Safety First

It should be obvious—the goal of life cannot be to survive it, and the attempt consigns us to a cramped and fearful half-life.

The mania for safety and the phobia of death are not a sudden, inexplicable madness. They are part of an encompassing state of human beingness that has reached its extreme in modern civilization.

That is why I have long warned the environmental movement away from the rhetoric of “We must change our ways, or we will not survive.” The real solution is to fall back in love with the living world, to see it as a beloved not as a collection of resources, a waste dump, or an engineering project. Then we will not only survive; we will flourish, as one does when they are partnered with their lover.

— Charles Eisenstein

Concerto for String Orchestra

Grazyna Bacewicz 1948

Liberals, please come home

Liberals once proudly harbored a deep skepticism toward Pharma, and the military-industrial/intelligence complex, and generally nurtured an antipathy for war, a contempt for blind obedience to undeserving authorities, a wariness of officials who used fear as a governing tool (recall FDR’s admonition that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”), and solicitude for bodily autonomy (isn’t our mantra “My body, my choice”?).

During the COVID coup d’état, the same liberals who had fought the Patriot Act and opposed the Iraq War suddenly adopted the Neocons’ hostility to the Bill of Rights, their affinity for a national security state, and their embrace of a bellicose, expansionist “regime-change” foreign policy.
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Liberals seem unaware that their acquiescence to censorship and the erosion of the Bill of Rights to silence opponents of Big Pharma’s vaccines will invariably open the door to King Coal, Big Oil, Big Ag, and Big Chemical and all their captive agencies likewise silencing their own inconvenient critics. Military contractors and their government captives are already wielding the new tool of censorship to silence debate on the Ukraine intervention.

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I continue to dialogue with individuals with whom I differ on many issues…
If we don’t talk to our political opponents, how will we ever find common ground? If we can’t explore scientific truths through debate, how will we ever bridge the widening chasm between America’s warring tribes? Those fierce disputes between Republicans and Democrats, Blacks and Whites, vaxxed and unvaxxed serve only the intentions of the global elite who exploit the distraction to systematically rob us of our treasure, our health, and our freedoms.

Coercive policies—especially the suppression of speech and dissent—will only breed more skepticism and mistrust and will never bridge the gap between America’s polarized tribes.

from Robert Kennedy’s Letter to Liberals

Your ultimate destiny

This is the place the story began, and this is the end toward which all life will eventually return. You are destined to transcend the need for “harmony” and to experience the essence of being in unison with all life. That does not mean that you will disappear or be absorbed by one, all-consuming consciousness. Each of you will remain in a state of self-perception for all eternity, and as you enter the states of higher awareness, you will be graced with self-perception. That is the essence of the oneness of which we all partake. None of the personal qualities that make you a uniquely beautiful individual can ever be lost.

— Rasha, ONENESS

Massive non-violent uprising in Sri Lanka

Thousands of protesters outraged by the deteriorating material conditions of the nation’s economic meltdown have stormed the presidential palace of Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and I guarantee you the aerial footage as they poured into the building en masse has made every government leader and plutocrat a little uncomfortable today.

— Caitlin Johnstone

NOW – Protesters storm the presidential palace in Sri Lanka's capital.pic.twitter.com/Wv6oQ10kBQ

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 9, 2022

Months-long antigovernment demonstrations took a dramatic turn on July 9, when police were unable to hold back large crowds of protesters who stormed and occupied the official residences of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

— WSJ

A fine line

What we diagnose as “psychosis” in this culture might be a sign, in another culture, that a young person has talent as a channel or a shaman. We all have parts of us that are intuitive and able to receive telepathic messages, but these abilities have been socialized out of most of us.

More from Phil Borges…

Science has made us arrogant

Why are we so sure that ancient peoples were superstitious and that at last our science has got the one correct view of th world? What about indigenous peoples whose cultures have lasted far longer than the Enlightenment has inspired modern Western thought?

There are limits to the scientific world-view, and it’s high time that we ate a helping of humble pie, time that we learn what we can from human history and from diverse cultures.

Greg Anderson speaks to a TEDx audience at Ohio State…

A Radically Conservative Idea: Let’s return to the US Constitution

Lawrence Lessig is a scholar of history who reminds us of the ideals of our Founding Fathers, and challenges us to return to those which we have betrayed

• The Declaration of Independence was a ringing indictment of colonialism, but the US in the 20th Century became the world’s biggest neo-colonial power. We overthrow popular governments that we don’t like and install dictators friendly to US corporations.
• The Fourth Amendment used to guarantee protection against government spying on US citizens. Now every email that we write and every call that we make is recorded at a huge Utah data center, just in case it’s needed for future prosecution.
• It’s not in our Constitution, but this country was once committed to maintaining the conditions for free market competition by breaking up big monopolies. This was a bipartisan consensus early in the 20th Century. Now we have banks that are too big to fail and media monopolies and Silicon Valley tech giants that control the lion’s share of internet traffic.

A superlative dad

We’re used to thinking of the male as hit-and-run participant in reproduction, while the female does the heavy lifting. Roles are reversed in seahorses, so the social dynamics are also different from almost all other species. This creates an opportunity for polyandry — a single female keeps a “harem” of males.

Camouflage — Tiny seahorse and background coral are almost indistinguishable

Despite their size, these animals live rich, dramatic lives that you might expect to find in a telenovela, rather than a scientific journal. 

Through daily courtship rituals, bonded pairs of male and female seahorses can synchronise their reproductive cycles. By communicating through these elaborate dances, a female will know when to prepare a clutch of eggs to coincide with the male as he prepares his brood pouch. When they’re both ready, the pair will rise through the water column, and the female will pass her unfertilised eggs into the male’s pouch. He fertilises the eggs as they enter the pouch, and it is this quirk of their reproductive cycle that has resulted in another: due to the eggs entering the male’s reproductive system unfertilised and him subsequently fertilising them, he can be certain that each offspring is his. This is extremely rare in the animal kingdom. As a result, males have evolved to take better care of the developing offspring than perhaps any other male in the animal kingdom, due to the assurance of paternity. This was the behaviour I expected to see, repeated on a miniature scale.

Read more from Aeon

A sentence worth reading twice

Until we are presented with a plausible account of how the concept of “matter” arose out of matter itself, we should be prepared to argue that there is nothing in matter as described by physics that would suggest it could rise above itself, and enclose that which it has risen above in quotation marks.

– Raymond Tallis

(from a book review in The New Atlantis)

Escher