Monthly Archives: September 2015

Fragile!

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80%+                                                                                15%             1-5%

2015-09-09 17.23.53

Human civilization is, when you look closely, extremely fragile. The above graphic represents all of humanity divided into three groups. This graphic is not a representation of wealth. The correlation between the knowledge and skills depicted here and wealth is not strong.

The smallest circle on the right represents the portion of humanity that is highly trained, knowledgeable and substantially understands the science, technology and ideas defining, underlying, and driving civilization. These are the scientists, thinkers, and others who imagine, create, and transform their ideas into reality.

The second group representing about 15% is the portion of humanity who possess knowledge and understanding of the ideas and creations of the first group in general ways and are key in helping keep everything working. This group is the bulk of the educated elite in society, those responsible for providing the organizational and support skills vital to keeping everything working and growing. They understand the ideas and innovations of the first group and there implications, and are key in the smooth functioning and advancing of human civilization.

The 80% of humanity in the third group represent the muscle of society that provides the labor and support to create the wealth we all take for granted and benefit. But while this group is vital to the stability of society, they are, on the whole, less educated and have little or no understanding of the science and ideas that underlie the comforts, the technology, and virtually everything they take for granted and depend upon for making all our lives comfortable. This statement is not intended to be insulting or demeaning, merely a reality.

The vast majority that comprise this group, represent most of us. We know how to turn something on or off. We know how to use the device or tool, but have little understanding how or why it works or how to build one. Most of us really don’t care, we only want it to perform the task and do the job it is designed to do and we want done. We can change the battery and if it fails we can buy a new one, but beyond that we are virtually helpless.

The darker side of this reality is most of us go about our lives doing the work and enjoying the use of the technology and tools available to us while holding on to the narrow beliefs, superstitions and ignorance that have been passed down to us.

It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out if something happens to the 5% who think and create, our civilization is in deep trouble. In fact we have history to help us understand what will happen. We need look only to the fall of Rome and the nearly 1000 years of ignorance and darkness that followed.

In 537-538 A.D. Rome was under siege by an Ostrogoth army, but Rome was too large for the Goths to encircle completely so they blockaded the city’s entrances to starve them out and then blocked the aqueducts that provided Rome’s water. Without water the city couldn’t support its large population of almost a million people. Since no one remained with the skills necessary to repair these aqueducts once the siege was lifted, the people had no choice but to abandon the city. Rome’s population quickly dwindled to around 10,000.

In the past few months we have witnessed ISIS destroying the irreplaceable artifacts and archaeological treasures of Syria and Iraq. Less than two years ago a fanatical group gained control of Timbuktu and set its treasured library filled with priceless manuscripts ablaze. The difference between the space age and the Stone Age is a slim and very vulnerable veneer of knowledge and understanding of relatively few people. It illustrates rather dramatically our failure to transmit our values; knowledge and understanding to the widest possible audience in our country and to the rest of humanity occupying this planet we share. Each day we live on hope-the hope an asteroid or comet won’t hit the earth, the hope a pandemic of some kind won’t wipe out most humanity, doing to us what Europeans did to Native Americans when they arrived in the Americas 500 years ago. We live in denial of the evidence our science has provided. We live in denial of the ideals and values that the tests of time and human experience have provided us.

Human culture and civilization is extremely fragile and held together with not much more than a wish and a hope, but we have it within our means to protect, copy, duplicate and protect all we have learned and thereby create an insurance policy against planetary catastrophe whatever form it might take. We now have the knowledge, skills, expertise, devices and means to make this a reality. The digitization of knowledge is already underway. Just as humanity has built seed banks in various places on the earth, we can create multiple depositories of human knowledge and achievement. We owe this to our predecessors and our descendants. This is one project that is a benefit to all human beings and all life on this earth we call home.

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Graphic: author’s own.

The Gathering Darkness

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Do you remember the popular late 70s early 80s TV series –The Six Million Dollar Man staring Lee Majors that opened with the words “We can remake him. We can make him better?” The premise was the Majors character had been injured beyond recognition, but with the aid of technology could be remade into a stronger more powerful version of himself.

This was science fiction and we liked it. It allowed us to lose ourselves in a fanciful “what if.” But we should have paid more attention and given more thought to where this new technology was leading us. While the idea expressed in the opening of the show, “We can remake him” applied to a man, what we missed was what corporate America was already beginning to recognize was possible for remaking not only our society, but remaking us. What followed was the unleashing of an avalanche of technology and a Tsunami of information that has overwhelmed, buried and threatens to drown us in details while a few oligarchs and corporatists twist the meaning of America into something they control and manipulate for their own ends and to satisfy their own greed.

In the United States the top 1% control 42% of the wealth. The top 5% control 69% of the wealth; the top 10% control 80%, and the top 20% control 93% of America’s wealth. The ratio of CEO pay to the average worker in the U.S. is at an unbelievable 475:1! CEO compensation in no other nation on the planet is remotely close to the U.S. Compared to some of our biggest competitors (Japan 11:1, Germany 12:1, Canada 20:1, Britain 22:1) the scale is mind-boggling. It is no wonder then our two so-called political parties together represent only the top 20%. In the presidential election campaign in 2012 neither party bothered to more than mention the plight of working class America. They mentioned the middle class occasionally, but neither paid attention to the 80% of us who make the lives of wealth and luxury enjoyed by so few possible through our work and consumption.

Financial Wealth Distribution, 2007

The poor have little income and so don’t figure into the calculus of our electoral system other than the necessity of trying to manipulate their voting habits on Election Day. Poor and minority voters are being suppressed and denied their right to vote. Control of the electoral process begins with control over who votes. Our country is being made over. Our belief systems are being slowly altered and twisted toward acceptance of the new order. We are being homogenized and are expected to conform. We can be different as long as we all fit in. The principal propaganda organs, the corporate news, are selective in their coverage of events. Presentation is carefully managed to give us the approved picture. Managed news is our new reality. No one “thinks” until the thought shapers on talk radio and TV give their blessing to the new orthodoxy. The manufacture of consent that began on Madison Avenue during World War I has fully matured. We think what we are told to think, and we do what we are told.

Those in the new ruling class use the tried and true methods of every past tyranny to perfection. Fear is the principle weapon. It is easy. It is convenient, and it is effective. We live our lives under constant media bombardment and assault telling us to be afraid of anything or anyone different, the weather, the sky, our shadows, and ourselves. It works. We are.

*Graph: Distribution of Financial Wealth in the U.S. 2007 appearing in Inequality of wealth and income helped cause our current economic problems by Nancy Abrams & Joel Primack, Sept. 11, 2011. blog,sfgate.com

 

Terrorist or jus’ havin’ fun – It’s all a matter of perspective

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A few days following the 4th of July 2013 Bill O’Malley piloted his dad’s pontoon on a popular Northern Indiana lake while his kids along with all the grandkids went tubing. When one child fell off Bill circled around with the pontoon to pick him up. As he brought the boat around and into position he spied a white ball bobbing on the water. When he retrieved it he discovered it wasn’t a ball at all, but a homemade explosive. A plastic ball 6-8” in circumference had been cut in half, filled with gunpowder or TNT, heat sealed together and then taped. It had a hole drilled and a wick inserted in the top. Apparently the perpetrator(s) had lit the device and thrown it in the lake during or after the recently held holiday fireworks display, but it malfunctioned or the water extinguished it, and they left it to float on the busy lake filled with families and children during the biggest and busiest holiday of the summer.

Bill brought the device back and showed it to his dad. Recognizing what it was and the possible danger it represented they decided it best to put it someplace safe until after the busy weekend and everyone had gone home before placing it in the garbage. Bill put the device high above a window in the boathouse located beneath the large deck that faces the lake at the front of their cottage. Besides being the storage for boat motors and equipment it also has a refrigerator for drinks, snacks and other things that kept children and adults going in and out all weekend.

By Monday morning everyone had gone home and Bill’s dad, George, forgot about the device, and was in the garage nearby repairing a motor. At the same moment his wife, Roxie, was in the cottage working on a computer when an explosion knocked her off her chair. Running down the steps and to the back of the house Roxie didn’t see George and assumed he had been in the boathouse when the explosion occurred. In a panic she frantically yelled for neighbors to call 9-1-1.

The O’Malley’s boathouse has doors at both ends. Luckily those doors at that moment were open allowing the explosion to vent outward. Still it was powerful enough to blow one wall out including the door and sending fascia boards, vinyl siding and other debris almost 100 feet into the neighbors yard. Fortunately the blast did not cause a fire and since it vented out, it didn’t cause the three or more 5-gallon petro cans stored in the boathouse to ignite and explode with it. More importantly, there were no children playing outside.

It took the all-volunteer emergency services fire and EMS 20 minutes to answer the call, coming from a nearby lake community a few miles away. Being volunteers and amateurs they had no expertise in these matters, couldn’t determine a source and didn’t stick around to conduct an investigation.

After they left George finally remembered the device that Bill had put above the window for safekeeping. That turned out to be the source of the explosion. He and Roxie then went carefully over the interior of the boathouse (they had to clean up the debris) and found several pieces of what had been the plastic ball that contained the explosives.

George presumes this was a homemade fireworks device that someone carelessly left in the lake after it failed to explode. He is more generous than I am. Such a device raises a number of serious questions concerning who, what, where, when and why? Was this a homemade fireworks or a prototype? This area is riddled with people with extreme views. Militia ideas and extremist views are popular in this part of rural Indiana. For whatever reason the incident was never, to my knowledge, reported to any local police agency. The attitude and belief is that whoever the responsible individuals were, they were just some guys trying to have a bit of fun.

The ease in being able to make such a device suggests all the propaganda we are fed by government and media about “terrorism” is just that. Propaganda. It’s a false flag. We say we are worried about terrorists and see government intrude in every area of our lives, shred the Bill of Rights, spy on everything we do and yet we make no move to remove an obvious and openly available source for acquiring explosives for building weapons-FIREWORKS!

Do you recall the Boston Marathon bombings and how the Tsarnaev brothers bought the most powerful fireworks they could find to drain the gunpowder to make their pressure cooker bombs? They accomplished their goal with ease and without question or raising any suspicion what so ever. What are we thinking? Who are we kidding?