Like a seabird...

To have a sense of self, you need time to look back on what you experience to remember it and (you) alter the experience by building up a newer revised identity out of what you remember and (by) the new act of remembering (it) (connecting them to new events you did not know at the time you were experiencing them which came later.) Without these new times stringing together multiple times, there can be no "reflective" self to be aware of beyond current perception. In regards to other people in your environment, it is inverted. There is only the current perceptions of them and experiences of them without directly accessing their memories (or their own sense of identity built up through their past memories of events), or sense of self they tell you, or you learn of them to attempt to gain predictability to their future potential events based upon your own remembered experiences of their supposed pasts. Ultimately without gleaming insight into their pasts via your own (building) past memories of them or of other similar people and events to associate them to, others in your environment exist only in the now, in relation to you, as you would exist only in the now if you had no memories of your own. By not having recollection of somethings past states, it becomes more externalized. The more memories and knowledge of the past (of it) shared and in common, the less distinctions between the "otherness" between you and others in your environment, or of the objects and the environment (as a whole) itself.

Everything actualized now and yet to be is inherently made of potential. It is manifested differently, potential for experience and knowledge at certain points in time for different consciousnesses. Limiting others' abilities to know and interact with parts of their environments to control them by what they know is the most inherent evil in this system I know of, and what by censorship and culture, not only do all governments attempt but is verily what they are built of and feed on to keep (their members) (seeing themselves first and foremost) as distinct and separately defined as (apart from) the others ideas and values which its own (members) might otherwise one day prefer (other cultures systems or values), and decide many of these other attributes make more sense, are more just, or are preferable, more ideal, or just better suited to now compared to their historical baggage used often to weigh them down and keep them in "patriotic ignorance" of the outside world, and away from those ideas which might be better suited to who they might wish to one day become.

Just as one could say Bush is giving the world a taste of what it would have been like if the Nazis won WWII (one could say through Paperclip they did, the government or ideology it adapts to is merely the host which enables it to survive and mutate, is "progress" too and the countries and peoples are irrelevant and secondary to the "research" and "advancements" which are more important than even their own people are), we are also getting a taste of when Germany decided it no longer was bound by international commitments to the League of Nations, merely because it was in a greater position of power. The main difference between now and then is the US remains within the UN, though it says it is not bound by any rules or laws, procedures, courts, or enforcement mechanisms (against itself) it does not like, and all other major powers are either afraid of stating this obvious truth of what is going on, or are simply on the US payroll, willing to go along with anything so long as the money, directly or indirectly through contracts, trade, and business interlinkages, keeps rolling in at a greater rate than if this was corrected. It is for most countries a combination of fear and greed, and the US plays it well, both carrots of lucrative trade deals to make their leaders friends and supporters rich, and sticks of regime change, electorally (with boycotts and disrupting the economies of administrations it does not like) or by force of arms. But what happens when as now the treasury is emptied by corruption and we have only nuclear sticks left to keep the rest of the world in line to how we wish them to behave? That leaves only fear, but fear when persistent enough breeds people who grow up without it, and all the psychological warfare and conditioning cannot prevent it. The greater the downward push of new forms of oppression, new generations will learn new kinds of bravery and invent new methods of standing up to it.

Skimming over superficially the tops of most peoples beliefs and types of thinking and organizing thoughts, beliefs, goals, and values, is important to an overall view of human consciousness and direction. It need not be that inaccurate if gleaming accurate synopses because too much detail in any field of study inevitably puts one into traps of babble and irrelevance which furthers the discipline into further more marginal sub-sections which literally can be expanded and further divided infinitely. One must always stick to the most basic of questions: who is benefiting from this, who is being harmed. Anything else is superfluous. Turning the tables and saying more are being harmed than the number of people benefiting is good depending on who they are and how they are in a different group than they are who benefits, is to alter ones appraisal of the value of some human lives as greater and lesser than others. That is constantly what societies do without staring at that uncomfortable truth. One of our groups lives, survival, or even just comfort can be measured higher than millions of others' lives, discomfort, suffering, or even outright exploitation and torture. Once you get comfortable moving the balance away from the middle, the slippery slope gains speed which is progressively harder to stop or even slow down.

The only reason what they did illegally yesterday is talked about today is so they can inoculate the public to prepare them for what they want to do which is even worse tomorrow, advancing the conveyor belt toward making more unthinkable crimes less shocking, then debatably reasonable, and then ultimately legitimate, and even a necessary component of the world they have built up around such once "horrendous" unthinkable deeds. We are not only being trained to think the unthinkable by degrees, but to accept it as inevitable and just.

The media stranglehold likely to get us all killed, the public debate in America, when existent at all which now even this is not, is which party's "different" "Bold Ideas" to get us out of the world crippling downward spiraling situation, with machine-like unthinking polls and pundits alike whose thinking processes are limited to left, right, and now the "neither left nor right" neo-con neo-fascist "majority" ideology, which of these ideologies' jockeys, these cookie-cutter prepackaged types of ideological state-approved islands of thinking embodied in parrot talking suits, out of whom which one of them should try or can bring about a stable world in light of constantly escalating weapons of mass destruction, both present ones and damningly new types to come? The blindness and myopicness of it all is both frightening and hilarious at the absurdity of it all. Cheers.

The more a political party says it stands for life, the more people it can kill. The more it says it stands for democracy and promoting it and enhancing it, the freer it is to erode it and consolidate power to itself. The more it says it stands for liberty and less government, the more it can pass draconian laws, monitor what you say, do, who you associate with, and take away whatever civic rights you might have had, publicly admitting to it, or behind your back you never know about until they want something from you. The only thing that keeps the government's lines, the rhetoric, in any relation whatsoever to the truth of what is happening, is the Press, the Media, and they have now lost all compass and credibility. Truth, journalistic truth, now belongs to the highest bidder, and the liars, the most hypocritical, will always have the most money and the most power without a referee. The media is no longer a referee. It writes whatever it is asked to write and accepts payoffs, knuckles under to corporate or political pressure, and puts out one-sided government press releases as "news", and shamelessly distorts, swift-boats (the modern equivalent of tar and feathering) anyone who dares to interrupt the feeding frenzy at the trough of money and power. Journalism is now creating false histories purposely.

Seeing life as the drive to do things, to create events which others and yourself will re-experience at times in the future creating new events which is a doubling-back of those later times upon what you do and say and think now, straining to create relevance in what you do now to yourself and/or others in the future. Without those drives to create and experience, life fades to something else...I can see that from an outside perspective now because I can stop it, step outside of what I had thought to achieve with my life, everything I had been taught to and wanted to believe and achieve, and literally try to spin or put all of that in any other potential new perspective by how others in other cultures and other times might view those intents and drives, those perspectives and "truths" in relevance to their own lives and times. Even though this outside view is interesting, it is ultimately irrelevant to me. We need drives to wish to act upon our environments, to need something external to us to try to shape and mold to a form we choose, yet neither the "before" states, the "after" states, are ultimately real or relevant. The only thing that is truly real is the experience of the attempts and experiences that result in ourselves and others, and finding out or searching why we try to do or experience these events now, and more importantly, why we wish them to remain as templates for experiences of future potential others when what we can imagine for them is flawed and limited compared to what they can imagine and do better without knowledge of us. 99% of 99% of what we know, think, and believe, the "justice" and "rightness" of our (governmental and cultural) systems, is purely flawed, yet we try to strangle future generations with these limited and lack of perceptions, with these unjust and hypocritical "institutions" without daring to throw open the doors and say go for it, beat me, show me why all I know or believe might be wrong, why what I think or these present institutions and types of educations might be irrelevant to or in the future. Lacking of the capacity to do that is why what we think without that in mind becomes truly irrelevant.