Springs Democrats hope democracy loses to State Senator John Morse

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO- International news headlines read “G-20 Summit Overshadowed by Syrian Crisis” but not in Colorado Springs! Here every politically active Democrat was working to defeat a recall of state senate leader John Morse, a democrat though barely. Morse is a duly elected, if unlikely, representative of conservative El Paso County, being assailed by a mutinous GOP majority angered by his stewarding of gun control legislation. The NRA has backed a blitzkrieg recall campaign, aided by local Republican officials and judges who connived election parameters designed to coax a recall victory. But who’s on the side of right, presumably with the people?

Democrats are crying foul. They’re cursing corporate money and lobbyist-villain NRA, complaining that recalls shouldn’t be motivated by ideological reasons. Really? Are recalls only for impropriety? I’d prefer corruption be answered with criminal charges, and scandal should produce resignations. I’d say ideology would be the most appropriate reason for a recall, especially if it’s about a difference of opinion about the idea of representational government.

Ironically, the underdog’s usual complaint is that incumbents are always impossible to unseat, even when they act in total defiance of their constituents. Don’t you hate that? The irony is compounded because no one will deny that the overwhelming majority in these neighborhoods oppose any abridgement of the Second Amendment right to wave guns. Senator Morse acted in defiance of that interest. Undemocratic, is what he was, as his critics accuse.

We like to vilify the NRA as the worst of special interest lobbies, but one can’t accuse them of being corporate, they’re famously supported by members! The NRA is probably the single MOST democratic of lobbying outfits. The fact that the corporate media loves to demonize the NRA should give one pause about who’s looking after who.

What’s very odd is that the NRA-backed Republicans are targeting a term-limited Democrat who has only a year left in office. What’s that about? Pundits speculate that an NRA win would be symbolic, so it’s worth the money they’re spending. Maybe. It certainly will reinforce the corporate narrative that legislators daren’t cross the NRA. How convenient.

But the recall campaign, a national story now, is not so mysterious if you think about the Kabuki nature of our two party theater. The defense campaign contrived for Senator Morse is a disquietingly artificial shade for grassroots. Against “People Against Morse” the Democrats countered with: “A Whole Lot of People For Morse”, which is certainly a catchy slogan for a politician looking to highten his visibility for a run at a next office, but for locals it lacks the ring of authenticity. What viewers outside the area don’t know is that John Morse has been a superlatively minor functionary, with a reputation for backstabbing more than leading, and certainly no one to bother defending or applauding, even if his name came up, which it rarely did.

Before this recall, people hadn’t cared enough to even think about John Morse, except to spout the usual lesser of evils rap, when there is consensus, it’s that Morse isn’t the creepiest person they knew, depending on who you asked. Now the louse has “a whole lot of people” behind him, how odd. That’s a whole lot of people who don’t care that Morse misrepresented his district, who don’t care that he’s been a war-monger right-of-center pro-industry shill. Because he’s of their party, Democrats want to propel Morse upward. And this is how malignant anti-democratic corporate bureaucrats roll into power.

To judge by the press, and the surge of effort to combat the recall effort, it appears John Morse does have “a whole lot” of support. Propaganda and amnesia.

If the recall succeeds, Americans will be shown that money does influence elections and special interest groups are adversaries to be feared. Sounds like an honest lesson. If the recall succeeds, the displeasure of the gun-loving voters of Colorado Springs will have been heard. If the recall fails, you’ll have Democrats unironically cheering against what Democracy is supposed to look like. In either event, John Morse comes out looking like somebody likes him, and that’s a step in the wrong direction for those of us without a political machine.

What Does Democracy Look Like? Not likely the Old Testament Thank You

Posted on September 7, 2013 by Eric Verlo

I attended Occupy Denver’s forum “What Does Democracy Look Like?” this weekend to hear activist scholars of considerable repute throw in their two cents. The first day was a splendid gathering, except where a curated discussion of intentional community lapsed into theology. Yes, a distillation of mostly white reform literature (Fanon was dismissed as wayward) yielded three steps for The Way Forward: Egypt, Exodus and the Promised Land. Yep.

By which he meant: 1) Recognize your enslavement, 2) have the courage to leave all for an uncertain fate in the desert, and 3) seek/develop/discover your own promised land.

Even as metaphor it’s embarassing. Enlightened salvation from Old Testament mythology? No thank you, and for that matter, up yours! Unfortunately the language I used was less restrained, but his religious offensiveness had been compounding. He’d begun his presentation admonishing listeners that transformation begins with the self and so he’d already unmasked himself as spiritual. Worse, a monotheist.

Egypt: I’ll come back to “systems of oppression” in a moment.

The Exodus: a myth, it didn’t happen, even Hebrew scholars now agree with the historical and archeological records.

As to the Promised Land: that was a real estate scheme to backdate a deed, offered as divinely conceived proof of landlordship. The same title is being waived around to dispossess Palestinians today.

But really, isn’t the exodus-to-promised-land malarkey at the very foundation of Western Civilization’s expansion problem?! Are we really all entitled to virgin land? As if earth hasn’t been continuously and fully inhabited since before agrarian civilization, before monotheism was conceived to impose inequity, and justify slave-wages, interest and rent. The craddle of exploitation, that was Egypt.

But can we run from Egypt? The remedy staring us in the face, from which common men are deliberatly destracted, conspiring to emancipate Egypt, is to rid ourselves of the oppressor sociopaths. In practical terms understood more clearly by the better educated before us, we must strangle Egypt’s kings with the entrails of its priests.

I don’t care how academic your garb, when you tell your flock to reapply themselves to the sacred, and your “sacred” is biblical, supposing to transcend nature, you’re a priest.

Thank you WDDLL organizers but I do not go to church and I resent when devious means are employed to bring it to me. Actually those priests are the worst, they’re missionaries! If we’ve learned one thing as we discuss mankind’s break from his mille millenia of sustainable existance, resist the colonizer. Conquored peoples ourselves, we can only wish that indigenous peoples could have given Western missionaries the reception they deserved, and it’s no less true today: fire.

Alas as a result I heard a number of attendees today praise their faith. To each his own, but unhelpful. If you have to evangelize you’re a liability because nonsense is infectuous, especially as education levels recede. Can others entrust you with the battleplan while you commune with the adversary?

There’s a wonderful scene in AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, Werner Herzog’s dramatic depiction of conquistadors wreaking havoc in the Amazon. Following a coup among the greedy Spaniards, the wife of the abruptly deposed leader appeals to the mission’s priest, as her last resort to restore order. The priest, her ally only moments before, turns on her thus: “Her ladyship must know that the church always stands on the side of the strong.”

My impatience with not so anti frackers

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Eric Verlo

I’d tell you I’ve had it up to here with moderate turncoats, but of late I’ve resolved to keep them well underfoot. Take the local fight against FRACKING.

We’ve built a pretty determined group of fractivists in Colorado Springs, with healthy allies statewide, and in the interest of growth began to make alliances with less hardy participants who have unseemly strong opinions considering their otherwise unproven skills, stamina, and motives. Their most common denominator however is that they do not hold firmly oppositional positions to the oil & gas industry; they consider themselves more diplomatic than radical which by their own assumption will prove more successful. Except, no.

The conviction of moderates is so strong that they compromise not one iota, and isn’t it the same with every political issue? The centrists rule the roost, blind to the fact that their promises deliver absolutely nothing, every time. Yet their goals always look more attainable because they’re “reasonable.” Fuck ’em. Maybe they don’t even know it but they serve to preserve things as they are.

Some of these types appear highly effective in their personal affairs and so reach positions of influence in activist circles, ironically because they have gained a lot of that experience running in place. Some of them are professional, they’re paid whether they get anywhere or not, and it’s not difficult to deduce that their jobs are gone if the mission is accomplished. It’s also not beyond the pale that some are obstructionist, by nature or contract, but to speculate is irrelevant because the solution is much easier and occurs to anyone who’s true to his or her principles: dismiss all the semi-principled outright.

What I do find tiring is having to explain to newcomers, stepping into the conflict between activists and inactivists, that such implacable moderation does not get movements anywhere, it’s a lazy option that detracts from our real efforts, and very likely it wasn’t what drew newcomers to the movement either.

In truth before I joined the fight, there was opposition to fracking, it was faint, it was token, and it was prepared to capitulate. Those voices are around still, at the ready to wave the white flag. Why we welcome them as allies I do not understand, they are worse than worthless. By which I mean they are every bit as harmful as the corrupt administrators, the greedy frackers, or the pro-industry buffoons. And let’s also not dismiss the evidence that industry operatives are manipulating the divisions between community organizers, making the effect of the vacillators worse. Now I’m ready to give you the skinny on our city’s anti and not so anti fracking forces, so you’ll know where to lend your energy when the next assault begins.

Punxsutawney Phil fails to see eclipse of mankind, declares early spring for nature

Posted on February 2, 2013 by Eric Verlo

You know it’s GROUNDHOG DAY when newspaper weather forecasts read like articles in the Onion. The unseasonably warm winter that followed a record breaking hot summer has been declared by Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania’s mascot meteorologist to be an “Early Spring”. FOR NATURE. The rat.

Gun Control for weapons makers not users, for war mongers not hillbillies

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Eric Verlo

I’m really not big on this call for gun control, mostly because it means to further restrict individual liberties, and especially because the outcry is a media induced hysteria of disreputable provenance, aimed at America’s violence junkies instead of its dealers. Really? Is Going Postal the result of a citizenry not having laws enough to control itself? US prisons reflect a conflicting diagnosis.

In tragic synchronicity with the Sandy Hook school shooting which prompted US public calls for gun control, a knife-wielding madman in China assailed twenty schoolchildren with no resulting fatalities, giving rise to perhaps the first time the non-Mongol West has ever thought it glimpsed greener pastures over the Great Wall.

My takeaway from Bowling for Columbine was not “Gun Control Now!” but the toxic volatility of America’s culture of fear-of-violence-mongering and its gun-ho idolatry. Michael Moore called for a stepping up to our responsibilities, not a surrender to dumbassedness. I hold our national arrested adolescence to be a character flaw of pioneer, frontier provincialism, an adaptation of the civilian contractor settlers conscripted for the Westward Expansion, shock troops of the Enlightenment which became the onslaught of industrial capitalism.

Americans are hicks –we celebrate it– who define our personal space with armed borders. For us it’s bombs not education, simplistic fraternal evangelism over scientific sibling-hood, our pretended easy camaraderie really armed detente: trust but verify. Because of course, American frontierism, yet unable to see itself as invasive, from Columbus to Manila Bay, has been imperial for as long as “Yankee” has been a pejorative; Americans blissfully, Disneyfically unaware.

America’s gun problem isn’t just domestic, it’s export. For gun control I’d like to see a ban on production, not consumption. Unlike drugs whose source is organic, the manufacture of weapons is a centralized racket, easily constricted and regulated. The “Gun Show Loophole” is a stop gap for small fry; let’s muzzle the beast itself. And if you think reining in the weapons industry is improbably Herculean, why-ever do you think now is the time for Hercules to dispense with his Second Amendment protection?

Just because the Right to Bear Arms has come to exclude bazookas or drones, doesn’t mean its intent was not to protect our democracy from authoritarianism. If anyone had construed the Second Amendment as a mere hunting license, Theodore Roosevelt’s national parks would have been seen as encroachments on our revolution-conferred sovereign’s right to poach.

Are Americans thinking that democracy is lost because we can’t have bazookas — that the Second Amendment is inapplicable because the high courts adjudge the masses incapable of self-governance? The “well regulated militia” has surely gone the way of the Home Guard or Neighborhood Watch Committee, as our civic nature moved from social to anti, but it doesn’t diminish the need to have minute-men insurgents to counter would-be tyrants. Obviously we’re not talking about Minute Men privateers to whom police departments can outsource xenophobic vigilantism. If Occupy Wall Street proved anything, it lifted the fog on America’s militarized police state. Public gun ownership may be the only incentive law enforcement has to knock before entering American households.

Can you doubt it’s going to take armed resistance to overthrow Mammon? The world is teetering on uprising and already we’re seeing a stalemate on the streets, between unarmed protester and paramilitary police, a draw which upholds the power imbalance between cries for justice versus patronizing injustice. Is leading by nonviolent example going to overcome the sociopaths squeezing their underlings for blood? I’m not saying that hopes for a nonviolent transformation are misplaced, but these disciples of revolutionary pacifism espouse the same religious dogma that always shackled, never delivered, common man. Factoring sociopaths into the norm of “human nature” has been forever holding back aspirations for a harmonious social construct.

Going Postal in China is demonstrably less fatal, owing to China’s mentally imbalanced having resource only to knives. How utopian to imagine a disarmed populace, those greener pastures being a hellhole of forced interned labor. As an open air prison environmental death camp, Gaza’s got nothing on China.

We all hate bad teachers, and so do teachers. Chicago Teachers Strike is about improving education

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Eric Verlo

No one hates bad teachers more than fellow teachers. What a vile media construct to assert the Chicago Teachers Strike wants to force bad teachers on the public school system. The strike is a bid to strengthen the union and public education. Who better to fight privatization, standardized testing and the deliberate mis-education of common students than teachers?

Unions are regularly maligned as parasites bent on destroying their host, but it’s an obvious falsehood which ironically depends on an audience being unschooled in critical thinking, or being unemployed. If you have a job, you know that wishing against the interest of your communal enterprise is not human nature, and also that your job is made more difficult and unpleasant by workers who don’t pull their weight.

A strong union fights for the interests of its members, and what do teachers, the most altruist among us, want? Not just a better work environment, a better education system.

That’s no mystery woman, that’s my wife

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Curious the class distinction made with media persons of interest. Mrs Kim Jong Un is appointed an air of notoriety by nature of having been previously unidentifiable to the West. There’s not much mystery to a retroactive mystery. So what about every other North Korean? Mystique surely does not apply to anyone not already on the media’s social register. But that surely says something about the “made” personalities of celebritydom. If the corporate media doesn’t know their provenance, say, back to their apprenticeships at Disney, then those potential loose canons will remain without celebrity title until their personalities are known entities ie bondable to the system’s image of itself. Conversely, look at the treatment of the otherwise scandalous Tetra-pack heir melodrama.

Unfamiliar to the general public, a billionaire Tetra heir lost his wife, her body went undiscovered for five days, remember that headline? Eventually we learned she was lost to drugs. The billionaire heir ignored her body after her overdose, himself still on a binge, but you wouldn’t get to that side of the story until five paragraphs into it. Even though the police only came upon the scene because the heir addict had been interrupted driving erratically. If the couple hadn’t been philanthropists, the headline would have told of billionaire addicts, given their names where not household variety. Their chief interest in philanthropy was to support an addiction recovery program, it turns out obviously a kind of tithing in lieu of quitting drugs themselves. So their philanthropy was a whitewash as much as the obit and police blotter was in the end.

Waldo Canyon concert fundraiser feted Colo. Springs self-interest & ignorance

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Eric Verlo

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.- All night local speakers proclaimed: “Colorado Springs knows how to look after its own.” And doesn’t it! But I’m almost positive that it used to be, if only everywhere else, the virtue was looking out for others, not just your own.

The Waldo Canyon fundraiser for fire victims was titled “a community rising” and was explained as a coming together, without regard for religious or political differences, I would also add, minus humility and what would be common sense if the denominator wasn’t so debased. This was so embarrassing it hurt.

So we experienced a wildfire, part of the natural cycle of western forests, which burned a neighborhood probably built too far into a canyon, made worse, and ubiquitous right now across the Southwest, by an unnatural heatwave that portends climate change. Was any of that mentioned? NOPE.

Instead victims vowed to rebuild, as they fetishized firefighter vigilance over that ever threatening beast in the hills. Headliner Michael Martin Murphy, apparently the perpetual flame of wildfire vigil keeping, owing to his “Wildfire” hit but it was about a horse, sang a lament which listed the West’s many epic fires, appending mention of “Waldo Canyon” like a latest mining disaster. We’re supposed to prevent the fires apparently, like buying pink things to fight cancer. Wildfires aren’t tragedies except to logging interests. When Smokey the Bear cried, it was over timber that didn’t get logged. Of course national park visitors have to be reminded to exercise caution, because, the US Forestry Service jobs depend on the trees. We thought it was about Bambi’s mom, but those wildlives are managed too, with bullets, lest their populations threaten the trees.

Should people who who want to live in the forest be let to deny its nature like they shrug off global warming? And much as we gush over firemen, it’s a job. More clerks are shot at 7-11s than there are fallen heros listed on the multiple “national” monuments to firefighters.

The Waldo Canyon Fire destruction was the wrath of nature, whether owed to arson or deficient firefighting, the calamitous fire season throughout the state confirms that climate change created the perfect storm, but Jesus Springs is probably not prepared to consider the flaming villainy was an Act of God.

And where does anyone need reassurance that Colorado Springs doesn’t look after its own? We’re the no-holds-barred world street-fighting champions of supporting our workforce, standing up for our war criminal enabling ways. We’re a Support the Troops, Climate Denying, Drill Baby Drill, Charter-Schooling, God Hates Fags, No Thanks We’re Racists, God Damn apologists for Ayn Rand lowbrow cultural ignorance, and flag-waving PROUD OF IT. We don’t give a damn about burning other people’s houses, the people in them included. But when it happens to us, prayers and calls for prayers spam the internets.

We look after our own, if by our own, we mean our neighbors with homes. Colorado Springs stopped pretending to care about the homeless, it’s still piling on ordinances to criminalize poverty. If you’re homeless in Colorado Springs, you get as much compassion as people who lose their houses to our fires.

Are Colorado Springs Citizens Being Gagged On Fracking Issue?

Posted on May 16, 2012 by NMT

Our colleague Lotus has initiated some fruitful correspondence on the subject of the still-impending fracking of the Pikes Peak region. In light of the City’s abrupt cancellation of the May 17 public hearing, we’ll present excerpts of his emails and telephone notes here.

Are Colorado Springs Citizens Being Gagged On Fracking Issue?

The fracking hearing was cancelled. The more I learn about how the fracking issue is being dealt with in Colorado Springs, the more it looks like citizens have very little room for input. This even seems to be true of the way the City Council Advisory Committee on fracking was run – very little room for public input.

The letter from Councilman Val Snider below seems to be saying that the public will only be allowed to respond to the recommendations of the advisory committee, will not be allowed general input concerning the issue of fracking.

It appears that 4-5 people from Huerfano/Las Animas Counties, who have been harmed by fracking, may be willing to speak to the city council and the public here in Colorado Springs. But the process seems to be so closed that it does not appear likely that these people who were harmed will be allowed to speak, allowed to warn people here in Colorado Springs what may be in store for them if they allow fracking in Colorado Springs. The informal Council meetings do not allow for public input. The formal meeting only allow for 3 minutes of input on subjects not on the agenda. And what will be on the agenda may not allow for general input, will be limited to discussion of the recommendations of the committee.

I read articles about how the El Paso County Commission dealt with fracking, and they ignored the recommendations of their own planning commission when they watered down their regulations. Where is the protection of our water, land and air when it comes to fracking? There does not seem to be much of any.

Lotus

From Colorado Springs City Councilman Val Snyder:

Hi Lotus,

The city will not be having any public meetings on fracking. The city will have public meetings on the recommendations of the Oil and Gas Committee on areas of potential regulation for oil and gas activities. The first public meeting on this is May 24, 6-8pm, at the City Administration Building.

There will be opportunities for public comment before City Council, as the potential oil and gas regulations work their way through the process. The first is tentatively scheduled for June 12, a formal Council meeting.

…

Thank you for your writing.

Val

From a telephone conversation with May Jensen:

Anti-Fracking Info From Mary Jensen & Other Info
(From my notes, so hope is accurate.)

I have been wondering why people from other communities who have been harmed by fracking (their land, water, personally, etc) have not been asked to speak to the local Colorado Springs City Council, El Paso County Commissioners, etc. So I finally located the author of a letter to the editor of the CS Independent, Mary Jensen, who has a doctorate in applied clinical nutrition.

Mary Jensen’s March 8-14, 2012 email:

Fracking concoction by Mary Jensen:

Across the state and the country, there is documented evidence of wells being contaminated by chemicals used in oil and gas fracking. Yet Gov. John Hickenlooper recently demonstrated how supposedly safe fracked water is by taking “a swig of it.”

I am incensed at the example he’s setting — playing Russian roulette by drinking water that may or may not have been sanitized for a cheap publicity stunt. He need only look as far as his own state to see the irreparable harm done to our people, our livestock, our air, our water and our lands.
Here are some materials Hickenlooper might have ingested in his fracked beverage:

• Benzene, a powerful bone-marrow poison (aplastic anemia) associated with leukemia, breast and uterine cancer. It may also cause fatigue, skin and mucous membrane irritation, and narcotic behavior including lightheadedness, disorientation, loss of consciousness and coma.

• Styrene, which may cause eye and mucous membrane irritation, neurotoxic effects in the central and peripheral nervous systems, loss of consciousness and death.

• Toluene, which may cause muscular incoordination, tremors, hearing loss, dizziness, vertigo, emotional instability and delusions, liver and kidney damage, and anemia — besides potential harm to developing fetuses.

• Xylene, with cancer-causing and neurotoxic effects, which can cause reproductive abnormalities and death through respiratory or cardiac arrest. More toxic than benzene and toluene!

• Methylene chloride, which may cause cancer, liver and kidney damage, central nervous system disorders and worse.

• Or any of more than 1,000 other safe “food additives” used by the oil and gas industry.

Hickenlooper is welcome to come down to Huerfano and Las Animas counties to talk with the ranchers and other folks who have been irreparably damaged by these poisons.

— Mary Jensen, Ph.D.

From telephone conversation with Mary Jensen on 5-12-12:

Mary especially emphasized that we should get Josh Joswick to speak to our elected leaders. Josh Joswick: commissioner in southern Colorado’s La Plata County, which successfully fought state regulators and companies in court for a say in oil and gas production.

http://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Drilling-threatens-nature-Colorado-residents-say-1968302.php

Josh Joswick is now a Staff Organizer, Oil and Gas Issues the San Juan Citizens Alliance Staff Organizer, Colorado Energy Issues josh@sanjuancitizens.org Josh brings nearly 20 years of experience in dealing with the oil and gas industry to the position of Oil and Gas Issues Organizer. He served three terms as a La Plata County Commissioner from January 1993 to January 2005; in that capacity, locally he worked to see that La Plata County’s oil and gas land use regulations were not only enforced but expanded to protect surface owners’ rights. Josh has dealt with numerous agencies, and legislative and Congressional elected officials, to uphold the rights of local governments to exercise their land use authority as it pertained to oil and gas development, and to assert the right of local government to address with the environmental impacts of oil and gas development.

http://www.sanjuancitizens.org/otherpages/contact.shtml

http://www.spoke.com/people/josh-joswick-3e1429c09e597c10008191b9

Mary Jensen said there are probably at least 4-5 people who have been adversely affected by fracking that would be willing to travel to Colorado Springs in order to speak to the Council. Many people have gone to court and signed a settlement that they later learned prevents them from speaking to the press. Many of these people have spent everything they have fighting the fracking companies in court.

Silencing Communities: How the Fracking Industry Keeps Its Secrets
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9004-silencing-communities-how-the-fracking-industry-keeps-its- secrets

See attached two page fracking information add that was run in the LaVeta Signature and Huerfano County Journal. Organizers paid over $2,000 for these adds.

Mary mentioned that 6 people in her area have died of brain cancer, and another person has brain cancer.

Mary Jensen went on to say that she had heard that drilling down around Trinidad was disastrous in terms of contaminating many wells, but she did not have specifics. Her understanding is that the gas company declared bankruptcy and walked away from it all. (Contaminated wells are not likely to be usable for 100 years.)

In one of the Gazette articles, see below, it said that the Colorado Springs moratorium on fracking ends May 31, 2012. (A reason to extend the moratorium would be in order to provide more time to revise the regulatory structure.)

Mary said that fracking, this dangerous method of oil and gas extraction, is not more effective than simply drilling for oil and gas. Read: Deborah Rogers Transcript of “In Their Own Words: Examining Shale Gas Hype”

http://preservethefingerlakes.org/?p=127

Mary said that there is now a network of 14 anti-fracking organizations. The contact for getting on the Grassroots EnErgy activist Network (GREEN) is Citizens for Huerfano County, Kelly Kringel, kkringel@gmail.com

The CHC website is http://www.huerfanofrack.com/.

Also there is going to be a Colorado Grassroots Fractivist Summit, Jun 9, 2012

Mary stated that it was important that I visit the website TEDX http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/home.php and learn about the 600+ chemical used in fracking hundreds of which adversely affect the endocrine system.

http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/home.php

Mary said another important resource on fracking is A Primer for Local Governments on Environmental Liability

http://www.mrsc.org/subjects/environment/envliabprim.pdf

She said that the president of Citizens for Huerfano County, Kelly Kringel, kkringel@gmail.com , would be able to provide me with access to this document. The CHC website is
http://www.huerfanofrack.com/

On http://www.huerfanofrack.com/ I located POW: Protect Our Wells appears to be a mainly Colorado Springs based group. The president is Sandy Martin, 719-351-1640, sandra@protectourwells.org .

Other board members also seem to have CS area phone numbers

http://www.protectourwells.org/ ,
http://www.protectourwells.org/BOD.html .
http://www.huerfanofrack.com/
also listed the Sierra Club
http://rmc.sierraclub.org/ppg/
and Green Cities Coalition, which I am already familiar with.
http://www.greencitiescoalition.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=88&Itemid=30

Both of these organizations have people on the committee advising the Colorado Springs City Council on fracking.

Mary said that Perry Cabot from Colorado State University in Pueblo was helping people in her area with base line water studies. These are needed in order to later prove well contamination.

Mary said the Land Owner’s Guide To Oil and Gas Development by the Oil and Gas Accountability Project was another important document. And also the book Oil and Gas At Your Door: 970-259-3353.

Citizens for Huerfano County President, Kelly Kringel, kkringel@gmail.com, asked in an email if I knew Mary Talbott. I do not, so I did a search and came up with:

Mary Talbott & fracking issue:

Commissioner to energy company: ‘We’re scared of you’

http://www.gazette.com/articles/drilling-127253-county-approved.html

Citizens, county respond to frack attack

(Talbott, who is retired from the El Paso County Department of Health and Environment and does not live near prospective drill sites)

County, city leaders to get a present on Tuesday

(She plans to hand them a copy of “Split Estate,” a 75-minute DVD about drilling issues in Rifle, Colo. )

http://thecountyseat.freedomblogging.com/tag/el-paso-county-commissioners/

Talbott presented fracking report to El Paso County Board of Health (bottom p 3)

http://www.elpasocountyhealth.org/sites/default/files/11_14_11_Minutes.pdf

What has happened in El Paso County…Majority of Commissioners Ignored head of own planning commission, and the recommendations of the Commission!

Gazette article:

County adopts slimmed-down oil and gas regulations

ANDREW WINEKE
THE GAZETTE

http://www.gazette.com/articles/talbott-129368-denver-citizens.html

El Paso County commissioners on Tuesday narrowly approved a basic set of regulations to govern oil and gas drilling in the county.

The Board of County Commissioners voted 3-2 to approve a proposal that was significantly scaled down from what the county’s planning commission approved earlier this month. The regulations govern transportation, emergency response, noxious weeds and, controversially, water quality issues related to drilling.

Commissioners Peggy Littleton and Darryl Glenn objected to the water quality regulations, arguing that the county was overstepping its authority because the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission also regulates drilling-related water issues.

“I think it would be irresponsible for us to open ourselves up to lawsuits,” Littleton said.
The Attorney General’s Office and oil and gas commission director Dave Neslin have expressed concern over the county’s proposed rules, both in the version approved by the planning commission and a trimmed-down version the county’s planning staff developed last week, arguing that the county can’t regulate areas where the state has its rules in place.

However, commissioners Amy Lathen, Sallie Clark and Dennis Hisey said that water quality was too important to leave up to the state.

“I really don’t mind pushing the envelope when it comes to our water quality,” Hisey said.
The water quality monitoring regulations adopted by the county are similar to what the oil and gas commission has agreed to in other counties, requiring wells to be monitored initially for a baseline measurement and then at one, three, and six-year intervals after drilling begins.

The commissioners scrapped most of the rules proposed by the planning commission, including measures that would have governed setbacks from structures and property lines, mitigation of visual impacts and noise and impacts to wildlife. The commissioners will instead try to address those issues by working with the oil and gas commission on an intergovernmental agreement.

Getting some kind of oil and gas regulations in place was vitally important for the county, since a moratorium on oil and gas permits expired at midnight Tuesday and the county had no other regulations in place. Houston-based Ultra Resources has applied to drill six wells in El Paso County, four in unincorporated parts of the county and two more in Banning Lewis Ranch, inside the Colorado Springs city limits. The city imposed its own moratorium and set up a task force to study oil and gas regulations. The task force plans to make a recommendation to City Council by early May.
All of this was decided in a meeting that stretched nearly nine hours Tuesday. Several dozen speakers weighed in on the proposed regulations on each side of the issue.

Jeff Cahill, who lives near the Corral Bluffs Open Space, said that the proposed drilling has already hurt his property values and made it difficult for he and his wife to sell their home.
“They say they’re not going to impact us,” he told the commission. “Well, they’ve already impacted me.”

Steve Hicks, chairman of the El Paso County planning commission, urged the commission to pass more stringent regulations such as those approved by the planning commission.

“At times, there needs to be extra regulation where the state doesn’t go far enough, and this is one of them,” he said.

Other speakers praised the economic potential of expanded oil and gas development in the county.
Bob Stovall recounted his experience as an oil and gas lawyer and a city attorney in Farmington, N.M.

“Air is pretty clean there. Water is pretty clean there – and that’s after 100 years of oil and gas,” he said. “If oil and gas is around in this county, it could be good for us and it can be done well.”

Tisha Conoly Schuller, president and CEO of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, said the county’s new regulations were a good framework to build on.

“The El Paso County commissioners made significant progress today,” she said. “The rules passed are 90 percent within the guidance provided by the Attorney General. There are still a couple of important issues to work through, but I am confident that the county is serious about finding common ground, and after seeing the progress made today, we will continue to work toward county regulations that are protective of the environment and within the scope of the county’s jurisdiction.”

Read more:

http://www.gazette.com/articles/county-132696-water-quality.html#ixzz1ujNiqAjK

Split Estate: an eye-opening examination of the consequences and conflicts that can arise between surface land owners in the western United States, and those who own and extract the energy and mineral rights below. http://splitestate.com/

http://www.splitestate.com/video_clips.html
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?rh=n%3A2625373011%2Ck%3Asplit+estate+dvd&k eywords=split+estate+dvd&ie=UTF8

“split estate,” in which landowners have surface rights but someone else owns the rights to the underground minerals. Josh Joswick : commissioner in southern Colorado’s La Plata County, which successfully fought state regulators and companies in court for a say in oil and gas production.

http://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Drilling-threatens-nature-Colorado-residents-say- 1968302.php ;

http://www.spoke.com/people/josh-joswick-3e1429c09e597c10008191b9

Gasland, a documentary on fracking.
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/whats- fracking/affirming-gasland ,
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/
http://gizmodo.com/5905909/gasland-the-definitive-documentary-on-fracking

Frack-happy Ultra Petroleum is the city’s largest private landowner. What kind of neighbor might it be?

Ultra Petroleum Corp., which owns subsidiary Ultra Resources…has most of the leases and permits in El Paso County and Colorado Springs

http://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/close-up/Content?oid=2422410

US senator says bomb makers and their associates should be killed forthwith

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Said Senator Dianne Feinstein to Fox News about an al-Qaeda suspect in Yemen: “I am hopeful that we will be able to, candidly, kill this bomb maker and kill some of these other associates. This, about a certain Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri about whom we have only intelligence hearsay to go on, based on an undetectable bomb, on which they say they detect his forensic signature, and about his friends, members they say of AL-QAEDA OF THE SAUDI PENINSULA or some such. What this means, for employees of GENERAL DYNAMICS or RAYTHEON OF SOUTHERN COLORADO for example, is that you don’t even have to possess a factory security ID to be suspected by Yemen, or our other Muslim adversaries, of making bombs that terrorize their innocents. Allah forbid they should commandeer armed drones, in preemptive self defense, to kill you and your now pants-pissing friends, candidly.

And let’s be realistic, the BOMB MAKERS OF AMERICA is an awfully big fraternity at this point.

No dilemma, the human omnivore’s prerogative is unsustainable

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Radical slow food guru Joel Salatin is not popular with vegetarians. New Age wisdom has held that modern man had to transcend meat, the only sustainable future calling for us to cut out the middle beast and narrow our source of nutrition to the more efficient vegetable kingdom. Except it turns out that agriculture is no more sustainable than mining. Here’s the lesson I gleaned from Joel Salatin’s lecture last Saturday. Nature wants to grow grass not grain. The greatest environmental disaster to befall Earth was mankind’s development of wheat. Calling humans omnivores pretends we can eat anything, when in reality outside of meat we’re limited to the product of tillage, for the most part requiring irrigation and fertilizer. A sustainable biosphere calls for perennials cycled through their consumers, ruminant herbivores. As omni as we wanna be, we’re not herbivores.

How do humans know what’s edible? Nature or nuture? Pink Slime vs GMOs

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Eric Verlo

Is fellatio by nature homoerotic? SO I am going to brave the hypothesis that you can write about Twinkies without having to eat one. Actually I discovered Twinkie image aversion easily overcomes Twinkie the concept, and I don’t just mean examples like the phallic Strangelove Slim Pickens hat tip at right, excuse me? Even to look at the dubiously baked confections is unappetizing, so why do we think they’re edible? This might be a recurring quandary of mine to which short term memory blinds me. Why don’t we try to eat dirt? (Easy for a well fed person to ask.) Where do we get a hunger for breakfast cereals, but not processed pet food? Why do humans stop consuming a fruit at the seed or rind, yet question why those discards fail to interest animal life too? Taste? We grasp that fire consumes nutrients, a toaster sometimes terminally, but how do industrial processes blur how we discern between live food and dead? Is it box art? Which grocery aisle? Sugar and butter are both edible and inedible, with flour it’s the reverse –never mind, that’s not what I meant to write about, I wanted to address the sudden Soylent Greening of PINK SLIME.
I know that vegetarians deride animal flesh for being inhumanely unsavory, but since when have “food activists” been motivated by what’s “gross”? Exactly. Gross has yet to stop sausage makers, and obviously the “Pink Slime” assault on ground beef production is food industry astrotruf. It’s a PR back-burn against the real public outcry, the wildfire of resistance to Genetically Modified GMO Frankenfoods.

Tea Party soldiers attempt military coup of OCS, want Occupy to be more like occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Eric Verlo

ONLY IN COLORADO SPRINGS! (SPOILER: OCCUDRAMA ALERT)–
Not satisfied with heckling the OCS antiwar rally on Saturday, some “berserkers” from Fort Carson’s 4/4 2/12 regiment thought they’d march on the Occupy events committee meeting Monday and vote to make OCS more like their occupation stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, more pro-killer and all. Or vote OCS out of existence. Cute, as they pretend to uphold everybody’s freedom, etc. Apparently the soldiers were following the directions of Right Wing Youtube slackupier Agent Snuffleupagus Doubt, who promised to reopen his faux-occupy website for their coup, as if maintaining the fake OCS Facebook group wasn’t anti-occupy enough. True to idiotic form, Doubt’s plan was to overwhelm the democratic nature of OCS, forgetting to caution his winged monkeys about embarrassing mechanisms which protect OWS groups from malicious disruptions, many of his troops face disciplinary probation, for starters. But for Agent Duh it’s enough to videotape a flash-blob declaring itself king of OCS, and it’s done. Emboldened by this virtual occupy, next Mastermind Duh will probably scheme to send Republican operatives to crash the Democratic Caucuses, vote them all Republican, and steal their delegates for Ron Paul! What a plan!

BTW Commander Dumbass, how can someone who hasn’t attended Occupy meetings in months, someone who has publicly declared himself on repeated occasions to have left Occupy, and someone who has often acted in league with public attackers of Occupy, PRETEND to tell people what are its bylaws? Critics of democracy movements accuse proponents of advocating mob rule, and so you’ve confused democracy for your own caricature? I suppose you think if the minister of First Prez wanted to convert Occupy, he could march enough of his flock down to Acacia and vote OCS into his denomination. That logic may wash with Ft Carson boys, and your Youtube viewership, but it’s not going to cut it with real people. Are you kidding me with your inanity?

In the Leigh of the Storm

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Steve Bass

“Because we all share an identical need for love, it is possible to feel that anybody we meet, in whatever circumstances, is a brother or sister. No matter how new the face or how different the dress or behavior, there is no significant division between us and other people. It is foolish to dwell on basic differences, because our basic natures are the same.” — Dalai Lama

So our little Occupy group met with Colorado Springs City Council member Tim Leigh the other night. He came to meet us at our regular haunt, graciously provided by independent local business the Cafe Corto.

Tim is an affable dude, and our meeting seemed to go well, at least in the sense that we were able to develop a rapport with him and come away with a sense of friendliness, if not friendship. Tim is a self-described member of the 1%, an appellation that derives from specific statistics involving wealth which has acquired connotations as a result of Occupy that Tim may not be so quick to embrace. Fact is, i really don’t know enough about the guy to decide for myself whether or not he deserves application of the darker connotations or not. The group at the meeting is as diverse as any formed in October’s Occupy crucible, and as has been characteristic of the movement in general, each in attendance holds individual interpretations of just what Occupy is, and what we mean to accomplish. Good ol’ Thomas, in the course of his regular series of uncontrolled and only marginally civil outbursts, vehemently denied we constitute a “movement.” Others sought mostly to find little political fulcra with which to pry at Tim’s scales, (in case he’s a shape-shifting alien, i suppose). None of this was surprising–we are a group dedicated to disruption of the entrenched, monied status quo, working within a rough framework of fairly aggressive expression worldwide, if nothing else.

Tim weathered the various clods of dirt whipped up by the wind as one might expect from either a politician, which label he denies, or a very rich real estate wheeler-dealer, which would be ludicrous to attempt to gainsay. I don’t have the motivation to dig up lots of facts about Tim Leigh’s business dealings, but we know well enough that his name is on an awful lot of buildings around town, and he lives on a tidy and isolated landscaped lot up on the Mesa, where the houses are all overpriced, the better to keep the riff-raff away. His house is almost certainly bigger than yours. No one is apt to be shocked by those minor revelations. In fact, his now predictable assertions to be “in the same boat” as we would be fairly ludicrous to the casual observer, except that i think he’s right on the money with that one, though perhaps not as he sees it. Thomas asserts that we are an issue-driven–something not a movement–and he’s right about issues, at least in part. Tim is himself in a political position and making plenty of sounds i recognized as definitively politician-like in spite of his disavowals of the label. Focus on issues seems to be relatively comfortable, and certainly easier than addressing the grand thematics that permeate Occupy to the chagrin of some of its more terrestrially grounded aspirants, as well as its critics. As a result our conversation with Tim was often siderailed into issue-oriented lulls, at least in my mind, though i acknowledge the importance of issues as well. I’m just a grand theme kind of guy.

Tim had a few disturbing things to say about a few issues, like his statement that fracking in eastern El Paso county is “inevitable.” He said a few intriguing things as well. I bet he already regrets toying with the notion of giving OCS a building. He even let slip his own secret fears that the whole economic system might collapse. One thing that immediately raised lots of hackles, oddly enough, was his bemused question about the religious orientation of us Occupiers. And there’s the rub. Or at least one big one.

I promised to eschew incidental reporting for a while, and i am. Really. This may seem like reporting, but it’s otherworldly speculation. I suppose Chet will handle specifics well enough. Tim demonstrated a bit of a dichotomy one comes across in the Occupy phenomenon by stressing issues and suggesting ways for us to work with the System to get things to work out our way. This response to Occupy crops up all the time, both externally and internally. I met with a foreclosure working group in Denver last weekend, and spoke with a “constituent advocate” in Senator Michael Bennett’s office last week. The dichotomy arose there as well. The thing is, lots of people, including lots of Occupiers, are trying to figure out how to work within the System, however it may manifest, to change Things for the better. This is the ground where one finds the crossover between Occupy here in America, and the Tea Party. Again, everyone has a different take, but many express the thing as a desire to return to the Constitution, or to reclaim the “American Dream,” “End the Fed,” get money out of politics, or whatever, within a range of tactical thinking from addressing Congress and local pols, through–well, shooting Congress and local pols.

On the other hand, there’s a big batch of us that see the problems Occupy engages as rather beyond systemic reach and veering into if not fully established as spiritual issues. Although some at our meeting took auto-umbrage at Tim’s query, i think he asked the question in good faith, (ahem), and had worked up a rather bemused state for himself about our expression and motivation. Tim, you see, is a “pragmatist,” he says. He works the old system like a farm pump, and out comes serviceable, if foul-tasting, water. We look like Jesus freaks or something, to him, idealistic apotheoses.

We esoteric Occupiers, as one might call us, don’t see any hope at all from within the System, or at best, very little. (I’m willing to entertain the possible viability of the U.S. constitution, for example, if only because of its inherent malleability). We aren’t especially interested in, for example, the slick approach of establishment solutions to the foreclosure crisis where the government throws grease on the banking cartels’ bone-grinding machinery, setting up programs that allow mortgage holders to continue to be pillaged, a little less uncomfortably. Or policies that allow politicians to bray like drunken mules over the reductions in increase (!) in toxic emissions over the next fifty years when we all know damn well that the rate of extinction of species will have the very cockroaches fighting over table scraps soon enough to make fifty years seem a shaky proposition. Or bullshit excuses about some XX-anianstani or another that’s supposed to be aiming another batch of invisible weaponry at us while cartel honchos hop on a plane for Jerusalem so they can watch the fireworks from there, and record their profit and loss at close quarters.

We don’t like the damn crooked, snaky, backstabbing, cheststabbing, competitive, might-give-you-a break-after-i-get-mine-otherwise-fuck-you-and-yours System, and really we figure that even if it sounds ridiculous to many we’ve come to a point where abolishing the System is the only way to save our now tenuous hold on viable life here on Earth. We don’t see much pragmatism in working within the System in an effort to abolish the System. In fact there’s some concern that the thing may collapse on your head, doing it that way. There’s a real sense of unobtainability in working inside the System, akin to the application of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem i posted earlier. It really seems to us fringe thinkers that the best one can do by working within the System is to expose it’s inherent, indivisible, insuperable bankruptcy.

I’ve been criticized, (by an Atheist that simply couldn’t tolerate discussion of Anything outside his Box), for attaching Undue significance to certain ordinary terms by targeted capitalization. Here in this very post, i’ve capitalized the terms, “System,” and “Things,” in order to attach significance to them that i don’t see as undue. I’m really not so sure what Tim Leigh, or even other Occupiers mean when we bandy those terms about in conversation so very casually. I strongly suspect, though, that their use is far more fluid and troublesome than we notice until we condemn our fellows for misstatements that only derive from failing to recognize one another’s usage. So let me explain that i am not restricting the Terms to ordinary usage involving mere political or financial systems or things, but expect them to be interpreted in a kind of supra-dimensional sense where the mundane is enfolded into a set batch of meaning we can’t really plumb so well.

The point is we need a new System if Things are going to work out for Us. Get it? I’ve often said that i’m part of the 100%. That includes Tim Leigh, whether or not we can trust him. It includes N-eeew-t Grinch-rich. I includes, say, Eric Holder the U.S. AG that has the sheer balls to hire on in his current capacity, straight off the payroll at Covington & Burling where he helped big bankers commit the crime of the millennium. No shit. There’s just no way to trust a guy like that. But we’re all in this boat together, alright, even if some of us are busy drilling holes in the bottom. This System where we steadily compete to see which of us can screw the most of us over simply isn’t working. And i don’t think we can come out any better if we simply rearrange the game board a little so we can screw Holder, instead.

A different Eric, this one a dear friend, says i oughtn’t to hesitate to speak “for Occupy” in the media, and expresses discomfiture when i say i can only speak for myself. But i can’t always speak for everyone. Not all Occupiers agree with the idea that a spiritually oriented reimagining of Human consciousness and interaction–a Paradigm Shift–is central to our focus. But it is, because no political ideology is apt to rescue us from ourselves. We humans have soundly fucked Things up. We have the wherewithal to fix our messes, but only if we completely and utterly rearrange our values. Sometimes we Occupiers still need some rearranging, too, and the business of demolition of our own hoary paradigms and approaches has been uncomfortable already. It’s not so likely to get much easier, either, but here we are at sea together. We’d best all put our drills away.

All these themes are in earlier posts, and i expect they’ll come up again. We esotericists could be wrong about it all. The huge body of science professionals warning of impending and serious environmental dangers could be completely wrong, or even manipulated by power-grabbing globalists, (though that would fall within the scope of this notion of System over system). Being wrong about the imminence of karmic backlash doesn’t negate the ethical reality that we just don’t do each other right. That we’re simply way to caught up with our own rather infantile egos. We really don’t think the numbers are to easily deniable, though, so even though we know this business of attempting to shift the consciousness and motivation of the entire species is absurdly grandiose and improbable, what else can we do? Do or die, it is. And when the whole Thing collapses, hopefully some of us will still be standing. If it does, and we are, Tim, Newt, and Eric are all welcome to stop by for a sandwich, if we still have one. Same goes for those Occupiers alienated by differences of opinion. In the meantime, we mean to fight the Dark aspects of the System tooth and nail, both from within and without.

Patrick Henry’s priest would’ve favored Give me liberty, or give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Eric Verlo

Some juxtaposition, don’t you think? Patrick Henry’s call to arms Give me liberty or give me death mashed up with the Goddamn Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It sure puts passivism into religious perspective. It’s the fog of the opiate of masses, with church as enforcer of nonviolence, keeping the people down in advance of the king’s Dragoons. What a mockery serenity makes of poor fools eager to feel self-respect for docile servitude. It calls to my mind the impoverished parents who cripple their young so to be more effective beggars. Or who sell their children into slavery. What cretinous vile beings. Their desperation to be pitied of course, but their fate to be repudiated, not accepted with whatever boat-non-rocking serenity.

From The War Inevitable, March, 1775, by Patrick Henry

They tell us, Sir, that we are weak – unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.

Three millions of People, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Beside, Sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of Nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable; and let it come! I repeat, Sir, let it come!

It is in vain, Sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentleman may cry, Peace, Peace! – but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the North will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that Gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH!

African-American Voice

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Steve Bass

Occupy! is a movement that has arisen “in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice.” It’s a phenomenon, perhaps more that a movement. The state of the world, and of the human race has grown so imbalanced, so deeply dysfunctional, so painfully self-absorbed by malign tendencies that suddenly we humans passed a threshold beyond which our tolerance could not continue. So we spilled out into the street to demand attention to the aggressive imbalances we’re all forced to live with every day, be they economic, racial, nationalistic, religious–the nature of these distinctions is far less important than our weariness of the game we’re caught up in involving the necessity to grind down our fellows in order to keep our own heads above water.

We Occupiers are as diverse as the face of the entirety of humanity. And we’re tired of fighting a losing battle against the self-centered ideology gripping so many of the world’s institutions and interaction. We’ve come together to do something about it , even before we have any clue just what to do. We American Occupiers are coming at this thing within our established framework as a nation committed to law and Constitution, and struggling to absorb the idea that Occupy is not an American phenomenon, even though it stems from ideas we’ve been accustomed to supporting as Americans for a long time. We’re weary of the gap between our ideals, the underlying philosophies of equanimity expressed in our founding documents, and our collective expression in the real world. We’ve come together, now, to splay all our discontent out in the open, to figure out our commonalities, and to demand both a reckoning and a rectification. We Occupiers are convinced that the time has come, that we Humans stand at a crossroad in our history, and that we must finally learn to live cooperatively, or lose our place in the history of a small planet in a cosmic sea….

Birth Pains

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Steve Bass

Apologies to readers not at hand or interested so deeply in Colorado Springs’s silly affairs.

Last night , it appears more cops were called in to arrest or press charges against one of our own, Jack Semple, by one of our own, the identity of which latter individual seems muddled to some extent. It’s simple enough to determine that Jason W. and Kristie W. are the only individuals that have any sort of legitimacy, however dubious, for cop-calling, but we all know from experience that the cops possess a grasp of nuances like this one below a genuinely operable threshold. Some have been bandying about terms like “tyranny,” “hater'” and other such inflammations. I’ll note that, though Jack and Jason will serve as specific personifications for this piece, others have made alignments according to the differences described. More than one observer has noted the inanity of all this, both from here in Colorado Springs, and from afar. Holy mackerel.

Our unique, permitted status has presented problems left to fate at other Occupy locations. Jack Semple has, no doubt, insisted on performing behaviors of at least somewhat scurrilous foundation. To the best of my knowledge, no “rules,” or even “guidelines” have been adopted by the overall group “Occupy Colorado Springs, ” which i must insist on noting to be separate by definition if not in spirit from “Occupy Colorado Springs,” the permitted entity. Last Thursday, (9 Nov), a rather large and representative group of us agreed to adjust wording in our set of rules to reflect their nature as guidelines. Neither rules nor guidelines have been accepted by any consensus, to my knowledge. Jason has proffered the notion that other groups are more stringent in enforcement actions than ours has been, though no set of guidelines for either enforcement or encouragement have been adopted. Most of the sets of guidelines i have been able to dredge up from other sites online have been heavy on terms like”respect,” and “mindfulness.” Jason’s assertions that “the group” reached a consensus on the permit are unfounded, which i know because i myself with others in agreement objected to the permit on the grounds that the law it was meant to skirt is bad in the first place. There was and remains a group of like opinion in opposition to supporters of the permit–a predictable scenario, in light of the hasty disregard for consensus building at the start.

Jack has, in fact, “pushed the envelope” in his approaches both in GAs and in independent action, as have other group members, including at times, me. Jason has also pushed envelopes, and though his responsibility is unclear at certain points, he has it seems signed tickets and pressed charges in the two incidents involving mavericks in “his” tents. No small number of OCS participants have observed the detrimental effect of the behavior of both Jack and Jason. Jack has stubbornly insisted on proceeding without consensus, and given the leaderless, undefined nature of Occupy! worldwide and here, no real authority exists to prevent his behavior. Jason has stubbornly insisted on proceeding without consensus, and given the leaderless, undefined nature of Occupy! worldwide and here, no real authority exists to prevent his behavior. Hmm.

Jack has proceeded from his insistence on peace and love to his own occupation of places and resources to which his claim is at best undecided. There exist legitimate questions concerning what belongs to whom on our street corner, and it seems to me Jack’s self-installation as the Robin Hood of Acacia Park has been a detriment to his own stated motivation. At the same time, Jason’s insistence on a rather dictatorial approach based on his status as permitted signatory is at odds with the consensus model in general, and the overall spirit of Occupy!

Other than vituperative ad hominem attacks between both parties and their adherents, hardly communicative of either loving or peaceful sentiment, very few of the actual issues have been addressed. It must be granted that Raven, yet another aggressively expressive player in this little conflict, has the backing of fact in that those few consensus agreements to have been adopted have been soundly ignored by Jason, who must be named personally in this given that his name at the top of the permit and that he has apparently issued questionable edicts and instructions to “security” people. Some bits of definition have remained untouched to our detriment, for example, the fact that the tents in question were demonstrably in place well prior to the magical creation of the permitted entity, “Occupy Colorado Springs” by the City’s placing that name on the permit. Another example is Jason’s admonition to some complaining against his actions to come participate in the securing of the site. I can speak only for myself on this, but even though i have regularly helped build, supply, secure, clean, etc, i have not signed a waiver, so my welcome is in some ways disingenuous, leaving me to believe “permission” to enter tents is a matter of fiat. I’d love to spend regular nights at the Park, but as much as i’ve promised to do so, i’ve been stymied by the fact that it becomes necessary to abandon sleep entirely and pace the sidewalk all night, with no option for relief. I’ve found the prospect more detrimental to motivation than i’d initially imagined.

With or without this foundational uncertainty, it’s clear that the permit, or at least its handling in our group, has been the focus of a great deal of friction, as may well have been anticipated. The permit can be a good thing if utilized correctly. It allows us, for the time being, to Occupy the corner without fear of pepper gas wielding police bulldozing the site with their spiffy new urban assault vehicles we all know they simply must find some justification for owning. It’s also been the source of an authoritarianism bearing an awfully clear resemblance to at least one strong aspect of the problems that brought Occupiers to the streets in the first place. It’s also clear that the one truly solid consensus–to avoid calling cops in non-violent scenarios–has been ignored. There seems to be a lack of awareness of the fact that chair-swinging wrasslin’ moves and police action are no more prone to building consensus than impulsive disruption of group thought processes. The permit itself may well be a casualty of insistence on bad behavior from each quarter.

I simply can’t believe we in CSprings are the only Occupy outpost wrestling with these very fundamental matters, even if we have an unusual factor in the mix, especially with the introduction of a “security” guy from out of town crowing about tent-slashing escapades.

None of this will kill the Occupy Movement. We all seem to be in agreement that our time for ignoring the issues that brought us together has come to an end. The abrupt gathering of millions–no shit–of disgruntled citizens across the entire planet is an expression of the expiration of patience over an unjust, unkind, and self-servingly dictatorial status quo. A renewal of perseverance and, yes, patience while we learn to manage some very intractable problems with our common natures is necessary if we are to avoid actual bloodshed in this existentially unavoidable conflict. We’ll learn this, or we’ll die.

Practically speaking, no amount of voting or “telling” will solve the problems at hand. To an extent, events are proceeding in a predictable fashion. I suggest we consider with grave lucidity what a consensus process really is, and learn to abide by those few clear points of consensus at which we’ve come to agreement. Some discussion of broadening the list of permit-holders took place at the Thursday GA. If the permit holders in place are too burdened by liability to allow themselves to be governed by consensus, this question should be examined in detail, with consideration for alternatives. If the permit represents its own final word, then it seems unlikely consensus is attainable, and it will likely become a moot issue when it disappears, which will occur on our present course. If permit holders insist on arbitrary decision-making based on the dictates of the permit, we must recognize the equally sovereign nature of OCS (Permitted) in juxtaposition with OCS the leaderless movement gathered in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. That is to say, if consensus is ignored, it is done so on an individual basis, and the permitted OCS separates itself from the Movement to the extent to which it is able. We’re still forced by the fact that we have no choice but to learn to cooperate. In the meantime, let us not neglect the many deeply compelling reasons for being together, or the various projects our self-identified membership have undertaken, particularly internal educational projects which appear especially crucial.

Nothing about this is going to be simple. We will not be solving the problems of the World in a couple of weeks from our Acacia Park vantage. These issues represent the selfsame internally conflicted bits of human nature that have caused us to develop the drastically and fatally flawed social constructs we have come together to oppose. Breathe deep, kids. Learn to love Jack Temple and his half-cocked impulses while he learns how to manifest peace and love without starting a fight. Learn to love Jason Warf, C.J., and Rick the Tent-Slasher as they learn whatever it is they’re learning. Learn to love even me as i continually throw thought-wrenches in the cogs. Turn your most critical eye inward, because as i well know of myself, the only way to change the world is to enlighten ourselves to our own flaws and start right there.

Or stock up on bullets. You can find me standing in the Light without any if they start to fly.

Defined:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/consensus?region=us
A start at the notion of consensus-building:
https://www.msu.edu/~corcora5/org/consensus.html?pagewanted=all
A couple sets of Occupy guidelines:
http://occupydc.org/about-us/guidelines/
http://c1ecolocalizercom.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2011/10/occupyguidelines.jpg

Fear and Loathing in Colorado Springs

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Steve Bass

Those readers following the Occupy! Movement in its many forms around the world and in Colorado Springs will be glad to hear that Tuesday culminated a difficult week for us here with a resolution of many contentious issues, and an overall commitment to unity.

The subject matter behind this particular post is closely associated with the Movement in general, but it’s more a humanity thing than an Occupy thing, overall. I hope i can get the associations to make sense, and that readers will restrain themselves from developing the erroneous notion that this is meant to be a pitch for some sort of religion. It’s not.

I went to the Municipal Court in Colorado Springs to enter a plea of “not guilty” to the charge of camping on public property because of actions executed as a part of Occupy! Actually, i was camping on public property, to put it quite plainly, and the idea behind the plea is that the action does not engender guilt even if it violates a silly and badly unAmerican, (read, “oppressive,” if we’ve become a little unrecognizable in this regard), statute. A couple dozen supporters made it to the courtroom with me, and raised enough ruckus to get Municipal Judge Spottswood W. H. Williams to threaten them all with contempt charges. The whole thing was kind of a lot of fun, really. Made me feel a little like Hoffman or Hayden, in a much smaller sense. There comes a first time for everything, and this was my first visit to a courtroom during which i was able to feel utterly unencumbered by the dark nature of my own action that had led me there. My deepest thanks to all the OCS members and especially Dennis Apuan, who put his political credibility on the line to stand with us, and brought a good deal of patriotic weight to the room as State Rep for the fine soldiers of Fort Carson.

The hearing was only that, after all, and after entering the plea, we scheduled a pre-trial conference with the City Attorney, for 22 Nov, at which a government lawyer will make me an offer i’ll most assuredly refuse and we’ll schedule a jury trial. I’ll keep you news hounds posted as things progress.

The point to this post, though, is an underlying root to the no-camping ordinance, as well as to most of the woes of the day: The Fear.

Most of us don’t acknowledge the Fear because, well, it’s scary. Instead we get angry, or attempt to maneuver ourselves into a position to control uncontrollable factors like society or competitive economies. We eschew cooperation because we’re afraid of our fellows. We make assumptions about others’ behavior and how it will effect us. We bewail the corruption of society, and begin looking over our shoulders for the punishment of God, or black-clad mercenaries coming over the horizon to herd us into frigid winter FEMA camps. We worry about hunger, poverty, inglorious death. We develop elaborate political systems and foment revolution in order to establish “security” of dubious credibility. Look around. These tactics have not ever worked after attempting repeated, redundant permutations, and there is no reasonable expectation that they ever will.

The Fear has driven all this cutthroat competition. It’s what motivates folks to be sure they have more, more, more. It’s what causes us to petulantly demand our right to burn as much gas in our Hummers as possible, and to constantly engage in useless commerce. It motivates the lowest guy competing for some crappy job at Taco Bell just as surely as it motivates conspiratorial Rothschild backroom bankers. It motivates us to enact stupid, oppressive no-camping ordinances when someone that scares us becomes visible, oh my! We’re all deathly afraid of some horrible outcome, like someone else getting our stuff, or scaring tourists away, or enjoying some habitual pleasure we find repugnant.

The Fear is irrational! What’s the very worst that can happen to us in this life? We die? We find ourselves incarcerated or tortured? Consider, if you will, that we live our little spans, maybe a hundred years or so at the outside limit, surrounded at both ends by an unfathomable mass of toroidally twisted, multi-dimentional Eternity that not one of us will ever grasp while we live. What possible fear can be valid under this circumstance other than that we fail to live according to our own perceived Truths? I say “perceived” since only those afflicted by the Fear are afraid to examine those truths for the errors all honest thinkers know to exist within our own perceptions. If I knew my own blind spots they wouldn’t exist, right? We don’t even know what we’re afraid of mostly, though we can usually list a few if we set ourselves to the task. No one is to blame for his or her own irrational fears, especially cultural fears such as seem to be more or less universal. Many have been established by the direct influence of media that may well have been designed by nefarious folk for exactly the purpose of invoking unfounded fears in various populations. OMG! Now i’m making myself afraid! Not really–but what to do about the Fear?

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear,” reads a certain religious text, (1 Jn 4:18, for those with a source fetish like me). I won’t be digressing into a religious sermon here. The principle holds without the doctrinal baggage surrounding it in the context in which it nests. No matter how evil the Ideas we oppose as Occupiers, or as human beings in general, they can’t overwhelm a spirit of love. No matter the spiritual foundation or lack thereof, love can dissipate greed, fear, disappointment, embarrassment, and in fact any of the various bases for the secondary anger response we are all prone to manifesting in situations as apparently dire as the one we’re seeing now. As much as i can plainly see the bogus nature of the moves made in, say, the financial industry, (inseparable from other key industries at a certain level), applying some genuine empathy causes a mental process that can not end in hatred or vengefulness. Look guys like Greenspan or Geitner in the eyes next time you see them. They’re deeply miserable, and completely trapped in their own Fears. When it all collapses, i really hope they’re still available so we can feed them a plate of food, even if we can’t resist the temptation to ask, “What the fuck were you thinking!?”

We can’t fight fire with fire here. Battling greed with more greed, as some seeking to restore an “American Dream” involving bigger slices of a rotten pie seem to do. Revolution only spins us in circles: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” We always seem to find ourselves standing in the same spot we started, except standing in pools of blood with fewer resources after every revolution we’ve ever effected. We don’t have these options any longer. The planet is in a condition that will not permit us to continue on the deeply ingrained, competitive course we’ve followed for so long. Learning to love, to let go, to tolerate, to work together for our futures which are common whether we like it or not is the only way out of this. It’s not easy, only necessary.

I can’t tell anyone how to save anyone else, or how to convince the next guy that any of this is true. I can’t even describe the mental processes that led to these conclusions. All i seem able to do is to proceed in the direction the thoughts lead, as they come to me in a fashion that very often seems external. Examine the assertions that continue to spill out of me at 2 in the morning like this. Notice with joy that there seem to be many others reaching similar conclusions: Things are terminally fucked up and only Love can save us. If it turns out that we’re not saved, that the whole human experiment is doomed to fail, i’ll breathe my last breath in the knowledge that i walked the talk spoken by all my heroes in tongues long lost to history, or new today, or unspoken yet understood by common nature. I don’t think i’m alone. I don’t know how to be afraid of that.

George Who?

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Steve Bass

This is a paper from some time ago, well prior to the advent of Occupy events. Henry George wrote from a sensibility one rarely finds expressed so explicitly today. The modern reader should note that Christian underpinnings in no way disrupt either the reasoned logic or the passionate humanity behind George’s arguments. Follow the links! Many Occupiers have promoted education, the deeper aspects of which are rarely available in 3 page tracts….

For Eric Stephenson
16 February 2009

George Who?

It seems peculiar that in 2009 no one has heard of Henry George, if only for the fact that during his prime a hundred years past his was easily one of the most recognizable names on Earth. Just a journalist really, George’s hardscrabble upbringing, his early experience in the business world, and maybe just a little OCD inspired him to craft an entirely new approach to economic theory. Its publication very quickly garnered him international acclaim, respect, and supportive friendship from many of the greatest figures of his day. Many, encountering his work for the first time today, would no doubt label him a Commie, particularly given that George’s work followed Marx and Engels’ by three decades. This misinterprets George. His thinking split the difference between Adam Smith and the Communist theorists in many ways, sharing common ground with both camps but firmly establishing his own territory. His work deserves a second reading.

George was born in Philadelphia, September, 1839, to a family headed by a hardworking but low-budget printer. By providing the Church cut-rate printing services, George’s devout father enabled Henry to garner a relatively high-standard primary education from the Episcopal Academy. He left home after high-school seeking his own way, and after a brief period of adventuring, found himself in San Francisco where he joined the Printer’s Union, following in his father’s footsteps after all.

George lived a poor man’s life–same as any tradesman at the height of the Robber Barons’ power–until an editor at the San Francisco Times came across a piece he had written and left lying around. He accepted an offered staff writing position at $50 a week, which seemed a princely amount compared with his father’s $800 a year. He traveled quite a bit for the Times, and in 1868 on assignment in New York City first encountered the squalid conditions surrounding and adjoining vaunted islands of luxury and power that would inform and undergird his writing for the rest of his life.

Having gained considerable respect as a newsman and a fair amount of seed-money, George and a partner, William Hinton, established the San Francisco Evening Post in 1871. George unabashedly used the paper as a human rights platform until 1877, when, some say, powerful railroad interests against whom he had written since his SF Times days shut the Evening Post down. Quickly landing a government post through highly-placed friendships he had developed, he used the leisure time it afforded to produce his magnum opus, Progress and Poverty, and published it in 1879. George moved to New York in 1880 and promptly left for England and Ireland, touring there to support Irish land support. By the time he returned, his life had changed forever. Progress and Poverty had made him a celebrity (de Mille 1-152).

George’s political economy laid out in his roughly 600 page book begins with his assertion that Smith’s approach established private land ownership as the foundation of economic and social structure, referring often to “the sacred rights of private property” (Smith, par. 1.11.79). So far few would argue, but George figured this skewed, and brazenly wrote that, “[t]he great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the intellectual and moral condition of a people….[I]t necessarily follows that the only remedy for the unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common property” (295, 391). He argued that as a foundational natural resource there is no basis for sequestering land in private hands. He proposed to hold land in common and allot it to users for as long as they needed, for whatever production they could derive from it, and the holder would pay tax, (rent), on its assessed value until relinquished. The holder and any capital or labor involved would keep whatever profit came from the working of the land, and the public would base taxation only upon the land itself. Note that this negates both income and capital gains taxes. (During George’s prominence, no federal income tax existed in the United States). George insisted the extensive system described philosophically in Progress and Poverty, and rather more technically in The Science of Political Economy, would adequately supply the government’s fiscal needs without additional taxes while simultaneously encouraging entrepreneurship and curtailing development of a landed class.

Marx, whose seminal works came before George, but close enough that both wrote from the surrounding milieu of the Industrial Revolution, addressed similar problems. He and those following took the matter to a deeper extreme, however, allowing for no private ownership of either property or capital. Marx expressed a well known hostility to capital. The familiar Communist adage, “Property is Theft,” represents a drastic condensation from Marx’s arguments that labor always seems to wind up on the short end of dealings with those holding either land or capital (Marx, chap. 6, par.2). Like George, Marx chafed at the inequities this arrangement produced, especially with the exacerbations of capital lording over labor, which industrial development had completely disassociated from the land producing the wealth. “The means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up,” says Marx, “were generated in feudal society,” (Marx, and Engels 1848, chap. 1, par. 21).The Communists implemented a far more radical seizure of all private property, including both land and capital, consolidating it under a central federal power (chap. 2, par. 75). Contrarily, George felt that capital deserved its due, and sought to rectify the problems he saw by implementation of a more enlightened “single tax.”

A few germane observations present themselves for discussion. Smith, George, and Marx all expressed notions we might call idealist—Utopian even. Each sought to solve timeless conundrums with an incredibly optimistic approach. Jaded 21st century readers might consider any one of them painfully naive, in retrospect. None of them had the advantage of the hindsight we enjoy, however, and fruitlessly denying the problems each pointed out in his broader work does not help at all. Smith wrote when, fresh from the collapse of European Feudalism, land served as the key to wealth of any kind, and still viewed as an unlimited resource for the grabbing. The vast inequities the Industrial Revolution had abruptly produced vexed George and the Communists. None of these could have predicted today’s technological, information based economies, with the problems they addressed dispersed over the entire planet. Today, the rate of separation between the “Haves” and the “Have Nots” poises to exceed the conditions affecting either set of writers.
George did not design a perfect system. Neither, as amply demonstrated by both history and current events, did Smith or Marx. Henry George thoughtfully and humanely addressed a terribly intractable matter in human affairs, however, and deliberately allowed for future thinkers to expand his work. His work deserves contemplation as we forge into a new century fraught with uncertainties. Our present crisis may help encourage just that.

Works Cited

De Mille, Anna George. Henry George: Citizen of the World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950.
George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. 1898. New York, New York: The Robert Shalkenbach Foundation, 1979. 17 February 2009

Marx, Karl. Wage-Labor Capital. 1849. 17 February 2009

Marx, K. and Engels, F. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848. 17 February 2009

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776. Ed. Edwin Cannan. 5th ed. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1904. 17 February 2009

United States Department of the Treasury. Fact Sheets: Taxes. 17 February 2009 (This link is obsolete).

All in

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Steve Bass

When i first set out to write this blog i had no intention of writing about geopolitics, or anything any bigger than my own little world, or to develop any sort of readership at all, let alone to kick up international interest. Who knew? Since the time i started, Adbuster’s Occupy movement has overtaken the whole world and i’ve become a part of it, along with apparently millions of fellow humans dissatisfied with aspects of the concentric and overlapping political systems that govern and control the minutiae of our daily lives. Occupy has struck a chord that resonates well beyond what seems to have been its original intent as well.

Adbuster asserts in its campaign web-page opener that, “we vow to end the monied corruption of our democracy,” speaking, one assumes of U.S. democracy, even though Adbusters is a Canadian publication founded by Kalle Lasn, an Estonian. Adbusters itself claims to be a, “global network of culture jammers and creatives,” and that their Occupy is, “[i]nspired by the Egyptian Tahrir Square uprising and the Spanish acampadas.” One should note that Adbusters is a non-profit organization with aspirations and effect well beyond the confines of the magazine at its core.

Many of my dear intrepid friends struggle mightily with the unavoidable nature of the movement in which we all participate. Occupy Colorado Springs, (OCS), has garnered a fair amount of attention both because of its early acquisition of a city permit to camp on the sidewalk, and for its fragmentary infighting. Strong personalities have clashed fairly spectacularly for what scale we’re dealing with here, and precisely the same arguments are on display at Occupy web-pages all over the U.S., as well as abroad. Here, many patriotic, nationally oriented players have concentrated on addressing the U.S. Constitution and the influence of corporate interests in Washington, D.C. politics. Others have been caught up in causes of personal concern as the “focus” of the overall movement has grown more and more diffuse. The bickering and difficulty in reaching consensus has been frustrating but, i suggest, not unhealthy or out of place.

Adbusters, following ques from the Middle East and Spain, deliberately set off a “leaderless” movement, and has fastidiously avoided taking hold of any sort of control of what has developed since, refusing even media interviews for fear of exercising undue influence. Occupy remains a leaderless movement. Various groups and individuals have issued lists of demands; the one linked there, “is representative of those participating on this [particular ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Facebook] page.” We Occupiers have much common ground, which has served well to bring us all together, and will continue to serve as we gather to discuss and bicker over issues and particulars. There is plenty to differentiate amongst us as well, on individual and other categorical bases, but we have recognized, more or less, an essential humanity that has us willing to stand in freezing temperatures if we live in the northern hemisphere, and subject ourselves to the slow, often painful process of learning to live together.

Some among us, as we have seen right here in Colorado Springs, are very uncomfortable indeed with the amorphous nature of the Movement. We have seen splintering, censorship wars, general Assemblies that devolve into shouting matches, and the development of personal animosities. These phenomena are repeated on a grander scale throughout the Movement while observers gloat over the imminent dissolution of Occupy unity. Neither we Occupiers nor the Movement’s detractors ought to be misled by these birth pains. Our situation as humans, or for that matter any other creature inhabitant of the Earth has been rendered fully untenable by humans competing for dominance. The upheaval we engage from our Colorado Springs street corner, or from squares in Manchester, Belgrade, Cairo, and etc. is the natural response of rats in a corner. Were it not for the fact that we humans indeed possess reasoning capacity beyond a rat’s we really would be screwed. Fortune, or Divine providence, or evolution, or whatever mechanism or mechanisms turn(s) out to be true has granted us the tools that, utilized with empathy at every turn may–just may–allow us to work our way out of the massive pickle in which we’ve put ourselves. Nothing about this will be easy, quick, or for most, especially comfortable.

The Movement is leaderless. This is an existential fact. No matter how strenuously individuals attempt to grab hold of reigns, or to turn them over to others, there is no authority behind the Movement other than the profound spiritual authority of its essential Idea. The financial disparities that we have focused on here in the U.S. are real, and the supra-national bodies that control our government with full directive power are the same bodies that separate people from power in every nation on Earth. Each issue that has arisen into the Movement’s overall consciousness, from derivative markets, to marijuana law, to camping on public property is part and parcel of the whole thing, which itself amounts to such a gigantic, lumpen juggernaut that we have a hard time gathering our thoughts around the whole thing at once. We must.

Many U.S. citizens, including some prominent in and around OCS, have expressed insistent nationalism. Muslims and Christians around the world have pushed religions agendas. Nationalism is by no means confined to the U.S.A. Our corporate, non-personal enemy and its personal, human operators are Global already, and use these divisions to our detriment! At a Colorado College faculty panel yesterday, much ado was made of income disparities and market finagling by Wall Street financiers. We can isolate our minds all we want, but we can not eliminate the fact that Wall Street, Fleet Street, Singapore, Hong Kong, the House of Saud, whatever, whatever, are already one indivisible entity, operating in opposition to any concern for overall humanity or household priorities for any of us as inhabitants of the planet, including the natural requirements of the controllers. The Idea of competition and profit has acquired an independent life of its own and has prevented even those at the top of the unwieldy pyramid from living lives connected to the most valuable prizes of all, which we humans have recognized throughout our history and recorded in odes, songs, and literature to be transcendent of politics and possessions. The statistics cited by those college economists, and the many Occupiers that mention them in speeches and lists of demands are quite real, and Americans might note that Kurdish, Nepali, and Palestinian Occupiers, for example, skew the stats we’ve been flailing our arms about here even further, and that “First World” exploitation is a very large part of this discussion, indeed.

There can be little doubt that the “Wall Street” entities in control of our various governments have planned for and directed events toward a “New World Order” for decades, if not centuries. Lots of justifiably paranoid conspiracy watchers all over the planet have done their best to alert their fellows to this alarming and unacceptable development for as long as it has been in the mix. The Vatican, a power with negative credibility in its adherence to its own doctrine, has offered itself up as a potential controller of a global banking scheme. Currently entrenched power-brokers will absolutely without question attempt to co-opt and control the current Movement. We humans are not interested in more of the same bullshit, plus the added benefit of still more bullshit! We occupiers are fully Sovereign, each in his or her own right. We are leaderless by design, which is the natural development of the abject failure of our leaders, and in fact of the failure of the very foundation of our interaction amongst ourselves that has developed without much direction for at least the 10,000 year span during which we have written about it. Those who resist this fact will find little more than inversely correlated discomfort in their resistance. One can deny the nature of a rhinoceros till one’s dying day, but the beast remains a rhinoceros, and the denier’s last day may well come on the day he encounters a rhinoceros.

Sovereign consensus building is not democracy. It’s something we humans have never attempted on the scale we Occupiers are attempting now. Broad-scale cooperation as a foundation is against an established competitive approach that we have fallen into by default for a long, long time. Voting one another into submission will not work, simply because we have let the cat out of the bag. We noble individuals are learning a brand-new thing, like it or not, because a rhinoceros has smashed the freakin’ house down. I, for one will not abandon the Liberty of my own Sovereignty, no matter who votes what, nor will i abandon the respect i hold for each other Sovereign in the entire mix. I recognize the differences between whatever groups or persons are in the whole wide world. Categorical observations are real, so far as they go; but i won;t be bound by them. I won’t be forced to fight against the 1% simply because i am a member of the 99%. Rather i will be fighting with every fiber of my being for the 100% of us who will ALL be trampled by the rhinoceros, in pretty danged short order, unless we ALL relinquish our insistence on control, avarice, and irresponsibility of all stripes.

Each of us has a part to play, a purpose to serve. Never abandon what you know. Work hard at open discussion. Don’t be embarrassed by frustrating moments or attempt to hide your own humanity. Withdraw for a moment if you need to to prevent overboiling passions. We’re all in this together. Be patient Brothers and Sisters; this is gonna hurt some….

OWS List of Demands:
www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=157161391040462
Adbusters:
www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet
NPR:
www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141526467/exploring-occupy-wall-streets-adbuster-origins
Middle Eastern origins:
www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/apr/09/libya-egypt-syria-yemen-live-updates
Acampadas:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13466977

Occupying an empty house

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Steve Bass

My friend Maureen gets frustrated with me because i keep slinging all this outlandish stuff at her, and as one might expect, she has a hard time getting it sometimes, and an even harder time imagining that any of it might be true or practical. I keep telling her that money is over, she keeps telling me that people use money for good things. I start hanging around Occupy Wall St. and its attendant movement and she feels alienated because she lives largely from Stock Exchange investments. Maureen is not the only one with this issue; a man appeared at our GA in CSpgs last week deeply troubled by the fact that we “haters” were trying to force his grandma to eat cat food because as he noted, “Wall Street”, that is, the package of various stock offerings available there, is owned diffusely by grandmas and retirees, penny-pinchers and wheeler-dealers all over the world. My friend and this guy are both put off by the extremely jarring nature of the realizations at hand that have precipitated huge crowds of traffic-clotting protesters into the streets. (Actually that stranger stayed for the GA and came around, while Maureen has an injury preventing her attendance, so this is kinda for her, as well as everyone else).

The issue with the money that’s causing problems is closely associated with the Global nature of Occupy! and because of that, its fragmented nature. Both issues are rendered all the more discordant to many by their perceived urgency among occupiers. We want things to change right now, not after the next bullshit election cycle, but rather before we all die when the food chain collapses. Many within the movement at hand will object to what i posit here, but there really is no way around it in my own mind, so i have no choice but to put it out there. The FED, the IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, Royal Dutch, Al Rajhi, etc, etc, and their intertwined financial/military/industrial destruction machine already exist as a very solid Global beast with utterly uncontrollable and ravenous hungers. We humans are equally as Global, and Occupy! is the same. The destructive elements in this conflict as well as the creative are out of the hands of nationalistic players, and our old notions of money and its production will not save us in time. Once again, if it were gonna, it woulda.

I’ve put this educational chart up before, and if you have no motivation to look any further then i hope you’ll just go get another beer and stay out of the way. The World as we know it is a disaster, and we made it so. Don’t give me that crap about global warming is caused by dinosaur farts. We’ve dumped more toxic shit into the ecosystem in the last century than can be said to have even existed, anywhere. If Humanity can’t effect the world, like one hears on Rush, of some of those other insane programs where are all the American Bison? Passenger Pigeons? Pennsylvanians drinking tap water? Live, healthy corals? Why are so many of us completely, stubbornly ignorant of these obvious and urgent facts. It’s the Fear, of course, and it’s actually propagated deliberately by some, who fail in turn to recognize that they are trapped by it themselves. we’ll move on to the business of the Fear another time.

Plenty of accusations fly around about who caused the money crisis, the environmental crisis, and any other crisis at hand. It really doesn’t matter, and even though some players have obviously been behaving recklessly, some in succession with conspiratorial characters of some pedigree, we absolutely must give up the hatred and sort out solutions, if we want to live. There are a few links at the bottom to articles, (and one video–don’t like ’em myself), on financial and economic collapse. There are plenty more. The point is to assure you all that our monetary system, the means we’ve “developed” through haphazard mutual throat-slitting for trade and interaction among ourselves, is fucked. We can’t fix it. The “money” we’ve been passing around isn’t reflective of anything real. The “price” we pay for things has utterly nothing to do with their intrinsic worth or their scarcity in the world. This is our collective fault, not simply the fault of a couple Rothschilds and Morgans. We all scrabbled to keep up appearances and grubbed around to buy stupid shit we never needed, or even used. The numbers involved down at the FED are so unrealistic they’re meaningless, and trade imbalances and the like merely amount to spiffy terms for describing exported slavery, a kracken which is quickly coming home to roost for Westerners intent on prolonging the petro-economy for the sake of the god damn Fear. There is no money. Its value has been pilfered away by milquetoast pirates one Stewie Griffin party at a time.

The ends of the Dollar and the Euro represent terrific opportunity. Not for making more money, you dumb-ass! That’s the thinking that’s got us in this state in the first place. Some reasoned arguments exist that attempt to exonerate the financiers held up by many Occupiers as responsible for this mess. It really doesn’t matter. The people playing this game, which are all of us, have all been working at competition together ever since we began to establish societies. We didn’t know any better at the time. Now it’s apparent that the approach we’ve been taking isn’t working. If you are trapped in a mindset that insists on claiming a bigger slice of pie, or plaintively keens of the potential virtue of money if only it flows through the right hands, i’m sorry for you. Because when this all really hits the fan, you will be completely lost. We own nothing, except stuff that’s really not worth much, if you figure it in money. At some future point it may be necessary to argue these points at a higher level, because financiers are fond of obfuscation and bullshit in the literature, and hate to admit to themselves or anyone else how evilly they’ve been behaving, but soon enough the thing will collapse beyond the need to parse words.

So follow. The Earth is in the balance, because of the natural behavior of human beings when set loose to compete. Humans also have an innate drive to form societies and cooperate. The mechanisms of the old competitive game are worn, and the game is pretty much decided. We’ve already abandoned borders within the confines or the Game, only keeping nationalisms and “racial” distinctions in place when convenient to some other aspect of the Game, like the continued propagation of slavery, or the demonization of controllers of certain resources. Pull back and look a little. It’s 100% game players causing all the wars in the world, all the food shortages, all the misery. Do we really give a shit what color or religion a thirsty guy in the desert may be? Am i really worried about Iraqi invaders pouring over the horizon? Please! Even if all the current unrest and destabilization isn’t manipulated by people who thought George Orwell was writing textbooks, none of this is necessary. We don’t need petroleum, (look it up yourself fer cryin’ out loud). We don’t need to hate a bunch of desert nomads just because our shitheads set them up in business as a part of a grand scam. We don’t need to compete.

Cooperative living is so much easier and less troublesome you naysayers will be feeling really silly before this is over. It’s OK, though. It’s not so easy to see, at least for now. If it takes too long to avoid the pain you’ll see soon enough. Come see us then. What we have isn’t worth money but i am rich, rich rich! And this Manse won’t collapse, with or without money. Stay with us….

http://economiccrisis.us/
http://www.naturalnews.com/032999_financial_collapse_Euro.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26756
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16225
http://129.81.170.14/~dupre/SEEDS.pdf

Legal artistry

Posted on October 26, 2011 by NMT

(In response to questions received on another forum: “I’m curious as to why, exactly, you feel that you are entitled to stay in a public park at all?”, “What makes you feel that you are entitled to enjoy the ‘right’ of pursuing your happiness — that is, living in Acacia park — without having to contribute monetarily to the upkeep of that public facility.. Furthermore, why is it that you believe that, in the interest of effecting a change in a law which you disagree with, the best course of action is to choose to voluntarily break said law, rather than getting involved in the legal process and effecting a change in the typical fashion? After all, all that really accomplishes is an additional waste of taxpayer-funded services, in this case law enforcement.”)

I’ll reiterate again before i take this on that these are profoundly excellent questions that i think every Occupier, observer, and citizen of any country ought to contemplate deeply before entering the fray–maybe even before leaving the house this morning.

First I should clarify what may amount to a few misconceptions wrought largely by the media of late. As has been reported I am living with dear friends who find my comfort to be a valuable thing and have extended their hospitality freely absent any solicitation on my end. J. Adrian Stanley of the CS Independent has referred to me as a “technically homeless…couch[-]surf[er],” which is true, though only by certain technical legal definitions, which are generally designed to either skirt or address issues involving benefits of some sort. I am “technically” employed as the sole proprietor of the Paint Squad, a remodeling company that has been defunct for practical purposes since the media began trumpeting a new Great Depression, and the guy i had been working with abandoned the project. For the record, i collect no unemployment, disability, food stamps, or any other money or benefits of any kind from the government. Plainly stated, i have no monetary income. This is not meant to offer ethical assessment of my situation nor to elicit sympathy or whatever, but is merely offered to add perspective to my positions, and to rectify factual errors that have made it into the mix. Bear in mind i was camping at Acacia Park not out of necessity, but to effect the specific outcome that you may observe to have been effected. Note that although hundreds of campers are now down along Fountain Creek in violation of the same ordinance, they are not at Acacia Park kicking the bee’s nest with me–they have different and rather more imminent needs than i.

I believe i adequately responded to Mark’s first question by directing him to the appropriate pages here at hipgnosis. The second is a continuation of the first, with the addenda about “contributing monetarily.” A response must necessarily involve the natures of money, property and its use, and our interaction amongst ourselves as human beings. The third involves political processes and movements, civil disobedience, and my own spiritual foundation. I hope those statements enlightens the reader on the length of this post, and Mark in particular on the reason for the time taken for its development.

Some questions in answer to a question: Who owns public land? What does it mean to “own” it? Whence the resources to maintain the land, and what does that mean? We Americans have never adequately addressed these matters, and our ethical foundation for holding this conversation will remain forever spongy until we do. All land ownership in the United States harks back to the arbitrary decrees of that series of monarchies our predecessors here acknowledged to be so corrupt that a bloody war was necessary to shed the influence thereof. Land was simply declared by powerful people to be “owned” by favored sycophants, regardless of the opinions of the contemporary inhabitants. The Founders adopted the same attitudes governing property as had been utilized by their enemies. Every piece of property in the country now, public or private, is viewed through the lens of this fact. Its “ownership” is determined by arbitrary acts of murder and fiat. It’s understandable that this is the case–effecting such jarring and massive shifts in foundational thinking is never blithely easy, though it does appear simple once accomplished.

Having had an ear to the ground for some time on matters such as we are discussing , i am alert to numerous suggestion that “we” give land back to the “Indians.” This idea is as flawed as the other, and the thinking of indigenous peoples advocating it has been corrupted by our Western philosophical bias. The only genuine option uncorrupted by avarice and murder is to revert to a state of ignorance of ownership where the land is concerned. The elaboration of this notion constitutes a genuine system of political economy and i will carry it no further here, (but will link below). This is put in the mix to allow the reader to investigate further, and to establish that the following points are argued from an academic point of view rendered at least partially moot by the actual philosophical basis for the actions in question.

Be alert, Mark, that i have not been a societal parasite. I have worked and paid taxes since the age of 12, in spite of strenuous effort to limit the absurd, onerous, and unethical share the Government has taken through any nefarious means available. Maintenance at Acacia Park is paid out of city sales tax, unless i’m mistaken, which i certainly paid when i bought the sleeping bag i slept in there, the bicycle i rode to the park, the tobacco i smoked while there. Additionally, though i have not camped there in a week or so, one might readily visit the Park and ascertain that it is in a far cleaner state than before Occupiers carved out a space there, the rest rooms were locked coincident to their arrival, and the only maintenance in evidence is a guy that comes around in the morning to collect the bags of trash the Occupiers have gathered from around the whole park, and the sprinklers which still douse the tree lawns where people are camping even though watering season is so obviously over that infrastructure damage is imminent. Regardless, and without additional verbosity, the land in question is public, and we Occupiers clean up after ourselves requiring less maintenance, not more, of the City. Opposition to the notion that smaller contributions in tax payments ought to equal diminished rights to enjoy publicly held assets, with which we are endowed at birth is quite close to the heart of the Occupiers’ battles, whether individual Occupiers have become aware of the idea yet or not. We all pay for it, both monetarily and in karmic debt, or by whatever system of spiritual balance you may care to invoke. Any Rockefeller is welcome to pop a tent next to mine.

Your final point, that is, why civil disobedience rather than ordinary action is yet another that might be expanded at length. In the interest of getting this up i’ll restrain myself from that in hopes that you will recognize that i am not attempting to be glib or brusque with you here, Mark, but merely brief. Additional commentary on all these points is both available and forthcoming. Simply enough–civil disobedience, and in fact in my mind and those of many, many others, full-blown political and ideological restructuring is necessary because no approach within the confines of less strenuous discourse has worked thus far, and people all over the planet have had quite enough bullshit. If you imagine to yourself that this business of mine, or the business of Occupy in general is about camping in Acacia Park, or the stupid camping ordinance enacted but not enforced by the City of Colorado Springs then you have badly missed some very important news. I suggest you follow the links below. Visit the Occupiers, both here and in many other cities around the whole wide World right now.

This’ll do. Ask more questions! Read these links:

I’m not angry, but, hmmm… http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1

Henry George developed a system addressing this stuff. I can’t say his system is complete, and in fact, i am personally convinced our problem as humans must be addressed spiritually. That’s a topic for another moment, and it does not detract from George’s thesis: http://www.henrygeorge.org/

This strikes me as so obvious that it could be seen as a jab, and almost feels that way, but it’s still the place to go for primary discourse on civil disobedience: http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil.html

This is obviously unnecessary, but i’ll point out once more that the reader will find an abundance of words of my own that bounce around all these topics and more. It’s all the same conversation: http://www.hipgnosis21.blogspot.com

PPCC Philo Club page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/168063276537761/

Some other discussion and reporting establishing basis: http://wwwwendolbloggercom.blogspot.com/

There’s no end. Keep looking.

Genghis Khan’s socialism of the fittest

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Eric Verlo

Exhibit at Denver Museum of Science and History An interesting exhibit about Genghis Khan’s “enduring legacy” hit the Denver Museum of Nature and Science two years ago and continues its US tour, so you can still learn about “the ruthless warlord who conquered half the known world,” but who “is also revered as an innovative leader and statesman who brought unity, stability, and much more to his people.”

When it comes to curatorial decisions at a museum, I always wonder: why now? Indeed it’s hard to deny, when you look a little deeper, that Genghis Khan was a renaissance man for the Bilderberg set.

No seriously. Genghis Khan used to vie with Attila the Hun for most cruel overlord. Their reputations for inhumanity defied the western imagination. Now apparently it’s thought that both leaders of barbarian hordes have been undervalued, and dare it be suggested, unfairly maligned? I’ll tell you what’s happened. It’s becoming transparent that the techniques of Western war making, invasion, mass killing and ruthless administration of foreign occupation look a lot like the work of Khan. So it’s small wonder elements in our culture want to pay him tribute.

A key to what drove the Mongols to exterminate all the peoples in their path was that they had no need for them, their cities and hungry mouths. The Mongols and the Huns needed only grasslands for their herds and yurts. Expanding agricultural societies were cancerous tumors against their interests. Except for craftsmen who offered goods which the growing nouveaux riche Mongols could appreciate, they had no use for non-Mongols.

I’m thinking about the jet-set now, surrounded by the hoi poloi who are no longer needed in factories and fields now fully mechanized. Except for the outward most reaches of exploitable third world labor, they have no use for common man. If they were Khan they could just queue us up to kill us. When it came to thinking about sustainable populations on limited environmental resources, he had an unappreciated wisdom that Khan.

Bernanke at Bilderberg in 2008

Revolution at 2112 RPM

Posted on October 2, 2011 by Steve Bass

For Tom, the guys at Occupy Colorado Springs, and everyone else:

So, if I sit here and carry on about how we can get out of this grief under which so many of us find ourselves buried by living cooperatively, and no one plays along, it’s like division by zero, an operation that produces no definable solution and the thought of which is so troublesome it caused philosopher George Berkeley to suspect all mathematicians could be devil-worshipers on the side. Seriously. A new friend I met at Acacia Park yesterday asked where the little hullabaloo about banks and bailouts and revolution and such was happening in Colorado Springs was asking the general milieu of rabble rousers where their revolution could be expected to go. (Hi, Tom). Some of the guys there, as one might expect, were so fed up with the obviously unsupportable state of current affairs that they were almost gleefully anticipating violence and war–civil war–right here in the U.S.A.. (Hi, Pat). I certainly can’t blame anyone for thinking that way, given that I hoped fervently for exactly the same outcome from around the 3rd grade til only recently, really.

I’ve already mentioned my opinion of the futility of standard issue revolutions. We’ve tried that. It doesn’t work. We’ve tried Monarchies, ordinary dictatorships, “working-class dictatorships”, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Ism after Ism–none of what we’ve tried to do has worked, neither for the oppressed nor the oppressors. We’ve been dividing by zero all the while. You should look that operation in the eye some, so you know what I’m saying. It’s the same as proving a negative, or trying to work out the math of the Singularity, and if you find it difficult, one glance at a graph will turn the lights on a little for you. When I was a schoolboy, I always thought it was supremely bogus to respond to any questions about division by zero, (or other imponderables, for that matter), by asserting the answers to be “undefined” just because a conventional answer might be unsatisfactory. I was a weird kid, OK? Look at the link or find something more techie, (a little help, Kathryn?), and then extrapolate the idea to the business of social revolutions and you’ll find my point, or at least one “quantum” facet of it. You could have a look at a representation of the Ouroborus and get the same notion to materialize in your head, maybe.

The shit we’ve been doing has not worked, is not working, and will not work. The answers we’re after will not derive from the operation we’ve been attempting to apply, no matter what.

We compete. That’s just what we do. We compete against one another, against Nature, and maybe against God, though it’s not by any means compulsory for you to think of it in any sort of Divine sense, or wrestle with religious aversions for the thing to work out the same, here. That’s just me. The competition we’ve been so avid to pursue all these generations hasn’t worked any better for the atheists or the religious. If we pursue yet another bloody revolution, we’ll wind up bathing in another absurdly predictable vat of blood, and maybe you super-rich can stretch your inane Grand Game out for a few more years in your bunkers after some of us useless eaters are dispatched and used as semi-organic fertilizer. The snake will still have a mouthful of tail caught up in its throat, if it lives through this one.

Tom was serious about finding a solution when he came by our little protestation yesterday. Pat was just as serious about the blood, I’m afraid. I’ve had enough of blood, so here’s what I’m doing. See what you think. (Here comes the part that might curdle Mom’s blood a bit, but maybe not…maybe not.) I have completely abandoned ordinary reality. It’s never worked so well for me anyhow, and I was already kinda screwed when I came to this notion, so you are welcome to hold on to your own personal misery and think of me as just another hopeless crackpot, if you want–another useless eater. After all, I’m seriously just an 9th grade dropout and unemployed housepainter with bad joints and a broken back, a tragic character out of a Steinbeck novel if you will. Except I don’t feel tragic at all; I’m the happiest guy I know. No shit.

What does it mean to have abandoned ordinary reality? There are lots of angles to that so I apologize up front for the doglegs I’ll be working as I attempt to answer the question. First, I’ve given up looking for a “job”, or the hope of ownership of anything at all, including money. That doesn’t mean I’ve decided to laze around on someone’s sofa til I die of entropic dissipation; I’ve been incredibly busy since this paradigm shift, with no horizon in sight, really. There are millions of people in the shape I was in over last summer, wells running dry and bankruptcy looming while the whole time work to do abounds. I’ve just given up the game those $game pieces$ track, like a chess player laying down his king. Those guys won. It’s OK–it’s only a game, after all. I was never so good at it–never really gave a damn.

Now I find myself in a brand-new and rather sketchily mapped territory where I’m the president of my own head and nothing else, a monarch of abrogation and apostasy. So when Tom asked about a plan, I had to think about it some before I could even say as much as I am right here, right now. The two biggest differences I can define between this new approach and the other are cooperation and good ol’ hippie-dippie, Jesus freak style love and self-abandonment. And not just on my end, see. I don’t own anything, won’t own anything at least so long as I go down this path, and can’t pay for anything or support myself, or anyone else. Well then. WTF?

I’ve always given. Always. I loved Robin Hood as a kid, and I used to do things like stashing random campfire-scented homeless dudes in the back of my room at night, in hope that Mom wouldn’t discover them and put them out in the snow or, even worse, send them packing to jail. (Neither Mom nor Dad ever discovered any of them. Hi, Mom. Hey, Dad ;)) I give away food for…well that’s a fine question. When asked why I spend so much of my time on things like the Colorado College Community Kitchen, the best I’ve been able to come up with in response is that it’s just in me to do. I think it’s been some sort of psychic trade-off for the ethical compromises and outright violations to which I’ve succumbed in my lackluster prosecution of the game of property collection, which I’ve always vaguely known to be a sort of theft, just like the Marxists say. Follow me, though–the Marxists haven’t show me anything not-dysfunctional, either. (Sorry, Michele, Jon).

This new thing is about giving and receiving, and about a different way of seeing the whole picture, like when one of those optical illusions with the hidden horse and rider amongst the trees suddenly becomes apparent. Nothing changes; it’s just revealed–revelatory. I live at someone else’s house. I bring around food for everyone to eat that I never owned. I smoke tobacco that a gracious host brought to me, and hope my phone and broadband will still be operational next week. You’re welcome to pay it for me while I try to figure out how to do this with no game pieces at all. Message me; I won’t be paying for it. I’m living on a prayer, as the song goes, living on Love. You can too, I swear. Quit your shitty job at Wal-Mart’s haircutting kiosk and cut your neighbor’s hair for free. Don’t worry about game pieces. Come down to CC on Sunday and help us give away someone else’s food. Have some! Bring some pizzas from your shop to the protesters. Retire your jersey if you’re a big winner and forget about the conspicuous displays of wealth. We get it. You won! Yay for you! Now put a few families up in your east wing. Love them. Be tender. Let their hapless lost patriarchs know it’s unnecessary to numb the pain with whiskey, or whatever. It’s OK–we won’t call you a wuss, or anything.

Right now there’s Revolution in the wind. I like to read kind of a lot. It seems the handiest way to find out about shit, and I’ve read about a lot of Revolutions. It can make my head spin. If we pursue Revolution we’ll be running in circles. We’ll be eating our tails. The Earth herself is done with our bullshit, and there’s really not any more tail left to eat. Let’s get off the turntable. We’ll be dizzy for a while, but I think we can walk in a straight line if we get our bearings. Get hold of me. I’ve got these words for you all, for free. This is not a trade. I can paint your house, too, or build you a deck or something. If you want to give me something, or give something to my family, or give something to someone I don’t know and will never meet, then maybe you get it. I won’t take it as payment. I’m not in that game.

I hope this works. I’ve had enough tail. How ’bout you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_by_zero

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Pseu Pseu Pseudo-Do-Dah-Day

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Steve Bass

For Rob. Thanks buddy! Say hi to yer Mom.

We’ve been toying with some pretty weird bits of thinking here, and it’s already getting hard to follow. Lemme try and tie a few things together. Also, if you’re still with me, now’s a good time to point out that this humble site is best read in conjunction with the discussions on my Facebook, (Steve Bass), and for this bit, especially within the PPCC Philosophy Club page linked from my Wall or wherever it is.

Remember my mention of Pseudo-statements back at Willie’s story? Elsewhere, in Stage Magick and around about, notably at the PPCC Philosopy Club linked off my Facebook, I put up the business of our inability to prove a negative. The assertion that “This statement does not belong in the set of all true statements,” is a nice example. The statement is internally self-defeating, negated by paradox; it’s internally inconsistent, self-contradictory, neither true, nor false– a pseudo-statement. The “set of all true statements” statement is a tidy example in that attempting an answer produces a nonsense response awfully reminiscent, at least to me, of the sort of thing that happens to those hapless physicists when they try to crunch their numbers beyond the event horizon and into the heart of the Singularity. Lots of PHDs get real pissy if you try and take their numbers and drag them into the “real” world here. Like most of us, abstractions are fine for them. Hanging flesh on the ephemeral turns it into a monster for some. I, on the other hand, have no such qualm. If matter isn’t made of matter, as some rather esoteric physics appears to indicate, that most assuredly effects us, sez me.

The problem of proving a negative is stickier than the “True Statements” statement, because we can somehow tell the essence of the genuinely self-defeating pseudo-statement is True. Something about the very idea is akin to the business of the Singularity–we can’t seem to get there, or even define the nature of that There, but we know there has to be Something, OK? And thinking about it produces notions that resonate in our world.

We’ve also talked some about politics, and here’s the clincher. Our whole system, our World, maybe even our very Selves combine to make a big ol’ Pseudo-statement, overburdened by internal paradox and contradiction, and decorated with infinite concentric, overlapping circles and waves of Pseudo-reality.

The “Doctrine of the Many,” claimed by Zoroastrians, Jains, some Gostics, among others, avers that we humans are compound beings. Some scientists at the fringe have claimed this as well, but let me keep this as political as I can for a moment. The concept surfaces in Western thinking when we speak of “talking to ourselves,” which we all know can be quite an argument at times, and in notions like multiple personality. Most U.S. citizens will agree that we are a “Christian” nation in spite of that pesky 1st Amendment. We’ll acknowledge “diversity” in religious matters, but obviously those other guys are wrong and belong in Hell where they won’t fuck up our Christian Zen, see? The foundational Christian documents upon which the edifice of the world’s biggest group of religions includes a whole lot of admonitions about Love. Yet it is hardly necessary to provide examples of the embarrassing fact that a whole lot of Christians are rabid, violence-loving haters dribbling foam from their chins as the rail about how, “God hates fags,” or whatever. Don’t feel so smug if you’re a Buddhist or an Agnostic or < insert your favorite dogmatic crap here> and you still get that rush of glee when you see Saddam dangling from a rope or hear about the supposed demise of Osama. I may argue that a thing can be both A and non-A at the same time, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that killin’ a motherfuckah is the same as turning the other cheek. Where is the Love in this set of systems/politicals/religions/nationalisms? It’s in there, but only in the sense that it sets the whole business up as a sort of cosmic, (and often comic), Pseudo-statement.

I spoke a bit with my homeless friend Rob yesterday and he told me about a guy he knows with some brilliant talent–musical, I think–that lives outside. Rob had burned himself accidentally and the topic brought to light his friend’s plight; the guy is a multiple, and periodically his alter will emerge and industriously destroy his life. The fellow named his alter Jack, I think, and knows of his existence from observing the destruction “Jack” leaves in his wake, but the two never interact. The guy blacks out and has no recollection of moving about in the world while Jack is in control. Once Jack put his feet in a campfire til the shared body required a lengthy hospital stay. One day Jack just may kill the both of him.

I’m saying Christendom is just like Jack and his host, and so is American society. So is the whole freakin’ society of the whole freakin’ world. Only we suffer from a far more advanced stage of the condition and our legs are buried in hot coals. Our hair is on fire. Those homeless dudes don’t worry about a house, but we’ve been building a huge edifice on a foundation of shit for so long we think we can’t backtrack, but backtrack we must. This house is collapsing upon us right now, as we speak, so to speak, and we need to get the fuck out, tear down the M.C. Esher thing we’ve been trying to build, and start the fuck over or we’re all going to be buried. Our society, societies, lives, and now even the solid earth is/are collapsing under the weight of internal contradictions of our own making.

Most who’ve read so far won’t need me to explain the function of a keystone–the stone at the top of an arch that concentrates the force and thereby holds the arch in place. When the capstone at the top of an arch at, say, a Medieval cathedral erodes, the arch collapses. The capstone of the Christian faith is supposed to be Love, right? Isn’t that key to a great many doctrines? It seems hard to find a player in all the world that will openly advocate for a doctrine of Hatred. Even the nastiest Devil-worshiping headbanger seeks Love, if only amongst his own within the particular bit of the Chaotic waveform in which he finds himself. Whatever. Our shit is missing its capstone. And its foundation is shit, too.

Don’t you dare get all dogmatically ideological and ignore the fact that I’ve NOT preached Jesus here, or any other tributary. We–and I mean all of us, including those of us clutching the notions of enmity so close to our hearts, and those addicted to power–need to stand back, tear the whole house down, and rebuild something with a thoughtfully drawn blueprint. We need to build an edifice on a foundation of Love, designed toward the capstone of Love. When we do that–oh, what a mansion we’ll have!

What did that one dude John say? “God is Love.” Right? Can I get a witness?

Right. Thus sayeth the housepainter.

http://samaelgnosis.us/books/html/revolutionary_psychology/chapter_12.htm

http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html