Sunday, March 23, 2008

read and believe- or not

i think that there are many of us who feel that there is just something terribly wrong with our country- and the rest of the world. there is a ruthless, selfish quality to the people of this country- i see it in my neighbors sometimes when they are gleefully talking about a misfortune of someone else. the decaying infrastructures alongside the gated mcmansions along the strips of ugly chain stores- is a testimony to the soul less communities we have built. i don't know exactly what is going to happen to this planet. i have been harping about the environment for a long time and the author of the blog below is right- resistance is futile. i have been posting about self sufficiency for some time- and i am researching and putting some strategies together for me and my family. the bottom line is- we see in our news these days- basic necessity shortages and natural catastrophes. this isn't about hobby gardening any longer folks- it's about learning survival skills. it probably won't happen all in one day- but you need time to prepare- growing your own food takes time and getting up a surplus takes some time. if you don't start now- well, fill in your own blanks.

i posted the entire post from the survival acres blog here- because i know that at least some will read the whole thing. i can't convince you but i think many sense something coming- the other shoe dropping. listen to your instincts.

March 22, 2008

The Changes We Seek - What Can Be Done - Part I

Filed under: General, Sustainable Living, Peak Oil, World Affairs, Politics, Collapse — admin @ 8:29 pm

I hope this blog entry is one of the most important entries I have ever written, because it is my hope that this will break through some of the gridlock and indecisions and most importantly, the daily time wasters that consume our lives.

This blog and many others sources have revealed that huge, cataclysmic changes are coming to our world of such great significance that we should, if we are entirely honest with ourselves, seriously doubt our ability to actually deal with them.

The evidence we’ve seen possess these future facts of cataclysmic change as being both irrefutable and immutable, and utterly indifferent to our to our inability to cope. They are irresolute events headed our way, which we cannot rightly hope to stop or even contain, not even if we have applied our very best efforts.

Several years of my own life have been spent on documenting these things and writing about them. I do not consider any of this effort wasted or a part of the ‘time-wasting’ exercises I mention above, because this still on-going effort of my own has helped my understanding and that of many others, and why the collapse of all human civilization has come to be.

Other more notable and well-known luminaries have done the same things, and they have both encouraged and helped me with my own understanding of our situation. Like them, I do not believe that despite our common and collective “doom” future, that we should simply give up since it’s irreversible. I believe that giving up is in fact the only guarantee of our extinction, and I believe that it is simply not in our nature to do so. We have struggled for a million years to achieve our present position and stature, it’s not like quitting now makes any sense.

I do however, very strongly believe that there some things that do make sense, even many things we should completely abandon as the only sensible thing we can possibly do now — and this is the main focus of this entry.

The collapse of our civilization is now underway. Although immutable and utterly indifferent to our reaction, our collapse does not mean we should simply quit trying. The collapse of our world is a process, not an event. It will be ongoing process for quite some time to come, at least one entire generation if not many. It began years ago in fact, when human civilization reached its peak potential. Since then, we have already begun the long decline.

Most of us probably haven’t noticed this, but a few did. I became aware of this decline in the 80’s for example. The things that I noticed back then were not issues such as peak oil or peak resources, but peak humanity. I was living in a world that was very different then the one I had grown up in — and I didn’t much care for it. I was witnessing a collapse of morality, decency, respect and compassion. Even then, apathy was rampant. It’s much worse now as our society continues to cater to our base nature of greed and gluttony.

Later, I learned about peak collapse, as resources were consumed, polluted or destroyed. Peak oil became a big focus for a time, but even this wasn’t the whole picture. Modern human civilization and cheap energy go hand in hand, but even more important then this is the planetary climate. We can live without energy, some of us anyway, but we cannot live without a habitable climate. Or clean water. Or non-toxic soils. These, plus solar energy are the basic elements that provide for all life on Earth. And we’ve done an absolutely terrible job of making sure we have any of these things left.

It’s called ecocide and it encompasses every living thing on Earth, and it is all our fault. We cannot blame this on anything other then ourselves, and our base nature. This has now led to our peak as a civilization and to our collapse. An assessment of all of the conditions now present throughout the globe presents this fact as being irrefutable. It is not popular view, but then how could it be? Popularity also relies upon the same two vices of greed and gluttony.

I spent years and years studying history, politics, religion, the US Constitution, the Federal Reserve and many other issues, trying to fit all of the pieces together into a cohesive pattern that made sense. I came away with the realization after quite some time that none of this really mattered anymore, we hadn’t change anything and even if we could have, they have all been blind sided by something much bigger and far more serious. We had in fact, been paying attention to all of the wrong things, failing to realize that we had undermined the very foundation that we were all living on.

The collapse of our civilization is here. We are now going through our death throes in a desperate and foolish bid to forestall this conclusion. It will not work. It stands absolutely no chance of working and every effort that is now being expended to extend our present form of lifestyle and living versus working towards our planetary survival is a complete and utter waste of time, money and effort.

Billions and billions of dollars are being spent to extend the status-quo and maintain the present paradigm as long as possible. This is foolishness beyond belief, for we are robbing all of future humanity so that we alone may have a few more years of greed and gluttony of the ‘good life’. We have already consumed the inheritance of a hundred generations of humanity — do we really need to add more crimes to this already extensive list?

It is now extremely doubtful that humanity will manage to survive our present and past excesses. We certainly know that our civilization will not survive, all the energy and natural resource inputs that it requires as its lifeblood are now in critical short supply. We have already long since pushed the entire planet past ecological tipping points decades ago, a process that some erroneously think we can magically reverse through even more human intervention.

I disagree, I do not think we can do it and think that even our efforts to engineer such a solution will lead to even worse conditions then we are already facing.

The planet does not need our help. Modern human civilization is the unnatural variable in the natural cycles and events of the Earth. Without our intervention and ongoing contribution the planet will heal itself according to it’s own cycles and rhythms. But therein lies the problem — we can’t stop doing what we are doing and simply leave it alone. We have totally forgotten how to live in harmony with the Earth instead of against it. In our greedy quest for ownership and control of every resource, nation and people, our gluttonous ways have caused such great wounds and scars upon this planet that we killed the host that supported us.

A few semi-recent comments have indicated that warning others of these world changing events now underway seems at times to be self-defeating, as this creates as many problems in the minds of the listeners and tellers as it proposes to solve.

There is indeed some truth to this view. We can easily get caught up in this theme, and even become very defensive about it, which then becomes yet another time draining exercise of wasted effort, leading nowhere and effectively accomplishing almost nothing. We can easily exhaust ourselves trying to do this and I believe this is now a complete waste of very valuable time.

There are many, many issues clamoring for our attention now, not one of which has anything to do with the collapse or how we are going to try and save ourselves. It is as if the world at large really wants to ignore this angry Godzilla standing outside our door as it tears the building apart. Those that do discuss these things in couched terms don’t offer any real solutions either. In fact, of all the solutions I’ve seen, they ALL keep contributing to the absolute likelihood of collapse since they propose to mess with natural processes that are now terribly out of balance.

This is the wrong approach and always will be. These are the first things we should completely abandon as time wasting exercises, dangerous to a degree that none of us can truly fathom. Anything that proposes to perpetuate our continued rape of this planet and it’s natural forms of life is simply wrong. This is the exact opposite direction in which we should be headed.

There are many other issues vying for our attention, such as the next (s)Election or who the current presidential candidate front runner is as promoted by our misinforming media. These are truly time wasters that are entirely meaningless to each and every one of us. The actual outcome of this fabricated delusion we call an ‘election year’ will not affect you personally in any particular way, nor have any affect whatsoever on the now certain outcome of our civilization.

This “distraction” as it were, because this is what it really is in reality, is true for just about everything going on today. Your input into issues that you would like to see changed are like your vote, which is also infinitely small and is going completely unheard. You can spend a lot of time and a lot of money, screaming to the top of your lungs for your issues to garner attention by someone, somewhere, but you are still going to be almost entirely unheard, unrecognized, underutilized and unable to effectively change anything on a scale outside of your direct control.

This concept is very important, because it represents the super-sized significance of our world today and the infinitely small grains of sand that we each actually are and that we are lost to the tidal waves of momentum. We are awash with change in our world today, but it is not change that we personally have any control over at all anymore. These are changes being done to us, but most often not by us.

The changes occurring in our world, whether this is the next (s)Election, the Iraq invasion or any other major event such as the destruction of the Amazon, are effectively lost to us individually as being anything we can even reasonably expect to have any effect on. They are what they are now, their well underway and our input or our withdrawal is accomplishing almost nothing, even when we have combined our voices and dissent by the millions. Whether we like it or not and we are all being swept along with the tides and currents these events create despite our best efforts to stop them or prevent them from happening.

Should we try to change these things? Yes, in a normal world, we should. But we no longer live in a normal world and it is an absolute certainty that we will never have a normal world again. The normal processes that we’ve used in our so-called “democracy” (a complete lie) to instigate and incorporate changes simply no longer work anymore. At fault is the change processes themselves, which don’t represent the will of thinking people anymore (think “free speech zones” in cages surrounded by armed guards carrying automatic weapons for a quick example).

This is a critically important point for those who are still yet enamored with these processes for change and are still trying to utilize them, and the idea that they offer any hope for change. They don’t — and have not for a very long time now. They are broken so badly that they should simply be abandoned. We are wasting our time when the processes themselves are so inept and so poorly representative and badly effective that offer no hope of any change at all.

Therefore, whatever changes we might desire through such mechanisms are simply null and void before we’ve even started, and will remain so for as long as we cling to the false illusions that our voice, or our vote, or our desire is going to have any effect at all. We are only hearing ourselves and talking among ourselves, creating gatherings of people like ourselves, people like us who are sympathetic to our viewpoints and opinions, which is also true of the writings on this blog.

Let’s not kid ourselves here. We’re not changing the world and never will. Nobody is. A few will “wake up”, whatever that actually means (and it means a LOT less then most seem to think), but the numbers are tiny and few and will always remain tiny and few and they will not create a “groundswell” of opinion or change as some seem to profess. Changing our world has become an impossible task in reality, momentum and inertia and a still growing population are now so great that it IS now impossible for us to change effectively. We won’t change, cannot change until we after our collapse.

I’ve always known this from the very start of this blog and the old forum, because like others, I have tried to change the world in the past, spending my life and my entire fortune in the effort. I came to recognize that there were many, many things that could not be changed and never will be changed because of their sheer size and momentum and their deeply entrenched nature into the very fabric of our society and civilization.

I eventually learned to discard the illusions that widespread public support was needed or even worked, because it simply doesn’t. It just another lie we been told to believe and is a distraction in and of itself. Those that keep promoting this lie I generally just ignore, because what they claim simply isn’t true.

It does not take huge numbers to change the world — not at all and it never did. Just the opposite is actually true. That’s why the few today can still control the many very effectively. It’s why your boss can make or break your organization, but you can’t. It’s why corporations succeed or they fail. The people in powerful positions of influence and change are the ones controlling its direction and success, and are they are operating within entirely different parameters then we are, while we are ourselves are really in the position of absolutely nothing except our delusions.

We’ve been taught to think that boycotts, protests and letter writing campaigns actually work, when in reality, they don’t work and I can’t point to a single instance where they have. Even when the oft-claimed “highest form of democracy” is utilized (the vote), we re-discover again and again that nothing ever changes (voting is not the highest form of democracy, withdrawing your consent is, this is even better then dissent).

The ability for us to change things in our “positions of nothing” is a totally false hope that is leading nowhere. There is simply far too much momentum in the natural and political world today for this to possibly work. This isn’t 1776 for example, or 1681. We are dealing with extremely large and significant populations and the momentum they create and support, and all of the institutions, government and corporate direction this entails. Can we change any of this? No, we cannot. Even worldwide groups like Greenpeace are not experiencing any change, the best they can hope for and all they have achieved through many years of effort is raising public awareness.

But does public awareness work? This is a fair question, since it is the basic beleif behind all these efforts to instigate change. Public awareness takes years to develop on any scale. As a quick example, there are still supporters for the Iraq war. Millions of people still believe that Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on 9/11, despite significant efforts to educate the public to the real facts behind the attacks.

Yet despite this, many remain entirely clueless as to the real reasons why America attacked and invaded Iraq. Public education in this case has not changed anything. We’re still there, and the genocide continues with over one million dead.

Nor did public education of the events surrounding 9/11 change anything. Nor did the thousands of documented cases of vote fraud change anything. That moron we have for a Presidential pretender is still in office and still committing crimes daily. All that these efforts have accomplished is to achieve a certain level of public awareness, but they have not stopped the momentum and the inertia that is now in place. In effect, it’s too late for that. The list is truly endless where “public awareness” does not work as a change mechanism because the public has no control over the events now set in motion and never has.

Do we have years and years left to develop huge public awareness? No, we do not. Even Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” seen by hundreds of millions hasn’t accomplished what it set out to do. If and when (very doubtful now) it ever did, it would be far too late to now matter anyway, something that has been mentioned often here before. We can’t change fast enough on a planetary scale to make a difference now anyway.

Many, many efforts of change have been tried over the years, but they have not worked now for just as many years. The only thing they’ve accomplished is to make the participants feel better about their own selves and their level of awareness, but the momentum and they inertia they seek for change never materializes. Their “try” for change is their sole reward and their only accomplishment.

But now the time has come to stop doing even this on those issues which cannot be changed due to their size, complexity or momentum. Many people want to fight the Federal Reserve for example, or the two-party electoral system, or climate change or any number of deeply entrenched, very large and significant issues affecting us all. Their mantra is that if only enough people got involved, they could change these things and effect the outcome. This is simply not true anymore, sheer numbers of people cannot change something that is of a much greater size and force. The truth is, they are not even in the same category or classification. It’s like comparing your influence over General Motors, it’s absolutely meaningless.

Your buying power, like your vote, is infinitely small, even when combined with others of like persuasions. This is why boycotts never seem to work, and the companies they target can easily and swiftly redesign their business processes (or logos) and just keep right on doing what they’ve been doing all along. They have what we don’t — inertia, money and lest we forget, consumer products that people actually still want in huge numbers.

They also have something else at stake — their survival. We cannot say the same — yet. The issues we challenge are not so critical to us that our survival is at stake, and therefore, we respond accordingly, which in truth is a very weak response. We’ll just buy the same product from someplace else under a different brand name, effectively changing nothing in the end! What’s missing here? We didn’t change! This is the key.

There is also a very distinct different set of rules for the swift and mighty. They recognize any danger and will swiftly adapt to whatever they need to do to survive, including lie, cheat, steal, murder or rebrand if necessary. This is why the “business as usual” model always continues to survive, despite our many, many but terribly feeble attempts to make effective changes to these plantation owners that govern and control us all. We have no direct control over them and never, ever will under our present system. We are not even motivated by the same things as they are and we play by entirely different rules then they do. In essence, we are already defeated before we even start.

It’s a rigged “game”, it’s not an even playing field, but one that we believe we have been challenged into playing because that convinces us “we’re still in the game”. Nobody told us and we didn’t realize that the score was already 100-0 and we stand absolutely NO CHANCE of winning.

We also believe that we must abide by the rules of moral decency, not something which they have been found to do either. The double standards employed by our politicians, corporations, courts and the entire legal system is truly astounding, but we stupidly believe that we must still keep playing by the rules they’ve set for us, but not them, and they’re all too happy to ignore when it comes to their own survival. Its a rare day in hell when they are actually held accountable for their crimes and actions.

There was a time when change by the people did work, but only sometimes and really, not all that often. It no longer works now because we no longer have any control over any of our institutions, we keep kidding ourselves that we still do, but we don’t. This last Congress should prove that in spades. Objectors and dissenters are simply booted out the door (fascism) and the “business as usual” model continues. The political processes at work in this country (which are most definitely not ours) have fallen into the hands of thieves who are having their agendas promoted by whatever means they find necessary and often do.

The main stream media is a perfect example of this. Presently controlled in America by just five families, the American news regurgitates pablum and nonsense and outright lies, over and over again which is widely inhaled as manna from heaven in this country by stupid sheep. I have no mercy for people that believe everything they hear and question nothing. Failing to use the brain cells between their ears is their fault and nobody else’s.

The real news about America and the world is still being found offshore, which might eventually get picked up in a few months by the American media who then twists it all around and waters it down to fit a politically correct agenda. Even the “truth in news reporting” movement in this country has failed miserably to get the American media to honestly, fairly and accurately report the news.

To most Americans, if the mainstream media doesn’t say it, then it cannot possibly be true. They are the entirely gullible ones. Therefore, such issues like climate change was not actually real or anything to be concerned about — not until the media finally broke it’s complicit silence on the issue and seemingly, all at once as if on cue (and it was).

The same thing is now happening right now with the global food situation. Suddenly, this is “big news”. This didn’t just happen overnight, it take time to run out of food (months), but where were the warnings then? They were found offshore by other news sources for the most part.

The sad fact is, absolutely nothing in this country is reported unless it is first vetted and approved. Think about that fact for a moment. Since the media holds such a huge percentage of public opinion and public knowledge, what they “say” goes. It’s the Gospel, regurgitated and spewed far and wide. They are in fact responsible for the brainwashing and belief systems and even many of the moral values held by Americans today. They have literally shaped the American way of life into their design — and to the destruction of everyone. They taught us we all needed to have the “good life”, the cost and the consequences to the planet didn’t matter and was never even mentioned. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all paid prostitutes whoring themselves out for profit to the highest bidder (and advertisers).

War was “necessary” and “good” and “right” and “proper” and “democratic” and downright “patriotic” — because the media said so. But dissent and disagreement was treason! The media was very guilty of regurgitating the same outrageous lies by the American government — very often without checking the facts first, that’s how this country was sold an outrageous bill of lies for the Iraq invasion. But this isn’t anything new, this is how it has always been done in this country, this is the “business as usual” in the American dream (the one you’d have to be asleep to actually believe).

But none of this can be changed one-iota by us. We’re ineffectual as ever, even in very large groups of millions of ‘treasonous bastards’, and damn it it all to hell, we need to admit it, because it is so important for us to realize that we need to move beyond these time killing exercises of complete futility that do not accomplish diddly squat or change anything. Our planet is dying and we’re going to die with it if we don’t pull our heads out of our collective asses and start doing what’s right. We do not need their “consent” or widespread pubic support or the approval of ANYONE.

This is why I now discard all these ‘agendas’ to create public awareness, even on this blog. It will not change the certain outcome and this is now my focus. How can I be better prepared personally for the outcome of what is now an absolute certainty? And what else CAN I do besides beat my hands in futility at the air?
(to be continued in Part II)

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