"It don't really matter to me baby, everybody's had to fight to be free."
Tom Petty

Don't anger the Arab world, they will blow you up, rig gas prices, set off dirty bombs, torture your prisoners until they are dead. Who are we kidding here? Everyone knows the Soprano mentality by now. This weeks show showed someone calling a mobster gay. He was beaten half to death. It's like a disease, violent fevor, the whole world has it.

However, let us not pretend for a second that anyone is the opressor or anyone the opressed. In the end we are all refugees. America was founded by refugees, as long as ten thousand years ago refugees came here over the Bering Straight in Alaska. Is which refugee got here first all that important? Does it really give us a right to be angry when people migrate? Can we expect less than violence when people are running out of common ground?

Let's talk about empire, slavery, and cultural dominance. Sure, it's all relative, I think my job is slave wages and in China I'd be rich. But everyone knows what a real slave is. Still, a case can be made that todays public school is a modern slave auction, with our children graded like cattle. We are products of empire after empire which has planned dominance for the hell of it .But again, let us not pretend each culture does not rule it's own hatred.

And for whatever it's worth, this guy who runs this country is not good enough to be called a putz. But, have you seen what others pass for leadership?

So if you ask me, which came first, Arab violence or unfair American attack, the chicken is in the egg, we all have our reasons. But, for the last time do not pretend for a second that it's us or the other guy who started it, these things are born together, like spontaneous combustion.

We are all refugees, clashing on the continents of the world, vying for a small space to put our dreams, We are all residents of an empire, U.S., Arab, Brittish, which vies and will always vie for dominance. So don't tell me that no one would hate America if we didn't fight or use resources, because America is just a concept that could and has and will be duplicated again and again. People multiply, they move, they fight, they have peace for a while, they fight again. It may not be heaven, it may not be right in our minds, but the chicken is the egg and why doesn't matter.

So we can all stop breeding and wars will end, or we can all start our cylce of peace and it may last a short while. But don't pretend history hasn't shown you that someone would try to fuck it all up somewhere. And don't blame nature for the last part of her cycle, death, for without death in winter, there are no spring chickens.

The true war occurring is a war between the reptile mind and our higher-mammalian potential. The human brain is the product of a evolutionary process that has spanned ages, from being reptiles, to lower mammals, to higher mammals. Though many people don't realize it, the reptile that once scuttled along a rock eating bug is still with it, living as a tenant in the human body. What I mean by this is that the brain structure that we see in reptiles is still resting at the base of the human brain, and has changed very little in structure in spite of all the other evolutionary advantages that we have developed. The midbrain and cerebral cortex, which instill us with traits such as reason, empathy, and nurturance, have "grown around" the reptile brain, like the caramel around a candy apple.

The reptile mind is living in all people, at all times. It instills us with a conviction that the nature of humankind is predatory: basically, it says, "for one person to win, another must lose. Trust no one, obey fear, get them before they get you," etc. Propagandists who seek to focus society on dominance-obsession appear to have such an easy job of it because the inner reptile in each of us is so compliant with this kind of programming. It is such an old fixture in human consciousness, its presence is actually more "natural" (in a biological sense) than traits like love, trust, or the conscience.

Other resources:

from page 48 of "Transforming the Mind" by Peter Shepherd:

"It should be no surprise that most people, most of the time, are controlled more by the older reptilian-mammalian programs than by the human semantic (rational) program, or that the semantic program is so easily perverted into false logics (bigotries, intolerant ideologies, fanaticisms of all sorts) when the bio-survival program signals threat to life or the emotional program flashes threat to status."

source: http://www.trans4mind.com/transformation/Transforming_the_Mind.pdf
(Note: you need Adobe to view this file.)

Here is another segment from a Joseph C. Pearce interview on the radio program "Thinking Allowed"

"All right. We have three brains in our skulls, not one, and they're three uniquely separate, distinct brain structures, those developed throughout all evolutionary history on earth. We have a reptilian brain, which includes our spinal cord and the brain stem, which is identical to the brain found in all reptiles. We just have a little bit bigger one, a slightly more elaborate one, but essentially the same structure. That's our sensorimotor brain, Jeffrey, as you well know. And superimposed on that is the great limbic structure, which we share with all mammals, and that's our emotional-cognitive brain, that handles emotional energies. Now, emotional energy proves to be the most awesome thing in the universe. Emotional energy is the energy that hold all patterns in their pattern form, that relates everything together in our life. Emotional energy pulls everything into its formal relationship and maintains all relationship.

Source: http://www.intuition.org/txt/pearce.htm

There are always more than two sides to every fight.

There's the side, within each side, that desires the fighting to stop.

There are two kinds of brawls. The kind where the friends break up the fight, and the kind where the friends stand back and let the two combatants fight. Pick a side in that dichotomy.

No victory is decisive, except a victory for extended peace. No loss is decisive, except the loss of peace, and the extended war.