Monday, August 29, 2011
Medicine as medicine - Psychadelics and Healing
In case you had not seen: Michael and Annie Mithoefer, a psychiatric couple in South Carolina, are using MDMA (i.e. E, Ecstasy or Molly) to treat veterans who are the victims of PTSD.
I for one, applaud the courage of these and other therapists in trying to offer their patients an effective remedy and therapy approach to cure, and not just treat, their illness (which seems to be the current vogue in the medical industry). And while I am not without certain reservations, it must be said that its extremely encouraging to see the practicioners of Western psychological medicine finally using the right tools for the job, as opposed to simply doping up and keeping down their clients.
Yes, that's right - I did just say the RIGHT tool for the job. MDMA, Ibogaine, and even LSD, had been used successfully to treat depression, addiction and psychological trauma between their discovery and their criminalization, with a handful of extremely brave therapists such as the Mithoefers continuing to use it despite the bureaucratic and legal hurdles that exist to keep some of the most potent tools in their arsenal out of the hands of health care professionals.
And this is truly no surprise because ethneogens such as these, in addition to others such as psilocybin, salvia divinorum, amanita muscaria and many others have been the tools of treating and curing psychological maladies by another mental health professional - one that preceded the doctor of the industrial era. I refer, of course, to the shaman.
Shamanism has been around for a long while. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. There are many ways to describe it (not all of which that would promote understanding to those not already familiar with it), but from my own shamanic experiences I find that its best understood as a toolkit. A toolkit that allows for engaging with the Universe spiritually as much as a means of digging into the labyrinthine passageways of the human consciousness. Traditionally, shamans were viewed as healers and intermediaries with the Spirit world whose responsibility it was to find cures for the sick and to guide people out of the dark and awful places they might find themselves in life.
One of the important elements of the toolkit that shamans almost universally had at their disposal to successfully help others was some form of psychedelic or psychoactive plant or substance (Medicine, if you will), which either the shaman would take to garner insights into treatment, or that would be applied to the patient in order to facilitate the action necessary to address the underlying causes of the affliction. This isn't very surprising in many ways, because psychedelic substances activate portions of the brain that are often relegated to unconscious or subconscious processes - allowing the participant in such experiences to review memories, feelings and perspectives that might have been blocked or disassociated due to psycho-emotional trauma.
What's truly fascinating and encouraging about the Mithoefer's approach to the administration of the medicine is just how similar it truly is to the approach of the shaman. The patient is given the Medicine, and the practicioner keeps them under observation; only interacting when it would seem fruitful and giving the patient the space needed to engage in therapeutic introspection. The patient is ultimately the prime mover of their own engagement with their trauma, and empowers them (with the support of the practicioner) to confront and move past the demons that haunt them. In shamanic parlance, such an approach is called "holding space". In Western psychiatric terms, the Mithoefers refer to what they do as a "treatment session".
Different terms, similar results. BUT.
But there are still areas of concern here, particularly in the length engagement with the patient, which in comparison shamanic practice exhibits a far greater maturity of approach to the healing process. No medicine, even powerful ones such as psychedelics, is a cure-all. Such treatment is most effective only in combination with a full gamut of therapies and engagement that can last years.
And this ties directly into my most significant concern about the "rediscovery" of psychedelics as tools of psychological healing. Namely, that Western medicine is far FAR too quick to rely on pharmalogical/chemical quick fixes rather than the deeper (and proven) psycho-spiritual transformation that systems like shamanism have focused on. I fear that the overarching immaturity and irresponsibility of modern Western psychology will trend towards handing out powerful pychoactive substances like candy, leaving as many broken and incompletely healed people in its wake as it does now - but instead of numbing them with antidepressants or antipsychotics, destabilizing and disabling them.
As if to drive this point of intense concern home is this terrifying statement from the article: "Therapeutic psychedelia is a great, beautiful orchard filled with ripe fruit for picking.” As long as Western science and medicine cling to views such as this about such powerful substances, there will always be the high probability of their abuse and misuse - not just by the common citizenry, but by the so-called experts who claim to act with the best of intention.
At the end of the day, treating and healing psychological pain are two different but interrelated efforts. The crisis we confront today in mainstream Western medicine is that it only seems to care about the former and has forgotten the relevancy of the latter. As a result, its no surprise that so many people are turning away from the "norm" to alternatives that offer hope (some genuine, some deceitful) of the latter. Its for this reason that even mainstream research is looking into the impact that these powerful Medicines have. The tools of the mainstream are failing to deliver - something new must be tried. But different tools don't matter if the overall approach of the system stays the same.
But then again, as the old saying goes - you can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people ALL the time. Any system that ceases to deliver on the most basic of its expectations can not seriously expect to persist indefinitely. And in an era such as ours, when so many people suffer so much, do we have the luxury of subsidizing such an approach?
I do not believe we can.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Charting the collapse of the American Imperium
Suppose it were assumed true that the United States of America was reaching the end of its effective life as as a functional, coherent and organized political unit. What would the implications be? Globally? And for us as individuals?
If such a statement seems alien to you, I would HIGHLY recommend you spend time re-evaluating your world view. Because at the moment of history in which we are currently co-occupying, such a scenario is straying out of the realms of fiction and into the realms of probability. As the US of A confronts a crippling level of debt, mandated cuts in military spending, increasing restrictions of civil liberties in the name of national security, a withdrawal from the hot zones of conflict across the Middle East under the auspices of "mission accomplished" and an increasing amount of sectarian unrest at home (driven by insurmountable social and fiscal differences) - it becomes necessary to objectively review the implications of a world where America is not only no longer a superpower, but is actually non-existent IN TOTO.
Why? One need only look at the sister nations throughout history that share the model that America has so remarkably capitalized upon - and the two most enduring lessons stem from the Roman Empire and from the USA's erstwhile enemy: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Rome is actually an amazingly pertinent comparison, although the troubles that confront the US today confronted Rome in two parts - first the death of the Roman Republic and its replacement by "benevolent" despotism under a series of emperors, and finally the violent, brutal and ultimately cataclysmic destruction of the Roman Empire (at least the original Western half of it) some four hundred years later.
Stop me if you've heard this before: a young and aggressively expansionistic nation founded originally as a colony by an older and more "civilized" culture creates a myth of its own destiny and through good morals, hard-work, business acumen and military innovation manages to create a large, multi-ethnic power that prides itself on its adherence to justice, the exercise of popular power and its ability to bring the light of progress and civilization to the dark corners of the world. And then after centuries becomes corrupt, lazy, elitist - dominated by special interest groups, crippled by legislative inertia and in-fighting and a massive split between two mutually exclusive social groups whose ideological conflict is unresolvable through democratic processes.
(p.s. I'm talking about Rome here - and certainly NOT the U.S.A... *wink*)
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi - Thus Passes the Glory of the World. In this case, the Roman Republic. Now fast forward. Now we have a tired, over-extended military power facing massive deficits, unemployment, an over-bloated bureaucracy, an overwhelming amount of illegal and semi-legal foreigners who "put hard-working citizens out of work" by working for less, and undermine the cultural norms and language of the nation. Wars rage everywhere, mainly against under-privileged outsiders jealous of the empire's success, who launch assault after assault against the crumbling nation. Loyalties are divided, the people are apathetic and uninvolved as responsible citizens, civil conflict rages, the economy crumbles, inflation spirals out control - and inevitably central power collapses entirely and regional and local authority asserts itself.
Do I speak of Rome at the destruction of the Western Empire during the 5th century, or do I speak of the years to come for the US?
Or, if I have not driven the comparison home enough - let us review the last years of the Soviet Empire. The USSR was for decades a stalwart bulwark of Communist ideology, and the philosophical and political antipode to the US. America feared and hated the threat the USSR posed: its ideology, its national agenda, its brutal economic efficacy ("we shall bury you!" was not an idle threat in 1956), its weaponry and its geopolitical machinations. It was an enemy that, it was assumed, was going to last for generations (as Arthur C. Clarke's "2010" taught us).
And yet how quickly the dragon was dispatched. In 1979, at the start of the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan, the USSR could potentially lay claim to having an upper-hand on the US geo-politically, and perhaps even militarily. A decade year later, as the Soviet Army limped out of Afghanistan, the USSR was economically broken, politically divided, militarily outmaneuvered, increasingly isolated internationally and confronting internal dissent unseen in decades. Three short years later (as of Dec. 31, 1991), the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist as an entity.
While historical correlations are no definite precursor to predicting the future, it must be emphasized that when large, complex, pluralistic states such as Rome and the USSR face the sort of challenges that the US faces, the centrifugal social forces constantly at play in such societies have a strong tendency to cause them to fly to pieces in times of intense crisis. Why? Well - consider what holds the US together - is it religion, ethnic identity, clan loyalties or a shared popular myth?
No.
Ultimately, it is a matter of a nebulous sense of "Americanness" derived from very definite expectations of economic and political privilege. We implicitly assume that as Americans we will have a fundamentally better chance economically than people who live elsewhere, and enjoy a higher level of social and political freedoms. An America failing to deliver on those expectations due to a fiscal down-spiral, economic disparity, bureaucratic strangling, political dis-empowerment, lagging innovation, the revocation of civil liberties, and collapsing military hegemony abroad is an America increasingly in danger of its citizenry weighing the pros and cons of on-going participation in the Great Experiment that this nation really is.
Much like the citizens of Rome and the Soviet Union who confronted the same hard realities as their states withered from an incompetent and ineffectual leadership that no longer understood the intangibility of "Roman-ness", or "Soviet-ness" that motivated the citizenry to maintain and protect the state: likewise, the citizens of this country must also confront what "American-ness" actually means to them in their lives, and consider the consequences of maintaining that identity, or choosing to redefine themselves. Ultimately, that choice is driven by a sense of expectation of the capacity of the individual and the group to create a better situation for themselves. If it is in our benefit to maintain "America" or is it better to seek a new path?
And if America and its leadership does not awaken to that blunt truth and strive to create new possibilities for individual and social improvement, they can only realistically expect the same fate that befell the echelons of power that held sway in our two test studies.
Transform, or be swept away by the tides of history.
If such a statement seems alien to you, I would HIGHLY recommend you spend time re-evaluating your world view. Because at the moment of history in which we are currently co-occupying, such a scenario is straying out of the realms of fiction and into the realms of probability. As the US of A confronts a crippling level of debt, mandated cuts in military spending, increasing restrictions of civil liberties in the name of national security, a withdrawal from the hot zones of conflict across the Middle East under the auspices of "mission accomplished" and an increasing amount of sectarian unrest at home (driven by insurmountable social and fiscal differences) - it becomes necessary to objectively review the implications of a world where America is not only no longer a superpower, but is actually non-existent IN TOTO.
Why? One need only look at the sister nations throughout history that share the model that America has so remarkably capitalized upon - and the two most enduring lessons stem from the Roman Empire and from the USA's erstwhile enemy: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Rome is actually an amazingly pertinent comparison, although the troubles that confront the US today confronted Rome in two parts - first the death of the Roman Republic and its replacement by "benevolent" despotism under a series of emperors, and finally the violent, brutal and ultimately cataclysmic destruction of the Roman Empire (at least the original Western half of it) some four hundred years later.
Stop me if you've heard this before: a young and aggressively expansionistic nation founded originally as a colony by an older and more "civilized" culture creates a myth of its own destiny and through good morals, hard-work, business acumen and military innovation manages to create a large, multi-ethnic power that prides itself on its adherence to justice, the exercise of popular power and its ability to bring the light of progress and civilization to the dark corners of the world. And then after centuries becomes corrupt, lazy, elitist - dominated by special interest groups, crippled by legislative inertia and in-fighting and a massive split between two mutually exclusive social groups whose ideological conflict is unresolvable through democratic processes.
(p.s. I'm talking about Rome here - and certainly NOT the U.S.A... *wink*)
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi - Thus Passes the Glory of the World. In this case, the Roman Republic. Now fast forward. Now we have a tired, over-extended military power facing massive deficits, unemployment, an over-bloated bureaucracy, an overwhelming amount of illegal and semi-legal foreigners who "put hard-working citizens out of work" by working for less, and undermine the cultural norms and language of the nation. Wars rage everywhere, mainly against under-privileged outsiders jealous of the empire's success, who launch assault after assault against the crumbling nation. Loyalties are divided, the people are apathetic and uninvolved as responsible citizens, civil conflict rages, the economy crumbles, inflation spirals out control - and inevitably central power collapses entirely and regional and local authority asserts itself.
Do I speak of Rome at the destruction of the Western Empire during the 5th century, or do I speak of the years to come for the US?
Or, if I have not driven the comparison home enough - let us review the last years of the Soviet Empire. The USSR was for decades a stalwart bulwark of Communist ideology, and the philosophical and political antipode to the US. America feared and hated the threat the USSR posed: its ideology, its national agenda, its brutal economic efficacy ("we shall bury you!" was not an idle threat in 1956), its weaponry and its geopolitical machinations. It was an enemy that, it was assumed, was going to last for generations (as Arthur C. Clarke's "2010" taught us).
And yet how quickly the dragon was dispatched. In 1979, at the start of the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan, the USSR could potentially lay claim to having an upper-hand on the US geo-politically, and perhaps even militarily. A decade year later, as the Soviet Army limped out of Afghanistan, the USSR was economically broken, politically divided, militarily outmaneuvered, increasingly isolated internationally and confronting internal dissent unseen in decades. Three short years later (as of Dec. 31, 1991), the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ceased to exist as an entity.
While historical correlations are no definite precursor to predicting the future, it must be emphasized that when large, complex, pluralistic states such as Rome and the USSR face the sort of challenges that the US faces, the centrifugal social forces constantly at play in such societies have a strong tendency to cause them to fly to pieces in times of intense crisis. Why? Well - consider what holds the US together - is it religion, ethnic identity, clan loyalties or a shared popular myth?
No.
Ultimately, it is a matter of a nebulous sense of "Americanness" derived from very definite expectations of economic and political privilege. We implicitly assume that as Americans we will have a fundamentally better chance economically than people who live elsewhere, and enjoy a higher level of social and political freedoms. An America failing to deliver on those expectations due to a fiscal down-spiral, economic disparity, bureaucratic strangling, political dis-empowerment, lagging innovation, the revocation of civil liberties, and collapsing military hegemony abroad is an America increasingly in danger of its citizenry weighing the pros and cons of on-going participation in the Great Experiment that this nation really is.
Much like the citizens of Rome and the Soviet Union who confronted the same hard realities as their states withered from an incompetent and ineffectual leadership that no longer understood the intangibility of "Roman-ness", or "Soviet-ness" that motivated the citizenry to maintain and protect the state: likewise, the citizens of this country must also confront what "American-ness" actually means to them in their lives, and consider the consequences of maintaining that identity, or choosing to redefine themselves. Ultimately, that choice is driven by a sense of expectation of the capacity of the individual and the group to create a better situation for themselves. If it is in our benefit to maintain "America" or is it better to seek a new path?
And if America and its leadership does not awaken to that blunt truth and strive to create new possibilities for individual and social improvement, they can only realistically expect the same fate that befell the echelons of power that held sway in our two test studies.
Transform, or be swept away by the tides of history.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Down the Rabbit Hole
Where are you taking us Mr. Assange?
To a level of freedom any so-called “freedom loving” people seem to despise, that’s where.
At this point in our social development in the West, there seems to be a collective sense of amnesia about what freedom entails. Being Free means accepting risk, sometimes humiliating, sometimes deadly, resulting from openness and the minimization of sociocentric control and the decentralization of power amongst individual social actors.
And this is most particularly true of knowledge in an era dominated by Information/Technology. The cliché that knowledge equals power means that information restriction (by hiding it behind walls of “confidential” and “secret” labels) creates increasing power inequalities. The last decade has seen an explosion of barriers and restrictive labels placed on information under the guise of national security – is it any surprise that we have also seen our rights concurrently diminished? If you don’t agree, just try to fly on a plane in the US whilst retaining your dignity, let alone any slivers of your right to deny unlawful search and seizure (that would be the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, ladies and gentlemen).
The horror ingrained in both the popular and official reaction to Mr. Assange’s crusade for democratic discourse tells us all we need to know about the depth to which our expectations of liberty have been compromised. Accountability and Transparency are not merely words, they are fundamental perspectives necessary for the guarantee of personal liberty and the functionality of democracy. They do not come with groveling subservience to the status quo, they are fought for constantly in the face of forces that continually seek to deny them as a stepping stone to their own antidemocratic aggrandizement. This is a battle that often turns violent – just ask Martin Luther or Martin Luther King, Jr. - Lech Walesa or Thomas Jefferson.
So before you parrot the party line that Mr. Assange is a threat to the national security of the Free World, consider for a moment who is squawking it out – and what they have to lose by what’s being revealed. For if you can’t even do that, you may as well fit yourself for a slave collar now for as much use you are to your fellow liberty-loving residents of what little remains of the Free World.
For your viewing pleasure on the matter of Fundamental Perspective and Democracy: I leave you with this Holiday Treat.
Happy Holidays!
To a level of freedom any so-called “freedom loving” people seem to despise, that’s where.
At this point in our social development in the West, there seems to be a collective sense of amnesia about what freedom entails. Being Free means accepting risk, sometimes humiliating, sometimes deadly, resulting from openness and the minimization of sociocentric control and the decentralization of power amongst individual social actors.
And this is most particularly true of knowledge in an era dominated by Information/Technology. The cliché that knowledge equals power means that information restriction (by hiding it behind walls of “confidential” and “secret” labels) creates increasing power inequalities. The last decade has seen an explosion of barriers and restrictive labels placed on information under the guise of national security – is it any surprise that we have also seen our rights concurrently diminished? If you don’t agree, just try to fly on a plane in the US whilst retaining your dignity, let alone any slivers of your right to deny unlawful search and seizure (that would be the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, ladies and gentlemen).
The horror ingrained in both the popular and official reaction to Mr. Assange’s crusade for democratic discourse tells us all we need to know about the depth to which our expectations of liberty have been compromised. Accountability and Transparency are not merely words, they are fundamental perspectives necessary for the guarantee of personal liberty and the functionality of democracy. They do not come with groveling subservience to the status quo, they are fought for constantly in the face of forces that continually seek to deny them as a stepping stone to their own antidemocratic aggrandizement. This is a battle that often turns violent – just ask Martin Luther or Martin Luther King, Jr. - Lech Walesa or Thomas Jefferson.
So before you parrot the party line that Mr. Assange is a threat to the national security of the Free World, consider for a moment who is squawking it out – and what they have to lose by what’s being revealed. For if you can’t even do that, you may as well fit yourself for a slave collar now for as much use you are to your fellow liberty-loving residents of what little remains of the Free World.
For your viewing pleasure on the matter of Fundamental Perspective and Democracy: I leave you with this Holiday Treat.
Happy Holidays!
Monday, October 4, 2010
Can't see the Forest Fire for all these damn burning trees
For many years, humanity was an interdisciplinary creature out of a matter of necessity. Specialization was a high-risk choice, because local conditions could change suddenly and irrevocably – and specialists tend to respond disastrously to change.
Humanity of 10,000 years ago was part hunter, part gatherer, part herbalist, part astronomer, part meteorologist, part biologist, part doctor, part builder, part crafter, part animal trainer, part mystic. You might be better at one thing than another, but ultimately you needed all of these pieces of knowledge to be able to survive. Considering that this was an era that was pre-writing, knowledge was likely crowd-sourced within a tribe, such that the loss of a member or a few-members would not mean the irrevocable loss of all expertise that the tribe relied upon. Being a generalized specialist wasn’t only in your immediate self-interest, it was also in your long-term self-interest (when factoring in your tribe).
Yet, we modern humans are not. Industrial, urban, agricultural society has favored intense specialization. Writing, knowledge systemization and social systemization have encouraged people to excel at one knowledge stream to the increasing detriment of all others. With hyper-specialization, we don’t just have a career – we have become our careers. And while such an approach is absolutely fine in a period of low to no change, in periods of change and population stress – such an approach increasingly becomes detrimental to the survival of the individual, as well as to the ultimate survival of the group.
What better example do we have then the highly dynamic reality of our planet’s recent climate? As the Earth struggles to find a new equilibrium point for the global climate, everything in the planet’s ecosphere is being pushed out of equilibrium and into free-fall. What were previously outlier events – 100-year floods, 100-year droughts, 100-year heat waves, 100-year blizzards – are becoming 10-year, 5-year, and yearly events. And in an eco-climatic free-fall scenario, change does not proceed linearly – it accelerates over time, which is what system theory would tell us (until we hit a new equilibrium).
And yet, the mainstream of humanity is still pretty out to lunch with what’s happening. Why? How the heck did Homo Sapiens Sapiens – the CONQUERER of the biosphere and the hyper-apex predator of the third rock from Sol – manage to CHECK OUT whilst there’s a global, civilization-imperiling freight train rolling down the tracks straight at our faces?
Apart from the fact that we spend over 90% of our lives huddled inside of climate-controlled offices, cars, malls and homes (and are trying to remain willfully ignorant) , we’re also pathetically specialized inside of our happy hermetically sealed chambers of lifelessness. Having trained our brains to focus on pretty much one meme stream of data, it’s difficult for us to review other streams, let alone construct a coherent picture out of several. For the vast majority of us, interdisciplinary thinking is not a skill we are taught in school or the office. We’re essentially taught to be good at One Thing and let the nebulous mass of humanity in our society somehow take care of The Rest.
And since we didn't receive the training to approach the world in an interdisciplinary manner, we are ham-strung in making linkages between events that are taking place in our world. Our ignorance is not just in WHAT is happening outside of our climate-controlled lives, it is how these things interrelate and how they inevitably impact us.
"Backwards Stone Age" interdisciplinary thinking informs us that if we want to minimize risk to ourselves and do something crazy (like minimize our extinction probabilities?), then let's move away from low-lying coastal areas. Let's start growing our own resilient and diverse food crops. Let's expand our functional diet to include things we wouldn’t normally eat. And most of all, let's minimize the external liabilities for own survival (like fossil fuel derived energy, industrial agriculture, commuting 50 miles to work, cheap plastic crap from China, etc.).
In other words – we’re inside of an epic population stressor event: LET'S GET GENERALIZED.
Humanity of 10,000 years ago was part hunter, part gatherer, part herbalist, part astronomer, part meteorologist, part biologist, part doctor, part builder, part crafter, part animal trainer, part mystic. You might be better at one thing than another, but ultimately you needed all of these pieces of knowledge to be able to survive. Considering that this was an era that was pre-writing, knowledge was likely crowd-sourced within a tribe, such that the loss of a member or a few-members would not mean the irrevocable loss of all expertise that the tribe relied upon. Being a generalized specialist wasn’t only in your immediate self-interest, it was also in your long-term self-interest (when factoring in your tribe).
Yet, we modern humans are not. Industrial, urban, agricultural society has favored intense specialization. Writing, knowledge systemization and social systemization have encouraged people to excel at one knowledge stream to the increasing detriment of all others. With hyper-specialization, we don’t just have a career – we have become our careers. And while such an approach is absolutely fine in a period of low to no change, in periods of change and population stress – such an approach increasingly becomes detrimental to the survival of the individual, as well as to the ultimate survival of the group.
What better example do we have then the highly dynamic reality of our planet’s recent climate? As the Earth struggles to find a new equilibrium point for the global climate, everything in the planet’s ecosphere is being pushed out of equilibrium and into free-fall. What were previously outlier events – 100-year floods, 100-year droughts, 100-year heat waves, 100-year blizzards – are becoming 10-year, 5-year, and yearly events. And in an eco-climatic free-fall scenario, change does not proceed linearly – it accelerates over time, which is what system theory would tell us (until we hit a new equilibrium).
And yet, the mainstream of humanity is still pretty out to lunch with what’s happening. Why? How the heck did Homo Sapiens Sapiens – the CONQUERER of the biosphere and the hyper-apex predator of the third rock from Sol – manage to CHECK OUT whilst there’s a global, civilization-imperiling freight train rolling down the tracks straight at our faces?
Apart from the fact that we spend over 90% of our lives huddled inside of climate-controlled offices, cars, malls and homes (and are trying to remain willfully ignorant) , we’re also pathetically specialized inside of our happy hermetically sealed chambers of lifelessness. Having trained our brains to focus on pretty much one meme stream of data, it’s difficult for us to review other streams, let alone construct a coherent picture out of several. For the vast majority of us, interdisciplinary thinking is not a skill we are taught in school or the office. We’re essentially taught to be good at One Thing and let the nebulous mass of humanity in our society somehow take care of The Rest.
And since we didn't receive the training to approach the world in an interdisciplinary manner, we are ham-strung in making linkages between events that are taking place in our world. Our ignorance is not just in WHAT is happening outside of our climate-controlled lives, it is how these things interrelate and how they inevitably impact us.
"Backwards Stone Age" interdisciplinary thinking informs us that if we want to minimize risk to ourselves and do something crazy (like minimize our extinction probabilities?), then let's move away from low-lying coastal areas. Let's start growing our own resilient and diverse food crops. Let's expand our functional diet to include things we wouldn’t normally eat. And most of all, let's minimize the external liabilities for own survival (like fossil fuel derived energy, industrial agriculture, commuting 50 miles to work, cheap plastic crap from China, etc.).
In other words – we’re inside of an epic population stressor event: LET'S GET GENERALIZED.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
New Podcast: Inception and Paradigm Change, Part 2 Chapters 1 and 2
The conclusion of my podcast concerning the movie Inception and how a paradigm evolves and chances is now available. Its so good, I had to break it into two parts.
techv.dyndns.org/eqn_podcast.xml
techv.dyndns.org/eqn_podcast.xml
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
A Man they call James...
Friends, Romans, countrymen (and women) – lend me your ears. I come to bury James Lee, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with James.
Madman, misguided, martyr? Or perhaps just a man – angry, desperate and ignored, but a man who was willing to die for what he believed in, right or wrong. A criminal: a man who threatened murder and mayhem certainly – yet in the end, only a man. But as we so quickly do, I’m sure that whoever James Lee was before 1PM EDT Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 will be subsumed into the media swirl and cultural maelstrom of the era we live in.
And even as we speak, the brush is being pulled out and swabbed over what little is known about him. To the great relief, I’m sure, of environmentalists keen to distance themselves from his views – for he is the sort of man that can seem like an axle-stone around the necks of an entire movement. While on the other hand, to the intense delight of anti-environmentalists who cluck gleefully at the day’s events, hell bent on labeling any who care about our species’ survival as murderous extremists.
So before the body is grown too cold, I’d like to give an honest airing of the man’s views – so that if he be damned, let him by his own words be so. It will likely be the last time so small a justice will be paid him.
Here are excerpts from his website - www.savetheplanetprotest.com/protest.htm – concerning the reasoning behind his protest of Discovery Channel back in 2008.
“We are running out of time to save this planet and the Discovery Channel is a big part of the problem, not the solution. Instead of showing successful solutions, their broadcast programs seem to be doing the opposite. Shows like “Cash Cab” and “Dirty Jobs” serve as diversions to keep the focus off what is really important, which is Global Warming and Animal Extinction. Why do they broadcast a show like “Future Weapons” that only promise to destroy the planet even more? And their new lineup “Planet Green” is all about more products and other substandard solutions. Do we really need shows like these when the planet is in crisis? No, instead the focus should be on coming up with new formulas that actually work. Why would the broadcasters and programmers focus more on the destruction of the planet rather than saving it?”
Hmm. Is here lunacy? I spy in this some small truth: we are indeed rapidly running out of time to prevent the calamitous death of our civilization from ecosystem failure. And true, Discovery Channel, which in its earlier years was as great an advocate as could be imagined for the Earth, has more recently turned nigh completely to pop TV – while adding insult to injury by having Sarah Palin host a program on the wildlife of Alaska. And I must concede that more militarism and more consumerism are not the responses we truly need to a global ecological crisis. It would hardly seem so outrageous to imagine that the Discovery Channel (the mother company of the channel Planet Green) might focus its mission on continuing to champion for solutions in an era when they are so desperately needed.
“If something is not functioning; there needs to be a change of course. It’s time to bring about new initiatives and try different approaches whether they are conventional or unconventional. It is evident that the old approach is ineffective. We can see this when we watch the news or read the newspapers that their ways are not working. It’s one disaster after another. They are deliberately showing ineffective shows to make it seem like something is being done when nothing is.”
Has this not been the rallying cry of the drive for sustainability since day one? That business-as-usual simply was no longer an option? That innovative new ideas and technologies were necessary for us to move forward? And how ironic the failure at the 2009 Copenhagen UN Climate Conference, the continuing lack of American political action on climate change, and the Gulf Oil Catastrophe - in light of these words from 2008? It seems sad indeed that it takes an extremist with a gun and homemade bomb to push this to the forefront of our minds, when it should be branded there with all the ills we so stridently suffer now, and the more yet we fear to come.
Now here more words – these from this year – from this site: www.savetheplanetprotest.com
“The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas.“
Having not read My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, I can’t speak to the work or the author. But, apart from the tone of the statement as a blunt demand, there’s certainly some sense in doing this to facilitate individual enterprise and initiative. This country is sorely seeking new paths to job creation, and the Green economy has continually been touted as the only real way to do so. Is hoping to spark American dreams of entrepreneurship in the face of a collective crisis total insanity?
“Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both.”
Apart from the man’s hatred of children, and his vitriolic and tyrannical tone, I see little substance here that smacks of open madness. There has been considerable commentary on our population crisis since the 1960’s and its undeniable impact on our usage of resources, destruction of habitat, and generation of waste. Zero Population Growth was a rallying cry of the 1970’s – which saw its cinematic climax in Soylent Green (a truly dystopic, but sadly not impossible fate for our civilization). And it is fundamentally true that there is no consensus on whether we can feed the current population of the US, let alone continue to maintain the current 7 billion souls on this planet after Peak Oil, since modern agriculture is so heavily dependent on petroleum-based fertilizer and mechanized processes.
“Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!”
It is interesting to point out that no less a mind as James Lovelock himself – the man who practically invented the modern ecological Weltanschauung – has argued that the only plausible future for our civilization was in “rolling it back”, not in more growth. This is a view echoed by M. King Hubbert, the Shell Oil scientist who originally recognized the Peak Oil scenario and the impossibility of unlimited growth based upon a petroleum-derived economy. Again, the tone aside, the message itself is not anchorless.
(I can't help but point out that he must remind them to make it interesting. Has Discovery fallen so far that they'd forget otherwise? Tsk tsk, Discovery, Inc.)
“Saving the Planet means saving what's left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies! You're the media, you can reach enough people. It's your resposibility (sic) because you reach so many minds!!!”
Now here indeed is madness shown – to think that the anyone in American mass media might undertake any action out of a sense of moral responsibility… well, clearly the man is out of his mind!
But in all seriousness, this and the rest of his eleven point manifesto do clearly show a man that has undergone a significant downward slope psychologically.
“Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??”
“Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!”
“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.”
Apart from his admonishment to ‘Breathe Oil’ (not a bad epithet to hurl, in fairness), and the points herein previously mentioned – it is clear enough that we have a man at the extreme of his faculties. Here is a mind overthrown with frustration and rage at a world inexplicably stagnant in the face of an impending ecological catastrophe. I cannot but help but to some degree sympathize with this poor soul, as much as I must take him to account for his unbridled vitriol and destructive hatred – and the manner he chose to exercise it.
So I hope at least that if we have here condemned the man, we have done so with some small degree of equanimity, and perhaps even a touch of compassion in his treatment. I dare say that few in this nation will give him even so passing fair a review as this, being so quick in their rush to put the body in the ground (before even the gravedigger’s work be done). For in the end, as grievous an insult he may have given, and as much risk to life he may have incurred – in truth, the only one that died for what he believed in was he himself. And if that be enough, that some small measure of good may yet be wrought from what passed today, then may we consider ourselves lucky at the gain for so little lost.
So let it be with James.
Madman, misguided, martyr? Or perhaps just a man – angry, desperate and ignored, but a man who was willing to die for what he believed in, right or wrong. A criminal: a man who threatened murder and mayhem certainly – yet in the end, only a man. But as we so quickly do, I’m sure that whoever James Lee was before 1PM EDT Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 will be subsumed into the media swirl and cultural maelstrom of the era we live in.
And even as we speak, the brush is being pulled out and swabbed over what little is known about him. To the great relief, I’m sure, of environmentalists keen to distance themselves from his views – for he is the sort of man that can seem like an axle-stone around the necks of an entire movement. While on the other hand, to the intense delight of anti-environmentalists who cluck gleefully at the day’s events, hell bent on labeling any who care about our species’ survival as murderous extremists.
So before the body is grown too cold, I’d like to give an honest airing of the man’s views – so that if he be damned, let him by his own words be so. It will likely be the last time so small a justice will be paid him.
Here are excerpts from his website - www.savetheplanetprotest.com/protest.htm – concerning the reasoning behind his protest of Discovery Channel back in 2008.
“We are running out of time to save this planet and the Discovery Channel is a big part of the problem, not the solution. Instead of showing successful solutions, their broadcast programs seem to be doing the opposite. Shows like “Cash Cab” and “Dirty Jobs” serve as diversions to keep the focus off what is really important, which is Global Warming and Animal Extinction. Why do they broadcast a show like “Future Weapons” that only promise to destroy the planet even more? And their new lineup “Planet Green” is all about more products and other substandard solutions. Do we really need shows like these when the planet is in crisis? No, instead the focus should be on coming up with new formulas that actually work. Why would the broadcasters and programmers focus more on the destruction of the planet rather than saving it?”
Hmm. Is here lunacy? I spy in this some small truth: we are indeed rapidly running out of time to prevent the calamitous death of our civilization from ecosystem failure. And true, Discovery Channel, which in its earlier years was as great an advocate as could be imagined for the Earth, has more recently turned nigh completely to pop TV – while adding insult to injury by having Sarah Palin host a program on the wildlife of Alaska. And I must concede that more militarism and more consumerism are not the responses we truly need to a global ecological crisis. It would hardly seem so outrageous to imagine that the Discovery Channel (the mother company of the channel Planet Green) might focus its mission on continuing to champion for solutions in an era when they are so desperately needed.
“If something is not functioning; there needs to be a change of course. It’s time to bring about new initiatives and try different approaches whether they are conventional or unconventional. It is evident that the old approach is ineffective. We can see this when we watch the news or read the newspapers that their ways are not working. It’s one disaster after another. They are deliberately showing ineffective shows to make it seem like something is being done when nothing is.”
Has this not been the rallying cry of the drive for sustainability since day one? That business-as-usual simply was no longer an option? That innovative new ideas and technologies were necessary for us to move forward? And how ironic the failure at the 2009 Copenhagen UN Climate Conference, the continuing lack of American political action on climate change, and the Gulf Oil Catastrophe - in light of these words from 2008? It seems sad indeed that it takes an extremist with a gun and homemade bomb to push this to the forefront of our minds, when it should be branded there with all the ills we so stridently suffer now, and the more yet we fear to come.
Now here more words – these from this year – from this site: www.savetheplanetprotest.com
“The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas.“
Having not read My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, I can’t speak to the work or the author. But, apart from the tone of the statement as a blunt demand, there’s certainly some sense in doing this to facilitate individual enterprise and initiative. This country is sorely seeking new paths to job creation, and the Green economy has continually been touted as the only real way to do so. Is hoping to spark American dreams of entrepreneurship in the face of a collective crisis total insanity?
“Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both.”
Apart from the man’s hatred of children, and his vitriolic and tyrannical tone, I see little substance here that smacks of open madness. There has been considerable commentary on our population crisis since the 1960’s and its undeniable impact on our usage of resources, destruction of habitat, and generation of waste. Zero Population Growth was a rallying cry of the 1970’s – which saw its cinematic climax in Soylent Green (a truly dystopic, but sadly not impossible fate for our civilization). And it is fundamentally true that there is no consensus on whether we can feed the current population of the US, let alone continue to maintain the current 7 billion souls on this planet after Peak Oil, since modern agriculture is so heavily dependent on petroleum-based fertilizer and mechanized processes.
“Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!”
It is interesting to point out that no less a mind as James Lovelock himself – the man who practically invented the modern ecological Weltanschauung – has argued that the only plausible future for our civilization was in “rolling it back”, not in more growth. This is a view echoed by M. King Hubbert, the Shell Oil scientist who originally recognized the Peak Oil scenario and the impossibility of unlimited growth based upon a petroleum-derived economy. Again, the tone aside, the message itself is not anchorless.
(I can't help but point out that he must remind them to make it interesting. Has Discovery fallen so far that they'd forget otherwise? Tsk tsk, Discovery, Inc.)
“Saving the Planet means saving what's left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies! You're the media, you can reach enough people. It's your resposibility (sic) because you reach so many minds!!!”
Now here indeed is madness shown – to think that the anyone in American mass media might undertake any action out of a sense of moral responsibility… well, clearly the man is out of his mind!
But in all seriousness, this and the rest of his eleven point manifesto do clearly show a man that has undergone a significant downward slope psychologically.
“Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn't, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??”
“Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people's brains until they get it!!”
“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.”
Apart from his admonishment to ‘Breathe Oil’ (not a bad epithet to hurl, in fairness), and the points herein previously mentioned – it is clear enough that we have a man at the extreme of his faculties. Here is a mind overthrown with frustration and rage at a world inexplicably stagnant in the face of an impending ecological catastrophe. I cannot but help but to some degree sympathize with this poor soul, as much as I must take him to account for his unbridled vitriol and destructive hatred – and the manner he chose to exercise it.
So I hope at least that if we have here condemned the man, we have done so with some small degree of equanimity, and perhaps even a touch of compassion in his treatment. I dare say that few in this nation will give him even so passing fair a review as this, being so quick in their rush to put the body in the ground (before even the gravedigger’s work be done). For in the end, as grievous an insult he may have given, and as much risk to life he may have incurred – in truth, the only one that died for what he believed in was he himself. And if that be enough, that some small measure of good may yet be wrought from what passed today, then may we consider ourselves lucky at the gain for so little lost.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
A little Revolution, now and again...
Good evening!
As you may notice, I've made a few changes around the blog to try to spruce things up a little. Consider it a form of penance for not posting anything for so long. But like all good acts of contrition, they must be accepted before being genuine - so please let me know what you think about the new look. It would be an utter waste of our time if the setting of the writing was unconducive to its reading.
While I may not have been posting, it has not been for the sin of idleness. I have been hard at work in other areas, most particularly in my own development and some much needed work on evolving my consciousness. We'll have to hope that wisdom flows from maturity... and failing that, irreverence from senescence.
Posts again will flow soon, so patience yet!
Adieu,
Andrew
As you may notice, I've made a few changes around the blog to try to spruce things up a little. Consider it a form of penance for not posting anything for so long. But like all good acts of contrition, they must be accepted before being genuine - so please let me know what you think about the new look. It would be an utter waste of our time if the setting of the writing was unconducive to its reading.
While I may not have been posting, it has not been for the sin of idleness. I have been hard at work in other areas, most particularly in my own development and some much needed work on evolving my consciousness. We'll have to hope that wisdom flows from maturity... and failing that, irreverence from senescence.
Posts again will flow soon, so patience yet!
Adieu,
Andrew
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