small things
a set of short essays (under 1000 words), plus a few other oddities,
most of them created for and offered to Huffington Post
- so far none have been published - all the same, for someone who can't
write a sentence he doesn't like, being forced to be more pithy
has been an excellent discipline ...
National Insecurity
The State is meant to serve the People. This is hardly true in many places in the world, and in America a revolution was fought to make it possible for the State to actually serve the People. How well do you think that is working?
After 9/11, the intelligence institutions of the American government grew at an alarming rate - becoming over ten times their previous size and budgets.. Millions of folks now are authorized to know so-called top-secrets, many of them private contractors. The NSA monitors all of our electronic communications, has the biggest and baddest super-computers, and still can’t discover or stop two people from murdering over a dozen in San Bernardino. Meanwhile the FBI, and the DOD, recently wanted to force Apple to give them a pass key, with the false "promise": "We'll only use it once". Does anyone really believe that? Edward Snowden, by the way, said that someone can probably open the phone, which has turned out to be true.
The after-effect examinations of 9/11 revealed: We knew some of these folks were in America, but the CIA refused to share that information with the FBI. This was because the CIA wanted to conduct operations in America (turn the two identified terrorists into giving up higher ups), an action the law forbids the CIA to do. That it was illegal didn’t stop them, and we all know what happened next.
National Security people lie to Congress. James Clapper, now Director of National Intelligence, lied to a congressional committee when he was asked whether the NSA was spying on Americans. He said no, and to this day insists he was misunderstood. Lying to Congress is a felony, and he ought to have been charged, tried and now be in jail. Why does he still appear before Congress giving “advice”?
Many questions arose because of the revelations of Edward Snowden, in which he exposed NSA activity, and not only their general illegal and unwarranted intrusions into the private lives of Americans, but also the fact that individual people in the NSA used those secret gathering tools for private purposes (such as checking up on their wives or looking into the lives of celebrities). Snowden now has to hide out, and can’t come home.
Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning remains in jail, sentenced to 35 years, for leaking all manner of documents, to WikiLeaks, revealing the duplicity of our government, particularly the State Department.
WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, remains hiding in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, having been granted asylum. Movies have been made about Assange ("the Fifth Estate"), and Snowden ("Citizen Four").
The keepers of secrets want to call these people traitors, when in fact they are heroes in the War between the overreaching security apparatus of the State and the American People.
What does a tyranny look like before it takes over every aspect of our existence as Americans?
A fascist government is defined as a collusion between business interests, and a government. In its embryonic form in America, we call it an oligarchy. It is not likely to stay an oligarchy long. It very much seems that a mostly unknown elite dominates politics, and hides its worst crimes through the ability of its supporters, inside the government, to classify as secret anything they want to hide from the American People. This “government” demands absolute privacy for itself, while at the same time insisting that the dangers of terrorism, using the magic words “national security”, are to allow them to know all details of our private lives.
The people have been resisting, and one of the ways is to make have grade A encryption possible for all. Snowden suggest to only use open source free software, and avoid the high tech giants. Many in the government don’t like this. They want their secrets kept, and ours revealed. Are we suspicious enough about their true motives yet?
The government has justified intrusions into our lives because these will allegedly protect us from future terrorist attacks. This scare tactic is a fantasy. In this age the government cannot save us from all the crazy folks out there, whatever their religious affiliation, or mental instability. The world cannot be made perfectly safe, and we are foolish to require it, or blame the government for it’s absence. Gun deaths, car deaths, alcohol and drug deaths, gang war deaths, pretend ISIS believer deaths - death is part of life, and promises by politicians to save us are really just so much hot air.
The sad fact is the intelligence services are lazy, and want to use electronic means rather than the more skilled (but difficult) ways of gathering intelligence through human resources. They want quick and easy, and our civil rights can be damned. They like to sit at desks, and play with computers, instead of face danger in the field. Already military drones ride the skies in America.
We need, instead, the truth. We need to be told that the “security apparatus” cannot stop all dangers, and we need to force ourselves to stop believing it can. In a way, we too are intellectually lazy. We refuse to see the dangers, or acknowledge government intrusions that are everywhere. No-fly lists, long lines at airports, internal security check points requiring picture IDs to just vote - all this is a slippery slope we are already traveling down. It is known that Homeland Security (an oxymoron) has plans to make internal check points at all places of public transportation, such as bus, subway, and train stations. A national ID is being demanded in Congress. How soon will it be before everyone has to carry “papers”, and our militarized police can stop anyone anytime, and require we present the same - to show we have a right to be - to even exist.
Government has not earned our trust. It has, instead, earned our mistrust. We must wake up, or our children’s children’s lives may be horrible beyond our ability to imagine.
The Real America is not broken, it has just become invisible.
This political silly-season we could get the idea that America is a awful place, full of terrible people with grave moral weaknesses, producing all manner of reasons for us to sink into a sense of collective despair. We must build great walls across all our borders, for the world is full of dangerous folk who are coming here to kill our children and rape our women. Plus, the very rich have caused ordinary Americans all manner or kinds of harm, enriching their own pockets, while robbing the rest of us blind.
So the candidates for political office sing: Accept my unjustified and illogical metaphors, describing one or another group of people as responsible for all of America’s woes, and send me your money and give me your vote.
With great intensity, describing all this noise as “breaking news”, the major media battle for our attention, all the while seeking to increase their advertising revenues.
The facts suggest that this grab for our involvement, and personal wealth (what little there is of it), is not actually working. A recent news article, analyzing the “campaign” so far, has pointed out that up to the time of the article 14.9 million Democrats had voted in those primaries, and 19.7 million had voted in the Republican primaries, while 106 million ignored the threats of great terrible consequences, and stayed home. Some adherents on both sides will berate the stay-at-homes for unacceptable apathy, forgetting that having to have three jobs to keep one family alive, and this often without medical insurance, keeps a person pretty busy running around on too much sugar and caffeine, as well as dropping all kinds of over the counter drugs just to keep the stress created colds and flus at bay.
Is America actually falling apart and in need of rescue by the current crop of ambitious adventurers? Or is this just an every four year collective madness, that infects our national psychology for a time, and then fades away until the next opportunity to emerge from hiding?
Who are these people? Where do they get the idea that America needs them to fix things, or disaster awaits us all? Why do we believe them?
Well, one answer is that we have been told this tale, by the political parties struggling over power, so many times that we suspect it might actually be true. The parties don’t have our real interests at heart, and everyone with a grade school education knows this. Still, real Americans soldier on, shoulders to the grindstone continuing the doing of the heavy lifting that makes America America.
Think about it.
A society, such as ours, is inter-connected. Everyone plays a part, and all parts are necessary. Yes, some company can fire the particular lady who cleans up after the old sick folks, and replace them with someone else in desperate need of a job, but the jobs remain. If there are not policeman and teachers and drug counselors, and garbage collectors, and toll takers, and janitors, and mothers and fathers - if all these roles are not filled, or poorly filled, there is no nation and no economy.
Granted a complex society has severe inertia (resistance to change), as well as equally severe momentum (driven by passions galore), such a society is built from the bottom up, not from the top down. The driver of the rich man’s limo needs his morning coffee, which will be made by some regular person, who works in an environment that had to be cleaned by some janitor the night before. Everywhere inter-connections, and co-dependencies.
Most of the Country does ordinary hard work, while incurring too much debt, without which there will be no money in circulation with which to buy all the goods and services that drives a commercial economy. And, the folk at the bottom need the bankers to make the loans that keep the businesses that make the goods, and sells them, going. Some sales person has to be at the register to make the sales. Some cab driver has to drive the lawyer to work that wrestles the 1000 page contracts which enables the banks and corporations to manage to work together without each one needing (as in the age of European feudalism) a private army to do the nearly bloodless battles that now take place in boardrooms and before judges in various courts.
We also need the silly politicians, who can’t seem to do anything right - a gang that cannot shoot straight.
Everyone has a role.
The most crucial actions, however, are social interactions. There we say, please and thank you, and have a nice day. This is the grease that all the wheels of a sane society run on. Mutual kindness, and a generally freely willed agreement for all to follow the basic social “laws”: work hard, play by the rules, and mind your own business.
Those folks at the bottom, who do that, and lend their children to wars, and raise them under almost completely intolerable conditions ... these folk, collectively (out of many, one) are the real America.
They are also, as accomplish by the genius of the Founders, the possessors of all the needed powers of the true actual government. Governments at every level ... Nation, State, local ... all exist through a limited grant of power from “We the People”. Because, ... that’s how it got done the first time. People really need to read the Constitution, a written down aspect of the fundamental social contract, especially the 10th Amendment: “... powers not delegated ... are reserved to ... the people”.
The politicians work for us, ... for the extraordinary ordinary Americans, and it seems to be a very good time to remind them of this fact, which sadly, in their collective hubris, they seem to have forgotten. Woe on us all if they continue to refuse to pay attention. Enough is enough.
Science, GMOs, Weather Control, and other Weird Human Practices.
So, we are all going to be replaced by robot workers. Hmmm. Then where is the money going to come from to buy all these goods produced so cheaply by the robots, if 70% of us are out of work?
Science is the new religion, and scientists are its priests. If we read a sentence that begins: “According to the World Health Organization, there is a strong scientific consensus ...” just might be time to put our skeptic’s hat on. Sorry folks, but empirical facts are not created by a vote of the imaginary “leading scientists believe”.
Keep in mind that a lot of “news” stories come from propaganda put out by interested parties as a “press release”. The “news” organizations don’t have the staff or the time to fact check the constant rain of press releases. Try this example:
During the recent fantasy measles out break it was routinely reported that measles had been completely eradicated, which was not factually true. In a normal year (look it up), 80 to 130 people in America get measles, of which several will die. Now that is a “normal” year, and any year can be outside those statistical averages.
What was going on, if we were paying attention, is that the anti-vaccination movement was gaining traction. Vaccinations are a several billion dollar a year business for what is called: Big Pharma. Accused also of causing autism spectrum disorders, all these vaccinations, given in the first couple of years of life, opened Big Pharma to billions in law suits. Giving live viruses is not always a good idea, mostly because everyone is different. Recently, Bill Gates’ program to inoculate children in India against polio has supposedly caused 47,000 incidents of polio.
It isn’t just the live virus, but also the solution in which the virus is embedded. This solution often contains mercury, which is a poison. But the priests of medical science (which is actually more art than science) say: Don’t worry. Sorry, but a main job of a parent is to worry.
The writer, John Le Carre, wrote a novel which became a movie: The Constant Gardner. It was about how Big Pharma does experimental tests of its products in Africa, where there is less government oversight, and - well there are a lot of Africans already dying of AIDS ... right?
Speaking of AIDS ... ever hear of AIDS deniers? Part of their horror story goes like this: The test for AIDS antibodies was later disavowed in its meaning and accuracy, but is creator. He was drummed out of the scientific community for this “heresy”. Anyway, all kinds of healthy gay men were positive for the supposed AIDS antibodies (which suggests there is an AIDS virus, but that little bug is still in hiding), so Big Pharma took a bunch of heavy duty drugs sitting unused on their shelves and created a very expensive drug cocktail. According to the AIDS deniers, its these drugs that killed so many healthy gay men, and may be doing so yet. Keep in the mind that victims of AIDS die because their immune system is so compromised that they die of such usually treatable diseases as pneumonia.
See these movies, and learn stuff: “And the band played on”; as well as: “Dallas Buyers Club”.
By the way, I’m not selling these stories at all, but they are out there, and if you cross the line and accuse Big Pharma of something, they have the wealth to destroy your way of life without batting an eye.
We know that there are a lot of genetically modified organisms out there. In Europe they have to be labeled, and in America Big Agribusiness doesn’t want this. The risks of GMOs are downplayed, and it is frequently in the news (recall those press releases) that the matter is settled and GMOs are safe. Lots of scientific papers can be cited, and of course scientists never lie, right?
Except for the fact that the former chief editor of the English main scientific journal (Lancet), admitted that half of the stuff they reported should not have been reported. Why? Because the sample size was too small (a study of 20 people will prove what?); and, the causal logic argument for what the study supposedly proved was very weak.
Look up “The Nature Institute” on Google and read there: “Unintended Effects of Genetic Manipulation”. Those are where the real issues live. “The facts at issue have to do with the unintended and systemic consequences of genetic manipulations, as revealed in one research report after another.” If all the priest-scientist looks at is the obvious, and if the obvious is all that makes the news, then the more serious problems get ignored.
Buried under all the news “noise” is the unreported fact that the Zika virus is not universally thought to be the cause of these diseases claimed to be its victims. The Zika virus has been around a long time without such effects, and what changed was that a genetically modified organism was introduced into the environments of several places in South America to eliminate a certain species of mosquito.
Modern science is not as smart as it believes when it comes to understanding biological complexity. When business get involved, the profit motive causes scientists to be a even less careful. Should we be surprised when “unintended consequences” kill people?
Anyone doubt that governments are experimenting on how to weaponize the weather?
Do not trust the “news”. Do your own Internet research. Real answers are out there.
Scientific Materialism - a Philosophically Unjustified Religion.
“Scientific Materialism” is a world view that reality is made up only of matter, or various kinds of forces, and the words spirit and soul cannot describe anything meaningful at all. There is a history to this set of ideas, which it will help to understand.
A little over 500 years ago, a kind of war broke out between the Roman Catholic Church, and the early thinkers called “natural philosophers”. This is generally called: the Copernican Revolution, Copernicus being an individual who proposed that the Earth, and the Planets, revolved around the Sun, while Catholic teaching said everything revolved around the Earth. The Church killed some of these heretical folks (Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600), and they even forced Galileo to recant such views, or be killed as well.
Natural philosophers, on their way to becoming natural scientists, continued to study the world, and the Church had a harder time just killing, or excommunicating, these heretics. Most natural philosophers still believed in God, in some form or another. Our modern historical view of those years forget that Newton (discovered “gravity”) was an alchemist, and that Kepler (three laws of planetary motion) was an astrologer. Faraday, who gave us the main ideas underlying electricity and magnetism, was quite religious.
What we today call “physics” was what most of these early scientists investigated. What we today call biology was a bit later, and most of biology’s basic ideas about the matter in living things was derived from the ideas of physics as to what that matter is. The original research into electricity thought for a while that this “electrical” stuff might be the soul, for the search for a material basis for the “soul” and “spirit” lasted a long time.
Physics worked very hard at taking things apart. Its basic assumption was that “stuff” was made up (or out of) fundamentally smaller and smaller “objects”, eventually giving rise to the theory of the “atom”, something actually far older as an idea. A main tool of this kind of research involved making instruments (first the telescope and the microscope), so after a while a lot of science became dependent upon instruments of various kinds.
The ideas of the 19th Century, in all fields, eventually became disinterested in the idea of “spirit” in any form, and the theories about what it all means were then articulated in ways, in which only “matter” played a role. Darwinism appeared, and so evolutionary biology was explained without any need for a “Creator” at all.
For the physicist a rather odd thing happened. They found out that their instruments, in seeking to “see” the smallest aspects that made up the “atom”, disturbed these very small things. You could measure the presence of such a “thing”, but not its movements. Or you could measure its movements, but not find where it was. Most of science had by then decided that since we needed to “measure”, or count”, so as to keep the certainty of mathematics in play, the absence of precise measurement of the smallest “things” was now a problem.
At this point physicists made a huge theoretical mistake, known today to a few, but still so strongly believed to be true, it lives in the theories of physics as a kind of belief. They assumed that because their instruments could not determine, at the same time, where or what a single particle was doing, that nature itself was fundamentally indeterminate. Reality was assumed to conform to what was essentially a limit on our ability to investigate it. This so disturbed Einstein that he declared: “God does not play dice” in relationship to probability theories and the resulting quantum mechanics. To review this situation, read “God does not play dice” by David Shiang, although some of what he thinks is in error.
The thinking of physicists in the 20th Century also encountered another weird limit, which was the idea that something that was indeterminate, only become determinate when observed (the famous “Schrodener’s Cat” thought experiment). Consciousness appeared to play a role in how and when reality became “determined”.
Eventually biologists get around to this “consciousness” thing, and it is a large field of study today, mostly involving a rather unjustified assumption. What is studied is the brain, which is assumed to produce “consciousness”. Today, that it once was known to be an assumption has been forgotten.
Part of the sad tale here, is like the modern physicist, the brain scientist doesn’t like serious philosophers. Properly understood, philosophy is also a science ... the science of how it is we “know” something. It discovers “rules” and “laws” to what enables a thinking human being to claim to “know” something. The technical term is: epistemology.
Recall above when it was pointed out that if something could not be “measured” or “counted” physics ignored it. Today in philosophy these pesky uncountable things are called: qualia. They include that taste of a tomato, or what it feels like to be in love. These are studied, but only when it is possible to find a way to count and or number the phenomena. Unfortunately most of human experience consists of “qualia”. Physics and biology drank the kool-aid of quantities, and dismissed qualities, in this way falling down an “epistemological” rabbit hole.
So in spite of normal human experience, many brain scientists are asserting that human beings have no self, and no free will. These latter everywhere common experiences of being human, are allegedly a result of illusions manifested by the computer-like operations of the brain.
The brain scientist can’t study consciousness itself. He only studies “outsides”, which is all his instruments can “touch”. Only consciousness can study itself, which each of us is free to do. Where that is done, in all the many and varied ancient and modern Ways, the conclusion has always been that consciousness is in some fashion spiritual.
The religion of scientific materialism is yet to get it.
The Big Addictions: Money and Power, and their Macro-Social Consequences.
Just about everyone has a family member who may be an alcoholic or a drug addict. All this is very familiar to us. After first noticing these we began (socially anyway) to recognize many others, such as food addictions, shopping addictions, sex addictions, and most recently Internet addictions. The list is growing all the time.
Treatment varies, but one aspect is clear: only the individual can fix themselves. The rest of us are on the sidelines, often collateral damage to the out of control behaviors of others. I’m an addict in recovery by the way, addicted (oddly enough) to ganja (the Sanskrit word for hemp or marijuana), which is often said to not be addictive. For me ganja was a psychological addiction, not a physical one. This fact should suggest to us that addictions have unique causes, and are not easily labeled or understood. Mostly I got stoned as much as possible because the world had gotten so horrible (during the '60‘s and ‘70‘s) that I’d lost hope and the ability to dream of beautiful futures. The ganja gave me the dreams my life did not.
Right now in America there is a crisis of the usual addictions, mostly heroin, and the synthetic opiate oxycodone. These are addictions of the mind, and/or feeling life, with a physical component when we want to stop. The body acquires a “craving”, not just the psychological or soul life.
The worst addictions are of the will, and among those the most powerful will-addictions are to power and to wealth. These often go together, although not always. Right now the social life of humanity, all over the world, is in the thrall of human beings addicted to wealth and power. A basic characteristic of this type of addiction is that the addict never feels that they have enough. Enough money and/or enough power. More than any sane human being ever will personally need.
There is a social component, in the sense that the people around the power and/or wealth addict admire this person, want to be near them, and to bask in the sub-powers and sub-wealth that are bestowed upon those who serve and support. Most of normal people are not attracted to the crack or heroin addict.
Addictions provide many kinds of payoffs. For the powerful and wealthy, sometimes the rush comes from being feared. One word from such a person can crush another. Those who come near are like the moth attracted to a flame. Too close and you get burned. Another aspect is to be admired. So when the power addict is among his or her admirers, they are often seen as a kind of “god”.
Now the world is full of such folks, and they all tend to be very egotistical, and most of them do not “play well with others”, as the saying goes. If they are smart, or very intelligent, they are also often lacking a conscience or any empathy. But this is a very competitive world - this world of great power and wealth, and success there often requires working with others anyway.
The alliances are loosely formed, flexible, and often temporary. Several corporations might temporarily agree to “fix” prices, but loyalty is not prized. Heads of State (dictators etc.) still need bankers, various companies, and others, to accomplish goals. Large international construction companies build highways and dams, and other infrastructure, everywhere. In many places bribery is necessary, kickbacks required, and making payoffs of many kinds essential. Specialized sub-groups thrive, such as “fixers”, deal makers, private army companies, and so forth. Arms are extensively traded, from multi-million dollar planes and ships, to missile systems, huge electrical turbines and so forth. Temporary empires in shipping, oil and gas distribution, and other energy systems ebb and flow in their ownership and alliances. Trillions of dollars in value move globally daily. The scale is extreme and it is hard for ordinary people to even imagine how complex the whole situation actually is.
A great world of secret economic relationships exists, most of it invisible unless there are problems or stock and currency values at play in the various world markets. Little of this gets on the news, and the plots of movies hardly guess at the fluid and fragile nature of the whole.
Right now central bankers all over the world are concerned. It isn’t just places such as Greece and Spain that are in danger of financial failure. We don’t know the names of most of the “players”, but for a lot of them it all is merely a game. They take risks because they can, and the stakes, for them, are high. At the same time, the consequences of massive world-wide systems failures, due to excessive risk taking, is for ordinary people at a catastrophic level. The house of financial cards is collapsing, and governments have become powerless to stop it.
All that said, ordinary people are far tougher than often thought. They are well practiced at enduring, and often make saner alliances than to do wealthy and powerful. From the point of view of the ordinary people, we may face rough weather, but not anything we cannot handle. The large systems may crash and burn, but not a local family or a church. We’ve learned to value love and friendship far more than wealth or power. In the recent housing crisis, millions lost jobs and homes, but most survived and live now on their native human wits.
Clawing their way to wealth and power often leaves those folks without truly loyal friends. Plus, we need to recall history, which reveals that the world has always been thus - the “owners” only appear to rule the masses. The movie Antz pointed out that there are more of “us” than there are of “them”. Make good friends with your neighbors. Rediscover how to grow your own food. Endure and have faith. This too shall pass.
The Past We are Taught to Believe in is Not the Real Past.
Sometimes matters are right in front of us, in plain sight so to speak, and we just don’t see them because our minds are habituated to “looking” in a certain Way. With the Age of personal electronic instruments, and changes in how material is presented on television, movies and so forth, we hear such phrases as “short attention span”, and “dumbing down”. College teachers are frustrated because students don’t behave the Way the teacher did when he/she was a student. A few decades ago, the writer Alan Bloom wrote this book: The Closing of the American Mind.
Instead of exclaiming the young are failing, how about wondering whether or not some kind of macro-change in human consciousness is happening? Are the young becoming radically different from their elders? How often does a parent (or someone else) say: When I was young we did it differently?
When I was a teenager there were no mind-altering drugs everywhere. TV was just appearing, and computers and cellphones were hardly even imagined in science fiction stories. It took days for us to know about earthquakes in Japan, or see pictures of such destruction. The world of modern electronic communications has made the world smaller, collapsing (in a psychological Way) space and time.
The young have also become more individualized. There was a time adults complained about the “me” generation, for example. Adults and children have not been raised in the same worlds, so radically are the changes, which seem to continue to accelerate. The meanings of words changes all the time, such as “gay” going from meaning a state of happiness, to a name for a sexual orientation.
One of the great (mostly still unknown) thinkers of the 20th Century, Owen Barfield, wrote extensively about what a few now call: the evolution of consciousness. Basically he points out that the consciousness of an ancient Sumerian is not the same as the consciousness of an ancient Greek, and neither of those is the same as modern consciousness. Yet, wrote Barfield, we (in almost all our forms of knowledge, including history and anthropology) act as if our modern consciousness was the same as the consciousness of ancient peoples. Barfield called it “the assumption”, and pointed out (through many books) that once we actually look at the evidence, it is clearly not true. None of it.
Our whole picture of the Past is incorrect at the most fundamental level. People in the Past were not like us, on the inside, as are people today. Let me give just one example, from the book: The Broken Cord, by Michael Dorris, where he writes that in his native language, Lakota Sioux, you can’t say “I hit you”, but only “We hit us.”
Just about everything we believe about human nature in the Past is completely wrong. They even “saw” a different world. Ancient Greeks “saw” a sea that was not blue, but a kind of red. What Barfield (and others) have done, is look at language, and the changes over time in language, as being a kind of inward geological-like set of layers, which reveals clearly that consciousness evolves, such that how we interpret history, and human development over time, has to be rethought down to its bedrock.
This also will have the effect of completely changing our appreciation of the Present. There is no “me” generation, or dumbing down, or short attention span, but something entirely other. Human nature is changing radically right in front of us. A few decades ago, this process was called: the generation gap, or for the religious: the family values crisis and the culture wars. These names came from the fact that elders didn’t like the changes, when in fact we really need to learn to stand in awe of them.
Are aspergers and autism spectrum individuals actually a new kind of human being, instead of being “diseased”? This has to include what some see as de-evolutionary changes, with more and more people seeming to be acting like crazed animals. Is humanity splitting into more than one “species”? One kind evolving, and the other “appearing” to be devolving?
Consider the possibility that the whole World (the Earth and Cosmos) is a kind of single integrated organism. Aboriginal peoples clearly perceived themselves as “part” of something far larger than themselves. Today, under the influence (enchantment?) of scientific thinking we have tended to see the world as made up of parts, forgetting the obvious, that to our perception it aways appears as a “whole”, as one entity. An “atom” does not appear in nature as all those little pieces. We make it into even more broken pieces by smashing parts of it together at extreme velocities. What we call the chemical exchange in the leaf, that makes sunlight and so forth into substance, does not happen in parts. The Sun and the Plant, and our need for them, have always been a “unity”.
Only the modern “mind” believes the Creation happens from the parts, instead of the parts being always and forever integrated wholes to our normal perception. Do you know of anywhere in nature where a process that combines two parts of hydrogen, and one part of oxygen, happens with the result that we magically then get water? No. There is just water, and its necessary role in all that lives.
In the studies of the evolution of consciousness, modern consciousness is named: the onlooker separation. This separation, necessary for the enchantment of materialistic science to arise, is an illusion. Nothing in the world is factually separate from any other aspect. It only appears so for a time, which time now seems to be ending. My mind, and my consciousness, is not a product of my physical brain, but rather the doorway into the Inside of the Whole of Reality.
The Lord’s Prayer begins: “Our Father”, not my father. Every child knows the world is magical.
Who owns America’s Lands? Who owns America’s Laws?
Everyone knows foreign governments, and multi-national corporations, own a lot of “property” in America. Many know that fast-tracked trade agreements seem to bind us to rules that limit the power of local governments. For example, can New Hampshire pass a “law” which effects so-called “rights” seemingly protected by a trade agreement?
Much of the land in the West of the USA is supposedly “owned” by our national government. That we stole it from the Native Peoples is also well known, but this “dispute” may be secondary to reality. The cliche is: “possession is nine-tenths of the law.” Factually, however, the governments in America owe their primary allegiance to the People.
The U.S. Constitution is clear: From the Preamble: We the People ... do ordain and establish; and in the 10th Amendment powers not specifically granted are retained by the People. This means that the Federal, State, and municipal governments only have a limited, and temporary, grant of power from the People. The People, in fact, own the “law-making” process at its most fundamental level. A primary retained “right” allows us to reboot the whole Constitution, outside the Amendment process, as that was what “We” did in the first place. We never gave away that “right” to any government.
The “law” determines the nature and rules of “land” ownership. Recall, if you will, the number of times various nations have “nationalized” businesses once owned by outsiders. No corporation likes this, and the CIA appears to have tried to kill, or remove from power, governments that have done this, or are trying to do this. All the same no one is arguing that within its national boundaries, a Nation State does not have unquestioned sovereignty.
The many trade agreements (NAFTA etc.) are work-around attempts by foreign governments and multi-national corporations to pretend to make laws superior to the actual sovereignty of a particular People. In America it is recognized that a law is not “just” unless it comes from the “consent” of the governed. Fast-tracked trade agreements are not consented to by the American People.
It is argued that our elected representatives have the legal power to make these trade-agreements, but factually they do not, witness the recent efforts to fast-track the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, while at the same time keeping all its details secret. These agreements are theft by stealth of rights belonging to the People, and the People’s sovereignty cannot be eroded in this fashion. This is not any different from the abuses of the English aristocracy which led to the first American Revolution.
We (the People) do not have to put up with this abuse of power by economic (financial) aristocracies, anymore than we had to put up with the abuse of power by aristocracies of blood at the time of America’s Founding.
Freedom has enemies. These enemies play what is sometimes called: “the long game”. They think, strategically and tactically, years and decades ahead. The efforts at a stealth theft of America’s Laws has been carefully thought out, and thoroughly disguised. Like the even now threatening coming of fascism (an anti-rights-of-citizens alliance of government and businesses) creeps upon us, slowly and surely, while we sleep.
The agreement and cooperation, with this looming fascism and stealth theft of our Laws, by our political leaders, is nothing less than in-effect treason against the Republic - against what our Founders created for the People. The President’s oath of office is to the Constitution, which is the written down form of the Republic. This oath is constitutionally required, and when a president supports the fast-tracking of trade bills, they are giving away, in more and more bits and pieces, the publics’ political wealth. Not the government’s, but the People’s ownership of the “law-making” process.
These political leaders are focused on their own individual short term goals of personal wealth and reelection. They belong to political parties that do not actually serve the American People, which is understood by all of us, as evidenced by the low regard shown in polls for politicians. Trump and Sanders are evidence of our latent anger. But just being angry is not enough - not nearly enough.
We have to be wise.
The current election practices, which basically arouse people’s emotions, will do nothing more that create feelings and cravings for that which cannot be had. In fact, no politician is giving us speeches filled with wisdom. They are all just satisfying their own ambition.
The People must themselves choose to act wisely. Ignore the politicians. Ignore the media. Get together with your neighbors and renew your shared understanding of the foundational ideas of America. You will not hear from the politicians what you need to hear from yourselves.
Here are the basic questions about which our Founders thought: How does a free people govern itself? What is the social contract - the unwritten social agreements we already share? Is it like this: “work hard, play by the rules and mind your own business”? How does money actually work? Why do banks get to “rent” us a product that does not exist until the loan creates it out of nothing? What is the difference between the legal and the moral?
There are no right answers. The key is to talk about these questions, and once we are talking with each other about them, then we start to demand the politicians talk about them. We change the public dialogue, and make it real. That is our power. To speak the truth to each other, and to demand the politicians, and the media, also speak the truth.
Politicians and the media no longer have our trust. This the polls tell us. Who then is there left to trust but ourselves. The fundamental government in America is “We the People”. Lets get together and care for each other, something the ostensible government no longer does at all. We don't need them. They need us.
Just One Moment of Eternity (A friend of mine wanted a poem, from which he would create a painting. This is the poem, and below that the painting. For more of Robert Nuckles paintings, go here: http://robertnuckels.deviantart.com/ The painting came with a title: "APOCALYPSE LITE" )
The jaws of the abyss
open wider and wider,
while raw human appetites
escape their former social fetters,
and darkness seems to loom
over all the worlds.
From the depths of the Earth
roaring whispers of war and chaos,
while the Stars shudder and Woes
of great vanities come loose,
falling inward from above and below
seeming to obscure all potential light.
The Outer World darkens,
the Gods have set us free,
and abandoned us to become explorers
of all our worst yearnings.
Yet, from inside the deeps
of souls seeming lost,
a self-born wind
surges forth, singing gloria to I.
This regenerative outer darkness
calls forth a virginal inner light,
an infant force with which to meet
and make the dark obedient and tamed.
This struggle - this war
of us against each other,
and of us against ourselves,
shakes the world to its roots.
It would bring down mountains,
cause the stars themselves to fall,
releasing all waters to flood,
and burn the earth to ash.
To this song, Titans of the weather scream in harmony everywhere:
“The Day of Purification is at hand”.
Happy 4th of July:
Right now only the Shadow of America is clearly visible. Politicians, bent by their ambitions, cannot see with their hearts. The same with the News readers. The public mind is trapped in a maze that seems to have no exits. All the same, a wise providence has gifted poets, story tellers, and singers, with just the needed wisdom of the heart. Listen for it. When you hear it, share it with others, for social media is also a providential gift, made just for our Time.
The Founders knew even more than we give them credit for. Ideas have something magical about them, especially when we know them with the clarity of their original intent. All the same, only Art can bring forth once more these Ideas clothed in their true meanings, no longer lost and forgotten, but rather freshly returned when our need for them is great indeed. These poems reflect a true understanding of what America is meant to be.
The link below is my contribution, although at 1 &1/2 hours it is fortunate that all you have to do is sit back and lend an ear. The poetry is read aloud, and the capstone is a music video. Have some friends over to witness together, and then for conversation after. That conversation is all that is necessary to participate in the true second American revolution, which means to change the conversation to what “We the People” want to talk about. You don’t even have to be an American to participate. The Idea of America belongs to all.
Hold in your heart that the True Idea of America has been buried for generations in a Tomb, and it is not easy to roll away the Stone encasing It. The poet may begin such work, but those that dare to hear must carry It to fruition. It is, after all, a quite dangerous Idea. Over the generations many have died just to keep even a dream-like memory of It alive. Protect It in your hearts, for that is Its natural home.
https://youtu.be/QtZQJ5a1L0Q
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