You're Not a Kid Anymore When...

1. You enjoy watching the news.

2. The phone rings and you hope its not for you.

3. The only reason you're still awake at 4 am is indigestion.

4. People ask what color your hair USED to be.

5. You're proud of your lawn mower.

6. You start singing along with the elevator music.

7. Your car has four doors.

8. You've owned clothes so long that they've come back into style --TWICE.

9. 8 AM is your idea of "sleeping in".

10. You write thank you notes without being told.

11. You start Christmas shopping in August.

12. You don't like to drive after dark.

13. You say the words "Turn that music down!"

14. You point out what buildings used to be where.

15. You can't remember the last time you lay on the floor to watch television.

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Source: most of one chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998;
proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.

THE sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.

Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.

Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallise into well-organised complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.

But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.

We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.

In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals. Culture monopolies are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect their appeasement of the real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass society (a sphere producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easy-going liberalism and Jewish intellectuals) is not to undergo a series of purges. The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms and technical branches to be ignored.

The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasised and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organisation charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda.

How formalised the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice. The same applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions. But even the differences between the more expensive and cheaper models put out by the same firm steadily diminish: for automobiles, there are such differences as the number of cylinders, cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and for films there are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology, labor, and equipment, and the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. The universal criterion of merit is the amount of “conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves.

Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the fusion of all the arts in one work.

The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than in Tristan because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content. This process integrates all the elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with an eye to the film) to the last sound effect. It is the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production team may have selected.

The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematising for him.

Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalise it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office.

The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself – which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea. When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious and, in the period from Romanticism to Expressionism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against the organisation. In music the single harmonic effect obliterated the awareness of form as a whole; in painting the individual colour was stressed at the expense of pictorial composition; and in the novel psychology became more important than structure. The totality of the culture industry has put an end to this.

Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their insubordination and makes them subserve the formula, which replaces the work. The same fate is inflicted on whole and parts alike. The whole inevitably bears no relation to the details – just like the career of a successful man into which everything is made to fit as an illustration or a proof, whereas it is nothing more than the sum of all those idiotic events. The so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order but not coherence. The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art. In Germany the graveyard stillness of the dictatorship already hung over the gayest films of the democratic era.

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film.

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.

Even though the effort required for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie – by its images, gestures, and words – that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening. All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically.

The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. The entertainments manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure – which is akin to work. From every sound film and every broadcast program the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way.

The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the extinction in the West of a basic style-determining power are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigour and general currency of any “real style,” in the sense in which cultural cognoscenti celebrate the organic pre-capitalist past. No Palestrina could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any development which does not conform to the jargon. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not only when he is too serious or too difficult but when he harmonises the melody in a different way, perhaps more simply, than is customary now. No medieval builder can have scrutinised the subjects for church windows and sculptures more suspiciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinises a work by Balzac or Hugo before finally approving it. No medieval theologian could have determined the degree of the torment to be suffered by the damned in accordance with the order of divine love more meticulously than the producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be undergone by the hero or the exact point to which the leading lady’s hemline shall be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalogue of the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area of freedom but is all-powerful inside it. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly.

Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight. And the star performers, whether they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as freely and fluently and with as much gusto as if it were the very language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is natural in this field of activity, and its influence becomes all the more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension between the finished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty, can be detected and is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns out. A jazz musician who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily and will smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the beat. This is the “nature” which, complicated by the ever-present and extravagant demands of the specific medium, constitutes the new style and is a “system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain ‘unity of style’ if it really made any sense to speak of stylised barbarity.” [Nietzsche]

The universal imposition of this stylised mode can even go beyond what is quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden; today a hit song is more readily forgiven for not observing the 32 beats or the compass of the ninth than for containing even the most clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform to the idiom. Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system. The constraint of the technically-conditioned idiom which stars and directors have to produce as “nature” so that the people can appropriate it, extends to such fine nuances that they almost attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work as against those of truth. The rare capacity minutely to fulfil the obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture industry becomes the criterion of efficiency. What and how they say it must be measurable by everyday language, as in logical positivism.

The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has overreached the culturally conservative distinction between genuine and artificial style. A style might be called artificial which is imposed from without on the refractory impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of the subject matter has its origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears. The quarrels in which the artistic experts become involved with sponsor and censor about a lie going beyond the bounds of credibility are evidence not so much of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence of interests. The reputation of the specialist, in which a last remnant of objective independence sometimes finds refuge, conflicts with the business politics of the Church, or the concern which is manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself has been essentially objectified and made viable before the established authorities began to argue about it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, Saint Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer as brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of style. The reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, meaningful content to style, is futile because there has ceased to be the slightest tension between opposite poles: these concordant extremes are dismally identical; the general can replace the particular, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to something beyond the genuine style of the past. In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination. Style considered as mere aesthetic regularity is a romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard. Those very art forms which are known as classical, such as Mozart’s music, contain objective trends which represent something different to the style which they incarnate.

As late as Schönberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter. What Dadaists and Expressionists called the untruth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon of a crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and even in the admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant’s squalid hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too.

However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realised, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others – on a surrogate identity.

In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralised. To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematisation and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialised, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture.

And so the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of style. Not only do its categories and contents derive from liberalism – domesticated naturalism as well as operetta and revue – but the modern culture monopolies form the economic area in which, together with the corresponding entrepreneurial types, for the time being some part of its sphere of operation survives, despite the process of disintegration elsewhere.

It is still possible to make one’s way in entertainment, if one is not too obstinate about one’s own concerns, and proves appropriately pliable. Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism. Realistic dissidence is the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in business. In the public voice of modern society accusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perceptive can already detect signs that the dissident will soon be reconciled. The more immeasurable the gap between chorus and leaders, the more certainly there is room at the top for everybody who demonstrates his superiority by well-planned originality. Hence, in the culture industry, too, the liberal tendency to give full scope to its able men survives.

To do this for the efficient today is still the function of the market, which is otherwise proficiently controlled; as for the market’s freedom, in the high period of art as elsewhere, it was freedom for the stupid to starve. Significantly, the system of the culture industry comes from the more liberal industrial nations, and all its characteristic media, such as movies, radio, jazz, and magazines, flourish there. Its progress, to be sure, had its origin in the general laws of capital. Gaumont and Pathe, Ullstein and Hugenberg followed the international trend with some success; Europe’s economic dependence on the United States after war and inflation was a contributory factor. The belief that the barbarity of the culture industry is a result of “cultural lag,” of the fact that the American consciousness did not keep up with the growth of technology, is quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly.

But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of independence and enabled its last representatives to exist – however dismally. In Germany the failure of democratic control to permeate life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things were exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded the Western countries. The German educational system, universities, theatres with artistic standards, great orchestras, and museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and municipalities, which had inherited such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of the freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection. In the market itself the tribute of a quality for which no use had been found was turned into purchasing power; in this way, respectable literary and music publishers could help authors who yielded little more in the way of profit than the respect of the connoisseur.

But what completely fettered the artist was the pressure (and the accompanying drastic threats), always to fit into business life as an aesthetic expert. Formerly, like Kant and Hume, they signed their letters “Your most humble and obedient servant,” and undermined the foundations of throne and altar. Today they address heads of government by their first names, yet in every artistic activity they are subject to their illiterate masters.

The analysis Tocqueville offered a century ago has in the meantime proved wholly accurate. Under the private culture monopoly it is a fact that “tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.” Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually – to be “self-employed.” When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of incompetence.

Whereas today in material production the mechanism of supply and demand is disintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as a check in the rulers’ favour. The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the rigorism of the Hays Office, just as in certain great times in history it has inflamed greater forces that were turned against it, namely, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. The industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired. What is a loss for the firm which cannot fully exploit a contract with a declining star is a legitimate expense for the system as a whole. By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total harmony. The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their pretentious claim to know better than the others, even though culture is democratic and distributes its privileges to all. In view of the ideological truce, the conformism of the buyers and the effrontery of the producers who supply them prevail. The result is a constant reproduction of the same thing.

A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The ossified forms – such as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit song – are the standardised average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from college, have long since reorganised and rationalised the objective spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by Plato – and were indeed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.

Amusement and all the elements of the culture industry existed long before the latter came into existence. Now they are taken over from above and brought up to date. The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle, on divesting amusement of its obtrusive naïvetes and improving the type of commodities. The more absolute it became, the more ruthless it was in forcing every outsider either into bankruptcy or into a syndicate, and became more refined and elevated – until it ended up as a synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris. It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at will as a lie within. “Light” art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society. The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasised itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes – with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry attempts.

The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is as embarrassing to it as that of Schönberg and Karl Kraus. And so the jazz musician Benny Goodman appears with the Budapest string quartet, more pedantic rhythmically than any philharmonic clarinettist, while the style of the Budapest players is as uniform and sugary as that of Guy Lombardo. But what is significant is not vulgarity, stupidity, and lack of polish.

The culture industry did away with yesterday’s rubbish by its own perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish, although it constantly allows gross blunders without which the standard of the exalted style cannot be perceived. But what is new is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system. It is with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents – which are stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited. The social power which the spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for which the ephemeral contents stand in.

Nevertheless the culture industry remains the entertainment business. Its influence over the consumers is established by entertainment; that will ultimately be broken not by an outright decree, but by the hostility inherent in the principle of entertainment to what is greater than itself. Since all the trends of the culture industry are profoundly embedded in the public by the whole social process, they are encouraged by the survival of the market in this area. Demand has not yet been replaced by simple obedience. As is well known, the major reorganisation of the film industry shortly before World War I, the material prerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate acceptance of the public’s needs as recorded at the box-office – a procedure which was hardly thought necessary in the pioneering days of the screen. The same opinion is held today by the captains of the film industry, who take as their criterion the more or less phenomenal song hits but wisely never have recourse to the judgment of truth, the opposite criterion. Business is their ideology. It is quite correct that the power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete power and complete powerlessness.

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.

All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association. No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from the immediately preceding situation and never from the idea of the whole. For the attentive movie-goer any individual scene will give him the whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still seems dangerous, offering some meaning – wretched as it might be – where only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot is maliciously deprived of the development demanded by characters and matter according to the old pattern. Instead, the next step is what the script writer takes to be the most striking effect in the particular situation. Banal though elaborate surprise interrupts the story-line.

The tendency mischievously to fall back on pure nonsense, which was a legitimate part of popular art, farce and clowning, right up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, is most obvious in the unpretentious kinds. This tendency has completely asserted itself in the text of the novelty song, in the thriller movie, and in cartoons, although in films starring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity of the socio-psychological case study provides something approximating a claim to a consistent plot. The idea itself, together with the objects of comedy and terror, is massacred and fragmented. Novelty songs have always existed on a contempt for meaning which, as predecessors and successors of psychoanalysis, they reduce to the monotony of sexual symbolism. Today, detective and adventure films no longer give the audience the opportunity to experience the resolution. In the non-ironic varieties of the genre, it has also to rest content with the simple horror of situations which have almost ceased to be linked in any way.

Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth. A few years ago they had a consistent plot which only broke up in the final moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the very first sequence a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organised amusement changes into the quality of organised cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.

The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns into violence against the spectator, and distraction into exertion. Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses shown and recommended in the film. This raises the question whether the culture industry fulfils the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theatres were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street into the movie theatre is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would be felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theatre a place of refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied.

The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfilment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far. The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that the culture industry has established anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted; even license as a marketable speciality has its quota bearing the trade description “daring.” The mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the “natural” faces of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolisation of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty.

The triumph over beauty is celebrated by humour – the Schadenfreude that every successful deprivation calls forth. There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humour as Hölderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum gaudium. The monastic theory that not asceticism but the sexual act denotes the renunciation of attainable bliss receives negative confirmation in the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter. In every product of the culture industry, the permanent denial imposed by civilisation is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims. To offer and to deprive them of something is one and the same. This is what happens in erotic films. Precisely because it must never take place, everything centres upon copulation. In films it is more strictly forbidden for an illegitimate relationship to be admitted without the parties being punished than for a millionaire’s future son-in-law to be active in the labour movement. In contrast to the liberal era, industrialised as well as popular culture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is fundamental. It outlasts the organised acceptance of the uniformed seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts itself in the form of women’s organisations, but the necessity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible.

The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as capable of-fulfilment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe that the deception it practices is satisfaction, but it goes further and implies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up with what is offered. The escape from everyday drudgery which the whole culture industry promises may be compared to the daughter’s abduction in the cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget.

...

Even today the culture industry dresses works of art like political slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at reduced prices; they are as accessible for public enjoyment as a park. But the disappearance of their genuine commodity character does not mean that they have been abolished in the life of a free society, but that the last defence against their reduction to culture goods has fallen. The abolition of educational privilege by the device of clearance sales does not open for the masses the spheres from which they were formerly excluded, but, given existing social conditions, contributes directly to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric meaninglessness. Those who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent. The bourgeois who wanted to get something out of it tried occasionally to establish some rapport with the work. Evidence for this is to be found in the literary “introductions” to works, or in the commentaries on Faust. These were the first steps toward the biographical coating and other practices to which a work of art is subjected today.

Even in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange-value did carry use value as a mere appendix but had developed it as a prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially helpful for works of art. Art exercised some restraint on the bourgeois as long as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past. Now that it has lost every restraint and there is no need to pay any money, the proximity of art to those who are exposed to it completes the alienation and assimilates one to the other under the banner of triumphant objectivity. Criticism and respect disappear in the culture industry; the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities. Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless, they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it is being given them. The double mistrust of traditional culture as ideology is combined with mistrust of industrialised culture as a swindle. When thrown in free, the now debased works of art, together with the rubbish to which the medium assimilates them, are secretly rejected by the fortunate recipients, who are supposed to be satisfied by the mere fact that there is so much to be seen and heard. Everything can be obtained. The screenos and vaudevilles in the movie theatre, the competitions for guessing music, the free books, rewards and gifts offered on certain radio programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation of the practice obtaining with culture products. The symphony becomes a reward for listening to the radio, and – if technology had its way - the film would be delivered to people’s homes as happens with the radio. It is moving toward the commercial system. Television points the way to a development which might easily enough force the Warner Brothers into what would certainly be the unwelcome position of serious musicians and cultural conservatives. But the gift system has already taken hold among consumers. As culture is represented as a bonus with undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize the chance. They rush in lest they miss something. Exactly what, is not clear, but in any case the only ones with a chance are the participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the training the culture industry has given these recipients of gifts, in order to organise them into its own forced battalions.

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives are markedly economic.

One could certainly live without the culture industry, therefore it necessarily creates too much satiation and apathy. In itself, it has few resources itself to correct this. Advertising is its elixir of life. But as its product never fails to reduce to a mere promise the enjoyment which it promises as a commodity, it eventually coincides with publicity, which it needs because it cannot be enjoyed. In a competitive society, advertising performed the social service of informing the buyer about the market; it made choice easier and helped the unknown but more efficient supplier to dispose of his goods. Far from costing time, it saved it.

Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those who control the system are entrenching themselves in it. It strengthens the firm bond between the consumers and the big combines. Only those who can pay the exorbitant rates charged by the advertising agencies, chief of which are the radio networks themselves; that is, only those who are already in a position to do so, or are co-opted by the decision of the banks and industrial capital, can enter the pseudo-market as sellers. The costs of advertising, which finally flow back into the pockets of the combines, make it unnecessary to defeat unwelcome outsiders by laborious competition. They guarantee that power will remain in the same hands – not unlike those economic decisions by which the establishment and running of undertakings is controlled in a totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negative principle, a blocking device: everything that does not bear its stamp is economically suspect. Universal publicity is in no way necessary for people to get to know the kinds of goods – whose supply is restricted anyway. It helps sales only indirectly. For a particular firm, to phase out a current advertising practice constitutes a loss of prestige, and a breach of the discipline imposed by the influential clique on its members. In wartime, goods which are unobtainable are still advertised, merely to keep industrial power in view.

Baudrillard

*Baudrillard*

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

These would be the successive phases of the image:



1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.



In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.

1 That there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its fundamental capitalist mechanism.

2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy.

3 That in fact power, genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it or taking it over.

4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy - which might appear evident, but not so evident, since:

5 It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).


All the above is simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse. And this logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their wanting it.

Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.

For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.

But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.

Postmodernism # 3

Postmodernism?

Girl: So what the hell is postmodernism?

Guy: What isn't it?

Girl: What the hell does that mean?

What do you want it to mean?

Alright! Cut the shit and answer the question!

Alright. Read?... Postmodernism is.... a question.

A question?! Wh--

Yes exactly! Postmodernism is an un-answerable question propositioned to us to make us crazy. Postmodernism is the limbo, the wait between the question asked and the answer recieved. It's the cruel joke that answers are so abundant we are drowning in them... which is right, or wrong, or even relevent? How can you tell?

You ask questions?

Exactly.

So postmodernism is just a question you can't answer?

No. It's the answer you don't know you have.

What?! Those are two different things! You said--

Are they? Or are they the same thing but merely twisted, reversed, inverted inot themselves and thus appearing different?

Don't go all post-modern on me now!

Fine. I won't.

Too late actually, but what else is postmodern then, or what isn't postmodern actually!

Well if modernism is an old black and white photo, basic chemistry and light to creat images, to creat art, then postmoderism is best seen as streaming video on the web. Make sense. It is a million times more complicated than that wich spawned it.

Whoa. But what does that mean? I don't get it?

"Postmodernism emphasizes constructed, mediated and encoded processes that provide us with the effect of truth, meaning and reality. It is therefore wary of Big Science that unproblematically construes itself as knowledge either discovered or discoverable."
--Postmodernism and Big Science

You mean Big Science has failed us?

Not failed us, it just has not defined us, understood us or saved us. "Some branches of postmodern thought claim that scientific knowledge is a construct that makes reality in it's own image, but also that it is a system of thought that is insecure"--PSB

So science legitimizes it's self in the same way that, say, religion does.

Basically, yes.

So what does that mean for religion?

"The modern ends up being at war with itself and must inevitably become the post-moder; (modern coming from the Greek modo meaning: now) 'after just now'"
--Appignanesi

"There is no remainder in the mathamatics of infinity"
--Duston Hoffman "I Heart Huckabees"

Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl
"The new world reality, which is at the same time also a world unreality, is to a great extent free of causality."

Time and space don't exist according to the book I am reading, oh and crop circles apparently have sacred geometric constants linking it to Qabbala, and it seems that world is changing so fast that it could end or already has and the Ancient Mayan Calender runs out, says the world is over in less that six years.

Don't worry I'm not gonna lose any sleep, nothing can ruin my vacation or come between me and sleeping... all day. I'm on vacation and the world ending is not going to ruin this for me!!! I think the world already ended and I missed it... I was asleep.

What the BLEEP do I know?

Why do we need to learn to see the blanket truth all the time in the everyday stuff?

Well you wouldn't want to miss out on the big picture now would you? --I Heart Huckabees

The blanket truth is that everything is connected, intertwined and ultimately the same.

Consciousness creates reality, it creates matter by harnessing energy.

Much like planets are created out of cosmic gas and particles, electrons, protons and atoms are created out of tiny particles called thoughts. Thoughts condense to a point to be measured by intruments created also by human ideas.

Energy is both wave (undifined moving energy) and particle, just depending on who you ask and the probablitlity that they will say it is... make sense?

Good.

The point is that you can create your own reality be seeing that your reality is shaped by your mind and determined by how much you use it. You are the same as everything else and it is you.

Everything you could want or be you already have and are, you just don't see it yet.

All we really need to know is that we can change the world, every person can.

And once you see the world for what it is, once you get a unifed theory (a sense of enleightenment) you find you are changing the world.

Just watch, and see, go and just be.

Cognito Ergo Sum ...I think I like it.

**

Unified Theory

Why do we need to learn to see the blanket truth all the time in the everyday stuff?

Well you wouldn't want to miss out on the big picture now would you? --I Heart Huckabees

The blanket truth is that everything is connected, intertwined and ultimately the same.

Consciousness creates reality, it creates matter by harnessing energy.

Much like planets are created out of cosmic gas and particles, electrons, protons and atoms are created out of tiny particles called thoughts. Thoughts condense to a point to be measured by intruments created also by human ideas.

Energy is both wave (undifined moving energy) and particle, just depending on who you ask and the probablitlity that they will say it is... make sense?

Good.

The point is that you can create your own reality be seeing that your reality is shaped by your mind and determined by how much you use it. You are the same as everything else and it is you.

Everything you could want or be you already have and are, you just don't see it yet.

All we really need to know is that we can change the world, every person can.

And once you see the world for what it is, once you get a unifed theory (a sense of enleightenment) you find you are changing the world.

Just watch, and see, go and just be.

have to write a about postmodernism can you help me?

Fo schnizzel

I don't know where to begin though?

Begin with nothing, since that is where you are destined to end.

I think postmodernism is a term invented to confuse us, and prevent us from understanding things, like the truth!

What truth? What is truth?

Postmodernism is not hiding the truth it’s slapping you in the face with it; and so you reject it. The truth hurts. Postmodernism is just the messanger, the fiber optic digitally transfered photons illuminating plasma screen causing you to blink and think.

Pop!

If black and white TV is modernism, than postmodernism is DSL internet on a plasma screen. It's not just a way of looking at things that are abnormal and trying to reconcile them with the mainstream, it's the growing realization that the once 'normal' way of doing things is failing, crumbling, and possibly leading us towards global choas (Ahhhh!!!!! Global Warming)... or total spiritual/virtual unity as a planet (that’s hot).

Postmodernism is both an off-shot and a blowback of modernism. Modernism was about mechanics, science, reason, rationality, hierarchy and Order –purpose, place, and patron.

Postmodernism is thus about 'play' ‘placeless’ and disorder, --or ordered chaos. Its the coming together of all races religions and ideas having the differences all blending the meanings all changing and the play all the more enlightening than the purpose.

>>>>if accepted they change the way 'society' perceives itself and it becomes normal...<<<

Case in point: Hot Topic "Anarchy" shirts.

Anarchy and going to the mall to buy clothes is like smoking cigarettes while doing yoga.

You are not in either mode and committed to neither, you just are.

>>>it is part of the evolutionary process- about progress and change- I am not saying this is either good or bad-<<<

Good cuz it is both good and bad. Postmodernism is the break from modernism, without the next 'ism' to move into. In fact most people are so sick of 'ism's they would rather not have them. They want to move past them.

And thus was born: Post [after] modernism.

***************Modernism comes from the greek 'modo' meaning 'the now'. At the time it was built the Acropolis was modern.**************************

The fact is was are headed into uncharted waters. Technology is gaining speed, the world is shrinking, and growing in complexity, time and space no longer matter and eventually they can be manipulated...

it's crazy.

By 2020 desktop computers will be FASTER than the combined power of many brains.

That's right... enter: The Robots (A.I.? Shhhh!)

But where did it all begin?

______ say it with me _______


The movies!!!

Modernism gave us the camera, and when the pictures began to move... postmodernism was born.

Movies now quote other movies and it is EXCEPTIONALLY rare to see and original movie.

Quotes

“The moving finger writes and having writ moves on… nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line; nor all your tears was out a word of it.” –Omar Khayyam

“ For reason ruling alone is a force confining, and passion un attended is a flame that burns to it’s own destruction.” –Omar Khayyam

“We are not physical being having a spiritual experience we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” -- French Philosopher

The Meaning of Life

The Meaning of Life

The meaning of life, its purpose is to facilitate the betterment of something else. It is the evolution and progression of consciousness and the eternal (soul) into higher realms of being. Life exists to foster more life (better life), to foster evolution, it is the mid point between matter and energy; a consequence of this interplay/exchange. The nature of reality and the cosmos is so complex that it cannot be understood/comprehended… it can only be felt. You can be one with the universe, with everything (thus) including ‘god’, but you will not be able to describe this to someone. Life is about learning, about ascension and become one with the eternal in you and the universality of your being. The meaning of life is thus to give rise to more life, better life, higher life.

Live well.

Ideas

Ideas

“You can support the system… or you can transport the system… Sup’ trans’ systems?”

“Don’t waste your time if you have the ability to use it!”

“Time is the gift that keeps on giving provided you are excepting/accepting/taking.”

“All of life is a circle… and is circular… and goes around!”

“Energy is everything, anything and more than nothing.”

Enlightenment

Life is the pain…
…The pain of Learning…
Learning about Life.
Life lessons are painful… with a purpose behind.
Bliss is the place you can be once you learn to learn without pain.
This place is called…

Enlightenment.

Thoughts

Thoughts

•If all else fails, drug them.

•"What?" is a problem.

•Life is only painful because we make it that way. Life can be total bliss if you can rise above and learn.

•If you learn to live without pain you are ascending or evolved.

•I may not know y life’s full purpose, but I do know it is a very special gift which I do not, and cannot throw away leave un-used/explored.

•If you don’t think you look good try using your eye’s better and your heart more. Look until you see the good.

•We all want to be different, yet we fight over it. Difference is the only thing that creates similarity.

Enigma

Enigma…

That is what you are.

Don’t deny it, just except it, except your self for what you are. You are the universe, and it is you. Everything is connected and everything is inseparable; at the atomic level TOTALLY similar and constantly interacting and exchanging energy.

The world is too fantastic to comprehend and it’s intricacies and details to bizarre to be real, but it is, they are, even if you think otherwise.

Everything you think you thought your knew is untrue. Grip it, rip it and whatch that puff dissolve like the world as you knew it is going to, if you are ready…

STOP RIGHT NOW, YOU KNOW NOT WHERE YOU ARE GOING…

Where is you mind taking you, do you even know?

IF YOU DON’T, TURN BACK NOW!

How do you know? You don’t. You know that you don’t know anything.

You don’t know me. You say/think/assume you do, but guess what you don’t. And I don’t know you.

We are more than meets the eye.

I am deeper than my eyes can show, sharper than my wit expelled, and colorful as an oceanianic sunset. How can you possibly understand the complex shmorgasboard of logic and reason, the quagmire of religious and philosophical contradiction, the intricate web of facts fantasy images ideas and imaginings… the extreme and spiraling nature of my world, my mind, my universal construct.

It’s understatedly overwhelming to even think about it! Yeah… right?

You judge only the mind which {I myself and hopefully you as well} must be overcome. I am attempting to do so, but it is hard, very hard. Like a long hike up the mountain, full of hardship and endurance trials, but filled with bliss, views and vantage once you reach the top.

For you to truly see someone requires them to be looking at you (into you) and seeing the you, you perceive yourself to be; the true you that cannot be hidden in the moment of connection. Only at that moment do we become one and see that we are no different, only trapped and tricked by our minds to think so.

Looks can, and often do, deceive. Don’t let my looks (beauty if you like) fool you. Looks are heavily dependent on what is inside, physical beauty is 50% confidence, 35% genetics and 15% intelligence.

I consider myself more brains than beauty, but a healthy dose of both. I am not vain or narcissistic, I am confident and self assured. I am comfortable in my skin and accepting of who I am; what I want, who I want to be. I know not of ignorance, low self esteem, or victimhood. I have moved past those products of the mind.

I am me. What you see is what you get, even if you don’t get what you see…

I go with the flow. I try to be present, in the moment and free.

I love life, the world that gives it to me and I love you…

…after all you is/are me.

Odd? Sort of. But a better word for it is ENIGMA.

Bob says:Don’t worry (about it) be happy now.

ABC's

ABC

Appreciate an astronomical attitude
Be beneficial being beautiful
Carefully create caring corruption
Doubt dubious deeds diligently
Explicitly encounter exciting experiences
Form fortunate futures fast
Gain gifted gratitude gratefully
Have happy healthy heads
Instigate inner intuitions intuitively
Jiggle jovial jive joyously
Keep kneading kept kindness
Love lustful lingering life
Make malleable mind mentalities
Not no nothing never
Origin opens original opportunities
Passionately partake people’s perceptions
Quietly quote quaint quagmires
Respectfully reciprocate reasonable responses
Simply smile so smitten
Take terrific timing timidly
Up unveils underlying understandings
Voice vivid vivacious victories
Wonder wild worlds willingly
X-plain x-citing x-changes x-zileratingly
Yo you yield yes’s
Zoom zip zilch zero


Appreciate being carefully diligent, explicitly fortunate gifted heads intuitively jiggle kept love-like mentalities. Noting original perceptions, quietly reciprocate, so to unveil various wonders; xanido yields zones.

Life is Crazy

Life is crazy isn't it? A journey of ups and downs, in and outs creation and chaos. Just remember you are in total control of your life. manifestation. As I come to understand the world, and my place in it, I have begun to

If I have learned anything during my life's travels thus far, it's this:

WE ARE ALL THE SAME!

We are all searching for something that is missing from our lives; something that we feel is missing. We set out down the path of life, we explore foreign and exotic locals in search of that life changing experience that will somehow alter our existence, or help us escape our reality --our [sense of] self— if only for a short while. But sometimes we find we aren't comprehending that this is our reality, this moment, this feeling. By truly enjoying the moment, by uplifting yourself, by keeping your thoughts grounded in what you are doing in this moment... and loving it. This life is what we make of it. We get so caught up in making a living that we forget to make a life. We are so busy worrying about what we are going to do with our life, we forget that this is life, and it will pass us by if we aren't careful or conscious of it. Life is the people we meet and the experiences we share. It's the endless possibility of each day. Life is full incredible potential, but if not used, if not tapped it will fade away. Take the moment in and cherish it. You are so lucky, you have way more than most people in the world. You the whole world in front of you, and chance to make the world a better place. By making a better present.

Life is about learning, sharing and just being. Sometimes I get confused and think its about money, sex, and drugs, but then I realize those things don't fulfill my needs. They take you further from 'just being' or 'peace'.

Life is too short to waist doing something we don't want to do. Follow your bliss. Be true to yourself. Listen to your heart. We all need to get past our nationality, beyond religion, and immersed in the present, the now. All we ever have is the now, right?

Success is the journey, not simply the destination.

Live your life to the fullest, it's not about the years of life, it's about the life in the years.

Live well, respect your neighbors, be a good friend, and above all, smile. Remember, it's just life, so don't take it so seriously!

10 Insights

A Critical Mass
A new spiritual awakening is occurring in human culture, an awakening brought about by a critical mass of individuals who experience their lives as a spiritual unfolding, a journey in which we are led forward by mysterious coincidences.


The Longer Now
This awakening represents the creation of a new, more complete worldview, which replaces a five-hundred-year-old preoccupation with secular survival and comfort. While this technological preoccupation was an important step, our awakening to life's coincidences is opening us up to the real purpose of human life on this planet, and the real nature of our universe.


A Matter of Energy
We now experience that we live not in a material universe, but in a universe of dynamic energy. Everything extant is a field of sacred energy that we can sense and intuit. Moreover, we humans can project our energy by focusing our attention in the desired direction...where attention goes, energy flows...influencing other energy systems and increasing the pace of coincidences in our lives.


The Struggle for Power
Too often humans cut themselves off from the greater source of this energy and so feel weak and insecure. To gain energy we tend to manipulate or force others to give us attention and thus energy. When we successfully dominate others in this way, we feel more powerful, but they are left weakened and often fight back. Competition for scarce, human energy is the cause of all conflict between people.


The Message of the Mystics
Insecurity and violence ends when we experience an inner connection with divine energy within, a connection described by mystics of all traditions. A sense of lightness - buoyancy - along with the constant sensation of love are measures of this connection. If these measures are present, the connection is real. If not, it is only pretended.


Clearing the Past
The more we stay connected, the more we are acutely aware of those times when we lose connection, usually when we are under stress. In these times, we can see our own particular way of stealing energy from others. Once our manipulations are brought to personal awareness, our connection becomes more constant and we can discover our own growth path in life, and our spiritual mission - the personal way we can contribute to the world.


Engaging the Flow
Knowing our personal mission further enhances the flow of mysterious coincidences as we are guided toward our destinies. First we have a question; then dreams, daydreams, and intuitions lead us towards the answers, which usually are synchronistically provided by the wisdom of another human being.


The Interpersonal Ethic
We can increase the frequency of guiding coincidences by uplifting every person that comes into our lives. Care must be taken not to lose our inner connection in romantic relationships. Uplifting others is especially effective in groups where each member can feel energy of all the others. With children it is extremely important for their early security and growth. By seeing the beauty in every face, we lift others into their wisest self, and increase the chances of hearing a synchronistic message.


The Emerging Culture
As we all evolve toward the best completion of our spiritual missions, the technological means of survival will be fully automated as humans focus instead on synchronistic growth. Such growth will move humans into higher energy states, ultimately transforming our bodies into spiritual form and uniting this dimension of existence with the after-life dimension, ending the cycle of birth and death.


Holding the Vision
The Tenth Insight is the realization that throughout history human beings have been unconsciously struggling to implement this lived spirituality on Earth. Each of us comes here on assignment, and as we pull this understanding into consciousness, we can remember a fuller birth vision of what we wanted to accomplish with our lives. Further we can remember a common world vision of how we will all work together to create a new spiritual culture. We know that our challenge is to hold this vision with intention and prayer everyday.


Extending Prayer Fields
The Eleventh Insight is the precise method through which we hold the vision. For centuries, religious scriptures, poems, and philosophies have pointed to a latent power of mind within all of us that mysteriously helps to affect what occurs in the future. It has been called faith power, positive thinking, and the power of prayer. We are now taking this power seriously enough to bring a fuller knowledge of it into public awareness. We are finding that this prayer power is a field of intention, which moves out from us and can be extended and strengthened, especially when we connect with others in a common vision. This is the power through which we hold the vision of a spiritual world and build the energy in ourselves and in others to make this vision a reality.

Inconvienent Discussions

I love it when people say that global warming is just a theory. It is just Left wing propoganda.

They could not be more wrong. But then agian most people that think that Global Warming has no scientific basis probably don't even fully understand what 'science' is. Because if they did they would see that the facts and the 'science' is indisputable.

We have burned hundreds of billions of barrels of oil, millions of acres of rainforest, billions upon billions of tons of coal, all of which has happened out side of natural process and people think that this has absolutely no effect of the planet.

That is called ignorance. Dangerous ignorance of the highest order.

The signs are everywhere, people can choose to ignore them and pretend that there is not a problem, but that will only make things worse. How many more cities do we need to loose before people get the point? How many Hurricanes does it take to get the message across?

Will every glacier melt and the ice at the poles dissappear before we realize that we have started a chain reaction of change on this planet that needs to be acknowledged, and accepted.

What is so funny is that, the problems are already being addressed, they are just not being addressed publically because it is embaressing to the Bush Administration and to Dick Cheney who have agrivated the planet and the whole situation to no end.

The entire world is already addressing this problem, everybody except Bush is in agreement, everybody is noticing the signs, and many people are worried.

The issue is Oil.

There is too much money in oil and Bush and the East Coast Establishment do not want to give it up just yet. They have not found a way to maintian there control of the US economy without oil just yet, and so they will not let go. Sucks for New Orleans, Florida and for Texas.

The Hurricane season is upon us and it is not going to be fun, it is only going to get worse until we start to make it better.

If Global Warming is Left Wing Propoganda, then Terrorism is Right Wing propoganda (notice the oil connection agian). The fact is that global Warming and enviornmental destruction and pollution is the real global terrorist, it causes a thousand times more death and destruction than all the worlds terrorist combined. New Orleans is a classic example. The droughts and dessertification of Africa is another.

It is time we get our priorities striaght and high time we have respect for this beautiful Earth that gives us life.

Because it can take it away as well.

Ken Maskrey Jun 11, 2006

Actually, it is just a theory...a theory that happens to be wrong. Global warming advocates don't see the real data. What they see is warmed over summaries and second-class measuring instruments. For nearly 20 years, I developed the science behind atomospheric attenuation of high bandwidth propagation of signals thru the atmosphere, including the design of instruments aboard four different satellites: DSP, NOAA-K, L, and M; DMSP; and one other classified system.

These instruments were similar to the raiometric sounders and other NOAA type instrumentation, but with with a resolution of more that 2 orders of magnitude better. The data was linked to a TDRS satellite and down to a receiving station and then directly linked to my server. I was the first one to see the data. The data was ultimately pure.

From that data, I developed adaptive equilization algorithms based on atmospheric effects such as polarization, raindrops, rivulets, warming currents in the atmosphere, increased levels of various atmospherical elements, and so on.

The data that global warming scientists "quote" does not match what I personally saw and measured first hand. Many of their conclusions are based on faulty science, many are based on incaccurate data, most are simply lies.

Once, I was invited to a seminar on core samples taken from the Antartic. This was a US Goverment funded research whose purpose was to determine atmospheric change to look at long term effects of certain belts around the earth, of which, the Van Allen is just one. Again, the empirical data as seen in the core samples themselves were contradictory to what global warming scientists claim.

There simply is no scientific basis for global warming. It's a theory. It's a bad theory. And it's poor science. I mean, there are still people that claim that the earth is only 6000 years old. I put global scientists in that same category.

Now, I like Global Warming as a theory for storytelling and I like when people make fake documentaries claiming it as fact. I applaud their, and Gore's, penchant for fiction...by the way, did you know that Clinton never bought into Gore's global paranoia...that's why during his campaign in the mid-90's he distanced himself from Gore. I actually met Clinton once at the Pentagon and was very impressed...probably the brightest person I ever met...maybe he was coached...maybe not...still, mind like a steel trap.

Me

Science can be made to say whatever you want it to say that is why America loves it.

The point is Ken that our present attitude towards the planet needs to change, before we perminently ruin our habbitat beyond repair.

All science aside, the fact of the matter is our life style is not sustianable for the planet, is causing much hardship not always were it is due, and that things need to change.

What else is indisputable is Hurricanes. Record hot summers, snow in New York one day and 80% the next... this is not normal. Science could give a million reasons as to how and why this occurs and a thousand reasons why it is normal. But it isn't. It was never that way before, we used have what were called seasons... predictable weather patterns. No more.

I don't care about numbers or charts, I care about change. I want to see action and people acting like they care about the future and not raping the planet for present gain.

I fear for humanity if things do not change soon. My fear is not grounded in any science, it stems from the actions I see in front of me, from the choices that Bush Co. has mad and continues to make.

One way or another it is going to end. I feel as though the hard way is being chosen because the rich can afford to relocate.

Ken:

See that's a much better goal...people's attitudes towards their home should be to protect it no matter whether it's perishing or flourishing. The problem with the Global Warming thing is that it's too devisive. It polarizes people, like abortion or immigration or whatever...people just want to take the opposite side.

It's like the last presidental election...Bush didn't win it, the democrats lost it for John Kerry. It's like when Arnold won the Governorship of California...there was such a simple way to beat that, but the CA democratic party polarized the state by putting in Cruz Bustamante....

Call it the Democratic party, call it The Left, whatever, the politics need to change from one of confrontation to one of support. I vaguely remember the speeches of Martin Luther King who was at the same time in a power play with the Nation of Islam...the Government, the news media, and therefore the majority of the people, lumped them together and there was this immense hatred of King. I was in the South and remember wondering why do they hate him when all he wants is freedom and equality which seemed as it should be. The story I got from the old-timers was he was inciting riots...totally false, his peacful beliefs were lumped in with the more radical ideas of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.

The point is, like with the PETA people for example, as long as they (whomever) approach issues confrontationally, they will only garner as much opposition as support. Compare Peta's actions with say, HBO's heartbreaking documentary on puppy mills in Arkansas...a story which gets to the whole of the population.


That's what the "left" needs to do to make change. At least as I see it.

And you're absolutely right about science...

Dan Calvisi:

But Ken, aren't you asking us to trust you, one guy, one scientist who had one job and claims that his data happened the be the most pure data available, when there's apparently THOUSANDS of scientists the world over who believe in global warming?

I live in Oakland, near Berkeley, which is a hub of scientists. My brother just got his Phd from Berkeley, actually, and we have many friends in science. And not one of them would agree with you.

Sorry, but I just can't take your opinion on it when there's so much information out there, and has been for decades, that supports global warming.

But I appreciate that you're offering your experience.

Ken Maskrey

My doctorate is from MIT by the way...but it's in Mathematics, not earth science, specifically, the calculus of tensors. Most of my research done at Lincoln Labs.
But I don't ask that you believe me. I could, in fact, show you the data and provide a chain of evidence trail back to the source. There are two problems, one, most people cannot interpret the original data, and two, most people cannot accurately validate the chain of evidence, so no matter what I say or even show you, there's no way you could buy into it.

It's like one man looking at the Earth and saying "How amazing, that this all started from a superstring separation between a clockwise spinning string and a counter-clockwise spinning string that caused, etc., etc.". Then the other guy saying, after looking at the same thing, "This is beautiful, what got created in only 6000 years". Who's right? either?

On the other hand, you, and many others, buy into what other scientists say because it's convienent and it's what you want to hear. Again, I'm not a scientist per se, just a guy that's seen the raw data. One among thousands, I mean, it's not just me.

For years, scientists believed in Alchemy...up until 1968, no one in the scientific community believed in Plate Techonics, that the major and minor plates moved. It was inconvienent. A lot of glob al warming scientists, for example, believe that the sea levels are rising...the data is actually contradictory...in some places it's going up, some down. On the other hand, geologists have proven that plates all over the world shift and move. Denver, where I live, the Mile High city, is actually rising. Maui, where I came from is moving at the rate of something like 2cm per year. But yet, because some ocean levels are rising according to some measurements, the glaciers are melting. See...inconvienent...convienent to ignore one area of science in lieu of another.

Here's something that may interest you, the CFC's that are produced and destroy the ozone layer, really come in second to a problem that scientists have known about since about the 30's,, the amount of lead in the atmosphere. It's deadly and it never leaves. Since 1923 with the introduction of lead into gasoline, lead in the atmosphere went from zero to very serious levels. Sceintists into the 50's maintained that it was not a problem--why--because they tested the urine and feces of people and found no lead.. you call that science? The lead was absorbed by the bones and primarily the spinal column...of course there was none in waste, it didn't leave.

Again, I don't really care that anyone believes me, because personally, I think the world is on a path of destruction anyway and it's far too late to stop it. I'm just here for the debate.

Now, I'm not saying that it's not stupid to pollute the planet like what is happening, I just think that jumping on the Global Warming bandwagon, and it later being proved wrong to everyone's satisfaction, would spell disaster for the ecological movement...we'll see Bruce Dern and four or five rockets full of the last forest blasted off into space....

I'm not a conspiracy buff...I've seen the Government in action and they're far too stupid to organize a complex conspiracy, but, if I wanted to get rid of my competition, I might plant a faulty theory out there, let everyone latch onto it, and then say Ha Ha, got ya with that one.

Dan Calvisi:

It's clear that it's all the fault of McDonald's. And specifically, the chicken mcnugget. Even if they do taste really gooood.

And that's da tufe, baby!


not a scientist, just a guy who doesn't trust anyone especially politicians,
d.

Jeni Lopez:
WE need more solar power first of all... That's obvious as far as things that will help with other 'power' issues...

**It's like the last presidental election...Bush didn't win it, the democrats lost it for John Kerry. ***RIGHT ON THE MONEY. Last night I was watching the comedian LEWIS BLACK's new special and he put it very succinctly. The fat that the democrats couldn't find ANYONE to beat Bush in the last election is UNBELIEVABLE. It's beyond my conception as a democrat that we couldn't find SOMEONE to beat Bush at that point. Are we not trying?

I'm sick of R's and D's alike. NObody seems to know what we're doing or how to solve anything. Yeah, let's build a 700 mile wall to help with illegal immigrants (another LEWIS BLACK TOPIC) when we can't even fix the LEVYS in New Orleans. That'll work.

His suggestion, because of the AXIS of evil N. Korea, Iran and Iraq because their ideology is so 'nutso' and they'll kill anyone man woman child, themselves, happily... is to become CRAZIER than them... He suggested we make the DEAD ronald regan OUR NEXT PRESIDENT, cart his dead carcass out there... and show them WHO IS CRAZY!!

I almost peed my pants...

Anyway, global warming... I don't know... but I agree we need to take better care of our surroundings and that means less STUFF powered by gas and oil and things that destroy the surroundings in our immediate vicinity. Solar Power... smaller cars and less gas guzzlers... Car manufacturers have the ability to make cars more cost effective where fuel is concerned, so that should be made LAW... STANDARDS in fuel effeciency.

But somehow our governmental body seems to have lost the one sense needed to get things done. COMMON SENSE...

That's my 2 and 1/2 cents....

Good thread, Julian. Shame the powers that be think it can't be on the main boards and people can't play nice. This thread is one of the smartest I've read in a long time.

brava!

To Dan
Agreed....

And I also think common sense would tend to agree with global warming. We can't keep treating the earth as a whole the way we do and bad things NOT happen to 'her'.

Notice I describe her as a woman, and reverently so!

Ken:
Here's something i was thinking about on the road today. Basically, everything is just what we believe. I can point back to the science versus religon thing, but take even say, the blue sky. I mean we've been told, can read in a book, hear in science class, and so on, but how do we really know? I mean, maybe there's this blue gauze that drapes the planet. It all depends on who we believe.

Many people don't believe we went to the moon. I can see that, but I've actually had the chance to view some of the stuff left their via a large telescope, but even then, that's just cause I trust what I'm seeing through the glass...it could be not real.

I know this might sound off the deep end, but really, we tend to believe what we want to believe and that's pretty much it.

Now, I never said I don't believe in Global Warming...the idea that burning fuels and putting smoke into the air, just naturally seems wrong and a bad idea. I just contest some of the GW theories out there...and notice the correlation between GW and GWB??? coincidence??? I think not....

So, there's something like 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, and they (let's assume) trust this one guy called the Pope. Then, statistically, this guy is the most trusted guy in the world and we should believe what he says. But we, some of us anyway, don't...we believe other, uncontestably less trustworthy people and what they say. So who's right and who's wrong?

Me:
You are right Ken, everything is ONLY what we beleive.

But that is percisely why it is better to have ideas, ideas that can change rather than beleifs that are set in stone.

The idea of Global Warming seems to fantastic to be real, but then so did the idea of a storm leveling a Major American city, or a tidal wave killing 300,000 people instantly and millions more later. The world is changing very fast, so fast that many people are not able to comprehend or integrate all the new information that is coming to light into their world view. Or it is simply to INCONVIENENT for them to do so. Remember when everybody beleived that the world was flat... that didn't make it flat.

Remember when Galileo said that the earth revolved around the sun and the Church threatened to kill or excommunicate him for speaking about it. Everyone said he was crazy... but he was right. Al Gore is no Galileo but you get the point!

Remember when Newtonian Physics was the order of the day, his model WAS the world as we knew it (to some it still is) but along came relativity and Quantum Physics, (String theory!) and the Newtonian model colapsed under the pressure and questions generated by new 'scientific data', it collapsed because it failed to take into account consciousness into it's model, it was not able to incorporate the fact that matter does just pop up out of no where, that the world of the small is governed by different rules than the world of the large, and then there is the fact that the world of the large is all twisted and consisting of like 12 dimensions... it's all to fantastic to be real!

But it is.

I understand that the Global Warming issue is like a rallying point for the radical left, and that some people take it too far, but don't let that blind you from the physical reality of truth. The world is hurting, things are changing too fast for nature to cope and we have almost killed 90 something percent of the worlds species, we have burnt 80% of the rainforests to the ground (and counting) and we have dug up and burnt all the carbon we could get our hands on for the last 150 years... if you think there will not be consequences from this, you are insane. It needs to stop, especially since replacement technology exists!

It is time to get past what we beleive and get a grip with what is happening!

The point is is that America needs join the Kyoto Proticol Immediately, we need to ween our ecomony and the worlds economy off oil as soon as is practically possible (5 years is more than enough time) and America needs to be moving towards energy independence, period the end.

America is so powerful, we as Americans can change the world profoundly, we can save what is left if we move quickly, but the clock is ticking, and we don't know when the Alarm will go off, maybe it already has, so we need to get started and stop the squaballing.

Some say it is bad for business, but if Energy Independence is bad for your business than your business is bad for humanity and should stop anyhow.

You know what is going to be bad for business: Death, destruction, and choas...

...or is it?

Lets just remember what this is about: Power/Control/Money

We have a chance to do something right, the people in power have a chance to do something right and they must be made to take it, for the sake of the planet and humanity as a whole, whatever the cost is.

It will be a good thing in the long run, and it really isn't that hard.

The oil companies are rich enough as it is right?

Mark A Vizcarra Jun 13, 2006

It would be an easier task for human beings to prevent earthquakes, tornados and hurricanes, or to part the Red Sea once again, than to affect changes in the atmospheric CO2 concentrations, appreciably. The Kyoto Protocol is problematic because it is based on falsehoods, some of which are:
-That CARBON DIOXIDE gas, CO2, is a pollutant.
-That anthropogenic (human generated) CO2 content of air is too high and out of control.
-That the concentrations of CO2 found in air, LOW though these are, still manage to cause global climate change / global warming.
-That human beings / governments can affect, that is reduce, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere of planet Earth, at sea level.
This is an ideological battle, not an environmental one. Thus the reason why the Looney Left (aka America haters) have grabbed a hold of the issue. The Socialist/Communists have and will always hate Capitalism and Freedom. They’ll continue to do what they do best to seize their seat of power and control the masses – scare them. Don’t be duped.

Me: RE: Ken Maskrey

No longer is truth “out there” waiting to be discovered.

All knowledge is system-dependent and culturally bound. There is no neutral, timeless, self-evident foundational truth available to anyone or that gives us absolute certainty about anything.

The Augustinian dictum “All truth is God’s truth” has come to mean “Everybody’s truth is God’s truth.”

It all depends on how one looks at it. As scholars ranging from Thomas Kuhn to Parker Palmer to Lesslie Newbigin point out, even the scientist is not some neutral intellect unlocking secrets from the stuff she studies; she brings a certain perspective with her to her studies which colors her interpretation and even her observation of the data.

Add to this the information explosion through an electronic web that is world wide. The world that felt so comfortable, so manageable, is now overwhelming and often unfamiliar. Perhaps this in part accounts for the rapid cultural change we seem to experience.

Enlightenment universal acultural reason begins to look quaint at best, an illusion at worst. Perhaps the most profound cultural change is the proliferation of choice.

Me: RE: Mark A Vizcarra

Tornados, earthquakes and hurricanes are natural processes that we should not and never will be able to stop. But burning fossile fuel, burning rainforests, digging up coal, and drilling and spilling oil is not a part of the natural order of things nad we can stop doing it and prevent the damage it will cause.

C02 is a pollutant, it is a GREENHOUSE gas that traps heat. The planet has never exdperienced the amount of C02 that is presently being pumped into it's atmosphere.

The human generated C02 is too high and is out of control, especially since all the mechanisms for getting c02 out of the air are being destroyed even as the amount going into the air is going up, this is a dangerous imbalance that must be addressed before it is too late.

The conceptrations in the air are already causing climatic change, record hot temperatures, supermassive hurricanes, desertification of Africa, dissapearing glaciers, and melting polar ice caps, not to mention the extinction of millions of species that cannot cope with even a degree change in temperature.

Humans can and MUST affect the c02 conceptrations at sea level! First we can cut our emmisions and second we can generate and create means to suck Co2 out of the air. We can plant trees and explore technologies that will do this for us. Nano technologies that do just that are already being developed, but are a ways off and cannot be realied upon by themselves.

This is an ideological battle, I completely agree.

I also agree that there are some America haters on the Looney far left, just like there are some America destroyers on the evil far right. But blending enviornmental issues with communism (which is dead, it failed and will never return on the scale it was) is folly, and a cop out. This is not about politics, this is about the planet, about humanity and the green earth we inherited. Don't confuse the issue.

I don't hate capitalism and I don't hate freedom, what I do hate is greed and gluttony, I hate destruction, I hate selfishness and the evil way in which the world I love is being drestroyed by old cronies who don't care about the planet, or about gods creatures. They spill oil, pollute, and reclessly kill life and people for their personal gain and power conquests. They don'tr care about the future, or about what will happen as a result of their actions in 5 or 10 years all they care about is how much money they can rape the planet (and humanity) for and it is going to stop!

Don't be duped into thinking that the power has not long ago been seized by the upper echolons of the capitalist, they control the world and and all it's fincances. They are the ones taking away freedom (and life), and they know that no one can take the power away from them, so they do as they please.

The ideological struggle comes from those that care about life, and those that care about money. It is between those that value and worship nature and it's gifts, and those that seek to concor nature and use it's gifts for personal or private gain. Remember at the peaks Capitalism and communism and Fascism are all the same, a few people who call all the shots and make all the descisions, this is just that way it is. But nature and the enviornment cannot and will not go quietly and it must be saved. Saved from ambivilance and ignorance. The world you learned about in school is already gone and the world I learned about is almost gone too, I want my children to see nature, I want them to be able to go to Alaska and not see industrial waste and abandoned oil spills. I want them to be able to breath clean air and drink fresh water.

I want America to be beautiful and clean. I want pollution to be checked and them stopped so that Americans will be healthy and prosperous. I want animals and plants to florish in the parks and birds to fly in the sky and feel like I can still see nature if I want to. I want America to be releaved of hostile relations and bitter struggles over resources it does not need so that lives can be saved and famileis re-united.

If an America that leads the world in technological innovation, that is a beacon of hope and prosperity in the world, that creates green science and rids the world of pollution and takes action that makes the world a better place, while creating a whole new economy and thousands of jobs (that would return to America once we descided to create all our energy on the home front rather than import it), if this America is not for you or is against your beleifs, thenyou are the loon.

The alternative is a wasteland of a planet, no nature, no clean air, darkened skys and disease and cancers caused by the unchecked pollution of the air and water. The cures from the rainforest and from plants (where 90% come from) would be gone, all the worlds amazing wildlife, ancient history, and a descimated east coast that is uninhabbitalbe for 6 months of the year beacuse of hurricanes and powerful storms that make life there to hard to bear. New York would be destoryed by hurricanes and Europe would dry out and them freeze, all of Africa would die and regions that never got hurricanes (like Brazil who just had their first in 30 years or something last year) will also be destroyed... soon th planet would lie in shambles, toxic waste every where and the infrastructure to clean it all would also have been destroyed...

This is not a choice between Capitalism and Communism it is choice between health and happiness, and pollution and death.

Imagine a person that smokes, they have smoked for 20 years and they say, I'm fine, I don't have cancer, I don't feel bad. SO they keep smoking. That is humanity. We cannot wait until we find the inoperable tumor, we have to change our life style now, if we wait for the sign it is already too late.

Do something now.

Ken Maskrey -bio
Jun 15, 2006
RE: Julian W Tyler
Replies:
Julian W Tyler

But what you're saying is kind of like saying "throw strikes"...."everybody do good"...

Now, this may come as a suprise, but I love the world as it is...full of hate, terrorists, pollutors, greedy people, and so on...without that, it'd be really boring...I don't want a happy, well cared for planet.

I can't speak for Mark, but as a Navy fighter pilot, I would imagine that since he's trained to fly and fight, a boring world probably isn't in his best interest (or was) as well. Reporters...you think they want a happy world? Writers, most everyone here, you guys really want this utopian existance where the only inspiration is the malfunction that comes once a year from your floating bubble-car? Not me....I love killing, explosions, etc. I love devastation, hurricanes and tsunamis killing thousands...I sat mesmerized by the terrorist attacks, loving the mayhem and destruction...I stop at car accidents and take pictures when I can.

I don't have any children, don't plan to, and don't care one iota about anyone else's. Personaly, I hope to watch from the afterlife as all the remaining citizens of the planet choke on toxic fumes.

Seriously, it's good entertainment.

Me:

Ken that is horrible.

The world will always have hate, and destruction, but it didn't always have it on the scale it is getting to (towards the enviornment that is).

If you have such utter disregard for posterity and humanity you will not have a happy afterlife and may be born striaght back into the suffering. You could end up being born an African child that knows starvation his whole life until he dies slowly and painfully of plague, or you could be born a rat that is forced to eat toxic filth until your insides litterally dissovle...

It is your problem too, and if you don't care, or worse, make things worse, I assure you the universe will have it's karmic retribution, and beleiving in Karma is not a prerequisit of punishment.

Besides you will not have to wait until your afterlife to watch the toxic fumes and suffering, if we continue at the rate we are going, without an iota of care, you, in this life, may become a victim of the global destruction.

It is your mentalities and ways (and others like you) who created this problem and if you think you can escape the consequences... guess agian. The wolrd and the universe does not work that way.

I suggest you care at least.

Ken

Maybe, but you'd be suprised how many people feel the same way.

But see, I know exactly what happens after we die, and I assure you, it's not a God-Divine heaven or hell scenario; neither is it some Kharmic life restoration thing; nor is it just simply death.

Consciousness is a separate entity from the human form entirely. A simple thought experiment will prove this to some people (remember, there is no truth). Think about the universe or something really, really large...inside your mind you can imagine things far greater in size and scope than the physical size of your brain. Therefore, it is "safe" to imagine that conscious, if something tangible, is composed of compoents very, very small...again from thought experiments, the size of the smallest conscious particles can be calculated to be smaller than the Plank length...where general theory breaks down.

Then, if you find the M-theory model of our reality to be acceptable, that we exist in 4-dimensions where every point is in turn a 7-dimensional knot, then the mind, or consciousness can "slip" across the boundary of multiple existances by aligning into knot space.

As our consciousness grows and expands, i.e. learns, we exhibit more control and therefore change the structure. As the structure changes, when we die, there is a detent or an attraction of our conscious to physical realities. Right now, those of us that live in this reality, are at such a developmental stage that we are attracted to the human form...it may be that earlier versions exist in sub-species, but I doubt it.

Also, this explains dreams...dreams are not some kharmic, tell-all vision, but simply partial slippage across the knotted boundary as our conscious becomes still, unperterbed by sight and sound, and we slip to other existances, but without physical control...without the time to learn how to use wherever we are in a few hours of sleep.

Therefore, existance on this planet is irrelevant. Whether this planet lives or dies is irrelevant. To me, and what I believe, it is just a stop along the way...a sitcom in the much larger realm of existance. I think no more about preserving the harmony of life and nature on this momentary planet stop than I do about worrying about stepping on an ant.

While others around me worry and complain and live in fear and terror...I laugh at them...I wait for them to step into the moving traffic and splatter themselves along the asphalt. It's only temporary.

Everyone has their own version of what will happen to them when they die. None, other than mine, have a basis in mathematics and physics...well, I guess just dying might to some extent. So whatever on believes, it's generally their "faith" that drives and controls it. I feel the same way...except, I can show calculations that support my beliefs...

I think a lot of people, to some extent, subconsciouly belive what I do...criminals for instance...would you do anything steal, rape, kill, etc., if there were no punishment, which really means cost?

It's also interesting to note, that, in the model for all or most state laws, nothing is really illegal, i.e. against the law. What is stated in the model are the "costs" for doing certain things. So in effect, laws are really nothing more than say, a table menu.

Dave Fogerson -bio
Jun 15, 2006
RE: Ken Maskrey
I recommend anyone interested enough in this topic read Michael Chrichton's book "State of Fear." I am just finishing it now. Crichton has put together a well crafted story full of legitimate scientific references that really makes me question my assumptions about the environment that I now realize have been force-fed to me over the years.

My current opinion about global warming (and environmental issues in general) is the same as the prevailing wisdom about Hollywood: nobody "knows" anything. Making long-reaching policies and expenditure plans based on ignorance is just plain crazy.

My completely underinformed 2 cents.

Ken Maskrey

You didn't like State of Fear, did you? I don't mean anything about the political, global warming stuff...it was just so much more boring than anything Crichton ever wrote...It didn't even sound like his writing...compare that to Jurassic Park, or better yet, Prey...It just kept going and dragging...I kept wanting it to end.

Dave Fogerson

The biggest problem with the book is it's "on the nose" dialogue (the screenwriter in me). From an artistic point of view, yeah, it's not exactly his best. But the subject matter, and presentation of documentation is making me scratch my head and question what I believe. Which is, in fact, it's purpose. That's what I'm enjoying about it.

My fave Crichton is Rising Sun. Haven't read Prey. Is it good?

Ken Maskrey

Prey is edge of your seat Crichton...high tech, at least 3 years ago...very cool...I really liked Rising Sun, but then the movie came out and I got a bad taste from it. Not like crichton's other movies...I even liked Timeline movie, though not nearly as good as the book.

And yeah...I think you're right about State of Fear...I think it was the "on the nose" dialogue...my wife kept thinking it was so preachy, but because he kept giving both side's views, the preachiness was unfocused.
Mark A Vizcarra

Again Julian...nice try. All I'm saying is you might want to read some scientific and historical data before being duped by political propaganda from a pathetic idealogy that just divides and scares people so they can pander and get back into a seat of power -- God help us. Oh and just to let you know...as a 21 year career military veteran, I knew of no fellow officer who wasn't a proud voting member of your so called Evil Right -- but I'm sure you already knew that seeing that your enviromental hero Al Gore fought to have our overseas absentee ballot votes in the 2000 election not counted.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts...you might want to read this article.

Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists

By Tom Harris
Monday, June 12, 2006

"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."
This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.
So we have a smaller fraction.
But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."
We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.
Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."
Dr. Wibjörn Karlén, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."
But Karlén clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," Karlén concludes.
The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.
Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."
Karlén explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says Karlén
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."
Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.

Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com

Dave Fogerson -bio
Jun 15, 2006
RE: Mark A Vizcarra
Politicized science is, by it's very nature, suspect because the people doing the research know darn well who's footing the bill, and know that they expect results that support their side of an argument.

This is true of science sponsored by conservatives and liberals alike.

Dave Fogerson -bio
Jun 15, 2006
RE: Ken Maskrey
... but because he kept giving both side's views, the preachiness was unfocused.

Hmm. I didn't get that at all. Although he presented both sides, it was usually in the form of one person voicing the popular view, and another person completely slamming that view with numerous references (I've never seen a "novel" with so many friggin' footnotes). He constantly portrayed people holding current popular views as unaware and uneducated. Sounds pretty preachy to me, and definitely one-sided.

That said, Chrichton's reputation for accurate science in his stories is what is giving me pause for thought in the reading of this book. The man's definitely done his homework. I should probably go see the Gore movie after I finish the book. Then again, my head just may explode.

I'll have to go out and get Prey when I finally finish this one. Nothing like a good read.

Julian W Tyler -bio
Jun 15, 2006
RE: Dave Fogerson
Since science can be made to say whatever you want it to say, I think we should just throw it out all together. There is no way we can understand the enviornment in it's entirety, and science has failed us as a society... it has caused more problems than it has solved.

The point is that if we look around at the world today we see a world that is dieing from our actions, a world that is being destroyed at an unprecidented rate. The oceans are all almost completely dead, the forests are all burnt to the gound and the world is covered in cement and buildings, uncleaned oil spills and toxic filth, with people that crank out pollution and garbage at ever increasing rates...

We need to develope sustainable technologies, we need to stop polluting, and we need to get past the internal combustion engine that was invented over a 100 fucking years ago! We need change!

The world is a very different place today than it was 30 or even ten years ago... the worlds population hads more than doubled in that time and if we don't develope a new model for society we are all going to drown in our own filth.

We need to stop making filth!

Dave Fogerson -bio
Jun 16, 2006
RE: Julian W Tyler
Science has failed us as a society??

That's a pretty bleak view. And patently untrue.

Come on now, you can't really believe that science has failed you.

Do you really need a list of ways in which you personally have benefited from science?

How many diabetics can live well because of synthetic insulin? How many lives have been saved from terrible diseases being wiped out? How many glasses of clean water have you consumed in your lifetime? How often do you go on the Internet to express yourself? I could go on forever.

Julian W Tyler -bio
Jun 16, 2006
RE: Dave Fogerson
It's a bold claim I agree, maybe too bold, but hear me out.

(And mind you I don't think science is all bad, I do think it is getting better and more helpful)

The universal values of science, reason and logic were intorduced (late 18th century) to rid the world of myths, superstition, and the religious ideas that kept humanity from progressing right?

So as science took center stage, religion was abandoned (mostly) and god disappeared in a 'Nietzscheian' puff of rational logic.

Then came the industrial era, where all the forsests of Europe were cut down, all the coal was dug up, and weapons were built and then wars were fought and then millions of people were rationally exterminated in death camps... all in the name of reason, of rationality and with the help of science.

Science gave us the ability to kill on a global scale, it gave us drugs and pollution, it nearly destroyed the world, while telling us it was for the best.

It is so funny that you brought up diabetics, your right science did give us synthetic insulin, but it also gave us the ability to make high fructose corn syrup which has spawned a diabetes epidemic in America that is threatening the fabric our society! One in three kids today will get diabetes, becuase of the scientific ability to make junk food, to manufacture sugars!

Science at it's peak has taken us back to where we were before... At it's peak, at the levels of quantum mechanics and physics we see that science tells us the same things that the Eastern Mystics said all along! See Fritof Kapra's 'Toa of Physics'.

First science told us that consciousness is not part of the equation, it cannot be included in any rational argument of discussion. Recently last 20 years, this idea has had to be reversed, in subatomic experiments (and others) the observer is an inescapable part of the equation. For instance if you are trying to prove light is a wave, and you set up an experiment, and prove your point, you say Yes! Light is a wave. But then you find that another person was doing experiments that proved light is a particle, and they were also right! They each tested for something, were looking for a result, and science gave it to them... they can't both be right according to science... but they are. According to science that is.

Science has come to the point where it cannot help us to understand that which we really need to understand... ourselves. The spiritual world and the forces of the universe that we cannot set up experiments to test for, weh have to use our consciouness, our minds to find and seek the answers.

Science has it's use and purposes, don't get me wrong, but it did not do what it promised, and it made a big mess, that now, paradoxically, only science can clean up.

Science these days is taking new twists and turns and is being infused with imagination and magical inginuity... nano-swarms, particle smashing, cloning, terraforming, photo-propulsion... it's crazy dude.

Science failed us, and now it must save us... such is postmodernism.


Me:
Global Dimming

by Anup Shah
This Page Created Saturday, January 15, 2005
This page: http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/GlobalWarming/globaldimming.asp.

To print full details (expanded/alternative links, side notes, etc.) use the printer-friendly version:

http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/GlobalWarming/globaldimming.asp?p=1

On January 15, 2005, the BBC broadcast its weekly acclaimed Horizon documentary. This one was about a dangerous phenomenon called Global Dimming.

Burning of fossil fuels is creating two effects, Two effects of fossil fuel productions are:

Greenhouse gases that cause global warming
By-products which are pollutants that cause global dimming
What is global dimming?
Fossil fuel use, as well as producing greenhouse gases, creates other by-products. These by-products are also pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, soot, and ash. These pollutants however, also change the properties of clouds.

Clouds are formed when water droplets are seeded by air-borne particles, such as pollen. Polluted air results in clouds with larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. This then makes those clouds more reflexsive. More of the sun's heat and energy is therefore reflected back into space.

This reduction of heat reaching the earth is known as Global Dimming.

*Impacts of global dimming: millions already killed by it?*
Global warming results from the greenhouse effect caused by, amongst other things, excessive amounts of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. It would seem then, that the other by-products which cause global dimming may be an ironic saviour.

A deeper look at this, however, shows that unfortunately this is not the case.

*Health and environmental effects*
The pollutants that lead to global dimming also lead to various human and environmental problems, such as smog, respiratory problems, and acid rain.

The impacts of global dimming itself, however, can be devastating.

Millions from Famines in the Sahel in the 70s and 80s
The death toll that global dimming may have already caused is thought to be massive.

Climatologists studying this phenomenon believe that the reflection of heat have made waters in the northern hemisphere cooler. As a result, less rain has formed in key areas and crucial rainfall has failed to arrive over the Sahel in Northern Africa.

In the 1970s and 1980s, massive famines were caused by failed rains which climatologists had never quite understood why they had failed.

The answers that global dimming models seemed to provide, the documentary noted, has led to a chilling conclusion: “what came out of our exhaust pipes and power stations [from Europe and North America] contributed to the deaths of a million people in Africa, and afflicted 50 million more” with hunger and starvation.

*Billions are likely to be affected in Asia from similar effects*
Scientists said that the impact of global dimming might not be in the millions, but billions. The Asian monsoons bring rainfall to half the world's population. If this air pollution and global dimming has a detrimental impact on the Asian monsoons some 3 billion people could be affected.

*As well as fossil fuel burning, contrails is another source*
Contrails (the vapour from planes flying high in the sky) were seen as another significant cause of heat reflection.

During the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, all commercial flights were grounded for the next three days.

This allowed climate scientists to look at the effect on the climate when there were no contrails and no heat reflection.

What scientists found was that the temperature rose by some 1 degree centigrade in that period of 3 days.

**!****!******Global Dimming is hiding the true power of Global Warming****!****!********
The above impacts of global dimming have led to fears that global dimming has been hiding the true power of global warming.

Currently, most climate change models predict a 5 degrees increase in temperature over the next century, which is already considered extremely grave. However, global dimming has led to an underestimation of the power of global warming.

Addressing global dimming only will lead to massive global warming
Global dimming can be dealt with by cleaning up emissions.

However, if global dimming problems are only addressed, then the effects of global warming will increase even more. This may be what happened to Europe in 2003.

In Europe, various measures have been taken in recent years to clean up the emissions to reduce pollutants that create smog and other problems, but without reducing the greenhouse gas emissions in parallel. This seems to have had a few effects:

This may have already lessened the severity of droughts and failed rains in the Sahel.
However, it seems that it may have caused, or contributed to, the European heat wave in 2003 that killed thousands in France, saw forest fires in Portugal, and caused many other problems throughout the continent.
The documentary noted that the impacts of addressing global dimming only would increase global warming more rapidly. Irreversible damage would be only about 30 years away. Global level impacts would include:

The melting of ice in Greenland, which would lead to more rising sea levels. This in turn would impact many of our major world cities
Drying tropical rain forests would increase the risk of burning. This would release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further increasing global warming effects. (Some countries have pushed for using “carbon sinks” to count as part of their emission targets. This has already been controversial because these store carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere when burnt. Global dimming worries increase these concerns even more.)
These and other effects could combine to lead to an increase of 10 degrees centigrade in temperature over the next 100 years, not the standard 5 degrees which most models currently predict.

This would be a more rapid warming than any other time in history, the documentary noted. With such an increase,

*Vegetation will die off even more quickly
*Soil erosion will increase and food production will fail
*A Sahara type of climate could be possible in places such as England, while other parts of the world would fare even worse.
*Such an increase in temperature would also release one of the biggest stores of greenhouse gases on earth, methane hydrate, currently contained at the bottom of the earth's oceans and known to destabilize with warming. This gas is eight times stronger than carbon dioxide in its greenhouse effect. As the documentary also added, due to the sheer amounts that would be released, by this time, whatever we would try to curb emissions, it would be too late.

>>>>>“This is not a prediction,” the documentary said, “it is a warning of what will happen if we clean up the pollution while doing nothing about greenhouse gases.”<<<<<

Root causes of global warming also must be addressed
If we were to use global dimming pollutants to stave off the effects of global warming, we would still face many problems, such as:

Human health problems from the soot/smog
Environmental problems such as acid rain
Ecological problems such as changes in rainfall patterns (as the Ethiopian famine example above reminds us) which can kill millions, if not billions.
Climatologists are stressing that the roots of both global dimming causing pollutants and global warming causing greenhouse gases have to be dealt with together and soon.

We may have to change our way of life, the documentary warned. While this has been a message for over 20 years, as part of the climate change concerns, little has actually been done. “Rapidly,” the documentary concluded,

>>>>“we are running out of time.”<<<<

Julian W Tyler -bio
Jun 16, 2006
RE: Mark A Vizcarra
This article is more circustancial than anything I have ever seen!

>>>Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down.<<<

Where is this data coming from? What studies corroberate this? Seems pretty circumstancial. There was melting but then there was recovery... please.

>>> The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. <<<<

12 years it took to reach average agian then? Is that what he means. A sharp decrease of 15% is not something to gawk at!

>>Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."<<<

And that is all we need to hear! If a whole bunch of scientists are seeing changes in their local area's of study that means someone needs to sound the alarm bell! It is very hard to study the globe, the global climate as a whole, it would be very expensive and very time consuming and could takes years, but if you study it in peices, in local area's and find you are seeing the same effects as others...

It's not a coincidence, I promise.

Time to wake up.


It is time we some some results, there has been a lot of talk and very little action on this front... Georgie Boy and Arnold, lets see it.

Two words: Bullet Train! <---- This is a no Brainer Arnold! Get it going!

Somebody please get the California Bullet train back on track!

Somebody please tell Dick Cheney that Global Warming is just as if not more important than Terrorism. Pollution is a terrorist without a border and a friend of know one... oil companies are rich enough already!

The World has had enough!

Below is a compilaton my words and other peoples, read it and/or add your own thoughts!

* * * * * G L O B A L W A R M I N G * * * * * * *

I heard yesterday that hundreds of major American Cities are voluntarily joining the Kyoto Protocol, moving towards sustainability, even without the support of the present administration; which is amazing and so great to hear since this is a gloabl issue that is bigger than America and should not be up to one Texan, or someone who has shot someone in the face.

It is time for us all to accept that there is real change going on and that it will accelerate if it is not addressed and reversed. We cannot afford to 'wait out' present administration policies, it could be too late by then.

America has a responsablitity to create and use energy efficent technology and share it with the world, otherwise our air will get worse, despite our efforts, as China and India begin to pump vastly growing pollution into the air. We need to be a model for enviornmental policy, and energy efficentcy, share and sell our findings, or we cannot stop everything from getting worse and worse.

Blaming anyone will not fix the problem. Lets get with the fixing and less with the finger pointing we are on a short time frame here.

Everybody knows Clinton was far from perfect, but if Bush cannot see that the glaciers all over the planet are melting, Florida had four Hurricanes, ect then he is really stupid.

But the president doesn't matter, you should do what YOU can so your grandchildren can see New Orleans or go skiing, and enjoy nature. It is up to us individually not them. I don't think it wise to count on liars (polititions in general) to get anything done.

Think Globally; act locally.

Bush pulled us out of the Protocol saying it would hurt the economy, which translates as energy industry profits. It seems to me developing new technologies, re-working broken systems and finding ways to be more efficient would only generate more profits, especially in the long term, think of your grand kinds...

Imagine a large ocean liner heading on a collision corse with an iceberg. You can't turn the ship at the last second, it must begin turning well in advance or it will not subvert disaster. It is time to start turning the ship. Disaster is in sight. Numbers can be made to say anything, i think we all know our present actions are not sustainable.

"Also, you have to consider that science does not completely understand the ecosystem in total."

It is hard to understand an ecosystem that is suffucating under the pressures of modernization, it is hard to study an ecosystem that is rapidly diminishing. It is hard to know how long it will take for us to see the full results of our action for the past 150 years. One thing is certian, change is accelerating and and it shows no signs of slowing. Most of the oceans are dead, the rest are dieing, how can we study those ecosystems, we can't. All we can do is accept that they are dieing and work to save what is left and slow the death, and try ad developed technology to save it.

"It's a big place. To think that one species such as humans can destroy the planet is a bit conceited. The planet will survive, while humans may not."

What about nuclear weapons, humanity has within it's grasp the ability to destroy the planet, this is without question. The entire modern era was about concuring nature, not studying it. Humanity has been selfish more than concieted.

Don't you want humanity to survive? Most of it is already struggling, Africa is drying out faster and faster and lakes are dissapearing and people are starving. It is to late to study the ecosystem as it WAS. Most of the rainforest is already gone, millions of species have gone extinct in the last 150 years, an unprecidented thing usually requiring meteor impact or something. You cannot tell me 6 billion people are not taking a toll on this planet, and the planet is going to fight back unless we start to work with it.

"But, even if there were definitive proof, beyond a reasonable doubt...things still wouldn't change. It's just human nature. It's not a good thing, just the way it is."

Then we are all doomed, at least our children are.

Things can be done and need to be done. Technology is on our side. It is a daunting task but to simply say "Oh well there is nothing we can do" is just plain ridiculous and fool hearty. If you have cancer do you just say "oh well there is nothing I can do" or do you say "Alright, I accept this, I am going to make real changes and I am going to fight this and rise up better and anew". Don't be a quitter.

So in a similar situation, you think a person with cancer should just accept it and watch there physical self wither and die? (Tell that to Lance Armstrong) The planet has cancer, it can be cured, it just takes the right medicine and acceptance of the problems. Why can we not get past denial and ambivilance?

The real problem is that solutions cramp big energy profits, cleaing up the mess of modernization is not going to be cheap and nobody takes on the oil cartel and walks away a winner.

What is it going to take before people will WANT things to change?

Divide and concure is the name of the game; ironically under the guise of "United We Stand"
Great debate here, to everyone. I have to add some thoughts on this, as I try to stay as current as I can on these issues.

First, with regard to the sustainability of life on this planet, I have to discourage EVERYONE from adopting the opinion that human life is unsustainable in the long-term, or it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we just say right now, "Hey, there's no chance of changing all the bad things that have been done to the planet, so let's just kick back and enjoy it while we've got it," is a tempting thing for a lot of people to say, but it's also the rallying cry of those who feel that significant change is either unfeasible or just too difficult. By feeling this way, then, we really are dooming the planet, because, if we just say right now, "Yeah, human life will be wiped out at some point in the future, because we have really poor judgment skills," then we really will be wiped out because of ignoring the problems at hand.

Anyway, by that long ramble, what I'm trying to say is that every civilization has a turning point. Ours is at the very least almost at hand, I would go so far as to say that it really is at hand as we speak. The actions we take today and in the near future will determine whether or not we're here as a society in the coming centuries and millenia. Every civilization has to make a choice at that turning point - for the earliest humans that choice was basically "kill or be killed," from the vicious animals to the first murderous mongrels of our ancestors, to preserve meant to protect one's self. For European civilizations, the choice was to stay close to home and proscribe to the doctrines of the anti-scientific Roman Catholic Church, or to expand their civilization to further shores, running the risk of sailing off the purported edge of the planet.

For us, the choice is one between hedonism and reactionism or preservation and progressivism. Do we just say to ourselves, "Hey, life as we know it will be over in a couple of hundred years anyway, let's just enjoy it while it lasts," and, "Anybody that looks cross-eyed at us, let's nuke 'em," our do we pull our heads out of the sand before that sand is turned to glass and say things like, "We can change our future, but not if we don't act, otherwise we're just dooming ourselves."

Anyway, let me slide my soapbox away while I move to a different topic, the cyclical nature of the globe's climate. Yes, there is a several-hundred-year process of global warming and global cooling that has taken place ever since our planet first cooled into a ball of rock. The problem I have is that when I look at the numbers over time, each time the planet has gone through a warming period, the global average has been a little higher each time before the trend reversed into the global cooling, and has cooled off slightly less each time it has cooled. So, it's sort of like an out of control balance, for which we are contributing to the imbalance. Look at the following chart, just as an example.

(I'll get it in soon)

This shows a pretty eye-opening view of the last 120 years or so, the time period for which these measurements are most reliable, due to the fact that detailed records weren't kept BEFORE this time and so are left to geological studies of ice sheet composition and bedrock striations. At any rate, you'll notice that during the first part of this table, spanning the infancy of the American industrialization era and the full-swing of the European industrialization, shows a relatively stable temperature, with the Earth's characteristic warming/cooling trends. Most remarkably, though, is what we see after American industrialization really takes off, right around 1910 or so, and European industrialization has really had a chance to get a foothold in the ecosystem. The temp raises more each time, and decreases less each time. Now, there is no reliable data on the behavior of the climate before this time period, but it doesn't realistically look like we're flirting with an ice age anytime soon.

The last thing that worries me is the idea that humankind isn't capable of wiping out the planet. Quite to the contrary, actually. It's not egotistical or unrealistic to think that one species can do that - not that we will cause the planet physically not to be here anymore, but rather, what capacity will the planet exist in? One needs look no further than Venus to learn what the Greenhouse effect can do to a planet capable of sustaining life. It is very likely that Venus, based on atmospheric composition and landforms, was a planet not at all unlike today's Earth at some point in the galactic history. However, something happened during the evolution of Venus that caused a Runaway Train Greenhouse Effect to be set in motion. Obviously not a populace of ecologically-uncaring Venusians, but something extra-planetary, most likely the impact of a comet or the nova of a nearby star creating chemical reactions in the Venusian atmosphere. One of the primary gases which contributed to this runaway effect was CO2. The chain reaction of gaseous buildup was one that couldn't be reversed by any natural processes - rising air temperature contributed to rising metabolic processes in the seas, rising metabolic processes in the seas contributed to rising temperatures, both of these contributed to rising air pressure, rising air pressure in turn contributed to both air temperature and oceanic and atmospheric metabolic processes. Likewise, each of these things contributed to a rising level of greenhouse gases, and vice versa. Each of these things fed off each other, transforming the Venus of millions of years ago, one much like Earth, to the Venus of today, with an atmospheric pressure 90 times greater and an air temperature hundreds of times greater than that of Earth.

Now, carry that over to Earth. If the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere continues to increase, (both because of clear-cutting of forests decreasing the number of plants metabolizing that gas, and because of artificial processes pumping that gas out) then this planet is well on its way to becoming another Venus. Yeah, the planet itself may still be here long after we've killed ourselves off, but at 900 degrees, with several hundreds of pounds of air pressure, and clouds of sulfuric and hydrofluoric acid raining down on the planet, will it really matter that it's still here?

Okay, sorry about the long ramble there, but I love a good debate. I don't think our fates are sealed, we just need to put forth some effort to reverse or stabilize it.

"The last thing to address is your question of how to REACH all of the people on the planet and make them stop killing the planet and thereby our species."

The interent! We live in a day and age where you can reach EVERYONE inderectly and billion directly; instentaneously.

"It seems to me that the answer to the entire question lies in choice and, to a certain extent, modifying the choices. The future of the ecosystem, whether they are currently aware of it or not, lies in the hands of our Government."

Wrong. It lie's in each of our hands, most people however just hand over this personal power to the government, and now we can see that the government is not acting the globes or the global public best interest (like raising the MPG requirerments saving billion of barrels of gas). So it is time for people to take this power back, which was what I said was begining to happen with those cities voluntarirly joining the Kyoto Protocol. Every person needs to demand and support change, counting on the government to look after and protect you in this day and age is complete folly!

I see humanity not as viral but as sometimes or regionally Cancerous, some cells are multipling out of control and are affecting other parts, hurting other systems and threatening the very survival of the whole. The planet has a way of balancing itself out, but as the sheperds and protectors (we say we own it after all) of the land and the planet we should strive to balance ourselves to it rather force it to balance away us.

"So it comes down to one million-dollar question: which is easier - changing Government, or changing six billion people simultaneously? I would say the former would be easier, though still a daunting task. We need to focus on changing the ones in power, the ones with the power to make these global changes, and stop depending on the Terran population as a whole to "make the right choices." Heretofore it hasn't happened, and it won't unless the populace's choices are modified by those with the power to do it. "

I would just like to say that i love this debate as well, this is an issue that is very dear to me, and I cannot help but seek to understand it and stay the fear in my mind for the direction we are heading. But I know that it does no good to be afraid, fear never helps in fighting, being creative or manifesting real change, taking on the powers that be and demanding that what is right and just (towards fellow humans, life and the planet in general) be done. This will not be easy, cleaing up the mess of the industrial age, stoping toxisity from rising, and fixing the mechanisms that are damaging the web of life (I know it sounds so cliche but it the best analogy) are monumental tasks. But to not rise to the challenge, to ignore the facts and continue to be destructive, produce distructive things and be frivolous because it is profitable (in the short term, in the long term it brings red ink) must be slowed and then eventually stopped altogether.

"So it comes down to one million-dollar question: which is easier - changing Government, or changing six billion people simultaneously?"

The two are unequivically linked. The people can change the government and the government can change the people. The real question is who WILL change first. When I see Bush on TV I remember that presently the people have a much better shot : ) Soon the people will not be tolerant of unsustainablity (like hundreds of billions of dollars of deficiet spending... on war no less.) and will demand the people in power move towards reason and real change. Did anyone hear about the energy bill that Bush shoved down the throat of congress? Billions of dollars to energy/oil companies that are already reporting billion dollar profits??? I hope that with these tax payer dollars they are getting for funding enviornmental friendliness, sustianablity, green energy or at least, or maybe cleaing up old oil spills or something. I would hope this money would be used for the public good, for the long term and the planet but then I come back down from the clouds.

America is the modern day Rome of the world. It is the last Superpower, the largest most stable economy, and a force that must be reconded with all over the globe. The true power of this nation is far greater and more awsome than most people realize. Once you add the power of Military, media, techology, aerospace, Hollywood, the CIA, closeness with Brittian, you begin to see a differnt picture of this nation take shape,

"With great power comes great responsability" --Spiderman

This country is filled with promise that is not being utilized for whatever reason. The people of America have no idea how lucky they are and how much of an impact they have on the rest of the world. We vote for people who descide global policy, who can use/summon the most powerful military on the planet for right or wrong.

If America wants to be the leader of the world (if not too bad we already are and passing the baton could be disasterous) it needs to act like the leader. It needs to be an example, it needs to act like the Beacon of Light it presents itself as. If we don't stop polluting and cestroying how can we ask others not to? There pollution is our problem as well. I wish America would lead the world in the green revolution, force others to stop polluting and create a world that will be clean, pleasant and bristeling with life and nature. This is not an abstract notion, this is possible. For America to not move in this direction, invest in the technology of the future (stem cells, Bioeniniering, Aerospace, Energy efficentcy, Genetic enginiering), is to continue down the road of decline. I do not wish to see America decline, I wish it would wake up and or grow up.

In regard to Mars, I see visiting colonizing and terraforming [altering the enviornment of the planet to make it more hospitable] this planet as antidotal to the human cancer problem...

**Side note**
Humanity is not a cancer per se, the cancer stems from gluttony, malace, and greed within humanity. These real human emotions and mentalities are contagous, are spreadable but are cureable. Humanity can paradoxically be both the cure and the illness.

Going to Mars gives humanity a unified goal, will require many technological breakthroughs and applications and will open our eyes as to our place is this vast solar system and galaxy.. Many secrets and insights as into Human history and the history of earth in general lie waiting and burried on the red planet; some of these secrets are so fantastic that the could unravel the very fabric of our existence and our reality itself. We have much to learn, a long way to go, and a truely amazing future in store for us, if we want it. We have only just begun to awaken, to fully see and use what we have and what we can do.

I don't mean to sound preachy, I am just speakin' from the heart!

>>"Humanity is not a cancer per se, the cancer stems from gluttony, malace, and greed within humanity. These real human emotions and mentalities are contagous, are spreadable but are cureable. Humanity can paradoxically be both the cure and the illness."

That's a much BETTER analogy than mine...I think it (humanity) can be either...right now it just happens to be the bad kind.

>>"This country is filled with promise that is not being utilized for whatever reason."

That too is right on the money...my take though is that I don't see how any gradual change will ever occur. There are too many people fighting it at every step of the way.

Also, on the subject of Mars...never gonna happen...not as a Government program anyway...there are oly three ways this will happen: (1) The most likely is that private enterprise will get tax benefits and first dibs on anything and everything there and privately execute the mission; (2) The rise of a second superpower that initiates some Cold-War race to get there, as was the reasons for going to the Moon. I think we all admit that there was no scientific reason to send a man to the moon. Purely political.; (3) The dissolution of the US as a superpower and rise of the EU...which, is a reasonable possibility.

In fact...a rise by the EU as a superpower would likely be the best way to initiate global ecological thinking...Get the EU to embrace China and Japan then become a dominant economic force.

Don't put to much pressure on the EU, it is dealing with it's own identity crisis, and in fact it could be in the USA's best interest to keep it appart. I think it will eventually solidify but it is not going to be a quick process. Very similar to the Isreal Palistine situation on certian levels, ancient disputes working themselves out, never quick. And in order to be a Super power you need an army.

In regard to Mars, it has already begun my friend, the plans are on the table and the technology is being perfected. And the private sector is already invloved.

China has tons of money, but major people/population/social problems.

Japan is getting older by the day.

The U.S. is becoming more diverse, and is in the process of morphing it's economy.

The EU is torn, in dispute, not politically unified, and presently ill equipted.

The U.S. seems a fantastic dream come true, a huge unified market, a very powerful political base and the worlds most powerful (by very far) military. Who's cards would you wish to have?

In light of recent events I don't see how anyone (with a brian) can deny the fact that global warming is real, that human kind is finally beginning to see the results of centuries of polution and nature destruction. Nature has begun to fight back, it is not over, the battle has only just begun.

We can loose this battle, in fact we will loose this battle if we don not adapt and change our stratagey.

Everything has changed, cities are gone, boarders are imaginary, problems are communal and the internet is changing everything. Why is our energy policy not changing? Why is the government not addressing this change, accepting it and moving to deal with it? Everything has changed except the Bush Co. agenda...

Did you know the Forbes top wealthiest Americans saw there incomes skyrocket in recent years even as millions (1,000,000's) or Americans slipped BELOW poverty levels... this is a recipe for disaster.

I think we need to shift back for a while... rethink some things a bit huh?