The Great Trickle-Down Pyramid Scheme

"...when we look around, we can see that the Bush administration leaned on the middle class and expanded the poor while giving more money to the top tier. Predatory lending (among other things, including declining home prices and lower wages) caused working middle class families to be unable to pay their mortgages. Mortgages were foreclosed, etc. etc. A classic feedback loop.

So giving more money to the rich isn't working. You give money to the rich, sure they may create jobs, or they may just do something else with it. Send it overseas. Buy a boat. Take a rocket tour of space. Greed got them where they are, and they're not going to let a penny of that money "trickle down" unless they know they're getting a large return on their investment. Which means, yes, they may create jobs, but they will be exploitative, either not paying enough or lobbying for the 60 hour work week or some other greed-based thing."

- Mark Kuykendall on Change.gov

I hereby predict the near future...

I am currently convinced of the following from listening to the Transition policy makers:

Prevention sweeps away bloated health insurance schemes.

Renewable energy sweeps away bloated fossil fuel schemes, international loan schemes, and military-industrial schemes.

Net Neutrality sweeps away bloated media schemes.

The money saved goes to make education affordable for everyone.

I am currently convinced of the following from reading the news and weighing it with certain personal experiences:

Psychedelic therapy changes so many lives at such high success rates that a Cultural Singularity approaches.

I am preparing a post about how economics is inconsistent without observing environmental and psychological ecosystems.

Change is the Only Absolute

We were talking about the space between us all/

And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion/

Never glimpse the truth - then it's far too late when they pass away/

We were talking about the love we all could share - when we find it/

To try our best to hold it there - with our love/

With our love we could save the world - if they only knew/

Try to realize it's all within yourself/

No one else can make you change/

And to see you're really only very small/

And life flows on within you and without you/

We were talking about the love that's gone so cold and the people/

Who gain the world and lose their soul/

They don't know, they can't see - are you one of them?/

When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind/

Is waiting there/

And the time will come when you see/

We're all one, and life flows on within you and without you.

-Within You Without You by George Harrison and the Beatles

Listen To Our Lives/The Wind Will Whisper The Way

I feel as if I did not do enough justice to the subject matter in my previous post. For several years I have been navigating a web woven by people my parent's age and the internet is making it both easier and more complex. I will discontinue referring to how this vindicates my pattern recognition since I am just an explorer reporting back on my findings trying to be as patient as is necessary to wake the word up as it stumbles over this blog. That being said, no good story is complete without an understanding of the heroes involved. But I am not the storyteller, I am only the messenger.

The film depicted here tells the story of how, at the birth of the information age, two diametrically opposite worldviews regarding technology erupted from the psychedelic sixties. One, embodied by Ted Kaczynski, saw where technology could go and saw Hell, while the other, embodied by Stewart Brand, saw where it could go and saw Heaven.

Kacynski was a brilliant, paranoid, Ludditesque mathematician willing to resort to violence while Brand was a brilliant, sane, geeky artist who devoted himself to the non-violent ideals of the counterculture. Brand fed his head, Kacysnki was afraid of his head. Brand compiled the Whole Earth Catalog and Kacysnki used it to learn how to live off-the-grid.

This is a mythic and ironic tale about the psychological repercussions of the neurotic American obsession with (and inability to obtain) freedom and equality and how their outer limits were forged and tested by two different, but very similar people after their first encounter with LSD; Kaczynski as a university professor, Brand as a hapless hippie, and both through the research establishment.

The film begins by quoting Kurt Godel, but I will resort to the Buddha today.

"Never think that I believe I should set out a "system of teaching" to help people understand the way. Never cherish such a thought. What I proclaim is the truth as I have discovered it and "a system of teaching" has no meaning because the truth can’t be cut up into pieces and arranged in a system."
-Diamond Sutra

White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane (Or How The Information Age Stop-Gapped The Counterculture)

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call
Call Alice
When she was just small

When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said:
"Feed your head
Feed your head
Feed your head"

The Beggining of The End or The End of The Beginning?

"The government will now attempt to keep bad loans from failing and real estate prices from falling. Rather then allowing market forces to rein in excess borrowing and replenish savings, it will encourage even more borrowing and drain what is left of our savings pool. Rather than allowing our economy to return to one based on legitimate production, it will continue to encourage reckless consumption.

In the end, by refusing to allow market forces to work their cure, our economy will inevitably die from the disease. Our economy will now face death by hyperinflation, which will cause a complete loss of confidence in the dollar and result in prices and interest rates skyrocketing out of sight. The evaporation of our national wealth will lead to civil unrest, food and energy shortages, and the possible imposition of martial law. If such a scenario unfolds, what is left of our Constitution will surely be completely shredded."

-Peter Schiff, President and Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital on 10/10/08

This Sentence is A Lie

In 1933, Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel destroyed Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica with his Incompleteness Theorems. He used mathematics itself to prove that mathematics cannot be self-contained or perceived in absolute, but is instead a kind of knowledge that is self-actualizing in an infinite variety of forms.

In the near future, humanity will destroy religion with enlightenment. She will use spirituality itself to prove that spirituality cannot be self-contained or perceived in absolute, but is instead a kind of knowledge that is self-actualizing in an infinite variety of forms.

Your head may now explode.

Civilization is An Anomoly

"These are and were a people with no notion of linear time. Theirs was one of the great experiments in human thought. The notion that the world existed as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of humanity was to maintain through ritual activity the land precisely as it existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation. The logos of the Dreaming was constancy, balance, symmetry. In the moment there is deductive logic, on a hunt for example, when the men pay attention to signs with a perspicacity that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. But in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning. Had humanity followed this track, it is true that we would have never placed a man on the moon. But we would most certainly not be speaking of our capacity to compromise the life support of the planet. I have never in all of my travels been so moved by a vision of another possibility, born literally 55,000 years ago."

-Wade Davis on the Aborigines in Australia

5 Great Science Books to Expand Your Mind

"One of the great discoveries of modern science was the realization of how interconnected the world is. The deterministic, Newtonian view of a clockwork universe was replaced by the much more dynamic, uncertain and entangled world of quantum mechanics..."

read more | digg story

The Ten Ecstatic Commandments

א Know that everything is one and that nothing is truly separate.

ב Answer only to the infinite and you will not become oppressed by the finite.

ג Use caution when using the limitations of language to invoke the limitless.

ד Supplement Earth with Heaven by cycling between effort and effortless ecstasy.

ה Seek the wisdom of duality in order to transcend it.

ו Respect life.

ז Respect one another.

ח Do not become attached to the impermanent.

ט Do not distort what you know to be true.

י Be grateful for everything.

"You are flung into other levels of reality so visceral, so tangible, so all-enveloping, that they become your sense of the real world. And you suddenly realize that the relatively mundane realm of ordinary consciousness is a crude facsimile of what awaits in the psychotropic trance. This and other experiences in the presence of people taken by the spirit left me with visceral evidence that cultural beliefs can really make for different human beings, that there are other ways of knowing, other levels of intuition, that cannot necessarily be understood through the filter of Cartesian logic."

-Wade Davis on Ayahuasca