It's The End Of The World As We Know It

Thirty years after I am dead and gone and turned to worm food, someone is liable to stumble on this commentary. They may be the first person to to read it, in fact. I don't think I have a lot of loyal readers.

In a nutshell, and I've said it before, the world as we know it is screwed. People have lost touch with reality, and reality is not working out the way we had always expected it would be. Something needs to be done approximately 25 years ago, and the only things that is being done is valuable resources are being wasted to debate what needs to be done.

Twenty years ago, the leading scientists of the world stood up and and told us all that something needed to be done, and it needed to be done soon. This is documented. It was in all the papers of the time. The uproar lasted exactly long enough for the influence of big business to squelch the publicity. What was meant to be a snowball gaining momentum was laughed off in the plenty of the times.

Near we are, a score of years farther down the line, not even a blink of a cosmic eye, and there is indisputable proof that our poles are melting. Beaches are not eroding 50 years from now, they are eroding right now, and local weathermen pass it off as "unusually high tides."

Folks, you can take your blinders off any time you get ready. If you don't wake up and take notice pretty soon, it is going to be too late for us to do any good. Some of the best minds in the world think it already is. Look at what is happening in the world, and start connecting the dots.. they are really big dots and you have to work pretty hard not to see the big picture.

• Nearly every week, some foodstuff or other is recalled due to contamination.
• World military forces are drawing in on the expansive oil fields of the Middle East.
• Ice at the planet's poles is melting faster than anyone had expected.
• Ordinary people are becoming mass murderers in whims of fantasy.

How about some more bad news:
If we eliminated 100% of our human carbon emissions tomorrow, every last bit, it would still be 25 to 50 years before the things we have already pumped into out atmosphere have had their full effect. Let me repeart that, in case the are Doctorates reading: If emissions completely stopped tomorrow, it would still be 50 years before the damage stopped increasing. Think about that very carefully, because it is important.

Think of the carbon emission phenomenon as peak oil in reverse. The theory of peak oil says that you reach a peak production, and then the availability constantly drops off from that point onward. For carbon emissions, if they suddenly drop off, it will still be 50 years before the peak is reached, at which time the slow decline would begin.

Anything we do to the atmosphere today is being done to treat conditions that we put into motion at about the same time as those first scientists were trying to raise the alarm. We are DECADES from dealing with the emissions that were released while I have been writing this. 

If you don't get the point by now, the odds are good that you never will.

©2009 ColGlobe Productions

Writing: The Secret Society

Let's talk about me for a minute. ~ Alan Parsons Project

I write for a living. Whoop-de-do. Another writer who can't seem to put together a best-seller, lurking a little to the limbo side of being an author. It is not the fact that I put together words which makes me a member of that elite group, but more a factor of the words I am paid to weave. I write product reviews and how-to articles for the most part. I teach you how things are done the right way, and why you should buy this product instead of that one. It is not a glitzy occupation on the surface.

But underneath, I have my fingers on the very wheels of capitalistic society. With a few clicks of my mouse and several tens of thousands of key presses, I tell you what you want, and convince you of what you don't want. I mix facts and fantasy in a way that makes it difficult to separate the two, and dish it out a few hundred words at a time, not as the gospel truth, but as something more basic. I give people without confidence the desire to make something of themselves, and encourage people who will never use them to invest hundreds or thousands of dollars in equipment that is destined to collect dust and do little else.

That is how I am a member of that select group. Without ever seeing it happening, I somehow went from being one of us, to being part of the mystical them who makes the rules and decides the fads. And I do it off the top of my head, often in the very wee hours of the night.

Who else is a member of this elite club? I have no idea. I have talked to a few of us, but most of those I have talked to really aren't moving and shaking anything except their own egos. And the ones who are helping to shape what society sees.. they don't realize it any more than I did for a the first year. We are such a top-secret organization that we don't even know who the other members are. Less than 1% of us even realize what it is we are doing.

I read a book some years back by a man named Clive Barker. If you want to read some quality storytelling, Mr. barker is one of the best. He doesn't seem to know the difference between the words procrastinate and prevaricate ( an error that I have noticed in several of his books), but other than that one flaw, I have found very little in his tales that is mediocre, and nothing that is poorly told. But I brought him up to present an example.

The book in question is titled, The Great and Secret Show, and centers around the fantastical notion that the dead letters office of the post office contains an intricate collection of conversations and hopeless searches for some corner of reality that lies somehow just beyond comprehension. The story becomes much more fantastical as it unfolds, but this basic notion gave me reason to stop and ponder, and my conclusion is that the writers of the world are only another facet of that great and secret show. We do not exist in some alternate reality, but we are in the business of creating them on a regular basis for others. We add the scent of lemons on a summer afternoon, and sprinkle a light mist of pollen on the branches of trees on spring mornings. We define the way a particular dog barks, and set words to the music that soothes the heart of savage beasts.

Writers are not creatures of other dimensions, or demi-gods of this one, as the characters in that book, but we are the closest thing to it that exists in the world, so far as even "they" know. Without us, your world would be less colorful, your meals would be less tasty, and everything you do would have less meaning. Those things are defined by people like me. We don't even have to know anything about them in order to make them real, we simply imagine them into existence, and pour them on a cold screen where they congeal into something that almost looks like the real thing.

I cannot speak for other writers, but I have a very strong suspicion that those of us who belong to the club write, not because we want to, but because we somehow have to. We write for the same reason most people eat, or sleep or breathe.. we do it because we have no choice. Myself, I can set down my pen or close OpenOffice any time I want to, but I can't walk awy from it. Somehwere farther along the path, I will return to gluing together random words. If I don't write, something inside me becomes constipated, and I find myself having more and more trouble keeping fresh thoughts flowing, because I have not set others to rest. Ghosts of concepts wake me up from a sound sleep, and tell me that I have something I need to do. I write for the same reason a lizard catches flies.. because it is what I exist to do. And that is the qualification that I think defines our special club.. people who don't write from choice, but from necessity.

Human Arrogance - Evolution and Self-Defeat

As a species, we have a lot of nerve. We talk about how we need to protect our planet, and protect this species or that one from possible extinction. And all the while, no one ever points out that we are an aberration. If not for the chance impact of one or more meteorites 65 million years ago, humans as we know them today wouldn't exist. And when you get right down to the facts of life as we know it, the human species is hell-bent on self- destruction anyway.

Breaking Babies
As I write this paragraph, a television ad is offering "protection in case of birth control failure" which is a fancy way of saying an abortion pill. And abortion itself is a species defeating tactic. How many times have crucial mutations in our gene pool been sucked out of a woman's womb with a vacuum cleaner?  There is no way we can ever know. But what we do know, and what has been verified time after time, is that it only takes a single favorable mutation to complete split a species and allow new ones to develop.

Voluntary Sterilization
Every man that gets a vasectomy, or woman who gets her tubes tied, is a voluntary dead-end in an evolutionary chain that stretches all the way back to the first first primitive life on Earth. Of their own free will, they have ended any additional material they may have had to offer the tree of life. How many times have the smartest people who would ever live never lived at all? And how has that damaged the future of our species?

Racial Inequity
A chihuahua can't see that it isn't as big as a pit bull. Only the human species has set up lines if division within the species, blocking off possible genetic mutations, and performing occasional bouts of genocide on people who simply don't look or act or talk like other people. Reality check: We are all different from other people. Not even a plague-like disease will try to kill itself, but humanity has turned it into an art, known as war.

War - What is it Good For?
Nowhere in nature is a spectacle like war repeated. Limbs and entire branches on the tree of evolution engaged in wiping themselves out. The very best that the races of mankind have to offer are packed off to die by weapons that strike from impossibly long distances. Not the ill and dying, or the frail and disabled. Not weak of mind. The very best that can be found. Smarter. Stronger. Braver. Taller. The best features of the entire species are recruited for possible execution.

The Miracle of Man
The real miracle of our existence is that we have not exterminated ourselves. Humanity is alone in feeling malice towards itself, and has spent thousands of years devising methods of bring that malice into action. We burn, starve, subjugate, isolate, and eradicate ourselves in ways that are not duplicated anywhere in terrestrial evolution. And we applaud ourselves for being masters of the world while we do it.

Mass Extinctions
We spoeak of mass extinctions being caused in our lifetimes, but neglect to admit that such extinctions have happened throughout the history of the planet. When a species is able to successfully displace other species, those which can't compete die. We are far from the first invasive species that has wrecked havoc around the globe, and the odds are good that many more will follow after us.

Ti-Ming - The Theory of Everything (Reprint)

Perhaps as old as the universe itself, Ti-Ming accounts for a goodly portion of everything that exists. The discipline of Ti-Ming has been preached by many and practiced by few for thousands of years, in palace gardens and village hovels. Ti-ming is so important to life as we know it, that it has been given it's own dimension, right along with height width, and depth. And that is where the pity begins.

Timing is everything. It is an axiom of all life on earth, and expressed in various forms in every language. Every battle that has ever been won, or heart lost, has been at the whim of Timing, and acknowledged as the great decider yes or no, success or failure, even here or there. To say that it is a dimensions such as the width of an object is both misleading and belittling to something as valuable as timing, without which neither space nor substance could exist at all.

I have seen personal fates mortally altered by the dropping of a coin, and studied histories that came crashing down as the result of the act of an instant. Every instance is printed on the film of time, not a moment in the past but a version of right now that has already happened. It contains the depth and length of every moment, defining it as the container in which the other perceptions are locked, not a partner in their presence.

Without the timing of the seasons, or even the spin of the planet around the sun, it couldn't have happened at all. This is not obscure philosophy, but a statement of fact so basic that most would never notice it at all. And yet our very existence depends on not just one such instant of time, but an entire sequence of them stretching back to the moment of the Big Bang itself. Each one a direct and necessary result of the ones that came before it.

Without the element of time, there is no touch, no taste, no sense of cold or sound of the wind. Sound itself is a feature of something traveling directly across the field of time. The idea that even space could share equally in something as powerful as time is a mistaken impression of the very nature of time itself.

Light itself is helpless in the absence of time. there can be no movement, leaving light as frozen in an instant as if it didn't exist at all. Time defines the movement of the smallest particles, and the largest masses, it played a apart in the very act of creation in every way we have ever imagined. Without time, there can no creation, regardless of the form that creation may take. Nothing of which we have any concept at all exists outside of the container that is time. Nothing.

Length can be zero, as well as depth and width. Dimensions can be eliminated from the equation, narrowing down each variable until you reach a point in time where nothing exists. But that was a point in time, because even time could not be removed until there was nothing else left, and only then because time would become meaningless, not because it would cease to exist.

Time controls gravity, and regulates magnetism. It causes elements to decay, and unleashes both the fury of storms and the majesty of snow capped mountains.

Never forget that. Ti-Ming is everything. In Ti-Ming, all other things exist, but none can exist without it. The smallest instant is but a representation of the much larger fabric of time, which stretches to the very ends of space itself.