Dem Holocaust Blues

Gonna blow on over like a nuclear wind
Leavin' us dead and burnin' in the end
The world be gone, and momma's in the street
Dead dogs gonna eat our bones for the lack of meat
Huddlin' in the rubble and the smoke an' ash
Clouds o' human dust gonna clash
Down in the street an' down in the road
Stories that everybody done been told
School children under their desk
Payin' their respects not darin' to ask
"Dem Holocaust Blues", Unfinished Composition

Folks who are tracking on current events and forecasting their future, or trying to, based on what happens now are aware that things are changing, rapidly and aggressively. I simply call it a "shift", others have called it "the quickening", still others call it "the apocalypse" or even "end times".
I, personally, disagree - I do not believe things can or will simply end, at the whim of the universe. I do not believe human beings, hate them or love them, can or will simply be wiped from the face of the earth like snot off a glass coffee table. I, will not be wiped from the face of the earth like snot off a glass coffee table, I like it here and feel I still have a lot to learn here.
And there-in, I think, is the nature of the coming unpleasantness - Human will, very human forces, all at play all working for something, reaching breaking points. After so long, ignorance, greed, imperialism (ooohhh, I said it - although unlike the fuckknuckles who usually say it now, I dont mean the U.S. in Iraq. The Olive Tree Wars are the result of several centuries of colonialism and imperialism from mainly Europe), and the general disintegration of society in the mass of conflicting cultures, even conflicting "worlds" (the first world versus the so called "developing" world, those third and fourth world countries we have, in reality, forgotten except for the occasional $0.75 a day "adoption" of little Ndugu by some well meaning middle American whitebread church lady), are coming to a head. One force cannot hold back the others, but one cannot allow the necessary freedom to the others either - Everyone is trying to fit through the door at once, toes are getting stepped on, elbows are finding eye sockets, blood will be spilled.
And that is what is coming - Not an end, not in the conventional sense of "full stop, end", but an end as a beginning. I think it is what the world needs.
It has happened at least once before - probably more than that (The ancient cultures, the Sumerian and the Anasazi, didnt just fall off the face of the Earth.... yet for all intents and purposes their people did) - and after the dark ages there came a period of enlightenment, a renaissance of art, technology and eventually science. New religions supplant old, old take on new faces, new tools replace no tools, and people learn and grow - Society makes a surge forward.
It is a cycle.
The forest has to burn to grow properly. Everything has to burn. We're approaching our time.

It is my hope, that in the end, what will have been burned off at least for awhile will be the detritus, the fractured, disconnected, hateful elements that are driving us to the fire now. There always have to be some of those things, Balance in all things - but the balance is off, their weight is toppling the scale at the moment.
In a few generations, maybe it will be different. I doubt I will see it in my life - I am, honestly, simply looking forward to the cataclysm. After all, Chaos is one of my required nutrients, just how I'm made. I am looking forward to putting the first part of that famous Thomas Jefferson quote to work, with the absolute belief that my son will be a farmer, and his son will be an artist.

A Dire, But Not Entirely Wrong, Prediction

Folks, I want you to take a bit of time and go over to the website of sci-fi author Dan Simmons, and read something - I'll even be so kind as to provide you a direct (for the time being) link to what I want you to read: http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message.htm

I would, as is my usual fashion, post the text here but it is both long and I want you to actually leave this page, go to another and be in the spirit of doing that because this is not a casual piece of reading I'm asking of you - I'd ask you to do as the Traveler in Mr. Simmons message suggests and Google some of the words and names mentioned as you read.

Do I agree entirely with the predictions of Mr. Simmons? No. I do not. But, I agree with many of them or at least see the potential for them happening. It is a worthwhile read simply as a warning that if not this then something like it.

There are millions of, if not a billion or so, people in this world who would like these days to be the last days of light. The last days of science, education, free thought, freedom itself. They are not a silent faction either, they have taken up arms and we are fighting them now.
There are others who have no dog in the ideological aspects of that fight, but can only see a lot of money to be made off it.
Unfortunately, we are not fighting the enemies of light very well. We are looking to profiteers to lead us, and they are too busy trying to protect the feelings of the sensitive lest they upset the cash flow to actually wage a war.
War is a ruthless business and we have lost our ruthlessness for a feigned moral superiority. It is, in fact, only the ethics and morals of the leaders that are ruthless - their strategy and their tactics are not and their mindset, for all its ruthlessness, is purely self-serving.
It's total war, or a very long war. No foundation unshaken, no field left un-burned, no shrine un-desecrated. We must make the region ours, isolate the enemy on his own ground at every turn, and we must make the people subject to us or we will never be able to give them stability, and without stability they will never have democracy.
We have not given stability to Iraq - We are letting them run far too much of the show before they are ready, before the bad seeds are weeded out and the corruption burned out, before the squabbling factions are driven together into the dust and beaten together so that when they stand up the dust and blood have rubbed out the lines between Sunni and Shia - And because of that the in-fighting, the insurgency, is stronger than ever and the entire region is less stable than it ever was when Sodamn Insane was in power. And unless we change that, while we still can, it will be our doing that we're embroiled in that bullshit for many many years to come.
I'm not saying we destroy their country, or kill all the people, please do not misunderstand - Women, children, who are non-combatants, should have every measure possible taken to spare and protect them. Nonetheless, no quarter should be given to any and all combatants, and their resources and supply chains should be destroyed. Their stomachs should be empty, their wells dry, their streets unsafe for them, the beds of their wives death traps - Starve them, thirst them, isolate them and when they are weak, hungry, and out of places to run we run them down and kill them.
Then, and only then, should we start rebuilding, start trying to build and train their police, their army, holding elections. Anything we do before then is a farce, a cruel joke on the people of the region and a blessing to our enemy. We are only making them stronger.
Total war - At this point there is no other answer.

We are rapidly approaching a shift - The shift cannot be avoided, they happen throughout human history and even before it, but we can determine who has the role of actor, and who is forced to react, we can take and hold positions of strength. We can choose to bring the light with us through the period of darkness - Or we can choose to loose it and have to learn what it is again, someday, generations down the line.
We need leaders who are committed to preserving the light, enlightenment of science, medicine, education, freedom - Not leaders committed to the almighty dollar and corporate power. We need strategy and tactics, we need warriors, that are committed to this and are capable of doing what is necessary to drive the forward progression of ignorance and destruction. Unless we can find that, we're fucked. And we certainly aren’t going to find it blindly marching down the path we're on after the fools currently leading us.

This Modern Life

Fifty years ago the world was a bigger place.
The size of the actual ball of mud, rock and water wasn’t any different than it is today (give or take a few tons of ore that have been hurled into space never to return since 1956, a truly insignificant thing to a planet), but it was a bigger place. And fifty years before that I was even bigger still.
So, you're probably asking, if it wasn’t bigger in physical size, then how was it bigger?
It was bigger in solely one fashion; The room a man had to live in it was bigger.
People could come and go as they pleased. They could live in the city next to their neighbors and with the immediate convenience of the close urban quarters, or they could live in the country and see no one for miles and miles around and spend days and days alone pursuing their interests. A person could make a living, living out - Be it off the land or off their works which they took into town once in awhile and sold, one could make a good living and remain as far from neighbors and the supposed "convenience" of the city as they liked.
Today the world is a much smaller place, and the universal consciousness is turned more inwards, into the city and the close knit urban vibe of it all. In the heads of most people is an idea, so subconscious it’s actually more just a sense, a feeling, that unless they are surrounded by others they are in dangerous territory. They want to have neighbors, they want the hubbub of modern living all mashed together right on top of their subdivisions and washing around their minivans.
You see this in how people drive when they get out on the interstate in between cities and towns. I live in a state with a, thankfully, fairly low population density, and there is a lot of wide open country between places, I do a lot of driving. And I see it. People coming from the city get onto the interstate and instead of finding a nice open stretch and maintaining their solidarity for a casual drive they get right up behind someone else, who is in turn right up behind another someone else, and they keep it up until you get these little undulating conglomerations of five to ten vehicles moving down the interstate, constantly jockeying for new but in no way superior positions within the herd.
They cannot, possibly, be alone. If you happen to come along one of these poor helpless creatures when they are alone, they will inevitably be driving quite slowly fearfully looking about or talking on their cell phones to someone back in the city about how "awful" and "empty" open country and open road are. Then, you will pass them in an attempt to leave their slow moving wagon of banality and despair behind, to maintain your oneness, your solitary leisurely place on the road. Suddenly they will speed up and will drop right in behind you, and stick there like they've harpooned you until they decide to pass, only to be in front where they can slow down lest they leave the "safety zone" of another human presence.
These people are "the people" anymore, they live, work, play and function as the baseline of society. Everyone else is a statistical anomaly. The mass consciousness, the one that drives marketing, trends in entertainment, fashion and everything else, the consciousness that writes the unwritten rules and guidelines of society that PTA's use to write rules and guidelines for the next generations and that are used to win (and lose) elections, is the consciousness of these "baseline" individuals. These people who cannot bring themselves to be alone on the open road are the society in America.
They want all the service, all the convenience, all the pleasure and most certainly all the profit and none of the responsibility. They go to work, they pay their taxes, and they want everything else to be guaranteed, insured and immediately available day and night.
They want someone to save them from fire, burglars, kiddy diddlers and flat tires. They want someone to insure that new laws are made to better "protect" them from fires, burglars, kiddy diddlers and yes flat tires. They want the supermarket shelves to be full, they want their skies to be blue, they want their neighbors to have nice lawns that compliment the Norman Rockwell picture perfect essence of their own front yard. They want it all, and they want none of the responsibility of getting it, maintaining it or protecting it. That is someone else’s job. The kind of person who would suggest differently is most certainly the same sort of horrible individual who would drive by themselves along those long open stretches of road.
But they are conflicted - The urban lifestyle with traffic and stoplights and fire departments and cable television and lawn care specialists and a gas station on the corner has them demanding and wanting, of course. This is the life they know, it is the life the consciousness of the nation is telling them is the good life and they believe in that message, and why not? It’s hard not to when it grows just a little stronger every day.
But there is another message, another signal from the universal consciousness, that is slowly being pushed out, its bandwidth decreasing - It is in fact dying, as all old things must. It carries the idea that land is a good thing to have, and that open spaces aren’t so bad, and the good life is having the land to enjoy the open spaces and be away from the maddening roar of it all. It is an idea kept alive by an older generation still working, and by a few rebels and radicals who, the urban dweller must admit when alone and contemplative, have some positive characteristics, a certain charm to their ideas of independence.
These two signals meet, and in a violent cataclysm the newer, stronger, signal tears asunder much of the older one and in the friction of such the ideas fuse. Out of this confusion comes the idea "We will live out of town, out in the country, but we will bring all of our friends with it and they can live out there too, and along with us we will bring all the conveniences of town". So they do, and pretty soon, "out there" has grown and meets up with town, and becomes just another neighborhood. Some developments, further out back of beyond, will take longer to do so, and some may become towns of their own, but in the end it is all still the same.
Those of us who drive alone on the interstate, we anomalies, who have lived out there since before there was anywhere else to live, are simply left to watch in horror as people who do not belong come and fill up our world, surrounding us and smothering us with their way of life.

There are places in the world where most people do not belong. Most people, and that probably means most of you who will read this, do not belong way out back of beyond. You don’t understand it, and cannot truly appreciate it, and you certainly can’t conserve it.
Such people are the teeming, screaming, masses who choose to live in the city, who choose not to break free of the disease of the mind that lifestyle promotes, and they are mentally incapable of doing good for the places where they settle when they move out of the city.
There is no equality between those people and people like me, people who understand and appreciate the land, and want the space and freedom it affords and are willing to live without the supposed "necessities" of city living to have those things.
In the end those whose blood burns for freedom (in the bigger sense than just what that old song with the bits about the bombs bursting in air talks about), and those whose mind is polluted with the fundamental ideas of the current social consciousness are mortal enemies.
But it is a losing war. There are too many people, and despite the ravages of disease, disaster and human destruction they are never going to go away. People will keep consuming, and destroying, and in the end yes the planet, that ancient organism of smaller organisms chained together in symbiosis, that old god we barely understand, will sneeze use off like dust in a cosmic nostril, but before we reach that end what hope is there for the man of freedom and wide open spaces?
He is an antique, a creature of the past, a reverse Neanderthal too smart and too capable for the "good" of society as society has deemed.

Visions of Armageddon

Driving in to town from the ranch this morning I saw a strange set of contrails in the sky.
At first it looked like two planes, and then two become four, branching off into wildly different directions at first, and then after a mid air explosion four become two, and two disappeared into nothingness.
They were not planes.
As suddenly as the previous two had disappeared through that far away place in the sky where everything turns blue and is hidden, four more appeared out of that blue nothing to the East.
The missiles chased each other, to the west and then turning back to the east, and then back west again, before finally ending it - Either dropping out of the air, or blowing up each intercept having met with its target.

Most people have never seen this.
I've seen it several times, living not far (not in air space terms) from the Stallion Gate of White Sands Missile Range.
Most people wouldnt know, for sure, what the missiles were until they hit their neighborhood. Most people of my generation anyway.
Those from the cold war - They know all too well what missiles look like in the sky, or would look like should that day ever come.

They are beautiful, really. Most of my shots were taken from a moving pickup, camera held out the window. and couldnt capture it, but missiles catch the sun and glitter like jewels against the pure blue sky.
The big ones, the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles, would glitter like that too, streaking back into the atmosphere and arcing above the Earth, flying to their horrible, final, destination. And then, like God said, there would be light.

I am Pro-War (not any war - really not the current war - but the right war, absolutely), and Pro-Violence. When its necessary, its necessary - No two ways about it.
But I am absolutely anti-Nuclear. It is not a tool anyone needs to have. It is a tool I hope to never see used - but one that I am sure will be in my lifetime.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientist for the Manhattan Project, said as he witnessed the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Stallion Range, White Sands, New Mexico, "I have become death. Destroyer of worlds".

Information, Network Survival - Control

"The atom is the icon of the 20th century. The atom whirls alone. It is the metaphor for individuality. But the atom is the past. The symbol for the next century is the net. The net has no center, no orbits, no certainty. It is an indefinite web of causes. The net is the archetype displayed to represent all circuits, all intelligence, all interdependence, all things economic, social, or ecological, all communications, all democracy, all families, all large systems, almost all that we find interesting and important." Kevin Kelly

I've quoted this before - I think it may be my favorite quote about current events, because it is so true.
We live in a great, big, network. From the physically urban, to the suburban, more and more is tagged onto the network every day creating great digital, informational, communes.
We are surrounded by services, other people and connections (even undesired ones) all the time. Survival takes on a different meaning, for those who are not mindless sufferers of the modern condition, inside the web of network-urbanized humanity.
Being on the fringe of this, physically and digitally (I am a techno-neanderthal, with an understanding and an interest in all things modern and technological, but a five year old computer, no iPod, and a fairly personally private person who still machines things by hand on an old fashioned lathe without Computer Numerical Control), I like to watch like a fly on the wall. One of the things I have always found fascinating is the databases of arcane, controversial, knowledge that begin to amass in the midst of these environments.
People start collecting information about unusual things - spycraft and the intelligence trade, surveillence technology and defeating it, mental training, fighting methods, hacking, survival, chemistry, lock-picking, cryptography. There are websites all over the internet that are vast repositories for this sort of information, and there are even more people who practice it and have become adept at it, for no particular, good, reason. Its not their job, or related to a job they'd like to have - They have no darker mission, psychotic desire or zealous religious calling to be martyrs or super-soldiers - They are clerks, stockboys, brokers, photographers, artists, shoe salesmen, gas station attendants, computer repair technicians, writers, insurance salesmen, people from all walks of life, and all careers.
So why? Why do they do it - Why do they spend late hours collecting, sorting, posting, reading, practicing, training, these bizarre skillsets?
Why does a housewife sit in-front of her computer, night after night, with a set of Rytan's and a pile of old locks she found at the flea-market, working on one of the ones she hasnt defeated yet?
Why does an ear/nose/throat doctor on another side of the world sit up late during the night, every night he's not working, practicing lying in his bedroom mirror, or watching videos of people testifying in court, talking to the television news, trying to detect who's lying through subtle movements, and speech patterns?
Why does the computer technician for an elementary school in Bath, Michigan, spend too much time at work, reading material about intelligence operations and tradecraft skills, when he's never even been out of the United States?
In an ever maddening world, of chaos and destruction, of invasive technology, government and business, of hyper-connected agoraphobia and panoptic surveillance, some of us, desperately, need to control our environment.
We are no longer a generation with a future - not like our parents or grandparents had a future they could hopefully look forward too. The world is too volatile, full of rapid change and innovation for both the positive and the negative (as technology is rapidly innovating, so is warfare on the scale, and of the style, that Al Qaeda plays - thus far in the new century global terrorists have to be said to be among the greatest innovators we have seen. See the Global Guerrillas link at left), for any presupposed "future" to have the ground to stand on. We have to survive the now, to have a future - and essentially, with the high-risk, low survivability, state of the world now, we have no future to speak of. There is the future, as a natural thing, but not something we can predict or say anything concrete about. There is no future, things are changing to rapidly to to have a grand master plan - "We have only risk management. The spinning of any given moments scenarios" William Gibson.
In this environment we need to retain some ability to be in control and to move, silently, through the world without disturbing the sleeping giants, going about our business in control of our lives and destiny. That helps us manage the risks - a buffet-table of odd skillsets, outside of the convetional, tie your shoes, drive your car, type, push papers, sign checks, go home, take a bath, balance your checkbook skillsets.
The only control you can have is to take control of the things you arent supposed to. Even if its just in minor ways.