Modern man lives for number one. What’s ironic about this is the small fact that more than any of his predecessors, he is dependent on others for every element of his survival . His clothes, transportation, food, shelter, entertainment and indeed all the most vital services which he enjoys and consumes daily are provided by others. Previously, as his very lifestyle was built around an agrarian farming culture that provided his sustenance, he depended on an intimate network of extended family , other farmers and the village which sprung up around him to house the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker. The products he consumed until very recently were all produced locally by people he, by and large, knew personally.
This urban scheme has been with us since the first farming communities sprung up. An arrangement dating back to our earliest recorded history, beginning with the departure of our ancestors from a nomadic hunter gatherer existence which lasted hundreds of thousand of years to move into villages leading to the creation of the worlds earliest civilizations in places like Sumeria and Mesopotamia. The elements of our modern lives have changed very little since the beginning of our earliest written history a mere four thousand years ago. Shops, markets, money, houses and streets, writing and book keeping, the wheel and much of our technology, the nation state, war, ethics, morality and the laws which govern us are all very similar to those we now employ in daily life in the twenty first century. Outside a few tweaks, all of what makes us modern , the vast majority of it, has been with us since that time. Even our religions in the West, the Bible stories which are still clung to and interpreted literally by a large portion of the American population such as the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark as well as many others are in fact originally from Sumerian pre Judaic sources. Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was a Sumerian.
This adopted city dweller approach to survival has indeed made us very successful, coupled with the extensions of basic technological innovations acquired as we moved on from living with the natural world so closely. The harnessing of fire or combustion, the little trick of spinning magnets around a coil of wire to produce electricity, the generator. Electricity, which when reintroduced into the very same mechanism, spins a wheel and becomes the electric motor. Some cultures, the few indigenous ones still present in many places but vanishing quickly, continue to maintain that pre urban lifestyle but these are increasingly extinguished as separate cultural differences, ancient skills and knowledge disappear in the march towards mono culture that can be seen the world over.
While the “new” approach has certainly made us very successful in evolutionary terms, the so called “masters of nature”, it has also, as can be seen in the impending destruction of the natural world which all life, including people intrinsically depend upon, put us in a position where the very strategy which has made us so successful imperils our continued survival along with the rest of life on the planet. No longer consciously connected with nature, human life now occurs entirely within an artificial system of man’s own creation.
Specialists, whose entire lives are lived within civilization’s comfortable cocoon, removed from any personal awareness of the community of life around us or our effects upon it, we have become alienated from the very web which our survival as a species depends. Ironically, everything about us , the edifice of our civilization, our books, our housing, buildings , televisions, computers transportation, entertainment, and indeed the windows we look out at the world from, are all square , all come in boxes. We seem incapable of any experience outside this simple package, blind to the damage we are inflicting on our own future, we are truly boxed in by the limitations we put in place only a few thousand years ago .
Perhaps we need to heed an older voice , one that was with us far longer than civilization has been, in order to evolve beyond our present conundrum . Perhaps things have come full circle and progress is not a line from here to there but rather a spiral making it’s way to a perfection at the heart of the evolutionary process that all life obeys. I think the words of the Sioux medicine man and shaman Black Elk , who knew Red Cloud and Crazy Horse and was witness himself to the battle of the Little Big Horn and the massacre at Wounded Knee stated what we, in our linear thinking have all but forgotten.
“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it… Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The Sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The Moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back to where they were. The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.”
First published on firedoglake , Wednesday July 31, 2013
http://my.firedoglake.com/freeman/2013/07/31/rewriting-the-dominant-paradigm-thoughts-on-evolution-part-1/
An American strike on Syria could very conceivably be the shot that is heard around the world. It could lead to a Third World War involving the most important players and economies on the world stage.
Below are just a few of the facts that point to such a possibility.
Russia’s only international military base outside the former Soviet republic is the port of Tartus, Syria. It’s warships entered the Eastern Mediterranean for the first time in decades recently and it is sending more ships plus advanced weaponry to Syria, as we speak. Syria already has the most sophisticated anti ship missiles on earth which can reach Cyprus where US forces are likely to be stationed and any strike on Syria will be conducted from the sea.
Iran, a nation which the US has sought to make war with for a decade has a mutual defense pact with Syria, which places them in a position of having to defend Syria by treaty obligation.
Iran is sitting on the second largest Natural Gas and the third largest oil reserves in the world. It controls 35% of the oil provided to the entire world and more than half of the amount is provided to China through the Hormuz Strait, the world’s single most important geostrategic pathway for energy.
Iran refuses US currency for it’s oil trading, a direct blow to American hegemony. Dominating Iran is also seen by American war hawks as a way to control China based on the reasons stated above. These are transparently the real causes for American aggression towards Iran, a signatory to the nuclear non proliferation treaty with every right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Since the nuclear red herring isn’t gaining traction, a war with Syria is seen as the next best thing.
China is the world’s second largest importer of oil. Perhaps as much as half of China’s oil and gas come directly from Iran and this action, if taken by the US, is the backdoor to a war with Iran, make no mistake.A small disruption in Mid East oil passing through the tiny opening known as the Straits of Hormuz and the effects on the worlds economy will be unmistakable. Between that fact and the obvious Russian and the Chinese elements involved in a conflict with Syria, this could be the riskiest gambit any administration has taken since Hitler invaded Poland.
Meanwhile, if you are an American, the country you are living in spends as much as the entire planet combined on it’s military and has it’s entire population under surveillance. Your government is controlled entirely by corporate money. More than nine out of every ten elections are decided by which candidate has the most corporate money, which means unequivocally that as a point of fact the US in no longer either a functioning democracy or a representative government where it’s citizens can reasonably expect to affect the outcome through participation. The nation’s government assassinates it’s own people in secret without any due process and claims the right to arrest and hold those people or anyone else indefinitely without ever charging them. It is currently operating military operations in at least seventy four other countries, often without those nations blessings.
Wondering what it felt like to be German before the Second World War ?
Originally published on firedoglake
Saturday September 7, 2013 12:56 pm
I won’t be voting Republican, that being said I think it’s important that we should be able to have an honest discourse on just how bad it’s gotten under the good guys, a discussion which would leave our candidate in a pretty bad light all in all . This is too taboo to discuss among true believers in the democratic camp because the other guys are “even worse” which is exactly the danger in the lesser of two evil approach to politics.The danger being that the most important issues of our times are now too taboo to truly reflect upon in the public forum. Essentially no matter how far to the right the democrats move or how awful the policies they embrace, they seem to be the only choice left us within the system. A system transparently, in the wake of Citizens United, entirely bought and paid for by large for profit corporate interests. Over ninety percent of all congressional elections are decided by the candidate with the most money.
Obama has expanded the definition of war, enlarged and embraced the neo cons attack on civil liberties and stands with the Bush Administration before it on the assumption of sweeping new powers for the executive, such as, we are told, the right to assassinate American citizens, abroad or at home .These powers include the authority to arrest and detain us on no charges or try us on secret charges in front of a military tribunal. Meanwhile domestic spying according to the ACLU has risen exponentially under Obama’s watch. He has resurrected the Espionage Act and despite protection of whistle blowers being one of his major campaign planks now brags that his administration has prosecuted twice as many whistle blowers under it than any other in history . This of course is the diametrical opposite of what he campaigned on previously .
Drones ravage civilians and children , 800 of them in Pakistan alone, a country we are not officially even at war with. The images of their bodies never make it onto the evening news. The military budget grows uninterrupted and the health care offered by Obama is itself little different from Romney’s in Massachusetts, straight out of the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank. The man has done virtually the opposite of everything he ran on and that’s inexcusable. Remember FISA ? It’s gone downhill dramatically since then . We’re like the Nazis in this country , both parties .
So what’s the downside to a knife in the back exactly and why should the democrats ever move to the left ? They can merely offer you any alternative short of the unthinkable and you will vote for them anyway. The government is no more than a subsidiary of industry, the entertainment division, as Frank Zappa aptly put it , of the military industrial complex. Unfortunately both at home and abroad what happens here will have dramatic consequences for all of us because of America’s present position on the world stage .
One half of all life on the planet will disappear in the next 100 years . Scientists now believe the Arctic will be free of summer ice within the decade .As a result of the fact that one third of the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere ends up settling into the oceans scientists predict a mass extinction event in those oceans “unseen in human history” within the next few decades .The Greenland ice sheet melted in four days this summer. Hear about this at the debates ? Didn’t think so.
We do know through the Wiki Leaks documents that the lesser evil party bribed and threatened smaller countries NOT to sign on to any binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions though and have opened the arctic up to oil drilling. They also apparently support a pipeline to bring Canada’s tar sands to Texas for refining, a move Nasa’s chief climatologist has called game over for the planets climate because it is far more polluting than what we have been using till now and will dramatically extend our use of dirty fuels way past our species expiration date.
This is not advice on how to vote , for that I suggest you use your own best judgement but please stop fooling yourselves with your cheer leading, the good guys aren’t very and have managed to rival the worst of the Bush years while you all remained silent out of political convenience or actually defended what should be indefensible if you care about the fate of the human species or democracy in America.
Originally posted Thursday October 18, 2012 1:54 pm
An original song in commemoration of the death of the Bill of Rights at the hands of the two corporate parties .
The fact that it was a democratic administration which asked that the language exempting American citizens from indefinite detention without charges be removed from the NDAA is lost on very few .
The remarkable bipartisan enthusiasm displayed for legislation which clears the way for the military to operate on American soil should be an epiphany for all those still sleeping .
Nothing illustrates the depth of this betrayal of the oath of office better than the passage of the NDAA and it’s being signed into law by a man who ran as a constitutional law expert and predicated his campaign for the presidency on fixing the grave abuses to that document under Bush and the neoconservatives .
Good luck out there .
The Rags of Liberty
They don’t serve cupcakes in this jai.
indefinitely detained here , no charges evidence or bail ,
My advice ?
Be careful with your mail.
Keep opinions to yourself or you’ll end up in a cell .
Bipartisan consensus, the government has finally come to it’s collective senses . “Torturer , that could be a good occupation . I mean if in you can’t find work flippin hamburgers !”
My living room is front and center . In America’s global holy war on terror . “Whadda you worried about , your innocent ,. You don’t even have an opinion !”
At least now you can be happy knowing that your never really alone !
“Who needs rights anyway , I don’t care , you can assassinate my children !”
You say you can bug my telephone,
Geo locate me when and where I roam.
I once felt safest in my home,
then I committed treason when I wrote this silly poem.
They can torture people as they please ,
use a bloody scalpel between your navel and your knees,
You never get a lawyer, not when your seized,
they feel about the constitution the way a leper feels towards his disease .
” Just wave that flag faster ,maybe they won’t notice us !”
My living room is front and center , In America’s global holy war on terror.
“The Bill of Rights ? Didn’t I already pay for that ?”
Yesterday , along with my wife and daughters , I spent several hours at the wall street occupation. I have several observations to make and report of what I found there as well as my own attempt at activism, largely made up of talking with the police which surrounded the event in large numbers.
"Straw Poll on Direct Action" by Colin David Anderson on flickr. Straw poll on the consensus to form a subcommittee to explore being autonomous actions leading to arrest
As expected, the vast majority of people I saw there were white and in their early twenties. Most were radical looking middle class youngsters who sat together looking somewhat frayed around the edges, having spent several damp nights hassling with the authorities, though the weather yesterday was better than nice , which I’m sure helped raise spirits. It is obvious that not many older citizens were able to attend due to the need to pay bills and mortgages , which the youth is typically exempt from for a time . Aside from a few construction workers , eating lunch in the park, there was no one who could be representative of those people,who made Madison Wisconsin so successful, working men and women and union members.
I commended the young individuals there. There were not more than a few hundred present at best and without their presence there wouldn’t have been anything happening at all , but as always , where people are concerned, they were not entirely homogenous in their attitudes .
While most were respectful there were also those who were more confrontational with the police, dancing into an area of sidewalk which the local authorities were compelled to keep clear , a woman who decided this was the right place to go without a shirt ,and someone holding a sign up with something along the lines of “GO FUCK YOURSELVES ZIONIST PIGS “, none of which IMHO did much to create sympathy from the passers by.
In addition to this scenario was the obvious fact that most of those present lacked enough information to truly explain why they were there and it was hard to see that there was any real spokespeople to represent the movement and accurately portray the reasons for the action. This could easily have been remedied though some printed talking points but as far as I was aware this hadn’t happened. Invariably the media focused in on those pushing the line over the side walk area that the police had been instructed to keep clear for pedestrians and the more unsavory looking and uninformed youths.
I spent between three and four hours talking to the police , all in groups of between two and four, asking them first what they thought of the protest and if they knew what the reasons were for it . Essentially none had any idea whatsoever but were polite and listened respectfully to what I had to say about income inequality, record poverty and profits, Citizens United and our loss of basic rights such as habeas corpus and rampant domestic spying etc.
At the end of each conversation I believe the police I communicated with were far more aware of what is at stake and why the action was occurring ,becoming both supportive of the occupation and somewhat shocked by the facts and statistics I offered in defense of my positions .
My question is are we going to bring working men and women, union members , people of color, religious congregations , other political groups and older statesmen into the fray or can we expect only the youth to carry the standard without clear talking points and a thorough understanding of the issues to present our reasons for attending ?
