distractions...

ah sports...little league world series, nfl pre-season (fuck to and fuck espn for that new insider bullshit, fucking capitalists...), the nhl is back (though I think I'm still subconsciously holding a grudge), NCAA will be starting up soon...and before long, it'll be sweater weather again in beautifully depressing north carolina.

Don't leave me behind, just drop me off at point-zero and paint a target on my skull...

To being, steal a copy of Bad Religion's, "No Control" (and others, should you choose). Put them on repeat for the next two decades or so...

And when you have the tune nicely in your head, sing along...
BIG BANG
this isn't another new fashion, or a new wave plastic trend. everybody's searching for something but in the meantime let's all just pretend. i've got this feeling and i don't know what it is. this room is overcrowded, man, and i need air to breathe, yeah. big bang, big crunch, you know there's no free lunch. kneel down and pray, here comes your judgment day. big crunch, you know, it's gonna be quite a show. what comes around always goes around, yeah. a million hopeless faces dwell within protected walls, all waiting for a moment in life when they can heed the clarion call. and it's all so oppressive my mind feels like a sieve. this city's overcrowded, man, and i need room to live. big bang, big crunch, you know there's no free lunch. kneel down and pray, here comes your judgment day. big crunch, you know, it's gonna be quite a show. what comes around always goes around, yeah. i think of the countless shadows that have all come and gone, all suffering in the notion of better things to come. if you share these beliefs you know i wish you well, 'cause there's no room left in heaven and there's sure no room in hell, yeah. big bang, big crunch, you know there's no free lunch. kneel down and pray, here comes your judgment day. big crunch, you know, it's gonna be quite a show. what goes around always comes around.

So, PBU is going to be writing about doom and gloom... I guess I'll find out if I'm alone in being crazy, this should be fun.

The question we've been given as a topic was "The Evil-doers:How far will they go?"

I think I will take a view that accepts some of the positive aspects of our time's negativity. Meaning, I will start form this point: those who are in power, now, either believe that they are blessed to an afterlife robed in beautiful white censorship free from sexuality (which will begin just as soon as they take over the "Promised Land" and the Great Hero, the Commander and Chief tortures and slaughters all thieves and takes away all Believers to the Land of Milk and Honey), or they believe that they are something more than Bald Apes...of course there are variations to these, there's Karl, who sold...scratch that, who is Ni666on's bastard child, thus he's about doing his Dark Father's work, corrupting souls and seeking to bring about the End Times (thus, the pairing of W and him, they both want the same thing, just for different reasons...). Beyond this, a couple hundred years of believing the fairy-tale of infinite supply has forced this planet to the breaking point...well, a critical point would be more accurate.

The point is, the planet will survive us. We will be recycled.

So, will the world end? Not for a couple billion years. Will humanity self-destruct? This remains to be seen.

We have the ability to curtail our negative impacts on our environment. We have the ability to seek balance. Further, we have the ability to forecast where this spinning wheel is going to stop, and to adapt to that new reality.

I don't believe in a jackasses who quote from Revelation.... especially when they call it revelations. The writer of that piece of literature was writing in a specific historical period, to a specific audience, making specific historically bound allusions.

If you want to quote the Bible, how's about taking a look at what the philosopher Jesus said... take a good look at his moral theory (of course founded in Jewish theology, he was, after all, a Jew)... then take a look at what he said about the "End Times." Could he have been warning not to make any claims because he understood that the messianic era (in terms of the end of the world sort of crap) was bullshit? God was not coming down from the sky, sin was not something that a Zoroastrian creation was going to boil you in a lake of fire for, and further, to be more explicit, there was no such thing as the Devil.

We hold our future in our hands. Perhaps the time is coming for a true battle. Perhaps the time is coming to debate the semantics of a fist. Or, perhaps the time is coming for us to walk away.

waiting for the great destruction...

Approximately 250Mya, life on earth nearly ended. Though perhaps a contributing factor, most scientist agree that this crash was not caused by a bolide impact. In fact, life has been nearly wiped-out mulitple times by geo-environmental changes (see the "snowball earth" theory). But I digress, the Permian Mass Extinction began in Siberia. Volcanic activity pumped billions of kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (as a side note, this volcanic activity was most likely the eruption of a cauldron volcano, similar to the one under Yellowstone, which is continuing to grow... moving closer and closer to an eruption, the likes of which could only be described as Biblical--and that would be the thoughts of an observer in NYC where God would be raining down fire and brimstone on the sinners and econorats that scurry up and down Wall Street, never mind what would happen to the politicks in DC). This increase in atmospheric CO2 led, as greenhouse gases (GHG's) tend to do, to a rise in earth's overall temperature. As tends to be the case for systems, this change triggered further effects. Frozen in the bottom of the ocean were vast quantities of methane, safely separate from the atmosphere, so long as it was frozen. An oceanic rise of just 4 degrees Centigrade triggered the sublimation of the methane, which is a far more efficient GHG than CO2. From here, the effects ran their course. This extinction event wiped out nearly 96% of all life, approximately 95% of marine life and some 60% of land life.

Scientists are now reporting that thawing Siberian permafrost is releasing methane into the atmosphere.

And still, we cannot curb our appetite for petroleum. This is what our entire culture is founded on. And still, we are moving toward peak oil production and the end of cheap oil. We are actively seeking our own demise.

Order and balance will establish itself, but we do not know what the new homeostasis will be. Human history has witnessed the rise and fall of numerous empires, and has continued. This is the best case scenario. With any luck, the US and the Capitalist (because, yes, there is such a group, organized under various corporate logos, "societies," and treaties) will recognize that their world-view rest on a dangerous fallacy and decide to simply step down. This, however, is mostly a non-likelihood; and their inevitable fall will have ripples because we do live in, and as part of, a system.

In order to understand just what we face, we must accept the other possibility. But in this too, there is hope. The earth has survived numerous mass extinctions. Life has survived. And life will survive us, eventually. It will grow in complexity and become intelligent. And just as we have discovered the tragedies before us, something will discover our tragedy. They will be gifted with the understanding that they can be their own destruction. They will not look to dominate the earth and sky trying to prevent extraterrestrial shots in the dark (which may or may not have ended the reign of the dinosaurs), because ours will be the top layer.

And with head phones on, I'll tune out the world...
waiting for the lights to change
the raindrops skip the wiper blades
buildings fall from the sky in panes
and it carries me down
if you gave me a chance to be sincere
do you think they'd let me outta here
gonna walk out in the traffic
if I promise not to make a sound
and the look upon your face
would be chiseled there forever
as the glass came through the windshield
and the car lifted from the ground
maybe at my funeral
they'll say I found the answer
they'll say I had it coming
they'll say I was just sitting around
waiting for the great destruction I am
waiting for Holden Caulfield to call
waiting for the great destruction I am
waiting for the sky
the sky
to open up
make me feel small
like a bird in bad weather
these engines won't stall
time enough to watch the free world fall
under the black and blue handle of
it will only take a saw
waiting for the lights to change
the lies they learn to rearrange
the truth they hold to exchange
and it carries me down
second hand to the greater fear
these words of promise disappear
so I wrote them down to make it appear
but nothing is what I found
but if it was really all that easy
don't you think I'd have given up by now
and if the questions had an answer
they wouldn't be believable out loud
and you know that I would tell you
even if it sounded like a lie
funny thing about the truth is that
no-one warned us to wonder why
and I will leave the car door open
as a symbol of my freedom
like the riddles of a dead man
who didn't always need them
and in the end they'll say I'm crazy
'cause I never give a reason
he always talked about tomorrow as if
he were always leaving
and I am waiting for the great destruction
waiting for Holden Caulfield to call
waiting for the great destruction
I am waiting for the sky
the sky to fall
--Matthew Good

But still mark your callenders and call Rummy and tell him you'll be there with boots and a cowboy hat on to show your support for the troops on September 11th.

in brief...

Goodnight, Mr. Jennings. Thank you for your professionalism.

And in other news, it seems that Dole is trying to make a deal with UNC...more on this later...

A Paradox.

Life is at once entirely accidental and random, but it exists as it does because it absolutely must.

So long as we adhere to dogma, whether under the guise of science or religion, we will never come any closer to solving these mysteries. Acceptence of Truth, however, is not dogmatic.

I hope that in forty years, we celebrate a century without the use of nuclear weapons between opposing nations. What's more, I hope that we can celebrate forty years since the last weapon was built.

The World is Beautiful...

...embrace its magnificence.

As tends to be the case, schools of thought fall into the dangerous area of dogma. This is no less true for Religion as, ironically, it was for the Existentialists. Their flawed dogma was the outright rejection of all systems, when in fact, the System is the very point one should focus on.

We will never be able to absolutely calculate Pi, but that endeavor was essentially missing the point from the start, regardless. The point is that there is an absolute order, a constant relationship between a circumference and a radius which constitutes what we've labeled "circle." From this simple fact, we are able to further articulate and describe our perceptions of the world around us. This is not to say, however, that syntax is never important, only that it is worthless without its counterpart semantics.

So to carry on this train of thought further, we live in a charged and active world. From the earth's iron core to the thermohaline circulation of the oceans to solar radiation, we are surrounded by a world in flux. Our weather is dictated by electromagnetism in ways that we are only now beginning to comprehend. Beyond this, all of reality, humans, dust, lightning, grass, E. coli, stars, the universe itself, everything is but simple variations of one fundamental energy. Einstein's discovery showed that mass, space, and time are separated in dimentional expression, only. They are equal in terms of energy density, which is by the factor of the speed of light square; another constant.

In this, inexhaustible sources of energy are to be found. In this, clues to solving that old riddle are to be found. In this, a foundation for a true Ethics is to be found.

But if existence is defined as a System, there are limits and equilibrium. This cannot be refuted. None of this is new thought...

So, why the fuck are we still killing each other?