Something Big is Happening

Dear Heather,

Thanks for your comments.  It is quite telling to me that, in a forum like Gaia, a rather tame blog on male “sexuality” gets way more comments than a posting such as this.  Granted, I have perhaps not been the most compelling blogger, but the truth is that I see very few posts on current events, as if many participants here think that there's more urgency in finding out about Ken Wilber's new ways of categorizing human experience than to find out what the human experience of a person in Baghdad, Tehran, or our closest street corner might be. 

I agree with you that it's amazing how we've violated the Geneva Convention and what's even MORE hair-rising to me is that we've now reversed the writ of habeus corpus, which is simply the right of a person who is being imprisoned and deprived of her rights to know the charges against her.  We're talking about the Magna Carta, signed in 1215!  This is a setback of almost 800 years of jurisprudence and armed struggle against government tyrrany!  And the fact that so many people on this forum have so little to say about this simply amazes me.

So, for me, gaia is simply another forum that proves that Bush, Obama, McCain, Clinton really are the type of scheisters that the U.S. deserves as president, and the Democratic Congress that was voted in on a landslide due to dissatisfaction with Bush, and which took impeachment off the table and has walked hand-in-hand with Bush is the Congress we deserve.  Unfortunately, and somewhat alarmingly, the people of this country are ripe for much, much worse, and I see very few historical instances of countries ruled by gangs beholden to unspoken interests, where they people don't get served up precisely what they're ripe for. 

I'm amazed that gas is still so CHEAP!, yes CHEAP!  because it's way more expensive in so many other parts of the world where the governments haven't bankrupted the currency.

Did you watch the video on my blog called Money as Debt? 

I wish you well.

Dear Heather,

Thanks for continuing the dialogue.  I find your comment interesting:

“I hope that whomever wins this next election will at least surround themselves with people who will not just “yes” them and will get back to what the original intentions of our forefathers. Our administration has completely lost touch with reality.  I'm so discouraged by what I see happening. ”

Right now the two front-runners (interesting terms, isn't it, given the front that they're running) both approve ALL of your communications being surveilled, archived, and retrieved WITHOUT any warrant nor any judicial review.  Sure, they talk two very different games, but their voting records are remarkably similar.

In 2006 an overwhelmingly Democrat Congress was voted in. They have, in large part, proceeded with the Bush doctrine step-by-step on all of the really draconian shit that has gone down. 

No, this is going to take more than another election.  Our elections in this country are a very bad joke, the candidates are picked and funded by the same interests,  see my post at http://fullspectrumtoolkit.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/g_edward_griffin_on_2-party_u_s_politics

I have plenty of military and pilot friends and I'm sure you have plenty of stories to tell.  I'd like to hear them someday.

Kind Regards,

O

Before you think that your next election is going to make a damn bit of difference, you might want to read this article, by Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing under George H. Bush.  Fitts paid her dues to enter the lofty ranks of government.  She paid the price for telling what goes on there.  Read this article and you'll understand that Gore vs. Bush, Gore vs. Kerry, and now McCain vs. Obama are pseudo-choices that guarantee that the same interests shall be served. 

I love Fitts' writing because it reveals how we are all participating in our own enslavement and how, exactly, that process gets carried out, from the guy dealing drugs on the corner, to the corporate executive getting government funding to build more for-profit prisons. 

The U.S. is a sick country, and it has only gotten so because we have a population that insists on continuing to deny what's going on.  Kind of like a patient who's content to just put a band-aid on a cancerous lesion hoping that, if it doesn't go away, at least he won't have to look at it.

 Wow!  Heather! 

You're the FIRST person that I've been able to get to read that article.  Amazing, isn't it?  Do you think that when Al Gore goes out and talks about global warming that he and his investment partners have some new laws they'd like to pass to make some more money?  Just so you know, yes, I believe that there's global warming - and it's happening on EVERY planet in our solar system as reported by Russian scientists.

But, not to digress…  Catherine Fitts is pretty amazing and that's a mind-blowing article, isn't it?  Next article I'd recommend is: http://www.narconews.com/narcodollars1.html.  It's called Narco-Dollars for Beginners and is a three part series.  On the first page you'll see a surprising picture of Richard Grasso when he was acting chairman of the New York Stock Exchange down in Colombia hugging Raúl Reyes, the second in command of the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia), a communist, cocaine-smuggling, kidnapping and murderous guerilla movement in Colombia. 

Here the picture is worth a thousand words:  WHAT THE FUCK IS THE HEAD OF THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE DOING IN COLOMBIA HUGGING THE COMMANDER OF A COMMUNIST GUERILLA GROUP!?

Hahahahahaha!

Communist, Capitalist, Democrat, Republican, the money interest has the game sewed up.  Any way and either way, they're not just making money (hell, they print as much as they want and indenture people worldwide to paying the debt that backs it, see my “Money as Debt” video post on this blog), they're consolidating power.  This is a Slave trading racket of a sophistication that most people don't understand, and any so-called “leader” on any national level is taking orders because the financial power has the tools to bankrupt any country that doesn't go along with the program.   To learn more, read G. Edward Griffin's essay at http://www.freedomforceinternational.org/pdf/futurecalling1.pdf.  Next time you listen to NPR or any other “public broadcasting service,” you'll have a totally different outlook when they tell you “this program is funded by the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation” or any other of these megalithic foundations that control the intellectual dialogue in this country. 

Do I blame them?  Hell no!  Their game is Raising Slaves for Fun and Profit and they do it well.  The people who really piss me off are the people, such as many of those in this gaia forum, who have the wherewithall to examine these issues but they're too damn busy contemplating their belly buttons.  Hey!  There's nothing wrong with meditation, yoga, whatever you want.  I myself spent YEARS on meditation retreats, studying with medicine people, etc.  But I also know that many Buddhist monks in Burma, for example, shed their robes to pick up the gun because they understood the level of tyranny that was coming on was going to annihilate whole villages and whole sectors of their society and they took responsibility, made a choice, and are paying the price. 

Many Native American medicine people have had to set ceremonies aside for the sake of working politically to try to preserve their people's health, homes, and sanity. 

We are facing a Mother-Fucking Juggernaut and, when you see your mother getting treated that way we have the choice to FACE or to DENY.  Slaves deny and prefer chains to the cost of choosing to make a difference. 

I admire those slaves in all times who found freedom within, and God damn the asshole who failed to respect it! 

__________________________________________________________________

Janet,  Guess you popped in while I was writing this.  Thanks for reading!  The day we understand how the game is played there is no f'cking way that we're going to fall for a McBama vs. O'Cain, pick your slave foreman charade.  Fuck Obama!  Fuck McCain!  I ain't buying the shit they're slingin!  Obama is a pimpin', slavin' asshole just like McCain and he's got a track record to prove it and, just like the brothas I grew up with on Chicago's Near North side, he's got a wrap that's got fools mesmerized.  “Change you can believe in” MY ASS.  Son of a bitch just sold more of our rights down the river and he'll be sellin' you and me as soon as he gets his price!  Now he's talkin' about keeping some of the Bush assholes in his cabinet.  Last week he gave RETROACTIVE immunity to the telecoms that let the Feds eavesdrop on communications without a warrant. 
_______________________________________________________
Sherri,
The mogul “capitalist” assholes are internationalists.  Many of them have dual Israeli/U.S. citizenship, many of them are the descendants of the same internationalist slavers that the American Revolution was fought against, i.e. the Rothschild banking cartel for whom King George was a royal buffoon. 

Some friends of mine just spent the last year living in Turks and Caicos, doing business with some high-up people in that jurisdiction of governmental thugs.  And thugs is what they were.  People, let's look at the history, let's look at our own experience and quit being set up:  Right now every government on the planet operates through FORCE, i.e. VIOLENCE, i.e. YOU WILL OBEY OR LOSE YOUR MONEY, HOME, LIFE, etc!   We are entities owned and operated by our governments. 

Let's reclaim self-ownership!

Just because it's slavery 2.0 don't mean it ain't slavery!  First question of politics:  WHOSE PROPERTY ARE YOU?  The rest derives from your answer.  Please see take 9 minutes and see:  http://isil.org/resources/philosophy-of-liberty-english.swf

IT'S A FREEDOM THANG!  THERE'S A WHOLE LOTTA PEOPLE THAT DON'T WANT TO UNDERSTAND!

Peace and Love and thank you all for READING!

As the Revered and Esteemed Bob Marley offered up his sonic ministrations to our culture, his exhortation rings true through the ages of mankind's wandering in a wilderness devoid of the recognition that we are indeed Queens and Kings and can create a culture where we treat one another as such:

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!”

P.S.  Please don't call me an American, unless you call me a Philosophical American.  I embrace the aspiration to individual sovereignty, dignity and grace that has stirred within the breast of all oppressed people EVERYWHERE.  The U.S. government has been a racket since its founding, has violated every treaty with the First  Nations who continue to labor under the yoke of its tyrrany, and has violated its Constitution and the restraint imposed upon it by the Bill of Rights since the start. 

Sherri,

          I'd love to learn more about how Slave Trading for Fun and Profit goes down in your part of the world.

          Damn I miss that picture of your Super-fine Smile!  You've got the kind of Smile that would be just perfect for breakfast!

          

Yes, it helps.  BTW, I'm from Belgium, but that gives me no comfort except for the fact that I know what tyrrany is about from the closeness I had with my uncles, godmother and relatives that went through Nazi occupation.  And I also grew up with a mother and grandparents for the Congo hearing about how the Belgian colony was a kinder and gentler occupation (after Leopold) than the other European colonial administrations in Europe.  Maybe so, on some counts, nevertheless they had no damn business carving up somebody else's world.  But the real question is, who benefited?  Was it really the Belgian engineer who benefitted?  Sure, he got a job when Europe's economy was depressed, etc.  But the real beneficiaries were the same European financial interests.  And Europe's passed even more draconian surveillance laws than the U.S. has, as well as walking pretty much in lockstep with the imperial axis. 

I don't see the empire as more American than any other nationality.  If I had to put a descriptor on it, I'd say it's Zionist, but even that is over-simplification.  I pity the poor Israeli people ruled by a genocidal regime, forced into military service one and all, using Palestinian children as target practice.  A murderous culture that has exceeded all bounds of human decency thanks to endless U.S. funding. 

Capitalism?  Capitalism presumes that there's capital, but in a global debt-based currency system there is none.  With true, free-market (i.e. you get to choose to accept or reject a product, service, etc.) capitalism relationships and prosperity are fortified, not weakened.  The world economies don't run on free market entrepreneurship (although there is still plenty at the local level, especially OUTSIDE of the U.S. & Europe), they run on political entrepreneurship.  The top corporations fund themselves out of the pockets of taxpayers around the world without those taxpayers having any chance to say “yes” or “no,” except to put themselves at the mercy of the police state, and thus fund the candidacies of all major candidates. 

If you take the time to watch the Money as Debt video, you'll see how our entire planetary culture is being forced into the crassest form of what I call “idiot consumerism.”  I have nothing against consuming, though my personal tastes are VERY minimalist.  We could be consuming EVEN MORE and WITH GREATER WASTE even and, if we applied the technology AND the wisdom available to us, we could IMPROVE our environment, our culture, our education, health, etc.  We already have the tools to do so.  See the video post on “Waste=Food.” But without understanding how the money system has us all chained, a beautiful, feisty black girl from the islands as well as a rough and tumble international rogue scholar like myself presently at the foot of the Rockies, we are going to fall for surface remedies.

Barbados' currency is as much debt-based as the U.S. currency, that's how the entire system works.  A few years back there were rumblings that Malaysia's Mahathir was going to revive the Muslim dirham in gold.  I wish it had happened but of course they would have taken care of him in short order.

Yes, and as far as the crass consumerism and overall ignorance of people in the U.S., it's something that I've tried to figure out for years.  My current thesis is that generally the people who leave their homeland in droves are those who are least-educated, least equipped culturally, and often living in such abject poverty that to just have a car, a stereo, a computer, surpasses any of the expectations that they ever had of life in their homeland.  At the same time there is profound loss:  starting with the loss of language, the new American generation finds itself divorced from what now become “embarrassing” traditions from the old country, tedious tales that can't compete with the latest x-box or tv show.  My word for people in the U.S. is “The Children of Forgetting.”  Most immigrants never ever became PHILOSOPHICAL Americans, thus they are stuck in that mass hypnosis whenever flags, anthems, pledges and refrains of “our team” are repeated.  They are an amorphous mass ripe for tyrranny of the basest order.  Aldous Huxley spoke of them quite eloquently in his essay on Self-Transcendence appended to his tome, The Devils of Loudon:

“The fact of being one of a multitude delivers a man from his consciousness of being an insulated self and carries him down into a less than personal realm, where there are no responsibilities, no right or wrong, no need for thought or judgment or discrimination —only a strong vague sense of togetherness, only a shared excitement, a collective alienation. And the alienation is at once more prolonged and less exhausting than that induced by debauchery; the morning after less depressing than that which follows self-poisoning by alcohol or morphine. Moreover, the crowd-delirium can be indulged in, not merely without a bad conscience, but actually, in many cases, with a positive glow of conscious virtue. For, so far from condemning the practice of downward self-transcendence through herd-intoxication, the leaders of church and state have actively encouraged the practice whenever it could be used for the furtherance of their own ends. Individually and in the co-ordinated and purposive groups which constitute a healthy society, men and women display a certain capacity for rational thought and free choice in the light of ethical principles. Herded into mobs, the same men and women behave as though they possessed neither reason nor free will. Crowd-intoxication reduces them to a condition of infrapersonal and antisocial irresponsibility. Drugged by the mysterious poison which every excited herd secretes, they fall into a state of heightened suggestibility, resembling that which follows an injection of sodium amytal or the induction, by whatever means, of a light hypnotic trance. While in this state they will believe any nonsense that may be bawled at them, will act upon any command or exhortation, however senseless, mad or criminal. To men and women under the influence of herd-poison, “whatever I say three times is true”—and whatever I say three hundred times is Revelation, is the directly inspired Word of God. That is why men in authority—the priests and the rulers of peoples—have never unequivocally proclaimed the immorality of this form of downward self-transcendence. True, crowd-delirium evoked by members of the opposition and in the name of heretical principles has everywhere been denounced by those in power. But crowd- delirium aroused by government agents, crowd-delirium in the name of orthodoxy, is an entirely different matter. In all cases where it can be made to serve the interests of the men controlling church and state, downward self-transcendence by means of herd-intoxication is treated as something legitimate, and even highly desirable. Pilgrimages and political rallies, corybantic revivals and patriotic parades—these things are ethically right so long as they are our pilgrimages, our rallies, our revivals and our parades. The fact that most of those who take part in these affairs are temporarily dehumanized by herd-poison is of no account in comparison with the fact that their dehumanization may be used to consolidate the religious and political powers that be. ”

Thanks for engaging the dialogue!

BTW, the thought of you blushing sets me on fire!

O

Sherri,

Let me tell you a little somethin' about indulgences:  Honey, if the Pope had indulgences like you, I'd become a Catholic all over again!  (but I gave up Catholicism for Lent back when the priest busted my brother and I during our short careers as altar boys for getting a little heavy-handed with the Liebfraumilch.  Ain't nothing like a mouth full of hosties and a swig of good white wine at 7 a.m. to bring one closer to God!)

Yes, you're right about blame.  I've come to the conclusion that we are all innocents.  G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney are innocent.  A dog with rabies is innocent.  There's no one to blame!  But there is choice!  And there are parts of our heads and our hearts that we're not quite using to our potential.  We are living in PARADISE.  We don't have to deprive ourselves, as a whole human race, of anything that would make us flower into increasingly beautiful levels of our cosmic, creative potential.  That's what I'm talking about. 

And I'm all about wealth.  YOu walk into a forest, into an ocean, into any part of the natural world, an open, loving (and mischievous!) human heart and you are in a wealth paradigm.  Yesterday I was on top of the Continental Divide in the Rockies, way above treeline, with glaciers down below me, and I look around and there are these incredibly intricate, delicate and beautiful flowers growing out of moss, little spiders walking around, skunks passing gas in the wind, hawks screeching, and black butterflies on the wind - and I just get overtaken with the beauty of our world, that we are a part of this and yet we are playing so small, we barely dare to embrace the sensuality, intelligence, wisdom, and fun of our potential. 

And I see you, Sherri, as one of those people making the invitation back into brilliance for more innocents, back into themselves, back into their true Natural Nature, back into the wildness of Zebras with no ulcers and breakfast, lunch and dinner smiles!

Yum! 

O

Dang!  

I just wrote y’all what seemed prosaic to me but probably came off as a rant to you.  Laugh and feel yourself spared!  Hahahaha!

Oh!  Oh!  Here comes another one!

ROFLMAO!

Sherri,

            In reference to your post a few bumps up:  You can call it “Anti-human Capitalism,” which it certainly is, but that’s more of a judgment rather than a term which elucidates the mechanism.  More precise is “Debt-based Capitalism”  because that’s how it works.  It’s Slavery 2.0 and as a descendant from a grandfather who was enslaved as a kid in the Polish countryside, as someone who has spent time in remote parts of Mexico where caciquismo is still practiced, as a friend, apprentice and traveling buddy to Native American friends who have since been assassinated, and as a Belgian proud of the legacy of 500 years of kicking Roman ass (no insult to you Italian ladies out there, it was another time and I now have a profound reverence for modern Roman ass) slavery and conquest are themes that fascinate me, especially the modern version. 

            But let’s consider the older version:  you’ve got a slave chained up in the back yard.  This is a very primitive and low-margin way of conducting slavery.  Imagine:  First you’ve got to buy the slave, then you’ve got to train them to do whatever job you want them to do, you’ve got to feed and house him, and they’re always coming up with the damnedest ways of running off into the swamps and joining the Indians, and then they get sick.  That’s all a risk to your “capital investment.”  

Slavery 2.0 is way better:  You’ve got a slave and the first thing that you teach him is that he’s free!  Now THAT was a stroke of GENIUS.  Then you get him pledging to all kinds of things outside of himself, symbols of fictitious authority, symbols of the protection rackets that sanctify themselves by teaching their minions to reverentially call them “government.”  Then you teach him he can stay free as long as he does exactly what you tell him to.  If he doesn’t, you’ll take away his money, her house, his kids, her life!  But he’s free!- not by practice, BY DEFINITION!  i.e. Freedom is a refrain, it is a slogan, it is not something you actually DO something for.  Of course, for slaves, freedom comes from government, and in democracy it comes from the mob: i.e. 50% of the turkeys who vote plus one.  And every other right does, too.  And as the Good Book says, “ he that giveth, also taketh away.”  That’s okay.  They weren’t really your rights, they were just on loan to you from the government, just like everything else, the house you say you “own”  but have to still pay the government rent to stay in.  Even your own life!  Now, of course, there’s a brand new game in town.  The game is NOT raising a bunch of food so you can have all the relatives over and have a week long celebration of exercised freedom.  The game is NOT comin’ up with more fun, enlightening, heart-opening, kinky, loving, tender, outrageous, poetic or romantic pastimes to lushnify yourself and little Honey-boo through the years, the palms, the storms, the kids, etc. The game is NOT finding new ways to make more outrageous instruments.  Oh yeah, you can do that, but now you do it for money!    Nothing wrong with that, but the game’s been changed in a way that most people don’t understand.  The money’s not backed by gold, cowrie shells, cocoa beans or anything from the natural world. 

It’s back by debt!  And all the money in circulation is the principle on debt, but when you pay interest you're taking money that was circulated as principle on somebody else's debt, so the only way to pay principle plus interest is to exponentially expand the debt continuously so the pot keeps growing ad infinitum, the servitude keeps growing ad infinitum, and you “cook the frog slowly” so to speak, so that she never notices that she and her “freedom” are way past half-baked. 

If you haven’t watched the video yet, do!  And the only way to pay that debt is to chop up the natural world you live in and are a part of to pay it to the government/bank Debt Monster who will devour your very life itself if you don’t throw something else in its maw to feed it. 

At least that’s what most people believe.

The reason the economy’s insane and people are being driven to consume is that we have to expand the economy exponentially just to pay the debt-masters.  Americans HAVE to consume more than any other people on the face of the planet because the U.S. is the largest debtor nation in the world.  Right now just the public debt is up to $250,000 for every single man, woman and child in the U.S.  That’s not even counting private debt.  Take away the debt and recreate a natural, wealth-based system and you restore communities, fertility, civility, etc., automatically. 

The only alternative is to wake up and face the monster and to realize it’s just some pompous assholes in a boardroom inviting shills like Bush, McCain, Obama, Clinton, Gore, to carry out their plans in exchange for privileges normal debt-serving serfs can't afford.  But for that people would have to understand what money is, what sovereignty is.  Most people on this forum would rather practice some new-fangled version of wishful thinking.  How many of you on this blog thread have actually read the articles and watched the videos? 

The people who rule the U.S. have no more love for U.S. citizens than for anyone else in the world.  And that’s where most U.S. citizens are fooled.  They are fat and fooled and there’s a little shepherd calling to them from over the hill – gonna take them someplace they’ve never been before!  What do you expect from a culture that grows up saying stuff like “the lord is my shepherd.”?  Damn straight he is!

Heather,

It’s a person-to-person proposition.  We start paying attention.  We meet others interested in how things move: birds on the wing, clouds over a ridge, a politician in a pig poke, a spider.  Then we look for the openings in the world of possibilities and we choose.  We converse.  We move.  We play.  

What the debt-masters fear is that people ever realize how simply we can live and how opulently we can PLAY! 

Revive play!  Revive conversation!  Revive long, lazy days on the porch, hanging out long enough that the drool you slobber on my belly after falling asleep after laughter, loud debate, and dessert doesn’t disgust me – but I still pretend it does and chase your sumptuous ass round the yard.  Church of Porch!  AMEN Reverend Docta Mistress Heather!

Cooking our own batch of kool-aid means inviting each other to become artists in the medium of culture, in the medium of LIVING.  These are the kind of folks I want to PLAY with.  Folks who abso-fucking-lutely grasp the variegated dimensions of our earthly human sojourn.  Folks who dare See, Hear and ¡Move! 

Our world is replete with possibilities we simply ignore because we’re trying to convince someone to join us.  When we move, all of a sudden we start to recognize the shining beauties who are moving and smiling with us!  (Sherri, just to clarify, I’m talking breakfast-, lunch-, and dinner-smiles – and red cheeks for dessert!)

Elisa,

Whaccha gonna do with a gal whose name is like a poem?  “Elisa”   Thanks for linking to this.  What's compelling about all this for YOU?  You’re invited to add to the dance.  You're invited to PLAY, to bellow forth, to let us know how your maternal and variegated wisdom informs your view, your play, your challenge, your aspiration, your delicious, your vision, and those openings back into the wilderness of your sovereign and natural heart, beating in sync with the pulsations of our planet, solar system, universe!  i.e. Hop on Board and bring your toes!

Here’s to the shuggashugga ¡BOP! of every single one of you!  I wish I could tell you how much you inspire me.

Love in, Love out!

¡O!

Dear Sherri,

         Good morning Ms. Breakfast-Smile!  Always the prize, eh? 

         Reading you is a damn good way to feel the heart open, to feel a connection to hearts on the horizon, and to know that luminous mischief is afoot. 

         There is an interesting term that you use, “people from the colonies.” My study of history shows me that there are very few people in the world that are not “from the colonies” and, yes, you're so right, people are trying to go from slavery 1.0 to slavery 2.0 without realizing that they're just going into a trickbag that it's going to be way harder for them to exit, because they've surrendered the hearts and minds of the children to get “processed” through the education racket. 

          Hey, have you ever read any of Ivan Illich's work?  I would recommend Tools for Conviviality which I think you will find compelling on all counts.  Here's a bio. which is an intro to just a smattering of the brilliance of this visionary lover of the diverse expressions of uninstitutionalized human intelligence.

           I would love to read your speech in Kenya and anything else you are writing and working on. 

           I like what you see about being “through trying to talk it into people now” and “the freedom from obligation.”  My intention with these blog posts is to sift, not sell.  It's a way to connect with people that “get it” and think that generating new paradigms for collaboration, wealth-building, adventure, expanded intelligence (of our entire cellular capacity), and fun is a proposition worth pursuing. 

           Thanks for being breakfast!

            Yummmm!

                          O

Hello Sherri!

I missed pursuing the dialogue with you and our other readers for the last 24 hours, now I’m back.  Wow!  Before I talk about your presentation with you, I can’t wait to discuss Tools for Conviviality with you.  It is absolutely germane to your work and I believe will very much support your perspective through its appreciation of how human communities, when allowed to flourish without coercive and “professional” disruption in a place, develop surprisingly brilliant (to those who have undergone industrial educational processing) and adaptive ways of maximizing the quality of life in that place.  Of course, the culturally petro-chemical observer has no linguistic or experiential differentiators allowing her to appreciate the nature of an adaptive, collaborative, mutually-fertilizing relationship to Life.  As my teachers taught me years ago:  any culture that shits in its water is insane in the most fundamental way.

Hmmmm.

The fact that this paper presents an appeal to government to embrace the greater societal needs, etc., I think denies the precise nature of governments in our day:  i.e. they rule by force.  Typically, the people are divided between those who favor the use of government power to “social” ends, and other prefer its limitation to “defensive” ends.  In either instance though, very little examination is given to how, precisely, that “government” obtains its power and the fact that there is no government; there are only individuals who equip and arm themselves and others to force other individuals into whatever protection racket they come up with.  To me it doesn’t make a damn difference whether they want to blow up Iraq or fight global warming: either way it’s a racket:  you have Billions of monetary units that are extracted from hard-working people, in the name of “God, country, climate, healthcare, whatever” and the people whose money funds these efforts have no choice as to whether they will or won’t fund whatever half-ass project a government comes up with.  

I worked in such government programs, with beautiful social intentions, but where the waste and abuse was not just mind-bending, it was a direct consequence of how such programs are funded: by coercion.  What do I mean?  As soon as you divorce an enterprise from any consequence for incompetence, and even reward the failure to achieve stated goals with more funding, you have a setup for abuse.  

To appeal to racketeers to further the greater social good, even if they would embrace your plea, fails to address and actually legitimizes the violence at the root of the their so-called “authority,” i.e. it does not arise because they are wiser, more just, more visionary and honest than the common working man & woman, it arises because these people have mastered the art of sophistry and, using such, have “legitimized,” i.e. converted into laws, their assumption of arms and armed wo/men against their own people and for whatever purpose they damn well please.  I treat agents of government the way I would treat any gang member.  Now here's a visual example of how protection rackets operate.  Whether it's the local cop on his beat or agents of the World Bank and IMF doesn't make a damn bit of difference: they will abuse, harm, torture and kill people because they can and at this point the majority of people in places like the U.S. and Europe either get their paycheck from the government protection racket directly, or they get paid by working for a company that is a political entrepreneur and gets funded coercively from the taxpayer's labor. 

What evolves from this sort of society is a culture where people vote for  greater benefits for themselves and others at a third party's expense.  Thus the voters are pitted against each other in a contest as to who can use government coercion (i.e. armed thugs) for their purposes instead of those other people's purposes.  Because most people love the idea of getting something at somebody else's expense, the protection racket manipulates democracy quite skillfully.  Yet very few will question the premises of either government or democracy, addressed at length in other sections of this blog.

To me, one of the most brilliant attempts at a freedom-based governance model was the U.S. Constitution.  And, yes, there were slaves in the early U.S., as there have been in ALL agriculturally-based empires worldwide.  I think that the founding documents of the U.S. were brilliant testaments to the human aspiration to freedom, AND THEY WERE ABJECT FAILURES RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING.  

Listening to Lew Rockwell’s interview of Tom Woods, author of Who Killed the Constitution  (I love www.lewrockwell.com) lends insight into the corruption of the governmental structure of the U.S. and to ALL government structures where power is based in coercion.  See article here.

Also, in your paper you point out the difference which distinguishes the “Large Corporation” (bad) vs. the “Small Entrepreneur” (brilliant).  I believe that your focus on size confuses the issue and that a “large” corporation is not any more or less virtuous than a “small” corporation or enterprise.  The distinction, to lend true clarity to MECHANISM, would best look at HOW the Large OR Small Corporation funds itself.  

Having done consulting for large, multinational healthcare corporations has allowed me to see how this works firsthand and has left me in amazement at how little of what passes for “enterprise” today actually happens in a free market.

The distinction alluded to is that of the political entrepreneur vs. the free market entrepreneur.  The first seeks gain through courtship of the political class:  politicians, bureaucrats, licensing boards which regulate competitors out of the market (and thus incentivize big corps to fund much regulatory legislation), and government contracts where the “client,” i.e. the taxpayer, has no right to refuse to fund the enterprise and, furthermore, for the most part has no clue as to its existence.  

The free market entrepreneur, on the other hand, has to engage in the honest texture of human needs and aspirations with no shortcuts.  Her offer to fellow human is subject to an individual’s free choice to evaluate that offer and freely decide whether the offer is desirable or not, without further compulsion.  

As we know all too well, the leading corporations in the world find the free market untidy, even though they promote so-called “free trade agreements” which give them further exclusivity and privilege in operating in politicized markets internationally.

But it’s not just the Big Corporations that benefit.  What’s brilliant about the system is that even ordinary people find advantage in the system.  Here’s a very simple example:  a union plumber.  In the U.S., if you build a house you must have a licensed plumber and electrician on the job.  Have YOU hired a licensed plumber lately? 

So the other day I was talking to a plumber and asked him how one becomes a plumber.  He told me that a plumber has to go through a 5 year apprenticeship and needs to work at least 10,000 hours on the job before they can get licensed.  He assured me that “this is because plumbing is actually quite complicated.”  How interesting!

As a Registered Nurse (another licensed “profession” ) I was required to have less than 1600 hours of on-the-job training before I could get licensed, and a physician, before specializing, can get licensed with around 4000 hours.  

Of course you wouldn’t want to compare a Plumber to a Physician.  That would be quite insulting to the Plumber, would it not?

But what gives? 

Let me tell you a little aside:  when I lived in Mexico I had a friend from Zapotec country who found out that I was a silversmith and asked me a strange question:  He said, “I’m building my home and, since you’re a jeweler, why don’t you come out to my place, stay with me and help me put in my plumbing?”  I was somewhat taken aback by what seemed a non sequitur.  “Yeah, but I'm not a PLUMBER,” I told him, ” I’ve never put plumbing in a house.”  “Well, you know how to solder, don’t you?”  “Yes.” “Well I’d like for you to stay with us and meet my friends at home.” And so I did.  I installed his plumbing and I still get e-mails from him every couple of years telling me that it’s working perfectly 11 years later.”  

In most “civilized” countries this would be totally illegal.  There’s not only a benefit to the Plumber in a place like the U.S. or the E.U., there’s also a benefit to the individual racketeers hiding behind the doorplates of alphabet agencies:  they have another subscriber to the concept that “the government is protecting them.”

What they fail to ask is “at whose expense?”  In this instance it’s at the expense of the person who’d like to afford a home but can’t afford to pay some asshole $10,000 for a job that should cost $1000 but doesn’t because they practice a profession that is party to political privilege.  

How’s Kobi?

O

And lately I’ve been fortunate to have met a group of WILD 20-some year-olds that love me because I’m wilder than they are, and seasoned.  And I LOVE to go hang out with them, to see how they are birthing a new world into being.  I’d say, make friends with kids that didn’t go to college and that ARE engaged in a creative process.  I find them endlessly fascinating, engaging, and beautiful.  They inspire my rapt, bemused, and enchanted attention.

There are plenty of solutions.  I have a number of them posted on my blog.  Check out Waste= Food, the brilliant essay about the fish farmer in Africa revitalizing an entire region’s economy (from the Greek oekonomia “ the administration of households,” etc.), biofuels from algae, etc.  We have had hundreds of solutions to every manner of human challenge for the past thousand years.  What we are still figuring out is how to awaken each other to the fact that we can acculturate each other and our children to live without the constant desire for domination, obedience and the persistent, re-doctored damnation/salvation paradigm.  

We’re still learning.  What are you bringing to the mix, Elisa?

Thanks for engaging.

Sherri,

            I like what you say about looking for the solutions that come out of peoples’  own mouths.  Getting from there to implementation is an entirely different step.  My previous example is one of precisely that:  meet a jeweler, invite him over to do your plumbing, make a new friend, get your plumbing in exchange for tortillas, frijoles and veggies, and then 4 turkeys for the fiesta when you put the roof on.  This is human brilliance, elegance, simplicity.  Same goes for the electrical wiring, etc.  Where my friend lived in Oaxaca was a zone of earthquakes.  When I was there the ground started jumping, literally, while we were having supper with about 12 people in the house.  The locals barely moved or commented.  When I asked them about the earthquake they said, “that was just a little one, the big ones make the boulders jump out of the hill and come rolling down the mountain, those are the ones we worry about.”

            And their houses are just gorgeous.  Sumptuous even.  Clay, pine needles, and mule shit.  The ingredients for adobe but they don’t make adobe bricks, they just pile the mix on about 8 inches at a time on the walls, let dry a little, put on the next layer.  No housing codes, no housing insurance, no experts inspecting, just a crew of men continuing a thirty thousand plus year tradition.  Along with that comes: no homelessness.  If you can get mule shit, clay and pine needles together, you can have a home. 

            And it’s not a place you’d want to go to uninvited because many uninvited visitors have been found dead after nightfall.  No one there talks about it much, except to say that the night belongs to the Jaguar who devours the uninvited. These people have seen too many conquistadores, especially the kind that come from the city and want to improve a thirty thousand year old way of life.  

            It’s not a male or female solution.  It’s a male PLUS female solution.  And there’s nothing mystical about it.  Building your home is a natural human activity that, in most ancient cultures, takes anywhere from 3 hours to 3 weeks, and very little money.  Try doing that in the U.S., in Canada, in Europe and a government agent will show up to shut you down.  Continue insisting and armed agents will show up.  How is it in Barbados?

            Now in Mexico, if you want to build a house, you build a house.  You can start with a cardboard shack, start saving up cement blocks, pay a mason (who doesn’t need a license) once you’ve got 50 or 100 blocks, or make a bunch of adobe bricks and now you’ve got a cardboard shack with one cement block wall.  The process continues for 3-5 years and pretty soon a family has a home that’s going to last several hundred or thousand years.  Rooms get added on, floors, etc.  What always amazed me in Mexico is how “wealthy” in real, living terms “poor people” are.  It’s something Illich talks about eloquently and a right he fought to protect wherever he lived and traveled: i.e. the RIGHT, yes, the RIGHT to have little money and enrich oneself, one’s family and community without being reduced to an annual per capita income figure.  

            “Homelessness” is not a housing problem.  Same with poverty.  Africa, Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia.  Everywhere you see famines and human destitution you see protection rackets destroying people’s balanced ways of living in their environment.  It’s a government interference problem.  It’s a problem of other protection rackets that are acting like governments.  It’s a problem of illegitimizing anyone who doesn’t want to spend their time in the debt-based currency racket and who doesn’t want to ask permission from interlopers to continue living in the places and ways that they’ve lived for tens of thousands of years. 

            Anyways, Sherri, I’d love to hear about how free, local, home-grown culture is thriving in your neck of the woods and who your teachers there are.

            Kind Regards,

                        O

Dear Sherri,

First things first:  I love it when you call me sweetie.  Yes, I know, you still want to fight a little and then make up,don't you?  Call it “keepin' it spicey!”  I bet you they got a term for that in Bajan.   I love what you posted elsewhere about keeping it “untraditional.”  ROFL.  Honey, we got a love thing for sure.  And yes, what with you posting without reading, without dialoguing, if I was in Barbados, I probably would have gone to your house with my feather duster and asked you to bare your butt so I could spank your ass.  But only if you loved it.  And if you loved it too much I'd make you wait for it while I sipped a cool drink in the shade.  Love is a many-feathered thing…

And let me tell you somethin' else:  I can't even imagine what a fine and perspicacious siren song of femininity was doin' around some musty-dusty Ph.D. sycophants, darlin'.  The way I've got you sized up, what you need is a ROGUE who's a scholar, and Honey, just so you know, Rogue Scholar is my middle name.  Little Big Rogue Scholar O.  That's me!

“Leadership.”  Now there's a term that's wholly misconstrued.  In most indigenous languages the word for chief is “one who speaks to the heart,” “one who speaks beautifully.”  A chief has no authority; they speak to authority.  Authority is in the heart. 

I think you're absolutely right about the parasitic caste eventually working themselves out of a reality to suck blood in.  Check this out:  www.tolfa.us  Date?  Let's shoot for 2020 and do our damnedest to make it real.  I'd love to see Kobi, the Master of Positioning, unhampered in his genius to inspire heart-to-heart connectivity and tending to a world of his nurturance and creation where Life is courted to unfurl in profligate magnificence.  I want to sit in the garden of his genius someday, knowing full well that human brilliance is set free and truly the stars that we are have no limits. 

I remember a long time ago Martin High Bear tellin' me that “the Indian's Bible is written on his heart.”  At the time I thought that was poetic.  Took me a long time to start reading it, to know that he wasn't talking metaphors, he was talking practical truth. 

Helps to have the light shinin' from your smile while I'm readin, makes all the signs a lot clearer…

….yes… love is a many-feathered thing

            and I am that crazy bird, singing wild songs you’ve never heard, laughin’ and raisin’ Cain up in your tree!

¡O!