Ever fewer people, particularly those in institutions of power, but also in the general populace in developed countries, most especially in the United States, appear to be aware of, much less devoted to enlightened or humanistic values. Interest in the betterment of humanity, in the hope of minimally ameliorating our worst human impulses, or perhaps peeking at transcendence if only occasionally and imperfectly, or even hypothesizing about potentially preferred realities, is no longer a core concern, having given way to raw economic and military subjugation.

Ever since men became capable of free speculation, their actions, in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world and human life, as to what is good and what is evil. This is as true in the present day as at any former time. To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers.

~Bertrand Russell

Major Ralph Peters expressed succinctly and nakedly the dominant philosophy in America today (and across the past two centuries), in his book, Endless War:

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She sat rocking her baby in her arms, looking out the window at the rain, hoping that its ferocity would drown out the scream rising within her. The scream was the kind you feel when you realize that you may have made a huge, irreversible mistake. With someone else's life. The kind of rising scream you try to shove back down to the depths of your unconscious with denial.

But denial didn't seem to be working anymore.

It never used to rain like this. She had just watched Russia burning on the news. And Pakistan under water. A huge iceberg calve. Floods around the world. Food stocks and crops of all kinds being destroyed. Followed by the news that not only would the US not pass a climate bill, and that the latest round of international climate talks seemed to be going badly.

She rocked her baby harder and faster.

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So my name may seem familiar if you have frequented Daily Kos or Street Prophets. If you know the story, I'm sure anything I say won't change your mind; if you don't know the story you'll tell me you don't have the time to learn what is surely a "personal" issue. I accept the invitation under the same premise that I defended my actions at other blogs: no matter how much you might disagree with me or my views, I'm still some small portion of your world - as you are a part of mine.

Our views do matter to one another; we often delude ourselves by avoiding this reality. We blog, so that we might understand and find ways to co-exist with one another. Liberal, Conservative; American, citizen of the world; one individual human vs. Nature and Mankind.

A primer:

-If the TEA party is right, our founders were complete idiots

-Why "Survivor" is exactly the opposite of our reality, and proof that America loves losers more than winners.

-Why Tweets may spell the reversal of Evolution as we understand it.

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These are three of the cheerful passages in the article. If you've never read the whole thing I'd recommend it...

The Delusion Revolution:
We're on the Road to Extinction and in Denial
By Robert Jensen

Imagine that you are riding comfortably on a sleek train. You look out the window and see that not too far ahead the tracks end abruptly and that the train will derail if it continues moving ahead. You suggest that the train stop immediately and that the passengers go forward on foot. This will require a major shift in everyone's way of traveling, of course, but it appears to you to be the only realistic option; to continue barreling forward is to court catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of action, others who have grown comfortable riding on the train say, "Well, we like the train, and arguing that we should get off is not realistic."

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When one is looking at any system, whether it is a business process or something even more complex it always helps to know what the end state is or what the purpose is. This holds true when we are talking about our government as well. What is the purpose of government? If we do not know what that is, then all policy will be a reduced to tinkering at the margins and flailing.

Conservatives have a pretty clear, if sadly simplistic, view of what the role of government is. They will talk (endlessly and in an ever rising register) about how the federal government is only for the defense of the nation and that nothing else should really be in its purview. The problem with their assertion of States Rights (aside from the racist history behind this idea) is that they don’t really want their state government’s to do a lot either. It is this kind of thinking that gets us into the situation where Republicans want, as David Corn of Mother Jones said, “Small government and Big Oil”.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

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AP reports:

GULF SHORES, Ala. - Dolphins and sharks are showing up in surprisingly shallow water just off the Florida coast. Mullets, crabs, rays and small fish congregate by the thousands off an Alabama pier. Birds covered in oil are crawling deep into marshes, never to be seen again.

Marine scientists studying the effects of the BP disaster are seeing some strange - and troubling - phenomena.

Fish and other wildlife are fleeing the oil out in the Gulf and clustering in cleaner waters along the coast. But that is not the hopeful sign it might appear to be, researchers say.

The animals' presence close to shore means their usual habitat is badly polluted, and the crowding could result in mass die-offs as fish run out of oxygen. Also, the animals could easily get devoured by predators.

"A parallel would be: Why are the wildlife running to the edge of a forest on fire? There will be a lot of fish, sharks, turtles trying to get out of this water they detect is not suitable," said Larry Crowder, a Duke University marine biologist.

I'll quote someone far more eloquent than I, that I hope will help in understanding how we are contributors to it, and give you a couple of other people to hear whose words should also help.

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In the nineteen sixties and seventies the western world was in the throes of a cultural and psychological revolution of awareness that at times threatened to bring down the governments and destroy the societies of some of the most powerful countries on earth, and terrified many who were unable to step outside of the structure and limitations of the worldviews they had constructed for themselves in the course of their lives.

Questioning cultural norms and prejudices and searching for alternatives that better respected and valued human beings and their relationship with the larger society and with the natural world as the basis and reason for societies actions and existence rather than society and the state and the status quo as the determining factors of how people should interact with each other, were the drivers behind this revolution.

The insecurity of many in the face of insistent and deep questioning that in a religious context would have been labeled blasphemy and heresy caused knee-jerk fear reactions that in many arenas turned into violent confrontations, particularly but not only race riots and countless smaller horrors of the racial Civil Rights Movement, and in the struggle for equality under law and social systems of  more than half the population in the Gay and the Women's Liberation Movements, and what was often termed a Sexual Revolution, all of which had been percolating and growing for many years and all of which naturally contributed to making up the more encompassing psychological or awareness heightening Cultural Revolution of the times.

Noted philosopher Alan Watts in the nineteen sixties in "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are" described our situation, our human condition, this way:

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Michael Specter is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new book, Denialism, asks why we have increasingly begun to fear scientific advances instead of embracing them.

Specter recently spoke at the TEDGlobal2010 Conference, held over the course of four days in Oxford, England to explore "the shocking undercurrent of good news just below the surface of today's troubling headlines -- new ideas, new science, new technology, new social and political thinking, new art and a new understanding of who we are".

While I don't agree with everything Specter says here and I don't disagree with a lot of it, one of the things that I cannot deny is that I'm not always wrong in my opinions. I doubt that you can either.

But nor am I always right.

Why Michael Specter is worth listening to:

Michael Specter's new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, dives into a worrisome strain of modern life -- a vocal anti-science bias that may prevent us from making the right choices for our future. Specter studies how the active movements against vaccines, genetically engineered food, science-based medicine and biotechnological solutions to climate change may actually put the world at risk. (For instance, anti-vaccination activists could soon trigger the US return of polio, not to mention the continuing rise of measles.) More insidiously, the chilling effect caused by the new denialism may prevent useful science from being accomplished.

Specter has been a writer for the New Yorker for more than a decade; before that, he was a science writer and then the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times. He writes about science and politics for the New Yorker, with a fascinating sideline in biographical profiles.

"Denialism is a virus and viruses are contagious." -- Michael Specter
Spend sixteen and a half minutes with Michael Specter here, and see if he doesn't challenge some of your ideas that you might be wrong about. Or some you might be right about.


Recorded at TEDGlobal2010 - February 2010

[R]eality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.

The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common.

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.

When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.

In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world. Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world.

The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.

After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.

The Teachings of Don Juan
by Carlos Castaneda

The ongoing and rapid collapse of the US and Global economy, far from being an abstract series of events, is being brought home forcefully and concretely to millions of people on a personal level with the loss of their jobs and consequent drastic reduction in their ability to not only purchase things they want for themselves and their families but even to purchase the basic necessities of life and obtain things they need.

A cycle pushing us into a self reinforcing deflationary spiral in which less and less people are able to support the dwindling economy with their purchases which causes even more job loss and less economic activity, and so on, as we saw highlighted in very sharp focus in How Bad? This Bad with the graph from Swampland compiled using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers that:

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ESPRESSO PARTY MISSION STATEMENT: The Espresso Party Movement gives voice to Americans who are fed up to fcuking here with the bullsh*t in government.

We recognize that the federal government is the enemy of the people, not the expression of our collective will, and that we must all participate in the process of tearing the system down and kicking ass in November 2010 in order make room for building something fcuking useful to address the challenges that we face as Americans.

As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and we will mercilessly hunt down and politically destroy those who obstruct them.

A Message From Our Founder