This will probably be my last blog entry. In the future my thought will (as long as health permits) be expressed in videos on Youtube, under the subject line: The Teachings of the True White Brother of the Hopi Prophecy. All my blog entries (this and the whole past) I will make into a book form and place on my lulu.com storefront sometime this summer (2008). Here is the link to my storefront.

It should be obvious by now that things are falling apart (apparently). A more accurate way to frame these social dynamics would be that all human biographies are undergoing an intensification of their levels of crisis. This is the Fires of Purification, as predicted by the Hopi Prophecy, as well as by certain aspects of the Christian Gospels: John the Baptist in Matthew 3: 11: "I indeed baptize you with water, for repentance. But he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to bear. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire."

We now enter a social present and future that cannot be understood without recognizing that the human being is a spiritual being, living in a spirit-ordered world. My book the Way of the Fool explains this in detail (it can be bought on my store front or read for free on my website.

See you on Youtube!

People have what are sometimes called: bad habits. What makes them "bad"?

One kind of "bad" is a moral judgment. The act is defined somewhere as a sin, or some such. Another kind of "bad" is ill effects, of which there are two kinds. Ill effects on other people and ill effects on yourself. Lately our society (in the West mostly, in other places in the world the context and the rest of the related factors are different), first smoking and now obesity have come under intense scrutiny for their effects on the rest of us.

We should also keep in mind that money is made and lost for a lot of people in how these things play out. Cigarettes make a lot of money for the corporations that produce them, and also are heavily taxed (taxes of this kind are regressive - that is they are most costly to the underclasses). Given the cultural forces defining beauty, there is also a lot of money made by companies that sell diet plans, products, supplements and so forth.

The studies on secondhand smoke are not very scientific, although this is not told to us. Mostly this kind of scientific investigation is based upon epidemiological studies (statistics of incident correlations among large populations). This kind of science doesn't really know much and assumes a great deal. It can't actually prove a causal relationship between those who are near secondhand smoke and various disease. All they really know is that the incidents of certain disease are higher when some people are exposed to secondhand smoke.

There are also animal studies, but these too have a problem in that usually the effect on the mice and rats (for example) is produced by the application of a excess of the so-called "dangerous" substance. The reality here too is that there are a lot of assumptions involved and not enough real knowledge. Let's look a little closer at obesity to see if we can discover something.

A doctor friend of mine (here's a link to his book), once said to me in conversation that the real cause of obesity is starvation. The body knows its needs, and our food has become so denatured that it actually contains not enough minerals and vitamins to sustain us. Our food also has all the wrong kinds of fats in it as well. The result is that even though we eat a lot, our body continually tells us we are hungry because our real nutritional needs are not being satisfied.

We are then driven to eat and to eat and to eat, trying to receive what we need from the food, but it is not actually in the food. As a consequence (and body type enters in here), for those people who are endomorphic (goolge it) the excess starches aren't eliminated as with other body types, but stored. So when we look at obese people, we are only superficially looking at someone who eats too much. The reality is that they are endomorphic and are starving for real food, and not getting it through what can be found in the grocery store. Presently they are being made social pariahs - outcasts, for something that is really the fault of our society and its profit driven food businesses, coupled with a complete lack of the nutritional knowledge among our medical practitioners. Smoking is similar, but here the problem is in the soul life (that is, it is psychological), not the physical.

Everyone has stress in their life. We all cope with stress in different ways, according to our basic psychological type (what another age called the four temperaments). Yes, of course, the nicotine in cigarettes is addictive, but what is the payoff? Why does the person seek the nicotine in the first place? If we assume it is just because they once tried cigarettes we will not understand, because lots of people try smoking, but not everyone keeps it up, and fewer still make it a lifetime habit. If we assume there is a genuine psychological need, what might we find if we looked for it?

The four temperaments are: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. A choleric wants to be a leader, has a strong ego sense and would rather be a boss than a worker. Sometimes such people are called: the nervous type. We also sometimes call them nervy. They go to the front. They go after what they want in a direct way. In a lot of biographies, however, this impulse is frustrated. They want to go to the front, but can't. Their nervy impulse is impeded.

As a consequence they are drawn to nicotine to relax. The cigarette calms them. A worker who is a choleric, but has a sanguine boss (a sanguine can't make up his mind), will always be frustrated by the boss, because the choleric sees how they would do it, how they would make a decision and go for it.

I could say a lot more, but here I just wanted again to point out that we live in a culture that is very much ignorant of a lot of the truth about human beings, and for complicated reasons tends to make some groups the bad guy. Some readers here will have perhaps understood that we can only change ourselves, not the world and not the other guy. But the common impulse today is also to want the world to change, so people think that they can fix the world by forcing other people to change. This is an unhealthy social impulse, because it is rooted in ignorance, and as a consequence will not only not really work, but actually cause harm.

There are better ways to do a lot of things, and the ways to help smokers and fat people is not by social control over their freedom. Enough said,...if you don't get the point, there isn't anything more I can offer to help you find the right direction.

A lot of people are in agreement, or so it seems. Barack Obama will be our next president. His grand themes: hope and change.

Lets not make the mistake of thinking carelessly about this fact, however. Hope and change can be addictive kinds of ideas, in large part because they are so vague. The listener gets to fill in the blank so to speak. These ideas call to our imagination of what we might want the future to reveal, and by their very vagueness they enable us to imagine that our hopes for change are what is to come.

That a politician speaks like a preacher should not surprise us either. There he is with his face upraised, looking to us all like he sees a brighter future. In tone of voice and posture he sings his song - see, he says, we can find better days. It is intoxicating, which is why I called it an addiction, and want to offer here some serious caution.

The fact is during the whole of his campaign he had no real concrete ideas about what to do. Oh, he sketched stuff out, but everywhere this concrete content was carefully analyzed it didn't pass muster. Just more empty calorie political bullshit. A new face and even some new words, but at heart its all the same tired old promises.

In my earlier political writing I pointed out that we could elect a saint to the White House and little would change, because the problem is not who is president, or which party controls, but the very substance of the institutions themselves. The problems with the economy, with the War in Iraq, with just about any issue you can name - these problems are symptoms of something. They are not the fundamental illness, and newer band-aides on older already rotting band-aids isn't going to change anything.

There is a need for change, and perhaps even a reason for hope. But Barack Obama is part of the problem, and to the extent he sells us the opiate of a delusion, he serves other masters than the People of America. We'll get feel good speeches, but no reform of banking, no reform of the electoral processes, no reform of the military-industrial complex, no real change.

The good in this is that as time goes on, more and more people are going to recognize that government (at least as presently constituted) belongs to the Lords of Finance, and that we are pretty much on our own (remember the lesson of Katrina). The kind of economic downturn we are facing is just a very slow moving Katrina-like social process - what I have elsewhere called "the third-worlding" of America. Once we accept being on our own though, then we can actually start to do something, but that is a story for another time.

Recently Secretary of War (Defense) Gates just removed from office the main civilian and two leading general officers, who collectively oversaw the Air Force. A few months earlier Gates had removed from Army positions similar leadership. In the case of the Air Force, the reported cause was lax oversight of atomic weapons, while in the case of the Army, the reported cause was lax oversight of Walter Reed Hospital and other veteran services.

It would be interesting to know whether these voices, now no longer heard in the halls of the Pentagon, were voices urging resistance to White House ownership of the military and its guiding policies, or voices favoring another War. Because policy arguments among Pentagon leaders, both civilian and military, are by tradition not out in the open (as would be normal in the case of members of Congress and other leading political personalities), it is possible to weed out certain points of view in the Pentagon and not have anyone really notice.

A clue to this tendency is found in the removal in March of Admiral Fallon as head of U.S. Central Command (which, among other responsibilities oversees the mid-East), following Fallon's apparent public criticism of Bush's policies. Fallon's removal was voluntary (so it is said publicly).

The expectation in Military culture is that the chain of command is to be followed, unless the orders given are "manifestly" illegal. General officers do not usually speak their conscience publicly while inside the Military, but only after retirement. At the same time, during discussions inside the Military, general officers are encouraged to present contrary views as to the efficacy of plans (whether the goals and missions can be achieved by the suggested means).

Obviously Bush would not have made Gates Secretary of War (Defense) if Bush anticipated any reluctance on Gate's part to follow orders and support White House policy. Given what we know from the past of this White House, and its relationship to the Pentagon as well as to our intelligence services, it ought to be clear that these institutions have by now been carefully cleansed of any serious potential dissent.

As pointed out in this blog years ago, in spite of the direction of the War in Iraq, the administration is in the process today of seeking to finalize Iraqi government support for permanent military bases there. Obama, who has just secured his presidency (baring outside interference), is clearly on board for a long term presence in the area. This need for a permanent base structure was already a goal of the imperial ambitions of the neo-cons, previously exposed in their position papers back in 1992.

Something, that seeks to dominate the world using the blood and sweat of the American People, still grinds slowly forward toward its goal of imposing a New World Order, run by the West, and overseen by the still anonymous aristocracy of wealth I have been calling the Lords of Finance. This monster, out of our Founder's worst nightmares, also readies itself to use extra-legal (outside the U.S. Constitution) powers to control dissent in the United States.

If another War is added to the mix, during a time of economic chaos, internal dissent inside the U. S. will escalate. Are we ready for these trials?

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Unfortunately for gun control advocates, the meaning is more obvious than a lot of people want to admit, given the historic context and the nature of the world in which our Founders lived. For example, a militia was made up of ordinary citizen volunteers. They provided their own arms for the most part. Many owned their own rifles, used for hunting and for protecting their livestock from predators. A few (mostly more wealthy individuals) also owned pistols. When the American Revolution required volunteers from the lower classes (indentured servants etc.), arms were provided, but many people brought their own.

Part of the historic context would also have to include that in England and Europe, during the century prior to our Revolution, only aristocrats were allowed to bear arms (swords and pistols). It was a crime punishable by hanging for the lower classes to own them.

We also need to keep in mind that our Founders did not trust government. The Bill of Rights was put in place because of concern that unless some of the basic rights were enumerated, a central government would be tempted (as the prior aristocracies had been tempted) to make rules for some that didn't apply to all.

A militia then, belonged not to the central government, but to the people. In our day, of course, we see how deeply controlled the National Guard is by the Central Government. Just as the Constitution was a work of art designed to divide power among the three aspects of government (the three Branches) in order to set limits on each single Branch, so the Bill of Rights was designed to set general limits on the Central Government, and put the peoples' rights as primary.

See in this regard the ninth and tenth amendments of the Bill of Rights: Ninth Amendment – Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Tenth Amendment – Powers of states and people. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."

We don't understand the Bill of Rights unless we appreciate that it was created precisely to set as superior the Rights of the People over the limited power granted to the Government by the People through the Constitution. The meaning of the Second Amendment then can't be read alone, but has to be understood as part of a whole.

The existence of a gun culture in America, and of the influence of the history of the West on that gun culture, are social phenomena that while some can find reason to wish otherwise, most Americans like the idea that they have rights which they can defend (a man's home is his castle). That the State (the Central Government or State Governments) wants to effect American culture (crime etc.) by gun control is understandable. However, it is not a decently thought out social policy. If the goal is to reduce violent crime, then the regulation of guns is a very poor choice of a way to proceed. We'd get farther in reducing violent crime by decriminalizing many drug offenses and prostitution, and eradicating poverty (and improving inner city life in terms of schools and medical care). We'd get further by stopping the insane increase of the income of the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes. We'd get further by having sane rules of property ownership that didn't concentrate access to real properly and the ability to grow food into a single class.

The knee-jerk liberal thinking that wants to control guns, already knows that such causes in the Muslim world (power in outsiders rather than in the local communities) creates much of the violence directed against the West. The same is true in America. Gun control is just more of the same - power applied by a central authority on a minority based on its fear driven need to rule. It won't work. Its never worked historically, and it won't work tomorrow.