History Has Gone Vertical

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by Brutus in Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Arctic Ice Melt, Chasing Ice, Chris Hedges, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, IPCC, Mass Media Manipulation, Morris Berman, Mythos and Logos, Nature Bats Last, Oswald Spengler, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Religious Fanaticism

This blog is cross-posted at The Spiral Staircase. Feel free to comment here or there.

To orient oneself in life, a person chooses from among myriad narratives, typically assembling a hodgepodge worldview out of diverse parts. According to Oswald Spengler, cultural artifacts (e.g., the arts, humanities, and sciences) arise “needing the guidance of inspiration and … developing under great conventions of form.” The very same can be said of our origin and orientation stories, ancient or contemporary. Narratives intertwine and need not necessarily be discrete, mutually exclusive, or competing, even though that’s what’s often implied by time-worn tensions underlying science vs. religion, sometimes understood more philosophically as logos vs. mythos. Indeed, they cohere despite conflicts of logic and their being ahistorical. The power of subscription and consensus overcomes all objections.

If a master narrative exists, it ought to be simply reality obtained, though that is probably visible to only a small percentage of people able to apprehend the world clearly. For the rest, scales not yet having fallen from the eyes, the considerable benefit of hindsight can help clarify the view, but only if one has sufficient nerve to behold it honestly. Instead, our dominant inspirational narratives promulgate a wide variety of incompletely fulfilled hopes and desires. Few such promises bear much resemblance to reality, those of economists, politicians, and clerics demonstrating the most striking discontinuities from the actuality experienced by ordinary folks. A Chris Hedges article at TruthDig.com called “The Folly of Empire” discusses this departure from reality in his characteristically erudite style (apologies for the long nested quote):

… absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking. “The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. “We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

I don’t usually lump into the mix entertainers, sports figures, gurus hawking self-help books and programs, or media pundits offering half-baked analyses because only idiots expect truth from them, but perhaps I should include them considering their stranglehold on the public’s wasted attention. Most of today’s media-driven narratives rely on conventions, gestures, and rhetoric that are notoriously predigested and therefore immediately swallowed by the guffawing crowd, disinviting additional analysis or careful consideration. This bears a curious family resemblance with intellectual conditions that sparked the Reformation. Further, because such mediated (or should I say medieval?) content is composed largely of fiction, pageantry, and untethered conjecture, no time is needed for the narrative to actualize. Hope functions in the present tense and requires no closure.

Perhaps the quintessential inspirational narrative was trotted out by the Obama campaign back in 2008, which relied on promises (empty, we later found out) to fulfill everyone’s desire for a better life, calling on hope and change to achieve those promises. Another religious hope narrative promises to enhance one’s afterlife, earned in earthly realms through achievements in social justice and the judgment of posterity. Both adopt time-honored conventions and are part of what is described in Morris Berman’s book Wandering God as the ascent tradition. Significant among those conventions is orientation along a vertical axis as seen, for instance, in easy acceptance of the legitimacy of hierarchy (and therefore egregious power, wealth, and class stratification and imbalance) and a longing for transfiguration, transcendence, and communion with god (or the gods) above.

Looking back across history, evidence of “progress” and growth is legion. However, most of those achievements are demographic, material, and technological, each having their unique and unintended blowback. What’s notably lacking as we sally forth into the 21st century is the ability to transcend our own base nature, which is characterized by corruption, violence, stupidity, short-term gratification, and inability to achieve the utopian dreams that populate the minds of many despots. So that same history is marked by downturns and setbacks. One might even say that the overall upward trend of history is pockmarked by periodic scars. Still, nothing just yet has stalled the hubris of history rising (unless domestic peak oil in the 1970s and global peak oil a few years back prove to have been among the first of a series of turning points). And judging from blog traffic and commentary, the steady stream of negative assessments in scientific literature, and news reports telling of weather and ecological calamities with increasing frequency and severity, awareness is beginning to dawn on even the most congenital optimists (plus some fools and the average ignoramus) that what goes up must eventually come down. Since history has gone vertical, hard limits must eventually assert themselves.

The plethora of charts, tables, graphs, and infographics that evidence not just rising trends but verticality is frankly astonishing. Sometimes a gradually ascending slope is observable within a short timeframe, such as receding glacial ice documented in Chasing Ice. Other times it takes long traces of historical, evolutionary, or even geological time to observe. Even short timeframes often conceal effects that lie handily beyond normal perception, but we luckily have scientists trained to recognize short- and long-term trends. Too bad they’re uniformly ignored and/or pilloried by a public spoon fed the blandishments of corporate marketing and political propaganda. Typically, ascending curves (whether geometric, logarithmic, or exponential) don’t appear to be walls (limits) when viewed from the far left or from within a narrow time band, meaning microscopically close. Zoom out or to the right, however, and the trend pointed into the stratosphere is readily apparent, such as in the following video (animation) of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere:

Similar x-y coordinate graphs showing, for instance, energy use per capita and human population growth demonstrate the same trajectory but at much briefer durations. Trendlines are mathematical abstractions, like fiat currency being printed into existence. At some point, gravity takes hold and drags everything back to earth (reality), though that eventuality can be forestalled for a surprisingly long time. The return trip down various vertical trends is approaching ever more quickly as lift skyward fizzles like an Icarus nightmare. Or in the case of atmospheric carbon, we can’t stop the rising trend we unwittingly initiated from blowing through the roof and rendering the earth uninhabitable.

It’s often said there is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. Presented with the likelihood or certainty of battlefield death, holdouts succumb and cash the eternal-life insurance card of a last-minute profession of faith. Same as death-bed conversions. Thousands of years of philosophy and religion might prepare us to face our inevitable demise if we bothered to learn anything worthwhile besides how to make money, and yet in all our frailty, many of us cannot accept that our final departure is merely a fact of life, not a gateway or journey to somewhere else. (Um, opinions vary on this, obviously.) The final departure of Homo sapiens sapiens is even harder to contemplate.

So what foxhole moment awaits us? Here’s one: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in late September 2013 a publication by Working Group I of the Fifth Assessment Report, which presents the underlying physical science behind climate change (used to be called global warming). The IPCC website states that “The Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is being released in four parts between September 2013 and November 2014. It will be the most comprehensive assessment of scientific knowledge on climate change since 2007 when Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was released.” Preparation of these reports has been ongoing for decades already, and the difficulty of their assemblage assures that they’re already out of date at the time they’re released. Being the work of governments, AR5 is also reputed to be remarkably conservative in its conclusions, as contrasted with prophesying near-term human extinction (NTE or NTHE) as those of us unconstrained by geopolitics have begun to do (mostly taking our cues from Guy McPherson of Nature Bats Last). That’s not a gambit for attention, BTW. It’s about a soul-destroying a realization as there is, and no one comes to admit it easily.

The likelihood of anyone plunging into the 2216 pages of this first of four parts of AR5 is, well, dismal. One could easily level the accusation that the IPCC is burying its findings behind pages and pages (and pages) of prefatory material; acknowledgements; missing or incomplete figures, tables, and citations (to be inserted when?); technical and executive summaries; glossaries; references; and dry obfuscation. That’s not really the case, though; the data and discussion are abundant and available for anyone capable of deciphering it. Technical and scientific analysis and discussion is exactly what Working Group I delivers in these chapters:

Introduction
Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
Observations: Ocean
Observations: Cryosphere
Information from Paleoclimate Archives
Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
Clouds and Aerosols
Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
Evaluation of Climate Models
Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
Sea Level Change
Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change

I downloaded the report and sought something succinct to quote, such as an answer to the question “Just how fucked are we, anyway?” but the technical summaries proceed with this sort of dry, useless, blank, uninformative text:

The primary purpose of this Technical Summary is to provide the link between the complete assessment of the multiple lines of independent evidence presented in the 14 chapters of the main report and the highly condensed summary prepared as the WGI Summary for Policymakers. The Technical Summary thus serves as a starting point for those readers who seek the full information on more specific topics covered by this assessment. This purpose is facilitated by including pointers to the chapters and sections where the full assessment can be found. Policy-relevant topics, which cut across many chapters and involve many interlinked processes in the climate system, are presented here as Thematic Focus Elements, allowing rapid access of this information.

The WGI Summary for Policymakers is not contained within the larger report but both can be found at this link. It’s unclear how much of the report was used in preparation of this story at National Geographic, but the story provides five takeaways from WGI:

On the extreme weather front, the report concludes it is “very likely” that cold days and nights have decreased, while warm days and nights have increased, since 1950 …
The oceans have warmed with “virtual certainty,” the report concludes, at a rate of about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.11 Celsius) per decade since 1970 in the upper 246 feet (75 meters) of surface water …
What about those polar bears? Sea ice (as well as glaciers and ice sheets) has declined overall since 1970 …
Sea level rise has happened, and will happen in the future, as a result of global warming, the report finds …
More than half of the global warming observed since 1950 has a human cause, largely from the greenhouse gas effects of gases such as carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels ….

The ellipses indicate brief discussion behind each takeaway. The conclusions are hedged, of course, relying on observations of what’s happened so far and omitting extrapolation of trends that go vertical. Even the three levels of confidence communicate not certainty of our fate (exact details TBD) but hope that projections are subject to change or we can do something to reverse things or at least forestall the worst. Like IPCC, National Geographic is yet to have its foxhole moment even though the evidence is staring them ghoulishly in the face. If one is at all engaged in this subject, I suppose it makes sense to stay hunched in the hole chain-smoking cigarettes and making do with what meager rations and sleep are available. My sneaking suspicion is that the go order will come quickly enough to catch lots of shivering, quivering, wavering souls before they get to their last eternal hope. In the meantime, the fat lady is singing, the coal-mine canary has expired, pigs are flying, and hell has frozen over. We’re vertical against the wall, facing the firing squad, and what’s left to do, though no one knows just quite when, is to get horizontal.

How Big is Your Prison Cell?

14 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 81 Comments

Tags

Bodhidharma, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mass Die Off, Police State, Privatization, Robert F. Stroud, Runaway Climate Change, Security and Surveillance State, Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds, The Elite 1%, The Social Contract and The Discourses, Wall Street Fraud

Author: ulvfugl

Over at Nature Bats Last, my favourite virtual park bench to watch the virtual pigeons, the talk is of hospice. Life is a terminal disease.

I suppose there’s not a lot of difference between hospice and death row.
Degrees of freedom. How big is your prison cell ?

What’s the company like ? Do you get any choice ? What about the visitors ? Are they friends, priests, nurses, jailers, torturers ?

I have to say, for a man of my disposition, my own cell, here, is perfection.

Long ago and far away, in another lifetime, I did a course in kitchen design.
I found it fascinating and enjoyed it very much. Efficient use of work space. Sink. Work top. Storage. Things you use most often, nearest.

Later, I discovered Permaculture. Much the same idea, really, but working with the natural physical environment.

Design your prison cell. Oh, but you cannot, because you have no freedom to choose, because it’s not yours, you don’t own it… Ha !

That’s a problem isn’t it. Property and ownership. On a crowded island, a crowded continent, a crowded planet.

“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The Discourses

Freedom to choose. Property. These barriers that we collide with when we desire to design our lives, the space between birth and death.

Used to be, long ago, you could just walk off into the desert, or into the forest, or into the mountains, and get away from it all, and find a place where you could settle yourself down and be undisturbed. But that’s not so easy anymore, at least, not where I live, and then what do you eat ?

When I was 20 I had a vision, with my wife, to find a ruin, some abandoned old farm in the mountains, where I could set up some home and make an anarchist commune. I found a couple with two kids, beatniks, about 15 years older; they were right into the idea. We had a good try but it didn’t work out.
We learned some of the reasons why it is hard to succeed.

Took me a lot of trying and a lot of failing to get what I got. The perfect prison cell.

People think I’m crazy. They are right. Depends what you mean by ‘crazy’, of course. You have to be crazy. You see, most people try things, twice or ten times, and fail, and give up, and say it’s impossible. But some things aren’t like that. You have to try 999 times and fail every time. And then the 1000th time, you make it. And only a crazy person discovers that, because everybody who wasn’t crazy gave up long ago.

But, you see, it really might be impossible. What if you have to try all your life to find that it was impossible ??

That’s circus people. They have to be crazy. Special sort of ambition to do something really peculiar. I knew some once. Not a proper circus, a really silly circus. All they had was a lama, and a sheep and a goat. And the guy could walk along a tightrope. A low one, about six foot off the ground. But if you can do it, doesn’t really matter about the height. It’s about the falling off.

So they were determined to have a circus for a livelihood. With one fucking lama that they decorated. And a sheep and a goat that they trained to go around in circles in a tent. And the guy walked along the tightrope. And twenty people would pay and wonder why these crazy people were doing this.

Point is, they were designing their own lives. They were AMAZING. You just wanted to help them because they were crazy. The crazy was contagious. In a good way. Two girls were identical twins, impossible to tell which was which; that was crazy in itself.

So, you find a place. Like designing a kitchen, the sleeping place is the centre. Or maybe, if you’re into Bodhidharma, your meditation place. Then comes the things you use and need most often, nearest. Then, like a spider in the middle of its web, you need strands that connect out into the world.

People are very different. Depends upon what your personality is like, what your desires are, what you require to be satisfied. Design the structure around you; design yourself to fit the structure. Build in the right habits, the rituals, the efficient and effective functioning. Remember, its death row. Nobody gets out alive. What’s worth caring about, what’s not ? Music !

I have a field which I’ve left for the grass to grow long. This is so it can be a refuge for the linnets. They are just small brownish song birds. They are somewhat endangered but not dramatically so; average little birds, so to speak, nothing spectacular or flamboyant, not the ‘most’ anything; finch family, thought to originate some time in the Middle Miocene, 10 to 20 million years ago. From what I gather, skeletons of these small song birds are rarely well-preserved in the fossil record, so it’s a patchy picture and much is guesswork.

The linnets are some of the company I have here, in my cell on death row.

http://www.birdcare.com/bin/showsonb?linnet

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/l/linnet/index.aspx

http://blx1.bto.org/birdtrends/species.jsp?&s=linne

In 1963, someone called Robert F. Stroud died. He had spent 54 years in solitary confinement in a prison cell. It states on the cover of the book he wrote that no man in the history of the world spent more time alone. I don’t know if his record has been broken since then. America seems so perverse and sadistic these days, it wouldn’t surprise me.

Anyway, Stroud spent his time researching bird diseases and became one of the world’s greatest bird pathologists. See. You’ve got to be crazy. He couldn’t design his cell at all. It was not his property. He had no freedom. But he could design himself. He wrote this incredible book Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds. Made a life for himself. Didn’t let the fuckers destroy him.
I think most people have got more options, bigger cells.

If you look at the previous mass extinction events, a few species made it through. My thinking is, try to save something for as long as possible.
Could be the linnets, this time. Who knows ? Nobody else seems to care.
But it’s just my version of the crazy circus…

Birds are much smarter than most people realise or appreciate:

“Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.”
http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf

So, as far as I am concerned, on any sane scale of values, those circus people and the linnets are worth more than all the wankers on Wall Street and in the City of London put together. Because when it really comes down to it, freedom has, as Stroud discovered, to do with what’s inside you, not what’s outside.

Be realistic. Demand the impossible. Insist that you get it.

Adrift In A Wayward World

12 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

"Duck and Cover", Atomic Age, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Frankenstorms, Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Inverted Totalitarianism, Japan, Kevin Moore, Mahatma Gandhi, NSA Spying, Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Runaway Climate Change, Security and Surveillance State, The Elite 1%, The Energy Skeptic, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit, War on Terror

I haven’t kept up much on Fukushima because I find it too horrifying to contemplate; one quick look into this subject is enough to ruin your day. In a future of cascading failure, conceivably hundreds of nuclear meltdowns are in danger of being set off. The last breath of human life on Earth could be extinguished from such a toxic brew of radioactive isotopes. Thirty-one months after the nuclear catastrophe called Fukushima, this festering wound persists with hundreds of tons of radioactive water uncontrollably leaking into the Pacific each day and thousands of exposed fuel rods threatening to make Japan uninhabitable. In light of this ongoing manmade fiasco, I find it morbidly humorous that Japan has been chosen to host the 2020 Summer Olympics. It’s like planning a house party while the roof is ablaze and a sinkhole is opening up under the home’s foundation. But this seems to be par for the course for a species that has come to rely on technology as its steadfast savior. Only as this century draws to a close and the polar regions are seen as the last refuge for a depopulated planet will humans have finally realized that their precious technology served to extend human overshoot only for a brief time… and at the expense of making the inevitable crash that much worse.

Art by Charles Burns

There is no better way in determining the worth of a society than the kind of future it leaves for its children and future generations. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members.” Are not the unborn generations of our descendants the most helpless of all, voiceless and invisible to those making the reckless choices of today? By this measure, modern capitalist industrial civilization, notwithstanding its technological marvels and humanitarian achievements, would have to rank quite low when we look at the silent, lifeless wasteland that our present way of life is creating. The specter of climate change has replaced the Cold War psychic burden of a nuclear winter. The children of the Atomic Age had the naive “duck and cover” plan to escape that monster, but what plan do the kids have today for the horror of runaway climate change? As the Energy Skeptic recently discussed, climate change has destroyed many civilizations in the past and our globalized one will undoubtedly be no different. A doomsday date of 2047 was recently set for the cities of today’s world:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered the barbarity of nuclear bombs, but these decimated cities were rebuilt. Climate Change will in time make all cities uninhabitable through flood, drought, scorching heat, fire, sea level rise, and continent-sized Frankentorms. There will be no rebuilding of such uninsurable cities. They’ll be left to wither away like the deindustrialzed and bankrupted city of Detroit. The lights will go out and stay out permanently in these ghost towns and ghost cities ravaged by an unstable biosphere. Climate refugees will strain the resources of countries and cause social unrest which may lead to more wars in the future. The response of our leaders at the helm of modern civilization is to build levees and dikes, geoengineer the planet, and bioengineer the food supply. None of these are adequate responses in the long run and only eat up finite resources that could go towards building a whole new way of life that is not under the dictate of Wall Street and disaster capitalism. Such solutions, however, are pipe dreams in a world so thoroughly controlled by the concentrated wealth of multinational corporations which are today’s feudal lords, their armed henchmen in the police state, and the insidious manipulation of public sentiment and behavior by corporate media and the security and surveillance state. I took it as ‘divine retribution’ when I read that the NSA has had a rash of electrical problems at its yet-to-be-completed data collection spy center.

So if the kids are feeling unmotivated and adrift in such a world, can they be blamed for wanting to drop out? Attention-deficit disorder and the epidemic of other behavioral problems that afflict the youth of today along with society’s knee-jerk response of medicating the misfits may just be another sign that things are far from alright in the world. Judging from the craziness of the people running the show, I’d say that capitalist industrial civilization has become one big insane asylum with the governments around the world acting as Nurse Ratched of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Everyone must acquiesce to the rules of the corporate state:

1. Keep the masses distracted via internationalised sport, celebrity gossip and ‘news’ about mating success of caged animals and dogs that can ride surfboards.

2. Keep creating money out of thin air, lending it as zero interest to members of the club, and charging everyone else significant interest. Dilute the purchasing power of money on a continuous basis and call that process inflation.

3. Manipulate or fabricate economic data to create the illusion that everything is just fine.

4. Ensure that official planning (at least that which is public) ignores everything that will actually determine the future.

5. Conduct wars or covert operation as necessary to maintain the flow of resources from poor nations to rich nations.

6. Ensure wealth continues to be transferred from the less wealthy to the ultra-wealthy.”

~ Kevin Moore

“The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine.” ~ Nurse Ratched

The Conspiracy is Systemic and Legalized.

08 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism

≈ 69 Comments

Tags

Apophenia, Capitalism, Class War, Colin Todhunter, Confirmation Bias, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dr Patrick Leman, Empire, Financial Elite, Glenn Beck, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Michael Parenti, Military Industrial Complex, Noam Chomsky, Patternicity, Plutocracy, Police State, Poverty, Regulatory Capture, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Subjective Validation, The Elite 1%, True-Believer Syndrome, unwashed public, Wall Street Fraud

If you are a person who gets their news solely from mainstream media and forms a worldview from that information, then this website would perhaps strike you as radical, off-base, and conspiratorial. But what if nearly everything you listen to and read has been filtered through the monied interests of the most powerful entities on the planet? And what if those entities quite literally control the government by way of a revolving door, campaign contributions, and lobbyists who unduly influence the crafting of legislation in favor of big business while ignoring the needs of the common citizenry? What if you are merely a pawn in the machinations of such a system — a consumer for the all-important world market and a disposable human resource in its labor pool? What if the wealth created by such an economy is amassing at the very tip of this pyramid scheme while leaving those below to fend for themselves in a world depleted of its resources and poisoned by industrial waste. Would such a grim reality be considered a conspiracy theory? In other words, would the previously described outcome of such a socio-economic system necessarily have to be the plan of a secret cabal of powerful people? If corporations must compete to survive and are legally bound to look after the financial interests of their shareholders, then protecting and growing profits must in the end override all other concerns — environmental and social. The gross wealth disparity, environmental destruction, and political disenfranchisement created by capitalism is not the byproduct of a conspiracy; it’s simply the end-result of a system operating as intended. Concentration of wealth, a characteristic result of capitalism, inevitably leads to a near total corruption of journalism and democracy. Of course the corporate elite may collude to price-fix, bribe regulators or heads of state, and cover up environmental damage and dangers to public health, amongst many other devious activities, but it is invariably done in the interest of gaining dominance in the market place and protecting profits. Capitalism and democracy are not compatible. In fact, life on Earth is ultimately not compatible with capitalism.

One author who has written extensively on conspiracy theories is Colin Todhunter. In his essay New World Order “Conspiracy Theories”: Diversions and Deceptions, he pinpoints the time at which conspiracy theories became widespread:

“…Although conspiracy theories have been around for centuries, some gained in popularity during the 1960s and 70s as ‘post-modern disillusionment’ set in and people began to question the very notion of ‘progress’. Modernity had not lived up to expectations. Living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, poverty and the inability of science or politics to address such concerns, people began moving towards ‘new age’ beliefs and concepts or embracing unconventional theories that seemed to explain humanity’s plight.

This all occurred against a backdrop of (failed) proposals to collectively address worldwide problems that went beyond the capacity of individual nation states acting alone. The UN had been set up along with various other international institutions in order to address global issues but also to cement US global hegemony…”

In his insightful essay The Role of Anti-Establishment “Conspiracy Theories”, Todhunter informs us about the exploitive and unstable nature of a system that has given rise to so much conspiracy theory:

“…The advocates of populist conspiracy theories seek to explain everything in terms of secret societies and codes, Zionism, ‘communism’ or the hand of ‘Rothschild’. Of course, families like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and groups like Bilderberg exist and do hold great power. That much is not in dispute. However, the nature of the dynamics of power is. Groups or think tanks like Bilderberg, Brookings Institute, Trilateral Commission, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, RAND Corporation and so on are where capitalism’s state-corporate hegemons, including the rich families mentioned above, meet to discuss, devise policies and manage capitalism.

Radical critiques of society have often focused on the underlying logic and processes of capital accumulation and capitalist economic crises as well as capitalism’s inherent contradictions. An analysis of the historical antecedents of modernity according to scholarly analysis has also been prevalent. Today, it is popular to assert that the members of some shadowy group have been in charge all this time – the Illuminati, often used as a metaphor for ‘the Jews’.

The rise of such explanations are understandable in a complex world, where the ordinary person feels utterly powerless, confused and craves easy answers. Little surprise then that events and crises are said to be the work of some sinister ‘Illuminati’, an explanation which tends to steer clear of any genuine analysis of capitalism.

In the West, jobs are being outsourced, wages are falling and unemployment rising. As the market becomes saturated with goods and demand is unable to mop up supply, firms go bust. There is a shift towards powerful monopoly capitalism, while citizens and workers experience increasing powerlessness and immiseration. And to seek out new profits, imperialist ventures abroad become the norm. State-corporate monopoly capitalism and imperialist intent are not part of a ‘New World Order’ but are part of a world in which the few benefit at the expense of the many and that has been in the making ever since Britain became the first industrial nation and capitalism emerged.

But what we now have isn’t free market capitalism, some might say. The notion of the free market has always been a myth. It’s always been controlled and manipulated. It’s never been ‘free’. And we are now witnessing advanced capitalism in all its gore.

Capitalism has inherent contradictions. All was never intended to be fine. Remember the slogan to end poverty by 2020 (or whatever the date was)? Capitalism thrives on poverty. It’s integral to the system. That’s why it is rampant in the West and much more so in the cheap labour economies of the ‘developing world’. The increasing concentration of power, ownership and wealth and the rising impoverishment of the masses is one of capitalism’s greatest contradictions. It’s not some kind of conspiracy to keep the masses in poverty or in fear of falling into it. It’s built in to capitalism.

But many do not refer Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky to gain an understanding of the processes of dialectic materialism and capitalism. They and their theories are regarded as being part of the Zionist conspiracy. If socialism and communism are the creation of Zionism, which supposedly exerts so much control over the US and Britain, strange then that the secret services of both the US and Britain spent so much time and energy on infiltrating, deradicalising and subverting the left (3).

While the late Antony C Sutton (sometimes regarded as the father of modern conspiracy theories) provides food for thought in his writings and research (4), conspiracy theories tend to provide limited insight into the dynamics of power and oppression in the 21st century.

However imperfect the work of people like Robert Brenner (5) and Barrington Moore (6) may have been, their research was based on broad comparative sociological analysis of the cultural, historical, agrarian and economic factors that led to the rise of capitalism, fascism and communism in various societies. In the absence of this, however, prominent proponents of conspiracy theories in the US and Britain make crude assumptions about such phenomena comprising part of an Illuminati plot, which play on the prejudices and fears of ordinary people, who in turn latch on to the explanation offered as a proxy for the underlying causes of their powerlessness and frustrations.

Why bother having an informed understanding of the dynamics of the modern world based on rigorous research? Much easier to watch a few YouTube clips about some secret, manipulative elite or even amphibians from outer space with an agenda to control the world.

Many conspiracy theorists have indeed actually been quite informative on how the banking system works and how bankers conspire to control policies by keeping governments in permanent debt. They have also highlighted glaring flaws in official accounts of 9/11. They have rightly pinpointed what the mainstream misses out of its narratives and have raised issues that many on the left had tended to ignore or gave scant attention to. But such useful insights then become wrapped up in theories that too often appear to be based on flights of fancy.

There is no doubting that people can and do conspire to shape events. Not everything can be explained by structures where individual motive is eradicated. For example, corporations conspire to produce price cartels, media barons conspire to dominate and state-corporate interests embark on military jaunts to control markets and resources. And yes, bankers conspire to restrict credit for various reasons. But this has to be placed within the wider context of Empire and capitalism.

In capitalism, the compulsion to compete, dominate and pursue profit casts long shadows over virtually every social and cultural institution, from government and politics to education, law, agriculture and entertainment.

Conspiracy theorists and their followers may well appreciate aspects of this, but merely speculate about the intentions of and actions of groups of people without addressing how capitalism shapes any of it…”

How many commercials and advertisements are bombarded at the average person every waking day of their life. It’s in the thousands – everything from TV commercials to billboards to junk mail to radio adverts. Don’t you think this would have some sort of effect on a person’s psychological well-being? Is it any wonder that the one country in which conspiracy theories thrive most also happens to be the epicenter of unbridled capitalism? British author Roger Cohen said, “Captive minds… resort to conspiracy theory because it is the ultimate refuge of the disempowered.” In an environment where everyone is expected to sell themselves everyday in order to eat and ‘the truth’ is manufactured so as to protect the vested interests of those who bring you the ‘news’, desperate souls grasp at any explanation for why the system is so dysfunctional, corrupt, and unfair. According to Dr Patrick Leman, a psychologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, the weak and marginalized of society gravitate towards conspiracy theories because they have no voice in society:

…People are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories if they feel powerless in the face of large social authorities or institutions, and not part of the mainstream of society.

This is supported by the observation in the USA that beliefs in conspiracy theories tend to be stronger amongst members of ethnic minority groups.

Sociologists suggest that these minority groups feel politically disenfranchised or discriminated against and this gives rise to higher levels of belief in conspiracy theories…

Cognitive bias also encourages the acceptance of conspiracy theories. One such behavior is the human tendency to seek patterns from random information. Conspiracy theorists are said to be notorious for this proclivity and it goes by several different names such as apophenia or patternicity. Other cognitive biases include confirmation bias, subjective validation, and true-believer syndrome.

Development of hi-tech communication technology coupled with the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web and social networking has fueled the growth of conspiracy theories around the world. With little money, the rantings of anyone can be voiced to the world. Below is a picture of a twenty-dollar bill folded in such a way as to resemble the twin towers on 9-11. It quickly spread across the internet and was picked up by Glenn Beck, a monger of conspiracy theories, and featured on his blog:

“What are the odds that a simple geometric folding of the $20 bill would accidentally contain a representation of both terror attacks?”

“The radical analysis sees such things as ecological crises, military interventions, the national security state, homelessness, poverty, an inequitable tax system, and undemocratic social institutions such as the corporate owned media, etc… It sees these things not as the aberrant outcome of a basically rational system, but as rational outcomes of a system whose central goal is the accumulation of wealth and power for a privileged class…” ~ Michael Parenti

Rules of the Game for Our Dystopian World

28 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation

≈ 67 Comments

Tags

Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Deep Green Resistance, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Fascist Dystopia, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Nature Bats Last, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Sonderkommando, The Elite 1%, Yevgeny Zamyatin - We

Author: ulvfugl

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don’t know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth reading.” ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin, We.

——————————–

Everything is going to go.

The End.

Let’s look back, where it started.

The Beginning…

The Sumerians, formerly hunters and gatherers, began settling in villages in the fertile valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the period from 8000 to 7500 B.C.

According to the theory of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, this is how writing began:

Archaeological studies of the period show evidence of grain cultivation in fields surrounding villages, the construction of communal silos for storing grain, and a rapid increase in population. In such a setting, individual farmers needed a reliable way to keep track of their goods, especially the amount of grain stored in shared facilities.

It seems they did it by maintaining stocks of baked-clay tokens—one token for each item, different shapes for different types of items. A marble-sized clay sphere stood for a bushel of grain, a cylinder for an animal, an egg-shaped token for a jar of oil. There were as many tokens, or counters, of a certain shape as there were of that item in the farmer’s store.

Thus, tokens could be lined up in front of accountants, who doubtless organized them according to types of goods and transactions. They could even be arranged in visual patterns to make estimation and counting easier.

This simple system of data storage persisted practically unchanged for almost 4,000 years, spreading over a large geographic area. Eventually, the growth of villages into cities and the increasing complexity of human activities, especially in southern Mesopotamia, forced a shift to a more versatile means of record keeping. This shift was marked by the appearance of elaborate tokens alongside the well-established system of simple counters. Though similar in size, material, and color and fabricated in much the same way as their plainer cousins, the new tokens bore surface markings and showed a greater variety of shapes.

The elaborate tokens were apparently used for manufactured products—the output of Sumerian workshops. Incised cones and rhomboids probably represented loaves of bread and vessels of beer. Disks and parabolic tokens marked with lines signified different types of fibers, cloths, and finished garments. Incised cylinders and rectangles stood for ropes and mats. Other tokens seem to have represented luxury goods, including perfumes and various kinds of metalwork.

The advent of complex tokens coincided with the emergence of powerful central governments and the construction of monuments and great temples, beginning around 3350 B.C. Art from that period shows the rise of a governing elite and the pooling of community resources for celebrating large festivals. The token system, extended to cover goods and services, played a key role in managing massive building projects and orchestrating large public events.

Temple excavations reveal that the Sumerians often kept sets of tokens in clay globes, or envelopes. Temple clerks marked the envelopes by pressing tokens into the soft clay before sealing and baking them, making visible the number and shape of tokens enclosed. Excavated specimens show circular imprints left by spheres and wedge-shaped imprints left by cones.

Once sealed in their clay cocoons, the tokens were hidden from view. It didn’t take long for busy bureaucrats to realize that once the clay envelopes were marked, it was no longer necessary to keep the tokens. In fact, the marks by themselves, impressed on a clay tablet, were sufficient.

Complex tokens couldn’t be stored in clay envelopes as conveniently as simple counters because they often left indecipherable impressions. Instead, perforations allowed such tokens to be strung together, with special clay tags apparently identifying the accounts. In this case, the shortcut that the bureaucrats discovered was to inscribe the incised pattern found on the surface of a complex token directly onto a clay tablet. For example, they could replace an incised ovoid token with a neatly drawn oval with a slash across it.

The result was a practical, convenient data storage system. A small set of clay tablets with neatly aligned signs was much easier to handle than an equivalent collection of loose tokens, and using a stylus for marking clay tablets was a lot faster than making an impression of every token.

Around 3100 B.C., someone had the bright idea that instead of representing, say, 33 jars of oil by repeating the symbol for one jar 33 times, it would be simpler to precede the symbol for a jar of oil by numerals—special signs expressing numbers. Moreover, the same signs could be used to represent the same quantity of any item.

The signs chosen for this new role were the symbols for the two basic measures of grain. The impressed wedge (cone) came to stand for 1 and the impressed circle (sphere) for 10.

In this way, the token system evolved into a kind of shorthand in which signs representing standard measures of grain, impressed on a clay tablet, came to represent not grain or any other specific commodity, but the concept of pure quantity. It was a revolution in both accounting and human communication. For the first time, there was a reckoning system applicable to any and every item under the sun.

Thus, “writing resulted not only from new bureaucratic demands but from the invention of abstract counting,” argued Schmandt-Besserat in How Writing Came About. “The most important evidence uncovered is that counting was not, as formerly assumed, subservient to writing; on the contrary, writing emerged from counting.”

Clay tokens became obsolete by 3000 B.C., replaced by pictographic tablets that could represent not only “how many” but also “what, where, when, and how.” With the introduction of a new type of stylus, pictographic writing developed into cuneiform notation. The resulting record-keeping system proved so efficient and convenient that it was used in the Near East for the next 3,000 years.

“The tokens were mundane counters dealing with foods and other basic commodities of everyday life, but they played a major role in the societies that adopted them,” concluded Schmandt-Besserat. “They were used to manage goods, and they affected the economy; they were an instrument of power, and they created new social patterns; they were employed for data manipulation, and they changed a mode of thought.

So once there was writing, there could be written stories, and one of the earliest we have is the glorious Epic of Gilgamesh. My favourite part is where Enkidu – who I see as representing the wild hunter gatherers and pastoralists who remain connected to wildlife and nature – is tempted by a prostitute to go to the bright neon lights of the city – the ‘lure of civilisation’ so to speak – the streets paved with gold, sex and drugs and rock & roll, something which must have happened to uncountable numbers of people over the millennia and which continues to this day as rural folk move into urban life in search of money and the buzz of ‘modern life’…

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

So then we have all of the world’s literature, one of the wonders of our species, the legacy of millions of minds and imaginations.

What would we be without that?

Fast forward several thousand years, of stories and cities and risings and vanishings of entire civilisations, to circa 1920 when we get a clear glimpse of something that joins the first city states of Sumeria to our own time today, using writing and the newly invented format of the dystopian novel.

‘’In a country constructed of glass, under complete surveillance…’’

Here we can already see the outlines of the NSA and Edward Snowden, as we look back past 9/11, past the Stazi, through 1984 and Brave New World, through the flames of the burning Reichstag the Sonderkommando arranging the corpses into neat piles to make smoke signals warning the coming generations – “Die now or, in four months time, you will know what makes time so precious.”

Nobody paid attention to Zamyatin; nobody paid attention to the smoke signals.

Enkidu always falls for temptation because he does not know any better, until it is too late…

The streets are never paved with gold, only blood, bones, tears and torment.

In a country constructed of glass, under complete surveillance and devoid of individuality, D-503 discovers he has a soul and is now in danger.

http://libcom.org/library/we-yevgeny-zamyatin

First there were a few hundred on the internet who discussed this and what to do.

It has grown to a few thousands, and now it grows faster and faster and soon, I suppose, millions.

And nobody knows what to do.

I was one of the first to face this matter head on without flinching.

This is the most amazing time in all of human history.

We have evolved since about a million or 2 million years or a couple of hundred thousand years depending upon how you define a human being exactly. And then we made the first cities about 6000 years ago and agriculture and civilisation and technology and writing and now we reach our peak, and destroy everything and become extinct and cause a mass extinction event of most of life on Earth.

That’s how I see it.

And just for a brief moment, we have all these things, computers, etc, and access to all this information. And we peer out into the Universe and try to understand why we are here and what’s going on…

And then we all vanish.

Every day I review this picture because every day people are questioning, and I am trying to reply.

Most people are unable to comprehend that this civilisation will collapse, with billions of people condemned to die prematurely, because it is too horrible to face. But it is absolutely inevitable, only a question of when, and exactly how it takes place.

It might be any time in the next 100 years which seems long and vague for humans, but is an instant in geological time, a millisecond, a nanosecond.

And then I think, going by previous mass extinction events, it takes about 10 million years for life to recover. But whatever it is, it will be nothing like us.

So the problem is, how does one live when one has this knowledge?

This terrible, TERRIBLE knowledge. Hahahaha, enough to make a strong man weep. Seriously. It is such a difficult matter each person has to solve for themselves and, if they have children, their predicament is made much worse.

But I think, live in the moment, striving to be as happy as you are able to be, because each moment is very precious and never returns.

And now, I think we come to write our last stories as our era draws to a close.

The Epic of Human Demise…

Everything is going to go.

So, if I did have children, anyone under thirty, say.

What could I possibly advise? This is very hard because I don’t want the responsibility and I don’t know what will happen, but I get a lot of emails from people who feel bad, and I feel obliged to reply and I feel obliged to say SOMETHING, and I can’t be dishonest or evasive…

So….

You don’t need much of anything.

Cut possessions and consumption to essentials.

Stay fit and healthy, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

Get a network of others who share same views. Be loyal and supportive.

Everyone is monitored, so develop in-group language, opaque to outsiders.

http://gawker.com/the-nsa-created-intricate-maps-of-the-social-connection-1417840544

You know what I mean. Do as much off-line as possible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=us&

Share what needs to be shared, need to know, otherwise keep stuff to yourself, especially stuff that matters. One good person you can trust is the most valuable asset you can have, the more the better.

Most people can’t keep secrets. The more they want to, the more they feel compelled to tell someone.

Regard all MSM info with suspicion, as propaganda; nowadays it’s often downright lies.

Distribute important and interesting information as widely as possible.

Don’t be naive. Don’t be anybody’s fool; be your own best friend who you can trust.

It’s going to get much, much worse, so expect that you’ll be shocked. Don’t get knocked off-balance; roll with the punches, bounce back.

Learn stuff all the time, something new every day. There’s a technique to this, make it fun. Go over what you learned yesterday. Get a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Build self-esteem. Learn about ecology, nature, wildlife, the land, the past, what happened. Learn critical thinking. Don’t let anything slide by unnoticed…

Permaculture is good to learn, so is Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Aikido, even basic gardening, cooking, food preservation. One of the saddest thing with so many old people, like me, haha, who have skills – I have knowledge of hand tools used in woodwork and chairmaking with a direct line going back to their invention in Egypt 6000 years ago – is that all this is lost as we die off with no young people who are interested to hand it on to. It’s not just one generation’s knowledge. It’s taken centuries to learn this stuff… Nobody wants to know. Sigh.

Know your enemy.

Who are they?

Well, as far as I am concerned, they are these people. Not necessarily the individual names with the faces and addresses attached, but the whole idea that is acceptable and alright to behave in this way. The whole idea that it is acceptable and alright to live and conduct yourself and your affairs in this way:

http://guymcpherson.com/2013/09/radical-embrace-breaking-the-cycle-of-an-unfertile-demise/#comment-95686

http://guymcpherson.com/2013/09/radical-embrace-breaking-the-cycle-of-an-unfertile-demise/#comment-95700

WikiLeaks released 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors.

TIL the wealthiest 20% of the world’s population receives 76.6% of the world’s income, the poorest 20% of the world’s population receives just 1.5% of the world’s income.

We look back a couple of hundred years at the way certain people were behaving and we are shocked and disgusted, and yet we have the same kinds of people behaving in the same kinds of ways, in fact even WORSE, if you check out the actual damage they do.

These people are insane. They have always been with us, since the first cities of Sumeria, these accumulators of wealth and power, whose lust for money is never sated.

But what good will it do them when they inhabit a dead planet? Because that is what is happening and they are to blame, their greed, ignorance and stupidity is the direct cause of this oncoming catastrophe. Everything has to be turned into money, and what good will money be, when Earth is like Mars? Because that’s what is happening….

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/22/the-terrible-plutocratic-plan/

You’re going to have to mix with the enemy, to survive, but you don’t have to become them, or support them, or fraternise with them. Just disguise yourself and shapeshift your way through to get whatever you need. Ostracise anyone who is supporting The Machine.

Some people think that what matters is people and social reform and justice and that sort of thing. I’m not against those things, just that I don’t think they matter anymore, at least not to me personally. I think the only thing that matters is saving the other species for as long as possible and stopping the killing Machine as much as possible. Pretty much the Deep Green Resistance agenda.

But if you disagree, who cares? I don’t have time to debate and argue over crap. I’d rather see some action, someone fighting to save some fucking butterflies or something, than complaining about the bankers. Sooner or later, all those bankers, anyone who even looks like a banker, are going to be ripped limb from limb by hordes of enraged starving folk with machetes. They’ll deserve it. But that’s not my agenda.

It’s time to get apocalyptic, or get out-of-the-way.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/get-apocalyptic-case-new-radical?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

I mean, we all know everything is going to shit. We all know that’s extremely depressing. We all know it makes you feel suicidal. Okay. That bits done. Sorted. Leave it behind.

Like an old jacket you used to wear. Familiar but worn out.

If you’re into suicide, do it. There’s too many of us. Otherwise, get a grip. Don’t go the way that they are currently on NBL, of endless ‘counselling’, because IMHO that’s another disaster. It’s for the people who enjoy self-indulgence and self-pity and the people who exploit them by selling their books. The only person who can sort yourself out is you, and you do it! Right here, right now.

The way I see it, the Roman Catholics had Confession, which was a means for their power pyramid to gather intelligence, much like the NSA and GCHQ are doing now.

People could ‘sin’ and then be absolved and go away and ‘sin’ again, and that became an habitual lifestyle. Remember, the Inquisition was the equivalent of the CIA and lasted for 400 years.

Then Freud and Jung came along and Heaven and Hell were replaced by The Unconscious. Instead of Confession, people lay on the couch and talked about their childhood and their dreams. Same deal really. The equivalent of the Inquisition was perhaps Bedlam, the lunatic asylum.

Basically, all the pyramid power structures that are not fighting to SAVE the biosphere – are there any that are ?? – are the enemy. That doesn’t leave many powerful allies.

It does leave billions of ordinary, rather powerless people who know they don’t like what’s happening. If I was Che Guevara, I’d say it was a perfect time for revolution. The only problem is that a social reform doesn’t fix an ecological crisis caused by exceeding the carrying capacity.

These people are plain evil. They have done nothing good for anybody ever, in their entire history. How does humanity rid itself of such a monstrosity that has caused death suffering and misery for millions and millions of innocent people ?

The problem is power. If the greatest power is corrupt and evil, then who or what will hold it to account for its actions? How can it be removed? How do you prevent it being replaced by something even worse? Only the mass of the people can do this, and they have to understand the problem. Usually they don’t, or they are betrayed by leaders. Any leader who cannot be corrupted will be assassinated.

And now we have the New Age, and all kinds of therapies and therapists and counsellors who’ll take your cash for a book and dvd and a private consultation if you can afford it. It’s just a new priesthood for a new religion, and NTE is a whole new business opportunity for a whole new industry to arise, and some people will spend the whole of the rest of their lives ‘coming to terms with’ whatever it is…

Well, I am a warrior, and that’s not my way of dealing with this. If you get damaged and hurt, you heal yourself as well and effectively and efficiently as you can. I know, because I’ve been through a lot of stuff and been battered all to hell. Be as kind and gentle to yourself as you can possibly be. But there’s no need to rely on someone who doesn’t know any better than you do. How can they, if they have not been through what you have been through, and are doing what they do to make money? There’s a danger in that.

People who are addicted to booze or video games or who are obese or who expect to be told what to do, whole sectors of society – well, what will happen to them? Zombie food?

The old, the children and babies, the pregnant mothers, the weak and disabled, people who rely upon medication for survival, the gentle and tender-hearted ones – what happens?

We know what happens, because it has happened before. We can look back at history and see what happened when societies collapsed. It’s not a new thing. Inform yourself.

Next comes next. We’re going to die anyway. So how are we going to live while we are alive? That’s the bit that matters.

I think Enkidu has to get out of the rotting poisonous city, escape, get back to what he was… find himself again… his soul, his power, his way of being.

Forgive the male tense. There must be a female version of Enkidu, but I have failed to find one. Suggestions in the comments, perhaps.

“It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come today.”
~ Yevgeny Zamyatin.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/7121/description/From_Counting_to_Writing

A Vast Desert Coming Soon

11 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, Climate Change, Climate Chaos, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Desertification, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Militarism, Military Industrial Complex, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Police State, Resource Wars, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, War for Profit, War on Terror

The Middle East is on the frontline of the multi-pronged crisis of overpopulation, resource depletion, and climate change. Fault lines in that region are widening as climate change exacerbates crop-destroying droughts, peak oil starves economies, and stressed populations scramble to survive. Advanced industrialized countries are buffered from the same fate only temporarily by their military and economic might. The oil-cursed Middle East also suffers from being in the crosshairs of industrial civilization’s insatiable appetite for the black stuff. Since the peak of conventional oil in 2005, the industrial world has not only turned to harder to extract and environmentally damaging unconventional sources of oil, but has also ramped up military intervention in order to keep the energy flowing. Access to resources has always been an underlying factor in all wars, but as climate change, resource depletion, and social disintegration escalate, the grip on foreign energy deposits by western powers becomes increasingly tenuous. Climate Change multiplies threats. Militarism and climate change feed off and drive each other:

The war machine of the American Empire is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet.

Our priorities are overwhelmingly skewed toward militarism in order to maintain the unsustainable, while the real threat of climate change grows ever stronger:

(BLUE=Military Spending; GREEN=Climate Change Spending)

(source of slides)

In the meantime, the false hope of technology maintains the illusion that our current way of life is inalienable. The industrialized monoculture farming that feeds the masses will quickly fade as synthetic fertilizers become too expensive to artificially replenish nutrient-depleted soils. Pesticides and antibiotics are losing their effectiveness as natural selection breeds super weeds and drug-resistant pathogens. Fresh water is also being sacrificed for fracking, tar sands production, and mountaintop mining. We appear to be systematically destroying any basis for future civilizations as we burn through what is left. “Forests precede mankind; deserts follow.”

Severe land degradation is now affecting 168 countries across the world, according to new research released by the UN Desertification Convention (UNCCD).

The figure, based on submissions from countries to the UN, is a marked increase on the last analysis in the mid-1990s, which estimated 110 states were at risk.

In an economic analysis published last week the Convention also warns land degradation is now costing US$490 billion per year and wiping out an area three times the size of Switzerland on an annual basis. – link

No techno-fix chicanery will bring back the melting polar caps or stop the series of runaway feedbacks loops unleashed from industrial civilization’s fatal attraction to fossil fuels. Our eyes simply don’t appreciate the full scale of climatic change now underway, eroding mankind’s food production, infrastructure, and socio-economic stability, in addition to degrading nature’s ecological resilience and biological diversity, both of which underpin all of mankind’s activities. The megatons of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere by industrial activity everyday are as invisible to humans as the mountains of toxic plastic waste filling up the world’s oceans. Out of sight, out of mind until the effects become too obvious to ignore and too late to change. Overpopulation continues unabated and is in fact encouraged by the imperatives of economic growth; the environmental pressures are ignored as resources are methodically stripped and depleted to unrecoverable levels.

Despite the ingenuity and intelligence of the human race, we appear subject to the same rudimentary biological urges of the lowest single-celled organism which, if given favorable conditions, will uncontrollably multiply its numbers deep into overshoot territory until its food source is exhausted, finally extinguishing itself in a mass die-off. Environmental laws and initiatives appear to be no more than slight speed bumps in our one-way road to extinction. All this talk about curbing GHG’s, “going green”, and “saving the planet” are mere window dressings for our motorized hearse. Nice accoutrements, but the destination is still a grave.

Building Inner Strength in Chaotic Times

07 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 59 Comments

Tags

Alan Watts, Buddha, Buddhism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Derrida, Eco-Apocalypse, L-Field, Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, MONS ANGELORUM, Nature Bats Last, Pali Canon, Qi field, Subtle Body, Taoism, ulvfugl, Vachagotta, Wu wei, Zen

The following is a guest post by a writer who goes by the odd pen name ‘ulvfugl’. Portions of his personal blog can be found here:

MONS ANGELORUM: DEADLY SERIOUS 3

MONS ANGELORUM: WAITING FOR GOOD WEATHER

His essay describes one way in which to find inner peace in a world of upheaval. Contemplating the world’s problems is maddening. Those delving into and obsessing over the subject of modern civilization’s collapse take on a sort of burden like that of the Greek mythological figure Atlas who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders as punishment. But we’re mere mortals, not Gods. Thus we must find methods with which to build our mental and emotional strength for weathering the coming chaos…

There’s all kinds of takes on philosophy. Nobody can say any one take is the right or the wrong. It’s a bit like music. You choose what appeals. Some stuff gets very popular and everybody tends to agree on the greats.

Along comes Derrida. Odd little fellow from the outside. Says something like, ‘Hang on, all philosophy is words. Are words ‘truth’ ? Of course not.’ Created something of an uproar at the time, the idea that Western philosophy is Logocentric, weighted towards words, which means it’s missing all the stuff that can’t be put into words. Like love, etc.

But this idea goes straight back to the earliest Buddhist recorded teachings, 2,200 years ago, 300 years after he died, written down in the Pali Canon, where the Buddha is interrogated, by Vachagotta and says that the truth that is most important cannot be put into words.

“Vaccha, this teaching … is profound, subtle, hard to see, hard to comprehend, beyond the sphere of mere logic, to be understood only by the wise.”

Derrida’s radical philosophy was part of the wellspring of the movement called postmodernism.

I’m going to shorthand my take on what that means, by saying we are story-telling animals, and that we construct both ourselves, as individual identities, and our cultures, and ‘the world’ as, or, out of, our stories, which are constantly on-going and in flux.

You can picture it this way. Neuro-chemistry, flashes of electrical activity in my brain synapses, forming word sequences, translated into finger movements on the keyboard, into symbols on the screen, into electrons down the wires, through the cables, to your screen, into your optical nerves, into your brain, the story moves and flows, just as it did, tens of thousands of years ago, as I sat across the campfire from you, relating my tale as you gazed into the embers, sound vibrations in air, beneath the vault of the starry night sky.

For those of us on the cutting edge of the doom story, we are expecting things to get extremely nasty. Some of the smartest people I know of, are expecting most of us, if not all of us, to die. If this comes as a shock to you, dear reader, perhaps you have not been paying close attention. Most people have not been paying much attention. Anyway, soon, seems likely, it’ll be impossible not to pay attention. So what happens then ?

The way I see it, all we have, is stories, all we are, are stories. Yes, there is more. All the ‘stuff’. The empirical measurable tangible tactile solid and not so solid material world.

Science can tell us stories about that. And then there is the other ‘stuff’, the spiritual stuff, that elusive, ethereal, contentious region, the numinous, the non-physical realities.

Here is where things have to get personal. What happens when disaster strikes ?

You see, it’s no good having facts and figures and making glib statements, and it’s no good saying you belong to a religion. Nothing is any good at all, is it, you only know what is any good, when the disaster actually happens.

I lived for some years on a street with a little shop across the road, where I used to go at least once a week to buy a few items. The woman who ran it made very little money and worked very long hours. One morning early, she was weeping. I asked what was the matter. Her two teenage nieces had been burned to death in a car crash on the motorway.

She composed herself, she carried on running the shop with quiet dignity, seven days a week, 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.

Most people reading this are probably Americans, a country with a history of a couple of centuries. China has a continuous history of several thousand years. Long ago, in the 700’s perhaps 36 million people died in war and famine, perhaps 15% of the population. Such events have recurred, again and again. Maybe there’s a reason they have recipes for duck feet soup and hundred year old eggs.

The Taoists have survived through countless appalling catastrophes where they have watched the empire collapse and the population crash. Bodhidharma brought Buddhism to China, and Buddhism and Taoism survived side by side for the last fifteen hundred years or so. For Westerners, these are quite strange belief systems, because they are quite unlike the three Abrahmic religions. What both of them have done is collected techniques that help a person to survive and cope with disaster. They learned what worked, and they learned it the hard way, and they kept the good bits. Western people, in general, know nothing about this. For all I know, modern Chinese people don’t either, because as far as I can tell, they are busy emulating Western culture.

I am by no means an expert, I know for sure there are people who know much more than I do, but I have had some very good teachers, and I have been studying a long time on my own. I have endured great suffering and faced periods of great adversity. There’s ways to deal with these things and to prevail. You can tap into absolutely astonishing sources of power that are completely unrecognised and unknown to Western culture and medicine.

We can hope for the best, of course, that the future is not as black as it looks. But the wise prepare for the worst, and the worst case is that there will be the nightmare scenario.

The kindest, softest, gentlest, the middle class civilised ones with nice manners, the decent considerate children from good homes, the girls who burst into tears if someone is angry with them, the boys who blush if you shout at them, the whole generation that has never seen a dead person. The period of my own lifetime, for Europeans, has probably been the easiest, most comfortable and prosperous episode in the entire history of the human species, abundant food, adequate health care, orderly justice, endless entertainment and access to education.

You see, the emotional trauma, the shock, the impacts upon the feelings of a total upheaval if and when this all comes to a gruesome end, are going to devastate the population. What can be done about this?

…I think it is important for everyone to listen to this tape, that’s why I decided to share it, as we appear not to have learned enough, yet, from the mistakes of the past.

There is nothing to be seen here, no photos, no motion pictures, no multimedia presentations, only sounds you can listen to.

Sounds of death, destruction, pain, fear, hate…

Fascism typically trains a class of brutalised thugs, attack dogs, that it releases upon the citizenry to terrify them into compliance. Decent people only need to see one mutilated beaten corpse to be shocked into submission. How to teach people to expect this, to be resilient, to bounce over the impacts, to be able to make autonomous decisions ?

Perhaps the easiest introduction, concerning Taoist philosophy and zen for Westerners, is Alan Watts. There’s plenty of his videos on youtube.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/49037178/The-Wisdom-of-In-Security-by-Alan-Watts

My basic thesis is this. You train yourself, gently but persistently and regularly. Your inner being, that is. You do this with determination and with discipline. It’s not a shallow or a frivolous thing, you treat it with all the seriousness that you can muster. It doesn’t need much time or very much effort. Say, fifteen minutes a day. Twice a day perhaps.

Here is a video of a qi gong exercise.

You can think of this as what you see, a physical display, but you can also think of it as what you don’t see. That is, that we are, or have, an invisible energy field. Consider Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man as cosmografia del minor mondo, cosmography of the microcosm.

http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/history/leonardo.html

The energy field is, partly at least, an electrical field that can be detected by standard instruments, I believe that the heart pulse can be detected from many metres distance.

But it must also be a qi field, which is much more mysterious and not understood, and little research has been done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Field

However, one can speculate, that certain movements are configuring or tuning this field, and altering its properties. One can further speculate that the ‘being’ that you are, that is, the Subtle Body, is changed.

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

So, the thesis is, that when the shocks start happening, words are no use. Ideas are no use. There is no instruction manual on the shelf that you can grab with a chapter ‘What to do in a crisis’ that you can quickly read up on, that tells you ‘how to be’. What you need is inner strength that goes much deeper than verbal intellectual knowledge. That’s what this Subtle Body thing is about.

So, you train yourself, and then wherever you are, and whatever is happening around you, internally, you are secure, you have a refuge, you have a resource, you have a place to turn, and as you learn, you discover how to heal yourself, and all manner of rewarding experiences, so that life becomes very rich and fulfilling, whatever the circumstances.

This is not something for the faint hearted. But it is not something for the brutalised either.

It’s not about being macho and tough. We are human beings, and as such, we can all be broken, because there’s limits to what the physical body can withstand. And there’s limits to what the inner being, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, psychologically, can endure.

I do happen to know something about this, so I can speak from first hand direct personal experience. I’m not bullshitting you. There is a way to deal with this, an art, a skill, and once you catch on to what it is, it becomes rather interesting, and there’s a positive feedback, ‘aha !’ moments, and you want more… damn thing takes on a life of its own. Effortlessly… Wu wei.

http://www.jadedragon.com/archives/june98/tao.html

There is a choice to be made. If we extend the trends of what we see happening into the future, then it looks very clear, to me at least, that we are plunging into a mass extinction event, and that, en masse, there is not the political will or the leadership or the public awareness and insight to take any effective action to avoid this disaster. Imo, it is already too late, because so many of the causes have time lags before the full effects become apparent.

So the choice is, give in to the fear, apprehension, despair, anxiety, anger, and all the other responses that we see every day on NBL[Nature Bats Last], discussion of suicide and resignation and so forth.

Or, recognise that the Sun rises every morning, and each moment is a precious gift, and that life always was, always has been, always is, temporary. You are always falling towards the Abyss. There is a way to make the most of this, to be the most that you are. It’s not the way that most Westerners tend to think it is. Nothing dramatic. Something quiet and subtle that you do inside yourself. It’s not well-understood by science, but you don’t need to understand how it works to be able to do it.

This approach doesn’t care what your religion or beliefs or ideas are, because it’s not about words, it’s deeper, it’s more like eating or sex, closer to physical biology, more sensual, but it’s a bridge, it’s linked to the conscious mind, it’s not unconscious like the digestive system. The key seems to be the breath, which is both unconscious, on autopilot, like heart beat, but always available for conscious control if one wills it.

http://www.psychologytomorrowmagazine.com/inscapes-enlightenment-and-science/

Democracy is Finished

19 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, Inequality, Peak Oil, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

Abuse of Power, Brazilian Protests, Capitalism, Corporate State, David Miranda, Empire, Financial Elite, GCHQ, Glenn Greenwald, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, NSA, Peak Oil, Police State, Schedule 7 of the UK Terror Law, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, Wall Street Fraud

I was reading about the creepy Corporate State incident with David Miranda, and what particularly gave me pause was the following excerpt:
“They even asked me about the protests in Brazil, why people were unhappy and who I knew in the government,” said Miranda.
This tells me that the power elite are all on edge right now. Brazil was supposed to be one of the BRIC countries that “benefited” from economic growth in recent times, yet the social unrest is not confined to the backwaters of America’s Empire in the oil-cursed Middle East. The cost of daily essentials is becoming too much for the average person in Brazil.
Numerous environmental and socio-economic tipping points are converging, inevitably leading to social disintegration on a global scale. And it doesn’t help that neoliberal capitalism is accumulating the global wealth into fewer and fewer hands. This situation is what I was referring to in my previous post when I called it a “deadly game of musical chairs.”

The Chrysalis

While I was away, and as time permitted, I entertained myself by musing on the fate of democracy.

Now that I’ve returned home, I’ve also come to a conclusion of sorts. It’s over. It seems to have returned to where it first began.

View original post 249 more words

Post-Apocalyptic Musings

17 Saturday Aug 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Neo-Colonialism, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Environmental Collapse, Financial Elite, Geoengineering, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Overpopulation, Peak Oil, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, The Elite 1%, The End of More, Theocracy, unwashed public

Having conquered every last inch of Earth, humans now dream of spilling their burgeoning numbers out into distant planets, even whilst our own blue orb reels from climate chaos and our ever-growing consumption. Every iota of nature is now at the whim of the free market which sees no other path than to convert everything into a profit scheme. Thus a deadly game of musical chairs will be played out in the last days of capitalist industrial civilization as the foreign lands and water reservoirs of indigenous people are stolen to feed the mouths and gas tanks of cash-paying consumers in the First World. As the industrial world clamors for the last pockets of high-density energy sources to feed its energy-starved economic machine, desperate governments and businesses will continue to cut their country’s social safety net, throwing more and more people to the wolves. If you happen to live in a so-called developed country, you will have to run faster and faster on the cutthroat treadmill of the free market in order to stay afloat, lest you fall into the same boat as those of the malnourished and starving Third World. Wary of growing instability, governments will continue to strengthen their security and surveillance apparatus to control the growing unrest. For many, the confines of a prison cell may become the only place that a meal and secure place to sleep can be found. The last remaining chairs of this perverse game will be saved for the cosseted elite who sit at the top of the capitalist pyramid scheme. This social system may seem savage and ‘uncivilized’, but little has changed since the brutal reign of medieval kings up to today’s rule of international bankers and corporate overlords…

…The laws of survival for them are the same now as they were in mediaeval times, when eating above subsistence level was a privilege of those with the means to pay for it… The market economics of the Middle Ages has been brought into the twenty-first century, its brutal indifference unchanged in 500 years…

~ End of More

Thus we are headed for a modern Dark Age: a tyrannical corporate state wielding overwhelming fire power and surveillance capabilities, a collapsing biosphere with unpredictable weather patterns and superstorms, and a blissfully ignorant population eager to find a scapegoat. The time to avert disaster was decades ago, yet the public believes technology is a source of energy as well as a solution to every conceivable problem, that economic growth is a prerequisite to living on Earth, and that anthropocentric climate change is still debatable, if not an outright lie. Our house is on fire and we’re still watching TV. The exit doors have all been super-glued shut with hopium and MSM propaganda. There is no place to run; the deathtrap is foolproof.

Reality filtered through the most effective propagandist tool in history, i.e. the television, has made even climate change a boring non-event for the masses awash in disaster flicks and Hollywood CGI effects.

Some have predicted that we will embrace theocracy as our world falls apart and the myths of modern life can no longer be maintained. The wrath of climate chaos could be interpreted and used as a sign of retribution from God; some already declare such disasters as divine vengeance:

In the absence of government, bishops ruled for decades and even centuries during the Middle Ages with religion as the law and morality system. It’s highly conceivable that the surviving populations will fall back on this authority when governments lose legitimacy, providing that the climate does not spiral too far out of control and allows some humans to reorganize into post-industrial communities. Of course there are other manmade booby traps lying in wait around the globe, as explained by a Guardian reader:

“A sudden cessation of industrial activity, besides financial collapse and the end of a regular and plentiful food supply, will affect every industry from nuclear and chemical to oil and electrical. Deep-sea oil wells, left to themselves when workers desert them to return home to their distressed families, will eventually escape into the oceans. With no-one willing or able to plug them, entire oil-fields will vent until depleted. Nuclear power stations, already the repository of all the nuclear waste of decades of power production will eventually meltdown and every molecule of radioactivity will ultimately escape into the biosphere, irradiating the entire planet to one degree or another while leaving much of it uninhabitable for hundreds of thousands of years. Poisoned water sources, from chemical leaks and spills as well as polluted underground aquifers created from frenetic and frantic fracking will add to the mess. Returning to even a medieval style of living will be impossible.”

When entire civilizations crumble, megalomaniacs come out of the woodwork to institute their warped agendas and visions of how the world should be. The luxuries and wealth of today’s corporate elite will simply be transferred to this new circle of self-proclaimed holy leaders – televangelists of the post-apocalyptic world. With electricity in short supply, low-tech forms of punishment such as execution by the wheel, quartering, and of course hanging would come back into fashion. Human muscle would make a comeback in a post-fossil fuel world. Given enough time and with the absence of our fossil fuel servants, large-scale human slavery would likely become acceptable again. If you think about it, the wage slaves of today toiling away in mindless, soul-crushing corporate slots are not that far off from forced labor in a rock quarry.

In the mean time, we’ll all be a captive audience to the onslaught of geoengineering schemes soon to commence once governments of the world figure out that food does not grow very well in a destabilized climate and that the 99% will not go quietly into the dark night of ecological overshoot. In a future of catastrophic sea level rise, the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” will not apply.

The Point of Focus

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by Brutus in Empire, Environmental Degradation, Military Industrial Complex

≈ 65 Comments

Tags

Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Financial Elite

This blog entry is cross-posted at The Spiral Staircase.

Many traditional cultures regard the heart, situated at the center of the torso, as the body’s principal organ, having special processing powers directed to emotion. A heart-felt sensation is regarded as irreducible truth because emotions can’t be wrong. Indeed, the passions, as emotions are also called in their extremity, are something to be harnessed as motivation, at least until they run afoul and have to be restrained. For instance, a charismatic can inspire or inflame the passions and lead people along unwise paths.

In the modern industrial world, however, the eye and the perceptual faculty it provides has usurped the heart as the principal organ, at least in terms of cognition (ignoring the fact that the brain is the actual processor). The primacy of vision can even be seen (read: understood) in terms used to describe two major eras in Western history: The Dark Ages and The Enlightenment. Such visual metaphors stretch much further back in time, but the emergence from darkness into the light — the overarching story of modernity, religious salvation, and techno-utopianism — is clearly a central feature of Western thinking. For example, in the late 18th century, the U.S. incorporated symbology tracing back to Egyptian antiquity, namely, The Eye of Providence, into the Great Seal of the United States, which even now is displayed on currency shown at left (detail from the one dollar bill). It is noteworthy that, similar to emotional emanations of the heart, the eye is depicted with rays or beams shooting out in all directions, suggesting its other name, The All-Seeing Eye, its view being omnidirectional. That the function of the eye could be understood as both a receiver/processor and projector was apparently well-known long before modern physics revealed that the observer influences the observed by the mere act of observation.

Another version, one of many, actually, can be seen at right. Think of the eye’s function as the light on a miner’s hat, illuminating whatever the wearer brings into view. Much more than the heart, which is responsive and far less prone to intentional direction, the eye can cast its view upon whatever one elects at any moment, bringing the observed into awareness, into the mind, and into focus. (It’s no surprise then that poor eyesight — poor focus — makes for fuzzy thinking. Those who can’t see well uncorrected have diminished powers of observation.) This metaphor may be more accurate than the all-seeing eye for an important reason: a large percentage of information gathered by the eye is discarded. The eye’s narrow point of focus is a relatively small portion of the entire visual field; the rest is peripheral. If this were not so, conscious awareness would be subject to stimulus overload from just one perceptual channel. Other senses compete for attention (especially kinethesia), further limiting what can be brought into conscious awareness at any one time. This limitation is sometimes called the bandwidth of consciousness, a sort of built-in bottleneck.

Another telling expression of the eye’s power of projection is found in the superhero genre, where good guys and bad guys alike frequently possess the ability to shoot lasers, x-rays, or power rays from their eyes. Everyone has experienced the similar if less hoary effect of a withering look (or the hairy eyeball), which may signal an underlying emotional state but is understood more commonly as an aggressive or intimidating behavior. With superpower eyebeams, eyelines drawn into illustrations connecting the viewers to objects of interest (familiar dotted lines used to track the viewer’s gaze) are thus amplified into beams of intense destructive power. The source of the power is unclear, as with most superpowers, but the fact that it is delivered by a look is an indication of the mythical power behind the eyes, which is known poetically as the window to the soul.

It is not a difficult stretch to suggest that directionality, whether omnidirectional or pinpoint, also brings the world into being in the sense meant by New Age gurus and adherents to theories of quantum reality. At a more mundane level, each of us pursues interests that appeal to us and gain familiarity and expertise accordingly. Subjects that sustain one’s interest and focus are often later distorted through professional bias and cherry-picking support, as when a religious person turns to scripture for justification or a scientist relies solely on data to substantiate an argument or theory. This is also what’s meant by the old saw that to someone holding a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail to be pounded down. After a fashion, tools of thought can become weapons.

One could easily dismiss all this as mere perspectival diversity, where some interpret the world in one fashion while others take different approaches. However, I intuit that something deeper is going on, namely, that a sort of blindness develops when one learns how to see the world primarily or even exclusively from one perspective. Everything can’t be illuminated at once, so where one turns one’s attention and the habits of mind that develop from focused expertise can render the viewer/thinker fundamentally blind to other valid interpretations. More specifically, to the capitalist, the wholesale commodification of human activity as well as the world’s resources makes it so that the only possible view is in terms of money and/or profits. Such folks aren’t starry-eyed dreamers, they’re dollar-eyed gluttons. And to them, collateral effects such as increasing class tensions, social upheaval (and eventual regime/institutional collapse), pollution, resource degradation (e.g., overfishing or soil depletion), and climate change lie outside their scope/view, making denial easy to assert without lying outright. This doesn’t excuse conscientious blindness to reality, but if one is ever dumbfounded that others can’t see what seems glaringly obvious, this explanation might being to shed some light on why.

Addendum: Even in the portion of the blogosphere taking collapse as its subject, bloggers adopt highly idiosyncratic approaches that fit their styles, interests, and expertise. For an incomplete survey, let me summarize a few. (I could be wrong about some of these. Don’t hesitate to correct me.)

At The Collapse of Industrial Civilization, the focus seems to be chronicling the onset of collapse with copious citation of news reports and other blog entries. The news is sometimes cited as support when a summary or report of a scientific finding, but more often, the news is soundly derided because journalists in the MSM are obviously carrying water for the military-industrial-corporate complex.
At The Spiral Staircase, though not solely a doomblog, the focus lies with causes and available responses (even if only in attitude) related to the culture surrounding or giving rise to eventual collapse.
At Clusterfuck Nation, the focus is on exposing corruption at the heart of empire, with a healthy self-awareness on the part of the blogger and reticence to engage commentators in dialogue.
At now-defunct Deer Hunting with Jesus, the approach was a wickedly colorful combination of memoir and explanation of the redneck perspective, which accounts for a surprising percentage of the population that barely had a voice in the conversation until Joe Bageant appeared.
At Dark Ages America, the focus is chronicling the waning of empire, with special attention paid to the utter stupidity of the American public and mining cultural history for reasons how Americans in particular got to be such corrupt and incompetent buffoons.
At Nature Bats Last, with diverse content, many guest bloggers, and a robust commentariat, the focus is wide-angle, with the result that NBL is often in the vanguard with respect to recognizing developments and drawing sound conclusions.
At How to Save the World, the focus has shifted from organizing grass-roots, transitional, and intentional communities to a full-on retreat into inner life following the recognition that absolutely nothing is going to prepare us for or stem the tide coming in.
At TomDispatch.com, the focus lies with nonmainstream reporting on mostly American politics and society.
At TruthDig, commondreams, and elsewhere, (specifically) Chris Hedges reports primarily on political and military corruption and scandal.
At Club Orlov, the focus lies with comparisons to previous regime collapses and prepping.
At The Automatic Earth, the focus lies with financial analysis in light of anticipated upheavals.

There are many other blogs and bloggers who go unmentioned, but it’s clear that a huge amount of information is out there, hand-picked and curated from a variety of perspectives. In addition, the comments section behind each, if not populated by trolls and deniers, are often as worthwhile as the posts themselves. An odd sense of community comes from connecting (virtually) with others who share a perspective that still eludes the so-called great unwashed masses, who are still gorging themselves (typically through debt spending) on the bounty of the modern age. Whether by innate character or conditioning, some of us never required much by way of convincing. The science and larger historical trajectory becomes fundamentally clear upon even modest inquiry. Chronicling our descent only reinforces conclusions reached intellectually, namely, that the path before us is unavoidable. Dissenters may assert that conclusion is pessimistic, defeatist, fatalistic, or nihilistic (is there a continuum for negativity?), but with so much going wrong with the world, evidence overwhelms denial.