Banff Landing

I arrived two nights ago after my seven-hour drive from my home in the West Kootenays. I was worried about feeling distracted being in Banff; after all I spent two decades living and climbing here in the Canadian Rockies. But luckily my friends are busy and the ice is slow in coming in. I have been running up Tunnel Mountain and going to the rock gym at the Sally Borden Centre to get my daily training fix. Sarah Hueniken told me about the new “Playground” for mixed climbing that is just outside of Canmore, and we’ll get out there as soon as we can both clear our schedules.

The writing is going well. I came here with a lot of existing material, in need of a lot of editing. Tony Whittome is my main editor, and he has given me quite a lot of feedback on how to structure my story. As you can imagine, it is a chaotic affair sorting though the contents of one’s psyche, so there’s nothing better than an objective mind throwing in their professional perspective.

The Banff Centre is taking on a whole new slant for me. I have been coming to the mountain film festival here every year without fail since 1992, and I can say that being here on campus as an 'artist' has a completely different feel. I have a wonderful room; complete with king-sized bed and balcony, and a little writing studio in the basement of a different building. There is no view in this room, and it is dead quiet. The only distraction is the piano against the wall, where I can practice my scales and arpeggios whenever I need a break from putting thoughts down in writing.

I started having trouble sleeping about one week prior to coming here, and my insomnia is still in full swing. This gives me lots of extra time to write, especially late at night. I feel like I am running on some sort of adrenaline high, but I hope it wears off soon so I can go back to my normal sleep patterns.

Sovereignty

There’s a lot of talk about sovereignty these days, and with good reason. The fundamental question we all should be asking ourselves is: “Can a country maintain political sovereignty without economic sovereignty?”

When a country enters into free trade agreements, especially more global ones like GATT (as opposed to more regional ones like NAFTA) they are then operating under a supranational organization that supersedes their sovereign right to decide who to trade with and how that trade will be organized. Most citizens have no idea what it will mean when they enter into trade agreements with other countries and regions, including such things as manufacturing jobs and capital investment moving off shore, higher unemployment, a decrease in real wages, etc… It could not be otherwise, and the politicians and corporations who campaigned for and signed these agreements into reality were well aware of this.

For more information I recommend going to YouTube and listening to Sir James Goldsmith’s U.S. Senate speech on November 15th, 1994.

New Blog

Thank you for following my “Beyond Glitter” blog. I have started a new blog, “The Glitter Girls: Adventures for Every Woman”. This new blog will focus on wilderness adventure and its attendant topics: backcountry fashion, training tips, gear selection, etc… I will continue to post my rants about politics and the economy at this blog, so if you like the current information simply stay tuned in to this blog even as you begin to follow my new one. Better yet, subscribe to one or both in a reader or sign up for email notification of new posts.

Opiate Optimism

As you can imagine from reading my blogs I get accused a lot of being a “Doom and Gloomer”. I put this phrase in the same category as “Conspiracy Theorist”, for both of them originated from think tanks whose goal it is to turn potentially powerful movements back onto themselves by using the ignorance of the masses through brainwashing via the mass media. Whenever I see a word being used over and over in the mainstream press I know that it is only a matter of time before the anesthetized public gets a hold of it and hurls it as an accusation against one of their more conscious brethren.
What if everything I write is based on research instead of regurgitated media bits? Have I not then earned the title of ‘Realist’? I can assure you that what you cannot see right now will become common knowledge when the time is right, which usually means “too late for anybody to do anything about it”.
I don’t leave anything to faith. I have no reason to believe that there is any leader or expert out there who is working on solving those problems in the world that either directly affect me, or will soon be affecting me. You can sit around watching the football games, drinking your cans of beer, and I salute the validity of your choices. I grant you your freedom to believe that there are people out there with your best interests in mind, people who will fix all of humanity’s current problems in good time. But I’m laying bets on myself, which is why I have chosen to step out of the way and to live on land that provides me with clean air, pure water, and an abundance of organic food.

Central Banking Warfare Model

Some call it Consumer Capitalism, others the Military Industrial Complex, but no matter how you slice it up it is a very powerful and sophisticated machine that fulfills its agenda through the use of marauding pools of capital that it sends throughout the world to make sure events happen along the lines of its own long-term agenda. It has been going on for decades, centuries even, although the level of sophistication we are seeing in the world today is at an all-time high. It is the very reason that humanity becomes more and more enslaved to a cabal of pirates with each passing moment.

If you control the issuance of currency, along with the ability to make the rules about how it is governed once it is in circulation, it would not take long before you owned everything in the world. That is why a famous bankster uttered the truism: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws"

The game is hardly subtle, yet very few people can connect the dots to make a picture complete enough for them to see what is really going on. I find that it is instructive to ask oneself some very obvious questions:

If most every country in the world is in debt, as well as each country’s citizenry, then who are we all indebted to?
If we renege on these debts, either personally or nationally or globally, what is it that we must forfeit as collateral?
How can it be that one generation ago a single bread winner with a grade 8 education could easily support a wife and four children in a nice suburban neighborhood, while today you need both parents to be working professionals just to stay afloat with skyrocketing expenses?
When the stock market goes down, where did all of the wealth that was previously there go?

It’s game on, and time to ask yourself what the end game is. If you are not aware of how the world’s wealth is managed and manipulated, chances are you are financing the very system that is determined to make you an indentured servant and, I would argue, already has.

The Passivity of Hope

Hope breeds passivity beyond comprehension as the multitudes sit idly by awaiting some higher power to take care of things for them. We have been asleep at the wheel for far too long, and now that it is time for action the world is placing all of its eggs in a basket called hope. Even Obama counseled his countrymen that there would have to be sacrifices made, and hard work to be done, by all. But a country so lulled by its own magnificence still believes in the old paradigm that the world taxation system is still in full swing and will continue to bring in the riches of the globe. We refuse to see the current tide of change at our own peril, for instead of taking the bull by the horns and creating the world that we desire, we are standing down while the very people who created this mess tell us that they can get us out of it. I say it is time to place your hope for change in yourself, not some outside icon. If there was ever a time when the powers that be are not going to come to your rescue, it is now. The greatest opportunity to create something new, something that works for more than the military-industrial elite and its entourage of a few complicit first-world countries, is upon us. This is our chance to align our consciousness along the lines of higher principles, to live up to our potential as human beings, not brainwashed remote-controlled automatons. It is time to wake up to the reality that there is going to be no more free ride, not for America, and not for the world. We are all going to have to work hard if we want to avoid allowing ourselves to descend into the depths of our own worst nightmare for humanity at large. Those who do not know are responsible for their ignorance; those who do are responsible for idly standing by.

Death of America

What you are now witnessing is something most people of this epoch thought impossible: America is dying a slow and protracted death. It could have happened faster, but the genies of market management have all but mastered the art of manipulating economic pumps and dumps from behind the scenes to an ever unsuspecting public. The media has successfully boondoggled people into thinking that economics is far too complex a topic for their understanding, so they are given sports scores and cheap beer to assuage their inferior intellects instead of the facts that could enlighten them to the reality of economic warfare. In retrospect, people will not be able to believe how they missed all of this careful orchestration, how they sat idly by waiting for their experts and leaders to swoop in and save them from the fruits of their own over –indulgence. Lucky for the universe the laws of cause and effect are still in full swing and no amount of mass denial will change this fact. You are witnessing an historic event, the death of an empire, but you will miss it if you remain asleep at the wheel.