The Occupy Wall Street movement is now two months old and spread all around the planet. It's exciting stuff. This civilization of ours has been in the process of collapse for three decades but it's now accellerating rapidly... toward what I believe will be a much better way of life for at least half the people on the planet.

Unfortunately, because of misunderstanding of the system, it could quite possibly mean the end of life for many people. Those who die in this global revolution will have died uselessly. They will have died because they chose to fight the wrong battle against the wrong enemy.

I find it fitting that one of the crises converging on us here in Southwestern Ontario is a bedbug epidemic. Some blame climate change (of course), for not producing cold enough winters to kill off the bugs. Others talk about not being allowed to use enough pesticides to keep the bedbugs under control: a direct consequence of whining and lobbying by tree-hugging anti-pesticide environmentalists in this commie-loving province of ours.

I know differently. I know that bedbugs, like all other parasites, have a place in nature. They have a a real ecological purpose and this world wouldn't work properly without them.

The word “Jasper” means “treasure.” We chose our baby's name before we knew he was a boy, and we never even thought up a name for a girl. This is a funny story because a girl would have been a surprise, but a child with a birth defect called Down syndrome – and the “life sentence” that goes with that diagnosis – was something for which I was completely unprepared.

There's a permaculture principle that says the problem is the solution. In fact, your biggest problem in life is actually the key to achieving your most important goal.

My naturopath saved my life a few years ago. I was a stressed-out mess and I didn't know where to turn anymore and my naturopath cared about me and gave me attention and yummy things. I didn't begrudge a single dollar of the thousands that it ended up costing over the long haul of supplements and meridian balancing and the rest of the woo-woo.
But now I can solve my health problems for (almost) free

Some of us have been waiting most of our lives for a huge change to occur in our unsustainable civilization. We began to despair that it would never happen. We knew that the situation was unsustainable, but we still had to live our lives as though getting a good job in order to be able to afford products was the only option. Never mind pursuing our individual life's purpose. Sometimes we got sad, because the big shift never came and all that waiting time ended up being our life itself (to paraphrase John Lennon).

Well, now that I'm an official whacko with whacko fans and everything, I can admit that I personally believe that civilization is in the final stages of collapse. I can admit that I think that Carl Calleman and Ian Xel Lungold really are onto something and that we are on a sort of cosmic schedule toward an amazing, purposeful existence. Really soon.

The great irony of life is that most of us spend most of it completely missing the point. And that's the point!