Syria – A Low Stakes Affair

I used to think the Syrian conflict would be over by Christmas, but that was several Christmases ago. Now I think it is meant to be a more or less forever thing – for the benefit of some of the world’s major military powers – none of which appear to be capable of or show any great interest in seeing it brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Satisfactory to themselves or anyone else.

I would love to be proved wrong.

I guess the stakes are not high enough. Yet.

“In Mysterious Incident US Military Lost Two MQ-9 Reapers Over Idlib” – video report from Southfront

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You can solve all the world's problems in a garden.
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Tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.
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Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.
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It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
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Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
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Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only.
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Many people today work jobs they don’t like, to buy things they don’t need, so that they can impress people they don’t like. But at the end of life these people will deeply regret spending their lives trying to impress other people. Be humble and seek to impress yourself only. Let other people worry about chasing status. This perspective is extremely liberating.
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What I hear, I forget;
what I see, I remember;
what I do, I understand.
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It is the microbes that will have the last word.
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Society is an anonymous enterprise for living a life of secondhand emotions.
Josephin Peladan 1885

Without a sense of the past and its meaning, without narratives that weave the events of our daily lives into patterns that touch the principles that matter, we lack the essential raw materials of thought, and so our collective reasoning processes, such as they are, spit out the same rehashed nonsolutions over and over again.
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I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
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In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
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...western Health Care... is mostly, a method of social control and a means to generate economic growth.
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The general population doesn't know what is happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know.
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You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.
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Remember that fact and faith are mutually exclusive things. If you have facts you have proof, therefore you don't need faith. Conversely, with no facts there is no proof and faith is needed to believe something. But faith is more emotion than logic, so almost anything can be justified. And that's where the Church gets its power.
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...from nature’s perspective, we’re simply one more species that overshot the carrying capacity of its environment and is about to pay the routine price...
John Michael Greer - The Falling Years: An Inhumanist Vision

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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Money is not what it used to be and not what it seems.
JH Kunstler http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/are-you-going-to-entropy-faire.html

Hope and history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present.
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John Michael Greer
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Knowing many stories is wisdom.
Knowing no stories is ignorance.
Knowing only one story is death.
John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2006/05/knowing-only-one-story.html

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts. The Blight which assails us is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We are more wicked together than separately. If you are ever forced to be in a crowd, then most of all you should withdraw into yourself. Never trust another to do your thinking. Even a maston.
Gideon Penman of Muirwood Abbey - from The Blight of Muirwood (Legends of Muirwood Book 2) by Jeff Wheeler.

Syria – A Low Stakes Affair

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