Last night's dream (edited once again)...

Sometime in the future, a combination of nuclear warfare and cyber attacks have taken down the electrical grid in much of the developed world. Most domestic residences have been abandoned due to the putrefactive stench of spoiling food, untreated water damage and maggot-eaten cadavers. Religious organizations have assembled neo-feudal feifdoms around power generators, ham radios and other remnants of industrial civilization. Churches are the only available food banks and, here, worshippers, admonished over imaginary sins, eagerly trade obedience for "gift boxes" full of mildewed clothing and produce covered with spreading black mold. Public bathrooms, relics of a rapidly fading bureacracy, are avoided as vectors of assault. Babies are routinely abandoned and infanticide gains a resurgence in popularity. Criminal mafias regulate commerce and street gangs adopt the role of police. Although "might-is-right" is the rule of law, small groups unnoticed by the predominant Church-police-mafia network organize around principles of mutual aid without undue attention to social status.

The formerly monolithic military-industrial complex has been privatized as a security firm service for the world's elites, sequestered in facilities shielded from chemical and biotechnological attacks. A subcontractor and "super soldier" for the intelligence community has defected from his employers to lead a small group of us into a deep underground military base. Here, we observe an automated, climate-controlled microcosm of civilization, including dormitories, cafeterias, sewage treatment plants and, absurdly, a library including row upon row of pulp detective novels. I wander away from the group to discover sprawling halls the size of football fields, each containing specialized ecologies functioning as unique climate zones. In the subtropical room, the only evidence that I'm not above ground is a minute glimpse of crystalline ceiling peeking from between layers of dense foliage. Where are the residents of the endlessly spreading facility? Does its lack of human oversight imply an overarching sentience? There is not a living soul as far as the eye can see.

When I wandered into the Barnes and Noble mere hours after the dream ended, greeted by the refrains of Winter Wonderland, my surroundings appeared as the Palace of Versailles when compared to the utter misery of the night before. What are the causes and effects of collective end times dream scenarios? Carissa from in2worlds has speculated that the dreams are intended to romanticize a post-apocalyptic future. Certainly, one of the effects of the growing trend of "disaster entertainment" is to induce identification with the resourceful survivors who weather the storm, with the potential for subsequent empathy loss resulting in little regard for how catastrophic changes may affect said persons' greater community. Are end times dreams thought fragments of a meta-intelligence bent on actualizing widespread societal chaos? Or, more specifically, and even more schizophrenically, the apocalyptic scheming of AIs remotely directed by primeval Archons and augmented by less/greater-than-human thought reformers? This hierarchy of consciousness need not be truly omnipotent, in fact, the effects of its realization may be dependant upon collective perception of its power, whether based in "objective" reality or not.

The possibility is far more engaging than the stale musings of creatively challenged philosophers who would mutter something about archetypes without following Jungian theory to its more fantastical, albeit socially unacceptable, conclusions. Whatever the case, the unavoidable certainty is that the near future holds a dramatic reconfiguration of every sphere of human life, from geography to politics to technology to economics. I still keep up with current events, in large part because of the necessity of documenting the spectacular failure of humanity's narcissistic, ill-fated attempt to conquer the natural world. If this vital task is left incomplete, future generations will have no way to benefit from our mistakes. In any event, the likelihood that the current political economy will continue past the present century without dramatic and sweeping changes is near impossible.

Does the meta-narrative of post-apocalypticism predict the inevitability of catastrophic collapse? Probably, because such a scenario is already occurring for much of the world and the intrinsic inter-connectedness of all things, presaged by Zen Buddhism and rationalized by Chaos theory, inhibits the reductionistic logic of discrete components. Yet, the cyclical nature of the collapse of civilzations also implies an irrevocable loss of privilege for present institutions, such as academic science, organized religion, the nation-state, etc., and the resulting transformation holds the possibility for a far more equitable paradigm inclusive of the majority of society's stakeholders. Whether current generations will repeat the horrific violence of previous revolutions is very much dependant upon whether or not these same societal institutions can adapt to evolving changes and improve their own future trajectory accordingly. Let's hope, for everyone's sake, that they do.

Honduran human rights lawyer murdered hours after declaring charter cities unconstitutional

via Huffington Post:

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — A prominent Honduran human rights lawyer gunned down after a weekend wedding had long complained about death threats, including in documents filed last year seeking protection from a powerful billionaire landowner.

Antonio Trejo Cabrera, 41, who died early Sunday after being ambushed by gunmen, was a lawyer for three peasant cooperatives in the Bajo Aguan, a fertile farming area plagued by violent conflicts between agrarian organizations and land owners. The most prominent is Dinant Corporation owned by Miguel Facusse, one of Honduras' richest men. Thousands of once-landless workers hold about 12,000 acres (5,000 hectares) of plantations they seized from Dinant.

Trejo, who was shot six times after attending a wedding, reported threats in June 2011, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press, including photocopies of a BlackBerry message he received saying: "Trejo, you dog, you have 48 hours to get out or you're dead."...Before his death, Trejo had publicly said that if he were killed, Facusse would be responsible...Honduras, considered to be one of the world's most dangerous countries, is plagued by assassinations of journalists, lawyers and public officials, very few of which are ever prosecuted...More than 60 people, most of them farmers, some of them Facusse employees, have been killed over the past three years in the conflict over the Bajo Aguan Valley, according to activists, police and Facusse's company...Trejo had also helped prepare motions declaring unconstitutional a proposal by the Honduran government and a U.S. company, MGK Group, to build three privately run cities with their own police, laws and tax systems.

Just hours before his murder, Trejo had participated in a televised debate in which he accused congressional leaders of using the private city projects to raise campaign funds.

Also related, via Honduras News:

Honduras signed a deal for an initial investment of 15 million dollars to create the first “Private City” in the country. (Also referred to as “Free Cities”, “Charter Cities”, “Model Cities”, or in Spanish, “RED – Regiones Especiales de Desarollo”, and “Ciudades Modelo”.) The city will be built in Trujillo, in the Department of Colón, where it does not have the full support of the Garifuna people, as they fear that the loss of their land may be on the agenda.

Carlos Pineda, the president of Coalinza, stated that this was not just an agreement, but the most important project for the development of the country in 50 years...Michael Strong, an executive with the MKG Group that was granted this project, stated that the objective is to create a secure and prosperous community for Hondurans....The new Model Cities will have their own police force, and will enlist a highly-reputable policing authority to train police officers and hold the police leadership accountable for fair and effective policing. In addition, there will be an audit committee that is overseen by a Transparency Commission, which is an independent body, with the power to gather and evaluate such information and statistics on crime rate, and the efficiency in handling of crimes by the legal system, as well as police misconduct.

Honduran President Porfirio Lobo appointed the initial members of the Transparency Commission:

George Akerlof - Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, Senior Resident Scholar at the International Monetary Fund, and Nobel Prize Winner
Harry Strachan - Former President of INCAE Business School, Director Emeritus at Bain & Co., and Managing Partner at Mesoamerica Partners and Foundation in Cost Rica
Ong Boon Hwee - Former Chief Operating Officer of Singapore Power and Former Brigadier General in the Singapore Armed Forces
Nancy Birdsall - President and Co-Founder of the Center for Global Development , former Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former Executive Vice President at the Inter-American Development Bank
Paul Romer (Commission Chair) – Professor of Economics at the New York University Stern School of Business



The Cryptogon domain owner dug up a bio about Smart, a libertarian entrepreneur, from Smart's own website:

In order to create an educational system capable of improving the happiness and well-being of humanity, we need to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, government involvement in education at all levels, as well as government restrictions on the free pursuit of whatever occupation one desires. Government financing and regulation of education at all levels prevents the emergence of the more authentic, humane, and effective forms of education that we need. Thus around the world we need to move towards a principled separation of school and state, occupation and state, and research and state.

More information is provided via Climate Connections:

The Afro-indigenous struggle for land against charter cities and mega-tourism

On August 27, the Garífuna human rights organization Fraternal Black Organization of Honduras, OFRANEH and their allies around the world launched the Land Recovery Campaign in the village of Vallecito which, with 2,500 acres, is the largest single landholding of the Garífuna people. There, they are occupying land that has been taken from them to build mega-tourism projects and an autonomous Charter City that is slated for development on the legal and ancestral Garifuna territory. The peaceful occupiers have faced constant intimidation from paramilitary groups, most likely hired by local developers...