January 1, 2008. At the new year, people who predict big changes like to go into detail. The usual subtext is: "By telling a story about change, we will convince ourselves that there will indeed be change, and that this empty existence will not keep grinding along just the same." This year feels different, because big changes have begun. We no longer have to convince ourselves that the American economy will collapse, because we can see the early stages of collapse all around us. So I'm going to take another angle, and focus on what we don't know. (Also, I'm focusing on America.)
How much inflation will we get, and how fast? How quickly will we lose our ability to buy stuff from China, and as we stop buying it, what will happen to the Chinese economy and the giant Chinese import stores like Wal-Mart? How long will it take American manufacturers to fill the gap, and what parts of the gap will remain unfilled? Are there products that non-elites will never again be able to buy?
Where will the industrial system cut waste, and where will it continue to be wasteful? How long can airline prices remain ridiculously cheap? Will the toxic "foods" of industrial agribusiness finally become more expensive than fresh local produce? How expensive does food have to get before people plant gardens? How high does gas have to go before people actually drive less? How many vacant houses and middle-class homeless do we need before squatting becomes socially acceptable? More generally: how soon, and how smoothly, will economic pressures translate into long-needed adjustments to behavior?
Compared to all that stuff, the presidential election is easy to predict because, well, it's rigged. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul represent the values of mainstream America, but mainstream America will not be permitted to know it, and certainly neither man will be permitted to serve as president. Paul will do better than Kucinich because Democratic voters have been trained to think bland right wing candidates are more electable, while Republican voters have been trained to go with their gut. The only question is whether Paul will do so well that the ruling gangs will have to kill him. I'm guessing they'll marginalize him with some hyped-up scandal, and in the general election, Giuliani will edge out Clinton. If either Edwards or Obama is permitted to get the nomination (and therefore the presidency), that's a very good sign that the elite are willing to compromise, and that the coming changes will not be as ugly as they could be.
I'm not worried about the police state, because central control is extremely inefficient, especially on a spiritual level. People who do what they feel like are more energetic, more adaptable, and much cheaper than people who have to be forced. The tighter any society gets, the weaker it gets, and the faster it breaks down. In the next year you'll read about a lot of repressive new laws, and the best response is: "How well can this be enforced, and what do I have to do to stay out of its way until it dies?" The best we can hope for from the big systems is that they will not fight too brutally against the better smaller systems that will grow through the cracks.
January 3. Robert reports from Phoenix:
The new employers sanctions law went into effect on January 1st, shutting down businesses who knowingly hire illegals. There are 500,000 to 750,000 undocumented people in the Phoenix area. One of the local Spanish radio stations yesterday was predicting that a minimum of 20% of these people will be gone within two months. What happens to a city when 100,000 to 150,000 people just vanish at once? It is like the Black Death is going to be sweeping through. With what results?
January 9-13. Did Diebold rig the New Hampshire Democratic primary? Here's an analysis that factors in big vs small towns and still shows a fix, and a chart of Clinton vs Obama and Diebold vs hand counted. And a deep statistical analysis revealing that Clinton vs Obama optical scan percentages are the exact inverse of the hand count percentages, to within a ten thousandth of a percent.
The fact that they match to within one vote means that the match is too good to be true. We're talking as unlikely as a 3-sigma deviation. If you're a teaching assistant and a student turns in a lab report with data of this quality you suspect them of doctoring their data to match the textbook answer and call them to your office for cross-examination.
January 10. I'm gradually figuring out this Clinton thing. How is it that Mike Huckabee can get away with being a near-socialist, and Ron Paul can almost get away with aggressively opposing the war and the police state, but any Democrat who takes those positions is pushed to the fringe? It's because American politics is like an abusive family, and the Republicans are the abusive father, and the Democrats are the abused wife, and we're the kids, some of us broken and some of us still rebellious. The father can disobey his own rules, but the wife must obey them perfectly. Hillary Clinton, as a woman in this culture, has a lifetime of training in sensing just exactly what the biggest bully wants, and doing it. This is why so many Democrats support her even though they disagree with her on the issues and they find her uninspiring and they know Obama is more electable. On a subconscious level, they are resonating with her "expediency," her submission to the Abuser. When they say they support her for her "experience," they mean her experience in being broken, like them.
January 12. Matthew sends this article by Richard Moore, What to expect from the next US Administration. It starts out really well: the Iran war has been called off by powers above the presidency, and their plan is to put the Clintons back in, make a show of fixing the most hyped excesses of the Bush gang, and then follow Al Gore's agenda. But then Moore slips into what I call the foilhead religion. Now, I'm totally on board with some of the most out-there "conspiracy theories," but I've never bought the Master Narrative, that the secret rulers are omnipotent, that whatever happened in the past or will happen in the future, it's exactly what 'they' planned.
If you look at history, you don't see a master plan -- you see a mess! The plans of the most powerful people in the world repeatedly come to ruin. Enormous plot twists come out of nowhere. The only thing you can be sure of is that empires will fall and resistance movements will become the new dominators. Of course there are powerful insiders who want to build a green police state, steal even more resources, and smoothly manage everyone else for their own benefit. They will fail. History is like a wild horse that nobody can stay on top of for more than ten seconds. The awful truth is that no one is in control, not even the forces of evil.
Josiah comments:
It's kind of like someone who jumps from the (correct) assumption that top predators will kill smaller prey whenever they can to the (incorrect) assumption that top predators determine everything that happens in an ecosystem. Top predators will tend to win head-on confrontations, even during a forest fire or blizzard, but they are as tightly constrained within their structural niches as the smallest plants and herbivores. The difference seems to be that human elites consistently practice predation unsustainably, killing not only what they and their pack need to survive, but hyperaccumulating and destroying their resource base. They are reckless and over-exuberant, not all-powerful.
January 17. Sally writes:
I read this article on Facebook. Then I had this vision... It's after the oil has run out. We huddle, in ones, twos or groups, in our forlorn abodes. We shiver or we sweat, our stomachs growl with hunger. It's night and the only light comes from the ghostly glow of our computer screens, deliberately kept working to keep us lulled into submission by a virtual world that feeds without nourishing and allows us only the illusion of power but none of the reality.
Meanwhile, The Powers are hunkered down in bastions of wealth and opulence. They have commandeered all the best views, all the waterfronts. Their larders are filled with decades worth of feasts and their growing fields and gardens are well-protected by guards and fences. Sound far-fetched?
Actually, it sounds like the way the world is now, except we're not hungry or shivering. And it's precisely because the system can still buy us off with physical comfort that we continue to be submissive. When enough of us lose our incomes, our savings, our housing, our access to health care, then the domination system will no longer be able to control us by threatening to take that stuff away.
Last summer on the radio, I heard a Green Day cover of an old John Lennon song, Working Class Hero. The chorus is "A working class hero is something to be," but I heard it as "A working class zero is something to fear." When the system can no longer buy us off and string us along, we become powerful and dangerous.
I love the internet, or I wouldn't be using it so much. The internet has the potential to be an extremely powerful tool for bottom-up change. When tens of millions of people become willing to do massive coordinated actions that are practical and not merely symbolic, then the internet can allow us to self-organize in ways that revolutionaries of the past never dreamed of... but then, when the internet becomes more useful to revolutionaries than to advertisers, the elite will pull the plug! Or they'll try to. A lot of smart people have thought about how the internet could be killed, and the consensus is that the only realistic way is to take shovels to fiber optic lines. Every year the internet gets less vulnerable to electric blackouts, with advances in micro-solar and low-power machines and wireless reception and decentralized networks. You could always detonate a hydrogen bomb in the upper atmosphere to make an electromagnetic pulse that would fry most microchips within a thousand miles, but that's not really a tactical move, more like "If I'm going down, I'm taking you all with me."
January 19. The current scientific consensus is that dogs are domesticated wolves, but it's wrong. Here's a great summary of the issue, Controversial origins of the domestic dog, and a PDF of a scientific paper, The Origin of the Dog Revisited. Basically, dogs were domesticated from wild dogs:
Canis familiaris is a distinct species with its own independent history. Prior to domestication, it presumably existed as a relatively small, generalized canid that voluntarily adopted the commensal pariah niche still occupied by many dog populations today. This is supported by the morphological and molecular distinctiveness of domestic dogs, by the anatomy and behaviour of primitive domestic dog breeds, and by the archaeological and fossil record.
If this is true then the truly wild ancestors of modern domestic dogs are extinct... [This] is not unprecedented nor unusual: Dromedaries Camelus, for example, only exist in the wild today in feral form, and are otherwise entirely domesticated, and the wild ancestors of modern domestic horses and cattle are entirely extinct. In fact the eradication of the wild ancestors of a domestic form is thought by some to be one of the key historical events that occurs during the domestication process.
January 22. Last week I got this report from Nick, who works as an engineer at a coal power plant:
I am seeing first hand an electrical grid that is going to be tattering pretty hard the next few years. I see three big issues coming up fast.
1. Close to 70% of the utility workforce is set for retirement within five years. So much plant knowledge is internalized by the workforce and many changes to the systems have been made without proper records of it. Just like anything else the plants are suffering an entropic decay. The engineers that designed and understood all the various little systems of these places are gone.
2. 2009 EPA Clean Air Interstate Regulations have forced nearly all of the coal power plants to install scrubbers, baghouses and low Nox burners. This has been a massive investment roughly a quarter of a trillion dollars. 60% of our electric power comes from these aging 1970's vintage coal power plants. These retrofits increase auxillary power consumption by up to 10%, increase plant cycle complexity, increase maintenance costs and labor requirements, and perhaps most significantly they impact the the plants in unpredictable ways. For example our plant just installed low Nox burners. These burners changed our combustion process in ways the boiler was not designed for. As a result we will see reduced boiler tube lifespans. Boiler tubes are the arteries of the electrical system and they are already quite old since virtually no new plants have been built in the last 40 years. When I add it all up I expect to see increased unit failures.
3. In most areas demand is set to outstrip production by 2009-2012. Currently it is difficult to get a new coal plant licensed, and pretty much impossible to get a new nuclear plant licensed. So to meet this demand all the utilities are gambling with more natural gas turbines. Natural gas prices though are volatile and total natural gas supplies are are questionable.
When I add up the lack of utility labor, the cost and loss of reliability from emission equipment investment, and the dependency on natural gas I suspect two things: massive rate increases, and forced reduction in electrical consumption and perhaps rolling blackouts. If peak oil hits and we expect to shift to electric transportation it simply can't happen without a major reinvestment in generation plants and transmission systems.
One thing I know for certain is I want the heck out of this buisness before I am expected to fix the problems that are looming very close on the horizon.
Patricia adds:
My dad was one of those "scrubber" operators at a coal-fired electrical plant, until he retired about seven years ago. I'm certain he would add spectacular mismanagement and misallocation/abuse of "human resources" beginning back in the 90's to the list... which makes for VERY unhappy rank and file workers who eventually get so angry they no longer give a shit about the place, steal and slack off when possible, and quit or retire as soon as they can! So, I wouldn't expect any heroics from them when TSHTF.
This is the psychological angle that a lot of gearhead crashbloggers miss. I often see the argument, "Here's a new source of energy that will keep the system going forever," or conversely, "If we run out of energy, it's all over." I think the most important kind of energy cannot be numbered or measured. If people love what they're doing and feel inspired, they will work miracles. If they think it's bullshit and just go numbly through the motions, no amount of machine force can keep the system going.
January 25. Harper's article on George Bush's favorite painting and why he doesn't understand it. As you can see, it shows a guy who looks just like Bush charging on a horse with people running behind him. But according to Robert G.L. Waite's book The Psychopathic God, and this page about Hitler and Franz von Stuck, Hitler also loved a painting of a guy who looked like him charging on a horse with people running behind him! Here's the painting, The Wild Chase.
January 29. I've had several comments on Barack Obama, arguing that "they" won't kill him because his positions on the issues are basically in line with big money. But the same thing was true of Howard Dean. Dean even went to Yale, and yet "they" had to stop him from getting the nomination, because he would have hurt them on a deeper level than money. Money is just a symbol for power-over, and the fundamental rule of power-over is that all influencing energy must be top-down and not bottom-up. Martin Luther said it best: "Better for the princes to rule badly than for the people to rule well." Underneath Monsanto and the Rockefellers and the IMF is a Spirit of Control that would rather drive to hell than ride to heaven.
The problem with Obama is that the little people are excited about him, and if he wins, the little people will feel inspired and powerful and courageous, and the thought of this makes the Big People shit their pants. So what about Bill Clinton? Didn't he inspire people? I remember being excited that the Democrats could really take back the White House, but Clinton himself, from the beginning, seemed like a smooth talker with questionable ethics and allies, and a lot of us thought so. I went to the Washington state caucus in 1992, and you could tell instantly who was for which candidate. All the Paul Tsongas supporters, including myself, just looked like regular folks. All the Jerry Brown supporters were hippies. And all the Clinton supporters were creepy young guys in suits. It was like they stepped out of a pentagram in the back room. We made a deal with the devil to get a Democrat elected, and lost everything.
Obama combines Bill Clinton's charisma with courage and integrity you rarely see in politics. It doesn't matter where he stands on the issues -- anyone with courage and integrity is a giant threat to a system built on cowardice and corruption, and that system, and anyone who resonates with it, will want to kill him, even if it's not in their interests! The real tragedy is that "they" need Obama -- the elite need to keep the system going so they can continue to feed on it, and the best way to keep it going is to let go and allow energy from below to continually transform it. But because they are demonically possessed, they will block energy from below until it explodes in violence, and the cycle of abuse will circle around again. Still, I'm endorsing Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, and traveling five miles each way in the snow to go to the caucus. As Theoden said in Lord of the Rings: "We cannot defeat the forces of Mordor, but we must meet them in battle nonetheless."
February 7. I've avoided writing about the damaged internet cables because I see too much certainty based on too little evidence. But I like this article, Submarine Cables, Subsidiaries and Subversion, because it offers four different possibilities. One that it doesn't mention, which I've seen elsewhere, is that this is a preparation for war. And Nathan suggests yet another theory by sending an excerpt from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:
A balance of power has been struck between the people who own navies -- i.e., the people who have the ability to cut cables with impunity -- and the people who own and operate cables. Each side is afraid of what the other can do to it.
So this could be either a show of power, or an overt act of war, by certain governments in a conflict with certain businesses. What I like about this theory is that it reminds me of Fredy Perlman's distinction between two kinds of big system: the octopus and the worm. The worm is basically a strong military that can go around and smash things up. It's powerful, but slow and stupid. And the octopus is a network of commerce. It's smart, wealthy, and often decentralized, but it's physically weak. The Roman Empire was mostly a worm, and the Phoenicians were completely an octopus. Right now, every big military is a worm, and the internet is an octopus. The octopus always needs the consent of the worm to exist, but sometimes the worm doesn't need the octopus, and then the octopus is in trouble.
February 11. Sean writes:
I am hoping McCain will win, that way it will hasten the collapse and revolution.
And Brian adds more details:
If civilization is a mistake and requires replacement by smaller, decentralized, sustainable spheres of social and economic activity, aren't we better off with the worst candidate in office? As long as civilization hangs on, there are more people added, more species being made extinct, more resources depleted, and more energy and false hope put into a system which is flawed beyond repair.
What would our worldview be if we had lived the past seven years under president Gore? The Bush presidency has caused me and some of my peers to begin a transition from armchair progressives into people preparing intellectually and materially for a new world.
When I supported Nader in 2000, it wasn't because Gore wasn't pure enough -- it was because I believed that Gore would have been even worse than Bush in the long term, and I still think so. This is because Gore is a coward. He's fine as an elder statesman, but when he's actually holding office or running for office, he does nothing but back off to the right while pretending to lead the left. The Clintons do the same thing. They are owned by the neocons on foreign policy and by big money on domestic policy. President Gore would have done almost the same stuff as Bush, but he would have done it with more moderation, more discretion, and the whole time, the right wing pundits would have been screaming that he wasn't going far enough, and the liberals would have wrung their hands and said "We have to support him because he's a Democrat." Then Bush would have won in 2004 with a landslide and a mandate, and we would now be in a full-on police state.
By installing Bush in 2000, the right overplayed their hand. I was iffy about John Kerry in 2004. He's a little less cowardly than Gore, and had more excitement behind him, but I kind of wanted Bush to take another term, and in hindsight I'm glad he did. The last seven years have been a great investment in awakening and learning. But at some point, we have to stop investing and take the payoff.
Barack Obama's candidacy is the kind of opportunity that only comes along once or twice a century. He has honesty, courage, intelligence, charisma, and great political instincts, but most important, he shows a willingness and ability to channel bottom-up energy, to challenge the people to act, and to serve as a focus for public passion. It doesn't matter where he is on the issues! When you look on the level of human spirit, Obama represents our only chance to renew America without passing through really horrific violence.
Admittedly, it's not much of a chance. Even if he manages overcome the ruthlessness of the Clintons, and then not get assassinated, we can't just sit back and expect him to take care of us. That's the kind of thinking that ruined America in the first place, and Clinton supporters are trying to keep it going, answering Obama's "Yes we can" with "Yes she can." We're going to have to organize boycotts and strikes and local currencies and secession movements and illegal mutual aid networks and mass physical actions that are tactical and not merely symbolic. We'll have one, or four, or maybe eight years with Obama in office, and we should think of him not as a leader but as a weapon, a lever big enough to move the country. And the elite are going to have to stand down, to allow painful moderate changes instead of violent big ones. In the last hours before the French Revolution, the lawmakers relented and passed a bunch of huge reforms, but by the time anyone found out, it was too late -- they were already burning the chateaus.
The closer America gets to economic collapse, the more I sense viscerally that hard collapse and violent revolution would totally suck. And I think the critique of civilization begins to work against us when we move from thinking to action, because it's too black and white. Of course, eventually, we must evolve stable societies built on autonomous action, but I think that's going to take us thousands of years, and in the meantime, we're going to continue to have large complex societies muddling around and making mistakes.
February 13. Suzanne asks some good questions:
You wrote: "Obama represents our only chance to renew America without passing through really horrific violence." What does this mean, and how exactly? What kind of changes do you see happening if Obama were elected? What does "renew America" mean? How will Obama as president help create a softer crash as you talk about later in the post?
By January 2009, when the next president takes office, it will be obvious that we are in a Greater Depression. Tens of millions of Americans will be angry and desperate and uncomfortably awakened and confused. People will be losing their homes, their incomes, their ability to buy food and fuel and health care. And giant predators, from banks and corporations to foreign property owners to Blackwater, will be trying to exploit the crisis for selfish gain.
Now imagine that you are part of an organized movement that's technically against the law. Maybe a few hundred people have occupied an abandoned suburb and you are tearing down houses and making gardens. Or some farmers are refusing to leave land that the banks claim to own, and they've blockaded the roads with tractors and pulled out their hunting rifles. Or some truck drivers have gridlocked a major port to protest fuel prices. Or the people in one poor neighborhood have run out of food, and they march to the Whole Foods in a rich neighborhood and take what they need. Or half a million people march to protest the Iraq war, and because they don't have jobs or health insurance to lose, they don't go home, but occupy the center of a major city for days.
Now, what would President McCain do? He would send in the blackhawks and smoke your ass, and if you weren't killed, you would be shipped to a "detention facility".
What would President Clinton do? She would talk to all her big donors and neocon advisers, and do whatever they told her to do. And then she would talk to all her pollsters and spinners and focus groupers, and go on TV and say whatever bullshit they told her to say. We could do worse, but we could also do much better, because the elite will be too removed from reality to make good decisions, and her words would be so different from her actions that people would just get more cynical and angry.
What would President Obama do? I could be wrong, but I think he would go in person and listen to you, ask you what you needed and how he could help. Then he would go back to the big money people, and explain your position to them, and ask them what they needed. Then he would work out a compromise, and he would go on TV and explain the whole situation and how he resolved it and why. Nobody would be completely happy, but we would avoid a big disaster and gain in understanding.
The main thing we would understand is that we are powerful, that we can illegally threaten the status quo and win concessions. Tactical organized mass actions would break out all over. It would be anarchy! And I mean that in mostly a good way. One way or another, energy from below will take apart the system and build a new one. But with Clinton or especially McCain, it would be a worse kind of anarchy.
February 19. Last week I read this 2005 Daily Kos post by Barack Obama, and I learned from it. I had been imagining the political landscape as a simple line, where every step away from Kucinich is a step toward Lieberman. Obama explains (edited):
I am not arguing that the Democrats should trim their sails and be more "centrist." In fact, I think the whole "centrist" versus "liberal" label misses the mark. Too often, "centrist" seems to mean compromise for compromise's sake, whereas on issues like health care, energy, education and poverty, I don't think Democrats have been bold enough. But I do think that being bold involves more than just putting more money into existing programs, and will instead require us to admit that some programs don't work. And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise, including ideas that originate from Republicans.
Our goal should be to stick to our guns on core values, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention, and try to create the sort of serious, adult consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will. This is more than just a matter of "framing," although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required. It's a matter of actually having faith in the American people's ability to hear an authentic debate.
When I read this, I suddenly understood the Clintons. I had been thinking they were either amoral and ambitious, or cowardly. The truth had never occurred to me: The Clintons are incompetent! Of course, they're very smart intellectually, and Bill is one of the best public speakers alive. But they're not good at building consensus with their opponents, they're not good at adapting to political obstacles by exploring new ground, and they're terrible at bringing the issues honestly before the people. It's because they lack these skills that they appear to conservatives as liberal crusaders, and to progressives as simpering sellouts.
As an example of Obama's skill, here's an Obama endorsement from Clive Crook, a NAFTA-loving corporate capitalist.
Mr Obama is so much the better candidate that I find the party's hesitation difficult to credit. But I made the case for Mr Obama in terms of vision, temperament and appeal to uncommitted voters, not policy... His plan and his votes in the Senate show that he is a liberal, not a centrist. And he is no wavering or accidental liberal. His ideas are of a piece. He sees -- or convinces people that he sees -- a bigger picture. And yet this leftist visionary is pragmatic, non-ideological and accommodating of dissent. More than that, in fact, he seems keen to listen to and learn from those who disagree with him. What a strange and beguiling combination this is.
February 20. Why We Banned Legos Basically, some teachers at an incredibly enlightened school noticed that the kids were slipping into authoritarian patterns in their lego play, and led them through exercises until they understood how bad power relations can be built into systems, and how to build a new set of lego rules that led to cooperation and equality.
What I'm wondering is, where are our teachers? Doesn't it seem unfair that kids playing with pieces of plastic get guidance, and in this more real world, with so much more at stake, we are completely on our own to blunder through bad rules again and again for thousands of years, repeatedly focusing on the people at the top and not the system itself? What larger story can explain what we're doing in such a fucked up world? I really hope this all turns out to be a big simulation to show us the depths of our potential for evil, so we can avoid the same mistakes when the simulation ends and we go back to some more real world.
Also, I'm thinking about how well this fits the themes in my new essay: it's like we were playing with a very simple lego set where we had mostly mastered egalitarian systems, and then we got a much more complex lego set, and fell into bad systems. Now we either have to get rid of it, and go back to the simple lego set, or learn to work wisely with the complex set. I continue to think we're learning, but I'm not sure how fast, or how deeply.
February 22. Philip asked for some links to debunk the Clinton talking point that Obama has no substance. Here are a few: Judge Obama by His Laws ... 37 Bills Written or Co-Sponsored by Barack Obama ... "I have been surprised by how often Senator Obama turns up, sponsoring or co-sponsoring really good legislation on some topic that isn't wildly sexy, but does matter" ... I Refuse to Buy into the Obama Hype.
February 23. When Change Is Not Enough: Seven Steps to Revolution. We're going to have one -- the only question is what kind. I think Obama's candidacy is a big step in a peaceful revolution. If he wins, his supporters will feel their power and take bolder steps on the same path. If that path is blocked enough times, the energy will move to a path of violence.
February 24-25. So Ralph Nader has just announced that he will be running for president again. Of course he's much closer to me on the issues than Obama, but there's no way I'll support him this time, because the story is completely different. In 2000, Al Gore represented the Dinosaur Democrats and their strategy of playing not to lose -- run the most uninspiring and inoffensive candidate, position yourself a hair to the left of the Republicans, and count on people to vote for you out of duty, or out of fear of your opponent. And Nader represented the strategy of energizing the base.
It's easy to forget how little public passion was behind Gore in 2000, and how much was behind Nader. He was filling basketball arenas with people who stood up for his entire two hour speech. Howard Dean was riding the same wave in 2004, and I supported him even though he's way to the right of me on the issues. Now Obama is riding it, and Nader will not be taking votes from him, but from people who would otherwise stay home. I'm sure he'll be pointing out all of Obama's flaws on corporate and foreign policy issues, and he'll be right, but on a deeper level, he doesn't get it. Before we can change policy, we have to establish a pattern in our collective psyche of change coming from below. Millions of us have to get in a groove of being excited, acting, and making a difference. Once we have that energy structure, then policy change can follow.
A good metaphor here is horse and cart. Ralph Nader is out on the road trying to pull the cart by himself. Barack Obama is in the stable waking up the horse. Now, I'm not saying "the people" are just an instrument for politicans and intellectuals to manipulate for their own ends. My point is, the more the human energy structure of a society rises from the aliveness inside everyone, the better, and anything that anyone can do from any position, to feed that pattern, is good. Even the nicest tribes have chiefs, leaders who stand at the focus of attention, not to rule, but to inspire and guide anarchy in the best sense.
February 25. Great bit from an Alan Moore interview in Steampunk magazine #3:
It seems to me that at this juncture of the 21st century we are more aware of ourselves -- we are more aware of our past -- than culture has ever been before. Because of the internet, because of our tremendous archives that we've accrued, the culture of the past is open to us. And as we look at it, we can see that it's a fabulous junkyard of ideas that may have been incredibly beautiful -- and may have had an awful lot of life left in them -- that have been discarded by the relentless forward rolling of culture and our insistence upon new things every day. I think that we're now in a position where we can look back at the wonderful, glorious remains of our previous cultures -- our previous mindsets -- and we can use elements from that treasure trove to actually craft things that are appropriate to our future.
February 27-28. This article, The Truth About Autism, makes a good argument for an idea that's been on the fringe for years: that autism is best viewed not as a condition to be cured, but as a valuable addition to the human potential. And this article, Government Concedes Vaccine-Autism Case, throws in a twist. It's possible that the condition caused by vaccinations is something else that is being misdiagnosed as autism. Andrew, whose son has autism, comments:
Autism is a big catchall. There are nine symptoms in the diagnostic criteria, and you only have to show five in order to get the diagnosis. So two people who have been labeled autistic might only share one symptom. What we're really dealing with is a class of something, and each thing in that class would have it's own causes, symptoms, and appropriate treatments. But the state of the art isn't good enough to notice the difference between all these things yet.
I think that autism is both a disorder and a valid different way of thinking. It's a disorder because it hampers everyday living. But it's a blessing as well because the different ways of thinking can show us new and interesting things. I think the greatest strength of community and caring for each other is that it allows those of use who are capable of everyday survival to care for those who aren't, but whose other skills can contribute to everyone's quality of life. This type of relationship between people is why humans succeed as a species.