GENIUS FORUMS

<In my opinion OIL > BLOOD. = WRONG!>
I wont quibble, but its not upta us. the Orwellian NEWSPEAK Hsandman referred to will have a lot to do with it, at least for a while. Orwell always assumes there is a power elite, which many think are the "Jews". Which I point out *repeatedly* would not be getting anywhere were it not for the Christians helping them. Nations which are not Christian have never had a "Jewish problem". The Muslims simply butcher Jews if they think there's a problem. Or Jains, Christians, or anyone else.

Where Orwell's Brave New World breaks down is on Hubbard's Peak. Orwell never imagined a serious resource problem. Nor did he imagine that human slaves would be replaced by robots who are easier to train, work longer hours, and do it more reliably. And the real question is what to do with all the fucking slaves. Pun intended. They are breeding faster than robots.

Since Christianity and Islam and other religions impairs attempts to get the birth rates under control, one way to deal with that global problem is an economic crisis. Some of us are old enuf to remember how farmers were paid to store their harvest rather than dumping it on the global market. Well, that has all been eaten up. Globally, there is just enuf food to last until the next harvest in the Southern hemisphere.

If the American economy crashed, the nation still has enuf of its own oil production to keep agribusiness going and feed its own population. While masses in the undeveloped world starve, and the OPEC nations would get to find out how their peoples like having diesel for breakfast. Things could get real messy, real fast. The trick would be keeping the urban populations at home in the city, fed, clothed, and housed... and out of the way of agribusiness.

The thing about Hubbard's peak, is that while the climb up has been on a smooth bell curve, the way down will be precipitous. As the price rises, so will the attempts to use violence to control a source of oil. That violence will damage the infrastructure so that production will fall. Which will raise the price further, which will raise the greed, then the violence, then the infrastructure damage, then back to square one.

daybrown: You are correct:"It is not up to us." It has never been up to us, and the longer it is not up to us, the chances are it will never be up to us. That is the inescapable and irrefutable fact , which I see clearly. I have seen it before, and I hoped that I have escaped from that,but I was wrong. That is exactly what bothers me so much and scares me so.

I guess, I will just have to get used to it again. :(

The silence of the lambs is deafening.

hsandman wrote:daybrown: You are correct:"It is not up to us." It has never been up to us, and the longer it is not up to us, the chances are it will never be up to us. That is the inescapable and irrefutable fact , which I see clearly. I have seen it before, and I hoped that I have escaped from that,but I was wrong. That is exactly what bothers me so much and I am scared.

There are great forces at work, but also contending, and not all of them are visible. I dont see how we can know if we have all the relevant data on which to judge. The Chinese glyph for danger includes that of opportunity. Trying to sort it out is dicy. But some fundamentals are irrefutable. Might still makes right. 5000 years of rule by the warrior class is over; the brave heart, strong right arm, sword in hand- dont cut it any more. Smith & Wesson guarantee equal rights for smart women. And, women still have their ancient weapon, the vaginal cavity, intact.

At the end of the day, decade, score, or even century, women will be in charge. The only question is how much chaos that revolution will go thru, and whether your own personal rectal orifice in harm's way while that goes on, however long it takes. For me, at age 68, its an academic question; I dont have enuf years left to worry about. But any young person who is not scared, is not rational. Largely because so many young people are- not rational. And trying to predict what crazy people will do is nearly hopeless.

One of the things that gives me hope, is that reality is not all its been cracked up to be. The Old World has 5000 years of history that have lots of examples of events that seem too improbable, and taken together, are not possible from a statistical standpoint. Central Asia even leaves us the the Vedas, which basically say it is all a put up job. If you ever have the experience of de Jevu, you know something is fishy. I do not know anyone who tries to prove Murphy's law is false. Like in the Bagavd Gita, the whole world is a pot boiler, cliff hanger, and you are spozed to be scared. It'd be too boring otherwise.

But, let us take it at face value, Look at the rise and fall of empires. I contemplate a visit to New Orleans this winter, and hope to re-establish contacts with those in sexual services. You could always tell when there was going to be a coup in Xian when the call girls left town. The smart money always gets outta dodge first. I see a lotta money being invested in my obscure neck of Ozark woods. I have no idea where the money comes from, other than its never been made here, so I assume it was made in the great power centers.

Jared Diamond, in "Collapse" sees the construction of mcMansions going on in his Bitterroot valley. The Little Rock paper a few months ago gave a long list of the states that had falling real estate values, and then two states which were seeing the prices still rising significantly: Arkansas & Alaska. Why? Well, if you can manage investments with electronic communications, then you can, as I do, use a satellite dish, and be damn near anywhere. May as well pick someplace with a nice view. Dont need any kind of apocalyptic vision for that trend to develop.

LeBlanc, in "Constant Battles" notes that empires break down, but to different degrees in different areas. If we see the dissolution of the Untied States of Denial, then we'd expect some states to break down into total anarchy and genocidal warfare, while others, with more homogeneous populations tend to retain more civil order. Interestingly, both Arkansas and Alaska have enuf oil to run their own economies. Oklahoma looks good that way too, but its not as scenic. TX & LA have plenty of oil too, but the whites, blacks, & hispanics would prolly be shooting it out for a while. The Arkansas Ozarks and Alaska, which have the scenery, are also 99% white.

Alaska is remote enuf so that there's less worry about clueless urbanites trying to come in, but unless you are there prepared with enuf firewood to survive the winter, you got a problem. Which I guess is outlined in a movie now in the theaters. You guess is as good as mine what global warming will do to that, but so far, my winters are now so mild I can pick greens in my garden all winter long. All 3 weeks of it.

When empires implode, there are always some areas which, freed of the taxes to support an obsolete corrupt system, get it together really quickly, while others- usually those feeding at the trough of government entitlements, subsidy, & contracts, break down into anarchy. When the USSR, came down, areas that had military infrastructure contracts came apart, the grid crashed, and they saw famine, but I doubt the lights in Riga and Tallin even blinked. Diamond, in "Collapse" says that regions with small farms reorganize quickly. Which is what there was in the Baltic Nations. And Alaska & the Arkansas Ozarks. We now recognize the high tech from the Baltic nations. Hardly anyone knows of the high tech strip city that is now evolving along I-540 in NW Arkansas.

There are places like this that look good if the global economy keeps right on rolling along, but also would look good if it crashed. Dillard's, the upscale family owned department store in Little Rock is building a new store in Rogers. A NW AR town of perhaps 15,000. Why? Well Rogers is where the upper management that works for Walmart in Bentonville sleeps. They will work for Walmart, but they wont shop there. But drive 30 miles East or West of I-540, and you are back in the Ozark boonies. So- there's lotsa folks that commute every morning just like they do in the major metro areas. Only, rather than hassling with traffic jams, they drive on the same kind of steep twisty two lane mountain roads you see in the new car ads on TV.

If the proverbial schitt hits the fan, they plan to just stay home and tend the gardens, orchards, and livestock on their hobby farms til it all blows over. Mite work. The census bureau website has a new classification besides urban and suburban: x-urban. Folks moved from city lots to suburban lots of 1/4 acre or maybe 2.5 acres, and now are moving onto hobby farms of 25 acres on up to 250. Telecommuting most of the time. Those folks have an investment to protect, and no doubt would, in the event of federal collapse, quickly form "well regulated militias". In the meantime, there's lotsa opportunity in security systems and other support services as they increase their investments.

I've read that Wall Street insiders have taken the middle class for a trillion from their IRAs, pension funds, etc. As may be. It does look like that was part of the reason for the housing bubble, real estate being the one thing people thot they knew they had that was real. But now, areas with these hobby farms, besides the mcMansions on them, have the land to grow crops of some commercial value. The intrinsic value is not limited to what it would sell for.

So- something else to consider is what job skills fit that culture, and still be worth something in a post crash system. I am very lucky, having been born on a farm in 1939. I saw the transition from draft horses to tractors, and became familiar with both. I can raise, train, and harness horses, or- tear an engine or transmission down and rebuild it. I'm at the end of the grid now, but still have my solar panels, and one of my friends is building a business installing solar power. Linux expertise is also a comer. More secure than windows for businesses, but with a range of distros that will work on low power consumption platforms that wont hit so bad on a solar powered home.

So- if you look into it, there are places where life can be lived well now, and if TSHTF, will still be reasonably comfortable; and some careers that will be economically rewarding no matter which way the global economy goes. But one other thing you should do is go to your county health department and get the documentation to prove you are STD free. That will be better than a passport if there is social crisis. Because Smith & Wesson will guarantee equal rights for women with, or without, the current power structure in place, that documentation will get you laid no matter how ugly you are.

Either way, smart women will not be depending on a husband for protection. They would vastly prefer a man who had some surveillance equipment and knew how to set it up. They would also tend to live communally so that they had someone awake 24/7 to keep an eye things while they sleep. A husband hasta sleep sometime, and that wont be good enuf. Whether the global economy goes on or not, increasing numbers of smart women will see the nuclear family model as obsolete. Your attitude about that will determine whether you get laid a lot, or laid at all.

daybrown: Your posts can sometimes be very insightful, a real pleasure to read. Experiance/wisdom shows, even when you express it with superfluous verbosity. :D

eg.:

One other thing you should do is go to your county health department and get the documentation to prove you are STD free. That will be better than a passport if there is social crisis. Because Smith & Wesson will guarantee equal rights for women with, or without, the current power structure in place, that documentation will get you laid no matter how ugly you are.

<- LOL! Sound advice I guess :-S

ps. Yes, the lights in Riga did not go out. ;-)

I just love this quote :-)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct
the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present
period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree
of comparison only.

<It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct
the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present
period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree
of comparison only.>
Amen.

I used to watch the friday nite economic analyses like "Wall Street Week". But then found out the Fed no longer publishes the M3. Which means that they can use digital money to the brokerage houses any time they want to prop the price up. Nobody talks about this. Then, the other nite, I heard a pundit say that the reason Wall Street was doing so well was that the SEC oversaw the market to make sure there was an even playing field. 13-14 months ago, the big 4 precious metals brokers colluded to dump silver, and the price fell from 15$/oz to 9$ over nite.

They took small commodities investors for a trillion on that one. The SEC has done nothing. But like Barnum said, there's another sucker born every minute. Since Roman times, Gold has been worth 16-20 times Silver, which has been worth 20 times copper. http://www.kitco.com/ says the gold/silver ratio now is 54.3 to 1. Silver/copper is 60:1 now.

What are the real numbers, and what should they be? http://www.kitco.com/ind/fekete/sep282007.html has a rap by Antal Fekete on the way the Fed has been playing with them. Posted on the Net from Zurich was a financial software analysis that showed put calls on American Airlines and 19 other Blue Chip stocks just before 9/11/01. But even if you are an insider, you dont get tips on the weather, do you?

Part of whats behind the prices http://www.cbot.com/ is that Australia's had drought, China had hurricanes, & Canada had a US type corn belt summer. But because there's a monsoonal flow now coming up all the way to the Ozarks, I had the mildest summer I ever saw here, and the corn just went nuts. So, at the very time when so much of the rest of global agriculture was stressed, the US got 155 bu corn/acre at a record price of 3.75/bu. 1000 acres, after the costs of diesel and fertilizer, will still clear half a million dollars. Damn Yankees are Lucky.

I look at life as a video game; I didnt start out with many hit points, and damn near got killed a couple times. I never noticed the key to the right treasure chests, so while my weapons are really puny, I cant afford better armor, blades, potions, or spells. I'm doing good if I can just stay out of the way of the monsters. Only, in this game, I dont see any great satanic mind behind it all. The monsters are too disorganized for that, and sometimes have at each other.

The mindlessness of their struggles is such that you dont have to kill a monster, just be there to clean up after he gets taken out. And even if you get to win big, your name wont be written in stone, merely glowing phosphor, and when the system powers down, you wont even be history. But if you poke around the dungeons, you can find a room that is ignored where you can make yourself comfortable while thunder rolls in the halls.

I watch for peeks and pokes at the software running the whole show. There seem to be some potions, like LSD, Pscilocybin, Cannabis, Opium, & Amanita Muscaria that can provide a kind of x-ray vision to see into the subroutines, which are too scary for most players to use, but if you wanna hack the code, its lots quicker than meditation. For those with enuf testicular tissue, the only score that really counts is not on the battlefield, but in the bed, and the mastery of these potions can be really useful in that regard. Course, failure in that tends to take you out of the game entirely.

If you cant win, cant get comfortable, & cant get laid, it makes perfect sense to strap a bomb on your chest.

Daybrown

If you find meditation does not work for you, you could still order Amanita Muscaria online, slather a gram of the dried shroom with butter for every 25 lb of body weight, and have an enlightening experience.

I note that the sites sell in 30 gram parcels - one dose as I thought.

But if you learn to meditate like a Zen master, it has all of the same results.

big if.
+++++
Alex,

And also, isn't it odd that the Mazateca Indians who use the mushroom ritually, equate the mushroom itself with Jesus Christ? That during his agony he coursed over the Earth and where his saliva fell to the ground the mushroom sprung up? The Eucharist from another angle. Many people I have known who have spent time in south central Mexico with Mazateca mushroom curanderos have reported mega-visions that have to do with the 'Christian mysteries' (this comment because you seem to imply that the LSD experience would 'cure' one of one's Christianity, whereas in some senses it seems to explain it). A friend of mine told me that some Peruvians who were members of the guerrilla group 'Sendero Luminoso' wound up at the house of his curandero and ate mushrooms. The visions they had dealt with all the people they had killed for no good reason, all the misery and suffering they had created, and an absolute moral authority who 'told' them in no uncertain terms that the gig was up, that they had to radically change directions on the paths of life, and the mushroom spirit showed them in visionary form what new roads to take and how they could make amends. The mushroom took them on a hell-journey for the whole night and when dawn finally came, they were found crying like babies and begging God to forgive them. You have to admit the effect of this sort of visionary experience is contrary to the typical tragic interpretation...

Here's what I think. Psychedelics indeed underpin the visions and so forth upon which religions are founded, most certainly including the Old Testament, and those experiences are genuine 'going within' for truths. Then, later, the priest-king duos come along, and pervert the message. the eucharist being a case in point. I can certainly suppose that the wonderful and healing presence sprung from the ingestion of amanita would be the true eucharist, the manna from heaven, the Christos, the divine rejuvenating fire - which then later got commercialized and sold to the public in the empty form of wine in a chalice which the priest prays over, and voila, it becomes the body and blood of Jesus, albeit quite indistinguishable from regular old wine. the priest having the power to do so because by golly God said so, and his own spiritual state is quite irrelevant.

The catholic church pedals materialistic garbage as a substitute for the real stuff. As do the protestant and orthodox churches as well.

<The catholic church pedals materialistic garbage as a substitute for the real stuff. As do the protestant and orthodox churches as well.>
Agreed. The earlier Vedic tradition, which endured to some extent in India, as we see in the hymns to Kali by Ramprasad, often, if not always, relied on the sacred potions. But one of the insights, summed up by Ramprasad, is that everything you see is part of a "projected matrix". Like a 3D video game, which in this case has all these Avatars as Christians, Jews, or Muslims.

Given the way the underlying software messes with probabilities, I dunno that we can do anything about it, and may be damn lucky if we can just be out of the way while these great forces have at each other. I feel like Moses, that I can see the promised land, but dont expect to get to live there. i've retired from case management, and doubtful now that my efforts to ameliorate the suffering ever succeeded to any significant degree.

i read that whereas Dionysianism (archetypal Aryan religion) was based on works of theater claiming allegorical truth, the Levantine religions you refer to were based on works of literature claiming literal truth. Of course, if you are too neurotic to get it, it makes perfect sense to prefer Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Dr. Freud says that neurosis is intractable, and now looking back at the futility of my efforts, including 20 years of postings, I must agree. Its like trying to alter the software of a video game while being inside playing it.

The altered states of consiousness you refer to do permit a more objective view from outside the game of what has been going on, but that dont mean you can alter a single line of the code. Altho- the experience does allow you to play more dispassionately.

A young friend emailed me tonite about their hopes of getting some video screened at Sundance. It occurs to me that while they think it is a documentary, video is nonetheless an allegorical, Dionysian tool. I've not seen it, but see that it may be the form of art that can reach neurotics. ASCII like this certainly wont. And while the chance that their work mite rise above the clutter to be seen and evaluated is slim, it seems that the clutter includes a lot of Dionysian work that may change the zeitgeist and wake the neurotics up.

Well, Daybrown, some say and I hope they're right that change is in the wind, duality will no longer be the reigning paradigm. those peddling 'I've got mine' and the one true religion will no longer have the wind at their backs as this age of the sun is waning now and the next one arriving, oh, say, about 2012 or so.

I do live in Dodge but my off-the-grid place is a 6 hour drive away, so I sorta hope I get enough warning.

I don't know about neurosis - intractable eh? maybe so but that's pessimistic because that would mean we can't learn and discover new methods. I think we have. Holosync perhaps. Also, I think neurosis can give way to psychedelics.

Our bondage is indeed a deep one. I ponder it often. Freedom??? Hah! There are so many varieties of bondage here! Imgaine that americans are living in a totalitarian state and don't even know it. More and more rules all the time. Could be worse, tho. And perhaps will be.

Have you read Wilhelm Reich? You should. Try The Murder of Christ, which is about neurosis, armoring he calls it.

Hi Anna,

I tend to agree with you, or with the school of thinking that thinks that way, that these plants have played a big role in the evolution of consciousness. With the right attitude, at the right time and place, a psychedelic journey can reveal so much, it's awesome. How odd it is that after *that* there is a tendency to revert to the regular way of seeing, and over time there is a forgetting. But, other experiences seem to take up the slack, if one has at all the temperment, and to keep one on track.

There seems to be so many layers and levels. I don't outrightly judge the 'work' of the Church, and it seems to me that there has to be 'temporal authority', and temporal government, and that in a way governing is maintaining ignorance, or if not outrightly 'maintaining ignorance', a containing of crude human material, a directing of it, which is an expression of authority, and at least bringing people face to face with very loaded symbolism: Christ as the brightest of bright suns, the solar God who dies and resurrects. Maria as the lunar luminary, and all the myths that lie behind it. In the African traditions (Candomble, Sanataria, Voodoo, etc.) the solar God is 'Chango', and in all the stories that pertain to him he is always being killed and then having to resurrect himself.

People seem to live within 'stories' and narratives that define their identity, and this identity needs to be fixed, concretized, fortified. For many people the rituals and routines of life centered around a Church with its intoning of moral and ethical ideas and demands, was not such a bad arrangement. CG Jung has written about the effect on people as this institution has been eroded, and people are faced with a modernity (a story that is a bad story, a nihilistic story, a story of atomazation and anomie). If we don't have a unifying story, by that I mean culture-at-large, things seems to slide off toward the deep end.

So, I guess there has to be inner and outer mysteries, different levels and means for dealing with different people, with different needs.
______________________________

Here's an anecdote: my present GF told me a few days ago that her dad, who is now 79 (my GF is 25) took ayahuasca a few years back! It just sounded so strange, I mean I met the guy, he is a very typical Colombian from the traditional part of the country. I just couldn't imagine someone's dad, in the States for example, at that age, going to an ayahuasca ceremony. Apparently most of his visions had to do with retracing the years of his upbringing, all sorts of visions of his life as a boy. He said he wouldn't do it again but that he didn't regret it at all.

Maybe in the best of circumstances, like with the American Indians with their Vision Quests, the vision of the Vision Quest is a story that a person carries with them all throughout their life, a story that explains their path, validates and maps their path, with symbols and meaning that they can refer to, can return to. I guess I really do think that Life is like that, we all have our 'story' of who we are, what we do, and how we came to be what we are. True, the molders of identity and the purveyors of 'path' are more often than not the tele-dramas and so many other extremely boring narratives, and they lock people into dreary roles, and we who seek freedom have to resist all that and develop an entire vocabulary of resistance, but many people seem to need that, to seek their ultimate comfort within those dramas...

Now if you start dosing people with the de rigueur '9 grams of dried cubensis', is that going to help or hinder? You are likely going to witness some very heavy changes in the social order, and people, after that, are going to clammor for 'order' and 'story' that they can live with, and shopping malls, and shoes, and sports...

iolaus & Alex, there's a lotta threads here that deserve more study than we have time for now. But hopefully, we will have the time. I see some signs that the Power Elites are waking up to the risk they mite be dragged out to be shot if they dont clean up their act. Maybe they are reading the postings.

And yes, a lotta neurotics would be brought out of it with a sacred potion in the sacred space, at the sacred time, in the sacred way. But a lot are also too far gone, and if there is economic crisis that disturbs what little sanity they have left, they'll go postal.

Agreed also that the binary cosmologies are breaking down. Bush has done us a favor by being a reductio absurdum for that whole macho way of looking at the situation, and even he now looks like he's trying to be more reasonable. Spoze the Dali Lama gave him a clue? He's the only person I know of who said he did acid that ever had Bush's ear.

Its still "wars and rumors of wars", and the price of gas keeps going up, but we keep on driving. Ten trillion in national debt by the time Bush leaves office, but the global economy cant afford to blow that all off. The US mite work a debt reduction deal in return for its global security services. Mite need an iron fist.

For us, the only question is whether we can tell in time to get the fuck outta Dodge, and if we do, whether we have a safe place to go, or whether all we need to do is just hang tight til it all works out despite how crazy it looks. One reason it looks like that comes of the altered state of consciousness where you realize that what passes for reality is a put up job.

I'm just another Avatar on some kind of "Truman show", "Matrix", "Tron" or "3D virtual reality" game, programmed to play along with it all, but for some reason, to ponder why I bother. There's no reason to think that if my part were pulled off the set that it would matter much. Nor does that idea bother me.

The "Christians and the Pagans" by Robin Lane Fox, writes of the last great cosmological change, when different generations of families were upset, each thinking the other damned because of what they believed. It was remarkable also, that he points out that several millennia of cosmology collapsed in the mere 60 years from Constantine to Justinian.

In "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", maybe you noticed how Gibbon saw that the early Christians were utterly convinced that Jesus would return in their lifetime. "the Rapture" goes back a lot longer than people think. Other historians showed how they all thot it would be all over at 1000 Ad. then 2000 AD, and now its 2012. I dunno. I do know it looks like a pot boiler, always ready to blow, but it never does. That seems to be one of the fundamental rules of the Matrix I live on.

But if we take it just at face value, we are at the end of 5000 years of rule by the warrior class. The sword in hand just dont cut it anymore. And all those whose middle class lives have been disrupted by downsizing, outsourcing, corruption, or whatever, mite have their minds concentrated enuf to consider another cosmology as a useful tool to create a new narrative for what is left of their lives. But just as the era Fox wrote of, its chaotic. Ever see "The King of Hearts"? When the inmates got to run the insane asylum?

Cute movie, but if you ran the script over time, they'd all starve to death. They cant even grow turnips. Seems like there are some posters who are rational and realize there is a problem, but I dont see enuf on which to reconstruct a workable system, either globally, nationally, or locally.

The bunker boys and others with some kind of hidey hole, have a plan, but for real survival beyond the near term, you need a community with a broad local resource base. Anything else just lets you starve slower. i do not see the postings on what that community plan should look like other than what I put at alt.community.

daybrown wrote:For us, the only question is whether we can tell in time to get the fuck outta Dodge, and if we do, whether we have a safe place to go, or whether all we need to do is just hang tight til it all works out despite how crazy it looks.

Doesn't it make more sense to get out of Dodge (or at least start planning a move) when you realize you are living in Dodge, rather than waiting for a large scale collision between fan and feces?

The bunker boys and others with some kind of hidey hole, have a plan, but for real survival beyond the near term, you need a community with a broad local resource base. Anything else just lets you starve slower. i do not see the postings on what that community plan should look like other than what I put at alt.community.

It looks like you are just about the only poster on alt.community.
Here, it looks kind of like you've been trying to "sell" Arkansas. Are you trying to create something there?

DHodges wrote: Doesn't it make more sense to get out of Dodge (or at least start planning a move) when you realize you are living in Dodge, rather than waiting for a large scale collision between fan and feces?

That makes more sense to me, but I dont have the attachments of family and friends in an urban area that tend to prevent people from thinking clearly about the risks.

It looks like you are just about the only poster on alt.community.
Here, it looks kind of like you've been trying to "sell" Arkansas. Are you trying to create something there?

Ya, its like a blog that usenet, for whatever reason, gave me to store my posts. There's nothing to prevent anyone from posting there, but they only do thru cross posting from whatever forums they sub to.

The AR Ozarks are an example I am familiar with. I assume others with other regions in mind will compare the factors presented to determine whether what they already have in mind is appropriate. There are enuf Rebel flags in front yards and decals on the back window of pickups to suggest non-whites mite have trouble. None of those I know very well are racist, but we all know there are too many methead rednecks who would make trouble for Hispanics and Blacks.

If I were Black, I'd drive thru the hills of AL or MS, and establish some personal contacts there, get a handle on the economic and agrarian situation, what resources Black folks there had to work with. If Hispanic, to similar regions that have lotsa Hispanics in the SW states. You need to get a handle on who to trust.

Twards the end of "Collapse" Diamond notes how diverse ethnicities tend to have at each other during periods of economic distress and chaos. He says, in contrast, that homogeneous populations pull together rather than falling for demagogues scapegoating minorities. The AR Ozarks are 99% white.

And the Rednecks have been moving to urban areas where their natural predatory instincts benefit from the anonymity, and the welfare benefits to their women are more generous. They are being replaced by upscale early military and civil service retirees, many of whom have the economic resources to start new businesses.

Diamond sees the same upper middle class moving into his Bitterroot Valley, and sees their economic impact is far greater than the old line cattle and mining interests. Your call. Montana is a lot further from the metro areas and the risk of urban refugees, but we also see forest fires, which after an economic crash, will be left to burn. No matter where you go there are lotsa tradeoffs; your best bet will depend on what you feel you can deal with, and what resources you'll have to do that, and what your relationship is with the locals.

The postings are full of rants by angry jackasses who look forward to economic crisis and a breakdown in civil order thinking they will be free to express their violent instincts. I dont think the new owners of Ozark starter castles and McMansions will have that attitude; rather I'd expect them to try to organize "well regulated militias" to defend their investments. The Bitterroot valley, Lake Tahoe, Aspen, The St. Laurence "thousand Islands, Hawaii, and other such areas would prolly do the same.

Of the lot, the AR Ozarks have the most job opportunity for those of more modest means. Manufacturing jobs are still increasing, and for parents, the school systems still work. The radio today was talking about an outbreak of an antibiotic resistant pathogen. Something like that could get out of hand in a metro area any time.

A global run on the dollar would not be rational, but even if we had wise political leadership, as the price of oil keeps going up, global market panic could set in at any time. Everyone worries about the sub prime and foreclosure. I heard fags and hippy wannabees are moving to New Orleans to squat in houses. I dont think we will hear about that in the media.

I also know of a somewhat ratty, but nevertheless sound, house on 3.5 acres that associates acquired by simply paying the taxes. We have a couple dykes living in it, another part of the Ozark trend. The bank never actually foreclosed after the former owner moved out so as to avoid listing it as a loss on their books. So far as we can tell, it is just on that list of pending litigation, and will stay there forever. I have no way of knowing how much of this kind of thing is going on, but mean to check on another 10 acres I know about next time I go to town.

This is one of the hugely important points that arise out of having personal contacts and knowledge in an area. The only people who know about this are friends. The real estate agents and bankers turn a blind eye to it. Just as they are turning a blind eye to what's going on in New Orleans. Your guess is as good as mine what else they are turning a blind eye to. The only way to find out is to put gas in the car, drive out to put boots on the ground, and take a look. Sure, the dykes could make more money living in a city, but their cost of living now is so low they love it here.

Hi Alex,

How odd it is that after *that* there is a tendency to revert to the regular way of seeing, and over time there is a forgetting.

Well, yes, that is the way of mystical experiences. But I don't think the reversion is complete. At least, not for everyone. Perhaps it is necessary to repeat from time to time. People don't take communion only once. Reorganizing one's worldview from a default or neurotic position probably would require repeat applications to dislodge the old rutted neural pathways.

it seems to me that there has to be 'temporal authority', and temporal government, and that in a way governing is maintaining ignorance, or if not outrightly 'maintaining ignorance',

Alex we are in prison here, and the bars are mental. Who says humanity must be stuck forever in this morass?

Christ as the brightest of bright suns, the solar God who dies and resurrects. Maria as the lunar luminary, and all the myths that lie behind it. In the African traditions (Candomble, Sanataria, Voodoo, etc.) the solar God is 'Chango', and in all the stories that pertain to him he is always being killed and then having to resurrect himself.

I hardly know how to combine the first half of that helluva sentence with the above. Even the semicolon doesn't relieve my confusion. But it is indeed interesting how the same symbolism repeats all over. I suspect there was a world culture at one time, and we see the remnants of it. Atlantis was destroyed, you know.

People seem to live within 'stories' and narratives that define their identity, and this identity needs to be fixed, concretized, fortified.

Yes they do and if you ask me men need it even more, in fact they author the stories for the most part. This is because a man's manhood is at stake if he doesn't know where he is, not to mention his reproductive success. Women look to men for many answers. Where are we, honey? How will we get where we're going? Where are we going? What are we? What are we composed of, anyway? What am I? What kind of a place are we in? Where are the reference points? Is there anyone else here?

And answers there are none.

For many people the rituals and routines of life centered around a Church with its intoning of moral and ethical ideas and demands, was not such a bad arrangement. CG Jung has written about the effect on people as this institution has been eroded, and people are faced with a modernity (a story that is a bad story, a nihilistic story, a story of atomazation and anomie). If we don't have a unifying story, by that I mean culture-at-large, things seems to slide off toward the deep end.

Yes, our society is in a bad way. Perhaps, though, it is just a necessary stage before we hatch into something better. Sometimes, a building has to be torn down before a new one can be built...and that means the wrecking ball, and a lot of dust and debris.

So, I guess there has to be inner and outer mysteries, different levels and means for dealing with different people, with different needs.

Yes, of course but it just pisses me off how people are lied to. I mean, couldn't they do a whole lot better if they weren't fed such shite?
******************
But there are many people in the states, and surely some of 75, who have taken LSD. I would love to go to an ayahuasca ceremony and I have a child of 27. So there.

and they lock people into dreary roles, and we who seek freedom have to resist all that and develop an entire vocabulary of resistance,

You know Alex I really like you. Perhaps you should read Jed McKenna. Freedom is pretty stark. I get more glimpses all the time. Driving down the road today, I saw how all my emotions are just like some sort of program and are optional, I saw how my positive emotional state, the kind of bliss that people aspire to in their spiritual seeking, and which is of course quite pleasurable, is to a large extent under my control and manufactured by me, and furthermore, that it is just a preference, and optional.

Now if you start dosing people with the de rigueur '9 grams of dried cubensis', is that going to help or hinder? You are likely going to witness some very heavy changes in the social order, and people, after that, are going to clammor for 'order' and 'story' that they can live with, and shopping malls, and shoes, and sports...

I think all americans should be required by law to smoke pot once per week.

Iolaus:

Is there anyone else here?

Yes. :-)

"Keep your imagination under control. You must sometimes correct it, sometimes assist it. For it is all important for our happiness and balances reason. The imagination can tyrannize, not being content with looking on, but influences and even often dominates our life. It can make is happy or burden us, depending on the folly that it leads us to. It can make us either content or discontent with ourselves. Before some people it continually holds up the penalties of action and becomes the mortifying lash of fools. The others the imagination promises happiness and adventure with blissful delusion. It can do all this unless you lord over it with the most prudent self-control."

---from The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Balthazar Gracian.
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Anna wrote:

"Alex we are in prison here, and the bars are mental. Who says humanity must be stuck forever in this morass?"

There is so much implied and referred to in your sentence, whole blocks of ideas, hopes, projections, misunderstandings, idealisms, a forcing of subjective 'truths' on an objective world. It is not that I am criticizing you or your idea(s), but rather that I am noting the way that ideas, almost like unconscious potencies moving under Sinbad's sailing ship, determine what we see and what we think. We seem to have certain ideas about 'the world' that, to me, seem less really about the world than about certain cherished notions we hold...about ourselves.

There was a time, I guess, that no one ever even bothered to try to force 'the world' to be anything different from what it 'is', and had all sorts of otherworlds, worlds-beyond, onto which they could cast their projections, their hopes, and in that other-world *feel* everything resolved---a longed-for peace, rest, the end of arduous journeys. In modernity---very specifically in modernity---this sacred world, this 'world beyond' was punctured like a child's balloon. In modernity, in fact, there really is no 'great beyond', there is no Heaven, and so it seems to me that a big part of modernity is being thrown back on ourselves, of seeing our metaphysics thwarted, of having no alternative but to seek our happiness, our 'well-being', in this tangible world, but a tangible world that is secretly controlled and directed by a mental world, a mental world that is one of imagination, even fantasy, delirium even! yet too a very sensible world and domain, very rational, straight-ahead, feet on the ground.

Sometimes it seems pretty clear to me that we have lost track of the way that ideas have developed in the last 200 years, and have molded our perception of the world, turned it round, set fathers against sons and sons against sisters, placed so many contradictions, seemingly unresolvable, in front of us, and that it is no ourselves who are 'masters of our fate' (if this is even possible) but that we are more than anything blown around by idea-winds, we are at the mercy of them. I think sometimes that we don't have even the slightest idea what end is up, where we are or where we are going.

So, with that knotted group of ideas exteriorized (!), one can then approach what you have written, that though it is only 21 little words, is loaded with volumes and decades of condensed thought.

I am not at all certain that we are any more (or less) in a prison than we have ever been at any other time. So much depends on perspective, on where you stand, and so much depends on one's mood, on the humours that one has subjected oneself to. It depends on whether one's reading of 'reality' is misnthropic or 'optimistic'. it depends on what sorts of nutriments one takes in, on what one views as the ends of life, or even the possibilities of life, whether one is a straight 'humanist' or some sort of 'transcendentalist'. There is a sort of 'hystericism' that has taken hold of many people, it is a mood that is passed from person to person like a virus, and when it takes hold of one it turns one into a sort of mouthpeice of some very dark, very fear-driven ideas, some very paranoid ideas about life. Some part of this thread, and some part of this entire forum, seems to like to dwell in this darkness, to rub itself all over, and to proclaim with others how fucked up everything is, and how (logically...) we are right on the brink of Apocalypse. But if one looks at this as partial perception, a semi-awake perception (the perception of a somnabulant), as perception influenced by subvisible forces, unconscious forces, it leads one to at least be open to considering...that the way we see things might be part of some kind of 'group-think' as daybrown says, and at the very least we give ourselves some choices with which to relate to this phenomenon of projection (if that is what it is, I am not making any positive statements one way or the other).

Someone has set before us a road that leads to a magical kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, but it is no longer a metaphysical idea, no longer an idea of transcendence, the path to this kingdom is physical but more importantly 'mental', which is a strange metaphysic in itself. The implication is that it is our minds that direct this theatre, and that it is heaven or hell depending on how we think about it, or what is happening (or not) in our mental world. While I think that our mind determines a great deal, it also seems to me that positive thinking or utopian thinking could only carry us so far. I think we will always run up against rather severe limitations, we will always be thrown back on ourselves, and perhaps we will always be frustrated, in pain, inhibited. But more important than that, or more considerable, is to examine how utopian idealism has infected (!) our thinking, and to what degree this thinking is trickery and dupery, and to what degree it actually directs us toward progress, or thwarts it. In no sense am I at all certain that it is a positive force, so I have to question that element in your 21 words sentence...

Maybe I think that we need some metaphysic, some division, in which the world is divided into three principal realms: that of Hell, a Middle World (where we are) and a Heavenly World of our striving. I am not sure it is 'in the order of things' that our earth is going to be perfected, or that it could even approach perfection, and I actually have some pretty hard questions I want to direct to this perfected world because, oddly enough (in concord with Nietzsche) it looks to be a pretty bland world, a living horror in its own way, and anyway completely contrary to a diagram of 'reality' at least as it pertains to the way things have been. So, we might need another model, and that model is a 'Tragic Model'. The Earth is a place of woe, it is a place where everything is constantly vanishing, but more often than not with tremendous sorrows. You can never really build anything here because, one day or the next, it will be destroyed, often through outright malice, but in any case once you get it all nicely put in order a giant asteroid will crash into it, and you will sit there like old Job scraping your sores with a pot-shard, trying to reason things out with God.

Why cannot we have a tragic and chiarocsuro model of life, where we are not trying to force 'life' to be something it cannot be? and will never be? In any case, for those of us who are the real intelligences, those of us who will drink the strange potions and catch glimpses of the reality behind the veils of 'reality', shouldn't we have more realistic vision? a philosophy of realism? Then, we might be able to have some helpful influence on people, on culture, on consciousness, but none of thie false-messianism that is so damaging to people. I think we have to know what is attainable (not a great deal, but certainly something) and to separate it from what is highly unlikely and a dangerous and foolish illusion, at best.
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And that is why I have reinterpreted the Tibetan Book of the Dead but refracted through a temporal tablet of Machiavelli's Discourses! It's gonna be the next big thing, and I'll be as rich and sought-after as Carlos Castaneda! and just as well known in the upscale eateries of Bevery Hills as he ever was!

;-)

<Why cannot we have a tragic and chiarocsuro model of life, where we are not trying to force 'life' to be something it cannot be? and will never be?>
You could have it Alex, but not in an urban area. As I infer in my Sane Asylum post, you can only do that with people who are rational. The irrational believe in all kinds of insane shit, and you are not going to talk them out of it.

If you had a sane asylum that functioned in the way you describe, then you mite be able to *show* some of the less than optimally rational a better way to live. But I dont think you are going to get anywhere in the postings.

Well Alex,
First, you accuse me of an overactive imagination. I rather think of myself as seeing thru the imaginations of people in general, and myself in the past. It's quite an accomplishment, if I say so myself, and I've worked hard at it. You have an odd way of agreeing with me and disagreeing at the same time. Must be a Jewish trait...

There is so much implied and referred to in your sentence, whole blocks of ideas, hopes, projections, misunderstandings, idealisms, a forcing of subjective 'truths' on an objective world. It is not that I am criticizing you or your idea(s), but rather that I am noting the way that ideas, almost like unconscious potencies moving under Sinbad's sailing ship, determine what we see and what we think. We seem to have certain ideas about 'the world' that, to me, seem less really about the world than about certain cherished notions we hold...about ourselves.

Mmmm...this has been a big insight for me, one that I realized just a year or so ago - naturally there can be some subjectivity about it, but I pretty much reject your final sentence, that I am projecting some cherished notions about myself. I don't think it's about myself. In a nutshell, our world is under control by evil more than I had ever wanted to see, or knew how to see. I suppose that's a negative statement, but it does not mean everyone is miserable, or I am miserable, or that the kingdom of heaven is not spread out upon the earth, all unseen, as Jesus said in the gospel of Thomas.

The hellmarks are the confusion, the fear, and the deliberate twisting of truth for puposes of exploitation and greed. And the way that people re so vulnerable to the lies, and do not know how to find the keys to their cells. Our entire political and medical institutions are built upon lie after lie, and people are regularly dying over it. Looking hard at the world as I have begun to do, and deciding to take seriously Bodhidharma's advice:

Behold the Mind!

meaning: See that the mind has the primary role in shaping our reality and in preventing us from breaking out of the mental prisons, and taking seriously Jed McKenna's opinion that no belief is true, and deciding that human nature, whenever it is within the relative spotlight called "modern times" is not modern and has not been magically released from its foolishness, I therefore must look hard at the present day and discern what foolishness will they be shaking their heads at in wonder 200 years hence? I want to see it now.

There was a time, I guess, that no one ever even bothered to try to force 'the world' to be anything different from what it 'is', and had all sorts of otherworlds, worlds-beyond, onto which they could cast their projections, their hopes, and in that other-world *feel* everything resolved---a longed-for peace, rest, the end of arduous journeys. In modernity---very specifically in modernity---this sacred world, this 'world beyond' was punctured like a child's balloon. In modernity, in fact, there really is no 'great beyond', there is no Heaven, and so it seems to me that a big part of modernity is being thrown back on ourselves, of seeing our metaphysics thwarted, of having no alternative but to seek our happiness, our 'well-being', in this tangible world, but a tangible world that is secretly controlled and directed by a mental world, a mental world that is one of imagination, even fantasy, delirium even! yet too a very sensible world and domain, very rational, straight-ahead, feet on the ground.

That may be true in so far as large chunks of humanity, esp the university educated, but I have not followed that line of thought and I am not floundering for a lack of metaphysic. My trouble with the world as it is, is that people are suffering and confused, and that our world perhaps need not be so cut off from the great beyond. The difference is that I don't look to a childish daddy-god to solve the problems in an imaginary future. The game here, or one of the games, is to take responsibility and to understand why that is the only way. And the only escape is always the now.

Sometimes it seems pretty clear to me that we have lost track of the way that ideas have developed in the last 200 years, and have molded our perception of the world, turned it round, set fathers against sons and sons against sisters, placed so many contradictions, seemingly unresolvable, in front of us, and that it is no ourselves who are 'masters of our fate' (if this is even possible) but that we are more than anything blown around by idea-winds, we are at the mercy of them. I think sometimes that we don't have even the slightest idea what end is up, where we are or where we are going.

Yes,...I suppose...was it better 200 years ago, tho?

I am not at all certain that we are any more (or less) in a prison than we have ever been at any other time.

An interesting, perhaps not crucial question. It may flux a bit.

There is a sort of 'hystericism' that has taken hold of many people, it is a mood that is passed from person to person like a virus, and when it takes hold of one it turns one into a sort of mouthpeice of some very dark, very fear-driven ideas, some very paranoid ideas about life. Some part of this thread, and some part of this entire forum, seems to like to dwell in this darkness, to rub itself all over, and to proclaim with others how fucked up everything is, and how (logically...) we are right on the brink of Apocalypse.

And, I suppose, the alternate opinion is that we are not. Which is what most people will want to think, and even I have to go on living as tho there weren't quite this cloud overhead. As the Bible says, when the apocalypse comes, as in the days of Noah, the people will be doing their thing, getting married, paying their mortgages and living in the city.
And to comfort yourself, you dream up many Nietzschienesque words with which to express how it is all just a dark fantasy having more to do with the individual psychology than anything else. Hey, I hope you're right. I'm having as good a time as anyone has a right to in life, and I want to live in my country place until deep old age. But even if you are right, and there is not particular collapse coming, it does not detract from my statement about living in a hell world.

But do you see how you have made your decision first, and justified it with your mind after?

But if one looks at this as partial perception, a semi-awake perception (the perception of a somnabulant), as perception influenced by subvisible forces, unconscious forces, it leads one to at least be open to considering...that the way we see things might be part of some kind of 'group-think' as daybrown says, and at the very least we give ourselves some choices with which to relate to this phenomenon of projection (if that is what it is, I am not making any positive statements one way or the other).

Now, I could concur as to some groupthinking, but I cannot agree as to the somnambulance. It appears to me instead that those who, like you, apparently, do not want the group perception messed with that are the sleepers. We on my side look hard to information that does not come from fox news and the mainstream in general, all which is mostly paid for. that does not define a sleeping approach. You have given yourself away here that you have dismissed my opinions as being pure fabrication. So yeah, I feel disrespected. You have not considered that you could be missing any information. You have not considered I might have some information.

But that is to be expected, as most humans will strongly resist a leak in their paradigm, although not from one who speaks of those of us who seek freedom having to resist and develop an entire vocabulary of resistence!

Someone has set before us a road that leads to a magical kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, but it is no longer a metaphysical idea, no longer an idea of transcendence, the path to this kingdom is physical but more importantly 'mental', which is a strange metaphysic in itself. The implication is that it is our minds that direct this theatre, and that it is heaven or hell depending on how we think about it, or what is happening (or not) in our mental world. While I think that our mind determines a great deal, it also seems to me that positive thinking or utopian thinking could only carry us so far. I think we will always run up against rather severe limitations, we will always be thrown back on ourselves, and perhaps we will always be frustrated, in pain, inhibited. But more important than that, or more considerable, is to examine how utopian idealism has infected (!) our thinking, and to what degree this thinking is trickery and dupery, and to what degree it actually directs us toward progress, or thwarts it. In no sense am I at all certain that it is a positive force, so I have to question that element in your 21 words sentence...

Someone? Me?
At any rate, I largely agree with this paragraph, so it's worth exploring the contents, and in what sense do you fear it isn't a positive force?

I actually have some pretty hard questions I want to direct to this perfected world because, oddly enough (in concord with Nietzsche) it looks to be a pretty bland world, a living horror in its own way,

A common fear! a source for many jokes - whatever shall we do in heaven? But how dreary to suppose that we must be caught endlessly in this ridiculous situation of confusion and fear and greed and lies.

Do you think the earth is a place of woe?

Why cannot we have a tragic and chiarocsuro model of life, where we are not trying to force 'life' to be something it cannot be? and will never be?

Ah, well then, in your world I am simply trying to keep the darkness at bay.

In any case, for those of us who are the real intelligences, those of us who will drink the strange potions and catch glimpses of the reality behind the veils of 'reality', shouldn't we have more realistic vision? a philosophy of realism?

But I have not proposed a vision, other than frustration at the magnitude and persistence and cruelty of the lies - for the most part I have simply presented my glimpse behind the veils of reality. And it is not as if people have failed to note what I say, but I think they have noted it in an obscure way and that is insufficient because they mostly pretend it is not so, and act accordingly. They don't see the depth and pervasiveness of the problem.
There are others glimpses behind the veil, more enjoyable and interesting. But this problem of evil !

Then, we might be able to have some helpful influence on people, on culture, on consciousness, but none of thie false-messianism that is so damaging to people. I think we have to know what is attainable (not a great deal, but certainly something) and to separate it from what is highly unlikely and a dangerous and foolish illusion, at best.

In fact, I am not sure what you refer to. Dangerous messianism? Dangerous illusion?
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<<Sometimes it seems pretty clear to me that we have lost track of the way that ideas have developed in the last 200 years, and have molded our perception of the world, turned it round, set fathers against sons and sons against sisters, placed so many contradictions, seemingly unresolvable, in front of us, and that it is no ourselves who are 'masters of our fate' (if this is even possible) but that we are more than anything blown around by idea-winds, we are at the mercy of them. I think sometimes that we don't have even the slightest idea what end is up, where we are or where we are going.>>

<Yes,...I suppose...was it better 200 years ago, tho?>
yes!
Archaeological exam of bog body stomach contents and rural village bone middens to find over 100 wild plants and animals in the diet. That's a wide variety of trace minerals and micronutrients which are missing in the modern diet, but were still in the diet of the Founding Farmers and 90% of the rest of the population, which was also living off the land.

You can track the decline in academic performance in the schools with the replacement of the family farm by agribusiness, and organic agriculture with petrochemicals. You can look at the neurological studies done on rats to see how this nutritional deficit and contamination damaged mental development.

You can look up the school reports from areas which still have family farms and notice the maintenance of academic performance. The posted autism rate is 1:166. The posted rate for the Amish kids, who are still raised on organic family farm food: 1:15,000.

when European farmers came to America, they found richer soils and more biodiversity in the ecosystems, which very rapidly became evident as American soldiers became bigger, more organized, and more innovative than their European counterparts, from whom they descended.

lol jews did wtc!!!!1!1111

lol jews

Unidian wrote:lol jews did wtc!!!!1!1111

lol jews

They could not have done it without the cooperation of American Christians.

I was joking. But one could quite seriously say that "religion did wtc" and be on the mark.

Iolaus: Nice post.

daybrown wrote:You can track the decline in academic performance in the schools with the replacement of the family farm by agribusiness, and organic agriculture with petrochemicals.

Oh? Evidence, please.

here is a little fact for you? Average IQ worldwide has increased about 30 points in the last century. This is called 'Flynn effect'. interesting, isn't it, how academic performance would drop (according to your unsupported claims) while IQ would rise, given how strongly IQ is correrlated with academic performance?..

You wouldn't be making shit up, would you?..

You can look at the neurological studies done on rats to see how this nutritional deficit and contamination damaged mental development.

You mean ther studies when they feed rats poison and stuff? Why don't you look at axctual real intellectual development of real people, and how much it has increased?

You can look up the school reports from areas which still have family farms and notice the maintenance of academic performance. The posted autism rate is 1:166. The posted rate for the Amish kids, who are still raised on organic family farm food: 1:15,000.

We can look it up? No, dude. You make the claim, it's your job to source it. Hop to it.

The bit about the Amish is true, but it's not clear what the cause of that is.

IQ has become a debatable item because the configuation of the test has been altered in response to charges of sexism and racism. No place is this seen so clearly as in Diamond's report on the New Guinea Highlanders, who cant handle simple algebra. But Diamond also mentions how he can follow a hunter into the forest and listen to the man draw on an encyclopedic scale database to expound for hours on the minutae of all the flora and fauna encountered.

Cause Diamond cant remember this, they think he is retarded. No, I look at the attention span, and the way that elections are carried on. We have candidates speak for a minute or so on any given topic. But people today can hardly read thru the Lincoln/Douglas debates, which went on for a couple hours, much less actually stand around long enuf to follow the threads.

PBS did a report on the New Orleans schools last week, noting the dropout rate was 60%. If you get out an atlas, and look up the small hill towns in the Arkansas Ozarks, like Alread, Bee Branch, Clinton, Deer, Eureka Springs, Flippin, Greer's Ferry, Heber Springs... thru the alphabet, and then look at the school report, http://normessasweb.uark.edu/reportcards/select.php
The numbers just jump out at you if you know anything of statistics. The dropout rate is in the single digits. The graduation rates near 90%. Attendance rates near 95%. And the classes themselves average between the mid 50th and 60th percentile.

Some of the scores seen turn out to be the result of eliminating from the testing all the kids who are autistic, or have ADD, ADHD, ICD, are depressed or on meds. Which would prevent the averages from being lower. But if you look at the report above, you see that over 95% of the kids are tested. I was put on to this by asking an old friend who was a school nurse. I used to work with autistic kids, had seen the TV report of 1:166, and wondered how many she had:"none." She went on to say she only knew of one kid in a district of 4000. I asked again at another school, and they didnt have any either.

What's the diff? Like the Amish kids, most of them grow up on family farms. the towns are too small for fast food joints. But not too small for a couple of local produce and fruit stores. Leslie, the town I'm most familiar with, has had an *organic* bakery for over 20 years. pop 627.

Why has Christian fundamentalism expanded so fast if the population has not become less rational? Why are half of the Green Berets raised on family farms? Why are the postings so full of insane rants, ad hominum, and lame attempts at quick comebacks?

While there certainly have been lotsa rat studies on poisons, there are also some done with soda. Which show that the rats will drink as much as they can, and return as often as they can to drink more. When this is tried with real fruit juice, the rats drink a lot less, and dont come back nearly as often. Neurological study suggests that there are real nutrients in the fruit juice which the rat neural biology evolved to expect. It is not the volume of intake, but the presence of obscure trace minerals and micronutrients in the limbic system that turn off the appetite response.

Its also been demonstrated that the chemical molecular structure of organo phosphates mimic that of essential nutrients, and that some of the 150 or so neurotransmitters identified so far, lacking the appropriate molecular structure, will try to make do, but this results in the failure to lay down the correct neural pathways during learning. This is partly how organo phosphates kill bugs in the first place, by damaging the nervous system. But merely homeopathic levels, when ingested during childhood, prevents maximal mental development.

It is not good news. People dont want to think about the way their parents raised them, much less what they have been doing to their own kids. But I know some women in healthcare who have picked up on it. FRONTLINE's "Yaqui Valley" report showed an alarming epidemic of autism that they traced to exposure to agribusiness chemicals. the small family farm kids and the Amish, mentioned above, have the lowest rates, and the least exposure to petrochemicals, sugar cereals, junkfood, and soda.

i see it in the 911 postings. I dont pretend to know what happened. But the sheer number of postings by former staff members of the bureaucracy and retired military who are not satisfied with the officlal report leads me to think that a more thorough investigation would be in order. A number of apparently logically inconsistencies in the official report have been brought to my attention.

But I am told I am crazy for thinking that a less hurried and more complete investigation is called for. I have worked in mental institutions, and have a degree in psych, and that request is not sufficient grounds to call for having my head examined. I am also aware of the work on obedience by Milgram, that on authority by Zimbardo, and that on group think by Janis, which those who say I am crazy seem oblivious of.

Modern media has moved well beyond the techniques of the Nazis and Orwell. But one of the reasons I like the postings, is that you can go back thru the ascii to see if it is logically consistent. there's no need to take a commercial break when a difficult point is reached. They know what the attention span of their audience is, whereas I'm often accused of exceeding it in the postings.

How many today have read Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'? Even among the politicians? Yet Gibbon published vol 1, in 1776, and if you read the writings of the Founding Farmers, you can tell *they* had. It was a big hit. How many know what Gibbon had to say today? Bush?

And what historian today shows us how to draw on such a vast canon of sources? He could keep up with a New Guinea Highlander, but instead draws on the minutia of the Roman age in a way that far exceeds the mental powers of historians now, much less today's audience. But the Founding Farmers ate it up.

http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/home.html Take a look. see how many of those you know could handle it.