Pointless Ramblings from an Apathetic Futurist.

I've got to get some things off of my chest. Life inside the hallucinated hologram of American entitlement is reaching levels of torturous pain for me. It feels sort of like I felt when I was imprisoned behind the very literal federal penitentiary walls in Bangor Washington for my insolent disobedience while on restriction in the USN. I was caught out of my rack past 2200 hrs and was sentenced to three days in solitary confinement in the brig. That's a story for another time. What I'm talking about is the feeling I felt while I was trapped in that cell for three days eating nothing but white bread. Something about the very real resentment that I felt then is vibrating with me again only now the cell I'm trapped in is society. I'm isolated now just as I was then. Every once in a while I can hear the screams of those who have lost their minds in the wind. I can hear the creaking moans of those who are slowly losing their minds. It's depressing.

There is a big difference between my experience of solitary confinement then and my feelings of isolation now. Then my situation was temporary and the resolution was not far away. Now the situation is a permanent decline into an unknown collapse of all that we, as a society, knows to be normal. I feel similar to when I was in solitary confinement because I know nobody who can see the collapse from this lonely peak. It's as clear as the spring waters before the corporatocracy arrived and took a big ole shit in the spring. I've yelled and screamed about infinite growth on a finite planet and it was all to my own detriment. My vocal chords hurt and nobody cares to know. Nobody wants to face the fact that economic growth is over due to physical and planetary constraints. The growth is over and the contraction has started. Life becomes cheaper and cheaper as the days march forward into our fated dystopia. Life becomes cheaper because more people arrive for their share of the dwindling resources that the corporations have been steadily working on destroying and polluting. We do nothing to stop this process because we have grown to view it as normal. We are entitled to that six dollar package of socks made by an indentured child servant working in El Salvador for a tin roof, rice and beans, and some modestly poisoned water to drink. We are entitled to cheap gasoline and gargantuan and embarrassing monstrosities to transport us to our service economy jobs that are becoming less important and viable by the second.

The world that I see before me is one that functions under the oppression of fear. Everybody is to afraid to move. What is needed most is a revolution of consciousness to rise up and revolt against the corporations and their jacked up offerings. More people are working more hours for less money and afraid for their job while they are doing it. Why are we doing this to ourselves? To consume throwaway crap manufactured by slave labor? For cheap energy? For a house made out of vinyl siding and particle board? It's like the nightmare leaped from my dream state and coerced reality into servicing the bull shit black hole. Amongst all of this necessary growth is the death of a viable human habitat. What we have been knowingly doing for the last half a century or so is the equivalent of being an astronaut in a space ship having a bad trip on designer drugs with a sledge hammer. We are cutting all of the trees down, removing mountain tops, spooging shameless globs of deep water oil all in the ocean, and growing food to burn in our gas tanks. We are two year olds left unattended in a candy store. There are better ways to live in harmony with reality if we would only stop listening to the television and start thinking on our own. Granted, we are programmed from the beginning to swallow the mans bullshit, but we are capable of realizing this and waking up from this terrifying dream.

It's very simple to understand the root cause of all of this malignant non-sense. Never mind morality or philosophy. Why is it so hard for people to understand that infinite growth is not possible..ever? Our debt economy requires infinite growth to function. Even when the government prints money it's a loan that requires new money to pay the interest on. This only works in a growing paradigm. We are near 7 billion people now. At what point are the masses going to realize that this is unsustainble. It necessarily means 10 dollar per gallon gasoline, 100 dollar per sheet ply wood, and hundreds of dollars per week in astronomically expensive groceries for a modest family. Life has become cheap but living is becoming unattainably expensive. It doesn't have to be this way. There are well thought out answers to these problems. However, the solution to the current mess we are in requires austerity, sacrifice, patience, discomfort at times, and more pain. The solution requires us all to live like intelligent adults and not two year old hedonist egos. The solution requires respecting such things as the commons and caring about your neighbors well being as well as yours.

We can live in harmony with sanity. We can live in a human way, but we won't. The hologram has won already. It has managed to make addicts out of us. Addicts who refuse to realize that they have a problem and are out of control. Addicts who are high on fast and convenient everything. Fast and convenient food, entertainment, communication, and friendships. Everything about this epic wreckage that we call Western Civilization is throwaway non-sense that is not worth caring about. We hide this fact by consuming more and more worthless crap while high on prescription fukitol pills. We are zombified in the backseats of civilization's bus with a drunk corporation driving. His fingers are stained brown with the poisonous crap he's been selling us and he's flicking half smoked cigarettes out the window. He's cut the brake lines and were careening down a mountainside and just before the bus slams into immovable mother nature he gets on the PA and sings a ridiculous and flashy song to lull us all into believing that we are not careening into an immovable mountain bottom. He sing's his lullaby for his own twisted sense of entertainment because we are all to sedated on fukitol to know or care. Wake up!

Freedom Is NOT Free!

The above film is very empowering and inspiring and for the right reasons.  It's about the only thing that is worth being patriotic about.  Now, to be clear, I'm not really one for patriotism; at least not in it's current form.  The idea to be loyal to made up lines on the surface of the earth is a stupid one to me.  I'm loyal to the human race.  I'm patriotic towards the idea that every human is entitled to certain rights for no other reason than that they are human beings.  Compassion dictates this in my opinion.  I believe that every individual has a right to freedom all the way up to the line that their actions infringes upon the freedoms of another.  That is to say that you should have the right to do whatever you deem necessary so long as it does not infringe upon my rights to do the same.  This concept is what should dictate the "laws of the land."  This is the spirit that the Constitution of the United States of America and the Bill of Rights were penned with.  However, I believe that Patriotism is a concept that needs to be redefined.  The American Heritage College Dictionary defines patriot as follows:

One who loves, supports, and defends one's country

When the U.S. was founded, times were different.  At that time there was no other country created with the premise that all men were created equal and should be afforded the same rights.  Now I realize that there were still slaves, and obviously they were not afforded those rights, but levels of consciousness expand as we move through time.  Eventually the slaves were freed and freedom expanded.  I don't want to get caught up in a discussion about consciousness unfolding to higher levels and collective consciousness and the like.  My point is that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are worth defending and supporting.  Maybe these documents need to be revised and spoken in a language that is more up to date, but that is all semantics and rhetoric and probably not necessary.  I'm referring to the spirit of these documents.  The spirit of these documents, which is the old spirit of the United States, is what is worth defending.  That spirit is no longer around.  It has been replaced by this:

This kind of patriotism, which is the kind prevalent in America today, is fear mongering coupled with a blind faith, newspeak, and ignorance.  This is the type of patriotism that Hitler harnessed during the Holocaust.  This type of patriotism is outdated, a mechanism of control, and exactly what George Orwell had in mind when he wrote 1984.  It is dangerous to allow yourself to be pigeon holed along with this sentiment.  This is not what the founding fathers had in mind.  They were up in arms against the tyranny of the money changers, not a vague terrorist (could be you if you're not careful).

This country broke away from the ruling banks, not from England.  Humanity was duped by a ruling elite with the manufactured ability to create worthless paper money.  They eventually used this worthless paper money to create slaves out of this nation.  This nation bled its soul out into the world.  The same soul which was usurped by those who controlled the money.  Globalization allowed the same ruling elite to envelop the world.  Now there is a great equalization occurring in the world.  The rest of the peasants of the world want whats been promised to them.  We live in a world with physical rules and limited resources.  Our numbers continue to expand and the resources continue to dwindle.  We are globalized through technology yet still constrained by the physical rules of nature.  To put it shortly, there's only so much to go around.  The corporatocracy controls these natural resources and through the fed they control the contrived resource that is now digital money.

This all means that equalization is going to change our current energy intensive way of life.  So what is the link between this revelation and patriotism?  What does it mean to be patriotic now in a globalized world.  Think about this; if it's true that 1% of the U.S.'s population owns 40 to 50% of the wealth (depending on where you get this statistic) than how does that translate globally?  I'm sure the numbers probably move in the wrong direction.  At any rate, if there's only so much to go around, and that is less and less as resources are depleted and our species numbers increase, than austerity begins to emerge in the United Empire of the World.

I believe that what is happening with the MENA countries is the beginning of this global revolution.  The difference between the MENA countries and America is that they are largely composed of 20 somethings who are all hungry.  In America we have plenty of Corn, Corn Meat, and Corn product to go around.  It's empty calories but it keeps our stomachs full.  A satiated and gluttonous man/woman is not going to strike or riot.  A hungry man/woman on the other hand?  Question is, is this movement going to move to America?  Rest assured that the MSM is going to spin this story like a top...as they have been doing.  Will democracy emerge in the MENA countries?  Sure, the same type of democracy that services the new type of patriotism.  The type that is loyal to the big money changin' banksters.

Is there a conspiracy?  I don't think so.  Just a bunch of tenth generation (or 20th) oligarchs who are entitled to what they perceive as theirs.  They perceive the operations of the world to be theirs.  What do you know about the private bankers whom own the Federal Reserve?  Before you write this all off as a conspiracy why not try really comprehending what I have written about above.  Can you imagine being born into a life where money was never something you had to think about?  You can do whatever you want for your entire life and you never have to worry about running out of money.  By the time you were 18 do you think you would be bored yet?  How about 25?  Now keep in mind that your family has connections and you can do ANYTHING!  People like that exist.  They own the Federal Reserve.  What is it going to take for a revolution to happen in America?  We need a revolution.  One where the money changers are ousted.

I am not patriotic towards the U.S. anymore.  I am patriotic to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America.  It should apply to every individual in the world.  Being patriotic used to include both....it no longer does.  I'm not going to be afraid to stand behind this message and put it out into the world.  Hear it!  I believe it's the true sound of righteousness.  Who could argue that freedom for every living individual is true righteousness?  This is not a left/right political paradigm that I'm advocating.  We supposedly went to Iraq to spread democracy.  One would conclude, since the U.S. is the one spreading this democracy, that it would be the kind dictated by the Constitution and the Bill of rights.  I think it should be obvious to anybody with a brain at this point that we went to the middle east to occupy it for oil and oil alone.  Afghanistan is for the opium and strategic location.  Libya is about oil.  The ruling corporatocracy could care less about spreading true democracy to MENA.  Don't get caught up in that web of deceit.

I'm going to begin exploring where I feel this is all headed in my coming blogs.

Cyborg Anthropology and the Cyberutopians

The above picture is actually a picture of the world wide web...the net.  I ran across this picture while watching a TED talk featuring a self proclaimed "Cyborg Anthropologist" by the name of Amber Case.  In her presentation she introduced me to several new ideas.  Ideas like we are a new form of Homo Sapiens due to all of the technology that have become permanent fixtures in our lives, like the fact that we have a second self that we have to service on the net (an avatar), that we now have two adolescences that we must go through.  Ideas like the internet is actually functioning as an extension of our mental selfs.  New phrases such as "ambient intimacy" meaning that we can connect to any of our contacts/friends any where and at any time.  Her talk was a fascinating talk.

I don't agree with everything she has to say.  I've always been skeptical about technology and especially communication technology.  There seems to be a split between those who embrace it entirely and those who remain skeptical.  I have noticed that those of us who are skeptical about it are rapidly disappearing.  Her basic optimism revolves around the idea that the machines utilizing the internet are actual helping us become more human by increasing our connections to one another.  During the above linked presentation she states:

The most successful technologies get out of our way and help us live our lives.

I tend to not agree with this statement.  Every time I see somebody driving down the interstate with their head down, not looking at the road, texting, I think to myself "how reckless."  Every time I have a conversation interrupted by a cell phone call, every time somebody picks up their cell phone to check a text or something on line during the middle of a conversation, I wonder to myself how is this increasing our humanity?  I realize there are actual people on the other end of that digital information, but they are not physically here.  How much is a physical presence worth now?  It seems that the worth of a physical presence becomes less and less as the months and years click by in my life.  Believe me when I say that I live mostly in my head.  This new digital arrangement is very convenient when applied to the space in my head.  I can communicate much better via the written word than I can speaking in person, and so communicating via text, FB, Blogger, or any other internet medium is very easy for me.

I resisted FB, Blogger, and Smart phones for several years.  The Blackberry was the final stand for me, and I lost (however I have never tweeted possibly because I find the name to be ridiculous and I still have a little fight left in me).  In my own life I can say that I have a handful of people I met online whom I have never met in person.  I value their interaction with my digital self, which according to Case is actually an extension of my mental self.  She is right about that.  In many ways I connect with these people on a more profound level than I do with the people I interact with on a daily basis.  This level of interaction, however, is all mental, and that is where the problem lies.  This is where the bulk of my skepticism comes in.  In order to say that these machines increase our humanness we have to be willing to give up on a lot of what it means to be human.  It's almost a contradiction.  After all, the first thing Case says in her presentation is that we are all Cyborgs.  She is right about that as well, for the majority at least.

My generation was the first generation to be raised alongside computers.  I can remember around 1986 being in grade school and playing "Oregon Trail" on a black and green screened Apple computer.  This was an actual class and personal computers were new.  I was a new human being.  However, I was not born a cyborg and I have resisted becoming one as much as possible.  There are signs on my horizon that this resistance is indeed futile.  For instance, it is rapidly becoming mandatory for me to have a smart phone for my job.  Mandatory in the same way that the steel toed boots I have to wear are mandatory.  Mandatory as in I have to pay for them myself.  They are required for me to provide for myself before I show up to work.  The reason they are able to get away with making me pay a cell phone bill as a condition of my job is because everybody already has cell phones.  Not only do they have cell phones, they have smart phones, and it is convenient for the newer generations to use their personal smart phones at work because they can't imagine not having them to begin with.  For them, not having a smart phone is simply not an option and they have never even entertained the thought before.  Factor into all of this the rate at which new technology is emerging in the world.

So what is it that we are giving up to become cyborgs?  I think we are mainly giving up a slow and reflective pace of life.  We are no longer smelling any roses.  I think the main tragedy in all of this is that we are giving up on the natural world.  After all, what does a machine care about the natural world.  We can merge with machines in a mental fashion, and that is the only fashion.  Todays 20 year olds are rapidly turning in their humanity for cyborgity.  They have never stuck their hands in the soil, tended to a food producing plant, sat under a tree for hours on end reflecting on their humanity, or spent nights in the wilderness.  They have no need for any of that because they have become largely foreign to it.  I don't know how spirituality translates digitally either.  I have a suspicion that it cannot translate, not in any human way.  I have that suspicion simply because spirituality is much more than a mental state, at least in my belief.

I think the main concern I have for humanity is a concern for freedom from tyranny.  Cyberutopians believe that a western style democracy is inescapable with the internet.  They think that digitally connecting the world is somehow going to translate into democracy.  Indeed they could use the current MENA countries (middle east and north african) as evidence to support their case.  The MENA revolutions are certainly made possible by these social medium that the internet provides.  Yet the other side of this story can look more Orwellian if one were to drop the perpetual optimism.  Sure, these regimes go away, but what are they going to be replaced with?  Dictators are already using the web to ferret out dissidents and digital renegades.

The above linked video sheds a lot of light on, what I believe to be, the more realistic outcome of government relationship to the internet.  It's easy to think that you can control who sees your second self, your digital self, your avatar.  It's easy to think that you control your Avatar.  I suppose if you believe that democracy is real, they actually count your votes, and that this is not a global corportocracy than these optimistic delusions work well for you as fact.  I like to concern myself with the truth in all things.  The internet has played a pivotal role in my life where new ideas are concerned.  It has taken a lot of mystery away from the different cultures of the world.  Basically the internet has made humanity very transparent to itself and I think that's a good thing.

I want to point out here that I'm not demonizing the internet.  I love the Godlike access to whatever information strikes me.  I can learn about anything I want to for free (well, pretty much for free).  It is a virtual library of all things human knowledge.  The internet is one of the most amazing things in existence today where technology is concerned.  It should remain a useful tool that is used to enrich our young, and us.  Having said that, it's more important to me for us to regain some skepticism.  I'm enough of a realist to realize that this skepticism I'm advocating is a non-starter.  Essentially these technologies are already mandatory for mainstream life.  In ten years from now...I honestly can say, I am afraid for the emerging future.  I'm mainly afraid for my son, and these problems are making it difficult for my wife and I to navigate raising him.  I'm also afraid for the day when a smart chip will become mandatory to be implanted in my brain so that I can be controlled while at work to limit any corporate liabilities.  Just like how the flu shot and cell phones have become mandatory.  The skepticism I speak of is rooted in fear of government control.

The nature of man seems to be that of rich and poor.  The richest of the rich get tired of being just rich.  When you have so much money in your bank account that it regenerates at a rate that you can never spend, than power becomes the new drug for you.  Control is power.  The corportocracy is drunk with power and now technology.  She's right...we are mostly cyborgs, and one day soon we will all be cyborgs.  Well at least those of us who still play the game.  You can quit your job and turn in your house, cell phone, credit, and debit card and live on the fringe.  You can do that comfortably if you are already rich.  If you're not...and you have a family to support...well...they're coming for your delusions of freedom.

The Valentine Odyssey of the Broken Down Stroller in Suburbia

A View from the Trail 

Yesterday my wife, son, and I went for a stroll along the Catawba river.  The city I live in recently added a 2.5 mile asphalt trail along the river.  While walking I noticed an unpleasant smell that was slightly intrusive.  I asked my wife if she smelled it and she said that she did and yet neither one of us could identify what it was.  We walked along the river talking about where our lives are headed and what we were going to do to bring our actions more in line with our vision of the ethical good life.  Until the wheel fell off of the stroller.  Well it more snapped off at the weakest unrepairable point.  Now a wheel breaking off of a stroller isn't necessarily a travesty. It all depends on the ins and outs surrounding the particular stroller failure.  For instance, the stroller could become inoperable at the grocery store where your car is just outside.  Or it could break in the yard of your house in which case you pick the baby up and go in the house with him.  Even still the front wheels can break a good distance from your vehicle allowing you to simply give your baby a reclined ride for the rest of the way back.  He might even enjoy it and fall asleep due to the new comfortable reclined position.

However this was not the case for me.  The back wheel snapped off over a mile from our car.  The metal pin that holds the back right wheel sheared clean in two making the thing unrepairable.  This particular break down also made the back left tire unusable because as the stroller was pushed it continued to work it's way out.  Apparently it was kept in place by the other rear wheel.  This left us with a stroller with only two functional wheels up front.  The only way to continue utilizing the stroller, given this particular break down, was to use a lot more upper body strength to hold the rear of the stroller up while pushing it forward.  Luckily for my son, he was oblivious to the fact that his ride was broke down due to the father, now donkey, exerting himself to keep this broke down POS on the trail...he just continued cheerfully babbling on about how much fun he was having in his comfortable stroller.  After about a mile of this nonsense my forearms were burning, I had a kink in my upper left back that is still soar, and I was now sweating.  So much for a leisurely stroll with my little family.  Our stroll quickly became an exercise in unnecessary unnecessariness.

After about a half mile I realized that not only was I carrying the weight of my son and the stroller, but I was also carrying the weight of the diaper bag, various other babymajigs, and my wifes stuffed oversized purse.  You know all of the things that were necessary to take a wife and baby 2.5 miles away from a vehicle on an asphalt trail on the edge of suburbia.  Once I realized all of the extra weight I was fighting gravity about, I put the strollers back nubs (the now useless portion that used to be responsible for maintaining a way for the stroller to comfortably stroll along) on the asphalt and began handing my wife domesticated packages of baby/wifey things to carry.  That worked for a little while but not for the whole while.  At this point, in protest of reality explaining to me how out of shape I was, I had had enough of this 100% FDA certified domesticated tragedy.  It was time to regroup.

My next strategy was to simply pick up my son and carry him.  It was my wife's turn to play with our now useless stroller.  Now it was simply an unnecessary burden.  We collapsed the stroller hoping to find a way to use the remaining wheels to perhaps pull the dead weight behind us.  Unfortunately when collapsed, only the strollers rear wheels were designed to roll.  In case you haven't been following along well, those were the wheels that were now missing.  Imagine the passerby's surprise to view this circus show.  Picture me with my 8 month old son slung over my right shoulder and my wife dragging a collapsed broke down stroller behind her behind me.  All while Ayden incessantly babbles on about why he's not in his comfortable stroller any longer, and why is mama dragging it, and could I please have my Baby Mum Mum back?  Unfortunately I was unable to explain to him the nature of our predicament due to the fact that he doesn't speak English yet.  I think he understood.

Eventually we were able to collapse the stroller, reverse it, and flip it in such a way that the front tires became the back.  This allowed us to place our donkey load of domestication on what used to be the back of the stroller.  We limped on in the rest of the way to the car feeling out of shape and ready for a beer.  This was ridiculous.  Yet, memorable.  It left me with a sense of accomplishment and arthritis in the hips.  And now, for your laughing amusement (I think the best part is Ayden's babbling):





On the way to work this morning I found the source of that intrusive smell.  I have to cross over the Catawba river on my way to work.  As I was driving across the bridge I could see a steady plume of gray/black smoke billowing from beneath the bridge.  They have been building a new bridge beside the old bridge and apparently part of that process involves smoke that smells similar to when a jack wagin drives a straight drive that doesn't know how to drive it.  Combined with worn out breaks.  So, warn out breaks and an abused transmission with a little bit of burned petroleum smell.  That about describes the smell that infiltrated my closed vehicle and inhabited the enclosure of my heater vents.  The diluted version of that smell was what we smelled yesterday during the Valentine Odyssey of the Broken Down Stroller in Suburbia  (sounds like one of those poor excuses they are passing off as comedies in the movie theater these days doesn't it).

It's the smell of progress and growth.  I wonder how this city has the money to pay for a new four lane bridge over the Catawba river?  States are going bankrupt and the federal government is supposedly going to start slowing their spending (which just means they're going to cut social spending and continue giving free money to themselves...the corporatocracies).   Whatever the case, this bridge building is just another probable exercise in unsustainable delusions.  Not much different from the trail that we broke down on yesterday.  All along the path I kept noticing the base of recently cut oaks that were over 50 years old.  They were beside the path.  I kept wondering why they cut them down.  The only conclusion I could come up with was that they didn't want the roots cracking the asphalt?  They didn't have to cut those trees down.   Just like they didn't have to be a mile down river making that awful smell of supposed progress and growth.

After I drove through that cloud of pollution on my way to work today I just couldn't help thinking that this was somehow all connected.  On the one hand it's just a broken stroller and some random everyday pollution.  It's just man cutting down trees for no reason and spreading petroleum products on the Earth's surface for our own amusement.  It's a city providing it's inhabitants with a new, faster way to cross the Catawba and a nice 2.5 mile asphalt trail next to the river.  What is the connection?

It was an easy stroll with my family on an unusually warm Valentines Day.  I'm wearing Croc's, basketball shorts, and a t-shirt in the late afternoon in the middle of February.  It was nice until the stroller broke.  It was cheaply made out of plastic (petroleum) by a China man making .87 cents per hour.  The only metal part on the entire stroller happened to be the part that broke.  God knows what that cheap metal pin was before it was sent to China and recycled into a stroller pin.  I remember reading during that "Cash for Clunkers" debacle that we sent all of those old cars to China.  We have exported our jobs and are exporting our resources to a communist country.  They turn around and sell it back to us in the form of cheap ass strollers that break, ironically, at the only metal part...the part we shipped to them for free.  Once that break happens it must be made up for by human muscle.  The human muscle that should have been making sustainable things of quality locally all along.

It's all connected all right.  It's connected to the smell that infiltrates the river air reminding me of the supposed "progress."  The sound of oak trees twice my age screaming to me from the past to respect their brilliance and firm endurance and to not cut them down for trite reasons.  The sound of microorganisms under perfectly good forest duff being covered by thick, gooey, ugly black asphalt composed of prehistoric dead microorganisms and dinosaurs.  The quality of hallucinated delusions spinning lies of infinite growth on a finite planet being possible.  The conversation just moments before between a husband and wife attempting to navigate away from a culture of deceit...and accepting entrance into underground counter culture.  In an attempt to escape a culture that worships convenience and egotistical laziness propped up on unsustainable hubris made possible by that same hallucinated delusion of progress smelling of pollution.  That pollution is necessary.  It's even more necessary to ignore that smell.  In that moment, when the pin sheared off, all of that came clearly together.

The truth is that this was a clear snap shot of what our future is going to be like.  The past and the present has allowed me to take the shape I'm in now.  The culture I was born into allowed it.  Our future, even amidst this new construction, is crumbling before our eyes.  It's going to require what reality before the petroleum fueled fiesta required, human muscle.  We're going to have to pick ourselves up along with our progeny.  We're going to have to carry our responsibilities down a new trail with muscle.  Most of the crap that we use to help make our convenient Western lives lackadaisical to begin with is no longer made here.  It's made cheaply in a distant land that is truly not concerned with our well being.  Most of us don't know how to make that world any longer.  We've forgotten because of all the clever machines that we have made.  We have machines that make machines in factories with no lights to maximize profit.  Machines don't have to see to work.  They aren't human after all.

So most would only see a broken stroller.  I see a broken future that we must begin thinking about fixing.  The symbolism is all around us.  It's deafeningly loud.  You just have to know where and how to look.  The upshot is that there is hope.  The hope is born between us caring for one another.  Community is resilient.  We bought the stroller used for a really good deal.  My wife asked a network of friends if anybody had a stroller they would care to donate to our household.  We now have a stroller that is of much better quality than the broken one.  It's also designed better and suits our needs better.  Our future needs of using our bodies more and participating in this convenience culture less.  Due to the kindness of a friend we no longer have a stroller problem and are actually better off than before the broken stroller came into our lives.  As we will be when we get on down this polluted path of convenience a bit.  My firm belief is that we will be better off in a world that once again honors our muscles and local friendships.

In the meantime, that POS broken stroller is on it's way to a dump where it won't rot.  It's just going to be sitting there just like it will be in 1000 years.  Another useless and unrepairable consumer widget that won't even rot.  Ironically it may end up having vasts amounts of energy spent on shipping it back to China where it will not rot in one of their dumps.  Maybe I could have figured out a way to fix it but in the end...it's not even worth my time.  You can't fix the past.  I'm looking forward to a future that resembles something worth caring about.  I'm all for the mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle" but some things are just so epically useless that there can be no use for them once broken.  Just like our current way of life.

Welcome to 1984

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face---forever."

-- O'Brien speaking to Winston in Orwell's 1984

"If you want a picture of the future, read 1984 by George Orwell"

  --Aaron McCarty quoting himself in a blog

The future as predicted by George Orwell in 1984 has been coming true for some time now.  Orwell saw the process at work in his time.  1984 was published in 1949.  Clearly he thought things would happen faster than they have, but nonetheless they are happening.  It seems to me that the process of changing the English language has been noticeably increasing lately.  This process is perpetuated by government.  In 1984 there is a scene where the protagonist Winston is told that the chocolate rations were going to be decreased slightly.  He records that fact, as that was his job, and then later on during that same day Big Brother announces that the chocolate rations were going to be increased.  Winston begins to realize that something is amiss.  The point is not whether the rations are going to increase or decrease.  The point is that whatever Big Brother says is to be believed without question.  

Our world is run by the multinational corporations.  Big Agriculture, Big Pharma, Big Chemical, Big Oil, Big Weapon....Big Brother.  The people comprising these corporations make decisions everyday about how to make money.  They don't make decisions based on right and wrong.  The only morality is profit and any obstacles to this profit are written out of reality.  Just take a look at the world wide financial system to see this mechanism in action.  Reality is what they say it is, and they are the controlling interest of this world.  The corporations.  In 1984 Orwell called them "The Party."  During Winston's re-wiring at the end of the novel he implores O'Brien, or the face of Big Brother:

"But the whole universe is outside us.  Look at the stars!  Some of them are a million light-years away.  They are out of our reaceh forever." "What are the stars?"  said O'brien indifferently.  "They are bits of fire a few kilometers away.  We could reach them if we wanted to.  Or we could blot them out.  The earth is the center of the universe.  The sun and the stars go round it."Winston made another convulsive movement.  This time he did not say anything.  O'brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:  "For certain purposes, of course, that is not true.  When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away.  But what of it?  Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy?  The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them.  Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that?  Have you forgotten doublethink?

They want you to believe that your vote counts for something.  Sure, maybe the electronic voting machines actually count your vote.  You just have to have faith in that.  Even if they count your vote, what of it?  It's just a matter of a different puppet that will be placed in power by the controlling interest.  The puppets are well vetted to ensure that they will do as they are told.  What do you think lobbyist are all about?  People go from employment at Monsanto to employment by the government for the FDA, or high up in the department of agriculture, or for the EPA and then back to Monsanto.  They craft the government from the inside to work for the interest of making more money for the corporations.  While this is going on they are raping and pillaging the earth of all it's resources for profit.  They return only waste to the earth.  They distract you from all of this by mindless trappings such as Football.  Did you see the Superbowl?  Was it not an insult to you?  Was it not transparent that it was only about money.  The Superbowl is a few plays punctuated by a few commercials...rinse and repeat for four hours with a circus break in the middle.  Don't think, just drink more corn bear with your fried corn and chemical dip full of petroleum sugar and MSG.

Can't get it up, we have a pill for that. Can't deal with our bull shit, we have a pill for that.  Can't sleep we have a pill for that.  Thinking too much, we have a pill for that.  Your body isn't working properly because you subsist on the poison that we pawn off on you for profit, we have a pill for that.  Our genetically modified poison gave you diabetes?  Here's a syringe, we have something you can inject for that.  There is a pill for everything.  There are pills to help your body deal with the pills.  There are pills to help your mind deal with all of this.  What, you have a soul, care about spirit, have a mind, are concerned with integrity, competency and truth...we have a pill for all of that.  Shut up, drink your corn, and do what your told.

Big Oil provides the energy, Big Chemical provides the chemical manipulation, Big Ag turns the oil into poisonous newfangled food, and Big Pharma provides a "cure" for all of this nonsense, and Big Weapon provides the security to keep the whole toxic mess going.  All you do is provide the obedience to Big Brother.  Big Brother is all of the above and his face is Uncle Sam's.  He want's your face and his face to be the same thing.  He has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
Winston thought.  "By making him suffer," he said.
"Exactly.  By making him suffer.  Obedience is not enough.  Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?  Power is inflicting pain and humiliation.  Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.  Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?  It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined.  A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.  Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.  The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love and justice.  Ours is founded upon hatred.  In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.  Everything else we shall destroy--everything.  Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution.  We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.  No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.  But in the future there will be no wives and not friends.  Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.  The sex instinct will be eradicated.  Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card.  We shall abolish orgasm.  Our neurologists are at work upon it now.  There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party.  There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.  There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.  There will be no art, no literature, no science.  When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.  There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness.  There will be no curiosity, no employment of the process of life.  All competing pleasures will be destroyed.  But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.  Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.  If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever.  

In order to be a functional member of society, and not be lobotomized either chemically or physically, you have to be insane.  You can't be concerned with integrity, or competence, or definitions to words, or things making sense, or doing what's morally right.  You have to be heartless, soulless, and mindless.  Without any of those things all that is left is hatred.  That's what O'brien was talking about.  In order to be insane you have to forget about truth.  Truth becomes falsehood.  Freedom is slavery.  You can't even count on things being the opposite of what they are supposed to be because they are what Big Brother say's they are and that is it.  Like O'brien said:  "The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them."  The stars are clearly distant and they are always distant from earth.  Just because big Brother says that they are near does not make it so.  But the point is that his will does make it so, and you will comply.  It doesn't matter about right and wrong.  Correct and false are what Big Brother say they are.  Let me give a recent anecdote to illustrate what I'm talking about.

Did you know that a signature must be legible?  According to The American Heritage College Dictionary Fourth Addition, which is a dictionary I was required to have for Literature 101 and 102 while in college, signature means the following:

1.  One's name as written by oneself.  2.  The act of signing one's name.  3.  A distinctive mark, characteristic, or sound indicating identity.  

Nowhere in the definition of the word signature does it say anything about a legible mark.  The point is a signature is that it's your signature.  It's how you write your name.  The specificity of your signature is what makes it different from somebody else signing your name.  This is why you usually have to print your name and then sign.  You print your name so that there is a legible account of your name on the document.  Then you sign your name so that it can be shown that you indeed signed the document.  As in you placed your mark next to your printed name to verify that it's you who signed.  The more specific and unique your signature, the better.  The point of a signature is that it is yours and you use it to verify your identity.

According to the jack wagin' bureaucrat's over at the Medicare department of Big Brother signing your name in an illegible fashion is not acceptable.  They want your signature to be legible.  There is a problem here.  The problem is that they say they want your signature, but they clearly don't.  At least not in accordance with the definition of the world "signature."  My signature complies with the definition of the word in ever sense, but you cannot read it and get anything resembling my name out of it.

Over the years my signature has undergone a metamorphosis into a very quick, split second, mark.  It has done that because I have signed my name thousands of times.  Every time it got shorter until it arrived at the signature that has been distinctly mine for the last seven years or so.  Now, in order to maintain my employment as an EMT working for the county I work in, I must change my signature to be in accordance with Big Brother's Newthink version of the dictionary, or Medicare will not pay the bill for the patient attached to the Patient Care Report that my illegible signature is attached to.

To further cultivate the bureaucratic bull shit black hole, below the box in which I sign my unacceptable signature is a printed version of my name.  It's in the same print you are reading these words in.  This is the electronic version of signing and printing your name.  However, if they cannot read what your signature says than it is not acceptable and no payment will be doled out.

Do you see the problem here?  Effectively Big Brother is changing the meaning behind signing your name.  Who is in the position to stop this nonsense?  This is how the bull shit black hole was created and is perpetuated.  After all, as O'Brien said to Winston in 1984:

The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them.  Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that?  Have you forgotten doublethink?

Take a bow

Pack on powder

Wash 'em out with buzzing lights

Pay an audience to care

Impress me personality

Still and transfixed 

The electric sheep,

Are dreaming of your face

Enjoy you from the chemical 

Comfort of America

Come one

Come all

Into 1984

Yeah, three, two, one

Lights, camera, transaction

Quick, your time is almost up

Make all forget that they're the moth

Edging in, towards the flame

Burn into obscurity

Still and transfixed 

the electric sheep

are dreaming up your fate

And judge you from 

the card castle 

comfort of America

Come one

Come all

Into 1984

Yeah, three, two, one

Lights, camera...

Come one

Come all

To 1984

Yeah, three, two, one

Lights, camera, transaction

The foundation is canyoning

Fault lines should be worn with pride

I hate to say it

You're so much more

You're so much more

Endearing with the sound turned off

If the wrong person were to read this...I could probably lose my job.  Sometimes I strongly question whether or not I'm able to function in mainstream society.  I refuse to be lobotomized.  I believe in Karma. Hopefully Karma will lead me, and my family, through this difficult time.  One baby step at a time, given enough time, is a very long distance.  One compromise of your integrity at a time eventually leaves you soulless.  Eventually, when Big Brother holds up four fingers and asks you how many fingers you see, if you don't draw an uncompromising line in the sand, you will say five.  It's just a matter of enough baby steps.  Somewhere the bullshit must stop.  When asked for my signature, I will sign my name according to the specificity of my mark.  

Until I'm told I'll either comply or lose my job.  At that point, I'll say that Big Brother is holding up 5 fingers.  Hopefully at some point I'll actually believe it's true and this torture will stop.

  

  

Newfangled Food (an introduction)

Aspergillus oryzae, or "Koji", is a fungus/mold used in eastern traditions to make soy sauce, amongst other things.  Soybeans, some grain such as wheat, water, salt, and koji all ferment together and the creation is a delicious sauce known as soy sauce.  I love the taste of soy sauce...the kind that is fermented.  Unfortunately, just like everything else in this industrialized culture of convenience, the majority of the "soy sauce" is in fact not soy sauce at all.  Today one of these packets of gastronomical maleficence conspired to ruin my modest lunch of plain cous cous.  Care to guess what this is:

water, salt, vegetable protein, corn syrup, caramel color, 1/10 of 1% sodium benzoate


The packet said "Soy Sauce" on it.  Regardless of what the lettering on the packet labeled this laboratory concoction as, it is not soy sauce.  On the bright side the packet did say that there was no MSG.  Pheww, at least I dodged that biological weapon.  Keeping MSG out of your body is nearly as impossible as keeping petroleum sugar (high fructose corn syrup) out of your body.  By the way, contrary to the industrial food complex's new line of propaganda:

 your body can tell the difference between petroleum sugar and cane sugar you jack wagin's.  According to research done at Princeton University they found:

The first experiment — male rats given water sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup in addition to a standard diet of rat chow gained much more weight than male rats that received water sweetened with table sugar, or sucrose, in conjunction with the standard diet. The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas.

The second experiment — the first long-term study of the effects of high-fructose corn syrup consumption on obesity in lab animals — monitored weight gain, body fat and triglyceride levels in rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup over a period of six months. Compared to animals eating only rat chow, rats on a diet rich in high-fructose corn syrup showed characteristic signs of a dangerous condition known in humans as the metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides and augmented fat deposition, especially visceral fat around the belly. Male rats in particular ballooned in size: Animals with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained 48 percent more weight than those eating a normal diet. In humans, this would be equivalent to a 200-pound man gaining 96 pounds.

 Simple sugar, from cane sugar, has been around for a long time.  There are reports of crystallized can sugar from around 5000 years ago in India.  Here's a picture of cane sugar being extracted from the sugarcane.

  
That's how simple it is to get simple sugar.  From this one image you can see how simple it is to get sugar from sugarcane.  One picture...I'm pretty sure from just looking at this picture that I could do that myself with a few simple tools.  Contrast that to this:

That's from a documentary film titled "King Corn."  If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend that you take the time to watch it.

This blog entry started with the application of a packet of "soy sauce."  I brought some left over cous cous for lunch today.  It was plain cous cous and I was looking to add some more flavor to it.  I started rootin' around in the drawers at my station and found a plastic tub full of condiments from fast food fry pits and take out food.  I found a couple of packets of soy sauce and without thinking emptied the contents onto my cous cous.  I started to eat my lunch and realized that it didn't really taste like soy sauce. In fact it tasted sort of bad.  As I continued on I realized that it was really not very good.  I don't like to waste food, and it's all I brought for lunch, so I decided to charge forward.  Luckily I only emptied one packet.

We have become desensitized towards what we place in our bodies.  If you read the ingredients of any industrially processed "food" item from the grocery store, you will likely see many words that make no sense to you.  These words represent chemicals that have been synthesized by chemist.  That is the difference between food and what Sally Fallon, author of the book "Nourishing Traditions", calls "newfangled foods".  Newfangled sounds about right to me.  There are many unnecessary ingredients added to traditional foods bought at the grocery store because it's necessary for profit and function.  These foods are the function of our industrialized convenience society.  Whole foods become fractured and are disassembled into molecular parts.  Even the whole foods that are left whole by industrial agriculture have been genetically tampered with.  The apple that you eat is not how nature intended it to be. You can't tell when you eat the apple but your bodies cells can.

As the days move forward it is becoming more and more difficult to eat natural and whole foods.  This is a travesty.  Americans are overweight and starving to death at the same time.  The foods that we are offered provide energy and nothing else.  Unfortunately the food is compact with energy that we don't use due to our sedentary western lifestyles.  We can exceed our daily caloric need by stopping at a petroleum station and filling up a petroleum cup with flavored petroleum sugar drink while filling up our petroleum tank.  We have become the petroleum people.  Our food is nothing more than a clever way to eat petroleum.

When addicted to a drug, the drug will win in the end.  The drugs victory is your lose.  In our case, it's our lose.  It is still possible, in some instances at least, to still subsist on nutritional whole foods.  One way is to grow as much of your own food as you possibly can.  You have to have access to a patch of dirt to utilize that particular method.  Plus you have to learn a lot about growing food in a sustainable fashion.  Then you have to learn about traditional food preservation.  Plus you have to be willing to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.  In other words you have to make it your mission to enter food culture.  You have to be willing to take responsibility for what your body becomes.  Your priorities must change drastically from the normal convenience lifestyle that we lead in the Western world.

It is necessary that more people begin taking responsibility for their food needs.  It is necessary that people begin waking up to the reasons behind why Americans lead the world in obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.  You are what you eat, and what we eat is industrialized convenience assembled from petroleum sugar and machines.  We are being transformed into units requiring a daily dose of petroleum.  The importance of food cannot be understated.  I'll be musing on this topic.