Trout Clan Campfire

ACQUIRING INFORMATION

2012-01-27T12:05:00.000-08:00

from Murph

I have touched on the idea of acquiring information before. The reason I am going into it again is because I have been running into people periodically who have no idea concerning how they acquire information. I am going to postulate there are 4 levels of information.

1. First hand information. Your were there and observed. You are part of the insiders doing the investigation, doing the research, collecting the data, part of the experts doing the investigation.

The problem is, for most of us, we don’t have very much first hand information. For the most part, this kind of information is highly specialized and for the people involved in it the information collected is kept discrete and without relationship to other specializations. We aren’t doing the research on global warming, on the depletion of resources or the goings on in our government or much of anything else. We depend, for the most part on other sources of information. First hand information includes; this is what I saw; this is what I heard; this is the results (data) of my experiments. And, of course, if the experimenter and data collector have an agenda, this information can be heavily skewed. Even in the case of observed event, the observer can completely misinterpret and misunderstand what was observed. That is why first person witness testimony in jury trials is not absolutely dependable.

2. Second hand information. This is reported to us, through various means, from people that study the first hand information. If they are good at it, they give us the facts and nothing but the facts about the area of study they are reporting on. Reliability of the informant is key here.

The problem here is that way too often, this second hand information is clouded up with opinion and projected inferences of the data they are reporting on. Also, often agendas also interfere with this kind of reporting. Good second hand information gives you the facts of the case and allows you to draw your own conclusions.

3. Third hand information. This takes the form of quoting and interpreting what #2 reported on #1 information source.

This form in information starts to rely heavily on opinion about #1 information. It will often morph in unsubstantiated conclusions and even misinformation. Often this form of information is just pure gossip with little to no relationship to the facts. Listen to Rush Limbaugh.

4. Fourth hand information. This is where propaganda, spin and deliberate misinformation take place. This information takes all of the above sources and often utilizes them for an agenda. Again, listen to the Rush Limbaugh rants.

We are exposed to this form of information constantly in the popular media, the internet, and the rumor mill. Even those groups and individual that are sincere in providing us information have an agenda. Nothing wrong with having an agenda and putting out information to support the agenda. But the two need to be separated by the recipient. I suspect that often the reporter from this source doesn’t even know they are not being completely factual and thus draw conclusions that do not stand up to examination.

The inadvertent inaccurate transmission of information is legendary. Remember the school day experiment of sitting in a circle and starting a statement and have it whispered to each person down the line? By the end of the line, it hasn’t much relationship to what the original information was about.

All of the above sources of information can be factual and well analyzed or misleading or contain only half-truths or in some cases out right lies. I have been getting into to the practice of asking for sources from people that assert information that doesn’t sound right to me, and even when it does sound right. This is why it takes so much effort and time to try and determine what the truth of any situation/issue that I am not directly involved with, which are most issues.

I think we are all guilty of rather indiscriminant use of these sources without realizing it. We rely on experts and people involved for our information that may not be reliable at all. We also rely on people that supposedly spend time analyzing all 4 information sources to give us a synopsis of what they found. The difficulty comes with conclusions, projections/consequences and assumptions of the findings.

I have found over the years that most of the information coming from government people to be unreliable, usually contains half-truths and very often out right lies. It shows up today in bold print when the government economists issue pronouncements on the economy or when the president issues statements on the state of the union.

I often question just what is our advantage in acquiring accurate information. The internet today is full of enough information that no man can digest it all. My oft-repeated mantra is that I want accurate information to give me an idea of which way to duck to soften the blows I perceive coming my way. So far, the sources I have used to determine this have worked out pretty well for us in planning our next moves. How’s it working out for you?

The disappointing aspect of all this is that nothing substantial has changed. The information is out there to be acquired and acted upon. The totality of information I have indicates that our social contract is being very rapidly torn apart, we are progressing toward a totalitarian fascist state, our environment is being poisoned to an alarming extent, our society is consumed by greed, our eco systems are being destroyed, the worlds raw materials are finite and being squandered on superfluous bull shit and outside of a very small minority of folks, nobody gives a damn and no changes are taking place that will stop or reverse these directions.

Large-scale social change takes time and a huge amount of energy input, unfortunately. Humans are not very amenable to change, particularly if it is to their personal short-term disadvantage. If my conclusions have validity, then the question arises as to whether we have reached a tipping point and no action can possibly change the direction we are headed. I suppose that if there was sufficient collective will, it could happen but it sure doesn’t appear to me that is on the horizon. Our social momentum is too strong.

It sure would be interesting to me to know what the future historians (if there are any) had to say about our present period of history.

Considering the Nanny State

2012-01-10T13:23:00.000-08:00

photo: Carson River, taken by freeacre

By freeacre

”Move over Big Brother! An insidious new group has inserted itself into American politics. They are the nannies—not the stroller-pushing set but an invasive band of do-gooders who are subtly and steadily stripping us of our liberties, robbing us of the inalienable right to make our own decisions, and turning America into a nation of children.

As you read this, countless busybodies across the nation are rolling up their sleeves to do the work of straightening out your life. Certain Massachusetts towns have banned school-yard tag. San Francisco has passed laws regulating the amount of water you should use in dog bowls. The mayor of New York City has French fries and doughnuts in his sights. In some parts of California, smoking is prohibited . . . outside.

The government, under pressure from the nanny minority, is twisting the public’s arm into obedience. Playground police, food fascists, anti-porn crusaders —whether they're legislating morality or wellbeing—nannies are popping up all over America. In the name of health, safety, decency, and—shudder—good intentions, these ever-vigilant politicians and social activists are dictating what we eat, where we smoke, what we watch and read, and whom we marry.

Why do bureaucrats think they know what's better for us than we do? And are they selectively legislating in the name of political expediency? For instance, why do we ban mini-motorbikes, responsible for five deaths each year, and not skiing, which accounts for fifty deaths each year? Why is medical marijuana, a substance yet to claim a single life, banned and not aspirin, which accounts for about 7,600 deaths?…”
from a book entitled The Nanny State by David Harsanyi

And, from Wikepedia:
"A nanny state is the perception of a situation characterized by governmental policies of over-protectionism, economic interventionism, or heavy regulation of economic, social or other nature.
The subjective term nanny state is typically used pejoratively, expressing an anxiety that these policies are being institutionalized as common practice. Opponents of such policies use the term in their advocacy against what they consider to be uninvited and damaging state intervention.”
And, from Survival Acres.com 12/31/11
“The global grab on the world’s food supply isn’t about protecting anybody. It is about making sure that you and everyone else on this entire planet is forced to buy something extremely essential like food from a gigantic Ag-business. These companies will have the power of life or death, something they already have now, but it will be significantly worse in the days ahead.
Even growing your own food, or buying it from the local co-op or farmers market is now at risk.
We all seem to think we are not at risk, because we are not yet experiencing the utter defeat being experienced by other countries. In India alone, over 200,000 farmers are already known to have committed suicide. The reason is because they are being forced into bankruptcy, having to buy GMO modified seeds from the Ag giants, who could care less about your health, your freedom, or your right to eat safe, healthy foods. All they care about is that you are being forced by necessity (to stay alive) that every dollar you spend has gone into their pockets.
Nobody has any idea how many other farmers have just utterly given up or killed themselves.
It’s getting serious folks. If you want to survive into the future, then you are going to have to start helping yourselves.
I’ve seen ZERO evidence that the best interests of the people are being supported. What I have seen however, is agency after agency, government after government, and entity after entity being arrayed against the individual and collective rights of the people in a non-stop fashion, forcing us all into a tighter and tighter grip.”
Our last post, from Belgium, has had me mulling over several aspects of freedom. On the one hand, the pejorative term, “Nanny State”, signals more than simple meddling in personal affairs. It encourages a callous disregard for the thoughts, rights, decisions and feelings of others. I overheard a couple of grocery clerks chortling about the cost of cigarettes rising three dollars a pack next year. “Well, ha ha, I guess that’s going to make some more people quit smoking…” he said with a satisfied smirk. Is this a blatant infringement of my civil liberty? Yes, by God, it is. But, they could care less. Shaping behavior by raising prices translates into the rich being able to afford to do whatever they want, while for the rest of us, the politically correct is mandatory.
Parenthetically, “Nanny State” also includes a derision of the Feminine influence – as if nannies are stupid cows that spoil children and don’t know the real world…
But, is there no role in government for the protection of its citizenry? Yes, of course there is. The Federal government is mandated in the constitution to protect our borders and to provide for the national defense. The power of the federal government is supposed to be aimed at large forces (corporations, big banks, foreign armies, etc.) that would curtail our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Big corporate entities like Agra-business, Big Pharmaceuticals, and the Central Banks cannot be fought by individual efforts alone. In my opinion, it is the duty of the congress to monitor the globalist fraudsters and polluters and protect the rights of the common citizen and the planet we hold in common.
But, of course, just the opposite is happening. The foxes (lobbyists, miscreants and minions) are ruling the hen house, and our rights are systematically destroyed.
Furthermore, the agencies, which are supposed to be protecting us, like the DEQ or the EPA or FEMA are actively working for the misanthropic mutants. So, the DEQ in Oregon is concerned with NITRATES in the water (which is almost totally harmless) and not the hormones, toxic pesticides, antibiotics, and chemical runoff that corporations are guilty of spewing into the environment. Or, the EPA just ruled that they won’t go after Big Agra for over-medicating healthy cattle, which is creating ever more virulent diseases. Eighty percent of the antibiotics used in this nation are given to animals we eat.
It looks to me like the people in these agencies “help” the country by collecting their substantial paychecks and spending them on big-ticket items, vacation homes, ski trips, and luxuries whether they do anything good for people and the planet or not.
The “nanny state” term is also used with great animosity toward the social welfare system as well as the social security system. Programs which were sold in the 60’s, like The War on Poverty” have been dismal failures. The endless rules and more and more entanglements have created two generations of dependence and dysfunction. I bet about the same percentage of those on welfare are married as were married on the plantations. Two parent families don’t qualify for welfare. “Get a divorce” Is the advise from the social workers. So much for “family values” and caring about the state of families in this country.
Come to think of it, any of these so-called “wars” seem to be false. The war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror… all rackets that take their tolls on all of us.
The hypocrisy never stops. Liberal Dems are “shocked….shocked!” if anyone utters “racist” terms - but do nothing about laws that incarcerate a third of the black men in this country and leave them ineligible for much of anything other than to distribute drugs to enrich the Rich and enslave their brothers and sisters.
And they funnel the rest of the working class kids into the military by offering the carrot of a job, career, or education in a skilled trade. Or they indenture themselves for years in the hope of a professional career.

Meanwhile, the wisdom of the Mother State is never advanced. There is one, you know, or could be. A state based on the natural law that mothers love all their children. The baby cries, the mother lactates. She can’t do otherwise. She doesn’t care for and nurture her offspring so that they can be dependent on her forever. She raises them to grow up to be free men and women with a sense of their talents and capabilities and a responsibility for and to their world. And, She provides them with the knowledge and opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.
As the paternalistic, militaristic, and materialistic world we know continues to deteriorate, now is a good time to imagine what we would like to create in its place. I think it would start with the balancing of masculine and feminine “energies” that p often refers to, and their practical applications in our world.
It would begin by considering ourselves to be Human Beings first and foremost. We have done it before. Somewhere within we can feel the memories.

Freedom and Order

2011-12-27T14:57:00.000-08:00

photo credit to blogodak.com

from Belgium (sats)

It is not usual for me to talk about film reviews in a piece like this however sometimes a piece from a film strikes you as significant or starts a thought process. So it was with the film Satantango (Satan's Tango) by Bella Tarr. It is a hell of a film and is only for the very brave. The storyline is not linear, rather it goes backward and forward like tango dancers. The reason it is a hell of a film is that with a quick coffee break and a quick WC break it is eight hours long. That means you go into the cinema at 2 in the afternoon and come out at 10 at night, unless like me you watch it on DVD. It is shot in glorious black and white, the spoken language is Hungarian (Magyar) with English under text and during the whole film there is practically no action to speak of apart of the consistency of the rain falling on the quagmire of the Hungarian plain in winter. Having said that, the whole experience affected me greatly and even a month after seeing it I was still thinking of the significance of various parts. The film deals with life after the collapse of communism in Hungary. A group of people try to sell their collective and use the money to become 'free' however the silver tongued Irimias (I-ra-me-as) who everybody thought was dead, turns up and persuades the group to reinvest in a more modern farm somewhere else. He has such eloquence almost everybody agrees, thus placing themselves in a hierarchy under his control. I was going to be nice and call Irimias a false prophet of hope but he is in fact a con man. Because he doesn't work but always seems to have money he and his sidekick Petrina are summoned before the Police Captain to see if they should be turned over to the tax authorities. As it turns out, the police captain lets them off the hook provided they do some spying for him. During the course of the conversation the Captain comes out with the following monologue, which was the starting point for the current post.

"Captain: Not that human life was so highly valued. Keeping order appears to be the business of the authorities, but in fact it's the business of all. Order. Freedom, however, has nothing human. It's something divine, something... our lives are too short for us to know properly. If you're looking for a link, think of Pericles, order and freedom are linked by passion. We have to believe in both, we suffer from both. Both from order and freedom. But human life is meaningful, rich, beautiful and filthy. It links everything. It mistreats freedom only... wasting it, as if it was junk. People don't like freedom, they are afraid of it. The strange thing is there is nothing to fear about freedom... order, on the other hand, can often be frightening."

Hmm, I think this is one of the most profound pieces of dialogue I have ever heard but is it true? There are probably as many meanings of freedom as there are people so let us see if we can come up with a definition which is universally acceptable. Then we can have a look at social order and see if there is any link between the two. Freedom is such a simple word, probably too simple, that we automatically assume we know what it means.
At the end of the last World War the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made an election broadcast on the radio in which he expressed the view that now the Allies had won the war, the world was free from the tyranny of the Third Rich. Replying the next night Clement Atlee for the opposition said “Mr Churchill has made much of the concept of freedom but it was not many years ago that employers were free to send little children climbing up the inside of chimneys. Is that the sort of freedom to which we wish to return?” This demonstrates that the word is not such an easy take.

Here are Murph's thoughts on the subject from ibid April 2008, which are about as broad as you can get and are difficult for anyone (me at least) to take issue with.

“It would seem obvious to me that a concept of total freedom of action when living in groups cannot work. Being by yourself in the wilderness is not how most of us live. More power to those that do so. The early mountain men were about as free as you can get. But, some enforceable means has to exist to impede those who do not respect others right to freedom within a social context. I sum it up this way; you cannot perform an action which takes away from or restricts another persons freedom, that is, you cannot harm another or their property, and I include the environment. That simple edict would automatically stop environmental degradation, exploitation and legal thievery.”

So, summarising, you can do anything you like so long as it does not harm another or the environment.

Not that many of us are mountain men, in fact most of us in the 'developed' world live in industrialised countries. We live in conurbations from small villages to great cities where by and large we all have to get along with one another. The tighter we pack ourselves the more chaffing occurs which impacts on others rights to do as they like.

Most people do not see that there is a problem with freedom because they believe that they are already free. They feel they have a right to improve their lives, which indeed they do however they exercise this right by placing themselves under almost life-long obligations to financial institutions. What most don't realise is that for a mortgage for instance, for every dollar they borrow over the term of the loan they will pay two dollars in interest. Even if they do realise it they figure there is little they can do about it if they want a place of their own to live. Most buyers do not choose a place that fulfils their spacial needs for a modest price but are influenced by peer pressure to buy the most expensive they can afford. Another thing not commonly realised is that the sort of new properties projected at the aspiring owners are not priced on a cost plus basis but on what is the greatest proportion of average income they can afford to miss and still get by on. That is until negative equity comes along and they suddenly realise that the freedom to own a home does not apply to them. There are only so many times a loan can be restructured before the debt becomes overwhelming. A similar system operates with credit cards, it is only the matter of degree that is different. The minimum repayment is designed so that the interest is on a continuous roll and the principle sum is never paid off. So much for taking the waiting out of wanting.

If people grow up within a system which everybody regards as normal they never realise there may even be a problem with it. So it is with Federal Reserve Notes, or Euros or in fact with the majority of the worlds currencies. In every country which has a national bank, that bank issues the local currency which it prints out of paper and ink and apart from the cost of the building and the printing workers, that is the only cost to the bank. It costs exactly the same to make a hundred dollar bill as it does to make a one dollar bill but the bank sells the currency to the government at the face value of the bill. Not only that but the bank charges the government interest on the currency whilst it is in circulation. You are only allowed one guess where the government gets the money to pay for this. And all the time you thought your taxes went to pay for infrastructure. So where does the money for infrastructure come from? Well that is also borrowed from the national bank as well and the repayments are recouped through income and sales taxes. What alternatives do people have if they don't want the banks to appropriate the benefits of their hourly labour? Well there are Credit Unions. It is very difficult for the government to place a tax on sea shells or chittys for a number of hours worked or what ever else may be used in place of money. The down side is that it is very difficult to buy a Japanese car or any other consumer item with a currency which is not nationally or internationally recognised. Not only this but the pressure on such systems to conform to the national standard is enormous. A question then arises if people participating in such alternatives should be allowed to enjoy the infrastructure paid for by others. Should they be allowed to travel over a bridge which they have not paid for or must they do a twenty mile detour or should they be defended by a national military to which they have not contributed? Allowing the bankers to skim the fruits of your labour is a system which is very difficult to opt out from. As employers were free to send children working up chimneys so also are you free to give the banks a portion of your income. You might not consider this to be much of a freedom and you might be right but it is the system with which most of us are forced to conform.

Over the years, commentators here have bemoaned inflation, the invisible tax. Even though the standard of living has improved over time, the quantity of things that can be bought with a weeks wage has decreased. We have long said that grandfather could work to support a home, a wife and a house full of kids. Then couples decided to leave the kids until until they had filled their house with stuff. When it was realised that women were willing to go out to work, with a bit of strategic nudging, the elite bankers began the femanist movement in order to farm two lots of taxible income instead of one. Where as previously, the second income was there to provide extras, inflation now ensures that the second income is necessary for the family just to get by. The elites are currently progressing onwards and upwards with their unfettered greed. Throughout Europe in general and Belgium in particular the countries have been so reduced by the rolling financial cricis that there is a move by governments to increase the pension age by two years to 67 for men and correspondingly for women. At present there are one day protest strike actions but if something is not done about this increasing disparity of those on either side of the zero sum game then this could develop into Europes Occupy Movement. I don't know how things will pan out but if the situation is left to fester I can't see the Europeans being as genteel as the Occupiers. The elites are becoming more brazen with their stick prodding. Maybe they are anxious to take their new crowd control toys out of their boxes.

Nearly everybody knows that there are three branches of government. The one I am interested in here is the legislature. In the case of the USA this is The Congress and its job is to enact new laws as it sees fit. It has been estimated that the USA has at least a quarter of a million statute laws. Every one of these inhibits a freedom either by denying an action or making an action compulsory. A law is the removal of a freedom, as it dictates that there is something you cannot or must do. If the former, you're not free to do it; if the latter, you're not free to do otherwise. You will probably ask if laws are not for the benefit of all? After all not killing another, God knows it might be you on the receiving end, or not stealing another's property is clearly to the greater good. The purpose of other laws is more moot. Is it to your benefit to have your private telephone conversations listened to by a government body or every e mail read? Is it to your benefit for any US citizen to be withheld indefinitely without trial or even access to a lawyer, yet according to the Military Commissions Act this is the state of US law as it stands at present. Clearly many of the newer laws have less to do with the public good and more to do with controlling the population, thus giving the government more power and the citizenry less. In former times the legislature made just laws, now it just makes laws. This begs the question of who works for whom and why we allow a system in which our freedoms are balanced against us. As an exercise I did try to find a league table of the number of statute laws by country as a measure of which ones were freer than others but if such a table exists I could not find it.

Because the USA does not adequately provide for health care as other countries do, people are forced into very expensive substandard health care where people are obliged to do battle with insurance companies at a time they are least able. This is a clear case of butter or guns; a healthy nation or shiny missiles in a silo. Even if you are dying because you cannot afford appropriate medicines, you are free to know we will get our retaliation in first.

Let us look at a hypothetical example of how freedom might be wasted. Suppose a country existed, for argument sake we will call it The Land of Milk and Honey and this land was ruled over by a benevolent benefactor who was paternalistic towards his own people but who regarded the outside world with some suspicion. In fact this ruler put the well being of his people before that of his own family (now you know I am making it up).

In order to make the lives of his people as free as he possibly could he gave them the following things. Every citizen received a free house, even before the benefactors own parents received one, so the citizenry was free from mortgages and obligations to the financial institutions. Of course nobody was forced into the standard fare and if they wanted to build a mansion at their own expense then they were free to do so. To go with the new free house they were also given free electricity. Throughout the land, there was no difference in status between men and women. As a result of the universal free education, literacy rates had increased above the 90% level. Free education means no student loans. The idea of incurring personal debt for the countries greater benefit was a concept abhorrent to the benefactor. Along with free education there was also free health care. Health care in the land was pretty comprehensive but as an exercise in PR, the leader said that if anyone needed any health care or a procedure that was not available in that country the patient would be taken free of charge to any other land where it was available. If any citizen wanted a loan they could have one from the benefactor free of interest. Agriculture was considered one of the most important professions to the benefit of the community so anyone with serious intent in starting a farm was given land free of charge together with seed for the first year.

Then there were the nice to have things, the icing on the cake: a yearly present of $500 to every citizen; a wedding gift of $50,000 to every couple that got married; the benefactor paid for half the price of a new car and gas throughout the land was 14 cents a gallon.

What silliness! Such a land of Milk and Honey can only exist in children's fairy tales. Yet it was real, it did exist. How many of you guessed that the land I have described was Libya and the paternal benefactor was Colonel Gadaffi. Not everybody's first choice of a leader I will admit but those people didn't live in Libya. When Colonel Gadaffi faced the news cameras and said “Nothing will happen to me because my people love me” he actually believed this to be true.

Now that is all gone, the people in their greater wisdom have decided to swap all of this for the pleasure of having a national bank. Such is the power of persuasion and taking a step backwards whilst the flow goes past.

Those interested in knowing what is behind the Arab Spring can check out the post I wrote here in January 2011 entitled Non Violent Resistance. We know what Libya has given up, you can remind yourselves what Tunisia gave up.

“Human life... mistreats freedom only... wasting it, as if it was junk. People don't like freedom, they are afraid of it. The strange thing is there is nothing to fear about freedom...”. Well it sure looks like the police captain had the right of it after all.

Freedom is a zero sum game in the world of us and them. The more we have the less the PTB have; The more they have the less we have. In order to maintain this disparity the PTB need control and the means of control is Social Order.

Concepts in social order have changed over time. Writing for the American Journal of Sociology in March 1944, Lawrence K Frank had this to say.

“Social order has long been conceived as an organization or mechanism which exists as a part of the cosmos and operates through large-scale forces acting at a distance. Social theory has taught man that he must learn to submit to these assumed forces and accept this cosmic organization as necessary to social order, while social research has attempted to measure these assumed forces. Recent studies of culture and personality indicate that social order is not given but historically developed ideas, beliefs, and patterns of conduct and of feeling which each culture has evolved as the guides to human conduct and the management of group activities.”

Whilst it is certainly true that the type of social order within many cultures is different from each other, the statement that “Social order is not given” has, in recent times, been shown to be false. Since the advent of the internet, the source of social order has been identified and is no longer believed to be an invisible force like gravity acting somewhere out in space. It is now believed to be manipulated by a clique of top international bankers and their programmes acted out through governments, particularly those of the United States and the European Union. It would seem that in recent times, social order is inversely proportional to economic stability. In other words, as the world economy goes to hell, there is a greater social crackdown on the citizenry. Whilst we are unaware that any US citizens have yet been 'rendered', the obvious question is how would we know since checks and balances are now things from a different age?

So far as I am aware there have been no physical conflicts by the US authorities against a large body of its own population apart from the police maintaining the status quo against demonstrators in Seattle, Miami and earlier in Watts. The military were used similarly in Little Rock according to the Force Act when the Alabama authorities refused to let the police intervene. The present effort seems to be a psychological war to undermine the moral confidence of the citizenry. Although there are too many examples to list here, I give a few to demonstrate what I mean.

Do you remember a year or two back a small You Tube clip that went viral of a great bear of a traffic cop tazing a 70 or 80 year old lady over some minor traffic offence. Was this released by a well meaning colleague or was it a set piece intended to build a picture in the mind of the general public? We are in control and you don't matter. This was followed a short time later by a video clip taken with a cell phone camera of students first being tazed and then shot by police in the public areas of a university.

Over in England, the ex government scientist Dean Warwick died on stage whilst in the middle of giving a lecture. Amongst the subjects he had planned to talk about was WTC 1 & 2 and his experience of bringing down different tall buildings, in Russia if memory serves, using only infra-sound waves. Also what really happened with the Lockerbie plane and why a small number of survivors were allowed to die on the hillside of hypothermia. He also said he was going to name the Antichrist. It was commonly believed that he was taken out with some sort of beam weapon which resonates the brain's delta waves. These are the subconscious ones which keep the body's heart and other organs functioning so the body's organs just stop working. A man holding a device which resembled a camera was seen laughing as he left the building after the death. A couple of months later it was reported that one of the minor Rockefeller's was taken out in a parked car in a similar way.

There has been much commentary on this blog and others that drones exist and could be used to break up demonstrations, insurrections and other forms of civil disobedience. If the type of beam weapons mentioned above could be incorporated into such drones then this would give the authorities an awesome advantage.

There have been many reports, on You Tube particularly, of hundreds of detention camps throughout America which according to popular belief, are intended for American citizens whenever the time comes. This is reinforced by images of fenced off fields stacked high with what are reported to be three person open coffins.

Is this all fantasy? The thing that gives it some credibility are the reports that came out of Iraq a little time ago that US troops stationed there were asked if they would be willing to stand militarily against US citizens on US soil. What a strange question, why was it asked at all if there was no intent behind it? And why did President Bush rescind the Posse Comitatus Act which now allows the military to do such things?

Let us remind ourselves where we came in, with the police captain's speech from Satantango.

"Captain: Not that human life was so highly valued. Keeping order appears to be the business of the authorities, but in fact it's the business of all. Order. Freedom, however, has nothing human. It's something divine, something... our lives are too short for us to know properly. If you're looking for a link, think of Pericles, order and freedom are linked by passion. We have to believe in both, we suffer from both. Both from order and freedom. But human life is meaningful, rich, beautiful and filthy. It links everything. It mistreats freedom only... wasting it, as if it was junk. People don't like freedom, they are afraid of it. The strange thing is there is nothing to fear about freedom... order, on the other hand, can often be frightening."

For me this is case proved.

Next time we will have a look to see if it is possible to rescue self order from the authorities. We will examine the part of the police captain's speech which says “Keeping order appears to be the business of the authorities, but in fact it's the business of all” and we will see if such a self ordered Anarchistic type, fairly well developed society has ever existed in the past.

THE RELIGION OF CONVENIENCE

2011-12-12T16:33:00.001-08:00

More on this picture below.

from Murph
I am going to propose a different perspective on our society today that I have not come across before. It has been an idea in the back of my mind for a lot of years now. It is the concept of the progress of western civilization and probably most of the world toward personal convenience.

It appears to me that most people are very happy to have much more convenience, which is in reality, less physical expenditure for a given goal. I realize that I indulge in this myself. There are several ramifications to this. Less physical and/or mental output for any desired goal means one more step toward physical atrophy and in many cases, mental atrophy.

Let’s examine the mental atrophy first.

When I was doing my practice teaching at the university, I noticed that the classrooms were filled with students happily punching in 2 + 2 into hand held calculators to get an answer, literally. Frankly, I was appalled. When I had my chance, I asked the classroom how many people thought that every time they punched in a request for an answer to an arithmetic problem that what the calculator told them in the readout was to always be assumed to be correct. Every one of them affirmed that it was always correct. At the time I was fresh out of classes engaged in all kinds of math problems and it was so long ago that I don’t remember the examples I used to show them that it wasn’t always true. I do remember asking them to give me an absolute number for pi. Of course this is not possible. For most hand held calculators, you get only 8 or so numbers that represent pi. I got some varied responses to this.

But, one of the results of students at the grade school level using calculators was that very simple arithmetic problems, (like multiplication) were seemingly beyond their abilities, same with simple addition, subtraction and division. I am forced to call this a form of mental atrophy.

Further, I found this to be true in other areas. Discernment, critical thinking, and logic were lacking, even at the university level of study. The convenience of calculators, computers and experts’ pronouncements on anything were accepted at face value rather than expend the mental energy to determine a truth for oneself. This mental atrophy can show up in some of the most obtuse areas. When we moved here to north central Oregon the “experts” told us that raising our own food was impossible, don’t bother to even try. Well, we found out that wasn’t a true statement, but most of the residents accepted it at face value. We and a very few others had to demonstrate that it was not a true statement and call attention to that fact. In the last couple of years, there has been a flurry of gardens and greenhouses in the area and the raising of small livestock for food.

I am sure that all of us can point to physical atrophy through convenient tools and gizmos that reduce our physical expenditures of energy. Otherwise there would be no reason to have workout gyms or home workout gadgets. Interesting, that sports do not fall into the concept of convenience but most of our daily lives do. It’s as if we are encouraged to make up for the convenience of daily life functions by being very extreme in our inconvenience of non-productive physical exertions. We are constantly being admonished to get off the convenient sofa and walk, run, go to the gym, whatever. And of course, there is the age thing to deal with; as we age, the ability to engage in non-convenience diminishes. I find interesting the proliferation of extreme sports activities that in actuality are quite dangerous. It’s as if the extreme convenience of modern life for most of us has to be compensated for by risking life and limb on dangerous sports.

In my younger days I participated very little in dangerous sports. Not that I wasn’t fascinated by them and wanted to, it just seemed that I never had the time or the money to participate. I was too wrapped up in expending energy on just living. Things like making money cutting, splitting, hauling and stacking firewood for the folks that would never be bothered with doing that. Or the making of things by hand for sale.

One of the themes running through the Archdruid posts is that convenience entails complexity, and that appears to be true to me. He further asserts that complexity also entails fragility, which also appears true to me. Complex technology has increased rather dramatically, in the last 200 years, the convenience of daily living. It would take very little to completely interrupt this technology and convenience. If a person has no idea how to make things, or how to maintain simple technology, and the complex technology is interrupted from whatever source, how would that person have a chance to survive? Examples; what percentage of our adult population knows how to either produce their own food or to even prepare it if they had it? Prepared boxed food that is tossed into the microwave or heated in a pan on the complex technology in the modern kitchen is the norm. I lived for a while in a city where almost without exception; the people I knew didn’t even have food in the refrigerator since they ate out at every meal.

IMO, we have carried the technology of convenience to such an extent that any interruption of this technology means a distinct lack of survival for most. It has also promoted the mental attitude of dependence and disdain for those that chose to not live that way. I’m a lazy old cuss, I want to find the easiest way to solve problems, and I have to admit that if I had the money to compensate, I probably would indulge in complex technology more than I do. You know, the bigger, better, more powerful machinery to accomplish a given task or to hire it done. I have to ask though; are we actually better off for it?

Let’s take a look at just one example of what is lost from a hi tech society with lots of convenience.

Only a few generations ago, we were predominantly an agrarian society wherein most families produced their own food. The extended family normally lived fairly close by. In the fall when the harvest came in, everyone got together and helped in the harvest and also got to share in the harvest. Also, fall was when the butchering of animals took place to supply winter meat, the steer, the hog, the rabbits the goose, etc. Everyone from toddlers to the oldsters took part. This is a far cry from going to the grocery store (the convenience) to doing it yourself. Without even touching on the quality of food difference, it did make the extended family all have skin in the game. In this only one example, convenience has an impact on social structure. I am sure all of you could come up with other examples that illustrate how convenience has affected social structure.

This also applies to the broader society, not just those in an extended family. The Amish are a good example of this cooperation between the whole community in projects that benefit everyone in the community and that group certainly cannot be accused of living with a whole bunch of technology to make their lives more convenient.

The top photo of a log building that encloses our wellhead is a personal example. We had loaned some money to a couple that were just flat out desperate. They reciprocated by helping us build that building. Now we could have bought sized lumber that probably would have been a lot easier to build, or even bought a pre-made small building and just had someone drop it on a rough foundation, a lot more convenient. But I had the small logs on hand taken off the property several years ago and a pretty good pile of reject lumber and roofing. I figure we have forged a much more lasting relationship doing it the less convenient hard way. Now believe me, I understand that our modern day life of long work hours to make the money to buy the convenience gizmos is the standard today. I spent a lot of years on that treadmill.

For the most part, it sure appears to me that the convenient life style has encouraged divisions between the populace rather than closeness and cooperation. I also think it has made our society a lot less resilient. Cripes sake, I live in a community of several thousands of people but yet there is only maybe a couple of dozen or so that I see face to face to exchange ideas and thoughts and to help each other out when there is a need. Depending on what value system you hold close to your heart, you can answer the question; are we better off?

Ramping Up

2011-11-26T12:19:00.000-08:00

(photo credit to wikimedia)

by murph

It sure appears to me that the worldwide and US situation is escalating in the protest department. It may get dampened a bit during the winter, but I do think it will pick up again come spring, barring some catastrophic event. The PTB are ramping up their suppression and their counter attacks are becoming more severe. If the protests do not degrade into negotiated talks, which the protestors will seriously lose, I do expect protests to increase and probably escalate into some form of violence, which of course the PTB will forcibly answer. If that indeed comes to pass, the character of the American public will be laid bare by their response.

I have run across some younger folks that when I talk about the doom and gloom crowd on the internet talking about how bad things will develop, I am hit with the idea that these folks are selling fear through their advertising. I wanted to point out that there was a big difference between scaring people for economic gain and warning them that bad events were coming and to get ready, with or without economic gain. There are some kinds of mindsets that simply are not worth the time to argue with. Of course when I come across the Pollyanna folks I figure they may feel the same way. Being a doomer is hard work and very seldom much in rewards. J These kinds of conversations remind me of a Robert Heinlein statement that optimists have more fun in life but the pessimists are more often right.

There has been a lot of discussion all over the internet, including this blog, that goes back and forth over the idea about violence to affect change. I would like to examine a bit the assumptions on both sides of the argument.

Those that advocate or predict violent responses to perceived injustice, of course, assume that they can win confrontations, particularly if they have enough people involved. In today’s world, with the modern technology involved in suppression of a populations uprising, (like Libya) this is a tenuous assumption. If the western powers had not intervened, the uprising in the Eastern countries and Africa probably would not have been successful. And, in those cases, the goals of the uprisings are highly suspect as to agendas and alliances. Another problem with the violent uprisings is the agreement that if they are successful, what is to take the place of the current way things are done. I look at the outcomes of the French, the Russian, the Chinese revolutions, and what forces took over in the aftermath and it sure doesn’t appear to be any better than what was fought against. The assumption that something better will be the result is not born out historically except in very few isolated examples.

On the other side of the discussion that proposes non-violence, their assumptions have some very real problems too. The first assumption revolves around that if sufficient pressure is brought to bear by non-violent protest, the situation will change, that those in power will see the legitimacy of the demands and change their policies. This contains another assumption that those in power will voluntarily give up some or all of their power. Historically, I don’t see this as a reasonable expectation (see Tibet’s non violent attempts at freedom from Chinese rule). Or, our own attempt at separation from English rule by peaceful protest and demonstrations, the protests by the Indians against the atrocities by the US government and their brutal suppression, or the protests after WWI by the veterans, or the peaceful protests of bailing out of the bankers not so long ago that were just flat out ignored.

I do realize that any movement to change the status quo by whatever means will result in attempts at more suppression and a lot of blood in the streets, at least in a figurative sense. I do not see the PTB voluntarily giving up power, ever. It has to be taken from them and they always seem to escalate the suppression dramatically every time that is attempted.

I do realize that if enough folks (in the 70% or above) all got on the same bandwagon, change would happen. In this country, that would mean around 200 million insisting on an agreed upon agenda. What is the chance of that happening today? I do not see a general consensus agreement on what needs to be changed nor what is to take its place. Yes, lots of discussion on this, and small groups of people do agree on a few things, but by no means a consensus of the population. If and when that consensus does happen, then watch out! Something will change. The scary thing for me is what groups agenda would prevail. If the Christian right had its way, we all would be living under Old Testament law as they interpret it. Frankly, blaming Katrina on homosexuals as god’s punishment as an agenda for social organization is scary to me.

Now maybe I purposely seek out writers that support my own view of what is happening. I do periodically seek out the other side of stuff, but am always disappointed. Rhetoric, outright false information and political ideology seem to be the only mainstay they have. None of which impresses me in the least.

The comments from the last posting were intense and plentiful. I must have spent 4 hours on them and the links within the links and the added stuff that looked interesting on the sites.

My inbox email is being overrun with political ads and propaganda, from all sides. Maybe I’m just prejudiced on the subject but the ones from the conservatives leave me thinking what a bunch of asses. Not that the liberal side is any better. After all, both sides of the political spectrum are bought and paid for by the same groups. I am left with the question of how any thinking person can vote for any of them. Maybe all this ideology talk should be settled by a duel at 20 paces. Oh, I forgot for a minute there, the Repugs would win hands down. What liberal would think of violence and guns to settle anything? But at least it would provide more profits for the popcorn distributors.

Other than a vast majority of citizens agreeing on an agenda and willing to take part in it, I do not see a successful non-violent change in the status quo. Our own revolution against the British had less than 40% of the population support, at least in the beginning. Same with our civil war and WWI. It takes time and propaganda to fire up a population to go to war or have a popular uprising.

I truly wish I could come up with a solution so that violence was not the outcome to affect the changes we need if we want to preserve any sense of freedom at all in our society. Freedom to be consumers and wage slaves is not freedom in my book. But to achieve anything else, control has to be wrested away from the corporations and the sociopaths that are currently in power and there must be a consensus about what to replace it with. Otherwise, it will just be another cluster fuck laid on all of us.

A Note from Belgium (satc)

2011-11-13T21:26:00.000-08:00

photo credit to SV40foundation.org

Belgium (From Belgium or Spirit Across the Sea) has kindly written a very informative post that I find shocking. We delayed posting it until I could get my nerves under control... Before reading, I would suggest that pie is in order...

Post No 1 of 2

It is very recently that Murph and Freeacre asked readers their opinion over the continuation of this blog. They had two main concerns, firstly they considered that over the years they had covered most bases and were having difficulty finding new subjects to write about. The second was that they had noticed that an increasing number of politically motivated bloggers were dropping out and wondered if they were being subjected to any pressure or at least that difficulties were being put in their way. They had concerns both for their own personal futures and also for those of their contributors and readers. Following an overwhelming positive response they decided to continue. I said I would write a couple of posts for the blog even though my output is not prolific. Typically for me I tackled the logically second post first and then went on to the first post which was about what we are not being told about Fukushima. I had two main sources for this, the first was the blog of Investigative Journalist Jim Stone with additional photos; charts and diagrams from Jennifer Lake's blog. Two days ago the following appeared as a header to Jim Stone's latest post.

“Update:

Sep 28 2011 What happened to Jim Stone?

After being detained without charges or a phone call for six days, even after repeated requests to be allowed to make a call to let friends and family know where I was, and to be allowed to call 4 radio programs to cancel appearances, I was released without charge within 43 minutes of FINALLY getting a call out in a way they did not plan for. They destroyed my business, destroyed the equipment and inventory, and forced me to flee. I have lost EVERYTHING and that is why I am now silent. Even posting this is probably a huge risk. I am under severe threat and will not post another article until I am certain I have found safety in a foreign nation. I have been left too devastated to get out of the country and am living on the streets. That's the price you pay for doing real research and getting the real truth out. Journalism, TRUTHFUL ground breaking journalism is DEAD in America.”

First MCR and now Jim Stone. It sure looks like he touched a nerve. I am determined that Murph and Freeacre whom I regard as friends should not be added to this list and so have abandoned the first post.

All the material I was going to use can be found here:

http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/fukushima.html
and here

http://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/category/1/

This has some overlapping material

http://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/category/radiation/

These articles are insanely long and my intended purpose here was to summarise them into a reasonable length without loosing the plot. Notwithstanding this I regard them as extremely important and would urge all those who want to stay appraised of the world events we don't usually get to hear about, to read them. With this introduction in place of a post and the footnotes at the end of the second post I am already well over normal length. I hope the Murphs regard them as two posts together and put them up as one piece. If they decide on balance that the material is too sensitive then I will understand.

Post No 2 of 2.

THE EFFECT OF RADIATION ON HUMANS

This is a serious subject but lets start off with a question you may think you know the answer to because the real answer made my eyes open wide.

What disease, caused either solely by radiation or radiation in combination with toxic pollution has the greatest effect on people, world wide, in modern times?

Those of you who said radiation sickness, well it was a brave try but unless you have actually witnessed a nuclear test, been one of the clean up workers at Chernobyl or live in the immediate vicinity of Fukushima then this one is not likely to affect you.
The ones who said cancer in any of its various forms are getting up there but it is not the biggie.
Line up for a gold star, all those who gave the correct answer of polio myelitis or its big brother influenza.
Not so many I see. This information is a real eye opener and jaw dropper.

So many questions come tumbling into the mind at the same time. How can it be caused by radiation when everyone knows that both of these diseases are viral? If polio is so prevalent then how come we never hear about it? I thought we eliminated polio in the 50's along with smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever and a host of other nasties? If polio is still around at the levels you say then what was the Salk vaccine all about with its initial main shot and two subsequent boosters? Didn't it work?

I shall be addressing all of these questions throughout this article but lets start by answering what class of disease polio myelitis actually is and how it works. But first to deal with the question that is still hanging in everybody's minds, whatever polio is and we are getting into that, a double sized polio unit is known as the disease influenza.

Polio is a brain infection, sometimes involving the nerves of the spinal cord and sometimes not. It never went away like they say. Most people who get it have a mild case of flu and then it’s gone –almost no one thinks twice about it or ever guesses that it might be something other than the familiar symptoms of a normal ‘bug’

Not climbing the mountain of lies surrounding the nature of the disease will not preserve the life you have now because at the heart of Polio’s story are the most fundamental issues of Life. The future of your experience has been pre-determined unless you take an active role in moderating the outcome. The War on Germs is a War on You. Take it personally.

But how is it that people who were properly vaccinated as children end up sick with polio as adults? How is it that a paralytic illness called Guillain-Barre Syndrome struck hundreds of Americans in the round of 1976 swine flu vaccines? What’s happening in the world today with Alzheimer’s and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, MS and other neurological illnesses afflicting so many? Is it normal? Is it contagious? Is it pollution? Does it cause cancer? Is it in the vaccines? A frightening surge of perplexing illnesses, including AIDS and Ebola have emerged since the late 1970s. Are these “polio-like” in some way? Is there a parallel in the 1970s and 80s with the emerging illnesses that followed the Spanish Flu in the 1920s and 30s? More questions than answers appear, but unravelling the history of polio has surprising discoveries in store.

First, we need to know what polio is, the way medical experts describe it, and second we need to know that the official historical record began erasing polio as quickly as possible in the mid-1950s in order to give the appearance of creating a successful vaccine –successful, not in the ordinary sense, but in the triumphant and heroic sense of the Greatest Medical Achievement of All Time!

I am not a microbiologist and I hope that I have this right but as I understand it the whole thing works like this. Radiation from whatever source attacks the brain and sometimes the brain stem and spinal chord . Collectively this is known as the Central Nervous system. The exact location of this attack depends on the type of radiation, its frequency and strength. The brain is slower to show signs of this attack than other bodily organs however the specific part of the brain under attack controls a specific part of the body or organ. For instance polio attacks the part of the brain which controls the lower part of the body particularly the legs and this is noticed before brain damage becomes apparent. In order to try to protect itself the brain collects proteins and other chemicals which will minimise the effect of the radiation from the ganglia (the part of the brain which is not associated with neurons, synapses or motor functions). This collection of chemicals does not have a 'life force' and is known as a virus which is then absorbed into the brain cells under attack by the radiation. So contrary to what we have been told before, virus's are the good guys not the bad ones. The composition and size of virus's are specific to the type of radiation and hence to the part of the brain under attack. Flu virus's are similar but bigger than polio virus's and are specific to a different region of the brain. Mostly the virus's do their job and the brain repels the effect of the radiation allowing the effect of the disease to just go away but sometimes the strength of the radiation overwhelms the cells containing the virus and this is when damage to the CNS sets in with associated varying degrees of debility.

Paralytic polio was a rare disease before the Industrial Age but the palsies were not uncommon and known to be caused by toxic medicines containing mercury, arsenic and other assorted ingredients, referred to as “mercurial diseases”. Examples of toxic paralysis are all around us in nature. Snakes, spiders and species of fish in particular emit potent neurotoxins as a means of food gathering and survival defence. Our ancestors coined the word “virus” in its original meaning of “poison”, a concept that still resonates with us now although a false belief persists that viruses are living things, encouraged by the inaccurate use of words like “live” and “killed”. Viruses are biochemical structures with crystalline shapes and coded genetic information very similar to enzymes. They’re considered key components of evolutionary change, carried in the cells of living organisms which transmit viral ‘programs’ into the greater environment, internally and externally. Viral infections are usually specific to the type of tissue infected because they are biochemically ‘directed’ and require a precise set of conditions to occur, including “receptors”. Viral infections can arise when living cells die and decompose, their viral components released in a phenomenon called a “cytopathic effect”. This is why antibiotics don’t work on viral infections, and can actually increase the presence of virus.

Large inputs of new chemicals introduced in the 1860s began affecting small pockets of people who shared geographic proximity, industrial labours, or contamination sources With hindsight, it’s easy to see how the Rothschilds' and Rockefellers' institutionalized their practice of eugenics. It’s much harder to encompass the scope in our present time and realize that millions of good people have been miseducated into helping them execute their plans. But planned it is. Hand over hand in the great military-industrial complex that we were warned to watch, ironically by the same man under whose tenure the polio vaccine came to fruition, the wheel has come full circle (President Eisenhower - ed).

Speaking on behalf of the Gulf War Syndrome researchers, Dr. Howard Urnovitz happened to relate his graduate experience in the lab inducing polio in animals with chemicals or radiation. Radiation! Why has no one else told us that radiation causes polio? The obvious answer is that we might dig into the record and find out that almost everything we learned about disease is a lie and we totter now on the brink of losing the last domain which we thought was truly our own –our genes and chromosomes. If the establishment choice of ‘treatment’ is an indication of how we are being targeted for control, Dr Urnovitz’s words are right on the money. “It’s not the germs –it’s the genome.”
Through the use of X-ray experiments, and subsequent studies on fallout, we can finally see the connection to polio and understand how hundreds of disease conditions were brought into unnatural being

___________
These are quotes from research documents dating from the 1950s and 60s, most of them prepared under military auspices. The chief military concern was human performance under conditions of the Nuclear Battlefield:
“Radiation-Induced changes in the nervous system’s..central role in behaviour makes it the presumed primary mediator of radiation-induced performance deficits.” (Radiation makes soldiers performance diminish - ed).
“…One hypothesis is that a sufficiently large radiation dose causes permanent brain lesions, demyelination,and necrosis, which in turn produce chronic behavioural deficits. In addition, short-lived behavioural phenomena may be mediated by transient vascular changes that induce edema or ischemia in the CNS (Central nervous system - ed). A second hypothesis is that performance changes are mediated by significant alterations in brain function due to neurochemistry and neurophysiology. As is often the case, there is some truth in both hypotheses”
“A review of many standard radiobiology textbooks reveals the common belief that the adult nervous system is relatively resistant to damage from ionizing
radiation exposure…however, this view was eroded when it was later shown that the latency period for..radiation damage..is simply longer than it is in other organ systems.”
“In the brain…different topographical regions may have varying susceptibility to ionizing radiation.
…gamma nerve fibres are more sensitive…reflexes are more radioresistant than motor coordination..indicating that radiation mainly affects the functions of the subcortico-brainstem formations of the brain.”
“The phenomena of latent Central Nervous System radiation damage (with doses above the threshold) has been well documented.
…speculation on the likely pathogenesis of late radiation lesions reveals (a) radiation may act primarily on the vascular system…and (b) radiation may have a primary effect on cells of the neural parenchyma ['parenchyma' means "primary organ tissue"]

There are thousands upon thousands of declassified and publicly produced medical citations in the GWU archives indicating all manner of conceivable experiments with radiation and radioactive chemicals on human beings. Paralysis, cancer, birth defects, psychological disorders – this is just a taste. X-ray abuse was an essential component in paving the way for nuclear proliferation and high-energy weapons. Chemical giant Monsanto, wartime operator of the Oak Ridge nuclear facility along with Union Carbide, began pumping out reactor-made radioisotopes for medical ‘study’ in 1946 under the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission and its chief, David Lilienthal http://citizen2009.wordpress.com/monsanto/. The imperative of covering up the radiation cause of polio, and “racing for a vaccine” after 1945, is obvious in retrospect. The military-medical establishment put its top guns on the task. The anomalous propaganda and distortion of polio takes on a meaningful light with the knowledge that Operation Polio was integral to maintaining and advancing nuclear weapons. The Salk vaccine was a massive radiation experiment

This graph was designed only to bolster the DDT cause of polio, and yet it more accurately supports the radiation cause, strengthening an argument that pesticide poison data helps to cover-up the mass irradiation of the public. In reality, it does not. Careful perusal of this graph demonstrates radiation exposure, including the accident at Chernobyl (but not Three Mile Island until cumulative problems emerged between 1982-83). There’s nothing on the graph for 1979, yet it is famously known within the polio story that outbreaks among the Amish in 1979 were the “last wild polio” cases in North America. It simply doesn’t rate. The first burp on the line appears in 1887 and disappears completely in 1967. It’s assumed that less than one thousand recorded polio cases in a given year don’t show at all, because Zero cases in any year since the 1890s, the introduction of x-rays and radium, has never happened. In 1983, the line takes off like a rocket with the inclusion of ‘post-polio’ diagnosis (cumulative TMI fallout from ‘venting’), peaking in 1986 (Chernobyl), dropping fast to 1991 and falling as rapidly as the ’83 rise over the course of 1992, where it levels near the case-rate of 10,000.

Heady stuff for contemporary thinkers. 90,000 commercial chemicals, gene-destabilizing radiation, and 150 years of conditioned social science later we stand on our own crossroads. Scientists have the means and the will to “build better humans”. The issues are matters of utility. Weapons and Germ Theory have proved-out the degenerate lot of the human species. The Nuclear Age’s Baby-boom generation is mature: yesterday’s polio children are in their Golden Years but Americans would probably not survive another assault of the kind perpetrated in the 1950s. Our bodies are more fragile. The fallout from atomic-bombs has been estimated to be equivalent to 40,000 Hiroshima-sized blasts, or 16kt of deadly poisons 40,000 times over. It came down with the snow and rain, grew up with the grasses and trees, and the cycle is repeating itself with Chemtrails as we shift from Nuclear to Nanotech, biologically speaking. Nuclear energy is not going away. In fact, more is planned and the medical research hierarchy is devising ways of reconfiguring entrovirus 71 DNA to become radio-resistant.

In 1963, it also became public news that the Salk and Sabin vaccines were contaminated with a monkey virus called SV40, now known as the most useful biological agent in creating artificial transgenic lifeforms. How deep does this experiment go?

Here is a list of diseases that are polio by another name or are medically very closely related to polio.

Accute flaccid paralysis
Entrovirus 71 (Real polio's new name)
Meningitis
Encephalitis
Influenza / Grippe (the French name is common in Europe)
Parkinson's
Multiple Sclerosis
Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Lupus
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Guillain-Barre Sindrome
Fibromyalgia (Sorry about that one but it was in the list)
Alzheimer's
Creutzfeld Jacob Disease
West Nile Virus (Real polio)

(FDR caught infantile paralysis when he was 39 except it isn't contagious so best medical opinion decided it was Guillain-Barre syndrome)

Footnotes

1 I would like to introduce you to Jennifer Lake. All of the material
for this post and the previous one came from either of her two blogs.
http://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/about/
http://polioforever.wordpress.com/what-is-polio/

Jennifer was a nursing student who read extensively around her subject. As a result she discovered that polio was caused by radiation alone or radiation together with toxic waste. She also discovered the depth of the fraud of the military industrial medical complex in creating modern disease, not for use just against an enemy but against the population at large. She gave up her studies to concentrate on research because she had no intention of patching people up for another ride on the health bus only for them to get thrown off again further down the road. The result is the two blogs listed above. In two years they have become an extensive work. New articles are tagged and tagged headings appear down the side of the page. An article appears in full as part of each tag so the whole subject can be read without going backward and forwards.

2 Colloidal Silver

I know some of you are into ingesting this for health reasons. I would recommend those people to read Jen's article “Every silver lining has a black cloud” subtitled “How the PTB got the informed to poison themselves.” You can then make a balanced decision on how you proceed.
Detox is usually performed with a class of chemicals called chelates (pronounced key-lates). This is a class of chemicals which seeks out heavy metals and traps them in a spatial arrangement of atoms known technically as steric hindrance. It can be thought of like a hand and fingers gripping a tennis ball however there is no chemical bond between the chelate and the metal. The body then disposes of the chelated metal in the usual way.

3 German New Medicine

I found this through Jennifer Lake's blog and was so seduced by this I was considering writing a third post about it. After getting fairly deep into microbiology for beginners for a couple of weeks I decided it was all Emperor’s Clothes and so I junked it.

The theory goes like this. Other diseases, cancer particularly, also begin with a physical assault inside the head in a similar way to radiation. According to Dr. Hamer, who invented the theory, this is not some Freudian psycho babble but a real effect that can be detected on a CT scanner. Like radiation this is always associated with a physical disease at a part of the body controlled by the brain at the point where where the brain attack occurs. The effect of disease is actually the healing process and not some random act of terrorism by nature. As the body heals then also does the brain. There is a lot more to it than that but this is the theory distilled down to its essence. The initial problem I had with this is how does leukaemia and other diseases of the blood occur since the blood doesn't have a site, it is everywhere. I did some reading around and found that Dr Hamer is not all that he first appears but that in itself does not make his theory wrong. The non-sequitur step is the initial supposition that other diseases attack the CNS in the same way as radiation. This combined with the fact that anomalies or quirks in the CT brain scan results is a known issue of some models of generation 1 CT scanners. The best thing on this one is to let you decide for yourself. I think however that Jennifer Lake is letting herself down a bit by endorsing this theory without mentioning there is unresolved controversy over it.

Here is the pro argument:

http://www.newmedicine.ca/overview.php

And here is the anti:

http://anaximperator.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/german-new-medicine-hamer-house-of-horror/

It should not be implied from this that I am throwing my weight behind Anaximperator. I consider him to be a shrill for big pharma. His purpose seems to be to denigrate anything that is not established mainstream treatment. If anything new shows promise or is well received such as this which appeared in New Scientist:

http://www.rexresearch.com/diclacet/dca.htm

it is just never mentioned, not a sausage, not even a hint of a whisper even though a well researched guy like him must know of its existence. On the balance of probabilities, however I am going with the sticky mud theory.

Making "Change"

2011-11-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

by murph

Those of us that spend a disproportionate amount of time getting their news and views off the internet (like us) are seeing more and more discussion about the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) movement. Every web site that I go to daily for information and commentary are dealing with it to some extent. On a personal level, I have to lend moral support to those folks that are out demonstrating against the big banks and the Federal Reserve.

However, upon close examination it sure appears to me that all this demonstrating, occupying some small area of a city and chanting will be for naught. The reason I say this is because of the assumptions these demonstrations have to justify their happening, namely; 1. That change in the economic system can be affected by the citizens by the demonstrations, 2. That the demonstrations are taking place in an environment where the government is sensitive and hopefully sympathetic to the demonstrators, and 3. That our government is an independent entity (not controlled by the financial interests). None of those assumptions appear to be true to me.

Charles Smith in Monday’s post put up a link to a Tyler Durden article, which outlines what he thinks should also be done. His article contains much of the same kind of assumptions that the OWS demonstrators have. Common throughout Durden's article and others of the same sentiment is the theme that the money has to be removed from the big banks and the Federal Reserve has to be abolished. There are many more assumptions contained in these ideas, namely removing money from the election process, doing something about the Supreme Court being another toady group for big financial interests, citizen financing of the electoral process, term limitations and so forth. I happen to agree with all of it.

However, upon close examination of these problem-solving ideas, there are some rather palatable big problems that I can see being created.

For instance, removing money from the too big to fail banks, that is, closing your accounts and taking possession of the money, such as it is. For those citizens that have bank accounts of one type or another, that means doing SOMETHING with the cash. Hide it under a mattress or bury a fruit jar full of it or put it into a small regional bank or a credit union? I have seen no commentary on what would happen or what the PTB response would be if that became a mass movement.

So let’s take a look at the probable PTB response. They could create the environment and/or laws where small regional banks and credit unions could not operate and force you to use the to big to fail institutions. They could force a cashless economy for those who insist on having in hand possession of the cash money. If you start investigating this you will find that the push to a cashless society is actually underway. In Louisiana you supposedly cannot buy and sell used goods with cash anymore. Toll roads all over the country are going cashless. The internet is full of examples of this push to a cashless society. When we can avoid it, we do not use the big international banks either. But, I so see that if a lot of momentum in the populace to remove money from the big international financial system caught on, there would be a big response from the financial elites.

Lots of other suggestions abound to fight the big money interests. Going to a mostly barter system for exchanging goods, going to a gold and silver means of exchange, etc. I do hope that you all realize that the IRS does not like barter systems because then flow of capital in whatever form is neither traceable nor taxable. If that caught on, you can bet the screws would be tightened up on that. In fact, in many states right now, barter is considered illegal under some circumstances. In the news has been a bunch of instances where coop farms, (a form of barter) is prosecuted and shut down and food coops are being shut down, again a form of barter and localization.

Going to local currencies and script for trade has been in the past and currently being shut down by law enforcement. Just try and issue a local currency in your community to cut out the big banks for their grabbing a chunk of the dough. If local currencies gained much traction you can bet there would be a massive effort to stop it.

All of this is to enforce the use of plastic as currency and focus control by the financial elites.

Of course, it sure appears to me that the financial elite’s control of money and its usage has been going on forever. The means of control has remained rather constant over time. The government and its control over law enforcement, enactment of advantageous laws and control of the military make sure the uppity citizens that want to keep a bigger share of whatever capital in whatever form is available are thwarted, and ensures the flow to the top people at any given time in the financial world. It also appears to me that enforcement of this has worked by keeping citizens afraid of all sorts of things. Enforced starvation and/or poverty, incarceration and even death being the most potent forms of fear based control.

Again, I encourage people to look at assumptions contained in solutions to the many problems that are engaging societies. They will be the death of many legitimate movements to change how things are done.

In my view, as long as most of societies view government as the means controlling how people interact with each other and controls their well being, it will not improve the situation. There was a certain amount of truth to Reagan’s statement that “government IS the problem”.

I think that the latest essay by Survival Acres (Oct 31) is a synapses of our situation these days. Although he is the king of gloom and doom for sure, it doesn’t take away from his premises and conclusions. His conclusion that humans on this planet are a blight and are doomed to extinction may indeed be a bit extreme, all due to our hubris about ourselves. It also seems fairly obvious that if we don’t change our ways of living that we very well could drive ourselves to extinction, along with almost all other living things on this planet. I do not believe that it is necessarily inevitable though, even if a definite possibility. Whatever the conditions of development in humans to end up where we are today is not necessarily a condition that has to be perpetuated. Humans can change, perhaps a bit of oddity in the animal kingdom on this planet. If humans are incapable of changing how they view themselves and what they do, down the road I do not see how we can survive as a species. Hell, there is even a question of survival in the lives that inhabit this planet today.

I see but one solution. Humans must change.

Seduced by Curiosity

2011-10-11T04:52:00.000-07:00

Things are pretty good at the homestead.

by freeacre

“I, too, have been seduced by the Intellect - obsessed with "understanding" and "knowing what is going on," I can while away hours, big hunks of days and years, trying to put it all together in my head, despite wrong information, lies, deception, with enough just enough truth thrown in to keep things going.” From freeacre

Zoner shared in the comments from the last post, that he has come to terms with not knowing, and now he has more time for his kids and his guitar. Somehow, a balance between awareness of the world and a subjective immediate immersion in one’s own life and location needs to be established, it seems to me.

I was mulling over the conversation regarding a “fast” or a “slow” crash as I walked around the property in my pajamas the other morning. I was checking out the garden and the greenhouses while being followed by the poultry posse. After all, it was upon reading Michael Ruppert in 2002 and 3 that we began to anticipate a fast crash. Ruppert nailed the timing of the real estate bust. It gave us time to take out a home improvement loan, pay off the car and the credit card debt and re-model the house. We figured that we had a year to fix up the home and sell it before the housing market tanked. I am grateful to that “knowing what is going on” fixation. As you all know, we sold the house in Tahoe, moved to central Oregon, and bought the cheapest acre with a mobile home in the local MLS listings in September of 2004. And retired.

That was seven years ago.

Anticipating the crisis that would manifest once Peak Oil became a household term (we figured around 2006), we began stocking up on food supplies, and began to compost our leftovers and planted a garden a year after that. It’s a good thing that peak oil has not caused the disruption that we thought it would. I mean, it has led to all sorts of political and financial mischief, wars, etc. But, so far the gas is still in the pumps. The oil barons are just pumping it now from deep waters where the damage will not only be to the land and air, it will now extend to the seas as well. I guess the big plan was to reduce our use of oil by getting rid of manufacturing. Americans can all be waiters, stockbrokers, bank tellers, ski-slope trimmers or whatever… Yeah, that was a plan. We can see how that one is working out. I guess it did buy some time. And the rich have been able to get richer, so their plan seems to have worked. I had a different plan. But then life hit.

That food we stored up is going bad now that the expiration dates have long since expired. I guess we were not as diligent as we should have been regarding the “rotating” of the canned goods. For openers, it took murph about two years to convince me that rotating the cans didn’t mean turning them upside down. Well, anyway, I digress…

I was walking around in my p.j.’s thinking about a “fast crash” with a sense of irony. If and when things ever really fall apart it might seem fast. But, it will be like the actress who works her ass off for years in small plays and bit parts, all the while learning her craft and making the right contacts. Then “all of a sudden” she gets a part in a film that puts her on a whole new star track for the foreseeable future. So, was that sudden or not? Depends on how you look at it.

So, for us, living in a way that anticipated coping with immanent disaster, has led us to the way we are now. We’re feeling pretty secure on the crisis front. We have not slacked in our efforts to cope in a post electronic and post petroleum world. The latest effort that murph is making with the help of this young couple who are our friends, is to build a well house over the well head that will shelter a hand pump installed in the well. I figure that if an EMP from the sun or some man-made weapon takes out our electricity, we had better figure a way to get water than standing outside in the winter dipping it out by hand with an Amish dipper. So now, thanks to the Lehyman’s non-electric catalog, we have the hand pump, and soon we’ll have the shelter as well. Just, you know, in case…

Peak Oil doesn’t seem to be the critical issue right now. But, after reading Matt Savinar’s blog for years (Life After the Oil Crash – Breaking News), there is no doubt that it is having an impact on our lives – and fortunes. It’s probably part of what drove the money mutants to ramp up the finance industry with real estate and assorted derivatives when they couldn’t depend on Oil anymore. So, The Rich have been squeezing it out of the The Rest for the last thirty years or so. They also have been enriching the military-industrial complex, running the international drug trade, and propping up the stock market with the laundered drug money. They’ve managed, world-wide, to centralize banking to the point that sovereign nations are secondary to the regional currency, as with the Euro. The plan to institute the Amero for us, Canada, and Mexico seems to have stalled after many of the neo-cons left Washington D.C. It’s probably still on the books.

A different warning that Ruppert, et al, also trumpeted years ago was about debt. He and many money gurus counseled avoiding being crippled by personal debt. But, back then they were really pissing into the wind. Advertising, media, and international corporations merged and became the communications arm of the globalist bankers. Computers, cell phones, desk-tops, iPads, television programs combined with social networking – all commercials for stuff and more stuff to purchase with a credit card, of course. And now banks are going to charge a fee for us slackers who do not maintain at least a $1,500 balance of debt!! It’s like a pimp telling his lady to not come home without at least five hundred dollars. What a pimp job.

Most of the kids growing up didn’t have a chance. Everybody told them they had to go to college at all costs if they were to have any chance at all to jump onto the gravy train. Many even signed up for the armed services just to get the chance to someday go to college. Now, on average, they are graduating at least $25,000 in debt at an interest rate that most of them will never be able to re-pay and from which there is no bankruptcy recourse. Debt servitude. That’s slavery without the housing. With not near enough jobs in site, for them, the shit HAS hit the fan. And, on top of that, the country just put them in the position of footing the bill for the trillions of dollars of national debt – all owed to the same detestable douche bags (Yes, that’s you, the Federal Reserve). And there is no real promise of any social security or any other help from the government for them.

Engineered or not, this is getting pretty close to the spontaneous combustion stage. If you think back to most of the rioting in the world, it’s mostly youth who feel that they have nothing to look forward to or to lose. Who can blame them? School loans and growing up with no medical and dental have taken their toll on a lot of them. With the “take over” movement, maybe the oldsters will stop whining long enough to take a look at what young people’s suffering looks like, what families are going through, Reminds me of the poem by Langston Hughes,

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Well, here in my backyard, I’m not sensing any explosions. Even the comets and asteroids, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, earthquakes, planetary alignments, stuff falling from space, the marching magnetic poles of the earth, and the alignment with the Galactic Center seem to be managing to hold things together without my help. One of my biggest problems is that my pole beans only produced two beans in the greenhouse. Why? Why?
But, still we build a hand pump onto the well. By now, it’s not so much for the Crash – fast or slow. It’s because more and more it feels good to be connected – to the land, the water, the garden, the animals. It tastes good to eat mostly stuff that is not contaminated with godknowswhat. We like the neighbors and friends we have developed here. We are on a first name basis with our city and county commissioners, as well as the DEQ and the planning commission’s steering committees.
Sometimes I have to remind myself to tear away from all the things that are sick and wrong, and focus on what’s around me that has worked out right, even though it was not a well-controlled event.
But, once again, I think the Overlords already have a plan to deal with the troublesome Useless Eaters. Take a look at Clif High’s most recent post. He anticipates a Shock & Awe event around the 15th of this month if I am not mistaken.
There goes that Compulsion to Know thing again. Rats!

Related:

http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONv-xrjC9Qg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWgwJP3YCPk&feature=email

http://www.halfpasthuman.com/grunch.html

MIDDLE CLASS WOES

2011-09-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

HSW calls this the circle of everything

from Murph
MIDDLECLASS WOES

Upon investigation, the term middle class is a real tough definition. We tend to want to define it in terms of income. That is not complete because a $30 -$50 grand income supports very large variables in standards of living, depending on where you are locating that income. Manhattan and $50 grand income is nothing. In Podunk city a $50 grand income is indeed upper middle class. I think that middle class should be defined as the amount of income left over after a very basic cost of living, and that does not include a 3000 sq ft house in the burbs with a BMW in the driveway. It seems that when distributed across the US, middle class is commonly accepted as incomes anywhere from $50 grand a year to $100 grand a year.

I did a bit of poking around and the difference in definitions of middle class is spectacular. Industrial countries all define it different. But it appears to me that it is mostly dependent on the amount of stuff you can buy over and above basic median living costs of the area you are living in.

So how does middle class life style show up in job demographics? After perusing government stats and several papers on the subject, I have to conclude that for the most part, middle class jobs consist of what we call white collar jobs, that is, jobs that make nothing and mostly consist of paper and computer work and supervisory positions. Parts of the health care areas that are middle class and several other areas are exceptions to that.

It appears that the most meaningful demographics on middleclass indicate that it comprises about 30%-50% of the working part of society.

Now what got me started on this is that for the last several years’ economic commentaries from a variety of authors are bemoaning the decrease in the amount of middle class households. Other than the idea that middle class incomes are the mainstay of government taxes and support of the consumer society, they haven’t much else to say on the subject. Oh the poor middle class, they are disappearing and it’s all the fault of government taxation and confiscation of wealth that class had accumulated. Bull shit!

There have been several periods in this country when the middle class had heavily invested in stocks and commodities through various means and that was where a lot of their wealth was centered. Direct buying into stocks and things like 401K investments. In what appears to me as a valid perspective on that; it was a gamblers position. So when we had the big financial dump in 2008 these people got hurt, they lost all or a large percentage of their wealth holdings. Now do we have sympathy with the folks that go into a casino and lose a bundle? Of course not. We know the casino is loaded against the gambler. Well, investing in the financial services and stocks and municipal bonds and all the other forms of finding a means of making money with no output of effort is a gamble. If the financial situation turns sour, as it has, you lose. All of this investment effort was directed to increasing ones money holding with free money and making no productive effort in doing so, in other words, trying to get something for nothing over and above your original payout.

Same thing applies to other investments. Housing and land are a very good example. Remember during the early 2000’s that the common concept on land and housing is that they would never go down in value, that is, what they could be exchanged for in dollars. Well, the middle class bought hook line and sinker into that and many got burned with the housing crash. All of a sudden, their million dollar home cannot be sold for anywhere near their purchase price. And, in conjunction with that, many had refinanced multiple times so that they owe much more than the property can be sold for. Under water home ownership indeed! I feel their pain!

My lack of sympathy extends to more than the financial aspect too. What economic class bought into the consumer society? It sure wasn’t the poor folks that barely got by, at least originally. I think it is apparent where that has gotten us; Huge degradation of the environment, huge usage of non-renewable resources, and the throw away society. As a class of consumers I reckon that is something to hold up with pride, right?

The middle class has always jumped on the wagon carrying the value system that “I got mine and if you ain’t got yours, your either lazy or god doesn’t approve of you at all” That last part was in very common usage from about the end of the civil war to the last great depression, encouraged by the Christian value systems of the time. Although I have had that attitude expressed to me countless times over the years and a lot of the new age semi religion advocate it in a variety of forms. Did that attitude encourage the “greed is good” value system? I would posit yes it did and then along came Ayn Rand and Bernays, and Karl Rove and Leo Strauss that reinforced it at the government level. You know, “the American way of life is non-negotiable” stuff out there.

During the heydays of the American industrial revolution the blue collar workers could actually have some hope of reaching the middle class position. Many did. WWII helped a lot on that also. The late 40’s and the 50’s were the period of the largest percentage of middle class folks in our society. It’s been down hill since the 60’s for a variety of reasons. Since 1944, inflation has devalued the dollar by over 90% and wages began a very noticeable stagnation since the 60’s, that is, blue collar workers pay didn’t even keep pace with inflation. The incomes of certain types of jobs did increase enormously, from the middle class jobs up to the elites income in the form of investments and the complete financialization of the economy, to where today; those with the top positions have increased their share of the countries incomes and wealth way beyond whatever justification you might offer. Multiple million dollar bonuses are absurd, especially when they are causing so much grief down the ladder of economic class.

I would expect to get some disagreements on this kind of analysis, but for me, the data speaks for itself. I have no sympathy for the downgrade of the middle class. They brought it all upon themselves as far as I can see and with rare exception, their value systems suck.

That said, I return to a brief statement about the last post on SF and Greer.

Several people noted that Greer and some other writers have, in a nutshell, a real ego problem. It shows up in their comments concerning disagreement of perceptions or reasoning and in some cases, of data. I can understand the impulse to defend ones position on some subject; hell I do it too. This subject of defense of ones most cherished beliefs I have covered before. When a person’s beliefs are based on ideology rather than a realistic assessment of what is transpiring around them, that person then becomes immersed in a defensive position, and is a trap easy to fall into. My father years ago had what I considered a piece of wisdom for me; every thoughtful person should take out their most cherished beliefs and examine them very periodically for how they work, consequences and how they match up with the reality around them. If they no longer work, or have undesirably consequences or not match up with the reality around them, then change those beliefs. Unfortunately, this usually involves some mental energy and usually some emotional pain, both of which are generally avoided by most people. You first have to admit that your stance is/was wrong. Not an easy thing for most to do, a contradiction of the ego. I am using “belief” here in a broad sense; A commitment to an idea or pattern of ideas that may or may not have substantial data to support it. An example. A writer that Freeacre and I have followed for years maintains that all questioning and conspiracy theories concerning 9-11 are bullshit, there is ample evidence that none of those theories have weight. I along with some others have suggested to him that he needs to dig a bit deeper into the data, which he adamantly refuses to do and has shut down all discussion on the subject. His sole defense that he has presented to me is an article in Popular Mechanics put out in Feb of 2005. (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/1227842)
It’s as if Popular Mechanic has the last word on the subject. When I take that article and compare it to a lot of the other 9-11 data dug up by supposedly reliable researchers, the PM article becomes a joke, in my opinion of course. Read it if you haven’t before. It is easy to tear it apart using other data from other “experts”. Now, this writer is seemingly unable to delve deeper into this controversy. What are the consequences of a general population doing the same? Does this position actually work with the additional data being presented? Or, is my stance (beliefs) on the corruption of high elites in our government and the reliability of the “science experts” that presented this article in PM not realistic and am I taking a stance that has no basis in reality?

In reality, the best an individual can do is to examine as much of the data available on any subject and come to some kind of conclusion (Belief) concerning it. That mine is very contradictory to the above writer’s conclusions proves nothing. It appears that this problem of “beliefs” on any subject is a black hole that cannot be resolved. If a person is conscientious about such stuff and keeps an open mind to new information that can be considered reliable, we can hope that we are at least somewhat in alignment with the reality of the situation. However, it appears to me that we can never be absolutely sure of that. I honestly try and keep in a mental space where I can change those “beliefs” with sufficient evidence to the contrary. LOL But we all know that 9-11 was an inside job.

As a side note, I find it very interesting that large amounts of the elites are assembling in and around Denver Colorado, where the huge underground city (documented) has been built. Does this have anything to do with space events that have been posited that promise to be detrimental to life on earth? I guess if that huge solar flare heading for earth actually happens and fries most everything on the surface, all we can really do is put up the lawn chairs and enjoy the light show as it comes at us.

This brings up my last comment for this post. One of the common assumptions is that the elites are people who, at its most basic level, are pretty much just like us. You know, the putting their pants on one leg at a time kind of thing. While their value systems we take issue with, they are not necessarily more intelligent than we are but, obviously more clever at making money and exercising power. I’m beginning to question that assumption for these reasons. Outside of the newly rich, the power families of this world are very closed, in some cases inbred and their children are raised having just about every advantage this world has to offer in education and health care. Would this lead to a dynasty in these families of overall superior intelligence and abilities? Notable exceptions do appear, like our last president, either that or he was immensely clever at disguising his superiority and appear as just another dumb Billy Bob. With smart breeding and culling of the less desirable traits, humans can do the same thing as we do with domesticated animals, breed for the desirable traits. Now there obviously is not data on this kind of speculation, but I do wonder about it. If it is true, us other mere mortals are so doomed. In which case I just can hope that when the elites emerge from their underground cities that there is enough of a wasteland left that they all commit suicide from depression. Sigh.

I can't believe these feathered dinosaurs. They actually threatened me with a moratorium on eggs if I didn't hurry up and get the grain out!

Science Fiction and the Future

2011-09-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

Dehydrated cherry tomatoes. Finally getting some things from the Garden!

by murph

SCIENCE FICTION AND THE FUTURE

I know many of our readers follow The Archdruid postings. I do faithfully. A few of them I considered important enough to archive into storage. John Michael Greer (the archdruid) I have great respect for. Knowledgeable, well read, studious, pays attention to details and a good writer and I seldom have serious dispute with his postings.

However, I have to take exception to his Sept. 7 post titled “Invasion of the Space Bats” that is concerned mostly with science fiction writing.

I will fully admit that I have been a big fan of science fiction writing since the late 60’s. I had a rather huge collection of paperback novels a bunch of years ago, finally got tired of moving them and sold almost all of them, comprised of nearly 1500 books. I still have around almost the complete works of Heinlein and several others of my favorite authors.

In my opinion, Greer has a rather myopic view of SF writing. He stated; “it was basically a collection of wish-fulfillment fantasies for teenage boys. (And that, Mr. de Camp, is what the woman in the brass brassiere is doing on the cover of your book.) “. Bull shit in my opinion. In fact, Greer’s belittlement of SF smacks of Ayn Rand and her condemnation of everything but classical music. I sure would hate to see Greer go in the direction of Randisms, he’d lose me in a heartbeat.

My fascination with SF up until about 1980 was the alternate views concerning how humans could organize themselves into societies and how they would work. “The wish-fulfillment fantasies” dealing with technology was entirely of secondary concern for me. I was interested in the author’s conception of how societies could be organized differently, how motivations of individuals and groups could influence actions and what the consequences might be, and how future societal values might evolve. I have a rather long list of SF books that highlight that line of thinking. Greer’s myopic view that these novels were exclusively about technology and teenage fantasies is very poor reductionism and IMO misses the author’s points by wide margins.

It is true that many SF novels focused on the author’s concept of future technology and engaged in how that technology was used. These novels usually had poor character development, pretty thin plot lines and rather predictable outcomes. I read them for the purely entertainment value. But to make Greer’s mistake of lumping them all into “wish-fulfillment fantasies” is only showing a lack of extensive investigation on his part.

I mostly stopped indulging in SF reading around 1980 or so because I observed a couple of changes going on. I got tired or reading acclaimed novels that seemed to only be concerned with the number of words being printed and paid for and had nothing significant to say. I also lost interest in the change from speculation on social organization to what I call science fantasy. These works migrated into magic and the occult and completely unbelievable futures. Purely entertainment without significant content and probably would fit into Greer’s “wish fulfillment fantasies”.

I recently had an acquaintance lay on me 4 sacks of her SF books to read. I recently went through two of the sacks and am reading only one of the novels. The rest I won’t bother with because they are those science fantasy types that IMO have nothing significant to say about anything. The person that let me borrow these book is a retired teacher and a self proclaimed SF nut and offers literary critique on a broad scale. I’m not looking forward to returning the books unread since she recommended them so highly. But I refuse to waste my time on them. The one novel I am reading is concerned with nano-technology misuse and how it affected the people involved. The author seems to have made the attempt to really understand the technology as it is today and project it into the future applications, mostly military. So far, that novel hasn’t disappointed me. I shall see how it ends up.

In talking about SF we also need to include the movie part of it. Freeacre and I have recently seen a bunch of the most wretched god awful written and produced Sf movies ever. The plots were pretty good, but everything else presenting it was so poorly done as quite literally, were not worth watching. For some reason that I don’t fully understand, the SF movies for the most part do not have much significant to say, pure entertainment alone. There are exceptions IMO. The Matrix series I think have some significant statements as does the Terminator series. “The Road” which is a pretty dark movie does project some possible scenarios into the future, as does the movie “Children of Men”. I think that “The Postman” (which is a futuristic movie and SF) also has some significant statements about humans and how they can organize and live after a huge catastrophe.

Which leads me to another subject associated with SF that I have touched on before. There is much written today and in the past concerning the past, present and future. The advice from many authors, religions and philosophy views is to live in the present. Upon examination of some of these “live in the present” positions, I have come to the conclusion that it is a fantasy game in the brain. There is no such thing as “the present” and humans that try and live there are kidding themselves. What is possible is to limit to some extent the amount lived in the past or projections into the future.

Let’s start with some definitions. The future is what might be, but is not manifested at this time and space. The past is what is remembered and has already taken place. The present is what is “now”. That is where the rub is. What is the time interval for “now”? The minute you identify “now”, it is in the past. The past and the future have no time limitations. I am going to assert that humans cannot live in that short a time span of brain activity. What are we going to talk about, milliseconds, Pico-seconds? “Now” in reality simply does not exist in any human conceptualization that has meaning. What we mostly refer to as “now” is a short time span in the past.

It is true that humans may indulge in what is called “impulse behavior” that does not have significant reflection on past memories, but, I would assert that operating primarily on impulse behavior has more negative consequences on a person than might be acknowledged. Even the “fight or flight” impulses are based on past memories.

One of the characteristics of the human brain is that it has selective memory and is most of the time very inaccurate for a variety of reason. Since the memory of the past events can never be absolutely verified we have to accept our interpretation and “memory” of events that influence our actions in the future. Living in the “now” implies that memory of the past and projections into the future can be discounted and that, my readers, is flat out impossible. It is not the way the human brain works. Even other animals operate by remembering the past, which is the basis for actions in the future. A well-trained dog remembers past commands and acts accordingly. So do all of us. .

The real question for me anyway, is how accurate are the memories and their relationship to reality. From experience, I know damned well that I have memories that are doctored, maybe even pure fantasy. How many times have friends said to you that your memory of some incident is not how it was, or that they saw it very different? Or how many times has a friend related and incident you were involved in sometime in the past and you don’t recognize it because you remember it different?

On a very rudimentary level, our very survival depends on memory of the past. That memory and the resulting consequences of some event is what keeps us alive and able to project consequences into the future. When our memory is very inaccurate most of the time and not in conjunction with reality, we probably will not survive. In my view, that is the purpose of history, inaccurate as it is, to keep us focused on what has gone on before and its implications for the future. If the history that we keep locked up in our minds is way off base in relation to reality, we will make some really bad decisions concerning future actions, much to our detriment.

I conclude that all the new age stuff about living in the “present” in the “now” is so much nonsense. It can’t be done and only diverts ones attention from what is important to human living and survival.

At this point I want to thank all of you that have offered opinions concerning this blog and its continuance. That the comments were so predominately encouraging and supportive took me a bit by surprise. It truly felt to me that the blog was becoming stale without much new to talk about. We are not about to disconnect from this blog in the immediate future, and maybe we just need a few people to make contributions with some fresh insights we haven’t thought of. Belgium says he has some in the works. Let’s see how this progresses.

Thanks again to all of you.

THERMOPYLAE ALL OVER AGAIN?

2011-09-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

The build up in the fire pit during HSW visit in preparation to fire 3 of his clay heads. Sort of looks like a salad doesn't it? There were at least 10 different items in that fire for effect on the clay.

THERMOPYLAE ALL OVER AGAIN? from murph

If you aren’t familiar with the battle of Thermopylae, Wiki will give you some of the background. The legend is that 300 Spartans defended a pass to stop the passage of a huge amount of invaders intent on taking over Greece. It was referenced at the last part of the movie “The Last Samurai”. In actuality, there were back up armies to the 300 Spartans, but a turncoat got them all killed. In the end, the invading hoards were repelled.

I bring this up as a simile to current situations. There is a huge horde at the gates, threatening the PTB and wanting to abolish their rule. The Spartans (an extreme warlike group) composed of the PTB and their minions are defending the status quo. They are vastly outnumbered but have the machinery of war and suppression at their disposal. We have been talking for years now about who will win this confrontation. How many of the defenders were killed? To the very last man according to the story.

Our problem as citizens is to survive until the conclusion of the battles and then deal with the aftermath. The question in my mind, are there enough bodies to oppose the PTB? At this time, it appears not to be although that could change dramatically as our living situations deteriorate. There does seem to be considerable rebellion going on around the world. How much has been instigated by the PTB is open to question and just what the agendas are we, of course, are not privy to.

Freeacre and I have been exposed to huge amounts of contradictory information concerning Libya and the uprising there. According to a couple of sources, Libya was in actuality a very open populace democracy wherein the government used its oil revenue for the benefit of the population and Gaddafi had no power at all, only as an advisor. The country supposedly had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa. The contradiction is that Gaddafi was a tyrant dictator that had to be replaced. It has been fairly obvious to us that a lot of the photos and news items concerning the rebellion has been spun and doctored. Preparing us for another damned war? Is the US determined to control the whole of mid-eastern countries? Considering how much hate is directed toward the US in that area of the world, it is going to take some pretty hefty military presence to do that. Who in hell is going to finance that? China? Japan? Germany? Not likely. But we shall see.

One of the big contradictions I see is over the worlds oil supply. Circulating around is the concept that the US has oil reserves that far exceeds all the other reserves in the world put together. Well, if that is true, what are doing fighting over oil in the Arab worlds? Make sense to you? Somebody is lying to us on a grand scale.

On the home front.

It sure appears to us that heavy criticism of the US government is coming under some pretty draconian suppression. In many ways, I approve of that. Nothing like suppression to get the adrenalin boiling up and rebellion started. At the same time, a lot of people are going to take it in the ass. Not justice, not pretty and with no real justification at all outside of the top people’s lust for power. This has led us to be concerned with what is being said on the internet, principally, the criticisms of policy and behavior of the PTB and their minions. How much of a crackdown is coming at us? How many folks are going to be made example’s of what happens when you criticize?

While this blog has a, relatively speaking, small readership and comments, it has tended over the years to be quite critical of the goings on nationally and worldwide. Will any of us be made examples of? We have quite a few examples of popular sites being discontinued. What was the reason? Pressure from some power players? Threats? We don’t really know. Small blogs such as this one are primarily composed of people with few resources to fight that kind of pressure or defend against threats. But, we do know that often when an example is to be made, it is mostly directed at those folks with the least ability to fight back. The family organic farmers and food coops are a prime example of the big commercial agricultural business taking on those without the power to fight back. Observe whom the IRS goes after. Same thing is happening at the international level. The US certainly is not taking military action against a country that has the capability to mount an effective resistance. Although I have to admit that Afghanistan is doing pretty good with asymmetric warfare. We sure as hell are not pressing those countries with nuclear retaliation capabilities.

So, Freeacre and I are contemplating whether to continue this blog. We are as concerned for you the readers and those that comment as we are for ourselves. Is it time to stop and become a bit more anonymous? Have we said all that is to be said? Do we now need to turn our attention elsewhere?

We are interested in what others have to say on this subject. Let us know.

A Note from Freeacre –

Personally, I don’t want to end our association with the tribe. But, the blog site gets about two thousand hits a month from all over the country. Most of the people who read our site do not make comments. That’s been fine with me during the time when we were attempting to raise awareness of peak oil and other resources, provide alternatives to the corporate injunctions, learning to produce our own food, organizing the community, etc. But, now it seems to me as well, that we have written about preparing until we are practically blue in the face. We thought it would have all crashed and burned years earlier. Who knew they would come up with the wild assortment of mitigating factors that they have – trillions in “bail outs,” never-ending wars, creating a suffocating police state, and God knows what all? It looks as if they are going to string this crap out forever.

I’m about done with preparing. Now, I want to accomplish some things on my “bucket list” while it’s still possible. We may not even plant a garden next year. We may take a year off and travel a bit. I’d like to be more artistic. It seems that many of you have moved on as well.

The earth changes and possible asteroid, comet, or dwarf star approaches mostly either will or will not take place within the next couple of months. Frankly, I’d like to keep holding each others hand awhile longer at least. Somewhere down the line, I think we should close down the blog and the “regulars” continue our friendships through e-mail, phone calls, or visits.

The grid could go down at any time – whether through natural or man-made reasons. I guess that’s the last thing that we need to prepare for.

aho

Space Doom?

2011-08-23T03:30:00.000-07:00

by Freeacre

Okay, okay. Forget the fact that most of the more well known predictions in my lifetime have all turned out to be duds. Let me think: Haley’s Comet was supposed to be the event of a lifetime. They told us when we were kids that we’d grow up and see it. Fifty years later, it was just kinda cool. All these Harmonic Conversions bringing change and higher consciousness… haven’t noticed. The Age of Aquarius… and now we live in perpetual warfare. Mars was supposed to be HUGE, closest it’s ever been and whatnot. Obama was going to change all the bad stuff… And now I am reading that they plan to arm police with robot helicopters that can taser you from the air. And the new head of the FDA used to be Monsanto’s lawyer. I fear that someday I am going to find my entire personal worldview on Snopes.

But, good things do pop up like mushrooms in times that just seem like dirt. In fact, it happens a lot. It’s just that those things are most often unanticipated. They are most welcome, none-the-less. There is no disappointment when something that you don’t expect doesn’t happen. There’s no money or time lost. There’s no reality that jars your sensibilities. No ego investment. No anything.

So, there is a lot more energy involved in a prediction - to make a prediction as well as to act on one. We need more than inspiration to make a prediction. We need some facts to back it up. Some numbers. Second opinions… a visual. More than a visual. Verification. And, even then, maybe only your kids will get it. Especially if it’s bad news.

It’s even worse when there are several reputable and not so reputable sources that make contradicting calculations and conclusions. It seems almost impossible to sort out.

With all those qualifiers in mind, let me tell you what the hell I am talking about: Mr.2tuff and his prediction that our heavenly sphere may suffer serious disruptions at any time and especially on Oct. 28th of this year. He has made many fascinating videos showing info from NASA and other official astronomical sources. He goes out into his backyard and you can see what his telescope sees. And you can verify it on googlesky or googlespace or whatever it is. And he has this amazing, down home, favorite uncle voice that betrays a really keen intellect. You have to judge for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/user/Mr2tuff. Or look into it further. Not everybody is coming to the same conclusions. NASA, for instance. And most of the folks and scientists who study the comet Elenin and the possible dwarf star, Nibiru; Patrick Geryl’s work on the Sun, etc.

As I understand it (and feel free to enlighten me), mr.2tuff says that we are in a binary star system. This system comes close to our solar system periodically, about every 3,600 years. It’s not just a planet that comes relatively near us, it’s another solar system. What the ancients thought was Nibiru was actually Jupiter and it’s moons when it was exceptionally close. It would be good to view the two DVD’s available on http://www.thunderbolts.info/home.htm regarding the cataclysms and their aftermaths.

As solar systems approach each other, they spin faster and contract like an ice skater who pulls in and spins faster. In times like these, Jupiter is closer and looks bigger. Go look at it. It’s the bright planet near the constellation Orion. It’s ‘way big. As it approaches, it effects the Sun as well as all the planets, including earth. It has a big belt of hunks and pieces around it, just like our solar system does. No, naturally, lots of these in the form of asteroids or comets or meteors can be hurled at us in increasing numbers, ergo, Elenin (and the asteroids).. So, “Heads up,” as he says.

This is not necessarily an extinction level event. After all, it has happened before and people did survive. They may have wandered forty years in the dessert or suffered a great flood, but they survived. The species, at least. But he further contends that our Overlords have known about this for years and years, and have been preparing for it. The privileged few plan to carry on without the riff-raff. The riff-raff would be us.

So, that ‘s why they don’t care if the world economy tanks or not. They didn’t care if they poisoned the oceans and the air and sucked the resources from the world. They don’t care that people are sick, disabled, and dying. They don’t care that our government is a zoo and we are living in a feed lot. They prefer it that way. I am paraphrasing now – expanding on a theme, as it were.

On any given day, a case can be made that between the global central banks, the stock markets, the pharmaceutical companies, the big agricultural corporations, the complicit congress, and the nuclear power industry, there is a race going on as to who can kill or exploit the most of humanity. I am not exactly certain why they need the money, since logically money would not matter anymore in the event of a real cataclysm. But, you could consult the people of Haiti, and get a different perspective.

He says that all this divisiveness and hostility being fostered between differing factions of our society (Dems and Repugs, immigrants vs. locals, Fundies and infidels, gays and straights, Muslims and everybody else, etc.) are all reinforced by the media, et al, so that “when the lights go out” we’ll be fighting amongst ourselves and the rich will slide into their shelters and wait to pick up the pieces, basically. Personally, I am not entirely convinced that TPTB are so smart. This clusterfuck may just be the result of our collective flaws.

Mr2tuff’s prediction is that despite all that we are concerned about, this second solar system is approaching now. It’s time to get out of cities and into the country. Hopefully, people who are awake have already prepared. All hell is about to break loose and there is absolutely nothing that we can do to stop it.

Well, we might not be able to stop the relationship with a binary star. But, we could react to the predicament like the Irish and the Scots did at the battle of Sterling (in Braveheart) when they joined forces and refused to fight each other. We could drop all the bullshit and watch each others backs. That would be a step in the right direction. Or, we may take the opportunity to die well, if it comes to that. All I can say is that if this is a time of transition into some sort of “higher” consciousness, we better fuckin’ well get to it. We may be almost out of time, at least in this incarnation. Or we could just declare ourselves to be up to the job and get on with it. Let’s hope the kids figure a way to keep the internet up.

We have been kicking around assorted doom scenarios for years now. And we have created a supportive cyber tribe who have helped many of us work towards surviving and maybe even thriving in the event that the Matrix breaks down. So, we are probably more prepared than most to ride out this storm and be of service to our neighbors. We might just have been born for this. It helps me to think so. Like Charles Duvall said in Second Hand Lion, “Some things you believe in because they are worth believing in.”

It is a good time to figure out for ourselves just what is worth believing in. And it is a good time to take pleasure in the great gifts of this lifetime. If this prediction turns out to be another dud, all the better. At least my attention will have been on these issues rather than “Pippa’s New Hairdu,” “Kim Kardashian Will Always Look Like a Midget next to her new husband”; or “Demonstrators for Peace Now Considered Terrorists.”

aho

The Political Circus

2011-08-06T12:37:00.000-07:00

photo courtesy of Hot Springs Wizard

by murph

In the last few months Freeacre and I have been flummoxed over what appears as news these days. Since our TV’s won’t do anything more than play DVD’s and we can’t watch broadcast stuff, we are out of the loop on MSN. So we go to all our favorite Internet sites to find out what is happening, or at least to get an idea about current events. Our radio reception is so poor that we just don’t indulge in it.

I have also waited to put up a new post until the Tuesday vote on the new budget proposal in Washington.

We have periodically over the last couple of years commented on the seemingly escalating evidence of the deterioration of our society and government. Every day it is something new to get us upset. Cryptogon had a posting on the voter registration in Wisconsin that was very interesting. Seems that a person’s voting registration was linked to bank account activity. What the hell!? Now you have to show not only citizenship, a couple forms of identity docs, AND bank account activity? I wonder when they are going to start asking for documentation for how many times you have had sex last month and how many glasses of water you drank last week. I guess that might involve testimony before a judge (with oaths, swearing on the bible and notarization) by a person close to you to back up your claim so you can vote.

The July 17th posting from the Archdruid got on one of my favorite rants; education. I’ve talked a bit about it over time on this blog. A number of authors that I respect have spent time on the subject. I’ve had just a bit of experience pertaining to this subject; having spent 4 periods of my life engaged in some form of formal education and have done some teaching; about 3 years worth, part time mostly. It amounts up to 21 years of full time formal schooling, right around 1/3 of my life to the present. Economically, it has gained me very little and put me in debt such that I can never pay it off. I have commented before that going to school has changed a lot in the last 50 years. My last stint in the 90’s left me breathless in observing the changes, both at the university level and the elementary and high school level. Generally, formal schooling has devolved into primarily job training. It was not always so. The consequence is that we have people graduating from some school at whatever level in the expectation and dream of getting a well paying job. As the Archdruid pointed out; what job? Going to school does not create jobs. There are only a certain percentage of jobs that demand special training (schooling) and if the amount of people trained for these jobs exceeds the jobs available, more schooling will not solve an employment problem. On top of that, the jobs available are changing so fast that by the time you graduate, that particular area you studied so hard for may not even be available anymore or soon phased out. Plus, at a university level, the debt level to get that training is excessive and is going in that direction for parents at the grade school and high school level, more so at the college level.

What has happened in my opinion is a very drastic shift in the definition of what it means to be educated. We have shifted away from the idea that being educated means being able to integrate diverse information, being able to think critically, being at least functionally literate, having a broad view of trends and perhaps most important, being able to examine critically ones own perceptions and conclusions, and a good grounding in history. Instead, we have gone to a high degree of specialization, lack of knowledge of anything outside of a specific specialization, mostly memorization, little critical thinking and borderline literacy and little curiosity outside of the “job training” and almost no knowledge of history. The consequence is that we have a generation or two that has no idea of what has been done to us, what we have had to give up and why from the manipulations of the elites of this world. The changes have been relatively slow and what they currently experience is normal to them. Their lack of knowledge of history gives them nothing to compare “now” to the “past” and does not give them the ability to project into the future what is likely to be the consequences. Witness the popularity of the Tea Party and the radical groups that form, (politically and religious) reform and shift allegiances at the drop of a hat with no clear agenda and no understanding of consequences of what they do pay homage to. Blind obedience to ideology has taken the place of thinking and critical analysis for most of society. As a side note on this, in our area, the amount of people ignorant of local events is astounding, even though the local paper announces it well ahead of time. The excuse: “I don’t read the paper”. In fact, I suspect that they cannot read well, it is a chore and so they don’t. The old farts that have spent the time and effort to keep up with events in their life can explain all day what we have lost and it is for the most part wasted effort on the majority of the population that are the result of our famed American educational system. Technology uber alles is the chant in refutation. The attitude seems to be centered on the concept that “hard reality” is only a malleable variable in life. While the idea that “drill baby drill” as a panacea to our energy problems is starting to retreat it still seems to be the predominant point of view for most Americans. While the green energy advocates are still agitating for massive expenditures, some hard questions of its viability are starting to show up in the mainstream thinking.

Few people are willing to examine how our lives are going to change; our lives are going to become less efficient and more resilient, less convenient and more human energy output in living. Government services will decrease and become undependable. We are seeing that going on around us. For individuals and communities that are striving for localization and sustainability, government is becoming less relevant. And yet, government, in order to preserve their authority and perks are loading more economic burdens on the populations and increasing their harassment.

I’ve stated before that it sure appears to me that the internet as we know and use it today is not going to last. Free exchange of information, criticalness of government actions, criticalness of large corporations simply is not acceptable to a fascist, autocratic plutocracy. The internet also serves a function for like minded folks of whatever persuasion to exchange information and opinion, (and even to organize resistance) again unacceptable to the PTB and their minions, especially if it does not parrot the accepted positions within the elites.

The political circus going on for a while now over the government debt and the entitlements (that the republicorps hate) is so laughable that I can hardly stand it. No matter what your favorite political ideology is, flat out stopping or vastly reducing what they call entitlements to citizens is going to cause havoc. Notice that they also include SS into the category of entitlements. Pure unadulterated bull shit. It was a government sponsored savings program that all wage serfs contributed to with the idea that it would provide at least minimum living standards upon retirement. Give politicians and oligarchs access to funds and it will soon be gone, which is what has happened with that savings program. Also notice that the advocates of smaller government and balanced budget don’t say a word about corporate entitlements and freebies, nor do they want to talk about funding wars or the huge amount of money being made by the people that are supposed to be running the government. Hypocrites, all of them.

Some of the latest economic projections indicate a booming inflation coming our way. There is the contrary opinion for deflation out there too. Personally, I expect inflation big time. Not so sure of hyperinflation, but it is the only alternative I can see to the economic mess we are in. If, IF our government bonds are downgraded in value, inflation (or degrading the value of the dollar) is the only way to stave off default. Interest on the national debt takes all the tax money that is collected in one analysis I read. It sure appears to me that no matter what action is taken, we as a viable democratic republic are doomed. I rather doubt that starting ANOTHER war is going to keep things moving either, a tactic that has been successful so far.

Then I read and listen to the statements by the political candidates and I have the opposite reaction. Instead of being amused, I find my stomach churning. How did these idiots get into politics anyway? Lowest common denominator? For all those lovers of the smaller government put out by the republicorps propagandists and all their minions, take a look at these stats. http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/deficits.html Oh yeh, Ronny Ray-gun is the savior in economic policy and trickle down economics is a message from god. The Koch brothers and the Tea Party really need to get their heads out of their collective asses.

Met a younger fellow the other day that said that he is bored most of the time. Sheesh, bored? With all the shit going on today? Freeacre and I are as busy as we have ever been. Her son has arrived and that takes some time to get everything set up. Garden and greenhouse finally growing well, hope there is enough growing season left to get some harvest. The guy that in previous years has had a farmers market here hasn’t even shown up this year, yet anyway. We kind of depended on him for stuff we couldn’t grow enough of or couldn’t grow at all. I actually saw 4 honeybees yesterday out working some of the garden blooms. I wonder where they live.

Just What Are We Going to Do?

2011-07-17T23:52:00.000-07:00

This is a snapshot that Hot Springs Wizard took of a Montana moose on his recent trip.

by murph

I know, I really do know that we haven’t written a new post for almost a month now. Not only has there been a problem with time allotment, but also once more I have been searching for a subject. The last 4 weeks have been really hectic. We were hoping that our pooches’ problem with seizures was solved and this weekend she went back to them, big time. She had 14 grand mal seizures in 12 hours. We didn’t get much sleep. The garden and greenhouse have had to be continually monitored because of the really strange weather we are experiencing and adjustments made because of nighttime temperatures going down close to or below freezing, in July no less. We have had to get ready for the community chicken coop and garden tour coming up this weekend that has been eating up a lot of time. To top it off, Freeacre’s son is moving here and preps have to be made for that. All in all, we are playing catch-up on almost every aspect of our lives right now, so new posts have to take a back seat in priorities.

In the last 4 weeks, in our daily reading of stuff posted on the internet, it appears that a lot of writers are getting down and dirty lately. They seem to be anticipating some abrupt and radical changes coming in soon. What these changes are going to look like differs somewhat depending on who is talking about them. But, the consensus seems to be that they are coming and coming soon. If the change is abrupt and relatively severe, there is going to be some interesting social upheaval showing up. What the PTB do about it is open to question also. In any case, it sure appears to me the PTB is losing its grip on events. Either that or it is all planned to come down in some manner, whatever it looks like. I don’t anticipate that it will be either pleasant or make things better.

Of great concern to a hefty percentage of our population (like 70 million or so) is the threatened cuts or even elimination of Social Security and Medicaid entitlements. Now I wonder just what 70 million folks will do if that happens? Revolution of the infirm by wheelchair and walkers? My mental picture of granny with her walker and an AK slung on her back marching on Washington would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.

Did you know that around 17% of our working people (out of about 140 million) are employed by the government at some level? That is about 24 million folks that are involved in making decisions and their minions that are involved in enforcing those decisions on the rest of us. That is about the same as Greece, and we know what that has done to their country. And this is during a time when local governments that are strapped for cash are laying off government service employees. One of the biggest surges in this direction took place during the Reagan administration; Smaller government say the Repugs; yeah right!! And most of this control is now in the hands of the international corporations. Good old Obama, change for the better. Yeah, right!

It occurs to me that with all the changes going on, that we can plan for it to some extent, but as I’ve also expressed, the universe has a lot of surprise events and ending in store too. Briefly stated, be flexible, be as self-sustaining as possible, and anticipate the worst.

A lot of chatter on the internet lately about what is to become of the internet. As has been shown in other countries lately, the internet has become a tool for rebellion. This is of course untenable to the PTB and something is going to change in that regard. Whether it will be an abrupt change or gradual is open to question of course, but I rather suspect that if open rebellion starts showing up in this country, it will be abrupt. Can’t have those pesky uppity commoners and serfs organizing themselves to challenge the status quo.

Going to have to keep this short today. Wanted to wait for the road trip by the Wizard to be completed and got to get on the clean up work for the chicken coop tour for this weekend.

Wizard's deer. Thanks for sharing, Hot Springs

Let's Get Real About Going Green

2011-06-26T22:33:00.000-07:00

Homemade California rolls - still eating with Fukushima in mind.

from murph

On Saturdays post (June 26) from the Charles H. Smith blog (Oftwominds), has a guest post by Kevin Mercadante, who Charles referred to as a fellow blogger. The post is very interesting to me as it summarizes most of the arguments for renewable energy production, particularly wind and solar. He didn’t present anything I would consider new information on the subject, but he did put it all together into a comprehensive argument. However, he did leave out some of what I would consider very important details.

At the same time, the latest posting by the Archdruid from June 22nd also talks more on this subject. Greer has been hitting on this subject for quite awhile now. This particular posting is a rather scathing rebuttal to the renewable energy advocates.

I am going to summarize some of the problems with Kevin’s advocacy.

I am assuming that Kevin is speaking from the position of keeping society running pretty much the way it has been for the last 100 years; Continuous growth, plentiful and cheap energy availability and the life styles that enables. He never addresses the availability of raw material to make this happen and does not address the “gorilla in the room” of total energy in vs total energy out (TEITEO), also called EROI (energy return on investment) involved in any system where one form of energy is converted into another form.

Most of the studies I have seen compare alternate energy systems to oil and its conversion to another form of energy. At this point in time, the studies indicate that the extraction ratio for oil varies anywhere from maybe 1.5 to 1 ratio to 40 to 1 ratio, from a low of tar sands to easily available sweet crude. (That ratio is a reflection of how much oil it takes to pump oil to the wellhead from a reservoir.) As the availability of the easily available sweet crude diminishes, the over all ratios also decrease. As the technology now stands, it appears that the conversion ratios for wind and solar vary from about -3to 1 up to +3 to 1 ratios for TEITEO, (how much energy it takes to generate the output). It would seem rather obvious to me that some huge technological breakthrough would have to occur to do this conversion from oil and also keep our present standard of living. Even if the ratio for alternative electrical production went up 10 to 1 we would still have a decrease in the standard of living. In other words, at our present state of technology, it is a pipe dream to expect no decrease in standard of living arrangements if oil production declines or becomes prohibitively expensive. We simply do not have any technology at the present to make up that difference. We also must keep in mind that generation of electricity is not a cure-all anyway. An example is plastics, no other way to make them other than with petroleum products.

Now lets examine what happens if we have some kind of wild ass technological breakthrough that does makeup the difference. Right off the top, we got a scalability problem. Individual home units have to be either cheap enough to make it available to nearly every household in the world and work flawlessly, or, it has to be able to be up-scalable to the extent to run the majority of the electrical grids in the world. The other problem concerning the grid is that a whole bunch of new infrastructure would have to be put up; alternative wind and solar generation is not going to be located where the infrastructure is currently located. It’s a big investment problems: not insurmountable, but a problem.

Looking at increasing wind energy, take a look at this study linked from Archdruid. Remember I talked about this a couple of years ago.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063.300-wind-and-wave-farms-could-affect-earths-energy-balance.html?full=true&print=true

Solar conversion to electricity has another set of problems, not only with efficiency but also the availability of raw material to make it happen.

This is my often-repeated conclusion’s.

Sustainable growth is an oxymoron on a planet with finite resources.

Unless we want to try and negate some of our “laws of physics”, conversion of one form of energy to another always incurs losses and involves consequences we neither understand nor can we adequately predict.

Oil supplies are not infinite, despite the abiotic advocates, With the worlds present and ever increasing use of oil, the replenishment rate of availability simply isn’t there to either claim sustainability or infinite supply.

There is simply no currently known energy source to replace it on a worldwide basis. Therefore standards of living WILL go down, if not tomorrow, then sometime in the near future. If the effort was going to be made to substitute for oil, it should have been started 50 years ago, and that is assuming there is a solution.

Since our society and most of western culture runs mostly on oil and the oil companies are the primary controllers of the political systems in western society, there is no incentive to make a change.

Going to individual systems to provide electrical power is not going to work for most people in this world. The problem of cost and availability of the materials and the gearing up of the manufacturing infrastructure to supply a system of this nature are insurmountable within any kind of time frame to ameliorate a reduction in amount or high price of oil, it appears to me. Plus, I rather suspect that such an effort is politically a non-starter at this time. Yes, individuals can either put up the large amount of capital to produce their own electricity or cobble up and experiment at low cost for themselves and as a consequence, decrease their use of this energy drastically.

Neither wind nor sun produced energy is flexible enough to be used everywhere. The cities, where the majority of people in this world reside, are not going to become giant wind and/or solar farms.

Whatever amount of reserves of energy in the form of oil and gas that exists within the boarders of the US, its extraction cost is going up, its environmental damage will increase, and it will be put on the international market to be sold to the highest bidder.

Even if we developed some kind of substitute for oil and what it represents in living standards, that only means a further increase in world population and a subsequent increase in demand for energy consumption, which implies exponential growth which is impossible to maintain. World population increase that we have seen in the last 100 years was only possible with the use of oil. Take that away, or limit it severely and population has to go down, not up, until we reach some kind of environmental equilibrium. Since it appears to me that “green” energy supplies cannot possibly fill the gap of oil decreasing in availability, something has to give. Sadly, this seems to be ignored by the advocates of supposedly sustainable energy production.

All of these conclusions are based on the assumption that oil will not be readily available at its now relatively low cost and that “green” energy is not cost/benefit doable. We will only know this after the fact, which will then be too late to take effective counter action.

As a side note, Freeacre and I have been introduced to the idea that the tilt of the earth on its axis has increased enough that the sun no longer rises in the east south east and sets in the west south west in the northern hemisphere. Now it is slightly north in both cases. This will, of course, affect the intensity of different types of energy entering earths atmosphere. This certainly has the ability to affect weather patterns and intensity. No wonder our garden isn’t doing near as well this year and could explain the weather anomalies that are so obvious.

Hmmm, does this mean I need to relocate the greenhouse?

Off to the "Real World"

2011-06-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

This is who murph is going to be talking to next week. It's Henny Penney, his other girl....

by freeacre

Next week is going to be interesting for me because I will be out of town…and away from my computer for a week. I will be in Corvalis, OR, attending the State Grange Conference, where we have submitted a proposal to stop the sale of Millstone herbicide for hay that becomes toxic to gardens when the manure of horses who eat the hay is used as fertilizer. I am looking forward to attending the conference because I believe that the National Grange organization is potentially a very good resource for those who are attempting to empower the localization of food production and sustainable agriculture. I want to meet the other activist Grangers in Oregon and see if my hope for the organization is viable or not.

At this point they have activities scheduled like “Dress in green and yellow to show your support for the Ducks” and in “orange and black to show support for the Beavers”. I had to look up the Ducks and Beavers on Google just to figure out what the hell they were talking about, since I am not a fan of collegiate football. Guess I’ll go with the orange and black since the college in Corvalis is the Agricultural School. Go Beavers. Anyway, beavers are good.

On another day we are supposed to wear Red, White, and Blue to show our patriotism or something. Personally, I think all these so-called patriotic displays are just delusional activities that obscure the sad fact of the demise of liberty in the nation, the truth that the country is being sabotaged from within by the globalist central bankers and corporations, and to justify imperialism. This is corn-ball, to say the least. I guess I have to be grateful that they didn’t declare a “Lawrence Welk Evening of Music with Champaign Bubbles.” Like I said, this organization is ripe for the next generation to take over.

I think I will suggest that next year we have a “Dress Like a Pirate” day. Aaaaaaarrgh, Matey!!! I already have my costume.

At any rate, this will be a challenge for me because it will be a major disruption in my routine. Unless I frequent cyber cafes in Corvalis, I will not begin my day with George Ure’s latest projections of bear markets and web bot predictions of chaos and “people behaving badly.” I will no longer be kept in touch with the differing radiation levels in the country by Deutchsince, or the approach of Nibiru or Elenin. I won’t know if the planet is aligning with the sun and assorted planets and the approaching comet to instigate earthquakes and volcanoes. I won’t be warned about possible tsunamis or death rays from the Sun. I won’t be given conflicting information about whether the weather is warming or getting colder, whether Obama is a Kenyan or an American, if we are headed for inflation or deflation, if cell phones are giving people brain tumors, if cures for cancer are being suppressed, or even if I am one of those who have been “left behind.” I won’t be e-mailed by one Christian friend after another who sends me prayers and blessings in the name of Jesus, or informed for the 40^th time this year that’s it’s International Girlfriend’s Day. In short, it’s just going to be me and the “real world” for a whole week.

Now, that’s really scary.

And, I ‘m going to be by myself in a motel room with a TV that is hooked up to cable. The last time this happened, there was some sort of Jesse Ventura Conspiracy Theory marathon going on, so it wasn’t too bad. And, I caught up on several missed episodes of The Iron Chef.

The good thing is that Corvalis is a really cool college town that is a center for learning about sustainable farming and permaculture. If I have time I plan to explore the campus and pick up literature. I was happy to read in our comments recently this from gamedog:

”I have weaned myself off the daily doomster research, I felt I was stagnating, I can still keep up with the headlines, but no need to research in depth these days. I now spend more time researching solutions, implementing permaculture design within our community, and generally quietly getting on with it.”

I do think that permaculture and homegrown health and traditional skills are the hope of the world. I find myself changing in my orientation to our alternative living situation. We have chosen a more or less post-collapse lifestyle. Like Gamedog, we were greatly influenced back in 2003 by Michael Ruppert and his From the Wilderness website. Back then, it was all about preparing for what we thought was the immanent arrival of Peak Oil and the Real Estate collapse. Then is sorta morphed into Peak Everything, the global takeover by the banksters and mutant agriculture and Big Pharma. All still true, but impossible to convince anybody of.

So now, if asked, we just live the way we do because we like to. We like to eat healthy food that we grow ourselves. We like to not be in debt to the banks. We like to not sit through a zillion commercials on the tube. We enjoy our chickens and rabbits and garden. We feel more free when we cultivate a sense of “enough” and don’t feel compelled to buy the latest thing or watch the popular programs. And, we find that the less we speak of our rational behind the activity, the more popular it has become. See our website: www.LaPineCoopandGarden.com.

I don’t know if we are on the vanguard of a religion or a revolution or just two old eccentric goofballs, but whichever it is, I feel happier about it all. I feel more secure knowing that our mother, The Earth, can put the kibosh on human foolishness at any time; that the frightening march of tyranny has within it, seeds of failure; that Time will take out even Dick Chaney and those miscreants of his ilk; that life on Earth has prevailed despite encounters with other celestial bodies, hideous war-mongering despots, famines, plagues, pole shifts, ice ages, and calamities of all sorts. I am still appalled by the prevailing idiocracy in America. But, then, I am encouraged that not everybody is brain dead – witness anonymous. Let’s just hope we don’t form a circular firing squad.

Anyway, my dear troutclan, I will be leaving Sunday and hoping to visit the Campfire once or twice through some cyber café or something. Keep an eye on the murphinater for me. He’s going to have a lot to do while holding down the fort around here.

The Ultimate Disaster?

2011-05-22T12:02:00.000-07:00

murph fixing the electrical line to the well pump. Keeps on keepin' on...

by murph

We have seen comments and observed that the MSN has completely dropped the Japan story. It flat out isn’t there any more. Why?

On Carolyn Bakers site there is an article at this address that is worth reading; http://carolynbaker.net/2011/05/12/new-the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-in-perspective-by-dr-helen-caldicott/

The article by Dr. Helen Caldicott has some lacking in my opinion, but never the less is an important article. She does not talk about the specific types of radiation particles and their half-life that she says are blanketing most of the world, including the US.

Admittedly, I have no adequate means check out her assertions. Her credentials are impressive (that I’ve checked) and for the life of me, I cannot fathom an agenda in putting out this kind of information, other than maybe making money talking doom and gloom. So, assuming that her information is credible and mostly true, we really are doomed as a species, if not right now, at least within 20 years or so, the amount of time for all humans and most other life to die of cancers from radiation exposure.

She also reported on the affects of radiation from the use of depleted uranium in war munitions. According to her report, in the areas of heavy usage of depleted uranium, doctors are telling women not to get pregnant, that the increase in drastically deformed babies is astounding, like 80%.

So, if Caldicott is correct in her assessment, we are doomed. The lucky ones will die of old age or some accident before we start seeing this come into focus.

This brings up the argument again, why would the PTB poison even them selves if this were all true? Again, I have to repeat my thinking on this. If true, the PTB doesn’t believe it is a threat to them, or they have some kind of protection we don’t know about, or they flat out don’t give a damn.

A very small percentage of folks on this planet have the means of living in a radiation proof 100-year shelter. And even if you did, what would you emerge to after the supplies run out? Land poisoned so badly that you dare not eat what is growing, including animals from the ocean.

She asserts that in the US and in Europe that if it rains, don’t eat out of your garden. So just where do you get your food that is safe? I guess the hydroponic garden in your 600 yr radiation proof shelter. That’s something to look forward to, particularly if you have a few billion dollars to buy your way into one or build your own. Although, after having to live underground for long enough for it to be safe to come out, after multiple generations have grown up in that environment, I’m not so sure that what would be left would also be worth saving.

It appears to me that we can take this information a couple of ways. We shrug our shoulders and just keep on trucking for as long as we can and stock up on gentle poisons for when it becomes obvious that we can’t continue. Or, we deny that as a reality. Or we go on a rampage. All three of those alternatives contain sub categories of course. Maybe we all should just pray to god or gods for deliverance. Although I haven’t seen much response from gods these days for all that is besetting mankind.

I rather suspect that Caldicott is, at the least, partially right, and that’s the reason we don’t get any news about it. Mankind has created a stew of radioactivity that rather dramatically affects living things, even if it is delayed by 20 years. Although, it hasn’t taken 20 years for the effects to show up in the use of depleted uranium in war according to Caldicott.

The bill COICA 2.0 in congress right now will effectively shut down all ability to find out the truth about much of anything from the Internet. MSM in print or TV sure doesn’t seem inclined to tell us much of anything. In a way, I can understand that. If Caldicott is correct, and that information was put out for general consumption, what would be the consequences? Like you, I have several scenarios running through my mind and none of them very pleasant.

Those of us that were around in the 1950’s will recall the nuclear war fears, and all the back yard fallout shelters and often hysteria that accompanied the times around that subject. Satan personified in the form of the Soviet empire was a continual threat, and all the issues surrounding that concept were foremost in our minds. McCarthy and his minions come to mind right off, and the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin wall, etc. I was just a young kid back then, but I recall the war drills and fairly constant references to the Russkies threat. Now, it appears that we have some new threats to worry about. Terrorists are around every corner, suitcase nuclear bombs, plagues, poisoning of the environment gone viral, a crazy acting sun, space objects hitting the earth or at least coming close by and causing havoc. Now we have the radiation threat that is man made and no amount of money, ingenuity, military build up or political double speak and international posturing is going to do a damned thing about it. If this is indeed of the seriousness the Caldicott indicates, every single person on this planet will eventually be affected to a greater or lesser extent. My father, years ago, (a biology teacher) insisted that mankind was going to poison itself to extinction from human made waste. He wasn’t thinking of a worldwide radiation problem, but it appears that radiation could be the ultimate threat to human survival and that surely can be classified as human made waste product.

Harry Bellefonte years ago did a comedy routine that lasted some 20 min or so where he was giving an archeology report by a extraterrestrial archeologist on the planet earth after all the humans had killed themselves off. It is an obscure recording and I might just have a copy of it somewhere in my archives. It sure rang true with me. I ought to search around and see if I can find it.

Sure would be interesting to see what off-planet archeologists would find in 1-2 thousand years on this planet and what their conclusions would be. Humans as a species have shown themselves incredibly stupid (despite the brilliant ones among us) and do not appear to want to change that. The conclusions and consequences we see before us were neither necessary nor inevitable. We may have come to the point where nothing will stop any of it from happening. One more cosmic experiment turned to shit.

Of final mention that is not a disaster pending, in the sense of radiation or the sun going mad, but that of our MSM handling of the coming elections. I am talking about it in all its forms. Generally, the only TV we watch is the news in the evening while we eat supper. Of course, most evenings it is really bad for the digestion. The TV coverage of candidates is probably the most influential part of elections and who gets elected. We have not heard one word on the TV about Ron Paul running. Now whether you like him or hate him, he is running as a Republican and we haven’t heard one word on the news that recognizes that fact. My conspiracy meter is pegging out on this. Tell me people out in digital land, have you seen or heard anything about Ron Paul running as a Republican? I hear all kinds of stuff about candidates that I have never heard of, and way too much about Palin and Romney and Newt and the rest of the dumbrepug crowd.

For those of you that want to do further research, here are a few more tidbits. Scientists are getting data that the core of the earth is changing, affecting the surface; Or how about the spectrum being emitted by the sun is changing; Or Cliffs projections into 2013 show absolutely no data at all, ie, no humans left to get data from, or at the least, no internet activity at all; Or George Ure’s charts and graphs showing a correlation between sunspots and earthquakes; Or the testing of some municipal water supplies in Texas showing increases in radio nucleotides in the water supply and the lowering of the water standards to afford non compliance by the water works. The list keeps expanding every day it seems.

One last little tidbit if anyone thinks we aren’t living in a fascist state. In Missouri a family has been fined for selling $4000 worth of young rabbits on the market in one year. They have been fined $90,000 for selling over $500 in a year of the rabbits and not filling out the paper work and for not having been inspected. If they don’t pay the fine soon, the added charges go up to $1.3 million. Also, google “companies that no longer accept cash” and make a list of all you can find. It will blow your mind; at least it did for me. If that isn’t enough, do some digging around for states are having the police on a traffic stop asking how much cash you have with you. If it is over a few hundred dollars, they can confiscate it, your car and luggage and toss you in jail for suspicion of drug trafficking.

A year or two ago Freeacre and I commented that it seemed like bad news was coming in on a daily basis. Now it seems like it has accelerated considerably. If I discount half of it as rumor or exaggerated or just flat out not true, the other 50% is alarming indeed. When that other 50% is verified over and over by other sources, you can’t help but repeat the mantra; “We are so doomed”.

... need more pie. This one has a gluten-free crust.