The clock has run out. The political and social climate is extremely unstable, and it has now been 40 years since the last major social upheaval. We are overdue, and I believe that it is upon us and that all Hell will break loose in the next 12 months.

Of course, there will finally be a lot of "to dos" for those who have been clamoring that we should "do something!"

The clock has run out. The political and social climate is extremely unstable, and it has now been 40 years since the last major social upheaval. We are overdue, and I believe that it is upon us and that all Hell will break loose in the next 12 months.

Does this mean it's time to learn how to use a gun?

The clock has run out. The political and social climate is extremely unstable, and it has now been 40 years since the last major social upheaval. We are overdue, and I believe that it is upon us and that all Hell will break loose in the next 12 months.

Does this mean it's time to learn how to use a gun?

Personal self defense is always advisable.

That said, it might indeed be the time for the "summer soldier" to shit or get off the pot. Who knows how it will shake out, there is a convergence of clouds on the horizon.

Strike while the iron is hot.

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~achim/lib/bitmaps/dali1.gif

Time for something completely different:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/guide/pp3900.jpg

"I don't care. I'm not afraid anymore. If I die, I die. But let me die for the right cause" - a voice from New Orleans today.

Sorry to be so cryptic. I am sensing a big shift. I am a long way from having this sorted out to where I could write a coherent essay, and others here are more skilled at that, so I will just ramble and give you my impressions. But things are changing and changing quickly. That long stretch of time when you were ignored and not listened to is coming to an end. "No, no, no" people have been saying. "What you see can't be happening" they thought, and turned away and focused on... focused on what? They quickly dismissed you, turned away, looked off at something, something else, something they saw or imagined - on some other reality, some other plan for their life that all of their hopes were enmeshed with. They tried to peg you, to write your character into their script. How to get rid of you and what you were saying...who were you, anyway? Were you anyone to listen to? Someone important? Was there any evidence that you were an authority, or had power or influence? What did your friends and neighbors and family think of you? Some sort of eccentric?? Some sort of loser who had these strange and disturbing ideas about what was happening as a function of some sort of pathology, or self-serving small and inconsequential silliness? What was your history, what was the story about you that could be easily fit into their reality? If what you were saying to them were true...but what you were saying couldn't be true, because that would mean...that would mean that everything was wrong somehow. Life is orderly, life is predictable, they think. They have navigated the maze, found their place, made accommodations with life, accepted reality. They heard it on CNN - the report, the story. "Oh, come on, are you trying to tell me that they are all in on this?? That is just crazy!"

The banality of it all, the pettiness, the stupefying emptiness, the relentless monotony - that is what has been so enervating, so destructive, so miserable about living in the midst of this. That is about to end. People will be listening to you suddenly, even seeking your counsel. We have been in a process of rejecting - rejecting paths, rejecting choices, rejecting ways of thinking about things. All roads led to ruin, and again and again we were betrayed, fooled, had the rug pulled out from under us. Now, many paths will suddenly be open to us and all of those dead end paths will lose their power over our imaginations and dissipate into the ether as though they had never existed.

Either you were crazy, or a whole Hell of a lot of people were crazy. Very stressful position to be in. But you weren't crazy. Not being crazy means that what you saw happening was in fact happening, and people around you thinking you were crazy cannot change what has been happening, and what has been happening will sooner or later reveal itself to all, regardless. There comes a time when people can no longer successfully wish the truth away. The signs that this is about to happen are everywhere.

I have had the opportunity to do something I haven't done in years: watch television news. They talk about "your money" and "your traffic" and "your weather." The things that really matter to you. The things that day after day they pound into your head - "these are the things that matter to you. These are the things that MUST matter to you, or look how you could wind up!" followed by stories of personal tragedy of various kinds - so and so murdered, arrested, discredited, ruined. "This is reality." What are the clever things to do and what are the dangerous things to do?

Keeping the ruling class in power, keeping the social pressure for conformity in place, keeping each of us in a certain state of lust combined with anxiety, fear combined with reassurance - back and forth, back and forth people are whip-sawed - all of this depends upon a certain trick, a certain illusion. Everything must be kept in our minds in discrete compartments, and one must not make connections. Should you start to make connections, anxiety, disorientation, alienation would follow.

You are an American. We will now tell you who you are, what reality is, what your role in it is - as you choose the different options we set out for you, and look out! you might slip and fall in thousand different ways that we will explain to you as though you were a child.

Your money, your traffic, your weather, your worries, your strategy, your reality - that is all over here - see it? Do I need to go over that again so you know just who you are and what you should be doing? Do I need to go over that again and again and again night after night after night? Do you get exactly who and what you are? Good. Now that we have established your place, your identity, let's look at the world. Over there - separate from your reality - see those brown people? Weird aren't they? They might come after your money, your traffic - people get killed in traffic you know, or delayed maybe and are late for work and lose your job or who knows what might happen; scary things are happening every day - your weather, your shopping, your lifestyle, your plans, your career. We might need to invade or bomb them or something - hard to tell, they are wily and poor and angry or something, and we tried to talk to them or whatever and why do they want to harm us anyway? No matter what we think, it makes no sense to let them just harm us for whatever reason, does it? I mean something needs to be done. That is "foreign policy" - events in the world. And no you are informed. You follow the news and you know what happens - you sort it out, you analyze it, you make your own judgments and from your own opinions. You don't just go along with the herd. That is the world, the "not-America" and it is over there. See it? Just a bunch of strange people running around in pajamas burning things and shouting - beings from another planet, they seem to be - and what sort of people would want to live like that? Why don't they take care of their money, their weather, their traffic, their jobs, their lifestyles?

Everything must be kept in categories. Politics - over there. Some silly exercise. Yap, yap. View it all with great cynicism and with a detached aloofness. It has no connection to your life, except maybe as the Republicans keep the brown people at bay - and hey, it isn't that you are a racist or anything but the fact is that they really do want to kill us and that "be nice" Kumbaya stuff is too risky and dangerous - and except maybe as the Democrats might help you with "your money." Your pocketbook. Your pocketbook issues. Probably not and best to look out for yourself.

If people started making connections, if everything could no longer be kept isolated in its own neat and tidy little category, with a short and simple phrase assigned to it that tells us everything we need to know about it, then everything might start unraveling.

Things are about to unravel.

I guess what I can help folks with first is that I am pretty far from being capable of total shock or surprise, no matter what comes. I'm just not surprised anymore, dismayed, saddened, disgusted, not surprised... a huge spaceship coming to take me away, that might do it...but folks just keep on turning a deliberate blind eye and when it all comes unraveled, they will need some people who will have already taken the shock...


when does the Mayan calendar end again?? :?

Violence, even terror, always exists on the periphery of America. These are the means by which empire is consolidated, defended, extended and perpetuated. There is, quite sadly, nothing new about Cho Seung-Hui and the massacre at Virginia Tech (no it is not close to being the "largest massacre in America" despite the MSM meme) the examples are numerous and all too easily drift off into the recesses our collective amnesia.

We live in a culture of increasing emptiness; there is a vacuum at the heart of our empire. Epidemics of illegal drugs succeed one another, while tens of millions, including children as young as two, need antidepressants to get through the day. A great hunger exists for anesthesia in the face of emotional devastation and loss. Everyone knows that something is missing, that meaning and value are steadily being leached out of daily life, along with its very texture.

"The less people really live - or perhaps more correctly, the more they become aware that they haven't really lived - the more abrupt and frightening death becomes for them, and the more it appears as a terrible accident." Theodor Adorno's observation of decades ago seems even more pertinent today. Exploding jetliners, school shootings and anthrax scares can terrify; meanwhile a much deeper crisis triggers a far more pervasive and fundamental fear.

The empire is global. There is nowhere to go to escape its corrosive barrenness. We live in the most standardized society that has ever existed. It seems the whole world now tends towards a universal sameness. A global unity of alienness, of disorientation and disconnection, destined to resemble a mall or an airport. People now dress alike in every major city in the world. They drink Coca-Cola, and watch many of the same TV shows.

The empire's landscape of unreality and routinization grows steadily more pathological. Damage to nature and violence to the psyche compete in a postmodern culture of denial, punctuated by eruptions of the homicidal at work, at home, at school. We can expect to hear more and more alarm bells that will wake us altogether. Peaceful slumber is unthinkable.

Who doesn't know, on some level, where this empire - this civilization - is taking us?

Violence, even terror, always exists on the periphery of America. These are the means by which empire is consolidated, defended, extended and perpetuated. There is, quite sadly, nothing new about Cho Seung-Hui and the massacre at Virginia Tech (no it is not close to being the "largest massacre in America" despite the MSM meme) the examples are numerous and all too easily drift off into the recesses our collective amnesia.

We live in a culture of increasing emptiness; there is a vacuum at the heart of our empire. Epidemics of illegal drugs succeed one another, while tens of millions, including children as young as two, need antidepressants to get through the day. A great hunger exists for anesthesia in the face of emotional devastation and loss. Everyone knows that something is missing, that meaning and value are steadily being leached out of daily life, along with its very texture.

"The less people really live - or perhaps more correctly, the more they become aware that they haven't really lived - the more abrupt and frightening death becomes for them, and the more it appears as a terrible accident." Theodor Adorno's observation of decades ago seems even more pertinent today. Exploding jetliners, school shootings and anthrax scares can terrify; meanwhile a much deeper crisis triggers a far more pervasive and fundamental fear.

The empire is global. There is nowhere to go to escape its corrosive barrenness. We live in the most standardized society that has ever existed. It seems the whole world now tends towards a universal sameness. A global unity of alienness, of disorientation and disconnection, destined to resemble a mall or an airport. People now dress alike in every major city in the world. They drink Coca-Cola, and watch many of the same TV shows.

The empire's landscape of unreality and routinization grows steadily more pathological. Damage to nature and violence to the psyche compete in a postmodern culture of denial, punctuated by eruptions of the homicidal at work, at home, at school. We can expect to hear more and more alarm bells that will wake us altogether. Peaceful slumber is unthinkable.

Who doesn't know, on some level, where this empire - this civilization - is taking us?

Sadly, I do think most know on some level, however, I think its akin to the parents who know deep down their kid is "doing drugs", when they find out for sure the shock is still as great, perhaps more so, because a hope has been built up, a denial that is even stronger than ignorance would have ever been has been built. And what happens to those on the pharmaceuticals when the they are no longer available??