symptoms simply show you…

I see people crusading against symptoms in rites of dominance for public office. They will bring a statistical figure to within an almost believable margin, if you vote yes. I seek to stop my own knuckle cracking, my cuticle-chewing, compulsive grabbing for instant-pleasures now, because that’s not what a “healthy” person does. These are not where the solution to the problem is found, and the outcome is cyclical, and disappointing.

I’m often faced with this feeling in large-scale popular media attendance to questions of “controversy and conspiracy”. Anything someone says is filtered solely through a pre-programmed, unwavering interpretation of the message, according to the world view that suits them. No matter what new measure -a vaccine, a GMO food, etc.- introduced for the best intended of reasons, because of our emotional ideas about “natural” things and “chemicals”, and the overwhelming distrust many have of their leaders, there will be a group of nay-saying, shirking conspiracy theorists to resist and retort. (I write somewhat sarcastically, as I am someone whose social critique ventures beyond the scope of a Michael Moore film, and feel fully conservative stating that our governments are to varying degrees a show for our appeasement, and that the richest and most influential among us have made a formality of “democratic” institutions in their favour wherever necessary and possible).

Nothing can be heard over the roar of preconceived bias. There are more or less definite camps, and you could mind-map the forum conversations and media rallies around fluoride or limiting the use of resource x, or how many children we produce as a species. Emotions are flared everywhere around issues that essentially cannot and must be brought up.

According to where you’ve grown up, and how you’ve reacted to that, the ideas that have floated over your piece of pachamama can be found in a unique mix inside you and your peers and the counties and countries adjacent. Freak abuse and illness blister the atlas. People are categorized and objectified, and these images are rarely reviewed or updated. We age, and harden, and the world and its people become a lot less mobile for the lot of us. The damn rich and the dirty poor, the thieving bitch and the selfish pig are who they are.

Educational, bureaucratic, legal, and cultural processes stand between many parties, their communications thus limited, and people -requiring certain societal access outside their ability to secure it- can be deprived of their life needs for such technical trivialities.

The distrust (and hence the duplicity and classism and the grasping at ‘things’) needs to be addressed, and the prejudices dissolved so that the human conversation may become one open conversation that everyone is educated, trained, and welcomed to join in. This lays deep beneath our insecurities and fears: the inability to reach out to the reality of the “other” and to understand things as they do. Bridging this with the linguistic, social, personal, inter-cultural, and educational tools needed to speaks each others languages (literally and otherwise) starts the process of addressing symptoms of socioeconomic inequality, inter/intracultural tension, familial disintegration, urban isolation, and the creeping alienation of humanity from the Earth, its processes and complexities; it short, scientific illiteracy.

Crucial also is an addressing of the “conspiracy theory” facet of a full conversation on the nature of our reality. A shift from the puppet-string, 4-year term burlesque, bought-and-sold power politics stance of many modern states (USA, Russia, UK, Israel, Canada, China, Iran…) is an obvious and necessary goal. A wide disclosure of the activities and privies of intelligence and military organizations, especially as pertains to civilians or opponents of the parties in question. For many, acknowledging that the people who make big decisions on this planet aren’t just the plucky, earnest politicians they see on tv, will be a big hurdle. Likewise, to admit that some people are genuinely in politics to get a slice of power for the people will be the death of certain “internet researchers”. To decide just HOW corrupt, and just HOW inept we are, together, will be a tough call.

But, it must be shouted repeatedly: the present conversation is not helping. The current narrative does not function. The way we’re doing this is too slow, and distrustful, and violent, and arrogant, and shit, kids are starving out there. We need to accept only an adult, informed, earnest, and updating conversation about politics, sustainability, over-population… whatever. We need a real attempt at informing the public from our media, and real attempt at social advancement from scientists, engineers, doctors, and officials.

This game of holding a handful of buzzwords, and leaping and freaking like electric maniacs when the “enemy” uses a “socialist” word, or booing and hissing when they manifest the patriarchy in your safe space, is old and useless and childish. Developing towering legal and procedural lexicons and effectively barring many many people from the conversations you have about their futures, and worse making no provisions to truly correct the imbalance thus created, is unconscionable, and evidence of the malice and distortion that build our judicial enterprises. Focusing all our educational resource on test scores and standards quotas, in ignorance of deepening cultural, informational, and societal gulfs between students and the world we’re “preparing” them for, is fucking insanity, and effectively class genocide in the information age.

Stream of mind thoughts on seeking the root causes and drivers of a culture in decline.

Free DVDs @ “Money & Sustainability”, an IRBE event.

Institute for a Resource Based Economy…

…is some dope shit (and by that, yes, I do mean “fuck introductions”). They promote a new economic system that connects the environment and our economy to achieve a sustainable society. This system, labelled a ‘Resource Based Economy’, challenges our current growth economy and proposes a steady-state economic model based upon our scientific understanding of our planet and the resources and ecosystems which we depend on for our survival.

At IRBE we recognize that human beings cannot indefinitely grow our economies and our consumption given the limitation of a finite planet with finite resources. The evidence is clear that we are up against actual barriers to growth whether we speak about fossil fuels, mineral resources, deforestation, species extinction, ocean acidification and more.

IRBE has run an overview and discussion series featuring Chris Martensen’s “Crash Course” on the current global economic situation, and it’s home-hitting implications. They’ve featured the like of Bernard Lietaer, Jacqui Dunn, Charles Eisenstein, and a couple of 3D printinggenie’s asses named Rory and Adam.

Their event last night “Money and Sustainability” was a promising look at the possibilities of complementary currencies to ease the inherent fluctuations of the current model, as well as transition to a more sustainable way of living. Through real-world examples the authors explain how thousands of communities across the globe are reassessing and re-engineering money with astonishing social and environmental results. These strategies do not replace the conventional monetary system, but work in parallel with it, providing new options and resources that promote sustainable abundance and cooperation. In fact, since 1980 the number of cooperative currencies has increased from a mere handful to more than 4,000 mature systems today.

I picked up 4 free DVDs from the table set up there by IRBE’s sister organization, Zeitgeist Toronto. They were:

Zeitgeist: Addendum

 (2008) The movie that sparked the Zeitgeist Movement, director Peter Joseph discusses the monetary and banking systems, the social values they enforce, and a more sustainable hypothesis for the future from a scientific perspective. Featuring Jacques Freso. (2hr 3m)

  Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

 (2011) The 3^rd and latest Zeitgeist film Moving Forward presents a case for a transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs our global society.

 This subject matter takes a different perspective from those of cultural relativism and traditional ideology (nationalism, religion, etc) and moves to relate the core, empirical “life ground” attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a “Resource-Based Economy”.

 History – Zeitgeist: Moving Forward was released in 60+ countries and in 25+ languages on This large scale release was not associated with any major distributor, and sold out in Toronto’s Bloor (now Hot Docs) and Underground Cinemas. (2hr 45m)

 Awakening

 From space systems engineer writer/director’s youtube video of Awakening:

 “Awaken to the world around us, the problems we face, why they exist, and how to truly solve them once and for all. Please rip, share, push and promote this video. Make this viral, and educate the world! There are many groups and organizations around the world working to make it a better place. Here’s a very small list that I’d like to share…” (31 min)

 “The Rise of Our Social Immune System”

 A mix of documentaries and a lecture on one disc, compiled by Zeitgeist Toronto

 Humanity Ovedue –Short Documentary exploring the current state of the world and some of the social, environmental and economic changes which could be put into place to create a better quality of life globally. Interviews from Occupy London, The Eden Project and Ben Mcleish and Will Dixon from The Zeitgeist Movement. (16m 12s)

 Crossroads: Labour Pains of a New Worldview – A documentary exploring the depths of the current human condition and the emergence of a worldview that is recreating our world from the inside out. Crossroads* places evolutionary context to today’s escalating social unrest, natural disasters, and economic failures. It illuminates the footsteps of an integrated worldview, penetrating its way through the power of social networks to the forefront of our personal and collective awareness. (1hr 4m)

 Peter Joseph @ TED^XOjai:The Big Question: Environmental Misalignment –
This talk examines todays economy in light of our environmental misalignment and the value war of personal want and industrial/corporate “rights” and the finite carrying capacity of the Earth, and the dire interrelatedness between poverty, mental health, and overall levels of social prosperity. (10m 25s)

 Charlie Kaufman’s “We Are All One” (Excerpt) – (2011) In front of a sell-out Theatre at the BFI in London, Charlie Kaufman delivered the final lecture in BAFTA’s Screenwriter’s Lecture Series. This is an excerpt from the 70 minute speech. (5m)

Their sign read:

FREE (awesome) DVDS

Simply because you feel something does not make it so.

“Only 15% of our stress is related to external/material circumstance…”

Circumstances don’t matter. Only state of being matters.

That is to say: after meeting the nutritional, medical, social, and educational needs of a human, they don’t get happier by doubling or tripling material comfort.

The way to fill that “hole” is to identify the potential we have inside of us. Ask what you really want to accomplish in life? What do you want you existence to have meant? What would you regret to have spent your time on (think of your parents)? And what wouldn’t you regret?

Your meditative practice, and the consciousness it creates, is a genuine contribution to a better, more sustainable and peaceful world.

A talk by Matthieu Ricard on the power of concentration and contemplative practices for compassion, insight, stress reduction, and optimal brain and body function.

A good book to read on a related note.  

Children with hand-grenades

Here is a video of out dear ex-(and let’s hope it stays that way)mayor. Skip to 1:00 for the main attraction. It exemplifies the ultimate immaturity of so many that run public offices. They’re children. Business minds and lawyers are not technically or emotionally equipped to do what they are tasked with.

So here I’ll express the regret I have that so much energy is expended in the focus on figure-heads and puppet-show controversies like the American abortion debate. There is not much to talk about, don’t dignify anyone who tries to drag it up. Mind your p’s, and don’t like ’em, don’t get ’em.

But we take icons, representations of reality that stir us emotionally, instead of the underlying processes with want addressing; these are messy or scary or ugly, and not nearly as glamorous or inducing of that good ol’ simple “I’m right, motherfucker” sensation. And so they’re ignored. Further, the focus on the root causes of human problems are seen as “oppressive” or “_____-normative”. As if while recognizing what is healthy and unhealthy to eat, one cannot admit the obvious need for variant diets amongst individuals. It does not do egos enough justice to recognize xenophobia or “otheritis” in everyone’s perspective, and ask its correction of everyone. Only those who fit an equally broad-stroke of generality must change themselves, I have “rights” as the “oppressed”. The right to deny reality. I wish I was so blessed (well, by such definitions, I AM, but I don’t wield my challenges, I seek to overcome them).

We are like children with hand-grenades. Please forgive how disjointed this has just become. It’s all one, little darlin’s. Stick with me. We use our very effective tools for the manipulation of reality to try to change reality itself, it seems. We can farm and build and travel so efficiently and effectively that we deny the effects it has upon our homes and selves, and do not even consider them in more than abstract terms on charters and agreements most of the time. We have productive and creative capacity in material venues far exceeding what we’ve collectively managed on a personal and spiritual scale. This is an age old observation. Technology is not -cannot be- a bad thing. But that every person can hold and fire a gun does not endow each with the reason to keep it, for most of its life, empty of bullets. That there exists the possibility to do something does not mean we are ready to do it. My fears in relation to the convergence of technological and biological beings in an advanced way stem not from any sci-fi nonsense, but from the real fear that a system that governs human capability in bionics and super-abilities and health-preserving technology on a monetary basis is ripe for a very disastrous new form of class warfare. Our social values are sick, and old, and useless -in fact outright harmful.

We are gross. We are overt. We are sensationalistic. We are reactive. And very very simple much of the time, but we put clutter in the way, cause the simple facts of reality are… well they’re certainly not a fucking hug from a giant teddy bear. The self-caricature of a self-caricature that are the modern semi-to-popular media (our governments, big journals and rags, major interest groups, UNs and so forth) seeks to put out what will get a reaction from audiences. Due to their nature, some are even directly governed, or are in part, by the reaction of the audience. A cycle develops where no one can rock the boat too much. The common denominator is as often heightened or lowered by mass-delusion or impulse as it is by deliberate propaganda or awareness or understanding. Probably more on the impulsive side, actually.

Taylorism, scientific production, individualization, the specialization inherent in complex systems (though ours mostly cluttered with the useless complexity of commercial production), the worship of the young, beautiful, powerful ego have and the villainizing and oppressing of their opposites and alternatives have given us Carbon Man. The budding appendage homo sapiens sapiens that will in time go extinct, either through it’s own evolution into a Post-Carbon Man, fueled and sustained by other, hopefully cleaner processes, or its own demise, as an oil-dependent economy drives off its cliff, and slowly falls; starvation and mass unrest. The loss of a million Alexandrias in the survival of a fraction of our skilled and learned humans. I do hope we live on as post-carbon people.

This Carbon Man only sees moving, brightly coloured objects. Only feels fear and its opposing vice, righteous rightness. It only sees violence and dominance as its tools for change. It only understands laws and commands, only obeys under threat and duress. It is repressed, and internalizes its role. It becomes a self-appointed guardian of the status-quo. Post-Carbon man is held buoyant on the surface of reality by the child’s wings and rings and jackets. They are intensive (but rarely extensive) bouts of pleasure. The tv-dinner communality of Super Bowl Sunday. Tasty treats and traditional meats. The refuge of popular banality. “Nobody gets THAT far, so I won’t  try”.

The implications this has on our political system are evident: Rob Fords get elected. Rob Fords insensitively offended and ignore thousands of constituents, and, lacking the technical understand of the infrastructure, social systems, ecologies, biologies, and so forth they are tasked with operation, they cannot but fuck up royally. They arouse controversy. They court it, and pursue it down the hall squealing, relishing in the slop of rightness. They must be right. Call them ignorant, call them short-sighted, reactive, naive, or dead, do not call them wrong. But as George Carlin points out, they emerge from among US. We are their source. We produce them, and we are their supplicants. The status quo pumps through the veins of this system. God, I’m rambling.

When we impeach them, the same thing that created them, the basic inability to accept the different, the new, the less immediately pleasurable, the less familiar, proceeds to pump out more. We cannot change the things we must: our fear of death, our monetary-market system and its restriction and burden and violence, even our opinions or choices, lest we be flip-floppers or unfamiliar to those who loved what we were. Conformity, familiarity, and convenience are the girders in a structure that should not stand. Structure, there should be no structure. We are intellectual nomads, following the North Star of the reality as it is, without end or rest, wherever it shall take us. This is our next step.

The Organism of Knowledge:

Observation, its assessment, documentation and integration with other knowledge, existing or pending, is the manner by which all distinguishable ideas come to evolve. This continuum is important to understand with respect to the way we think about what we believe and why, for information is always separate in its merit from the person or institution communicating or representing. Information can only be evaluated correctly through a systematic process of comparison to other physically verifiable evidence as to its proof or lack thereof.

Likewise, this continuum also implies that there can be no empirical “Origin” of ideas. From a epistemological perspective, knowledge is mostly culminated, processed and expanded through communication amongst our species. The individual, with his or her inherently different life experience and propensities, serves as a custom processing filter by which a given idea can be experienced and represented. Collectively, we individuals comprise what could be called a “group mind” which is the larger order social processor by which the effort of individuals ideally coalesce. The traditional method of data transfer through literature, sharing books from generation to generation, has been a notable path of this Group Mind interaction, for example.

Issac Newton perhaps put this reality best with the statement: “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” This is brought up here in order to focus the reader on the critical consideration of data – not a supposed “source” – as there actually is no such thing in an empirical sense, and the co-mingling of ego and science leads provably to controversy and stagnation. Only in the temporal, traditional patterns of culture, such as with literary credits in a textbook for future research reference, is such a recognition technically relevant.There is no statement more erroneous than the declaration that: “This is my idea.” Such notions are byproducts of a material culture that has been reinforced in seeking physical rewards, usually via money, in exchange for the illusion of their “proprietary” creations. Very often an ego association is culminated as well where an individual claims prestige about their “credit” for an idea or invention. All of this hinders the actual process at work, unnecessarily.

Yet, that is not to exclude gratitude and respect for those figures or institutions which have shown dedication and perseverance towards the expansion of knowledge itself, nor to diminish the necessity of importance of those who have achieved a skilled, specialized “expert” status in a particular field. The contributions of brilliant researchers, thinkers and engineers such as R. Buckminster Fuller, Sam Harris, Jeremy Rifkin, Rene Descartes (for all his bullshit), Richard Feinman, Thorstein Veblen, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Dr. James Gilligan, Carl Sagan, Nicola Tesla, Steven Hawking,  Siddharta Goutama and many, many others, past and present, are represented in the concentrate of these words. Great gratitude is expressed here towards all dedicated minds who are working to contribute to an improving world.Yet, once again, when it comes to the level of understanding, information itself has no origin, no loyalty, no price tag, no ego and no bias. It simply manifests, self-corrects and evolves as an organism in and of itself through our collective group mind to which we are all invariably a component vehicle.

So let’s drive.

Is Everything Designed to Break?

We need a system that rewards the creation of products that last, rather than punishes it. We have a limited amount of resources on this rock, and I don’t think we can just move to the plastic ocean patch when we’re done with this land we’re on.” -LeeCamp2

A video about planned obsolescence.

You’ve just pissed on a dumpster at 4:00 am- it’s Miller time.