You Can't Fool Mother Nature For Long: Profiting from Sickcare

Sickcare, the fast-food/packaged food industries, the entertainment industry and the Marketing/Mainstream Media complex are all facets of one system.

In America, the implicit belief system promoted by marketing is that you can eat anything you want in whatever quantity you want, and if anything goes wrong with your body or mind, there is a pill or procedure to fix it.In other words, your diet and fitness level is given lip service, but what really counts is access to all the medications that are constantly touted and pushed by the Marketing/Mainstream Media complex.

It would be comical if it wasn't so tragic: if you've seen one advert pushing a med, you've seen them all: the description of the disorder, the fear and pain it inflicts, the solution in a pill, and then a voice-over, spoken at a manic pace to fit all the possible side-effects in the waning moments of a 60-second spot: suicidal thoughts, symptoms of heart attack, heart attack, itchy skin, dizziness, bizarre dreams, and on and on. Good golly, all these side-effects from one med? What happens when they're combined with 7 or 8 or 11 other meds with their own swarms of nasty side effects?

The core of sickcare is this: creating and treating illness is highly profitable. For creating illness, we have the packaged food, Big Food and fast food industries. Does anyone seriously believe that human beings can function healthily for decades on a diet of sugar water, fried potatoes, white-bread buns and fat-larded hamburgers?

Large family gatherings during the holidays are often interesting opportunities to witness the consequences of corporate brainwashing via the Marketing/Mainstream Media complex. For example, I heard more than once that So-and-So dislikes fish and vegetables, and only like burgers and fries or equivalents such as hamburger "steak."

In a surreal divergence of entertainment and reality, our society broadcasts popular food shows in which chefs routinely assemble impossibly complex dishes while our schools produce students who cannot identify a healthy home-cooked meal, much less actually prepare one.

In a similar fashion, fitness has been marginalized in much of American education; in our rush to raise math and science to "must haves," we have neglected finance and the science of nutrition and fitness--applications of math and science that really count.

In fitness, another surreal divergence has opened between the entertainment provided by "extreme sports" touting superhuman endurance and daring, and the average American's ability and desire to run a mile (or even a kilometer). We have been brainwashed into a nation of spectator/consumers who know very little about living a nutritious and fit life. We are content to watch extreme sports training on TV but are averse to becoming even marginally fit ourselves.

Preparing programming and food for spectator/consumers is highly profitable; teaching people how to prepare healthy meals at home and becoming fit on their own is not.

The food industry is the tangible analog of the entertainment industry. Both have access to reams of data about what activates the reward centers of the human brain--what tastes, sights and smells bypass the conscious mind and go directly to the primitive brain centers that control appetite and response to high-value, rare-in-Nature triggers such as sugar, fat and salt.

Fast food and packaged food are specifically engineered to trigger these reward centers. No wonder they "taste good"--they are super-saturated with tastes that are sparing and rare in natural food.

In a similar fashion, newscasters speak with an unnatural urgency and tone that we instinctively respond to as evidence of danger or threat.

The entire sickcare system that includes the food/diet industries and "entertainment" is engineered to maximize profit by triggering instincts wired to reward sensitivity to danger/threat and sugar, fat and salt. In addition to these instinctive triggers, corporate cartels and their handmaidens, the Marketing/Mainstream Media complex, have actively embedded the craving for sugar, salt, fat and "excitement" (of the profitable, corporate kind) in American culture. Consumption of these triggers is viewed as "cool," "hip," "elite" activities, or as culturally sanctioned expressions of self-reward, i.e. of "treating yourself because you deserve it" and self-indulgence, i.e. spontaneity as instant gratification.

Then there's over-treatment. If we test 1,000 people for cancer and treat 50 and end up with one person who received treatment that extended their life while 49 others suffered early deaths or negative consequences of needless treatment, then American sickcare calls it good.

Those statistics come from studies of treatment of prostate cancer, as detailed in a Scientific American report (February 2012 issue): The Great Prostate Debate: Evidence shows that screening does more harm than good. (Subscription required, or find the issue at a library)

These are difficult issues in any caregiving system, but the downside of overtreatment and overtesting is rarely addressed in American sickcare because somebody's making big money from administering the tests and treatment, and from suing anyone who "withholds" treatment-- even if the treatment helps one in a thousand and demonstrably harms 49 others.

Mother Nature cannot be fooled for long. A sedentary lifestyle and a diet heavy with sugar, empty carbs, salt and unhealthy fats derived from factory-farm animals cannot sustain a human body selected for an omnivorous, active hunting-gathering lifestyle. Health is simply impossible when the body is destroyed by this sort of diet and inactive life.

Infectious diseases can be miraculously cured by a pill--an antibiotic. But cancer and other "lifestyle" diseases are not caused by single-source infections; in these diseases and chronic conditions, health is rarely restored with a pill or even a handful of pills.

How can anyone be healthy in a culture whose most powerful industries are actively and ceaselessly promoting consumption of products and "entertainments" that derange the mind and body because they are unnatural super-doses designed to "hit" natural triggers so hard that resistance is futile?

Our caregivers are tasked with "giving lifestyle advice" to their patients, each of whom gets a few moments a month at best with their doctor/nurse, and then the patient goes home and absorbs 4-8 hours a day of Marketing/Mainstream Media pushing of illness-producing consumables and a fear-based desire for an endless array of costly "magic pills" to fix all the diseases which mysteriously ail us--for what we eat and our fitness levels are never mentioned as causal factors.

There are never enough tests and treatments--more can be added every year-- and of course there can never be enough money spent on healthcare. We just need to leave enough money to consume the food and lifestyle that spawns many of the illnesses, and then we can spend the rest on treating these diseases.

Mother Nature is not amused by the destruction of her systems for profit. Sadly, it isn't the corporate cartels who suffer the consequences of what they push for profit, it's the people who absorbed the marketing and consumed the fantasy.

"Without health there is no happiness. An attention to health, then, should take the place of every other object." (Thomas Jefferson, 1787)

from zero hedge

Evolution of Religion

In two and a half million years of ‘homo’, theistic belief systems were first noted about 70,000 years ago and struck as an apocryphal disruptive technology. Human communities in possession of this phenomenon expanded through the world, driving all archaic populations extinct, such that naturally occurring atheism (or non-believing humans) disappeared 30,000 years ago. They simply could not compete.

A second destructive wave began with the introduction about 10,000 years ago of ‘organized religion’ (characterized by a ‘tribute’ supported class of professional practitioners or priests, and the construction of temples).

[The introduction of religion also coincided with the development of agriculture and the creation of slavery. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable.]

Those communities not in possession of organized religion [now] survive primarily in books or on reservations, with a few fading communities in fringe environments – they are being out competed.

It is not our genes that drive us to religion, but competition – it gives us the winning edge. Non believing humans have been out competed by believing humans for 70,000 years, and that phenomenon is continuing into the present.

As devout Christians, Europeans dominated the world economically, technologically, and militarily for five hundred years. When Europe withdrew from that competition in the mid twentieth century (with foreign armies camped upon their soil), the ‘right cultural settings’ were in place for the mass conversions to atheism we see today.

Religion provides a significant competitive advantage, but at a steep price (in time and money). If you have chosen to not compete, why pay the price? It’s all quite rational.

from epiphenom

Personal Evolution

Slowness of Change

An obvious objection to the idea of personal evolution over a multitude of lifetimes is that there does not seem to have been much change in people within historical times. The major issue here is that while conscious standards and beliefs are often difficult to change for the better, a person's subconscious standards and beliefs are usually resistant to change. A person's core beliefs, which we can call his primary beliefs, are those formed in early childhood; they are formed from the child's interpretation of its experience and they function at the subconscious level of mind. These are the beliefs that are often resistant to change. As the child begins to mature during later childhood and adolescence, he adopts conscious beliefs, what we can call his secondary beliefs, from his social groups and family ties - these beliefs are more adjustable.

Psycho-analysis provides insights into the problems of personal change. All the difficulties, frustration, and joys of personal development and evolution are highlighted by psycho-dynamic therapy. However, such therapy does not always seem to produce noticeable results. Why ? [¹]

The issue to understand is that people normally change and evolve (in terms of their character) so very slowly ; in fact they do not evolve very much in a single lifetime. The reason for this slowness is that the adoption of better ethical standards requires concurrent psychological change.

Standards arise from a person's character and beliefs. It can be difficult to change conscious beliefs ; it is even more difficult to change subconscious beliefs. Changing attitudes and character traits is much more of a problem. Once the person has reached adulthood, then to change primary beliefs (in the sense of making them more ethical ) is hard enough ; to change primary attitudes and basic character traits is nearly impossible. [²]

This psychological resistance to ethical change exists because people are only willing to learn about themselves so very slowly. Learning about oneself involves realising in what ways one is inadequate or immature, and this learning is a painful process.

A person can stand only so much psychological pain.
When the pain limit in a life has been reached the person stops learning,
and hence stops evolving in that life.



What is often mistaken for psychological change is change of circumstances. Suppose that a person is unhappy with his existing situations and relationships. His basic attitudes will more likely be negative ones rather than positive ones. Then his life changes, for some reason ; perhaps a better job, a new house, etc. His spirits rise and life becomes rosy for a time. When life changes for the better, the person thinks that he has changed for the better too. The self-deception in this view of oneself becomes obvious when circumstances change back to being bad – now the person resumes his former negative attitudes. Hence little actually changes internally in the person when external changes occur. All that has happened is that different aspects of his character are called into play when different circumstances are experienced. Only the way that he balances his attitudes has changed, not the attitudes themselves.

To appreciate better this difficulty,
we need to separate behavioural traits from character traits.


When circumstances change then our behaviour usually changes too, but our character traits remain the same. There is always a difference between changing the emphasis on what traits to work with ( behavioural change) and actually changing a trait (character change).

In an undeveloped and non-idealistic person, character traits are likely to be the same as behavioural traits (since the person is not likely to have a concept of self that is different from his concept of his role in that society). In the process of evolution, as the person begins to acquire a firm sense of individuality, along with cultural sophistication, so character traits and behavioural traits start to diverge.

From a modern thinker

# - a spiritual manifesto (work in progress)

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

(outline of the concepts of living v dead money, belief in money, heirarchy of needs, living machine)

Occupy the Machine

The Occupy Movement is beautiful. We support it and though we are small, we are participating all over the country. We invite all occupiers to read, give feedback, and if you feel moved to do so to present this at a General Assembly or committee meeting near you.

We invite you to imagine, as many of you already probably have, if thousands of people occupied local refineries, roads, ports, oil and mining extraction sites, etc. – in other words, imagine if people occupied the locations where the 1% destroy the land and exploit humans, all for profit.

Imagine their stock prices falling, their cash flow being interrupted, their ability to get loans and/or expand “production” – a euphemism for converting living beings into dead products – finished.

Imagine if we were able to stop them, stop the 1%. Literally. Not symbolically.
We think it can be done if we all do it together. We think it can be done if we all figure out how to do it and if we are willing to make the necessary sacrifices, together.

Here’s one way we could start:

Though we are all part of the 99%, not all of us are impacted the same way.

First and foremost we recognize that nonindigenous people in the US are occupying stolen land in an ongoing genocide that has lasted for centuries.

We affirm our responsibility to stand with indigenous communities who want support, to risk our lives, and give everything we can to protect the land without which none of us have anything.

We also recognize and stand in solidarity with communities of people of color who are also disproportionately impacted by environmental racism, capitalism, and a system of white supremacy.

We recognize that women combat a system of sexism and patriarchy, and we commit to supporting the struggle for gender equality, which is the basis of equality for all.

Our focus will be to stand in solidarity with local indigenous communities, people of color communities, and women in struggle—ask if they would like support and what that support would look like, and share some version of this overall strategy.

Then, based on this information and in collaboration with local communities if all agree, each Occupy General Assembly would decide what they want to target. Or they would call on people to form local affinity groups and those groups would decide the local targets on which they would focus.

Many local affinity groups could conceivably attempt to occupy multiple targets. Strategically, however, it will likely be more successful if occupiers focus on one or two major targets – such as Tar Sands refineries, fracking, coal plants etc. The idea is that if we can successfully shut down a few major targets all over the country, one or two targets per region, people more broadly will see the power they all have and then more targets can be taken on.

To be clear, what we’re envisioning here would mean a massive escalation. It would mean hundreds of thousands of people all over the country leaving behind school, jobs, family, and comfort, to really go for it. To not settle for less than victory. To leave behind symbolic action for good.

One obstacle to making this happen, however, is that as soon as we announce where we would occupy, they would come and would likely remove us immediately, especially if we don’t have enough people there. They won’t want the 1% to lose a damn penny. So, we don’t tell them where we’re going ahead of time. But if we don’t say where we’re going ahead of time, then we can’t get people out by the thousands – and we’re gonna need thousands of people to make this work.

So, here’s an idea: We announce, big time, that some of us are planning on occupying the sites of direct exploitation and destruction. And we say that we’ll need as many of the people who love the Occupy Movement and who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, to come out decisively and to not plan on going home for as long as it takes.

We’d ask all those people to start preparing right away, have their stuff packed, tents, food, money, and a plan for how they can participate and be able to stay for as long as it takes (we’d encourage people to ask their community to support them so they could go for as long it takes) so that as soon as the local Occupy groups would announce targets, perhaps through text messages and other means, those people would be ready to go to the targets at a moment’s notice. This kind of tactic has been used successfully in the past to get lots of people to a location for a blockade while keeping the cops on the run and always one step behind. If we can get enough people to the different locations before the state gets there, we have a chance at holding it until even more people can come.

If there are enough of us who are willing to make the necessary commitment and sacrifice, we believe we need nothing more than our bodies, community support, and the will to keep going to:

Occupy the Machine – Stop the 1%, Literally

Here are some other points that could be helpful:

1) Start Together – The key as we see it would be to start on the same day so that they’re overwhelmed with people going to different locations. They may seem all-powerful sometimes, but they can’t be everywhere at once.

2) Sustained Blockades – this would mean doing what Occupy does so well, stay, day after day after day after day… as long as we can go. For every person they drag away to jail, we must bring ten more to replace them every day. We will cost them as much money as we can with our bodies and our determination. Blockaders will blockade both inside and outside of targets when possible. And they will blockade roads and ports to stop supply lines.

3) Demonstrators/Community Encampments – for those who cannot blockade, the role of the community will be crucial. Demonstrators encamped on the target’s land or nearby will provide support to the blockaders and will be crucial to success.

4) Building Communities of Nonviolent Resistance – For those involved in this who lack a strong, unified community, we must very deliberately build the concrete infrastructure for a community of resistance to support these struggles. This is already happening in many ways. But a systematic approach to creating networks of people who are devoted to supporting occupiers could be the key to success. This will mean legal defense funds and a network of lawyers who will work pro bono or for a reduced fee. This will also mean arranging transition housing – places for people to stay after they are released if they are jailed for long periods of time. It will mean relentless fundraising so that those who lose their jobs, take significant time off from work, or who go to prison for long periods will have funds to support themselves and provide for their families. It will mean creating free medical care networks so that people in the movement will have access to health care. It will mean creating food networks to provide food for those who are protesting day after day, and for families of those who are imprisoned or lose their jobs. It will mean creating networks of childcare. It will mean creating a transportation network, including carpools, donations of frequent flyer miles, movement cars and vans, caravans, and buses, to be available for the kind of sustained civil disobedience actions we will need. And last and most important it will mean simple companionship – the incalculable gift of camaraderie and friendship, the healing nature of laughter and hugs, the deliberate creation of a network of communities of love spread far and wide – healers, body workers, artists, musicians, actors, facilitators, counselors, those called by spirit, nonviolent communicators, restorative justice facilitators – all of us will be needed – to see us all through the hard times that will come if we do this kind of sustained direct action.

5) Jail Solidarity – rather than trying to construct civil disobedience actions so people spend the least amount of time in jail and cooperate with the police and court system to the full extent, we will follow the lead of those who have come before us. Instead, those who can, will use jail solidarity as a tactic. Jail solidarity means that those who get arrested will not bring identification with them, won’t give their name, and will not cooperate while in jail. As more and more people are arrested, the jailers and those they protect will not know what to do. At first they will threaten, try to divide, offer deals, or even beat people or put them in solitary confinement to break their wills. But those who will get arrested will know this going in and will commit to maintaining their solidarity. They can’t jail us all and if we don’t cooperate the system will not work, if there are thousands of us. Their actions will further highlight the illegitimacy and cruelty of this system that lets the CEO of BP walk free but will jail and do worse to those who are only trying to protect life. Jail solidarity combined with more arrests, demonstrations, encampments, community involvement, and a network of communities of nonviolent resistance offering material support are unstoppable.

6) Escalation: A Promise – Too often when we don’t succeed, we don’t escalate. Too often when they escalate their attacks against the planet and all living beings, we don’t escalate. (Have you noticed that all of our victories are temporary and defensive, and all our losses permanent and offensive?) No more. If our actions do not succeed, we promise to escalate. We will regroup, reorganize, and go for more than before, risking more and holding nothing back. We promise they will lose more money and we will get stronger and fight harder.

This is our chance. We can use our energy and love to stop the 1% who are literally killing us, stealing from us, and destroying the only home we have. Our bodies will be our demands. And with our bodies, we will stop the 1% together, permanently.

These are just thoughts. Not a plan. But we hope it’s the start of a conversation about how we can do some version of this. The 1% don’t really own or control anything. They do what they do because they have guns and we allow them to. But that can all change.

Acts of Conscience

7 Ways to Defeat The Banks: Stop Participating in the System!

We expect the system we live in to provide answers, to provide nurturance, to provide fairness, and to provide change where necessary. This expectation is a dangerous one.

Most social and political systems today are designed around collectivist methodologies. Their primary tool is centralization of power, and the removal of choice from the public consciousness. We are made to believe that the establishment is necessary for our survival, and that to abandon it would mean certain destruction. We are taught that the individual is subservient and inconsequential in the face of the state. This is simply not so. Like the traveler in “Before The Law”, we have been defeated by our own expectations of how the law (or justice) works. We sit and wait for permission, when we should be charging through the gates and taking what is rightfully ours.

Even amidst recent and increasingly prevalent protest actions on the part of Occupy Wall Street groups, there are still some within these movements who believe the answer to fighting back against the corruption of banking cartels and puppet politicians is to hand even MORE power over to the state, and to collectivize our culture still further. The ignorance of this mentality is no less than astonishing.

The only practical strategy for combating the tyranny of centralized systems has been and always will be decentralization. Individuals must stop relying on the rules of a rigged game to see them through to the truth. This means that while mass protests are certainly a powerful tactic for voicing concerns on an international stage, they accomplish little to nothing in the way of meaningful change in the long run unless they are backed by individual actions to break away from dependency upon a poisoned political and economic framework.

The common assumption amongst Americans is that nothing can be done without mass action resulting in “compromise” from leadership. That the healing of our cultural dynamic is a “top down” process. That one person alone has little at his disposal for bettering the world. In fact, it is always self aware and self sustaining individuals who build better societies, not angry mobs without understanding or direction. Individuals blaze the path that the rest of the world eventually follows, and they do this through one very simple and effective act; walking away.

By walking away from the corrupt system, and building our own, we make the establishment obsolete. This philosophy could be summed up as follows:

Provide for yourself and others those necessities which the corrupt system cannot or will not, and the masses (even if they are unaware) will naturally gravitate towards this new and better way. Offer freedom where there was once restriction, and you put the controlling establishment on guard. Eventually, they will either have to conform to you, attack you, or fade away completely. In each case, you win. Even in the event of attack, the system is forced to expose its tyranny and its true colors openly, making your cause stronger.

The obvious question now is; how can each one of us use this strategy in our daily lives? Here are just a few easy applications:

1) Focus On The Federal Reserve
If you as an activist or the movement you support are not fully aware of the private Federal Reserve Bank and its primary role in the destruction of our economy, our currency, and our political dynamic, then your protests are a waste of time, and your movement will end in failure. Uneducated mass actions are easily manipulated, and can even end up serving the purposes of those oligarchs they seek to dethrone. G. Edward Griffin’s full analysis on the history of the Federal Reserve “The Creature From Jekyll Island” and similar materials should be handed to every OWS protester before it is too late.

2) Take Back Your Savings
Do you have a bank account with one of the so called “too big to fails”? Is the culmination of your savings currently in the hands of financial monstrosities like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, etc? Well, take your money back! This has been done by a few protestors and the response from banks has been outlandishly oppressive, including new guidelines attempting to obstruct customer access to savings, and even calling the police! This tells me that they are afraid. Afraid of Americans catching wind of the idea that the money they place in the accounts of bad banks is still theirs to do with as they will. If you don’t like how these institutions operate, don’t let them have your money. It’s as simple as that. Not only is this an act of defiance that truly hurts the banking system, it also protects your hard earned wealth (at least initially) from the inevitable collapse of these fiscally insolvent blood leaching leviathans (watch Bank of America closely, folks!).

3) Use Alternative Currencies
After you take your savings away from the banks, you still aren’t quite free of their influence. You are now holding fiat dollars, which the Federal Reserve, the foundation of all banking fraud, is currently devaluing. The idea of walking away from the dollar sounds ridiculous or even frightening to those trapped in the centralization mindset, but it is a highly effective method for combating the system itself. The dollar is a sham, and has been since its future was handed over to the Fed in 1913.

Alternatives exist, and they must be utilized. Communities across the country use various scripts as a means to diminish reliance on the dollar, but ultimately, the best currencies are those that cannot be created out of thin air unhindered. This means gold and silver.

Central banking proponents have been railing against even the concept of a return to gold and silver currencies for years, and the Department Of Justice has labeled the use of such alternatives in place of dollars as a form of “domestic terrorism”. This should tell you, quite clearly, that they are deathly afraid of activists organizing to drop the dollar to pursue metals. If the system is willing to use the law as a weapon to keep us from having sound money, then we should be rubbing their nose in it daily by trading without dollars. They should be forced to react, and in the process, forced to expose their true intentions for our economic futures.

4) Build Barter Networks
If a bunch of people can band together to huddle in parks with signs for weeks in cities across the nation, then they can band together to trade goods and services outside the establishment system as well. Barter networks grow spontaneously out of economic collapse regardless of what any group decides to do, but generally, they appear AFTER the worst has happened. Wouldn’t it be wiser to organize such markets now, before a full collapse takes place? By preempting disaster with a backup or failsafe free market barter economy in each town and city, we insulate ourselves from the effects of the crisis, and, we cut loose from our dependency on the controlled mainstream economy. Localized trade makes it possible to walk away from corporate chains and maintain the circulation of wealth within a community, while countering the increasingly higher taxes caused by austerity and inflation that we are likely to see in this country very soon. It really is a no-brainer.

5) Grow A Garden
I don’t know how to say this nicely; don’t be a jackass, learn to grow your own food. Don’t expect that our economy will continue to sustain you. Actually, you should have every expectation that it won’t! If every Wall Street or Fed protester had their own garden patch and some stored goods, we would all be much safer. Food dependence is the worst kind. It has been used by governments and despots for centuries to cull the masses and dissuade dissent.

Sharecropping should be common in every community. Neighborhood gardens should be standard. Every household should have a year’s worth of food. Period.

Imagine that you lose your job and every cent you have tomorrow. Imagine that mom and dad are broke and have no money to lend you. Imagine that food stamps are a thing of the past because the national debt has become so exponential that entitlement programs have been erased. Now, how do you live from day to day? Where do you get the nutrition required for you to continue holding up that sign or shouting that slogan? Think about it...

6) Start A Micro-Industry
If the U.S. economy is ever going to get on its feet again, it will be because average Americans bring it back through local industry. This means ending our community addictions to corporately produced goods and returning to specialized trade skills. It means coalitions of local farmers, craftsmen, and micro-industries providing goods and services with a city or county based market focus. Large manufacturers and business chains relying on the model of globalization will have absolutely no ability to rebuild mainstreet commerce, even if they wanted to, because their methods depend upon constant outsourcing and downsizing for survival. Private tradesmen will be the only people capable of filling the dark void these corporations leave behind.

7) Start An Activist Group
The establishment HATES when you do this. The spontaneous organizing of groups outside government or corporate purview has generated notoriously absurd responses from authorities, including accusations of “extremism”, infiltration, and wrongful arrest. If this sounds frightening, then I suggest you get over it quickly, because this is going to be the norm for many years to come. The evils of the world are not undone by apathetic naysayers anymore than they are undone by mindless mobs. Without the coordinated actions of aware individuals with a common focus, nothing is going to change.

This group could be something a simple as a local barter network or a political discussion forum, or, a complex national organization geared towards tangible political action. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s based on the promotion of Constitutional freedoms, and its leadership is decentralized. Just make it happen…

At bottom, if we want to fight back against a system we cannot take back through traditional means, then we must learn to walk away. If the system feeds us, clothes us, and shelters us at will, then ordinary protest is pointless. Our tender parts are in a rusty vice on the autocratic workbench and until we pull them out, no amount of screaming and pounding will improve our situation. Independence is won through the constant striving for self responsibility. Freedom is won through a position of personal strength, not weakness and self-enslavement.

Numbers alone do not make a movement, and the elites we currently work to supplant are not going to flinch at a few random protests. In all likelihood they will welcome these actions as a useful distraction. Tyrants don’t fear the torches and pitchforks anymore. What they do fear is balanced insight, self reliance, and exceptional force of will. A handful of men with these attributes are far more dangerous to a corrupt system than thousands of citizens driven only by insatiable anger. To overcome oppression, we must first overcome ourselves. The ability to step outside the paradigm, the ability to act without permission, and charge the gates without apprehension, is the key to toppling totalitarian systems and exposing the great lie of our age; that we cannot exist without the cage we were born into.

Gold is a good investment, but self sufficiency is real wealth

The great rush to find a safe haven financial investment has led many supposedly savvy citizens to put their money into gold. This has caused the value of the precious metal to soar, reaching over $1,800 per ounce, giving investors a sense of security that their money is safe and likely to hold its value.

However, in a world undergoing seismic social, economic, and environmental convulsions that are growing by the day, gold may not prove to be the solution to our future security that many are hoping for.

If one stands back from the spinning vortex of speculative financial roulette that preoccupies the world's media and many of her better-off citizens, one will observe that unfortunately gold is inedible (some will say 'fortunately') and is less easy to turn into plough shears than other base metals. A fact that has not gone unnoticed by globally oriented financial investors. These speculators have recently started pouring money into agricultural land holdings as a hedge against higher food prices, set against a guaranteed demand for world staples like wheat, rice, maize and sorghum. Unfortunately the objective of such investment policies are not benign, but rather are symptomatic of the same convulsive profit driven motives that have catalysed the wild economic swings of the past decade.

So, where to turn when turmoil is encompassed by inflated egos, unashamed greed and rabid exploitation?

The answer to this starts by firstly recommending careful consideration of the circumstances that have brought us to this point. Then, a plan of action which offers a longer term commitment to a saner and perhaps 'simpler' model of everyday living – one which shifts decisively away from the present day crony capitalist and consumerist ethos that has brought our planet to the brink of asset stripped ecocide and unchecked human inequality.

In seeking to raise our awareness of the background to this unprecedented upheaval, it soon becomes apparent that there is some other force operating behind the front line villains picked out as being responsible for the rising and falling fortunes of the global economy. Those 'in the news' are often simply puppets of this unseen regime which appears to be intent upon a far-reaching domination of global events for its own ends. The regime appears to be composed of a rather small group of very wealthy individuals and corporations that have established a controlling influence over both national governments and the international financial institutions that form the lynch pin of the global economy. It is a mostly shadowy cartel whose field of influence includes such institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. Its leaders are also strategically placed to control events within the European Union, the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the Pacific Rim economic zone.

Banking empires, weapons cartels, pharmaceutical giants, oil magnates and food and seed monopolies are well represented within this club, which exercises decisive control over all our lives without us ever really noticing it. At their behest, moral codes and human values are flaunted and dispensed with with reckless abandon, and brutal wars are started in foreign countries with almost complete impunity.

One soon becomes aware that the fascist regime of the last Great War did not end with the Nuremburg trials, but re-established a formidable foothold within Western and North American society – performing this stealthy manoeuvre right under our half-closed sleep-filled eyes.

The fact that this state of play is successfully disguised as 'democracy', is proof of their cleverness and our stupidity.

Recognising this state of affairs for the first time can be a shock, especially if one has pinned their faith in the status quo to see us through these “troubled times”. However, reality it is, and once we have absorbed the truth there can be no turning back. Which brings us once again to the question: Where does one turn when all around is turmoil?

The answer is – firstly we have to turn to ourselves; to recognise that we are complicit in allowing such a dark agenda to have become adopted right in our midst. After all, we live in what citizens of Europe and North America like to refer to as a “modern democracy”. Yet it is we, ourselves, who have repeatedly put our faith in autocratic charlatans who freely exercise the levers of despotic power. It is we who have handed responsibility to run our affairs to those who are masters of spin, deception and propaganda. It is we who have filled the role that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain filled on the cusp of World War II when he held up a scrap of paper and declared it to contain Hitler's promise that Nazi Germany would never invade the United Kingdom. We too, like Chamberlain, have appeased ourselves in submitting our destinies to the diktats of the corporate vandals and the smiling politicians in their pay.

We have freely allowed ourselves to be duped into a state of virtual paralysis by a corporate-backed media whose agenda has nothing to do with “raising awareness” but a great deal to do with keeping us busy with the trappings of superficial consumerism and mindless entertainment. The vast propaganda machine that pumps out the relentless message that we should strive ceaselessly to acquire the means to purchase our pleasures from the glittering shelves of the global market place.

However, these shelves are now beginning to lose their luster, and we are beginning to lose the scales from our eyes. We can begin to see that we confused this 'virtual reality' with actual reality. The world turns out not to be a hypermarket after all, but a sentient being in an advanced stage of severe fever; poisoned, polluted and exploited almost beyond recognition - by us – the trolley pushing, brand seeking puppets of the global corporate elite. That small cartel marching on its robotic way to the grand take over of every last bankable asset on planet earth, as well as all those who, consciously or unconsciously, submit to becoming pawns in its sinister master plan.

But now its time to take back our power and to take firm control of our destinies. We can still make this choice – its not too late. Nobody with the means of survival needs to be a slave – and nobody with some land needs to go without food. We are fast becoming aware that 'money in the bank' is no guarantee of our future security. As dying state and private financial institutions increasingly empower themselves to reach ever deeper into our pockets, we struggle to grasp the fact that much of what they steal goes straight into the pay cheque of the brightest scavengers and the bonuses of already bloated bosses. We barely seem to notice when our revenue payments are utilised to further crank up the deadly imperialist war machine so it can bludgeon its way through yet more oil and mineral rich countries in order to fulfill insatiable material addictions and barely disguised neo-colonial ambitions.

However, behind all events is a law of karma which states “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” And just as the despotic forces of imperialism appear to be wresting decisive control over mankind, strong voices of reason and truth are rising to challenge its dominion. Among the genocidal acts of nefarious despots, we are witnessing the dawning of fresh visions of another way mankind can look after itself and this sentient planet upon which we all reside.

In fact we have arrived at something of a watershed; one where it will no longer be possible to sit on the fence and not commit to a resolution of this age old conflict, one way or another.

Thus, those now fretting about how and where to securely invest their financial savings, just might find that cosmic Lila has brought them to an auspicious karmic fork in the road of life. Pointing to the left – a signpost saying “Financial Security” and to the right a sign saying “Voluntary Simplicity.”

Those whose priority is to preserve their wealth will take the left fork and they will put their money into gold. Those who seek to deepen their awareness and move beyond material dependency will choose the right fork. Those who turn left may find themselves still in familiar territory with no lack of advisers on how to put up barriers against uncertainty and change. However this will merely ensure an extended contract with the dark ways of the old regime. For those who turn right will be a challenge of a very different nature: how to shift away from old material dependencies and towards a simpler and more harmonious relationship with the non material values of existence; the universal energies that are held back by materialistic indulgence. Those who take this path may wish to consider investing whatever funds they possess (individually or collectively) in some fertile land capable of producing good quality, ecological food, fuel and fibre for their daily needs. Thus taking control of their destinies and ultimately achieving independence from the clawing centralised control system which feeds upon the compliant serfdom of its participants.

The more we can free ourselves from this unholy contract, the less power it will have over us and our World, and the more realised we will become in the fulfilment of our deeper needs and creative aspirations. Once the collapsing institutions of the status quo have dragged all that has value into the cauldron of its hastening demise – where we find our next meal, how we generate our energy and where we acquire pure water – will become of paramount importance. The skills of the land will be at a premium, whereas the skills of money making will become a useless impediment.

We can start right now. We can take our money out of the mainstream banks which fund the oppressive institutions of this planet, and put it instead into ethical investment institutions, local ecological food and farming ventures, local human scale renewable energy initiatives and/or the thousands of localised land-based and artisan ventures now springing up all over the planet. We can, right now, begin to end years of energy sapping compromise and finally put our money where our hearts are. Because when the corporate gods are toppled and the lights go out, we will need to be prepared.

This preparation process can catalyse a new and positive interaction at the community level. One where we start purchasing the basic necessities of life from those who are already operating humane, responsible and environmentally benign enterprises; and not those who are exploiting the last seams of planetary wealth for their personal profit and power.

So to those who think they will find their salvation in precious metals, I would countenance them to think again. One cannot eat gold.