Meg Lee Chin's blog

The biggest threat to modern civilization is not from terrorists, Global Warming or nuclear bombs. The biggest threat to modern civilization is OBFUSCATION:

ob·fus·cate (bf-skt, b-fskt)
tr.v. ob·fus·cat·ed, ob·fus·cat·ing, ob·fus·cates
1. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand: "A great effort was made . . . to obscure or obfuscate the truth" (Robert Conquest).
2. To render indistinct or dim; darken: The fog obfuscated the shore.

Obfuscation as a legal term is the practice of deliberately making something nearly impossible for the average person to comprehend. Through using various dirty tricks such as hiding relevant information within a mountain of words and documents or using incomprehensible archaic language known as "legalese" lawyers and politicians are able to hoodwink the general public. This is the way politicians manage to trick us into accepting laws which we would never agree to if we understood them. Obama sneakily inserted laws relating to the ownership of gold into a 2,300 page health bill. According to "The Independant", Tony Blair's government introduced over 3,000 new laws. It's not difficult to see that they can now find something to pin on almost anyone if they wanted to...

This dangerous state of affairs could be easily remedied by the immediate adoption of my proposed "Clear Language Contract law. According to this law any contract which is not comprehensible to 2 of 3 peers in the field that the contract relates to is immediately NULL AND VOID. This would render the majority of the dirtiest, sneakiest and unjust laws illegal.

Modern day lawyers excel at making contracts indecipherable through use of archaic language designed to keep the ordinary citizen in the dark. How can we possibly be expected to respect and obey laws which we cannot understand?

There is no doubt that there is a frenzied movement on planet Earth toward the centralization of power and control by those at the top of the human hierarchy. The most recent example of a move toward this totalitarianism is the SOPA bill which will result in the abolition of internet free speech. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhwuXNv8fJM

The antidote to centralized control from above is a parallel movement from below toward a personal self sufficiency revolution through the use of open source software and hardware. The movement of the manufacturing of products away from large scale operations into smaller home scaled setups could spark a creative renaissance never before witnessd on planet Earth. This potential is most evident in the Personal Fabrication or Personal Factory movement.

http://moritzbappert.com/blog/how-personal-fabrication-might-change-the-...

At the heart of this movement are self-replicating machines such as the "RepRap" which is an open source hardware based 3d printer capable of printing the parts which can be used to clone itself. By putting manufacturing in the hands of people instead of multinational corporations, we will do away with the inhumanity of the assembly line and the reduction of human beings into robots expending their life's energy performing mind numbingly repetitive tasks. The opportunity for creativity is vast and no longer remains only in the hands of the few. We can all be artists and inventors and not just cogs in the machinery of the factory with only a privileged few doing the more interesting jobs while the rest labor like slaves.

I believe in astrology, but disagree with the actual use of it because of this fundamental flaw; Astrology plays down the fluid, dynamic and relative nature of personality and fixes individuals into a stereotype. In doing so, it is oppressive and limiting.

The personality traits of any given individual only really only exist in relation to those of another person. Ie: you are an extravert in relation to an introvert. In a room of three "alpha males", one will emerge as the alpha while the other two will adjust accordingly. Groups are dynamic and self organizing. Roles emerge depending on the task and other external variables. One of the former alpha's may adjust to the role of "the clown". Another may take the role of "scientist" or "scapegoat", "underdog", "nurturer", communicator or whatever else is needed by the group.

I challenge anyone to name just one single personality trait which can not be attributed to every single human being at least once at some point in their time on Earth. Who has never in their lives been generous or selfish? Kind or cruel? A leader or follower? Saintly or devilish? Heroic or cowardly? We have all at one time or another been all of these things. At some time in his life Einstein was stupid, Madonna was shy, George Bush was intelligent and Mike Tyson was a weakling. It all depends upon the company they were keeping at the time. Personality traits are so ephemeral that not only is their very existence dependant upon relativity but also upon the biases and subsequent interpretations of the observer. Beauty and every other trait is in the eye of the beholder and relative to the next face.

We cling to our personality traits as if they are us. But they are not us as they are ever changing and fluid. We create the illusion that they are us in order to maintain a sense of security by deluding ourselves into believing we are who we think we are. But of course we are not and in doing so we deny ourselves infinite potential...

We Human Beanz have always looked toward leaders and as far as evolution was concerned this may have been a good thing...but modern day celebrities are like the junk food of leadership. They look good, but ain't da real deal. When in doubt just follow yo'self!

Here is the worst news yet and a devastating blow for the internet.

http://www.infowars.com/draconian-anti-piracy-censorship-bill-passes-sen...

It's time to work towards an alternative internet;

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19816-info-pirates-seek-an-alterna...

http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-alternative-p2p-wireless-internet-netw...

I admire Rupert Sheldrake for being a bit of a heretic and a maverick but I am not entirely convinced by his theory of morphic fields and prefer my own Garden of Eden theory of shared consciousness.

Edgar Cayce said that fish, birds and bees share a species consciousness rather than the individual self awareness which we humans have. However I suspect that we humans also possess the latent ability to share other types of consciousnesses including a species consciousness, a "God" consciousness and those of other entities.

Like radio tranceivers our minds can receive material from various sources. This is accessed from the subconscious through dreams, art, poetry, drugs, religious and other altered states. Some of these states can be somewhat dangerous such as those accessed by Ouijja boards, drugs or seances. Thus we've got to be careful what we allow ourselves to be tuned into.

I suspect the Garden of Eden story symbolizes a moment in history when human beings evolved from this shared species consciousness into a state of self awareness with a separate individual consciousness. We began as animals in a state of paradise living fully in the present and with no knowledge of good and evil nor past and future. Animals are happy because they live in the now. They do not ruminate about the past nor worry about the future. They are only unhappy when they are directly experiencing pain. Once the pain stops they go right back to being content. I noticed this in Hampstead Heath as I watched a duck being chased by a swan. The duck was distressed only so long as he was being chased. Once the swan stopped chasing him he immediately went back to swimming as if nothing had happened. If he was human he would build fortresses and organise neighborhood watch groups. Then he would form armies. This ability to think abstractly is the source of our unhappiness.

When we developed the neocortex and pre-frontal lobes we became self conscious and no longer content to live in the moment. We left the state of ignorant bliss and began to fear for the future while ruminating over the past. The fall from grace represents this development of self awareness or what Freud would call the "Ego". Lucifer may have meant well in bringing humankind the light of knowledge but he condemned us to a lifetime of psychological torture... and we call animals dumb!

Freud revealed the existance of the subconscious. However he failed to explain the source of its material. I suspect the shared consciousnessto be this source with the Divine spark as the seat of creativity. I do not accept the atheist view of a purely mechanistic universe. The day Richard Dawkins builds a machine which can write good music, poetry and create art, is the day I will accept a view of a soul-less universe.