Preparing For The Now

The past is an illusion. Even our best recollections and memories are synthetic, created to give us a false sense of security in knowing that our perceptual apparatus was perceiving the whole story accurately. That is often the only time we can find ourselves to be truly right. We know that our ideas about the past are completely made up, that is why there are so many different stories about our history, lives and experiences. We lie to ourselves constantly about why we are rich, or poor or happy or sad. Silly people, we make ourselves that way to feed or define some complex or another, nearly always unbeknownst to us. Whatever our methodology, we just cannot capture the reality of what has taken place in that very nebulous part of our timeline.

The future as well is an amalgamation of fears, anxiety, perceptual errors and to make it even more interesting and unreal, it includes hopes, dreams and expectations that have been built on the false assumptions about our past. All we really have is now.

We are Creating each moment as we go through life and often forget to pause and realize that each and every event that takes place has never happened before. In the entire history of the Universe, we create each moment, not anyone but us. What our fathers said or left unsaid has no bearing on who we choose to be this second, or the next. Whether our mothers felt that we were a godsend or a burden is of no account. What we do with each moment is wholly and completely up to us.

There are those whop seek the advice and wisdom of the elders, those who regale their pastors and preachers with stories about how much pain they are in or how the devil has tested their faith, but these too are fictional accounts of the past as surely as the day is long. Many well-meaning folks rely on "enlightened" individuals or "seeres" to tell them their future, or to assure them that things will get better or that they too can seek truth. Oddly, there are few among us who take matters into their own hands, do the subtly difficult work of paring away the illusions that we base our artificial timeline upon. "Don't think about the past, don't think about the future." was the way one of my early teachers put it. Just Be Here Now. Even in my undeveloped state, I had some difficulty releasing ideas about where I had come from and to what future I was headed. Releasing these artificial constructs took only a change in perspective. One that required trust and dilligence.

Releasing attachment to both past and future sounds as simple as child's play, but the fact is that for most of us, even asking the right questions can threaten our sense of self, or expectations and begin to feel like our sense of self is being attacked. Even as a child I got a certain sense of identity from calling myself a latch key kid, child of a single parent, war protester, student. Who I was seemed to be completely determined by what I did and what I would do in the future. When I began to understand that these traits have virtually nothing to do with who I really am and that the weight I gave them when defining my self or situations around myself was completely arbitrary, only then was I able to start the realization process. I may be all of these things, yet am none of them . I am more than words can say...I am stardust, animated.

Especially in these times, we need to speak truth to power, live according to a new code and unleash as much personal power to transform the world around us as possible. What that really means is that we do not have time to spare sucking up into our own brains, trying to make sense of what has come before or laying plans for an elaborate future take over of the power structures that have kept us in servitude and heinously raped the planet. Fretting over whether we are good parents or not, or trying to negotiate the guilt that our parents tried to make us carry is obsolete and provides nothing of importance or value in this moment. We have to begin to express a new paradigm that allows each of us to become agents of change, truth tellers and to stay in touch with who we really are and the world that we want to create instead of letting folks guide us back to old ways of behaving old ideas about good and bad, right and wrong or the dreaded guilt and shame over how we may have failed a time or two at the high stakes game of getting what we want out of life. Perhaps there is nothing to "get". Another great understanding of the way things really are came when I saw Ram Dass as a youth. He said, "I don't have to talk. You don't have to listen. We just need to Be Together and it will all happen."

He followed this up with the Ha Fiz poem: The fish trap exists because of the fish, once you have gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. Then Ram Dass elaborated: Words exist because of meaning, once you have gotten the meaning you can forget the words. Uncomfortable giggling and nervous laughter hovered in the room of hundreds, dying out as more and more people grappled with that concept. Then the next question out of the teacher's mouth was "Where can I find a man who has forgotten words, so that I might have a word with him?"

If someone tries tempting you out of your now, gently remind them that you are Creator and that you are having plenty of fun just be-ing. Try it on for a while and see how it begins to transfom each moment. Don't get upset if you can only do it for a few seconds at a time at first, the saying practice makes perfect was not created just for fun. Often I tell people that nothing worthwhile is easy and the same goes for living in the now. My own journey to this particular "now" involved carefully paring away layer after layer of excess. I find that my personal, emotional, physical and spiritual satisfaction increased with each step toward having enough. Giving away the excess and sharing as much as I can with others, as well as the planet, also brings me great joy. Perhaps that is one of the most important reasons that I write.

BP In The News

Today I heard that BP filed two separate cases regarding their Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One was challenging the competency and thoroughness of the person put in charge of the claims made against them. It seems the the pot of money established ran out, or is about to and only a small fraction of the injured parties have had their cases reviewed. Their claim is that since the money ran out so quickly, depleting the money that they were fined and had allocated for "clean up", that there must be some mistake.

They have also made the case for not being required to pay any additional costs toward the satisfaction of claimants against them. They refuse to pay additional fines or levies because as they see it, they have done their part. Remember all those commercials we have been seeing about how great life is again along the coast? Well, the corporate leaders have said in no uncertain terms that they will pay no more, even though the fines imposed upon them represent their profits over a time period, which was also in the news today, of 23 seconds.

My personal pledge is to never, ever spend another dime on products that come from their stores and if there is any way to stop using their products entirely, I'm going to do it. I have been driving my car as little as possible, riding my bike a lot more and walking to place I used to drive to, but until and unless we put these corporados on a strict financial diet, consisting of NO MORE of our money, they will continue to flaunt their immense fortunes, buy the most expensive lawyers and shirk all actions becoming of responible corporate citizens. These were the people who sucked up as much government money as possible when the corporate welfare was flowing for research and development of solar, wind and other alternative energy sources.

Now they have nothing to show for it but a lot of over paid executives who can regurgitate twenty year old data. We the people are left with the interest we pay on the loans that our own government took out to enrich the corporate elite during the economic downturn and they want to reestablish the gravy train as soon as possible so they don't have to do any real work, just produce more high end commercials claiming what great corporate citizens they are and how they have our best interest in mind. We can continue

Lets all think about that for the next twenty-three seconds. Now, let us look at who has been.destroying-gulf-oil-evidence. We can continue allowing corporations to break the law, destroy the environment and to cripple our chances at survival only so long. I have tasted gulf shrimp that tasted like petroleum. I never want to do that again. If we do not stand up soon, our children will have good reason to hate us. What will the world be like when no shrimp are good to eat? Will they still be making commercials that try to convince us that they are doing their best for us?

Please give what you can to help me continue to bring you this blog. The hours I spend are a labor of love. Green energy as the Rainbow Family call it always helps to keep spinnin' the wheel. I promise not to trash the Earth with it and I sure as hell won't use it to defend wrongdoing or obscuring the truth. We are one. As the revolutionaries have said for ages, we must truly stand together or we will all hang separately.

Asking the Right Questions

In the age of media saturation and torrents of digital data heaped upon our supersaturated grey matter, finding ways to sift and winnow are exponentially gaining importance. We used to turn ideas over and around in our minds, deciding, like we sometimes do with pebbles found on the beach, whether to pocket the novel ways of thinking about the world around us, or whether to toss them back into the shoreline from which they came. The inspection of elements warrants less and less of our attention as the data stream increases. What we are experiencing now is similar to the entire beach being crammed into our pockets, without a good way to stop the ever increasing burden of more. some helpful techniques and tools lie at our disposal, if we only take the time to look for them or to employ their simple and elegant design. We can benefit immensely by stepping out of the torrent, reassigning value to things that really matter and making choices that link us to a more humane world view, way of life and relationship with one another and ourselves.

First, we must understand that we are more than a perceptual apparatus, seeking stimulation. In part we may be just that, but we are so much more if we just take the time to step away from our addiction to stimulation. By periodically unplugging ourselves for our typical sources of information we can become more facile with communication generally and begin to unleash our tethered minds from the bondage of imagery that people are paying to maintain. In the past week, I have allowed myself to be exposed to several things that I almost never experience. One was "real life crime dramas", a sort of heavily edited and condensed crime show where the whole thing becomes a tease, to get the viewer through the next series of commercials. It was seductive and disorienting to say the least, but the most interesting part of this programming was the sort of commercials that they run. One was pairing Coca-cola with health and fitness imagery, as if you could get healthy and strong from drinking their brand of poison. another tried to do the same thing with fast food, making it look like a healthy part of a good diet. The questions that these images and ideas brought up in me were twofold, "Who is paying to have these images and ideas broadcast?" and "Who is the intended audience?"

Frequently, just asking the "Who?" question is enough. Billionaires and multinational corporations rarely, if ever, have our best interest in mind, they are too busy tending to our brainwashing to consider us as human beings. We are simply the tools that they use to concentrate more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands. by their design, we are reduced to infinitesimally small units of consumption, nothing more. Some other interesting advertizing techniques caught my eye as well. One in particular was for a retail chain that used children doing a rendition of the "Yo' mamma so fat, she..." but with a twist, they were building one another up and praising the virtue and style of mammas who shop at corporation X. This was hilarious in that it not only didn't make you want to shop at corporation X, but just brought up how out of touch the Madison avenue commercial production corporation was as well. Not only were they not savvy to the folks who they were trying to appeal to, but they probably never set foot in the discount retail chain stores. they don't have to shop where the poor people go to save money. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of what you see on a day to day basis is either the result of the 1% trying to convince us of something, or it is the fallout from them having their way with us. The only difference is that we pay for the second one with our day to day living and dying, while the first is subsidized by us in higher costs for the products we do consume.

What are they trying to say versus what do they mean is another important set of questions that we need to understand if we are to have some level of control over our own exploitation. They may be trying to say, "Our soap is better than their soap." but what they mean is, "Since there is no difference between our product and the kind you can make yourself for a tiny fraction of the cost, we will offer you a false sense of status, freedom or wealth if you purchase our soap rather than making your own. Anyone interested can find recipes for soap now, but the powerful elites are bargaining on their brightly colored packaging, secret ingredients, and NASCAR sponsorships to keep their product flying off the shelves. Pairing every sort of grave fiction with the stark reality of paying far too much for far too little is the way advertizing has been allowed to work for centuries. One look to the ancient tombs of the Pharoes and one can see that these were just massive ad campaigns to prove the supremacy of regular guys. In the end it was just a subsidy of elaborate pawn broker schemes when the tombs were looted, the money and wealth got laundered and the artifacts smelted down for subsequent generations of rich folk.

The "When?"and "Where?" are nearly constant and seemingly everywhere on Earth simultaneously.

That brings us to the great "Why?". In our country, the good old U. S. of A., there is an interesting quirk of tax law. Every single penny a business spends on advertizing , no matter how intrusive, foolish or filled with lies it may be is taken directly off the top of corporate profits and as such is non-taxable. So when hundreds of thousands of dollars get spent putting the corporate logo for Tide on a race car, guess what, no tax is paid on those dollars. If a corporation spends a billion dollars telling us that they are on our side, or seek to improve our lot in life, that money is tax exempt even if the corporation is in the business of of exploiting us and ruining the environment. Supplanting human interest for self interest often leads to asking better questions or asking the right questions to begin to make sense of what it is that we are actually seeing on a day to day basis. Unplugging from the media torrent can also help us to see what is going on more clearly. Talking to one another, our neighbors, families, friends and co-workers can begin to yield clarity about how and why we are so harshly treated by the media and when we begin to see ourselves as worthy of better treatment, perhaps we can ask ourselves even more important questions, like what can I do and where do I need to take a stand to help create a more compassionate and humane world? We really need to get to the bottom of the question, "How can we take our world back from those who would desecrate it and exploit us in the process?"

This is what Northern Wisconsin looks like today and what it would look like under the exploitation of mining that has been proposed for it by wealthy out-of-state interests. The 1% have purchased and installed a Governor here who is more concerned about their wishes than our own. The fascist dictatorship that democracy has morphed into serves only to disillusion our young people, circumscribe their option in the future, poison the planet and degrade our quality of life. When will we begin to be the advertisers of truth? How will we step up to meet the challenges that the ultra-wealthy are throwing at us? We need all the vision, creativity, and strength we can muster to defeat those who would sell us out for their enrichment. Please, ask the right questions and teach your children to do the same.

Toward Encouraging Healthy Leadership

Parenting has the power to shape the future. Having been raised as and trained to be a teacher, I have had a unique opportunity to be exposed to reams of data about raising children to be all that they can be, as well as what poses the greatest threat to their intellectual capacity and emotional health. Having raised three exemplary individuals who are making positive contributions to their environment and community, I feel especially qualified to guide others on their own parenting experience. Please feel free to question me further on any of these issues, I am always open to integrating new ideas and information, honing my own parenting style and my own teaching techniques. Parenting is the most important job on the planet and has the ability to shape future generations across the ages.

 We must teach the next generation, for their good as well as our own. The future of our entire culture rests on the foundational knowledge passed on to the next generations. Negative risk taking should be discouraged, such as violence and thrill seeking, smoking, alcohol abuse, addictive and dangerous drugs, etc. There will be times that young people will need our help, affirmation or protection. However, all children are going to want to spread their wings. They have to try things on their own. Adults must let them. Let these few tips guide you when developing your unique parenting style.

Help them learn to take calculated risks. Talk ideas over with them, point out possible outcomes and help prepare them for what they may find. Then, let them do it. Your primary job is to prepare your child for how the world really works, making sure that they are still alive when they finally fly to coop.

Discuss choices. Prepare them for possibilities and teach them how to both, win and lose, gracefully. Remind them that they may not get all they want and encourage them to face the consequences of their decisions.

Share stories of your own “risky” experiences. Help interpret them. This is one of the hardest pieces of parenting advice for most people. Sheltering our young from our own learning experience assures that they will suffer through making many of the same mistakes we had to. Because we’re not the only influence on our children, we must be the best influence.

Instead of tangible rewards, just spend time together.  Be careful not to teach them that emotions can be covered up by a trip to the mall or burying yourself in work. Children are often smart enough to realize that they don’t want to grow up to participate in their parent’s world, but if they learn from us that there is no other choice, it can lead to very dangerous consequences, depression, mal-adaptive and self-abusive behaviors.

Encourage positive risk taking. It may require encouragement, but get them used to trying new things in safe ways and pursuing as many opportunities as they can. Help them understand that they will never know if they like something unless they try it.

Don’t let guilt get in the way. Your number one job is not to placate your own feelings of guilt or inadequacy by giving your children everything. Never use guilt as a tool to exact compliance either. The surest way to raise a damaged child is to let them see you trying to overcome your own guilty conscience through them, or by instilling these toxic emotions in them.

Do not praise or reward the basics. If any relationship is based on constant praise or material rewards, we experience neither intrinsic motivation nor unconditional love. Certain activities are necessary for health, survival and living with others. Basic levels of functioning are not to be celebrated or praised excessively; it is just what we all must do. Taking on additional responsibilities or going over and above what is expected can be noteworthy, but some things in life are just that. The reward is that others do those same things.

Acknowledge intelligent risk-taking and hard work. Help children to see the advantage of both. Be a living example, showing them that stepping out of our comfort zone usually pays off. Communicating our own process and encouraging them to take on both freedoms and the responsibility that comes with it allows them to flourish.

Your child does not have to love you every minute. In fact, if you are doing your job well, occasionally they won’t. We all must learn to get over disappointment and failure but we don’t being spoiled. Let your children fail, let them fall, and let them fight for what they really value.  Treating our kids as if they are fragile creates fragile adults. We only have a short time to prepare them for the world that awaits them. Our world needs resilient adults not fragile ones.

This is an edited and expanded version of advice that I found on another site, but my readers are important to me and I wanted to share a tiny part of my own methods for raising children. Many of these same ideas hold true for our relationships with others. Especially those who have had bad experiences by being parented poorly. Damaged individuals often damage others and to develop a more resilient population, we have to heal the wounds that have been perpetrated on others. what is most hopeful is that with our own children we have the opportunity to do things right, before the world has a chance to influence them. The skills that we give our children have the possibility of being transferred to future generations. All parents need to be taught these basic truths, take their work seriously and do their best to strengthen inherent compassionate and helpful qualities that children are born with. I humbly submit these ideas for your consideration and use.

Getting Our Bearings

When we took our first tentative steps into the information age, we brought along with us the baggage and predispositions of a by-gone age. We assumed that knowledge was power and that human beings would do the right thing with the information that was being collected and distributed about us. Although we had no idea of the size and extent of data that would be at our fingertips, we thought we knew everything we needed to know about information. We had a relationship with the press, textbook publishers and the libraries of the world that allowed us to assume that some sort of due diligence and thorough fact check had been performed on the information that was available. Many of us had forgotten about the dark ages, the library at Alexandria and tried not to think of the data collected by the FBI. We also considered that editorial staff would have ejected the lunacy, tightened up the grasp of fact and elucidated ideas that had merit. Many of us assumed that history was correct and that there had been, once upon a time, such a thing as a just war. What has taken place in the information age is that none of these processes are operating and the sieve that we had hoped to capture the most important ideas for distribution has been removed, allowing falsehood and speculation to proliferate. 

I have shared memes that I did not research exhaustively on facebook, but I have worked hard to only re-post things that I am reasonably certain are true. The idea of reasonable certainty has morphed into something quite different over the last forty years and there may be little we can do to get our footing in the flow of current information overload. My concern here is about the rampant use of powerful information management and retrieval systems to bolster our fictional account of the world around us. I have watched hours of footage that supposedly "proves" that 9-11 was an inside job. What I have come to understand is that it was more likely pure incompetence that allowed the structures to be brought down. The possibility of the series of events going utterly perfectly for legions of munitions guys, who supposedly set the explosives for the demolition, seems far fetched, but not inconceivable. That is the foot in the door that is required for uncertainty to get a foothold.

Stories swirl around us as if they are a very part of the air that we breathe. They often obscure more fact than they are based on and the murky waters seem to never be allowed to settle. Before we can take the time required to dispel one myth, several more have come into existence. Often it is better to follow ancient wisdom like, "A stitch, in time, saves nine." If we can get to the bottom of a single modern myth, perhaps we can begin to break the chain of hearsay and contempt that seem to be alive and well within our culture. When working to break the stranglehold that bad information has over our societies, it is well to attack the weakest link in the chain of events that allows us to be taken in by whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is. I have heard hundreds of people dismiss it all as lunacy, but the grotesque and unsubstantiated things they purport to believe dwarf the ones they deny. 

Case in point, the climate change deniers. It has been my experience that scientists do sometimes get things wrong, to be sure. Looking at allopathic medicine we have more than enough fallacies to question the whole assumption that our bodies are like a battlefield and that waging war on "germs" can make us healthy. It has been my experience that our health is a lot more like a good cocktail, it depends on a majority of things we do not normally think of as good by themselves and a small portion of poison just to give them the desired kick. Okay, I'll stop being flip, but don't miss my message here. Just because some scientists initially thought that the greenhouse effect would heat the whole planet evenly, and that has not been the case is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The deniers blame the whole warming of our planet on things like sunspot activity or a "conspiracy of the left". I have even heard that scientists are "making the whole thing up to secure research dollars from the government." The fact that the ozone layer that protects us from incoming radiation has been slowly stripped away by a chemical process proven to be caused by chlorofluorocarbons (man-mad chemicals) in the atmosphere seems to have gone in one ear and out the other with these folks. The fact that we have reintroduced into the atmosphere more CO2 in just the last fifty years than it took hundreds of thousands of years to store up in the geologic deposits that we are trying desperately to eliminate seem to be lost on these powerfully stupid individuals and groups.

It seems that some conspiracy theories pop up like mushrooms, almost of their own volition. Unfunded and as if by magic, they bloom in an instant virtually from thin air. others are continually propped up by well-funded think tanks and almost religious zeal by a few well-heeled interests. It is interesting that in some cases, like those who claim that global warming is not real, we can follow a glut of money, corporate welfare, fortune 500 companies and political might to the perpetrators of the myth. The public is not being told that for every BTU, kilo-calorie or ounce of fuel that is produced from fracking, four are expended to wrest the oil from the tar sands or shale. The massive wasteland that is being produced by these sorts of activities is every bit as grotesque as the deforestation of the rainforest with the added twist of (lime that accompanies great drinks) a toxic legacy to go with the annihilation of native flora and fauna. This past month, the petroleum council, a public relations and industry mouthpiece for the industry has said that of all the gasoline sold in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, 50-80% of it comes from tar sands oil. The irony here is that when a person pulls up to a gas pump, there is no way to know the source of the oil used to make the fuel. Most people do not even understand that for the convenience of fueling up, a series of not so wonderful things have to have happened  to allow that luxury.

This first image is just a portion of the existing Midwest pipelines and refineries. The image is dastardly incomplete because I have personally been to at least one other refinery in Midland, Michigan near Saginaw and Bay City. Also missing from this schematic diagram is the pipeline running into the heart of my city, Green Bay, Wisconsin. The irony of these lies perpetrated by map makers is that petroleum and the petroleum industry itself has special status as a result of the fact that it is a feedstock for the machines of war and has been allowed nearly military intelligence status. we are supposed to remain ignorant about the levels of subsidy, the health threats posed by it and the exact toll that is being placed on the environment by our pursuit of this black gooey gold.

I heard an excellent perspective about the energy contained in a gallon of regular gasoline. Imagine the energy equivalent of 100 people working for eight hours a day for a week. Yes, 4,000 human hours of actual work, that is the amount of energy in a single gallon of petrol. It is nearly unbelievable until you start to do the math. Over half of the energy is squandered as heat. Even the most efficient transportation device, the bicycle can only allow a human to produce about three quarters of a horsepower. Add to these facts the effort of punching a car-sized hole in the atmosphere, pushing half a ton or more of steel along surfaces with bumps and potholes perhaps on under-inflated tires and you begin to see the truth of the matter a little more clearly.

When we add the energy required for our vehicles, imagining every gallon of fuel as an extra hundred people just hanging out for a week, one can see the problem of global warming a little more clearly. Just having that many extra people would choke the air with carbon dioxide from them breathing, but instead of a waste gas that feeds trees, shrubs and plants of all types, these tools that we use to move about the earth exhale poison gas that can kill. We have the tools needed to stop, look around, follow the money and make up our own minds about what is right and good. The time has come for us to use every tolls in our arsenal to wage peace, speak truth to power and to teach the next generation what it truly means to be human. I throw down the challenge to everyone to be the best we can be in the face of the tumult and turmoil that we have foisted upon us each and every day. Be strong, hold tight to your soul, for there are those who would estrange you from it for money out there and they feed on fear and hate. Love them as you would yourself and perhaps we can heal their wounds as well as our own.  

Unleashing Dogs Of War

My last post about the words "just business" is meant to point out the cover up that takes place continually by folks who are only motivated by greed and their own personal enrichment. Th activities that these two simple words can justify, indeed, sanction, in the minds of the oligarchs are limitless but the impetus behind the need for them are far fewer. Deceitful, conniving, duplicitous actions are warlike and the root cause of virtually all neglect, pain, exploitation, oppression, dislocation and abuse. This war has been taking place for centuries, but the escalation of it has reached a crescendo in modern times. There is a full scale blitz taking place in our day and age against the majority in many, if not all nations. We have heard it couched in a variety of contexts, but the aim is always the same, to bring more cash to the table and deplete every possible source of capital creating crisis management scenarios in rural areas, towns, cities and villages across the planet. The death of a thousand cuts is just as murderous as a bullet to the head, but once we allow the dogs of war to run wild in our communities, it will remain hard to know which slit or slice was responsible for our demise.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, there have been continuous brutal attacks on the fabric of our culture and society for decades. The wounds may never completely heal and systems that used to help create stability across generations remain in tatters. The very relationships and systems that we used to patch one another up, ameliorate traumas and soothe ragged nerves have been removed one by one by a series of attacks we hardly recognize because the attacks seem so far away and disparate. The teachers, for instance, in days of old had the ability to speak to parents as equals. In the early days of our nation, teachers were revered and valued as important members of society. In America for more than thirty years, both the authority of and respect for teachers has been undermined. In addition to other cost cutting measures, classrooms have swollen (in numbers of students) and responsibilities to people outside the classroom have skyrocketed. In very recent times, especially in the great state of Wisconsin teachers have been vilified as lazy rich folks who have summers off and who fail our students during the part of the year that they are in the classroom. Thirty years of undermining education has allowed uneducated people to believe this tripe.

Another wedge issue being driven into our communities is the us/them divide. Ask any "minority" what it feels like to be attacked in the media and you will find the same response. we have all been outnumbered from time to time, but that in and of itself is no reason to be beat up. Instead of understanding the fact that we are all one species who share many, if not all, the same thoughts, feelings and aspirations, we are fed the lie that "those people" are the problem, whoever those people happen to be at the moment. The only minority that you never see vilified are the oligarchs. Instead, we focus on their lavish lifestyles and opulent surroundings as a goal to be attained if we just subscribe to the theory that you must screw the other guy before he screws you and that exploitation of others is a hard and fast rule that leads, eventually to "success". The people who tell the truth about these fallacies are called disparaging names like idealists and Polly Annas and their truth is attacked as if it has the potential to cripple our society. The exact opposite is true. We are told that the lies being foisted upon us are true and that the truth is a lie, but science is teaching us that what we have been told by the oligarchs and their minions is just a sophisticated lie based on phrases like "just business" and "this is the sacrifice we all make for a just society."

There is mounting evidence that human beings are born to be creatures that desire to be helpful, friendly, supportive, compassionate and good-hearted, until they suffer neglect or abuse. These assaults create anti-social psychopathic tendencies that when latent only fester, leading to passive aggressive and sociopathic behaviors. Ultimately, those who strike out at the world around them are only trying to fix some unconscious sense of injustice. Sadly, the initial events that crippled us recede into the darkest parts of our memory and are either justified or forgotten rather than being dealt with honestly. Several types of therapy and many shamanistic practices delve into the thought creation that lies behind our ideas and ideals. This is part of the reason that the dogs of war feed so heavily on the mentally ill. If we ever come to realize the extent of the damage caused by the oppressors, we may just stop allowing them to cripple us in the name of their own self-aggrandizement.

In our own way, we need to learn how to foil those who would exploit us. We need to learn to keep the dogs of war from our larders, to keep them from abusing and neglecting our children and to protect one another from their nearly constant attacks. These dogs of war are always hungry and will always take more than they give, so whether they are nipping at our heels or disemboweling our institutions, their hunger and thirst for blood will never be slaked. We are the walking wounded and we need to help one another bind up our injuries, spread the healing salve of love amongst our families and communities and protect one another from further damage at the hands of powerful interests who take advantage of every opportunity they see to build their own empire at our expense. I offer a series of ten steps to a more just and sustainable future.

I will send you a hard copy for whatever price you charge for an hour of your labor plus postage to your location. To pay, you can use Paypal account: tnsaladino42@hotmail.com or use my account number to send an e-mail for my physical address. It may sound silly, but together we can do anything. Beating back the assaults, frauds and abuses of the uberwealthy will be easy if we do a few simple things to take our own lives and the fruits of our own labors back. Billions of people working in harmony will always vanquish the select few who operate in discord with Nature, the people of the Earth and one another. No matter how many dogs of war they foist upon us, if we stick together in defense of one another, things will certainly improve.

This dog of war was recently photographed in Northern Wisconsin. sadly, they are not always this easy to spot. As often happens, the folks who are doing the most heinous things hide behind their guns, their minions, and attempt to hide their faces from those they are hurting for profit. Corporate welfare whores are only interested in their next fix. As long as they can keep the money flowing in and hurting the rest of us, their position is secure. They have virtually all the lawyer guns and money they could hope for, but truth, no matter what they may say, is not on their side.

"Just Business"

These two words have been used as cover for so many sociopaths that their number seems nearly infinite. All manner of injustices can be covered with these two words. Many are most familiar with these two words from mafia movies. Right before the hit man caps his quarry, he tries to make clear that he feels no animosity. It is "just business". When the rivers of the world are contaminated with runoff or toxic compounds from agriculture or industry, municipal sewage facilities or emissions from power stations, that is "just business" as well.The banks say it when they foreclose, the local grocer says it when he gouges you for your food and those who collect the interest on student loans say it to struggling graduates who took out the loans in the hopes of bettering their station in life. It is hard to look into the world of commerce without seeing hordes of these exploiters chanting the mantra that their terrible behavior is "just business".

The paradigm that allows for this exploitation, this oppression and this dehumanizing aspect of commerce is what most of the peaceful loving people have been struggling with for decades, perhaps centuries. Those who have looked closely find that there are plenty of problems with the current system. Fining a way to a better place requires exploring territory that is both unfamiliar and a bit scary. If we are to get out from under the thumb of oligarchs, we must find a way to stop the flow of money to their hands. I have many friends who are "homesteaders". These folks believe in independence and work to produce as much of what they need as possible. I also have another cadre of friends who are "survivalists" or "preppers", who spend inordinate amounts of money and time planning for Armageddon. They are sure that the crash is near and they want to be able to live in isolation, but preparing for that they are willing to spend the lion's share of their income on well-established corporate entities that are laughing all the way to the bank. To them it is just business and truth be damned, they defend shutting the rest of the world out from their stockpiles with whatever resources they can muster.

First of all, we need to realize that there is no "away", we cannot escape the results of our actions, nor can we defend hurting others or the environment in the name of procurement, commerce or disposal of our wastes. The so-called green revolution that took place nearly three generations ago was "just business". The moral claim that Africa and Asia wanted to be just like us was perhaps fabricated by wealthy white men much better connected than most of us will ever be. What they were driven by was the smell of money, not compassion, not realistic ideas about feeding the world. There was certainly no consideration of what would be best for anyone but themselves. The more we exploit the world around us, the less time we have to look closely at the effects that occur in our wake. The two words that have given so many a free pass to foist harm on others are the opposite of what they imply. The green revolution, if it is to be of any value at all, can teach us that the driving force behind most business is unjust. The giant agribusiness corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, Du Pont, Allis Chalmers, etc. made billions of dollars as we (the USA) foisted "modern" agricultural practices across the globe. The "scientific" approach to food production continues to have grave costs that are borne by farmers and consumers worldwide because it is "just business".

Large areas of Minnesota and Wisconsin (two states that I know for sure have been proven to have this problem) have polluted groundwater as a result of mechanized agriculture, application of hazardous chemicals and reliance on industrialized methods, corporate welfare and deceptive advertizing for dangerous and unwise products. This perfect storm of abuse has all been defended as "just business". This problem exists in many other areas but research and detection is often "too costly" so it isn't that the government isn't interested, but ignoring the problem is, you guessed it, "just business". The "science" behind our technological approach to food production is partial at best. I have written extensively about the fallacy that led to the N,  P &K revolution. Around about the time that we "discovered" Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, we had a cold war to win and our leaders thought that by feeding the world, we could win the war for minds. What the science of the time didn't tell us is that this was only a tiny sliver of reality. Healthy looking plants that are starved for nutrition became the rule worldwide by the application of synthetic fertilizer that shifted wealth from across the planet into the few corporations willing to line up for the corporate welfare being offered by well-meaning governmental and non-governmental agencies. Today, the other shoe is still dropping, but we justify the terrible outcomes as "just business". As more and more people learn the truth, some are beginning to see that it is a terrible shame.

The current "green revolution" is hard to see in context. Again the chemical companies and giant industrial, corporate welfare inspired agents sell Roundup-ready corn, a single strain of wheat across the entire globe and are working to patent nearly every potentially profitable seed imaginable. Soy has been deftly manipulated by Monsanto for instance, but rest assured they don't want to put organic and open pollinated seed producers out of their livelihoods, their suits and restraining orders are "just business". For those readers who may not know, pollen from Monsanto's genetically altered soy travels in clouds across the fields of folks who do not want it. If the seed is collected for food or next years crop, it can contain genetic information that is patented by Monsanto. To put this in perspective I like to remind people that if my mutt dog runs off and impregnates a prize-winning poodle down the block , I become responsible for the resulting pregnancy. There is no recourse for the farmers whose seeds have been tainted, in fact, there is a penalty and they can become liable for massive court costs, as well charges for "stealing" the patented genetic material that contaminated their fields. On the one hand there is a sea change taking place amongst the people. We realize that the planet has been raped, strafed, contaminated, and poisoned long enough, but the wealthiest among us are still claiming that they are exempt from having to change because it is just business.

Pristine wilderness has to go, "It's just business..."