At the end of another year, and slipping quietly into the new, I take note of a couple of news items in particular:
* The Gulf Stream seems to be in shambles, caused by the lack of dealing with the Gulf oil spill in a proper, earth-aware manner. We could be on the verge of an ice age. Global Warming and Global Cooling are converging. We are being asked to raise our game on our lovely planet Earth - considerably.
* The corporate-government complex continue to have things their way in many areas.
On the latter note: I submitted this comment to an article, at a website called Truthout, on the continued gap growing in the U.S. between the Haves and the Have Nots; the article entitled 'Serfing the USA: Corporate America is Robbing American Workers,' by one Dave Lindorff (published 29/12; my comment early a.m. of 31/12):
"Unfortunately it would appear that things have to get worse before they can get better. Worse, as in the PTB wanting to eliminate a strong middle class in order to recreate a subservient feudal system; called, in this day and age, the 20:80 society, whereby 20% of the people will be handsomely paid for their services & loyalty to The System, and 80% will be 'useless eaters', deprived of any power, for thinking that they have no choice but to take the scraps thrown to them from the table of the privileged few. But that's only if they continue to buy the idea that The System as is is the only one possible.
"Enter the game changer: the understanding of the higher motivating factor than the human concept of 'profit'. That being the providing of goods and services to one another, and the giving of our best to one another in the process, out of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning - the motive, in a word, of Love. And thus we don't even have to slash through the Gordian knot, as the answer to the riddle. All we have to do is slip out the piece that it is tied to from its moorings; in this case, in the two cogs of interest-bearing money and fractional-reserve banking. And away we go, into the new era, just waiting for us to inherit it. To, in other words, look neither Left nor Right but Up.
"It's time, in other words, for a change, all right. Real change. Fundamental change. Not just more of the same, on the same level as the problem. Been there. Done that. Next stage of life on Earth coming up. And with thanks to the PTB for playing their role so well, in helping us to get to it. For we are all involved; all have karma to complete, to inherit our next step. As I say: Coming up."
Happy New Year, everybody. And may it help ferry us to the truly New.
Friday, 31 December 2010
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Calling All Souls
As the American dollar heads for collapse - on purpose; for the American Dream to collapse, on purpose, in order to meld the United States into a larger, regional entity, tentatively titled the North American Union, to be run of, by and for the corporations, in a neo-feudal New World Order - and I look in the daily papers (two; one national - UK - and one Scottish) to see what is occupying the people's attention, I see banality. Oh, the latest leaks from Wikileaks; but they seem to be curiously pedestrian, like the controlled opposition that the corporate world likes to throw up to itself in order to give the public the semblance of counterbalance. (Think, eg, the Valdez spill, and the environmental groups that sprang up in its wake that turned out to be funded by the oil industry; etc.) And then there's the rest of it. The continued, quiet privatisation of the NHS and the school system by the coalition government (and the continued widespread inability of Johnny to Read)1; the random killings, by sexual predators and drunken teenage females alike; etc etc ad nauseam.
Blah, blah, blah.
And I retreat to my cave, after walking out of a silly old movie, a 'comedy' with Eddie Murphy called Holy Man (bor-ing), and before it, sitting through an up-teched showing of the first movie made about my community, up here in the north of Scotland - made back in 1974-5 - and realising that if it hadn't been for an afterthought of one of its founders at its first public showing, in southern California, which I attended, I wouldn't be here today; for it seemed, on the surface, really to be a waste of everyone's time involved in the project, of tending a garden, in a caravan park (trailer park to Americans), in 'harmony' with something called 'devas', and growing a community up around that concept.2 Shoveling horseshit and seaweed into compost heaps; laughing at 'in' jokes in community get-togethers; dressed up against the cold: What A Way To Look at Life! - not.3
Fortunately the reality of the place has turned out to be very compatible to my spirit. But my spirits were, for whatever all reasons, low this evening; and got lower when, deciding to go through some DVDs on my recently-bought portable DVD player, I sat through one that had segments involved in the corporate takeover of my home country, and through that doorway, the world (according to 'their' best-laid plans). The first was a preview of Aaron Russo's 'Freedom to Fascism', a no-holds-barred critique of both the Federal Reserve System and the legislative and executive-order moves put in place by the Bush administration to declare Martial Law and take over the country when the proverbial hits the fan. The next was a short 'take' on 9/11, and how that caper really didn't hold up under scrutiny; turned out to be a godsend, you should excuse the expression, for the Bush administration and the Neocons to do what they obviously long wanted to do, which was to go into the Middle East and secure the oil for the U.S. Empire. And the next was a longer take on that obscenity, by David Ray Griffin, who has written a number of books systematically shining a light on the serious discrepancies in its official version. Which brought it all back up for me: my anger at how the PTB have such a control over the mainstream media that it doesn't even matter if some individuals uncover holes in their scenario, and even share it with audiences, live and in books: they run the dog and pony show.
Disgusted with them, and with mankind in general - Folks! How can you live as if there were no God? Either there is or there is not. If there is not, then nothing really matters anyway, and you might as well live the way you are. But if there is - and there is plenty of evidence that there is indeed something more than Man - then you should be living as if there WERE 'something more than Man'. WE should be living as if there were, since I am - at this point in time, at least - one of you. And I am trying my damnedest to do so. But you are making it very hard on me; on all of us who are trying to live up to that potential4 - I took a break from the drama, and put on a CD of some soothing classical music. And finally, at a rendition of Albinoni's Adagio from Oboe Concerto in D Minor, I calmed down.5 But I beseech you, people:
We can do better than this.
We MUST do better than this.
In order to prove that the Plan, of free will - of freely returning to Source - is superior to the involutionary plan of control. Of forcing people to be a certain way.
Because that way is the way of tyrants ruling the Earth; stalking it like Rex of old.
And I for one will not let that happen.
But I - and We, so conceived, and so dedicated - need your help.
Please rise to the occasion.
Now.
A new world awaits.
And NOT the New World Order of those who are under the control of those dark forces that give opposition to the working out of our Creator's superior plan for 'his' children. 'His' sparks of the Divine. Separate unto themselves only for a time, and a season.
And the season has come to bring that new world about.
Before the old collapses to the point that it takes longer to achieve Synthesis. Transition. Ascension.
Awaiting us.
Now.
---
1 A subject in itself; and involving both the 'right' and the 'left' sides of the political aisle. The Right may be in charge of educational issues at this time, but it was not ever thus. In the '30s and '40s especially, in the U.S (to my knowledge; it may have been true as well in the UK, home of the Fabian Society, pioneers of the philosophy and technique), socialists commanded the heights of educational philosophy, and instituted a method of teaching reading designed to control the child's exposure to information. Rather than teaching Johnny merely to read, they desired to 'educate' him to read 'with comprehension' - comprehension of what they wanted him to be raised with. Which was a brainwashed exposure to leftist propaganda, in keeping with the thinking of such 'educational' philosophers as John Dewey. How to do that. Eureka: Bring the child up with controlled material, slowly fed to him/her over the critical, early years. (As pioneered by such as the Catholic Church, whose propagandists asserted 'Give me a child to the age of six and I will have him for life' or words to that effect. Also used by the Nazis, and the Soviets.) Instead of learning how to sound out words for himself, by being taught to understand the alphabet, Johnny was 'taught' to recognize words by their shape, and association with visual cues. Thus, 'cat' with a cat; and 'monkey' with a picture of a monkey hanging off the tail of the 'y'. (I have actually seen this, in a primer I perused when starting to investigate this matter, of Johnny's difficulty in learning how to read; which subject I first came across at my university, in the mid-'50s, when I browsed the campus bookstore for interesting material before early-departure from those hallowed halls of ivy for my 'learning' in the world at large, and then revisited over a decade later, when I was having my eyes opened to left-wing shenanigans by right-wing literature. Which included seeing an early-years reading primer telling the story of how one squirrel informs his mate that he doesn't have to save his nuts over the winter because "the little boy in the White House" - pictured - will provide him with all he needs.) It is the old Egyptian system of hieroglyphics, "in which pictures or symbols are used to represent objects, concepts, or sounds" (similar to Chinese pictographs). This requires the child to have to memorize the forms, a far harder task than simply learning how to sound out words for herself. And so the child in such a system is patiently brought up in/with a controlled vocabulary, and stories.
The 'Right' part of the Faustian bargain happened when the corporate world of the medical-pharmaceutical-government complex instituted mandatory vaccination in elementary schools, without sufficient regard for the potential side effects of this wondrous new medical modality. It came into being in the U.S. starting in the late '40s, and by the '50s signs of brain damage were already surfacing, in the forms of what has come to be known as ADD and ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and full-blown autism (aka the euphemistically lump-summed 'Learning Disabilities') - let alone other iatrogenically-induced conditions, like a whole range of autoimmune 'diseases', and other neurological disorders, like epilepsy/seizures, and 'social violence and criminality'. (The latter phrase part of the title of a book on this subject by one Harris L. Coulter, Ph.D., arguably the U.S.'s foremost medical historian. The whole phenomenon obscured because of the time lag between the child's shots and his formal education years.) Thus, our children - and through them, our societal conditions as a whole - have been seesawed between the machinations of both the Left and the Right for over half a century.
It's time, and past, for a change.
(N.B. Are vaccinations the only cause of the brain damage that has been afflicting humanity for the past half a century in particular? No. Another cause is fluoridation of our water supplies - which started at roughly the same time. Another cause of the unclarity around causation. And another is the widespread use of pesticides. Altogether: A perfect storm. Which needs to be sorted out. Now. Before we can take less hesitant steps into our future, on this hurting planet. Hurting, because of our abuse of it. Reflecting our own inner abuse.)
2 The 'afterthought' involved the community's recent purchase of the hotel that the founders of the community had formerly managed before moving to a caravan park on a windswept section of a forlorn peninsula next door to a military airbase, from which big nasty birds continually took off in the background, overriding the quaint conversations taking place in the foreground. I remember sitting in the large audience at its first screening, at a week-long 'new age' convention in Santa Monica, and being rather unimpressed; touched by the sincerity of the people, but unmoved. Until the male of the couple who had founded the community, Peter Caddy - a former RAF catering officer, and manager of that four-star hotel, now reduced to penury, and making the most of it, with some gullible and idealistic young hippy types, mostly - stood back up at its completion, to polite applause, and announced that they had just bought said hotel, for the next stage of the community's development - to be its main educational base - and if anybody in the audience was interested in that aspect of the community, ie the running of the hotel as an educational centre, to come up and see him afterwards. And I got a tap on my figurative shoulder. That's your cue, it said.
'It' caused me to seek him out afterwards - as did a number of others from that audience. He quickly 'got' that some of them thought he was just talking about a congenial place to work for awhile - perhaps before heading off for India, as was the zeitgeist of that time for many young people - and he clarified that he had meant that he was interested in people who had some life experience to come and join the community, especially to help with that enterprise; and if anyone still felt drawn, after that clarification, to write something about themselves, and submit it to him later in the week. The next day I went up to him with my brief resume, which outlined my experience as a 'building maintenance foreman' of a crew with the cleaning contract at a holiday resort in Idaho (name of Sun Valley, where I had worked for a summer season and part of the following winter one, back a half-a-dozen years before, when I had had too much of the hustle and bustle of life in the L.A. area and needed a change). He read it, and handed it back, saying, "I agree; you should come," and walked away. And I thought: Great. Now how does one get to the north of Scotland, and stay awhile?
One gets here by getting here. And my stay has lasted me most of the past 34 years since that fortuitous encounter in southern California, at an event looking at something being called 'the new age'. Which I was to find out more about, after getting involved in it.
N.B. Only some years later did I find out that I was, in the eyes of the community members, one of 'Peter's boys'. he had a habit of keeping his eyes out, when he traveled in the world, for people whom he thought had something to give to the community, and then telling them there that so-and-so was coming to do such-and-such. It turned out that he had told them that he had found the person to hold the focus for the renovation of Cluny (Hill Hotel, hereinafter to be known as Cluny Hill College). When, during that renovation work, the winter of '75-'76, one of the leaders of the group came up to me and announced, "Well Stan, we're ready for you to take over now," I hadn't a clue what they were talking about. I had been a foreman of a crew that did basic maintenance of buildings, ie, sweeping, mopping, cleaning toilets, waxing dance floors, setting the fires in the bedroom fireplaces, etc etc - not the plumbing and electrics. The guy went away and reported this to his team, and I never heard anything more about that peculiar interaction, until some years later when I overheard that I was an example of how Peter could be wrong but also right - that someone would come there under the wrong impression, but be the right person after all.
That was some consolation, after realising I was there - here - under false pretences.
3 The title of one of the community's sing-along music tapes.
4 I have seen what you can do in the way you have developed, and though it has some merit, I am, overall, not impressed. I am not interested in a system that leaves so many people destitute. You can do better than this. WE can do better than this. Let's be about it. Dammit. Come out from under the control of the moneychangers, and CLAIM YOUR MATURITY.
And the next step after that: Release that which causes suffering: desire. Why would individuals keep going around and around on the wheel of rebirth, accruing karma, which by definition needs to be paid off, like an educational loan, once they realise - really grok - what is going on? what the purpose of the whole exercise is??
Come ON, people.
Show me your best, humanity. Not this ignoble business you are engaged in right now; involved in, to the extent that you can't see the forest for the trees.
5 And was briefly reminded of the last time I needed some classical music to soothe my soul. That was in university, during the time when I was still in ROTC - this was at the time of the Korean War, and we were being prepared, as dutiful university students, to be officers in that conflict - and one hot afternoon was sitting through a class on different kinds of machine guns. What?! I thought. Machine guns? This is insane. I'm not going to fire no stinking machine gun. What in blazes is going on in this world I have found myself in?? And I went home in a bit of a delirium, and locked my dormitory-room door, and put on some Wagner, and laid on my bed with my eyes closed to that outside world, and bathed in the music, to try to come back down to some sort of inner reality, that had nothing to do with air-cooled, x-millimeter, such-and-such caliber machine guns, for heaven's sakes. And that was it: I stopped going to ROTC class. Got in some trouble for it. But no matter. That wasn't my path. Somehow. Some way. There was more to life than this effing nonsense, of socially-constructed enemies, who you then treated as trading partners afterwards - all in order to make money. Get me OUT of this nonsensical reality, I thought. It doesn't compute. Even before computers came on the market...
Blah, blah, blah.
And I retreat to my cave, after walking out of a silly old movie, a 'comedy' with Eddie Murphy called Holy Man (bor-ing), and before it, sitting through an up-teched showing of the first movie made about my community, up here in the north of Scotland - made back in 1974-5 - and realising that if it hadn't been for an afterthought of one of its founders at its first public showing, in southern California, which I attended, I wouldn't be here today; for it seemed, on the surface, really to be a waste of everyone's time involved in the project, of tending a garden, in a caravan park (trailer park to Americans), in 'harmony' with something called 'devas', and growing a community up around that concept.2 Shoveling horseshit and seaweed into compost heaps; laughing at 'in' jokes in community get-togethers; dressed up against the cold: What A Way To Look at Life! - not.3
Fortunately the reality of the place has turned out to be very compatible to my spirit. But my spirits were, for whatever all reasons, low this evening; and got lower when, deciding to go through some DVDs on my recently-bought portable DVD player, I sat through one that had segments involved in the corporate takeover of my home country, and through that doorway, the world (according to 'their' best-laid plans). The first was a preview of Aaron Russo's 'Freedom to Fascism', a no-holds-barred critique of both the Federal Reserve System and the legislative and executive-order moves put in place by the Bush administration to declare Martial Law and take over the country when the proverbial hits the fan. The next was a short 'take' on 9/11, and how that caper really didn't hold up under scrutiny; turned out to be a godsend, you should excuse the expression, for the Bush administration and the Neocons to do what they obviously long wanted to do, which was to go into the Middle East and secure the oil for the U.S. Empire. And the next was a longer take on that obscenity, by David Ray Griffin, who has written a number of books systematically shining a light on the serious discrepancies in its official version. Which brought it all back up for me: my anger at how the PTB have such a control over the mainstream media that it doesn't even matter if some individuals uncover holes in their scenario, and even share it with audiences, live and in books: they run the dog and pony show.
Disgusted with them, and with mankind in general - Folks! How can you live as if there were no God? Either there is or there is not. If there is not, then nothing really matters anyway, and you might as well live the way you are. But if there is - and there is plenty of evidence that there is indeed something more than Man - then you should be living as if there WERE 'something more than Man'. WE should be living as if there were, since I am - at this point in time, at least - one of you. And I am trying my damnedest to do so. But you are making it very hard on me; on all of us who are trying to live up to that potential4 - I took a break from the drama, and put on a CD of some soothing classical music. And finally, at a rendition of Albinoni's Adagio from Oboe Concerto in D Minor, I calmed down.5 But I beseech you, people:
We can do better than this.
We MUST do better than this.
In order to prove that the Plan, of free will - of freely returning to Source - is superior to the involutionary plan of control. Of forcing people to be a certain way.
Because that way is the way of tyrants ruling the Earth; stalking it like Rex of old.
And I for one will not let that happen.
But I - and We, so conceived, and so dedicated - need your help.
Please rise to the occasion.
Now.
A new world awaits.
And NOT the New World Order of those who are under the control of those dark forces that give opposition to the working out of our Creator's superior plan for 'his' children. 'His' sparks of the Divine. Separate unto themselves only for a time, and a season.
And the season has come to bring that new world about.
Before the old collapses to the point that it takes longer to achieve Synthesis. Transition. Ascension.
Awaiting us.
Now.
---
1 A subject in itself; and involving both the 'right' and the 'left' sides of the political aisle. The Right may be in charge of educational issues at this time, but it was not ever thus. In the '30s and '40s especially, in the U.S (to my knowledge; it may have been true as well in the UK, home of the Fabian Society, pioneers of the philosophy and technique), socialists commanded the heights of educational philosophy, and instituted a method of teaching reading designed to control the child's exposure to information. Rather than teaching Johnny merely to read, they desired to 'educate' him to read 'with comprehension' - comprehension of what they wanted him to be raised with. Which was a brainwashed exposure to leftist propaganda, in keeping with the thinking of such 'educational' philosophers as John Dewey. How to do that. Eureka: Bring the child up with controlled material, slowly fed to him/her over the critical, early years. (As pioneered by such as the Catholic Church, whose propagandists asserted 'Give me a child to the age of six and I will have him for life' or words to that effect. Also used by the Nazis, and the Soviets.) Instead of learning how to sound out words for himself, by being taught to understand the alphabet, Johnny was 'taught' to recognize words by their shape, and association with visual cues. Thus, 'cat' with a cat; and 'monkey' with a picture of a monkey hanging off the tail of the 'y'. (I have actually seen this, in a primer I perused when starting to investigate this matter, of Johnny's difficulty in learning how to read; which subject I first came across at my university, in the mid-'50s, when I browsed the campus bookstore for interesting material before early-departure from those hallowed halls of ivy for my 'learning' in the world at large, and then revisited over a decade later, when I was having my eyes opened to left-wing shenanigans by right-wing literature. Which included seeing an early-years reading primer telling the story of how one squirrel informs his mate that he doesn't have to save his nuts over the winter because "the little boy in the White House" - pictured - will provide him with all he needs.) It is the old Egyptian system of hieroglyphics, "in which pictures or symbols are used to represent objects, concepts, or sounds" (similar to Chinese pictographs). This requires the child to have to memorize the forms, a far harder task than simply learning how to sound out words for herself. And so the child in such a system is patiently brought up in/with a controlled vocabulary, and stories.
The 'Right' part of the Faustian bargain happened when the corporate world of the medical-pharmaceutical-government complex instituted mandatory vaccination in elementary schools, without sufficient regard for the potential side effects of this wondrous new medical modality. It came into being in the U.S. starting in the late '40s, and by the '50s signs of brain damage were already surfacing, in the forms of what has come to be known as ADD and ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and full-blown autism (aka the euphemistically lump-summed 'Learning Disabilities') - let alone other iatrogenically-induced conditions, like a whole range of autoimmune 'diseases', and other neurological disorders, like epilepsy/seizures, and 'social violence and criminality'. (The latter phrase part of the title of a book on this subject by one Harris L. Coulter, Ph.D., arguably the U.S.'s foremost medical historian. The whole phenomenon obscured because of the time lag between the child's shots and his formal education years.) Thus, our children - and through them, our societal conditions as a whole - have been seesawed between the machinations of both the Left and the Right for over half a century.
It's time, and past, for a change.
(N.B. Are vaccinations the only cause of the brain damage that has been afflicting humanity for the past half a century in particular? No. Another cause is fluoridation of our water supplies - which started at roughly the same time. Another cause of the unclarity around causation. And another is the widespread use of pesticides. Altogether: A perfect storm. Which needs to be sorted out. Now. Before we can take less hesitant steps into our future, on this hurting planet. Hurting, because of our abuse of it. Reflecting our own inner abuse.)
2 The 'afterthought' involved the community's recent purchase of the hotel that the founders of the community had formerly managed before moving to a caravan park on a windswept section of a forlorn peninsula next door to a military airbase, from which big nasty birds continually took off in the background, overriding the quaint conversations taking place in the foreground. I remember sitting in the large audience at its first screening, at a week-long 'new age' convention in Santa Monica, and being rather unimpressed; touched by the sincerity of the people, but unmoved. Until the male of the couple who had founded the community, Peter Caddy - a former RAF catering officer, and manager of that four-star hotel, now reduced to penury, and making the most of it, with some gullible and idealistic young hippy types, mostly - stood back up at its completion, to polite applause, and announced that they had just bought said hotel, for the next stage of the community's development - to be its main educational base - and if anybody in the audience was interested in that aspect of the community, ie the running of the hotel as an educational centre, to come up and see him afterwards. And I got a tap on my figurative shoulder. That's your cue, it said.
'It' caused me to seek him out afterwards - as did a number of others from that audience. He quickly 'got' that some of them thought he was just talking about a congenial place to work for awhile - perhaps before heading off for India, as was the zeitgeist of that time for many young people - and he clarified that he had meant that he was interested in people who had some life experience to come and join the community, especially to help with that enterprise; and if anyone still felt drawn, after that clarification, to write something about themselves, and submit it to him later in the week. The next day I went up to him with my brief resume, which outlined my experience as a 'building maintenance foreman' of a crew with the cleaning contract at a holiday resort in Idaho (name of Sun Valley, where I had worked for a summer season and part of the following winter one, back a half-a-dozen years before, when I had had too much of the hustle and bustle of life in the L.A. area and needed a change). He read it, and handed it back, saying, "I agree; you should come," and walked away. And I thought: Great. Now how does one get to the north of Scotland, and stay awhile?
One gets here by getting here. And my stay has lasted me most of the past 34 years since that fortuitous encounter in southern California, at an event looking at something being called 'the new age'. Which I was to find out more about, after getting involved in it.
N.B. Only some years later did I find out that I was, in the eyes of the community members, one of 'Peter's boys'. he had a habit of keeping his eyes out, when he traveled in the world, for people whom he thought had something to give to the community, and then telling them there that so-and-so was coming to do such-and-such. It turned out that he had told them that he had found the person to hold the focus for the renovation of Cluny (Hill Hotel, hereinafter to be known as Cluny Hill College). When, during that renovation work, the winter of '75-'76, one of the leaders of the group came up to me and announced, "Well Stan, we're ready for you to take over now," I hadn't a clue what they were talking about. I had been a foreman of a crew that did basic maintenance of buildings, ie, sweeping, mopping, cleaning toilets, waxing dance floors, setting the fires in the bedroom fireplaces, etc etc - not the plumbing and electrics. The guy went away and reported this to his team, and I never heard anything more about that peculiar interaction, until some years later when I overheard that I was an example of how Peter could be wrong but also right - that someone would come there under the wrong impression, but be the right person after all.
That was some consolation, after realising I was there - here - under false pretences.
3 The title of one of the community's sing-along music tapes.
4 I have seen what you can do in the way you have developed, and though it has some merit, I am, overall, not impressed. I am not interested in a system that leaves so many people destitute. You can do better than this. WE can do better than this. Let's be about it. Dammit. Come out from under the control of the moneychangers, and CLAIM YOUR MATURITY.
And the next step after that: Release that which causes suffering: desire. Why would individuals keep going around and around on the wheel of rebirth, accruing karma, which by definition needs to be paid off, like an educational loan, once they realise - really grok - what is going on? what the purpose of the whole exercise is??
Come ON, people.
Show me your best, humanity. Not this ignoble business you are engaged in right now; involved in, to the extent that you can't see the forest for the trees.
5 And was briefly reminded of the last time I needed some classical music to soothe my soul. That was in university, during the time when I was still in ROTC - this was at the time of the Korean War, and we were being prepared, as dutiful university students, to be officers in that conflict - and one hot afternoon was sitting through a class on different kinds of machine guns. What?! I thought. Machine guns? This is insane. I'm not going to fire no stinking machine gun. What in blazes is going on in this world I have found myself in?? And I went home in a bit of a delirium, and locked my dormitory-room door, and put on some Wagner, and laid on my bed with my eyes closed to that outside world, and bathed in the music, to try to come back down to some sort of inner reality, that had nothing to do with air-cooled, x-millimeter, such-and-such caliber machine guns, for heaven's sakes. And that was it: I stopped going to ROTC class. Got in some trouble for it. But no matter. That wasn't my path. Somehow. Some way. There was more to life than this effing nonsense, of socially-constructed enemies, who you then treated as trading partners afterwards - all in order to make money. Get me OUT of this nonsensical reality, I thought. It doesn't compute. Even before computers came on the market...
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
The End of History: Neither Bang, nor Whimper, but Celebration
Over here in the UK, George Monbiot is a prominent - even, dare I say, celebrated (in some circles; denigrated in others) - liberal, who writes excellent books (like 'Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain', presciently in 2000; and predecessing both John Perkins's 'Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man' (2004) and Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' (2007))* and besides having a website (www.monbiot.com), also writes a weekly column in the Guardian daily national newspaper (the required reading in this country for all sandal wearers and tree huggers). In his column for this week he took on and roundly lambasted the subject, again in the headlines, of PFIs, or Private Finance Initiatives; the way that governments - both Labour and the Conservatives in this county - move construction costs off their books and onto private industries, who make a bundle on long-term building contracts that cost far more than it would have cost the government to borrow the money for the projects up-front. It has been a scam of eye-watering and blood pressure-increasing proportions, and has been a pet peeve of his for yonks (as they say in this country).** His closing lament, after trying to make a case for the public refusing to pay what he tried to deem an 'odious debt' (a term which has legal restrictions on its application) was: "Now I see corporations squatting like great cuckoos on our public services, while officials pour the money that should have been spent on nurses and teachers into their widening bills. Yes, I'm bitter. Yes, I'm clutching at straws. Have you got a better idea?"
My response to his column, and closing query:
"Indeed, George. And Seumas Milne's column of the 18th; and...and...
"What to do?
"Nothing but the total release of the money system as it has developed will do.
"Note that I didn't say anything about 'overthrow'.
"Just let it go. Having learned our lessons. And that's how we enter a new era, of life on Earth. Just waiting for us to wake up to it.
"Before too much more damage is done, by people who have lost sight of the real purpose of what we call money, and confused means with ends."
First, to clarify a reference: Seumas Milne, another chardonnay-drinking columnist in the Guardian, wrote a piece, published on the 18th inst., also bashing the corporate world's takeover of public institutions in the country. Headed 'The corporate grip on public life is a threat to democracy', it opened:
"The onward march of corporate power is a long established fact of British life. We've become familiar with the relentless privatisation of public assets and services, the creeping colonisation of Whitehall, [ie, government departments/ministries] and the revolving doors that see politicians, lobbyists, executives and civil servants swap places and exchange contracts with bewildering speed.***
"But the Guardian's revelation [that week] that fast food and drinks companies such as McDonald's, PepsiCo, Unilever and Diego have now been asked by ministers to draw up public health policy shows the corporate takeover of politics has reached a new level. This isn't an issue of government consulting business. We're talking about the same vested interests that have fuelled the obesity and alcohol abuse crises as good as dictating terms at the heart of government."
After pointing out that they will try to deregulate their industries as part of their takeover agenda, and how the health secretary had already signaled that he was "happy to oblige in what amounts to a surrender of the public realm,' he went on:
"It would be almost comical were it not so dangerously destructive. But so accustomed have we become to the advance of private profit-making into every sphere of society, it's easy to miss the acceleration of privatisation now being overseen by the Cameron administration. Across government, the crisis of the private sector is being used to launch a renewed assault on the public sector, covering everything from Royal Mail to vast expanses of public woodland..."
Ah yes; the 'crisis'. Which brings me to an earlier column by Monbiot, wherein he fingers precisely the strategy involved in this takeover programme, of democracy by corporatism, aka fat cats, aka fascism. Headed 'For the Tories, this is not a financial crisis, but a long-awaited opportunity' (the Guardian, 19 October), the column in print form highlighted one of his comments in particular: "In a classic example of 'disaster capitalism', the cuts are being used to reshape the economy in the interests of business". In the article, he points out the role of the "extreme neoliberals at the University of Chicago" - under free-market guru Milton Friedman - not only in applying their economic prescription in Chile after the military coup there in 1973, but how they were working hand in glove with the CIA in order to 'make it happen'.
A phrase which also brings to mind the 9/11 'crisis', which opened the door for the Bush administration to make legislative moves to destroy the people's rights under the nascent imposition of Martial Law, in putting America on a legalistically-opportune war footing. It comes from the 'conspiracy theory' discussion on what role, precisely, did the Bush administration play in the unfolding of that atrocity - that 'new Pearl Harbor' that the Neocons had already posited as being needed for Americans to be spooked into spending more on defense spending than they already were (as a key engine for the economy, doncha know). One school of thought has been identified by the acronym MIHOP - ie, 'Make it Happen On Purpose'; and another perspective is branded as LIHOP - ie, 'Let It Happen On Purpose'.
I won't go into the 9/11 affair in detail here; this is just to point out the role of Crisis in giving the PTB the Opportunity they need to further their ends. And that, rather than just waiting for a Crisis to give them that Opportunity, they can quite possibly be going out to Make It Happen.
The same as the subprime mortgage fiasco of the financial industry's doing. To set up a Crisis, in order to capitalize on it - figuratively and literally. (The latter, in getting the taxpayers to cover your risks. Sweet.)
Monbiot, on the Chilean affair, when Friedman visited and encouraged General Pinochet to go even further, and faster, than he was (because you have to strike while the iron is hot, or you lose the momentum of your objective and agenda):
"The result was a massive increase in unemployment and the near-eradication of the middle class. But the very rich became much richer, and the corporations, scarcely taxed, deregulated and fattened on privatised assets, became much more powerful."
- in the creation of the 20:80 society that the PTB want, and have envisioned for years; 20% of the populace being very well paid for their services to the system, and the 80% rest being 'useless eaters'. Not to eat up too much of the capital in welfare services; so those need to be cut back before the ordure hits the fan in earnest...
All of this, as if this were the whole point of an economy - of money itself: to enrich an elite. Not to share and provide goods and services. And why would you, if you don't do unto others as you would do to yourself - if you don't look at others AS yourself??
On the next page over from Monbiot's 19 October article there was a column by one Bethany McLean (co-author of 'The Smartest Guys in the Room: an Expose of the Enron Scandal') on the subject of the home repossession scam going in the States. Headed 'It's one law for murderers, another law for homebuyers', she details the disconnect between the legal standards applied to the lenders ("paperwork has been tossed into the garbage, affadavits have ben forged and the seizure and sale of homes hasn't been documented correctly. The mortgages themselves may even have been sold without proper transfer of the physical documents that show who actually owns the loans...") and those applied to the shmucks. Early on in the article she points out: "The importance of the letter of the law explains why corporations try to dot every 'i' and cross every 't' in their dealings with each other. if the transaction goes sour and the two parties end up in court, judges don't look kindly on missing or forged documentation, whatever the merits of the case. Even more, the importance of following the proper procedures under the law also explains why convicted murderers or apprehended felons go free because of tiny violations in the way their cases were handled, even when it's crystal clear that they're guilty. So why are homebuyers subject to a different standard?"
Because, Bethany, they were used as patsies, to achieve a desired outcome. And so are simply expendable, with no real rights. Do cattle have rights?...
This is all why I said, and say again: Let it go. Even if a critical mass of people 'got' that the system is corrupt, and about as near to being beyond redemption as it could possibly get, that's not enough of an answer at this point. At this historical point, we can see - for those who have eyes to see - that the system itself is fundamentally flawed, in proving how lost you can get, without a vision. Without the vision; of what life is all about. For if we got that, we would realise that we don't need the training wheels of interest-bearing money on the one hand and fractional-reserve banking on the other to provide each other with goods and services - the real point of the exercise (NOT for the very rich to become much richer). All you need is a motive. The profit motive is one; and it is proving to have deadly consequences. There is another. I submit that all we humans need, in order to provide each other with goods and services, and the best reflection of our individual ingenuity, is - as I have said, and shared, before - to do so out of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning.
This, of course, requires us to awaken - truly awaken - to the fact that there is Plan in and Purpose to 'the universe' - to the life experience. And more. That the life experience itself is, essentially, an illusion.
A stage, on which we play parts. And keep swapping them around, In order to learn from the experience; in order, in turn, to grow. Evolve, spiritually.
I read people like Monbiot, and Milne, and others - on both sides of the economic-political aisle; the dialectic we are engaged in, to come out to a higher stage, of Synthesis - and I think:
People, people. You don't get it yet. With your nose too close to the scene, you're not seeing that: You are - we all are - playing parts. That's all that the life experience is: theatre. In order to play different parts at different times, and gain awareness in the process; from the experience. To grow in consciousness. And now it's time to enter the stage on another level; one more in keeping with our present enviro-spiritual evolution and circumstances.
It's time, in short, to wake up. We have major work to do, with a greater degree of awareness than we have engaged in - as a collective - heretofore.
Let's be about it.
And stop this role-playing that is hurting so many people.
That is hurting you. In essence. As part of the Whole.
---
* and David Cromwell's 'Private Planet: Corporate Plunder And the Fight Back' (2001); but not before 'The Global Trap: Globalization And the Assault on Prosperity and Democracy' by Hans-Peter Martin & Harald Schumann (1997) or Kenichi Ohmae's 'The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies' (1995). Not to mention David C. Korten's seminal 'When Corporations Rule the World' (also 1995). Just to name the good ones that I have personally come across.
** Have I made it abundantly clear yet where I am currently domiciled in my life? I really don't want the PTB to have to hunt for me with too much difficulty, when they start going around trying to silence the too-strident opposition to their best-laid plans for the planet. Yoo hoo. Over here. Up here, in Scotland. Keeping a weather eye on you from my cave. And that's 'weather' also as in whether to start calling you the names that you deserve to be called - like despicable, and so forth - but biting my tongue, because I know, as you, apparently, don't, that, on a fundamental level, I am you; and vice versa. And I really don't see the value of calling myself names. So I'll keep it clean. For as long as I can. Being human; at this stage of our mutual evolution, at least.
*** I almost typed 'swapped bodily fluids' there, wilh my mind caught up with the subject and level of intimacy that Milne was describing between the government and crony capitalism'. The reader will forgive me, I'm sure; and understand.
**** The article, incidentally, was not just about this move by the fast food and drinks industries to feather their beds in government; it also covered such other profit- and propaganda-promising fields as education. Milne went on:
"International takeover has also been the fate of John Bauer, the largest private free school provider in Sweden, which was bought out by a Danish venture capital firm. Whether many parents in Britain actually want their children's schools controlled by private equity or military service companies, over which they have no control and which might go bust or be taken over and run from abroad, seems pretty doubtful..."
My response to his column, and closing query:
"Indeed, George. And Seumas Milne's column of the 18th; and...and...
"What to do?
"Nothing but the total release of the money system as it has developed will do.
"Note that I didn't say anything about 'overthrow'.
"Just let it go. Having learned our lessons. And that's how we enter a new era, of life on Earth. Just waiting for us to wake up to it.
"Before too much more damage is done, by people who have lost sight of the real purpose of what we call money, and confused means with ends."
First, to clarify a reference: Seumas Milne, another chardonnay-drinking columnist in the Guardian, wrote a piece, published on the 18th inst., also bashing the corporate world's takeover of public institutions in the country. Headed 'The corporate grip on public life is a threat to democracy', it opened:
"The onward march of corporate power is a long established fact of British life. We've become familiar with the relentless privatisation of public assets and services, the creeping colonisation of Whitehall, [ie, government departments/ministries] and the revolving doors that see politicians, lobbyists, executives and civil servants swap places and exchange contracts with bewildering speed.***
"But the Guardian's revelation [that week] that fast food and drinks companies such as McDonald's, PepsiCo, Unilever and Diego have now been asked by ministers to draw up public health policy shows the corporate takeover of politics has reached a new level. This isn't an issue of government consulting business. We're talking about the same vested interests that have fuelled the obesity and alcohol abuse crises as good as dictating terms at the heart of government."
After pointing out that they will try to deregulate their industries as part of their takeover agenda, and how the health secretary had already signaled that he was "happy to oblige in what amounts to a surrender of the public realm,' he went on:
"It would be almost comical were it not so dangerously destructive. But so accustomed have we become to the advance of private profit-making into every sphere of society, it's easy to miss the acceleration of privatisation now being overseen by the Cameron administration. Across government, the crisis of the private sector is being used to launch a renewed assault on the public sector, covering everything from Royal Mail to vast expanses of public woodland..."
Ah yes; the 'crisis'. Which brings me to an earlier column by Monbiot, wherein he fingers precisely the strategy involved in this takeover programme, of democracy by corporatism, aka fat cats, aka fascism. Headed 'For the Tories, this is not a financial crisis, but a long-awaited opportunity' (the Guardian, 19 October), the column in print form highlighted one of his comments in particular: "In a classic example of 'disaster capitalism', the cuts are being used to reshape the economy in the interests of business". In the article, he points out the role of the "extreme neoliberals at the University of Chicago" - under free-market guru Milton Friedman - not only in applying their economic prescription in Chile after the military coup there in 1973, but how they were working hand in glove with the CIA in order to 'make it happen'.
A phrase which also brings to mind the 9/11 'crisis', which opened the door for the Bush administration to make legislative moves to destroy the people's rights under the nascent imposition of Martial Law, in putting America on a legalistically-opportune war footing. It comes from the 'conspiracy theory' discussion on what role, precisely, did the Bush administration play in the unfolding of that atrocity - that 'new Pearl Harbor' that the Neocons had already posited as being needed for Americans to be spooked into spending more on defense spending than they already were (as a key engine for the economy, doncha know). One school of thought has been identified by the acronym MIHOP - ie, 'Make it Happen On Purpose'; and another perspective is branded as LIHOP - ie, 'Let It Happen On Purpose'.
I won't go into the 9/11 affair in detail here; this is just to point out the role of Crisis in giving the PTB the Opportunity they need to further their ends. And that, rather than just waiting for a Crisis to give them that Opportunity, they can quite possibly be going out to Make It Happen.
The same as the subprime mortgage fiasco of the financial industry's doing. To set up a Crisis, in order to capitalize on it - figuratively and literally. (The latter, in getting the taxpayers to cover your risks. Sweet.)
Monbiot, on the Chilean affair, when Friedman visited and encouraged General Pinochet to go even further, and faster, than he was (because you have to strike while the iron is hot, or you lose the momentum of your objective and agenda):
"The result was a massive increase in unemployment and the near-eradication of the middle class. But the very rich became much richer, and the corporations, scarcely taxed, deregulated and fattened on privatised assets, became much more powerful."
- in the creation of the 20:80 society that the PTB want, and have envisioned for years; 20% of the populace being very well paid for their services to the system, and the 80% rest being 'useless eaters'. Not to eat up too much of the capital in welfare services; so those need to be cut back before the ordure hits the fan in earnest...
All of this, as if this were the whole point of an economy - of money itself: to enrich an elite. Not to share and provide goods and services. And why would you, if you don't do unto others as you would do to yourself - if you don't look at others AS yourself??
On the next page over from Monbiot's 19 October article there was a column by one Bethany McLean (co-author of 'The Smartest Guys in the Room: an Expose of the Enron Scandal') on the subject of the home repossession scam going in the States. Headed 'It's one law for murderers, another law for homebuyers', she details the disconnect between the legal standards applied to the lenders ("paperwork has been tossed into the garbage, affadavits have ben forged and the seizure and sale of homes hasn't been documented correctly. The mortgages themselves may even have been sold without proper transfer of the physical documents that show who actually owns the loans...") and those applied to the shmucks. Early on in the article she points out: "The importance of the letter of the law explains why corporations try to dot every 'i' and cross every 't' in their dealings with each other. if the transaction goes sour and the two parties end up in court, judges don't look kindly on missing or forged documentation, whatever the merits of the case. Even more, the importance of following the proper procedures under the law also explains why convicted murderers or apprehended felons go free because of tiny violations in the way their cases were handled, even when it's crystal clear that they're guilty. So why are homebuyers subject to a different standard?"
Because, Bethany, they were used as patsies, to achieve a desired outcome. And so are simply expendable, with no real rights. Do cattle have rights?...
This is all why I said, and say again: Let it go. Even if a critical mass of people 'got' that the system is corrupt, and about as near to being beyond redemption as it could possibly get, that's not enough of an answer at this point. At this historical point, we can see - for those who have eyes to see - that the system itself is fundamentally flawed, in proving how lost you can get, without a vision. Without the vision; of what life is all about. For if we got that, we would realise that we don't need the training wheels of interest-bearing money on the one hand and fractional-reserve banking on the other to provide each other with goods and services - the real point of the exercise (NOT for the very rich to become much richer). All you need is a motive. The profit motive is one; and it is proving to have deadly consequences. There is another. I submit that all we humans need, in order to provide each other with goods and services, and the best reflection of our individual ingenuity, is - as I have said, and shared, before - to do so out of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning.
This, of course, requires us to awaken - truly awaken - to the fact that there is Plan in and Purpose to 'the universe' - to the life experience. And more. That the life experience itself is, essentially, an illusion.
A stage, on which we play parts. And keep swapping them around, In order to learn from the experience; in order, in turn, to grow. Evolve, spiritually.
I read people like Monbiot, and Milne, and others - on both sides of the economic-political aisle; the dialectic we are engaged in, to come out to a higher stage, of Synthesis - and I think:
People, people. You don't get it yet. With your nose too close to the scene, you're not seeing that: You are - we all are - playing parts. That's all that the life experience is: theatre. In order to play different parts at different times, and gain awareness in the process; from the experience. To grow in consciousness. And now it's time to enter the stage on another level; one more in keeping with our present enviro-spiritual evolution and circumstances.
It's time, in short, to wake up. We have major work to do, with a greater degree of awareness than we have engaged in - as a collective - heretofore.
Let's be about it.
And stop this role-playing that is hurting so many people.
That is hurting you. In essence. As part of the Whole.
---
* and David Cromwell's 'Private Planet: Corporate Plunder And the Fight Back' (2001); but not before 'The Global Trap: Globalization And the Assault on Prosperity and Democracy' by Hans-Peter Martin & Harald Schumann (1997) or Kenichi Ohmae's 'The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies' (1995). Not to mention David C. Korten's seminal 'When Corporations Rule the World' (also 1995). Just to name the good ones that I have personally come across.
** Have I made it abundantly clear yet where I am currently domiciled in my life? I really don't want the PTB to have to hunt for me with too much difficulty, when they start going around trying to silence the too-strident opposition to their best-laid plans for the planet. Yoo hoo. Over here. Up here, in Scotland. Keeping a weather eye on you from my cave. And that's 'weather' also as in whether to start calling you the names that you deserve to be called - like despicable, and so forth - but biting my tongue, because I know, as you, apparently, don't, that, on a fundamental level, I am you; and vice versa. And I really don't see the value of calling myself names. So I'll keep it clean. For as long as I can. Being human; at this stage of our mutual evolution, at least.
*** I almost typed 'swapped bodily fluids' there, wilh my mind caught up with the subject and level of intimacy that Milne was describing between the government and crony capitalism'. The reader will forgive me, I'm sure; and understand.
**** The article, incidentally, was not just about this move by the fast food and drinks industries to feather their beds in government; it also covered such other profit- and propaganda-promising fields as education. Milne went on:
"International takeover has also been the fate of John Bauer, the largest private free school provider in Sweden, which was bought out by a Danish venture capital firm. Whether many parents in Britain actually want their children's schools controlled by private equity or military service companies, over which they have no control and which might go bust or be taken over and run from abroad, seems pretty doubtful..."
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
A Rush to Judgment
My sense of fairness - my passion for fairness and justice - is being riled by a beast from Alaska slouching towards America to be born again, and again, and again. That is the brouhaha kicked up by the Republican candidate for the Senate, one Joe Miller, being a stickler for legal detail. And if we are not sticklers for legal details, we run the risk of being overwhelmed by people who do not want the rule of law, but the rule of the strongest. Thus the image of a beast from Alaska - from the wilds, where the 'survival of the fittest' reigns - is rather apt.
The situation has been occasioned by his being challenged, after his win in the primaries, by the losing Republican incumbent as a write-in candidate. It was reported that she ended up winning the election by some 10,000 votes. But hold on. There's some details here that need to be looked at.
One is a peculiar situation whereby votes in question were counted for her, but not for Joe. Quote from one of the posters on the thread of an article on CNN to this subject - all of whom otherwise were all over Miller, as a "sore loser":
"...there are only 8K ballots with questions leaving her a 2K lead, but one thing this article fails to report is that machine rejected ballots were only counted in her favor." Curious, that. Worth looking at. The power of the incumbent political machine to control such things, and all - from either side of the political aisle. So there's a legitimate question here, to be looked at more deeply. Besides the "questions" regarding the ballots in question.
This latter seems to be mostly a matter of write-in ballots with his write-in opponent's name on them, in different spelling - 'Merkowsky, Murcowskee" etc etc. Two things. (1) The state law says that such ballots - ballots not being precisely correct according to spelling - must not be counted. Sounds a little dogmatic; but that's the law there. However, the Election Procedures Committee (or whatever their correct name) said before the election that they would in fact allow the 'intent' of the voter to be honored. Curious, that. Not the idea itself; a number of states have such laws. But why the declaration contrary to their state law? Well, let's say that the incumbent political machine had an agenda to win the election for their candidate, but it might well entail that many of the people they rounded up to vote for their candidate could not spell his or her name correctly; how could they get around the state law on the matter? Well, one way would be to fudge a little, and hope they could get away with it. And that's where my fairness detector starts to sound, loudly. And I'll say more about that in a moment; but first, let me finish my thought as started above, in getting to: (2) There was another report that the incumbent political machine not only may well have rounded up voters for their candidate, but may well have 'stacked the deck' in stuffing the ballot boxes with phantom voters; and the suggestion was made that those write-in votes should be checked for the possible same handwriting. One way of which to smokescreen it would be to spell the write-in candidate's name in different ways, to make it look AS IF the ballots were from different voters.
I am saying that there is every reason to believe that there were voting shenanigans going on up there in Alaska, primarily from those incumbent political 'forces' who weren't going to go into the political wilderness without a fight.
I am also saying that there is a major principle here, which needs to be addressed, if the nation is going to continue to live under the rule of law, rather than under the rule of tyrants. And that is, the importance of deference TO the law. And to the fine point of the law. And I come now to my closing, fine point; which has to do with
the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of the United States of America; and to the quite possible illegitimacy of that election process.
He is, in short, according to the understanding of the English language at the time of the setting of the Constitution of the United States of America, NOT a "natural born citizen". Which meant to the Founding Fathers something more than just a citizen, or a 'native born' citizen. It meant, according to material that I have researched in the matter - that others have researched for me, and for the American public in general - a person who was a citizen by both 'blood' and 'soil' - ie, born of citizen parents ('blood'), and on the soil, or equivalent thereof (as on a military base elsewhere).
It was a hurdle put in place by the Founders for that particular office for a particular purpose; which was to make sure that the person in that particular office did not have any conflicting loyalties - and especially not to the British empire, which the country had just fought a war to declare itself independent of.
Barack Hussein Obama's candidacy for that particular office fell at the first hurdle.
And why wasn't this picked up on?
Because some people with an agenda decided that it was just a 'mere detail', and could be gotten around, by a little playing fast and loose with the detail of the law.
Nothing to see here folks. Just keep moving on.
Well, I for one won't.
And neither should Joe Miller. Until both of these situations are dealt with. Honestly. And fairly.
The situation has been occasioned by his being challenged, after his win in the primaries, by the losing Republican incumbent as a write-in candidate. It was reported that she ended up winning the election by some 10,000 votes. But hold on. There's some details here that need to be looked at.
One is a peculiar situation whereby votes in question were counted for her, but not for Joe. Quote from one of the posters on the thread of an article on CNN to this subject - all of whom otherwise were all over Miller, as a "sore loser":
"...there are only 8K ballots with questions leaving her a 2K lead, but one thing this article fails to report is that machine rejected ballots were only counted in her favor." Curious, that. Worth looking at. The power of the incumbent political machine to control such things, and all - from either side of the political aisle. So there's a legitimate question here, to be looked at more deeply. Besides the "questions" regarding the ballots in question.
This latter seems to be mostly a matter of write-in ballots with his write-in opponent's name on them, in different spelling - 'Merkowsky, Murcowskee" etc etc. Two things. (1) The state law says that such ballots - ballots not being precisely correct according to spelling - must not be counted. Sounds a little dogmatic; but that's the law there. However, the Election Procedures Committee (or whatever their correct name) said before the election that they would in fact allow the 'intent' of the voter to be honored. Curious, that. Not the idea itself; a number of states have such laws. But why the declaration contrary to their state law? Well, let's say that the incumbent political machine had an agenda to win the election for their candidate, but it might well entail that many of the people they rounded up to vote for their candidate could not spell his or her name correctly; how could they get around the state law on the matter? Well, one way would be to fudge a little, and hope they could get away with it. And that's where my fairness detector starts to sound, loudly. And I'll say more about that in a moment; but first, let me finish my thought as started above, in getting to: (2) There was another report that the incumbent political machine not only may well have rounded up voters for their candidate, but may well have 'stacked the deck' in stuffing the ballot boxes with phantom voters; and the suggestion was made that those write-in votes should be checked for the possible same handwriting. One way of which to smokescreen it would be to spell the write-in candidate's name in different ways, to make it look AS IF the ballots were from different voters.
I am saying that there is every reason to believe that there were voting shenanigans going on up there in Alaska, primarily from those incumbent political 'forces' who weren't going to go into the political wilderness without a fight.
I am also saying that there is a major principle here, which needs to be addressed, if the nation is going to continue to live under the rule of law, rather than under the rule of tyrants. And that is, the importance of deference TO the law. And to the fine point of the law. And I come now to my closing, fine point; which has to do with
the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of the United States of America; and to the quite possible illegitimacy of that election process.
He is, in short, according to the understanding of the English language at the time of the setting of the Constitution of the United States of America, NOT a "natural born citizen". Which meant to the Founding Fathers something more than just a citizen, or a 'native born' citizen. It meant, according to material that I have researched in the matter - that others have researched for me, and for the American public in general - a person who was a citizen by both 'blood' and 'soil' - ie, born of citizen parents ('blood'), and on the soil, or equivalent thereof (as on a military base elsewhere).
It was a hurdle put in place by the Founders for that particular office for a particular purpose; which was to make sure that the person in that particular office did not have any conflicting loyalties - and especially not to the British empire, which the country had just fought a war to declare itself independent of.
Barack Hussein Obama's candidacy for that particular office fell at the first hurdle.
And why wasn't this picked up on?
Because some people with an agenda decided that it was just a 'mere detail', and could be gotten around, by a little playing fast and loose with the detail of the law.
Nothing to see here folks. Just keep moving on.
Well, I for one won't.
And neither should Joe Miller. Until both of these situations are dealt with. Honestly. And fairly.
Saturday, 13 November 2010
2012: A Sign of the Times
A film played in our community last night, a premiere of a documentary by one Daniel Pinchbeck on the general subject of '2012'; a theme, or even meme, gaining a lot of notoriety these days. I didn't go to it, for basic practical, mundane reasons - living my life in a community, with various community chores to take part in; but I have read a little in the subject area, including the book by Pinchbeck that the docu is presumably based on ('2012: the Return of Quetzalcoatl'). Which all brings up various memories for me, and a sense of happenings in our time.
First, the memories. There was a time in my seeker's life (I consider myself a seeker of Truth) when I read a fair amount in the subject area of the 'religions' and histories of various cultures in Central and South America. Interesting things going on there, reaching way back in time. I even started planning at one point to travel down to Central America and do some research, and feeling, in situ; but life circumstances intervened and prevailed. Anyway, it's all interesting food for thought. I was, am, particularly intrigued by the Mayan concept of the cyclical nature of time; which ties in somehow with even the Sumerian's understanding of the precession of the equinoxes. There is, in short, a larger canvas that we are playing out the human life experience on. But I also have a sense of 'right time'. And my inner sense of 'right time' tells me that there is, indeed, something of a profound nature to happen in our time; and it is why I have chosen to incarnate at, and for, this particular time. And so have many (all? to varying degrees of awareness) of us.
I like something that one John Major Jenkins has said to this subject:
“Around the year 2012, a large chapter in human history will be coming to an end.
All the values and assumptions of the previous World Age will expire and a new phase
of human growth will commence.”
Jenkins is one of the key 'voices' in the '2012' subject area; along with the likes of Terence McKenna, Jose Arguelles, and Carl Johan Calleman. He has studied the Mayan philosophy and calendric 'code' for some 25 years, and leads tours to the original sites. Of course, that makes him a big 'suspect' in the eyes of skeptics, since he is making a living on his area of interest; can hardly be said to be objective, or above potential lily gilding. But the information itself is worth investigating; bringing up, as it does, questions about what all has taken place on this lovely planet in the past - and what that all may tell us about the future. If there even is such a thing fundamentally as 'past' and 'future' - as 'time'.
But I'm starting to get a bit afield. I want to back this blog up a bit, and share my sense of what's going on 'in the world'.
Besides a rather big Crisis emerging, of the western monetary and economic systems, there is also its concomitant Opportunity. An Opportunity of breakthrough, into a whole new level of human civilization, characterized by a higher level, in a critical mass of humanity, of consciousness. A readiness to take on new horizons of being; which also includes stellar travel.
To me, two things are converging on the - our- time line: Technology, and History. We, in short, have the wherewithal now in technology to attain to a higher level of 'history', of civilization, at the same time as our scientific processes have helped us gain insights into who we are, really. And one of those scientific processes has been the ability to bring people back 'from the dead', who have shared their experiences, in what we call Near Death Experiences, or also Out of Body Experiences. Plus other people's experiences of disincarnate entities, with provable pieces of the experiences. There is evidence, then, in our time, that something of 'us' exists outside of our material brain. That we are, there is, something 'more than Man' about us. That there is a larger reality than our conventional scientific instruments have allowed us to access in the past.
There is also a voluminous literature by now on the subject of reincarnation, which, together with this sense of a major Opportunity in Time being afforded us, can help us sense into our 'larger' reality.
That we are more than our current personalities.
And thus have been caught up in something of a play, in this theatre called Time.
Which brings up my summarizing point; that: We have been caught up in a drama. For learnings, and the gaining of wisdom, yes; but there is, has been, something of the artificial about it. It's time to stop playing parts, and get on with 'it'- get to the real thing. Which is living our lives as sparks of the One; transcending in consciousness our moment's (ie, in fundamentally unreal 'time') individuality, and belief that we are separate entities, strictly unto ourselves. We have more important things to do than any longer be mesmerized by, and caught up in, the illusion of life as we have known it. We have, in short, work to do.
Let's be about our real work:
of making of Earth an Eden; and recognizing it as if for the first time.*
It's time for transformation, and renewal. And that's what the Mayan calendar - and many other 'hints' in our history; including the curious 'coding' in the first five books of the Judeo-Christian Bible (the Pentateuch) - is really all about.
---
* 'We shall not cease from exploration; and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.' T. S. Eliot
First, the memories. There was a time in my seeker's life (I consider myself a seeker of Truth) when I read a fair amount in the subject area of the 'religions' and histories of various cultures in Central and South America. Interesting things going on there, reaching way back in time. I even started planning at one point to travel down to Central America and do some research, and feeling, in situ; but life circumstances intervened and prevailed. Anyway, it's all interesting food for thought. I was, am, particularly intrigued by the Mayan concept of the cyclical nature of time; which ties in somehow with even the Sumerian's understanding of the precession of the equinoxes. There is, in short, a larger canvas that we are playing out the human life experience on. But I also have a sense of 'right time'. And my inner sense of 'right time' tells me that there is, indeed, something of a profound nature to happen in our time; and it is why I have chosen to incarnate at, and for, this particular time. And so have many (all? to varying degrees of awareness) of us.
I like something that one John Major Jenkins has said to this subject:
“Around the year 2012, a large chapter in human history will be coming to an end.
All the values and assumptions of the previous World Age will expire and a new phase
of human growth will commence.”
Jenkins is one of the key 'voices' in the '2012' subject area; along with the likes of Terence McKenna, Jose Arguelles, and Carl Johan Calleman. He has studied the Mayan philosophy and calendric 'code' for some 25 years, and leads tours to the original sites. Of course, that makes him a big 'suspect' in the eyes of skeptics, since he is making a living on his area of interest; can hardly be said to be objective, or above potential lily gilding. But the information itself is worth investigating; bringing up, as it does, questions about what all has taken place on this lovely planet in the past - and what that all may tell us about the future. If there even is such a thing fundamentally as 'past' and 'future' - as 'time'.
But I'm starting to get a bit afield. I want to back this blog up a bit, and share my sense of what's going on 'in the world'.
Besides a rather big Crisis emerging, of the western monetary and economic systems, there is also its concomitant Opportunity. An Opportunity of breakthrough, into a whole new level of human civilization, characterized by a higher level, in a critical mass of humanity, of consciousness. A readiness to take on new horizons of being; which also includes stellar travel.
To me, two things are converging on the - our- time line: Technology, and History. We, in short, have the wherewithal now in technology to attain to a higher level of 'history', of civilization, at the same time as our scientific processes have helped us gain insights into who we are, really. And one of those scientific processes has been the ability to bring people back 'from the dead', who have shared their experiences, in what we call Near Death Experiences, or also Out of Body Experiences. Plus other people's experiences of disincarnate entities, with provable pieces of the experiences. There is evidence, then, in our time, that something of 'us' exists outside of our material brain. That we are, there is, something 'more than Man' about us. That there is a larger reality than our conventional scientific instruments have allowed us to access in the past.
There is also a voluminous literature by now on the subject of reincarnation, which, together with this sense of a major Opportunity in Time being afforded us, can help us sense into our 'larger' reality.
That we are more than our current personalities.
And thus have been caught up in something of a play, in this theatre called Time.
Which brings up my summarizing point; that: We have been caught up in a drama. For learnings, and the gaining of wisdom, yes; but there is, has been, something of the artificial about it. It's time to stop playing parts, and get on with 'it'- get to the real thing. Which is living our lives as sparks of the One; transcending in consciousness our moment's (ie, in fundamentally unreal 'time') individuality, and belief that we are separate entities, strictly unto ourselves. We have more important things to do than any longer be mesmerized by, and caught up in, the illusion of life as we have known it. We have, in short, work to do.
Let's be about our real work:
of making of Earth an Eden; and recognizing it as if for the first time.*
It's time for transformation, and renewal. And that's what the Mayan calendar - and many other 'hints' in our history; including the curious 'coding' in the first five books of the Judeo-Christian Bible (the Pentateuch) - is really all about.
---
* 'We shall not cease from exploration; and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.' T. S. Eliot
Friday, 12 November 2010
A Miracle? Yes, And...
Saw a film last night (on DVD) on A Course in Miracles, produced by the main holding group of that initiative. ACIM, to explain briefly for newcomers to this school of thought, is a set of material ( 'a self-study curriculum') dealing with life and its purpose(s), which came through a woman in the U.S. some 40 years ago, and is presented as coming from the entity known to history as Jesus.* The key aspects of it are: that life is an illusion; that nothing unreal exists in reality; and that the point of the life exercise - ie, life as we know it - is to release it and get back to Unity, with Source; where we actually already are, since Time is an illusion also; is part of the matrix that we are embedded in. Or some such wording of the concepts. I'm not a student of the material (tried to get into it years ago, but felt a block, for whatever reason(s)), but I have read in Gary Renard's 'Disappearance of the Universe', and much of his 'Your Immortal Reality', and so 'get the drift' of the material.
What do I think of it.
I think that, although it feels to me basically valuable, even 'correct', I sense an emphasis in it that doesn't sit quite right with me. It is very much about the Buddhist concept of releasing desire, getting off the wheel of rebirth that has us trapped in life after life. So far, so fair enough. But there's another element to life that is as important as that truism about it. And that is, that life - far from some sort of error, with such a negative connotation to it - is for a purpose. Not to mislead us, by some sort of evil daemon or whatever for nefarious purposes. But to give us an opportunity for growth.
So that, yes: Life, as we experience it here on this material plane, is 'a snare and a delusion' - is maya, the Buddhist concept of illusion. So ultimately it needs to be released. But it also needs to be appreciated, for what it more fully is: the vehicle for us individually to gain in consciousness, grow in awareness, and engage in evolution; what is, ultimately, spiritual evolution. And since we are part of a larger Whole, the Whole engages in evolution as well - through us; through ours. So 'God' - the Elohim; the Source; whatever Source is - benefits by our acting thus.**
And that's the ultimate lesson. Not just to understand that the way to get TO that goal is through release of guilt, and practice of forgiveness. Both, the qualities that will release us from the wheel of rebirth; dipping us, over and over, into life, into we get 'it'.
Enough for now. Have to go to attend to material things.
Except just to mention, that it is that quality, of appreciation for the experience and 'substance' of life, that should inform our treatment of that substance. (The environmental movement a part of that attitude.) It may, in essence, be illusion. But it is a reflection of our gratitude for the life experience - for the possibility of growth - how we treat 'nature'.
It is every bit as holy as we are.
Honour it. Your life - your immortal life - depends on it.
---
* There is considerable question whether there really was an individual by that name and history, as handed down to our day and (very interesting) age through the Christian tradition. But that's for another blog. (See the research especially of Tony Bushby and Ralph Ellis in this regard, according to my personal experience. There are others. It's no secret, to the seeker.)
** the Law of One material - also material channelled through an individual; but also through a group, holding a group energy field - speaks of coming from 'a social memory complex'. I can imagine that there is something else higher up the ladder of spiritual evolution than individual souls, sparks of divinity, making their way individually back to Source, from their sojourn in the learning wilderness of perceived separation.
At this point, let me clarify: Do I believe everything that comes through individuals as chanelled material? The answer is No, but: No, but I like to keep an open mind to any information that comes my way; process it, and see what I think of it. As one of the founders of the community where I have spent, off and on, nearly thirty years of my life liked to put it: 'The proof of the pudding is in the eating.'
A community founded, by the way, in part by a woman who also channelled material; from what she felt as a higher source, and which she felt was 'God'.
Who knows. Who cares. Read, reflect, digest, and see what comes out of your own inner process. That's all, really, any of us can do; in our attempts in the physical to resonate to & with our highest potential.
What do I think of it.
I think that, although it feels to me basically valuable, even 'correct', I sense an emphasis in it that doesn't sit quite right with me. It is very much about the Buddhist concept of releasing desire, getting off the wheel of rebirth that has us trapped in life after life. So far, so fair enough. But there's another element to life that is as important as that truism about it. And that is, that life - far from some sort of error, with such a negative connotation to it - is for a purpose. Not to mislead us, by some sort of evil daemon or whatever for nefarious purposes. But to give us an opportunity for growth.
So that, yes: Life, as we experience it here on this material plane, is 'a snare and a delusion' - is maya, the Buddhist concept of illusion. So ultimately it needs to be released. But it also needs to be appreciated, for what it more fully is: the vehicle for us individually to gain in consciousness, grow in awareness, and engage in evolution; what is, ultimately, spiritual evolution. And since we are part of a larger Whole, the Whole engages in evolution as well - through us; through ours. So 'God' - the Elohim; the Source; whatever Source is - benefits by our acting thus.**
And that's the ultimate lesson. Not just to understand that the way to get TO that goal is through release of guilt, and practice of forgiveness. Both, the qualities that will release us from the wheel of rebirth; dipping us, over and over, into life, into we get 'it'.
Enough for now. Have to go to attend to material things.
Except just to mention, that it is that quality, of appreciation for the experience and 'substance' of life, that should inform our treatment of that substance. (The environmental movement a part of that attitude.) It may, in essence, be illusion. But it is a reflection of our gratitude for the life experience - for the possibility of growth - how we treat 'nature'.
It is every bit as holy as we are.
Honour it. Your life - your immortal life - depends on it.
---
* There is considerable question whether there really was an individual by that name and history, as handed down to our day and (very interesting) age through the Christian tradition. But that's for another blog. (See the research especially of Tony Bushby and Ralph Ellis in this regard, according to my personal experience. There are others. It's no secret, to the seeker.)
** the Law of One material - also material channelled through an individual; but also through a group, holding a group energy field - speaks of coming from 'a social memory complex'. I can imagine that there is something else higher up the ladder of spiritual evolution than individual souls, sparks of divinity, making their way individually back to Source, from their sojourn in the learning wilderness of perceived separation.
At this point, let me clarify: Do I believe everything that comes through individuals as chanelled material? The answer is No, but: No, but I like to keep an open mind to any information that comes my way; process it, and see what I think of it. As one of the founders of the community where I have spent, off and on, nearly thirty years of my life liked to put it: 'The proof of the pudding is in the eating.'
A community founded, by the way, in part by a woman who also channelled material; from what she felt as a higher source, and which she felt was 'God'.
Who knows. Who cares. Read, reflect, digest, and see what comes out of your own inner process. That's all, really, any of us can do; in our attempts in the physical to resonate to & with our highest potential.
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
On Appreciating the Detail of Things
I'm feeling the impulse to make a comment on the need and value of 'looking at the detail of things', in the many ways of that sentiment. I'll start with spelling.
Spelling seems to have become a lost art. Well; strike that: It's more than an art. It has to do with our daily lives, and how we live them. Let me start this 'essay' into this area with an observation. I keep track of a lot of e-newsletters and blogs and their Comments threads, originating both in the US and here in the UK. And I am appalled at the level of what at least used to be called illiteracy. There are a number of strands to that condition - how to express oneself in sentence structure, etc etc - but the main piece of the pitiful picture is incorrect spelling.
It's obvious that much of this comes from a lack, in the schooling of the last generation or so, of a commitment to proper spelling. It's too widespread to be just a local phenomenon. To confirm that impression, I would love to visit some elementary schools, and see how much classroom time is dedicated to this aspect of learning how to use one's language to express oneself. I suspect the worst. Other subjects have been deemed more important. 'Oh well; they'll pick it up as they go along. The important thing is to let them express themselves in a way that's comfortable for them.' Well, no and no. They WON'T just 'pick it up'. That's the attitude that has resulted in far too many kids just sent on in their classes without a basic education, in learning to read, eg, or do 'rithmetic. Because they'll 'pick it up as they go along'. Sorry. Doesn't happen much. Too many other things to take up their time. 'They' have been deprived of a decent education, because of this attitude. And as for being 'comfortable': That would be fine if they didn't have to make their way in life with others - with others involved in their being vetted for jobs, say.
We don't live isolated in our own little bubbles. We live in a society, with others; interact with others. That requires some communication skills.
But let me get on with the main point I want to make about this matter. And that is to claim that: To learn how to spell correctly is to honour the value of looking at the detail of things.* It trains the mind. What am I talking about. I'm talking about the likes of 'the fine print' to contracts: needs an eye for the details. I'm talking about the laws of physics, and such. Equations that don't balance are NOT 'good enough'. Medicines (organic chemistry), inventions, hinge on details. 'Close enough' is good enough in washing a car, but not in designing one. It's like Robert Frost said of free verse: It's like playing tennis with the net down. I hope I've made my point. Poor spelling is indicative of, symptomatic of, sloppy thinking. Now, yes: the spelling of words can change over the years, via usage. But the process needs to be conscious. Not just from sloppy thinking, that it's 'close enough'...'good enough'...**
We come now to the further point I want to make with this. And that is to bring up the subject of the contractual nature of the U.S. Constitution. I will refer here specifically to the 14th Amendment, the 16th Amendment, and to Barack Obama's apparent ineligibility for the office of the president of the United States - due to 'the detail' of things like words and their meanings.
First, the 14th Amendment. Most people -and, apparently, including some constitutional scholars - don't realise how it has been perverted into turning the Constitution on its head, and changing it from a contractual document applying from the States to the federal government, into a wet noodle applying from the federal government to the States. Coming in the wake of the Civil War, it had a number of features. One was that it established that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." This made full citizens of the former slaves, who did not have such full citizenry before this. The amendment goes on to say: "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." I submit that any commonsense reading of this clause would take it as meaning (and the 'original intention' can be checked on this) that the States could not treat their citizens (now citizens of the U.S. as well) arbitrarily, had to abide by the rule of law. But lo and behold, this clause has been used by liberal law-school professors and other likeminded people to drive a coach and horses through the Constitution: to create a 'doctrine' of what is called 'incorporation' - that is, that the terms of the Bill of Rights were now to apply, as I said above, from the federal government to the States; that the Bill of Rights was all 'incorporated' into/by this statement, thereby making the States subject to the rulings of the (federal) Supreme Court.
This is a nonsense. This is a playing with words, to make them come out to mean what the beholder wants them to mean. This is known as the Humpty Dumpty argument; who said: 'Words mean what I say they mean - neither more nor less." And thus has been born the rule of activist judges, interpreting the Constitution according to their personal sociopolitical proclivities.
Two things. (1) The necessity of looking at the detail of things has been perverted here, in a major way; and (2) It turns out that the 14th Amendment was never properly ratified anyway. So it is, according to the detail of things, null and void.
its pronouncements can, of course, be legalised - ironically, by "due process of law", to put the matter in the 14th's own words. Not in its manufactured meanings.
Next, the 16th Amendment, aka the 'Income Tax' Amendment. Neither was it properly ratified. That little detail needs revisiting as well; again, if we're going to live by the rule of law, rather than by the rule of tyrants.
And finally, the question of Barack Obama's eligibility to hold the highest office in the land. This little matter hinges on the definition of "a natural born citizen", as understood by the Framers of the Constitution.
What did it mean to them, in their minds. There are several historical clues to this, all leading to the most logical understanding that it meant that such a person/candidate had to be a citizen by 'blood' and by 'soil' - had to born on the soil (or its equivalent) by parents who were both citizens. That the person to hold that special and specific office could not have dual loyalties - and especially not to the British Empire, from whom they had just declared their independence.
It doesn't matter where, precisely, Obama was born, if words are to have any real meaning. If his father was, indeed, Barack Obama Sr., his eligibility for that office fell at that first hurdle.
And I say, 'If" here, because there is some question about his parentage, as passed down to him in oral history form from his mother and maternal grandparents. This anomaly in the story of his birth would account for why the Hawaiian authorities have been so 'legalistic' in their statements regarding his original, long-form birth certificate on file. Yes, they may have seen it. And yes, he may indeed be a "natural born citizen" - but of different parentage than we have all been led to believe.
And was it this that his maternal grandmother might have talked to him about, on her deathbed, when he visited her during his campaign for the office? And is this why he has refused to let his original birth record be made public? And why he has refused to let any of his other official records be made public - because they may also bring up questions about his eligibility, which investigation might all lead ineluctably back to his original birth certificate, and a serious questioning of who he is really? And perhaps also answer why Speaker of the House and Chair of the Democratic National Convention, Nancy Pelosi, made some curious statements on the nominating forms to the States, about this matter of his eligibility??
Things get curiouser, and curiouser, and curiouser, the more one goes down this rabbit hole -
the rabbit hole in particular of Obama's eligibility and background, and in general of what has been going down in America for some time, regarding the rule of law, and attention - or not - to detail..
Which brings me back to the bedrock of the matter: the Constitution of the United States, and the honoring thereof, as a legal document.
To sum up: How it is interpreted now is to miss the point. If you want to change the meaning of a legal contract, you must come to an agreement of the parties to the contract.
So, in sum: Yes, spelling of words can change over the years.
But the meaning stays the same.
Unless or until it is changed.
Legally. Or, in certain words: according to "due process".
Which has not been accorded to changes in the Constitution.
And needs to be.
Or we are living under the rule of tyrants.
Who must not be allowed to stand on our necks, any longer.
For we have a higher destiny to fulfill, than being their minions.
We have a change of consciousness to be ushered into consciousness.
In order that our potential can be fulfilled.
Our potential, as 'spiritual beings having a human experience'.
Paying attention to the detail of things.
Not simply accepting things as they are; as 'good enough'.
Or, like, not understanding what primarily has caused the breakdown of the nuclear family. Which was not because of the rise of 'feminism' (except tangentially, as part of the same agenda; of people who wanted more people to be taxed, so they could make more money off them, via the 16th Amendment, and its partner in crime, the concomitant establishing of the Federal Reserve System). But because of inflation. Causing the value of the money to be surreptitiously lowered. Aka stolen. By people who knew precisely what they were doing, and why.
And who got away with it, to the current point of - almost - collapse of the system; of the current paradigm (that does not give them all the power they would like to have; especially with that damnable Constitution in the way).
Because the public was lulled, by the opiate of entertainment, into not noticing what was going on, all around them.
Because they weren't paying enough attention to the detail of things.
Got your attention now, didn't they.
When it's almost - almost - too late.
Except that they have a surprise in store for them.
The surprise that God moves in mysterious ways.
And has a different outcome in store, for us all.
If we will choose it.
Which we have had all along.
Choice.
The choice to look at the detail of things - like life itself - or not.
And learn from our experiences.
Of life as a school.
The purpose being to graduate.
To learn our lessons. And move on.
A minor detail to some.
Obviously; the way they are acting.
And note the word, 'acting'.
As we are all playing parts, in a drama, created to catch our consciences.
Ultimately.
All.
As One.
And then we won't need things like written words to communicate with ourselves.
We will just Be.
Having - again; to underscore the point - learned our lessons.
And the biggest lesson of all.
That We Are All One.
A heckuva detail, that one.
---
* And I used the word 'honour' here on purpose, to acknowledge that there is a difference in spelling in the English language between the British version and the American version. But at least it's consistent; is not all over the place, just what seems to be good enough to convey one's point. Read on.
** I'm also aware of the research that has found that the human eye can 'read' a word if only the first and last letters are correct, and the middle is even gobbledegook (or, equally, gobbledygook). But that's also why so many children can't read: because they never learned, via the 'whole word' method of reading, to decipher the code of the alphabet, 'get' that a particular letter stands for a particular sound. This has also been a bane to our educational existence for some time now; kids having to (learn to) read by memorizing the shape of the word, rather than being able to sound it out for themselves, get it for themselves. I remember, when researching this whole business of Why Johnny Can't Read, reading a 'whole word' reading primer whereby the children were taught, eg, to recognise the word 'monkey' by a picture alongside the word showing a monkey hanging by its tail on the 'y' at the end. This is Egyptian pictography stuff; not civilization since the invention of the Arabic alphabet.***
*** There's more to this story than this; having to do with brain damage, primarily via vaccines, since the late 1940s-50s, leaving many children with such as dyslexia (and dyspraxia, and ADD, and ADHD, and...and.....). But that's another blog.
Spelling seems to have become a lost art. Well; strike that: It's more than an art. It has to do with our daily lives, and how we live them. Let me start this 'essay' into this area with an observation. I keep track of a lot of e-newsletters and blogs and their Comments threads, originating both in the US and here in the UK. And I am appalled at the level of what at least used to be called illiteracy. There are a number of strands to that condition - how to express oneself in sentence structure, etc etc - but the main piece of the pitiful picture is incorrect spelling.
It's obvious that much of this comes from a lack, in the schooling of the last generation or so, of a commitment to proper spelling. It's too widespread to be just a local phenomenon. To confirm that impression, I would love to visit some elementary schools, and see how much classroom time is dedicated to this aspect of learning how to use one's language to express oneself. I suspect the worst. Other subjects have been deemed more important. 'Oh well; they'll pick it up as they go along. The important thing is to let them express themselves in a way that's comfortable for them.' Well, no and no. They WON'T just 'pick it up'. That's the attitude that has resulted in far too many kids just sent on in their classes without a basic education, in learning to read, eg, or do 'rithmetic. Because they'll 'pick it up as they go along'. Sorry. Doesn't happen much. Too many other things to take up their time. 'They' have been deprived of a decent education, because of this attitude. And as for being 'comfortable': That would be fine if they didn't have to make their way in life with others - with others involved in their being vetted for jobs, say.
We don't live isolated in our own little bubbles. We live in a society, with others; interact with others. That requires some communication skills.
But let me get on with the main point I want to make about this matter. And that is to claim that: To learn how to spell correctly is to honour the value of looking at the detail of things.* It trains the mind. What am I talking about. I'm talking about the likes of 'the fine print' to contracts: needs an eye for the details. I'm talking about the laws of physics, and such. Equations that don't balance are NOT 'good enough'. Medicines (organic chemistry), inventions, hinge on details. 'Close enough' is good enough in washing a car, but not in designing one. It's like Robert Frost said of free verse: It's like playing tennis with the net down. I hope I've made my point. Poor spelling is indicative of, symptomatic of, sloppy thinking. Now, yes: the spelling of words can change over the years, via usage. But the process needs to be conscious. Not just from sloppy thinking, that it's 'close enough'...'good enough'...**
We come now to the further point I want to make with this. And that is to bring up the subject of the contractual nature of the U.S. Constitution. I will refer here specifically to the 14th Amendment, the 16th Amendment, and to Barack Obama's apparent ineligibility for the office of the president of the United States - due to 'the detail' of things like words and their meanings.
First, the 14th Amendment. Most people -and, apparently, including some constitutional scholars - don't realise how it has been perverted into turning the Constitution on its head, and changing it from a contractual document applying from the States to the federal government, into a wet noodle applying from the federal government to the States. Coming in the wake of the Civil War, it had a number of features. One was that it established that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." This made full citizens of the former slaves, who did not have such full citizenry before this. The amendment goes on to say: "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..." I submit that any commonsense reading of this clause would take it as meaning (and the 'original intention' can be checked on this) that the States could not treat their citizens (now citizens of the U.S. as well) arbitrarily, had to abide by the rule of law. But lo and behold, this clause has been used by liberal law-school professors and other likeminded people to drive a coach and horses through the Constitution: to create a 'doctrine' of what is called 'incorporation' - that is, that the terms of the Bill of Rights were now to apply, as I said above, from the federal government to the States; that the Bill of Rights was all 'incorporated' into/by this statement, thereby making the States subject to the rulings of the (federal) Supreme Court.
This is a nonsense. This is a playing with words, to make them come out to mean what the beholder wants them to mean. This is known as the Humpty Dumpty argument; who said: 'Words mean what I say they mean - neither more nor less." And thus has been born the rule of activist judges, interpreting the Constitution according to their personal sociopolitical proclivities.
Two things. (1) The necessity of looking at the detail of things has been perverted here, in a major way; and (2) It turns out that the 14th Amendment was never properly ratified anyway. So it is, according to the detail of things, null and void.
its pronouncements can, of course, be legalised - ironically, by "due process of law", to put the matter in the 14th's own words. Not in its manufactured meanings.
Next, the 16th Amendment, aka the 'Income Tax' Amendment. Neither was it properly ratified. That little detail needs revisiting as well; again, if we're going to live by the rule of law, rather than by the rule of tyrants.
And finally, the question of Barack Obama's eligibility to hold the highest office in the land. This little matter hinges on the definition of "a natural born citizen", as understood by the Framers of the Constitution.
What did it mean to them, in their minds. There are several historical clues to this, all leading to the most logical understanding that it meant that such a person/candidate had to be a citizen by 'blood' and by 'soil' - had to born on the soil (or its equivalent) by parents who were both citizens. That the person to hold that special and specific office could not have dual loyalties - and especially not to the British Empire, from whom they had just declared their independence.
It doesn't matter where, precisely, Obama was born, if words are to have any real meaning. If his father was, indeed, Barack Obama Sr., his eligibility for that office fell at that first hurdle.
And I say, 'If" here, because there is some question about his parentage, as passed down to him in oral history form from his mother and maternal grandparents. This anomaly in the story of his birth would account for why the Hawaiian authorities have been so 'legalistic' in their statements regarding his original, long-form birth certificate on file. Yes, they may have seen it. And yes, he may indeed be a "natural born citizen" - but of different parentage than we have all been led to believe.
And was it this that his maternal grandmother might have talked to him about, on her deathbed, when he visited her during his campaign for the office? And is this why he has refused to let his original birth record be made public? And why he has refused to let any of his other official records be made public - because they may also bring up questions about his eligibility, which investigation might all lead ineluctably back to his original birth certificate, and a serious questioning of who he is really? And perhaps also answer why Speaker of the House and Chair of the Democratic National Convention, Nancy Pelosi, made some curious statements on the nominating forms to the States, about this matter of his eligibility??
Things get curiouser, and curiouser, and curiouser, the more one goes down this rabbit hole -
the rabbit hole in particular of Obama's eligibility and background, and in general of what has been going down in America for some time, regarding the rule of law, and attention - or not - to detail..
Which brings me back to the bedrock of the matter: the Constitution of the United States, and the honoring thereof, as a legal document.
To sum up: How it is interpreted now is to miss the point. If you want to change the meaning of a legal contract, you must come to an agreement of the parties to the contract.
So, in sum: Yes, spelling of words can change over the years.
But the meaning stays the same.
Unless or until it is changed.
Legally. Or, in certain words: according to "due process".
Which has not been accorded to changes in the Constitution.
And needs to be.
Or we are living under the rule of tyrants.
Who must not be allowed to stand on our necks, any longer.
For we have a higher destiny to fulfill, than being their minions.
We have a change of consciousness to be ushered into consciousness.
In order that our potential can be fulfilled.
Our potential, as 'spiritual beings having a human experience'.
Paying attention to the detail of things.
Not simply accepting things as they are; as 'good enough'.
Or, like, not understanding what primarily has caused the breakdown of the nuclear family. Which was not because of the rise of 'feminism' (except tangentially, as part of the same agenda; of people who wanted more people to be taxed, so they could make more money off them, via the 16th Amendment, and its partner in crime, the concomitant establishing of the Federal Reserve System). But because of inflation. Causing the value of the money to be surreptitiously lowered. Aka stolen. By people who knew precisely what they were doing, and why.
And who got away with it, to the current point of - almost - collapse of the system; of the current paradigm (that does not give them all the power they would like to have; especially with that damnable Constitution in the way).
Because the public was lulled, by the opiate of entertainment, into not noticing what was going on, all around them.
Because they weren't paying enough attention to the detail of things.
Got your attention now, didn't they.
When it's almost - almost - too late.
Except that they have a surprise in store for them.
The surprise that God moves in mysterious ways.
And has a different outcome in store, for us all.
If we will choose it.
Which we have had all along.
Choice.
The choice to look at the detail of things - like life itself - or not.
And learn from our experiences.
Of life as a school.
The purpose being to graduate.
To learn our lessons. And move on.
A minor detail to some.
Obviously; the way they are acting.
And note the word, 'acting'.
As we are all playing parts, in a drama, created to catch our consciences.
Ultimately.
All.
As One.
And then we won't need things like written words to communicate with ourselves.
We will just Be.
Having - again; to underscore the point - learned our lessons.
And the biggest lesson of all.
That We Are All One.
A heckuva detail, that one.
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* And I used the word 'honour' here on purpose, to acknowledge that there is a difference in spelling in the English language between the British version and the American version. But at least it's consistent; is not all over the place, just what seems to be good enough to convey one's point. Read on.
** I'm also aware of the research that has found that the human eye can 'read' a word if only the first and last letters are correct, and the middle is even gobbledegook (or, equally, gobbledygook). But that's also why so many children can't read: because they never learned, via the 'whole word' method of reading, to decipher the code of the alphabet, 'get' that a particular letter stands for a particular sound. This has also been a bane to our educational existence for some time now; kids having to (learn to) read by memorizing the shape of the word, rather than being able to sound it out for themselves, get it for themselves. I remember, when researching this whole business of Why Johnny Can't Read, reading a 'whole word' reading primer whereby the children were taught, eg, to recognise the word 'monkey' by a picture alongside the word showing a monkey hanging by its tail on the 'y' at the end. This is Egyptian pictography stuff; not civilization since the invention of the Arabic alphabet.***
*** There's more to this story than this; having to do with brain damage, primarily via vaccines, since the late 1940s-50s, leaving many children with such as dyslexia (and dyspraxia, and ADD, and ADHD, and...and.....). But that's another blog.
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