Thursday, August 16, 2012

Our Cooperative Darwinian Moment

Reposted from Energy Bulletin

By Richard Heinberg

Evolution can be ruthless at eliminating the unfit. “Red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson memorably described it, Nature routinely sacrifices billions of individual organisms and sometimes entire species in the course of its adaptive progression.

We humans have been able to blunt Nature’s fangs. We take care of individuals who would not be able to survive on their own—the elderly, the sick, the wounded—and we’ve been doing so for a long time, perhaps tens of thousands of years. In recent decades more and more of us have leapt aboard the raft of societally ensured survival—though in ways that often have little to do with compassion: today even most hale and hearty individuals would be hard pressed to stay alive for more than a few days or weeks if cut adrift from supermarkets, ATMs, and the rest of the infrastructure of modern industrialism.

This strategy of expanding our collective fitness has (at least temporarily) paid off: the consequent reduction in our death rate has resulted in a 700 percent expansion of human population in just the past two centuries, and a current population growth rate of about 80 million per year (births in excess of deaths). Humans are everywhere taking carrying capacity away from most other organisms, except ones that directly serve us such as maize and cattle. We have become expert at cooperatively avoiding nature’s culling, and thus at partially (and, again, temporarily) defeating natural selection—at least, in the way it applies to other species.

Some argue that “natural selection” is at work within human society whenever clever and hard-working folks get ahead while lazy dullards lag behind. The philosophy of Social Darwinism holds that this kind of competitive selection improves the species. But critics point out that individual success within society can be maladaptive for society as a whole because if wealth becomes too unequally distributed, social stability is threatened. Such concerns have led most nations to artificially limit competitive selection at the societal level: in the United States, these limits take the forms of the progressive income tax, Social Security, food stamps, disability payments, Medicaid, and Aid for Dependent Children, among others. Even most self-described “conservatives” who think that government shouldn’t prevent society’s winners from taking all still think it’s good for churches to give to the needy.

While the last few decades of rapid economic growth and material abundance—enabled by cheap fossil energy—led to a dramatic expansion of social safety nets in industrialized countries, they also featured the emergence of an ostensibly benign global imperial system led by the United States, whose fearsome military machine kept a lid on international conflict and whose universally accepted currency helped maintain relative international economic stability (in ways that served U.S. interests, of course). Globally, deaths from war have declined, as has mortality linked to dire poverty.

So far, so good (more or less).

Unfortunately, however, many key components of our successful collective efforts to beat The Reaper are essentially unsustainable. We have reduced mortality not just with antibiotics (to which microbes eventually develop immunity), but also with an economic strategy of drawing down renewable resources at rates exceeding those of natural replenishment, and of liquidating non-renewable resources as quickly as possible. By borrowing simultaneously from the past (when fossil fuels were produced) and the future (when our grandchildren will have to clean up our mess, pay our debt, and do without the resources we squander), we are effectively engaging in population overshoot. Every population ecologist knows that when a species temporarily overshoots its environment’s long-term carrying capacity, a die-off will follow.

And so, as the world economy stops growing and starts contracting during the next few years, the results will likely include a global increase in human mortality.

Resilience theorists would say we’re entering the “release” phase of the adaptive cycle that characterizes all systemic development, a phase described as “a rapid, chaotic period during which capitals (natural, human, social, built, and financial) tend to be lost and novelty can succeed.” This is a notion to which we’ll return repeatedly throughout this essay, and it’s a useful way of conceptualizing an experience that, for those undergoing it, will probably feel a lot less like “release” than “pure hell.” Among the possible outcomes: Government-funded safety nets become unaffordable and are abandoned. Public infrastructure decays. Economic systems, transport systems, political systems, health care systems, and food systems become inoperable to varying degrees and in a variety of ways. Global military hegemony becomes more difficult to maintain for a range of reasons (including political dysfunction and economic decline at the imperial core, scarcity of transport fuel, and the proliferation of cheap but highly destabilizing new weapons) and international conflict becomes more likely. Any of those outcomes increases our individual vulnerability. Everyone on the raft is imperiled, especially those who are poor, old, sick, or disabled.

We could redesign our economic, political, transport, health care, and food systems to be less brittle. But suggestions along those lines have been on the table for years and have been largely rejected because they don’t serve the interests of powerful groups that benefit from the status quo. Meanwhile the American populace seems incapable of raising an alarm or responding to it, consisting as it does of a large under-class that is over-fed but under-nourished, over-entertained but misinformed, over-indebted and under-skilled; and a much smaller over-class that lives primarily by financial predation and is happy to tune out any evidence of the dire impacts of its activities.

A thoroughly unsentimental reader of the portents might regard an increase in the human death rate as an inevitable and potentially beneficial culling of the species. The unfit will be pruned away, the fit will survive, and humanity will be the better for it. Eventually. In theory.

Or maybe the rich and ruthless will survive and everyone else will either perish or submit to slavery.

The greatest danger is that, if social support systems utterly fail, “overshoot” could turn to “undershoot”: that is, population levels could overcorrect to the point that there are fewer survivors than could have been maintained if adaptation had been undertaken proactively—perhaps far fewer than the population just prior to the Industrial Revolution. And for those who did manage to struggle on, levels of culture and technology might plummet to a depth far below what could have been preserved had action been taken.

We have a population bottleneck, as William Catton calls it, ahead of us no matter what we do at this point. Even if a spectacular new energy source were to appear tomorrow, it would do little more than buy us a bit of time. However, we still get to choose how to pass through that bottleneck. We can exert some influence on factors that will determine how many of us get through, and in what condition.


Cooperative or Competitive Adaptation
A worst-case scenario is likely to be averted only by an effective, cooperative effort to adapt to scarcity and to recover from crises.

Fortunately there are perfectly good reasons for assuming that collaborative action along these lines will in fact emerge. We are a supremely cooperative species, and even our earliest ancestors were dedicated communitarians. Other species, though often squabbling over food and potential mates, likewise engage in sharing and cooperative behavior. Members of one species sometimes even cooperate with or offer help to members of different species. Indeed, as evolutionary theorist Peter Kropotkin pointed out in his landmark 1902 book Mutual Aid, evolution is driven by cooperation as well as by competition.

More directly to the point: hard times can bring out the worst in people, but also the best. Rebecca Solnit argues in A Paradise Built in Hell (see this review in the New York Times) that people tend to cooperate, share, and help out at least as much during periods of crisis as during times of plenty. A critic might suggest that Solnit stretches this argument too far, and that collapsing societies often feature soaring rates of crime and violence (see, for example, Argentina circa 2000); nevertheless, she supports her thesis with compelling examples.

Assuming we fail to prevent crisis but merely respond to it, we might nevertheless anticipate a range of possible futures, depending on whether we set ourselves up to compete or cooperate. At one end of the competitive-cooperative scenarios spectrum, the rich few become feudal lords while everybody else languishes in direst poverty. At the other end of that spectrum, communities of free individuals cohere to produce necessities and maximize their chances for collective prosperity. Back at the “competitive” end of the scale, there is hoarding of food and widespread famine, while at the “cooperative” extreme community permaculture gardens spring up everywhere. With more competition, people perish for lack of basic survival skills; with more collaboration, people share skills and care for those with disabilities of one kind or another. Competitive efforts by investors to maintain their advantages could lead to a general collapse of trust in financial institutions, culminating in the cessation of trade at almost every level; but with enough cooperation, people could create a non-growth-based monetary system that acts as a public utility, leading to a new communitarian economics.


It’s a Set-Up
In the real world, humans are both competitive and cooperative—always have been, always will be. But circumstances, conditioning, and brain chemistry can tend to make us more competitive or more collaborative. As we pass through the population-resource-economy bottleneck in the decades ahead, competitive and cooperative behaviors will in turn come to the fore in various times and places. My initial point in all of this is that, even in the absence of effective action to avert economic and environmental crises, we still have the capacity to set ourselves up to be either more competitive or more cooperative in times of scarcity and crisis. With the right social structures and the right conditioning, whole societies can become either more cutthroat or more amiable. By building community organizations now, we are improving our survival prospects later.

But I’d go further. Here’s a preliminary hypothesis for which I’m starting to collect both confirming and dis-confirming evidence: We’re likely to see the worst of ruthless competition in the early stage of the release phase, when power holders try to keep together what wants to fall apart and reorganize. The effort to hang on to what we have in the face of uncertainty and fear may bring out the competitive nature in many of us, but once we’re in the midst of actual crisis we may be more likely to band together.

Among elites—who have enormous amounts of wealth, power, and privilege at stake—the former tendency has carried the day. And since elites largely shape the rules, regulations, and information flows within society as a whole, this means we’re all caught up in a hyper-competitive and fearful moment as we wait for the penny to drop. Elites can deliberately nurture an “us-versus-them” mentality (via jingoistic patriotism, wedge issues, and racial resentments) to keep ordinary people from cooperating more to further their common interests. Revolution, after all, is in many respects a cooperative undertaking, and in order to forestall it rulers sometimes harness the cooperative spirit of the masses in going to war against a common foreign enemy.

The over-competitiveness of this pre-release-phase is playing out most prominently and fatefully in debates over “austerity,” as nations bail out investment banks while leaving most citizens to languish under lay-offs, pension cuts, and wage cuts. It seems that no measure aimed to prevent defaults and losses to investors is too draconian. But in many historic instances (Russia, Iceland, Argentina) it was only after a massive financial default occurred—that is, once release ran its course—that nations could fundamentally revamp their monetary and banking systems, making recovery possible. That makes “release” sound a bit like a long-overdue vacation. It’s important to emphasize, however, that what we face now is not just a collapse and reorganization of a national financial sector, but a crucial turning from the overall expansionary trajectory of civilization itself.

Our collective passage through and reorganization after the release phase of this pivotal adaptive cycle can be thought of as an evolutionary event. And, as noted above, evolution is driven by cooperation as much as by competition. Indeed, cooperation is the source of most of our species’ extraordinary accomplishments so far. Language—which gives us the ability to coordinate our behavior across space and time—has made us by far the most successful large animal species on the planet. Our societal evolution from hunting-and-gathering bands to agrarian civilizations to industrial globalism required ever-higher levels of cooperative behavior: as one small example, think for a moment about the stunningly rich collaborative action required to build and inhabit a skyscraper. As we adapt and evolve further in the decades and centuries ahead, we will do so by finding even more effective ways to cooperate.

Ironically, however, during the past few millennia, and especially during the most recent century, social complexity has permitted greater concentrations of wealth, thus more economic inequality, and hence (at least potentially) more competition for control over heaps of agglomerated wealth. As Ivan Illich pointed out in his 1974 classic Energy and Equity, there has been a general correlation between the amount of energy flowing through a society and the degree of inequality within that society. And so, as we have tapped fossil fuels to permit by far the highest energy flow rates ever sustained by any human civilization, a few individuals have accumulated the biggest pots of wealth the world has ever seen. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that it is precisely during this recent, aberrant, high-energy historic interval that Social Darwinism and neoliberal economics have arisen, with the latter coming to dominate economic and social policy worldwide.


The Leap

With release will come the opportunity for a collaborative evolutionary surge. Recall that in the release phase of the adaptive cycle there is expanded opportunity for novelty to succeed. Most people these days tend to think of novelty in purely technological terms, and it’s true that email and Twitter can speed social change—for example, by helping organize an instant political rally. But spending hours each day alone in front of a screen does not necessarily lead to collaborative behavior, and it’s just possible that we may not be able to count on our hand-held devices continuing to function in the context of global economic crisis, trade disruptions, and resource shortages. Therefore perhaps it will be in our interactions within flesh-and-blood communities that our most decisive further innovations will arise.

The details are impossible to predict, but the general outline of our needed cooperative evolutionary leap is clear: we must develop a heightened collective ability to conserve natural resources while minimizing our human impacts on environmental systems. In some respects this might turn out to be little more than an updating of traditional societies’ methods of managing common grazing or hunting lands. But today the stakes are far higher: the commons must extend to include to all renewable and non-renewable resources, and “management” must bring extraction and harvest levels within the long-term ability of natural systems to recover and regenerate.

At the same time, with energy flows declining due to the depletion of fossil fuels, current levels of economic inequality will become unsupportable. Adaptation will require us to find ways of leveling the playing field peaceably.

Laying the groundwork for reorganization (following the release phase) will require building resilience into all our social structures and infrastructures. In the decades ahead, we must develop low-resource, low-energy ways of meeting human needs while nurturing an internalized imperative to keep population levels within ecosystems’ long-term carrying capacity.

There are those who say that we humans are too selfish and individualistic to make this kind of evolutionary leap, and that even if it were possible there’s simply too little time. If they’re right, then this may be the end of the line: we might soon wind up in the “unfit” bin of evolutionary history. But given our spectacular history of cooperative achievement so far, and given our ability to transform our collective behavior rapidly via language (aided, for the time being, with instantaneous communications technology), it stands to reason that our species has at least a fair chance of making the cut.

To be sure, evolution will be driven by crisis. We will adapt by necessity. In this release phase there will be vast potential for violence. Remember, release is the phase of the cycle in which capital is destroyed—and currently there are towering piles of human, built, and financial capital waiting to topple. We have been set up to compete for shards and scraps. It’s no wonder that so many who sense the precariousness of our current situation have opted to become preppers and survivalists. But things will go a lot better for us if, rather than stocking up on guns and canned goods, we spend our time getting to know our neighbors, learning how to facilitate effective meetings, or helping design resilient local food systems. Survival will depend on finding cooperative paths in which sacrifice is shared, the best of our collective achievements are preserved, and compassion is nurtured.

Darwin tells us we must evolve or die, and current circumstances bring that choice into stark relief. A lot of people evidently think that fitness and selfishness are the same. But we’ve gotten ourselves into our current fix not because we’re too good at cooperating to achieve collective fitness, but rather because, in our success, we failed to take account of the finite and fragile nature of the natural systems that support us. It’s true that individual initiative is important and that group-think can be stultifying. Yet it is our abilities to innovate socially and to cooperate in order to increase our collective fitness that have gotten us this far, and that will determine whether we survive, and under what conditions, as we adapt to scarcity and re-integrate ourselves within ecosystems in the decades ahead.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

A Terrifying Study of Planetary Collapse

Reposted from AUTOMATIC EARTH


A few days ago, I posted an article on how the Brazilian government has sacrificed the lush Amazon Rainforest for short-term economic profits over the course of a few years. Today, I'd like to share more "good news" about the global environment that probably went unnoticed by many people (h/t Jaded Prole). About two months ago, Nature published a report by a group of 21 scientists who arrived at a very startling conclusion - Earth's ecosystems are heading for an "imminent, irreversible collapse" well before the century is out.

Sound a bit too extreme and alarming? Perhaps, but the authors feel that the logic and data to back up such a conclusion are all there. One key factor, for example, is the rapid loss of biodiversity in our ecosystems - something Brazilian federal de-regulators should know all too much about. That's just one factor among many others, though. And while these scientists don't focus much on human financial, economic, social or political systems, we must remember that they all play an integral part in preventing radical reversals of Earth-destroying policies at large scales.

At the same time, it is equally frightening to imagine what a desperate group of elite policymakers will do once they can no longer hide from reality, but can only think to act in extreme ways, perhaps at the behest of the masses. I'm confident that there are at least a few of them who are already thinking about what they can get away with in such a scenario. That's why I cringe when I read the scientists proposing this - "Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly".

Anyhow, here is Carol Thorbes summarizing the terrifying report in an article for Simon Fraser University, where one of the 21 scientists works as a Professor of Biodiversity (Arne Mooers). The actual report can be found through Nature's website.

 
 
Study predicts imminent irreversible planetary collapse
  Using scientific theories, toy ecosystem modeling and paleontological evidence as a crystal ball, 21 scientists, including one from Simon Fraser University, predict we're on a much worse collision course with Mother Nature than currently thought.
  In Approaching a state-shift in Earth's biosphere, a paper just published in Nature, the authors, whose expertise spans a multitude of disciplines, suggest our planet's ecosystems are careening towards an imminent, irreversible collapse.
  Earth's accelerating loss of biodiversity, its climate's increasingly extreme fluctuations, its ecosystems' growing connectedness and its radically changing total energy budget are precursors to reaching a planetary state threshold or tipping point.
  Once that happens, which the authors predict could be reached this century, the planet's ecosystems, as we know them, could irreversibly collapse in the proverbial blink of an eye.
  "The last tipping point in Earth's history occurred about 12,000 years ago when the planet went from being in the age of glaciers, which previously lasted 100,000 years, to being in its current interglacial state. Once that tipping point was reached, the most extreme biological changes leading to our current state occurred within only 1,000 years. That's like going from a baby to an adult state in less than a year," explains Arne Mooers. "Importantly, the planet is changing even faster now."
  The SFU professor of biodiversity is one of this paper's authors. He stresses, "The odds are very high that the next global state change will be extremely disruptive to our civilizations. Remember, we went from being hunter-gatherers to being moon-walkers during one of the most stable and benign periods in all of Earth's history.
  "Once a threshold-induced planetary state shift occurs, there's no going back. So, if a system switches to a new state because you've added lots of energy, even if you take out the new energy, it won't revert back to the old system. The planet doesn't have any memory of the old state."
  These projections contradict the popularly held belief that the extent to which human-induced pressures, such as climate change, are destroying our planet is still debatable, and any collapse would be both gradual and centuries away.
  This study concludes we better not exceed the 50 per cent mark of wholesale transformation of Earth's surface or we won't be able to delay, never mind avert, a planetary collapse.
  We've already reached the 43 per cent mark through our conversion of landscapes into agricultural and urban areas, making Earth increasingly susceptible to an environmental epidemic.
  "In a nutshell, humans have not done anything really important to stave off the worst because the social structures for doing something just aren't there," says Mooers. "My colleagues who study climate-induced changes through the earth's history are more than pretty worried. In fact, some are terrified."
  — 30 —
 
  
Backgrounder: Study predicts imminent irreversible planetary collapse
  Coming from Chile, Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States, the authors of this paper initially met at the University of California Berkeley in 2010 to hold a trans-disciplinary brainstorming session.
  They reviewed scores of theoretical and conceptual bodies of work in various biological disciplines in search of new ways to cope with the historically unprecedented changes now occurring on Earth.
  In the process they discovered that:
  Human-generated pressures, known as global-scale forcing mechanisms, are modifying Earth's atmosphere, oceans and climate so rapidly that they are likely forcing ecosystems and biodiversity to reach a critical threshold of existence in our lifetime.
  "Global-scale forcing mechanisms today "include unprecedented rates and magnitudes of human population growth with attendant resource consumption, habitat transformation and fragmentation, energy production and consumption, and climate change," says the study.
  Human activity drives today's global-scale forcing mechanisms more than ever before. As a result, the rate of climate change we are seeing now exceeds the rate that occurred during the extreme planetary state change that tipped Earth from being in a glacial to an interglacial state 12,000 years ago. You have to go back to the end of the cataclysmic falling star, which ended the age of dinosaurs, to find a previous precedent.
  The exponentially increasing extinction of Earth's current species, dominance of previously rare life forms and occurrence of extreme climate fluctuations parallel critical transitions that coincided with the last major planetary transition.
  When these sorts of perturbations are mirrored in toy ecosystem models, they tip these systems quickly and irreversibly.
  The authors recommend governments undertake five actions immediately if we are to have any hope of delaying or minimizing a planetary-state-shift. Arne Mooers, an SFU biodiversity professor and a co-author of this study, summarizes them as follows.
  "Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly. More of us need to move to optimal areas at higher density and let parts of the planet recover. Folks like us have to be forced to be materially poorer, at least in the short term. We also need to invest a lot more in creating technologies to produce and distribute food without eating up more land and wild species. It's a very tall order."

Friday, August 10, 2012

Revolutionary Conditions

Source: http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2012/08/revolutionary-conditions.html#more


Alex Jeffries
Travel advisory: Starting in 2013, in many parts of planet Earth there will be too little food and too much political unrest to make them pleasant destinations.

Food is about to get very expensive everywhere: farming states in the US are living through the worst drought since the Dust Bowl; in Russia and Ukraine, heat waves and drought have produced similar results, with estimates for grain production down 30-50% from last year; in India, the critical monsoon rains are already down 22%.

 Exacerbating the poor harvests around the world is the brain-dead scheme in the US which mandates that a lion's share of its corn harvest be diverted to ethanol production, raising the price of corn and squeezing out cattle and poultry producers. (This is yet another symptom of a broken political system in the US: with an extremely low EROEI, corn ethanol barely qualifies as a source of energy.)

The problem is further exacerbated by the financialization of agricultural commodities; instead of being used to hedge risk to consumers, the agricultural futures markets have become the playthings of traders who gamble with large blocks of money trying to reap a windfall from disaster. The effect is to make food price spikes much worse; this has already happened in 2008 and is happening again now.

When food gets too expensive, people riot. A study by Marco Lagi et al. (cited in Trade Off by Korowicz) includes the following chart, which shows the timing of outbreaks of social unrest relative to price spikes:

The countries most at risk are those where food makes up a large portion of overall spending: 40% in China, 43% in the Philippines, 45% in Indonesia, 48% in Pakistan, 50% in India and Vietnam, 70% in Congo. If food prices double, much of their population will become malnourished (if it isn't already). Go here to explore these data on your own. (It would be helpful to include data on the percentage of calories each country imports; poorer countries that import basic carbohydrates are most at risk.)

The United States, with just 14% of its spending going toward food, may seem relatively immune to this effect, but it really isn't. There are 50 million people in the US on food stamps, and if food prices double then, unless there is a similar increase in funding for food stamps, this will halve the amount of food available to them. With the federal government's finances in disarray, the Congress deadlocked, and the federal budget headed for sequestration which will result in automatic, draconian budget cuts starting in 2013, such an increase seems unlikely. Millions more people in the US will be forced to choose between buying food and paying their mortgage, resulting in another round of mortgage defaults and the next wave of the endless financial crisis. With the widespread availability of cheap, low-quality processed food in the US, food price increases will mean that such unhealthy food will come to make up even more of the average diet, with negative effects on nutrition and health. The US is not Congo, but it isn't Switzerland either.

Food price spikes and food shortages are very effective in driving people to revolt. Since everyone has to eat, food is not a divisive issue. Whereas political régimes are quite adept at exploiting differences of opinion to divide and neutralize the populace (in the US, issues such as gay rights and abortion rights are their favorite tools) a shortage of food divides the population into the hungry and the well-fed. The well-fed inevitably turn out to be in the minority, defended, for a time, by the slightly less well-fed. They also tend to be associated closely with the régime or the moneyed interests that prop it up, and once they are dislodged, so is the régime.

Political régimes tend to be quite adept at putting down rebellions, but social unrest produced by a food shortage can only be addressed by alleviating the food shortage. If there simply isn't enough food left to distribute, their choices of action become rather limited. In some cases the government can exercise direct political control over food production and feed those who serve and protect it, allowing everyone else to starve. But the last few decades of neoliberal policies around the world have left few countries where this is still possible. Thus, the brunt of the revolt is likely to be focused directly on the transnational companies, and their presence in many countries will either come to an abrupt and messy end, or, where their vital interests are involved, come to resemble a military occupation. Given the recent advances in guerilla warfare, such occupations are likely to come to a messy end as well.

The failure of weak, neoliberal political régimes around the world will expose the men who have really been pulling the strings. Most countries remain nation-states in name only; their sovereignty has been eroded to the point where they are now mere servants to transnational business and finance. Vestigial nation-states continue to serve one function: controlling their borders. They are, in fact, prisons—keeping some people in, others out. But for transnational business and finance they are now porous entities, allowing them to practice labor arbitrage (finding cheapest labor), and jurisdictional arbitrage (finding least regulation). The US government is now little more than a proxy, with its presidential candidates (1, 2) vetted, appointed and financed by the global investment firm Goldman Sachs. A recent vote in the UN General Assembly accusing Bashar Assad of Syria produced a list of the remaining nation-states. These are the only countries whose governments still possess sufficient independence of will to oppose the US-led drive for régime change in Syria. They are: Syria (naturally), Russia, China, Iran, Belorussia, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia. It remains to be seen how helpful their independence will prove when it comes to them feeding their own people.

The three main indicators of collapse seem to be oil use decline, debt deflation and population decline, with oil the leading indicator and population the lagging indicator. But given the food crisis that is now upon us, it is starting to look like it won't be lagging by very much.

Monday, August 6, 2012

The implications of over-population are terrifying. But will we listen to them?

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/03/ian-jack-overpopulation-ten-billion

Aerial view of advancing deforestation in the Amazon Basin
A tide of frightening facts … increased demand for food leads to deforestation, as pictured here in the Amazon. Photograph: RICKEY ROGERS/REUTERS

Sitting on my own in the bar of the Royal Court theatre on Wednesday with my orange juice and lightly sea-salted packet of crisps, I remembered that I was first here more than 50 years ago, as a teenager down on holiday from Scotland and determined to witness England's cultural revolution. In 1961 that still meant John Osborne, whose new play, Luther, had just opened at the Court with Albert Finney. I queued at the box office and got two tickets to stand at the back of the stalls, where my brother and I were so thrilled (so this is what the Reformation was like!) that when the play came to the Edinburgh festival later that year, I bought another ticket and stood through it all over again.

The contrast between Luther and the performance I was about to see couldn't have been starker. Luther was intensely theatrical – as gorgeous as a pantomime – the stage filled sometimes with pious monks and at other times with flag-waving knights. Finney's Luther grappled loudly with his faith and his constipation, while a cynical huckster sold the weirdest of Papal indulgences. Comedy, seriousness, noise, colour and, above all, those biting monologues that were Osborne's trademark: they made for that thing called "a wonderful night at the theatre", but the play's message, whatever it was, would never have fitted under the rubric "news you can use". When you left the theatre, you stepped out of the Reformation and into the relevance of the present day.

Ten Billion, on the other hand, is a piece of theatre only because it occurs in a theatre. The curtain rises on a reconstruction of a modern office; we hear the melancholy sound of a cello; a middle-aged man walks on stage, opens his laptop and begins to talk. He says he's a scientist and not an actor – that will become obvious – but that the set is a "depressingly accurate" reproduction of his office in Cambridge. His name is Stephen Emmott. He's head of computational science at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and professor of computational science at Oxford, and what he wants to tell us about is the future of life, particularly human life, on Earth. And for the next 75 minutes that's what he does, moving just a little around the set with the help of a stick (because a disc in his lower spine has popped out) as visuals appear on screens to illustrate what soon becomes a tide of frightening facts and predictions.

Taken singly, few of these facts would be new to even the most casual Monbiot reader or the least faithful friend of the Earth, but their accumulation and the connections between them are terrifying. Rarely can a lay audience have heard their implications spelled out so clearly and informally: a global population that was 1 billion in 1800 and 4 billion in 1980 will probably have grown to 10 billion by the end of this century; the demand for food will have doubled by 2050; food production already accounts for 30% of greenhouse gases – more than manufacturing or transport; more food needs more land, especially when the food is meat; more fields mean fewer forests, which means even more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which means an even less stable climate, which means less reliable agriculture – witness the present grain crisis in the US.

On and on he goes, remorselessly. It takes 3,000 litres of water to make a burger and the UK eats 10bn burgers a year. A world population of 10 billion will need 960 new dams, each of them the size of the world's largest in China's Three Gorges, plus 15,000 nuclear power stations and/or (my note-taking in the dark isn't up to his speed) 11m wind farms. The great objective of intergovernmental action, such as it is, has been to restrict the rise in average global temperature to no more than 2C, but a growing body of research suggests a warming by 6C is becoming more and more likely. In which case, Emmott says, the world will become "a complete hellhole" riven by conflict, famine, flood and drought. Go to a climate change conference these days, he says, and as well as all the traditional attendees there will usually be a small detachment of the forward-looking military.

What's to be done? Emmott takes us through the ideas offered by "the rational optimists" who believe that, faced with the species' near extinction, human inventiveness will engineer a solution. Desalination plants, a new green revolution, seeding the oceans with iron filings to absorb more CO2: all of these threaten to produce as many problems as they solve. He believes the only answer is behavioural change. We need to have far fewer children and consume less. How much less? A lot less; two sheets of toilet paper rather than three, a Prius instead of a Range Rover – that kind of sacrifice won't really do it. And does he believe we're capable of making this necessarily far bigger curb on our desires? Not really. He describes himself as a rational pessimist. "We're fucked," he says. If a large asteroid were on course to the Earth and we knew when and where it would hit – say France in 2022 – then every government would marshal its scientific resources to find ways of altering the asteroid's path or mitigating its damage. But there is no asteroid. The problem is us.

Recently he asked one of his younger academic colleagues what he thought could be done. "Teach my son how to use a gun," said the colleague.

And there the performance ends. Emmott steps forward to take the applause and then the audience files down the stairs to Sloane Square, busy with taxis and young people standing on the pavement with plastic beakers of white wine, as though there would be infinite tomorrows. It isn't quite clear what we've seen – a lecture or a theatrical event – but what its ominous content most resembled, or so it seemed to me, was the kind of Protestant sermon brought about by the Reformation, in which humankind was told to repair its ways if it wanted to avoid damnation. In retrospect, this looks a relatively easy matter of regular churchgoing, refraining from obvious adultery and not doing the washing on Sundays. Light qualifications for entry to heaven compared to the levels of material renunciation needed to save the species.

The speed at which our likely future has arrived is the frightening thing. How little we realised, leaving Luther in 1961, that the atmosphere's carbon content had been increasing since the industrial revolution, which you might argue was a Lutheran/Calvinist byproduct. We had our worries, of course, but the cold war and nuclear weapons didn't seem intractable threats. They produced protest rather than the fearful depression that touches some of us from time to time, when every distraction has failed. Emmott sees his performance as a wake-up call and it has apparently had that effect on its young audiences (its entire run is sold out). But it would be just as easy to see it as a well-articulated piece of despair, a scientist's soliloquy in front of the final curtain.

See Also:  

http://dieoff.org/


Herman Daly: The Big Population Question

Source: http://steadystate.org/the-big-population-question/

Should we be thinking about the number simultaneously alive or the cumulative number ever to live?

 

by Herman Daly


More people are better than fewer—as long as they are not all alive at the same time! Sustainability means longevity for the human race—more people enjoying a sufficient level of consumption for a good life over more generations—not more simultaneously living people elbowing each other off the planet. Nor does it mean a perpetual sequence of generations. Nothing is forever in the present Creation—both science and Christianity agree on that, and perhaps other religions do as well. Christianity hopes for a New Creation free from death, sin, and decay. Science is not in the business of hope, although scientism peddles cheap optimism as a substitute. I share the Christian hope, but also accept the scientific description of the present Creation and its subjugation to entropy and finitude. Economist Georgescu-Roegen criticized sustainability and the steady state economy as advocacy of perpetuity (or “eternal life for the species”) rather than longevity. Maybe some people confused the two, but it is a confusion easily corrected. As creatures of the present Creation we must do the best we can with what we have for however long it lasts, even while we may hope for the New Creation as an eschatological faith.

In the past “doing the best we can” seems to have meant a larger and larger population consuming more and more stuff. Now we see that too many people alive at one time, and consuming too much per capita, reduce the carrying capacity of the earth for all life. This will mean fewer people and/or lower consumption per capita in the future, and a lower cumulative population ever to live at a level of consumption sufficient for a good life. If our ethical understanding of the value of longevity (“sustainability”) is to “maximize” cumulative lives ever to be lived, subject to a per capita consumption level sufficient for a good life, then we must limit the load we place on the Earth at any one time. Fewer people, and lower per capita resource consumption, facilitated by more equitable distribution today, mean more, and more abundant lives for a longer, but not infinite, future. There is no point in maximizing the cumulative number of lives lived in misery, so the qualification “sufficient for a good life” is important, and requires deep rethinking of economics, a shift of focus from growth to sufficiency.

Given that the whole marvelous shebang is still going to end sometime, why make extraordinary efforts to prolong it, especially if, as the modern intelligentsia assures us, the universe and all life are just random events, as well as temporary? And if we have no idea of what a good life is, then we cannot say how much per capita consumption is sufficient for a good life. But for some of us faith in the love of the Creator and the promise of New Creation substitutes divine purpose for cosmic random, and saves us from despair over our repeated failures, as well as over the ultimate impossibility of preserving this Creation in the very long run. Like the first Creation, New Creation will be a miracle. It gives hope in the face of entropy and finitude, but does not solve our ethical problem of how to share the limited life support capacity of the present Creation among generations and species. Belief that the end of the world will occur soon, with lots of life-support capacity left unused (wasted), is a tenet of some fundamentalist Christians who consequently consider themselves exempt from the responsibility of Creation stewardship. Fortunately this view seems to be waning.

Most scientists will not be happy with talk about miracles, with hope in the New Creation. Yet when faced with the ultimate heat death of the universe, and the meaninglessness implicit (and increasingly explicit) in their materialist cosmology, some scientists seem to flinch, and look for optimism somewhere within their materialism. They invent the hypothesis of infinitely many (unobservable) universes in which life may outlive our universe. They were led to this extraordinary idea in order to escape the implications of the anthropic principle—which argues that for life to have come about by chance in our single universe would require far too many just-so coincidences. To preserve the idea of chance as reasonable cause, and thereby escape any notion of Creator, they argue that although these coincidences are indeed overwhelmingly improbable in a single universe, they would surely happen if there were infinitely many universes. And of course our universe is obviously the one in which the improbable events all happened. If you don’t believe that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, you can claim that infinitely many monkeys pecking away at infinitely many typewriters had to hit upon it someday.

Unfortunately the evidence for infinitely many universes, or monkeys for that matter, is nonexistent. Likewise, the only “evidence” that could be offered to support hope for a future miracle would be the occurrence of a similar miracle in the past. That of course would be the Creation itself. Science rightly tries to account for this Creation, as far as reasonable, in its own mechanistic terms, and of course rejects “miracle” or God as an explanatory category. Whether ad hoc postulation of infinitely many unobservable universes qualifies as a reasonable scientific explanation, I will leave to the reader’s judgment. But the working hypothesis of scientific materialism, however fruitful it has been, should not be sanctified as the Ultimate Metaphysics of Chance. Nor does adding Darwinian natural selection to Mendelian random mutation alter the picture, since the selecting criterion of environmental conditions (other organisms and geophysical surroundings) is also considered to be a random product of chance. Mutations provide random change in the genetic menu from which natural selection picks according to the survival value determined by a randomly changing environment. Such a Metaphysics of Chance precludes explanation of some basic facts: first, that there is something rather than nothing; second, the just-right physical “coincidences” set forth in the anthropic principle; third, the “spontaneous generation” of first life from inanimate matter; fourth, the creation of an incredible amount of specified information in the genome of all the irreducibly complex living creatures that grew from the relatively simple information in the first living thing (random change destroys rather than creates information); fifth, the emergence of self-consciousness and rational thought itself (if my thoughts are ultimately the product of random, why believe any of them, including this one?); and sixth, the innate human perception of right and wrong, of good and bad, which would be meaningless in a purely material world. Explaining these facts “by chance” strains credulity even more than “by miracle”.

Metaphysical humility remains a virtue for both science and religion, and longevity (sustainability) is a metaphysically humble goal appropriate for limited creatures in the face of ignorance and mystery. Whether we will in the long run have the courage to serve even that modest goal in the absence of eschatological hope remains a question. Christianity and science both recognize the fundamental limits of this Creation. Christianity offers ultimate hope in New Creation; science remains mute about that. Scientism, however, seeing no limits to this Creation, offers, instead of hope, the campaigning optimism of, for example, IBM’s call “to build a smarter planet” and NASA’s promise of space colonization—all in the service of a forever-growing population of simultaneously-living big consumers. Phooey!

Sikh Temple Shooter: Random Massacre or Mk-Ultra Type Assassination?


Make sure you read all the way to the end with this one, for those unfamiliar with the work of Dr. Steven M. Greer see:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/06/contact-and-disclosure-final-sequence.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/06/thrive.html

If there is indeed a connection here it would bolster the suspicion that the "Elites" are pulling out all the stops to prevent the "Filthy Masses" from mitigating, preventing or even reversing "The Apocalypse".

Source: Source: http://cryptogon.com/?p=30685

Sikh Temple Shooter Served in U.S. Army Psy-Op Unit

August 6th, 2012 
 
Wade Michael Page Was White Supremacist

Via: CBS News:

Before he strode into a Sikh temple with a 9mm handgun and multiple magazines of ammunition, Wade Michael Page played in white supremacist heavy metal bands with names such as Definite Hate and End Apathy.

The bald, heavily tattooed bassist was a 40-year-old Army veteran who trained in psychological warfare before he was demoted and discharged more than a decade ago.

Page joined the military in Milwaukee in 1992 and was a repairman for the Hawk missile system before switching jobs to become one of the Army’s psychological operations specialists assigned to a battalion at Fort Bragg, N.C.

As a “psy-ops” specialist, Page would have trained to host public meetings between locals and American forces, use leaflet campaigns in a conflict zone or use loudspeakers to communicate with enemy soldiers.

He never deployed overseas while serving in that role, Pentagon spokesman George Wright said.
Page was demoted in June 1998 for getting drunk while on duty and going AWOL, two defense officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release information about the gunman.

Page also received extra duty and was fined. The defense officials said they had no other details about the incident, such as how long Page was gone or whether he turned himself in.


Page Served in U.S. Army Psychological Operations Unit

Via: CBS News:

CBS News reports that Page enlisted in the Army in April 1992 and was given a less-than-honorable discharge in October 1998. He was last stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C., serving in the psychological operations unit.


Wade Michael Page

Via: CBS:

The suspect in a shooting that left six people dead at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee on Sunday has been identified as Wade Michael Page.

Authorities confirmed to CBS News on Monday that Page was the suspect in the shooting. He was killed outside the temple in a shootout with police officers after the rampage that left terrified congregants hiding in closets and others texting friends outside for help.

Multiple sources tell CBS News that Page was a former member of the U.S. military, but he was no longer serving actively. It was not immediately clear under what circumstances Page left the military.


Officials had previously described the suspect as a heavy-set, 40-year-old Caucasian with numerous tattoos.

Sources tell CBS News some unspecified evidence suggests race or ethnicity may have played a role in the violence, but no links to extremist groups have been confirmed.

Local police called the attack an act of domestic terrorism, but other sources tell CBS News correspondent Bon Orr it may be more accurate to refer to “an investigation into a possible hate crime.”

Neither the local nor the federal sources provided further details or suggested a possible motive, including whether the suspect specifically targeted the Sikh temple.

CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports Page is only believed to have lived at the residence for two weeks, according to neighbors.

Suspect Lived on Holmes Avenue

In other Holmes news: Colorado Movie Theater Massacre.
Via: Journal Sentinel:

Law enforcement personnel from various departments and agencies are on the scene at E. Holmes Ave. in Cudahy, where police were searching a house after Sunday’s mass shooting.

UFO Documentary Film Director’s Father Killed at Sikh Temple

[???]




Via: New York Daily News:

The president of the temple, Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, was shot while trying to tackle the gunman, CNN reported. Kaleka, a married father of two adult sons, later died, his family told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Kaleka’s son, Amardeep, said he got a call from his father’s cell phone soon after the shooting broke out. It was a priest telling him his father had been shot.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

The Batman Shootings and Crossover Effects

Source: http://www.realitysandwich.com/batman_shootings_crossover_effects

bane.jpeg  

The tragic situation in nearby Aurora, Colorado  (I live in Boulder), with 70 people  shot at a showing of The Dark Knight Rises, is not a random, incomprehensible event. When these horrific mass killings happen, however, it is common to hear people say that we may never comprehend how such things can occur. For example, at a memorial service after the Oklahoma City Bombing, the governor of Oklahoma said, "We can't understand why this happened." These seem like odd statements that people make on behalf of a species that has managed to project its understanding into black holes, subatomic particles, the genetic code and the edges of the universe.  If we can't comprehend the murderous actions of a member of our own species, then we damn well better keep trying.

Mass shootings, like the one that just happened in Aurora, have become a recurrent nightmare that haunts the collective psyche. As the nightmare repeats, we see patterns emerging. One, which we don't have confirmation on yet in this case, is that the shooter will almost always turn out to be on an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor).  For example, Colorado's other most famous mass shooting, Columbine, was masterminded by 18-year-old Eric Harris who was on the SSRI medication, Luvox.

Here's an index of shootings and the SSRI connection someone put together: http://ssristories.com/index.php. The popular press, which depends on big pharma's advertising money,  doesn't have much to say about this established connection. Even the literature from the drug companies admits that "homicidal and suicidal ideation" are possible side effects of SSRIs.  In this article, however, we will be exploring other parts of the pattern.

Movies are a collective dream delivery technology.  Some movies that have high access to the contents of the collective unconscious are what Charles Fort called "window zones," or portals between realms, and weird and uncanny things happen in their wake. Particularly, movies about dark, occult things have a long history of these crossover effects. An example most are familiar with is Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, and his role as the star of the movie,  The Crow.

Brandon plays a character who has been murdered, but returns from the dead.  During a stunt, a gun loaded with blanks somehow also became lodged with a dummy bullet, which a blank propelled, killing him. Other movies with equally bizarre crossover darkness: The Omen, The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone and Poltergeist.

One aspect of the present shooting that seems to cross the improbability threshold into synchronicity/ crossover territory is that the same movie company, Warner Brothers, that produced Dark Knight Rises had trailers out in movie theaters concurrently for Gangster Squad which shows gangsters breaking through a movie screen and firing at the audience. I can't imagine a more direct emblematic image of crossover effects. To see a stunning still image from the Gangster Squad trailer (or to experience this article as a podcast or youtube) go here:

 http://www.zaporacle.com/the-batman-shootings-and-crossover-effects/

Also, in the trilogy of Batman films that concludes with Dark Knight Rising, we already had a crossover, the untimely death of Heath Ledger before the release of the previous film in the series, The Dark Knight. His uncanny portrayal of the Joker seems to have had generated crossover effects in both Heath Ledger (as we'll examine more closely later) and the present shooter, James Holmes, who told police "I am the Joker," and dyed his hair red to look the part.

The Joker is probably the best personification cinema has ever brought us of the trickster archetype. The trickster archetype has a dominant role in paranormal phenomena, and this is brilliantly analyzed in George Hansen's seminal book, The Trickster and the Paranormal.  Hansen describes the trickster this way:

The trickster is a character type found in mythology, folklore, and literature the world over; tricksters appear as animals, humans, and gods. They have a number of common characteristics, and some of their most salient qualities are disruption, unrestrained sexuality, disorder, and nonconformity to the establishment. They are typically male. Tricksters often deceive larger and more powerful beings who would thwart them; they may be endearingly clever or disgustingly stupid -- both cultural heroes and selfish buffoons.

Tricksters are boundary crossers; they destabilize structures; they govern transitions. They also embody paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity. The topic of marginality can be included here. Tricksters are marginal characters; they live at boundaries, with uncertain, ambiguous statuses.

Many of these same characteristics, as Hansen points out, are also true of the paranormal:

...psi, the paranormal, and the supernatural are fundamentally linked to destructuring, change, transition, disorder, marginality, the ephemeral, fluidity, ambiguity, and blurring of boundaries. In contrast, the phenomena are repressed or excluded with order, structure, routine, stasis, regularity, precision, rigidity, and clear demarcation. 
 
The trickster violates the social order and crosses all expected boundaries. In the case of the Batman shooting, the trickster seems to have crossed out of the movie world into the waking life. The trickster is the natural enemy of established order, and the boundary between realities is the one he most likes to violate. As the Joker puts it in The Dark Knight,

"Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes...chaos. I'm an agent of chaos."

The paranormal, as Hansen points out, is fundamentally a crossover phenomenon:

ESP and PK are, by definition, boundary crossing. They surmount the barriers between mind and mind (telepathy), mind and matter (clairvoyance and PK), as well as the limitations of time (pre-cognition), and that of life and death (spirit mediumship, ghosts, and reincarnation).
 
Another crossover,  that no one could have planned, is that the nemesis of The Dark Knight Rises is "Bane." A character created 20 years ago, and dominating the news (before the shooting) was  Mitt Romney, and the questionable actions of his company, Bain Capital. Rush Limbaugh, never known for his research (googling the character, Bane, reveals that he was created in 1993), suggested that the homophonic name parallelism was a leftist conspiracy,

"Do you think it is accidental that the name of the really vicious, fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?"

Soon, we will likely be told that James Holmes is a schizophrenic or suffering from bipolar psychosis or something like that. My former writing mentor, novelist E.L. Doctorow, once described psychiatric jargon  as the "industrial form of story telling."  We need to look past the industrial story telling of news analysts and mental health professionals. There is more in heaven and in earth than is dreamt of in the DSM-IV.

Crossover effects are especially likely to happen when creative people contact certain elements existing in the collective unconscious through the imaginal plane. Here's an example of this crossover effect from Jeffrey Kripal's, fascinating, elegantly written and illustrated new book, Mutants and Mystics:

It appears that the paranormal often needs the pop-cultural form to appear at all. The truth needs the trick, the fact the fantasy. It is almost as if the left brain will not let the right brain speak (which it can't anyway, since language is generally a left-brained function), so the right brain turns to image and story to say what it has to say (without saying it). Consider how back in the late 1970s the prolific comic-book writer Doug Moench found himself writing out the real in a work of fantasy a few seconds before it became the real, in fact. I sat down with Doug in the spring of 2009. Here is the story he told me. Moench had just finished writing a scene of a Planet of the Apes comic book about a black-hooded gorilla named Brutus. The scene involved Brutus invading the human hero's home, where he grabbed the man's mate by the neck and held a gun to her head in order to manipulate the hero. Just as Doug finished this scene, he heard his wife call for him in an odd sort of way from the living room across the house. He got up, walked the length of the house, and entered the living room only to encounter a man in a black hood with one arm around his wife's neck and the other holding a gun to her head: "It was exactly what I had written...it was so, so immediate in relation to the writing and such an exact duplicate of what I had written, that it became an instant altered state. The air in the room congealed, became almost like fog, and yet, paradoxically, I could see with greater clarity. I could see the individual threads of his black hood." Doug's emotional response to this series of events was a very understandable and natural one. He became obsessed with the black-hooded intruder for months, then years. More immediately, he found it very difficult to write, so terrified was he of that eerie connection between what he might write and what might happen: "It really does make you wonder. Are you seeing the future? Are you creating a reality? Should you give up writing forever after something like this happens? I don't know." (from the highly recommended book, Mutants and Mystics)

I've written extensively about crossover effects in my book Crossing the Event Horizon -- Human Metamorphosis and the Singularity Archetype.  The most relevant case I discuss concerns both versions of the movie Village of the Damned, and the tragedy that left Christopher Reeve a quadriplegic shortly after the release of the John Carpenter 1995 version of the film. Both the 1995 version and the British, 1960 version, had numerous, disturbing crossover aspects. It would take too many pages to unfold that case here, but it certainly brought to the foreground of my mind that movies can be crossover portals (window zones) where there are lapses in the supposed firewall between the collective unconscious and the waking world.

Movies that probe into archetypal darkness are like windows into the abyss. We feel safe as we gaze through them as though we were observing the abyss through the synthetic sapphire porthole windows of an impervious submarine. We are accustomed to think of movies as our impervious submarines and space ships that allow us to probe the darkness without being consumed by it. For ten dollars or so we take a ride into the underworld and are usually returned safely to our seats.  But as Nietzsche put it, "If you gaze overlong into an abyss, the abyss gazes back at you."

Of course, I'm not warning people away from movies. We need movies to be portals, even if the portals sometime become associated with instances of tragic magic.  Movies are a very good example of what people mean when they say "the veil between the worlds is thinning."  Some will dismiss this statement as a New Age cliché. But this statement can be rationally defended with very unmystical examples of familiar technological effects.  The veil between the world of the psyche and the waking world of seemingly solid objects has been greatly lessened by movies, video screens and search engines amongst various veil thinning technologies.

Search engines are one of the most potent veil thinners we have ever created. Whatever strange thing might be in our mind, it is only a matter of moments before we can make it appear on the shape-shifting, pixellated screen in front of us. And this, of course, is for better or worse -- dark thoughts and light will both be magnified and manifested. For example, let's say a man suddenly forms an unwholesome desire to see  Japanese school girls in S&M poses.  He can type the right words into Google and in a second or two his inner obsession has manifested into websites filled with images and videos offering to act as portals into this particular fetish.  In a more positive case, someone with a few hundred million dollars at his disposal may create a portal to another world (see Avatar and the Singularity Archetype),  and distribute that portal throughout the planet.

There is no such thing in nature as an H-Bomb, that is all man's doing. We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger.   --C.G. Jung

We have a moral obligation to look into the collective unconscious because one of its crossover effects is called "history."  And as Stephen Dedalus, the James Joyce character, so memorably put it, "History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." History is a crossover effect of the collective unconscious. War, every aspect of the economy, violence, mass shootings, environmental pollution -- these are all psychological products. All these things originated from psyche, so any discussion of those things that doesn't probe into psyche is superficial, and misses the prime mover of all human phenomena.

There was tension in the air at the Century Movieplex here in Boulder, Colorado (nearby Aurora, the scene of the shooting) when I went to see the film on the sunny afternoon following the shooting. Two squad cars were parked out front and heavily armed and armored members of the Boulder Police Department were standing in the lobby.  According to the friend who took me to the movie, when I stood up during the film to go to the bathroom, he could feel the whole movie theater take a breath.

Movies so often contain mayhem, but it is usually assumed to be safely confined to the silver screen. The presence of the police in the temple of fantasy, the multiplex, was the tangible acknowledgement by the established order that movies can project themselves past their silvery screens.

Another extremely weird crossover is that Warner Brothers, the producer of Dark Knight Rises, just pulled all the trailers for Gangster Squad. According to the local CBS news, the trailer included gangsters with machine guns firing into the audience of a packed movie house.

I'm not going to analyze Dark Knight Rises in detail, but here are a few impressions: I found the film to be extremely powerful and to resonate potently with some charged themes in my psyche, and no doubt the collective psyche. An implacable dark force is superbly personified by the character Bane. We see the dark force manipulate politics and use technology to put a Sword of Damocles over the heads of the citizens of Gotham City. Disturbingly, Gotham City was never before so explicitly New York City. There is even an aerial shot of lower Manhattan that shows the incomplete Freedom Tower rising from ground zero. The New York City setting stirred anxiety in me as I am a relocated New Yorker and most of my family lives in the city. Bane, the ultimate terrorist, striding the streets of the 9/11 city was an unsettling image.  Many scenes on Wall Street and inside the stock exchange seem to manipulate the resentment between the 99% and the 1%. Also resonating in my mind as I watched the film was the 2012 presidential race and the odd homophonic crossover of Bane and Bain.

The movie is brilliantly done, deserves to be seen, and resonates with American, if not international, anxieties. I absolutely do not hold the movie makers in any way shape or form responsible for what happened. The unconscious always erupts and seems to particularly favor erupting through the portal of the movie, a technological artifact that functionally bridges the imaginal realm and the waking life.

Here's another example of a crossover effect:  An unemployed artist haunts an occult book store. The books are like portals for him, and the artist has strange synchronicities and visions as he probes into them. The artist had fantasies of a thousand-year world empire, of a sinister sigil emblazoned everywhere -- a reversed astrological symbol called a swastika, of a master race, and of mass extermination camps where people were put in ovens.  His twisted, improbable fantasies crossed over in a most unpleasant way and this obscure, unemployed artist  becomes famous for his crossover event called World War Two.

My recent book, Crossing the Event Horizon -- Human Metamorphosis and the Singularity Archetype, is about a cataclysmic, but ultimately evolutionary, metamorphosis about which we are getting signals from the collective unconscious. Quite often, these signals are most powerfully delivered through movies such as 2001, a Space Odyssey.  The forces of quantum metamorphosis get to speak through movies, but so also do the forces of darkness.  Movies, and all media, need to express both dark and light thought forms. As change accelerates, as novelty increases, we should expect that the outer edges of light and the outer edges of darkness will both be intensified. As a Tom Robbins character put it, "You don't get a big top without a big bottom." Movies will reflect both the top and bottom edges.

Consider the above to be an introduction to crossover effects with movies and other media. Now we will shift our focus to actual cases and take a look at the previous Batman movie, The Dark Knight, which was electrified by the unsettling, uncanny performance of Heath Ledger as the Joker.  The best known crossover effect for this movie was the tragically untimely death of Heath Ledger before the film opened. Less well known is that during the filming, a technician, Conway Wickliffe, a New Zealand-born special effects technician, was accidentally killed while operating a camera during a stunt.

Heath Ledger talked to many people close to him about being adversely affected by the joker. Ledger took increasing doses of prescription drugs to deal with insomnia and other problems.  According to the Office of the Medical Examiner of New York, "Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine."

According to a Daily News article entitled "Jack Nicholson warned Heath Ledger on 'Joker' role":
Heath Ledger thought landing the demanding role of the Joker was a dream come true -- but now some think it was a nightmare that led to his tragic death. Jack Nicholson, who played the Joker in 1989 -- and who was furious he wasn't consulted about the creepy role -- offered a cryptic comment when told Ledger was dead. "Well," Nicholson told reporters in London early Wednesday, "I warned him." Though the remark was ambiguous, there's no question the role in the movie earmarked as this summer's blockbuster took a frightening toll. Ledger recently told reporters he "slept an average of two hours a night" while playing "a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy ... I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going." Prescription drugs didn't help, he said.
 
In the above, and in most descriptions of him, the Joker is described as a psychopath. As I've written in Foxes and Reptiles, Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown, we seem to be in a time of awakening to the dangers of psychopathy. We've recently discovered that there are genetic differences in psychopaths and that they look different under functional MRI scans. Some evolutionary biologists consider psychopaths to be a subspecies. The 99% and the 1% has been criticized for its numerical inaccuracy as the elites are actually a small fraction of the 1%.  But this ratio may reflect an unconscious realization about psychopathy, as psychopaths are 1% of the population.  This 1% is disproportionally to be found concentrated in spheres of high finance and political power.  Amongst these 1% are the Jokers and Banes who drive the nightmare of history from which we are trying to awaken.

It looks like someone has done a thorough job of writing about most of the other cases of crossover movies -- The Omen, The Exorcist, The Crow and Poltergeist. Please read Cursed Films.
 
A case of  tragic  crossover effects not mentioned in the above article is the 1983 movie, The Twilight Zone.  According to Wikipedia: "The film garnered notoriety before its release for the tragic stunt helicopter crash which took the lives of Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, during the filming ..." Vic Morrow played the role of a man who represented dark threads in the collective American psyche. In the movie, he is taken through something like bardos where he experiences himself in the roles of people who were recent objects of his racism and hate speech.  The movie included a remake of the most haunting of Twilight Zones episodes, It's a Good Life, in which a mutant boy creates very unpleasant crossover effects out of his imagination. Perhaps the most dramatic crossover of my life happened on the day of the premier of this movie which I attended in NYC in 1983, but I have yet to write about it.

As a collective, we need to realize that the veil between the collective unconscious and the waking reality is always thinning and erupting.  Much of what we see in the phenomenal world is an eruption of psyche. Movies are crossover artifacts that stand between the imaginal plane, the dreamtime and the waking reality.  It should not surprise us that they are often crossover portals, reminding us that the firewall between the reality in which you read these words and other realities is a semi-permeable membrane.
 
Copyright Jonathan Zap, 2012.

Our Enemy the Internet - Intel Operations Galore

Source: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/08/02/our-enemy-the-internet/

Prison Internet:  Weaponized, Propaganized and Lethal


       …by  Press TV and Gordon Duff



Parents have long warned their children about the internet, predators and pornography, but globalist force have made the simple dangers of old seem tame.  

Today’s internet is a web of deception, false identities, “robo-sites” and “black propaganda.”
The internet, meant to be a world of social interaction and shared knowledge has been systematically targeted by “psyops” groups that are capable of dominating content through money, intimidation and deceit.

Two years ago, a viral video was released showing classes being recruited in Israel, hundreds at a time trained to dominate Wikipedia, comment boards, social media sites and pressure service providers to limit freedom of speech.


 
More advanced groups systematically search the internet, day and night, sanitizing content critical of leaders accused of despotism and criminality.

Backing them up are lobbying groups that threaten advertisers or hackers that simply take sites down with malware and viruses.



For every criminal that is misrepresented and “sanitized,” a free speech advocate or political opponent is attack through “black propaganda.”
Where a few years ago, governments, more appropriately “spy agencies” hired “volunteers” to pollute the “information highway” with smears, threats and conspiracy theories, today computers can, overnight, create a hundred, a thousand “robo-sites.”

“Ok..I think I’ve got them all fixed now.”

What is a “robo-site”? Let’s say we were to examine the issue of support for a war on Iran.
In hours, a hundred sites could appear, each loaded with comments and articles, all anonymous, no real names, the site owned through an anonymous “proxy” and all ideas, all “facts” and all accusations are carefully orchestrated to give the impression of a large scale public movement advocating the wishes of a computer at a spy agency.

In a single day it can appear the entire attitude of the world has changed with language carefully designed by psychological warfare trained agents who use methodologies developed in studies of mind control.

An unsuspecting internet surfer can come on site after site and be subjected to subliminal images, “facts” backed up by non-existent “authorities” and outright fabrications.
In fact, as the world moves closer to war, and we are seeing it now, and as elections in the US are key to that process, millions of dollars, thousands of man hours are being dedicated to creating what appears to be a world racing toward war.  
Net users are terrified through imaginary threats carefully attested to by non-existent authorities, ad-hoc organizations that no one had imagined only minutes before.
Things that could never be done on mainstream news, no matter how corporately controlled, how financially intimidated or politically dishonest now appear on the internet, wild rumors, racist slurs, threats, imaginary plots, all engineered to destroy the fabric of civilization through control of the one tool that could have made us all so much more human.

A century ago, Lenin said it best. 

“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.”Vladimir Ilyich Lenin


Ritz Katz – SITE Intel – An Israeli Disinfo Front?

Lenin said it and this is how it is done.  Al Qaeda websites are only found by a single Israeli company, SITE intelligence, run by Rita Katz, whose father was executed in Iraq as a spy in Syria.
The bin Laden videos and audio tapes debunked by scientific experts as fakes all come from that same source as do most quotes on issues of “Islamic extremism,” all traced back, quite curiously, to Israel.

There is one enemy, FACT.  One product, BELIEF.

Through manipulation of every human instinct from generosity to fear to the need to belong, the “herd mentality,” there is one goal, the abandonment of reason and discernment, of logic and sensibility and the surrender to emotions.

Emotions are the key as once fact is no longer an issue, the desire for truth succumbs to the need to conform or distrust or to simply surrender.
This is done, to a great extent, through “interest groups” that continually beg for money and dispense a form of unreality, systematic disinformation, millions of emails from countless organizations, all of whom have dedicated themselves to the eradication of an imaginary threat.
Americans live in fear of millions of Mexicans overrunning their homes, government officials seizing their guns or forcing them to go to a different doctor when they forget they neither own a gun nor could afford to see a doctor in the first place.

The solutions are always simple.  Lower taxes on the wealthy, limit the rights of the middle class, preemptively attack any nation that the interest groups are told needs to be “bombed” or “droned” into submission.

Sometimes the issue can be more “micro” than “macro.”  Instead of the threat being a group controlled by an unseen hand, tasked by unknown powers, always advocating increased spying, more prisons, less freedom and more war, it can be as innocent as someone asking for “friendship.”


Is Zuckerberg’s Facebook Active or Passive

Thus, social networks, such as Facebook, are infiltrated, are “data-mined” to select those who are potentially gullible, potentially angry, undiscerning or, worst of all, educated, independent, socially just and strong of heart and will.

One group is recruited while the other group is put on “watch lists” and subjected to additional airport searches, monitoring of phone and internet communications and even, during international travel, actual surveillance.

There are some unique tools for using social networks.  One few know of is the “Robo-Person.”  Tens of thousands, perhaps more, even millions who belong to social networks, what seems to most to be actual people, photographs, children, political and social beliefs are actually constructs of computers.

“Internet friends,” carefully designed to infiltrate social groups or through networks of contacts, manage to secure personal information on people around the world.
These “non-persons,” I have at least 20 on my own Facebook “friend” list, when tracked by sophisticated software end up as nameless proxy servers or tie to Washington based “think tanks” or private security companies contracted to Washington law firms. When investigated they represent either unsavory foreign interests or corporations suspected of systematic criminal activity.

They use different methods for kids

Thus, man’s humanity, the need to belong, to be accepted, to join together in the common good has become the tool of his potential downfall.

Imagine a child of today, sharing a lifetime of that experience.

Computers can profile a child, help guide his life, his development, emails can attract him to “multi-media” entertainment, drugs, sex and criminality or, just perhaps, help find the next “lone gunman” to kill a president or member of congress.

Anyone who imagines less than this is being done on a minute by minute basis to every single one of us is less than naive.

To some the worst of the internet is the anonymous expression of aggression and bad manners.
It is time that all are told that, just behind that keyboard, the world they have never wanted to know is reaching out to them with a seemingly innocent hand.
Editing:  Jim W. Dean

https://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2023/06/unto-final-chapter-of-great-reset.html

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