Almost everyone has a slightly different idea of what “life is precious” really means. Since everyone has a voice, we naturally take this to mean that life is precious because all of us are here, and we each have an equally valid opinion! The problem with this view is that it ignores the larger patterns of nature, in which we are participants but not “in control” as we like to assume we are.

Our entire society suffers from this illusion of control. When we think about it, life being precious means the exact opposite of catering to the individual ego. Life itself is precious, not our interpretation of what we want right now. Life is the bigger natural process, a pattern of nature more than a tangible thing, and if we don’t pay attention to it, it’ll slip right on past while we zone out.

Even twenty to thirty years ago, growing up in a suburb meant playing kickball with the neighborhood kids; parents didn’t even have to watch every move you made; before the busy-ness of full time school started a kid could wander into the woods and let his imagination run wild – with or without friends or supervision.  Those days are over in favor of two years of preschool so Mommy can get her hair done and “have a life.”

Think about a supermarket. Buy the raw ingredients that require someone to cook them, or just stock up on the convenient products of an industry conveniently based around the things cheapest to make, like grains and sugars? The vitality of nature is removed from a Twinkie, or from machines draining hormone-bloated cows or squeezing eggs out of debeaked GM chickens.

Yet it’s easy to space out and ignore all of this. There’s a nice cool breeze in the supermarket, and pleasantly vapid music, and people who are paid to smile when you greet them. So you pile all the crap in the cart, swipe the card and head off home — one more thing checked off the list! One fewer obligation! Now you’ve got time for yourself again, to do something you really want to do instead of have to do.

The alternative is not so easy. Instead of thinking about what you want, as if the world is an optional part of yourself, think about how you fit into the world. Think about the patterns of nature, which evolved over billions of years, and how you’d live harmoniously with them. If we look at the food industry, we can see how we’d do that.

Replace centralized food production with self-sufficient, smaller communities. Don’t eat peaches in the middle of winter; eat them in season, when they grow around you. Grow tomatoes in the summer and eat them in the summer. Then grow your squash, tubers, grains and fruit and store them for the winter. Squeeze yourself back into the patterns of nature.

In doing away with the idea of not having certain foods in certain seasons, we disengage ourselves from nature – and hence, reality.  We have used our technology to obliterate the patterns of nature  because it “seems like” the individual wants more convenience and more options, even if that individual has no idea what to do with all those options. But if you want peaches in winter, you’ll need a globalized economy and centralized food production.

Before we decided to replace reality with a fake reality, the summer solstice and winter solstice were celebrated precisely because the summer gave us bounty and the winter was a sign of prolonged sleep for most of the food that gives us life.  But everyone knew it was a cycle, and a few short months from winter we’d once again be celebrating longer, warmer days.

As part of local communities, we inherently understood how much the land could bear and kept our populations low. We didn’t need so many laws, because what should and should not be done was clearer. We followed the rhythm of the seasons, and were less manic about staying in touch or checking in with the news. We didn’t need to be told what was real or important — we lived it.

To people who were raised to ignore and even fear natural processes, these ideas are sacrilege. Following natural patterns means we need to give up the idea that we are in control. But if we ignore these natural patterns, we become a species that is more tumor or virus than animal, and our sense of detachment heightens as we wonder if we will ever find anything “real” again.

The reason why many people buy pets these days may be familiar to what Ted Kackzynski called the power process. In this it says every living organism needs to be in control of some niche of natural-reality for the feeling of happiness and fulfilment to ever accumulate in correlation with survival.

In modern society there is no intelligent response to our problems therefore this niche of a natural existence is taken away from us, and in response a feeling of emptiness within an isolated personal-reality consumes these simplistic consumers. Most individuals alive today are domestic-humans and most of us can barely comprehend the meaning of ‘community’ in a healthy traditional sense.

In this domestic ignorance and laziness toward real social satisfaction, the majority will immediately feel socially worthless and alienated from their own species. The most unintelligent of humans that are unable to form social consensus with other more intelligent beings will simply prefer to create domestic ‘clones’ from less powerful organisms and make them look all ‘cute’ and ‘cuddly’ – Like eating a social cake, full of saturated socialization and therefore, will make your ego obese, unhealthy, and almost certainly susceptible to social viruses and diseases.

It is the easiest solution that every moron can follow whilst increasing profit - Buy a pet to exhert your consumerist dominion over and feel like an all powerful deity amongst the crawling things upon the earth - all whilst major corporations race at the opportunity to pour over-socialized cummodities over the face of millions of fools, it also drains each individual of any actual wealth in a personal-reality orgy which is the core of consumer orientated business.

Our atrocious responsibility toward other life is simply because ‘all humans are equal’ apparently, and because ‘humans are not animals’ - animals are not human, therefore we are ‘superior’ to anything that is an ‘animal’ and can perform whatever we want on them regardless of how weird and perverted it may have become.. Freedom is tyranny against everything that is non-human and natural.

This power process shows a feeling of powerlessness against the domestic prison of urbanization and dystopic ‘progress’; it is a main driving force behind the vapid deforestation and increasing bulk of overpopulation, all drowning the landscape in a  flood of cultureless neon zombies. With this sharp growth of population, the number of domestic pets rises because many people’s lives are just useless and enslaving an animal to join them in an artificial prison is just one of the endless freedoms that make them ‘happy’ and supposedly ‘content’.

The domestication of animals allows humans to crudely breed some weird and embarassing little ‘loyal’ underlings. From the wild dog came so many undignified frankensteins of life – their very existence in life has no meaning, they do not have the freedom of natural selection or the freedom of a natural environment to evolve independently. Domestic animals lack the chance to ever evolve into something great, they are alienated and depressed from their ancestors exuberant ecosystems.

Just think - humanity continues to drag everything down with us in our freedom – we cage up everything we want. It’s our right to torture nature and no one can stop us. If I want to have ten thousand cats that end up drowning in the toilet then it’s my right!

But that’s not enough, lets have lots of pet fish aswell! Fish obviously have no brains, no soul and are pretty; therefore we can stick them in a little tank with a treasure trest and a disney castle with little bubbles coming out! OMG like, cool!

From observing other fish in their native environment, the trade off between a thriving stream stretching for miles swimming for dear life against the fascism of gravity into an ocean of near infinant expanse and constant physical and mental stimulation - is what they are capable of, even having the chance to evolve into great carnivorous predators, lords of seas.

But instead the monkeys got there first – monkey-people stole these fish and traded their challenging environment for a square box approximately 40cm cubed with a couple of mediocre consumer pieces of trash made to look all girly and pretty. 99% of domestication is simply cruel and treats these animals with no dignity or respect toward any present or potential future of independent evolution.

If we realise that life as a whole is sacred; not just little car driving monkeys - then we would have no need to needlessly consume other species. But if ever we need to capture other life – we also must realise that we are stealing its independence and therefore it loses all power over its own life. It is therefore stupid and completely selfish to ever restrict excessive amounts of life when it is solitary and independent towards us. There is absolutely no reason beyond survival to restrict life which is performing a natural niche in the ecosystem, living as its species should in the natural order of things in relation toward one another.

You don’t go on a masochist extermination for profit. Not for ‘exquisite cuisine’ for some calcified gluttons just so he can eat blubber meat and brag to his colleagues about how he can afford to eat at a top restaurant all to climb the social world of popularity.

Nevermind these animals needlessly killed – humans are special and they have rights, and now there are more than ever!

It’s just business for ‘exotic pets’ - for the clueless masses to go home everyday just to stare at goldilocks the suicidally depressed goldfish with their passively boring faces.

Nor to just wonder why a lonely parrot who plucks all its feathers out because it has been stolen from a vibrant jungle with its own thriving socialization and instead thrown in a cage with a little bell and a dusty mirror to stare and question the meaning of life for the rest of eternity.

With our ‘need’ of exotic pets from foreign continents, we inadvertently introduce alien species (yes humans can become foreign species too - immigration) and undermine ecosystems and social systems. If you research into hawaii and the conservation problem there, nearly all of the native species are endangered by iguanas, deer, rabbits and hundreds of other introduced animals that are not respective (in evolution) of the native ecosystem patterns and therefore destroy it, inadvertently. This situation happens anywhere when alien species coincide with one another after, perhaps, millions, even billions of years in isolation from one another.

Exact numbers are unknown, but scientists estimate that nationwide, cats kill hundreds of millions of birds, and more than a billion small mammals, such as rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks, each year. Cats kill common species such as Cardinal, Blue Jay, and House Wren, as well as rare and endangered species such as Piping Plover, Florida Scrub-Jay, and California Least Tern.

There are more than 77 million pet cats in the United States. A 1997 nationwide poll showed that only 35% are kept exclusively indoors, leaving the majority of owned cats free to kill birds and other wildlife at least some of the time. In addition, millions of stray and feral cats roam our cities, suburbs, farmlands and natural areas. Abandoned by their owners or lost (stray), or descendants of strays and living in the wild (feral), these cats are victims of human irresponsibility due to abandonment and failure to spay or neuter pets. No one knows how many homeless cats there are in the U.S., but estimates range from 60 to 100 million. These cats lead short, miserable lives. – American Bird Conservancy

Stupidity is simply cruel whatever way we look at it. Weak mental strength drones on for a taste of honey and so these pesty humans become so unsatisfied with their insecure little lives that they must be ‘all accepting’ and give every other moron the liberties to enslave and industriously kill or commodify every animal they please – regardless of the consequences (above).

To give what is called ‘people’ the right to domesticate any form of life whose noble attitude toward them is simply “I dunn fckin care u nob” who then kicks and beats his dog to death for consistently barking due to it being retardedly down-bred, is a pathetic attempt of reality-deniers to attain social satisfaction.

Liberals overlook these errors of man and label them simply as ‘human nature’ – Oh humans always do this, they say to themselves. But simply cannot join one and one together and generate an overal view of this situation. By giving them rights without responsibilities we are the very causes of this ‘human nature’ itself, a form of domestic ‘nature’ among humans.

Liberals; being socially defunct, seem to think we have no power over these things without realising they are the morons who released the peadophiles onto a world of naive children – because it’s their right! Other life cannot speak symbolically toward humans, therefore we assume nothing is wrong.

Even humans who are retarded get treated like this – If people wern’t such simplistic idiots then we would have the decency and wisdom to prevent them from suffering in the first place through a wise eugenics – and it’s called tradition.

What is the meaning of a life that is disabled, dysfunctional or progressive? A life which needs social ‘support’ just so it doesn’t choke to death on its own turd? It would be much better to give them some dignity, show them some respect - all living organisms need to face nature and all the challenges of life honestly without life-support cheat codes.

This is so that what they are made of can either survive the trials of the ancestors and live on in sanity and happiness, or be a retard eating its own turd and die thus leaving the land it occupies for something better, a karma to regenerate as something more powerful and dignified; that is the most compassionate in reflection to the whole of nature – anyone who opposes this has had too much social-cake and needs to get out and enjoy some exercise in natural-reality to observe how nature operates.

We are not to allow some mutated corpse of a living entity to live on social support by the discontents of society whose only use is to look after useless people. They then abuse them, rape them and drug them so they don’t unleash their retarded fist flinging poo frenzy on the clueless proles.

Life needs dignity, life needs power to follow its own destiny, to be challenged either to live or die. Not to have the potential of joy and empowerment prematurely stolen just so some fat ass can stick it in a corner of a house and ignore it for the rest of its impoverished life.

There is a clear change in the genetic and social characteristics between domestic species and wild species; and the same is with humans, those with minimal aggression and the tiniest ammount of alertness or perception – will predominate – a reason why chandala under-castes always explode in population numbers and demand more ‘rights’ regardless of essential responsibility.

There is a close correlation between brain changes and behavioral changes in domestic animals. It has been primarily gregarious wild species that have been domesticated. In captivity, social behavior patterns changed. Many social structures that have the effect of preserving the species in the wild lose their purpose in captivity. Indeed, in view of high-density living conditions, social structures are disadvantageous for contact of domestic animals among themselves and with humans. This can be demonstrated in wolves and domestic dogs. Wolves form packs and the behavior patterns of individual members vary widely. There are powerful, successful fighters whose alertness and powers of observation are quite poor. In other members, these capabilities are well-developed, but “fighting spirit,” power, and agility are lacking. The cooperation of the differently skilled animals is important for successful predation by the pack. In domestic dogs, animals with minimal aggressiveness and alertness predominate.
Domestic Mammals and Behavior

For human life to escape this stupidity and attain natural empowerment, it is best done through working together on the best of our strengths and not by the fake social ‘support’ through ‘equality and diversity’ of the insecure humanists.

By being reasonable we can achieve consensus and communities and then the majority of people left alive woulden’t need pets, equality and facebook to make us feel socially satisfied.

An ad for $13.99 toilet plungers just blends in to the optical background ambience of 30 other ads within our field of view. As a result, we never distinguish Pete’s plungers from Margaret’s $8.99 margarita mix.

It’s all a wall of badly contrasting, incoherent optical ambience we reflexively shove to the back burner of our immediate awareness. If you regularly travel to non-rural places for business or as a consumer, or regularly use electronic media, you already know what I’m driving at.

Outdoor advertising has experienced such a phenomenal growth that some downtown cores resemble the not-so-far-fetched city blocks out of the film Blade Runner. At the sides of major highways, in washrooms and even permanently etched into skin, advertisers and their agencies are on a constant lookout for innovative, and sometimes shocking, ways to get their message to you.

“The ad agencies keep fighting against each other, making more and more and larger and larger ads,” Dave Meslin of the Toronto Public Space Committee says. “But no one is buying.”

corporateknights

People seem to appreciate the coherent information they planned to tune into. They shun irritating interruptions and confusing sensory clutter. The former aids our pleasure or survival. The latter just gets in the way.

And even though the audience for broadcast radio is actually growing, stations cannot seem to increase their revenue.

Radio advertising was down 10 percent last month from October 2007, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau, the 18th consecutive month of declines.

nytimes

Most of us understand the idea of noise pollution. Optical pollution is no different. It’s probably worse. If we are primarily visual creatures as natural senses go, trashing our visual environment demands attention as well.

Marketing oversaturation along with other overt forms of modern blight heightens our antipathy reactions to our own shared public spaces. At least some segment of the population who are visually oriented with discernment in taste will avoid such spaces, leaving those less perceptive and careless about their surroundings as regulars.

Which segment likely has money to spend and which is likely lower class?

Retreating from one failing venue to the next, the mindless corporate marketing herd stampedes to another niche, oversaturates it, devaluing its time and space as a data distribution node.

One newspaper after another is going out of business across the United States, and the ad revenues of traditional print media, even of highly respected magazines, is declining. The ultimate failure of broadcast media advertising is likewise becoming clear.

Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him.

techcrunch

When done right, one sign can help us orient our bearings or offer helpful advice. But twelve signs are a nuisance when they point us in twenty directions, none of which lead to where we had planned to go.

If we started as hunter-gatherers, wouldn’t it make sense to let us mostly forage on our own for what we seek? Advertisement overkill hits us with the opposite: our products probably aren’t what you wanted, so waste your limited time to let us tell you where you can find them.

Depressing.

Those living in areas that were 10 percent green in a one kilometer radius had an anxiety disorder rate of 26 per 1,000. In contrast, those with 90 percent of the area green within a one kilometer radius had an anxiety disorder rate of only 18 per 1,000. Likewise, those living in the 10 percent green zone had a depression rate of 32 per 1,000, while those in the 90 percent green zone had a rate of 24 per 1,000.

This translated into a 21 percent lower risk of depression. The effect was strongest among children under the age of 12.

naturalnews

Stocks continued to move higher and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a new 2009 intraday high Monday, extending a strong run fueled by the flow of easy money to support global economic recovery.

The Dow was recently up 176 points, or 1.7%, to 10199.43. The measure is on pace for a fourth straight daily gain and a new closing high for the year.

wsj

We have about as large a population as ever, but millions have been virtually exiled from the economy by way of job loss, to expired unemployment compensation, on down to complete destitute homelessness.

They may remain consumers to some extent, but to be sure, they are no longer producers. Let’s not count the few million self-exiles incarcerated, institutionalized, and the several who have dropped out of the system entirely to rough it in the wilderness.

So far we have learned the market is, or was at the time up, a likely hiccup, but that Obama administration spending is also up variously for corporate and public welfare. This is the cause of the stock market hiccup. The number of productive working people doesn’t appear to be climbing, so it is of questionable value to point to rising stocks for one given reporting period:

The jobless rate rocketed to 10.2 percent in October, the highest since early 1983, dealing a psychological blow to Americans as they prepare holiday shopping lists. It was another worse-than-expected report casting a shadow over the struggling recovery.

yahoo

With unemployment across the board, labor migration from the southern border has taken its own losses for about a year now:

According to informal surveys by the Mexican consulate in Dallas, most of those wanting to return to Mexico cite the sudden scarcity of jobs, fear of deportation and uncertainty about obtaining legal resident status any time soon.

In the last few years, and particularly the last few months, Mr. Sánchez struggled to find work. His earnings dwindled as his children grew up and their needs multiplied.

“People like me, if you don’t work one day, you worry about how to feed your family the next day,” he said. “We as immigrant workers never have stability, even if the economy is doing well. Imagine how things are now.”

dallasnews

Looking back to the Clinton administration, we can recall the growth of the information technology sector, the IT bubble, which would bust soon after Bush took office. When the bubble was inflating, demand for trained IT people was up.

Twelve years ago, ordinary Americans who were unskilled or underskilled labor at the time found ways to get certifications like the commonplace MCSE or even a technical degree. Many of them went on to make a decent living in IT for a few years until the tech bubble burst and mass layoffs took place under the first Bush term.

The Clinton IT bubble created a demand for new unskilled laborers to flip burgers, house clean, mow lawns, hammer trusses, lay up drywall, or pour concrete. We added millions of immigrants to fill this gap and they brought families. So for several years, we operated with a larger population than ever, mostly employed and consuming.

But then there was another bubble bust with the housing collapse, an end to many new construction proposals and the banks seizing up new credit for growth capital. Now, we have some low wage laborers making their exit, the unemployed masses, the broken homeless, the long term institutionalized, and a handful of voluntary society dropouts.

That’s less productive people operating in the economy and less consumerism. Yet, if you are one of the remaining productive consumers, life goes on much as before, except perhaps with a bit less crowding in some places, less traffic in other places, and a little more quiet at times.

Does America have an ideally stable optimum population density that is similar in ways, and possibly parallels ecological carrying capacity?

One of the older online domains takes us in for a closer look:

“In 1990 the nonrenewable resources remaining in the ground would have lasted 110 years at the 1990 consumption rates. No serious resource limits were in evidence. But by 2020 the remaining resources constituted only a 30-year supply. Why did this shortage arise so fast? Because exponential growth increases consumption and lowers resources.

So, real progress is found in the maintenance of an equilibrium factoring tech level or affluence, population numbers and the carrying capacity of our living space, which includes to lesser extents, foreign trade with the carrying capacity of places abroad.

Progress is evidently not found, as popular notions would have it, in perpetual growth.

“As both food and nonrenewable resources become harder to obtain in this simulated world, capital is diverted to producing more of them. That leaves less output to be invested in basic capital growth.

dieoff

More than a third of American youth of military age are unfit for service, mainly because they are too fat or sickly, the Army Times reports, quoting the latest Pentagon figures.

Most of the rest are too dumb or have used too many drugs to qualify, the study shows.

The report says 35% of the 31 million Americans aged 17 to 24 are unqualified because of physical and medical issues.

usatoday

Sixty years of commercial life replacing culture, a ban on “unfair” eugenics, tolerance, rampant mass consumerism, and constant foreign wars killing off our best young people for the purpose of spreading this way of life brought us to this point.

Private companies and individuals alike buy into needless luxuries. This is in part due to ordinance requirements in some locales.

In other cases, like the bleaching-white of our paper products, it is a shallow expectation forced on us from our modern progress social reality.

The US landscaping services industry includes over 70,000 companies with combined annual revenue of $40 billion. Large companies include the TruGreen Landcare division of ServiceMaster, The Davey Tree Expert Company, The Brickman Group, and Asplundh Tree Expert. The vast majority of companies are small with annual revenue less than $2 million. The industry is highly fragmented: the top 50 companies hold only 15 percent of the market.

firstresearch

The sterilization of formerly biodiverse spaces on private property combined with chemical contamination are side effects of having lawns.

Lawn Culture, or considering the loss of local biodiversity, lawn monoculture, like Automobile Culture, is one of those destructive modern design defects that has been mass marketed to us for decades.

As defects, these artificial modern cultures cause errors that while benefitting a company or a consumer only in the most selfish way, in exchange tax the whole for the long term.

Not many residents understand that lawn fertilizer can cause water quality problems – overall less than one fourth of residents rated it as a water quality concern (Syferd, 1995 and Assing, 1994), although ratings were as high as 60% for residents that lived adjacent to lakes (Morris and Traxler, 1996 and MCSR, 1997). Interestingly, in one Minnesota survey, only 21% of homeowners felt their own lawn contributed to water quality problems, while over twice as many felt their neighbor’s lawn did (MCSR, 1997).

stormwatercenter

After pollution cleanup, medical costs from toxins, and maintenance like water treatment, this is both a form of hidden capitalist welfare and a form of hidden individual pleasure welfare.

While we cling to such needless modern luxuries, the invisible costs stay with us for the long haul.

They’re like a prosperity sink in that when the economy is good, people buy into goodies like brand new cars, driving more miles, landscaping and lawn chemical services more, which of course applies the invisible costs against us in the background in a roughly zero-sum game for civilization overall.

UN agencies have said reduced or ended lawnmowing and treecutting will slow down global heating. The 1990′s EPA published legal briefs available without cost to those fighting compulsory mowing ordinances. Highway departments have found that bushes are better than mowed median strips.

phillyimc

The growing proliferation of anthropogenic biomes on a large scale has already been addressed here. So has the utter destructiveness of this activity, even as it is marketed to us, in a mindless display of contradictions, on no less than utilitarian and progressive grounds.

Anthropogenic biomes describe globally-significant ecological patterns within the terrestrial biosphere caused by sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems, including agriculture, urbanization, forestry and other land uses. Conventional biomes, such as tropical rainforests or grasslands, are based on global vegetation patterns related to climate. Now that humans have fundamentally altered global patterns of ecosystem form, process, and biodiversity, anthropogenic biomes provide a contemporary view of the terrestrial biosphere in its human-altered form.

eoearth

Since mass marketing is practically a century-old science by now and another of the modern pillars is individual liberty combined with the distributed hidden cost of damage of such freedoms, we can’t reasonably expect decades of mere public environmental educating to outcompete these two forces.

Nevertheless, a tiny minority will always be around to calmly dissent against the liberated democratic masses who like a caged tribe of monkeys are as a whole easily manipulated  by using consumer marketing combined with their own natural apathy and ignorance.

In the context of landscaping, three of the most significant ways to reduce environmental pollution are by cutting back on the use of chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers.

about

The negative method, doing without, is only half the possibility for lawn alternatives. Another possibility is to replace these high maintenance, sterile lawns with the positive actions of natural local flora and fauna.

After all, they’re prettier and cost us much less both visibly and invisibly than paying for a host of economic and environmental parasites we call lawn services and chemical treatments.

Landscaping with native wildflowers and grasses improves the environment. Natural landscaping brings a taste of wilderness to urban, suburban, and corporate settings by attracting a variety of birds, butterflies and other animals. Once established, native plants do not need fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides or watering, thus benefiting the environment and reducing maintenance costs. Gardeners and admirers enjoy the variety of colors, shapes, and seasonal beauty of these plants.

epa

Is it any surprise, then, that in today’s economic climate, despite all the government is doing to, as they say, help people, that fraud only increases?

So, here’s the scam:

1. Get behind in your bills, so you can prove that you can’t keep the house that has depreciated below to loan amount.

2. Make a case for a short sale with your lender.

3. Go through the motions of selling on the open market with a crooked agent. Have the agent send only the low Offer of your confederate to the lender.

4. Once you sell to your not-arm’s-length partner, rent it back from him/her or buy it back at a later date.

(I have, in the past, run into agents who don’t present Offers. But, I can’t prove it is happening now, or for this reason, based on my experience in the marketplace. I am experiencing the inability to see properties, which may be a symptom of the same disease.)

[+]|Boston Real Estate Now blog

People see short sales and foreclosures as a way out of a mortgage obligation they signed up for when things were good. Instead of realizing that the mortgage is the first thing one must pay for each month, they continued to buy toys and rack up debt for things like car payments. Since the idea of entitlement tells these leeches that whatever they happen to “own” at the moment is theirs, forget letting these toys go or just giving them back to the bank to help cancel that discretionary debt. They’d rather play around with the system ($8,000 down payment courtesy of the government, anyone?) to do crooked buy and leaseback deals.

This is loosely related to the idea in economics known as moral hazard. Where there’s a way for someone to make profits or avoid losses through loopholes (or even fraud), it happens, just like people will act differently (read: not follow the rules) if there’s no risk involved for not following the rules. This is exactly why most economists – not the policymakers in Washington, D.C. who are driven entirely by politics, but the academics – would never support most of the recent transition from capitalist republic to nanny-state. The most government loopholes you create for parasites to work the system, the more you’re subsidizing parasitic activity instead of actually helping.

This is the result of shelling out eight thousand dollars to anyone who wants to buy a home, and then injecting banks with billions in cash to keep credit flowing while also allowing the banks to be less conservative with short sales and foreclosures. To blanket the economy with funny money only gives people ideas (How do I get mine??).

Sane people choose to live a sustainable lifestyle and wait until they’re sure they can afford a house regardless of who is fronting the cash. One can only hope the idea of saving gets back in vogue as funds dry up and the government runs out of stopgap solutions.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake:
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble;
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

From William Shakespeare’s
Macbeth Act IV, Scene I

In William Shakespeare’s England, the practice of witchcraft was already ancient. The celebration of nature—the worship of earth, sky, and the changing seasons—is humankind’s oldest faith.

NG

Like the Christianized Easter and Christmas festivals, Halloween was an important time that served a purpose.

The Celts believed that at the time of Samhain, more so than any other time of the year, the ghosts of the dead were able to mingle with the living, because at Samhain the souls of those who had died during the year traveled into the otherworld. People gathered to sacrifice animals, fruits, and vegetables. They also lit bonfires in honor of the dead, to aid them on their journey, and to keep them away from the living.

Moving on as a community event from grieving over deceased loved ones so people could get back to their lives seems like a healthy practice.

The pragmatic Pope Gregory:

As a result of their efforts to wipe out “pagan” holidays, such as Samhain, the Christians succeeded in effecting major transformations in it. In 601 A.D. Pope Gregory the First issued a now famous edict to his missionaries concerning the native beliefs and customs of the peoples he hoped to convert. Rather than try to obliterate native peoples’ customs and beliefs, the pope instructed his missionaries to use them: if a group of people worshipped a tree, rather than cut it down, he advised them to consecrate it to Christ and allow its continued worship.

about

Fast forward to now. You buy the kid another plastic mask, plastic hatchet and plastic bucket and drag her around begging processed sugar treats from everyone. What good is this mindless, empty routine?

Processed sugars and carbohydrates, which turn into sugar, cause a rise in the insulin level of the blood. This also raises the endorphins level, a natural mood upper in the brain. These sugars causes the body to have a chemical high, mentally, which results in a lift in mood. .

Continuous large doses of sugar and/or carbohydrates, overtime, usually cause the brain’s endorphins sites to slow production or close sites to regulate the amount of endorphins in the brain. When the body cuts back on endorphin production it reduces the amount of endorphins available in the body at any given time. The lack of enough endorphin in the brain causes slight to deep depression.

To maintain a normal level of endorphins in the brain the individual must eat more sugar and/or carbohydrates to get out of depression and maintain a normal mood level. This causes a vicious cycle of addiction, physiologically (Nay, 1996). This is also directly comparable to the cycle that is developed after excessive endorphins are released into the body from the use of alcohol.

three-peaks

Candy-free Halloween

Halloween is often on a work night so it can be a total hassle to take kids around door to door to pester the neighbors for the junk food they’ve been socially pressured to hand out.

Tip: natural food and home cooking is appropriate for every day of the year. Decent recipes for Halloween and Autumn season are easy to find and they don’t consist of 130% processed sugar with food coloring added for variety.

Why not start locally and change this ancient tradition from pure consumerism to festive, reverent and awe for the spiritual side of living?

As an alternative that is more traditional, yet oddly enough, less likely to conflict with many religious beliefs, simply spend some time in remembrance for a loved one who has recently passed on and ignore the trick-or-treaters.

Plastic-free Halloween

Try elegant thematic gatherings and fairly authentic with all things therein instead of always cheap, always plastic, always some random mix. Although pumpkins are a native New World gourd, they’re natural and are now a part of the festival, so they’re in.

Ceramic and steel objects like skull candle holders, medieval weapons and jewelry are decorations that last for generations rather than a few years until they deteriorate as plastics to be discarded.

Candles and Autumn type incenses, oils, and even blazing torches are another excellent fit.

Costumes, if desired, also give us another junk plastics or authentic natural materials option.

Gothic, Celtic, Greek or other folk period theme styled gatherings (think Renaissance Faire but earlier in history) can shame the neighbor’s hodgepodge cowboys, pimps, pirates and accident victim mishmash.

Applying some standards for quality or authenticity in our lives can get us around passive Green Halloween type reactions and its oblivious consumerism counterpart and make for much more charming, non-destructive life experiences.

Opposing this new idea is the old fun-as-the-goal of modern living, but only when it is cheap and disposable. While we don’t need to lose fun-having, it is best had as a side effect of capturing meaning in our lives without leaving destruction in our wake.

In a speech at the 1991 Bilderberg Convention, Rockefeller stated “we are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty on an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

examiner

What puts people like this in power?

1. Athletic ability
2. Good looks
3. Intelligence
4. Money
5. Untarnished character

If you answer money, you’re right. Now assuming such people aren’t professional safe crackers centering their operations around bank heists, how do they amass such fortunes?

Simply put, the answer is hundreds of millions of consumers spending themselves into debt. There isn’t another consistent source of sustainment for globalist wealth. It is only the earnings of ordinary people in all their great numbers, converted into consumer spending.

If this process continues–if consumers get their debts down to reasonable levels–it will eventually make the country’s primary economic engine, shoppers, stronger and more sustainable.

business

It’s fair to say that most of last Friday’s G20 protesters, marching in downtown Pittsburg where the latest summit was held, are themselves corporate consumers. That’s right, they fuel the very engine of unfair effects of globalization against which they protest.

The protests are expected to continue indefinitely, which is another way of saying, mass protest is not expected to change anything, but you’re perfectly free to do so.

John Kirton, director of the G20 Research Group at the University of Toronto, said he expects protests to remain a fixture at summits and that he considers them a valuable part of democracy.

Maybe a change in perspective and behaviour is needed. If international capitalism is a problem, why run around in the streets like angry primates throwing monkey poo at it?

Protesters on Friday held up signs such as “We Say No To Corporate Greed,” and “G20 = Death by Capitalism” and chanted “Hey hey ho ho, corporate welfare has to go.”

reuters

The protest strategy is now predictable like clockwork, arriving any time and any place that globalists announce to the public they are gathering. The angry crowd is expected and as its history shows, impotent in its goals other than getting itself injured and destroying property.

Luckily, there are some others who have come up with some new ideas. Some of these are replacement economics operating in parallel under the larger capitalist dominion.

Others call for mass non-participation in order to “starve the beast” of its wealth and power. Still others propose spawning new societies under different rules in the hopes these succeed, inspire others around the world, and overtake the old order.

There are three main choices:

• Accept the world as it is
• Get upset at the world and show one’s own impotence
• Undertake the difficult task of working on a superior replacement

Ideas:
Alternative Local Economy
Buy Nothing Christmas
Buy Nothing Day
Culture Jamming
Micro Communities
National Day of Slayer
Pan-Nationalism
Post-Globalism
Relocalization
TV Turnoff

It is interesting to note that both sides often claim the other is a shill for some hidden benefactor.

The non-human-causes folks claim the other side is trying to burden us with a useless carbon tax. The human causes folks believe their opponents are protecting a wealthy old industrial pollution regime.

In our complex modern world, when one item is singled out for so much attention, it is prudent to look for what we are missing, if we are being led astray, and why.

A coalition of more than 500 international companies on Tuesday urged rich countries to commit to “immediate and deep” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions at U.N. climate talks to help combat global warming.

The group of some of the world’s biggest energy companies, retailers and manufacturers said a failure to agree a strong new climate deal at U.N. talks in Copenhagen in December would erode confidence and cut investment in low-carbon technology.

reuters

If business interests are consistently true to any principle, it is that of self-interest and profit. Industry sees climate change as an opportunity to unload more consumer products on us, but with a green label.

This has two effects. At the social reality level, industry and consumer adopt the illusion that green consumerism benefits the environment. At the reality-as-it-is level, people and industries continue to crowd out the planet’s ecosystems like always.

Green consumerism is more of the same economic and population growth that brings us right back to where we began. Population growth amplifies consumer demand that shoves aside the natural world, replacing it with an anthrogenic landscape for system management, production centers and housing.

Carbon taxes are also questionable because they would hinder profit on the business side and consumption on the public side. Political actors offering such a solution would find themselves constantly at adds with both business and the voting public, a losing proposition.

Worse, the rather weak carbon tax proposal does not curb the endless expansion of anthrogenic landscapes or the growth of all the non-greenhouse gas pollutants.

The team’s new study is the first to show that degrading plastics are leaching potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A into the seas, possibly threatening ocean animals, and us.

Scientists had previously thought plastics broke down only at very high temperatures and over hundreds of years.

The researchers behind a new study, however, found that plastic breaks down at cooler temperatures than expected, and within a year of the trash hitting the water.

The Japan-based team collected samples in waters from the U.S., Europe, India, Japan, and elsewhere, lead researcher Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist with the College of Pharmacy at Nihon University in Japan, said via email.

All the water samples were found to contain derivatives of polystyrene, a common plastic used in disposable cutlery, Styrofoam, and DVD cases, among other things, said Saido, who presented the findings at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C., today.

Plastic, he said, should be considered a new source of chemical pollution in the ocean.

NG

In our world of nations, the U.S. alone has surpassed 300 million people. Virtually every American wants to live a 21st Century lifestyle with the lights on all day, 4-5 televisions, computers and gaming consoles buzzing away, refrigerators, washers and dryers humming, etc.

That means each American has an electrical power demand. Without digging up the exact numbers, some of that demand requires coal, a resource we can harvest cheaply, locally, so it doesn’t require a huge, costly military presence abroad to protect.

So far, so good, until we review the practice of harvesting this resource. We don’t even need to get into the global warming and other air pollutant aspects of coal burning emissions.

The Powell and Clinch rivers are home to 16 species of rare fish and one of the world’s richest concentrations of freshwater mussels. The number of identified mussel species has dwindled from 60 to about 40, with 26 of those listed by the Conservancy as globally rare.

You’d think such a special ecosystem would be cherished and protected, but it isn’t. Like much of this area of southern Appalachia, Black Mountain contains buried treasure: black gold, also known as coal.

The mountain is owned by coal companies, and to get the coal out as quickly and cheaply as possible, they scrape off the forests and blast off the sides and tops of the mountains, dumping rubble, or “spoil,” in the surrounding coves and hollows.

appvoices

The daily demand for coal for energy use, multiplied by 300 million and rising consumers are mostly voters who the politicians had better keep feeling pampered. A light weight, uneducated estimate of one pound of coal per person per day gives us a handle.

Over five years, about 275 million tons of coal, using this gentle estimate, are extracted and burnt to keep the power generators spinning and Americans happily blogging about their daily personal drama and playing the latest console games all day.

The significant factor at work, the one that we do not have a handle on because to do so is to oppress people freedoms, is population numbers. We can educate, and a few people will turn a light off once in a while if they think of it and if doing so isn’t inconvenient.

If destroying the chemistry of the oceans and chopping mountains in half aren’t keeping 300 million+ oblivious brats entertained enough, what about the flattening of entire woodlands?

This is believed to be the first time logging has been challenged on the grounds that it will damage the climate. It comes at a time when there are signs that the Forest Wars may be once again heating up in California.

The Board of Forestry is under attack from environmentalists and fishing groups for seeking to weaken logging rules that were enacted a decade ago to protect Coho salmon and other at risk salmon. Those rules only apply to watersheds where Coho and other at risk salmonids spawn and rear. The logging rules were themselves deemed inadequate to protect Coho by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

hcn

So now we come back around to climate change. The forests, although less so than the oceans, are carbon absorption sinks as well. But, that isn’t their only role is it?

The ecology consists of layers of composite, interdependent systems, none of which play one single role. Ravage one aspect of the ecology and the side effects strain innumerable other parts.

Nonetheless, we come back to the point of our topic today. Devastate multiple parts through clear cutting, plastics dumping and mountain chopping, and so many other ways and the life support system of the planet itself is eventually sabotaged.

People and their demands are the saboteurs, not one detached aspect of a complex system called global warming. Perhaps it is more convenient for the masses to simply spend seven dollars on a mercury light bulb, making the manufacturer, distributor and retailer happy for their trouble.

Are popular, soft solutions like green consumer products or a few cents of carbon taxes actually effective or do they serve only as illusion reinforcement concealing the global expansion of a sterile human monoculture?