Along with the ways we use energy, the levels we have consumed of finite, non-renewable fossil fuels — the energy source that powers the bulk of what makes our civilization run — have brought us to a unique moment in our history. Consider:

“If we were to add together the power of all of the fuel-fed machines that we rely on to light and heat our homes, transport us, and otherwise keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed, and then compare that total with the amount of power that can be generated by the human body, we would find that each American has the equivalent of over 150 "energy slaves" working for us 24 hours each day. In energy terms, each middle-class American is living a lifestyle so lavish as to make nearly any sultan or potentate in history swoon with envy.”
—Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, 2003.

Practically everyone has an opinion about this uneasy topic of crisis. Indeed, there is widespread, legitimate disagreement about the extent to which a "perfect storm" of complementary crises may be emerging in the near future, involving, but not limited to:

• peak oil
• accelerating climate change
• serious economic disruption
• loss of democracy
• significant resource depletion (including fresh water and arable land)
• international instability and terrorism
• increasingly disruptive technology developments and
• "wild card" events such as pandemics.

In these circumstances of profound uncertainty, the fact that we disagree about our collective future and how to handle it could be our most important asset. Living systems tend to be as resilient as they are diverse. In the same ways that diversified investments are considered more secure than putting all your money into one stock, genetic variation makes a crop more resilient against bugs. Crop species and populations that include wide variation don't tend to collapse when challenged, because they can call on a wide spectrum of strengths and resistances. Some variations may die, but others thrive, with the specifics depending on which environmental challenges show up. The same can be said for ideas and approaches. Since we don't know what will happen, it behooves us to have people and organizations who are researching, advocating, and preparing for as wide a range of scenarios and outcomes as possible.

The bottom line is that a computerized vote count is a secret vote count -- and that's illegal. Technology cannot supercede the constitutional and mandatory provisions of election law, which require open and verifiable elections. There is no way to do a public vote count with computers.
          Listen, here's my idea. After the public Touch-Screen bonfire (we really need more community minded events, don't you think?), we should march to our Secretary of State's office and demand the restoration of a hand-counted paper ballot system.
          Picture it. Millions of citizens marching on the gates of power, demanding their keys back. It would be a quick, effective, non-violent, American Revolution. And I think it's long overdue.
          The fact is, with a well-designed ballot and see-through boxes (to prevent stuffing) the paper system can be simple, user-friendly, and fosters community-based democratic participation. High school kids, even children, used to count the ballots in America. We must have a strong, diverse presence of citizen watchdog groups to oversee the count, along with poll workers. The only election officials who are truly independent, who represent the interests of all parties in an election, are the poll watchers. The count must be done by hand, in public, video-taped, aired live on television, and the results posted on the precinct wall -- just like they used to be. Ballots should be counted on the same day as the voting takes place, making it much more difficult to alter ballots.

This Legal Brief is historically significant in the evolution of fulfilling the aspirations that drove the American Revolution. To reclaim the unfulfilled promises of that insurrection, including the professed right to self-governance, will require addressing the unfinished business of usurpations enacted through the U.S. Constitution. Prior to World War I, most people understood usurpations to mean the illegitimate seizure of public governing authority by private forces.

Dr. William F. Pepper was the King Family's lawyer-investigator in the 1999 Circuit Court trial in Memphis, Tennessee, King Family versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators. The story of Martin Luther King's assassination, and the 1999 trial where the truth of this event was finally revealed in a court of law is now encapsulated in Pepper's new book, An Act of State - The Execution of Martin Luther King. Pepper's investigation of this case spaned 25 years. In one hour the jury returned with a verdict that Loyd Jowers participated in a conspiracy to do harm to Martin Luther King and "that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant." An Act of State expands awareness and consciousness of how our world actually operates. Although this story has been blacked out in the commercial press, the significance of it's reality remains paramount to understanding and then changing our human world to be one that works for all. Help address the imbalance created from such censored facts by sharing this narration with your friends, family, acquaintances -- all who will listen.

Special Operations is a euphemism for clandestine or covert operations. In 1955 the U.S. Secretary of Defense created an Office of Special Operations in the Pentagon to provide military logistical support for the clandestine activities of the United States government. The authority for this was based on NSC 5412, the "National Security Council Directive on Covert Operations," approved on March 15, 1954. NSC 5412 defined "Covert Operations" and established how the United States government would perform and support these activities. For nine years Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty occupied a unique position in the initial implementation and operation of this military support structure run through the Office of Special Operations. This book is based on eleven hours of recorded interview with L. Fletcher Prouty in 1989. Prouty served in the U.S. military from 1941 to January 1, 1964.
        By far one of the most significant periods of Prouty's work was performing his duties as Focal Point Officer in the Pentagon for Allen Dulles' CIA. When assigned to this position in July 1955 he worked for more than six months drawing up the formal paper entitled "Military Support of the Clandestine Operations of the United States Government." From creating a clandestine Focal Point System throughout the Executive Branch, to a clandestine system of reimbursement, Fletcher Prouty describes how the United States government established a largely ad hoc system of euphemism and deception devoid of any public awareness or consent.

Sisters and brothers speaking to the fundamentally interdependent nature of our species and how psychically connected we are to each other. What are the challenges we face in creating a globalized world that cares for all of Gaia's children? What will our future contain if we survive growing through this period of our species' adolescence? What does it mean to be fully accountable to ourselves, to each other, and to our world and place in universe? Essential reading explores these and many other questions of our epoch in the context of all that is occuring and all we are creating by choosing to interpret what we perceive in precisely the manner and form we choose to interpret it.

A book review of David Korten's magnificent work, urging everyone to take in and be expanded by it's far-seeing living-serving perceptions.
        Whatever the barriers to our taking the step to species maturity, our era of adolescent irresponsibility is ending for the very reason that we have reached the limits of the planet's tolerance for our recklessness. It is now our time to accept responsibility for our freedom or perish as a species that failed to find its place of service in the web of life.(p.275)
        "David Korten, amongst a few prescient others, predicted the collapse that was set in motion in Asia and is now spreading worldwide. Beyond the fear and enormity occasioned by this growing discontinuity, David once again looks ahead, envisioning the rudiments and principles of an economy that is guided by life rather than currency. It is an articulate and hopeful expression by one of the leading architects for a positive future" - Paul Hawken;
        "Does for our view of corporatism, what Betty Friedan did for our view of women and Rachel Carson did for our view of the environment. . . . One of its strengths is the way it connects what we are learning about living systems, the environment, colonial economics and democracy" - Peter Block

This is the classic lay-person's primer explaining precisely what the health costs of nuclear power plants are, as well as describing the historical development of nuclear power in the U.S and how an entire industry was "misled in their belief that some safe amount of radiation truly exists". The costs to health, never honestly acknowledged or adequately discussed by nuclear industry proponents, affects not only ourselves and our children, they impact all mammals, fish, birds, insects, reptiles, plants, trees, bacteria, and everything else we share this irreplaceable home with. Even more serious, the on-going damage to the collective planetary DNA gene pool is increasing and deepening the burden all life yet unborn will have to bear, nothing less than the future of all. What is it that actually justifies such costs?

This unfolding story reveals more of the range of depth into which Biological koyaanisqatsi will plunge all life exploring itself here and now if we permit it. This situation is operating on the same level as the continuing generation of man-made radioactive matter around the Earth by the International Nuclear Mafia. Nothing less than a supreme assault on the integrity Earth's gene pool -- human, mammalian, plant, aquatic, bird, insect -- is underway. The DNA of all life is being irrevocably damaged by this parallel inappropriate exercise of human intelligence. Learn all about this. Teach your fellow humans. Education can stop this incoherent state of life that calls for another way of living.

          Added to the film record, Lost World of the Kalahari, I made in 1954-5, my book The Heart of the Hunter, and this film [Testament to the Bushman] made with Paul Bellinger and Jane Taylor, what we have written here is in a sense, therefore, a last will and testament. Late, partial and hurried as it was in the doing, it will make those who ponder its fragmentary bequests nonetheless rich because they are all he had left to bequeath of the wealth of natural spirit out of which in his own day he gave so abundantly with all the grace, willingness and fulness of which he in his time on earth was capable. . . .
          That this vital link with the first man in us is no subjective assumption of mine but objective truth is proved, I believe, by the striking parallels that exist between the basic images of his spirit and those of Shakespeare, Goethe, Blake and Valéry on which I have already drawn. I know of many more. But I believe these are enough to show how, in considerations such as these, we can proceed to dispel the lethal imperviousness in the cultures which compelled men to fear and extinguish him. Our diminishing civilizations can only renew themselves by a reconciliation between two everlasting opposites, symbolized by Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau and, in our own day, by the Bushman and his murderer. We have no excuse left for not seeing how fatally divided against themselves the processes of civilization have been, and how horrific the consequences in the human spirit. Now there is only a re-dedication of man to knowing himself:   the command of both Christ and Apollo which can lead him to rediscover the wholeness lost in the beginning in a contemporary and greater form. Something of this sort is the armour the spirit needs for a future imperilled by corruption from the power we have acquired over the forces of nature.

The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) is an audacious attempt by giant global corporations larger than most nation states to consolidate their power by making capital mobility a legally enforceable property right. . . . The next step is to defeat MAI. . . . It stands in direct opposition to the democratic principles on which this country was founded, no matter how elusive their realization has been.
          But the third and most important step is pro-active: To use MAI as the launching pad for a truly vigorous and searching debate on property rights and democratic values. For too long we have allowed advocates of corporate hegemony to dominate this discourse, even appropriating language which should be ours through the "wise use" movement. It is time to start a "fair use" movement which recognizes the "reliance interest" of workers and community in the creation of capital and the transcendence of public property rights of communities and preservation of the biosphere over private property rights when they are in conflict.

"The amount of radioactively contaminated metal entering the marketplace is on the verge of a dramatic, exponential increase. . . . DOE is already releasing and the EPA is developing standards to justify unrestricted radioactive releases into the public domain. . . . Essentially, state-level regulators from one of the most nuclear states in the country, are setting defacto standards, using loopholes and exemptions, for routine contamination of the unsuspecting public." §
          The public comment period for the draft regulations ends 1/31/98. Contact John Karhnak, EPA Director of the Center for Cleanup and Recycle via phone, e-mail, and/or write him at his address in D.C. using one of the sample letters provided. §§

One of the major undertakings of [the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report] was to place the CIA quietly within the structure of the entire U.S. Government, ostensibly to obtain more complete secrecy when necessary. . . . §
      Many of these people have reached positions of great responsibility. I believe that the most powerful and certainly the most useful agent the CIA has ever had operates in just such a capacity within another branch of the Government, and he has been there for so long that few have any idea that he is a long-term career agent of the CIA. Through his most excellent and skillful services, more CIA operations have been enabled to take place than can be laid at the feet of any other, more "legitimate", agent.
      This was the plan and the wisdom of the Dulles idea from the beginning. On the basis of security he would place people in all areas of the Government, and then he would move them up and deeper into their cover jobs, until they began to take a very active part in the role of their own cover organizations. This is how the ST was born. Today, the role of the CIA is performed by an ad hoc organization that is much greater in size, strength, and resources than the CIA has ever been visualized to be. §§

      The energy industry has no place in its ledgers marked "health and welfare of future generations." Therefore, the task of accomplishing a moratorium and providing a sane energy economy cannot be entrusted to that industry. But individuals in society do have a moral obligation to avoid recklessness and extremism in dealing with the future of living creatures on earth. Given the nature of the real problem of nuclear power, a problem admitted by proponents and opponents of nuclear power, it is difficult to understand the position of anyone who is not insistent upon an immediate moratorium on all nuclear fission power generation.

The image of our Mother Earth dancing in celebration of Spring, the Full Moon and Lunar Eclipse evokes an entire book by Elisabet Sahtouris

"The ancient Greek myth told of Gaia's dance; the Indian myth told of Shiva and his wife Shakti, who forever dance the universe and our world into being. Of all creation myths, none tells of a world assembling itself mechanically as tiny parts come together to form the larger parts, which then come together as a whole world--none but that of mechanical science. Rather, most creation myths begin with a whole- -a simple wave or whirl, or a single being, that divides into or gives birth to the different things we see as parts of the world. These parts may later rejoin as new wholes--or holons--within the great dance holarchy."
-- from Chapter 15

We wanted to know if the threshold issue, for ionizing radiation, could be settled. Our analysis proves, by any reasonable standard of scientific proof, that there is no safe dose or dose-rate of ionizing radiation.
          These four chapters from Section 5 of Radiation-Induced Cancer from Low-Dose Exposure:   AN INDEPENDENT ANALYSIS, 1990 comprise the proof that there is no safe threshold of exposure to low-level ionizing radiation. As stated in Part 3 of What Is Factually Wrong with This Belief: "Harm from Low-Dose Radiation Is Just Hypothetical --- Not Proven", "We have found no refutation of our proof. On the contrary, our method is extensively confirmed in the 1993 report of the United Nations (UNSCEAR 1993, esp. pp.627-636, p.681, p.696 Table 17)."

The rat haus, source of the namesake of this web haus, was built in 1982 over a 10-month period while living in Bolinas, California. That project was embarked upon because i had "lost" an earlier instance of this haus, built in Eugene Oregon, in the first half of 1976. . . . Things began rather humbly. In January, 1976, i elected to build a balsa wood house for my rat at the time. i believe his name was simply "rata". . . . i had enjoyed building models as a kid, . . . [but] At this point, i wanted to build something from scratch -- not from a kit -- and let my imagination be the plans.

This mastery of stone architecture raises a fundamentally essential question:

How did people who left no record of a written language, manage to construct
such massive, well designed, and pre-planned geometrically precise structures?

-- from the Pueblo Bonito, part III image gallery

          What we are talking about here is Specificity and Wholeness.
          Western science deals from the specific to generalities about the whole.
          Indigenous science begins with an apprehension of the Whole, only very carefully and on close inspection reaching tentative conclusions about any Specificity.
          Indigenous science is based on a profound immersion in and awareness of the whole circumstance. Rather than mistrusting personal experience, Indigenous science has learned to thrive on it. The standards for personal honesty are excruciatingly exact and taught from earliest childhood. Educational structures like the Vision Quest have as one goal coming to terms with accuracy outside of or devoid of your own assumptions or the assumptions of your society. The idea is that you are always--if you are wise--moving toward enhanced accuracy. You will never entirely arrive at complete accuracy, but you are constantly trying to move in that direction. . . .
          One of the attitudes taught in my tradition is the Rule of Six. The Rule of Six says that for each apparent phenomenon, devise at least six plausible explanations, every one of which can indeed explain the phenomenon. There are probably sixty, but if you devise six, this will sensitize you to how many there may yet be and prevent you from locking in on the first thing that sounds right as The Truth.

Then she turned to Anne: "Have you started working on the mental hospitals yet?" . . .
          "I worked in several of them before I found the right one to get things moving," Anne told them, "but it's going well now. Some patients have got themselves transferred to other hospitals and are beginning to work things out there. It was quite simple, really. It always is, when you find the place to begin. We just expand everything a little more, and a little more, so nobody notices, so they don't pay any attention to the direction of the expansion. The head men are too busy writing papers, anyway. By the time they notice what's happened, they'll think they did it themselves. Probably they still won't notice that it's a school-no degrees, no credits, no teachers, everybody just learning from each other and from everything else, and not for anything but the people in it.+

The future of humankind is present today within the bodies of living people, animals and plants -- the whole seedbearing biosphere. This living biosystem which we take so much for granted has evolved slowly into a relatively stable dynamic equilibrium, with predictable interactions between plants and animals, between microscopic and macroscopic life, between environmental pollutants and human health. Changes in the environment disturb this balance in two ways: first, by altering the carefully evolved seed by randomly damaging it, and second, by altering the habitat, i.e. food, climate or environment, to which the seed and/or organism has been adapted, making life for future generations more difficult or even impossible.

"Look at that picture near your bag -- see the snowy white roots on those reeds? That was in a really awful brew of water in America, in South Carolina, where we did substance tests. It's a small river in which the water had become so polluted the farmers could no longer let their stock drink its waters, and no one could find a solution. The hoses we laid actually disintegrated, yet the plants continued to grow! That is, plants have a completely different lifestyle than animals. And this is something still not understood. If you want to prepare things for animals to live, you must create a prior culture of plants."

-- Kaethe Seidel, 1990

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
(letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
Ref: The Lincoln Encyclopedia, Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY)

By arguing that American Indians (principally the Iroquois) played a major role in shaping the ideas of Franklin (and thus, the American Revolution) I do not mean to demean or denigrate European influences. I mean not to subtract from the existing record, but to add an indigenous aspect, to show how America has been a creation of all its peoples.

The menace to health from ionizing radiation at low dose-levels involves the genetic damage which is unrepaired, unrepairable, or misrepaired. The "troublesome trio." It is factually wrong to believe or to claim that no harm has ever been proven from very low-dose radiation. On the contrary. Existing human evidence shows cancer-induction by radiation at and near the lowest possible dose and dose-rate (radiation doses which deliver just one or a few tracks per cell-nucleus, on the average) with respect to cell-nuclei. By any reasonable standard of scientific proof, such evidence demonstrates that there is no safe dose or dose-rate below which dangers disappear. No threshold-dose. Serious, lethal effects from minimal radiation doses are not "hypothetical," "just theoretical," or "imaginary." They are real.