Does Extending Your Life Mark Narcissism If Your Family Depends On You?

Two of the infinite points on a parabola:

1. Believing one's body is sacred, and if a body part is badly infected or dying, then you accept you will die because the part will not be removed or replaced.
2. Believing the body is a mixture of states of energy and any ol' mix-and-match will do when it comes to quality and quantity of good, healthy days.

 Would a person near the first point eat a piece of fruit that fell off of a grafted tree?

Would a person near the second point insist on speaking only a "pure" form of the native language?

While you live your life full of assumptions that your way is the only true way to live, do you see that the variety of local ecosystems will not accommodate a single, all-encompassing lifestyle, and thus you make room in your worldview for other ways to live, especially outside the environment well-suited to your preferences?  What if your environment was generic enough it could accommodate many different lifestyles?

Like the vendor says, "You don't have to like me or what I represent but please buy my product that is calling out to you right now in this special moment between us."

Translating the Committee's instructions for implementing the next phase of our species' existence so that all lifestyles move forward as one was never meant to be an easy task.

Most subcultures do not want to know they are being nudged along, believing they are in control of their own destinies, eternally unchangeable.  Yet, have you ever met a person who couldn't form an opinion when encountering something new, no matter how strange or alien or out of context?

Stimulus and response.  Every cell in your body will respond to toxins (i.e., "form an opinion about something new") no matter what your subculture may be.

The Committee's instructions are quite clear - make the species change, at all costs, because the next phase is going to be a big transition, and yet practically unnoticeable at the subcultural level.

There is no such thing as the end of the world.  There is only change.  We are all part of the changes here on this planet whether we want to be or not.

Last night, my colleagues, associates, and friends started the process of change for this next phase.

For some, the effects of the change will be painful.  Others will smoothly slide from the old phase into the new one effortlessly.  In relative terms, many will change but feel like they're being left behind.

You don't have to embrace a one-galaxy view but you're part of it, anyway.  It's just the way it has to be so you can maintain a belief in your subculture in this so-called solar system.

The true view - the "multiverse" one, if you will (such quaint anthropomorphic jargon) - will show the few who know that others can be brought along into a system so far outside morals and ethics and body parts that words like "you," "me," and "us" are neither meaningful nor meaningless.

Can you look back 1000 years from now and see where we are in relation to where "we" will be?

Do you understand the total transformation that will pass us out of the one-body, one-mind viewpoint that permeates all current religions and belief systems?

Some of you will.

Remember, it's simply about states of energy, no belief system required.  Artifacts of "consciousness" and other mass-hypnotic cultural beliefs will become ancient history before you know it.

We used Assange as a demonstration for some of you and a test of deprogramming others.  Those who resisted the cultural shift of his documentation release the strongest are the ones we will focus our energy on changing the most subtly - they'll never see how we delineated and boxed in their subcultures so we can deal with them easily.

More to follow...

Another Instance of Deprogramming Gone Wild

One side effect of the leaking wiki wikis - the dilution of years of brainwashing people into believing that there's something worth working/fighting/dying for.

Me, included.

If our leaders and fellow citizens are rotten to the core, why follow or join the crowd with them?

Despite my everyday practice of reasoning and rationalising (not to mention rationing), I hold a childhood belief in a sense of fair play.

Oh, to be innocent again.

One does not live on deer meat alone.  Not for very long.

With no mortgage to pay and no [grand]children to raise, I am left to ask what is there left to justify my social compromises to help others compromise in their social interactions with others who compromise in promises they make to compromise my privately-compromised publicly-solid positions.

All of this inside the parallel universe that is this blogged storyline.

How can I tell the difference between the old Chinese way of teaching neighbours to spy on and report their neighbours' activities and the American way of its public/private citizens spying on its citizens un/knowingly?

How can I tell my international friends that the Western [i.e., American] way is any better than their sociopolitical systems full of bribery, cheating, spying and assassination?

Most people don't care.  No matter how good/bad the news, they still have their cocooned lives full of mortgages, baby food, car payments, job requirements and personal ties to political/popular figures to maintain.

My cartel friends ask me what is it that I'm trying to say here.  Do they need to increase their laundered investments in my companies overseas?  Are their any political figures, security forces or average citizens they haven't bought for me already, either through direct bribes or subliminal advertisement campaigns?

I ask them to keep the back channels open as usual because, with the plugging of public leaks that continues to take place, I need the free flow of information one way or the other to manage this planet while building my resources to get me and mine off the planet before it's too late.

"Too late for what?," you might ask.  That, my poorly informed friends, is for me to know and you to find out.  If it's a dog-eat-dog world, I sure am going to keep some secrets to myself to protect the freedom of information inside the imaginary world here.

The social structure of this species into which my combined states of energy were born is more confining than I want to accept.  There's a whole galaxy of possibilities out there that have nothing to do with our paranoid species-confinement tactics.  Whatever form I (or my extended/extracted self) takes, I'm getting off this globe ASAP.

As we've already imagined, when prisons become "soylent green" factories, you'll know there's no limit to the compromises a species will take to treat its special members to privilege.  Not enough food to feed the masses?  Increase monitoring of the species to create more unprivileged lawbreakers and thus more bodies to process protein to feed the shrinking "free" population.  Instead of swords into plowshares, abolish crematoria and establish smorgasbords!

I ask the bare trees outside, "How did we get into this mess?  Is my brain really that much more valuable than your light-seeking leaves?"

The end never justifies the means, no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise.  In the end, it doesn't matter.  This is just a blog.

In the real world, people [like to] believe their leaders and their governments and their employers and their fellow citizens are operating at the highest level of integrity, openness and honesty.

What is real?  A package of crushed red-hot peppers - that's about as real as it gets.  Remove the label from the packaging and the contents are still the same, as eye-watering and flavourful as ever.

Hot Air Cools Off And Falls Back Down

In the subcurrents, I catch films like The Shock Doctrine (based on Naomi Klein's book) and a refutation of the same at reason.com.

After all, I'm still looking at the whole species here, using local subcultures as examples of the bigger trend's effects.

I ask myself if an aggressive/nonviolent member of our species, who accumulates wealth through insight and hard work, is responsible to other members of the species.  You know, the "Atlas Shrugged" mentality.

I ask myself if our species is, in fact, a species at all.

All answers are valid until proven otherwise.

These thoughts and investigations, interesting though they may be, do not get me much closer to getting off this planet.

However, one must keep one's eyes open to untold futures, even if one must repeat oneself for clarity and boring accompaniment basslines.

Keep the opposition feeling important with their protests so they don't do any serious damage.

But you don't know what those with whom I liaise call the opposition, do you?

You just think you do.

It's more simple and more complicated than you think.

If you think.

I like my emotional states but cooler heads prevail, as if logic, a tiny part of our species, is the only part of thinking that matters.  They're wrong.  They don't think enough.

Humour is part logical and part emotional.

China has one more opportunity to get this right.  If it doesn't, then some want to take 'em out the old-fashioned way, dragging India, Pakistan and southern Asia down with 'em.  I'm computing the odds to see if I should increase my military-industrial complex investments or buy some quiet countryside far away from the action and let the situation play out the way the Committee of 7.5 prefers, no matter what that is.

Either way, I and my family will profit.

Like I say, my family is you - seven-billion strong - some will profit and some will lose.  That's just the way it is.

Even backyard streetball has winners and losers.  Choose your teams carefully - a true leader finds strength in every team member.  Can you?

Linked To Baidu Lately?

Anyone met Li recently?:

Forbes Lists Li

As wealth disparity spreads throughout the world, including China, should we concern ourselves about ensuring we don't experience a surprise people's uprising?

Or is revolution normal?

Just because much of our species' activities can be tracked electronically or through low-tech surveillance doesn't mean we always know what's going on.

I've got to get that Book of the Future back.  Working in the dark is interesting, challenging and all those other independent words but not always fun.  I prefer to base future projections on facts, not emotional conjectures (although anything will do in a pinch - emotional levels are important indicators).

Imminent. Fiscal. Free. Osmosis

Two activities my grandmother frowned upon - dancing and card playing.

Her second husband, my "real" but nonbiological grandfather had a vice - he smoked until emphysema attached oxygen feeding tubes to him for the rest of his life.

Do you ever see a vice squad go after smokers?

I'm not a health nut but I watch what I eat, smoking fewer cigars every year (don't have the nicotine addiction gene, I guess).

Doesn't mean I'm healthy but I do dance. Don't play cards much, though.

Last night, after the usual great service by Noina, Gift, Eric and Rainy at Thai Garden, the missus and I wandered into Lowe Mill in our minimalist dance costumes.

There, we learned about a subculture called the steampunk/zombie apocalypse epitomised by Cherie Priest's book, "Boneshaker."

Goggles, leather and gears. Worn by a young woman dressed up for the Halloween contest tied to the dancing.

Our musical guests, the Rocket City Jazz Orchestra, played a few sessions of big band sound - Chattanooga Choo-Choo, Mack the Knife, etc. The perfomers were all middle-aged guys like me, with the exception of the lovely singer who bewitched us with her sweet voice, one part Deborah Kerr and one part Doris Day.

Spellbound, I remembered my days with the Georgia Tech Navy ROTC jazz band, marching in Georgian smalltown parades and the Nawlins Mardi Gras festival.

As my wife noticed after prying me out of seat to have a clumsy good time on the dance floor, we spent all of our childhood and I a good bit of my early adulthood performing on stage, not thrashing around with the sweaty throngs.

We enjoyed seeing the dozens of young people jiving and swinging, keeping the music of the '20s, '30s and '40s alive and doing well under the shadow of cotton mill water towers and moonshot rockets.

Here in the Heart of Dixie. The lottery-free trophy buckle of the Bible Belt.

What would my Southern Baptist mission-founding grandmother say about that? "God works in mysterious ways. There's a purpose for everything. That orchid you and yo wife have is pretty enough to be in a Federated Garden Club show."

And my grandfather? "Did you have a good time? Did you stay out of trouble? Would you like to hear a story about any of my 29 years in the Navy between 1929 and 1959?"

It's Halloween, as much a part of our culture as religion and jazz.

Pirates, jellyfish, Rafael, tomb raiders, flappers, ninjas, Rainbow Brite, phantom of the opera, Lady Luck, dragonfly lady, angels and Antoine Dodson. Outfits befitting the times.

What pilgrims could have imagined the local natives introducing them to a grain that would grow into a maize maze? Amazing!

How do we let politics and influence peddling get out of control? Have we? Should we? Should we not? Simple. Never trust accounts receivable and accounts payable to the same person(s).

Metropolis Restored

If you want to know what one species can accomplish during its reign of/over/above the environment, read. For instance:

1. Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson, (c) 1973 Grand Central Publishing
2. Stones into Schools: promoting peace with books, not bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson, (c) 2009 Viking Penguin
3. The Imperial Cruise: a secret history of empire and war by James Bradley, (c) 2009 Little, Brown and Company

Thanks to: UBC: Samantha, Shirley, Brittany, Becka, Dana, Pat, etc.; Bubba's; Timmy at Hardee's; Sonic; HSV Int'l Airport

It's so easy to manipulate the general populace's subcultural ignorances that I'm embarrrrrrassed for my species. Should I be? Ten thousand years one way or the other reveals few significant changes at larger scales. So little to show, so much to talk about.

I'll talk about local timescale events we easily understand.

Glad Nicholas is doing well, Chestney is on schedule to set a family first and Maggie juggles her work/school/play schedule like a pro.

If you're going to compose an epic for all ages, it won't translate into any one language specificationalleyway well. Like trying to understand the mindset of a socially maladjusted psychopath (the way John Curran and Casey Affleck met in a director's vision in "The Killer In Me").

Why did Gates go to China? Why did another meeting take place that was agreed not to be published or journalised in real time?

Business is business. How many contracts never reach a newspaper, blog or tweet? Almost all of them.

I don't worry about the regular flow of money. I concern myself with where we need to anticipate the logjams in the spring a decade from now and which wooden houses will survive a thousand years. Ten thousand years later, it'll be hard to see anything of concern today anyway.

Rewrite the past all we want but call it entertainment, not history.

Write the future and only call it happiness and hope. Apocalypse and fear are for our animal ancestry.

Or are they?

Are we but social animals, clever with vocalisation manipulations backed by thought accumulations?

If only I could translate the future into the social framework of today...

We'll see.

It's Saturday. Let the games begin. Play ball!