This afternoon I scanned through the United Nations global economic report that came out last week.
World Economic Situation and Prospects 2011
http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wesp/wesp_current/2011wespupdate.pdf
It starts off with a healthy dose of sleep-inducing, bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, but in just a few pages it suddenly gets right down to brass tacks and sums up the world's parlous economic condition in just two succinct sentences.
<< The baseline outlook for 2011 and 2012 is subject to a number of risks. These include problems regarding the sustainability of public finances in developed economies, the remaining vulnerability of the private financial sector, continued high and volatile commodity prices, and the still looming risk of a collapse of the United States dollar. >>
Simply put: we are skating on the razor edge of a financial abyss.
“...(L)ooming risk of a collapse of the United States dollar.” If that doesn't grab your attention I do not know what will.
It certainly has gotten my attention. Indeed, the evidence for the ongoing collapse of the dollar is ubiquitous. The collapse is already well underway. All that remains is the ultimate coup de grâce, which some people expect as early as this summer.
When the last props fall away and the whole façade of phony-baloney paper “wealth” denominated in ephemeral USA dollars comes fluttering down, like red-white-and-blue confetti raining from on high, the silence will be deafening.
At first.
The world will pause ever so briefly in a global moment of dumbstruck incredulity. And then the chaotic reshuffling of the planetary order for whatever comes next will commence. That process should prove to be – how to put this? – boisterous.
Oh, there's still hope for you, or at least some of you, and for me, and for some others here and there, but make no mistake about it, the America and the world that could have been, overflowing with the sweetest love and bounty that ever were, surpassing even flowing honey in its nectar good and pureness, are about to hit an exceptionally rough patch in the road.
Alas.
I remember walking home from school on a splendid fall day in 1963 in the Virginia Tidewater, in a time and a place that no longer exist, down Lucas Creek Road past Sam Powell's dairy pasture where his Guernsey and Swiss Brown cows were grazing. I was just 8 years old. A car slowed and someone leaned out the window and shouted, “President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas!” and sped away down the road.
That day the course of the great evil that has brought us to this unfortunate fork in the road took a huge stride forward in its plan for subjugating this planet and the human race. That period was also characterized by assassinations of other important public and political figures: Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm “X”, Robert Kennedy, and by war in Indo-China and the omnipresent threat of nuclear war.
Right down to this very second the global system is afflicted with the pestilence of never ending war –Iraq, Afghanistan, attack against Libya, coups and invasions here, there and anywhere for the sake of bloody empire and corporate plunder. And it is all set against a back drop of past decades, centuries and millennia of never-ending warfare, slaughter, conquest, pillage, enslavement, rape and ruin. So much is made in American popular culture of The Good America, The Pure and Noble America of Centuries Past, but even that is a lie. That place never existed. The ugly reality of today is built on a historical foundation of horrific slaughter of Native Americans, theft of their territory and resources, and enslavement of unknown millions of Africans, forcibly brought to the British colonies and later the USA in chains. It was a a cruel and murderous business and that is how a large part of America was really built – on blood, guts, theft, genocide and slavery.
It always was an exploitive, hyper-violent, imperial project. It always was that way from the very beginning.
And now it is all impoding, as the dollar wheezes and coughs, as prologue to its approaching death rattle, perhaps as early as sometime later this summer. The dollar's death is unquestionably for the best, both for the people of what is still known (for at least a little while longer yet) as the USA and also for the rest of the planet's peoples. The central banking – debt based – warfare centric, economic model that the USA dollar props up is so murderously foul, exploitive and destructive that no sane person will long mourn its passing, if at all.
We don't know the half of the deep wickedness that has been done behind our backs by the shadow creatures furtively scuttling about in the dark of night, constructing their elaborately compartmentalized vampiric parallel realities that siphon off our life juice unawares. One of my readers has some knowledge of how numerous, secret underground facilities have been built all over the place, literally right under our feet, in front of our faces, with the vast majority of us being none the wiser, basically being positively clueless, dumb 'n dumberer, as it were. Here's one example of how it's done:
<< There was an old factory building that was being demolished, and they left the outside walls intact while in the center of the area they dug down to build the (underground) area so the public could not see what they were doing. (And) they usually build these next to a motel nearby, at which the people working in the (underground) location park their cars, and the (underground) install(ation) is usually accessed by a new building such as a 7-11 or other store where there is an entrance door with a key which leads to another door with an electronic lock which then leads to a stairwell or elevator down to the (underground) area. And the employees of the small store & maybe also the motel are gov(ernment) employees. >>
The Hopi people in Arizona warned us about all this. They warned us to mend our ways, to repent of all of this destruction, lying, exploitation, war and evil. They told us to turn aside and go down a more peaceful and constructive path.
We did not. And now we are where we are, as a people, as a species, as a global society.
We have called the tune, the centuries-long jig is up, and now the piper will certainly be paid, and paid in full.
Oh, the horror, soon-to-be-dead and dread!
There is a real analogy to the hubris that was associated with the sinking of the Titanic, a century ago. On that unfortunate occasion, the ship's orchestra serenaded the passengers as they slid down to their mortal end in the cold and unforgiving waters of the North Atlantic.
Today, the crisis is ever so much more severe than that. It's not just the fate of one large passenger liner at stake, but the life and times of a whole planetful of several billions of living, breathing souls. And so, as the nuclear radiation from the melted-down reactors at Fukushima, Japan wends its way across the northern hemisphere, as the petroleum and Corexit befouled waters of the Gulf of Mexico make their way to the open sea, as war rages in more and more places and the international, fiat-currency-based economy teeters on the brink of ruination, we ponder the fast approaching cataclysmic rupture of the socio-political-economic-military-industrial paradigm that has held sway on our home planet for a very long time.
I don't know about you, but I'm a little like the passengers on the foundering Titanic; I also find solace in music, and not the raucous, eardrum splitting noise that so much of contemporary popular culture regards as “music," either. No, I mean real music, with actual lyrics that speak to the full depth and breadth of the human condition, music performed by accomplished artists who have mastered their craft. I'm thinking of people like Johann Sebastian Bach and Samuel Barber.
J.S. Bach Air on the G String
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2j-frfK-yg
Adagio for Strings (Samuel Barber)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KylMqxLzNGo
And Tony Bennet and Janis Joplin.
When Joanna Loved Me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d-2JaK-CHM
Little Girl Blue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVpDOIPx_sY
And a great classic by Willie Nelson and Shania Twain.
Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7vaYOIKWYY
Shania Twain with Willie Nelson, Blue eyes crying in the rain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6wBxQVBozI
Then there are George Dalaras and Glykeria at the Herodeion in Athens in 2006.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io2F-9CReU8 (I wish the volume were a bit louder on this clip.)
Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3_pMzWY6ug
I am especially fond of this rendition of Amazing Grace, sung in Cherokee by Walela.
Amazing Grace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqkpYgvIBtU
Of course, a new order will arise, Phoenix-like, from all the doom and gloom that will characterize so much of the coming months and years. Ultimately, a different sort of age will come into focus, characterized by a new Zeitgeist, by alternative ways of thinking, behaving and living that will be as different as day is from night, when compared to what has passed for "normal" for so long in this world.
I think Carl Calleman has tremendous insight into the overall process. There is a "World Oneness Revolution" aborning.
The Third day of the Ninth Wave (Universal Underworld) and the World Oneness Revolution
http://www.calleman.com/content/articles/Third_day_Ninth_Wave.htm
Something new and fresh is beginning on this world, right alongside the hyper-violent death rattle of the expiring world order. The two are taking place at the same time, in virtually the same space. All of us have the opportunity to choose which process to resonate with and cooperate with. Many will elect to pursue the path of death, destruction, exploitation and ruin. We wish them well, though in the same instant we recognize that such elections tend not to end pleasantly.
Others are choosing a path in an altogether different direction. They have decided to “Upwise.” They are taking part in a grand, global “Upwising,” characterized by withdrawing their support from the system of death, destruction, exploitation and ruination and spontaneously joining with others to sketch out alternative ways and means of acting and living in the present times.
A big key to the global “Upwising” is an actual change in the process of mentation. Naturally, new ways of thinking and acting reflect and require changed mental circuitry, new neural pathways that are adequate to channel novel visions and life modalities.
I suppose this falls into the “Music of the Hemispheres” category, but one of the best and most useful ways I have run across for “Upwising” the human brain and mind can be found at this website, and scores of others like it:
http://www.worldofalternatives.com
You can find many similar websites, offering a wealth of similar CDs and MP3 tracks for spiritual and mental “Upwising,” by doing keyword searches on terms such as << binaural, hemisync, brainsync, mindsync, holosync, brain entrainment, brainwave generator, etc. >>
Individual “Upwisings” happen one new neural connection at a time, one newly harmonious brainwave synchronized with another and another – until – whoa! – suddenly you sort of seamlessly slip into a new reality groove, exactly like a slick watermelon seed squirts through your fingers ~
It will be something like, well, like when I went into the Godforsaken, hole in the wall toilet at the Greyhound bus station in Amarillo, Texas in mid-October last year. I ensconced myself on the throne and there on the side of the stall I espied to my surprise, not the usual crude renderings of you-know-what and attendant crass odes thereto, but a genuinely inspired piece of poetry. It was the last thing you would expect in a third world bus station latrine, smack dab in the middle of the Texas Panhandle, and yet, there it was:
A new and glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with 400 billion suns,
The dawning of the Milky Way.
-- Carl Sagan
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