Taunted, Tormented, Tortured but not Tainted

My fellow Americans​ .. One is never too old to learn new concepts and all are free to confess their faults in public as long as it doesn’t threaten National Security (or even if it does if you don’t mind being tortured.) Something that has bothered me for a long time has finally become clear enough to express in English. I had heard the word ‘recalcitrant’ before but I never realized it describes me in a large way. I know that at times, I had “…an obstinately uncooperative attitude toward authority or discipline…” as both my 5th grade teacher (Mrs. Wiggins for La Center Elementary​ students.) and a few of my old bosses could tell you. As a practitioner of a “Christianized” form of Falun Dafa, I remind you that Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance and other Human ideals are not typical of non-human entities such as governments and corporations. Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism and many others are under attack by organized collections of confused individuals that resort not to the best of human natures, but to the worst.

To my grade school com padres, I apologize for all those times I cried in front of the whole class. I remember the bewildered looks on your faces while I was getting railed for my “disobedience” or other random act of rebellion. I know it made you all uncomfortable and made you shun me. I remember you all applauding when it was announced that I was finally moving down the road. It has taken the best part of 50 years for me to understand what happened “back there” in the 1950s and 60s. You all need to understand that my brother Dennis and I were in our dad’s loins when he was captured and tortured by the Red Chinese in North Korea. You see, I understood true authority and strict discipline. My dad was a Master Sargent in a very sensitive intelligence unit doing aerial reconnaissance over “enemy” territory during the Korean “Conflict” through which the US was desperately trying to “contain” communism. I don’t think ANYONE really knew what that war was about, but my mom said that the man that came back was not the boy that was sent over there.

I wonder what my life would have been like if he had been allowed to stay over here and play trumpet with a Big Band as his original ambition was. He loved Tommy Dorsey​ and Benny Goodman​ and had even gotten a part with Jack Stalcup​ and his Orchestra before he was conscripted to that stinking “police action” or whatever it was. He was the one that had to “contain” all of the nasty secrets and classified information that he took to his grave in order to honor the oath he was compelled to take. I had to stop asking “why” a long time ago. My dad hated that question.

Now that my feet are shod for the preparation of the Gospel of Peace, I’m finished carrying on the torture of not knowing why we had to grow up under the cloud of secrecy that our own government cast over us. All governments on Earth are evil, especially if they use torture, including ours. It is time to arm ourselves again and fight a whole new kind of battle. The reconciliation of national conflict must take place first in the hearts and minds of the combatants. (…and we are ALL enemy combatants in SOME context…) The Cold War doesn’t end as the politicians and profiteers say – it simply gets colder as the memories fade and the wounds heal.

Meanwhile, as the inner battles rage, we as Neochristians, Buddhist, Taoist and other peace-loving spiritual climbers continue to face the nonscientific world. We “get” that the teachings and traditions are often distorted if not lost altogether by the authoritarian and undisciplined. The discipline is not of word or action until it is of mind and spirit. The mind is the only part of our nature we can change. Growing into higher systems of integrated belief should never be painful for others. The science of self-in-community (Greek Christian – Koinonia) adds to the Buddha Fa in Falun Gong. Collective well-being is a measurable side effect of increased participation. It is well understood that the singularity will not be another individual like Buddha or Jesus, but will be the community of practitioners of the sciences they taught.

In Honor of the author’s dad on Veterans Day (USA) 2015: Thank you Knox E. Quinton for your service to The Country I Grow Into.

Five things I learned about teamwork from tracking lions on foot in Africa

I “met” Tim Raynor through an online climate-change activism group about five years ago and have been following him around ever sense. He has this amazing sense about how one paradigm on one side of the planet translates and para-mutates into wholly different ways of seeing things in a completely different world. Have a look at this awesome adventure from a month in the African bush and what he brought home to share with us!

Philosophy for change

296My partner and I just returned from a month in Zambia. We spent most of our time in bush camps in North Luangwa and Kafue National Parks, where we had the opportunity to track lions on foot. This was a life-defining experience. We slept in bamboo huts and listened to the big cats calling in the dark. We tracked a pride of lions from a buffalo kill through pathless wilderness, encountering them unexpectedly and holding our breath as they sprang roaring through the trees. At one point, we were charged by a bull hippo and ran for our lives, saved by a warning shot from Justin, our scout, who stood his ground. We spents our nights about campfires in the bush, sipping whiskey from tin cups and feeling the thrum of nature about us.

I don’t believe I’ve ever felt more present and alive than when walking with small groups of people in the African wilderness. The experience is at once magnificently beautiful and…

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We Are

We are body, mind and spirit,
We are flesh and blood and breath
That’s the trinity that makes us
And guards us until death.

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And the Father of the three
Is the Life that circumscribes
Every river, seed and tree,
Every star and all our tribes.

Ownership or Mother ship

Before Europeans, The Mississippi Basin was home to hundreds of tribes of stone age people living in relative harmony with the land and each other. With no concept of ownership, no idea about property rights, no notion of state, no high-tech agriculture, no aerial photography…

…they understood the importance of stream confluences on a spiritual level. Continue reading

Ecological Economics

As proof of how long we’ve been thinking along these lines, A Working Prototype reveals:

The physical infrastructure of public utility is currently susceptible to much abuse and waste. Electricity, communications, water, natural gas, transportation fuel and many other aspects of physical infrastructure have long been managed by the existing bureaucratic elements through social conditioning. Corporate marketing and governmental control have played a major role in making people feel powerless in the struggle for economic justice and sustainability. The vicious circle of consumption and imposed billing has presented a model of subjugation to the populace. Reversing this trend is a necessary task of the new ecological paradigm that we propose to institute. The same model that we used for governance is translated to the physical form described in the following table.

ECOLOGICAL RESOURCES INFRASTRUCTURES
ECONOMIC RESOURCES
soil, water, sunlight local public utility (specific instance of the village infrastructure) food, energy, shelter, etc
local integrated service grid the village infrastructure applied to localized communities transmission of local resources between communities to a larger bio-region
the aggregation of local ecologies to larger bio-regional areas the confederation of bio-regions and producer communities the gross national product derived from the aggregation of bio-regions

Shifting from a consumer culture to a producer culture will require social conditioning which is very stringent and pervasive. This process is inevitable and an intentional schematic for doing so will greatly ease the pain of the process. Everyone knows that solar energy and other ecological forms for extracting resources from our natural environment cannot and should not be metered or abused. The moral adjunct of economics and ecology is a planetary mandate which we all have received from our logical collective consciousness.

That is from an eBook we started in 2001. Since then, social media, eco-village thinking, regenerative agriculture, permaculture and free, libre and open source software production and distribution have grown enormously, but so have the commercial consumerism-based Internet ploys, schemes and exploits. The OzoneFarm Experiment is far from complete.

See ecological economics for further proof that the idea is pervasive, logical and inevitable.

Stay tuned!

The Telepathic Rodent

Today we’re looking at PETA and humane rodent control to try to reconcile the conflict between killing and non-killing economic models involving animals. The argument has been raised by many practitioners of vegan livelihoods why farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, and any other craft would need to kill an animal in order to survive or even to make a living. Many omnivorous people remain confounded by the question of the “Rise Peter, Kill and Eat” question that is so deep within the human psyche. Separating metaphor from anecdote is where we start:

From PETA: “Sometimes those in power claimed that juvenile or dark-skinned human beings couldn’t feel pain. Sometimes the powerful claimed that their superiority was granted by God. Our society no longer believes that any human being has the right to rape, torture, or enslave another human being for any reason. We accept that all human beings share a fundamental value and celebrate our differences.” — source

Now anyone who grew up with Tom and Jerry on TV knows that the predator-prey model can indeed be funny, but the difference between the screen world and the real world clears up when you are cognitive of how the mouse feels while it’s being eaten alive by the cat – which we never saw on the screen. I remember picking my dog, Duke, up from the side of Highway 60 after he’d been run over by some asshole driving the speed limit but not paying attention. This is the problem… People telling other people how to live, what to eat or wear, where to drive, what they can and can’t laugh at or about… what to deny or accept.

https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Apodemus_sylvaticus_bosmuis.jpg

I know what you’re thinking…

The Telepathic Rodent is OzoneFarm’s publication for dealing with cognitive empathy issues.

A Community in Cyberspace

I started an eBook back in 2001. I wrote it in HTML directly onto a Linux box server built from an old PC. The only copy of the book is on the Internet Archives. Here’s the forward:

A Community in Cyberspace

For decades now the feverish pace at which computing systems have developed, has left many people alienated, confused and bewildered. For a few that have managed to stay abreast of the technologies it has been quite a boon. Some of the folks with savvy and skill have been placed in a position to abuse their newly found power in exploitative schemes using ruthless business practices. Others guided by ethics that are more generous have managed to create a very powerful new medium that fosters a level of co-operation never before possible.

The Idea of Democracy in North America has evolved from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution of the United States and has been all along a series of conflicts, revolutions, and long periods of stagnation and complacency. The advent of the Internet has presented a new dimension to human communication and will, as this book will try to show, become the catalyst for change that will foster a new era in representative government.

Electronic signals traveling at the speed of light can now shrink the global community to a surprisingly small size with respect to the physical planet. At the same time, the level of complexity, diversity, and inter-nationality have become staggering in relation to traditional ideas pertaining to society. There exists a need to harmonize the possibilities into a logical whole that can be managed by the standard Human mindset, and applied to bettering the union of souls that resides on this globe. Finite physical beings that remain here can tap the cybernetic well, join, and perfect the Community in Cyberspace in a new and exciting way.

Achieving goals, setting standards, creating associations and fostering co-operation has never been easier. Similarly, exploitation, abuse, and downright fraud have never been easier, either. Those with a strong desire for change and a passion for designing a sustainable future can wield the power of information technology. This raw power should be directed toward the ideals that honor the dignity of the noble purposes of past generations and build an honorable legacy for future generations. The time to do so is now!

I didn’t have spell check back then. That was then.. this is now! Oh wait.. what’s changed? To join the book try this link. You may have to jump through a hoop or two to get access.

KeyLineAmerica.org

ozonefarm

The application of Keyline design principles for North American agrarian ecosystem services.

Continued from Keyline design principles

The problems we create by placing dotted lines on maps are sometimes greater when we back up and look at them from a different perspective. Drawing lines based upon the notions of ownership, governance, dominion, infrastructure and other abstract constructs can lead to ecosystem damage, poor performance, pollution, and other ugly manifestations of the lack of thoughtfulness. The pure genius of the land itself should inspire humanity to create a built environment that is worthy of the natural environment that provides a substrate upon which and from which we earn our livings.

KeyLineAmerica.org proposes to become a think-tank (for lack of a better term) that looks at the emerging open data structures and open geographic information systems as they apply to advanced techniques for designing permaculture-based systems and infrastructures for local food ecosystems…

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Orbital Perspective

Astronaut and space man, Ron Garan speaks on NASA’s Fragile Oasis blog:

“Seeing the Earth from this vantage point gave me a unique perspective – something I’ve come to call the orbital perspective. And at its core is the undeniable and sobering contradiction between the staggering beauty of our planet and the unfortunate realities of life on our planet for many of its inhabitants.” Ron Garan – Seeing Earth From Space

I wanted to be a spaceman.

When I was a teenager growing up in a quiet mid-western USA town, I would sometimes climb the water tower and gaze out at the woods and fields in the distance and survey the sleeping town below. Usually I was all alone, but a few times I dared a few buddies to climb up there, too. The vantage point offered a mind-altering perspective of the world below as rural towns in the 1960s weren’t very exciting. No one even knew nor cared that we were up there. Being physically above the planet surface gave me an overview allowing me to see Highway 60 winding through the rolling plane and all the tiny streets that framed the town from edge to edge and top to bottom. For me, the experience was an introduction to holism and a foretaste of seeing the world from a higher plane. We all benefit from from seeing the big picture more clearly via the lenses of the Global Free Internet, especially when we gain control of the “filters” and learn to apply them.

No matter where we are on the planet, its strength and beauty seems obscured by some kind of unrest, chaos, or disorder. I’m grateful that I had the relative comfort of a home devoid of machine gun fire, mortar attacks and military jets flying over. This Christmas, I wish for a way for those children in Pakistan, Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and other parts of our world where violence has become “normal” to have assurance that there is someone “up there” who has an eye on them and a better plan for their future. I believe that the ideas for solving the problems are coming down from above as a new wave of spiritual rainfall to water the seeds that have been planted in our collective conscience and consciousness in a most mystical way. Many people are heeding a quiet call to disruptive action that seems to ring out on every continent and in all languages at the same time from a source that simply can’t be identified as Earthly in origin. Have you heard it, too?

I have to agree with Ron the spaceman:

“Up there, hovering above Earth with my orbital perspective, I came to believe that the answer to why our world still faces so many critical problems — in spite of the ample technology and resources we have at our disposal — lies primarily in our inability to effectively collaborate on a global scale.”

Thanks for participating and accepting the dare to challenge the status quo. As we embark on the grandest mobilization of ideas, resources, data, research, thought and collaborative effort our world has ever known, be sure to stay tuned in and connected to that higher calling!