January 22. According to this article about ancient global warming, when volcanoes did what humans are now doing, and put a lot of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, oxygen levels dropped, temperatures rose, and dinosaurs might have appeared as an adaptation, thriving in that low-oxygen high-carbon greenhouse environment.
But now we're putting that carbon back into the air, re-creating the ecological niche of dinosaurs. And I've seen the idea in indigenous traditions, in investigations of the paranormal, and in Sheldrake's morphic fields hypothesis: that extinction is not exactly permanent -- that extinct critters can survive on some other level that we don't understand, making enigmatic appearances, just waiting for conditions to change so they can come back in full physical form.
So we could be circling around to a new age of the dinosaurs, 200 million years of hot, low-oxygen jungles as the carbon slowly goes back into the ground. And if the energy matrix of dinosaurs is hanging out somewhere, suppose it has intention and the power to influence the energy forms underlying this world. Suppose the consciousness of dinosaurs has created and steered human civilization to restore the conditions they can live in. David Icke could be literally right: Ancient reptilians are controlling human society from another dimension. Except they're not aliens. This is their home.
January 28. This article about chemtrails as fortean phenomena just made my head explode. First, if you thought all those white trails in the sky were regular jet contrails, here's a non-foilhead article about chemtrails that explains why they're not, and offers a conventional explanation about a military program to counteract global warming.
Now, by "fortean," I mean the kind of phenomena studied by Charles Fort, which confound conventional explanations and lead us into trippy views of reality itself. The article points out that the chemtrail operation goes way beyond the capabilities of human governments, that there are too many planes, they go too fast, they violate airspace with impunity, they make no sound, and they have never been observed to take off or land. This is something much bigger than the UFO phenomenon, and just as strange, that's been hiding in plain sight for years.
February 21. This is the coolest online dream description I've ever seen: Tim's Aliens over NYC dream, which eerily matches a Wernher Von Braun prediction that I find eerily plausible:
The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy... Then terrorists would be identified... Then we were going to identify third-world country "crazies"... The next enemy was asteroids... And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. "And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie."
March 14. These "newly discovered" "nanobacteria" sound an awful lot like Wilhelm Reich's bions. I predict this whole story will quietly vanish. As both Reich and Royal Rife discovered, looking at living things under powerful microscopes is too politically dangerous.
April 22. Great reader comment. This reminds me of November 29, 1999, when I was at my corporate job in Seattle on the day before protesters shut down the WTO, and they were marching through the street below us in turtle costumes. And one of my co-workers, a nice middle-aged woman, the last person you'd expect, suddenly smiled gleefully and said, "I hope they start smashing windows!"
Yesterday there was a power outage where I work for about five minutes. The first 10-15 seconds were not of fear -- but of some sort of primal excitement like, "The system has crashed! I don't know if I will dehydrate or starve to death but... the system has crashed!"
I think a lot of people want it to happen. People who like myself are so deep in debt there is no way out. People who are poor who have no debt but will never be able to rise to middle class. Then there are people who are disgusted with the system either because of the unequal distribution of wealth or the system is plain boring.
April 28. Secret Service records raise new questions about Gannon/Guckert:
Guckert made more than 200 appearances at the White House, attending 155 of 196 press briefings. He had little to no previous journalism experience, previously worked as a male escort, and was refused a congressional press pass. ... Perhaps more notable than the frequency of his attendance, however, is several distinct anomalies about his visits.
Guckert made more than two dozen excursions to the White House when there were no scheduled briefings. On many of these days, the Press Office held press gaggles aboard Air Force One -- which raises questions about what Guckert was doing at the White House.
What was he doing? Obviously, he was "servicing" people at the White House. Why not? The deeper issue here is the elitism in our culture. If a known prostitute was making many unexplained visits to some slum house, nobody would have any trouble figuring it out.
May 4. Missouri River drying up. This article calls the Missouri "big muddy," with complete oblivion to how rivers become brown. Here's a bit from The Final Empire, chapter 3:
Soil erosion is not an esoteric matter. Anywhere one is, it can be seen. It is possible to view any area and roughly conclude the erosion rate. In an uninjured climax condition, most waterways of the earth are, or were, clear. The discoloration of any stream or river means that the watershed is being abused. If the color of a body of water is green, it indicates that nutrients are eroding into the water causing a population explosion of plant organisms. If the color of the water tends toward brown, it is simply from gross movement of the soil and subsoil into the water.
May 9. Jesus as anti-civilization. Blog entry about an interpretation of the Bible by Walter Wink, with some different translations than the ones we're used to. This is from the book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.
Do not love the Domination System or the things pertaining to it. If anyone loves that System, the love of the Abba [loving divine parent] is not in that person. For everything in that System -- the desire engendered by an alienated body and a wandering eye and the arrogant pretensions of those who are full of themselves -- is not of the Abba but is begotten by the Domination System itself. That System is passing away with all its perverse desires, but the person who does what God wants done remains "into the aion" that is coming.
May 18. Stacy asks:
What do you think about the fact that all of these end of the world sites are by men?
Women and men see the "end of the world" differently because of their different sexuality: men anticipate a giant tense buildup, a sudden overwhelming climax, and after that they're no longer interested. And women see it going on and on, one interesting event after another.
May 19. I used to think organ transplants were creepy, but this article has made me think again: Organ Transplants and Cellular Memories. Apparently, especially in heart transplants, aspects of the donor's identity get transferred into the recipient. Some of these case studies are amazing!
Now I'm wondering about unintended consequences, if poor people and political dissidents are murdered to supply organs to the elite. It reminds me of an old science fiction story where an evil dictator trades pituitary glands with a political prisoner, and it ends up switching their identities.
May 23. I often see the argument that when this system crashes we're going all the way to the stone age, because our advanced industrial technologies are built on early industrial and pre-industrial technologies that have been forgotten. But those technologies have not been forgotten! Thousands of people are keeping them alive, partly with the help of the Lindsay's Technical Books catalog. Here's a nice summary of Lindsay on Cool Tools.
I have a catalog in front of me. It's mostly about metal working, including a book series that tells you how to build a full machine shop starting with nothing but charcoal and common industrial scraps. There are blacksmithing manuals, cookbooks of chemical formulas, books about how to make radios, telescopes, catapults, engines, stone arches, stills, motorcycles, sawmills, and guns. "It is the business of the future to be dangerous."
May 27. Comment by JH:
I grew up in a creative little cult that hoped, hoped, hoped we'd be spending 3.5 years in Petra waiting out the tribulation. All the adult men I knew got a sickening ego boost from thinking they'd be something special, something smart, when this new world started. They spent a lot of energy cultivating a feeling of scarcity and generally making everyone else unproductively nervous. The women, well, they made bread and jam and generally hoped their friends would be there in Petra and that their children would be warm enough. There is something in me to this day that gets satisfaction out of planning to flee, but I've decided, intellectually at least, to put my effort into where I am now: a community in a middle city, with a crumbling infrastructure but lots of empty lots for food to grow. I'm learning to re-use scrap building materials, and doing some seed-saving stuff, but mostly I'm learning to be more aware of my human surroundings, and to coordinate with and among people.
When I was eleven or so I remember thinking, sitting in church once, that the trouble with humanity comes down to men and women not getting along. If we get that worked out, there will be less hell here. And more recently I thought: no power = no power: a low energy environment will inevitably settle human relations down to a more peaceful, egalitarian level. There will never be a world with no power, and on the way down it's going to get ugly, but there will be a lot less easy power. And this is inspiring! Humans will get to be humans again.
May 31. Lately people have been telling me how unimaginably difficult it is to raise kids, and just now I had a thought: The difficulty is partly cultural, because in this culture, what kids do all day is different from what adults do. So there's always a conflict between giving attention to your kid, and living your adult life. But in many other cultures, you can simultaneously do your adult activities while teaching them to the kid. Our ancestors did it that way in forager-hunter and even agricultural societies. Why can't we do it in a technological society?
Because our workplaces are too fast-paced to permit being slowed down by teaching things to kids. They are too rigidly structured to be compatible with the needs, the personalities, the learning styles of young people. And most important, the tasks required by this society are so dismal and meaningless that we would never do them without first having all paths to alternative societies blocked, and then having our spirits crushed by the schooling system. For more on this subject, read John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education.