Society deals primarily with cosmetic change, no matter how threatened the world is. But, the way we think got us into the mess we are in, and, unless we grapple with paradigm change, it's fingers in the dike. For this column, send your thoughts about what outside the box ideas might contribute to setting us on a better course.
Look at this chilling story by the great British journalist, George Monbiot, about the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It concludes:
"...we have to stop calling it climate change. Using 'climate change' to describe events like this, with their devastating implications for global food security, water supplies and human settlements, is like describing a foreign invasion as an unexpected visit, or bombs as unwanted deliveries. It's a ridiculously neutral term for the biggest potential catastrophe humankind has ever encountered. I think we should call it 'climate breakdown.'"
If we knew that without intervention the world would end at a finite date, humanity would dramatically scratch its collective head. Short of a deadline to save ourselves, what could we do that might change our course? Here are some of my thoughts.
1. My #1 idea is to investigate the crop circle phenomenon. If we knew there was other intelligence, which the circles indicate, we would be one humanity in relation to 'the other,’ working together to solve planetary problems.
2. Florida’s St. Petersburg Times asked, "How Would You Fix the Economy?" Here's one answer:
Patriotic Retirement: There's about 40 million people over 50 in the work force; pay them $1 million apiece severance with stipulations:
1) They leave their jobs. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.
2) They buy NEW American cars. Forty million cars ordered - Auto Industry fixed.
3) They either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing Crisis fixed.
Much cheaper than the trillions being ineffectively spent on the financial industry…
3. Promote a change of paradigm where getting the most money as the primary goal would be replaced by doing the most good.
4. Make a brilliant ad campaign: "Whoever Does the Most Good Wins!"
5. Have revered states people look out from TV and address the human core in everyone, urging us to think as a planet to solve the challenges we face.
6. Call for a truce worldwide, where wars end -- via inducements, including a clean slate for everyone. Even terrorists. Promise everyone universal health care, universal education and job training, and whatever it would take to give everyone the fundamentals of a decent life. Pay for it with military budgets.
7. Give ecstasy to people we want info from -- turn evil people into heart-connected ones.
8. Use plants for vision, a la shamans who use psychedelic substances for guidance.
9. Convene a new Twilight Club. "The Twilight Club was an organization founded in the late 19th century, with the intention to counter the moral decline by bolstering up the spiritual and ethical awareness of the society. Illustrious members were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herbert Spencer, Walt Whitman, Andrew Carnegie, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mark Twain...From this club, service clubs such as the Rotary Club and the Lions evolved at a later stage."
First of all, thanks so much to all of you who posted on Yahoo about the crop circle video, getting the word out about my movie. The comments continued to be overwhelmingly critical of the video — but it could be cause it was all of you! Am continuing to try to see if Toyota would follow up cause of how mad people got at them. And look on my blog for how many of you wrote to me — never got so many responses, and, as I’ve said, that was only people who posted directly on the blog. My own person email was swamped. In fact, to get on the blog, where I’d like to put all the comments on all the posts, please do it through the comments boxes at the end of each blog entry, which is the way your remarks can indeed get on the blog site.
Here’s a story from UFO Digest, analyzing a particular crop circle. (Photo by Lucy Pringle of a glyph from 2004.) I pass it along not because I expect non-scientists to pore over what it says, but to show you a typical sort of thing the circles give rise to. Many pieces are written about many circles to describe intelligence that is embedded in them.
People frequently wonder what the message is of the circles, as if they are a giant jigsaw puzzle and we will get the picture when we get all the pieces fitted together. Or that they are something like hieroglyphics, and we’ll get their message when we get everything translated. I don’t think so. My speculation is that each formation is its own bundle of encoded smarts. It’s not about deciphering the master message, but about getting it that some source is trying to get attention to itself. Intelligence, intelligence intelligence pulses at us. I think of the circlemakers scratching whatever passes for the heads in wonderment that we haven’t realized, en masse, that they exist: “We see you, we understand you, we are feeding back evidence. When are you going to get it that that’s what’s going on?”
I was especially impelled to pass on a story about this particular formation because this one has a featured spot in my movie. It was perfect on the ground, with all the stalks laid in a gorgeous carpet, nothing damaged, no evidence of any human tampering. “Yes, there is a real phenomenon,” says Andy Thomas, who is using this perfect glyph in his presentation to a conference audience about the fact that there incontrovertibly is a real phenomenon.
Yesterday, after Yahoo ran a 2-minute video about crop circles, I got this email from my friend, Kaia, who is working on a proposed reality TV series about the circles:
Wow, are they really trying to re-visit Doug and Dave? This made the front page of Yahoo today: http://whoknew.news.yahoo.com/?vid=20899874 (Note from Suzanne on 7/26 — this link won’t take you there any more. Five days after this video was posted, it was cycled off, never to be retrieved.)
The video is beyond terrible. Watching it, I wondered if this total dismissal of anything mysterious going on, as if it’s a done deal that people have made all the circles, is where the world is at.
Then, I read the comments — not all 1,080 that were up by then, but a lot of them. Almost all of them were castigating Yahoo for showing something so shameful.
These are the 24 comments posted just before I posted one. They aren’t edited at all, to cherry pick for the most interesting ones (or to fix any grammar or punctuation), so you can see the overwhelming rejection of the video.
Is something changing out there? Is there a lot of awareness now about the circles, and acceptance of them as likely to be coming from elsewhere? It used to be the other way round — whenever something about the circles appeared, there was one defense to a slew of attacks. The comments on this video, up to 2080 and still going strong at the point at which I wrote this post, are extraordinarily good news!!!!
Here are those 24 that preceded what I wrote — to watch my movie, of course. (It would be lovely if you listmembers would do the same — the trailer is here: http://CropCircleMovie.com) :
Hank Winig
You people suck. What did you do sell your soul to the US Government. There the only ones dumb enough to think we will believe all crop circles were made be a few drunk collage kids. All with in hours or even minutes in some cases. Ya Yahoo this is the one that will flush you out of the lime lite.
David
WOW!! That was intense exposé! Yahoo should be deeply ashamed of airing something this blatantly stupid. Yes, many of them have been hoaxed, but the anomalies on too many of them require a different explanation.
BarefootBoy
Those who think Doug and Dave made all those crop circles cannot recognize a LIE even if it is tied to a board and whacks them over the head. Crop Circles are laid down at night in moments, some- times in a driving rain, even with researchers watching through the night with night vision.
Steven
1971 wasn’t the start of them. If they had done a little research they would find that crop circles have been appearing since the beginning of recorded history. Many are far too complex to be made by man. Try explaining the excess radiation and a magnetic field alteration. Just stupid propoganda!!!
Sierra
Its aliens. I heard people who go into the circles lose there cell signals, and its like there in a magnactic field or something. Also this isnt really news everybody knows its aliens theyre just making up stuff like area 51
TEJ
Okay, you know they don’t want us to know the truth and like someone said, people will just take this garbage and run with it. This is some Bu-u-l-l!
HiwayMan
Crop circles have been documented for centuries, on all continents and all cultures. This whole thing is a @#$% whitewash.
David
Crop circle were reported way before the 70`s In chile they have carved out mountains that are cut in half for the purpose a landing run way. Thousand of yards long. You can only see this from above. Airplanes are what? a little over a houndred years old from the Right Brothers.
Renee
Give me a break! Planks and rope! RIGHT!
Donald
The word is ZO ology, not ZOO ology
Jared H
Those two guys that claimed to have made are full of crap.
Howard
I’ve never seen a real crop circle myself, so I can’t speak from experience, but from what I’ve read and heard in interviews from the independent experts, the plants in these crop circles have undergone molecular changes, and are not simply “tipped over” with ropes and boards. Nice try, Yahoo.
G
YAHOO PROPAGANDA……YAHOO LEADS THE WORLD IN MISINFORMATION
Proper Drainage
Who cares if they are fake or the work of some lazy aliens its just a little disinformation scam by your government.
Danny
What dumbass made this video? The first recorded crop circles date back more than 200 years. And no, you can’t superheat the insides of plant stalks with a plank. You can’t char roots under the soil with a plank. The only thing that could do that would be a huge microwave oven…
Mik F
hilarious!! well im sold with such a fine detailed answer!! give me a break
Ann
Dave and Doug were debunked a long time ago. Get your facts straight. It’s so much easier to try to not think about something then to spend one moment of time giving a true mystery and wonder one iota of sincere thought. It must require just too much effort.
?
Some years back I remember actor Judd Nelson narrated an utterly ridiculous program that claimed this phenomenon was the work of crop circle ninja’s that appeared out of a cloud of smoke all dressed in black and traveled the planet making formations … it was just bizarre!!!
Samplethat
Wow, Government disinformation at it’s dumbest. My friend, Linda Moulton Howe sat in the middle of a field as the circles appeared….in less than 2 minutes. Doug and Dave were not there. BTW Doug and Dave were working for the British Govt. Calm the masses and cover your a$es.
Harpdog
whoever made this “report” should never have graduated highschool. read the book “secrets in the fields” and then appologize for the dumbest “report” i’ve ever seen from anyone older than a 10 year old. those man made things are actually called crap-circles, because that’s what a man made one is…
24FRANCISCO
WHO CARES! I NEED A JOB!
Mike
who posts this @#$%? Many crop circles are legit and are too complex to be created by man. This is just the ongoing smear effort to cover the growing sightings of UFO activity. Disclosure is coming, and soon.
David W
Good grief. What a brainless piece of propaganda. In this too-fast-paced society of ours, unfortunately, most people will just assume what they just saw here sums it all up and must be the truth. BULL. If you dig and study this phenomenon, you will find quite a different result.
Doug
This is such a lame video explanation of crop circles
To follow up on the note in the last post about buying the film T-shirt, here’s a 90 second video we did after we made the shirts. I was touched by the things people said, and we use this video as the clincher to sell DVDs on our sale site: http://www.CropCircleMovie.com.
Here’s how we set it up:
We can keep telling you all kinds of great things about this award-winning documentary, but don’t just take our word for it. Watch the video below to find out what those who’ve seen “What On Earth?” have to say…
The crop circle season is in full flower. You can track the formations as they come in here (scroll down), where each gets a page of pictures and information.
There are good books that give you the history of the circles and beautiful pictures of them, but there is only one book that takes you into the sense of discovery of what it is about them that blows your mind. And it is by a gifted writer, as well. Michael Glickman, an Englishman who was early on into the circles, which you learn about in my movie, taught architecture at USC when he lived in the States. Also, he is a designer, so he is uniquely positioned to appreciate the design factor of what the circles are demonstrating. That they are pretty patterns is one thing, but the staggering intelligence that is being delivered is another, and he will show you how the circle indeed are ”the bones of God.”
From the back cover:
“Glickman lucidly explains the intelligence and prodigious skill behind the design and geometry of an amazing and interrelated range of crop formations, and he brings an acute intellect to bear on the complex interdisciplinary signals encoded in these agrarian riddles…The text, while avoiding dogmatic certainties, raises fundamentally challenging questions about the origin and meaning of the circles, the reason for their current manifestation, and our own evolving role in the wider universe.”
Buy this great read through this link, and your filmmaker will get a little piece of the action: http://tinyurl.com/32plbh5
Also, our film T-shirt is available to purchase. The image on it was drawn by Michael Glickman back in 1991, and it is considered by most to be the star formation of all time, loaded with intelligence that is still being analyzed. Get the T-shirt here:
When somebody sent a ping back on what’s been quietly parked on my blog onto his website (the headline isn’t what’s posted), I got inspired to rev up my energy to figure out what to do with it. A little while ago, I pointed Arianna Huffington at it — although we have a faint connection, she graciously answers my emails.
She told me to blog about it on Huffington Post.
Actually, I did blog there, briefly. I struggled for approval of my pieces during a probation period, and finally was told my topic was a bit off-putting.
