My most recent piece, just below this — EVEN A CHILD ASKS IN GIBBERISH “WHY . . . WHY . . . WHY?” Why not listen to, follow, study and apply what Rachel Carson was telling us? (see below)!

It is a microcosm, each story on how corrupt and corrupting and culpible Capitalism is, was and will be until we dismantle it!

Sackler Anyone? Ralph Nader Radio Hour. Yet another slight to humanity: lawyers, judges, and the felon corporations, including Oxi Pharma! No recovery for the victims of the Sacklers, et al.

At the end of this, [the Sackler family] will be richer than they are today and have paid the settlement back. That is insanity. This bankruptcy–it wasn’t a bankruptcy, it was a heist. It was a scam. It was a money grab.

Ryan Hampton, author of Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis

This is beyond the imagination of writers of fiction about corporate fugitives from justice… And listeners should know that individuals can’t get away with this, with bankruptcy. There now is a double standard: the privileges, immunities, escapes from justice under corporate bankruptcy laws are far, far more enabling then any debtor who tries to start a clean slate and declares bankruptcy for a few thousand dollars of debt. This is a double standard that someday should be challenged under the equal protection laws of the US Constitution.
Ralph Nader

[The Sacklers] are now moving to eliminate the last remaining social sanction for their crimes, which is stigma. And it shows you the power that these corporations have: they escaped from regulation. They escaped essentially from criminal prosecution. None of these people are going to jail. They escaped from the state attorney generals. And now they want to escape from stigma, and just come back and start their mode of operating and getting more profits.
Ralph Nader

A democracy (sic) run-ruled-legislated by the criminals —

Executives in multiple industries have long been kept up at night by knowledge of the looming power of the Responsible Corporate Officer, or RCO doctrine, also known as the Park doctrine, a legal liability standard used largely to prosecute executives at companies responsible for affecting public health and safety. Under the Park doctrine, federal prosecutors could target senior executives and board members of opioid pharmaceutical companies for their role in the sprawling epidemic if violations of criminal law were proved true, regardless of whether they could prove knowledge or motivation.

Purdue helped to quietly finance an effort to unravel that doctrine, according to people with knowledge of the company’s activity.

How many why’s do not get answered? A million? A billion? A trillion?

Of course, the standard bearer for this rotten and rotting capitalism is a deep question: “Why have you allowed this system to not only take root, but to have metastasized in our cultures, to the point that everyone without money and power are vlunerable to the leeches, the pathogens, the murderers, the thieves, the poison spreaders?”

The answers are deep and tied to systems of oppression and supression. But, not so complicated as to the basic response — All of this is done, all those why’s, all those doubts and questions, come down to rapaciouis subhumans looking for money-profits-spoils by any means necessary.

And, alas, I run into more and more 60-plus somethings who have found some spiritual-Christian-Christ loving way to “deal with all the bad bad bad.” To deal with the fact all of the systems set up that they benefited from, even those on social security only, are rotten, and so they find the Jesus message, even the simple one of love your neighbor, your family, your children. They see Christ as a rabblerouser, and one who was outside the lines, outside of the laws of pharaohs and money changers, et al.

That’s fine, in one sense, to retreat to the “we are only answerable to god” default, but the reality is we are here, those of us atheist or pantheist, to do good, and if we are so outside the lines of belief systems which look only to the powerful, all-knowing, single God, ONLY, or ultimately, then there must be a plan from that same diety, and we are here as living proof that there are other ways of seeing and living and learning about what it is to be Homo Sapiens. We aethists are the creator’s creation!

Ahh, what would a “messiah” do and how would that person be treated in 2020?

The why’s and the what’s and who’s and the how’s and when’s and the where’s are captured in so many books and research projects. Here, Ralph writes about this, over at Dissident Voice –

Critical Exposés Everywhere as the Corporate State Worsens He talks about how decayed or decaying the US democracy is. It is a time now for the almost-90-year-old Nader to delve deep into what should be done, now that all the books and exposes have been done, and all those videos and documentaries. The revolution will not be litigated or legislated or likened through books and documentaries!

Despite the many books on corporate crooks, there have been no corporate crime law reforms, no additional prosecutions of these CEOs, not even comprehensive congressional or state legislative hearings. The corporate crooks at the top of giant companies still get away with profiting from their corporate crime wave. None of the top Wells Fargo executives or Opioid’s promoters or the sellers of dangerous products and chemicals are facing prosecution. You have to steal a loaf of bread or get caught with a miniscule amount of heroin or cocaine to be incarcerated.

The massive fatality toll annually (about 400,000) from preventable problems in hospitals and clinics gets exposed yet nobody stirs in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, state departments of health, or the state legislatures. That’s almost 8000 Americans losing their lives a week!

Profiteering, corruption, and fraud in the health industry are documented by many specialists, including Dr. John Geyman’s many books, but the exposés do not result in any calls for law and order by the politicians or even hearings in Congress.

Access to justice by victims faces increasingly closed courtroom doors and limits on tort laws for wrongful injury.

Meanwhile, the institutions we are expected to rely on to make a difference, with too few exceptions, are asleep at the wheel. These include the legal, medical, and accounting professions, the law enforcement agencies (there is no corporate crime index in the U.S. Justice Department), the toady legislatures, the corporate-owned media, the timid, often compromised labor unions, college campuses, and the silent corporatized organized religious institutions.

Our democracy is in serious decay. 

Those children will ask why, and they will want to see what cause and effects are, and how the cause and effect shifts to the effect now promulgating effects, therein turning from effect to new cause.

Here, books, and how many why’s are answered in these? When the mother of all why’s is, “Why do you allow public, environmental, cultural, ancestral, human, natural, city, town, community life to be eviscerated?” Why, as in the why of capitalism? “Why does it exist?” For unchecked and unimaginable wealth and accumulation of it in fewer and fewer hands? The children will ask why.

“Take a look at 65 recent searing books about corporate violence and malfeasance, crushing influence over our electoral and political systems, and expanding immunities from law enforcement and public accountability.”

1. Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement by John Coffee
2. Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation by Elizabeth Burch
3. Why Not Jail?: Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction by Rena Steinzor
4. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
5. Closing Death’s Door: Legal Innovations to End the Epidemic of Healthcare Harm by Michael J. Saks and Stephan Landsman
6. Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?… by Guillaume Coudray
7. The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption… by Carey Gillam
8. The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business by David Courtwright
9. Frankie: How One Woman Prevented a Pharmaceutical Disaster by James Essinger and Sandra Koutzenko
10. Killer Airbags by Jerry Cox
11. Making the World Safe for Coke by Susan Greenhalgh
12. Big Dirty Money by Jennifer Taub
13. Business and Human Rights by Ellen Hertz
14. Industrial-Strength Denial by Barbara Freese
15. Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker
16. Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations by Brandon L. Garrett
17. Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age by Samuel W. Buell
18. Profiteering, Corruption and Fraud in U.S. Health Care by John Geyman
19. Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power by David Dayen
20. Global Banks on Trial by Pierre-Hugues Verdier
21. Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception by David Michaels
22. Murder, Inc.: How Unregulated Industry Kills or Injures Thousands of Americans Every Year…And What You Can Do About It by Gerald Goldhaber
23. Paradise Lost at Sea: Rethinking Cruise Vacations by Ross A. Klein
24. Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller
25. Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in An Age of Fraud by Tom Mueller
26. Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban
27. GMOs Decoded: A Skeptic’s View of Genetically Modified Foods by Sheldon Krimsky and Marion Nestle
28. GM: Paint it Red: Inside General Motors’ Culture of Failure by Nicholas Kachman
29. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives by Jesse Eisinger
30. Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy by Richard Cordray
31. First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat by Christopher Shaw
32. Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War by Erik Edstrom
33. Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
34. Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press
35. Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar
36. Public Citizens by Paul Sabin
37. The United States of War by David Vine
38. The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions by Chuck Collins
39. Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis
40. The Case Against George W. Bush by Steven C. Markoff
41. Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer by Erica Payne and Morris Pearl
42. Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet by Dr. Michael Jacobson
43. Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy by Daniel G. Newman
44. Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits by James D. Zirin
45. Stealing Our Democracy by Don Siegelman
46. Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse
47. All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Monique El-Faizy and Barry Levine
48. Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic by Christopher Shaw
49. Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink by Seth M. Siegel
50. Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy by Mike German
51. United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America… by Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon
52. The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu
53. The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail
54. Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator by Dr. Gregory Jaczko
55. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
56. America, Democracy & You: Where Have All the Citizens Gone? by Ronald R. Fraser
57. Unsettled (on Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family) by Ryan Hampton
58. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
59. China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh
60. Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World by Nomi Prins
61. Attention All Passengers: The Airlines’ Dangerous Descent and What You Can Do To Reclaim Our Skies by William McGee
62. Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science by Carey Gillam
63. The CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop It by Steven Clifford
64. World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
65. The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, …. and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

That’s the why, and children want it answered — “Why not listen to Rachel Carson? Why was Rachel looking into pesticides? Why are the chemical companies so mean and criminal like? Why haven’t we as a nation taken control of everything coming out of industry?” Oh the why’s equate the kids to being commies:

Opponents of Silent Spring attacked Rachel Carson personally. They accused her of being radical, disloyal, unscientific, and hysterical. In 1962, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, criticism of the United States struck many as unpatriotic or sympathetic with communism. Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson wrote privately to former President Dwight Eisenhower that Carson was “probably a communist” (Lear 1997, 429). Velsicol’s threatening letter to Houghton Mifflin argued that if the public demanded elimination of pesticides, “our supply of food will be reduced to East-curtain parity [i.e., as inefficient as the Communist nations east of the ‘Iron Curtain’]” (Smith 2001, 736).

[The great editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin of the Chicago Sun-Times illustrates the gender dimension of the controversy over Carson and Silent Spring. In this 27 October 1963 cartoon he pairs her with Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, a scathing indictment of the funeral home industry. Men from both industries have been flattened under the platens of the women’s typewriters. Illustration by Bill Mauldin.]

If not an outright Communist, surely Carson was linked to “food faddists” or, as William Darby of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine characterized them, “the organic gardeners, the anti-fluoride leaguers, the worshippers of ‘natural foods,’ and those who cling to the philosophy of a vital principle, and pseudo-scientists and faddists” (Smith 738). Another decade or two would pass before most Americans considered organic gardening or natural foods as fit for anyone but cranks and misfits.

Allegations that Carson was just a hysterical woman appeared both in the pages of chemical and agricultural trade journals as well as in the popular press. Women were imagined to be less rational, more emotional, and more sentimental than men, who could be relied upon to study the issues dispassionately and propose rational solutions. An agricultural expert told a reporter at the Ribicoff hearings, “You’re never going to satisfy organic farmers or emotional women in garden clubs” (Graham 1970, 88). In his letter to Eisenhower, Benson wondered why a “spinster was so worried about genetics” (Lear 1997, 429).

As Carson had no institutional affiliation, she was dismissed as an amateur who did not understand the subject like a professional scientist would, or who distorted or misread the science. To her critics, Carson’s frequent use of terms like “nature,” “natural,” and “balance of nature” identified her as a mere sentimental nature lover or a pantheist like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau. Reviews in Time, U.S. News and World Report, and even Sports Illustrated took her to task. The reviewer in Time, for example, criticized her “emotion-fanning words” and characterized her argument as “unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic.” He traced her “emotional and inaccurate outburst” to her “mystical attachment to the balance of nature” (Brooks 1989, 297).

They are the reason, no, for hope, then? First time around, now, old people are sacrificing babies, unborn, youth for their existence?

As Kennedy (RFK, Jr.) writes in an ironically understated way, “The pervasive CIA involvement in the global vaccine putsch should give us pause.”  Yes, a long pause. He continues:

There is nothing in the CIA’s history, in its charter, in its composition, or in its institutional culture that betrays an interest in promoting either public health or democracy. The CIA’s historical preoccupations have been power and control. The CIA has been involved in at least seventy-two attempted and successful coup d’état between 1947 and 1989, involving about a third of the world’s governments. Many of these were functioning democracies. The CIA does not do public health. It does not do democracy. The CIA does coups d’état.

Why Mars?

The child asks why the caterpillar, why the coccoon, why the butterfly?

The child, if given a seat at the G-7 or IPCC or any other bored board, would ask, Why the CIA and Heating up Ionosphere?

Child of awe/ dirt to mouth/ fantasic jellies, seaward bound/ uncatchable shoals of sardines and starlings/ she looks at ground and blood

Child to menstruation/ child capturing pollen of a thousand Ponderosa/ running through moose territory/ asking why those VW Bug sized antlers?

Yet, we are nothing more than body with machine, to Gates and Google. We are the broken part of biology, ready for gene editing, gene driving, manipulation in vitro.

Child is the king and queen of the world, yet we have dethroned youth, thrown them into the winds of bio-accumulation, bio-feedback loops, bio-magnification.

The potato chip is crispier in the bath of chemicals old adults spray onto life.

Engineered potatoes with Satanic Seeds of Elite.

Child asks about why billions misspent when children annuallyt die of gut disease in the millions?

Child asks why burning chemicals delivered with cancer sticks are part of the game? Who makes money off of tobacco, off of the advertisements, off of the lobbies and off of the COPD, the cancers, the hospices?

There are no questions of WHY in the brains of stupid adults? They have no WHY we need the souls of the future for their eugenics and euthanasia plots?

Why no-stick frying pans end up frying endocrine systems?

They don’t ask WHY is there no precautionary principle applied? They ask not the why’s, just the HOW’s.

• How to make money from nothing?
• How to make work more efficient?
• How to hold nature at bay?
• How to improve nature with plastics, oil, metal, gene therapies, bio-clipping?
• How to amass knowledge at the click of a digital mouse?
• How to start plagues and end plagues?
• How to stop the youth always asking why?

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following from his prison cell before he was executed:

Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

They will ask why, they will want answers, if given the chance to be on boards, commissions, inside political parties, at CEO meetings, inside courts, on top of agencies, in state Capitals, at the Capitol, in Brussels, London, Tokyo, Moscow, anywhere the adults never ask why the world is dirty, dying, dungy, disenfranchising, profane, backwards, devolving, controlled by monsters, with us, so many of us, so many adults not of the One Percent or Point Zero-Zero One Percent Class, why have they not led the rebellion? Why have so many in the 10 Percent or 10 Percent TCollectively urned into Banality of Evil?

Are adults sheep?

Why the birth defects?

They will ask Why Aren’t we Taught about Real History So We Can Raise the Pitchforks and Stoke the Tar and Ready the Feathers.

The Child Asks: Why are these White Men Re-Making My World in Their Image, Bound to Their Sick Heads, Reflected in their Nightmares, within their Sick World of Control? Why are they at the top of the pyramid? Why haven’t they been dethroned? Why are they killing us? Why aren’t they gone?

Why, the child asks, is the Female Testicular, Death-Ray Women of the Nightmare? Testerone running through their wombs?

The Child asks, WHY, and they also want to know HOW, from mother figure to depleated uranium, Hellfire, cluster-napalm-phosphurus bombs?

Why are hospitals, schools, clinics, electrical power grids, growing fields, museums, newspaper, social security office bombed by these heathens? Wardem. Hewson, Novakovic, Caret, Thompson, Gordon. Why are they not names of infamy, terror, and the dirt of humanity, as the Nazis that birthed them?

The child asks why are these heroes thrown in jail, murdered on the streets?

Oh, why, the child asks, are we not told to research, review, celebrate, critically ask why for these heroes, too?

child of war child of peace child of buds child of chrysalis child of soil child of trees child of sky child of water child of sea child of coral child of everglades child of desert child of alpine forest child of manatee child of flamingos child of parrot fish child of deer child of wolf child of coyote child of the world child of the lower world child of the upper world child in the sky child in the womb child holding peace conferences child of music child of painting child of farming child of planting child of harvest child of moons child of stars child of telescopes child of healing child of song child of theater child of WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY

Ask why no why’s in Industrial and Fourth Industrial Minds of the Madmen and Madwomen?

Every child asks questions. Questions on the why of things, the when, the who, the where and the how. 

Adults do not so often ask such questions. Especially not, when these are of utmost significance and urgency – such as in today’s comprehensive crisis pertaining to nature, society, civilization and life itself.

Why not?

One example of this lack of questioing can be seen in the movie ”Technocratic Dictatorship”. This too seems true when it comes to deep reflection and highly critical analysis, offering, one would hope, more than just scepticism on the current situation, but also outrage.

Those interviewed in this movie, myself among them, describe in various ways the dilemma of our times, which is the undisputable progressive destruction of the environment, nature and life on earth.

Primarily, the interviewees analyse modern natural sciences and technology as the main contributors to this destruction. The mechanistic world view of the modern era and its subsequent technology are seen as the major cause of this destruction, its technology being broadly conceptualized in terms of machine-technology.

They agree: contrary to all predictions and promises, so-called progress has not resulted in the improvement for humankind, for life itself, nature and the environment. Quite the contrary, it has instead led to a situation which threatens to become a technocratic dictatorship, as the movie’s title aptly indicates. (Source — Prof. Claudia von Werlhof)

Coleoptera (beetles) are the most diverse order in terms of the number of species not only among animals, but among all organisms on Earth. No other group of living beings can compete with them in terms of diversity and abundance of species.

child of bugs child of fish child of sponges child of birds child of canine child of feline child of beetles child of bats child of snakes child of apmhibians child of antelope child of elephant child of the world child to be left alone child away from social media child never forgotten in this world child of future child of our pasts child of love child of fear child of heroics child of dolphins child of whales child of crustaceans child of wood wide web child of field child of vallye child of mountain peaks child of volcanoes

Reset #7

dams bursting
old Woody Guthrie
singing away those rapids
CCC transcontinental by-ways

now the baby powder
more TP, every clogging
arterials, arteries
supply chain of the brain

Turkish coffee dervish
no more, homogenization
homo sapiens plasticized
ambulatory distinction

body works was a play
on us, each specimen
splayed, posed, future
homeostasis held frozen

they want ionosphere
stratosphere, reflective
mica, surfactants
albedo like confetti

simple fish & chips
wrapped in daily
grind, muscular stories
the homicides with bromides

Dickens and Melville
Garcia Marquez Lorca
Vonnegut and Voltaire
Sartre and Sontag

reminiscences no remedy
pre-crime on a dime
fluffery flooding social
network, metaverse

looping lights
onto algae
marine layer lit
with bioluminescence

we are the satellite, lost
in space, holding dear
demented ideals
we crave new

Yes, it’s difficult for people to think it’s dry in Oregon, along the coast, along the Central Coast range. But it is, and it’s wet in the winter, too. Breweries, shrimp industries, hotels, they use a lot of fresh water.

But the reality is clear — America is so dysfunctional, that those trillions thrown at billionaires and military et al, well, not for the people, by the people, because of the people. Remember, this story about Newport, around 10,000 folk, with a swelling of 20,000 or more during any fun given weekend of summer beach fun, is your story in San Francisco or Boise or Hope, Arkansas. The very debilitating aspect of predatory capitalism is tremendous —

The earthen dam is failing, and will fail with some earthquakes that will hit our coast. This is the reality anywhere in the USA — wildfires, tornadoes, dust storms, droughts, blizzards, deluges, heat waves. We have money for trillionaires, for the mercenaries of Military-Pharma-Chem-Mining-Ag-Oil-Energy-Media-Education-Medical-Legal-Prison-Education-AI-Surveillance-Mining-Finance-Banking Complex, but not for a few million dollars water tank, or a $20 or $80 million dam for Newport, and those other places around the place that call this place home.

We are a third world, banana republic —

On a recent visit to the upper dam, Newport city manager Spencer Nebel pointed to a large pipe sticking out of the facility. He explained how crews just fixed one leak there and said it will need more work next year.

“(I) hate to make this kind of investment here for a facility that we’re planning to replace,” he said. “But it is a legitimate safety concern. And the security of the system is critical for the community and for the folks that live downstream.”

Now the city plans to build another, concrete dam halfway between the two older ones.

“So if we can build a higher dam and build a bigger basin, that’s going to reduce our reliance on the Siletz River, which is a really important environmental consideration here,” Nebel said. “And we’ve been working closely with the Siletz Tribe.”

Historically, Pacific Northwest tribes have often not been supportive of government-built dams, because of their propensity to block fish runs. But Robert Kentta with the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians said pumping water out of the Siletz River every summer is really bad for salmon, lampreys, crayfish and river mussels.

“We had the lowest flows that I can remember and I’ve lived here for nearly 60 years,” Kentta said. “It was scary low and scary warm. It was like bathwater, and we’re just not used to those kinds of temperatures in our river.”

Kentta said a new, larger dam and reservoir on Big Creek would mean more water could stay in the Siletz River and more fish would likely survive. (Source)

In this broken land, where the coroporations have huge lobbying outfits, huge industry coalitions, have huge organized protection rackets, we the people are up shit creek since living in the USA is all about paying for it, paying for water, air, all of it, through regressive and quadruple taxation. Through taxes, fines, code violations, penalties, late fees, fees, tolls, surcharges, add-ons, restrictions, eminent domain, externalities, we are left to the devices of elected officials and state agencies and this hyper-competition looking for grants, lobbying bucks, pork barrel.

Oh, those hog blood-shit-guts-urine lagoons —

Oh, those feedlots —

Oh, those thousand-plus chemicals —

Oh, those oil companies —

Oh, those tornados —

Oh, those wildfires —

Oh, that Guantanamo —

Oh, America, the Banana Republic: Nearly 40% of Americans Live in Constant Risk of Catastrophic Explosion or Poison Gas Exposure – People of Color, the Poor, Schools, and Medical Facilities at Even Greater Risk

So we are here, with the most broken society ever, as we have smug lockdown forced vaccine (sic) pro-incarceration people advocating all manner of illegal, unconstitutional and inhumane measures, and yet, and yet — never holding the billionaires who are war-pandemic-planned-demic profiteers accountable. It is ugly, that Biden thing, all his Neoliberal War Hawk Handlers, all the same old same old. Embarassing to see the Republicans in their racist zeal hold onto their KKK robes, and singing Dixie in their million-dollar bathrooms.

Here’s that coronavirus map, well, the one that should be part and parcel in this bullshit manic narrative —

Those drug overdoses, man —

It’s the war profiteering, man, and the trillions shipped to war lords, mining lords, Zionist lords, ag lords, chemical lords, all those lords of punishment-theft-disease-pollution-societal collapses.

Poem #6

mothers lactating forever
chems, everlasting everywhere
plague upon all our houses
Homo plastico sapiens
better living through
chemistry, lands
fumigated, fungicides
poured near purring
gatos kids playing
scratch’n’ sniff
phone app magnificent

blue dots floating
in air, magnificent
world, power washed
with Capitalism’s corrosives

children scurried away from
caterpillars, told to stay away
from mice, every corner
a spiked protein pathogen
chubby cheeks pinched
in supplication of jabs
arms exposed for boosters
into space, the GE-sphere

promises of receding hair
snipped out in vitro, stories
of new noses like those
Anglo angels of film-lore
clipped in, spliced
blue eyes and six-foot-one
frames, legs for volleyball
tournaments in Gobi desert
double helix freedom

the miracle of genes manipulated
men drought resistant
ovulation, menstruation
turned on/off with 6G
swish of EMFs

entire worlds escaping screens
booted into dreams
nightmares for the non-
squeamish, deep dives
Mariana Trench dark
fighting three-headed
20-foot squid
anything spliced in
you wait and see
wishes are your
design

money buys 300-foot
3D-printed yacht
money gets the sculpted
yeoman’s mate
all the pulverized
growth hormones
mushroom spores
virgin Chinese cum-
soaked goose eggs
money gets it
Hollywood flaunts it
ghetto boys, girls
swaging it

gold-plated smiles
17-bullet clips
diamond encrusted
anything in the reset
anything desired
money has it
trickle down into bombast
music will swill it
books will pronounce it
memes on TikTok will
drill it

resetting in a time
of Cholera-Covid-Corona-Chlamydia-Cancer
fear is the commodity
data is the game
every shirking scream
skittish sweating singing
slinking minute captured

the wrist device, reset its
steps-turned-to BP
new devices to monitor
mothers catching
postpartum blues
with handmaids at
the robotic ready
scooping up
CRISPR child

the new Adam
the emerging Eve
an apple a day
keeping the Mac
blue screen low
lo down
this new reset
Hallelujah

I am on a webinar with the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is about Gen Z, and higher ed, and what they want, need, deserve. And, well, no Gen Z people on the call.

This guy talking, a VP at Purdue, worked in Big Pharma for 10 years and he is proud of that. And he says, the price of student data is the price of a pizza. These are smoke and mirrors folk. Scary:

“But why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures? How did such a simplistic view of the relationship between health and the economy emerge, one which makes a mockery of decades of (Left-leaning) social science research showing just how closely wealth and health outcomes are connected? Why did the Left ignore the massive increase in inequalities, the attack on the poor, on poor countries, on women and children, the cruel treatment of the elderly, and the huge increase in wealth for the richest individuals and corporations resulting from these policies?”
Toby Green & Thomas Fazi (The Left’s Covid Failure)

And, another facet, the brown shirt syndrome, Vaccine Youth Brown Shirts — Pathetic:

About one-third of Millennials and Gen Zers have cut ties with friends, family members or acquaintances who will not get the COVID-19 vaccine.

This is according to a survey from Axios and The Harris Poll. They surveyed 1,334 U.S. adults in August 2021 and categorized them by generation.

The survey results show:

• 33% of Millennials say they have cuts ties with somebody in their life over not getting vaccinated against COVID-19
• 30% of Gen Zers, 9% of Gen Xers and 7% of Baby Boomers say the same

“It’s the new cultural dividing line,” John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, told Axios. “Three in 10 Gen Zers, and even more millennials, have ghosted friends who would not get vaccinated.”

Out of those four generations, Millennials are most likely to have young children who are not eligible for the vaccine — it’s not available to anyone under 12 years old. This could be a contributing factor to the generation’s concern for the virus as they worry about their unvaccinated children.

Oh, higher education is conservative, as Noam Chomsky states (see below). The rapid growth of billionaires’ wealth and inequality across the nation grew particularly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic. As millions of Americans lost their jobs and struggled to have adequate food during the crisis, America’s 722 billionaires saw their profits soar by some $1.2 trillion from January 2020 through April of this year. It’s actually much much more as we end 2021. Are there pitchforks? Are there people crashing their gated parties? Christ no!

These people “running” the show are corrupted, Zoomers, and they talk about recruiting people off campus, out of state, out of country, to be faculty. Get rid of dirty on campus faculty, those of us who can get together and organize for democracy, for freedoms and those of us who can organize against the oligarch. Amazing, how atomized the world is, and these people are the enemy. Debt debt debt.

These people are bizarre. Talking about bringing pets to Zoom class lessons. Talking about dressing down for the screen as faculty to relate to the Z’s.. These people are Eichmann’s. John Steppling, here:

Throughout the pandemic and certainly forefronted in the propaganda of the ‘Great Reset’, is the idea of saving — rescuing or protecting. Save the planet, save your grandmother, save the future. Protect the planet, protect nature, protect grandma. There is a quality of messianism running through the marketing, and I sometimes wonder if its even intentional. For the climate marketing, it’s clear they have pushed something akin to an evangelical tone, in a mash up with New Age bromides and cliches. But even the pandemic has taken on a tone I last heard on charismatic christian preachers.

Now, I was struck how often when you read descriptions of the Nazis you hear the word technician. The emphasis is always on precision and a near Euclidean code of duty. Agamben’s observation that the pandemic is now a religion certainly seems correct. And the authoritarian subjects of the affluent white bourgeoisie, those of the new OCPD (Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder) variant of anal-sadism, are eager to join in this new crusade, a planetary exercise in white saviourism. And yet, millions of people around the world are protesting. My sense is these are mostly working class people, those hit hardest by this new religion. I think they fear for their children (shit, I fear for my children). And then Africa, a continent barley vaccinated at all, whose population has near unanimously rejected the entire narrative.

So the question is really in what way the engagement with screens, with social media, and with electronic media has contributed to the weakening of an already weak ego, a ‘small ego’, and in turn this weak ego has intensified this divorce from our bodies, and a reliance on an ever stricter super-ego. Or, perhaps more, that this screen habituation has reinforced a societal encouragement to think instrumentally, to mimic those symptoms found in OCDP, and perhaps that mimic of symptom becomes actual symptom. For what is illness, exactly, in a society so aggressively irrational and manipulative. What one has seen over twenty years is the the manufacturing of the anal character, and the simultaneous evisceration of any counter culture. (The Happiest Place on Earth)

These people are so-so happy about ordering groceries via apps, using apps to pay bills, it’s all app app app. The Great Reset is already in full-force. And these people are happy about it, and now, happy about AI, on weekends the youth can get FAQ’s answered, all those student experiences to $150K a year administrators have concocted. These people are empty. College admissions honcho, campus experience VP’s, retention experts, marketers, institutional research dudes, these folk, are vapid. I am writing this while listening to them, again, with no Gen Z on the line. No alternative view, and all of them are nodding nodding nodding in agreement.

Steppling cites James Baldwin, and it is really about the Black Person scarring the crap out of White People, and now replace, “Covid-19” with “Black people”:

“White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness…{ } They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history.” —James Baldwin (Esquire interview, 1979)

Steppling does make a strong point about how a subculture is missing, and has been missing, for years. Decades. “Without a sub culture, informal meetings, collective creative projects, and gatherings, people can no longer discuss things. Social media is the anti-sub culture. It is not even a pretend replacement, but an antagonist.”

And I will almost end with Alison McDowell:

To my way of thinking, there are two types of people in the world. Those who believe natural things of earth, water, and sky have spirit and those who don’t. Those who embrace animism, and those who consider it silly, or perhaps even profane. Everything I’ve learned since the biosurveillance state has rolled out, especially with regards to bioengineering, particle physics and frequency, tells me we are living in a universe of sacred energetics where dynamic communication beyond anything that we can imagine is happening all the time. Onto that network, the authentic cosmic dance, molecular engineers desire to place a counterfeit web. It is our task, for those who take it up, to bear witness, to speak the truth, to put positive affirmations into the world, and to listen for the songs of life sung by the brooks, breezes, birds, and cicadas.

They never asked permission to use their thunderbolts on us.

We cannot give consent.

Our DNA is a fractal antenna signaling the universe.

Life isn’t a computation.

Life isn’t an electrical engineering schematic.

Life isn’t a data dashboard.

Pi used in equations is an inadequate substitute for that which eternally unfolds.

Nature is (mostly) curves. (h/t Sofia Smallstorm)

Chomsky, and this is in 1973:

One Man’s View

Noam Chomsky interviewed by an anonymous interviewer

Business Today, May, 1973, pp. 13-15

QUESTION: By their very nature, it often seems that the faculty assume a liberal or radical or critical view of the society.

CHOMSKY: I don’t agree. I think the faculty is a very conservative group. That is, it is considered liberal within the spectrum of American opinion, but American opinion on the whole has shifted so far to the right as compared with, say, Western Europe, that by the general standards of the Western European democracies, the faculties in American universities are really quite conservative.

QUESTION: Then, do you think faculty are failing in a role that they might play of supplying a liberal thrust in society — one of positive criticism?

CHOMSKY: Well, I don’t care what kind of opinions people have. I think the university should tolerate a large diversity of opinion, which it does not. I think there is a severe failure — the failure is one of honesty, in my opinion. That is, I don’t believe that scholarship within the university attempts to come to grips with the real structure of the society. I think it is under such narrow ideological controls that it avoids any concern or investigation of central issues in our society. And this is not merely a matter of opinion; I think this is easily demonstrable.

QUESTION: Is it possible within the society as it is now constructed to let the faculty have a more free role?

CHOMSKY: I don’t think that anyone is stopping the faculty from doing it. Because of their profound conservatism, the faculty in the ideological subjects such as history, political science and so on, find ways to avoid studying basic issues about the nature and exercise of power in our society. Or if they do study them, they do it in a perverse and confusing fashion. In fact, the very nature of academic specialization contributes to that. For example, consider the study of political economy — there’s a specialization of fields which makes it very difficult to investigate the central topics in the structure of American society within some academic department.

I think the most striking example of this that I know of is the study of foreign policy. There was a recent survey that appeared in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. The author investigated two hundred major works in what he called the respectable literature on international affairs and foreign relations, and he discovered that more than 95% of them make no mention whatsoever of the relationship between corporations and foreign policy, and that less than 5% give the subject passing mention. Now of course it’s obvious to any 10th grader that that’s a central issue. And the fact that academic scholarship so systematically avoids what is a central issue is just a very dramatic indication of the ideological controls under which it operates.

QUESTION: From what I’ve read myself, that article itself seems pretty conservative in its considerations.

CHOMSKY: You see, what’s striking to me is two things. First of all, the fact that he was able to unearth it; namely, that within the mainstream, everybody avoids this topic like poison. And secondly, his own attitude toward that fact. That is, having noticed that there’s a mass of literature that avoids the central issue. I think there’s a periphery that touches the real issue. It never occurred to him that maybe its the periphery that’s the respectable literature, and the mass — that’s the literature of advocacy. He himself is so caught up in the ideological structure of the society that he can’t see what his own data suggests to him.

Chomsky states it here, again, the conservativism of universities, but his lockdown mentality, his bizarre belief in the science of technology and the science of the overlords and Pfizer and Big Pharma, and this absurd narrative of the left, the fascism of mandates, the hate of the unvaccinated (Chomsky stated that the unvaccinated should be locked up!), all of it, it is a sad commentary on this fellow who is, or has been for decades, shielded from many of the realities of us who do research and who open our eyes to the convergence of the entire game here, and he discounts the power of The Net to colonize people, and he discounts a lot, and Lowkey is not going to push back, that is for sure. However, have at it!

Reset #5 poem

by Paul Haeder / December 8th, 2021

ready set go
bio-net turns to 5G
power of lasers
drones magnificent
controlling body temperature
flooding corpuscles with
flavanols on command
demanding love
titrating lithium

gnats metal diode torsos
gripping buildings
computer aphids in trees
matrices spreading everywhere
modulated wherever
you go, dreams foretold
masters of illusion

some want backbreaking digging
simple sweat glands soil
percolating humanity
others squeeze acrylics
onto canvases deep
inside woods

but the masses
are amassing for meta
verses, music already
prepackaged, dirges
only syncopated with
6 G reverberations
inside spinal fluid

there are no real sci-fi
stories, just lamentations
cowboys and Indians
trekking along starships
yet human touch
outlawed in schools
public displays of affection
felonies

then you say
no reset, just tinfoil
mad hatters, jabberwocky
of unrealized youth
conspiracies of souls
all good men, good women
enter S.T.E.M. with
higher ideals, good of
country countryside continents
everlasting communities
might as well stay in hive
ants or termites
lovely colonies
held at bay

drones digital dungeons
apples as crispy as
Eden bio-mimicry
ten million colors
Mac screens, inserted
VDTs of corneal transplants

you yell no reset
no 9/11 no false
flags, unreality
proven empty thoughts
proven blind spots

resetting is new dining
table set, the new improved
you genomic reset
no more ALS MS STD
clipped and cured
DNA coiling up
this is what we
evolved from
vole or sea jelly

we are the end point
in the set, reset
reorganizing for the
good of cybernetic
mankind reset the song
music drilling at apex
of eardrum
magnificent science

…. will not be solved by these freaks!….

With that big fat felony smile from the bipartisan criminals in congress, now that they have an $800 billion dollar killer MIC budget (really, double that, or actually quadruple that — gotta count the externalities, and, well, make that 10 times more, with the reality that all that brain-money-energy power expended for this crap). Oh, space exploration and ocean exploration, and, hmm, Economic Hitmen, add another 10 fold to the Military Spending. 20 trillion $?

Electric Sky wins DARPA grant to work on focused power beaming system for drones

By Alan Boyle on December 7, 2021 at 7:01 pm

That’s the way the criminal cookie crumbles —

In bipartisan fashion, the U.S. House of Representatives late Tuesday passed a sprawling military policy bill that contains nearly twice as much funding on an annual basis as Democrats’ flagship social spending and climate bill.

That reality led Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, to slam the $778 billion National Defense Authorization Act as “a reckless misuse of resources, a windfall for war profiteers, and proof positive that most in Congress have little concern for the actual security of people in the United States or around the world.”

“Little could be more revealing of our nation’s broken budget priorities,” Miles added, “than the fact that this rubberstamp of three-quarters of a trillion dollars for warmaking was prioritized and will soon pass with bipartisan support, while the Build Back Better Act—which would invest in meeting real human needs—has been watered down and pushed to the back burner.”

You think defunding the police and defunding the military would help society? You think?

“Cutting the Pentagon’s budget could help fight threats like Covid, climate change, and more,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said following his no vote on the NDAA. “Our work to cut the Pentagon’s budget and reallocate funds to help communities across the country is just beginning. The fight doesn’t end tonight.”

But in the end, it’s DARPA — Yeah, this will be great for humanity: beams of lasers and EMF’s and energy fields:

The company’s mission is to pioneer novel electric power and propulsion technologies for aircraft and flight vehicles of all sizes.

Electric Sky isn’t the only venture focusing on wireless power for drones. Seattle-based PowerLight Technologies, for instance, is working on a laser-based system that could power up unpiloted aerial vehicles as well as 5G base stations. But Electric Sky’s proprietary technology takes a different approach.

Laser and microwave beams typically start out strong but get weaker as they travel outward. In contrast, Whisper Beam’s transmissions start out weak but get stronger near the receiver.

Flags are half-mast for that criminal, Bob Dole, and all the flags littering the land, December 7, for that big lie, Pearl Harbor: “Eighty Years of Lies: President Franklin Roosevelt Told Public Pearl Harbor Was A Surprise Attack—However There Is Considerable Evidence Demonstrating Government Foreknowledge”

“But they knew, they knew, they knew”

Right after Pearl Harbor, William Friedman, chief cryptanalyst of the Army Signal Corps whose team had solved Japan’s Purple code, paced back and forth in his home, his wife recalled, and muttered to himself repeatedly: “But they knew, they knew, they knew.”^[18]

Robert Stinnett, a naval photographer during the Pacific War and author of Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, notes that two intercepted radio dispatches sent by Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to the Japanese First Air Fleet on November 25^th pointed to the anchoring of 31 Japanese warships at Hitokappu Bay in the Kurile Islands, which were awaiting instructions to sail to Hawaii.

Here you go, 24 pages later on the lies of that suprise attack and the good war. Kuzmarov.

The drones are coming! But first,  things the felons in the military complex didn’t even WANT: “12 F/A-18 Super Hornets that were not requested; five more Boeing F-15EX jets than the request for 17 total; and 13 ships total—including two attack submarines and two destroyers―for five more than the request.”

But, that 5 G, and landing gear — another example of the stupdity of Western Capitalism, unfettered. “U.S. Warns 5G Wireless Use Could Prompt Flight Diversions.”

The FAA issued a pair of airworthiness directives ordering the revision of airplane and helicopter flight manuals to prohibit some operations requiring radio altimeter data when in the presence of 5G C-Band wireless broadband signals.

One FAA directive on Tuesday said the “unsafe condition” posed by the planned use required immediate action before the Jan. 5 deployment “because radio altimeter anomalies that are undetected by the aircraft automation or pilot, particularly close to the ground … could lead to loss of continued safe flight and landing.”

“The trick has been to publicly embrace its opponents’ concern for the environment while privately fighting attempts at regulation.” (Source)

Below is the Op-Ed in the local weekly, Newport News Times, twice-a-week newspaper, flagging, for sure, like many-many local rags are. Most rags are either DOA, or have been purchased up by small, mini or medium-sized newspaper or media groups. Those “groups” are not your neighbors, and in many cases, those groups’ members are not stalwarts of offending any official or CEO or member of a cabal or lobby or political organization or military-surveillance-policing conglomerate. You have to find truth, or look at those levels of truth tied to cultures’ evolution and the standard bearer of common sense: looking at systems.

That a whole other issue or set of issues tied to the death of the message, the murder of the messenger.

Yep, it’s Black Friday, but look hard at the piled up consumer rushes of fear and panic about not having enough, not keeping up with the Joneses or Garcias or Wongs or Patels.

Aaron Mate’s father, Gabor, talks a lot about addiction and how shopping is part of that brain-mind-body-hormone exchange around panic, hyper awareness, hyper senstivity and hyper diligence tied to shopping. Sort of a hoarding game.

The scam is much more deeper than just Edward Bernays and  the other Marketers and Madmen. It is Milton Friedman, and it is the processes of retail and consumerism.

The scam is multilayered. The scam is all tied up to nefarious actors on the world stage who are part of the pollution-forever chemical-chronic illness-depletion of natural resources complex, which is supercharged by media and marketing, and which is supported by big finance and protected by surveillance and military and theft Capitalism.

The Story of Stuff, well, it is now a panoply of “stories”:

You can read any number of things here at DV or anywhere, like the Environmental Working Group, Center for Biological Diversity and thousands of programs and universities and nonprofits who have a deeply profound mission to actually protect humans-animals-soil-plants-air-stratosphere which point to the nefarious aspect of making money anyway possible. Any group that colonizes a thing, a product, a service, a constellation of things, well, beware: those are Faustian Bargains and Eichmann Madmen and Enforcers and Economic Hitmen. Worse.

So how do we get through those barriers, since the Military-Medical-Education-Finance-Banking-Insurance-Ag-Chemical-Mining-Education-Media-AI-Digital-Prison-Legal-Banking-Real Estate-Congressional Complex* has deployed tens of millions of enforcers and propagandists and scientists and technocrats and armies to push their insane agendas. REALLY.

The foundation is pretty rotten to the core when we look at how to upwind the lies and cut through the marketing and psychological techniques that have embedded into the societies in general.

I remember teaching advertising and marketing and subliminal messaging and deployment of armies of behaviorists and psychologists and sociologists and others to get people to buy things they don’t need, want or can withstand economically or physically. Oh, the things airbrushed into ice cubes to get you to think you want that bourbon, or those spliced in burger images in the movies theater or so much on color, angle and flashing edits to get the mind to move toward anxiety, hyper-dilligence and fear, which creates a mirroring effect of addiction, or buying. Junk.

Subliminal messages are visual or auditory stimuli that the conscious mind cannot perceive, often inserted into other media such as TV commercials or songs. This kind of messaging can be used to strengthen or heighten the persuasiveness of advertisements, or to convey an altogether different message entirely.

The year of my birth, here it is — 1957 revealed overtly the practice of subliminal advertising and persuasion which became known beyond scientific and academic circles, with Vance Packard’s book, The Hidden Persuaders, brought the concept of subliminal messages to the mainstream.

In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, many professional sporting organizations and regulatory bodies expressed concern about the prevalence of cigarette advertising in Formula 1 racing. Until that point, virtually all of the world’s top drivers raced in cars emblazoned with cigarette brand logos, but the sudden ban on cigarette company sponsorship in Europe precipitated an exodus of cigarette brands leaving the sport.

To circumvent this inconvenient restriction, the marketing team at Marlboro came up with a dastardly ingenious idea; they would use subliminal visual messaging to convey the Marlboro brand without using the typographical logo of the company itself.

Marlboro accomplished this by using a barcode-style design that, at the high speeds at which F1 cars travel around the track, was almost as recognizable as the logo itself. (source)

Oh, the good old days. Now, the sophistication and the lack of regulation and the carcinogenic aspect of selling-buying-selling-buying-scamming-plying-messaging-focus grouping have colonized almost every corner of earth. It is legalized, the complete takeover of the public. SCOTUS or local judges. You can see this with — “Chevron Prisoner Steven Donziger Speaks From House Arrest”!

This is the nutshell case study in unfortunate living murderous color: Really. So, Chevron uses greenwashing and green porn and armies and murder and legal eagles and scientists to get that black gold, and that is a grand example of the Complex* listed above!

This is brainwashing, baby, and it is so pervasive we are unable to tell the difference between our own emotions and truths and what the world of the Complex* tells us.

Eco-pornography is akin to scientism and Vaccine Porn. Really. So, this Holiday Season we will be part of that pornographic system of nanosecond by nanosecond enslavement for goods and services.

America is awash in a wave of environmentalism, and corporations are loudly proclaiming themselves green. As Time recently observed, “companies are spending big sums to develop an earth-hugging image.” Products of every type and description are labeled “environmentally friendly,” while consumers struggle to determine who and what really is. Minnesota Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III, head of a multi-state attorneys general task force on environmental advertising, recently told FTC Commissioners, “Our task force has been grappling with the green revolution. The word revolution is a strong one-but it is not an overstatement. In all my years as both a consumer, and a consumer advocate, I have never seen a marketing movement anything like this one. (Source)

Post-Black Friday tidings (shop until we drop?) [Source]

With all those advertisements piling up, we as citizens of the central coast and USA have many choices for enhancing (or not) our lifestyles.

Terms like “Black Friday” ramp up consumer sales. Marketers have deceptive ways of pulling us in. In 1961, the Philadelphia police force used the term Black Friday to describe heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic as people “hunted” for deals after Thanksgiving. In the United Kingdom, the Black Friday before Christmas means more people are out shopping and drinking.

There are a set of emergency services contingency plans to cope with the chaos. I saw this decades ago, in London, when mobile field hospitals near City Center nightspots were set up.

As a former sustainability coordinator for a small college, Spokane Falls Community College, I worked with students on all manner of things tied to consumerism. We studied ecological and water use footprints. We delved into the idea of planned and perceived obsolescence. We tackled complex lifecycle analyses.

Those were Halcyon days, in the mid-2000s. Imagine, robust all-encompassing school teach-ins where hundreds of students and the public joined to listen to policy, tribal, environmental, scientific and anthropological experts give 10-minute spiels each as people made their way to 20 stations for rapid information sharing.

These took place before the two end-of-the-year holidays. We’d have local merchants selling locally made or fair trade manufactured goods and foods. People explained what was the local multiplier effect of buying in Spokane at mom and pop stores, versus ordering from Amazon or a box store.

We watched the short film, “The Story of Stuff,” on the big screen. Then panel discussions about the effects of our consumption-crazed culture unfolded. Perceived obsolescence means marketers decide what style is “in” for the year, and what is “out.” That creates huge waste streams because the jeans are the wrong style, or the color of the couch is no longer cool.

Then marketers working for titans of manufacturing design products’ planned obsolescence — cellphones no longer work, toasters break down in a year of use, automobiles last only a few years before components start falling apart.

Life cycle analysis really gets students into the weeds — we evaluate the environmental effects associated with any given industrial activity, which basically is, according to scientists, “from the initial gathering of raw materials from the Earth until the point at which all residuals are returned to the Earth.”

Cradle to grave! A coffee maker contains rare earth metals, diodes, copper, wiring, plastics, steel. Students study the sources of the nickel, aluminum, copper and injected plastic. Maps of the world are then pinned with digital tacks and yarn to show the entire energy and supply chain.

Students look at the sourcing, the manufacturing and milling locations, and study conditions for the workers, as well as supply chain nuances and energy for transportation, packaging, marketing.

With a sustainability mission, I shepherded students to study who is growing that coffee and what the communities look like; what sort of economic hardships exists; what sort of political climate is occurring; and what sort of inequities exist.

Here are a few questions we should ask during this year’s season of shopping: Who gets the majority of the profits? What are the working conditions for the laborers? How does the product benefit humanity? What sort of external negatives are involved in the mining, milling, manufacturing and shipping of the big screen TV?

Here’s a start. The Story of Stuff website is full of sustainability-related documentaries — “The Story of Plastic” is the latest project.

Recall right after the Sept. 11 attacks, George W Bush told us to “go shopping for your families,” and he encouraged Americans to “go to Disneyworld.” This is not a cheap shot at Bush, but emblematic of the American way of life, even now in this new pandemic “normal.” There is national obsession with the stock market and “the economy.” For a depressed coastal region, a little drop in sales spells disaster for many local businesses.

Again, life cycle analysis looks at the true value of a local bricks and mortar general store versus a national chain, or an online store, brought to you by Amazon or Target, et al.

Students discover marketing as a great deceiver, and all industries — corporations and companies deploy armies of lawyers and propagandists, i.e. marketers. Another saying pops up when I contemplate this buying season’s hawking of goods, wares, foods, things: “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

Do we get what we pay for? Most citizens would rather not have “stuff” that breaks down or falls apart within a month or year of purchase. Most people would rather not have their children’s health and safety compromised with products that off-gas toxins or contain carcinogens.

We still fall under the spell of Black Friday and pre-Christmas sales. Shopping is an addiction facilitated through the same brain pleasure center cocaine addicts succumb to.

Too bad we’ve lost our old ways of being addicted to giving, addicted to helping and addicted to saving and preserving. Let’s hope we get back to these basics, for our own and the planet’s sake.

**Paul K. Haeder is a novelist, journalist, educator and author of “Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam,” Cirque Press.**

poetry for healing

…Reset #4 Poem…

rhizomes hold
destiny, entwined bacteria
viral loads, symphonic
micro-second 100th
powered new regenerations

seeds of earth
belly of creation
fields left for germination
resetting and recalibrating
free of Frankenstein
triggers, assassins

each droplet, cloud rivers
virus cousins, like under ocean
passages, a million more viruses
sifting light Antarctica
staff of life genomic

tides vents sulfur plumes
amino acids proteins
lifting angiosperms
sailing winds Sahara siroccos
across continents
phytoplankton’s homes
Madagascar lifted into
Minnesota, swift hand
of microbiome, we stand
tall with fungi, bacteria

nothing algorithmic
nothing supercomputerized
no conjuring artificial IQ
blips, we, the lion, they
viruses, us, apes,
fishes, sharks, sea jelly
single cells, no reset by
steel-jawed men
no implosion of quantum
nucleotides, no mother womb
of B-1 bombers, no auntie
ionizing stratosphere, no
uncle of 6 G, no felons
of sixty thousand
orbiting satellites

the evolution will not
be microprocessed, the next
wave will not be mastered
quantum bits, speed of light
digits, memory etched
titanium diamond heads

life is no reset, no devolution
but sailing
transforming, second birth
rising, nothing reptilian
creatures, trillions
in stash, never willing
to envision
creation