His family was just in the way of the have and have more’s. Something I have thought about for years Robert put it well.

The delusional revolution is my term for the development of sophisticated propaganda techniques in the 20th century (especially a highly emotive, image-based advertising system) that have produced in the bulk of the population (especially in First World societies) a distinctly delusional state of being. Even those of us who try to resist it often can’t help but be drawn into parts of the delusion. As a culture, we collectively end up acting as if unsustainable systems can be sustained because we want them to be. Much of the culture’s story-telling — particularly through the dominant story-telling institutions, the mass media — remains committed to maintaining this delusional state. In such a culture, it becomes hard to extract oneself from that story.

Those sophisticated propaganda techniques keep people in a box with walls made of bullshit and all it takes is a thought to teardown those walls because they are not that sophisticated bullshit never is.

There is another revolution worth considering and storying in this context, a religious revolution. “The world as it is – rather than as we might like it to be”, is in a seamless relationship with the cosmos as a whole and that it was probably the unfolding patterns of this relationship ie; the stars in the night sky, a waxing, peaking and waning moon, a sun that appeared and disappeared each day and moved to and fro across the horizon that eventually got our pre human ancestors contemplating more than their navels. I am suggesting here that it was the way our ancestors received the creativity that surrounded them each season that resulted in a religio-loci, in them regarding their place as sacred, their ritual celebration of it and eventually all the other revolutions and major inventions that flowed from this way of receiving cosmic creativity such as language, pottery, weaving and agriculture etc. The human has long since been a religious animal and it is this revolution more than any other that has for better and for worse set us apart from the other than human. From my PaGaian perspective I am convinced that for any “Progressive Strategy” to achieve sustainability and social justice for the human to be successful will require a contemporary scientific understanding and re-inventing of our planet as sacred.

Thanks again, Taffy Seaborne

Some will be surprised. I’m not and there are many others who are not. Society is structured so that those who control wealth control everything else. That’s why you get a Congress in 2006 that some expected would act on Iraq, but others knew would do nothing. Why? Because they’re owned and it’s not time for the owners to change things much. They have not worked out the next facilitating act to transfer even more wealth.

It’s important to recognize this because it alters what we can expect with some changes that are reachable. The masses are not defective; it’s the elite who, at this time in history, are paranoid and incompetent. They don’t need or care about more money, they have enough. They need to salve their fears that somehow we will gather the means to unmask the filthy scheme of lies that accounts for our problems and do something about it.

You said, “It’s probable that no mass movements will emerge in the next few years in the United States that will force leaders and institutions to face these questions.” You may be right but only if the “delusion” masters are able to keep their power. There is already a mass movement, the Internet. That along with the uses of information gathered there is the only reason, the single explanation, for the opposition to the Iraq war. There has been no media coverage that would have generated that. MSM has “disappeared” Iraq, but the people know it’s a sham. This is the first counter revolution against the masters of lies and deceit. There will be more.

There has, to my knowledge, never been a major social change movement based on a medium of communication. So the Internet, while more than a vehicle, is not enough. But it’s sufficient as a basis. Every time the “rulers” try to rein in the Internet, they get slammed. And that’s just with the devoted on their backs.

The task is to move people from reading and viewing information to acting on it. But that’s a lot better news than you’re offering, which is an acceptance of the enduring folly of our condition. It doesn’t need to be that way. The real task is an even broader analysis – from anti-Iraq to anti-war to anti-wealth based domination of the political process. It’s a task that we can’t avoid and one that will offer real dividends, by passing what people can reasonably predict is the end of the species in the next 20 or 30 years. It’s a great challenge and opportunity.

One heartening example of change is the absolute failure of just about anybody to begin to take seriously the notion that “We’re all Georgians.” What a stupid notion. Hardly anybody has fallen for it, even with the very best efforts of the media. That’s what I call progress.

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=322

http://iceagenow.com/Arctic_ice_refuses_to_melt_as_ordered.htm

This recent study by top Norwegian climate researcher Ola Johannessen is called Decreasing Arctic Sea Ice Mirrors Increasing C02 on Decadal Time Scale.

For the first time, it draws a clear connection between rising global carbon pollution and erosion of sea ice. It concludes that Arctic ice is disappearing at an astonishing rate – far faster than what earlier studies determined. The Arctic regions, as we now know them, are creeping closer to experiencing a major change to an extremely sensitive ecosystem.

The once inconceivable notion of immense ice barriers in the Northwest Passage being unlocked by sudden climate change is now a reality, Johannessen concludes in his study, which will be published in October by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He identifies a “strengthening linkage” between the increase in carbon dioxide emissions over the last 100 years and the shrinking ice cap.

The presence of Arctic ice reached an historic minimum last year and predictions for this summer warn of similar decreases.

Scientists said the extreme 2007 melt will leave the ice cap vulnerable to even greater losses during this year’s melt season.

Last September, scientists recorded a decline of almost 50 per cent of normal ice cover in the Arctic.

Johannessen challenges forecasts of disappearing ice compiled by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning international scientific panel (known as the IPGG) on climate change – claiming in his paper that they failed miserably in their studies.

His studies describe the state of the Arctic Ocean as a “keystone indicator” of global climate change.

“Ninety per cent of the decreasing sea-ice extent is empirically accounted for by the increasing C02 in the atmosphere,” he concludes.

It’s time to get off that train people and the faster the better.

It concludes that Arctic ice is disappearing at an astonishing rate – far faster than what earlier studies determined.

There seems to be a bit of confusion. Capitalism and democracy are human inventions. Both represent a non-natural example of human sub-systems.

Absolute Predictability has NEVER been a human capacity. The very premise of science is uncertainty. Embrace it. It, with a dash of humility, will set you free!!

As far as democracy not being resiliant and capitalism proving otherwise, I think both exist in name only. We can continue to call what we have “capitalism” and “democracy” but both are a long way from the mark as is socialism.

But Robert has written one of the best pieces I’ve read here on DV. His understanding goes much deeper than isms. And for that I, for one, am grateful.

I’ll post more on this when time permits.

And hell, I’m damned if I’m going to go out grateful. I’m going kicking and screaming and fighting if I’m gonna go. If only a few humans are left, we will go on. If none are left and the sentient species of the earth are gone, who the hell gives a shit what has been in the past – there’ll be not a soul left to know that.

The American problem is that, like the Soviet Union, the system has become so rigid that it is no longer able to reform itself. The various political interests have just enough power to block each other but not enough to defeat each other. Worse yet, they have lost the will to compromise and the understanding that compromise is the essential feature of “tribal” existence. Like a huge, ailing dinosaur, therefore, the US is wobbling forward, smashing things and crushing things as it goes, as much out of clumsiness as with intent. All the other creatures around it are watching warily to see when, and it what direction, the monster is going to keel over, so that they can run for their lives if the thing starts to fall in their direction.

Precisely for the above reason, I agree with Mr Jensen that little will change in the US in the immediate future. POTUS 44 will be the American Gorbachev, elected to fix the system but who will pull the thread which will unravel it. Six years (and an attempted communist coup) elapsed between Gorbachev’s appointment in 1985 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and right to the very end, few could believe that the miracle was actually going to happen. So don’t think that even Obama will be able to accomplish anything fast. Things may begin to move in the second half of his term, or he may be replaced by the current Republican nasty in 2012 and the rest of the world will just decide that it is not going back to the bad old days.

Either way, I’m very optimistic about the future of my brain, be it big or small!