what I read in bed last night

So I totally read some things on my robot newspaper doohickey last night...

SILENT WAR from Vanity Fair
This was one of those long-winded in-depth exposes of cyber warfare being conducted between the United States (and Israel) against Iran, and vice versa. Obviously, as Vanity Fair is a western magazine, it takes on a favorable position towards US operations, and also talks a lot about how all this crap affects business. Everything is always about how shit affects business. Business is so goddamned important all the time. Business business business.
The whole NSA spying crap, and our beloved dear leaders stepping in line to tell us how we should not be worried, everything's cool, and then spy dudes being like, "Yeah but we totally stopped like 19 more 9/11s from happening. Like every other child in America would have been exploded by crazy terrorists if we hadn't been able to check their yahoo mail. So I'm thankful for that." Which is of course all bullshit, and of course all our leaders would try to ease our mind about this. However, I have a completely different question for you? Did you in all seriousness think they weren't doing that stuff? Do you think a Department of Defense project like an internet would be rolled out to the world and not utilized as a means for watching everybody and everything, both here and abroad? I saw a snippet of Obama on with Charlie Rose this morning where he was like, "We don't use this on Americans, only foreigners, and you have to do bad shit." That was what they used to say about drones too, but we now know there's been a ton of collateral damage with drones. So basically the same people who don't give a fuck about that are being responsible with this? Whatever bro.
But also, why would you think otherwise? If the technology is there, and all wired transmissions of information which would require a warrant to physically tap into that wire have now moved to wireless transmission, which legally is regarded the same as radio frequencies and open, why would you not assume they do watch that shit? I mean you have to be pretty naive to think that, and yet many people are that naive, as I saw an online petition circulating about being indignant about the NSA program that got leaked. As if you are going to call attention to these people that this somehow compromises the basic principles of America so they will just stop. Again, whatever bro.
What freaks me out though (and doesn't really freak me out, just something I noticed) is that since this all got whistleblowed, the internet is behaving differently. File sharing site cookies don't seem to be re-registering. Tor is acting funny. The entire speed of the internet is sketchier than it was, and sometimes this is specific to chrome sometimes to firefox. In other words, there are things going on you don't know. And you won't. Usually with programs like this, regardless of whistle being blown, what we find out about is already done and things are probably way more severe than what we see. This has always historically been the case. I know it's nice to pretend we live in some bold new age where information will be shared freely and ideas will spring forth and create a wonderful new world for all, but that's not literally the way the world spins for a majority of human beings, who struggle with continuing the "being" part of human being on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. However, we do get things like this...

SEASTEADING from N+1 magazine
This is an article about government-free floating nation-states as a possibility, and of course the people in charge are libertarian tech elite types who can afford such nonsense. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love to have my own houseboat homeland. But that's not realistic for most people struggling, nor are most libertarian philosophies which for whatever reason have been hijacked by this bullshit free market entrepreneur attitude that somehow people trying to make a business of everything is going to benefit humanity. All of this is built on the notion that business is good for everybody. I think that might be a faulty foundation.
I honestly would move my family from America tomorrow if I had the money. I mean this is the only country I've known, and where I was born, so I'm not exactly schooled on alternatives or know in my heart that something else is better. But I do know when I'm being bullshitted, and I've been heavily bullshitted in recent years. I may not be able to prove in a court of law someone is bullshitting me, but guess what? Courts of law are bullshit too. Legal/illegal does not necessarily directly correlate to right/wrong.
And then I get to the question is a country its laws and leaders, or is it its people? Is America our growing police state trying to protect us from constantly fed fear of things that may or may not be real but we have to trust the police state itself when it tells us it is real, or is it the population of people? I mean that's a chicken and egg type question, because American media starts to coax the population certain ways, not to mention our collective diet and activity levels and so on and so forth, so it becomes this self-perpetuating crisis. So I don't know what makes America what it is - the government or the people. I like to say that we get the leaders we deserve, but damn, I'd like to believe we deserve better. I'd also like to believe the naive notion that if there is something wrong here, then damn it I can make it better if I try hard enough and get enough people rolling along with me in the same direction.
But again, why? What am I answering to? Why should there be a higher cause? Why should I give a fuck if my government is a corporate kleptocracy and corrupt as fuck and spying on my every word? Just live my life, right? When I am sitting in the field, thinking my thoughts, fuck them. They could take that away, put me in jail, but I still have my thoughts. Well, they could put me in solitary confinement, do the things man knows how to do to people now, and alter the way my brain is processing reality, to change the way I am thinking. But it's still me, right?
The problem I have with these libertarian seasteaders is that they assume all humans are allowed this great potential to open source brilliance their way into utopia. A huge majority of us breathing oxygen and eating corn on this earth are not allowed that, and we live in a sort of feedlot existential space where we are mostly a tool. That's all we are. We are baboons trained to be productive instead of hanging around trees all day trying to fuck each other. We are a domesticated animal, nothing more nothing less. So saying something is legal or allowed by law or creating a new way of law or whatever seems almost irrelevant. Especially in light of this...

THE AMISH ARE GETTING FRACKED from New Republic magazine
Basically the Amish don't believe in suing people, so energy companies are fucking over the Amish in their rush to frack the world for profit. I can't even begin to tell you how much fracking bothers me, not because I'm some environmentalist or some green shit like that, but because we literally as humans have no clue what the long-term effect of this is going to be on the way the earth's ecosytem works. We are releasing large amounts of interior gases, just to chase a dollar essentially, and it's being justified in the name of business. I wonder if we'll ever get to a point where we, in large groups of us humans, can come to terms with the notion that business does not have to be the be-all, end-all of justifying how we live. The fact we have to earn money to pay a bill does not mean we should justify whatever the fuck we are doing to make that money. But because of the power systems in place, to one extent or another we're all trapped on that money grid, so we all think the way to escape is financial freedom. Get rich, and live the good life. Again though, this is assuming that business is good and the great benefactor of humanity. I'm not buying that, as these energy assholes fucking over Amish farmers show. Being human is the great benefactor of humanity. But we're only allowed smaller and smaller portions of our day to be human, more of it being channeled into being a tool for some sort of greater business good. And if we aren't being a useful tool towards a greater business good? Then we are made to feel like a failure, like we haven't tried hard enough, that we're a drain on humanity, although essentially we are only a drain on business, not humanity. We're still human.
I am not sure what all is going on in this world right now but it's a whole hell of a lot of shit, way more than we see or are made aware of. That's one reason my One Thousand Feathers video talks about being truth-free, because so many people offer their own truths, and all of it is cut with their own experiences and biases. There is no truth, no great ultimate goal to achieve. There is life, and you live it, and then you die. Try to have fun with it some, and try your best not to be an asshole to other humans, because they'd like to enjoy their lives too. Really, that's all I hope for, but as long as business has hijacked human consciousness I'm not sure we'll ever get there, and domesticated us into fucking tools working towards something completely removed from greater human good. I don't know man, sometimes I look around and it all seems so silly. We have been trained to psychologically justify so much bullshit. I doubt I could escape that anywhere on earth, so I guess carving it out secretly in the shadows of where I already am makes more sense than starting over elsewhere. So that's what I'll do. But it makes me sad to sometimes think about what we could be doing with ourselves.