Permaculture will be the next topic on this blog. Before getting into it, I want to write out an analysis of what is happening on this planet of ours so that the subject I'll be addressing afterward is a little clearer. This blog keeps drifting in directions we never planned, and more than a journey through Asia, it is turning into A JOURNEY THROUGH THE LIFE OF PLANET EARTH! Looking closely at what is happening right now, in the twenty-first century, we see wars being stoked by the same people who control the world's great money: oil magnates, bankers who steal with the full license and backing of governments and corrupt politicians, and so on. Where are we headed? I don't see a decent future anywhere except away from the economic system as we have known it, the one we naively assumed would just keep working forever. But the illusion that marketing (more sophisticated today than ever) sells us, that by working harder, logging more and more hours, and enslaving ourselves to big capital we will achieve a life of pleasure, comfort, and security, well, some of us are simply no longer buying it! There are brave people like Assange, Manning, and others, risking their lives and sacrificing positions that were, in some cases, genuinely privileged, in order to expose the atrocities committed against anyone who dares oppose the order established by the powerful, the mafia, and even fanatical religious groups. All of it in pursuit of more money, more power, but for a handful of people only! A world that seemed like pure fiction when we read Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and others who in their time could already see what was coming. Much like Jules Verne's novels, which were also visionary in their day. Today those futurist novelists look like they didn't go nearly far enough, and if we don't commit as a society to changing everything, we are heading toward a totalitarian world that most people can't even begin to imagine. Because when what you want is to enslave the masses without putting chains on them or locking them behind bars, you have to convince them that they are free. There are no prisoners more loyal to their jailers than those who cannot see the bars! But let me ask you: doesn't freedom mean being able to go where you want, however you can manage it? That is what freedom meant to me. But if in order to go where I want and how I can, I have to stand in lines, explain my finances to strangers, declare who I am and recount my entire life, well, that no longer fits within any definition of freedom I recognize. Of course, the majority of people have to work so hard just to keep their families afloat that they have no time to read, to reflect, much less to pay attention to what is actually going on. Because many people don't know that not so long ago you could travel freely with almost no paperwork, disembark or cross borders that were nearly nonexistent, and live or wander wherever you pleased. But these new generations have been sold so thoroughly on the idea of becoming famous, appearing in a YouTube video, being on Google. Posting photos and sharing them with the world, and what could be better than putting everything you do, think, want, and experience on social networks like Facebook? How clever of those who dreamed up this form of control that even manages to seem fun, that makes us feel we can share our own little world with the entire world. Remarkable genius on the part of those who understand how important it is for most people to share, to show off, to boast, and even to lie through these channels. Some people even constructing the lives they don't have and have come to think they'll never reach. Is this what we call living? To me, this is living inside THE MATRIX! But beware: when you say this to uninformed people (the majority) and advise them to encrypt their emails and protect themselves, they answer that they have nothing to hide, they're not doing anything wrong, so why would they need to conceal anything. Can't they see that the "lunatics like Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, and so many others" keep appearing, repeating mass murder under whatever pretext they fabricate at the time? And that we still have their kind among our leaders and politicians, only now they're less obvious about it? They even pretend to fool us with that famous Democracy, dressed up as dictatorship in disguise. If that isn't the case, then why does the world keep producing more and more weaponry designed to kill human beings who are inconvenient to THE SYSTEM OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER? Who manufactures and sells arms to "THE BAD GUYS," and, ultimately, WHO ARE THE BAD GUYS? I'll write more on all of this, but what I want to ask of you today is that you look into what PERMACULTURE (a design philosophy for living sustainably with the land) is actually about. It is something that could change the world peacefully, if it spreads. It is about living with ETHICS (which is not the same as the values imposed by those in power) and applying that ethic to the human beings we deal with, trying to help one another. But all of this while giving value to what truly has it: THE EARTH, or as they would say on the Pampa, LA PACHAMAMA (Mother Earth)! No more battering the planet in the pursuit of profit through MONOCULTURES that slowly exhaust the soil until they kill it, all in order to produce at massive scale. Because with yet another story like the ones I've already mentioned, they told us that in order to feed the planet they had discovered genetic modification of seeds. True enough: MONSANTO HAS THE MONOPOLY ON FOOD. They buy governments, they poison us, selling and cross-contaminating the seeds of anyone who doesn't use theirs. In Mexico there are "THE SEED GUARDIANS," indigenous people who, without being particularly educated in the formal sense, have far more common sense and can see exactly what is happening. We all need to support and protect them, and to stop buying seeds that come from the U.S. (unless they come from small farms or companies genuinely and seriously committed to this earth and everyone who lives on it). Nearly everything we find in supermarkets is over-processed and, for the most part, comes from monocultures of genetically modified seeds. My son has been encrypting his emails and using free software for many years now, and he let all of us who are lucky enough to know him in on what was happening. That we are being watched, listened to, and even photographed through our modern devices like the iPad and iPhone, and that if we as a society don't do something about it, we will lose our freedom entirely. For years he has been teaching anyone who showed an interest (entirely without charge) how to use free software and how to better protect their phones as well. Past generations paid a very high price to win certain freedoms, but the brainwashing inside our society has been steadily turning its members into zombies. Will we let them strip away our freedom while dressing their measures up as security? They make us believe that the people who have the least are the ones robbing us. But if that were true, they wouldn't still be so screwed, would they? We need to protect ourselves from the obscene wealth that certain people accumulate in just a few years. We need to ask ourselves where it comes from, and distance ourselves from people who produce nothing that benefits society in any way. Be wary of people who appear to have everything and want for nothing, because they always want more. Because hoarding and speculating with wealth, while we live in a POOR world, is just as criminal as killing someone with a weapon!

Sanuk