Going Green in America - Giving Up Driving

In the United states, having concerns about the ecology of the planet is apparently akin to some sort of crime. Over a year ago, in the face of the highest fuel prices in history, I gave up driving. I gave up my vehicle, and since have allowed my drivers license to expire. I haven't had a regret about it.

I am in better physical shape now than I was a year ago, mostly a result of riding a bicycle when I needed to go somewhere. I am also in a better frame of mind, because the bike rides give me ample opportunity to reflect on the world around me - to smell the roses, if you will.

But when it comes to my friends and neighbors, it is a whole different story. Last week, I spent 20 minutes trying to explain to someone that I gave up driving voluntarily, and the blank look on their face told me that they never did comprehend the concept. Apparently, the only reason one gives up the privilege of driving is through DUI or some other legal intervention. There simply isn't an analogy for giving it up voluntarily.

No, I was not arrested for drunk driving, there are not a lot of points on my driving record, and no judge took my license away. I chose to give up the non-right of my own volition. In return, I am healthier, and have reduced my problematic stress level. And I save several hundred dollars every month in car, insurance, fuel, and upkeep. In my mind, it was a decision worth making.

If only I could get my fellow Americans to see that there is no crime in cutting the strings that tie you to the fuel companies and insurance companies. Only in America is it accepted that everyone who is anyone has to drive a car. In other countries, vehicles can be shared among the entire family, or not owned at all, but we Americans have somehow got the car fixed in our head as a symbol of personal freedom.

THERE IS NO FREEDOM IN A VEHICLE. The idea that having a car makes you more free is absurd. If you have a car, you are a prisoner of the car makers and dealers. Your are held helplessly in the grip of auto insurance brokers. You are forced to pay tribute to oil companies in exchange for driving your "little piece of freedom." A vehicle is a liability, it is a luxury that has somehow become confused with a carefree, lifestyle. It is a huge expense, and little more.

People expect me to be embarrassed about not owning a car, as though it were a mark of my poverty or sin. It perplexes them when I am not penitent. They quiz me at length, trying to determine what my hidden crime may be, knowing it must be a hefty one indeed, for me to lie so vehemently about it.

After all, no one gives up driving a vehicle voluntarily. The idea of saving those thousands of dollars every year is completely beyond the average person's comprehension. Nothing short of a court order can stay most people's right foot, and even that won't work for a majority who perceive driving as a symbol of their brave and bankrupt nation.

Yes, there are times when having a vehicle would be nice. But there are others who own vehicles, and when times are tough, most people are willing to drive you around for a few extra bucks in the gas tank. It is an inconvenience when I have to find such a ride, but nothing compared to the financial burden of owning my own car.

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

Society: The Crazy Years

Some days, when I am feeling a bit more optimistic about humanity, I think you have all lost your minds. I don't hold it against you, because I don't think anyone is intentionally out of touch with reality, but it does make me cautious when I am forced to move around in the world. Your insanity frightens me, because it is an unpredictable insanity, and I have no way of guessing who might crack next, or in what direction they will go when they snap.

Half a century ago, a science fiction writer laid out a timeline of humanity, and labeled the years during the last decades of the 20th century and throughout the 21st as "The Crazy Years." During this period of time, according to Heinlein's timeline, all manner of strange behavior becomes the norm. John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up is based around the year 2010, and is filled with false "news" articles about people doing things which you and I might find completely insane, if not for the fact that those same things are happening in the daily news every day, for the same reasons that Brunner blamed them on more than 30 years ago. For him, these were not the Crazy Years, they were the end result of a society that was unsoundly based to begin with.

Any way you look at it, television stars who kill their spouses and then themselves is not normal. Exploding bombs anywhere, at any time, in protest of the loss of life is not exactly rational thought. The logic required to abduct a child escapes me. So much of what my fellow humans are capable of is based on unstable thoughts and actions that I have little choice but to admit that we have entered, for better or worse, the Crazy Years.

There is no cure for the behavior of the Crazy Years. It will play itself out an a billion minor deceits and major debacles, it will create alliances and topple the beliefs of thousands of years. And we have instances in our history that show us how it will finish out. The Fall of Rome was the culmination of another cycle of Crazy Years, and the debauchery and bloodthirst of the Empire's final decades were only symptoms of a disease that rippled throughout the entire society. Later, a second wave of Crazy Years, or perhaps the final dredges of the Roman Collapse, swept through Europe, eradicating knowledge and science in its path, and ushering in a period in our history that is simply referred to as the Dark Ages.

Are we really in the Crazy Years? Of course not. The books that forecast that period of time are purely fictional, and have no basis in fact. Never mind that the man who wrote them was also one of a very small group invited to help establish mankind's first voyages into space. Crazy Years are a fantasy.

Most adults get out of bed every day and work 40 hours or more every week, simply to give the fruits of their labors away, and start a fresh week in the same position as the previous one finished. And nobody seems to think there is anything wrong with that picture. Nobody seems to question that so much of their lives are being used to support the whims and maneuverings of the rich and powerful. My friends, I don't care what Bruce Hornsby had to say on the subject, this is most definitely NOT "just the way it is."

I have some bad news for those of you who have led sheltered lives and not had to experience the truth: There is absolutely nothing you can do that cannot be taken away from you in the blink of an eye. Nothing. Not your health, your family, your home, or your education. Everything you can imagine can be ripped away from by a single blown tire, or an errant bolt of lightning. You are not safe, and you are definitely not protected, and there is no amount of money you can earn that will provide safety or protection. Luckily, most of you will never have to experience anything worse than the loss of a friend, but that doesn't make total loss any less tragic for those who are devastated by it regardless of their effort to prevent disaster.

Are we living in the Crazy Years? Nope. Nothing wrong here.

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.

DoomsDay 2012?

Okay, I am not a superstitious person, and have very little use for ancient rituals of any religion. But I neither am I foolish enough to think that modern man knows so much more than his less-industrialized predecessors. Whether humanity is headed for Doomsday in a little over THREE years is doubtful, but the fact that we are very near to some major social cataclysms is irrefutable.

Let's put aside our haughtiness for a few moments, and look, not at the science of celestial rotations, but at the events in the world around us. I do not have enough fingers on both hands to tick off the many points of balance that are dangerously close to tipping, and that is a very bad thing, indeed. Instead, I'll name a few seemingly isolated groups, which encompass most of these problems through various interaction.

• Global Warming
  Even as the fools of the Northern Hemisphere have jumped onto their soap boxes and began to preach that global warming is a farce, and we are having one of the coldest winters on record, human beings are being cooked in their vehicles in the Southern Hemisphere. Droughts that have carried over and intensified for many years are starting to culminate in the inhabited portion of Australia becoming little more than fire tinder under the right conditions. And yet self-proclaimed experts in the United Kingdom tell us the danger of global warming has passed us by.
  
  
• Geologic Stresses
  Around the world, volcanoes that have lain in dormant remission for decades or longer have begun to rumble and spew and spit. Earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches, and all manner of devastation related to movements in the crust of the Earth are becoming weekly events in many countries around the world.
  
  
• Global Food Shortages
  Around the world, millions of people are falling short of the basic requirements of sustenance. Grain is rotting in shipping yards as human conflict prevent delivery to entire peoples who are facing slow death through malnutrition. Ill-considered concepts of sustainable fuel are further reducing the available grains that feed the world, and luring landowners away from human food crops altogether in search of elusive farming profits.
  
  
• Droughts and Floods
  As the ecosystem wobbles around, fumbling to adjust its internal balance to account for carbon releases beyond anything that should have been naturally possible, fields are wilting and dying, while other fertile regions are made unusable by rising waters and unprecedented rainfall.
  
  
• Financial Collapse
  World economies are poised to crash if only a little more stress is applied to the systems. Stocks which traded at record highs a few short months ago can now be had for pennies on the dollar. Working class people around the world are being faced with choices between food and shelter. Entire nations are struggling to prevent an economic failure unimaginable a quarter of a century ago.
  
  
• Human Deviance
  The murder rate is rising. White collar and strong arm crime are flourishing. Pedophilia is becoming commonplace, and tragic stories of abuse and neglect have become so common that there is a fear that society will be desensitized to their dangers. Psychopathic behavior, which has always afflicted a percentage of the population, is becoming more apparent as larger populations are crowded into smaller areas of habitat.

Now then. Let's look at 2012 again. No failure of such unprecedented proportions could happen overnight, short of some major calamity such as a meteor striking the earth. And the nightly news is happy to point out the chance of that happening is less than the chance of dying by falling in the shower. But it seems as though everyone is either missing the point, or choosing to ignore it: No failure of such unprecedented proportions could happen overnight.

Instead, let us consider that the current state of the world indicates an overall collapse of systems which is not GOING to happen, but is IN PROGRESS. Global warming won't happen overnight, but has been in progress for longer than any human living today. Desperate people will do the unthinkable. The very law of evolution supersedes any human legal edicts, and people will do what they feel is required to protect themselves and their offspring.

While researchers are pulling in grant money to study things which no one believes will come to be, the ugly truth is slowly wrapping itself around the figurative throat of a majority of the life forms on the planet. Doomsday, whenever it may arrive, won't come in the blink of eye, but will simply be there one day when the veil of ignorance is pushed aside.

We are not waiting on a global emergency, but living through it's final stages of development. And most us are blinded by the tiny points of consideration to the point that we are totally unable to see the larger picture of how these individual parts combine into a tapestry of human futility.

US Stock Market Stumble - Reprint

ColGlobe Productions › Edit — WordPress

Didn't your MOTHER ever teach you not to be greedy? Don't you wish you had listened?

It's okay, unless you were totally absorbed in imaginary wealth, you'll make it through. The rest of you are screwed. Not my fault, you did it to yourself.

The US stock market stumble isn't the end of the world.

It's the equalizer to bring the high and mighty back into the realm of reality. As it looks at this writing, not even gold is a sacred investment, but that isn't a surprise to people who have looked with open minds rather than open wallets. THERE IS ONLY SO MUCH WEALTH IN THE WORLD. It has always has been that way, and so it will ever be.

For the other 90% of us, there's some really good news. The inflated prices we've been paying for years to boost the incomes of the greedy few at the top are going to drop. It is not inconceivable that we'll see gasoline below 2 bucks a gallon again, and while it won't show up at the grocery store for a few months yet, we'll be seeing the benefits at department stores this holiday season. Those of us who work hard for our money rather than playing with other people's futures are being put on steadier footings than we've had for many years.
Credit is not real wealth. It never was. It never will be.

Go to http://www.myspace.com/illusnist, and read the blog posted November 14, 2007, titled "notes from my debit card." There is nothing happening today that wasn't already in progress a year ago. NOTHING. It has been in progress for over 200 years, perhaps as much as 2000 years.

An excerpt:

For exhibit number two, we'll introduce the influence of government. Like any other business, government wants your money as well. In exchange for your money, government will tell you what to buy, and when to buy and how to buy and why its important to buy it now. They won't TELL YOU they are telling you this. That would collapse the markets. In capitalism, the government is responsible for maintaining the markets. It must regulate the local currency exchange, and modify something that I will call "base value" as needed to keep the economy active. This second part sounds good until some wise-ass points out that "base value" is any arbitrary value. In other words, it isn't real. It is a value that is generated by a very select group of people (in the U.S., this group is the federal reserve, or simply "The Fed"), which has little or no actual basis in reality, but relies of the whims of current events. This number, while being imaginary, is the "base value" on which everything else is priced. And there you have exhibit two, parts A (government guides consumer buying) and B (government sets arbitrary base value of currency). If desired, we could complicate things by adding part C (government prohibits monopolies under exhibit number one to prevent competition under exhibit number two, parts A and B).

Hallelujah, noel, be it heaven or hell, the Christmas we get, we deserve.

Stock Market Woes

Are you having stock market woes?  For many, but only a small percentage of the population, the current stock market implosion is a terrible thing.  For the vast majority of us, it will make our lives a little better.  Let me explain it to you, slowly, and without using too many large words.

When the stock market is high, people were buying those high priced stocks instead of selling them are being set up for failure.  You see, when the price of a stock falls, the value goes down, and a stockholder takes a loss.  On the other hand, as that stock drops, so does the value of that stock as it filters down to the consumer market, and we see companies having price lowering wars to try and lure us in.  They need your money.

Okay, so now mainstreet, who expensive politicians are claiming to want to help, is finally getting a break in a continuous rise in pricing that has gone on for nearly a decade.  Fuel is costing less, food is costing less, the value of items are going down, and it is being reflected in our bank accounts in a way that bail-out billions and tax-payer rebates could never do.  The little guy is not hurt by falling stocks, but helped by them, because the value of that person's money suddenly goes up.

And if you have a few thousand dollars you'd like to do something with, ignore the Wall Street experts who are telling you to hold on to it.  Now is the time to invest, if ever there was one.  Think about it.  Are you more likely to make a profit on stock purchased at 35 a share, or stock purchased at the low of 17 a share?  Come on, folks, this is not rocket science.  The golden rule of stock trading is BUY LOW - SELL HIGH.  The people who don't want you to buy stocks now are the ones who purchased it at a higher price, and hope to drive the value up again to regain some lost revenue.  BUY LOW.  Don't even think about selling anything.  Whatever you have, keep it.  

That includes for selling a car or home.  You can't sell it for the same value it had, so don't try.  HOWEVER, if we BUY LOW, now is excellent for purchasing a home.  Builders are unloading property at record prices right now, to get out from under them.  If you purchase a home now, you are almost certainly guaranteed to make a profit on owning the home in just a few years.  BUY LOW.

Once you've bought a home, a car, and invested in AIG at bargain basement prices, sit on the investments.  The car is going to depreciate anyway, so you can cruise around town while you watch the stock market make a slow turn upward that multiplies the value of your investments.  Stock Market Woes?  Only for those who forgot to BUY LOW, and were stuck with worthless stock.

Go Green to Save Green

I've said it before, and I'll likely say it again many times. We have all got to start paying more attention to what we use and how we use it. The word is CONSERVE. The clue is to REUSE. The choice is not going to be available much longer.

But you can also save a little green by going green. As an example, let's say that you like tomatoes. Did you know that growing two tomato plants can feed the veggie-like fruit to your family for several months, and cost about the same as buying a single large tomato? Or that a fishing license and basic fishing gear have about the same pricetag as buying fresh fish at the market? Did you know that by spreading your lawn cuttings out thinly and evenly on your lawn can reduce the amount of nutrients you must supply to it, AND they'll help hold in moisture so that you can water less?

There are a number of fruits and vegetables that can be grown in pots or flower beds. Tomatoes are excellent potted plants, if carefully pruned, but can also be grown as a climbing vine. In fact, tomato, cucumber, yellow squash, and canteloupe can all be grown on a trellis. Other types of gourds, such as acorn squash, can be grown in a flower bed. A single plum tree will provide more plums than a family can eat in a blooming season. And the price for veggetable and fruit seeds is very low. You can feast for a summer for the cost of buying the ingredients of one deluxe table salad. Onions, peppers, and many types of spices can be grown in pots or planters. And your fence becomes a truly effective hedge when you plant blackberry or other thorny fruit bushes along it. The thorns dissuade trespassing through the thicket, and they'll provide an abundant source of vitamin C for about a month out of the year- longer, if you care to make jams and jellies, pickles and salsas.

Veggies are great, but you'd rather have meat in your diet? If you live within city limits, this can be a problem, but the odds are very good that you can find a private meat packing house within an hour's drive. You'll find that these places offer better deals than you can get in your local chain grocer, and it may sound strange, but the meant will TASTE better. Commercially raised livestock is treated and fed differently than the way the same animals would be treated on a farm, and the result is a leaner, more flavorful cut of meat. If you happen to live on the outskirts of town, you may be allowed by local law to grow some of your own meat, in the form of chickens, rabbits, or even a goat. A goat makes especially good sense, as it can also be used for most household vegetable waste disposal, and to cut and fertilize your lawn. Of course, if you raise any of these meat animals, you'll probably still have to find that area packing house, but you'll still find that you save hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year over conventinal grocery shopping. You'll only think you can't eat an animal you raised yourself until the first couple of bites. Humans have been raising and eating animals for thousands of years and, after all, it's the idea of NOT raising your own food that is recently developed.

Go fishing. You don't need thousands of dollars of expensive gear, either. The fish are not impressed any more by being caught on a brand new $300 rig, than with a 5 year old Zebco 33. Are you fishing to play the "look at me" game, or are you trying to save money by putting food on the table and in the freezer? If you're going to use the millenia-old bait, you can keep a worm bed at home, they're very easy to maintain, and the one-time purchase of a tub of live worms can last you for months, or years. If you really want to go the recycle route, walk along the banks of where you fish, and gather hooks and floats and sinkers for later use.

So let's look at this. We've grown the veggies, and fed the greens and leavings to our rabbits, and used the refuse from the rabbits mixed with plain black dirt to grow our fish bait, which in turn gives us excellent fertilizer for our planting beds. True, each step has an inherent cost, but the overall total is the savings of hundreds or even thousands of dollars over buying the exact same foods in the market. And now, instead of being a dead-end point at the top of a food pyramid, we've become the coordinating center of a cycle that goes around for as long as we wish to keep it going. And the food will all be more flavorful, with a better texture and density.

And what have you saved? Well, there's the cost of the foods themselves, but only by a small margin. If you have a particularly green thumb or lucky hook, you may be able to sell or trade with friends or relatives for something they have an excess of. Bartering allows the distribution of items that would otherwise literally become waste. If you have a really green thumb, you can find a farmer's market in your area to rent a stall, or sell to an existing distributor. But you've also saved fuel, electricity, water, and chemical use, multiplied over EVERY item you have produced yourself. If you are lucky enough to live in a location where a yard goat is an option, you have even provided better lawn care without adding chemicals or using any type of conventional power. And you get to eat the lawnmower!! A small goat will cost LESS than a riding mower, and where the machine continually depreciates, the value of a goat increases as it grows and fattens.

Which part of the equation are we all having a problem with? The part where we come out ahead, or the part where we do less harm to the planet?

--Illusnist
ColGlobe Productions

American Economic Crisis

You know what surprises me the most about the current U.S. economic crisis? It's not the sheer size of the bailout that is required. It's not that without the bailout, the economy can only slip lower. No, those things could be predicted, and anyone of the 3 or 4 people out there who have been reading my useless posts for the past 20 years knows that I've been expecting it. The thing that is a surprise is that no one else realized this was inevitable from the very beginning. And we haven't yet gotten to the exciting part of the ride. Wait until the whole planet finds out that there just isn't enough money to pay the debt, or enough resources to build the products, or enough fuel to power the machines. Cycles do not go forever in one direction, they go high only to fall low and roll around again and again, losing a little more momentum with ever smaller rotations. Until they reach a dead stop.

In the U.S., multi level marketing is illegal. Why is a valid and profitable marketing plan disallowed by law? It was that consideration that first drove home, in my mind, the flaw of the U.S. economic system. You see, MLM cannot be allowed to exist, because it is a model of the U.S. economy in miniature. A company produces a product, and that product is passed through the hands of the company managers to the next lower level of product distributors. The distributors in turn arrange for another level of product distribution below them, and another level below that. And another. And another. The only problem is that the only people who are actually buying the product are the ones at the very bottom of the pyramid, the ones who made the product to begin with, for the people sitting comfortably at the top. Those people live to make a product to earn the money that buys the product that they created. Is there logic in doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting the result to be any different?

Why has no one ever realized the that capitalism never had a hope of working smoothly forever? It cannot be sustained indefinitely by pouring more and more resources into the top tiers of the system. In the end, the people at the bottom simply can't continue to feed the top, produce the product, AND buy the product. This is not a difficult train of logic to follow. It's taught in middle school in the U.S. And yet I have never heard anyone point out the futility that is inherent in the system. Ever.

So here we are, and the people at the top, who own the mortgages on our nation's homes and collect on the balances on our people's credit cards, they are standing in front of us in their $1000 suits and telling us that as American citizens it is our duty to give them enough money to sustain themselves. Giving them the money will not eliminate our mortgages, or ameliorate our debts. We still have to pay the monthly bills, or they'll take everything we have, but we must give them an amount of money that exceeds that very debt as well. Excuse me? Those men in their fancy suits make more money in a single day than I earn in most of a year, and yet it is MY responsibility to bail them out? I think they are going to have to draw me a picture, because I surely don't understand the logic.

Right on, and pigs will fly.

I am a poor person. I rent a room. I pay for my rent, my food, and everything else I must buy with cash. I've always done so. I have done so with a dogged deliberateness that flew in the face of insurance companies who wouldn't insure me because I had no credit. I did it despite automobile dealerships who refused to sell me a car for CASH because I had no established credit. I did it because when the collapse comes, as I've always known it must, I will not be as badly affected by the calamity. I'll still be poor, but guess what? Having lived my life that way, I'll be better able to survive the crash than those whose lives have been dedicated to mounting sums of nonexistent money. I am poor by choice, not by force.

I resent that someone who makes more in a year than I will earn my lifetime needs me to bail them out. I find it laughable and ludicrous that the financial moguls are scrambling for some safe haven in which to continue their inflated egos. I say let them fall. Let them learn to wonder how to pay for next week's groceries, or have to repair a rip in last year's fashions. Let them sell their luxury cars which guzzle the last dregs of fossil fuels and walk to their jobs, or ride the public transportation they've always told me was good enough for such as myself. Let them discover that equality isn't just for the lower class, but it means we are all in the same boat, and that boat has a leak and must be constantly tended to avoid being left adrift without a life raft. Let them wash their dinner dishes with their own hands, and hang their laundry on lines to dry in the sun. After all, it's good enough for me, and they've told me so all my life.

Let the auto insurance companies go, they who have charged me more than the value of all the vehicles I have ever owned regardless that I have rarely sped and never caused an accident; let them fold up and fade away. I've supported them long enough, only to find out that even with the legally required support of an entire population they they have managed to put themselves into a stranglehold of debt. I've paid my share. I've missed my meals so that they could wear their suits, and worked straight through the day and night to give them money I have never seen a return on. I've lived on dried beans and dry rice, stale bread and tap water. Let them find out what it is like to do without, to wear a sweater indoors in the dead of winter, and to rummage through the sofa cushions for a lousy handful of pennies and nickels. Why should I care that they become just like me and my neighbors and their relatives and their friends and a majority of the people that make up and have made this brave nation? What have they ever, even once, done for me in exchange for all they've taken from me?

I haven't eaten at a restaurant in months, not even from the McDonald's dollar menu; I live on simple foods bought at bargain grocers. But I am far from starving, and I am not naked, and I do not get wet when it rains in the night. I do not ask for a hand out on street corners, nor blame my contemporaries for my failures or fallacies. And I am not alone. I am one of hundreds of millions of people scattered all around the globe. In fact, I am in better financial shape than a majority of the world. I am of sound mind and body, and I laugh at jokes and cry out in pain. I do not fear muggers coming out of the fog, because they can see that I've nothing to give them. I do not fear creditors taking my old computer, because it is mine, bought with money earned through hard work and hot sweat. For all the bits of nothing much that I have, my investment is paid and the deal is done. And it has been a fair and honest deal, which allows me peaceful sleep.

I don't envy those businessmen in fancy suits the fall that they must face. It will be hard for them to adjust, and the harsh reality is that many won't adapt at all. But life has always been hard and the idea that it wasn't difficult is not something that the poor people of this country or any other have ever had. They and I cannot afford such convenient lies filled with glitzsy gloss and glamour. For that reason, I cannot summon a false sympathy, or offer any compelling compassion. Let them reap the fruit of what they have sown, and deal with the harvest which they have for so long nurtured, feeding it on the refuse of so many other broken dreams. It isn't my problem, and will have little effect on my way of life. I learned in middle school that capitalism depends on taking from the poor, and lived my life to avoid a collapse that has been building since this country was founded, knowing all the while that it may never come in my lifetime, but prepared for the possibility that it could happen at any time.

When all the money has been channeled to the top of the pyramid, it collapses. MLM plans are illegal for that reason, and to prevent the blatant truth of capitalism from being recognized by the sheeplike masses. I have no sympathy for those who lose the money they've taken in bad deals and fruitless plans. Nor should you. To bail them out will not solve the problem, only postpone it. The only solution is to let the collapse happen, and step aside when the dust billows up from the wreckage of their wasteful expenditures. Whether it happens this year, or next, or twenty years from now, there is no other possible outcome, and we can only begin to rebuild when the rubble lies in a heap that we can pull apart and start with once again.

Illusnist

WTF is a Genius, Anyway?

I have been accused of being a genius.  In my mind, such a word is relatively meaningless, since we all have pretty much the same equipment to work with, and it is only in our application that we excel in this way or that. Some of the people who are true genius types are also completely incapable of communication, while some people who are regarded as fools really couldn't give a rat's arse what the world thinks anyway. And vice versa.

AM I a genius? Beats the heck out of me. If you put a multiple choice test in front of me, I will do well on it, whether I have studied the information before or not. But that isn't genius, that is simply the ability to read through a list of possibilities and deduce, reduce, or induce which of the answers is more likely to be correct. IQ tests invariably say that I have an IQ somewhere between 130 and 150. But I will be the first to say that such tests are meaningless, as I have just explained.

Some of the same people who will applaud my intellect will also say that a person who drops out of high school is a complete fool.  I am effectively a high school drop out. In my Junior year, which would have been my senior year if I had stayed out of trouble, I took the GED, got a diploma, and then signed myself out of school. Did I quit? Technically, once I had a diploma, I had no choice except to withdraw from classes, which means I didn't quit, even though I left school before graduation. So, does that mean I am a fool? Perhaps. It is a fine line line between insanity and genius, and we all walk the line our whole lives, occasionally stepping off that line onto one extreme or the other.

All I know for certain is that I have an excellent use of the English language. I am, for lack of a better description, a weaver of words; a person who takes abstract concepts and turns them into something that other people can understand. To me, it is nothing more than a form of art, similar to what a sculptor or painter is able to do. My palette is composed of the letters of the alphabet, and my easel is a blank page, or an equally empty screen. 

I don't expect to solve the world's problems, even though many of them are simple exercises in logic and could be easily reduced to simple answers. The problem is, the world doesn't really want its problems solved, and I don't care enough for humanity to put much effort into trying. I will post a message now and then, warnings to all who would listen, and have this far never been surprised that very few are willing to listen at all. Makes no difference, to me.  We are born and live and grow and die, and that is just the way it all works. I can't stop that process, nor do I have any desire to slow it down. I've already lived 9 years longer than I ever wanted to, and this body becomes harder to maintain as time goes on. Ashes to ashes is not a biblical prophecy, it is a simple statement of fact. That somebody chose to attach God's name to it weas most likely a mere attempt to claim for spirituality what was beyond the grasp of people.

God doesn't impress me. I can't imagine worshipping any being, no matter how omnipotent it may be, that would have so little regard for its own offspring as to allow it to die without lifting a finger. Any God that could be so callous is not a creature you really want to be in the company of for an eternity, folks. It is worse than evil.

Likewise, I have very little patience for science. Science is incomplete, and will always be so, for as long as people insist on treating the different sciences as separate forms. Biology and ecology are the same thing. Algebra and and art are sisters in the act of expression. You will never understand the secrets of the universe as long as you strive to put things into pockets of definition. The universe is a single thing, not a myriad myriads of different ones.  All I know for certain is that there are no singularities. Everything that exists does so in complete tandem with every other thing in all of creation. The breath I draw now has been aimed at my lungs since before my family tree was a bud on the tree of life. The women I have lain with have been only another part of me, and I a part of them. we are not solitary creatures, we are creatures who have not learned to exist as a single entity. People I have never met, and to whom I will never speak, have shaped my life with no realization of doing so, and I have likewise shaped the lives of people who have no idea that I have even existed. 

To some, this may seem a pointless rambling, and to those I can only say that I rest my case. Others will feel a tingling echo in their minds, and will sense that there is meaning hidden somewhere here. Both cases are extremes of delusion. There is nothing hidden here at all, and no unconnected patterns. I have stated in this message everything mankind needs to know to form a better future, including stating the fact that no one will pay attention. After all, one person can't do it. We are an entity, not individuals, and as long as we insist on behaving alone, we will prevent ourselves from achieving the greater truth.

Think about it. In large groups.