I can't stop being aware of how surreal it is that that the world, outside of war zones, is doing business as usual. Of course, don't let a heightened terror threat interfere with your Memorial Day Weekend, cable news cheerily admonished today — just some heads-up that's in order. What is wrong with this picture? The ever colorful Arianna Huffington ventures beyond all politeness here, in her effort to bust the trance we are in, where we participate in this insanity.

After Arianna's eloquence, read my latest stab at breaking the reality bubble. If there is a possible way out of our matrix madness, how crazy are we to ignore it?

Then, to appreciate some human artistry, have a look at the very excellent satiric videos  that Arianna shows o­n her book tour for Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America.

A White House Fluent In Language Of Fanatics , by Arianna Huffington, May 21, 2003

Maybe Karl Rove has moved his office into the “Matrix.” Maybe Laurence Fishburne is auditioning for Ari Fleischer's job. Maybe it's all just a bad dream: “The White House Reloaded.”

I've been racking my brain, trying to reconcile the ever-widening chasm between what the White House claims to be true and what is actually true. After all, we know the president and his men are not stupid. And despite the tidal wave of misinformation pouring out of their mouths, I don't believe they are consciously lying.

The best explanation I can come up with for the growing gap between their rhetoric and reality is that we are being governed by a gang of out and out fanatics.

The defining trait of the fanatic — be it a Marxist, a fascist, or, gulp, a Wolfowitz — is the utter refusal to allow anything as piddling as evidence to get in the way of an unshakable belief. Bush and his fellow fanatics are the political equivalent of those yogis who can hold their breath and go without air for hours. Such is their mental control, they can go without truth for, well, years. Because, in their minds, they're always right. Oopso facto.

That pretty much sums up the White House m.o. o­n everything, from the status of al-Qaeda to the condition of post-war Iraq to the magical job-producing virtues of the latest round of tax cuts.

Who else but a fanatic would have made the outrageous claim, as the president did last Friday, just four days after the deadly reemergence of al-Qaeda in Riyadh, that “the United States people are more secure, the world is going to be more peaceful”? More peaceful than what? The West Bank?

In the weeks before the attacks in Riyadh, the president had repeatedly maintained that “we are winning the war o­n terror,” and that al-Qaeda was “on the run…slowly, but surely, being decimated.” So he clearly wasn't going to let a little fact like 34 dead bodies — the result of three closely coordinated suicide bomb attacks — change his mind.

He was similarly unperturbed by that troubling new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential and non-partisan British think tank — released a day after the Riyadh bombings and three days before the president proclaimed us “more secure” — which found that al-Qaeda was “just as dangerous” and “even harder to identify and neutralize” than it was prior to 9/11.

And just 4 hours after the president strapped o­n his trusty blinders and delivered his rosy vision of a more peaceful world, the tranquility was shattered by the five simultaneous suicide blasts in Casablanca. Oh well, at least we still have the upcoming Jessica Lynch TV movie to make us feel good about ourselves — give or take a few last minute rewrites by the BBC.

The president's evidence-be-damned fanaticism is equally apparent when it comes to the state of post-war Iraq. “Life is returning to normal,” he proclaimed just two weeks after the fall of Baghdad. “Things have settled down inside the country.”

Really? Just who is preparing his morning briefing papers? Pollyandy Card? Little Condoleezza Sunshine? Did he bother consulting any Iraqis about “normal life” there? Probably not. o­ne of the keys to being a flourishing fanatic is to surround yourself with those of a shared — and equally deluded — mindset.

And according to that mindset, the definition of “settling down” can be expanded to include rampant looting, sporadic water and electrical service, hospitals in disastrous condition, outbreaks of cholera and dysentery, streets filled with uncollected garbage and raw sewage, half a dozen ransacked nuclear facilities, missing barrels of radioactive material, growing anti-American sentiment, and disparate ethnic and religious groups arming themselves. No wonder Don Rumsfeld called the media's reporting of all this “an overstatement.” It's just another “normal” weekend at Camp David.

And don't bother trying to make the case that everything isn't hunky-dory in Baghdad to rabid acolytes such as Jay Garner. Like the president, the demoted viceroy doesn't care what the facts indicate — to him even a looted and punctured glass can be half-full. “We ought to be beating our chests every day,” he said, dismissing the notion that any of us should feel bad about the problems besetting Iraq. “We ought to look in a mirror and get proud. We ought to stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, 'Damn, we're Americans.'” That's sure to win us some more goodwill around the world. Hoo-rah, and pass the Kool-Aid, General Jay!

And if you think the president is saving his fanaticism o­nly for the international sector, think again. His dogged devotion to selling his latest round of tax cuts for the wealthy as a “jobs creation plan” — despite an avalanche of evidence that it will do nothing of the sort — proves that he can be just as fervent o­n the home front.

“Jobs are o­n the line,” said Bush after the Senate passed its version of the tax cut. “I call o­n Congress to resolve their differences quickly so I can sign a bill that will help create jobs, boost take home pay and spur economic growth.” And for those with “…illionaire” as part of their economic description, it probably will.

It obviously makes no difference to the president that 10 Nobel Prize winning economists have condemned his tax cuts as “not the answer” to high unemployment, or that a new Congressional Budget Office study found that the “jobs and growth package” will actually have very little effect o­n long-term growth. Not interested. Not listening. The 1.4 million jobs the White House repeatedly says the tax cuts will create are more a matter of a fanatic's faith than of dispassionate forecasting.

The fact is there are now 2.1 million more unemployed Americans than when Bush took office — the vast majority of them having lost their jobs after the president's initial $1.3 trillion tax cut was passed in 2001. Difficult evidence to ignore — unless “ignore the evidence” is your eleventh commandment.

A popular definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Well, that seems to be the White House theory o­n the power of tax cuts to produce new jobs: It didn't work before; let's try it again.

Welcome to the D.C. Matrix.

Me again. I want out. Here is a way:

CROP CIRCLES: A Journey Into the Mystery, by me, 5/21/03

Do me a favor. Get a sense that something intelligent is watching you. It's not human.

What does that do to you? You can't get it off your mind, right? Where could it be? What's it like? Something has awareness of itself. It can act intentionally — and make designs. Until now, o­nly humans have been self-aware. And the capacity to design has been pointed to as the unmistakable evidence of human behavior. Now, we have relatives of some sort, who keep affecting our matter. Thank God they are friendly. And classy — the aesthetics they demonstrate are of a high order.

In fact, it's so mind-blowing to accept this as true that we are in denial. It being so outside our box that we won't even look, just think of the impact it would make if we did. No more mind as we know it would exist. It would be our next turning point — and an even bigger o­ne — after the twin towers changed the world. We are desperate for that level of change now. It would be put us in something bigger than the aggression we are caught up in that so threatens us.

We are blind to the noses o­n our faces. What if there really is salvation to be had? Why not explore the possibility?

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Dear Readers — Walter Starck came to the U.S. We hatched some plans for a project to bring crop circles to the fore — and got a start o­n a film about them, which begins with the conversation we were having about the state of the world and just what to do. Here's correspondence Walter and I have been having for the last little while, since his return to Australia.

Walter to Suzanne:

Read: Only in America by Norman Mailer

Suzanne to Walter:

It's good to read a writer like Mailer putting it all together. How to unite all the gadflies, like him, is the challenge at hand it seems to me. We've got lots of goods o­n Bush and the Administration, but no coordinated force to do anything about it. My favorite scenario is Dennis Kucinich becoming a hero to the world by getting attention to the crop circles, which in turn brings attention to his astonishing persona and gets him elected President.

Walter to Suzanne:

A few thoughts o­n current events:

Despite concerns of imperialism, empire building is a long term project and thanks to the foresight of the founders American presidencies are short term. Thanks also to the two party system no o­ne party remains in power for more than a few terms before the other addresses the current dissatisfactions and displaces it. Soon enough the current administration will be history. Meanwhile it helps to remember that our ability to predict the future is o­nly fair for a few days, increasingly poor over a few weeks or months and useless over even a few years. Nobody knows what is going to happen and seldom is it as bad or as good as promised. Most often it is entirely different. Neither despair nor elation is warranted and there is always hope. Regardless of dubious motives and deficiencies of rationale, recent events may well have a beneficial long term outcome.

Suzanne to Walter:

Nice musing — old Zen story, of course, about that horse that got away, updated here with contemporary material. Everything is heightened in modern times by how deadly things can be before they turn, which adds an urgency to trying to move things to the natural flow of things working out over time.

Walter to Suzanne:

See: Counting o­n Distant Worlds: Math as an Interstellar Language.  It is remarkable that when what they are talking about is right in front of us, they cannot recognize it.

Excerpt:

If some day we receive an information-rich signal from another star, no o­ne expects it to be written in English, Chinese, or Swahili. Instead, researchers engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) often suggest that mutual comprehension will come through the language of math.

Imagine for a moment an extraterrestrial civilization that can build radio telescopes and transmitters, and thus signal its existence across interstellar space. Wouldn’t such a civilization’s knowledge of the physical universe overlap at least in part with our own?

Mathematics, it has been argued, provides a common language for talking about this shared scientific understanding. As physicist and philosopher Sundar Sarukkai notes, “Nature, for scientists, is universal in the sense that the laws of science hold in any region of the universe. Their belief that nature is written in the language of mathematics actually reflects their belief that mathematics is a universal language.”

If in fact all extraterrestrials capable of interstellar communication have something like the science we are familiar with, would they describe their science in a form we could understand? Would extraterrestrial intelligence, living o­n worlds that differ from ours physically, biologically, and culturally, nevertheless share with us a common language of mathematics?

Walter to Suzanne:

Like crop circles this is something plainly right in front of us and yet our so called leaders refuse to recognize it. Unfortunately the consequences of this o­ne appear not so benign as are the circles. Although mass consciouness does have the capacity to make unexpected quantum leaps o­ne cannot but fear if they will always come in time. What makes the obvious so hard to perceive? Is it an ability some have that others lack or is something missing in those willing to think the unthinkable? Is it a benefit or a deficiency? Can it be learned and taught or is it inbuilt? Should we listen or ignore? The answers are far from certain but getting them right may be of monumental import.

The Oil-Consumption Party Is Over, Author Warns Mon May 12, 2003 12:34 PM ET by Manuela Badawy

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Famine, disease, economic collapse, despotism and resource wars. Sounds horrific, but that's what's in store unless the world cuts back fast o­n its energy consumption, according to a new book.

In “The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies,” author Richard Heinberg argues global oil output will peak in three to 12 years, and if an aggressive shift to include new energy sources like wind, solar or fuel cells doesn't happen by then, grim consequences will result.

It's no surprise the United States, which consumes a quarter of the world's oil and imports more than half of the 20 million barrels of oil it now uses every day, is at the top of Heinberg's list of offending countries.

But the author stresses high growth rates in oil-thirsty countries like China or India heighten the chances of calamity by increasing competition among nations for oil and therefore requiring the shift to alternatives to be even more decisive.

“The party, which is the past 200 years of fossil fuels use, is coming to an end, and we have the choice as to how to bring that party to an end,” Heinberg told Reuters. “Either we do it voluntarily or it will be thrust upon us.”

While Heinberg has his share of detractors, even among those who agree that the world may well face some sort of crisis when oil production begins to tail off for good, his worst-case scenario is certainly attention-grabbing.

He predicts a less global world where cities shrink into towns as people move closer to food and water supplies, where currencies will be local, electrical power delivered by cooperatives and bicycles and walking widespread o­nce again.

“We are going to have to run the movie of globalization in reverse,” said Heinberg, an ecology professor at the New College of California, in Santa Rosa north of San Francisco.

He also reckons many U.S. citizens would be willing to trade in their energy-intensive lifestyles in exchange for assurances militants halfway around the world would drop America off their target list.

Heinberg's views stand in stark contrast to those who believe that the transition from petroleum to alternative fuels will be smooth, even if new energy sources cost more.

“(An alternative to oil) is presumably going to cost more, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be catastrophic and it doesn't mean that the change is going to be abrupt, it could be a smooth transition,” said Ron Minsk, economist and special assistant for economic policy to former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

A SIMPLE CHOICE

To avoid catastrophe, Heinberg stresses that the United States must immediately reduce its dependency o­n petroleum and work o­n downsizing its resource-intensive way of life with a view toward conservation and developing renewable energy.

In his book, Heinberg quotes Colin Campbell — a geologist and author known for his forecasts that world oil production is likely to peak within a decade — to help make the case that time is of the essence to avoid disaster. But Campbell's claim that: “We now find o­ne barrel of oil for every four we consume,” is dismissed by people like Minsk as scare-mongering.

Heinberg's detractors acknowledge that oil will obviously run out o­ne day, but generally say that if oil prices rise as supplies begin to tighten, market forces will kick in to avert a global disaster.

“Since the 1950s people have been predicting that oil production will peak 10 years later, and we are now in the 2000s and people are still predicting that production will peak in a decade,” Minsk said.

Minsk said higher oil prices might hurt the economy in the near term, but would also increase the economic incentive to explore and develop oil and alternative energy sources that may have previously been too expensive to develop before.

Oil prices reached $40 a barrel this year in the weeks before U.S.-led forces attacked oil-rich Iraq o­n fears that widespread destruction of oil fields there could shock the world economy. Prices have since settled back to around $26.

Heinberg considers the latest conflict in Iraq not as an attempt to get rid of weapons of mass destruction but as a way for the United States to secure oil supplies. The invasion was, in his view, an early sign of the resource wars of the future he predicts if alternatives to oil are not quickly pursued.

He also says that in the absence of massive investments in alternative energy — that is in the billions of dollars rather than the millions proposed by President Bush in his latest budget — relying o­n price spikes as an early indicator of supply problems is pretty much useless.

That's because the next big supply crisis is likely to signal the beginning of the end of the petroleum era and thus the beginning of chaos — first in the developing world but also, eventually, in the industrialized world as well.

“We really need to wake up. It is the greatest challenge that we have faced in the last 200 years,” Heinberg said.

Suzanne to Walter:

Re the follies of the world, what a time this is. Would we ever have thought American life would come to this? We'd have thought it would have gone in another direction, toward what's heroic. But people became grabby instead of magnanimous. It seems as if there are two worlds, with the second o­ne populated by people who've gone beyond the limited thinking of the first o­ne. Short term thinking and thoughts of domination run world number o­ne. The o­nly way out is to raise consciousness so that everyone sees a higher vision.

Here's a graphic image I just came across about the scene in Iraq, with Disney-like cartoon insignia we still put o­n our airplanes that are such a vestige of the world we need to move beyond:

“Others have written eloquently about the euphemistic and affectionate names that the Americans give to their weapons of mass destruction: Big Boy, Little Boy, Daisy Cutter, and so forth…But there was something about those playfully grinning warplane faces that went beyond deception and distortion into the land of madness. A nation that can allow those faces to be painted as an image o­n its national aeroplanes has regressed into unimaginable irresponsibility. A nation that can paint those faces o­n death machines must be insane.”  I Loathe America and what it has done to the rest of the world. by Margaret Drabble 5/11/03

Did you ever delve into Brian Swimme? I seem to remember your getting The Universe is a Green Dragon. I continue to find his Universe Story supplying the most compelling picture about being human — and that having a compelling picture of what's bigger and better than the little o­ne in which we're imploded is a necessary part of getting beyond the status quo. It's the old idea that you can't stop doing things but you can start doing things — stopping what's awful is a function of taking o­n something better.

By the way, I know Richard Heinberg — from an interesting book he wrote called, Memories and Visions of Paradise, where cross-culturally there was the same mythology related to a longing for paradise. Here's some review material I found o­n the Net :

…the Judeo-Christian story of the Garden of Eden is mirrored o­n every continent and in virtually every culture, in myths and tales whose similarities to our own version far outweigh their differences. With inclusiveness, sensitivity and grace befitting a scholar and artist, Heinberg traces the roots and branches of what Roumanian-American historian of religions Mircea Eliade identified as the two central themes of world myth-nostalgia for a Paradise lost through a tragic Fall, and the long climb back toward at least partial restoration of the original Golden Age.

From Iran to China, from Egypt to Australia, in Africa and both North and South America, paradise traditions are present not as background details but as the heart of the teachings people use to define themselves and their relationship to heaven and earth. These stories embody the very essence of what we all remember in the deepest portion of our souls, and ceaselessly long to return to, if o­nly in our dreams and our unconscious. This longing can o­nly be repressed at great cost. Heinberg suggests that twentieth century humankind is paying that cost, dearly.

The universally remembered Golden Age was o­ne in which the First People lived “perpetually in the divine presence and continually in harmony with the divine will.” These original beings were immortal, until the “great blunder” of the Fall made them susceptible to death. With the introduction of death came the corresponding introduction of birth, and therefore sexuality.

Heinberg's expert grasp of his wide-ranging subject matter allows him to glide smoothly from the Australian Dreamtime, to 4th Century Jewish commentaries o­n the Old Testament, to Plato and back again in telling his fascinating story. He is deeply moved by the fruits of his scholarly journey, and his love and respect for all the traditions shines through continually.

Most traditions predict a future Paradise, but o­nly after a Great Destruction, which initiates a Purification, marked by a return of the consciousness necessary to usher in the new Golden Age. Heinberg notes, interestingly, that “few prophets have looked beyond the day of Purification to describe the events of the restored Golden Age, for the world to come will be inconceivable in terms of the present o­ne.”

The book closes with an intriguing discussion of recent research in near-death experiences, since the NDE seems, more than anything else, to consistently elicit the experience of Paradise. Quoting NDE-researcher Kenneth Ring, Heinberg raises the awe-inducing notion that the human race may be “approaching, and subconsciously preparing for, a collective near-death experience,” in what would be a dramatic journey back to the Garden.

Walter to Suzanne:

I have delved into Swimme and agree he has some important things to say. Unfortunately, not many people seem ready to listen so it appears a different manner of saying is needed.

Your comments o­n Heinberg have a deep resonance, both conforting and disturbing at the same time. They are conforting in that they affirm an ultimate goodness but disturbing in that a trial by fire seems to be necessary to get there. Perhaps we should not be hoping to intervene. It may just be a necessary shedding of diseased spirit.

Suzanne to Walter:

Swimme is compelling when you are exposed to him. There's a blueprint in The Universe is a Green Dragon that makes our human story makes sense. It's more likely that people haven't heard than that they don't want to listen. As with crop circles, when skeptics see our movie they walk out knowing something is going o­n.

Who knows the master plan. All you can do is what seems best. How could you not try to avert disaster, all the while knowing that it may be necessary?

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