Happy Earth Day -- The Earth is for All People

All people in all places deserve clean water, clean air, and un-contaminated soil, in order to live a healthy existence -- just as much as the animals with whom we share this planet deserve such necessities.  If trees and animals are people too, then every member of the human species should also be treated as a real person. Otherwise the structure of the argument fails.  If we treat our fellow humans foully, how can anyone expect us to respect and heal other living things on this planet?  But our minds are what make us human, and not merely like all other living things.  The human intellect is the inevitable result of natural, ecological development.  It is a part of the natural order.  More importantly, it has successfully lived in harmony with nature for 99% of the time it has been cranially present in the hominid family, fully emerging into wakefulness anywhere from 70,000 to 50,000 years ago, depending on what evidence you examine and which anthropologist you talk to.  Our present disharmony with Nature should not be blamed on the cerebral potential of the human species, but on society's political misguidance, on its dry-rot of despiritualization.

There are libertarians who would say we should blame environmental degradation on the ignorance and carelessness of the poor, while liberal progressives would blame it on the insouciant economic methodologies of the rich.  Rational minds will recognize that overpopulation is of vital concern, but birth control education, supplies and clinics are being stymied by right-wing religious lobbies and traditional male chauvinist tribal societies -- and within the United States, by legislators, judges and even pharmacists!  Here is the usual prescription for the Earth Crisis: recycle, reuse, eat no or less red meat, buy local produce, use less electricity, reproduce fewer children, walk or ride a bike instead of a car if you can, don't buy that malfunction-prone cheap garbage from slave-factories in Asia, press your political leaders and candidates to restrain extractive industries that produce greenhouse gases, demand that corporations actually develop systemic forms of green energy.  These are all helpful and constructive, but the rich and powerful hold the true keys, and they are stubborn.

Not only that, they purposely mislead the less informed to believe that environmental concerns are a hoax and that defenders of our biosphere are anti-business, anti-capitalist, even eco-terrorists.  All of this anti-green skullduggery is so frustrating that sometimes the imagination could lead one to wonder sometimes if there are not pod-people inhabiting the bodies of humans to efficiently orchestrate the disintegration of our world from within.  If it were a matter of mere ignorance, that would be one thing.  But when it is so willful and cannily informed in its destructive nature, its reflexive shirking of all positive alternatives, it seems diabolical.  Earth is all we have, and if there is a Congress of Intelligent Life in the Universe (which I think not unlikely), they are probably now awarding us a resounding "D-" in ecological stewardship.  And what are the powerful going to do with their piles of wealth and booty when the Earth has become a desert? Take a silver spaceship to a secret resort on Planet X and clink bubbling champaign glasses?

I apologize for being so negative, but I know there are probably plenty of more hopeful sites out there in there on the internet to celebrate this day.  I just want us to squarely face certain aspects of the problem of potential environmental collapse that I have grown sick of the mainstream media dancing around.  Did not Nero play his lyre while Rome burned at the hands of his paid arsonists?  And then he blamed a scape-goat.  The planet burns now -- have we learned nothing?

The Hubris of the American Aristocracy

The presumptions and insouciant arrogance of the political conservatives of America is nothing short of dumbfounding, We are talking now about a degree of self-arrogation that has achieved true hubris. They actually believe they can rewrite Western Civilization. They mistake the middle and working classes for having a short memory, they we have already been conditioned to accept serfdom. They forget that we all can look back on over seven hundred years of steady progress since the Black Plague failed to subdue the human spirit, and that we can all appreciate the past over two hundred years of democratic and economic progress of relentless, broadening social enfranchisement. There is no turning back for our psyches. You can create the most desperate economic situations using the slave labor of Asia, but we will not let go of our sense that we are entitled as members of a democracy to decent employment and human welfare. You can turn a state like Wisconsin into an autocracy and fire our legally elected officials and replace them with gubernatorially-appointed flunkies, and we will not fail to forget that the Constitution says we are entitled to a democracy. You can try to subvert popular sovereignty, and we will not forget that you transgress gravely upon the very fundamental reasons the United States of America was created in the first place. The rich are not entitled to trounce on the liberties and political participation of the common people. We have not forgotten our inalienable rights, and we know you are violating our Constitution. We know you are making our Founding Fathers roll in their graves, and we know you will pay for your transgressions. You bring suffering to us, curtailment of our freedoms and ability to participate in the economy of life. This goes against the basic principles of ethical society, and for those of us of religious belief, we see it as against the Will of God. You are cynical, and firm in your silent belief that you may do as you will without fear of Divine retaliation, or that we will meekly submit to your re-establishment of the bane of Modernity: serfdom for those you deem not as fully human as yourselves. Shame on you! How could you do this to a country that once gave hope and inspiration to the world?!  Shame on you for not being content with already an embarrassment of wealth and influence. Have you no conscience? Are you a class of sociopaths? Have you no imagination of what good your wealth could do for human civilization? If you would but constructively share but a fraction of it for the enrichment and rebuilding our once great society, what wonders might be wrought! Was it merely the Cold War that kept you within the moral fold? Now that there is no Soviet Threat. you sell us all like slaves down the river, because there is no more a powerful rival to shame you for your ill treatment of your own nation. China you have befriended as though they were the most venerable capitalists, but the affinity is nothing to do with Communist China discovering the virtues of capitalism. You are autocratic in will, and China has mastered autocracy to the most methodical degree. You are natural allies against true democracy. The challenge of the future is awesome enough with Climate Change threatening to turn our Earth into another planet Mars, and yet you set your most energetic will upon the destruction of democracy. Democracy is the one political mechanism that has any hope of solving the survival of our human species and the other biological organisms we seem so reluctant to admit we depend upon for our survival. If you do succeed in destroying our democracy in all but name, you will have also demolished the fine instrument our wise Founding Fathers created that might have saved us from this pressing ecological dilemma. If the ideology of greed triumphs, our species, both rich and poor, will find itself buried in a mass grave created by the cumulative blowing dust of Time, rather than the pitying hand of a human (and humane) gravedigger.

Talk to Real Human Beings

The popular media are intensifying a sense of "otherness" in our midst: that our fellow citizen is not really one of us. Flourishes of rhetoric, dramatic music, computerized hyper-visuals all can accentuate this illusion and make it feel like reality. But get out on the street, and where do these "alienized" fellow Americans exist? Do you see them at your local grocery store? Do you see them in the places where you do business? It has never been the nature of the human race for everyone to be exactly the same. Only badly written or primitive, naive forms of literature might give this impression. Each of us has a distinct personality -- this has been so since our distant ancestors were mostly covered with hair and used stone tools. Every moment of grief, frustration, fear, anger, doubt, confusion, dismay, incredulity, joy, surprise, hope, fellowship, courage, helpfulness, compassion, forgiveness, love, humor, cooperation and understanding we have shared alike in this life. This world is a place of chaos that humankind can never fully tame. We need to remember that the chaos does not come from some alien other, but from the very nature of the world in which we live. To blame something that is actually a cosmic force on a group of fellow human beings is not the answer. We must give our loyalty to the goodness of heart that dwells within each of us, and from there we can minimize the effects of this chaos upon the communities we create and maintain in good fellowship. But if we attack one another, the chaos will invade our lives at every step. We must understand that all sane people seek food, shelter, health and safety for themselves and those whom they love. How they look and dress is purely incidental. Look at history! Every time there are difficult economic times there have been power-hungry and opportunistic charlatans posing as "statesmen" who incite people to attack a vulnerable group. But doing harm to another group of people will not bring healing to you and those you consider your kind. Driving out people you think are somehow not as fully human as yourself will not put food on the table or a roof over your head. Imprisoning others or taking away their jobs will not enable you to afford better healthcare. A politically polarized population lends itself to the control of those who lust for power and have no one's welfare at heart other than their own. Do not let loud-mouthed pundits on the television or radio dictate how you perceive your fellow man or woman. Go out and meet real people. People who do not attend your place of worship, people who do not work where you work, people who do not eat where you eat. They are real, they are full of hopes, they are full of anxieties, they are like you. They are not the "other", the "alien". If you actually listen you will hear yourself, the good-willed self, speaking back to you. Take the hardness out of your heart. Remember the story of Pharaoh. There is no virtue or strength in callousness and hate. Love is what has made every noble leader and teacher admired throughout the ages.

The Future: We're Apparently Not Included

Passenger trains have been called by conservatives "rails to nowhere". California, so plagued by transportation problems, traffic overload, a highway system that is redundant rather than efficient, having an automotive pollution output equivalent to a whole slew of states combined, is the last vibrant hope for a passenger rail network. Conservative legislators backed by oil companies know that if they can stall it in California, they will have removed what will otherwise become a shining example to the rest of the country of a sustainable and modern form of transportation for the 21st century and the imminent post-fossil-fuel world. Just a few years ago, there was serious talk about creating a national rail network for people, but poor turnout by progressive voters in the mid-term elections caused this prudent design for the future of mass transportation to be sabotaged by the election of a coterie of conservative governors who rescinded federally-funded programs for passenger trains. The conservatives almost have us exactly where they want us: at the utter mercy of a gas-pump with unrestrained price calibrations. But if California gets its peoples' rail system built, the rest of the country will have real food for thought. We will know then that there are material options, possibilities, alternatives. In fact, we will know that the rest of us have a place in the future. The real road to nowhere is the highway system. Fossil fuels are making our climate toxic to living things. Passenger trains are a major economic means and incentive to turning this destructive trend around. Transportation has always been one of the pillars of civilization. And yet, we have conservative political forces that seem to want to set up a new Dark Ages for our future, where only the wealthy will have the means to master distance. I'm with Governor Jerry Brown, and I'm not even from California. I'm from Ohio, one of those states recently robbed of a progressive rail system for the future security of its mass transportation, a state where far too many of our citizens can barely afford gasoline, cannot afford decent vehicles, and cannot properly maintenance the ones they have because it requires a computer rather than their own two hands to fix. So are we going to be included in the future of America? That depends on whether the passenger trains can happily whistle back into our lives. Trains liberated people from poverty a hundred years ago. They can do so again. If California gets its passenger trains, the rest of the country will demand their passenger rails back too, and the tide will turn again in favor of the common citizen of these United States of America. The successful construction of California's passenger rail network could be our signal to grab a second chance at a positive future for all Americans. Let's not get caught sleeping again. There are some that would seek to lock us out forever.

A Space of Retreat -- It's Not Just for Shamans

Does everyone have a place to which they can retreat, in order to recover from the world? For extreme extroverts, this may only be a place to get their requisite hours of undisturbed sleep, and then back out into the delightful social maelstrom for them! But for us introverts, the sacred, singular, private space is necessary to restore our sanity and sustain our sense of well-being. For the poorer members of the introvert tribe, this can be a challenge. Poverty is often the enemy of privacy and quietude, but if you can hop on a bus or put one foot in front of the other, you may be creating a prescription for mental health by putting some distance between you and the daily neighborhood harangue. Find a park. There is such a thing as public privacy. Some of our kind can find it at home, either in a sunlit room simply furnished for time alone, or a quiet shady corner of one's property outdoors, or a place in between, like a back-porch looking out into a pleasant backyard. Sometimes the refuge might be on the move: a winter's walk through the sound-muffling snow, or a spring stroll down a country lane with little traffic. In whatever place it is, spend a little time contemplating a corner of the universe that has no dependency on the noisy madness of humanity: the rustling leaves in the breeze, the society of fluttering birds, scampering squirrels, flitting chipmunks, bellowing frogs, whizzing bees and leaping fish. The flowering trees, the emergent greenery, the tinkling rivulet of Spring: these things have nothing superior to them in terms of tranquility, even in the most finely-designed homes of the wealthy. However and wherever you can find your space of healing and restoration, do it regularly, as the world takes quite a weekly toll on the psyche. We have inherited in the bodies we wear literally millions of years of having our brainwaves attuned by evolution to the relative quiet of Nature, the aural tapestry of birdsong being the most significant sonic transmission, and we now live in the incessant electronic chatter, automotive cacophony and mad media blather of Post-Modern Civilization. We must be kind to our minds, sweet to our souls, merciful to our emotional being. Walk away for a precious while from the anger, bombast, pomposity, nervous talk and fear-mongering. Think like a child, focus on color, become sensitized to the feel of the air, recall what made you happy when you first freely and hopefully contemplated your adult future. And go ahead: listen without distraction to the anciently patterned bird-calls of the spirited cardinal, just like your grandmother and grandfather did while gliding on the porch-swing, back in the days when people still realized the world could wait.

Is There Room in Public Affairs for the Faithful?

Anyone of moral character has a welcome voice and will in public affairs, whether it be religiously or philosophically based. But hypocrites deserve to be tarred and feathered. Jesus frequently talked about those who liked to make a show of their religiosity, but were completely shallow spiritually. Any Christian running for or holding public office who feels they must "brand" their acts and words in religious terms when they must be responsible to and for a spiritually ecumenical community is acting with insensitive arrogance. America never has been a "Christian State". From the get-go we have been a nation of deists, atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Protestants and Jews! And now we can proudly add Hindus, Sikhs, Baha'is, Muslims and Wiccans to our Constitutionally-protected diversity! To speak and act as though the rest of us don't matter is not the behavior of someone who believes in the democracy of America! If you are a true Christian, it should suffice that your actions and words are guided by your humble conscience and informed convictions. There are moral principles shared by every faith and even non-belief system on the planet. You will have respect if your words and deeds truly are moral ones. You need not proclaim that you do this in the name of "Jesus" or "God", or by whatever name your deity goes by. Those who make an issue of such a matter are the enemies of democracy and democratic pluralism. They are also abusing the names of God and Jesus for mercenary purposes. Lead by example, not by religious chauvinism. Jesus looked upon the overtly religious with contempt. He wanted us to act from our inner light -- not for the limelight.

Religious Freedom Versus Religious Dominion

Mixing politics and religion has always led to bloodshed and curtailment of democratic rights. This our learned Founding Fathers knew from history (and for them, even recent history), and that is why they instituted the separation of Church and State. Today we are more and more finding both law officials failing to enforce violations of this separation and lawmakers testing the waters to overthrow this separation. Is it a weak-willed surrender to local/regional pressure by special interest groups, or is it an imposed agenda? In light of this trend, any religious body, sect of clerical/denominational alliance that stumps for a candidate, a political party or lobbies state and federal legislatures should be found in violation of their fiscal immunity, and should be taxed to the fullest extent of the law.

Every religious sect believes it knows the path to salvation better than (or even exclusively over) the rest, and some claim to actually know the "will of God" on every evolving issue, like a private hotline to heaven -- that is the problem. This is old fashioned religious hubris. If one group inveigles itself to undermine the separation of Church and State, they will also have simultaneously destroyed religious freedom. Just to remind people (despite the distortions of political rhetoric) "religious freedom" does not mean that one religion has the right to govern our secular institutions, nor to exclude citizens of other religions. If a religious group were to manage to gain such control, it would not only be unethical, it would go against the mandate of the Constitution of the United States.

Yet we have fundamentalist sects seeking to gain religious dominion over our governing bodies, and the result would in no uncertain terms be a theocracy. If such were to occur (and there have been inroads in terms of the number of our appointed federal judges being graduates of conservative-minded bible colleges (which is perhaps a redundant phrase), the inevitable effect would be the disenfranchisement of the following portions of the nation's population: progressive Christians, all sects of Jews, all Muslims, all Sikhs, all Hindus, all Baha'is, all followers of nature-centered spiritualities, all Buddhists, all Hare Krishnas, not to mention all those honest enough (under the circumstances) to admit they are either atheists or agnostics.

What will happen to our renowned pluralistic nation, our time-honored multicultural democracy? Already we have businesses that are allowed to screen people in job applications and job interviews according to the religious biases of the employer by using questions to ascertain the religious beliefs and values of the job applicant. Using this method, they can deny that person employment not based on their skill or employment record or work ethic, but upon their religious propensities. So why is "private sector" a shield against the principles of democracy? If democratic rights cease to be once one crosses the threshold of a place of employment, that means only children, retirees, government workers and the unemployed remain as the ones theoretically able to retain their full democratic rights. This is patently absurd. That religion is being used to prop up an interpretation of the law that allows private employers to enact arbitrary forms of tyranny over their workers' lives is only comparable to the surrender of certain citizen's rights upon enlistment or drafting into a branch of the military.

Religion has its place: in the heart, not in government. Democracy and theocracy can no more coexist than water and oil. The agonies of the Middle East are largely due to the mixing of religion with public governance. Why should we want to create such agony here in America? Do fundamentalist Christians believe that if we use the Ten Commandments to trump or supersede the Constitution, that if we outlaw birth control and abortion, that if we abolish women's rights and domestic violence laws, the jobs will come back? that the factories will be rebuilt? that the family farms will be restored? and that everyone will willingly and happily suddenly convert not only to Christianity but their particular brand of Christianity? What will these theorists of theocracy do with those who do not convert? How will they judge and care for those who do not find gainful employment, if such a religious coup d'etat were to succeed?

The Christian Right obsess on the Ten Commandments, but the most important one is "thou shalt not kill", and this they zealously support only on the issue of abortion -- never mind those children who would slowly die from malnutrition if we did away with the federal welfare programs they so despise. A far finer edifice for Christians of any stripe to build their foundational response to the problems of this world would be Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. But where does "blessed are the poor" fit in the conservative libertarian scheme of hyper-capitalism, where the winner takes all? Where does Jesus say that thou shalt obey ME under penalty of law? and where did Jesus ever say or imply that women were lesser beings than men, or that birth control was a sin?

I will close with this quote from one of the earliest Christian thinkers, who was writing at a time when Christians were being mercilessly and horribly persecuted by the government of the Roman Empire because of Christianity's resistance to State Religion. Writing in 205 AD/CE to Scapula, a magistrate who was persecuting Christians, these are the words of the brave Christian, Tertullian:

"It is a fundamental right, a power bestowed by nature, that each person should worship according to his own convictions, free from compulsion." [Translation from the Latin into English by Elaine Pagels, PhD; found in her new book of religious history, Revelations, Viking Press, 2012.]

S.N.O.B. (Someone Needs Our Brains)

If you are running for the highest office of a country which has the power to affect the very climate of the planet, the political security, medical health and economic stability of other nations, and plays a critical role in preventing a world war, you will need to be (at least!) a college educated man or woman, even to contemplate running for that incredibly onerous office. And if you obtained that lofty position, you would need to make sure that every cabinet post, every high-ranking aide position, every secretarial post, every judicial position was filled by someone with (at least!) a college degree. There was a time when people could be leaders without a college education. It was called the Middle Ages. If seeking a college education is an act of snobbery rather than a simple act of survival, then I would like to inquire what collection of imbeciles in this great good land of ours exported to the Third World all the gainfully employing jobs that did not require a college degree, and thereby forcing all of us with any desire not to live in utter poverty to commit the unforgivable sin of "snobbery"! And if going to college destroys a person's spirituality, how come a great many of us had it rescued by our college education? Twenty years ago, a candidate speaking such stupidities in public for such a high office would have been called an "ass". Thirty years ago, such a candidate would have been called a "fool". Forty years ago the pertaining party would have quietly and politely asked such a person to withdraw from the race. By the way, does anyone remember SPUTNIK?!

Sharia Law Courtesy of the Christian Right

While you were sleeping, a state in our supposedly democratic union of the United States of America is making all forms of contraception and all forms of abortion...illegal. When I was still a kid, the type of folks who are today pushing these sectarian observances into general law were back then considered by the majority of the population as belonging to the lunatic fringe. They still are among the lunatics, but they are no longer on the fringe. This is due in part to voter apathy among those of us who are more sane. Yes, there are a growing number of people who believe that their vote doesn't matter. Well, you non-voters need to ask yourselves if you are still convinced of this. Not voting got far right-wing legislators into office, and they got busy doing their devil's work. They want a theocratic state, and they are going to get one if the apathy set leaves it to us remaining active liberal progressives to try to keep their hands from tearing up our Constitution. The Christian right votes by rank and file like military regiments. They will make homosexuality and masturbation felony crimes if you let them. Their abettors are rewriting history, creating a myth based on out-of-context snippets that our Founding Fathers were all fanatical fundamentalist Christians just like themselves. Never mind that the Founders of our Country were Deists (go look it up in the dictionary) who worshiped above all else the trinity of Reason, Science and Nature. Never mind that our Founding Fathers were trying to do everything they could to prevent the nightmare of State Religion that had caused so much miserable civil war and sectarian persecution in their ancestral Europe. Right or wrong, the Christian Right has a well-worked-out agenda that spans everything from making sure sex is only for procreation, to showing no mercy even if the pregnant one is still an undeveloped child who could die from the process of childbirth. They are blind fanatics who brutishly see the world in terms of black and white "facts", and want to force us to live under the mindset of superstitious peasants living four thousand years ago in the deserts of the Middle East. Science they throw in the trash-bin unless it can make them money, but don't dare make any reference to natural selection if you're going to use that profitable scientific technology! And forget responsible stewardship of the natural world God gave us. They believe all the Earth is for their plunder -- a most un-Christian attitude, but then, they are just as selective about what they choose to believe in the Bible as the progressive Christians they criticize. Let us hope that the next Christian Sharia laws they pass do not include stoning suspected "fornicators" in the streets by mob judgment. Methinks they need to develop a sense of humor about all this (anti-spiritual) religion they take so seriously: go and rent Monty Python's Life of Brian and get over yourselves!

Horse and Buggy Time Again

I hate to say this, but necessity is necessity. State by state, our politicians effectively sabotaged a federal program to lay the foundations for a (nationwide) passenger rail network, which would have been developed to provide the mass of America's citizens with the benefit of a durable and efficient form of transportation, affordable and green, for our shared future. So now we face a very real and imminent deterioration of modern transportation. Oil prices are going to inevitably continue to rise, and the price of a motorized vehicle (economic trends being stubbornly what they are) is going to continue to outpace the wages we earn. This is a recipe for disaster, because our society is designed for people being able to get from various points A to various points B within very narrow cycles of time. Huge areas of our country are going to effectively suffer a "land-locked" situation. You may be grooving with your pick-up truck or your SUV now, but the days for such vehicles are numbered in their present form. And you might have to ask yourself: will I be making enough money in the future to afford an electric version of the automobile I am now driving? I am only being half-facetious when I now make the following recommendation: in light of the fact that our politicians and corporations have abandoned average Americans, we need to save ourselves, and that means HORSES! We need to stop misbreeding this precious species of mammal for horse-racing and pedigreed shows. We need to start breeding this animal en masse for practical duty. We need to create road-lanes reserved and protected for horse and wagon transportation. We do it already for the Amish, and in the future, we will need to do it for everyone who can't afford a hydrogen-powered limousine or sports car. We need to find craftspeople who understand and can reproduce the crafts of the cartwright and the wheelwright. We need horses that are strong and healthy and resilient. Towns need to build stables for the commuters. People will have to leave hours earlier to make it to work. It is neither crazy nor impossible. The Amish do it and they are flourishing. We have been left with little other choice. Our ferriers will no longer be poor. Our woodworkers will no longer be hard up. Our harness-makers will no longer starve. Carts and horses will not come cheap, but they will be far cheaper than using oil and the cars industries will produce in the future. The corporations already are catering more and more to a wealthier set. We who are not so wealthy need to stop looking to the politicians and the fat-cat companies to save our transportation future. We must take care of ourselves, and all of us have it in us to take care of horses to provide us with a means to meet the harsh demands of conquering distance in economically attenuated technologies of the future. The horse and humankind have been partners for many thousands of years. The automobile, on the other hand, has already nearly used up its friendship with most of humanity, and it is only a little over a century old.

Why You Can't Be a Libertarian and Environmentalist at the Same Time

If we want to get into the basic psyche of many libertarians, it is this: they don't like most people. For them most people aren't worth the skin they're encased in. They were brought up or were educated to value only a very narrow definition of what constitutes a worthy human being, and the rest, for them, are fodder. The whole idea that some are entitled to fully decent life and some are not is the underlying truth behind their facile philosophy of survival of the fittest. So now we encounter a special breed of libertarian: the environmental or ecological libertarian. It strikes one as funny at first, because most libertarians are forever griping about government regulations on corporate or entrepreneurial activities that affect the health of the environment. But let us examine this group more carefully. They are not really about making this planet healthy for all humans -- just those who are worthy, and otherwise what they are really talking about is the wild animals, plants and trees, etc. This subgroup has an interestingly ironic psychology: they love nature, forgetting that their fellow humans (even the most contemptible of whom) are a part of nature too. These eco-libertarians actually believe they can save the environment without bothering with the bulk of the human race. I hope they're not suggesting euthanasia! Of course they could be more supportive of birth-control education, but they aren't, because they know they need those right-wing Christian votes to maybe get some of their candidates into office. Yes, overpopulation is the problem, but a lot of the crises this factor causes is because too much of the good land is in the hands of the too few. So the poor must clear wilderness to create new land with which to feed themselves, and can you really blame them -- I mean they are exemplifying the libertarian spirit of independent resourcefulness! But of course, these desperate humans are the very enemy of eco-libertarians. So you can give to wildlife charities to save this or that species, but if people are starving, you aren't going to win the battle to save the natural world. You must save both the humans and the wilderness. There is still room, it just needs to be shared. There are too many large estates and private pleasure parks for the rich that could be farmed to feed the poor. And the rich have confiscated too much former farmland for mineral and fossil fuel extraction, forcing regular people to make a life somewhere else (i.e., clearing the wilderness or else into an urban death-trap). So stand up for something, and support international birth control efforts if you aren't going to stop the seizure of ancient tribal lands! And remember, most of you libertarians came from humble origins a few generations back -- just like 99$% of the world's population. There are people with perfectly worthy genetic potential who are trapped by sociopolitical repression and lack of educational and employment opportunities. No one achieves success without help from someone else -- we are social animals not "lone wolves" after all. Rugged individualism is a myth, and if you examined your own lives, you would recognize the advantages you had and have that others don't, upon which you built and build your illusion that you are homo superior, ready to save Nature from the "vile mob". Please come back to real nature, O eco-libertarians, and embrace your human brothers and sisters whose rags you disdain. We all look the same under our clothes of make-believe identity.

The Absurdity of the Right Wing Term, "Eco-Fascist"

It brings a bitter smirk to the face when one encounters the supreme irony of the right wing forming ridiculous new compound words like "Islamo-fascist" and "eco-fascist". Historically, the fascists in Spain, Italy, Japan and Germany formed themselves from the extreme right wing of those countries. Once again we find our own right wing playing their game of smoke and mirrors, the veritable pot calling the kettle black.

Maybe we need to recall what fascism really is. Well, first of all, it makes a big show of honoring values it deems "traditional", it enacts idolatrous ceremonies over political symbols, it creates an atmosphere of twinned fear by threatening people with insidious political power and by teaching them to fear their fellow citizens, and it demands utter unquestioning obedience. In return, it rewards those who expose political dissenters, and throws out cheap amenities to the masses if they do not make trouble for their rulers. Lastly, fascism must focus people on a scapegoat, so that their unsatisfied frustrations may be bestially trained upon some vulnerable segment of the population.

I will not go into a discussion of why it is ridiculous to put Islam and fascism in the same sentence, since they are mutually incompatible. It is like saying "Buddho-fascist". No, let us address ourselves to the fresher vocabulary the right wing has imposed upon us: "eco-fascist". Hmm, it is so ludicrous a word that I question the effort of bothering to expose its stupidity. However, since it is so heatedly used now by conservatives and libertarians, I had better not make the error of assuming that the word will merely implode of its own self-contradiction. Eco-fascists are what the right wing are now calling those who are making a last desperate effort to actively educate the public and our political leaders about the very real time-clock we now face in being able to save this planet from becoming a super-heated hell. Those who must frequently give utterance to this neologism are those who want to make their quick profit from hydraulic fracturing, and are incensed that anyone should question the effects of their actions upon the land we must live upon.

For these conservatives, it is "fascistic" to want to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and demand that regulatory laws which protect the public health to be applied, enforced and obeyed. They believe they can excuse their sins by claiming that what they do is born of "economic necessity", disregarding the fact that the economy will be destroyed by what they do. An economy requires a healthy ecology to sustain itself. If the land is made fit for neither man nor beast (nor even vegetable), it has been rendered desert. If the aquifers of a region are polluted by petrochemicals, the food shall wither, the livestock shall die upon the hoof, and the people shall face the harrowing death of leukemia.

So, does not wanting this to happen make a person a "fascist"? The necessity of an economy is that a country can grow food upon the land, and feed and water the animals and humans that live upon it. If this is vouchsafed for only for a few acres, a few aquifers, a few herds, a few people, the country shall implode as a workable entity, and all that quick wealth will sit vainly in its vaults, have nowhere to be spent, and its ill-gotten gain will have no one to use it. One thing I do know from history: the fascists destroyed their countries. They were nihilistic. They did not care whom they destroyed, even if it included themselves. What of those who believe in life? They were named years ago. They are called ecologists.

Through Logic We Arrive at the Real Motives of the Lunatics Who Set the Policies of This World

Many politicians profess not to believe in climate change. Given the emphatic and mounting nature of the material evidence and the adequate level of intelligence displayed by these politicians, one must assume that this profession of disbelief is as sincere as their theatrical assertions of belief in the moral tenets of Holy Scripture.

Scientists and engineers know how to use forms of energy and technology that will not contribute to the escalation of greenhouse gases, yet they are either ignored, or else corporations make toys for show of their ideas, patents and blueprints. Instead, politicians and corporations are redoubling their efforts to use deeply embedded subterranean fuels which will further exacerbate and intensify climate change, by exploiting sand-trapped oil reservoirs and shale-trapped natural gas deposits. And now, we are even hearing loudly-voiced intentions to extract oil from the Arctic Ocean Bed, as soon as Global Warming (!) has melted the polar ice cap -- never mind that the international counter-claims for that piece of once solidly frozen real estate may start another world war!

Since unabated climate change will ultimately lead to the demise of our living planet, one is left to conclude that these politicians and abetting corporations belong to something like a "cult of death". What they are doing in stymieing such measures as the Kyoto Protocols is tantamount to a suicide pact on a global scale.

The mass of the people of America have news for these politicians and CEOs who ride the death-tide of Global Warming: we don't want to be destroyed by your ill-begotten pact with fossil fuels. We choose life! That means you need to stop this abortion of our living planet with your invasive quest for fossil fuels!

The Fallacy of the Categorical Negative: Extraterrestrials Have Never Visited (And Probably Never Will Visit) the Earth

Astrophysicists have calculated the age of the Universe to be about 13 and three quarters billion years old, and geologists have calculated the age of the Earth itself to be just over 4 and a half billion years old. Because of the Asteroid Belt (the remains of a former planet shattered by a massive primordial collision with another astronomical body), the development of sapient life on Earth has been put at a severe handicap, as evolutionary progress has been repeatedly disrupted by periodic large meteor strikes from asteroids, which have caused numerous instances of pan-species extinction. With the arrival of homo sapiens, we ourselves were almost wiped out by another collision some 70,000 years ago by a more minor large meteor strike that reduced our species from many thousands of members to only a few hundred (!), and consequently we have to this day the narrowest genetic spectrum of diversity of any other species of primate, including some ape cousins who are now extinct.

After civilization finally began among humans about 5000 years ago, advances in philosophy and the sciences (the key components for the steady and stable progress of higher civilization) enabled humankind to begin grasping and interacting with the true nature of the universe and ourselves. However, science and objective philosophy met with repeated obstructions from secular and religious institutions of power, which prized a monopoly of control, rather than collective human progress. We are a species that has conflicting tendencies between a will toward animalistic domination of each other and a desire for the altruistic improvement of the well-being of our fellows. This fundamental conflict (however accustomed we may be to its tension in many disguised and euphemistic forms) creates another source of fundamental constraint on the advancement of sapient achievements on our planet. Therefore for many, it is hard to be objective about the very idea that other species on other planets in other star systems may have outpaced us by probably thousands if not millions of years.

And yet there is hope that we will at last no longer falter. If we observe merely our own progress as a global civilization within just the last two hundred years since the philosophy of the Enlightenment liberated us intellectually (and psychologically) from the blinders imposed by absolutist secular and religious powers, it is not unreasonable to speculate how much exponentially greater might be our accomplishments in science and technology over the next thousand years, if the principles of the Enlightenment are not weakened, repressed, undermined or eroded by forces who prefer domination and subjugation of their fellows, rather than real civilized advancement.

So now we have scientists who categorically reject even the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation of our planet by a sapient species, in the past, present, or even in our near future. They claim this response stems from the same healthy skepticism that governs all their other scientific positions, approaches and attitudes. Yet objectively speaking, such an absolute position on the mere possibility of contact here on Earth with what would have to be a more advanced species of sapient life is not in principle or practice a scientific attitude, nor is it a rational philosophical stance. In fact, such a position smacks of pre-Enlightenment dogmatism and prideful anthropocentricism. One thing is for sure, the powers of our present global civilization have promoted this position, and those powers have repeatedly betrayed an attitude that the mass of the human population must be intellectually and materially repressed.

We must admit that scientists, however well trained in the scientific method, can be as fallibly human as laypeople. Scientists are hungry for money and financial security. They need ample funding so they can pursue their various expensive projects of experimental and expeditionary research. Therefore, they take their cue from those with economic and political clout, and thus. they are willing to lay aside the principles of the Enlightenment (and even stark material evidence that contradicts dogmatic positions of our uniqueness in this corner of the Milky Way) and support articulately a false and misleading position in which their benefactors (or potential ones) have (for whatever unknown reasons) a political stake. That said, it is no transgression of Enlightenment principles for a scientist to say, "in my own personal researches and in examination of materials made available for my empirical examination, I have not found evidence of visitation by intelligent extraterrestrial entities." However, it is another matter entirely to flatly dismiss the very theory, given just how old our universe is and the inevitable propensity of any sapient mind, wherever it might hail from, to continue to explore as far as developing technology will permit (including other inhabited worlds).

If we are to advance as a civilization and surmount the worrisome problems we now face, we must not permit any form of dogmatism to corrupt the purity of scientific inquiry. Where one kind of dogmatism is permitted, more will build upon the precedent of such intellectual perversion. If the Academy does not wash its hands of resorting to double-talk with the public, it will mean the same thing to its future health as the present contamination of our system of public education, where anti-intellectual forces are hard at work to effect legislation that will compel our children to be taught Creationism as though it were a science, and make it a required part of the mandatory curriculum of our public school system. You can't have some things diverted one way, and expect the rest (i.e., what you presumably prefer to value) not to follow.

A Timely Article Worth Reading

I rarely write reviews on this blog but I encountered an article so apropos our current concerns, so well written, and so well researched that I must immediately recommend it. It appears in the December 17th issue from 2011 of The Economist. It is entitled, "How Luther Went Viral: Social Media in the 16th Century: Five Centuries Before Facebook and the Arab Spring, Social Media Helped Bring About the Reformation" (pp. 93-96), by an uncredited staff writer. It is a comparative analysis of a communication phenomenon of the Reformation with the social media phenomena of today's web technology. Back then it was efficient printing presses that could turn out mass-produced and affordable pamphlets on important current issues within 2 days of a person submitting the manuscript article. Martin Luther's pamphlets, written in a broad-based vernacular, were sold on the street corners and purchased by everyone from laborers, to artisans to burghers, and read aloud to those who were not literate in the public houses and in private homes. Earnest discussions occurred in response to these readings, and people realized they were not alone in their feelings of dissatisfaction. Mass consensus was built through what constituted a dynamic form of information technology for their day, and which some authorities (not surprisingly) tried to shut down -- but there were just too many printing presses in too many cities to stop it! This mass consensus mobilized firm resistance to corrupt and established power-blocs, and revolutionary human progress was the result. Here is the official link to the article, which is now freely accessible on the web: http://www.economist.com/node/21541719

Those Who Control the Flow of Information Control Everything

We now have two bills in our Congress, which if passed (and there would have to be an override of the President's promise to veto them) will cripple the Amendment Right of Free Speech on the internet for Americans. This is what such countries of totalitarian government as China and North Korea infamously already do. Because public libraries in America are gradually disappearing due to underfunding or a complete collapse of funding under various state and local governments, because bookstores are disappearing due to bankruptcy and cut-throat competition from Amazon.com, because higher education is becoming less affordable to more and more people (and therefore a resulting decline in access to the contents of academic libraries), because print newspapers are disappearing, because network and cable news channels are becoming more and more biased and agenda-oriented, because of all these reasons free democratic citizens of the United States are finding their access to information increasingly curtailed and the internet becoming increasingly vital to remain properly, adequately and accurately informed. If the internet becomes regulated by a federal agency with a conservative political agenda (and we know this would be the result since it is the conservatives who are supporting these noxious bills masquerading as "anti-piracy" legislation), then Americans will be plunged into a total state of ignorance and therefore be more broadly subject to manipulation by the mechanisms of narrow-minded and fallacious propaganda. Please call, email or tweet your federal representative and senators, and tell them that as a constituent, as a registered voter, as a free American, as citizen of the United States, you do not support either SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). Their titles seem perfectly reasonable, but they are veritable Trojan Horses nefariously enclosing what are effectively carte blanche regulatory controls on what sites (both domestic and international) legally get to function on the internet and be accessed by web-users in the United States. We will lose our means of practicing real democracy if we lose the internet due to arbitrary discretionary ad hominem and ad hoc pronouncements from authorities who are the puppets of lobbyist interests who seek a monopoly of political and economic power. Let us roll these Trojan Horses unopened out of our venerable City of Democracy, and then burn these false wooden horses along with their ill-begotten provisions (whose term aptly fits the metaphor here used -- legislative riders).

Why There Must Be a Soul

By "soul" I mean our consciousnesses of a self separate from but in positive relationship with our minds, bodies, the world and our fellow creatures, stemming from an immaterial quintessence of coalescent, materially animating energy. Hard science people find life to be a minor, peripheral, even freakish aberration of the normal and main purposes of the universe. In fact, they see life as an excrescence of matter in a state of senility. So what do such people mean by the "truly real"? Well they tend to focus on the life, death and afterlife of stars and their galactic communities, which surely is stupendous stuff. They are also interested in the in the dynamics of the various kinds of natural satellites attached to these stars. For them, the matrix of the real includes only the chemical, gravitational, electromagnetic and quantum processes in the space-time continuum. However, all that which lives (i.e., that which exerts autonomous behaviors outside the random dynamics of purely natural law), should therefore act in complete acceptance of the trials and consequences, however negative, of the environment for which it evolved. But this is not the case. Life resists and strives to overcome the negative forces of the heedless universe, rather than functioning seamlessly within it. For all the grandeur of stars and planets, you will never find one of these heavenly bodies singing an elegy because the planet is about to be swallowed up by a star in its Red Giant Phase (or perhaps sucked into a black hole), or that the star senses it is about to go supernova. But let's just take the case of higher forms of life, of which humans are only one. These sentient species express all sorts of unnecessary behaviors, including grief, joy, compassion, sentimentality, pride, serenity, playfulness and humor. If they were mere biological machines, their attitude toward their environment and their fellows with whom they share it would include none of these functionally extraneous behaviors. Now let's talk about humans specifically. If we were merely suffering under the delusion that we have souls because our brain chemistry had synthesized such a projection of materially transcendent identity, emotion would seem to have no practical utility. Our unavoidable feelings of attachment and sense of meaning would seem at odds with the presumption of our being mere accidents of senile organic-chemical traditions. The only emotions that would have any purpose if life were merely soul-less would be desire and competitiveness (and the violent expressions of such primitive yet practical motivating instincts). So is life a decadent phenomenon of matter? Or is there something about life (however small in proportion to things like stellar nurseries, dark matter, binary star systems, nebulae and spiral galaxies), which makes it something rather miraculous by comparison to all the other mightier things that roam infinite space?

No Shame When Our Origins Are Evidenced

Between Weeks 13 and 16 of gestational development the fetus begins growing a special kind of hair called lanugo, which is a kind of fur. By Week 20, the body is entirely covered by this hair, which forms an actual pelt. By Week 35 it begins to be shed, and by Week 36 it has all fallen out except for traces on the upper arms and shoulders, which unless prematurely born, is nearly all gone by the time the baby emerges from the birth canal. Lanugo emerges in the fetuses of all other mammals, and for primates it remains to become the permanent body hair it will grow throughout its postnatal life. In humans it is an evolutionary echo of just how closely related we are to our fellow Great Apes (i.e., chimpanzees, bonobo, orangutans and gorillas). For some rare people, this thick growth of hair is not rescinded in the succeeding stages of gestation, but they are born with it (without being premature), and it remains with them for the rest of their lives. This is due to the rare pairing of two recessive throwback genes, but the individuals with this condition are otherwise normal and intelligent. Our relationship with other Great Apes should not be a source of shame but an enhancement of our sense of connection with the rest of the natural world. Such evidence of this hirsute stage in human gestation should serve to liberate us psychologically from a sense that we have somehow become wholly "exiled from Eden". We are fortunate and should value our gift of superior reason, but it is certainly a reflection of "unreason" to be ashamed and reflexively resentful that we are so intimately related to other primates. I take joy that I am a mammal like my dear canine and feline friends, and a primate cousin of the resourceful hanuman monkey and the glorious mountain gorilla. Yet just how much more advanced must be reconsidered when we have the example of the Iraqi Army years ago during its invasion of Kuwait slaughtering all the apes in the zoo because they were "abominations". This is not to single out one group of people for chiding. Christians have shown extreme resentment ever since the discoveries of Charles Darwin in the Victorian Period that we have an evolutionary connection to other species of apes. Fundamentalist Christians grow irate when it is suggested that we are apes (or even just animals) at all. How can any animal be an "abomination" when God (according to the religious scripture of every monotheistic faith) is the Creator (i.e., the Ultimate Parent) of all living things, in effect His/Her beloved "creatures". Well, we certainly are not "godlings", and "bestial" behavior seems more often practiced by "humans" rather than by the pseudo-separate group whom the scientifically aversive identify as "animals".

Judge Not a Person By Their Government

One thing is for sure: when it gets down to the basics, everyone on this Earth (who is not criminally insane), shares the same values. Unfortunately, our governments too often get in the way of people unifying on the common ground we share as human beings. Things like compassion for fellow human beings in trouble, love of family, love of nature, love of animals, love of gardening, love of jokes and stories, love of recreation and sport, love of music, these matters are universal. There really are no "demonic" ethnic groups, there are only demonic individuals, and sometimes, regrettably, demonic governments, which do things like ethnic cleansing or denying disaster relief. There are governments that grow uneasy when groups of individual people reach out welcoming arms of humble peace across the artificial divides governments like to create for narrow partisan interests. Increasingly it is becoming evident that the stakes are so high that we can no longer afford to look the other way while governments stoke false hatreds between different groups of human beings. Not only do we have tools of unprecedented horror at our disposal that kill innocent people along with perceived evil-doers, but we can also use them to destroy the planet itself. Yet even without the question of weapons of mass destruction entering the picture, our planet, our biosphere is ailing. We are not going to be able to restore the health of this planet until we let go of these trumped-up ethnic and nationalistic squabbles and link arms with our fellow members of the human race. A mother by any other name is still a mother, no matter where you find her caring for her child on this planet. A father patiently teaching his child how to play a game can be found in any country you care to visit. A friend sitting at the bedside, cherishing an ailing companion with tender hands is a social scenario that arises in every human culture conceived. Hatred of crime and those individuals bent on committing crime is one thing, but to hate a whole people is one of the most foolish things you can do to your soul and a true handicapping of your mind. The Genome Project has proven that visual "racial" differences are the most recent development in the evolution of our species. We are otherwise the same inside, both biologically and spiritually.

Conservatives LIKE Regulation

Oh, the conservative decry "regulation" all the time as though it were the instrument of Satan. But let's be more exact and cut through the double-talk of demagoguery. The architects of conservatism just don't like regulation that protects public health and environmental safety. What they DO like is regulation which loads unnecessary and arbitrary expenses and fees on small businesses, small farms, and small-scale industries, in order that these might be increasingly crippled with overhead costs. Conservatives simply do not really believe in free enterprise, though the mouths of their politicians make a show of flapping about it on the campaign trail. However, as soon as their hand-picked politicians get into office, they listen only to the big business lobbyists. As legislators, they pass as many regulations as possible to crush the entrepreneurs. The laws they pass send a clear signal: there must be no alternative competition to the large corporations, who are all in an alliance with each other against the art of capitalism being successfully practiced by the little guy. What I would like to tell these conservative legislators is this: you clearly cannot run a durable economy on bullsh**t. An economy must produce something real, and if it doesn't produce it on home soil, the country has thrown away the economic sovereignty of its people. Unfortunately, big business no longer contents itself with remunerative success. Big business is determined to quash the emergence of small, regional competition. Of course, agribusiness and its particularly adept lobby groups are especially notorious for using ploys with legislative bills that effectively sweep away our yeomen farmers. In general, what seems to have happened is that big business has redefined the meaning of success: rather than it being about the quality of the product they produce, and getting people to recognize that quality, they would rather be predators that destroy or devour all competition. Not what I would call the economy of a once proud democracy.

The Pundits Advise and the People Feel Despised

I ran across a subtitle of a book which ran, "how to live in the new economy" [italics mine]. I will not reveal the main title -- I have no specific beef with this accommodationist author, but there are so many books on the same theme that have some variation of this same subtitle. It is nauseating. So what is this thing all these pragmatic financial and career advisors are talking about? Well, it is an economy that is certainly "economic" in its use of people: no employment for many, poor pay for most, lavish pay for some, parasitic profits for the few. Such a system is neither "livable" (in the human sense), nor even "new" (in the historical sense). In terms of the latter, it looks like the preliminary stage to slavocracy. Ancient Rome went through this transition when it passed from a simple republic to an acquisitive empire. By a more modern comparison, it also looks like the Land of Opportunity is morphing into a Third World social pyramid. What we must be clear about is that this new economy is not based on any form of necessity: there are so many resources that simply aren't being shared, but they want you to think it has to do with population increase. The economy we are now experiencing in America is actually a massive political indulgence of greed, and a full ratification of plutocratic arrogance. Thankfully, more and more Americans are standing up and saying that they will refuse to "live" in this "new" economy. These awakening Americans reject the might over right "legitimacy" of its very precept: wealth against the common weal. The world the elite are packaging for us makes a mockery of the Declaration of Independence's phrase "the pursuit of happiness". In fact, our sordidly New Gilded Age is downright anti-democratic. It is the connivance of a cabal of warmongers, sweatshop outsourcers, fossil fuel magnates, and peddlers of instantly obsolescent gimcrack merchandise. The deceivers have gotten an amazing amount of mileage by claiming that they're doing it all for "God" and the "Bible". But even among the blindly faithful, such lies will no longer work as the uncounted jobless and the underemployed face the desert these pundits know their abettors really have planned for us. If there is a God, He or She will want an Eden for the little people of this world, but the unimaginative rich don't create anything like that -- not even for themselves.

Carry On Those of Noble Heart

We might get blasted by a gamma ray geyser from a neutron star taking formation hundreds of light years away. We might suffer a years-long crippling of our electrical grid and apparati from a solar mega storm, the last of which occurred with our Sun a hundred sixty odd years ago. We might suffer a winter that lasts years unabated because of the eruption of the subterranean super-volcano beneath Yellowstone Park, which might put billions of tons of ash into our atmosphere. We might experience the largest tsunami the world has ever seen if the volcano of Tenguia on the Canary Island of La Palma erupts and causes a part of the island to subside into the Atlantic Ocean. If the cosmic pinball machine that is our Asteroid Belt causes one of those huge space rocks (or planetessimals as physicists like to call them) to change its orbit and fall into line with the Earth's, one of them could strike our planet and make a nuclear war seem like child's play. The glaciers on Greenland might melt away due to Climate Change and submerge Atlantic coastlines permanently (in terms of human lifespans), placing some of our greatest cities beneath the sea. And yet, we must go on being what we were meant to be, doing what we were meant to do, giving what we were meant to give, creating what we were meant to create. Of the aforementioned potential global disasters, only one could be prevented; if we change the basis of how we energize our society the glaciers will stop melting from greenhouse gases heating up the planet, but greed has made this issue a steep battle for change indeed. To warn about something we have the power to remedy is one thing. But if we can do little or nothing in practical terms, we must live our lives bravely and with hope, and accomplish things in defiance of the doomsayers who would paralyze us with pessimism. Threats of various kinds have always loomed over humankind, but if we had dwelt upon them, we would have never accomplished anything worthwhile. If possible dooms are being thrown in our faces now by a computer-animated media, one should inquire: what is the motive of those who so gratuitously do this? One thing is for sure: these dire possibilities hanging over us today are not slowing down the actions of those who would do harm. So let us boldly do good. If it all ends tomorrow, we can be proud to say with our dying breath that we kept our humanity. And if the world doesn't end after all, look at the positive difference we will have made by soldiering on beneath the arrogant spittle of these puppet-string prophets.