Dear Mr. Murdoch

Dear Mr. Murdoch,

I noticed today an article in which it was stated that every Republican potential candidate for President in 2012 is employed by you. Congratulations on your finalizing the takeover of American government. Now that you own Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House you can complete the conversion from a "democratic" republic to a true fascist state. I have to assume you will then announce that America's debts are not the debts of New America, or whatever you plan to call it. I expect you will retain the name to help the people adjust. Anyway, that seems logical. The Chinese will object, as will India and Japan, and for obvious reasons Great Britain will not. If you want my take on it I would suggest that China might be willing to have California and Hawaii in order to wash the slate clean for them. Maybe Japan should get Hawaii, that would be so ironic. 8-)
I am not writing this to sing your praises and make suggestions, actually. I am asking you if you expect the "wrong thinkers" will be allowed to leave the country or if you plan mass executions. The reason I ask is that my family and I will likely fall into one of the categories flagged for removal. I am 60 years old, disabled with a back condition so I require a lot of medication. I also have never voted Republican, and although I only occasionally voted Democrat I am sure the Tea Partiers would consider me a liberal. Personally I consider myself to be a financial conservative and a social liberal. So it seems logical that my family would be sent to the camps. That being the case I would like to have a chance at political asylum in a European country like Holland or Sweden. I doubt very much European countries will welcome a flood of refugees so I would like to start the process now. If you would indicate how scapegoated minorities will be treated in the New America it would save you and yours a great deal of effort and money by allowing people like me to leave before things get hot around here.
Traditionally a new fascist government cements it's power over the population by creating a mass sin for all to share. Germany used the Death Camps. With all the people having supported the camps by supporting the fascists they would obviously share the blame and the effort to ensure they won the war. I expect you are too savvy to have an actual war per se since your background is more along the lines of a financial manipulator. This would save the damage to real property and livestock. So a propaganda war and a redistribution of the wealth is the likeliest path. The war to be won, then, would be a paper war to see which corporation ends up on top. I would not forget the religious element here. The neo-Muslims continue to be a violent component in the Mideast and like you the leaders are eager to expand their sphere of influence. A treaty of some kind is the most probable tack to take with them, probably offering them most of the Mideast save Israel. That done it would be simple to sign a fuel and resource agreement with the Saudi family and others.
I'm thinking it's a done deal since there is no force nor government capable of stopping you, with the possible exception of the Neo-Muslims and as noted above they can be bought. So the most important thing for me is an indication about the deposition of the scapegoats to allow me to start applying for refugee status or arranging for some kind of safety net for my family. I'd very much appreciate it. I realize there is no Earthly reason for you to reply since I'm a nobody, but I am hoping your sense of humor might be a factor and my plight amuse you. In that case we might work an arrangement. I hope so.

Sincerely,
Will Shirley
poet, philosopher and artist

Lately

I am something of a news junkie, or rather I am a seeker of truth. There you go, in the 21st century we'll be able to read news stories as they happen everywhere in the world! So I do. And I find that the world I thought I lived in, the world of America the democratic republic with the mandate to rule the world, is even more disgusting. Our boys in green are collecting souvenirs in Afghanistan. Do you know where that is or anything about it's history? Let me briefly clue you in on a good thing to know: barbarians are not at the gate, they are in your mind. So we have our boys in green collecting fingers for necklaces (like in the movies) and skulls, maybe to make a goblet out of (like in the movies). I suppose we needn't become alarmed until they start peeling the tattoos off the dead for lampshades, I guess. We're still better than somebody in the past. What about Genghis Khan? Well, what about him? Wasn't he a barbarian who cut off heads and took body parts as trophies? Yup. Where did he do all that? Mongolia and places west during his takeover of much of the known world. OH, and Afghanistan. He didn't last very long there, nobody does.

The poppy crop is down, the CIA will be very disappointed. There goes their Xmas bonuses. It wasn't because we burned the crops, oh no. Mother Nature brought over a fungus which killed half the plants. We were trying to save the crop so the government would have a nice source of income. Lord knows they can't export rocks. OH wait! They can. We now have a great reason for our boys in green to be killing and collecting: mineral wealth. We just read a decades old report from the Russians, who also failed to conquer Afghanistan by force of arms. Seems Afghanistan is lousy with mineral wealth of the particular type of mineral wealth which makes computers possible. So we ain't never going to go away. That means in the future there will be a small market in body parts collected by Americans as they won the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.Like how in America 2075 poor folks have to sell kidneys in order to get served at Health Care Inc. It's a small but important part of our future economy.

The My Lai  massacre led to the failing of the American delusion that we were the "good guys". We have never been the good guys so long as our cars drive across the graves of the natives who we massacred for over 300 years to take and hold their dirt and the stuff underneath it. Of course they never had ownership of that dirt, it was sort of a caretaker position. Now we own the damn Earth and we will drill and burn and excavate until the last useful rock is melted, smelted and purified into liquid Plutonium for our furnaces. But if there are enough of the Aghan version of My Lai around, enough necklaces of fingers, ears, skulls, rape stories told over at Joe's Bar after a few beers, maybe people will see that supporting the "bad guys" makes us bad guys. Makes us targets for the real "good guys", the ones avenging dead sisters, dead sons, dead parents. We have been hit a bit, but the blood still flows so we can expect another, soon. Unless...

Unless somewhere there is in America a "lawyer" who actually believes in the Rule of Law and he arrests the previous administration and issues a warrant for this administration for crimes against humanity and war crimes, we have no way out but to tear their houses down and send them all to the World Court. Then we will be the "good guys" and we can hold our heads up in international waters.

Do the world a huge favor and if a buddy, a brother or a sister tells you that they have a necklace of fingers, go to the police, the FBI, and the press and see to it that others know about it. If we actually act like people with ethics and morals perhaps the next sky scrapers to fall will do so to build a multi-cultural center where people can learn about people in other lands, with other religions and the same love and respect for human life.

Colors

If you look at the house we seem surrounded by a golden cloud. It's the Jewel weed, mostly. That's about chest high and somewhat golden orange with spots and speckles. It trembles with the beating wings of the hummingbird checking out each bloom. Sometimes the shaking of the flowers causes the seed pods to pop, reminding me of the other name for the Jewel weed: "Touch-me-not".Great fun to watch them curl and scatter their seeds. Mixed in with the Jewel weed is Goldenrod and there are many kinds. Some have a huge single clump of bright golden fluff while other weeds have multiple heads, smaller but more exciting. They look like golden fireworks. Down the way we have many sunflowers, giant grey striped sunflowers and dozens of Jerusalem artichokes. I have actually pulled a few and examined the little tubers, like water chestnuts. They seem like the kind of food a wild man must eat, like Solomon's seal and bolete mushrooms. A lot of the yard is edible.

The flowers that I bought and are hanging from the front of the house are dead and dried, whereas the colorful weeds and volunteers are big and beautiful. The golden cloud around the house continues to the rear and is mixed in with the pinks and lavenders. This time of year we have one or two bright fuchsia roses growing next to the funny Turtleheads, whose pouty mouths grump in four directions. They are as much fun as snapdragons, which oddly enough don't like to grow here. Too many competitors I guess. There are maybe a half dozen lilacs of various shades growing flowerless in the late summer morning. Each year I am surprised by the increasing size and volume of flowers on the lilacs. Another shock is the wandering and misnamed Obedience Plant. Half the one bed is covered in pink flowers and spiky leaves. I have long since forgotten where I first planted them. They struggle with an un-named weed whose nasty stickers are a handful all the way onto the roots. It has small flowers which are not pretty enough to forgive the pricks over but whose roots apparently have wandered all over the beds. I pull them up by the handfuls and they come back nastier. I suppose I should boil and eat them just to scare them away but we can't be sure if they are poisonous or not. It's a desperate plan developed from an observation that certain weeds become less intrusive once I realize a use for them. The valerian root is great for back pain, so now they grow in more attractive groupings where the wonderful scent of the pinkish flowers can startle and delight the walker by.

An odd yellow surprise are the number of squash plants which not only volunteered to grow this year, but who volunteered to grow in funny places, like out by the well head, near the garden path, and of course where the old compost heap used to be. I expected either tomatoes or squash and got them both. the pumpkins gave us two fruit, both big enough to carve or small enough to eat. The blue Hubbard squash was planted from a packet of seeds last year and has come back to haunt me this year. It overran the path to the hammock and wandered over the obedience plants, mixing it up with the evil prick weed. yet all the plants manage to get along better than the residents of New York City do when politics are in the air. Two avocado trees from the compost have sprouted and are about a foot and a half. that's still a far cry from the ten foot tree we grew last year. I had it in a pot and eventually the head was so tall I had to move it to the deck, where the cold autumn air finally got to it. Let's see how the twins do this winter.

The Goldfinches have found the Jerusalem artichokes and are picking away at the flowers. They leap from choke to sunflower to chicory, looking for all the world like animated sunflowers. Over their shoulders is the more thorough hummingbird buzzing from the hibiscus to the Jewel weed, one flower at a time. After putting up the hummingbird feeder I am startled to find a little hummer poised in the air about two feet from my face, examining my features and perhaps evaluating my intent. She buzzes off, satisfied that the feeder is safe enough and later she comes by to see if it is, and it is safe and tasty. But as she sips a male comes by, chipping and buzzing, slamming her in the air and chasing her off. Then the male goes over to the hibiscus plant to sip and watch the feeder. I'm not sure why he doesn't just feed at the feeder or share the hibiscus, but that's hummers for you, too busy to think.

Decomposing America

I've been having a "debate" with a right wing nut over in social group land. He claims to be a millionaire businessman but Margaret thinks he's a poser. Nevertheless it has been interesting seeing just how angry and pissed off he is. He sees the changes coming up in our economy as being a direct threat to his way of life. He's in construction but he thinks the new economy will not help him out much. The "New Economy?" you ask? Yes, the old one was getting frayed around the edges so we got a new one coming in. The essence of it is that the corporations running the government have been devouring one another for some time now and we are reaching a tipping point. The Fascist Regime which is America is part of an older template for human social interaction based primarily on relative wealth. Read: class war. The money has been trickling up to such an extent that businesses have been happily sending factories east to make even more profits. A problem with this short sightedness is that the unemployed buy very few things, no matter how "affordable" they are. But the reason for this older form of economy is the transformation of labor into money. The flaw lies in the nature of money and it's perversion by our society.

Money is a tally device, a means by which labor completed or promised is kept track of by counters of metal or paper strips. The coins are fair for metalworking and the colored strips of paper make lousy toilet paper but good eyeglass wipes. If a person should work for ten hours they get a counter marking their rate of pay and hours worked. it is possible then to transfer this counter to another person in exchange for their labor. This is a sort of Ponzi scheme where everything works until the papers fail to deliver. For instance, say a ditch digger works ten hours and gets a paper saying ten hours @ $10/hr equals $100. In point of fact the dollars have very little intrinsic value but they represent ten hours labor @ $10/hr. If that $100 is given to a doctor, say, one might find that it covers one hour of labor, not ten. So, although the numerical markings on the paper have not changed the value of the paper has. Furthermore it is possible for someone to get their paws on a pile of paper when they have done nothing to earn it. It might be a promise or it might be theft. Let's say I find a wallet with $1000 in it and I keep the papers for myself. Aside from the question of right or wrong there is the displacement of labor contained in this act. I can now hire ten men to dig ten hours at $10.hr and get my basement fixed. Nevertheless it can be argued that there is an imbalance which will have to be reckoned with eventually.

In our society here in America, we can also write our own script through checks and money orders. We can write contracts for millions of hours of labor with no coins or paper passing hands. In short, currency has little or no value except to tally labor completed and/or promised. In recent years more and more of the tally markers are numbers on a computer screen. Eventually it would be possible to remove money from the system and replace it with a tally board of relative labor values and time spent in labor activities. Labor is not passive, it changes things. An hour with a doctor might result in a headache being cured or it might be a tumor detected and saving a person's life. Money takes on a local value determined by the value of that person's skill set. It is further modified by the immediate need for that skill set. When a pipe is not leaking a plumber's time is not so valuable.

Money was invented by the rich and powerful to hold sway over the poor. It tips the scales in society. If a person were to accumulate a considerable amount of money they would hold sway over those with none in a time of universal need. In a drought the money could be used to hire diggers to make a canal from a river to the farmlands. But nothing stops the diggers from digging before any money passes hands. The money is not even the motivation for digging, the water is. In a moneyless society the ditch would still get dug and all would benefit, but in a monied society if enough money is not present the ditch does not get dug and the farms suffer. An example is in Haiti where a lady owned several mango trees but hadn't enough water to grow more. The river was a few yards away and she needed a ditch. Arrangements were made for the ditch to be dug but because this was in a money environment it took many weeks of negotiating over who would get how many paper tokens in exchange for the use of the land and the transportation of the water for irrigation. It might be noted that the ditch can serve more than one farm. In a moneyless society it would quickly be determined that the ditch had value and workers would dig the ditch to increase the mango yield, serving many people in need.

I have had people question my contention that money per se has no real value and actually slows down an economy which is dependent on it. Prior to the invention of money work was accomplished by people in exchange for the common good. Like rice farmers working together for the common harvest things got done. We have used money for so long we have forgotten how to make things happen without it. I suggested recently that we have thousands of empty houses in America and thousands of homeless people. In a moneyless society it is obviously for the greater good to get those people into those houses. I am told that people who get houses "for free" will not appreciate the houses and will trash them. The bigotry revealed in this statement is really pretty obvious: the poor are slobs. The benefit to society should be obvious as well. People in houses get sick less often than people who live on park benches. There is no good reason for keeping the homeless as homeless, anymore than it is reasonable to keep people from working. Our bridges and roads are unsafe, we haven't enough light rail lines and virtually no way to move people around large cities without polluting the environment. All of these issues can be solved by people working together for the common good, and this labor pool would need to live in houses. The solution should be clear.

We would be surprised if firemen came to our burning home and declared their rates for saving the house, yet that is exactly how it worked a few years ago. Public financing of fire protection became a group effort because of the group impact of fires. Nobody goes to a fire with their hand out. Things change and we should be open to the passing of outmoded ways of getting things done. If we made food, housing and health care basic human rights afforded to all we could eliminate money, which would eliminate economic classes. People would work one on one with a fair exchange of goods and services being set up by the parties directly involved. One more item to scratch off the list of governmental functions.

My Nation, My Loss

Yeah, it's time for a serious one. Maybe it was last night's migraine that is still throbbing in the background of my head, but a few thoughts and words keep bouncing around ahead of the throb. Here's an image I cannot shake: Glenn Beck on the cover of some magazine in a Nazi uniform, grinning like a shit eating skunk. Not a piece of fiction, dear reader, Google up the image if you like. But, see, when Prince Henry dressed like an SS officer he looked like an officer, which he is. Beck looked like Mussolini, which he isn't supposed to be. For the terribly young, again, Google it.

Why is this important? Cut to a sound bite, Donald Rumsfeld, the Murderer of Iraq: "A treaty is just words on paper. That's all, words on paper." And he of course meant the same for all legal documents including the Constitution, all words on paper. Like the Bible for what that's worth. Like the oath of office Bush took: words on paper, signifying nothing. Now pan back to look at the administrations say all the way to Nixon. Look at the NAMES. Curious, when you consider how many people live in America, that so few have worked so long to run this country into the ground and the monies into their bank accounts. The same damn names over and over, a good old boy network that includes the 'right" kind of woman. Think Condi down on her knees doing Georgy Boy while he works on a puzzle.

Slip of the brain, sorry. So, no conspiracy, no plots written in blood by the night light. Actually these kind of people like rituals where somebody gets bloody, somebody gets off and nobody talks. So aside from that, let's get down to generalities. In a math problem the limits are known and finite. It is impossible to lie about one plus one equals two. You can jimmy up a form of math where analogies are made and substitutions are made, but still within that system the parameters have been spelled out and the rules are well known. One such form of math deals with chaos, the ruling deity of the Western world. You can use it's rules and parameters to follow a flock of birds for some distance before new data has to be added so they don't fly off. You can "see" how people will walk around a mall or in a stadium how the seats will fill up. Most of the time if you have enough variables spelled out you get pretty close. But chaos math still has rules and parameters, edges a little fuzzy but we have a handle on what the fuzz looks like up close.

Now take Don Rumsfeld and his words on paper. Let's ask Don to predict the flight path of a set number of particles being acted upon by Mars gravity and a forward uniform acceleration... ah! Now Don has folded his paper and snapped the pencil in half. He picks up his blackberry and calls up an engineer he owns and gives him the question. He hands the blackberry in and goes and buys another. See, math is just words and numbers on paper and Don has no time for that. he buys knowledge and owns people to remember for him. The one who knew about the Constitution fell down a mine shaft and exploded. But he never read Mein Kampf either, more words on paper. He is, however, living the books he never read, minus the death camps. Ours are much smaller so as not to attract a lot of attention.

Beck in a suit, Don with a blackberry and Bush with his girlfriend and millions of dollars. Toss in Rush and the rest of the wealthy assholes who think laws are for suckers and ethics get you killed, as if Hitler had a shred of ethics in his soul. In business, according to American standard fierce capitalism, it is a dog eat dog world. It is also a dog blackmail, murder, torture, slander world. Now in the theory set forth by Benito Mussolini, (by the way, Don, Benito actually wrote whole books of words on paper.) a fascist state is the result of a corrupted republic and republics are always going to corrupt because you put a small number of the wealthy elite in charge of all the money and power. He personally felt that this dog eat dog mechanism was part of a perfect state of eternal warfare wherein the best rose to the top. Social Darwinism is rampant in the writings(?!) of the right wing in America. They bought into the concept without understanding, I hope, who promulgated the concept. Now, a fascist state should more properly be called a corporate state and fascism is actually corporatism because the biggest corporations run the government for their own advantage while waging constant wars to keep up their bottom line. Nothing is so wasteful as a war. It uses up materials and people so fast that the factories and maternity wards can barely keep up with it. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy used slave labor from the countries they ate up. America uses Americans as slaves with the illusion that they have choices, when in fact none of the possible choices amount to a rats spitball. How many channels of pure crap do Americans have to choose from and yet how many corporations control the news sources for these American consumer-bots? Damn fucking few, and there is a reason for that and it is found in chaos theory.

A corporation is words on paper that a certain number of people or other corporations must agree with. Too few units and the thing is unable to protect itself from larger, nastier entities. Too big and it takes a government to support the appetite of the Beast. A country is words on paper tied to a physical location in which the document itself defines who shall be included. Note that it is identical to a corporation except for one small point: land. Multinational corporations are not like countries because they are oblivious to geography except as it relates to commodities and resources. They don't care if their actions destroy a country and send it's people into exile. they don't care because nowhere in the Corpora does it state that they care, so they don't. In the Constitution, dear reader, there is no mention of caring for people, not people caring for people. There are mentions of the government having responsibilities, duties and powers, but nothing about giving a damn about the old, the sick, the homeless. So they don't.

They are the people who run the corporation that is America, a huge, multinational corporation whose main product is death. It runs on human souls and bodies and has been in charge of my country for about 40 years that I know of. The ultra rich in America are not always the ones with the most dollars. In times of war, constant, never-ending war the real wealthy invest in things like gold, slaves, countries. Nothing has changed in 8,000 years except the words on the paper and they signify nothing.

The only thing that never changes, according to Fred Brighton, PhD, poet, philosopher and author of "It Takes A Real Prick to Screw America", is inconsistency. And per his Theory of 1957: "The only true consistency is inconsistency, and the only true inconsistency is inconsistent inconsistency." So you may go for 200 years thinking you lived in a democracy or a democratic republic, only to wake up in a failed empire collapsing into a fascist state, or Uber-Corporation. But in one or two years it might suddenly shift into a simple society of farmers and hunters linked by fiber and separated by miles of dangerous, toxic wastelands. It's all good! Nobody gets to live forever, no matter what words there are on paper. Cheney is kidding himself that bathing in babies blood while fucking your daughter will make you immortal.

Gulf Coast Fairwell

Now that the SC has declared corporations to be People, BP can run for President, buy the election, and proclaim the Gulf of Mexico disaster to be a minor, cyclical aberration that had nothing to to do with oil drilling. That would all be legal in the world of modern America.

Lately they have been playing clips of the Twin Towers burning and collapsing. Watching the second Tower come down I was reminded of a collapsing empire, how it teeters and rebounds, slips, and burns, until finally it's obvious to everyone what is happening and it collapses the last few feet. The Empire has collapsed into it's component parts. Then everybody around is breathing unhealthy air, contaminated water and debris falling, floating and blocking all the unlucky survivors. You don't want to be too close to the center of either the Empire or the Tower.

This oil will reach the Stream and poison beaches along the Atlantic seaboard. As it slowly kills off the fish population and the bottom feeders we can expect major changes to the chemistry of the sea water. Look at pictures of "dead zones". Now, here's the thing: unless this has a cooling impact on the waters we will continue to see the ice caps melt. Should they do so as the temperature rises we can expect more active, destructive hurricanes-born in the Gulf. So we have chemical stews of poisonous brews being tossed up above the flood lines by massive CAT 5 storms hitting a beach which is several hundred feet higher anyway because the oceans are rising! Got that? Whew. The oceans become lifeless here and there, especially in the Gulf, where we used to get a lot of our fish from, since the Atlantic fish are being fished out. They also get higher all over as the ice caps melt and the Greenland icecap especially melts. Now, as I said before, unless something happens to slow the melt... and that is a done deal by now, way too much inertia behind the warming... the storms continue to get larger and faster, influenced by our constant adding to the oceans chemicals which kill off our food supply. If we dumped this crap on our soils we would have to import all our food from China.

The good news is that with decreased salinity and increased petrochemicals the Gulf Stream may not stay on course. If it does not flow north, past Iceland and down past Britain, and back around to Florida or Cuba. That's part of the reason that hurricanes spin like that. And as the air mass expands due to heating, it doesn't gain mass, it gains volume, which allows for a bigger storm ceiling, and that changes weather patterns. I am hoping their various computer simulations included such a possibility. The Stream changing course, I mean. Although that might make Paris more like Montreal or Seattle. Alas for Boston! The City That never Sleeps will finally lay down and close her eyes, perhaps for good.

Filth, death, and poison, flavored with lies and stupidity all coming towards Washington is nothing new, but this time it's not a Party, it's a multinational corporation. In other words just a guy, a person like you or me... according to the Supreme Court.

Far away, Long Ago

Sometimes I get a whiff of a bit of moisture mixed with the pines and I feel the asphalt beneath my feet again, a long time ago. Once upon a time in Oregon, on a road in the evening, with the surface of the road warm and soothing, a young man walked with pack and stick and a growing awareness from the many scaly encounters his feet were having that his mocs had big holes in them, the snakes on the highway were hard to see in the growing darkness, and there was a real horrible possibility that he'd be walking in the dark, stepping on snakes for many a mile. It was an Oregon wetland and I was pretty sure most of the snakes were harmless, but a single hiss would do it: I would jump up in the air and land squishily on a gopher snake and he'd scream and bite me and I'd jump again, landing on some other snake and pretty soon I would look like a golf ball in a field of mousetraps.

A station wagon pulled up and the door to an old Plymouth wagon was the pearly gates and Golden Gate all in one. I climbed in and promptly shook my boots out to make sure I had no passengers and to check on the size of the damage. I had two good sized holes in each moccasin. It could have been worse, though, because I had traded an old harmonica to a kid for a nice calf hide. I just cut off a portion with my knife and placed it into a moccasin over the hole. When i was done I could get several more miles out of those guys! Good job! Now I looked at the guy driving the wagon.

He was scruffy, I guess, but I was worse off. He was also sucking on a bottle in a brown paper bag and holding the steering wheel with his left index finger while his elbow rested on the old girl's elbow rest. Not a bad deal, maybe a buzz, certainly further down the road, and best of al no snakes. I remember looking around back to make sure he wasn't transporting snakes to some zoo in Seattle. He wasn't. It had been raining off and on for an hour or so and my fake fur jacket smelled like a wet dog.

So when Wrigley and I went out back to open up the hen house and check for evidence of woodchucks or foxes messing around, as I walked up the path I was wearing my big green boots because it had been raining off and on and by now Wrigley smelled like a wet dog, which is of course what he was. But it takes you back. It takes me back anyway.

Fish and chips, good fish and chips in a newspaper cone with vinegar and salt on the chips and fish does it for me. I'm on Haight Street, that great street and it's 1967. I fear I was dressed in a green satin dressing gown sheered short and hemmed by my own fingers. It was a bit of splendor to make up for the sandals, tee shirt and jeans. Like the beads, except the beads on the street often moved from neck to neck, like puppies. But the small portion of fish and chips at the Shamrock cost a mere 30 cents and the large portion only 60 cents. That was not too hard to panhandle. A large portion had 2-3 chunks of fish and a LOT of chips, we'd be able to feed a multitude with a couple large portions. Everybody shared. Couples with babies were not unknown, but not often seen during the day. They tended to have crash pads and the ladies were often at home tending to the baby. Sometimes several couples would occupy a flat and there would be dogs and kids and a lot of confusion. They were always melting pots with all the races represented and some in between.

Going over to a place with a friend for some reason dealing with drugs and music... As we approach the front porch my friend turns to me and says, "Now, don't stare. Doug and Ada are nudists.." and the door opened. She was remarkably beautiful, with a full round moon-like face surrounded by a cascade of midnight hair and a Bode body, all pale and rounded. I could not stare. I looked beyond her to see the old man sitting on the couch, rolling a joint. I was real happy and it must have shown, because now that Goddess of the moment was in the kitchen wearing an apron and washing the sink full of dishes. Still, she had twin moons and I could glance as we chatted. Later, carrying an amp and being fairly high, I walked back to my friends house where, conceivably we would smoke a little more while trying out the amp. My friend turned to me and raised an eyebrow. "How'd I do?" I asked him. He looked away for a moment, thinking in silence. "Well, it's hard, ya know?" he said. We walked in silence back to his crash. It was hard.

The Old Hippie's Groovy Blog: You Think?

The Old Hippie's Groovy Blog: You Think?

They Didn't Let Me Post This

...all the forums have limits on the babble they can post and I babbled on too long, so I am posting it here:

A "country" is a concept, an agreement between individuals. Our nation was formed via a Constitution and Bill of Rights. Through the years we have amended our nation and our rights by making agreements with the world, for instance on how we will conduct ourselves in war. None of the agreements and contracts have any meaning if we show the world that we have no respect for written agreements, for treaties or promises. By killing civilians in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations like Gitmo and simply ignoring those deaths as somehow unimportant we show the world that the United States is untrustworthy and dangerous. The more we kill the more dangerous we show ourselves to be. We even poison fish supplies by dumping garbage and chemicals into the waters off Somalia and Peru. In short, in spite of our past actions where we "saved the world" we are killing it now. As my father used to say, "That dog won't hunt."
The world will someday stop us, it will have to in order to save itself. I would hope we could somehow do it ourselves, thus saving millions of lives, but we will have to turn off the TV and march in the cold, being chased by security forces and maybe even jailed. The question is, do we believe in anything anymore enough to risk our peace if not our lives?

Life Is Like A Two-Way Street

So much of life is binary, two-fold, two-

faced, too much. It seems that the initial

response to life, the immediate response, is

pure bi-polar good-bad, instantly. A bit of

tissue moves away from a bright light, or

towards it. This is my response: that it can

be a gray zone when no immediate response is

possible. Say you are interested in speaking

with someone and you are in a dark room,

possibly even outside in a new moon

situation, but you are walking about in the

dark while looking for someone and you bump

into someone. You may startle back and then

exhale to exclaim, "Whoosh! Oh, Jack! I was

looking for you!" To which Jack might say,

"In the dark, Jill?" But it doesn't matter,

Jill was looking for Jack and found Jack, so

that was "good", right? Well, yes, in the

short term, but in the immediate term, the

moment of contact, Jill stepped back and

inhaled sharply, before recognizing Jack's

leather jacket and exhaling like a hoot owl.

The owl was a symbol of wisdom, knowledge,

by virtue of an association with a version

of the Goddess.

Jill had a response that was from a

different part of her brain than the one

that "knew" Jack's leather jacket. In fact,

in a dark room it only knew "me" and "not

me- dangerous". This binary knowledge of

life is cellular. It comes from our spine

and the base of our brain; it comes from our

nerves in our fingers. Both Jill and Jack

and ourselves are a vast condominium complex

of cells and cell families. Just like any

small town most cells know or are aware of

the cells around the neighborhood. They are

much more aware of their families, the cells

they most have physical contact with. Some

cells just bounce around in fluids, like

"white bloods" and "the reds", who sometimes

get into altercations with other cells,

especially those from outside the

neighborhood, like rose thorns. There are

times when cells will die in the attempt to

kill other cells from outside the 'hood.

So it might be noted that racism is at it's

roots a cellular artifact. It should be

understood as that and treated as that. A

viral infection, such as re-writing history

can change an aversion to an insane hatred,

leading to a violent confrontation, death

and corruption. Corruption of the core

systems of the body will kill it, make it

incapable of going along with the everyday

needs of life. Cells die all the time. They

get replaced, until someday they don't. Then

some move on to other lifestyles. Compost.

Other compilations of living organisms may

recycle most of what is left. This is also

how cultures takes up the remains of other

cultures. They take up the knowledge, the

rituals, and the history of other cultures.

Suppose Jack had ingested a slice of rye

bread which had been made from flour

containing generous amounts of a fungal

infection called ergot that likes to grow on

certain cells. This bread now is being

digested in Jack's stomach and the

ergot amine poisoning has him seeing

everything in bright red flames and Jill's

eyes are burning coals while her hands are

those of a demonic banshee. So, naturally

when Jack said, "In the Dark, Jill?" he

meant the Dark Side, ie, Hell. So when she

reached for his face Jack did what any other

all American boy holding a bucket of water

would do: he beaned Jill on the head,

causing her to fall and twist her ankle.

Finding Jack in the dark like that was

really "bad" for Jill, and "bad" for Jack,

who continued on his psychedelic rampage for

another 12 hours and finally is arrested for

attacking a lamp post with a baseball bat,

and resisting arrest, assaulting an officer,

profanity and attempted sexual assault. Jack

had a real bad time after that.

Good - Bad? Who is to say? That's why they

call them "cell phones" so there is better

communication between the cells, and this

sort of thing doesn't happen. Jill could

have called someone, maybe Peter, and asked

where Jack was, whereupon Peter would

clumsily explain that they had gotten some

"bad bread, man" and everybody was freaking

out! She might have then tried to find a

safe place to sit it out, maybe called

someone else to meet her with a flashlight

somewhere.

Timing is critical, timing and experience.

If Jill had not wasted time hanging around

the 'hood with Jack and had got to night

school, or maybe taken classes in aikido or

intervention techniques, she could have

handled the encounter with a host of

variations.Alas for Jill, so many of them

would have gotten her hurt and Jack freaked

out, but at least two variations would have

had them making crazy monkey love under a

full moon, so that would be good.

Fancy Title

I keep going on about surfaces, titles, names. Names are such a bad idea. Add verbs and pronouns and adjectives and soon everything is covered in names like paper mache covers a cheap lamp. You can't see the thing itself, the absence of the rest of the universe. The reason for this is simple and basic. You can't speak of anything until you can agree on what a thing is. Cast about in your mind for a familiar thing, maybe a monitor. This thing is called a monitor although other things are, too. This is a different monitor, it occupies a certain space and is differentiated from that other space by a surface, which restricts other things from interacting much with the rest of the universe, although some do send out photons, packets of electromagnetic radiation which will display a picture if displayed in a certain matrix. It's all very complicated and electronic. Except it isn't in far more ways you might imagine. First and foremost let's try an exercise in logic: see that monitor there? Yup, you point to it, right there. So I pick up the monitor and remove it from your sight. Now I ask, Right there? and you look confused and turn your head. There! you point at the monitor. There, right there! Well, I say, the last time you seemed pretty sure of yourself. You pointed over there and said Right There. Now you point over here and say Right There! Which is it? Well, it's not the space I was pointing at, it was that monitor in your hands is what I meant. Now I look confused. I'm not holding hardly anything! I have pretty much nothing at all in my hands. And it is the Truth in more ways than you can imagine. Mostly what is in the vicinity of the ends of my arms is differing frequencies of electromagnetic energy, and nothing else. Now you want to try to touch it. Your finger stops moving forward and you say, There! Right There! but I am setting the monitor down on the table and although your finger continues to rigidly follow the monitor in its path, by the time I have stopped moving you have sketched out a wobbly line. Now I have to wonder what kind of thing you are describing. It seems pretty big because everywhere you point you seem to find it lurking. Everywhere I look I see varying frequencies and packets of frequencies and no end in sight. It looks like this monitor is either everywhere at once or nowhere at once, like a paddle ball dancing about the end of a band and occasionally slapping into the paddle of my consciousness. But not a thing, not a where, but a process. A corporation of packets of frequencies changes relationships with the rest of the universe in a coherent or mathematically  consistent ratio of parts. And there you have it. It's too hard to say that in a conversation, so we slap paper mache all over the place until everything Every Thing has been plastered down with names and names of names.

I've always enjoyed paper mache. I always thought it neat to be able to make little heads over a light bulb and then sew clothes for the heads to make puppets. I'd put together plays, with special effects for a smoking dragon and even performed in libraries for kids. Great fun. But the dragon was not a dragon and the smoke was a toasted Cavendish. Still the kids liked it and some young ones were even a little afraid of the dragon. They were afraid to touch him. They'd seen the smoke and heard the words and even though the knight had slain the dragon, apparently "slain" did not mean killed, because here he was, still smoking, potentially at least.

I'm not sure that kid was so wrong to fear a dragon. They have been known to terrorize a community, which does entail eating some of them. So people have been taken into the belly of a dragon, what an experience. Dragons, like snakes, could eat a person slowly from the feet up, or perhaps head first to quickly quiet the prey. Lots of things can creep up on you, lots of ways to die. Yet here we are, tickling the tonsils of a dragon and still wagging our feet at the sky. There is no sulphur to a dragon, contrary to popular fiction. The flames come from methane belches, followed quickly by the clicking together of steel and flint in the dragons teeth. This is one reason they come into human territories, to acquire the steel. The flint they can dig up themselves. It must have been an early, stone age dragon who discovered it could light beleches in the same way a human learned to light farts.

But the picture of early dragons roasting men for dinner does create a lasting image on the collective consciousness of homo erectus. It would collect on the DNA. DNA has that double helix thing, which is interesting in the fact that dragons fly up and descend in a tight spiral, creating a double helix flight path, also the spiral is the path a human takes being swallowed whole by a dragon. It was said that a knight going out to fight a particularrly nasty dragon would eat sausage and cabbage the night before so that if taken by surprise the knight could let loose a huge fart at the wrong time for the dragon and thus blow it's head off, killing both the dragon and the knight. This was the first suicide attack on another species. Since then we've gotten into doing it to other humans. Not the fart, so much, although we do produce a hell of a lot of methane, but the blowing up onesself for ones something or another, usually something invisible.

The funny thing is, all that blowing up stuff is pointless from the viewpoint that there isn't a lot of stuff to blow up, per se. Most of what gets blown up is empty space and packets of frequencies, except, of course, it ain't. IT's not a thing, though, it's things. many things, none with names, none with subjects or predicates, no verbs to offend. These things are called Dark Matter and they are dark because they just don't give a rats ass about the rest of the universe, which is not even nearly as much as the dark matter is. Most of the universe doesn't give a rats ass if everything blows up. It's happened before and will happen again, like a little red rubber ball on the end of a band, smacking some Great Paddle in the Nothing and impacting mostly nothing, but still, the back and forth goes on, sometimes you get a hit, sometimes you are hit. Nothing to get excited about, it's just an exchange of frequencies, some math to balance the Ledger and then you find that dark matter Caused an effect in the rest of the universe, just by being. This darkness is always opposed, but never overcome, because we are in and out of it, like water and oil, spinning in Nothing, forming a Great Yin Yang.

Sometimes the back of a mask is well made, smooth and polished by the foreheads of many actors. Sometimes the back of the mask is crude, chiseled out quickly to produce something for a tourist, or maybe a yearly ceremony, after which the mask is discarded, or sold to tourists. The special masks are painted with blood, smeared with spit, polished with the hair of the creator. Feathers may adorn it, down from a chick, and white dung used to paint the lines. This special mask is never seen, but is buried high in the hills in a very special place, sometimes with a child, sacrifised to be a servant to the God who will wear this mask. The child is always a female. They adorn her face with special signs, drape an expensive shawl over her, give her drugged drinks and then escort her up the hills to the very special place. By the time she gets there she is so stoned she thinks she is a goddess going to marry a god. They take her to the cave and she leans in to see the Special mask worn only by a god and seen only by one other person. Then they hit her very hard in the back of the skull and place her in the cave, seal it up and never return.

what i said

Ya know, voting in the Nazi Party would send a message to those bad old Democrats! If we wrote in Charlie Manson for President that would sure show them. After all, this IS all about "sending messages" rather than running the country, right? yeah! Vote in a communist to send a message to the right wingnuts and vote in a Nazi to show them lefties. Don't worry about actually solving the vital social issues of the day, or the decade, just send messages and pout when things go against you. What the heck has happened to American intellect?? Can you people look past your petty party loyalties for a second and SEE the world for a change? WE are bombing Muslim babies and their relatives are trying to bomb OUR babies. Nobody is talking, nobody is listening. Does you religion require madness? Are you obligated to kill all non-believers? Then move to Australia or some other place besides America. Let's live up to our propaganda and CARE about life and CARE about people.

Haiti - Lake Katrine

Today is Saturday, Saturn's the Male epiphany associated with Harvest. The farmers used to have a bash on Saturn's day and bring out the sour mash. I am more sour than usual, in large part because of the realization and full understanding the implications of so many heads being hit by so much violence in Haiti right now. If any father can relate to the face of the man holding his surely wounded, possibly dead child, it is I. Yet some might say the child died in the arms of someone who cared, and that is true and that matters. It instinctively punches into the gut, deeply next to the still-beating heart. Thank the One they died so loved.

The camera pans. GoogleEarth zooms down to Lake Katrine, to a bed near a window where a 35 year old man stares or sleeps. He's my boy, my child and for so many seemingly lame reasons, it is rare I can hold his hand. He's 100 miles away, being otherwise “cared” for, but in the end they don't care. IN point of fact a tiny piece of a percentage of the money being sent to help that other father and his poor, wandering neighbors, is all that prevents my boy from being closer to me when he dies. See, it is a fact that the general pool of brain injured people die after about 15-20 years. The ones who got deeply hurt, who almost never wake up, they tend to die easier and last fewer years. So it is not with a conspiracy I fear for my boy, it is time, and time is hard to avoid.

Jon could have been a father, should have been, would have been a good one, maybe if we didn't fight about how he was raised. I tend to interfere and that isn't something I'd want to hang on to. I might get a TV star to raise awareness of Jon and have his sperm extracted to give us a child to carry on his name. Oh, that would have ratings and hate mail. But I would much rather Jon hand over his own child, made by him, than some quasi-verse where we can skip past Jon to his child's life. There are so many reasons I could give for Jon being nearby, healthy or not, conscious or not. Jon may be the only man never to tell me to shut up, to let me prattle on about politics or faith. But I know I do not know he hears me, it is a matter of faith.

I do know that my body finds it hard to bear the pain and the liminal points, the edges and joints, are thinning a bit. In fact several are starting to go away, making it harder to take a 2 hour drive to be with my son so I can chat with him, possibly, almost certainly stimulating a few new cells to procreate, my boy trying to get control of his lungs and mouth so he can at long last ask me to change the channel or just shut up for a change. Failing that everyday stimulation from someone who loves him, my boy will most certainly die before I do. It is not hard to imagine him doing it alone, in a white bed, by a window, but not being able to look out at the sky. I can't even hang a poster from the ceiling for him to stare at, because, of course, the nurses and staff could not do what they have to do to keep his body clean and free from infection. An infection run wild, anti-biotic resistant, will eventually give him a pneumonia from which he will not recover. They will probably give me his ashes, or I may have to chase them down.

So it is I observe a Haitian man frantically staring all around at the bodies, trying to find his child, and fearing that he will find his child.

The Unionization of Mother Earth

Now, for a moment, I want you to see things through different eyes. I want you to see things filtered by some category or another and I want you to lose yourself in that perception. I am used to disappointments. Here's the thing: I am here digesting the contents of an imported beer, contemplating the idea of getting up and brewing up a 5 gallon batch of brown ale. I'd use the water from our well, our new, deep well. So the beer would be digesting malts and such using local water and local minerals. It would have a certain dialect. That beer would sit in my basement for a week or three, and then I'd be drinking it, rather than one imported from England. I like England. But I digest.

Over there, sitting on the couch which was made in Denmark in the 70's, eating her crunchy sandwich and thinking about school, is my sister-in-law. She's digesting food made somewhere between 100 and 3,000 miles away and shipped through an armada of vessels allowing us to have lettuce in our sandwich.

Outside I can see a little red squirrel eating the last of a corn cob. His stomach can handle what the stomachs of the jays could not. Actually, his intestine is processing the cob through the actions of some little critters about a cell wide, or if you get technical you'd have to admit that even at that scale there is a lot of sub-contracting going on, so they are about two cells wide. They are unions of specialists, each able to do a limited set of actions on something pressing against them, like a slurry of cob, seed, dirt and maybe suet. Like an assembly line the stuff that passes is added to or subtracted from, and the final product becomes food for the next down the line. The sunflowers that the squirrel favors are flavored with poop from the squirrel that favored them. Neat. But I digest.

Now see me at my table, my sister-in-law on the couch, the red squirrel on the tip of the elderberry shrub, just those three entities. Ah! Now see, in a simultaneous shift, just the intestines with the sub-contractors and digesters all working in such a way as to create heat, housing, employment, raw materials and social intercourse. Ah! It's slimy, I suppose, but still those wriggling tubes of shit and workers are analogous to a string of small towns and strip malls alongside a freeway or local highway. The people aren't the same color, but hey, what the hell? See those struggling worker unions, those hardhats and picket lines. That's our body, but that's our body expanded to relate to everything else. That's our local environment imprinted on our own DNA from drinking the water, eating the eggs and walking the walk. We aren't what we eat so much as we are what eats us, as well as how we handle the changes.

So now, looking at those twisting colonies of entities you should be able to notice the patterns of correspondence re the squirrel, the two humans AND as we refocus our eyes to acknowledge the earth beneath the squirrel is teeming with those unions, the couch has billions of entities working in and out of tandem, just getting by. My skin, my hair, my dog, all teem with workers changing one environment into another. We're getting beyond surfaces here. We're seeing our reflection on every facet of our environment. When the sun shines we are blinded by our presence. Except it is also the presence of the red squirrel, The earth itself and all the faces turned to behold that which holds us. It's fascinating.

I saw a red squirrel with a corn cob in it's mouth, chasing another red squirrel who had none, no doubt proving Darwin was squirrely. Who was directing the fight, the flight, the request and refusal? Who was it, the two sacks of little bitty workers hungry for more stuff to process, or the little squirrel brains which handled the chattering and scratching? Was it deeper than that? Do molecules crave carbon and oxygen? Do they whore themselves if needed for a nice oxygen fix? The earth, the Earth, Urda, all consume mountains of us all, taking us all in and changing us into nice oaks and poplars. That “sack” of critters is my Mom, I'll have you know! She's everything a boy could need, and more. She's everywhere, she will never stand you up. She might let you die. In fact, she most certainly will.

I could never eat a corn cob, neither could my sister-in-law. Our guts would not stand for it, the unions would go on strike. If you want to eat a corn cob, wait a bit and eat a squirrel, it's the same thing. It will taste like chicken. But I digest.

What would a sustainable life feel like? What if the critters eating that beer knew that in about 30 years the whole neighborhood would go to shit? Would they be long dead, or reincarnated into some other living entity? Would they just move into the Earth and start digesting there? Eventually the region would start to show promise as more minerals and critters died and were reborn. One day some being would harvest the wild fruit and make a fine beer or wine and have a moment when they realized how every living thing was related directly and indirectly to a common source of life and sustenance. Our old pall David Korten failed to name Her, but She has so many names...

Surfaces pt 2

It is possible to confuse the surface of a thing for the thing itself. When we do that we misunderstand everything about it. It is possible to confuse the mechanics of a thing for the thing itself. When we do that we forget about it's past, fail to see it's now, and cannot imagine it's destiny. We lose time. When we are lost in the girders of a bridge, looking at the columns, the asphalt and cables, we may forget and call this thing a "bridge" with all the things associated. We may believe a thing is it's purpose. A bridge is to move cars and people and products across the waters, when in fact this bridge, at this time was built for beauty, and love. So now we have a quandary, because our vision has deluded us into believing this thing is dead, it is steel and tar and paint. We fail to see the columns under the sand, or the rusted piles of iron it is becoming and will become. We don't see the pigeon shit or the hawks or the suicides. It is easier to filter all that out and become deluded into thinking a bridge is a bridge.

But what if it falls down? Then it isn't a bridge any more? But the rust is still there, the steel, the paint, all there. Pigeon shit may wash off, but it stays long enough to argue the case for the bridge. Then it flows downstream and the bridge rusts, the steel breaks down and the sands take up the color of the old bridge. Something was missing after the bridge came down, something left. Maybe the bridge had a soul, and maybe few could see the soul of the bridge in the steel cables and asphalt drives.

Now somebody took a picture of that bridge in an early morning fog and developed it in platinum and they hung it in a great gallery. It hangs there today. People who look at it can smell the fog, hear the birds and the rumble of the trucks. They sense the soul of that bridge. So that's where the soul went? Were the Plains Indians right to worry about the camera? Some young lover wrote a passionate poem, an epic tome poem comparing their love to that bridge, that wonderful bridge! And reading that poem you get a sense of the soul of that bridge, because it was built for love and for beauty. So there's more soul for you, we're getting closer.

Behind all surfaces, inside all mechanics, there are bits and pieces of a greater soul, enhancing and embracing the delusion of surface while providing the reason for life, for slogging through the physical strain of holding up a body, a form. Yet all is vibration, all is movement, all matter mere properties. So the mass is brass because you've got your head up your ass.

You can't go on forever, you know, pretending you don't understand the eleven dimensions and the folly of picking and choosing a few for particular attention, that's just squinting. Babies play peek-a-boo because it's fun. Mommies play it because it's fun and the baby laughs so sweetly. Neither is fooled by surfaces, no baby ever thought the mother was gone. The confusion comes when the laughter stops. A woman sobbing with her hands over her face, weeping over the covered up face of her baby, this too is confusion. This is a delusion of surfaces that can cause collapse. The knees get weak, the thighs tremble and the stomach sucks in a deep sob and there is a collapse, the bridge between two souls seems gone. This is confusion over surfaces.

When the last photo of the last bridge left behind by the last two people is dust, all of that, all of them, will be as the paint and shit that flowed downstream and stuck to the shore. Still there, just not so easy to see anymore, like a mother with her hands over her face, it's hard to see. And yet, it is because we are small and the rest is so big that we focus on parts and surfaces. But behind the fingers, behind the tears streaming down the face, is Mother and Children should know that. The covered up baby, the cold slab of meat and bone, this is not all there is to a baby and the soul has floated downstream to stick to another shore, but never gone. Even scientists agree things cannot be destroyed, only changed, and change is life, life is change.

What happens to the salt you put in the stew? It's in the flavor, in the smell. It's everywhere there is stew.

We aren't the meat, we're the salt of the earth.

Babylon

When once the fleeting moment leaves
The sacred widow dons black and grieves
The desert children weep and plead
For someone to supply their need
But none will hear and done's the deed.
The circle's closed, the candle snuffed
The shaman asks, "Was it enough?"
The holy rivers flow dark with mud
The streets of Babylon are thick with blood,
Imams and pastors locked in hate
While angels sleep before the gate
And orphans slink into the night
To dance beneath a moon so white
And owls and jackals post the guard
Beneath a sky so brightly starred.
- Aries

"Over Here Is the 'Big House'..."

 

Here I Am, With My Ent Friend, inspecting the hen house and collecting eggs.
It's wonderful to Know where my scrambled eggs comes from.

The best thing is, we may sometimes differ but I have found that His bark is worse than His bite.

Change the Climate

One aspect of the coming changes is more energy being retained by what is close to a closed system: the air. Some of the air is lost to space, probably a lot, actually. But by and large we'll speak of the air as being what is left. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says a lot of shit about closed systems, which just shows to go you that it was written back when smart men had the mistaken idea "things" were like machines were apparently. i.e. distinct and separate entities with hard edges and set properties. Too bad, because if they had seen the holistic nature of things they might not have been so fond of blowing things up, burning things down and pissing into the reservoir. The Law we should be paying attention to is the Brighton Law of 57, "The only consistency is inconsistency, and to be truly inconsistent you must be inconsistently inconsistent."

This is obviously a description of Chaos and Chaos is a property of infinity. By "one" I mean a personality, by "One" I mean Unity, or All. One's position can never be determined accurately due to the Heisenberg Principle, whereby if you accurately determine a position in space, in 3 dimensions, you have not accurately determined it's position in the other dimensions, eg if you accurately note the location of a moving train at 2:00AM you do not know the speed of the train, without the inclusion of another location. That gives you the speed on average between those positions but not it's immediate speed, nor it's previous speed. On the other hand, it is impossible to NOT know the position in all dimensions of the One, because by definition the One is Unity, is All. It's position is everywhere, all points. It's speed is both infinitely fast and zero. A Great Person once said, "As above, so below; as below, so above."

A body at rest loses energy, but no bodies can be at rest on their own, they require a reference point. It is relative to that point the body loses energy. Two bodies at rest relative to one another, in all dimensions, are the same body. This is because "rest" is a property of speed and speed requires distance. Thus there is the distance between the two bodies, and the rest of the universe. The distance between, relative to the remainder of the universe approaches zero. The one way two bodies can be at rest relative to one another is to be one and the same body, otherwise the distance moves away from zero and that is motion in a dimension.

Consider one example. I am in infinity. In all directions, in all dimensions is the Universe. Am I at rest or am I speeding at 500,000 kilometers per second? In order to be accurate in the answer, the question requires distance and time, and they require more than one entity. If I answer that I seem to not be moving, it will be relative to another point. In the night you see a light, it's not very bright and doesn't seem right but it doesn't take flight, although it might. Close one eye, you want to be sure. Two points define a line, your eye and that light. Let's forget about the light dimming as it approaches, thus fooling our eye, let's forget it is a far away star and thus to far to be sure of. It's just a light. You think you are at rest relative to it. But if you think about it as a light at the bottom of a very long well. you might find your imagination takes flight and you descend that well at a great speed until perhaps you hit. But now reach out to any side and feel a stone, a third point and now you are pretty sure you are at rest in a tunnel, not moving relative to the light at all, until the train with the dimming headlamp strikes you and the stone. You can't be sure of any one dimension until you are sure of all others.

So to know the distance between two objects as a stable, consistent value the objects have to have dimensions other than zero, eg "The distance between that stone and my hand is apparently the same as the distance between my pinky and my thumb." You need more and more information and it has to be accurate or the train will hit! Now close that eye again and hold up your hand, making an "okay" sign. Now spread the thumb and forefinger apart slightly and move the hand until you see the apple on the table. Now see the apple as the same size as the distance between your thumb and forefinger; wow, that's a small apple, not nearly enough for a snack! Even though your mind says you should be able to pick that apple up, you can't no matter how carefully you squeeze. You don't have enough information to make an informed choice.

A climate tipping point is not a point. It is a collection of conditions, of properties in a variety of dimensions. At some point in time it is possible to determine that we have passed it, but we cannot be sure how fast we are approaching it or leaving it behind because we can't have enough information. Heisenberg has made sure of that. But people of different vision may see different dimensions with differing clarity or accuracy. Minds which are trained to see an excess of patterns, that is to say, those who know more than they should, are most likely to be accurate as to the relative position of You and the Climate. Speaking for myself, as only I can, I think :

We are wasting a colossal amount of energy and time talking about stopping the climate from going chaotic due to the constantly increasing amounts of energy we pump into it. If we stop the burning of fuels for energy to move our machines and modify our environment, it does nothing about the existing inertia of the atmosphere in what we can see is a clearly chaotic pattern. How many times a day do you hear a newsreader say "the experts were surprised...more than the pundits predicted...?" Chaos is by definition impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy. The probability approaches zero.

We can fairly accurately tell which cities will drown when the last of the polar ice melts. It would be wise to plan for their evacuation,  taking the occasion to plan a 21st century replacement, or even a 30th century replacement. Where do we want our national capital to be and what do we want it to look like? Do the residents of New York continue to live in a flooded out city with no mass transit and the newly created canals where the streets were flooded with sewage and chemicals?

These are the type of questions we should be speaking of. These are the significant issues. Cutting back on pollution will be very easy after the oceans rise 10' and the weather is in a madly chaotic pattern, because the factories will all shut down, at least for awhile until the mobs settle down and the bodies get buried.

Thus it is that one and One are the same.

Jon Was Born on a Tuesday

Or was it me? I can't remember days of the week worth beans. That's not why I was expecting you today. I actually have good news today. A doctor called me back.

Well, actually it was a PA, but that's damn near as good. He called back to discuss the conversation we had back on Jon's birthday, the 3rd of November. I had told him that Jon was being over sedated and had been since the accident. He checked the records and said, "All these drugs would just sedate the man!" Jon just lay there, staring at the ceiling, staring at the room, juiced out of his mind.

We talked about Brainfingers, the mind computer interface being tried out on some "PVS" patients. We discussed drugs like Ambien and he wondered how Jon had done with those.

"Jon has never been given any therapy other than range of motion. No drugs to increase alertness. No attempt to find out if he is capable of thought."

So they want to try him on Amantadine, an anti-viral drug that will help him avoid Swine flu as well. This drug has been shown to help aggression in alert TBI patients, and increase alertness in patients who are minimally conscious or PVS. The other drug they might try is Ambien.

This is the closest we gotten in 9 years to getting off the Phenobarbitol. He was put on that crap in Arizona and he's been on it since, just because they fear seizures and all the paperwork they can cause. But Dr. Shroud is gone and maybe the new doctors have noticed that Jon is drugged up and left alone whereas his Dad seems a nice enough guy who says his son CAN think and needs help proving it. So maybe we'll get some help now.

Hang in there Jon.

Thursday Morning in the Rain

We become more and more isolated in the Western World. Like Pakistan we cling to our nukes and our torture chambers, ignoring the safety of our people, oblivious to everything but the lure of cash and the myth of social Darwinism. Meanwhile our children become more and more hooked on video and computer games, our middle class disappears, and our freedoms leak away as Obama becomes Bush and Amerika becomes post-war Germany. When all of the Western world is on one side with civil liberties and rule of law and we are on the other side with secret police, torture chambers and secret courts issuing “execute” orders who will speak for civil rights and essential freedoms? Britain? Hardly! Maybe Scandinavia…Who will be our Hitler? He will be a Republicrat at any rate. I have my passport ready.

Why is it when the roof is leaking and the ceiling is sagging I find it hard to be optimistic? Drip, drip, drip. Howling Wolf asks, "How long are you gonna do me wrong?" and I just don't know what to tell him.

"How many more years are you going to treat me like you do? You took all of my money and all of my love too."
I know how the Wolf feels. I can sense the K-Y jelly on my ass and the shaft still inside. I've been screwed so many times my threads are stripped and I can't go no where.