12/11/07 - Truth #0 - The virtualizing mind of homo sapiens is the creator of the adolescent hell which we have created for ourselves.

Computers are the most powerful virtualizing tools we have created outside of the human mind. We are able to do "work" within the virtualized worlds of the computer that exceeds the pragmatic limitations of the natural world (reality). From the nose twitch of Semantha to the thought of what's "possible" in any given situation, virtualizing of the human mind at this time in earthian history is at it's peak. And the world that this virtualizing mind has created is also at it's peak. Peak oil, peak resources, peak population. peak stupidity actually, or maybe more politely, peak naivite. Whatever the status, we are well past midnight and deep in the dark of self knowledge.It's time to awaken from the slumber and take our righful place among the universe of intelligent beings.

In William Catton's "Overshoot" written in 1980, the drawdown of our earthian resources is well documented as well as the fact that this knowledge has been well published within the scientific community for over 50 years It is now 27 years later and we have actually gone deeper into denial about living well beyond our means for actually about 150 years. Catton would describe the continuing denial of this fact as the persistence of the Exuberant Era of industrial activity that wants to continue to think, like Samantha's twitch, that some new trick of technology will save us from self-extinction. These projective illusions that manifest in real physical events rely upon an earthian resource to actualize. Our oil is finite, our ores are finite, our natural resources that can replenish themselves concurrently with us, like ocean fish, and forest cannot be used faster than they can replenish or they will extinct. The exuberance of our over-use of oil has produced an over-population which demands more of the same. It's like a flywheel action that requires brakes, or ... kaboom! Like Easter Island we will extinct with them. This is just fact. The longer we deny this the sooner it will happen.

(Christians who don't like humans self-controlling their own population like to say that "...oh, the more people, the greater the chance there will be for a new "genius" to appear to save the day...". Right. There are now 6.6 billion people on earth and our "geniuses" are crushing electric vehicles, back-shelving solar technology and waring for oil because they can't find a way to keep these "concurrent" technologies from evolving into free ones (non-profit Earth Brand!).)

We need to wake up now, start being the adult who sees what's happening around them, plans and coordinates with themselves and others to manifest behavior which is sustainable. This is not complicated to understand. This just requires a reorientation of daily expectations to revert back to the boundaries of what earth provides concurrently, rather than what we can virtualize in our minds and then manifest by exploiting human or natural resources.

12/2/07 - Chavez, Putin, Bush, Sarkozy, Congress, Saudis, Corporations, et all, all the "leaders" of our adolescent civilization are just petty authoritarians.

Chavez looses; Putin wins; Bush foams at the mouth like an insane war puppet salesman; Sarkozy fear mongers resitance to alienating pro-business policies into reasons for embedding the police state into democracies; Congress rounds up immigrants, builds a berlin wall on our border and guts our constitutional protections; The Saudis imprison a woman for sitting in a car with a man; and corporations gremlinize the entire planet with an eternal quest for profits at the expense anyone and everything.

The story is always the same as long as the existing adolescent paradigm rules our world. Chavez is the perfect example. Instead of breaking his initiative up into it's constituent parts and giving the Venezuelan voters the opportunity to ratify each policy, he attempts to slip a bundle of reforms together like our American Congress. They, all leaders, fear the people. They fear honestly allowing a process to evolve consciously for all to contribute too, because they think they must predetermine the outcome.

The "people" are just too scary to the "leader". Why? Because they are ill informed. Why are they ill imformed? Because the existing civilization does not inform them adequately. Why do they not inform them adequately? Because if the people new the truth about what is happening in the world around them they would stop buying the corporate crap being duped to them and begin asking questions and demanding solutions that don't make the leaders rich or popular (powerful). And the system, the existing world-wide civilization requires 24/7/365 monetary transactions into the "leaders" profit or power coffers. Slowing any processes down means reduced "growth" and reduced growth means less profits and less power and control for the authoritarian dictating the rules.

Chavez, like every leader of a new anti-capitalist government, fears the insidious empiracal manipulations of the first world as it attempts to secretly undermine and abort "competition" or the "rebelling slaves" from the 2nd and 3rd world that they depend upon for their subsidized toxic profit mechanisms. Like in Haiti, Chile, Iran, Cuba, Guatemala, the Philipines, Honduras, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Palestine, Congo, South Africa, Algeria, Bolivia, Columbia, Argentina, Brazil, Hawaii, Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, or anywhere where there is oil, natural resources, "slave" (super cheap) labor or land to harvest fror export back to trhe glutonous 1st world. The list goes on and on is not now in dispute except by folks that want to believe in convenient propaganda myth rather than documented historic fact. And in fear Chavez resorts to semi-authoritarian behavior in attempting to thwart CIA-like attempts to terminate non-obedient states. While resorting to authoritarianism under these circumstancesi is understandable it's not condonable. Homo sapiens must find a way to function without authoritarianism and bring everyone into the decision making process and to find it personally purposeful and useful.

One of the ways to achieve this would be to give the "people" the time to participate by reducing the workday. Work has one purpose, in this civilization, profit. Real work, in the real world, is acquiring the daily food shelter and water required and to coordinate with others to plan the future to be sustainable. This equation when applied to the "work world" is completely lost What once was lost must now be refound. And Chavez's initiative to reduce the work day may have provided an overpopulated world with extra available human brain and physical power to build a creative cooperative commons. His experiment deserves the support of the world to find out if this Ecotopian idea of the reduced workday, will work.

12/2/07 - Truth #2 - Lies are the foundation of the current "global" civilization.

The entire Bush Administration lies, nothing happens. Advertising lies, nothing happens. The media distributes lies, nothing happens. We lie to strangers, we lie to our kids, we lie to our bosses, we lie to our employees, we lie to our mates, we lie to ourselves, and nothing happens. All members of modern societies are expected to lie, otherwise the "system'" doesn't work. Whether one thinks this activity troublesome or innocent, this is a conscious refusal to portray the truthfulness of given situations. Why do we fear the truth?

Whether we hear someone speak formally, or listen to our neighbors and friends complain, we expect them to fabricate, to purposely over-emphasize, to convince, to sell or seduce for the purpose of supporting their intent. And in response we attempt to discern the underlying truth of what they are saying, "reading between the lines". This is the interactive default modality of our social civilization.

As the lies have convinced us to accept the "global economy" and it's "mandatory" apparatus in the form of "Free Trade Agreements", downsizing and outsourcing, the distance from from truth gets ever greater. The truth is easy to see when one observes it first hand. But when the "truth" is happening far from where you are, physically, and 95% of all of the sources of information are controlled by sources that have a vested interest in telling you lies so you will keep behaving in their benefit, the truth is nearly imosssible to ascertain. This functions to keep us away from information that would allow us to make sane decisions about making a sustainable world to live in. The "de-localization" of the global economies has actually made "corporately controlled economies" that supercede local laws and constitutions, and serve as "natural slave resources" to feed the First World economies (and "first- world-lifestyle" rulers within third world countries) with ever cheaper goods, while stripping these country's local indigenous economies of any locally sustainable viability.

Access to the truth of the above conditions is blocked by the our corporately controlled media. Lying has become a mandatory condition the elite's New World Order. And as long as The People accept being told lies and telling lies themselves, we and the world we have created, are lost in a forest of our own illusions.

The current Iraq/Afghanistan debacle is perfect example of the "acceptance" of lying in America. Our reactions to hearing about past wars for empire and corporate colonization 10 and 20 years later bring yawns (the long list is appalling). The truth that we are in Iraq and Afghanistan for control of oil for our cheap driving pleasure is an understood truth that is "accepted". So we accept violent military force to obtain what is not ours? This immoral, uncivilized beahavior for which there is no acceptable excuse.

11/24/07 - Truth #1 - Capitalism/Commodity Culture is a Pyramid Scheme.

Pyramid schemes are illegal economic behavior by law. Pyramid schemes require suckers on the bottom of the pyramid to give the elite above them their money so that they will then have to con a "sucker" below them to likewise forward their money upward as well. This hierarchical stream works only so long as another sucker can be found below the bottom sucker. The top echelon elite sucker is the only group to benefit while the rest of the pyramid scrambles to find another sucker to keep filling the pyramid. Problem is the top elite never goes away and always benefits. The bottom sucker group, as fewer suckers can be found, find funding drying up because the elite suckers control the total amount of money possible to enter the system. So more suckers enter but not more dollars. The elites claim that more dollars will be created by greater "productivity" by the suckers, which means the suckers work more hours to produce more stuff for more suckers born tomorrow. Meanwhile the elites get incrementally larger, lazier and more paranoid, trying to control the awareness of the suckers, so they don't realized that they are being suckered. The suckers numbers keep getting bigger because they keep over-reproducing trying to keep up with the inflation of more suckers, richer elites, and not more money. The sucker elites benefit by the ever increasing excess amounts of more worker/suckers that keep wages low and the demand for sucker products ("they make 'em, they buy 'em and we sit on our ass collecting their sucker tribute") high. To keep the suckers suckered, the elites use their immense piles of the sucker's cash to: own monopolies of media that give them information that they should be vaguely satisfied about life in general but totally confused as to how to change the situation for the better; place other elites in government, judiciary, law enforcement and military, to ignore constitutional law and the social equality principles of democracy to run empire (pyramid scheme) outside of morality; to configure institutions such as schools, prisons, election systems, public infrastructure, and organizations such as the UN to be totally under-funded and consequently dysfunctional so the average sucker will never have any confidence in government functions as useful tools; bombard the suckers with the message that only another sucker (another capitalist consumer/worker) will provide the "growth and productivity" required to make more suckers wealthy (which can be found by invading another Middle East country, stealing their oil and installing a new capitalist pyramid scheme to enslave the new found suckers in that country). "Best go back to work, keep your mouth shut and try and climb your way over the next sucker to get another rung up the ladder [while the elite suckers keep the somewhere-existing-lower Third World suckers in their place]...and please don't let us know the truth of this oppressive pyramid scheme empire, lest we become truly to feel guilty and uncomfortable because we can't challenge the suckers on top. Just gotta watch your p's and q's and make sure one of your co-suckers doesn't get the idea that you're a ruthless, self-serving asshole like the suckers on top [which they instinctually loathe, but are propagandized into worshipping]. That's reserved for the elite's zone, should you find a way to arrive there." ... Problem is, there's no more open space to scarf, no more indigenous peoples to suckerize that haven't been snookered already, and the Earth is plum maxed out. The pyramid collapses as soon as the bottom suckers realize they've been suckered and refuse to continue to feed the system. Sound familiar?

-Sandy