In the spirit of transformation and resistance to the corrupt forces that have risen to temporary dominance, I offer up my anti Trans Pacific Partnership leaflet.  I incorporated Dorothea Lange's iconic public domain image of an impoverished Depression era woman and her children because of its familiarity and its connection to a legacy of hard times brought about by the predatory system that we live in.  Please download and remix the leaflet as you like, adding in your website, contact info if you are an organizer, etc.
I included a link to the Public Citizen TPP information page at the bottom of the leaflet.  While I'm not affiliated with the organization, I found their website to be useful and professionally laid out, and included the link so that people who get the leaflet will have access to solid, well presented information. 

If you see this leaflet as being useful, please direct others to this post so that we can further the energies of transformation.  The file for download includes two images on one page, so if you print it at your locally owned copy center, they can cut a large quantity for you in house.   Also, copy centers will often give you a better rate if you bring your own paper.  I recommend something with a little color, and recycled of course.  Call ahead and you can  email them the file before you head over.  Happy leafleting!

It's common to hear words like "conspiracy theorist" or "nut job" thrown around these days in an attempt to marginalize those whose ideas lie outside the scope of accepted information.  Let's be honest, there are indeed a lot of beliefs out there that we should quickly  dismiss, unless we want to spend countless hours venturing down fundamentalist or pseudo scientific rabbit holes.  But by the same token, the interesting thing about using a word like "conspiracy theorist" to shut down debate is that implies that the accuser believes the accused to be crazy, while they perceive themselves to be firmly planted on the bedrocks of sanity and objective reality.   

But is the current Western culture, and its constituent members, truly sane?  And what indications might we look for that indicate otherwise?

Activist and author Derrick Jensen, among others, have suggested that the dominant culture is in fact insane, which is attributable, essentially, to the fact that civilization is destroying the life support systems that we depend upon. This seems a compelling enough argument.  Why would anyone in their right mind destroy the living planet and thus not only their livelihood, but the livelihoods of their children?  One answer to that question might be that the culture is collectively ignorant.  It just doesn't understand that it's technology is as harmful as it is.  But this is not an altogether convincing line of thought.  There certainly exists an element of this mindset, but mixed in are those who couldn't care less, and those who understand the conditions which we are creating, but also feel there is nothing we can do about it.  There are those who drive around in super duty pickups with pictures of Calvin pissing on the word "environmentalists," undoubtedly viewing the wolves they will be shooting from their snow mobiles as proxies for members of  the green movement.  And then there are those who will manipulate and coldly profit on inevitable planetary decline straight into the heart of oblivion.  Maybe we're not insane, but captives of a system of our collective traumas and eccentricities, actors in an ongoing survival drama gone awry.

Or maybe, as Jensen suggests, we have altogether lost it.

I think people with any compassion for human life would see the US sponsored killing sprees in foreign lands for the benefit of military contractors and access to fossil fuels as more than just a little over the top.  When we start to realize that this is done for essentially numbers housed in artificial constructs known as banks, in order to prop up an economy built on soul crushing jobs, questioning our collective mental stability starts to sound like the sane approach.

In the past, I've mused about the kinds of video games people are playing today, as a sort of window into our consciousness.  While the modern culture derides the "primitiveness" of animists and spirit world contacting nature worshipers, it has created its own parallel realms of magic and miracles.  It seems fitting that a technology and money driven culture, bereft of a sense of the sacred, would in the absence of dream work, shamanism, and vision quests, find refuge in pixelated realms of fictionalized exploration and self mastery.  Amid the ultra violent first person shooters and misogynist fantasy lands are a special breed of horror games in which the breakdown of morality and sanity plays an important role.  Take a look at the above trailers to get a taste of the kind entertainment kids, and increasingly older men, are consuming. This kind of entertainment, along with spinning wheels of fortune and a host of un-reality shows, are woven into the fabric of our consciousness.

But what recently got me thinking about the sanity of America was an article that discussed the revelations of US intelligence operatives infiltrating virtual worlds on the world wide web out of fear that online jihadists could be creating computer animated avatars of Osama bin Laden, in order to recruit extremists.  The report suggested

“The Bin Ladin avatar could preach and issue new fatwas for hundreds of years to come, as the fidelity of his likeness would be entirely believable and animated in new ways to keep him current and fresh.”

Current and fresh?  Terrorism a la Starbucks.  In a nation where drone operators drive home after a day of bombing wedding parties to catch up on the latest Disney Pixar flick with the kids, the perceived threats we are lashing out at are increasingly showing themselves to be the undying products of our own warped minds. And this was when I realized that we are officially through the looking glass. Security spooks are now haunting  virtual space, looking for digital re-animations of their own 1980′s Cold War creation, surrounded by 3d rendered penguins and dancing Star Wars creatures. The trajectory we have been following, while apparently parallel to a course of sanity and rationality in this so-called age of information,  diverged quite some time ago. As time passes along the X axis, the gulf is becoming increasingly apparent. If in our high tech delusion we are not wiped out in the short term from ecological or economic meltdown, we will soon be sucking down genetically modified drinks, whisked away to cubicles inside our self driving cars, immersed in a Google glass augmented reality of pop-up messages and floating emoticons, while unmanned heavy machinery extracts the earth’s last resources, and autonomous drones keep the desperate rest of the world scratching dirt outside of our grinning, DHS approved, commercial-break festooned eating contest.

Homo sapiens have been on the planet for around 250,000 years, and while our  saga of violence and destruction are not new, the current planet destroying scale and pathological disregard for the life system is unique.  In spite of our assertions in the West that "this i just the way things are," the last few centuries can only be viewed as a thin crust of human existence.  Welcome to the lunatic fringe.