Listen to a reading of this article: Michael Parenti has said that "Poor countries are not 'under-developed', they are over-exploited." The west tends to look down on the rest of the world for reasons that either directly or indirectly relate to the poverty in those nations, which is silly because that poverty comes largely from western theft and exploitation. It's like mugging someone and then scorning them for their empty wallet.
Every time I see a quotation by Mike Pompeo, I shudder. Could there have ever been a worse example representing the USA than that arrogant, rightwing loudmouth.
Sadly, he is not the exception, but the norm in 2022. Too many Pompeos, Nulands and Clintons directed by the exploiting Vanguards and Blackrocks and far too few Kennedys in that failing country.
"They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind.... The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899
"The government of the United States doesn't represent its people." See how easy it is to turn everything our warmongers say back on themselves?
And if the Western countries rob the global south and then scorn their poverty, the same thing can be said here at home: the government that has transferred the wealth of the country upwards to the elite then scorns the homeless who live under every bridge, since they can no longer afford to pay for housing.
While a few southern hemisphere countries have issues most do not. Sure they mostly walk or take a bus. Homes are nothing to look at. The kids are happy. A beer is cheap. They pay what they can to get reasonable health care.
Here in Panama they gave the elite the big middle finger. The media lied of course about violence. There was none. Some teens stole a police car and burned it. Nothing like cops riding people over with horses. The left media and politicians feel that the police were fustified, for fucks sake. All those protestors wanted the same thing. To be left alone, do their work, raise their families.
But here in Panama the food is reasonably priced, lots of it, gas prices are normal and people are generally happy.
I met the richest guy on the planet. He doesn't have a penny to his name lives in a concrete hut, sleeps in a hammock catches fish and eats fruit off of a tree. Doesn't have a care in the world.
Humans make their own cages.
They don't care about the big orange man or the senile prick with soft hairy legs.
“If most of us haven't even so much as mastered the ability to sit quietly for an hour ... maybe it's not yet time to start hanging a bunch of fancy bells and whistles on the human adventure as though we have taken this thing as far as it goes.”
YES!!! If you can’t be satisfied in yourself, you won’t be satisfied by taking the world, galaxies or the whole cosmos
The Buddhist term for our restless human nature is fundamental dissatisfaction, it comes from a longing to make something whole in ourselves that is incomplete. We try to fill a void within ourselves with the transitory pleasures of this world, but it will never work because what we are really suffering from is our sense of separateness. I don’t know that this fundamental dissatisfaction is really part of our human nature or a result of our civilization that has disconnected us from our environment, and increasingly alienated us from each other and ourselves. Certainly cultivating this existential pain within us is essential to our Capitalist system, and as a natural result we are a society of spiritually numbed out addicts. We got a bad case of Wetiko.
This is from Jack Kornfield’s ‘A Path With a Heart’
Contemporary society fosters our mental tendency to deny or suppress our awareness of reality. Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death, and loss, and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature. To insulate ourselves from the natural world, we have air conditioners, heated cars, and clothes that protect us from every season. To insulate ourselves from the specter of aging and infirmity, we put smiling young people in our advertisements, while we relegate our old people to nursing homes and old-age establishments. We hide our mental patients in mental hospitals. We relegate our poor to ghettos. And we construct freeways around these ghettos so that those fortunate enough not to live in them will not see the suffering they house. We deny death to the extent that even a ninety-six-year-old woman, newly admitted to a hospice, complained to the director, “Why me?” We almost pretend that our dead aren’t dead, dressing up corpses in fancy clothes and makeup to attend their own funerals, as if they were going to parties. In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers! How do we manage so consistently to close ourselves off from the truths of our existence? We use denial to turn away from the pains and difficulties of life. We use addictions to support our denial. Ours has been called the Addicted Society, with over twenty million alcoholics, ten million drug addicts, and millions addicted to gambling, food, sexuality unhealthy relationships, or the speed and busyness of work. Our addictions are the compulsively repetitive attachments we use to avoid feeling and to deny the difficulties of our lives. Advertising urges us to keep pace, to keep consuming, smoking, drinking, and craving food, money, and sex. Our addictions serve to numb us to what is, to help us avoid our own experience, and with great fanfare our society encourages these addictions. Anne Wilson Schaef, author of When Society Becomes an Addict, has described it this way: The best-adjusted person in our society is the person who is not dead and not alive, just numb, a zombie. When you are dead you’re not able to do the work of the society. When you are fully alive you are constantly saying “No” to many of the processes of society, the racism, the polluted environment, the nuclear threat, the arms race, drinking unsafe water and eating carcinogenic foods. Thus it is in the interests of our society to promote those things that take the edge off, keep us busy with our fixes, and keep us slightly numbed out and zombie-like. In this way our modern consumer society itself functions as an addict. One of our most pervasive addictions is to speed. Technological society pushes us to increase the pace of our productivity and the pace of our lives. Panasonic recently introduced a new VHS tape recorder that was advertised as playing voice tapes at double the normal speed while lowering the tone to the normal speaking range. “Thus,” the advertiser said, “you can listen to one of the great speeches by Winston Churchill or President Kennedy or a literary classic in half the time!” I wonder if they would recommend double-speed tapes for Mozart and Beethoven as well. Woody Allen commented on this obsession, saying he took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. “It’s about Russia,” he concluded. In a society that almost demands life at double time, speed and addictions numb us to our own experience. In such a society it is almost impossible to settle into our bodies or stay connected with our hearts, let alone connect with one another or the earth where we live. Instead, we find ourselves increasingly isolated and lonely, cut off from one another and the natural web of life. One person in a car, big houses, cellular phones, Walkman radios clamped to our ears, and a deep loneliness and sense of inner poverty. That is the most pervasive sorrow in our modern society. Not only have individuals lost the sense of their interconnection, this isolation is the sorrow of nations as well. The forces of separation and denial breed international misunderstanding, ecological disaster, and an endless series of conflicts between nation states. On this earth, as I write today, more than forty wars and violent revolutions are killing thousands of men, women, and children. We have had 115 wars since World War II, and there are only 165 countries in the entire world. Not a good track record for the human species. Yet what are we to do? Genuine spiritual practice requires us to learn how to stop the war. This is a first step, but actually it must be practiced over and over until it becomes our way of being. The inner stillness of a person who truly “is peace” brings peace to the whole interconnected web of life, both inner and outer. To stop the war, we need to begin with ourselves.
They speak of this "International Community" the leaders of which persist in their bullying, hectoring and disregard for the Global Majority, that 85% of the world's population who know what it means to commune with others for the common good. They speak of their "Rules Based Order" the 'rules' of which they expect others to observe with consistency whilst they twist and distort their dictates to satisfy themselves at the expense of others. The 'values' they speak of are actually worthless concepts that are expressed in terms of mere speculation and accumulation of exorbitant wealth and privilege rendering those they do not regard as viable as disposable as the waste they generate through their meaningless enterprises. They speak of the 'consequences' that will be visited upon those who they regard as inconsequential, whilst remaining blindly ignorant of the consequences they will experience as a result of their depravity. They speak of what is indispensable whilst dispensing with those they regard as useless consumers in a Malthusian drive to depopulate the planet. They speak of this cultivated garden that they stroll though not realising that the living hell they are creating for themselves and others is little more than a detention camp, gated and policed by the agents of a tyrannical regime that brooks no alternative. They speak of the autocracy and authoritarianism of others, whilst violating all the principles of freedom and democracy they claim to uphold in their relentless drive to bring alive the horrors of a creeping fascism that dresses itself in the garb of righteousness and truth and which quietly sneaks in through the back door unannounced. They speak of the iniquity of others whilst themselves preening and posturing as the very quintessence of an innocence as white as the driven snow. They take the very tenets of the constitution they boast of and shred them into confetti to be scattered to the wind, as their industry of organised mass murder sucks the very wealth of their nation though an insatiable vampiric appetite for the maintenance of their exceptionalism. With the bludgeon of their overbearing arrogance they beat to a pulp those who aspire for self-determination and autonomy on the false premise that others are a threat to the very life, liberty and happiness that humanity is deprived of as a result of their narcissism, their vanity, their unbridled greed and their pathological addiction to wealth, fame, power, and privilege. And through the acquisition of all this they have placed themselves beyond the very laws by which they prosecute, persecute, and terrorise those who refuse to accept that these sociopathic perverts have the divine right to take possession of all by the brutal exercise of force. Nevertheless that Law which eclipses the legal and judicial artifices of man, will eventually bring them to face retribution for their actions, that is, if in their lust to devour everything they don't come to devour themselves. They have little idea what they are bringing upon themselves.
* Do holotropic breathing, which creates a psychedelic experience. Perhaps start with Wim Hof, a world-famous person who emphasizes breathwork, meditation, and adaptation to cold.
Carl Jung believed we could avoid World War III if enough people did their inner work.
I think we're actually on World War V. Three was the Cold War. Four was the War on Terror, which was really a very dishonest war from W and O. And Five is what we are in now, with the WEF ready to destroy our freedom of movement (vaccine passports), our bank accounts (digital currency), and our speech. This is why the controllers are going insane over Twitter: they can't stand the truth getting out. But like Goebbels, they will ignore it as long as they can, even as Twitter begins to shatter illusions.
If our system is corrupted, that’s like the equivalent of having a computer that has a corrupted motherboard. All of our other problems are just programs that run on the computer. If the computer itself is no good, then arguing about what programs are best to run on it is a pointless exercise. We need to fix the system first. As long as we allow the systems that govern our lives to be corrupted we will never be able to navigate our way to the best society possible - and that should be the goal.
LARRY ROMANOFF • NOVEMBER 26, 2022 • 6,800 WORDS • 205 COMMENTS • 75 NEW • REPLY
The legal-political relationship between the City of London and the UK is a bit murky. On one hand, the City is at least theoretically subject (or can be made subject) to at least some UK legislation, although in practice this seldom if ever has happened for reasons I will describe below. On the other hand, the City is so sovereign that the King of England himself is forbidden by both UK and City law to even enter the City of London without first obtaining a “special invitation”, which process is too complicated to bother discussing. The invitation ceremony is not required by law, but the invitation itself is.[10]
Readers may not be aware that democracies can have “flavors”, the UK version being one such with a very distinct flavor. In this case, on the floor of the British Parliament, directly facing the Speaker of the House, is a special chair.[11]
Think of it as a kind of throne. The person occupying this chair is a representative of the City of London, attended by six lawyers. His purpose is to monitor all debate in the British Parliament and to scrutinise in exhaustive detail all proposed and drafted legislation to determine any possible effect on the “interests” or operations of the City of London, and to take appropriate action if such interests are affected. The “appropriate action” inevitably results in the legislation being killed. This is not necessarily done by force, but by wha very very interesting.....if 10% is truth, wow ....
Another good article! Yes, we go for the technology, the stuff with no concern for our habitat or morality. Down with drones and armed robots and AI. We should have outlawed war by now. If the little boys deciding to go to war actually had to fight in the front lines, they would grow up.
It's a psychological phenomenon: people hate and demonize those they exploit: it's used as justification in war, and it works great on a personal level as well. The exploited deserve it, they almost ask for it. So, no responsibility, no guilt is necessary. As I've said elsewhere, we live by and in delusion. It's far easier and works better than the truth - until it no longer works.
I am not against looking up at the Stars at night and imagining what might await humanity in the future. There is so much promise awaiting human exploration, near endless resources and human stories to be realized.
But at the same time we need to get our house in order first here on Earth. Perhaps that's the reason why we're still on this planet - like a teenager not allowed to drive a car until he or she understands their responsibilities on the road. And it looks like we may never grow up given this horror filled war right now in Ukraine and the suicidal destruction of the Earth's ecosystem.
Love your column. I emigrated to the Philippines in 2018 and can see what you describe first-hand. This should be the wealthiest country in the world, but the Colonial era shattered it. I now refer to the West as simply 'The Bubble'. Stop by sometime.
Every time I see a quotation by Mike Pompeo, I shudder. Could there have ever been a worse example representing the USA than that arrogant, rightwing loudmouth.
Sadly, he is not the exception, but the norm in 2022. Too many Pompeos, Nulands and Clintons directed by the exploiting Vanguards and Blackrocks and far too few Kennedys in that failing country.
It shows every day.
"They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind.... The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899
"The government of the United States doesn't represent its people." See how easy it is to turn everything our warmongers say back on themselves?
And if the Western countries rob the global south and then scorn their poverty, the same thing can be said here at home: the government that has transferred the wealth of the country upwards to the elite then scorns the homeless who live under every bridge, since they can no longer afford to pay for housing.
While a few southern hemisphere countries have issues most do not. Sure they mostly walk or take a bus. Homes are nothing to look at. The kids are happy. A beer is cheap. They pay what they can to get reasonable health care.
Here in Panama they gave the elite the big middle finger. The media lied of course about violence. There was none. Some teens stole a police car and burned it. Nothing like cops riding people over with horses. The left media and politicians feel that the police were fustified, for fucks sake. All those protestors wanted the same thing. To be left alone, do their work, raise their families.
But here in Panama the food is reasonably priced, lots of it, gas prices are normal and people are generally happy.
I met the richest guy on the planet. He doesn't have a penny to his name lives in a concrete hut, sleeps in a hammock catches fish and eats fruit off of a tree. Doesn't have a care in the world.
Humans make their own cages.
They don't care about the big orange man or the senile prick with soft hairy legs.
You know why? They got it made.
Mike Pompeo, Nov. 29, 2022: "The Communist Party does not represent the people of China".
Nor did you Pompeo represent the people of AMERICA when you were in TRUMPS administration.
In fact, no "GOVERNMENT" gang in any country represents that country's people. It's just the nature of that beast called "GOVERNMENT".
“If most of us haven't even so much as mastered the ability to sit quietly for an hour ... maybe it's not yet time to start hanging a bunch of fancy bells and whistles on the human adventure as though we have taken this thing as far as it goes.”
YES!!! If you can’t be satisfied in yourself, you won’t be satisfied by taking the world, galaxies or the whole cosmos
The Buddhist term for our restless human nature is fundamental dissatisfaction, it comes from a longing to make something whole in ourselves that is incomplete. We try to fill a void within ourselves with the transitory pleasures of this world, but it will never work because what we are really suffering from is our sense of separateness. I don’t know that this fundamental dissatisfaction is really part of our human nature or a result of our civilization that has disconnected us from our environment, and increasingly alienated us from each other and ourselves. Certainly cultivating this existential pain within us is essential to our Capitalist system, and as a natural result we are a society of spiritually numbed out addicts. We got a bad case of Wetiko.
This is from Jack Kornfield’s ‘A Path With a Heart’
Contemporary society fosters our mental tendency to deny or suppress our awareness of reality. Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death, and loss, and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature. To insulate ourselves from the natural world, we have air conditioners, heated cars, and clothes that protect us from every season. To insulate ourselves from the specter of aging and infirmity, we put smiling young people in our advertisements, while we relegate our old people to nursing homes and old-age establishments. We hide our mental patients in mental hospitals. We relegate our poor to ghettos. And we construct freeways around these ghettos so that those fortunate enough not to live in them will not see the suffering they house. We deny death to the extent that even a ninety-six-year-old woman, newly admitted to a hospice, complained to the director, “Why me?” We almost pretend that our dead aren’t dead, dressing up corpses in fancy clothes and makeup to attend their own funerals, as if they were going to parties. In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers! How do we manage so consistently to close ourselves off from the truths of our existence? We use denial to turn away from the pains and difficulties of life. We use addictions to support our denial. Ours has been called the Addicted Society, with over twenty million alcoholics, ten million drug addicts, and millions addicted to gambling, food, sexuality unhealthy relationships, or the speed and busyness of work. Our addictions are the compulsively repetitive attachments we use to avoid feeling and to deny the difficulties of our lives. Advertising urges us to keep pace, to keep consuming, smoking, drinking, and craving food, money, and sex. Our addictions serve to numb us to what is, to help us avoid our own experience, and with great fanfare our society encourages these addictions. Anne Wilson Schaef, author of When Society Becomes an Addict, has described it this way: The best-adjusted person in our society is the person who is not dead and not alive, just numb, a zombie. When you are dead you’re not able to do the work of the society. When you are fully alive you are constantly saying “No” to many of the processes of society, the racism, the polluted environment, the nuclear threat, the arms race, drinking unsafe water and eating carcinogenic foods. Thus it is in the interests of our society to promote those things that take the edge off, keep us busy with our fixes, and keep us slightly numbed out and zombie-like. In this way our modern consumer society itself functions as an addict. One of our most pervasive addictions is to speed. Technological society pushes us to increase the pace of our productivity and the pace of our lives. Panasonic recently introduced a new VHS tape recorder that was advertised as playing voice tapes at double the normal speed while lowering the tone to the normal speaking range. “Thus,” the advertiser said, “you can listen to one of the great speeches by Winston Churchill or President Kennedy or a literary classic in half the time!” I wonder if they would recommend double-speed tapes for Mozart and Beethoven as well. Woody Allen commented on this obsession, saying he took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. “It’s about Russia,” he concluded. In a society that almost demands life at double time, speed and addictions numb us to our own experience. In such a society it is almost impossible to settle into our bodies or stay connected with our hearts, let alone connect with one another or the earth where we live. Instead, we find ourselves increasingly isolated and lonely, cut off from one another and the natural web of life. One person in a car, big houses, cellular phones, Walkman radios clamped to our ears, and a deep loneliness and sense of inner poverty. That is the most pervasive sorrow in our modern society. Not only have individuals lost the sense of their interconnection, this isolation is the sorrow of nations as well. The forces of separation and denial breed international misunderstanding, ecological disaster, and an endless series of conflicts between nation states. On this earth, as I write today, more than forty wars and violent revolutions are killing thousands of men, women, and children. We have had 115 wars since World War II, and there are only 165 countries in the entire world. Not a good track record for the human species. Yet what are we to do? Genuine spiritual practice requires us to learn how to stop the war. This is a first step, but actually it must be practiced over and over until it becomes our way of being. The inner stillness of a person who truly “is peace” brings peace to the whole interconnected web of life, both inner and outer. To stop the war, we need to begin with ourselves.
They speak of this "International Community" the leaders of which persist in their bullying, hectoring and disregard for the Global Majority, that 85% of the world's population who know what it means to commune with others for the common good. They speak of their "Rules Based Order" the 'rules' of which they expect others to observe with consistency whilst they twist and distort their dictates to satisfy themselves at the expense of others. The 'values' they speak of are actually worthless concepts that are expressed in terms of mere speculation and accumulation of exorbitant wealth and privilege rendering those they do not regard as viable as disposable as the waste they generate through their meaningless enterprises. They speak of the 'consequences' that will be visited upon those who they regard as inconsequential, whilst remaining blindly ignorant of the consequences they will experience as a result of their depravity. They speak of what is indispensable whilst dispensing with those they regard as useless consumers in a Malthusian drive to depopulate the planet. They speak of this cultivated garden that they stroll though not realising that the living hell they are creating for themselves and others is little more than a detention camp, gated and policed by the agents of a tyrannical regime that brooks no alternative. They speak of the autocracy and authoritarianism of others, whilst violating all the principles of freedom and democracy they claim to uphold in their relentless drive to bring alive the horrors of a creeping fascism that dresses itself in the garb of righteousness and truth and which quietly sneaks in through the back door unannounced. They speak of the iniquity of others whilst themselves preening and posturing as the very quintessence of an innocence as white as the driven snow. They take the very tenets of the constitution they boast of and shred them into confetti to be scattered to the wind, as their industry of organised mass murder sucks the very wealth of their nation though an insatiable vampiric appetite for the maintenance of their exceptionalism. With the bludgeon of their overbearing arrogance they beat to a pulp those who aspire for self-determination and autonomy on the false premise that others are a threat to the very life, liberty and happiness that humanity is deprived of as a result of their narcissism, their vanity, their unbridled greed and their pathological addiction to wealth, fame, power, and privilege. And through the acquisition of all this they have placed themselves beyond the very laws by which they prosecute, persecute, and terrorise those who refuse to accept that these sociopathic perverts have the divine right to take possession of all by the brutal exercise of force. Nevertheless that Law which eclipses the legal and judicial artifices of man, will eventually bring them to face retribution for their actions, that is, if in their lust to devour everything they don't come to devour themselves. They have little idea what they are bringing upon themselves.
I've been attempting inner work. I recommend:
* Read anything by or about Carl Jung;
* Go to an Emotionally Focused Therapy counselor;
* Do holotropic breathing, which creates a psychedelic experience. Perhaps start with Wim Hof, a world-famous person who emphasizes breathwork, meditation, and adaptation to cold.
Carl Jung believed we could avoid World War III if enough people did their inner work.
I think we're actually on World War V. Three was the Cold War. Four was the War on Terror, which was really a very dishonest war from W and O. And Five is what we are in now, with the WEF ready to destroy our freedom of movement (vaccine passports), our bank accounts (digital currency), and our speech. This is why the controllers are going insane over Twitter: they can't stand the truth getting out. But like Goebbels, they will ignore it as long as they can, even as Twitter begins to shatter illusions.
If our system is corrupted, that’s like the equivalent of having a computer that has a corrupted motherboard. All of our other problems are just programs that run on the computer. If the computer itself is no good, then arguing about what programs are best to run on it is a pointless exercise. We need to fix the system first. As long as we allow the systems that govern our lives to be corrupted we will never be able to navigate our way to the best society possible - and that should be the goal.
https://open.substack.com/pub/joshketry/p/what-we-need-is-a-transparency-movement?utm_source=direct&r=7oa9d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The City of London
LARRY ROMANOFF • NOVEMBER 26, 2022 • 6,800 WORDS • 205 COMMENTS • 75 NEW • REPLY
The legal-political relationship between the City of London and the UK is a bit murky. On one hand, the City is at least theoretically subject (or can be made subject) to at least some UK legislation, although in practice this seldom if ever has happened for reasons I will describe below. On the other hand, the City is so sovereign that the King of England himself is forbidden by both UK and City law to even enter the City of London without first obtaining a “special invitation”, which process is too complicated to bother discussing. The invitation ceremony is not required by law, but the invitation itself is.[10]
Readers may not be aware that democracies can have “flavors”, the UK version being one such with a very distinct flavor. In this case, on the floor of the British Parliament, directly facing the Speaker of the House, is a special chair.[11]
Think of it as a kind of throne. The person occupying this chair is a representative of the City of London, attended by six lawyers. His purpose is to monitor all debate in the British Parliament and to scrutinise in exhaustive detail all proposed and drafted legislation to determine any possible effect on the “interests” or operations of the City of London, and to take appropriate action if such interests are affected. The “appropriate action” inevitably results in the legislation being killed. This is not necessarily done by force, but by wha very very interesting.....if 10% is truth, wow ....
Another good article! Yes, we go for the technology, the stuff with no concern for our habitat or morality. Down with drones and armed robots and AI. We should have outlawed war by now. If the little boys deciding to go to war actually had to fight in the front lines, they would grow up.
It's a psychological phenomenon: people hate and demonize those they exploit: it's used as justification in war, and it works great on a personal level as well. The exploited deserve it, they almost ask for it. So, no responsibility, no guilt is necessary. As I've said elsewhere, we live by and in delusion. It's far easier and works better than the truth - until it no longer works.
I am not against looking up at the Stars at night and imagining what might await humanity in the future. There is so much promise awaiting human exploration, near endless resources and human stories to be realized.
But at the same time we need to get our house in order first here on Earth. Perhaps that's the reason why we're still on this planet - like a teenager not allowed to drive a car until he or she understands their responsibilities on the road. And it looks like we may never grow up given this horror filled war right now in Ukraine and the suicidal destruction of the Earth's ecosystem.
Love your column. I emigrated to the Philippines in 2018 and can see what you describe first-hand. This should be the wealthiest country in the world, but the Colonial era shattered it. I now refer to the West as simply 'The Bubble'. Stop by sometime.
https://visayasoutpost.substack.com/p/bubble-theory
Excellent article Caitlin, seems like the madness of the "system" is driving you inwards yourself, which is the sane thing to do in these times.