The Former United States of America

I am linking below three articles by Michael Ventura in his column Letters@3AM in the Austin Chronicle. A keen analysis of how and why the United States of America will decline and fall.
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A543178
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid:549268
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:554180

Outstanding.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

The Road not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that, the passing there
had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
in leaves no feet had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

The Hollow Men

* * * *

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

The Heart Sutra

Thus have I heard. Once the Blessed One was dwelling in Rajagriha at Vulture Peak mountain, together with a great gathering of the sangha of monks and a great gathering of the sangha of bodhisattvas. At that time the Blessed One entered the samadhi that expresses the dharma called "profound illumination," and at the same time noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, while practicing the profound prajnaparamita, saw in this way: he saw the five skandhas to be empty of nature.

Then, through the power of the Buddha, venerable Shariputra said to noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, "How should a son or daughter of noble family train, who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita?"

Addressed in this way, noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, said to venerable Shariputra, "O Shariputra, a son or daughter of noble family who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita should see in this way: seeing the five skandhas to be empty of nature. Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness are emptiness.

Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas, no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no non-attainment.

Therefore, Shariputra, since the bodhisattvas have no attainment, they abide by means of prajnaparamita. Since there is no obscuration of mind, there is no fear. They transcend falsity and attain complete nirvana. All the buddhas of the three times, by means of prajnaparamita, fully awaken to unsurpassable, true, complete enlightenment.

Therefore, the great mantra of prajnaparamita, the mantra of great insight, the unsurpassed mantra, the unequaled mantra, the mantra that calms all suffering, should be known as truth, since there is no deception. The prajnaparamita mantra is said in this way:

OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA

Thus, Shariputra, the bodhisattva mahasattva should train in the profound prajnaparamita.

Then the Blessed One arose from that samadhi and praised noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, saying, "Good, good, O son of noble family; thus it is, O son of noble family, thus it is. One should practice the profound prajnaparamita just as you have taught and all the tathagatas will rejoice."

When the Blessed One had said this, venerable Shariputra and noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, that whole assembly and the world with its gods, humans, asuras, and gandharvas rejoiced and praised the words of the Blessed One.

Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice

By Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Signs of the End Times.

Here is one of an increasing number of accounts of the first hard signs of what is to come worldwide with the end of the age of oil.

Disarray by James Howard Kunstler

http://www.kunstler.com/index.html
James Howard Kunstler
January 14, 2008
Disarray

The dark tunnel that the US economy has entered began to look more and more like a black hole last week, sucking in lives, fortunes, and prospects behind a Potemkin facade of orderly retreat put up by anyone in authority with a story to tell or an interest to protect -- Fed chairman Bernanke, CNBC, The New York Times, the Bank of America.... Events are now moving ahead of anything that personalities can do to control them.
(One of JHK's best.)
http://www.kunstler.com/index.html

Religion and Science

Reprinted below is an excerpt from a short essay by Clay Shirky originally posted here in the edge.org.

The works that changed my mind about compatibility were Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, and Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, which lay out the ways religious belief is a special kind of thought, incompatible with the kind of skepticism that makes science work. In Boyer and Atran's views, religious thought doesn't simply happen to be false -- being false is the point, the thing that makes belief both memorable and effective. Psychologically, we overcommit to the ascription of agency, even when dealing with random events (confirmation can be had in any casino.) Belief in God rides in on that mental eagerness, in the same way optical illusions ride in on our tendency to overinterpret ambiguous visual cues. Sociologically, the adherence to what Atran diplomatically calls 'counter-factual beliefs' serves both to create and advertise in-group commitment among adherents. Anybody can believe in things that are true, but it takes a lot of coordinated effort to get people to believe in virgin birth or resurrection of the dead.

Why Is this Apocalypse Different than All Other Apocalypses: Making the Case for Peak Oil and Climate Change Now

Outstanding post by Sharon Astyk re peak oil and global warming. The best summary I have found so far.
LP

How to Think and Why Change Your Mind?

Check out this amazing blog; a collection of essays by a wide range of intelligent and educated people who have changed their minds on one topic or another and and why. This collection of essays should be published as a graduate course on how to think.

Leaders or Followers

A comment by one Kiashu in the Oil Drum: "As to our elected representatives, the thing to remember is that they're not actually leaders - they're followers. They follow public opinion. Even the unelected ones have limits, Hitler could not have converted Germany to Islam, nor Stalin made everyone speak French. But in a democracy they follow the public, not the other way around. So if we want change we must change ourselves - and the elected guys will follow along reluctantly."
Worth keeping in mind. Part of the frustration I feel about the US government is that so-called political leaders aren't, in my humble opinion, leading effectively. Like many people, I suspect, I find it much easier to carp about how poorly they are doing than to accept, as Kiashu points out, that they are not really leaders, but followers, and they are following what they sense is the prevailing public opinion, or at least the prevailing opinion of their constituents.
"So if we want change, we just change ourselves." I kinda wish Kiashu hadn't put it that way. It really is easier to criticize the politicians, or the people who elected them, than to turn
the lens inward. And really, what the hell can I do about Guantanamo and the torture monkeys who want more Guantanamos, except to rant and rave? Changing ourselves sounds very new age to me. Meditate? Chant? Pray? Dialog? Blog? Eat less and exercise more?
And what exactly is it about me (or you) that needs to change? Maybe this is the time for a New Year's resolution: Think deeply on this.
LP

Nature Bats Last

This is an outstanding essay, a commencement address given earlier in 2007. I love this end of the world, extinction stuff.

Waterboarding Rommel

If German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox”, had been captured during WII, would President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Vice-President Harry Truman and Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower have ordered him to be waterboarded (tortured) to extract information about German troop movements, etc., intelligence that might have saved the lives of thousands of Allied and American fighting men?
When WWII torpedo bomber pilot George Herbert Walker Bush was shot down by Japanese anti aircraft fire, did he pray to God that if he was captured the Japanese would honor and respect the Geneva Conventions, a treaty expressly forbidding signatory nations from employing tortures such as waterboarding against captives?
What a difference a generation makes.
The shame that the Cheney-Bush Republican/Christian administration has brought on this nation will take generations to erase, if ever it can. And Americans wonder why they hate us.

Crazy

I liked Jim Kunstler's Dec. 24, 2007, blog entry, A Christmas Eve Story, here, where an old friend had told him, "You know, you've been predicting all these catastrophes for years now, but we're still here, the cars are all rolling down Broadway out there, and life is going on. You're beginning to sound like a crazy person." Kunstler's reaction, "It didn't bother me especially that G thought my my ideas were outlandish so much as being comprehensively written off by an old friend as a crazy person, someone who... I dunno... rummages through dumpsters and talks to himself on the street without any sign of a cell phone in hand."
I related because I remember calling up an old friend a couple years ago when the peak oil demon first possessed me. It took me a while to assure M that I wasn't selling anything, that I just called to pass the word that there was a dark line on the horizon that might develop into a major storm in the next few years. He said I sounded like an alarmist. I had to admit that yeah, I was kind of sounding an alarm. I gave him a few web sites to check out and hung up. It kind of bothered me because, being psychic, I could picture him picturing me on the other end of the line, wearing a tinfoil hat and rolling a pair of large ball bearings around in my hand.
Its not easy being a prophet in your own land. Especially when you're not even a prophet, just a guy who happens onto writings and research reports bearing on our economy, civilization and world that bear a second, third and more look, and passes the word on. Kunstler is not a scientist, he's a writer, a reporter. But he is a hell of a good writer and a hell of a good reporter. And he is not bad as a prognosticator either, having foreseen the housing meltdown several years back.
It is puzzling to me that so many Americans, or at least so many Republicans who call themselves Americans can fully support plunging a coerced coalition of nations into two wars, spending billions upon billions upon billions of dollars and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives in an effort to thwart a handful of scruffy religious fanatics who might be plotting to swim across the Atlantic Ocean and blow up an appliance store in Newark, yet indignantly oppose as liberal (they really need that liberal label) hysteria a great body of sober, credible scientific literature warning of imminent geological developments that will make concern about those scruffy fanatics fade into utter insignificance.
But I understand the fear of crazy people and alarmists. It's natural. I remember reading a letter in a newsblog from a reader who complained about the peak oil/global warming types who said things that frankly scared him and suggested that they could be so much more effective if they would just stop upsetting people. Indeed. Hush little baby, don't you cry, momma's gonna sing you a lullaby....

$100 Oil

Now hold off on the celebration there all you lunatic fringe, peak-oil
wackos. Just because oil tipped $100 a barrel does not mean the world has come to an end. Last I heard the planets were still circling the sun. (No, Mr. Whoever you are in the 3d row wearing the tinfoil hat, Pluto's demotion to planetoid had nothing to do with peak oil.)
This is not the end of civilization. Okay, prices have jumped up a bit, but there is still plenty of good farmland we can convert over to corn for ethanol production. What is it with you people? We are Americans goddammit and the American way of life is not negotiable!