THE SILENT MAJORITY IS INVISIBLE TOO

I seem to have become somewhat of a referral service when I find viewpoints aligned with my own about the responsibilities laid at each of our feet for our contribution to the multi headed hydra of environmental imbalance, population explosion, criminal corporatization of elite world government, energy crisis, herding of the sheeple, you name it. This post has been generated by a certain passage out of a great post over at Driftglass about the untypical, invisible majority so totally disregarded by representation of any elected servant.

“…because we have always believed, down deep, that there were certain things -- certain categories of things -- we could rely on. That certain things would persist, and therefore didn’t require our anxious attention.”

Christians and atheists alike believed in our exceptionally righteous place as the forefront of the future of the world ever since the US rescued Europe from a fascist foe our monied elite secretly funded. Behind every exploitation into foreign affairs since assuming the reign at the reins of global destiny it’s been raining terror. The obligatory use of our war machine to authorize the opening of the public trough to the already overfed military-industrial complex has overridden our will to diplomacy and statesmanship. The belligerent pride of the super patriot great-grand-son of a W.W.II vet is perked up for chances to exercise his right to silence anyone who says his country is not free. With the latest level of domestic surveillance paranoia encouraged by the White House anyone may excuse intrusion on the lives of others as a patriotic duty to report strangeness. This is the glue that seven years of panic government expects to bond the fracture of 911? More like a corral where the fence is fear. Or a brain-spinal cord amputation. We have never been able to trust the government to represent the will of the people, they are the last profession to be trusted.

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My thirty some odd visits to my childhood home over the forty years spanning my leaving it at 17 and Dad’s death at the age of 82 gave me something like time lapse photography’s ability to enhance perception of change in processes too slow for the civilized mind’s expedience oriented perceptions to suspect much less bother to notice. I watched my dad morph from vital breadwinner and loving husband to retired widower, daily golfer and wooer of country club widows to sailor extraordinaire, cabinet maker deluxe, to emphysemic housebound TV news addict given to political tirades and rants foreshadowing my own radicalization since 2000. Observing these stages so clearly in our fond friendship around the table in his den, lining up a putt on the third green or beneath the boom in the middle of the gulf over the years has led me to wonder whether such political orientation is an inevitable stage of a maturing human or whether my radicalization is a result of past seven years stolen by the present misadministration. Other factors in the quandary are his 24 year earlier sample of political influence than mine, the very real possibility that the powers that be beneath the electoral icing on the top secret ingredients of the American vanilla layer cake are conducting a long running experiment on how fast the heat can be turned up on the frog before he notices the intent to boil him, and the mixed blessing of dad’s not witnessing Dribblya’s debauchery.

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The last time this happened
Dad was my age
To hear him tell it
He had a voice for his rage
The people got big
And loud
And mad
And one
And right enough
To fill Dick with dread
Of the fear he had bred
Trials were held
Questions asked
Exposed his sweaty lies,
Behind scowling bushy brows
And bookie bearded face
Naked imperialism's hairy ass.

He left minions to steer,
While the main puppeteer,
Learned to use a dash more smarm
Down home, harmless, goofy
Opie country charm
To hide fascist plutocracy
Behind wartime democracy.

These same older, wiser sages
Chose a puppet from our stages
Ready-made, lily-white, nice guy
From our TVs and that movie
But his act wore quite thin
When their ambition to win
Showed through his puny fabric of groovy

It took seven sorry, sinful years
Of elephants sitting on asses faces
Putting secret microphones in private places
To catch Willie get aide shifting gears
Evoking bible thumping outrage
Setting up that born-again stage
For a country yokel so stupid
Alfred E. Neuman looks lucid
While the asses blew hot wind
From the party that had sinned
Dumbo snuck away with the prize

The stumbling bumpkin we’ve now got
Fills our lives with constitutional rot
Chasing fall guys for his own crime
Offering scapegoats just to buy time
Calling things things they are not

Will there be a ground swell?
Always too early to tell

MY AYN RAND

A few posts ago I began with the metaphor of choosing appropriate stones to match the look of the wall one is building as an example of cherry picking life experiences and literary inspirations out of a plethora of influences. I got a bit side tracked by the beauty of Andy Goldsworthy’s wall and South America’s rejection of the IMF, but I just got reminded of my original inspiration for beginning that metaphor by reading yet another socialist rant against followers of Ayn Rand’s philosophy over at Driftglass.

The chaos of nature insures a variety in individuals that genetic memory is powerless to prevent with its subliminal guidance. The sequence of life experiences is the new thread being woven into the growing tapestry of conscious memories by ones vision of the world and place in it. I find no example more apt than the bible of any religion to show such universal variety of interpretation, except in the area where threats of retribution for nonconformity influences those given to belief. I didn’t chose bibles for their religious aspects, but for their saturated dissemination within the culture from which they arose. From ultra orthodoxy to vehement heresy accounts only for the spectrum dealing with the idea that the books must be believed over all contradictions by ones own experience.

If I may (if I can), I’d like to leave the religious, belief, faith, trust aspects out of the rest of the discussion and get to life as an endless experiment based on the state of ones experiment at any given time. I have mentioned how I can glean pearls of wisdom from fiction and non fiction without a concern for which. Although the source deserves my gratitude for the expression that inspired me, likely as not, what I got isn’t exactly what the author meant. As Japanese golfers have shown me, everyone puts a signature twist to their lives as well as to their picture perfect strokes. And the proliferation of variety in ideas continues as inevitably and as coincidentally as the rest of nature.

When I turned on to Ayn Rand I had just left four years of the Marines and was a freshman mechanical engineer at Mississippi State University and was so inspired by Howard Roark’s courtroom defense of the rights of the creative individual in Fountainhead that it became the pet theory against which all other ideas had to compete in the formulation of a proto-yuppie philosophy that was to stand me in good stead through my first five or six years of realizing the ideal of that theory as an engineer at IBM. Silly me, I had interpreted her opposition to the collectivists to be a description of ruthless capitalists who profit from efforts not their own always out to buy up creations that would put them out of business. When the product I helped design passed all the performance tests and was formally announced, rather than being assigned a new product to bring into reality the next step for the team was to redesign the product to break down as soon after warranty as physically possible to achieve the ultimate bottom line, because a penny saved on five million machines is fifty thousand dollars.

Disgust with the ethics and the assignment combined to cause me to seriously reexamine how I had become part of an elite collective living in an IBM ghetto, confining all social interaction to the company compound and the company of company cronies in ventures to the local bowling alley, links and bars. Only the dichotomy seemed to be that that life was also John Galt’s solution to separating himself from the collective in Atlas Shrugged: secretly form alliances with other creative individuals to establish a community separate from the clueless, needy rabble of the collective!! WTF! You must understand, I had never even had a conversation with a "socialist" to this point in my life and really only knew about communism through American propaganda. Such are the fruits of US American, white, male privilege I have since learned. The blinders of certainty about the unknown.

After my family life moved away, my last justification for making more money than I knew what to do with departed as well. The part of Ayn Rand’s philosophy concerning the idea that the individual must become of use to, responsible for and an honor to ones own self before any action can fully realize the meaning of treating others as one would be treated is still the pertest of pet theories, though I have become bereft of my confusion about which collective collects the money and which collectives want the money and which collectives want never to see money again and how many tribes there are amongst communities who don’t even think about collectives or tribes or money. We ARE in it together, no matter what our attitude toward that little truism is or how little or much we discuss it.

I moved to a communal house, an honest to goddess, grass roots, cooperative collection of kindred souls lasting until gentrification scattered we roaches to our individual parts of the larger tribes of artisans, musicians, writers, surveyors, carpenters, dancers, and gardeners whose contributions to the gestalt are always gifts because none are so needy as to expect or demand them. The levitation trick with five friends comes to mind. Still, that remained my only experience of socialism until I began blogging.

It was like sticking my finger in a light socket. Within my first ten posts I received an invite to be a contributor to the Further Left Forum for reasons I have yet to understand, they sure didn’t want my light in their den of America haters. But the short while I was there I ran into blog friends with which my slant does not clash destructively, while we all hone our ability to express our outrage at the present state of world affairs in ways to better jostle, cajole, persuade, alert the sleepers to the dream, the collective myth of representative government from which we are awakening.

So when I hear otherwise reasonable socialists go off on Ayn for the conscienceless excesses of the collective elite, neocon, fascist, capitalistic illuminati I feel the urge to write this post.

And now I have, and I feel a lot better. Obviously, from where I show up in the political compass map below, her left/right politics didn’t influence me at all, while her championing of the responsible individual, especially in her shortest work, Anthem, definitely influenced my tendency toward anarchy.

Okay, folks, have at her once again.

THANKS BIG GUY

The practice of commemorating events with special annual celebrations of lessons to be learned and virtues gained by future generations would seem to be as humanely benevolent as the wish to end world wide starvation. With the exception of Halloween’s celebrating the pagan attitude that life is play, I find that modern, western civilization’s year is loaded to the gills with holidays to exercise self serving hypocrisy and opportunistic exploitation. Today begins the great American consumer's surge of the forty days of thingathon with a kick off feast to thank the creator for the land he made specially for us by consuming a great variety of the life forms with which we share the earth that are not as equal as us. Thanks big guy. Our Weekly Reader explains that when the divinely guided pilgrims arrived on the shores of Lake Gitchyergunnout the savages had a park bench all laid out with a feast of the local cuisine in a show of appreciation for being rescued from their godless ways. And to this day, children, we celebrate Thanksgiving to remember how thankful we should be that the pilgrims tolerated sitting at a table with naked people at least until the meal was over before they wiped them out.

And now in a modern version of the spirit that won the west I give you this little wake up as to what is going on over here while dribblya fights terriers over there.

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The Subject Tonight is Love

The subject tonight is Love

And for tomorrow night as well,

As a matter of fact

I know of no better topic

For us to discuss

Until we all

Die!

—Hafiz

GREAT SPEECH — I HOPE HE WROTE IT.

Perhaps, as has been suggested by several of my respondents to the Political Compass post above, there should be a third axis for a more specific position of socio-political opinions. For our times, I suggest that this axis should be attitude toward nature stretching from dirty-hippy, tree-hugging simbiotes like me all the way to God-gave-it-to-me-to-do-whatever-I-want, pollution profiteering corporations and their bought and sold politicians. This would also separate the theists from the secular, which may have already been done somewhat on the authoritarian/anarchy axis.

It is time we woke up to the fact that, by loving the earth we are all indigenous people being exploited by conquistadors as surely as the Aztecs and as surly as the indigenous people of Bolivia today awoke to the power of their majority to wrest control from the effete elite whose lifeblood was the people's labor and fear. Bolivia is a democracy built by the people instead of being imposed from the top down, as the US is prone to do.

On such an axis, I'd be right there with John Edwards, er, ah, right there with John Edwards' speech — I forgot he was a politician for a moment there.

LOVE IS ITS OWN REWARD

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
Sir Edward Gibbon

You heard the man you love

You heard the man you love
talking to himself in the next room.
He didn't know you were listening.
You put your ear against the wall
but you couldn't catch the words,
only a kind of rumbling.
Was he angry? Was he swearing?
Or was it some kind of commentary
like a long obscure footnote on a page of poetry?
Or was he trying to find something he'd lost,
such as the car keys?
Then suddenly he began to sing.
You were startled
because this was a new thing,
but you didn't open the door, you didn't go in,
and he kept on singing, in his deep voice, off-key,
a purple-green monotone, dense and heathery.
He wasn't singing for you, or about you.
He had some other source of joy,
nothing to do with you at all—
he was an unknown man, singing in his own room, alone.
Why did you feel so hurt then, and so curious,
and also happy,
and also set free?

——Margaret Atwood

I was compelled to post this poem for its rarity in delicately capturing the essence of what keeps love alive, beings sufficient unto themselves able to love each other for having the same such admirable capacities the day they met and allowing them all the room they need miles on down the road.

Consider love. Presupposing free will in others is the requisite for falling in love. It is the existence of a discriminating awareness on the other end that is the source of any possible thrill, attraction, and respect.
——Daniel Rirdan, Ecovillage proposer (1966 - )

FIND YOUR POLITICAL SELF

Can one plan to plot a table
Revealing how politicos are able
To carry on for hours
About issues never ours
By planning a plot to table
Pointing out the nudity in the fable?

I'm quite encouraged by the response I have so far received to my request for readers to email me their coordinates on the map as plotted by the political compass. At this point (11/19/07) there is a fairly tight group of we (13) anarchistic, sympathetic bloggers in symetrical opposition to all but three of the politicians who're promising to serve us!!! Riiiight.

Please visit Political Compass and email to me the results to be added for a fuller picture of this not so unexpected anomaly. I am leaving this post at the top for the rest of the year for easy access and better dissemination of the idea to casual surfers. I will update it every week or when three new plots need adding, whichever comes first. Make me busy, people. ;°}

I must add that although the politicians plotted here are running for US president, the political compass is quite applicable to any society's concerns, so no matter where you are from, it matters to this survey. Thanks.

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NOTES ALONG THE WAY:
11/15/07 —— The grouping along the diagonal from elite rich to the common bond of self reliant individuals seems to be a transition from an exploited perversion of the golden rule to its true meaning and reminds me of logarithmic plots that would magically appear to chart straight lines when applied to human's reliance on comparison to establish value.

I am also tempted to preemptively mention my lifelong suspicion that the majority of the eligible voters don't vote because the politicians are this separated from where they think they aught to be that they are irrelevant to their lives. But then, these are early returns and may only be an indication of how like minds and kindred spirits recognize one another without politics ever entering into it except as an indication of it.

11/18/07 —— It is getting pretty ridiculous, this crowding of my nine respondents so far so far from anyone who might represent them. There is quite a bit of birds of a feather factor in this grouping which I hope to see thin out as time goes by, but has only led to a more densely packed clot as yet.

For individual candidate identification
use the chart in the 11/7/07 post.

THE GAME WE FORGET WE'RE PLAYING

Having followed a link to the Wikipedia page on simulation I tangented off on a metaphor for how we can slip into our avatar in the civilization game so readily, being plugged in since birth. In a way a new born is like a circuit board full of the standard set of transistors soft wired according to their genomic memory prepared to deal with experience in nature by tweaking the analogue knobs for a clearer picture, only to be hardwired by civilization’s digital demands for certainty to gain security from the threats it alone poses — if not certainty, at least a bribe, a tithe, a tax just to keep ‘em out of your kitchen or insure they won’t be throwing a garbage can through your store front window.

So we wake up every morning with fresh possibilities of learning more about our relationship to the natural world our ignorance of which is leading to an imbalance that could end life as we know it. Before our eyes open the game powers up and our avatar’s agenda, financial and social maintenance, baby’s diaper, shaving, lipstick, hangnails all become much more immediately demanding of ones time as we once again slip into the game and fail to question our playing at all.

Matrix was a pretty cool, stylized scenario on the idea. If the story had come to reveal that each of the cable drained entities had actually volunteered the use of their energy to a hypnotic propaganda system as the patriotic, good for the country thing to do, it would have hit the nail quite a bit more on the head.




The Thirteenth Floor takes the man as simulation theory into the game aspect further by posing that game playing tekkies get so deep into their science they discover that they themselves are avatars for individuals in the “realer” world. This comes much closer to the idea of the avatar we begin manipulating within this poor, crudely digital, law and order simulation of nature we call civilized behavior replete with its sophisticated knowings blinding it to natural happenings.

The Truman Show gave me goose bumps by reminding me of my early sensitivity to changed behavior in adults whenever I entered a room. I often spun around unexpectedly, hoping to catch them resorting to who they were before I showed up, the false back of a set piece, a changing back drop, something to confirm a suspicion I have never quite lost. As I got older I realized that my suspicions were true; adults do hypocritically alter their behavior for children to the point that most parents become even more dedicated avatars to protect their children from the game they play and cannot imagine an alternative to. The only thing new was that I no longer saw the adults as aware parts of a conspiracy from which they too suffer. What appears to be a conspiracy is an unwitting complicity in support of a belief system whose whole premise of man’s exceptionality in the scheme of things, his grant from above of anything he can grub for himself below as upheld by the western version of civilization is poisonous bullshit held together with extremely frightened blind faith and unctuous prayer, the most fragile of last resorts, the most deadly of explosive treacheries an avatar can inflict upon its player for volunteering to play the game.

Then there are the exposés of the wizards behind the simulation ala Oz in the movies Network, Wag the Dog, and Broadcast News showing the gears under the hood of the roadster to hell.

Of course there are the attempts to accurately reproduce reality to be found in actual computer game simulations of hockey, golf, car racing, family life, war against whomever, history and empire building.

In the field of alternate realities Second Life is like the second derivative of civilization, still locked into the original parameters while Uru is more like a differential of nature requiring the avatar to figure out alien nature and probable clues to vague puzzles of an alien culture.


Cruder, though no less effective in conditioning the reactions of the avatars are the mathematical simulations in the form of pie charts, bar graphs and asymptotic plots of chaos should alternatives be considered. With the two year billion dollar campaign season being waged among a baker’s dozen of professional scammers for the right of one of them to be of “service to the people” for four years in the White House I cannot but wonder if there isn’t some other reason they want the job. Polls conducted with all manner of intended results are hawked as the wave of the future just to scare people the other way or play to the lowest common denominator of being on the winning side no matter what the principles involved.

Another sort of simulation has been suggested by having seen Steve Kilby’s proudly posting an award to his blog, the time being, the dubious honor of its requiring a genius to be understood. Seriously!! The subtitle to the site, The Blog Readability Test, is What level of education is required to understand your blog? and the award itself states “This Blog’s Reading Level: Elementary, Junior High, High School, College under grad, College post graduate or Genius. Considering that Einstein once said that if you can’t explain something to a child, you don’t know what you’re talking about, or something to that effect, it would seem that writing only geniuses can understand is ultimate sophistry. To check into their criteria a bit closer I entered the URLs of my blog buds and fellow canaries and was flabbergasted at the results. I won’t name any names to protect the reputations of my friends but: All the poetry/photography/art inclined blogs were restricted to high school or less education while the political ranters rated at least under grad reading required up to genius level for a USA hating group of armchair revolutionaries. WTF? Since when is being easily understood a minus and being relevant only to a rare few a virtue?

I am interested in one simulation I came across and posted on a couple of days ago, the Political Compass. I am hereby requesting anyone who cares about such things to take the test and copy/paste your resulting chart in an email to me so I can plot your position on the political map and perhaps against your reading requirements if their appears to be a trend. I love this kind of shit even though I know it amounts to less than a hill of beans, it must be a recessive gene.

IT COMES THROUGH THE CRACKS

Andy Goldsworthy — Storm King Wall

Remaining sane while becoming civilized is a process of cherry picking experience as preferences and probabilities to evidence who we are at any given moment much like I used to do as a mason picking just the right shape, color and texture in a rock to work with the state of the wall at each point in time. I always preferred dry stacking to the permanence of mortar just for the permeability giving room for rain to water stray seeds in niches to bring the wall to natural life.

There was a project undertaken by Andy Goldsworthy to rebuild an old, colonial wall that had been scattered asunder by trees growing along its length and other ravages of time in the Storm King area of New York. The beauty of the results lies in the idea behind its reconstruction and the metaphor I find in it for the point in ones life when the law and order of civilization is found to be in constant conflict with and no longer rules ones nature and must be arranged to allow it to flourish in the enlightenment of free thought. The hundred-plus years of growth of the stand of trees is a straight line where the original wall was built after clearing the wilderness for agriculture. Taking root along the wall, seeds becoming trees slowly eased the stones, rocks and boulders into points of imbalance and a falling away from the line. When he arrived very little erect wall stood amongst the twenty foot wide scatter of debris along the line. To commemorate the line of the original wall he removed all the remnants from around the trees and reassembled them in ribbon fashion snaking around each tree and back across the line of the original wall between them.

In the same way, after sufficient conflict between the learned behavioral propriety of civilization and ones growing experiential sense and awareness of natural instincts, one may find that the artificial imposition of laws becomes irrelevant to ones experience of nature. If one still considers nature to be something to be conquered, the rules are reavowed to be held impervious to the wilderness of the unknown and the mind begins to suffocate without fresh thought. If one honors experience over authority, the heresy may take form as anything from overt criminality in rebellion to hermetic hermithood off the map withdrawal. In my previous post I demonstrate that I am not even off the political map yet and my dependence on energy for this computer and some food means I am still on the real artificial map as well. My goal is to, like Buster Keaton when the front of the barn swung out and fell around him, be standing where the loft window landed when whatever occurs in the immanent collapse of the myths of American exceptionality, limitless oil and global abuse denial shakes the civilized world like nothing anyone alive has ever imagined.

As I commented on The Far Queue yesterday on the subject of World Bank versus South American alternatives:

At the beginning of the 21st century, mankind is torn between admitting the effect of its overpopulation and industrialization on the health of the planet and scrambling to finance further degradation by still relatively pristine third world populations. If we were serious about the survival of our progeny and health of the planet we would:

1) Stop the perpetually self-defeating increase of world food production to stop the population increases that inevitably increase the number starving people and quantity of polluters. The always increasing population is always the justification for industrial excesses in production.

2) Individuals must become more aware of the effect of over population by the sheer quantity of polluting, heating prosthetics technology requires each to acquire. Education about the need to prevent unwanted pregnancy with contraception is of paramount importance. Without wars, genocide or birth permits the human population could be reduced effectively in two or three generations if the implications of overpopulation were fully realized by everyone. It is criminal to prohibit the choice of birth control to a species becoming cancerous to the body of which it is a part.

3) Stop using harmful technology immediately, all the phase out plans are too soft. The internet already has the capability of every type of communication except teleportation of physical entities. A giant portion of western civilization's exceptionally excessive contribution to world wide pollution is due to the auto and air conditioning proliferation by commuters to and from jobs they could do just as well at home. While the impermeability of their offices and parking lots could be returned to nature or used to house the homeless, as if either of those would ever happen.

I don't find much hope for independent financing of local versions of the US's thingathon to gain South America the improvements its indigenous populations envision. Or anywhere else for that matter. The Nobel winning micro loan business is financing Indian farmers’ buying Monsanto hybrid seed for the first year only to find the same expenses the next year causing thousands of farmers to choose the alternative to such debt, suicide. Money is not food, what else does one need from day to day?

POLITICAL COMPASS BARELY FOUND ME

Came across Political Compass the other day and thought I'd limber up some animation skills to demonstrate my total confusion about politicians and their complete disregard of people, at whose pleasure, not the president, they serve. Find yourself on this enlightening and pretty valid charting of ones political orientation. My choice would be a Zinn-Chomski ticket or none of the above, but see Kucinich-Paul as a dynamic combination that should pretty well clean up the off-white house with their honest differences. If there is any apt title for this trend of the US political ideal it should be, Searching for Hitler. It definitely proves we don't have a two party system, whether it's the Nazi or Thatcherites is debatable.

LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY

I found this video and post it here for my daughter to share. Li'lwave, the little girl at the end is just about the age Donna was when you two moved away these 35 years gone by. I watch it and let beautiful tears of nostalgia wash away regret for things that cannot be changed and remind me of my good fortune to have experienced such a life at all.

THE ONION — GOTTA LOVE 'EM

MY ALIEN NATIVITY

This being the sixty-eighth anniversary of the tortured event, I thought I’d regale you with the story of my miraculous birth. The telling of it also gives me an opportunity to explore how truth is mistaken for its manifestations.

In 1898, inspired by canals on Mars perceived by Percival Lowell that Hubble or any number of robots on the surface have since yet to detect, the first speculation of life on other planets led H. G. Wells to write the first science fiction novel distinctly different from fantasy literature until its time. War of the Worlds told of an Earth invasion by malevolent Martians attacking England. For a cute Halloween prank, the eccentric genius and roaring egomania of Orson Welles took it upon himself to recast the story’s narration to a quaint little area of New Jersey and broadcast it uninterrupted, virtually unannounced over national radio as if it were a story breaking in on a real newscast.

In 1938, inspired by invaders from Mars just over the hill from her home in New Jersey, Jane Green jumped in the car with her husband Johnny to join the rest of their neighbors in panicked stampede out on the highways leading away from wherever the martians were last reported being sited. As the faux announcer was eventually overrun by Mars' deadly arrival, Jane's water overran when I announced my lively arrival. I always knew her as a placid person passionate about small things and the magic in nature, but the floorboard on the passenger side of any family car I remember was worn through the rug, mat and protective paint to the bare metal from just her nervous feet shifting at every turn dad put on the steering wheel, though I never heard a peep of backseat driving from this woman who never drove a car in her lifetime. Such contained imagination and nervous energy certainly were enough to reify the newscast and project me into catching hands almost a month before anyone expected, or so the story goes.

In 2007, inspired by the lack of personal responsibility for the life they lead, I feel more and more like an alien living among these people I resemble enough to not be noticed and occasionally even get invited places. Like a mouse living off the spillage of an overfilled silo here in my haven outside Austin I am aware of my proximity to the path of a real panic stampede when any or all of several ignored disaster scenarios come to a head: peak oil, China demanding value for US' imperial war debts, one world fascism, global starvation, global frying. After a history full of prophets crying wolf the confluence of natural, karmic disasters resulting from civilization’s continuous abuse makes hardly a ripple in the mainstream. Just the idea that a race of beings sufficiently sophisticated to visit earth would still be as malicious as human’s disregard of mother earth is a prime example of our culture's basic attitude to anything alien. I want to save the planet, I must be alien. To paraphrase Mickey Roark’s great line in Barfly, “I don’t hate earth people, I just feel a lot better when they’re not around.”