Im not brilliant, im not special, im not popular, nor am I an athlete, artist, or a guru of anything really important in the long run. However, what i do have in spades in empathy and intuition and the ability to logically reason and make informed decisions based on the evidence at hand. All my inherated intuition and instinct as well as all my learned tools and the mountains of damning evidence have been screaming at me and telling me for over a decade now that the current POTUS and his band of toxic misanthropic bullies are nothing but clear and present danger. If they succeed in their plans to destroy this once great country, we will all be chum for the deadly sharks that are circling in for the feeding frenzy.
Where is the NRA, I thought they were here to protect us from bad government? If this isn’t bad government, I do not know what is.
The founding fathers are spinning in their graves.
When I was a kid I would go outside and play and later ask my parents and doctors why I would cough and why my eyes, nose, throat, and lungs would burn and feel raw.
My parents and doctors would answer: it is air pollution from the burning of dirty fossil fuels that power our energy and transportation systems.
This is when I first learned what air pollution is – and how it impacts our health.
Then I would ask the adults this: if using these dirty fuels to run our society also harms our health – then why do we keep using these fuels?
They would answer with things like “It’s the smell of progress, the smell of money!” “It is just the way things are, accept it, move on, go outside, and play – oh, and stop thinking too much.”
WTF!
At the same time, I was spending around 1.5 hours a day riding to and from school on a school bus. The diesel exhaust was an everpresent aroma inside the bus. At the time I had no idea that I was inhaling concentrated toxic microscopic particulate matter originating from the combustion of the diesel fuel that powered the bus – and neither did all the other children. At the time, all I was concerned with while on the bus was staying away from all the toxic bullies I was trapped in the bus with – little did I know I was also inhaling toxic particles that were harming my health.
During this era my adoptive dad was also smoking himself to death. I said to him on many occasions – isn’t smoking just putting air pollution into your body? He said yes. He also said he knew that it was bad for his health, made him cough, poisoned and hurt his lungs, shortened his life, and cost our family loads of money. He often strongly told us kids to never ever do this terrible thing that he was doing all the time because it was harmful, dangerous, and expensive.
WTF! What was all this, all these conflicting signals? They were so very confusing to the mind of a child – and they are still confusing to the mind of an adult. (BTW: All this early exposure to air pollution during my developmental years later became allergies, asthma, and countless sinus infections.
Dad kept smoking and he died in his early 50s.
WTF! WHY?
I was dumbstruck by these apparent deep, dark, dirty problems that nobody seemed to want to change. They just kept up with the intentional, self-harming practices as if there were no tomorrow.
Again – WTF! WHY?
I then learned about all the anthropogenic pollution, global warming/climate change, the ozone hole, acid rain, species extinctions, desertification, sea level rise, etc, and the fact that all these things were tied to the uncontrolled rate at which our species was (and still is) burning fossil fuels.
During this time I also learned about addiction. I put 2 and 2 together and I realized that just as my dad had been addicted to tobacco and it had killed him, our society was addicted to fossil fuels and if we did not change – we were on the same path as my dad had been – a path that leads at best to misery and suffering and at worst – to our own extinction.
Yet again – WTF!
WTF was wrong with people???
Aren’t we Homo sapiens supposed to be the thinking apes???
If so, something is greatly wrong with our thinkers.
In middle school, high school, and later university, I learned that a great many everyday heroes were slowly and methodically working to end our toxic addiction to toxic fuels. They were inventing and putting into place new technologies and new laws that cleaned up our fuels, the atmosphere, and the waters and therefore our health and our shared futures.
Their efforts paid off and sometime in my early twenties my eyes, nose, and throat stopped burning and tingling when I would go outside in the summer – this was a direct result of the policies and technological advancements that limit and mitigate pollution from factories and power plants as well as require all fossil fuel-powered vehicles to have pollution reduction and control devices installed on their engines.
At the same time, others were inventing better energy sources based on renewable, non-polluting fuel sources that use the infinite clean energies of nature – the sun, wind, water, geothermal (and now even gravity energy) to make much cleaner energy that has far less of an impact on our health and shared future. A few years later others built modern vehicles powered by electricity – electricity that can be generated by the before-mentioned, domestically-sourced, energy-secure, renewable energy sources thereby starting the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable energy and transportation future.
Unfortunately for all of us there were and are powerful factions in government, religion, and the corporate sector teaming up and working together to spread Fear Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) about these new developments in a well-funded attempt to keep these technologies, innovations, and laws from being adopted by the masses. Why are they doing this? The answer is very simple – dirty money – and lots of it. These forces are more concerned with money than the future of all life on planet Earth. They are greedy, selfish humans whose only concern is the acquisition of as much wealth as possible at the expense of the environment and all the life it supports.
Today, and even with the greedy FUD manufacturing factions, I have even more hope for the future with renewable energy sources – especially rooftop solar – at prices, almost anyone can afford, fleets of quick, reliable electric vehicles hitting the roads, technological breakthroughs in clean energy happening almost daily, and so many great and forward-thinking people following the evidence and the science and making great and positive choices that will lead us into the future – all great reasons to continue forward and not just crawl into a hole somewhere and die.
This is why I follow the path of science and engineering – not narrow, self-serving politics, religions, and false prophets following only the profits.
This is why I let evidence, logic, and common sense be my guide to making the big decisions in my life.
This is why I am who I am.
This is why I fight for nature.
This is why I fight for the future.
This is why I teach.
Fight for change.
Be the change.
Do only good things.
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to change, it’s not.” – The Lorax
I often get the feeling/impression that when some humans speak, they are not speaking from a place of conscious, mindful, thought, but from a sort of pre-recorded, instinctual, canned, emotional response/outburst to an external input trigger.
This makes me ponder in real time, how many of us are actually using our amazing brains for actual critical thought based on the input of new evidence…or as simply a reflector on endless repeat for out-of-date and even toxic information absorbed during an earlier programming phase in our short existence.
Only you have the power to delete and rewrite your earlier programming with new and improved updates.
If you always follow through and do what you say you will do, if you do good things that support others, animals, and nature, and if you do those things above and beyond what is required – more good things will come back to you in great and helpful quantities.
The Universe, Gaia, God/Ja/Allah, The Great Spirit, Karma…something far larger than we little apelike creatures, notices our good actions and supports them with even more good things.
Do only good things.
Do what you say you will do.
Follow through.
Leave things better than you found them.
One Love.
Peace.
*photo of a Monarch chrysalis on a Milkweed in my garden as an attention grabber.
“The freedom we seek is to use our own mind and body, to live our own life, instead of the life of the belief system.”
“Everything you perceive is being filtered through your entire belief system. And the result of interpreting everything you perceive by using everything you believe is your personal dream, an entire virtual reality in your mind. Perhaps you can see how easy it is for humans to distort what we perceive. Light reproduces a perfect image of what is real, but we distort the image by creating a story with all those opinions and beliefs that we learned. We dream about it with our imagination, and by agreement we think that our dream is the absolute truth when the real truth is that our dream is a relative truth, a reflection of the truth that is always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.”
“The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates – a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it.”
“The truth is that beliefs and ideas only exist in one place: the human mind. They are not “out there” in the world, but rather the filter by which everything we perceive gets sorted.”
“Life as you perceive it is a reflection of your perceptions and beliefs. It is not real, but rather a dream. To some this may sound negative, but in fact it is positive because if your life is a dream, and you become aware of the fact that you are the dreamer, then you can consciously create the dream you want to see and live the life you want to live.”
“The dream you are living is your creation. It is your perception of reality that you can change at any time. You have the power to create hell, and you have the power to create heaven. Why not dream a different dream? Why not use your mind, your imagination, and your emotions to dream heaven?”
~Don Jose Ruiz
(Art by ‘Felipe Posada’)
There are no rules other than those we create that say we must follow a belief system, be it religious or political or any other, in order to live on this planet in this time.
True freedom is found only by freeing your mind from the ancient control systems devised by those who want to control you, your time, your energy, your money, and your consious. Free your mind and use your finite amount of uptime to think for yourself and do good things for others, and for our planetray life support system.
OMFGWTAF! Are these festering rotten scroatbags serious!?!? The first time I heard of this BS I thought – no way, they didn’t just drop that dam dirty bomb of distraction.
Well, after several hours to process, and do some online “research” – it seems this is a real event. They dropped the bombs and kill3d kids and teachers. KIDS AND TEACHERS!! Then – more bombs. One twisted crackpot religious lunatic kill3d. Then – our brave servicemen kill3d and our rotting puss-filled corpse of a potus praises statues and fukkin curtains… and when these brave service person’s, who had paid the ultimate price, bodies were returned home with honor, the hateful childrapistpotus did not remove his hat to honor the fallen – WTAF!!
But it just cant be reality…I must be fukkin dreaming. Nobody in this country would actually say something so incredibly lame…maybe from north Korea…or one of those other backward, greedy dicktater-led countries that do not seperate church and state like the USA does…or once did anyway…our founding fathers are spinning in their graves.
…but what about the constitution? Isnt that a binding…sacred…almost religious document? Now it seems that those who once preached to uphold the constitution at all cost, no matter what, no matter who dies…now those same people are just choosing to ignore it…WTAF!
Oh…and never mind the huge and in fukkin BOLD fact that we…our entire culture…has absolutely zero…ZERO…credible evidence – that ANY of the mystical gods, angels, and SO MUCH other random BS in the Bible and other evidence-lacking dusty ancient sacred books and all the words vomiting from the mouthpieces kings and clergy of the multitudes of religions and denominations – have ever even existed at all. In all logical likelihood the reality is this: all the stores in all the old religious books are simply lessons and myths to help ancient folks make sense of the world and culture around them. These old books are only reality inside the readers own head.
When I was young I was taught that in any important decision, one should put evidence first, and the decision second. The reverse of that is a decision without supporting evidence, and those who use this misguided strategy are in search of one of two things:
An emotional response possibly seated in a personal desire or need.
Or
Greed and control seeking hubris. Hubris is dangerous.
To make decisions without factual, logical, supporting evidence is insane.
It seems that these people – that some of us have chosen to place into power – are absolute fukkin deranged lunatics that should be locked securely in padded rooms.
For them to actually say the unbelievably and stupendously stupid things they have said about bringing about the “end times,” or “armageddon,” or whateverthefuk – with the most outrageous of them all that his orange painted magasty DJT was sent by jeezus/god et. all. – is totally and rabidly barking mad.
I still keep pinching myself hoping to wake up from this bizarre nightmare…but no, apparently I am awake and this IS reality.
So many human lives have been cut short, so many civilizations turned to vine or dust covered rubble, so much knowledge has been lost, destroyed by religiopolitical cult leaders claiming their way is better because they claim that an imaginary god figure said so – often through the mouthpiece of a fat, bloated, king, president, chief, or bigman…and even more bizarre and inexplicable – they followed the imaginary god/king’s made up commands and destroyed so many real and beautiful things that actually physically existed…and they did it all believing they were correct and in the name of their chosen leader or god that they could not even see worth their own eyes. Either they all were deranged lunatics, or greed and power mad driven charlatans with absolutely zero empathy predating upon their followers, or both of these things.
Sadly it seems history is repeating itself.
It seems that the dangerous cults of lunatic fringe religion are trying their best to bring back holy wars at the cost of…everything moving forward.
The toxic weight of the religious trauma this is going to instill into everyone who survives this mess will be immeasurable.
Speaking of religious trauma – for the first few decades of my life I was traumatized by the religion i was born into – Christianity. From a very early age I was confused by all the bizarre talk of loving each other, taking care of others, including the weak, the old, the poor, the homeless, the immigrant. ..but then, quickly followed by and absolutely terrifying to a young child – follow my invisible all powerful sky dwelling God, or burn in hell, suffer horrifying end times BS, Jesus this and Jesus that, the heaven and hell, fire and brimstone, rivers of blood, multiheaded beasts, 666, demons, devils, nostradomous, nukes, the cold war, yada, yada, yada. Even while writing these words I still feel the anxiety welling up inside me – but I know this is not a god or devil pulling my strings…it is the constant programming I received from the church, my culture, my (well meaning) parents and family who were also under the spell of all the religiopolitical madness. All of it that still to this day causes a PRSD type reaction in my mind. All this twisted mystical hate and fear filled BS really traumatized my young brain and truly wrecked my evidence based decision-making process…for many years.
The only way I was ever able to dig myself out of the mind killing grave that was that twisted religious death worshipping religiopolitical cult, was to remember what my amazing mom taught me about evidence supported decision making and critical thinking. Without evidence supported critical thinking skills, you will fall for and follow anyone and anything that promises paradise. My mom was also a teacher, she encouraged me to read and learn about anything that interested me, and she supplied books, frequent trips to the public library, and the power of the acquisition of factual knowledge. Through her I learned that knowledge conquers fear.
This is why I choose to not follow any religion. This is why I choose to follow the evidence wherever it leads and use the methods and tools of science and my own brain to make decisions for myself and others.
The only “religion” I respect is Buddhism – and its not even a religion, its a practice based on peace, kindness, compassion, and self discovery.
In my experience, most modern religions very rarely use evidence to support their decision making process…but dusty old words from an ancient book, written and rewritten by countless bloated kings and authors, and then taken far outside of their historical context…sure, why not. In fact, it is often the exact opposite, with the evidence from the last 2026 years suggesting that more blood has been shed in the name of religions than in all wars ever waged on planet earth. The rivers of blood have already been shed and if there is an actual hell, we are now living in it and DJT and his mindless minions are the devil and his demons.
These people are absolutely fukkin insane.
Examples: 911 and Iran – so many parallels between the radical islamic terrorists who attacked the WTC and Pentagon, and the lunatic fringe chrustofascist malignant morons now pulling the strings of yet more bloody oil wars in the middle east.
Oh, let us not forget the E. Files. Remember all the violat3d young girls, women, boys and men, the redrum and kanabilism, the pain, the endless lies, and the disgusting fear mongering and toxic racist h8. If there ever was an antichrist, the vile potus and his demented lunatics running this once great land are the embodiment of that mythical sentiment.
But all that is just my humble evidence-supported opinion.
If this speaks to you in any way, I have written at (even greater) length about the topic of religious trauma, and what it took me to shake off the sticky, gripping, toxic tentacles and hugely heavy anchors of religion. It is one of my longest blog posts and it helped me sort through my thoughts and finally get out from under the thumb of the religio-political mind control system that many of us in the US were all exposed to beginning from day one. If you are struggling with what is going on in the world or within your own mind, then feel free to read my post through the below link. If it helps you sort things out then please feel free to share, and I wish you, and all of us luck, love, and peace with whatever comes our way.
Stevo's Personal Blog 