Fear and Loathing on Urt

There are no boundaries but those which we allow ourselves to acknowledge. Acknowledgment comes in different forms though. It is not simply that one sees boundaries and gives them value. Often the boundaries between us and our goals are ones we allow to be there either through ignorance or lassitude. Often times, the boundaries are indeed structural and there is nothing we can do but slowly hammer away at the barriers.

What are we to do in the former cases, though? All too often people want what they cannot have. You can ask them how the plan to achieve it, with a simple reply that they don't know. You can tell them to start look and see what they can find. They look around, at the sky, the ground, the trees, bushes, shrubs and without seeing, they look. Marx was right to say "from each according to his ability and to each according to his need," but what if someone has nothing but need and not ability? Is there justification in leaving them by the wayside to wallow? How is ability defined? Are those with no ability limited in their boundaries, or are they bounded by their limits?

The theories and emerging laws of particle and quantum physics tell of a strange universe of existence in which everything is in flux. Nothing is solid and everything is constantly shedding and taking on particles from its surroundings. Entanglement says that everything in existence is connected at the most basic and intrinsic level of being. All particles are linked to all the others. Simply put; not only are all things living and material on earth and in the universe not physically a solid, liquid or gas, they are also literally connected: the Force in Star Wars is closer to being real than the "fact" that I am typing or you are reading letters on this (web)page. Boundaries are more of a construct of the human brain than they are part of the fabric of space or time. Anything anyone wants, they can get. I can't articulate either in words or actions how to accomplish all one wants to do. To me, the one key is to see without looking, to realize that all things grow, but some grow more slow than others and that sometimes growth isn't vertical. Growth itself is just a state of quantum flux, of the spiritual/physical intermingling of life with other life, with the physical universe, with reality: ultimately, with oneself and the creator.

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At best, history ‘began’ to be ‘recorded’ around five thousand years ago. Before that though, nothing happened that was worthy of being noted down on paper. Geologic history and ice cores note several thousand cycles of fire and ice ages, just as many periods of extinction, but for the most part they will show a history without humanity in the picture. We just gave it all a name. Language is our bane. Before man, everything was simply life and death. As the earth swung through the stars, which were also born lived and died, life sprang up, had its chance to get somewhere, beginning simply with amino acids combining to form single cells which evolved and evolved and evolved and evolved. It reached many stages, goop, sludge, fungi, plants, animals, and unlike any other that has made it man rode in on a high fucking horse to conquer the whole thing. Actually that is only the hope of some men who play the whole thing like a chess game with six billion epiphenomenal peons to run through slaughterhouses which a majority of the world’s population call a life, barely surviving, and even if they do, it is in agony. They will not be remembered in the history books, they are the proverbial unwritten losers. Sixty five million years ago, dinosaurs lost, but even natural science, biology, tells us that there are currently vestiges of dinosaur life, such as alligators, crocodiles, sharks, and such. Man came into the picture one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and evolved to current standards. Some things survived sixty five million years to current standards as animals, if man could come about in one hundred and fifty thousand years, could not some race of shape shifting lizards be able to evolve through very selective breeding techniques. A race of responsible lizards who have somehow taken the reigns from man when things got too out of hand, like standing on the gas pedal to destroy a deer instead of letting it destroy your car. I’m not saying I believe that a race of lizard people rule the world, but if history shows anything it is that humans really know nothing about anything, so a race of lizard men is not necessarily impossible, albeit improbable. The real point is that we’re new folks on the block, and history lies by saying that something happens on time. Nothing ever does, everything occurs in tides, build ups, peaks, and declines. The growth of the population of the earth is ever increasing even as people starve as billion people nations upgrade and industrialize, demanding better food, transportation, and living. The build up. Millions of baby boomers retire looking for social security and money in IRAs which banks may not be able to come up with, as millions of their children replace them to try and make more money than their parents did, and want the same things as their friends overseas. The peak. Meanwhile the earth is heating up, as the seas get more acidic and sterilize over the next forty years, and chunks of ice caps disappear. The decline. Life came from the ocean, and now it will end there, and, if science isn’t full of shit, the rest of us will be gone too, losers.

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Time is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, years; at least on earth. These measurements are all based off of the relative position of the earth to the Sun. One full elliptic of the sun is one year, and one full rotation of the earth is one day. Man separated that even further to hours, minutes and seconds, 24 hours in a day, sixty (!?!) minutes in an hour, sixty (?!?) seconds to a minutes. The latter three measurements are arbitrary, only there as a means of further separation of time for the sake of control. Without time being broken up further than a day, one cannot measure the time they work to anything less than an entire day. Even that is arbitrary though, for when there are eight hours of sunlight in Minneapolis followed by sixteen of dark on the winter solstice, in Argentina sixteen hours of sun are enjoyed and followed by a short eight hour night on their summer solstice. The only cycle that does not change across the globe is the lunar cycle; when there’s a full moon in Minneapolis, there’s a full moon across the globe. The moon itself affects tide cycles, and poor timing of lunar cycles can cause river reversing tsunamis. That’s beside the point though. Time is a construct of man. Certainly there is something that pushes the universe along, and keeps everything from happening all at once, but if time is real, it should be able to be proven scientifically. But it can’t. Mathematically, time cannot exist; mathematically the universe does not flow forward as does the tide, but instead lurches forward like an automobile on square wheels. This even makes it problematic for the measurement of distances and speed. Speed is distance traveled per time traveled: i.e. sixty miles per hour. Distances can be measured in reality, but their distinctions are as arbitrary as time, a mile is 5280 feet, and a foot is twelve (?!?) inches. A Kilometer is not so arbitrary of a measurement, but is still a relative measurement; ten thousand kilometers from the equator to a pole, one hundred centimeters to each meter, and ten millimeters to each centimeter. All measurements are based off of mathematical happenstance.
It is the nature of man, at least some men, to order things, in higher to lower. One plus one equals two, and two is greater than either individual one; hierarchy. Maybe, though, one plus one is only two here on earth. There maybe some advanced civilization in which one plus one equals one. There are tribes in the Amazon that have no number beyond three. Everything is in groups thereof. Modernism has given birth to infinity, presumably allowing the ranks of man and the earth itself to aspire to such a number. Time is always in the present though, and can never go backwards; the earth must continue its long journey around the sun, just as it continues to turn. The measurements we use for everyday existence are just a convenience to be able to measure and then separate all things into their respective spot of taxonomy: the construct for the modernist desire to know everything. As we march forward through space and time, though, the only things we can know for certain are not things that can be measured. Truth and knowledge are only retainable by each individual on earth. There is no universal truth or knowledge, but only personal truth and personal knowledge. The problem is that no one wants to seek their own personal knowledge or truth. They allow it to be told to them in classrooms and in beamed to them through their idiot boxes, accepting things the way they are, and sitting idly by as the social kills the individual.

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Speaking the classical sense of conservatism and liberalism, there is no form of conservative government on the planet. Anywhere. This stems from the idea that any formal governance is liberal. The liberal government men will always say that there is a need for government and not only that but bigger government. Fascism, communism, socialism, democracy, social democracy, and corporate socialism are forms of liberalism which give more power to government than to the people. The United States of America was founded as a constitutional republic, by which the constitution supposedly limits the power of government. However, all officials elected to government are elected by popular vote; whoever has a majority of the votes is the winning electorate, which is the basis of the liberal democracy upon which constitutional republics are modeled. Majority vote and majority rule are not egalitarian in means or ends; in short, might does not make right. Aristocracy is a more conservative, smaller form of government but concentrates power through inbred bloodlines. It would be cool, I think, if there was indeed a king of a region- of a certain number of people, within a certain geographical region-who was chosen at random, from anyone from any walk of life. If there was a DC high school janitor who had to serve as president for four years, chances are that minimum wage would go up, as would laborer rights across the nation. Instead, during my life, the presidents “serving� the people have been an actor turned politician, a business man turned politician, a lawyer tuned politician, and a president’s son turned politician. Democracy is a government meant to be representative of the people, but these men seem to represent everything most people, or at least I consider to be plagues of society; celebrity culture, big business, lawyers, politicians, assholes. Governments around the globe have similar democratic and social representative imbalances, because every nation on earth is ruled by elitist and the idea of elitism.

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Team sports teach a lot of valuable lessons. They teach lessons promoting competition, strategy, leadership skills, being led skills, and co-operation. One team is made up of many individuals co-operating, executing a certain strategy to achieve a positive outcome; score a goal, make a basket, advance down field, collect points. Oxford English Dictionary defines conspire as “To co-operate as by intention (so as to effect a certain result).� The most effective operating mechanism for effect means and ends is co-operation. Ask any lawyer. Ask any politician. Any lawyer will say that it is easier to settle out of court, lawyer to lawyer, both knowing all the facts about the case. A defending lawyer will always settle out of court rather than in it, but must act in accordance with the client’s word. Court time is costly to the state to the defense attorney and the prosecutor, and is generally avoided at most costs. Politicians would rather bargain in order to pass legislation, amending bills with provisions that favor both party, and individual, interests.
A majority of politicians are lawyers, if not, business persons. At least in America such is the case, in other parts of the world, holy men and their religious law are the political tyrants keeping the masses under their heel. Well over half of the congress people serving the American people now are lawyers by title, the entirety are conspirators by trade. The world is run by conspirators, and conspiracies, which, according to Oxford is a “union or combination (of persons or things) for one end or purpose.� If you get a job through a friend, that’s a conspiracy. If world leaders declare war on one another and feed banker pockets, drain oil wells, and build armaments, all of which a majority of world leaders hold vested interest in, that’s a conspiracy. The current president of the nation has a grandfather who was a financier of Hitler and his Aryan band. The history of the industrial world has been one in which the most elite of society -the money printers, the crude drillers, the arsenal manufacturers- have played both sides of every major war, and reaped unknown profits. Hitler’s military couldn’t operate without an oil additive patented and produced by U.S. Standard Oil, now known as Exxon-Mobile, still owned by the Rockefeller Family. Currently, the Saudi Arabian national oil company is a conglomerate of Exxon-Mobile and other oil companies. The American government supplied Iraq and Al Qaeda with light and heavy arms to defend themselves, only to march in years later to face those same weapons, but with much better ones to attack with. Central banks control money supplies by printing it and charge governments for doing so. Shit rolls downhill and in this case the debt rolls right into the hands of every taxpayer, taking bites from paychecks in the form of income tax.
Game theory suggests that a player in any situation acts without knowing the intent of the other player. There is the risk of loss. Elites, the class that actually owns; not just their house, but many none with a mortgage, and not just their business, but many which make money; work hand in hand, open faced, to have the most beneficial outcome for both. Eliminate competition by agreement, win-win. It’s why gas prices are the same all around town; if one station wanted to sell more gas and if by lowering their prices but selling more gas, revenue and profit increased, every station in the city should be competing for lowest price. Instead they all float on at about the same price. They all profit about the same by agreeing on a standard. This is not in the interest of the masses, but the people who extrude, purify, and sell the oil to the stations.
They all conspire together in their own, but against the interest of the masses.

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The first law of Thermodynamics, put simply, states that matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed from one form to the other. Plant matter turning into carbohydrates when processed by gastrointestinal systems, sunlight turning carbon dioxide and earth minerals into stored carbohydrates in photosynthesizing plant life, and gasoline internally combusted turning into carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and a number of other noxious gases are all examples thereof. The average human body can live four to five weeks without any nutrition, depending on bodily reserves (stored fat), the average deciduous tree goes four months without receiving any nutrients from the soil or the sun as they stay dormant through the winter. The average car can’t go anywhere with no gasoline. One cup of oil has the work capacity to move one thousand pounds one thousand feet, straight up in the air. That same cup of oil, if left alone, will never become anything other than oil; it can sit in storage containers for decades without degrading (it has been in the crust of the earth for thousands of decades without change), it can spill into waterways leaving black streaks in the water, and black stains on the rocks for years afterward. Oil is the wonder drug of modern civilization; cars, busses, trains, planes, shipping all obviously run on oil, however, hydrocarbon byproducts of it are also, necessarily, used in all pharmaceutical production, all synthetic agricultural fertilizers, all plastics, and lubrication in all modes of industrial production. Oil was only able to be used systematically after 1859 when Drake built and fired up the first oil derrick in Titusville, Pennsylvania. This was essential because in 1852, a new way to derive kerosene from oil was discovered, and with the seas being fished out of inexpensive whale oil once used in lamps, cheap kerosene took its place. For a while, oil was plentiful everywhere, America had large reserves under her purple mountains and fields of grain, the North Sea oil fields kept Britain and Europe fueled and on the move, while in Arabia, the sheiks left their oil alone as they kept traveling across the desert on camelback.
The energy crisis of the seventies in America was not one based upon the information that the entire world was running out of precious oil, but that America had tapped almost all economically viable domestic supplies. That was when the gasoline at the pumps began to come from foreign suppliers. America tapped into the Gwahar oil field in the middle east as it set up foreign relations in and with nations like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emerates, Kuwait, Qatar, and the rest of those desert nations created by western offices to fill their gluttonous hunger for oil, while at the same time satiating the sheiks’ hunger for money, possessions, influence. The need for oil during and after World War II sparked a worldwide hunt for oil fields, until almost all were found. Right now, the largest oil field in the world is the Gwahar Oil field in Saudi Arabia, with an estimated 71 billion barrels of oil still in reserve. Today, that field has ten million barrels of sea water pumped into it just to keep the pressure high enough so that the oil will keep flowing, but the oil that flows out is also about half saltwater. Oil fields are like pressurized tanks under the surface of the earth. There can only be so much pressure released from the underground tanks before the energy it takes to pull the oil out is greater than the energy in the extruded oil. It’s like using two barrels of oil to produce one, which of course is neither cost effective nor efficient. Oil sands and oil shale only get three barrels of oil for every two produced, and that’s only at the largest, most efficient open pit oil mining operations. World production of oil has hit a ceiling, which has come to be known as ‘Peak Oil’, after which world production starts a downslide that is literally irreversible, this is what happened during the energy crisis of the seventies in America; domestic oil fields had reached their peak production and have been on a steady decline since. Now, all the international oil fields that drive the globalized economy are slowing down production as decades of oil dependency have been chugging down millions of barrels of oil. It is not going to get better. Gas will get more expensive before it gets cheaper as developing countries develop dependant on petrol products, and more developing people want more developed gas burning gadgets, and more of the beloved everyday objects and acts that rely so heavily on black gold.

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The recorded history that we have come to know -as fact, as a field of study- covers approximately four thousand years of civilization's history, a liberal estimate being five thousand years. Beginning with the Babylonian empire around two thousand BC, modern history starts almost at the same point when man began to be regulated with the codes of Hammurabi, around the same time as the agricultural revolution. However, all this is a very recent development in the history of humans. Modern man, Homo Sapiens ('wise man' in Latin) stepped up off of his previous evolutionary step in Africa about 150,000 years ago. However, even at that time, Homo Sapiens weren't all that wise. It took approximately one hundred thousand years for our brain power to develop to its current abilities. Fifty thousand years. For fifty thousand years, man has had the same mental carrying and processing capabilities as we twenty-first century folk now have. But, as we know, we are far superior to those ancient savages.
For forty-five thousand years, nothing is known about what the earth looked like to humans, where man was, where he went and where he left. The pieces picked up by archeologists from cave walls and old bones give mere glimpses at early life for man. The last four thousand years of recorded or recollected history all tell the tale of control of the world we inhabit, and the people therein. Humans have to be in and have control in order to prosper. Control comes in many forms; laws, houses to heat up and lock ourselves in at night, laying roadways across virgin soil so that it can be raped and reaped to feed the starving mouths of the world (exponentially increasing the number of starving mouths), nine to fives, credit, making grades, and oil economics.
For the first several thousand years of our existence on the earth, nothing controlled us but nature. Since then, the power hungry humans have taken charge of the earth, and the people inhabiting it, making their select truth everyone’s truth for four thousand years. It’s been said that the winners write the history books. For four thousand years, history has been made and written by a select few people, before which there was no written history; no winners, no losers, but balance between man and nature. Over the course of the last four thousand years, man has slowly been dominating more and more of his globe by tilling the earth for food, cutting forests for fuel and houses, clearing quarries for castles, draining its oil to hyper streamline life. This has put the earth, its fauna and its biota under terrible strain with higher global temperatures, bleaching sea life and population of people that can hardly be supported.
The worst news is that none of it can be stopped. Temperatures will continue to rise as the atmosphere thickens and the sun gets hotter. The oceans will continue to get warmer and more acidic as the life in them is trawled out at an astonishing rate. There will never be an end to hunger on earth, for if hungry mouths are fed, they will undoubtedly procreate more hungry mouths. So, there is no answer, nothing that can be done, but wait and see if nature strikes the balance back to more even odds, which it so desperately seems to want to do.

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