to get through one more day and most will skip the article and go to ones concerning sports, celebrities, shopping or any other distraction to keep them on the treadmill of death.
If there is a next time, i hope to be part of a species that not only has consciousness but also “is sentient” (or “gives a shit” in the vernacular).
January 16th, 2013 at 8:32 am
@Tom & DMD
Tom, unless your very first memories are ones of luxury & privilege, you were born a slave/serf/sheep – and it goes back a lot longer than just 1871.
However, it isn’t until many, many years later (if ever) that you finally discover the truth. Now, this isn’t to suggest a certain minority from the slave class aren’t appointed as nominal leaders (Clinton is an excellent example), but the ruling families firmly retain control.
DMD, et al – diminishing marginal returns is the governing principle. Of course we will move into the final, untapped regions to exploit the last remaining reserves of scarce resources, but they will never deliver the same ‘bang for the buck’ as the first hits. To achieve the kind of return the original Ghawar field had, when global population was @ least half of today, would require 2-3x Ghawars & Cantrells. Ain’t gonna happen.
People who study & understand the game – on both sides of the social coin (slave & rulers) – know we’re nearing the end-game stage. I suggest that rather than moan, bitch & complain, or otherwise resign one to the fates, that they should become active fans of the unknown outcome. Think of routing for a favorite team – who is going to win? What are the odds? Will it be close & exciting.
A huge, momentous turning-oint in human history is unfolding. The PTB are ahead of the curve in terms of understanding what’s goin’ down (ie the topics discussed here daily), but that’s not to say they’re actually going to “win”. It takes unbelievably massive amounts of energy to maintain a full-spectrum security state; during a period of (rapid) decline, many are in the camp who believe the center will not be able to hold.
January 16th, 2013 at 8:33 am
@ dairymandave
I haven’t heard of any projects of geoengineering the Arctic to cool it down.
Plenty of suggestions have been made. Reckless and foolish, imo.
Projects to geo-engineer the Arctic are arrogance heaped upon arrogance, imo.
We have already been geo-engineering the planet for the last centuries, at rapidly increasing pace, faster since 2000 than ever before, without any idea what the results were going to be, and now more geo-engineering to reduce the harm, when we don’t know what effect that will have either ?
We still tend to work with nature.
I think you’re ( farmers ) kidding yourselves. The same arrogance as the other industries.
Farming destroys nature, changes the climate, then the farmers blame others.
The only way farming could get around this problem would be to mimic natural systems as closely as possible, as did the Amazonian indians ( as mentioned by Lidia, or was it BC Nurse Prof, in previous thread ), or forest garden type systems, or permaculture type systems as taught by Geoff Lawton, or cattle herding systems as taught by Alan Savory.
Conventional agriculture does not even attempt to consider natural systems, it replaces them with totally artificial land uses. Farming is about money, not about food, even less about ecology, or the long term future.
http://www.eol.ucar.edu/field_projects/field-projects/bufex-2005/research-goals-objectives
January 16th, 2013 at 8:54 am
http://www.terraforminginc.com/category/climateviewer-3d/
Did you know that men are “gently altering” your weather? Did you know that stock brokers and investors bet on the weather? Did you know scientists are making plans to coat your skies in reflective particles to reflect sunlight and save us from global warming? Read the truth about the wild world of climate engineering: Weather Modification and Geoengineering. Herein you will find the most complete directory of Weather Modification related companies, associations, and related research on the net.
(there’s a silly 3 minute video poking fun at the whole idea, but the subject matter in the articles is completely serious and science based)
January 16th, 2013 at 9:00 am
Dave, the AMEG group has a number of proposals for geo-engineering. I don’t know that anyone in power is paying them any mind, and I hope they don’t. We have enough horror facing us without meddling more. OTOH you could take the position that we are going out if we don’t do this, so what is there to loose. I think however they don’t expect any negative results from what they propose, eyes wide open about the danger, clamped shut about the unthought of possible consequences.
http://a-m-e-g.blogspot.com/2012/09/ameg-policy-brief.html
January 16th, 2013 at 9:01 am
some of the plans outlined on the Arctic blog
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/how-to-cool-arctic.html
January 16th, 2013 at 9:20 am
On a slightly different subject, does anyone have ideas about areas of the continental US that would yield slightly more mileage from NTE? I realize there are a thousand variables, but I presume deadly heat would be way up there on the list of no-no places. And of course, water, food, natural disasters etc.
January 16th, 2013 at 9:25 am
Farming IS geo-engineering.
January 16th, 2013 at 9:31 am
to quote Bailey, ( hope you don’t mind Bailey, it was a good comment that got no response ) from the previous thread, this IS geo-engineering :
Here is an interesting experiment (I am sure other’s have done it); Pretend like you are an alien coming down from space, and pull up google maps or google earth, and go to satellite view. Now zoom out and then closely in on many areas of the US – or other parts of the world. Look an area of green, and realize just a few hundred years ago it was all like this, and now EVERYWHERE you look is a patchwork of development, farms, etc. Now go to some rare areas like Bolivia or Peru and compare.
I just did this with the east coast of the US, and except for high mountains or right next to some rivers, 90% of all vegetation is gone. In addition to the effects on habitat (and the polutants and water usage from maintenance), how can this not effect oxygen? Are we to assume that mowed grass can produce as much oxygen as the once mighty canopy of trees and dense vegetation?
January 16th, 2013 at 9:35 am
It’s not so much the O2 part, ( which imo is relatively minor at this time ) it’s that it effects everything, the whole overall system, albedo, water cycle, soils, rivers, everything….
January 16th, 2013 at 9:43 am
Thanks Guy for gifting this website and for allowing the free exchange and sharing of information.
January 16th, 2013 at 11:00 am
Bailey, once the grid goes down for good any nuclear power plant not previously decommissioned will go Fukushima from lack of cooling the reactor and spent fuel pool
http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2011/03/16/the-nuclear-world-interactive-map/#axzz2IA6zwpcL
The map at the link should be your first line of checking – everything in the east coast looks like toast
January 16th, 2013 at 11:29 am
Everyone: I was in a hurry this morning when I posted, wasn’t very clear. I know there are plans for geoengineering and I don’t think they will work out so well, but the point was that no one, with the money, really wants to do it; they want warming.
All I was saying about farming is that no farmer ever made anything grow. We don’t do photosynthesis. Yes, we have messed up a lot of things.
Guy, I learned some more from your interview. The fact that the interviewer is not only on your side but knows a little something about the subject must be rewarding to you, if that is the right word.
January 16th, 2013 at 12:11 pm
I just read the article about the Indonisian forests being made available to the corporate monsters.
”If this happens, we’ll see the extinction of all the charismatic species in 10 to 20 years. The rhinos will be heading towards extinction in six months, the elephants will last perhaps 15 years, the tigers maybe 20. The orang-utans will go quite quickly because they live in the lowlands,” he said. ”It’s very sad.”
How did we as a species become so vile? We’ve pretty much created planet Treblinka and there is no end in sight, other than NTE.
I know this topic has been discussed before, but was this outcome inevitable once we reached the stage of civilization (since the use of fossil fuels was eventually going to occur)? Or, does anyone think that a sustainable civilization was possible?
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/extinction-risk-as-aceh-opens-forests-for-logging-20130114-2cpmr.html#ixzz2IAP8LOBi
January 16th, 2013 at 12:31 pm
The only explanation I’ve ever heard that makes any sense is wetiko. Jack Forbes, in his book Columbus and other cannibals, describes the mental illness that drives some to kill everything in sight.
The Native Americans would put the people who exhibited these symptoms down. I’m coming to believe that that is the only solution. But maybe this is just a bad day. You can only take so much omnicidal gore before you just want to join in to protect what you love.
January 16th, 2013 at 1:18 pm
@ wildwoman
Thanks, I had not heard of wetiko before
http://www.realitysandwich.com/greatest_epidemic
But imo, it’s giving it dignity to see it as an exotic aberration, millions of ordinary people see it as normal, culture, capitalism, which makes it normal and legitimate for a few to become very wealthy at everyone else’s expense, and add the myth of progress, I mean, a lot of people will call this ‘development’, the sort of thing that gets funded by the World Bank, because we all feel sorry for under-developed countries, China will gobble up all that wood, it has the cash, and probably some of it is purely criminal, because much logging is illegal, money can be doubled in six months which is a good return for people who have a lot of dirty cash already, and so on…
What is precious beyond value gets converted into numbers in someone’s bank account…
It is sickening…
January 16th, 2013 at 1:39 pm
Guy just listened to the interview. Well done. Also well done on America2point0. Got the discussion group more active than I have seen it before.
January 16th, 2013 at 1:50 pm
ulvfugl, speaking of criminality … the eco-new-age optimists who advocate for political change along Gandhian lines don’t seem to realize just how criminal and sinister are the nature of the controlling powers.
9/11 was an inside job. A massive psyop to justify the imperial expansion of the Anglo-American mafia into the oil rich Middle East and to establish a military foothold in Asia – abutting both China and Iran, no less.
Sandy Hook is starting to get more and more weird and the shifting official narrative is starting to make less and less sense. Jim Fetzer, et al., have done a good job of exposing the indications of another psyop designed to disarm 80 million Amerikuns. Now that the White House is learning that massive gun restrictions are going to be a hard sell in Congress, Obama is getting ready to impose gun control (and eventual confiscation) measures via executive fiat. Although I don’t claim that guns are the hallmark of a free society, nor are they even relevant to Arctic collapse and methane issues, the fact that the government is now aggressively seeking to disarm the public tells me that they don’t believe the concumption orgy is sustainable for much longer and are getting ready to put us in lock-down, probably before Obama’s term in office expires – I suppose that he is the “Dark Knight” who is rising over Gotham.
When asked whether he believed in conspiracy theories, filmmaker Michael Moore replied, “Only those that are true.” The problem is telling the difference.
Having spent much of the past 20 years in collaborative research on dark events (the JFK assassination, 9/11, Sen. Paul Wellstone’s death), Sandy Hook looks to me like part of an escalating series of covert operations designed to promote public hysteria to incite gun control and subvert the 2nd amendment. Here are some reasons why.
A theory is simply an interpretation of facts in a given case. When the police investigate a crime, they form a theory of the case. In courts of law, prosecutors and defense attorneys usually offer alternative interpretations. With Sandy Hook, figuring out what happened poses special challenges.
The facts are not obvious. There were inconsistencies from scratch. The suspect, Adam Lanza, was a student there; then he was not. His mother was a teacher there; then she was not. The principal called the local paper to report the shooting; then she was among the first to die.
The coroner reported all the dead were shot with a Bushmaster; then NBC News reported that four handguns had been found with the body and that the AR-15 had been left in the car. (Check out YouTube, “Sandy Hook shooting — AR-15 rifle was left in the car!”)
Even if Lanza, 20, had done some shooting, the ratio of kills to targets was remarkable. As a Marine Corps officer, I qualified with a .45 four years in a row and also supervised recruits of his age in their marksmanship training. I don’t see how he could have done it.
Police radio in real-time reported two suspects headed toward the officer calling in, one of whom was apprehended. The other was tracked into the woods, as police helicopter footage shows. We have no idea what became of these suspects. So what happened?
Most likely, Adam Lanza and his mother were killed the day before with Adam Lanza’s body picked up by police. He was attired in a SWAT outfit, including body armor, and stored in the school.
I argue a three-man team entered the school. One was arrested in the school, cuffed and put on the lawn. Two went out a back door; one of them was arrested and the other apparently escaped.
Those arrested currently are not in police custody; their names were never released. That is a telling sign that we are being sold a story based on fiction rather than on fact.
Does anything else matter? Most Americans are unaware the Department of Homeland Security has acquired 1.5 billion rounds of .40 caliber, hollow-point ammunition, which is not even permissible during combat under the Geneva Conventions.
A subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security has issued a study of 680 reports from “fusion centers” that integrate federal, state and local anti-terrorism efforts. It found no evidence of any domestic terrorist activity.
The absence of any terrorist threat and the existence of more than 300 FEMA camps and special boxcars to carry dissidents to them have been deliberately withheld from the public.
Since Homeland Security has no foreign commitments, those camps and ammunition have to be for domestic consumption. Homeland Security appears to be gearing up to conduct a civil war with the American people — but 80 million armed families stand in its way.
What better excuse could there be for banning assault weapons than the slaughter of 20 innocent children? Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., has a gun control proposal that would lead to the confiscation of virtually every semi-automatic weapon in the nation.
That’s my interpretation of Sandy Hook.
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/01/14/how-the-sandy-hook-massacre-went-down/
January 16th, 2013 at 2:09 pm
U, thanks for that link. I enjoy Paul Levys take (at least the stuff I understand) but I would caution that that is Paul Levys take. Jack Forbes sets it out in a different context entirely.
January 16th, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Patrick O leary. The story about aflatoxin is not the whole fungus story. In very wet years one set of fungi grow and in very hot dry years others grow. In 2011 vomitoxin was a troublesome one. At the most danger were pigs who as you might guess have stomach problems when they ingest to much vomitoxin. One way producers handle having too much of one of the various toxins is to mix good stuff with bad so the total parts per whatever are less. Peanuts also have aflatoxin and to save having to throw out some peanuts they mix contaminated peanuts with non contaminated ones.
This is serious for humans and livestock, but also a problem with ethanol. The process of making ethanol kills the fungi but doesn’t destroy the toxin. That wouldn’t matter except it doesn’t stay in the ethanol but rather concentrates in the left overs. The left overs are called DDGs or Dried Distiller Grains, and are used for livestock food. Without being able to sell the DDGs, even with subsidies, ethanol would not be profitable. So in 2011 or 2010 (the years run together when you get old) where the fields where corn is grown were quite wet, often farmers could not sell their grain to ethanol factories. A person I know in the pig industry said he wasn’t sure they were going to be able to get enough good grain to mix with the bad. http://ohioagmanager.osu.edu/legal-issues/guest-blog-vomitoxin-in-corn-%E2%80%93-legal-ramifications-for-producers-and-buyers/
Doing some investigation at the time I learned that some farmers thought the GM corn was more susceptible to mold. Of course Monsanto says it is less susceptible.
So on top of a poor crop we now have aflatoxin. Nice. I presume it will present the same problem for the ethanol production.
January 16th, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Ethanol/Wet Milling
Corn with aflatoxins can be used for ethanol
production. Aflatoxins do not accumulate in the ethanol
but will be concentrated in the distiller’s grains coproduct. In wet-mill processing, aflatoxins concentrate in the gluten co-products. A rough estimate is that aflatoxin levels in feed co-products will be three times those in whole corn. Therefore, processors may not accept corn with aflatoxin if their co-product markets are sensitive to aflatoxin levels, such as dairy feed or pet food. They also may screen corn at very low tolerances if the co-products are to be exported where 20 ppb is the general acceptance level.
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/PM1800.pdf
January 16th, 2013 at 2:42 pm
@ depressive lucidity
I don’t like to feed paranoia and hysteria. People need to be calm and clear headed to be able to make balanced judgements about what’s really going on. It is very difficult to make a balanced judgement. Some of the initial anomalies seem to have innocent explanations, but there still seems to be many more left that are very troubling.
I have been trying to follow the story. I don’t even bother with the ‘disarm Americans’ part, because if it is a hoax, or if it is partly a hoax/partly real, then that in itself, is quite enough to freak anyone out. That’s not legitimate conduct for any authority.
As far as I can tell, – and I accept that this is a terrible thing to say, should it be the case that children died, but I’m stating my judgement as if I was an honourable and honest member of a jury – there is not one single piece of independent evidence showing that anyone died, or that Adam Lanza or his mother, even existed. All there is are photos, and video clips, and so forth, all of which are EASILY fabricated.
So, as of this moment, I don’t accept the ‘official’ version, and yes, I don’t put it beyond possibility that there are people who are capable of staging a hoax that involved real murders to add authenticity. They, presumably, are the same people who do it in other countries all the time, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, etc. Fanatics, like Breivik, only a lot of them, and with an unlimited budget.
http://youtu.be/Wx9GxXYKx_8
January 16th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
@ wildwoman
Yes. That’s what I call right brain/mythos, kinda intuitive, and then the comments fly away…
I’ll have another look for the J. Forbes version later maybe.
January 16th, 2013 at 3:19 pm
re: depressive lucidity “How did we as a species become so vile?”
and
wildwoman “The only explanation I’ve ever heard that makes any sense is wetiko.”
I would like to suggest an explanation for the vileness and insanity of our species. It is because we are actually a DOMESTICATED animal. We domesticated ourselves just as we then domesticated pigs and chickens, etc. In the same way that most domesticated animals cannot survive without the infrastructure we maintain for them or, if they do survive in the wild, they are extremely destructive as goats, the Desert Makers, are. That is, as domesticated animals, no longer in balance with Nature, we are destroying everything we encounter just as feral goats do.
That we are domesticated has separated us from Nature and this is why we are afraid of nature and destroy it wherever and whenever we can. I am not going to provide any links to brief magazine articles or YouTube videos. I’m old school – I read books because I believe most of the issues we are facing cannot be explained or examined properly in a short article or video. Complex issues require in-depth complex analyses. Our inability to think deeply about complex issues, [caused by techno 'bread and circuses' (smart phones, YouTube, etc)] is, IMO, a major part of the problem.
If you want to get a glimmering of understanding about our vileness a species please read Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication by John A. Livingston (Canadian naturalist, professor). In addition read another naturalist named Paul Shepard. He wrote books with titles like The Tender Carnivore. I have read as much Livingston and Shepard as I could get my hands on and it explained to me how we actually made ourselves the way we are – maladaptive. Heck, even Marshal McLuhan, the famous media analyst knew “the hand makes the tool then the tool makes the man.”
The next step is to understanding our vileness as a species is to understand the phenomenon of the Psychopath. In indigenous societies psychopaths, once identified, were usually executed because of the danger they posed to the survival of the tribe. For instance, Inuit men would gather together and, as a group, force the psychopath of the ice and into the water to die. Civilization, however, has provided a perfect sheltered workshop for psychopaths, sociopaths (there is a difference) and narcissists (with the aid of their authoritarian henchmen) to occupy the positions of power and control which civilization needs in order to deal with increasing complexity.
Start with “Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths among Us” by Robert D. Hare, the man who composed the current ‘Psychopath Test’ used as a psychiatric diagnostic tool. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Paul Babiak explains why your boss seems so much like, well, a psychopath. “The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us” by Martha Stout is another excellent resource. For those of you who are not book oriented go to LivingHero.com and look around for an interview with Martha Stout and other summary material on Psychopathy.
Psychopathy is considered to be primarily a genetic condition and it has been given a sheltered workshop in which to flourish by civilization. Since the genetic aberration is no longer being culled from the herd, unfeeling controllers on the narcissist-psychopath spectrum are believed to make up as much as 25% of the population by the estimation of some scientists (source: CBC documentary).
In short, domestication is a maladaptive response insofar as it separates the species from Nature and leaves them to die or destroy when restraints (the coop or the pen) are breached. In the process of us domesticated primates, building sufficient infrastructure to protect us from the dark horror of untamed Nature, we have destroyed a planetary biosphere just as goats create desert. This infrastructure has become a breeding ground for psychopaths and protects them from the normal culling process of execution.
Wetiko is probably the notion of the psychopath. That our entire population seems to be ‘wetiko’ is a result of the deadening effect domestication has on any species as we are used by and manipulated for the power, profit and pleasure of the charismatic psychopaths, sociopaths and the narcissists who have weaseled their way into the positions of power opened up by the establishment of the domesticated infrastructure of civilization.
There is clearly more to the puzzle than this, of course, but in terms of getting a grip on why Homo sapiens is such a destructive, vile, maladaptive species doing such damage to each other, other species and the biosphere I have found the above ideas very helpful.
January 16th, 2013 at 3:56 pm
Makes a lot of sense, Madmanintheattic. I’ve read some Paul Shepard.
Re ecosystems, The microbial ecosystem of the human body
January 16th, 2013 at 3:57 pm
Madmanintheattic, Brilliant analysis. I’m going to copy it and email to some of my friends.
P.S. I’ve read Stout as well as Snakes in Suits and I would further add that the psychopathic psyche is now the dominant value system in late capitalist society.
January 16th, 2013 at 5:03 pm
Here’s to living with good microbes:
http://news.yahoo.com/video/abc-children-raised-farms-develop-080000120.html
2 min. video touting study that shows farm kids have healthier immune systems (generally).
January 16th, 2013 at 5:07 pm
Nature and Madness, Paul Shepard essay
http://www.primitivism.com/nature-madness.htm
January 16th, 2013 at 5:08 pm
depressive lucidity said:
“I would further add that the psychopathic psyche is now the dominant value system in late capitalist society.”
Agreed. One characteristic which Livingston emphasizes is the flattening or blunting of the senses of domesticated animals. For example, many of our cities contain millions of people living nose-to-asshole and shoulder to shoulder (like cattle in an Intensive Feeding Operation aka feedlot) and us humans make it “work”. However if you put one million chimpanzees fenced in to the same geographical area as any city of one million people the chimps would slaughter each other tooth-and-claw until the population density was proper for them. If you filled a feedlot with wild Cape Buffalo the same thing would happen until there were only a few standing. But humans, with our blunted senses, can be herded into cities and keep well there without the same carnage which would manifest in the chimps or the buffalo.
Compare the blank, stupid, dull look in the eyes of sheep or cattle and see most of humanity. Just as a flock of sheep can be manipulated by one man and a good dog or a herd of cattle can be manipulated by one man on a good horse with a good dog, so too can the dulled senses of Homo sapiens be manipulated by a few psychopaths with a good ad or propaganda campaign. The imposition of the psychopath value system on the rest of us good sheep and cattle by our psychopath masters is in their interests as our striving to be heartless psychopath consumers only increases their profit margins and prevents us from forming the meaningful communities we yearn for and miss deeply.
There seems to be no advantage to having the big brain in terms of most people being able to see what is going on around them. Rather it seems to be a trance (belief) generating machine which can be skillfully manipulated. By the same token, then, the big brain has given us great advantage in terms of, on the one hand, being able to create effective technological ways to destroy our environment and, on the other hand, allowing the psychopaths to develop better ways to intimidate, control and manipulate us.
I would submit that the third foundational piece for understanding why H. sapiens is the way we are is to get a grip on Meme Theory. Meme theory describes the mechanism by which the big brain turns out to be MERELY a belief/delusion/trance generator. The best source I have encountered for this The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore. Very readable book and startlingly informative. Read it. Read it now. An understanding of Meme theory explains how the psychopathic value system could be adopted by entire populations.
January 16th, 2013 at 5:10 pm
@ Bailey
You asked: “On a slightly different subject, does anyone have ideas about areas of the continental US that would yield slightly more mileage from NTE?”
In the theme of separating the wheat from the chaff, “we”, only sense this summer, in earnest, have begun to separate collapse from NTE. IMO, and I suspect this might be true with several others here, NTE now constitutes two primary issues: Nonlinear rates of climatic change, and the inescapable nuclear holocaust from exposed containment pools, once the electrical grids collapse.
The addition of these two fairly new phenomena, are still in the process of utterly eroding our past vested interests…….along with every assumption we’ve ever had.
While some have been slightly ahead of the curve, I believe we are all, still, jumping back and forth between the stages that Paul Chefurka brilliantly outlined http://www.paulchefurka.ca/ (I will repost them below, for I believe they should be re-posted on every thread from here on out). However the final stage within acceptance of NTE, now bears a weight that frankly no one honestly knows what to do with. It’s as if the singularity of NTE has created a round hole, and all we have, are a handful of square garden pegs.
But if one was desperate to glean any positives from NTE, I suppose it does greatly simplify our preparedness schemes, as well as, how we choose to live out the rest of our lives. And again, I believe we are only at the beginning of seriously questioning how this new paradigm completely overrides our past presumptions.
There is a massive overlap of information concerning the causative forcing behind both collapse and NTE. They are in fact, the same. It’s just NTE has proven itself–again probably only within the last year–to be the last chapter, in a story we were either pretending or imagining was still up for grabs, or were just hoping would play out differently. Hence the profound concept of “hopium”.
But with that said, if I could turn back the clock and pretend we were still living between 1998-2007, and you were looking to relocate in preparation of something resembling JMG’s “long descent”–even though he greatly underestimated the effects of climate change–there are IMO, two base considerations that must factor above all else.
The first, is you must be within a maritime climate zone. The second, you must be somewhere around or above the 45th parallel. The closer to the coast, the further south you can be. Of course there are niche exceptions to these two rules, but they are so small with their own localized climate zones, that I don’t think they merit consideration.
The next concern, is heating. Look at a map and find what places around the world meet the first two criteria, and then do a little due diligence in finding which places have the highest low temperatures during the winter.
Oregon–where I happen to live–has the same latitude as Maine, however our winters are far, far less severe. In fact, it is possible to live here without any winter heat, if one had to, simply because of the jet stream coming off the warm Pacific greatly moderates our climate. And this isn’t going to change until the earth starts spinning in the opposite direction.
Which brings me around to why I consider the Pacific Northwest of America, from Northern California to British Columbia, west of the Cascades, to be the best place to batten down the hatches….at least in all of the Americas. When you get down to southern South America, I would consider Chile to be the most accommodating for almost the same reasons. And let us not forget New Zealand of course, but they are going to be ravaged by energy scarcity. And unless you’re already a citizen, good luck getting in, unless you have a lot of money and a redeemable trade skill.
Of all the associative problems that will arise from Climate Chaos, flooding, which is what is in store for the PNW, it is the easiest to mitigate with proper planning. Of course none of this takes into account mass migration and climate refugees, which will eventually collapse every comparatively sustainable region, but that’s a whole other issue.
Honestly, no one knows anything for certain. The cascading deleterious fallout from collapse, renders any specific considerations moot. General rules of thumb are in my best guesstimation as close as we will ever get. Everyone has gaping holes in their personal strategies, for it’s impossible to predict how the timing of any one event will transpire, and instigate an unpredictable chain reaction in civic infrastructural failure. The collapse of just one key bottleneck road or bridge, can leave a whole region isolated, for better or worse.
The rest of our lives is nothing more than an endless sequence of unintended consequences now, the best we can do, is remove ourselves from the first wave of being in harm’s way. But unless you’re young and have the means, I don’t even think this is worth worrying about, given what little time we actually have left to enjoy our lives in peace.
Obviously, this is from an American bias, and while I’ve traveled far more than my share, I can’t speak for the specific pros and cons of northern Europe, even thought I suspect St. Petersburg will be the world’s last great fortressed city, if not Vancouver.
But again, I personally no longer subscribe to collapse preparedness. I believe this was just a window in time, that’s now closed along with all the other foolishness we once promoted. Regardless of where you live–aside from being among the first casualties of permanent drought not unlike the predicament Guy now finds himself in–by the time society at large has to physically fall back on whatever preparedness plans we’ve made, the electrical grid will have already collapsed, or soon will, and that’s just the end, period.
And because of this, I now consider the whole concept of “now what?”, be solely a philosophical and commiserative discussion.
Hope that helps in some way or another.
January 16th, 2013 at 5:24 pm
madmanintheattic: thanks for the book list etc. and great (psycho)analysis of Man’s devolution.
depressive lucidity: that explanation sounds more reasonable than the mainstream putsch being foisted on us by tptb.
January 16th, 2013 at 5:34 pm
To Daniel (and Bailey)
Regarding your response to Bailey’s question I agree with you in principle if not entirely in fact. I too live on the west coast of North America in British Columbia. In terms of Climate Disruption alone the principle seems to be that normal weather patterns will persist but as extremes. So for the Pacific Northwest (PNW) it is likely it could just get too darned wet for survival. Plants waterlogged, animals and humans hypothermic, increase in pests like slugs, wood too damp to burn, constant flooding, landslides, and wet, wet, wet.
One principle disadvantage of the PNW is the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Scientists are unsure whether when Cascadia gives way it will be in many “small” earthquakes (7.5 to 8.5) leading to “decades of disaster” or whether it will give way in one big jolt (9.5+) causing a “concentration of catastrophe.” But there is a 100% chance the Cascadia will cause widespread destruction sometime … probably soonish. One effect a 9.5+ might trigger is the collapse of the Mica Dam north of Revelstoke, BC which will send a wave of water down the Columbia River destroying everything in it’s path and excavating all the stored nuclear, nerve gas and other classified wastes buried at the Hanford site in Washington washing all this toxic waste through Portland and into the Pacific. Nice. Dam could fall by itself anyway too but no one knows – the geological reports remain classified.
As far as an overall assesment here is my take for Canada. The East (the maritime provinces) will be hammered mercilessly by Atlantic storms. This is already an established pattern with Hurricane Sandy just the most recent example of the potential devastation. Quebec and Ontario will become deathtraps of high heat and deadly humidity. The Prairie provinces will return to at least their normal semi-arid state. The 20th century was the wettest century on the Great Plains for the last 2000 years and in the early 19th century the area was considered by explorers to be too dry for human habitation and agriculture. The drought conditions across the United Snakes last summer are merely a harbinger of what is to come.
British Columbia: Mostly mountainous, more snow (all three highways connecting the coast with the interior were blocked a couple of weeks ago by record high snowfall), firestorms as pine beetle killed trees combust, and mountain ecosystems are very difficult to live in. The coast I have already covered. As far as the North, the arboreal forest will be a firestorm and the tundra is already melting and releasing methane. In terms of an actual NTE event, there really is no safe place.
Regarding above discussions of geo-engineering, all of it is futile because none of it takes into account the increased acidification and inevitable death of the oceans as the result of continued and increasing CO2 emissions. Read Under A Green Sky by Peter Ward to fully appreciate the consequences of Ocean Anoxia and consequent Ocean Death.
January 16th, 2013 at 5:35 pm
Daniel you wrote “But again, I personally no longer subscribe to collapse preparedness”
BTW I have a male Towhee who seems to have gotten interested in me. Usually they are very timid birds. This one sings his little call sometimes 5 feet from me. I call back to-weee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHQay0cu2o4 and we call back and forth – usually I end the session. I presume he found a strange towhee with a bad call and is trying to educate me as he hasn’t tried the more complicated calls yet. Time well spent once you accept NTE.
I agree. However many of the things that one might do to prepare for collapse are actually quite pleasant behaviors and can be even more so if you are no longer frantic to extend your life to what ever end point you previously thought you would reach. Gardening of course is one of those things. I can now garden without thinking I somehow have to provide all our food. Instead I can grow whatever I choose, and as much or little as my aging body will allow.
January 16th, 2013 at 5:36 pm
From Paul Chefurka http://www.paulchefurka.ca/
Climbing the Ladder of Awareness
When it comes to our understanding of the unfolding global crisis, each of us seems to fit somewhere along a continuum of awareness that can be roughly divided into five stages:
1. Dead asleep. At this stage there seem to be no fundamental problems, just some shortcomings in human organization, behaviour and morality that can be fixed with the proper attention to rule-making. People at this stage tend to live their lives happily, with occasional outbursts of annoyance around election times or the quarterly corporate earnings seasons.
2. Awareness of one fundamental problem. Whether it’s Climate Change, overpopulation, Peak Oil, chemical pollution, oceanic over-fishing, biodiversity loss, corporatism, economic instability or sociopolitical injustice, one problem seems to engage the attention completely. People at this stage tend to become ardent activists for their chosen cause. They tend to be very vocal about their personal issue, and blind to any others.
3. Awareness of many problems. As people let in more evidence from different domains, the awareness of complexity begins to grow. At this point a person worries about the prioritization of problems in terms of their immediacy and degree of impact. People at this stage may become reluctant to acknowledge new problems – for example, someone who is committed to fighting for social justice and against climate change may not recognize the problem of resource depletion. They may feel that the problem space is already complex enough, and the addition of any new concerns will only dilute the effort that needs to be focused on solving the “highest priority” problem.
4. Awareness of the interconnections between the many problems. The realization that a solution in one domain may worsen a problem in another marks the beginning of large-scale system-level thinking. It also marks the transition from thinking of the situation in terms of a set of problems to thinking of it in terms of a predicament. At this point the possibility that there may not be a solution begins to raise its head.
People who arrive at this stage tend to withdraw into tight circles of like-minded individuals in order to trade insights and deepen their understanding of what’s going on. These circles are necessarily small, both because personal dialogue is essential for this depth of exploration, and because there just aren’t very many people who have arrived at this level of understanding.
5. Awareness that the predicament encompasses all aspects of life. This includes everything we do, how we do it, our relationships with each other, as well as our treatment of the rest of the biosphere and the physical planet. With this realization, the floodgates open, and no problem is exempt from consideration or acceptance. The very concept of a “Solution” is seen through, and cast aside as a waste of effort.
January 16th, 2013 at 6:00 pm
Thanks guys for your take on possible places which might give the most milage from NTE. I live close to the NE Fl coast currently (Amelia Island), and am quite worried about sea level rise. However, I feel the moderation effect of the ocean might provide some buffer from extreme dangerous temp fluctuations. I have thought about moving about 40 minutues inland to be away from the coast – and besides, the coast may be coming closer anyhow! We have been in a bit of a drought here which has only recently gotten some relief.
It is hard to imagine that the nuclear facilities would not keep enough uranium on hand so that if there were a collapse of the grid, they would at least be able to maintain power to keep their own operations intact for some lengthy period?
I had also thought about an area in NE Tn high up – like Mountain City which is 2500 feet and affordable, and near two large lakes. Any thoughts on this? Finally, I have friends who are from Watertown NY, and because there is so much lake area, I felt it might provide some moderation in the summer. However, I am worried about too much cold and precipitation – and of course, the Sandy like occurrences which could extend influences that far.
January 16th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
@KathyC – I’ve developed the same sentiment regarding gardening. We have a fairly large backyard garden given that we live by the coast in a large urban setting.
During my journey through PF’s 5 stages, I began to explore ways in which one might possibly be able to not only sustain themselves, but also serve to help build community cohesiveness by sharing knowledge with others.
However, once you settle into #5, all these frantic preparations & plans for some unknown future society begin to vanish. Instead, those kinds of activities become merely hobbies, ones that provide pleasure on nice, sunny days.
In a weird way, “achieving” #5 actually allows one to experience, perhaps an emotion not felt for a very long time, a sense of inner peace.
Maybe that’s how ‘number 5s’ will be recognized amongst the crowd as this sucker spirals towards the end. The guy/gal who is happy & content, and doesn’t let current events disrupt or upset them in anyway.
As DL rhetorically asks, was this ordained from the start? To which I suspect, yes it was. No one asked to be born – you’re just here and slowly figure out what it means. The systems we experience were in place not only in our great grandparents days, but long before that as well.
Does the X-1 generation of yeast wonder why he must continue to consume, even the face of diminishing resources and environmental degradation, before the last population doubling point, and hence, the end?
January 16th, 2013 at 6:25 pm
I can only reiterate: “In terms of an actual NTE event, there really is no safe place.”
Where to go and what to do? To echo Kathy C., be with your family, be with your friends, do something you have always wanted to do, prepare yourself emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Simplify your life and open yourself to the last wonders our former Paradice Planet offers. Love your neighbour, nurture children, be kind to animals, be kind to yourself, strip away your own delusions, go for a very, very long walk (days,weeks,months), grow some food, do some art, create some music, seek like minds.
Continue your journey despite the likely NTE destination, but whistle while you walk and listen while others talk and help the elderly to cross the road safely.
The only safe place you will EVER find is in your own heart and mind. In the end, these are the only places we ever dwell.
“The very concept of a “Solution” is seen through, and cast aside as a waste of effort.” The only part of Who, What, When, Where, Why and How which can be solved is WHO and the WHO is YOU. This is an opportunity to delve into Who-is-You because, no matter what, we ONLY EVER do what we can with what we have wherever we happen to be. Do that honourably and mindfully with a pure heart and a quiet mind and you are living in the safest place you will ever find.
January 16th, 2013 at 6:26 pm
Sorry, above post was in response, again, to Bailey. Forgot the header
January 16th, 2013 at 6:49 pm
@ Bailey
You stated:
“It is hard to imagine that the nuclear facilities would not keep enough uranium on hand so that if there were a collapse of the grid, they would at least be able to maintain power to keep their own operations intact for some lengthy period?”
I think I’ll let Kathy C completely disabuse you of that assumption.
January 16th, 2013 at 7:00 pm
great analysis of psychopathy/sociopathy, glad it was finally brought up.
A few more two-cents.
Robert Hare is The Man on this subject. Read his books for the fine grained nuance of the subject. Lot of practical actual hands on experience with the perps.
He claims that true psychopaths are never deterred by pain or consequences for their actions. I agree that in the past the tribal elders of whatever culture in time or place knew of this defect and eliminated the threat of the ‘weitiko’ (Bad Seed) with death.
According to Hare, there is no ‘cure’ or even deep effective treatment for psychopaths. Makes them sound a lot like spent radioactive fuels rods in a cooling pond doesn’t it?
I think that Vampire mythology throughout the ages is a sublimated warning about the weitiko/ socio/psychopaths in our midst.
The current corporate cabal/syndicate that sits atop the hierarchy of humanity, as it has presently devolved into, was summed up by the caricature coined phrase of Matt Taibbi as:
“… the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money…”
There have been many test of empathy in humans. It’s not a conscious response. You have it, you don’t learn it. Normal humans (minus the socio/psychopathic component now run rampant) are naturally empathetic.
If various pictures are shown very rapidly before test subjects showing various themes, food, sex, status objects, etc… all human pupils will dilate in response at measured rates. If pictures of scenes of suffering and misery are shown at that same high rate of speed, too fast for the conscious mind to react to, most human’s pupils will react in an empathetic response, except for socio/psychopaths whose pupils have no reaction at all, unless they have trained themselves to respond.
They don’t have any empathy at all because they are essentially Reptiles, the mammalian parts of their brains where empathy works don’t work well or work at all. Yes, they look like mammals, but they are not. They are however very clever mimics and predators, think Hollywood Velocraptor dressed as humans.
Warren Zevon got it:
“Well, I saw Lon Chaney walkin’ with the Queen,
Doin’ the werewolves of London …
…I saw a Werewolf drinkin’ a Pina Colada at Trader Vic’s
And his hair was perfect“
Hare tells a story of the actress Nicole Kidman who was going to act the part of a psychopath in a movie and wanted him to consult/coach her on how real psychopaths operate. He told her a senario she could practice with to ‘get into character’.
Here is what we are collectively up against with ‘world leaders’
Practice Makes Perfect
Hare consulted with Nicole Kidman on the movie Malice. She wanted to let thew audience know, early in the film, that she was not the sweet, warm person she appeared to be.
He gave her the following scene to rehearse: “You’re walking down the street and come across an accident at the corner. A young child has been struck by a car and is lying in a pool of blood. You walk up to the accident site, look briefly at the child, and then focus at the grief-stricken mother. After a few minutes of careful scrutiny, you walk back to your apartment, go into the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, and practice mimicking the facial expressions and body language of the mother.”
Lon Chaney quote of the night”
“There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.”
January 16th, 2013 at 7:29 pm
@Speak Softly
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/conspiring-for-climate-chaos/#comment-58184
The whole world is a stage and I’m leaving on the next one.
Loved your commentary.
January 16th, 2013 at 7:46 pm
The way Forbes defined wetiko was cannibal, actually. A wetiko eats anothers life.
Was just retreading the book, given this discussion. It’ s a good book, but I don’t know if you can even get it in paper.
January 16th, 2013 at 8:13 pm
@ madmanintheattic
Not all potential threats are equal.
Yes, the Cascadian subduction zone is well documented, and yes it’s not a matter of if, but when. But since we’re talking about geological time, even though the “big one” is now considered overdue, in my opinion, it doesn’t fall within my perimeters of NTE.
For the same reason I don’t pay attention to EMP attacks, Mt Saint Helens, solar flares, or terrorism, I pick my battles. And given all the things that are currently in the process of rendering this planet uninhabitable, earthquakes just don’t register on my radar. But granted, when it comes, it will be utterly devastating.
As for the PNW being too wet, considering the earth has entered into an epoch of permanent extreme drought, I consider too much water, to be a problem you want to have……. You just have to be smart and plan for it.
And as for the Hanford nuclear site, which is well over a hundred miles from any metropolis, I’ll take a decommissioned site–even a leaking one–over an active site any day.
January 16th, 2013 at 8:44 pm
Daniel,
I’m not in disagreement with you. A Cascadia incident is remote, unpredictable and, I agree, need not be factored in to all that is threatening us. However I’m not sure about the drying thing. A warming planet means warmer air means the atmosphere holds more moisture means catastrophic rain events. Even though the Great Plains are drying they will be hit by a wonderful double whammy: desert conditions suffering huge super-cell thunder and lightening storms and tornados (first one of the season hit the US last week – a bit anomalous for January I believe) which wash away the soil, create gulleys and make an unlivable region even more unlivable.
By the same token heating will create more evaporation and more atmospheric loading in the PNW as well so a region already wet with high rainfall will only become more wet. Many areas of the planet are drying but many areas are flooding. I think climate disruption creating extremes of existing local patterns is the valid rule of thumb.
Otherwise, I agree. Pick your battles, unlikely events remain unlikely and most certainly a decommisioned site may be less dangerous than an active one – not going to argue with anything else you said.
But I’m pretty sure it will get wetter here. Already where I live the last several Springs have been much colder than in the past and the rain has lasted well into June. Many people loose big chunks of their gardens because the soil is too wet and/or cold for germination. Hay won’t grow properly in some areas and is too heavy and wet to harvest in other areas. Of course there is variability in all of this but the trend where I am seems to be, overall, wetter.
January 16th, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Hi wildwoman
re: Wetiko.
A bit of a conundrum here. In the Reality Sandwich essay he defines wetiko as “a Cree term which refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others.” I haven’t been able to find that definition anywhere or any definition at all in any of the 6 or so Cree dictionaries I consulted, not even in the Cree Dictionary being compiled by University of Alberta, Edmonton.
It seems Christopher Columbus actually coined the word Cannibal:
“Columbus created the Cannibals.(1) The Oxford English Dictionary
indicates that the word “cannibal” comes from the
Spanish, “Canibales,” “originally one of the forms of the ethnic name
Carib or Caribes, a fierce nation of the West Indies, who are
recorded to have been anthropophagi, and from whom the name was
subsequently extended as a descriptive term.” The dictionary further
asserts that the word originated with Columbus: “Columbus’s first
representation of the name as he heard it from the Cubans was
Canibales…. The American Heritage Dictionary states the connection
between Columbus and the cannibals even more succinctly: “From
Spanish Canibalis, Caribales, name (recorded by Columbus) of the man-
eating Caribs of Cuba and Haiti….” So Columbus gave the world the
word, “cannibals.”
Was Columbus, as our dictionaries imply, Europe’s first ethnographer
of the New World? Did he discover natives who were anthropophagi and
simply record in his log and letters their self-description?
Columbus’s log of his first voyage and his letters of February, 1493
and January, 1494, far from being objective records of New World
discoveries, are eloquent testimonies to the POWER OF LANGUAGE TO CREATE REALITY (emphasis added). A close reading of these texts reveals not how
Columbus discovered the Cannibals, but HOW HE CREATED THEM (emphasis added). These documents tell the story of their birth and maturation, their metamorphosis from fiction into fact. By his power to define,
Columbus created for the Old World the most fascinating New World
Natives–the ferocious, blood-thirsty Cannibals.”
continued at
http://descendantofgods.tripod.com/id44.html
I haven’t read Forbes but I am uncharacteristically going to go out on a limb and suggest Forbes might be misusing the word ‘wetiko’ since the alleged and unconfirmed Cree definition is somewhat different, more general and is more in alignment with the generalized concept of the psychopath in civilization as I outline above (so, yes, it serves my thesis).
Not a big point and certainly terrorizing others could include killing and eating them. In addition there is a case to be made that the psychopaths running the show on this planet are eating the planetary biosphere in the form of destroying it to produce profits. I have always thought “the Economy” was a monster which fed on human beings, consuming human lives and souls and converting them into money. Perhaps it is a potato/potato, tomato/tomato kind of thing, really.
I suggest the concept of wetiko as psychopath (terrorizing others) is more broad and thus has more utility for conceptual modelling and understanding of our situation over the more specific concept of wetiko as cannibal.
January 16th, 2013 at 8:58 pm
@ madmanintheattic
No doubt……it’s going to get a hell of a lot wetter and windier here.
January 16th, 2013 at 9:03 pm
Here we are:
“The Wendigo (also Windigo, Windago, Windiga, Witiko, Wihtikow, and numerous other variants) is a mythical creature appearing in the mythology of the Algonquin people, who inhabited present-day Quebec. It is a malevolent cannibalistic spirit into which humans could transform, or which could possess humans. Those who indulged in cannibalism were at particular risk, and the legend appears to have reinforced this practice as taboo. …
At the same time, Wendigos were embodiments of gluttony, greed, and excess; never satisfied after killing and consuming one person, they were constantly searching for new victims. In some traditions, humans who became overpowered by greed could turn into Wendigos; the Wendigo myth thus served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation. …
Among northern Algonquian cultures, cannibalism, even to save one’s own life, was viewed as a serious taboo; the proper response to famine was suicide or resignation to death. On one level, the Wendigo myth thus worked as a deterrent and a warning against resorting to cannibalism; those who did would become Wendigo monsters themselves.”
Extended definition at
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definitions/Wendigo
January 16th, 2013 at 9:09 pm
Dear Great Madam who resides in the Attic
I do not know what planet, galaxy, or parallel universe you hail from, but clearly you are not a native of our little planet of the apes, for you know the monkey people too well and your observations are too painfully accurate for a mere insider. You have the zoo keeper’s keen eye for his animals’ habits.
Unlike some of the commentators here, I do not view the hunter gatherer stage of human social evolution as desirable. Yes, had we remained dirty little savages we could have continued roaming around this planet longer than as civilized apes. But civilization, despite its deleterious effects on our animal nature, elevated us to a higher level of intelligence, of culture, etc… For example, the book (and I am a recovering bibliophile) was a magnificent achievement. Life in a world without philosophy, literature, music, metaphysical speculation, interesting conversation while sipping brandy at a bar in Paris, and so forth, for me would be a miserable experience. The problem is that we were unable to overcome the dialectic between civilization and the biosphere. We were clever, but not clever enough to understand the physical limitations placed on us by the planet. Over the last 10 thousand years we have moved into our collective abstract fantasies (memes, if you will) and have become more and more disconnected from the geological and biological systems that sustain us. The takeover of the mass mind by psychopathic myth makers has made matters worse. We are now locked into an omnicide cult which is probably inescapable for most of the monkey people.
But here is my quandary. Was this inevitable? Could we have culturally developed along different lines such that we would have eventually constructed a civilization that was both sustainable and technologically advanced?
January 16th, 2013 at 9:18 pm
P.S. What about the meme meme? How do you know that the neo-Darwinian theory of memes is not just another meme in an endless chain of memes? Who gets to observe the world from a meme-free epistemological vantage point? Who gets to determine that all belief systems are just invisible, theoretical constructs that a supposedly meme-immunized Dawkins dubbed “the meme”?
January 16th, 2013 at 9:20 pm
Oooops. Madman, I must be dyslexic, I thought it was “Madam in the attic.” Sorry. Won’t happen again.
January 16th, 2013 at 9:37 pm
Short quotes
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2046581-columbus-and-other-cannibals
January 16th, 2013 at 9:38 pm
Excerpt
http://www.scribd.com/doc/43900657/Columbus-and-Other-Cannibals-Jack-D-Forbes-EXCERPT
January 16th, 2013 at 9:56 pm
@depressive
“But here is my quandary. Was this inevitable? Could we have culturally developed along different lines such that we would have eventually constructed a civilization that was both sustainable and technologically advanced?”
I think it would have been possible had we maintained a simultaneous contact with the planet and all its beauty and had not gone the route of corporate insanity. I partly blame religion also, because without it’s foolish cries of ‘reproduce and have dominion’, we might have had our wits enough to maintain a balanced population via birth control. So yes, with a very sane approach, I think we could have developed a technological society – though it may have looked a little different (but far better than ecocide).
January 16th, 2013 at 10:02 pm
to depressive lucidity
re: Was this inevitable? Could we have culturally developed along different lines such that we would have eventually constructed a civilization that was both sustainable and technologically advanced?
My cover has been blown!! I AM an extra-terrestrial anthropologist from the third planet of the Z’nbl G’nubi system in the alternate Universe of Tralfamadore.
My short answer to your question is: No, we could not have, for at least two (likely interacting systemic) reasons.
The first, as outlined previously, is the problem of the presence of the Psychopath gene in the human construct. The only way our species could have succeeded would be by the diligent extirpation of the psychopath whenever it appeared. The structure of civilization has prevented that.
Secondly I believe the problem of Consciousness (and the subsequent vulnerability to Meme infestation) lies at the base of our inability to be decent human beings let alone animals in harmony with Nature.
The problem of Consciousness I think is best described by a thought experiment. Imagine you are an animal. Pick one, probably terrestrial, with a large enough brain that Consciousness (whatever that is) could arise. Now imagine you are this animal, totally in the moment, building your nest or mating or playing or sitting in a tree eating fruit. Suddenly you become aware you ARE, that you exist, that you are sitting in a tree or mating or eating, that you are a you and that you is suddenly separate from the tree, the fruit, the mate, the players.
Imagine the flood of terror coursing through your body at the horror of separation, at the horror of the OTHER whether that other is your mate, the banana, the tree or your playmates. Imagine the strenuous efforts you might make to feel safe, to feel in control, to defend, to exist because everywhere around you is NOT YOU when only a moment before you were one with all, in the moment, merely being.
We don’t have the panic moment of becoming conscious because we are born as embryos and slowly, so slowly over decades we are acculturated, trained, brainwashed, inoculated with a zillion culture-specific memes, judgements, evaluations, taboos which create a smear of mechanisms and defences intended to deal with the OTHER whether that other is Nature, the tribe next door, the Muslims in the middle east who have all OUR oil or whatever the OTHER is to your culture.
However, despite the acculturation and meme infestation the primal horror of separation, lonesomeness, non-connection is pervasive but operating at a non-conscious level. I submit we are all recoiling in horror at the immensity of Nature, of the Universe, at the inscrutability of ANY other – mate, parents, siblings – all inhabit an existence we can truly know nothing about. All the mystery and unknowing around us embedded in the separation, fuelling this horror, causes a generalized psychosis which we are happy to escape from by any strategy available whether that is jihad, conquering the wilderness, conquering the OTHER in any of its many forms.
Once this poor victims of separation-psychosis reach the stage of technological expertise which allows them to destroy the OTHER wherever they see it, then they do. Even without the psychopath gene, the utter terror of our aloneness is sufficient to motivate us into the exact situation we find ourselves in.
This separation, in our case, has much to do with our self-domestication. The actual mechanisms which selected for our huge cerebral cortexes are unknown and the original purpose of the cortex is also unknown. Theories abound but the effect, in the end, is sufficient brain complexity to give rise to self-reflecting consciousness, establish the individual ego and create the experience of separation and all that brings – destruction of the OTHER and, ultimately, ourselves.
I am reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s quip that we will never encounter extraterrestrial life because any civilization which reaches the level of technology to succeed at extensive space travel will have destroyed itself, just as we are doing, long before they got off their ground (except for us Z’nbl G’nubiians, of course but then I’m trans-dimensional too).
I hope that answers your question. I’ve thought about this a lot but never written it down so this expression might be a bit awkward but I hope the idea is apparent.
January 16th, 2013 at 10:12 pm
to depressive lucidity
re: What about the meme meme?
Regarding Memes and Meme theory and the Meme of Memes, it is far too complex a concept to fully explicate here so do read Blackmore’s Meme Machine. She is the leading popularizer of consciousness research right now. She raises that question and others (what IS consciousness, anyway) and answers it and others convincingly.
The basic notion is we can examine our own minds. Just as a Cognitive Behavioural therapist can help you examine your own mind for the cognitive tricks and traps which are causing you emotional difficulties; just as the therapist can find the self-talk, the self-recriminations, the maladaptive strategies, and all the other internal constructions which can shape your experience in the world, so to we can examine our minds and see the beliefs, notions, conclusions and trances which can be identified as memes.
That is as far as I can go with this. Read her book. It is not an easy topic. I’ve read it three times and I still can’t really summarize it effectively in this format.
I would suggest that your use of phrases like “the neo-Darwinian theory of memes” and your sarcasm directed at “supposedly meme-immunized Dawkins” are at best judgements on your part and at worst memes you have been infected with. Neo-Darwinism is itself a meme, a construct, a concept and not a very useful one IMO. Dawkins is not the monster so many people perceive him to be.
I suggest you are illustrating the theory right here and now. Both of those statements are merely judgements and judgement stems the flow of open debate and useful thought, exactly the purpose of most memes, and allow a convenient cookie-cutter, formulaic approach to dealing with THE OTHER – in this case another meme and an eminent scientist.
January 16th, 2013 at 10:43 pm
Interesting train of thought, Madmanintheattic.
I suggest one of the Self and Other dichotomies, is reinforced by the Cartesian Dualism inherent in science, ( and proven false, logically, by quantum physics and the double slit thingee, but I’ve promised not to mention that )
So, another tack, logic bridges the gulf, as above, but it is also bridged, or dissolved, experientially, via meditation, and other experiences, as described throughout history by the various accounts pf ‘One-ness’ or ‘Unity with the all’, etc.
Also, what do you make of Sorenson’s Pre-Conquest Consciousness, how does that fit, does that support your thesis ? I suppose it does, pre domestication ?
I’m familiar with Susan Blackmore’s ideas. Fwiw, I think she is mistaken about zen buddhism and mistaken about memes.
January 17th, 2013 at 12:06 am
It is a delusion foisted on the sheeple that the constitution gives sovereign rights to them. It does no such thing. The rights, if any, were granted to the landed male gentry of European origin. Neither Native Americans, nor those of African origin nor women were included. The constitution had to be amended no less than three times (the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth times) to give it a semblance of civility. A semblance only in the realm of the law – de jure. De facto conditions for those of African origin remained disgraceful for nearly another century. Laws don’t matter. What matters is who interprets and enforces them. Because the Native Americans did not submit to the constitution, their reservations retain a token sovereignty.
“All men” in the declaration of independence had a very definite meaning. Those “all men” rule the roost to this day. The sheeple ain’t them.
January 17th, 2013 at 3:08 am
‘Australian Bureau of Meteorology’
‘Bureau Home/ Australia/ New South Wales / Forecasts / Upper Western’
http://www.bom.gov.au/nsw/forecasts/upperwestern.shtml
(Temps in Celcius)
A snippet:
“Friday 18 January
Mostly sunny morning….Overnight temperatures falling to around 30 with daytime temperatures reaching the low to mid 40s.
Saturday 19 January
Partly cloudy….Overnight temperatures falling to 22 to 28 with daytime temperatures reaching 33 to 42.
Sunday 20 January
Overnight temperatures falling to the low to mid 20s with daytime temperatures reaching around 40.
Monday 21 January
Partly cloudy….Overnight temperatures falling to the low to mid 20s with daytime temperatures reaching 36 to 41.”
Sydney is forcast for tomorrow Friday 18th as 39 degrees C.
I wish I could say we are learning somthing down here, but it seems the news is dominated with the human interest situationals of firefighters, who IMO are to be commended, not laughed at as fools etc, and helping the devastated with some state cash and emergency housing.
I mean Duh! Does anyone think that wouldn’t happen, but what about national debate about the extreme temperatures and the catastrophic heat cells remaining for days not hours?
I have repeatedly contacted a neighbour of mine who happens to be an ABC radio producer, and was the correspondent in Copenhaggen for the 2009 Climate Vomit…eerr..Summit, sorry, and he is aware of most of the forcasts, and, has access to the latest reports from around the world…
But no answer.
I guess it is all about the share market, what else could it be?
The kids found a frog in our chicken water container tonight. I guess she is getting despirate for some H2O. She was there last night too but I didn’t recognise her call. It is good to know some are still surviving here.
Haven’t seen any roos lately, but I’m not sure of their usual seasonal movements, yet. Still poo to harvest so they must be there sometime eh?,(they don’t call me Sherlock for nothing).
Going over to raid a plum tree in full fruit tonight I found at the independent school next door. No one is taking them as school is not back for 2 weeks.
Yeah, that stage 5 stuff I think is just called:
‘getting on with it.’
But I might add, ‘getting on with it while pretty well informed.’
Many people are doing their own ‘getting on with it’, which is supporting the Empire, and consumption vulgarity lifstyle, but not informed at all.
Thinking about all you guys in the North American Hemisphere and what kind of Summer you will get.
I don’t pray, but if I did, I would be a long vigil this time – I think it will be hell, and let us hope, if it is, it will wake em all up.
What happens then will be anyone’s guess.
Look for the unexplained deaths from a pandemic at that time, just to end on a cheer up note.
January 17th, 2013 at 3:11 am
Sorry that should have read…
“…firefighters, who IMO are NOT to be commended, not laughed at as fools etc… ”
Sorry if I offended the firies, (or the fairies)
January 17th, 2013 at 3:40 am
Big Data
We study ourselves and collect data on ourselves so we can exploit ourselves, (not us, the other) No mention of looking outward at the place where we live. No data from there. Total psycopaths, the new future:
http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/big-data-analytics
This is where humans are going, they think. Maximize your return on investment, exploit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrNIZ7-SMPk
January 17th, 2013 at 3:42 am
The youtube link doesn’t work. Try this:
http://johnwphipps.blogspot.com/2013/01/i-think-theres-something-here.html
January 17th, 2013 at 3:44 am
B9K9 – exactly a sort of peace in accepting the inevitable. Easier of course to obtain if you have already gotten past personal death denial – most don’t do that without being told they have a terminal disease. I learned at 16 while volunteering at a nursing home that sometimes death was the great deliverer. It made me able to be a Hospice Volunteer years later. While I missed the people I volunteered with, I was able to be glad that they were past the pain.
But accepting NTE is easier when you are older, much harder for the younger, and very hard for those who still have young children in there care.
January 17th, 2013 at 3:45 am
Two days ago a yellow cabbage butterfly in the garden – unheard of for this time of year. Today possible snow. Fun and games in climate chaos.
January 17th, 2013 at 4:00 am
Bailey, yes it would seem that the nuclear plants could produce their own power and keep themselves cool, but in fact they can’t. Someone said once that they were trying that at Chernobyl when it blew. I haven’t found anything on that.
Unfortunately, the world’s nuclear power plants, as they are currently designed, are critically dependent upon maintaining connection to a functioning electrical grid, for all but relatively short periods of electrical blackouts, in order to keep their reactor cores continuously cooled so as to avoid catastrophic reactor core meltdowns and fires in storage ponds for spent fuel rods.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/7301-400-chernobyls-solar-flares-electromagnetic-pulses-and-nuclear-armageddon
Per Arnie Gundersen the NRC does not require diesel backup for the spent fuel pools only the reactors. Their assumption is the grid powering the area of any nuclear power plant would never be down more than 1 week and the spent fuel pools which heat up slower would be OK until then. At Oyster Creek when the grid went down there during Sandy. they were making plans to cool the spent fuel pool with fire hoses. I don’t remember if they had to actually ended up doing that or not. But there you have it. Diesel backup for the reactors (which still need to be cooled even if shut down) and 1 week fuel, and none for the spent fuel pools.
January 17th, 2013 at 4:02 am
U.S. reactors have generated about 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel, of which 75 percent is stored in pools, according to Nuclear Energy Institute data. Spent fuel rods give off about 1 million rems (10,00Sv) of radiation per hour at a distance of one foot — enough radiation to kill people in a matter of seconds. There are more than 30 million such rods in U.S. spent fuel pools. No other nation has generated this much radioactivity from either nuclear power or nuclear weapons production.
http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/spent_nuclear_fuel_pools_in_the_us_reducing_the_deadly_risks_of_storage
This could be put in dry cask storage (the Fukushima dry casks on site were not damaged) but surprise surprise it costs more than sticking it in a spent fuel pool so now those pools contain much more fuel than they were designed for.
January 17th, 2013 at 4:06 am
I post links for podcasts and articles all the time from http://fairewinds.com/ check it out to get educated on the ongoing dangers at Fukushima and around the world.
January 17th, 2013 at 4:08 am
This is an opportunity to delve into Who-is-You because, no matter what, we ONLY EVER do what we can with what we have wherever we happen to be. Do that honourably and mindfully with a pure heart and a quiet mind and you are living in the safest place you will ever find.
You’ve got the message.
I have always thought “the Economy” was a monster which fed on human beings, consuming human lives and souls and converting them into money.
The primary economy (resources) is converted by the economic process into the secondary economy (products). For a tree, the process is photosynthesis, for a cheetah the chase, for cattle it is grazing and ruminating, etc. money is a set of symbols under mutual agreement that are convertible into resources and/or products.
Pick one, probably terrestrial, with a large enough brain that Consciousness (whatever that is) could arise.
Consciousness does not arise; complex behaviour does. All behaviour is attributable to the meat robot.
Suddenly you become aware you ARE, that you exist,
The “aware” has no “you”, no “ARE” and does not “exist” or “not-exist”. The “you” is an apparition illumined by the “aware”.
Theories abound but the effect, in the end, is sufficient brain complexity to give rise to self-reflecting consciousness, establish the individual ego and create the experience of separation
Sufficient brain complexity gives rise to sufficiently complex meat robots with sufficiently complex behaviours. No behaviour, no matter how complex, proves that the meat robot has awareness and is therefore not a meat robot.
January 17th, 2013 at 4:09 am
http://enformable.com/2013/01/workers-complete-first-stage-of-steel-cover-for-fukushima-daiichi-unit-4/
Check out the pictures at the link. Then imagine if we couldn’t do anything anymore to re-mediate disasters because of peak oil
For the better part of the last 6 months, workers have been preparing Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 for the extraction of the spent fuel from the spent fuel pool of the destroyed reactor building. They have removed the debris from atop the reactor building, and worked on preparing the structure to be covered by a steel cover in order to remove the spent fuel assemblies from the pool.
Of note the first sarcophagus over Chernobyl is leaking. A second one is planned but not completed – that was how long ago?
On January 8th, workers completed the first stage of the work to erect a steel cover in order to extract fuel from the reactor building. The base of the cover has been set, consisting of 6 pillars and 7 beams.
The finished structure will include 4 more levels to be constructed on top of the newly-finished foundation, and will extend over the existing Unit 4 reactor building.
January 17th, 2013 at 5:21 am
Hi all,
I’ve been out of the environmental science loop since I bombed out of uni 20 years ago, after refusing to comply, and have been poking around this site for a week or so now. I’m actually inclined to believe that NTE is a reality, but I’ve lost track of the science over the years, to the extent that my thoughts on the issue are today based more on emotion as much as reason. So I have some questions and concerns…
But they can wait…I’ve been disracted by something, and I’ve got to get it off my chest:
depressive lucidity wrote:
Sandy Hook is starting to get more and more weird and the shifting official narrative is starting to make less and less sense. Jim Fetzer, et al., have done a good job of exposing the indications of another psyop designed to disarm 80 million Amerikuns
Speaking of psychopaths, I had a strange encounter with Jim Fetzer on a “deep politics” forum a while ago. He was arguing that the moon landings were faked, and I was doing my best to point out faults in the evidence he and others were presenting. He pm’d me at one point, asking me about my history, and promptly tried to use the small amount of information I dared give him to paint me in a bad light on the forum. Then, when imho I had intellectually cornered him and his sidekick, I was ceremoniously banned from the forum for pointing out that his theories involved an accusation against some Hubble telescope scientists of falsifying their published work. I felt like I’d stumbled upon a whole den of them.
I treat anything Fetzer is involved in with suspicion – if it’s important, other more reliable people will be talking about it too, so I look for another source. (His support of Judy Wood was what set me against him to begin with. As a mechanical engineer, she makes a good fruit loop.)
Regarding Sandy Hook, I’m too far away, geographically and culturally, and not sufficiently across it to say anything definitive about it, except that there definitely appears to be disinfo agents out there in internetland, turning legitimate concerns into claims easily percieved to be batshit-crazy.
January 17th, 2013 at 5:56 am
After listening to the interview above, i’m trying to figure out what is the 9th feedback system we’ve triggered that Guy alludes to.
Anyone?
January 17th, 2013 at 5:59 am
@ Peter D
…turning legitimate concerns into claims easily percieved to be batshit-crazy.
PsyOp cyberwarfare. So much weirdness. Say, for sake of argument, someone gets near the truth. Then, the opposition will outflank them, by taking their claims and adding on a whole lot of bat shit crazy stuff to discredit them.
Seems to be some very good examples of that from 9/11. At the start, there were relatively few investigators, and it was possible to get a handle on the sane, careful ones. Then suddenly there were a flood of totally over the top loony claims, a smokescreen of absurd exaggeration and confusion, to drown out the truth seekers.
I don’t go with Fetzer, or any one interpretation, I try to check a lot of forums and blogs. It’s admittedly incredibly hard to get a balanced view, there’s a lot of loons and crackpots and people with agendas. Nonetheless, my feeling, my overall impression, there’s something deeply, deeply wrong about all of this, something very troubling.
I don’t know if you followed the Syrian story at all. There was a video shown by CNN and BBC as ‘genuine front line footage’ which was later proved to be made in a studio, another camera showed them setting it all up and making the thing, faked propaganda to shift public opinion. This is happening all the time. Imo, nothing from MSM can be trusted.
January 17th, 2013 at 6:21 am
@ Robin D.
madmanintheattic : Suddenly you become aware you ARE, that you exist
This seems clear, plain, logical, has explanatory value.
Robin : The “aware” has no “you”, no “ARE” and does not “exist” or “not-exist”. The “you” is an apparition illumined by the “aware”.
This seems opaque, obscure, illogical, explains nothing.
January 17th, 2013 at 7:30 am
This seems opaque, obscure, illogical, explains nothing.
That’s why it is called the Void – Sunyata, Ein Sof. It is not an object, is opaque. It is beyond logic, appears illogical. It explains nothing as there is nothing besides, and is itself the “nothing”.
January 17th, 2013 at 7:44 am
Hi all,
Coming out to my circle of friends about believing in NTE has been discouraging. Either they outright disbelieve, or concede I might be on to something but a) they aren’t going to change anything or b) won’t look at anything that might corroborate what I’m saying so they aren’t accountable (I guess) for knowing it.
I have met some new people in my area who express concern and some urgency, but they (like me) are still casting about for *some* kind of hope. My concern is that the search for hopeful solutions is impeding actually DOING STUFF NOW. (Is there anyone on this list who has not already done significant preparedness planning and implementation?)
What do you all think about Allan Savory? He’s giving a talk called Reversing Global Warming while Meeting Human Needs: An Urgently Needed Land-Based Option next week at the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
The promo material says Allan Savory is an African rancher and restoration ecologist and originator of the Holistic Management approach to reversing desertification. This innovation is essential for our future, because replenishment of grassland soils worldwide is key to helping us obtain a livable climate. Allan Savory is winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award, finalist in the Virgin Earth Challenge, and 2013 TED Speaker.
http://www.ted.com/profiles/1505378
http://www.fastcompany.com/1655491/method-turns-wastelands-green-wins-2010-buckminster-fuller-challenge
http://www.virgin.com/people-and-planet/blog/virgin-earth-challenge-announces-leading-organisations
http://allansavory.eventbrite.com/#
January 17th, 2013 at 7:48 am
madmanintheattic, I agree that much of our neurosis stems from our reflexive and reflective self awareness. However, speaking in the first person as representative of one of those crazy humans, I think it is the awareness of our mortality which drives us completely INSANE. This is what produces religions, memorials, methods of postmortem bodily preservation, attachments to ideologies which lead to wars, aggression, and other sorts of ill.
If we could somehow realize that we are just a breaking wave of the ocean and do not stand independent of it, we might better come to terms with our temporality, because we are no less the ocean..
January 17th, 2013 at 7:49 am
@depressive lucidity; The psychopath tendency is in our genes because it works. Some have more or less. Seems the ones with more float to the top like skum. That’s because it works well for capitalism. Doesn’t speak well for capitalism. This tendency plus intelligence plus free abundant energy was bound to end up like this. How could it be any other way? Turned out to be an evolutionary mistake; we destroyed our environment. End of us and the environment which this time includes the whole earth.
I’m suprised at how many in this group believe in creationism. The key words defining evolution are “variation” and “selection”. Both activities are loaded with lots of deaths. Soon after life began, it became a game of “struggle to eat your neighbors until they eat you”. That’s a good definition of capitalism, I think.
If some of us can choose to overcome our reptilian tendences and supress them, we can form communities with empathy but there is always another community over the hill that wants our stuff. Remember, it’s a battle for scarce energy. I mean it always was and when the abundant supply is gone, a one time thing, it will again be a battle for scarce energy. (overlooking NTE for sake of argument)
Farmers are constantly bashed for feeding the world. If we stopped using fuels and fertilizer, half of our land would be used to feed the soil and 1/4 would be used to feed the horses. We would find out how scarce energy really is.
January 17th, 2013 at 7:57 am
Tom, in an interview it is easy to miss saying everything you mean to say. Guy lists the 9 feedbacks in this essay
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/
1. Methane hydrates are bubbling out the Arctic Ocean (Science, March 2010)
2. Warm Atlantic water is defrosting the Arctic as it shoots through the Fram Strait (Science, January 2011)
3. Siberian methane vents have increased in size from less than a meter across in the summer of 2010 to about a kilometer across in 2011 (Tellus, February 2011)
4. Drought in the Amazon triggered the release of more carbon than the United States in 2010 (Science, February 2011)
5. Peat in the world’s boreal forests is decomposing at an astonishing rate (Nature Communications, November 2011)
6. Methane is being released from the Antarctic, too (Nature, August 2012)
7. Russian forest and bog fires are growing (NASA, August 2012)
8. Cracking of glaciers accelerates in the presence of increased carbon dioxide (Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, October 2012)
9. Arctic drilling was fast-tracked by the Obama administration during the summer of 2012
Someone noted that several of them are methane and thought they should only count as 1, but they are different sources and locations and so I think it is valid to count them separately but you can take that up with Guy if you disagree. The number of feedbacks doesn’t really matter, it is the warming potential that matters.
January 17th, 2013 at 8:02 am
DisinfoCast 41: ‘Dispelling Wetiko’ with Paul Levy
January 17th, 2013 at 8:03 am
For some reason, I awoke with Franklin Lopez on my mind.
http://submedia.tv/stimulator
(I hope that works)
Sing it with me….”it’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”
January 17th, 2013 at 8:07 am
@ Robin
That’s why it is called the Void – Sunyata, Ein Sof. It is not an object, is opaque. It is beyond logic, appears illogical. It explains nothing as there is nothing besides, and is itself the “nothing”.
But THAT is not what Madmanintheattic is talking about, no connection, you’re confusing two entirely different usages and contexts and word meanings.
January 17th, 2013 at 8:07 am
Peter D, Fetzer does at times seem to go out on the deep end. Some have even suggested that he and Judy Wood are being used to make conspiracy theories seem so crazy that no one will pay attention to the valid questions about events that don’t look right.
If there is an attempt to create or use such events as Sandy Hook, I am not sure it is for gun control. After all what good is a gun against drones? Tanks? Active denial systems such as sound and laser technology? The new robots, or enhanced soldiers they are working on?
This may sound crazy but
1. I heard Sheriff Vance in an interview say they were going to prosecute those who create conspiracy theories on the web. Could they in fact be creating events with obvious questions just to have an excuse to clamp down on conspiracy theorists.
2. The NRA says cops in schools not gun control. Obama proposes gun controls with cops in schools and says it may be hard to get gun control through congress. Could they be in collusion to begin to put cops everywhere there are mass shootings – schools, movie theaters, malls. This feels more like a police state to me than banning automatic weapons and having stronger checks on who buys guns. Having said that I might get prosecuted on #1 above.
But in the end it doesn’t matter does it. Its all coming down, rich and poor, powerful and weak, they haven’t seen the full wrath of Mom Earth and they aren’t going to like it. I am reading Peter Ward on the Medea view of nature. I don’t agree with his conclusions about what we should do, but there is a good case to view the world as a Medea not a Gaia. Medea killed her own children.
January 17th, 2013 at 8:13 am
Dave “O’m suprised at how many in this group believe in creationism. The key words defining evolution are “variation” and “selection”. Both activities are loaded with lots of deaths. Soon after life began, it became a game of “struggle to eat your neighbors until they eat you”. That’s a good definition of capitalism, I think.”
Yes, death is what moves evolution forward, both in terms of selective death before reproduction and eventual death to allow room for the next round. When a living being is born the “gift” we give is not just life but also death for the unborn do not die. But I suppose if you went to see a new baby no one would like to hear you say “ah another human that has to die” however true it is
Time of course to think about that is before you decide to have a child. If in fact NTE is in about 20 years and each year up to that time gets worse in terms of climate and societal chaos, there seems to be no valid reason to conceive anymore.
January 17th, 2013 at 8:16 am
because we are no less the ocean..
You got it. And actually it’s all ocean: the “we” is an apparition/appearance.
January 17th, 2013 at 8:17 am
Thanks Kathy. i missed #9 in the last posting, but have signed many petitions to Obama lately against Shell Oil drilling there after their latest faux pas/ineptitude/blunder in grounding their rig Kulluck shortly after it got there. Obama is a tool of Big Oil so i don’t expect much.
Lately, i’ve been seeing commenters (not here) pooh-poohing climate science by laughing at their latest find, that volcanism is affected by climate change (or the way it was put: climate change CAUSES volcanoes – a haw, haw, that’s a good one, ‘ere!). They don’t read the underlying reasons (for example reduced pressure on the earth’s crust by melting glaciers) and just lump all climate science together as pure folly. Now, to be fair, the reaction is delayed (after all its a complex system) and the effect is not immediate (usually). But this is what we’re up against in trying to raise awareness of our dire plight – a dumbed down populace, misinformation and outright lies to keep the status quo in place as long as possible.
http://www.livescience.com/25936-climate-change-causes-volcanism.html
January 17th, 2013 at 8:18 am
@Kathy
“Time of course to think about that is before you decide to have a child. If in fact NTE is in about 20 years and each year up to that time gets worse in terms of climate and societal chaos, there seems to be no valid reason to conceive anymore.”
In the last decade, I cannot for the life of me perceive why anyone would conceive. But, evolution goes crazy with reproduction programming during stress – as is evident in the post Katrina baby boom.
January 17th, 2013 at 8:23 am
Global Grain Stocks Drop Dangerously Low as 2012 Consumption Exceeded Production
Janet Larsen
http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C54/grain_2013
Earth Policy Release
Eco-Economy Indicator
January 17, 2013
Eco-Economy Indicators are twelve trends that the Earth Policy Institute tracks to measure progress in building a sustainable economy. With grain providing much of the calories that sustain humanity, the status of the world grain harvest is a good indicator of the adequacy of the world’s food supply. The world produced 2,241 million tons of grain in 2012, down 75 million tons or 3 percent from the 2011 record harvest. The drop was largely because of droughts that devastated several major crops—namely corn in the United States (the
world’s largest crop) and wheat in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Australia.
Each of these countries also is an important exporter. Global grain consumption fell significantly for the first time since 1995, as high prices dampened use for ethanol production and livestock feed. Still, overall consumption did exceed production. With drought persisting in key producing regions, there is concern that farmers in 2013 will again be unable to produce the surpluses necessary to rebuild lowered global grain reserves.
REST at the link above
January 17th, 2013 at 8:23 am
But THAT is not what Madmanintheattic is talking about, no connection, you’re confusing two entirely different usages and contexts and word meanings.
There is no awareness in the world. The ability to discern the difference between awareness and the apparent content of awareness is not acquired through meditation alone.
January 17th, 2013 at 9:00 am
@dairymandave
Howard Gardner’s model of seven intilligences has been expanded to nine buy those who work in ivory towers. One of the two is natural intilligence. Academics have observed that people who spend their lives immersed in nature can solve problems better than those immersed in data, work and live behind a computer screen and profess (a somewhat pajoritative and simplified paraphrasing). A recent example of this is Ulvfugl’s apparent failure to see what you were saying about soil and energy while, again apparently, regurgitating what was felt was relevant information.
The other addition to Gardner’s model is spirutual intelligence, and again, for the same reasons.
To the degree the ability to solve a problem is a measure of intilligence, the addition of these two intelligences to Gardner’s model begs the question, what problem do these additions solve? Is it having economic privilege and viability as a trusted paradigm fails? To the degree NTE is the logical consequence of 500 years of enlightment, academia is faced with the hard truth that they have been, at best, engaged in an increasingly socially destructive behavior concerning education–while collecting a paycheck and garnering benefits for doing so. Coopting those with the wisdom to see through this shrade as having something they can control via this naming, is brilliant, if an oxymoron. Isn’t avoiding truth the antithisis of the social role of education in the Age of Reason? To what degree is an educator increasingly–and inceasently–talking a talk that is not walked?
Is Guy’s decision four years ago, regarding academia, an example of a slow learner . . . and, as such, exceptional?!?
To the degree the social concept of ‘value’ is relegated to a linguistic imprisonment within the economic paradigm created by money-as-debt, can truth be pursued as education? And if not, what, other than various iterations of motivated reasoning, is institutionalized education-based endeavors a pursuit of? Consider the “Big Data” video’s framing as an answer to this question. If analyzing data for economic renumeration is the tool one has, than doesn’t both the perceived problem, and its solution, involve a trust in the tool?
Who, but the spiritually mature, see this ‘problem’ of ‘BigData’ for what it is: the logical consequence of a motivated reasoning-based hate of motivated reasoning; a religious-like hate of that which is religious; an unproven trust that by understanding parts, the whole is comprehendible? Isn’t the quandry of consciousness: what is the meaning of life/what is a life? If so, isn’t the solution hidden in plain sight amid the cacophony of data that we process unconsciously, and occasionally, consciously? And doesn’t human histroy reveal that to the degree we can wisely interact with these processes, both personally and socially, this is best accomplished through stories that integrate more than segregate information? Isn’t it due to the self-aggrandizement &/or economic benefit of know-it-alls-NOT, that such is exceptional more than normative, within what passes as economically ‘successful’ academic disciplines? Isn’t such behavior mirrored in what dominates comment dynamics at NBL?
Applying this line of inguery and reason to unsustainable farming practices (and somewhat less unsustainable farming decisions), doesn’t the money-as-debt of CapitalismFail function as a contradictive force for doing what is rational: feeding the soil and husbanding regenerative agriculture? If so, except for niche markets that are predicated on an effete elite–Agnew’s corps of impudent snobs, which avarice-as-good enables–isn’t such short-term (i.e. the cycle defined by unconstitutional fiat currency-based indebitedness dynamics for creating ‘wealth’) economic suicide? Or a you’re-damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t dynamic; a Catch 22?
I find it telling that ulvfugl
January 17th, 2013 at 9:10 am
…reframes a query about geo-engineering regarding Arctic ice into a contextually irrelevate comment asserting farming is geo-engineering. Such is likely more about defending the homeostasis generating motivated reasoning dynamics of those living behind monitors within our information rich wisdom wasteland born of our secularly religious trust in CapitalismFail.
(And the rest of the comment got submitted before I intended, so it is posted without my effort at a final editing.)
January 17th, 2013 at 9:16 am
@ Robin
There is no awareness in the world.
I don’t know what that means, but it seems nonsensical to me
The ability to discern the difference between awareness and the apparent content of awareness is not acquired through meditation alone.
I never mentioned anything related to that.
Again, none of this has any bearing or relevance to what Madmanintheattic was talking about, has it.
January 17th, 2013 at 9:22 am
@ Greg Robie
A recent example of this is Ulvfugl’s apparent failure to see what you were saying about soil and energy while, again apparently, regurgitating what was felt was relevant information….
Please clarify and explain what that is supposed to mean.
I find it telling that ulvfugl…. blabla
More incomprehensible verbiage. If you desire a reply, you’ll have to explain what that word salad is supposed to mean.
January 17th, 2013 at 9:31 am
Greg – why don’t you try answering some of your posed circular questions?
So, what are you saying? No one can comment about anything without being subjected to endless analysis of speech patterns, “enlightened” reasoning or co-opted opinion now? That everyone has an agenda?
None of this matters – we’re on our way out! Argue all you want – it ain’t changin’ anything worthwhile and the human race, like it or not, is goin’ down with most of the rest of life on the planet and all our supposed “wisdom” turns out to be complete bullshit, along with stilted rhetoric. It’s crystal clear if you look around (yeah, even on a computer screen). Are you saying we shouldn’t bother with data, but instead base opinion on “gut feeling” or some such? Or that there are no “facts” other than biased outlooks? i have no idea where you stand on anything via your extended rant. Clarification would be nice, but it’s not important.
uh, thanks
Kathy: As the years roll on i expect food production to plummet due to the erratic climate we’ve induced via extended carbon pollution (and now enhanced with other noxious crap!). As i’ve stated before, i’m just waitin’ for a ‘silent spring’ type event to bring about total chaos in our civilization. With Gail’s observation of on-going global tree death, it can’t be too far off.
January 17th, 2013 at 10:08 am
Hey Robin,
When I came back from my last trip to India I brought back a T-shirt that said:
“I meditated on the Void for thirty years and all I got was this Kundalini injury.”
January 17th, 2013 at 10:28 am
For anyone, like me, trying to get a handle on SH story, who is interested and has time, here’s 2.5 hr review, which is calm and sensible, good basic journalism.
http://youtu.be/3fIdNl_KwEo
January 17th, 2013 at 10:35 am
@Steph
What would it mean to have prepared extensively? What is the goal – I mean, how would that be different from ~ you? Even at the end of preparing alone, you are here with a bunch of hungry animals.
So, Savory… He is good at making things less-bad, I suppose. Reversing is quite the stretch when it includes raising lots of hungry and thirsty animals to feed hungry and thirsty animals. Your own instinct to survive is destructive. The aggregate of our consumptive energies is habitat destruction and displacement of other species.
You might enjoy a visit to the Jevon’s Paradox/Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
(It has nothing to do with growing more vegetables than you ever thought possible.)
@ Greg
Please remember to breathe. Make it a wonderful day!
January 17th, 2013 at 10:36 am
There is no awareness in the world.
I don’t know what that means, but it seems nonsensical to me
The ability to discern the difference between awareness and the apparent content of awareness is not acquired through meditation alone.
I never mentioned anything related to that.
It is related to why it is nonsensical.
Again, none of this has any bearing or relevance to what was talking about, has it.
Suddenly you become aware you ARE, that you exist
I do believe the words “become aware” were used.
Awareness illuminates an apparent world, but there is no awareness in that apparent world. All phenomena in the world are attributable to processes in the world-appearance, including mental processes. Awareness of it all is exclusively the experience of the experiencer, including the awareness of a mental construct of the experience of others. This mental construct is projected like all other constructs forming the world-appearance, so that others appear to have awareness.
Of course this will remain utterly nonsensical to those who do not discern the difference between consciousness (the Void) and the seeming content of consciousness.
So, it must be conceded that it is all indeed utter nonsense, and the issue is thereby now closed.
January 17th, 2013 at 10:43 am
Tom,
How we go out matters to me; defines maturity (or not); constitutes homeostasis for me. I work to do what I can imagine to do, within the limits imposed on me by my iterations of motivated reasoning, to increase the possibility that our exit will be less violent; more non-violent; sapient. Isn’t a gracios exit preferable to an exit dominated by scapegoating and childishly violent tantrums? (And if what goes on in academia and/or dominates dynamics here at NBL is such an answer, such is easy to say and explain, is it not?)
To mentor my trust in maturation as a logical answer to the meaning of life/life of meaning quandry at this time of NTE, I ask questions as much as I can. In terms of transactional relationship dynamics (TA) it makes an adult to adult conversation possible, where the professorial adult to child dynamic tends to preclude such. In my experience, a question that moves thinking into more complex constructs, and knowledge into wisdom, and wisdom into action, is worth a ‘thousand’ ruminations that polish arguments and reinforce unquestioned motivated reasoning dynamics.
Anyway, thanks for the critique of my affect. I do not know if this expansion changes the perception of it, but, for what it is worth, the response is a try.
Ulvfugl, my comment was to dairymandave. No response is needed. The referenced affect is simply an example; a metaphor. There is no need to take it personally. Geo-engineering of the Arctic is, as a hail mary pass, the last remaining option for CapitalismFail to prolong its death-as-life paradigm regarding NTE. In conjunction with ongoing/permanent central bank removal of bad debt (i.e. until the housing market recovers) as it is doing through quantitative easing with the too-big-to-fail financial institutions, what is near term can be delayed numerous 20 minute intervals (the amount of time it takes for neuropeptides to be metabolized; the attention span of the spiritually immature; the frame of reference for the tales that seem to support the motivated reasoning dynamics of the dominate NBL meme).
And just to contrast the TA dynamics, there is a paragraph of statements, not a series of questions . . . though in my experience, the opening for such was effected by the questions.
January 17th, 2013 at 10:43 am
I meditated on the Void for thirty years and all I got was this Kundalini injury
Thanks, Madman, for pointing out one hazard of meditation.
January 17th, 2013 at 10:53 am
@ Robin
It appears to me that you are talking about something entirely different to what Madmanintheattic was talking about, as if you were trying to apply arithmetic or geometry to a work of literature. A category mistake. That’s why what you’re saying is, imo, nonsensical.
Madmanintheattic said The problem of Consciousness I think is best described by a thought experiment. Imagine you are an animal. Pick one, probably terrestrial, with a large enough brain that Consciousness (whatever that is) could arise. Now imagine you are this animal, totally in the moment, building your nest or mating or playing or sitting in a tree eating fruit. Suddenly you become aware you ARE, that you exist, that you are sitting in a tree or mating or eating, that you are a you and that you is suddenly separate from the tree, the fruit, the mate, the players.
I think that’s an interesting conjecture. I don’t see why it would produce the flood of terror, that M. does. Why not awe and wonder ? But anyway, this is a thought experiment, an imaginary projection back into evolutionary prehistoric time, nothing at all to do with Sunyata, the Void, En Sof.
January 17th, 2013 at 11:05 am
to Robin re: Sunyata &
to Ulvfugl re: particle physics
as imaginal realms vs
the material world in which we live
I’m not particularly interested in those kind of un-anchored, free-floating abstractions such as Robin is raising with his voiding the Void upon us or as Ulvfugl does with his IMO (mis)interpretation of the Nature of Reality vis a vis particle physics. I spent two years in India meditating in the Holy Caves and studying at the ashram library and following the Travelling Guru Dog & Pony Show as the culmination of 30 years of devoted and intense meditation and yoga practice and initiation into an order of Saddhus as sanyasin and all I have to show for it is a Kundalini injury which has left me with low level neurological damage which causes me constant pain. My conclusion after 30 years of intense devotion: there is nothing there. And NOT there is a Void there, but rather there is nothing there – no enlightenment, no imaginal realms … Or at least there is nothing there which was able to INFORM MY LIFE on this planet in any useful way.
Whether it is Sunyata or Sorensen, although I can speak abstraction, I find it more of an entertainment than, again, something which informs me here and now, anchored to this Earth. Here’s why:
[NOTE: I do not want to open the quantum physics can of worms for debate again; rather I am using it MERELY for the purposes of example. Please avoid becoming triggered.]
There is a Hopi word – Hakomi – which is translated as sort of a question of self-examination as “how am I doing in or relating to these various realms.” So lets use the realm of Sunyata as Robin is perseverating on and the realm of the quanta as Ulvfugl has misinterpreted as examples.
From the pov of the Hopi we interact with the various realms around us in different ways. Prayer, ritual, meditation, etc (supposedly) connect us to and allow us to interact with or in the Sunyata, the imaginal realm, the spirit world, whatever. This is all well and good and important for the Shaman to access for healing, divination, whatever. But he doesn’t live there. He may spend a lot of time there but he always comes back to the Earth, to his People. So there is a “Realm” of “spirit” or “sunyata” or some other made-up term which may or may not be informative.
But the question really is how am I doing in THIS realm with my family and tribe and on the hunt.
The equally imaginal realm of particle physics may inform us and provide us neat tech gadgets running on electrons and producing photons and some of them can be quite useful and some of them are distractions for the sheeple. But I don’t live there either. I live in a realm of matter. This is where Ulvfugl says matter doesn’t exist, it is just force fields and when I stub my toe on a rock it is the magnetic field of the toe meeting the magnetic field of the rock which creates resistance and there really is no toe to stub on the not-really-a-rock.
I am going to suggest that in the same way a fruitcake is made of flour and water and fruit and maybe brandy and it is baked and the discrete ingredients, through the alchemy of chemistry, are converted into a single whole entity which stands as it is NO LONGER as it’s constituents.
In the same way the particles and quantum phenomena and force fields of the Four Forces make up the Fruit Cake of Reality. In other words I’m saying matter in REAL and is made from a particular recipe. Sure it is cool to know what the recipe is and we can use than knowledge to do some neat manipulations like transistors and fibre optics but we don’t live in that world of mathematical abstractions. We live in a world of matter and the question is how am I doing in the realm of matter.
I usually propose a couple of experiments to people who claim there is no matter but rather vast empty spaces sparsely populated with particles and force fields. One experiment I propose is I take you by the collar and belt and run you head first into this convenient wall and you show me how the space making up your cranium slips through the vast spaces which make up the wall. So for no one has taken me up on that experiment.
Regarding the wild misinterpretations of the Uncertainty Principle (things only exist when they are observed) this ONLY applies to the quantum realm. The experiment I propose to test this is to stand face-to-face with the holder of the misinterpretation and suggest that if he closes his eyes and can no longer perceive me then I must no longer exist. The question then is how does he explain excruciating pain resulting from the swift kick in the nards I deliver after I have disappeared because he is no longer observing me. No one has taken me up on that either.
So I live in a Realm of Matter. The recipe for matter is particles and force fields and the probability waves collapse into the Realm of Matter in which we live. We may interact with other realms – sitting at my PC typing this then delivering it in the form of electrons to the server on which this blog is domiciled – or, through meditation or whatever interact one might interact with imaginal realms but we always come back. Not returning is not good.
Most of what passes for the popularized understanding of particle physics is a wildly fantastical interpretation twisted into an appealing fantasy so Depak Chopra and Gary Zukav and those guys can sell more books.
To support these statements I direct you to Where Does The Weirdness Go?: Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not As Strange As You Think by David Lindley. He does a great job of dispelling all the Bullshit interpretations of high-energy physics and explains what Bells non-local notion and the Uncertainty principle really mean and it is quite different from what is normally bandied about.
So I live in this realm, of Matter and Trees and ecosystems and climate change. The reality is the bio-sphere of our little blue marble of Astonishing Life is being killed and no amount of Sunyata gibber-jabber or Quantum misinterpretation will make any difference when you find yourself fighting your neighbour over the carcass of a dead dog to feed yourself and your family as you slowly choke to death in an atmosphere of increasing methane and poisonous sulphur dioxide gases as the ocean dies and anaerobic metabolites are released (see Under a Green Sky by Peter Ward).
Finally I am going to invoke the Pessimistic Meta-Induction to suggest that if Homo sapiens were to survive our science would probably change it’s tune in a hundred years and have a totally different imaginal model of reality which still has no resemblance to trees, rocks, rivers, people, organisms, sky and sitting-in-the-garden-talking-to-the-bird Wonder.
Chop wood, carry water.
January 17th, 2013 at 11:13 am
to Ulvfugl
“I think that’s an interesting conjecture. I don’t see why it would produce the flood of terror, that M. does. Why not awe and wonder?”
Great question. GREAT question. I suggest it creates a flood of terror because that is what it looks like it created. That is, our species seems to behave as if it is terrified. Terrified of The Other in all it’s forms. That is why we torture, enslave and slaughter our own species in huge numbers for pleasure, profit and convenience. That is why we slaughter wolves and seals to “protect” cattle and salmon stocks and then build dams to intentionally destroy salmon stocks in order to starve the Indians. That is why we fill the holes in our souls with gadgets and gee-gaws.
Looking at the writings of some of the early settlers in North America is informative. The spoke a great deal of the horror of the dark wilderness and of the motivation to clear and conquer same to create an reality and environment they felt comfortable with. Nations and religions fight each other over BELIEF SYSTEMS for goodness sakes! How can that be anything but terror and terror over an IDEA?
And on and on and on. It is self-evident to me our species is terrified.
January 17th, 2013 at 11:19 am
As to spent nuclear fuel rods and their pools.
Getting in touch with my Inner Engineer, the over arching idea is to keep the radioactive content of the rods cool enough for a Long enough time until they cannot melt the zirconium alloy nuclear fuel cladding tubes they are incased in and then combusting in the open air to liberate untold amounts of radioactive particles far and wide.
That’s the basic dilemma.
Sure, feeding all the rods into a Subduction Zone in the Earth’s Crust so it can be ‘digested’ by the molten core of the planet is the preferred method.
It’s just not ready for Prime Time.
Look, if a given set of rods is in a huge pool of water, like a big lake, it will never boil off all the water of a pool that large, assuming drought does not evaporate the lake water and natural rain fall keeps filling the lake.
The rods could be sealed in a larger alloy container with enough passive exterior heat exchange fins to keep the mass of rods inside cool enough, without electricity (assuming the body of water is large enough) for quite a long time.
Why is this not done now? You want your neighbor lake to be used? Probably not. Is it fool proof? Hell no. But it’s a better idea than relying on tiny swimming pool sized cooling containers powered by electric pumps. The only reason the pools are that small is the plant owners are cheap bastards who don’t want to build huge cooling ponds and nobody wants those pools in their area, no how.
Allowing the rods to combust in the open air of a drained pool is a super-duper bad plan. Sacrificing some lakes is less bad.
Think of a mature radioactive dandelion in a stiff breeze and then think of a mature radioactive dandelion in liquid in a thermos bottle at the bottom of a lake.
Ask the old expression goes, “It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”
It’s not a problem, it’s a dilemma.
January 17th, 2013 at 11:26 am
@Greg Robie:
A long time ago, when I took college English, the theme of the class was to say what you mean as simply as possible. Our homework was to unwind complicated writings with double negatives and various loops etc. Here goes, my homework on your post:
Farm kids have more natural intelligence than city kids. They have learned how things work including how nature works. What else is there?
Capitalism has devoured everything and so now is failing. How do its promoters, economists, cover their asses and continue to look good? It’s obvious their plan wasn’t truth; it didn’t work. Yet they continue to teach that crap.
Integrating data is how we see what works. There are too many specialists who see only the tail of the elephant and think they know it all.
NBL is all about integrating stuff to see the whole.
Farmers caught in the debt-trap are not able to do what is right and sustainable. Those doing it more right with organic practices need a niche market of snobs to make it pay.
ulvfugl is a …..
January 17th, 2013 at 11:44 am
@ Madmanintheattic
Thanks for all that, I follow what you are saying, yes, I live in that real solid world, I’m happy for you to try and grab me and bang me against the wall, I’m somewhat expert at all that stuff
As for the rest, I could lay out my analysis, or explanation, which would differ from yours, and from Robin’s, and nothing like Chopra’s, etc, but would be back into all the stuff I’ve promised not to discuss, so reluctantly, I stop here.
January 17th, 2013 at 11:56 am
@ Madmanintheattic
I suggest it creates a flood of terror because that is what it looks like it created.
Oh. Well. In my mind, the dawning of conscious self-awareness as separate being, as a sort of me-ness and other-ness, was in some remote distant pre-human past.
So, although I’m going along with your thesis, re terror of the Other, I suppose I’d put the terror part later, to do with domestication perhaps.
Yes, I know about the attitude of the early settlers, and thinking about Columbus, last night. Europe held so much darkness and horror, torture, oppression, disease. Spain was gruesome. The catholic church was horrendous. This might be explicable by thinking of what happens with domestication and overpopulation. Wild jungle fowl, pheasants, wild boar, are fierce and will fight over territory and mates. But there is usually space to flee to for the vanquished. Then they get domesticated and shut up in sheds and they eat each other alive. Maybe that’s the same for humans.
January 17th, 2013 at 11:59 am
to Ulvfugl
re: “… but would be back into all the stuff I’ve promised not to discuss, so reluctantly, I stop here.”
Nothing like the exercising Virtue of Restraint, eh? Congratulations on a great job!
What I would really love to experience is someone like yourself who is obviously informed to a certain degree on the topic to read Where Does The Wierdness Go? and discuss the influence that work has on your current interpretation. It was a major eye-opener for me and really put most of the popular work I had read in question as to it’s validity. This is what convinced me most of the popularizers are twisting the ideas to suit a particular marketable fantasy.
January 17th, 2013 at 12:02 pm
to Ulvfugl
re: “… Then they get domesticated and shut up in sheds and they eat each other alive. Maybe that’s the same for humans.”
More or less on the nose, yes. The torture, enslavement and slaughter for fun, profit and convenience is pretty much eating each other alive I’d say.
January 17th, 2013 at 12:08 pm
@ dairymandave
They have learned how things work including how nature works. What else is there?
A hell of a lot more than meets the eye. You can’t see most of what is out there. Two centuries of science, and we’re still finding out more. How would you know about the microbes in the soil, if scientists hadn’t used microscopes to study that stuff ?
You talk about energy, but what exactly are you talking about ? Everybody knows that it all comes from the Sun, that’s common knowledge, taught and learned in kindergarten. But how does it get from there, into the human body where it gets used ? I know it’s by way of the soil. You say ‘energy’, in the soil. But you don’t know what you’re talking about, hence your disparaging remarks re compost.
Seriously, what do you think is the difference between the muck from your heifers and compost ?
January 17th, 2013 at 12:18 pm
@ Madmanintheattic
Where Does The Wierdness Go? and discuss the influence that work has on your current interpretation.
Okay, I googled it, there’s some pages to read, I’ll check it out later. I may have read it before and forgotten, thanks anyway.
January 17th, 2013 at 12:32 pm
@ Madmanintheattic
…pretty much eating each other alive I’d say.
Yup. When I was a kid I had to collect eggs from fowl kept in what was called ‘deep litter system’, shut in a shed, very crowded, always some got eaten alive, slowly pecked to death, I had to put Stockholm Tar on the wounds.
Much like Wetiko.
If you consider European history, since civilisation began, it was nothing but horror, really. Think of the trauma that children experienced, seeing animals slaughtered, seeing humans being hanged in public, armies ravaging the land, plundering and murdering, all kinds of horrible diseases, famines, cities being besieged and the inhabitants killed, over and over, for millennia…
January 17th, 2013 at 12:52 pm
ulvfugl, A man wanted to build a fire in his wood stove inside his house to get some heat. So he found some wood in the back yard, burned it in the back yard, took the ashes into his house, put them into his stove and lit them. He got no heat where he wanted it. It’s the heat, stupid. He lost it in his back yard. The more energy we can feed the soil, the more energy it will feed back to us. As long as your compost doesn’t heat, it equals manure.
Let’s try this. Burn all your meals on the stove and eat what’s left. After a year, report to us on your health. By the way, no other organism on earth does it. Are we special? I can understand storing up waste for later use. Farmers do that too. But heat energy is lost.
January 17th, 2013 at 1:27 pm
@ dairymandave
It really doesn’t matter whether you put the vegetable matter through a cow, or whether you put it on a compost heap, or whether you just throw it on the surface of the ground, as mulch, so long as it gets to the microbes in the soil, they’ll be happy.
But they’ll be happier quicker, if it arrives in a form that’s ready to eat, so to speak. Fresh neat manure they don’t like, that’s why folks leave it, mixed with straw, to rot for a few months, that’s why people use compost bins, that’s why people use worms, to break the stuff down, so it’s easily integrated with the soil.
If it’s going to use humanure, then it needs to heat up, because there’s the risk of transferring nasty bugs, like salmonella, into your vegetable patch, which is not a good idea. If the waste your’e composting comes from other unknown sources, it’s also a good idea to let heat up first, could be meat, bones, whatever, nasty chemicals, most will be sorted by composting before spreading on the soil.
The actual energy is in the chemical bonds, the molecules, which get broken by the microbes, so then the chemicals are available to the plant roots.
January 17th, 2013 at 2:07 pm
to Ulvfugl
re: “Think of the trauma that children experienced, seeing animals slaughtered, seeing humans being hanged in public, armies ravaging the land, plundering and murdering, all kinds of horrible diseases, famines, cities being besieged and the inhabitants killed, over and over, for millennia… “
So this brings up another factor which contributes to the mix of influences on the answers to both “how did the species become so vile” and “Was this inevitable.”
The concept of a traumatized or “post-traumatically stressed” culture is an important idea to consider. The best example, one which resides literally just down the street in my life, is the decimation and destruction of the indigenous peoples of north America. Many people wonder why they can’t get their shit together, take responsibility, contribute to the economy and stop accepting government hand-outs. The thing they forget is the last Residential Schools in Canada, those instruments of brutal, forced acculturation, only closed in the early 1990s. These people have been slaughtered by disease, violence, they have been raped, tortured, enslaved, exploited, displaced and incarcerated (on reserves) for 500 years. No wonder they can’t get their shit together. It is an ENTIRE CULTURE which has been traumatized to the point of dysfunction.
In the same way the ongoing wars which took place over centuries by which the European tribes bled each other white must have left a traumatized culture which expressed it’s anger at it’s hurt by dominating the world, colonizing and exploiting everyone they could and leaving only more traumatized cultures in its wake.
Islam sprung from the traumatized culture which laid waste to the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, the Cedars of Lebanon, the Oak Forest of the Sanai Peninsula and the entire permanent desert which is now the middle east. These people destroyed their land base and the angry, aggressive religion of Islam is the result. Again, angry lashing out at the inability to heal their wounds.
Most cultures have been traumatized in some way or the other. And this leaves us with two things:
First is the ongoing conflicts which are unresolvable around the world. These traumas do not go away and the Hindus are still fighting the Muslims over Kashmir after 700 years.
The other is the inability to develop healthy strategies for getting their wounds healed and their needs met. Angry lashing out from hurt and trauma does not peace negotiations make. NO WONDER we can’t get along on almost any level from the individual to the community to the national to the international.
History is the story of war and conflict and the present is the traumatized and unresolvable result.
Please note I am not holding up traumatization as an excuse to behave badly but I do think it serves as an explanation as to why there is so much bad behaviour. I have found this explanation has allowed me to develop and maintain much more compassion for the traumatized than I had before I understood that pretty much all individuals and all cultures have been traumatized.
“Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.”
January 17th, 2013 at 2:12 pm
I’m generally sympathetic towards American’s attachment to their Constitutional rights, things are so different in UK, I don’t pay a lot of attention, but there’s plenty of voices on forums re the right to bear arms, but crikey, that comes from the days when there was a level playing field, more or less, muskets and stuff, look what you’re up against, Survival Acres has got the videos for modern warfare trade show, the guys with the wetiko and the money and the technology…
http://survivalacres.com/blog/sofex-mass-murder-by-all-governments/
January 17th, 2013 at 2:27 pm
Madmanintheattic
It is an ENTIRE CULTURE which has been traumatized to the point of dysfunction.
I listened to this a few days ago, I thought he was good on that stuff
‘Dr Gabor Maté reveals the biological basis of addiction, and the insanity of the statist war on drugs.’
http://youtu.be/–ZvvjfSZoY
January 17th, 2013 at 2:33 pm
Ruth Stout always thought it was better to put the straw on the soil than through a cow as the cow used some of the straw to make cow, so she figured that the straw had more nutrients for the soil than manure.
Dave, my humanure never heats up. I let it set about 2 years or more after the last fresh material is added. I dig it out of the bin after 1 year and let it set on the ground for another year or more. Are you saying that is actually better than heating up as it has more energy left in it?
At any rate per the humanure handbook all dangerous microbes are dead by that time except round worm eggs. Since we don’t have roundworms we can’t excrete their eggs. At first I used it just in holes I dug for tomatoes and around flowers but now I use it even around our sorrel. We have not gotten sick yet and in fact seem healthier than most people as concerns infectious disease (creaky backs and joints of course)
However should we get hit with some infectious disease that spreads through feces I would make a separate compost pile and use that differently. I always have about 6 buckets in waiting and they each take about 1 week to fill so hopefully one of us would be well before we filled them all so we wouldn’t have to create a new bin in the middle of an illness
January 17th, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Dr Mate is pretty cool. I’ve read his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction a couple of times and heard him interview often. He is local to me (sort of) in Vancouver and I’m just across the Salish Sea.
He says 100% of his addict clients in the ghetto where he works (Canada’s poorest postal code) were sexually abused as children. His insights into (against) the war on drugs are revolutionary only to someone with no ability to think compassionately.
We seem to be a heartless, cruel species in every aspect of our behaviour.
January 17th, 2013 at 2:50 pm
Dr. Elaine Ingham – The Soil Food Web video:
http://vimeo.com/21689321/download?t=1358458929&v=58026204&s=6502d640912d0eb2646da8dbd20fe7ea
The compost tea that Dr. Ingham refers to is known as AACT or Actively Aerated Compost Tea or ACT – Aerated Compost Tea.
More information about ACT can be found here:
http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Dec03_compost%20Teas.pdf
January 17th, 2013 at 2:59 pm
@Madmanintheattic
I meditated on the Void for thirty years and all I got was this Kundalini injury
I have got to get one of those t-shirts! Sorry, I just had to laugh, because I didn’t see a discussion of Kundalini Yoga in the cards at NBL, though I have only been following for a few months. I also have a Kundalini injury, though mine is not physical, more an injury to my psyche, I guess. I was introduced to Kundalini yoga while going to college, and around 2004 the original students of Yogi Bhajan finally introduced a teacher training program, and so I spent the next year of intensive study, practice, sadhana to become certified to teach.
Well, I thought I was learning to teach yoga, but little did I know that turning the mirror inward was what I was doing, for which I wasn’t prepared. I have a deep love and respect for the entire practice and technology of it, but it needs to come with a warning if you want to delve into it. I found some kriyas and meditations to be so powerful and jarring, that when combined with the garbage from past abuse and trauma, I wasn’t ready for the fallout. I haven’t taught or done much practice since I left Alaska around 7 years ago, but who knows…
Which brings me to another topic which I was glad to see being discussed re: best locations/preparedness in the face of NTE. Part of the reason we have decided to stay in god-forsaken South Dakota, is that all areas will have their own special set of problems. I checked out Kathy C.’s interactive map of nuclear sites, and though Wyoming looks pretty good on that front, is anybody going to set off on a great migration to such a place?
If they are desperate enough. (Nothing personal, Wyoming.)
I could move back to Alaska which is home to me, but I am so disenchanted with my family there, who have shown themselves to be uninformed, racist, paranoid gun fanatics since the election of our black president. No thanks. At least I can mostly avoid such people here in Rapid City, though they are pervasive enough that I wonder if I shouldn’t be scared to leave the house with the children.
If we get a few more summers of exceptional drought here, though, Seattle or somewhere in the vicinity, here we come. Willingness to adapt is more important than setting up fortress, which will provide nothing but a false sense of security, which will not feed the kids, which is already a monumental struggle when the “wetikos” of society have gorged themselves on our precious time so that we are always a day late and a dollar short, never quite able to keep up. We don’t even strive for the “American Dream”, just some moments of peace free from constant stress and worry.
Finding some sense of balance has been a struggle with the rug constantly being pulled out from under my feet, but I do my best to trust the universe and look terror in the eye. I can find it there in the mirror, if I choose to look on any given day, if I choose to feed it.
@Kathy C. When a living being is born the “gift” we give is not just life but also death for the unborn do not die. But I suppose if you went to see a new baby no one would like to hear you say “ah another human that has to die” however true it is
omg you had me lol! And that is so not funny, just the tragic nature of all life.
So, back to those preps. Mine include: the decision not to buy a house here, which is an easy one since the nearby military keeps the housing market outrageously high.
Purchase of a small printing press, inks, supplies. Making sure my young son knows that his food allergies are serious and can kill him (that may be abusive on some level, but I will do him no favors by candy-coating that one, especially paired with severe environmental allergies/asthma, and our lack of support system/community.) Teaching the kids to only take what they need.
Future preps include writing a will, for the sake of finding guardians for three small children, just in case, you know. Printing baby photos for the kids.
I’m telling you, I really don’t know what to do, so being ok with the not knowing is part of preparation, though it’s also just a part of daily life.
Oh, and two cases of bottled water at the bottom of the stairs, just as my own inside joke, to remind me I can still laugh in the face of certain doom.
Peace & Light to everyone. I’ll have to bookmark this thread as it is a fascinating discussion.
January 17th, 2013 at 3:07 pm
Hi
I have been following the ongoing dialog but this is my first post. It’s pretty long. Hope it adds something to the conversation.
A friend of mine was searching for the words to describe why she recycles in a household where no one else cares. She said she knew it didn’t make any difference but she just had to do it. In a subsequent conversation this was succinctly expressed as “I recycle because if I didn’t I would be someone who doesn’t recycle.” Implicit in this statement is the unsaid, “…and I wouldn’t be able to stand myself.”
thestormcrow Says (comments from the previous post):
January 10th, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Her friend “has come to believe that it is self-centered NOT to go and see the worlds beauty ”
I was talking to my local librarian a few days ago. He gave up a lucrative career in advertising and a brainless middle class life in favor of a library, beekeeping, riding his bicycle to work and a decision to forego breeding. He refused to think, however, that the personal lifestyle choices he is making had any particular value. He used the metaphor of the rapist that thrusts one less time during the act. He suggested that the most sensible response to the upcoming death of Earth would be to buy the biggest motorcycle he can find and hit the road. He also said that he believes that our thoughts are not our own, that because we are intensely social animals, our thinking is generally unoriginal and strongly tied to the norms of the social groups within which we place ourselves.
Please bear with me while I try to explain my (probably unoriginal) thoughts about how these interactions are connected.
The debate between nature-nurture is considered to be generally resolved. Human behavior and thought represent both genetics and environment, not necessarily 50-50 but somewhere nearer to an even split than strongly unbalanced one way or the other. The fact that humans can learn is proof that environment plays a role. Nurture means being manipulated (or conditioned or learning if that is more comforting), a process that we think centered in that most human of all structures, the cerebral cortex. True this or so the scientists say.
But what if human behavior is almost all instinct, or at least primarily motivated by the same desires for and willingness to compete for survival, sexual and social power as are attributed to other animals? And what if those instincts, along with evolution’s anomalous presentation of opposable thumbs and a technological brain to humans explains why there has been so little opposition to the enslavement of the planet, even though it leads directly to human extinction. Of particular interest to me today is the question of how likely is it or has it ever been that humans could learn (use that big brain we are so proud of) to be any different.
So here’s an idea. What if (what is claimed to be) the nurture part of the influence on human behavior is really mostly just another version of nature. I am wondering if human evolution predisposes us to learn only (or mostly) what are the cultural norms of our social groups (family, couple, country, class, occupation, gender, orientation, religion-whichever are important to each of us) so that “our thoughts are not our own” but rather a representation of a genetic need to be with the crowd (which is extremely destruction while trying to meet instinctive needs/goals). So what we learn is what our valued others have learned before us and very little else. We call instincts primitive and distance ourselves from any behavior labeled such. We pride ourselves on originality and independence. Can we even imagine the horizons of originality? Can we know what are boundaries of human thought?
Anyway, if humans are, like we believe other animals are, mostly “run” on a combination of instincts both “primitive” (nature/brain stem & midbrain) and “advanced” (nurture/forebrain), then what makes an individual person cognitively distinct? What is personality, sometimes defined as a number of characteristics that arise from within an individual? How much of what we are comes from within?
Completing the switch from biology to psychology, the other side of that question is how much of what we are comes from the power of the situation?
Social psychology is the study of how personality, attitudes, motivations, and behavior of the individual are influenced by the actual or perceived presence of other individuals. The unfortunate truth of what social psychology has had to offer is that, for the very large part, the social scene has a much greater power to elicit negative behavior rather than positive. It makes one wonder what is the norm for human behavior. Social psychology arose as a sub-science as a result of clinicians wondering at the WTF of it of 13 million holocaust victims of WWII. How could this have happened? What turned so many “normal” people into such monsters? All the social psych literature suggests it was pretty easy.
It is odd that personality, which is generally thought to represent traits that stay constant in humans is supposed to be part of what is manipulated by the “actual or perceived presence of others”. Is personality within us or not?
Stormcrow was essentially called self-centered for making personal lifestyle choices that s/he considers to be immoral, as in “If I flew around on a plane making unnecessary pollution to entertain myself and at the expense of a living planet, I would be someone who does that and I wouldn’t like myself for it.” It is self-centered. Not situation-centered. The situation is hopeless. The situation is that almost no one cares. The situation is that no one is doing anything to fix it. The situation is that a little more raping and pillaging of the planet won’t matter in the big picture. The situation says, get on the plane.
But I don’t want to get on the plane. What matters to me is that I have to look myself in the eye and justify what I am doing. I don’t want to be the person who gets on that plane. I want to be centered in a self, a self that fights to live according to my beliefs. Supposedly, humans can do this. Admittedly, my beliefs may not be my own but I am enough aware of the power of the situation to drag me toward ignorance, arrogance and addictive consumption that I am trying to fight it. I think of that as morality and it is self-centered because it’s about trying to have a self as a guide, a stable personality, a steel rod of belief and persistence to carry around and apply as needed. To not bend to the power of the situation. It is an attempt to not be manipulated by the crowd and other elements of the situation but to listen to a voice that stays strong within no matter what. And if it’s true, or more true than we generally think, that “our thoughts are not our own” but are tied to an evolutionary set of instincts, no wonder why so few try and/or succeed in this fight and why anyone who does try has to take solace in every step that is taken in a moral direction, even if it is now and has never been enough.
January 17th, 2013 at 3:11 pm
Sudden Stratospheric Warming
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/16/1179397/-Sudden-Stratospheric-Warming-Split-the-Polar-Vortex-in-Two
January 17th, 2013 at 3:54 pm
Ernst Mayr, one of the grand-daddies of evolutionary biology in the 20th century asserted that human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. .
I agree.
Human Self awareness on a grand scale is Cosmic mental incest. It’s like as kids when we discovered holding up two large mirrors faced to face and peeking in between them to see what happened. In our neighborhood we called it “Vampire Mirrors”. It always scared the crap out of the really little kids who looked in between before they were sufficiently cynical and jaded.
As to psychopathology, hey, it’s been a field of quantified study for quite sometime.
Some have even given it a fancy name: Ponerology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponerology
“….Ponerology is the name given by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski to an interdisciplinary study of social injustice.
This discipline makes use of data from psychology, sociology, philosophy, and history to account for such phenomena as aggressive war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and police states…yadayadayada”
Like a group of crows is referred to as a ‘murder’, the term for an organized collection of psychopaths is a ‘Pathocracy’
Definition: pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people
Also, various websites have sprung up hyping variants of the psychopathology genre.
http://www.ponerology.com/psychopaths_3.html
and from MMintheattic
“…The only way our species could have succeeded would be by the diligent extirpation of the psychopath whenever it appeared. The structure of civilization has prevented that…”
hahahaha, Brilliant MM@attic
Catch 22
Here is Robert Hare’s psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version
I love that, the “Youth Version”, hahaha, stop, you’re killin’ me.
Well, you do want to ID them little psychopaths when they’re young enough so you can buy them Rocket Bike motorcycles and they can then get either massive brain damage from crashing them or just outright kill themselves with reckless speed. That’s a tough call.
Andrzej Łobaczewski estimate the percentage of the population that are on the psychopathic spectrum scale at 1 to 6%.
Robert Hare puts it at 1 to 2%
OMG
Either way, it’s beyond dealing with sanely, it’s a positive feedback loop at this point in history, like a Murder of Crows caught between Vampire Mirrors.
January 17th, 2013 at 5:08 pm
“Andrzej Łobaczewski estimate the percentage of the population that are on the psychopathic spectrum scale at 1 to 6%. Robert Hare puts it at 1 to 2%”
Yeah, and when you add in the numbers for sociopath and personality disorders, it goes way up from there.
January 17th, 2013 at 5:32 pm
I thought you all might enjoy the inimitable John Prines take on the psychopathic infestation that has been loosed on humanity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rwYiBdoWHE
January 17th, 2013 at 6:33 pm
Madmanintheattic says: …My conclusion after 30 years of intense devotion: there is nothing there.
Madman, outstanding post!
==
==
Daniel says: …given what little time we actually have left to enjoy our lives in peace….how we choose to live out the rest of our lives….commiserative discussion.
Kathy C says: …if you are no longer frantic to extend your life….whatever I choose…Time well spent once you accept NTE.
Since chaos makes thoughts go astray,
Direction deserves a bouquet;
So Kathy and Dan,
And Guy, who’s The Man:
Thank you for showing the way.
January 17th, 2013 at 6:56 pm
Madmanintheattic says: My conclusion after 30 years of intense devotion: there is nothing there.
Changed mental states can be fun,
But the outside connections are none:
Whatever one mulls
Stays inside of our skulls,
And you have to come back when you’re done.
January 17th, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Very interesting segment on Free Speech Radio News this evening:
http://fsrn.org/audio/opponents-keystone-xl-pipeline-point-new-reports-climate/11448
Cheers to John Duffy for sitting in that tree in Texas. Probably a useless gesture, but a damned admirable one for all of that. Kill The Economy
January 17th, 2013 at 7:50 pm
Steph says: Coming out to my circle of friends about believing in NTE has been discouraging.
They don’t know, since they’re not doom inclined,
Whether to shit or go blind;
Might as well get resigned:
Your friends may be kind,
But they’ll still think you’re out of your mind.
January 17th, 2013 at 8:05 pm
Here is a very cool ap that show historical temperature variations for any area on the globe..
http://warmingworld.newscientistapps.com/
January 17th, 2013 at 8:55 pm
Some high temps today as predicted here in NSW Australia
Australian Bureau of Meteorology
‘Latest Weather Observations for Wilcannia Airport’
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60801/IDN60801.95695.shtml
As of 1:54 pm today Wilcannia Airport, which is in the North West of NSW, was 45 C. Yesterday it was 45 C at 5:30 pm . It is anyone’s guess if it will go higher today.
It is about 2:50 pm here in Blackheath and my thermometer has just hit 35.5 C and 21% humidity. A forecast is for thunderstorm later today, but I am not holding my breath.
‘Wilcannia airport location.’
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&q=Wilcannia+Airport+weather+forcast&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.41248874,d.dGY&biw=1051&bih=818&wrapid=tlif135846349935210&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
All I can do is keep the plants and us humans and the animals hydrated, from town water.
Blow working in the yard.
January 17th, 2013 at 9:13 pm
On the map I just posted, not how much the temp change ramps up as one moves the pointer farther north (in most places).
January 17th, 2013 at 10:51 pm
That link to ‘Wilcannia Airport NSW Australia’ was not correct, here is the right one, my apologies….
‘Wilcannia Airport New South Wales’
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&q=Wilcannia+Airport+nsw&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.41248874,d.dGI&biw=1051&bih=818&wrapid=tlif135848713948310&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl
At 4:30pm now the thunderstorm is brewing here, and winds are picking up. 30 to 40 km/hr it looks like. Won’t be long.
BTW, the local radar station, Mount Boyce, about 6 km away from our house(rental), has the highest recorded temperature for that station being 36.1 C, dated January 12th 2007. Records are from 1991-1013; that is over the preceeding 21 Januarys, today being 36 C, is only 0.1C shy of that record.
That has got to mean something. I wonder wha…Am I a frog?
January 17th, 2013 at 11:55 pm
@Madman
The first, as outlined previously, is the problem of the presence of the Psychopath gene in the human construct. The only way our species could have succeeded would be by the diligent extirpation of the psychopath whenever it appeared. The structure of civilization has prevented that.
Secondly I believe the problem of Consciousness (and the subsequent vulnerability to Meme infestation) lies at the base of our inability to be decent human beings let alone animals in harmony with Nature.
Sorry about the sarcasm re meme theory … it was good natured sarcasm. Thank you for your well reasoned response. I tend to agree with your assessment regarding the psychopath infestation and the terminal condition which human civilizations inevitably find themselves in.
I am not dismissive of memetics, I can appreciate its potential value for explaining how brains/minds in a social framework are interconnected and coordinated. The meme, however, is a theoretical construct for which there is no empirical evidence demonstrating that this kind of mental software exists (although the same could be said of quarks and superstrings, etc…) and there are many smart folks who are highly critical of the whole enterprise. In short, the jury is still out on whether memetics is a correct and/or useful way of understanding human minds. It has not been established that cultural phenomena (like beliefs and ideas) are subject to the same Darwinian principles of selection. Memetics may be an over extension of an explanatory model that works well in biology, but does not work in sociology, psychology, and so forth.
I tend to become a little wary of those who start wielding memetics in casual discussions because I have found that only those beliefs which the memeticists dislike are characterized as memes. I also don’t see how one can get around the self-referenciality problem … are all beliefs that are held by 2 or more people memes?
And by the way, the fact that you may disagree with some of my judgments does not mean that my feeble little brain is infested with bad cultural software.
January 18th, 2013 at 12:25 am
Random facts on our looming nuclear holocaust once the power goes out
“For years, nuclear power plants have temporarily stored used fuel, known as “spent fuel,” in water pools at the reactor site. Periodically, about one-third of the nuclear fuel in an operating reactor needs to be unloaded and replaced with fresh fuel. Designers of nuclear power plants anticipated that the spent fuel would be reprocessed, with usable portions of the fuel to be recycled and the rest to be disposed as waste. However, commercial reprocessing was never successfully developed in the United States, and a permanent waste repository has not yet been developed. As a result, the spent fuel generated at many commercial nuclear power plants has exceeded spent fuel pool capacity.”
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/dry-cask-storage.html
January 18th, 2013 at 12:51 am
I just read this article at Arctic News regarding the rapid warming of the arctic. The article ends with these words:
“This accelerated warming in the Arctic is threatening to destabilize the methane in the seabed and trigger runaway global warming within a decade.”
The video linked below demonstrates that TPTB are not even planning to take meager actions to stem the rise of carbon emissions.
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/01/17/the-cognitive-dissonance-of-the-corporate-state-on-climate-change/
January 18th, 2013 at 3:17 am
ulvfugl, I do follow the goings on in Syria – just enough to be frustrated by not being able to know more about what’s going on.
Kathy C, the Medea hypothesis seems to be a good counterbalance to the Gaia hypothesis – I guess the truth lies somewhere inbetween.
Sandy Hook may well be what the media reports tell us it was, and if it was just that and nothing more, I wouldn’t put it past them to take advantage of the opportunity to press the Gun Control Emergency Alarm and send half of America into a conniption about it. It’s all part of the same disease – won’t give up guns, won’t stop consuming the planet until it’s destroyed.
January 18th, 2013 at 3:31 am
Quote: “Things are warming up tremendously faster than most people anticipated.”
Carana says Arctic will be ice free this year.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/
January 18th, 2013 at 3:34 am
The logic of the monetary system rewards sick people: psychopaths and sociopaths. The more you screw over your fellow humans and the more you flat out destroy the environment that supports everyone’s life, the more power, wealth and status you are rewarded with. Just follow the logic and you’ll see we’ll all be cooked in the greenhouse or shot by soldiers and police if we try to stop it.
January 18th, 2013 at 3:57 am
language warning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-BLEXeY3N8&feature=player_embedded
January 18th, 2013 at 4:14 am
Daniel from the NRC quote “However, commercial reprocessing was never successfully developed in the United States, and a permanent waste repository has not yet been developed. ”
However per Arnie Gundersen the fuel rods can be put into dry cask after a few years in the spent fuel pool and stored on site which is not as good as a permanent repository, but better than crowding up the spent fuel pool. After the tsunami and earthquake the dry casks were undamaged at Fukushima. We know the state of particularly pool 4 there. However the casks cost 1 million apiece – I don’t know how many rods each can take.
Answering the question of why then more spent fuel has not been transferred to dry cask, Arnie says that if they transfer them now it comes out of current bottom line profits. If they wait until decommissioning it comes out of funds set aside for decommissioning. I wonder what happens if the funds set aside for decommissioning are not enough because there are excess rods in the spent fuel pool?
The situation with the Mark I reactors is more dangerous in the near term as the spent fuel pools are in the air as in Fukushima. In the long run when the grid goes out all the spent fuel pools become our doom
Arnie Gundersen: Well that is one and I am glad to see that the New York Times is talking about Chair McFarland, saying we need to look again at the seismic issue. The biggest one that is right on our doorstep, is the nuclear fuel that is stored up on top of these buildings like Vermont Yankee. There are 23 Mark I reactors. That is the kind that blew up at Fukushima. But there are 23 of them in the United States, almost the identical design. And at the very top in that box that sits up in the air, at the very top of that is the nuclear fuel pool. We have so much nuclear fuel in those pools, that it equals the equivalent of more than all of the bombs that were dropped in all of the above ground testing, 700 nuclear bombs blew up. There is more cesium in the fuel pool at Vermont Yankee than in all those above ground tests over 30 years. And we tolerate it. There is a solution. You can take it and put it on the ground in something called dry casks, but Vermont Yankee and the other 23 utilities do not want to spend the money and are keeping that fuel in a very precarious place.
A variety of Gundersen’s talks on dry cask storage can be found here http://www.fairewinds.org/search/node/dry%20cask%20storage I think most include transcripts so you can just search on Dry Cask to find pertinent info, although all of Gundersen’s talks are well worth listening to for all the info he packs in them.
January 18th, 2013 at 4:17 am
Btd you wrote
Since chaos makes thoughts go astray,
Direction deserves a bouquet;
So Kathy and Dan,
And Guy, who’s The Man:
Thank you for showing the way.
Aw thanks
January 18th, 2013 at 4:20 am
Madmanintheattic you wrote “Or at least there is nothing there which was able to INFORM MY LIFE on this planet in any useful way”
Due to a vow I took I can’t discuss this further except I will say of your post BRAVO
January 18th, 2013 at 4:49 am
@ Kathy C. : Madmanintheattic’s quote expanded:
I spent two years in India meditating in the Holy Caves and studying at the ashram library and following the Travelling Guru Dog & Pony Show as the culmination of 30 years of devoted and intense meditation and yoga practice and initiation into an order of Saddhus as sanyasin and all I have to show for it is a Kundalini injury which has left me with low level neurological damage which causes me constant pain. My conclusion after 30 years of intense devotion: there is nothing there. And NOT there is a Void there, but rather there is nothing there – no enlightenment, no imaginal realms … Or at least there is nothing there which was able to INFORM MY LIFE on this planet in any useful way.
I wonder what Madmanintheattic was expecting to find, via all of that effort and trouble ?
And why Kathy C. would cheer that he did not find whatever she imagines he was looking for and failed to find ?
January 18th, 2013 at 5:01 am
@ Peter D
Sandy Hook may well be what the media reports tell us it was
MSM told us it was many different contradictory things, most of which have subsequently turned out to be wrong, e.g Mrs Lanza was a gun nut, and prepper, etc, all the guns registered in her name, now according to Time Mag, none were.
Interesting radio prog re inconsistencies
http://youtu.be/SK8tLX6VQp4
January 18th, 2013 at 5:16 am
@ GreenGenes
Thanks for your interesting speculation.
Can we know what are boundaries of human thought?
It’s mostly building upon what others have already thought, isn’t it ?
I see it as telling ourselves mythos/logos stories. I see the only place further to go is to be fully aware of that. Have a still, silent mind, intensely attuned to it’s own existing. Consciousness conscious of consciousness, without any thought. All worldviews are limiting.
January 18th, 2013 at 5:31 am
Excerpt from a curious tale that possible deserves wider publicity….
Might I remind you that David Cameron is an MI6 agent who, along with Dr David Kelly, was sent by Margaret Thatcher in 1991 to recover three (3) 18.5 kiloton tactical battlefield nukes from the former Apartheid Regime in the Republic of South Africa before power was handed over to Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.
These two idiots manage to lose all three nuclear devices between Durban, SA and Oman, in the Arabian Peninsula. The containers were found to be empty at the other end of the short voyage, and both David Cameron and Dr David Kelly had verified that they were on board. One of them later turned up at the Nuclear Test Explosion that the North Koreans did in the fall of 2009 ….The other two 18.5 Kiloton Tactical Battlefield Nuclear Devices are also believed to be in North Korea
http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpress/2011/07/re-david-cameron-the-tory-nuke-incident-and-a-letter-to-my-mp/
January 18th, 2013 at 6:00 am
When people start saying that the entire Sandy Hill event was completely staged and with actors, such people start loosing intellectual credibility in my eyes very fast.
January 18th, 2013 at 6:15 am
RE: Sandy Hook.
I have only looked at this in a little detail in the last week, but it looks like the sort of thing that we used to say could only happen in America.
Many poorly educated,(in very broard terms), people cannot distinguish the actor from the character, nor reality from make believe. That is how it is with screen based experiences for some, and especially with young children – screen voilence, even ‘normalising conditioning’ – and it appears more and more for mainstream America.
I suspect The ‘Sandy Hook Incident’ whatever it was, served at least two important purposes. The first and obvious one would be to add some immediate cache to gun control legislation changes – many have pointed this out all around. No big revelation there. The second is to study and analse in detail how the media and internet searches were activated and responded to the whole show.
If I were in the game of Psy-ops etc, I would want some test runs to see how these events actually unfold, and what nudging is required to keep the game afloat. See what things work and what do not.
Hardly the burning of the Reichstag in pre Nazi Germany, but it is a shock to the demographic who love their kids and grandkids.
Did anyone’s kids actually die?
Have there been interviews with real grieving parents?
This sort of thing when viewed from so far away just looks like a people gone mad, or being duped into not knowing what is real or not, or both.
That is plenty of space to drive a wedge through the USA constitution, and even enough to get to FUBAR our public civil rights laws here in Australia.
I really feel for Daniel Radcliff, but then I realise he is probably got some form of ‘financial security’,(in the old world order sense) now at such a young age, so that being called Harry Potter in the street by preteens and not so well informed ‘adults’, is probably worth it. But he may have a different view giventhe scale of his emersion in the thing call Harry Potter.
January 18th, 2013 at 6:21 am
@ Bailey
…entire event…completely staged…
Is anybody saying that ?
The counter-argument is that accepting the MSM’s incredibly garbled and inconsistent narrative, full of anomalies and contradictions, as ‘truth’, shows a lack of critical independent judgement.
January 18th, 2013 at 6:24 am
GreenGenes you wrote “A friend of mine was searching for the words to describe why she recycles in a household where no one else cares. She said she knew it didn’t make any difference but she just had to do it. In a subsequent conversation this was succinctly expressed as “I recycle because if I didn’t I would be someone who doesn’t recycle.” Implicit in this statement is the unsaid, “…and I wouldn’t be able to stand myself.”
That is really quite profound. In the face of extinction how do we explain not becoming hedonists – because our pleasure is being the type of people we are – savers, conservers, natural gardeners, what ever and so in fact we are hedonists – it is just that what gives us pleasure is so different that to the rest of the world we probably look like fools.
January 18th, 2013 at 6:43 am
@ Ozman
If I were in the game of Psy-ops etc, I would want some test runs to see how these events actually unfold, and what nudging is required to keep the game afloat. See what things work and what do not.
Yes. It gives ‘them’ precise statistics, market data if you like, as to how many are fooled, how many see through the tricks, who they are ( right through to individual identities ) which forums and blogs, which political groupings, demographics, nationalities, ethnic groups perceive these acts in particular ways, etc, etc. They can see where they have made mistakes, and make adjustments accordingly, for the next time.
What is not clear, – at least, not to me – is who the ‘them’ are. This varies according to which forum or blog you visit, and what prejudices they have. Which I’m certain suits ‘them’ very well. ‘They’ are not going to come clean and declare ‘It was us !’ are they, they’ll want to hide behind as much confusion as possible.
But somebody must know, and I think it will eventually become clear. Accusations are no good, it needs substantive evidence.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:00 am
Good morning everyone:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/47643/how-to-stop-the-next-pandemic-end-factory-farming
Is our national habit of eating dead animals dragging us closer and closer to a flu pandemic that could kill tens of millions of Americans? Dr. Michael Greger believes so.
He’s the author of the new book, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, and he recently came on our show, The Big Picture, to ring the alarm bell.
“Up to sixty million Americans get the flu every year,” he said before asking, “What if it turned deadly?”
The question wasn’t exactly rhetorical.
We do know that the flu is already deadly. Hundreds, sometime thousands, of Americans do die every year from the regular seasonal flu, which according to the Center for Disease Control has a mortality rate of about two-tenths of one percent.
A particularly severe and infectious form of influenza struck the world in 1918 infecting a third of the global population and killing as many as 100 million people. In the United States, that flu took the lives of more than a half-million Americans. Unlike the average seasonal flu that we’re confronting today with a mortality rate of .2%, the 1918 strand of influenza had a mortality rate of 2.5%. It was the worst plague in history.
But what if a strand of influenza swept across the nation that was twenty-five times deadlier than the 1918 strand? What if we were dealing with a flu pandemic that had a 60% mortality rate?
Here’s the frightening news: We already are.
An extremely deadly and contagious form of bird flu, H5N1, has already infected people in several countries including densely populated China and Indonesia, as well as Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, among others.
Just in 2012, known cases of H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia killed 90% of those infected. In China, 65% died. In Indonesia, the mortality rate was 83%. And in Laos and Nigeria, the mortality rate was 100% – every single person who got it, died.
If the 60 million Americans who get the flu every year suddenly got this particular strand of the flu, H5N1, then upwards of 40 million Americans would die. It would be a disaster on a scale never before seen in this nation other than, possibly, how Europeans wiped out Native Americans when they first brought the flu from Europe. And if it spread around the rest of the world, it would make the Black Plague of the 14th century look like the common cold.
Dr. Greger warned: “It’s like crossing one of the deadliest known human diseases, Ebola, with one of the most contagious known diseases, influenza.” He added that the single factor that was most likely to cause this is factory farming.
ulvfugl: as to your last statement, i’m still waiting for those in the know to let us in on who killed JFK and RFK, and who was behind 9-11 beyond the smokescreen of the “official version(s).”
January 18th, 2013 at 7:04 am
So what’s the solution to climate change? I asked.
A young woman raised her hand.
We need to remember how to be happy.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/newsfrom187/entry/7335/
January 18th, 2013 at 7:06 am
Kathy C: In everything we do, we have 2 choices; we can do what we want or we can do what works.
Happy are those who want to do what works.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:06 am
@ Tom ..as to your last statement,
Oh, that’s easy, they told me, but if I tell anyone, they’ll kill me…
January 18th, 2013 at 7:07 am
as to the flu one can get updates on this year’s flu from Dr. Niman at recombinomics – latest post
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/01171303/CDC_Wk2_PED_9.html
January 18th, 2013 at 7:08 am
Also the H5N1 blog now covers various disease out breaks in the world
http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/
January 18th, 2013 at 7:08 am
dairymandavewe have 2 choices; we can do what we want or we can do what works.
No mention of ethics or morality.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:20 am
ulvfugl, if you think about it, ethics and morality work.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:22 am
@dairymandave
A friend of mine, and an editor of my local community’s newspaper, took me to task, years ago, concerning my writing style. In another iteration of how you’ve framed your critique, he advised me to write to a 6th grade level. To the degree your interpretation of what I wrote is a successful translation to such a level, it troubles me that, in terms of TA, there is now an opening for child to child discourse. (Given that such wasn’t engaged in, is my concern a mirroring of my own issues or, as relates to ulvfugl is … mature enough not to do so?) Regardless, the definition of such a direct writing style as ‘best practice’ can also function as an obstacle to communication if TheProblem attempting to be discussed is mostly uncomprehendable within the neurological development construct of an eleven year old. What is “best” about a ‘best practice’ that linguistically countermands any need to learn, mature, and evolve–especially if such is the meaning of life/life of meaning?
Since I didn’t awaken to NTE at NBL, and my experience of this comment space is limited, I am more critical of the NBL comment space dynamics Due to my experience of what transpires here than what you reflect. But then the social needs I have may be ones that are generic to a stage of grief that is not endemic to the preponderant of those commenting here; who have grasped NTE here. Where I am, whether it is best communicated as a stage of grief or not, I need a local, mature, and compassionate learning community. The concept of the virtual OST conference on motivated reasoning that was sprung on this space with my guest blog post, and without buyin, was a strategic attempt–on my part–to get what I need via a software interface that is not structured to do so; that seems to best serve other psychological and social needs. And it failed.
Moving on, the summary you offer does reflect a bias I share, however, it is the relative complexity of the environment, and the role such plays in human psychological development, which I was intending to raise as a point. It seems that the relative complexity of the natural environment makes more complex–or is it integrated–thinking less difficult for those who grow up in nature’s complexity. The predeliction to fix things is as much a skill born of economic necessity, gender bias, and privilege flowing to our society’s urban/financial centers, as it is a consequence of psychological development in a natural vs a constructed environment. In addition, those who psyches are shaped in urban environments may have a leg up when it comes to developing intra and inter-personal intelligences. Consider that rual inhabitants tend to have a conservative moral bias while urban ones tend to be liberal. In moral social psychology modeling, the relative complexity of the conservative end of the moral continuum reflects the complexity of the natural environment while the simpler liberal moral construct relects the less complex human-centric urban environment. This relatively simple environment may allow otherwise unused neurological capacity to hone skills for knowing oneself and manipulating people, where that same capacity is tied up with environmental awareness in the rural setting and necessitates a less nuanced form of social intercourse to be valued.
IBID for emersion in an established religious tradition. For those who embrace one, community is far more robust, and therefore more complex and challenging. It is this relative complexity, and the enhanced inter and intra-personal intelligences that are nurtured that go along way towards explaining the perceived enhanced problem solving skills, especially since academia, which is making such observations about natural and spiritual intelligence’s, tends to be secular and anti-religious. Furthermore, and as I define religion (that which tends to invoke motivated reasoning), CapitalismFail is a religious economic paradigm that, via systemic competition and avarice, contradicts community and it’s complexity; values manipulation and maneuvering as homeostasis over justice and sustainability as valued moral social constructs.
Is that more clear?
Ulvgal, thanks for the link to the interview with Gabor Maté. To the degree my assertion about community, complexity, and religious emersion/discipline are valid in terms of needed-but-absent psychological development and mental health issues, isn’t what Maté observes about the consequences of the breakdown of family and community integral to CapitalismFail and the consequenced secularism/consumerism/Individualism-as-community and the ongoing failure to respond to climate change in a responsible manner?
As a general comment, and likely directed to lurkers more so than comment leaders: is my need for a local, mature, and compassionate learning community a shared need? If so, especially in terms of the “local” part, NBL cannot be such in its current iteration. My limited experience here suggests that maturation is less valued here than I am comfortable with; that learning is constrained to a refining of the details and probability of the unimaginable social horrors of NTE with growing passivity and detachment as the means for doing so. That observation shared, I also acknowledge that while such contemplative skills are integral to human psychological health, without balance, they paradoxically limit health and/or affect a different iteration of motivated reasoning.
To the degree it is yet the top of the 9th, nature has a substantial lead, there are two outs, no one is on base, the count is 2/0 and the batter is blind, Guy, in particular, but anyone, is all that NBL can constitute is the grandstands from which to watch the batter go down swinging? When humanity takes the field in the bottom of the 9th, what constitutes the most sportsmanlike/sapient behavior that can be imagined? Is it simply more of the same?
January 18th, 2013 at 7:25 am
@ Tom as to your last statement
There’s no shortage of theories, is there. Plenty of books ‘proving’ who it was. Therein lies the difficulty. Who to believe ? Same goes for all these issues, including climate change. I don’t mean for me personally, I make my own critical evaluations, but for the wider general public, who are busy with their lives, don’t have time to investigate in depth, just grab headlines and soundbites, read a few books, talk to a few people, catch the rumours and gossip…
Anyone who thinks mockingbird stopped must be very naive, it’s just got much more intense and sophisticated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
January 18th, 2013 at 7:30 am
@ dmd
if you think about it, ethics and morality work.
I have thought about it. Most of what people do that ‘works’ is not ethical, and morality is never a consideration. Giving priority to certain ethical principles could very well mean that much of ‘what works’ has to be dismissed in practice.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:31 am
Ozman you wrote:
“I suspect The ‘Sandy Hook Incident’ whatever it was, served at least two important purposes. The first and obvious one would be to add some immediate cache to gun control legislation changes – many have pointed this out all around. No big revelation there. The second is to study and analse in detail how the media and internet searches were activated and responded to the whole show.”
Like everyone else I can only speculate, but I suspect that another purpose might be to instill fear of random violence and death into the minds of America’s children, with the long term strategy being to brainwash them into acceptance of a greater police/security presence in their lives in the future. Just another example of how the dominate and control paradigm works, it’s all about mind control.
ulvfugl – I thought the link you supplied, where the guy goes through the entire police scanner transcript line by line was pretty well done. Some pretty weird and hard to explain stuff to be found there.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:40 am
@ulvfugl
…entire event…completely staged…
Is anybody saying that ?
As a matter of fact, they are (though maybe not here). People see what they are looking for, so if there is a government conspiracy belief, people will find that in every event (the Alex Jones type). It’s call confirmation bias, seeing Jesus in the pizza slice etc etc.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:55 am
Greg Robie: Yes.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:58 am
@ Bailey
Sorry, I should have said I meant ‘here’. Out ‘there’, the insanity is unbounded, as anyone who has ventured far will have found…
There is undisputed evidence that actors have been used. I provided it, with links, in an earlier thread. Associated Press broadcast a video as genuine news, ( re parents looking for children after the theatre shooting ) which Crisis Actors had as a video clip on their website as an example advertising the work of their employed actors.
They had other examples, which have all ben removed because of the subsequent attention they received. That’s not ‘confirmation bias’, is it.
January 18th, 2013 at 8:24 am
@ dmd
Thanks for that weather link, re the interesting polar vortex split, which has dropped a very inconvenient icy blizzard and a big load of snow on me today.
I’m blaming you for that
January 18th, 2013 at 8:40 am
It is ethical to extend lives – except by extending lives we have overpopulated the planet and will use up our resource base (including a livable climate) which is unethical.
I suggest anyone wanting to talk ethics use the Human Footprint calculator and see how many planets it would take to if everyone lived your lifestyle. http://www.myfootprint.org/
If it is more than one it is not an ethical lifestyle. I am at 2.87 earths. I don’t live ethically from this standpoint even though I live far more simply than most Americans. I might be slightly lower as hand washing clothes and a humanure toilet are not options to choose.
Ethics, if you have young children and only enough food to feed them over the next year do you turn away a starving mother and child – is it ethical to operate on kin selection or on reciprocal altruism – both evolutionary strategies. What if you think the people you might extend altruism would never be able to reciprocate. What if you end up in a Fema camp and have to make Sophie’s choice (google it if you don’t know what that means) – where a Nazi guard says pick which of your children lives and which dies or we kill both.
Ethics – I don’t think we really know what that is, but we use it as a bludgeon to beat up other people all the time. We maybe can say certain acts like genocide are highly unethical, but that is about it. Should we crash the industrial economy (resulting in dieoff of billions) to save what is left of life. Maybe that is a good call, but can we call it moral, ethical. Is there ethics without an ethics giver ie a god? Or are we left with our programs that imbue what we call kin selection and reciprocal altruism in animals, but give religious overtones in humans?
At any rate if someone can give an ethical explanation as to why Sophie should choose her older son to live or her younger daughter to live or both to die, I would like to hear it. Folks we are leaving the realm of ethical recycling and entering the realm of life and death ethics and we have precious little to guide us, most of us never having had to risk our life for someone else, most of us never having to choose to starve so younger people have enough to eat.
Again, I urge folks to watch the movie the Grey Zone so you at least have an idea of what sort of choices you might have to make if we all get nabbed and put in a FEMA camp.
January 18th, 2013 at 8:58 am
’7 SH facts you can’t ignore’
http://youtu.be/h2MUNbGyld4
January 18th, 2013 at 8:58 am
Excellent short video by xraymike:
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/
January 18th, 2013 at 9:00 am
…Crisis Management Institute had created a PDF guide “Talking With Your Children/Students About the Sandy Hook Elementary Shooting” on December 10, 2012, four days before the Sandy Hook massacre took place.
http://fellowshipofminds.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/guide-for-how-to-talk-to-children-about-sandy-hook-pre-dated-the-massacre/
January 18th, 2013 at 9:59 am
@ ulvfugl, We’re getting the other half of that vortex over here. Still not as cold as past winters.
January 18th, 2013 at 10:00 am
patrick k o’leary
Thanks for that addition to a short list for possible reasons for the ‘Sandy Hook event’. ulvfugl added some detail I had also envisioned but not put down.
Your ideas about fear are all pervasive, and to me it is the well known technique of regressing an opponent to the child state of mind and emotions. The traditional war cry of a north american Indian, a Maori worrior, or a Norsmen Longboat squad disembarking on your shoreline is meant to disarm and imobilise. Like the lion’s roar it can penetrate and make you shit your pants, while your windpipe is squeezed, and your chest ripped open by lacerating claws.
Modern military use ‘Shock and Awe’ tactics, as did the artillary in the trenches in both world oil wars I and II. They called it in all the war films I ever saw softening the oppponents up.
Fear can easily be turned to rage, especially to a child not quite an adolescent. Reasoning is weak, and the fear is essentially bottomless, but put a floor in that fear and it will tank up to a rage. George Orwell knew this very well, and used that in his novel 1984. Remember the 3 minute hate, then of the Jews, Goldstein et al.
Now it is the Arabs, but it is just a convenient ‘different other’. I don’t mean that the actual effects on Arabs and people of Middle Eastern Appearence is not degrading and unjustifyable, far from it.
But on the Sandy Hook thing, I still can’t ascertain for sure if any kids, or educational staff were killed? Anybody with real evidence?
I actually wonder if those officers and security and rescue empoloyees involved in the ‘exercises’ that somehow synchronistically are set up for these events do not sign some waver to not reveal any aspect of the training or simulation for public scurity issues before or after the ‘simulations’, and after they actually occur, they are both held by the threat of prosecution, and so intimidated they fear for their own families. I mean if they do kill those kids and the teachers defending the kids, then I would figure they wouldn’t care about shooting my family and exiting me as the deranged father of 5 who took his own life after taking his families…scenario. I would shut my mouth too, even as one of those actors, get a job as a filing clerk in the back room.
As admiral Tarkin says to Dearth Vader, “Fear will keep the smaller systems in line”.
Only powerful adults can smash that lot. Why else has big Pharma succeeded in medicalising the post reproductive lives of Anex-1 nation women? Fear of brittle bone? Fear of the loss of attractive power to both men, sexualy, and women competatively? Fear of being unseen and unnecessary except by going and getting a prescription? No wonder granmas go berzerk with the grandkids, and ignore any parental wishes or worldviews, they have no other bridge to defend, it has all been somehow taken from them and disolved into the marketplace. And they can only think how they are needed! so very needed. Perhaps.
I’d be willing to bet that fear is the biggest weapon, and you can get a whole lot of bang for your buck, if you are really smart, and feel empowered to enact some heavy shit for your ‘Just Cause’.
We seem to be living in those ‘interesting times’ the Chineese proverb kinda warns you to avoid.!!
January 18th, 2013 at 10:19 am
Most women make sure their children have enough food to eat if they can. That works to pass on their genes.
Is that not moral or ethical?
Most men provide for their children if they can
That works to pass on their genes
Is that not moral or ethical?
January 18th, 2013 at 10:24 am
@ Ozman
Terrorism as a political tool
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
…I still can’t ascertain for sure if any kids, or educational staff were killed? Anybody with real evidence?
I have yet to come across anything other than assertions by tv talking heads…
Assertions which are obviously often ridiculous, e.g right at the start, saying A L had shot his mother. How did they know that it was A L that had shot her ? So much is assertion without any evidence, and then a few hours later gets changed, then changed again, and now that the story has vanished from MS news, and the narrative is fixed in the public mind as ‘the lone crazy gunman’, we start to find out all this other stuff that does not fit…
January 18th, 2013 at 10:26 am
Kathy C
Just did your Ecological footprint for the family, and am unsure if I divide this by 7.
Can you help”
OzMan and Family = 2.81 Earths
or
OzMan = 0.401 Earths
Either way its a lot to use up, or ‘consume’.
January 18th, 2013 at 10:38 am
dairymandave,
Carana’s starting to lose it. It is impossible, within the next six weeks, for the world’s political and business leadership to unite and follow his climate plan. The data coming in daily on the Arctic sea ice is clearly putting him under enormous psychological stress, stress that’s increasing exponentially.
He could go postal. Seriously.
January 18th, 2013 at 10:39 am
ulvfugl
You wrote:
‘Assertions which are obviously often ridiculous, e.g right at the start, saying A L had shot his mother. How did they know that it was A L that had shot her ? So much is assertion without any evidence, and then a few hours later gets changed, then changed again, and now that the story has vanished from MS news, and the narrative is fixed in the public mind as ‘the lone crazy gunman’, we start to find out all this other stuff that does not fit…’
Being a pommy( or Welsh?), I’m sure you’ll recall, in George Orwell’s distopian novel ‘Nineteeneightyfour’, Winston Smith, the protagonist, worked as a reeditor at the Ministry of Truth. His main task was to alter the entries in the public register to suit the Official Party Line. That is, he altered ‘history’, by erasing things no longer wanted, and added things that gave favourable ‘historical evidence’ for the Party.
But his revolutionary act was to keep a piece of paper that was the only record of something happening after he altered it so that it never existed.
What a rebel rouser he was, Winston Smith.
That Iphone is looking awfully like a telescreen to me too, or it is operating like a mental illness, with intrusions by unwanted messages/ thoughts.
January 18th, 2013 at 10:56 am
Thanks for this link to Daily Kos:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/16/1179397/-Sudden-Stratospheric-Warming-Split-the-Polar-Vortex-in-Two
This event, while not unprecedented, is unique in its intensity. After following Arctic weather reporting for a long time, my mouth fell open after reading about the severe effects of this split.
In my opinion, all other news of the day takes a back seat to this. Unfortunately, there’s more……
January 18th, 2013 at 11:01 am
….. I follow the predictions of El Nino and La Nina very closely, since the oscillation has a strong effect on my gardens every year. I study the historical record, the model predictions, and the comments by others. I was very surprised when the predictions of all the models were for an El Nino this spring. Then the prediction was abruptly called off last fall. Now we have more information on this, from the same author of the post on sudden stratospheric warming:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/18/1179915/-The-Strange-Failed-El-Nino-the-Deepening-Drought-Disaster
I recommend everyone grow some food this year, and buy a few hens.
January 18th, 2013 at 11:07 am
@ Kathy C
My nascent understanding of the dilemma surrounding the cooling pools, is that dry cast is only used once the containment pools have reached full capacity. As you stated, why would they spend all that money if they don’t have to. And given that the spent rods can only be put into dry cast after several years of cooling in the pools, dry cast will never be a “solution” as long as the reactors are functioning, which we can only assume they will be up until the power fails. For even if every nuclear reactor decided to shut down today, those pools would still require power for years to follow.
January 18th, 2013 at 11:26 am
Yes, Sam Carana is reaching the end of his rope, and taking a few others with him. Forget trying to reach the deniers now, folks. It’s too late. The stages of accepting NTE suffer from the same faults as the stages of accepting death; that is, not all people go through them in that order, or as described. I have had to stop nursing students from berating patients for not going through the stages “correctly.”
Given the circumstances, I believe humans will fall back on very primitive responses such as magic, the “strong man” response, religion, war, tribal affiliations, hedonism, suicide, mass murder and others. Typical dark ages type stuff.
Only this time we will have some complications: pandemics, nuclear radiation from war and Fukushima events, that involve the entire planet. This time there’s nowhere to run. This time there is no culture that can save some advancements that might be useful for after. Because there is no after.
There is nothing we can learn from this because there will be no one to learn it. Some will try to keep up individual moral principles to the end, and some will give up everything. Some will try to continue to adhere to the norms of some referent group, some will model their responses to some historical culture that they think will afford them the best chance of survival. But none will survive and the lessons will be lost.
So here we sit in this group observing the slide into oblivion and talking, as humans always have, about opionions regarding the news of the day, how each of us might respond when death stares us in the face, how other people don’t “get it”, whether or not there is something that survives death, where to live that you might see more of the inevitable, how to deal with decreasing levels of available energy, and in general supporting each other at the end of the world.
It’s comforting, and I try to read every comment, but I can’t respond to them all because this, my last semester of teaching before retirement, is shaping up to be incredibly demanding of my time. I want to support their dreams while opening their eyes to their inevitable future at the same time and I now see I can’t do that. I will have to concentrate on those who are ready to see. I have a few in this group of students that I have identified already. I’ll work with them directly.
Onward, friends, onward until we won’t be able to type to each other anymore. I’ll be sad when that happens.
January 18th, 2013 at 11:40 am
@ Ozman
Yes, and now we are seeing that in real time, history on the internet being rewritten, although I am confused over the technicalities, as to whether some date mistakes can be innocent.
On many forums, people are constantly reminding, ‘do screen grabs’, ‘download videos’, because when ‘they’ realise they have made a mistake, the evidence suddenly vanishes.
January 18th, 2013 at 11:47 am
O/T @BC Nurse Prof
I was wondering if I could bother you for a moment? My son is now 5, and while we have taught him the seriousness of his food allergies, I realized I have not taught him how to use an epi-pen. Do you have any ideas how to make it less scary for a child? He’s had the epi-pen in the leg twice now, and is terrified of it. Thank you for your help. And the links. I keep a close eye on the drought because we are in the deep red. We won’t be growing food, though we do have a freezer full of venison and trout.
January 18th, 2013 at 11:48 am
Nicely said, BC Nurse.
Someone mentioned a murder of crows…a thoughtful essay here:
http://www.robrdunn.com/2005/07/a-murder-of-crows/
KathyC – I’m with you regarding Medea…http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2012/05/gaia-or-medea.html
On the other hand, I blame Prometheus. My theory is, that as soon as humans figured out how to use and control fire, the fix was in. We became outside of Nature. Stupid, stupid humans with the power of gods.
Ever read Thorne Smith’s Nightlife of the Gods? It’s very funny. Even now at NTE you will laugh all the way through!
January 18th, 2013 at 11:55 am
How to make using an epi-pen less scary for a child. I don’t think I can help you there. I was never a pediatric nurse because I always broke down when I had to be a nurse for a child. So I never taught pediatrics, either. Maybe I can get some help from one of my colleagues. I know several excellent pediatrics teachers. It may take a while, but I’ll give it a try.
January 18th, 2013 at 12:48 pm
There is an inherent and innate intelligence in nature. Man became man by rising above this intelligence, and this is what allowed him to barely escape a few bottlenecks of close extinction eons ago. These evolutionary and environmental challenges then created a true Frankenstein who then usurped the intelligence in nature, conquered, and seemingly subdued it to the ends of the earth. But now, it’s time for another round (and the final one for ‘Homostein’). It’s not a good thought to know you are a Homostein.
January 18th, 2013 at 12:49 pm
Oh boy, can’t wait for summer!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TZih7I4VMY0#!
be careful what you wish for . . .
January 18th, 2013 at 1:06 pm
@BC Nurse Prof
Thanks for the drought link. The NY Times just had a lengthy article today, focusing on the lower Mississippi, where they claim to have barely averted disaster, but then claimed the upper Mis to be relatively stable. Just goes to show how fast, unpredictable and unreliable everything is becoming.
BTW, very much liked your take on our current coping approaches.
January 18th, 2013 at 1:11 pm
Oz man I think you don’t divide it by 7 or mine by 2 – wish we could. I think they just ask the family size to divide up things like house size etc. The average American footprint is said to be 5.
January 18th, 2013 at 1:20 pm
Remember Ravel’s Bolero animation from the 70′s. Worth a watch, speaks to Gail blaming Prometheus
http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=animated+bollero+&view=detail&mid=8F635F6E1B0F43FBE3CB8F635F6E1B0F43FBE3CB&first=0
January 18th, 2013 at 1:20 pm
Daniel, the dry cask is not a solution. However there are many rods in each spent fuel pool that could be put in dry cask. The cost has led them to leave them in the fuel pool – thus when the pools burn there is more radioactive material to burn than if they had been removed. They are currently overcrowded because of this failure to remove fuel to casks along with the extension of operating licences. Just the overcrowding creates a danger. Of course dry casks need permanent storage, but that is another issue. The more spent fuel that gets moved into dry casks as soon as it can be moved the less immediate radiation when the grid goes out.
Nuclear plant owners are currently storing some 55,000 tons of spent fuel—which remains dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years—in overcrowded cooling pools that require active safety measures to prevent overheating. These pools contain, on average, much more spent fuel and are more densely packed than the spent fuel pools at the Fukushima reactors. An accident or terrorist attack resulting in a rapid loss of cooling water from a pool could lead to a self-sustaining fire and release of a massive quantity of highly radioactive Cesium-137 into the environment.
“However, 80 percent of that stored spent fuel has been in the pools for more than five years and can be moved to dry casks, which do not require power for cooling and are passively safe. Given the potential consequences from a severe accident or terrorist attack on a spent fuel pool, it makes sense to transfer to casks as soon as it is safe to do so.
http://www.ucsusa.org/news/media_alerts/nrc-report-adequate-not-enough-0380.html
January 18th, 2013 at 1:21 pm
Gail, thanks for the book suggestion – books are my retreat
Just ordered a copy. Will check out your blog posting shortly.
January 18th, 2013 at 1:37 pm
Hello everyone,
A lot to catch up on here but first I want to thank all of you who have commented for your positive feedback and kind words. I’m very gratified that I could provide some food for thought. I do not have any answers but I think I have come across a few good tools for thinking about things and it sounds like they have been of value to many of you.. I will address some specific questions which have arisen presently. I would like to say the way I think about the world, where I’m coming from is very much described by the Climbing the Ladder of Awareness Stage 5
Awareness that the predicament encompasses all aspects of life. This includes everything we do, how we do it, our relationships with each other, as well as our treatment of the rest of the biosphere and the physical planet. With this realization, the floodgates open, and no problem is exempt from consideration or acceptance. The very concept of a “Solution” is seen through, and cast aside as a waste of effort.
I would expand this notion that in addressing the curiosity around the questions How did we as a species become so vile and Was this inevitable one realizes reaching understanding of the predicament demands examining all aspects of life and in that way reflecting a mirror back to ourselves as best we can.
The problem here is, for me and the way I think, to really delve deep into finding answers to our seed question ultimately comes to the nature of the mind we have and what consciousness really is and how then can we make sense of our experience at self-destruction without addressing the nature of who we are as ”conscious” self-aware, self-reflecting and therefore ‘sapient’ animals. That is why I made the thought-experiment. It seems to me there is something about consciousness or the illusion thereof that is the key to the frantic, destructive suicide our species history seems to be culminating in.
So in this way GreenGenes summary of pertinent Social Psychology (SP) findings provides a framework model to hang some other ideas on and rig some relationships to in order to fill in the pieces of a very complex puzzle. Thank you for that GG and I’m going to remind those interested in SP must also look at Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo’s famous Prison Experiment and the Diffused Responsibility findings after the Kitty Genovese case.
So far the framework models suggested to be included in the analysis of our two seed questions (SQ) include the Psychopath Infestation, Human Self Domestication, the Meme Hypothesis, Social Psychology and Influence, and we have touched on the Void, Sunyata, and some frameworks around the Nature of Mind, what is Consciousness and perception could be useful. I would like to elaborate on some of the other side themes which have come up as well. (at the same time I say there is nothing there I sure had a lot of strange experiences)
I’m not sure if NBL is the place for discussions on consciousness and mind but those are, to me, the clear directions implied to dig deeper into the SQ but on the other hand I’m not sure if NBL is the appropriate place for the current discussion of Sandy Hook either.
I guess I’ll just plough on until someone tells me to stop. Maybe I could get some advice on setting up my own blog and some of these themes could go on elsewhere, expand the NBL discussion in some ways.
Anyway, thank you all again so very much for the positive feedback and kind words and I’m glad I could make some of you chuckle.
January 18th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
to depressive lucidity
re: I can appreciate its potential value for explaining how brains/minds in a social framework are interconnected and coordinated. The meme, however, is a theoretical construct for which there is no empirical evidence demonstrating that this kind of mental software exists…. No argument here. the meme is probably a hypothetical construct. As you say, there is no evidence to support any kind of theory. I was going for the potential value for explaining things as a model framework for thinking about the idea of infestation. This is why, to me, a discussion of the nature of consciousness might be interesting in pursuit of our SQ because it turns out, as most of you know, all we really have are model frameworks to hang perceptions on by which to tell ourselves stories about the puzzle we think we are assembling. So Meme Hypothesis might give us some insight into our stories.
I agree with everything else you said. Especially I tend to become a little wary of those who start wielding memetics in casual discussions because I have found that only those beliefs which the memeticists dislike are characterized as memes. I also don’t see how one can get around the self-referenciality problem … . So some discussions of what is consciousness, recent brain research and stuff on perception might help with the self-referenciality (sr) but I agree that is a tough one. It is possible to get by sr in a lot of research but with memes … how? But as a philosophical framework I think it has value and I still think The Meme Machine is a worthwhile read.
January 18th, 2013 at 1:59 pm
This is an interesting article in Discovery magazine on the roots of violence and warfare in humans (and even primates). We are the very ‘product’ of violence; Is it any surprise we target our aggression also at the natural world?
http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jun/07-is-war-inevitable-by-e-o-wilson#.UPm3PB1fCKO
January 18th, 2013 at 2:08 pm
to Kathy C. and ulvfugl
re:
Madmanintheattic you wrote “Or at least there is nothing there which was able to INFORM MY LIFE on this planet in any useful way”
Due to a vow I took I can’t discuss this further except I will say of your post BRAVO
and
ulvfugl Says:
@ Kathy C. : Madmanintheattic’s quote expanded: … I wonder what Madmanintheattic was expecting to find, via all of that effort and trouble ?
And why Kathy C. would cheer that he did not find whatever she imagines he was looking for and failed to find ?
So, first, Kathy C. I am very curious to know what you mean so if you would care to elaborate you can write me at my nick name @ fastmail dot fm. and, in addition, what he said: Can you elaborate on ulvfugl’s question without breaking your vow? Anyway, I would love to hear from you if you care to write.
As to regarding what Madmanintheattic was expecting to find the short answer is why does anyone go on a spiritual quest? To seek the answer? To what question? The clincher no one ever thinks about, though, is: Are you, when you find the answer, prepared to face the answer?
If you are not dabbling, you are likely on a transcendent path which will release you from the cycle of birth and death (samsara – Hindu), lead to liberation from the chains of karma and result in the experience of Unification With The Godhead – nothing less.
I wanted peace, healing, spiritual understanding and to serve. The peace and healing parts I figured out myself with the help of an exceptional psychotherapist, I have no idea what the word “spiritual” means and I’m still figuring out what is service.
When I say there is nothing there, maybe there is and maybe there isn’t. There is a saying in the psychedelic community that the trick to making a trip worthwhile is to be able to bring back with you some kind of insight or idea intact into consensual reality. So for all the meditation I can’t say I brought back an insight or idea, any notion of grace or transcendence or insight at all, nothing explanatory, comforting or informative. From the psychedelic experience people extract music, art, science, mathematics, fractal sequences, discussions with extra-dimensional entities but from the thirty years of practice I did, like I said, all I got was this Kundalini injury.
That is not to say I didn’t have some interesting experiences. I have had some of the most strange, troubling, magical happenstances and patterns which are the stuff of legends but I couldn’t find the meaning. There was no meaning intrinsic within either the meditation or from the bizarre psychic experiences. The magical happenstances did not explain themselves; I still would have had to take them to the shaman or the elder or the currandero or the priest or some external authority to just have that person interpret them via their pre-existing belief system. From the shaman I might find I am blessed; from the priest I would likely be informed I was visited by demons. Which is it?
Robin Data might jump in here with some comment but maybe don’t bother because a lot of what I’m saying is although I got really good at controlling my mind and relaxing and all that and I manufactured strange experiences which were dramatic, intense, magical and psychic but which had no meaning and provided no insight. In short I was utterly bored, the whole pursuit felt increasingly empty and pointless and I was increasingly troubled with psychic phenomena culminating in the aforementioned Kundalini injury. So that’s a shot at explaining what I mean by nothing informative.
I don’t know if that explains anything but I’ve tried to keep it short.
January 18th, 2013 at 2:24 pm
to BadlandsAK
re: Which brings me to another topic which I was glad to see being discussed re: best locations/preparedness in the face of NTE
Regarding preparations I’ve already posted on that but for those who think there is something to do I strongly recommend Dmitry Orlov for those of you unfamiliar. His Reineventing Collapse and his new one The Five Stages of Collapse framework model discussions of what kind of strategies to employ and what sort of steps to take. Orlov himself lives on a sailboat and is ready to sail away from the mayhem at a moments notice.
January 18th, 2013 at 2:39 pm
re: That Iphone is looking awfully like a telescreen to me too, or it is operating like a mental illness, with intrusions by unwanted messages/ thoughts.
Smart so-called “phones” are, in reality, sophistocated tracking devices which function even when they are turned off which just happen, these days, to have a phone in them.
January 18th, 2013 at 3:07 pm
Madmanintheattic Says:
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/conspiring-for-climate-chaos/#comment-58374
“Orlov himself lives on a sailboat and is ready to sail away from the mayhem at a moments notice.”
What about the pirates? Arrgh!
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/static/dowbrigade/pissgums.jpg
January 18th, 2013 at 4:19 pm
Bailey, that Wilson article was shared in Guy’s Hansen discussion and really clinched it for me.
We are simply playing out what we are genetically programmed to do. All that crap about more benevolent, sustainable cultures is just that, crap, as is all the dreamy notions that there is some sort of “spirit” that exists outside of the real world.
The funny thing is for me, having accepted that it is in our condition to overrun our boundaries as set by nature, I feel so much relief and forgiveness, for myself and everyone else (well…not the Koch Brothers. I still hate them!)
It’s rather peaceful compared to vilifying our “capitalist” culture. WE made that culture – it did not make us. Our imperative has always been to grow and sucks for us, we live on a finite planet with no hope of colonizing another.
January 18th, 2013 at 6:06 pm
Dave “O’m suprised at how many in this group believe in creationism. The key words defining evolution are “variation” and “selection”. Both activities are loaded with lots of deaths. Soon after life began, it became a game of “struggle to eat your neighbors until they eat you”. That’s a good definition of capitalism, I think.”
This “understanding” of life on the planet as a struggle for survivial of the fittest is getting refuted. While it is the case for the individual it is not valid for populations or species. On that level there for long term viability the population/species must have a balance of give and take in their community. There needs to be an overall beneficial component of their existence. Otherwise they become hyper-competitive and soon overpopulate, damage their environment and then decline substantially or go extinct. The amount of energy they take from their environment must on average stay close to a 1:1 ratio. Tip it to far and the end will inevitably come. That is why Gail’s idea that our goose was cooked when we got control of fire rings true. It allowed us to access food sources/energy that we were not intended to. That lethal mutation of intelligence.
What is “good” for the individual is not necessarily good for the species. Our society has the view that what is good for the individual is good and F’ the rest whether it be extending life with modern medicine to amassing huge wealth by destroying the living planet. That is in the long term a pathological ideology.
The “struggle for survival” meme was one more footnote in our cultural myth of rape, pillage and genocide as progress, and an example of how divorced we were from the wisdom found in the Natural World.
FWIW, I teach this incessantly to my students who find it all very boring. The culture we have created is much to strong.
January 18th, 2013 at 6:51 pm
@ Gail
WE made that culture – it did not make us.
There is a nonsensical circularity in that statement.
‘We’ are socially and culturally constructed, reality is a social construct, culturally constructed. Yes, we make the culture, and then it makes us. It makes us, because it gives us our language, the way we think, our customs, our taboos, our identities, what is acceptable and what is not to be tolerated, etc, etc.
We are simply playing out what we are genetically programmed to do. All that crap about more benevolent, sustainable cultures is just that, crap, as is all the dreamy notions that there is some sort of “spirit” that exists outside of the real world.
So you say, and you want your own personal worldview and socially constructed belief system to be privileged over all others. Any other beliefs are to be dismissed as ‘crap’.
Which is part of the problem that got us into this mess. The conviction that only one culture really matters, the most powerful one, the destructive, exploitative, dominant white Capitalist one, that grew out of Judaeo-Christian Europe and Enlightenment scientific materialism.
So, although I am certain you will disagree, you are, imho, exemplifying the very force which you are complaining about as having trashed the planet, and which is killing the trees.
Here’s just one example of how worldviews are socially and culturally constructed.
http://edge.org/conversation/how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think
January 18th, 2013 at 7:00 pm
Anthony, I see the natural world struggling for survival as well. In fact it’s much more severe. Even the grass struggles. I think that if man had never found oil, we would have continued to wreck North and South America just like we did Europe, by cutting everything down and ruining the land, but when the food ran out we would have died off to a sustainable level. We would be heading into an ice age, not run away warming. The poles would not be melting at this time. Levels of CO2 would be normal.
For billions of years energy was scarce and all life had to struggle to get enough to grow long enough to reproduce. Yes, groups that cooperated had an advantage over groups that didn’t cooperate.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:28 pm
@ dmd, Anthony,
It was very convenient for the Capitalists and Banking 19thC equivalents of the Kochs and Rockefeller’s to mangle Darwin’s insights into biological evolution to suit their ambitions and agendas.
Herbert Spencer came up with the completely unscientific ‘Survival of the fittest’ bullshit, which Darwin never said and which is a complete travesty of what he said, but then got taken up in America as Social Darwinism, an ideology to justify ruthless capitalist exploitation of nature and lack of care for the poor.
I see dmd’s phrase ‘even the grass struggles’ as typical of this mythical nonsense. No species in Earth exists independently from the rest of nature. The whole damn thing is a co-operative venture. Maybe try reading Kropotkin on Mutual Aid and examples of co-operation.
January 18th, 2013 at 7:39 pm
@ Madmanintheattic
I’m curious, I know a little about kundalini, theoretical and experiential, but I have never heard the term kundalini injury, so I googled, is this the sort of thing you’re talking about
http://www.johmann.net/book/ciy4-5.html
January 18th, 2013 at 7:57 pm
Here’s a little ditty to assist those working on their levitation.
Moody Blues – Floating
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne9mMNC5xQQ
January 18th, 2013 at 8:06 pm
Madmanintheattic
You may find this 47 minute excerpt helpful.
‘Adi Da Samraj: Midnight Sun Or Narcissus?’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaFsYriZjsw
Adi Da is doing the real work, pointingout the challenging no bullshit state of egoity and bondage.
Hope it helps with that Kundalini damage.
January 18th, 2013 at 8:41 pm
I tender, egoity is the temporary ‘problem’ of humanity, and adolescence as a dominant mode of cultural exchange brings egoity and all its attendant issues and problems to the forground….
so we can deal with them.
This is the essential wizdom that came to Black Elk after his horrific vision of his tribe, and all the other tribes around the world being decimated, no… destroyed. The terror only abated for him when he realised it was a process that could not be avoided, and indeed was a natural course, as wierd as that sounds.
We have a world cuture now, not a variety of civilisatiosn based on world religions like say Hinduism, Christianity etc. That world culture is has as it’s core engine Adolescent psychology.
When that persists in an individual also disposed to fulfill the dynamics of the adolescent phase, which is to realise oneself, it stagnates. In this dominant world culture that impulse has been channelled into rebellion against authority, aka babyboomers rejection of war and parental authority. It has also channelled the impulse into regressive chaldlike consolation pathways of pleasure, power and false live forever indepencdence. The sum is Egoity wholesale.
Traditional pathways to progress beyond adolescence in culture were the core, even esoteric roots of those world religions, but as many have seen for some time these have been corruppted, and even if they couldonce lead to self understanding and self realisation, which I doubt,(IMO), they no loner can do so.
As many spiritual dabblers will note, ego transcendence is not a weekend activity, or even a leisure activity, even though the 1980 -90s decades tried to turn the Western desire for utilising Eastern knowledge into commercial spinoffs like sandals that stimulate your acupoints and retreats wekends, (not a waste in themselves, IMO)that morphed into manicre and health spa indulgences to “nurture me’ approaches.
All this is remedial, not addressing the central issue of egoity.
Unlike the early Eurpean and gGermanic transpersonal psychologists like freud and Jung, who in translation give a structural bent to the ideas of the Ego as a psychological ‘structure’ in a human personality,ego is an activity, and your culture can either indulge and support it for gross profit, which is what we now haveemerging as a dominant mode of existance, or it can downplay that aspect of beng while offering alternative paths to self understanding, perhaps not with complete understanding butat least in direction. Al the world indigenous paths have been savaged and attempted genocide meansthose ways are now largly gone.
That is what Black Elks vision was showing him.
Enquiring long enough to see the activit of egoity, what Ad Da calls the activity of self-contraction, is required- like basic maths training 101, if you want to be an engineer.
The only real outcome of a positive kind for the adolescent condition is the chose to keep going into the world and asking the real question Who am I?
This meditation will illicit all thepresent conceptions of identity, and memory all of which must beshed like a snake and its skin. The immediate problem is that once it is time to shed the skin for the snake, there is no going back, the die is cast.
We are at that stage now, on a world scale, because as inall growth stages its do or die(or regress and lose the tides force).
N.B.
I attempted to find a link to Black elk’s vision but cannot find anything remotely good enough, anyone know of one, ulvfugl? any help there would be appreciated.
January 18th, 2013 at 8:45 pm
ulvfugl
You wrote:
“…No species in Earth exists independently from the rest of nature. The whole damn thing is a co-operative venture….”
On the same page there brother.
January 18th, 2013 at 8:55 pm
Hi all,
I thought some of you might enjoy this beautiful and moving short by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. I think it portrays quite eloquently what we are all losing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=BUOQ_yPW_0s
This year on New Years Eve here in Boulder, CO two police officers took it upon themselves to “harvest” a trophy elk who had been hanging out in a downtown neighborhood for the past three winters. The following link tells the whole sordid tale, but I will also mention that I heard the memorial service for the elk on the local radio station a few days later. Neighbors gathered to reminisce about “the elk” and ended by singing Amazing Grace. Strange thing that.
http://www.dailycamera.com/news/ci_22401544/boulder-district-attorney-announce-decision-charges-mapleton-elk-shooting
I have been thinking about this, and have to conclude that for the big ungulates and carnivores of North America the Great Extinction will come more sooner than later. I would be surprised if there was a single large mammal left standing within six months to a year of collapse. When the lights go out, and the trucks stop, and people get hungry, they will still have lot’s of guns and ammunition; and more than enough precedent for wholesale slaughter.
January 18th, 2013 at 9:06 pm
@ Ozman
On the same page…
Well, the 100 trillion bacteria inside each one of us are all ‘struggling to survive’… but without them, we’d die… I don’t accept Gail’s view of the inevitability that we’d destroy the biosphere, because it was ‘all in our genes’, I think that’s just another way of saying it was pre-ordained, ‘It’s all God’s Will’, so there’s nothing we can/could do…
So now, having gained supremacy with Promethean technology, and wrecked everything, over a couple of generations, it’s a way of avoiding any guilt or sense of responsibility, by saying ‘Oh, it was always inevitable, we’re a flawed species, it’s all in the genes’. Similar to what Kathy C. said several threads back, that Nature was always really horrible and cruel, so perhaps it’s a good thing that it ends.
I find these kinds of arguments, that justify what is happening completely unacceptable. It’s people that are doing these things, by way of the decisions and choices that they make. It’s not ALL the people. It’s particular individuals with names and addresses. Like in UK, it was Cameron and Osborne and a small bunch of lobbyists with powerful commercial backing who decided to go ahead with fracking. That’s not in the effing genes, is it. That’s to do with power and social influence and organisation, and the wider culture which permits such conduct.
January 18th, 2013 at 9:40 pm
I don’t think that man is innately more destructive than many other creatures. It is believed that certain pre-man hominids were under incredibly unique environmental challenges, and this led to the evolutionary response known as homo sapien. By virtue of his acquired intellectual acumen, bipedal locomotion, dexterity, language, use of tools and weapons, fire, and a host of other attributes, he/she was able to push back against the threats which would have otherwise corrected another species’ pestilential ways or overrunning of the environment.
For example, we know that elephants can do incredible damage to 1000s of acres of trees, or plagues of insects can devour whole countrysides, beavers can do immense damage, etc, etc. But these are all held in check by eventual environmental and biological boundaries.
So man is no different and not uniquely ‘evil’, it’s just that he has potency to push back and thwart the natural corrective forces of balance. However, nature abhors imbalance and always wins, so this pushing back is like putting pressure on a spring; It never breaks but just eventually corrects with a magnitudinal force of incredible devastation – which we are now beginning to witness
The crowning glory of man would have been that he would have on one hand, been able to survive and thrive, but on the other, that he would have been cognizant of his infringement on the natural boundaries and would have used his intelligence to self correct (knowing that ultimately it would be pay a little now, or a lot later). But alas, because of his shortsightedness, he choose instead to kick the can down the road and bring about the destruction of the planet as the only remedy to his parasitic infestation.
January 18th, 2013 at 10:50 pm
Undoubtedly a factor in the stellar human population growth, and our up-to-now survival and thrival, is our unique reproductive ability to procreate at at least 13 cycles in any solar year. That is as close as one can get to independent breeding ability, regardless of season. An achievment, no?
Gorillas have usually two breeding seasons. Kangaroos and some Wallabys can procreate when seasonal rains occur, at any time of the year. During drought or dry conditions they can keep 3 young in the system at any one time, suspending the progress of an embryo in the tri partate uterus, a joey in the pouch and one gestating on a teat.
Humans will not reproduce if the body fat of the female goes below a cetain threshhold, about 3.5 to 6 % I think(?) and many female elite athletes go into Amenorrhoea(stalling of oestrous) deliberately so as not to go through hormonal variations for all sorts of weight and mental resilliance reasons, but mostly so they can achieve consistancy in a busy workload year in year out.
Humans can move around and pop a few kids out anytime it is possible to. When that capacity is modified by stores of grains and foods that are calorie rich, bingo, we can quickly increase population size.
That adaptation beyond what the Chimps and Apes and Bonobos have arrived at so far, is also eminating from some sort of environmental challenge, but I am not qualified to postulate what it was that brought it about, beyond the concept of wandering groups in periods of dry conditions. Anyone with further ideas please jump in.
January 19th, 2013 at 2:01 am
Jay Hansen has said that if you haven’t learned something by the age of 25, you won’t learn it. Regarding evolution, he was right. I’m jumping out.
January 19th, 2013 at 2:25 am
Regarding Sam Carana, my guess is that he takes a great deal of responsibility for reporting the Arctic situation. The fate of the world is in his hands, so to speak. And few are listening. His solutions may be called “desperate” but are his facts correct anyway? Put yourself in his position.
The fish that washed up probably died from lack of O2 caused by methane release along the eastern shore of US where waters are much warmer. Sam got that one right.
January 19th, 2013 at 2:26 am
@Gail
Just because sacrifice and suffering is integral to human social psychological maturation, and immature high testosterone gender proclivities, because they tend toward violence to avoid maturing, and can dominate a society that chooses to economically value immaturity–that tells itself stories that allows its economically privileged to be irresponsible and dishonorable–such does not logically lead to a conclusion that the species is genitically violent or non-violent. Either conclusion is rationalization rather than reason. Both are examples of motivated reasoning relative to the condition of being a conscious species.
Just because ours is a culture, whose religious (motivated reasoning) component (CapitalismFail) is immature, childish, and powerfully so, and has become so unconstitutionally (via our currency, corporate citizenship and limited liability laws, The War Powers Resolution law, the presidential signing statement practice, twisting the commerce clause, etc.), and the gestalt of this being a violation of the establishment clause that allows such actions of the spiritually immature religion of CapitalismFail to function, unconstitutionally, as the constitutionally forbidden state religion, such is simply a situation that calls for the “when in the course of human events it becomes necessary…” response, for which “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” are sacrificed and social maturation, again, is effected due to mature personal suffering and sacrifice.
Our choice to be immature and, over time, limit the suffering and sacrifice spiritual maturation involves, is simply a rationalizing of this choice. As someone who, based on religious preciepts and discipline went to prison rather than Vietnam can attest, the resolution of feelings you bear witness to is little more than a personal homeostasis based on motivated reasoning. Once individuals and their society immaturely choose privileged comfort over the struggle and sacrifice to be vigilant for justice as the meaning of life/life of meaning, there are consequences: the loss of freeom. As you share, this can feel ‘good’.
Thomas Jefferson said that constant vigilance is the price of freedom. As children we have squandered what our forebearer sacrificed for. Such childish squandering is ‘genetic’ only to the economic aspects of social intercourse, in our case, CapitalismFail. In truth, and genetically, to the degree our SPINE* is in our genes, being spiritually immature is a choice. Isn’t this choice to be–and remain–thanks to motivated reasoning–immature what stands in the way of a gift economy and a mature disciplined living of suffering and sacrifice that is intragal with nature?
*socio-psychoimmunoneuroendocrinology
January 19th, 2013 at 2:54 am
Yeah, it looks like there’s evidence for both views. So people will choose to emphasize the data that supports their view.
http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jun/02-no-war-is-not-inevitable#.UPpcAmeCk6c
One thing for which there is no evidence, is a primate species suiciding itself, as we are about to do. And what up with Homo Erectus, they used tools, fire, and probably had language, and managed to live for at least 1.7 million years? That’s nine times longer than us!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus
Some evidence for a relative lack of a desperate struggle to survive, and for abundance.
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
Is there enough evidence to draw firm conclusions? I’m doubtful.
Are there any paleoanthropologists out there who can come to our rescue?
January 19th, 2013 at 3:51 am
Found this quite entertaining, re who ‘They’ are, The Pathocracy
http://whale.to/b/shadow.html
January 19th, 2013 at 3:56 am
@ As someone who, based on religious preciepts and discipline went to prison rather than Vietnam can attest, the resolution of feelings you bear witness to is little more than a personal homeostasis based on motivated reasoning…
Yes, bugger genetics, -isms, etc, etc, we are not mere ‘meat robots’, we can make moral choices and decisions and take responsibility for our lives…
January 19th, 2013 at 4:04 am
@OzMan–& jumping in…
The SPINE of our species, relative to stress mitigation, is another factor in this species’ reproduction dynamics. As background, we’ve apparently two dominate biological responses to stress: testosterone and oxytocin. The first, as a hormone, generates the fight or flight response, the second, and as a neuropeptide, is generated by ‘tending and befriending’ behavior. Together, and in conjunction with our gender differences these two biological responses to stress, all kinds of personal and social contradictions are affected that function to both ‘resolve’ and create stress (a positive feedback dynamic).
As a consequence, the stories we tell ourselves tend to be biased toward one gender’s or another’s SPINE and feed alternately into a society ‘succeeding’ (an expansion of the population), or a ‘failing’ (a population decline/collapse). Spiritual adults are more likely to anticipate the decline and, through trusted stories that invoke the motivated reasoning necessary, choose to suffer and sacrifice as a response to anticipated threats. Spiritual runts, on the other hand, will tend to tell themselves stories that allow themselves to avoid such suffering and sacrifice, and exaserbate
January 19th, 2013 at 4:12 am
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/018967b4-60ba-11e2-a31a-00144feab49a.html#axzz2IQ19FPL3
They ask me not to cut and paste so here is the link. Basic summary – drought still here – winter wheat in bad shape.
January 19th, 2013 at 4:16 am
“The Dust Bowl (in the 1930s) lasted for several years, but eventually the rains returned and the region recovered,” U.S. Representative Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) wrote in a recent letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Unfortunately, our current drought may be more than a passing natural phenomenon.”
“Unfortunately” is right. We simply can no longer think of drought as aberrant weather that we can ignore until it goes away. Instead, it’s part of our new, unpredictable normal.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/dont-ignore-the-drought-20130117#ixzz2IQ2vjtvN
January 19th, 2013 at 4:27 am
Whoops, another touch screen misfire.
…exacerbate the decline/collapse (such as Bailey describes).
To the degree such is the challenge consciousness predicates for our species with its gender-based and differentiated SPINE differences regarding unconsciously and consciously perceived stress, I posite that TheProblem, which the pursuit of constitutes both the meaning of life and the life of meaning, is dynamically held in querying the spiritual maturity of personal and social behavior, and doing so, religiously; through stories; via motivated reasoning.
Population growth is, in conjunction with our capacity to impregnate [not-quite]-as-fast-as-rabbits [did in Austrailia]
, a consequence of differing blood testosterone levels, across and within genders, and both the biological limits regarding the amount of oxytocin that can be experienced and the time frame for that experience . . . and how this is talked about in trusted stories.
January 19th, 2013 at 4:56 am
@ Greg R.
I think you are striving to understand something that just blows all the fuses in your brain, because it is probably not something that can be comprehended by intellectual analysis.
What is meaning ? What is the meaning of meaning ? What is the meaning of the meaning of meaning ?
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-do-organisms-mean
January 19th, 2013 at 5:11 am
Drought in America, and no sign of rain in Australia either. El Nino/la Nina normally sends rain to one or the other, doesn’t it?
The spike in human population is mostly due to our increased ability to feed extra mouths – agriculture, fertilizer, mechanisation, large-scale takeover of ecosystems to produce food for humans. Humans are relatively slow at reproducing themselves, compared to most other species, but population has dramatically increased because the mortality rate reached new lows over the last few centuries.
January 19th, 2013 at 6:28 am
If ulvfugl were to write ulvfugl feels (i.e. ulvfugl’s sense of health) makes ulvfugl think…, such would be move accurate in terms of how I understand things. As a contemplative of 40 years, I would counter, but I would rather not, that it is language and stories that limit what can be consciously felt, articulated, and heard (acted on; hoped for). Is it the spiritual immaturity of ulvfugl’s assertion of what is and is not understandable, and systemically so, an understanding/a story/motivated reasoning which functions to protect a personal homeostasis? If so, does doesn’t this both fed into and exasperates the NTE dynamic and function as a positive feedback. To the degree this is so, and as a social behavior, doesn’t it do so as well?
If so, and to the degree it is allowed to dominate dynamics in the comment space of NBL, doesn’t such a dynamic rationalizes an inane, to the degree it is non-local, virtual engagement at NBL? As Lidia has observed, there seems to be a quest for the role of protagonist in a story and provides meaning that is going on in the comment dynamics at NBL (and here I would suggest that the time invested in an action is a measure of its value, e.g. meaning). If due to motivated reasoning, we cannot not be engaged in a pursuit of meaning-as-homeostasis, then, logically, the conscious choice is to do so consciously, responsibly, maturely–or not. Such is always a choice, as ulvfugl, in a previous quoting of me affirmed.
I now hear him negating that affirmation with a story he seems to trust. To me this seems to both contradiction, and through chosen/observed behavior, an answer to his queries regarding meaning.
For me, if it was my behavior that was being reflected to me as a contradiction, I would be grateful. Such is a potential opportunity to learn and grow beyond the comforting limits of a motivated reasoning that otherwise constitutes immaturity and functions as a sycophant. Such would also be reflective of the dynamics of a learning community. I would experience, due to story and motivated reasoning, functioning as a savior, a dynamic solution to what I have posited is TheProblem: How do I, in a sustainable sense within the dynamics of nature, personally and socially, pursue, as a creature capable of conscious choice, homeostasis; meaning?
January 19th, 2013 at 6:47 am
@ Greg R.
I put your comment into my text editor and reversed the order of the words and it made more sense than it does as you wrote it, above.
January 19th, 2013 at 8:05 am
A fair look at those who believe that societal collapse may be immanent ? This VICE piece features perspective on conspiracy theorism and the breakdown of the American Dream from several angles, including Alex Jones and Chris Hedges
America’s 2nd Revolutionary War
http://youtu.be/ZkJ_ZiX_Tek
January 19th, 2013 at 9:05 am
@Bailey “The crowning glory of man would have been … cognizant of his infringement on the natural boundaries and would have used his intelligence to self correct.”
I’m not sure if becoming aware of para psychopathy is a necessary condition for reaching #5, but it is certainly essential if you want to continue in the money-making game.
As Madman has stated many times more eloquently than myself, both masters and slaves are products of countless generations of (in)breeding & domestication. Slaves/serfs/sheep above else desire comfort, whereas masters thrive on conflict.
If one were to attempt, even if they so desired (which they don’t), to take away either the bread and/or circuses, a global revolt would quickly ensue. However, to the contrary, the masters know how to keep the sheeple enslaved in passivity, because this is the necessary condition for them to play their “game” of conquest & control.
Some suggest they are actually Luciferian; indeed, it seems quite clear that they simply have no regard for this or any other life. So, even though they are just as well armed with the same facts that we are regarding NTE, their response is wholly different.
Once you realize there is no getting out of the clown car, you might as well sit back and enjoy the ride.
January 19th, 2013 at 9:25 am
to Ulvfugl
The link you noted is sort of along the same lines as my experience but much, much gentler. There was no way I walked around and shook it off. This happened more than ten years ago and I still suffer some.
I had something more closely resembling the experience of Gopi Krishna as described in his 1967 book Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man. published in NA in 1972 by Shambala. Gopi Krishna almost died from his injury. My pain was so intense I came to fully understand why people in severe pain choose self-termination.
For anyone involved in intense “spiritual” practice Kundalini is a must read.
January 19th, 2013 at 9:40 am
re:
@ Gail
WE made that culture – it did not make us.
There is a nonsensical circularity in that statement.
‘We’ are socially and culturally constructed, reality is a social construct, culturally constructed. Yes, we make the culture, and then it makes us.
This is exactly the notion Livingston is trying to get across in his book Rogue Primate: we made the culture and the culture made us, makes us, continues to make us and draws into question whether we are evolving genetically given the protection from or shift in the kind of selection forces we face.
Accepting the notion we are domesticated and programmed by our culture, tools and infrastructure sort of falsifies any claim which includes the phrase
We are simply playing out what we are genetically programmed to do.
No, we are playing out what we have been culturally programmed to do.
I would agree All that crap about more benevolent, sustainable cultures is just that, crap, but because the structure and programming prevents us from making up or taking up any other structure. That is, your ice cream cannot be chocolate if it is already vanilla. We might be capable of being nice to each other but our cultural programming will be harder to replace than scaling up alternative energy to save ourselves. As far as as is all the dreamy notions that there is some sort of “spirit” that exists outside of the real world I didn’t find anything confirming such claims in my 30 year investigation.
January 19th, 2013 at 9:56 am
to Ozman re:
You may find this 47 minute excerpt helpful.
‘Adi Da Samraj: Midnight Sun Or Narcissus?’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaFsYriZjsw
Adi Da is doing the real work, pointingout the challenging no bullshit state of egoity and bondage.
Hope it helps with that Kundalini damage.
Thank you for the suggestion however
Irony report.
When Gopi Krishna had his Kundalini injury back in 1937 he was living in Srinagar, Kashmir. He spent years contacting yogis, gurus, sahdus, sannyasins, herbalists, practitioners of all kinds and he found no one who had the skills by which to help him. So this man, actually living in the time and place where the experts on this subjec reside could find no help; I doubt a 40 minute video will help me after a decade of injury.
Please remember we live in Kali Yug, the age of Loss of Spiritual Knowledge and there are no knowledgable gurus around. By defdinition Adi Da Doo Dah Day is a fraud as are all the rest of them. Their own tradition defines this age as a time of charlatans, darkness, loss of knowledge yet they present themselves as knowing what they are doing. Adi Da tries to get around this by claiming to be Kalki, the last manifestation and appearance of Shiva, the Bringer of Conclusions.
If there is such a thing as spirituality it is not accessable, by definition, in the age of Kali (bad luck, not the goddess – Robin Data could probably confirm that) according to my understanding of Hindu orthodoxy and I, merely by default, chuckle and back away from anyone claiming to be god in the meat.
January 19th, 2013 at 10:12 am
to Bailey
re: ”I don’t think that man is innately more destructive than many other creatures … So man is no different and not uniquely ‘evil’
I always cringe at the “we are no different” arguments.
So rats and weasels and termites and orangutans could have built the Three Gorges Dam or put a man on the moon or built a super-computer.
Homo sapiens is ABSOLUTELY different and utterly uniquely evil – that was the point of the dissertation on Domestication and the Psychopath.
Domestication is what makes us different in kind and in quality from all other organisms. The most similar organisms to us are our own domesticates, not chimps or any other wild thing.
We are a geological force when it comes to changing things. I want to tear my hair out when I hear we are no different because it is us who is the geological force releasing carbon dioxide and methane 1000 times faster than the extinctions featuring this problem. We build dams which cause the rotation of the f_____g earth to wobble.
We are clearly much, much different and obviously uniquely evil. We are the only species which exterminates, enslaves and tortures it’s own kind in massive numbers for convenience, profit and pleasure. If that is not unique evil I don’t know what the fuck is.
January 19th, 2013 at 10:28 am
to Ulvfugl
re: What is meaning ? What is the meaning of meaning ? What is the meaning of the meaning of meaning ?
I am firmly convinced there is no meaning. All meaning is made up. One chooses a conforting story and believes it to be true. That is meaning. So make up your own meaning and meaning of meaning, etc.
I do believe there is Purpose here, though. The Purpose of Life is two fold:
1) to make more Life, i.e. DNA makes more DNA
2) to reduce the thermodynamic gradient i.e. to turn food into shit
(adapted from Lyn Margulis)
Meaning implies intention. Meaning implies a creator who made up an Uber backstory for it’s creation. However, there is no meaning because existence is just a series of happy accidents following the original happy accident, probably a quantum vacuum fluctuation or perhaps a ‘brane collision. Who knows? Too bad we won’t be around long enough to find out.
January 19th, 2013 at 10:43 am
Correction: should be
“One chooses a comforting story and believes it to be true”
January 19th, 2013 at 11:04 am
@ Madmanintheattic
Quick replies
For anyone involved in intense “spiritual” practice Kundalini is a must read.
I think I have done as intense as it is possible for anyone to do. Have not had that sort of pain. I don’t know what that bion thing is. Is that prana ? I think I have that book upstairs somewhere. Someone gave me a lit of kundalini books once, which I did read but it was long ago.
As far as as is all the dreamy notions that there is some sort of “spirit” that exists outside of the real world I didn’t find anything confirming such claims in my 30 year investigation.
But than you said you have no idea what the word ‘spiritual’ means, didn’t you ?
I think it’s a fairly useless word, hard to define, but I’d say I found what I was looking for, it was the best thing I ever found, it’s been central to my life, and if anyone asked, the nearest crude indicator would be ‘spiritual’, to give a rough idea, that is, I am my soul, living in my body, I can detach any time I wish, move through different levels or whatever you want to call them, they have different terms according to the various traditions. But all the while I’m in this ‘real world’, I don’t find any difficulty there. Samsara is nirvana is samsara…
I am firmly convinced there is no meaning. All meaning is made up. One chooses a comforting story and believes it to be true.
Or, in your case, you find meaning by way of ‘meaning-lessness’ and choosing a ‘non-comforting’ story and believing it to be true.
January 19th, 2013 at 11:14 am
@MMintheA: Bravo. i’m not only in total agreement, i brought this up a LOOOOOONG time ago to my parents when they were forcing me to do the Catholic thing and attend catechism (indoctrination). i could NOT for the life of me figure out where the f#<! these clowns got off claiming that we were "made in the image and likeness of GOD!" What a complete crock of shit! If there is a God (as opposed to a whole bunch of them or none at all) that's ANYTHING like us, he's a total jerk and i'll confront him/her/it/them in no uncertain terms when and if i ever get the chance.
If, on the other hand we were an experiment by aliens, it looks to me like we're a complete failure on multiple levels. i abhor humanity in our unfettered numbers, gross and slavish self-serving self-important selfishness, our "me first" attitude as individuals, ethnic groups and countries, our lack of cooperation (except of course by the 1% who are colluding to keep the rest of us as slaves with great cooperation), our "rape, pillage, loot and war" tendencies, wanton destruction of our life-sustaining environment via resource depletion and pollution, our idiotic dependence on misused science and math (the only "good things" that came out of the Dark Ages – used to make weapons of death and enslavement – like banking, commerce and usury in general) to corral us into "civilization" and many other traits we exhibit without thinking or changing, and our complete lack of sapience or wisdom. i could go on for days bashing humanity – we totally suck ass – as a species. Big brains turned into big problems and our opposable thumbs made us stone cold killers.
i can't name one damn thing we've created that isn't currently a wreck. Oh, what, medicine? Don't make me laugh – we've CAUSED more problems than we've ever cured using western medicine concepts and ideas. Not that we should go back to bleeding people, mind you (that was the beginning of how idiotic we've gotten), but genetics hasn't done us much good to date – just look at our growing unsustainable population growth and longevity due to "the miracle of medicine." Besides being unaffordable to most of us, it's a BUSINESS fer crissakes, which doesn't want to cure you when they can continue to MAKE MONEY with "treatments." It's probably not PC, but people born with defects are SUPPOSED to die off! It's natures way! When you contract a disease – if you can't fight it off with your natural immune system, then i'm sorry but it's time to go! But no, we "can't" do that, because that would be "unethical" – not to mention all the business the medical/psychological field would lose if it were the case (keeping the population low but healthy). Now i'm sure i'll get an earful from taking this position, and you're welcome to your opinion supporting the status quo – i'm not going to argue with anyone because it's just my opinion, and i'm no one of any importance.
Computers – how about that! Oh please. Another distracting, misused gadget to waste your time for the most part, and largely used to spy on us/keep us enslaved (via banking/homeland security abusage). i realize the irony here (ranting on a computer), so there's no need to bring it up.
Cell phones! – Brain cancer! Automobiles! – Pollution machines! Electricity! Hahahahahahahahahah! – Right, fast track to where we are now with resource depletion, dam construction and other environmental damage, and all the other problems it's brought us.
What we were supposed to do was learn how to love and take care of the environment and each other (again, my opinion). Not that it's any more sustainable, i'm sure we'd have still found our way to extinction – but it would have been eons from now, had we stayed low in numbers and engaged in local cooperation with the carrying capacity of the area (maybe even being nomadic) and individually died after a well spent short life.
No, instead we were so smart that we started believing in crazy ideas of gods or the stars or "mysterious forces" controlling our destinies which lead directly to ORGANIZED RELIGION – worst idea ever (more wars fought over these stupid ideas than for any other reason).
So yeah, i think mankind SHOULD go extinct with all our vaunted "intellectual" ideas (as Greg is a big proponent of) while we plunder the planet to the point that nothing can live here. The "meaning" of our lives, the "importance" of the human species (above all others), and all our constructs – from math to philosophy to science – it's all in our heads and the planet could have done much better without us.
i'm beginning to think that even our "consciousness" is over-rated.
January 19th, 2013 at 11:27 am
My cousin finally died at 9 a.m. today after 61 days of eating nothing and sipping water when he could, weighing less than 90 lbs.
His life was normal up to graduating college, then it began to slowly fall apart due to medical conditions. He suffered and lived as a recluse for about 35 years trying any and all therapies for his mounting conditions which apparently started with trying to remove a pilonidal cyst from his lower back when he was about 23.
Now he’s a memory.
January 19th, 2013 at 11:58 am
to Tom
re: i could go on for days bashing humanity – we totally suck ass – as a species.
“You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it.”- Charles Spurgeon
“Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.”
Ambrose Bierce–The Devil’s Dictionary
January 19th, 2013 at 12:11 pm
to ulvfugl
re: “Or, in your case, you find meaning by way of ‘meaning-lessness’ and choosing a ‘non-comforting’ story and believing it to be true.”
I believe I came to a practical decision based on long personal experience. I think there is a difference between adopting and accepting wholesale without examination someone else’s story and behaving as if it is true and doing one’s best to investigate something and coming to a conclusion based on that investigation.
At least I did not concoct an elaborate deception to “explain” my experiences so I could continue to accept a story I feel I had falsified by my own experience. I also don’t think I’m telling a story; I feel I am merely saying “I took as indepth a look as I could (thirty years!) and I didn’t find anything.” That’s all. I didn’t find anything and injured myself in the process. That’s all. Over and out. No story, no elaboration, no self-deception, no motivation to keep the story going or justify or vilify or anything. Just I didn’t find anything, meditation is now dangerous for me, I have moved on. Full STOP.
I think there is a difference between accepting a story and looking at the data. Presumably we here at NBL are looking at Data which Guy and other provide for us and have come to a conclusion regarding NTE. Have we made up a story out of the whole cloth some priest have given us via our parents or are we looking at data and making conclusions. There is a difference. If you can tell me I have just adopted a story of non-meaning and discomfort then we must accept the notion of NTE is merely a story we have made up and not one based on data.
My conclusion about my “spiritual” whateveritwas was based on data, not a story.
I don’t think anyone knows what the word “spiritual” means insofar as everyone on this blog, if they have a definition, is going to have a definition differing from everyone else. The word “spiritual” is a placeholder for a nebulous term which is probably meaning-free insofar as there is an infinity of supposed meanings. We bandy about many words we don’t actually have clear meaning for but which are placeholders for concepts we think we and others should understand but in actuality do not.
January 19th, 2013 at 12:14 pm
Oops. That should have read “The word “spiritual” is a placeholder for a nebulous idea or notion or fantasy wish which is probably meaning-free insofar as there is an infinity of supposed meanings.
January 19th, 2013 at 12:42 pm
Tom, I am glad your cousin’s suffering is over. I am sorry he had such a difficult life and hope that the part before his troubles began were good at least. What a hard way to get self deliverance. He must have had great courage. Sorry for your loss. Kathy
January 19th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
Mad – “I am firmly convinced there is no meaning. All meaning is made up.” Yep, meaning would imply a meaner who could only be described as a meanie. The Grand Meanie!
But we are not just here to make shit, we are also here to turn fine wine into piss.
January 19th, 2013 at 2:19 pm
http://www.climatespectator.com.au/commentary/what-s-causing-australia-s-heat-wave#comment-235876
It is not that common for the Australian-average temperature to exceed 39 degrees for even two days in a row. A run of three days above 39 has occurred on only three occasions, and a run of four days just once, in 1972.
The current heat wave has seen a sequence of Australian temperatures above 39 degrees of seven days, and above 38 of 11 days straight.
The sequence of Australian mean temperature has been just as impressive. As things currently stand, the first two weeks of January 2013 now hold the records for the hottest Australian day on record, the hottest two-day period on record, the hottest three-day period, the hottest four-day period and, well, every sequential-days record stretching from one to 14 days for daily mean temperatures.
The number of records that have tumbled for individual sites are now too numerous to catalogue here, and the Bureau of Meteorology has prepared a Special Climate Statement with a detailed analysis the temperature records broken. The list of records is limited to just those stations with at least 30 years of records.
January 19th, 2013 at 2:35 pm
Right under Guy’s pic at the http://conspiracyhq.com site you can read…: “By the end of the interview, I took away one major point. It doesn’t much matter at this point what is causing these effects, we need to prepare.”
Believe me when I say there’s little I could have done to prepare for the heat wave we are now experiencing in Australia…….. the weather has gone totally haywire here.
We live in sub-tropical climate. We get a dry season in Winter, and a wet one in Summer. The extremes, however, have now taken on a new dimension…. we normally get ~1200mm of rain in a “normal year” (whatever that means today). Last year, we got ALL that rain in the first two months (southern hemisphere Summer..). It was so wet, I lost plants in the food garden that simply rotted in the ground. Our water tanks, all 12,000 gallons worth, were overflowing at the sight of clouds… we could’ve easily filled another six. We got a bit more rain in the ensuing 3 or 4 months (meaning we had more rain than normal), but then the taps were turned right off. Since July, we’ve had a further 70mm. So far this month, we’ve had 3mm (1/8 inch!). The garden tank’s been empty for weeks, the garden’s as good as f*cked, the goats are hungry with almost no feed left for them, and all I can say is thank Gaia TS has not HTF yet and we can still buy food at the supermarket…….
I was really not expecting this at all. In retrospect (and isn’t 20/20 hindsight wonderful…) we could have bought another tank, but we would have had to borrow the dough, which goes against all my principles.
So yes, maybe just maybe we could have prepared….. this has been one helluva wake up call.
January 19th, 2013 at 2:35 pm
OMG! (pun intended)
What a string of posts reflecting the damaged youthful psyche that Gabor Maté talked about (in the interview ulvgal link to). No wonder the NBL comment space is what it is; is comfortable with the immature story that is promoted, nurtured, and pragmatized here (and, the cosequenced and invoked motivated reasoning withstanding, so countermands what I experience Guy mentoring). How’s this for a summary of it in haiku form?
prayer for destruction
meaninglessness as meaning
righteous child power
cc 2013 greg
January 19th, 2013 at 2:37 pm
From Blindsight by Peter Watts available free on the Creative Commons at
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Brain’s a big glucose hog. Everything it does costs through the nose.”
“True enough,” Cunningham admitted.
“So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it’s expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution’s gonna weed it out just like that.”
“Maybe it did.” He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. “Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can’t always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can.”
“So what’s your point? Smarter animal, less self-awareness? Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient?”
“Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks.”
“So why didn’t that happen to us?”
“What makes you think it didn’t?”
It was such an obviously stupid question that Sascha didn’t have an answer for it. I could imagine her gaping in the silence.
“You’re not thinking this through,” Cunningham said. “We’re not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence.”
“Why would it bother? What would motivate it?”
“As long as you pull your hand away from an open flame, who cares whether you do it because it hurts or because some feedback algorithm says withdraw if heat flux exceeds critical T? Natural selection doesn’t care about motives. If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd.” Another silence; I could hear him chewing through it. “It’ll even be able to participate in a conversation like this one. It could write letters home, impersonate real human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence.”
“I dunno, Rob. It just seems—”
“Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository infodump. But even real people do that, don’t they?”
“And eventually, there aren’t any real people left. Just robots pretending to give a shit.”
“Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I’d guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy; if you can’t feel, you can’t really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world’s upper echelons, hmm? How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded up in the stratosphere, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted off into detention with the Realists. Almost as if society itself is being reshaped from the inside out.”
“Oh, come on. Society was always pretty— wait, you’re saying the world’s corporate elite are nonsentient?”
“God, no. Not nearly. Maybe they’re just starting down that road. Like chimpanzees.”
“Yeah, but sociopaths don’t blend in well.”
“Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don’t, but by definition they’re the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don’t need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you.”
January 19th, 2013 at 3:14 pm
I know that nihilism and meat puppetry are regular topics on the rhetorical merry go round that passes for discourse in these parts … imo, those who don the cap of happy nihilists are just posers, you ain’t no Becketts or Ciorans… Godot will out you when he returns and then Pozo will kick you in the bum. Perhaps the kundalini eruption messed up your brains. Too many fatty memes in your diet can have a similar effect.
Check out the research on reincarnational memories by children conducted by the late Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, which is now being carried out by Jim Tucker, M.D..
http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops
You may also be interested in the near death experience research of Dr. Pim van Lommel.
http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Beyond-Life-Near-Death-Experience/dp/0061777269/ref=pd_sim_b_4
Bottom line: reductionist theories that try to explain the higher in terms of the lower have only limited success. The multiverse is a lot stranger than the imaginationless ones can imagine.
January 19th, 2013 at 3:35 pm
@ Madmanintheattic
I think there is a difference between accepting a story and looking at the data.
Then you and I are using the word ‘story’ differently. For me, it’s all stories. Just that they can be divided, left brain/logos stories and right brain/mythos stories.
Data would be left brain/logos. A graph of the rise of CO2 over the last 100 years is a story.
I don’t think anyone knows what the word “spiritual” means insofar as everyone on this blog, if they have a definition, is going to have a definition differing from everyone else. The word “spiritual” is a placeholder for a nebulous idea or notion or fantasy wish which is probably meaning-free insofar as there is an infinity of supposed meanings. We bandy about many words we don’t actually have clear meaning for but which are placeholders for concepts we think we and others should understand but in actuality do not.
Agreed. This problem applies to many terms, but is particularly acute regarding everything internal that cannot be pointed to.
Anyway, so you spent thirty years plus, looking into the matter, as it were, and found nothing. I’m not quite sure what to make of that, whether to admire you for such stubborn perseverance, or to be sorry you wasted so much time. I suppose it must have influenced your character in many ways, nonetheless ? Like walking round and around in a hayfield searching for lost car keys ? That were not there ? Or might be there, still, undiscovered ? No, you’ve done such an astonishingly thorough job, I don’t doubt your word at all. If you didn’t find them in thirty years, the fucking things are not there to be found… I believe you…
And you got this injury. That’s another thing. I don’t know if that Gopi Krishna or the other guys you were hanging out with talk about prana, or acknowledge the correspondence with qi, chi, ki, etc ? as a form or bio-energy, in other traditions ?
January 19th, 2013 at 3:54 pm
Hi Tom, so that sad story concludes.
It’s probably not PC, but people born with defects are SUPPOSED to die off! It’s natures way! When you contract a disease – if you can’t fight it off with your natural immune system, then i’m sorry but it’s time to go! But no, we “can’t” do that, because that would be “unethical”
Yeah, I agree with what you’re saying, but we are complex creatures, and amongst the mix there’s kindness and compassion, especially in children, and it’s quite hard to say to something that wants to live ‘No, you can’t, you must die, you cannot exist, I’m going to deny you a life’, I know it, I’ve done plenty of it, I hate having to do it, makes me feel sick. Yet we can only exist ourselves at the expense of other life. I wish the slaughter houses were beside the supermarkets, so people would be forced to see the animals being murdered, so they can eat that meat in those plastic packets.
Sperm Whales Adopt Deformed Dolphin
January 19th, 2013 at 4:32 pm
Hey here is an idea – why don’t we all take a day off from this discussion about kindness and compassion as human traits and go out and volunteer somewhere where people need some kindness and compassion?
By their works you will know them…..
January 19th, 2013 at 4:51 pm
Stumbled across NBL recently. Guy – my general feeling of doom for the last 15 years was superbly condensed recently by the chap in this video – mathematically and scientifically – and it ties in nicely with the Mayan Tun and Tzolkein ‘consciousness’ calendars and the speeding up of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc
I can’t recommend this video highly enough.
January 19th, 2013 at 4:54 pm
http://www.amazon.com/Biopolicy-Sciences-Public-Research-Biopolitics/dp/1780528205
Biopolicy: The Life Sciences and Public Policy (Research in Biopolitics) [Hardcover]
Albert Somit (Author, Editor), Steven A. Peterson (Editor)
BRIEF SUMMARY OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
Evolution is a theory of change among living forms. Whether we are looking at the familiar evolution of horses or of dogs or of humans, we see change in how the individuals within a species appear over time. Darwin’s theory of evolution was based on two simple propositions: first, there is variation among individuals within any species; second, some of the variation is more apt to provide survival advantage for individuals and, hence, will be selected. As Mayr puts it (1992, p. 22): “Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.”
Populations tend to produce more offspring than an environment can support. Natural selection is the process by which nature selects those individuals whose characteristics are best fitted for survival in their environments. Individuals whose characteristics are less well suited to their environment will tend to die off before reproducing or reproduce less successfully (for a good, brief introduction to evolutionary theory, see Mayr, 2001).
Those characteristics that fit the environment and confer some survival value for the organism are termed “adaptations.” Those organisms best adapted to their environments are more likely to survive to reproduce. Over time, individuals within a successful species develop adaptations that make them increasingly more apt to manifest reproductive success and have those adaptations become dominant or widespread within the species.
Assume that we have a particular environment. Each year, 200 young of a species are born with just enough food and other resources to support only 100 of the young. Thus, many will die. Those whose physical characteristics and behavior are better adapted to their environments will be the ones we would expect to survive. And, in turn, they would be expected to mature and reproduce and have their genes represented in the next generation. Evolution is not just about survival — but transmission of the characteristics that enabled that survival.
In Darwin’s time and for decades thereafter, though, the mechanism by which adaptations were transmitted from generation to generation was unknown. Those theories in existence at the time were unable to adequately account for transmission. It was the work of Gregor Mendel, who described the transmission of characteristics from generation to generation, that paved the way for an understanding of genetics. We now know that genes are basic units by which characteristics are passed on from one generation to the next.
In the 1930s, biologists like R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright began to link genetics with Darwinian natural selection. This wedding of genetics and Darwinian theory was the foundation of the modern synthetic theory by Ernst Mayr (1963) and Theodosius Dobzhansky (1951). More recently, Stephen Jay Gould has contributed his final work as a massive discourse on evolution: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002).
On major current approach to applying evolutionary theory to human social behavior is sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology), the study of the evolutionary bases of social behavior (Dawkins, 1989; Wilson, 1975). A key concept for sociobiology is “inclusive fitness.” For sociobiology, an underlying premise is that evolution has inclined living organisms to those modes of behavior most likely to maximize the number of his/her genes transmitted to the next generation. This can be done in two different ways: first, by passing along one’s genes directly, usually referred to as individual reproductive success; second, there is the reproductive success of relatives of one’s relatives, that is, those with whom one shares genes. The combination of these two is termed “inclusive fitness,” encompassing both the reproductive success of an individual and of that individual’s relatives (see Barash, 1982; Dawkins, 1989; Wilson, 1975).
January 19th, 2013 at 5:09 pm
pissed off scientists earth is fucked – commence resistance now
http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/pissed-off-scientists-earth-is-fucked-commence-resistance-now/
January 19th, 2013 at 5:13 pm
@ Gail
Isn’t all that very elementary, and common knowledge ?
The problem re evolutionary psychology and sociobiology is that both are entirely speculative, so, strictly speaking, not scientific, because they are not theories that can be tested.
January 19th, 2013 at 5:24 pm
@ Gail
That piece is actually highly misleading. Dawkins and E. O. Wilson are engaged in a bitter and vitriolic feud over their mutually exclusive understandings, and within the larger picture there is no consensus amongst biologists that either sociobiology or evolutionary psychology can explain human nature.
January 19th, 2013 at 5:36 pm
Conceding that it’s a material world, the paradigms of science are a way to catalogue and explain it. It starts with physics at the base, with multiple layers upon it: chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, sociology, etc.
The phenomena at various levels are either explicable at one or more levels or are emergent properties of other levels. Tectonic shifts are based on some other level involving protons.
All the phenomena associated with Homo sapiens are similarly based. They are mere ‘meat robots’, they seem to make moral choices and decisions and take responsibility for their lives…
They have no consciousness. They have no awareness, ether of self or others. When I say there is nothing there, maybe there is and maybe there isn’t.
But to pursue the scientific method, one must apply Occam’s razor and say that they are seven billion meat robots.
I, however, have awareness and am therefore conscious. The meat robots if challenged to prove that they are conscious, will respond in accordance with their programming and their wetware. This is fully in keeping with the scientific paradigms, and in no way demonstrates that they have awareness or that they are conscious.
As to the nature of who they are as non-conscious non-self-aware, non-self-reflecting and therefore non-sapient animals is quite simple: they are meat robots that will vociferously assert that they are aware and conscious if I challenge them. But their every attempt to prove that they have awareness or consciousness only demonstrates the complexity and intricacy of their wetware and programming.
Indeed there is nothing there which was able to INFORM MY LIFE on this planet in any useful way, because existence is just a series of happy accidents following the original happy accident.
January 19th, 2013 at 5:43 pm
For anyone into serious deep scholarship, this was this best analysis I ever found concerning the origin of the Industrial Revolution, which of course connects to capitalism.
This 6-series documentary films address the puzzle of the origins of Industrial Revolution. The central question: why did a scraggy little rainswept island off the coast of mainland Europe become the first major industrial centre, when so many other parts of the world, such as China, with its great history of inventions – looked more promising? The story starts on a single momentous day in Liverpool, a day that shows the best and worst aspects of the Industrial Revolution. We then look back 100 years, then 250, then 500, then 1000, until 10000 years – to the third millennium of the modern era.
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/270
January 19th, 2013 at 5:50 pm
Does evolution explain human nature ?
http://www.templeton.org/evolution/
January 19th, 2013 at 5:59 pm
Ask a social scientist, why don’t ya?
January 19th, 2013 at 6:06 pm
Madmanintheattic
I accept your comments. They are not untypical of a presumptive rejection of anything beyond ego bondage.
As I have put up in relation to spiritual matters before, spiritual understanding is tacit, and self authenticating, and no ‘argument’ is sufficient to understand with the Heart. That by definition leaves a lot of room for fakers, even self deluded fakers. I am in full agreement there are many Two Pack Polyfiller fakers out there, and a big big ‘market’ of seekers, born every day. That does not invalidate any REAL divine incarnation, just that there are a lot of fakers too. No?
Some get confused with that word ‘Divine’. I did for a long time too. It usually refers to in the West notions of personified Christian separate patriarchal ‘god’.
But it actually means ‘who we really are’, in this case beyond the two armed form.
These characteristics of ‘Divineness’ are actually those of humans, but as yet not realised.
In that Dark Time, a Hindu rekoning system you seem to use, it is also prophesied the Tenth Avatar, or incarnation of Vishnu, is Kalki, which Adi Da claims.
You are going to reject that out of hand? really? without fully looking at it? If you are correct you have lost nothing, but if you are mistaken, you have for the moment lost something of supreme value, have you not?
One needs to use all the human faculties in asessing one’s own response to such claims, all the functions available to one, not only Thinking, and Sensation, but Feeling and Intuition.
I was extremely fortunate as I became aware of Adi Da in a dream, and it was some 3 years later I discovered his teachings. In a dream!! I have subsequently learned that many devotees of Adi Da initially became aware of Him in a dream. Is that lived experiece of mine baloney? A sign of delusion? Just not worth looking at rationally?
These challenges to Scientism are everwhere in the real lived experience of our species, but presently, as we still live in adolescent rejection of spiritual anddevotional prescientific culturaly dominat modes of being, they are not taken seriously, in the main.
So, you see, I have no problem with understanding the way this sort of process, or revelation can work. Not scientific? No, hardly, but IMO that does not mean it is not real!! You only ever get ‘personal’ evidence of spiritual revelation, because it comes via those subjective functions of consciousness, Feeling and Intuition. That is because the spiritual matter at hand concerns ‘you’, your consciousness, your spiritual path, and development. (When those two functions are effectively blocked, either culturally or personally, that impulse to grow spiritually may errupt through the other objective functions, Thinking and Sensation, and that is not pretty when it happens.)
From your text: ” By defdinition Adi Da Doo Dah Day is a fraud as are all the rest of them.”
How could you or I, or anyone, know or define what is the appropriate manifestation in this world of the revealed Heart, or what we may variously label, the ‘Devine’? The Kali Yuga, as you put it, is the dark age, and seeing the Dark Age is largely generated from human activities, and now afflicts all systems of sustaining life vehicles on this planet, what is to be done?
How do you think the Heart, the Divine would respond? Lay down and just take it up the arse? From hubristic two armed bipeds? I think not. Nothing short of full emersion and full bodily incarnation is going to stop this mess.
What is causing this mess? In short Ego adaptation! A presumption of separation from Nature!( a very ambiguous term, anamistic and scientific?) So you start at the root, or from a radical understanding of the presumption of Ego bondage, and presumption of separation from Nature/Self, and you demonstrate the life of a two armed biped IN THAT DIVINE CONDITION, and teach what you undrstand.
There has only ever been one ‘way’ for us humans, and that is through the ‘fire’ of Ego submission and sacrifice. We are going to have to go through the fire if we want to survive, as a species, IMO.By definition Ego submission is voluntary, not a social dogmatic social system.
I hope the injury gets better soon, if it is chronic pain, it is hard to take long term. Best wishes there.
January 19th, 2013 at 6:36 pm
Hello annie,
The debate between people who insist on genetic determinism, ( Dawkin’s selfish gene, stuff which reduces people to meat robots, and all of life to abstract numbers ) and people who have no understanding of biology and genetics and who insist everything is determined by culture, no such thing as ‘human nature’, and could be fixed if we ‘changed the system’ is extremely tedious, imho, it’s been going on for a century, nature versus nurture, and seems to have re-appeared here, with Gail’s recent introduction of sociobiology and eco-psychology into the discourse.
It goes both ways, we have a genetic heritage, which gets modified by culture, and then culture modifies our genetics, as well as epigenetics, etcetera…
…it appears that social custom can have just as much impact on physiological evolution as does environment.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2011-12-team-cultural-biological-evolution.html
January 19th, 2013 at 6:39 pm
@ Ozman
I only watched half the Adi video, where he was talking about the midnight sun. I took it that that is his preferred term for nirvikalpa samadhi or some similar ?
January 19th, 2013 at 6:40 pm
Gail; Your piece about evolution used food as a limit but didn’t mention the other major forces on the process: war, disease, and predation. Add it all up along with the social element and let it all work together throughout a human lifetime and we can see how human nature was also driven, for better or worse. Seems it turned out for the worse.
January 19th, 2013 at 6:42 pm
I have a question that has never been answered to my satisfaction. What is the source of crop circles?
January 19th, 2013 at 6:56 pm
Advice to kids…
You kids are beyond screwed…Your parents and grandparents want what is best for you. But they do not understand your world in the slightest. You should probably ignore them.
http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/09/young-people-are-screwed-heres-how-to-survive/
January 19th, 2013 at 7:40 pm
I’ve posted a guest essay by Emily Stewart. It’s here.
January 19th, 2013 at 7:55 pm
ulvfugl
I think that is accurate, but I am new to His concept of The Midnight Sun. Outshining of the witness position of conscousnes, yes.