Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

Always remember Howard Zinn's remarks:

“In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.”

Also, check your vitamin D level from all your indoor work (humans are not adapted to life without lots of sunlight) and eat more veggies and omega 3s, and try other holistic stuff to maintain your balance in difficult times.

There is always a lot of corruption and confusion in any system under yin/yang tension. It is still worthwhile to focus on the green shoots that may someday grow into something better for a time.

You can ask yourself, what can be legally and honorably be put in place *now* to be ready for if/when the corruption and confusion in Washington collapses under its own weight? What world do you want to see emerge if that system collapses? What would you stand ready to offer to others as specific systems to use and specific social networks to expand if, as in Egypt, the US government falls from its own excesses and people turned to you and said, now what?

Continue reading “Paul Fernhout: Encouragement for the Sick at Heart – Planning for US Collapse, Learning from Soviet Collapse”

People looking for ‘more of the same' aren't actively looking

While there may be a lot of them, they're satisfied with what they've got, which means that they're hard to attract.

No, the real opportunity is in reaching out to the dissatisifed, to those in search of something new.

Phi Beta Iota:  Obama was elected by an expanded “base” seeking more of the same; today, with the exceptions of Gary Johnson and Ron Paul, the Republican candidates are all focused on the wing-nut base.  The “base” is roughly 20% on each end of the spectrum–Obama won with 30% of the total eligible voters–44% did not vote.  That's the 44% that could elect a sane honest President and a sane honest coalition team in 2012–that 44% could be expanded to 66% by embracing the sane honest Republicans and the sane honest Democrats who are disgusted by the pervasive corruption and illegitimacy of the wing nut vs nanny state mobs that today define America to the rest of the world–“idiot America,” “predatory America.”  We can do better.