*2012, Peak Oil, and Prospects for the Autism Spectrum*

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In 2012 Uranus returns to its October 1929 position, ( that of the Stockmarket Crash and the Great Depression ), in Aries, after 83 years travelling through the other 11 signs. Aries is the sign of new beginnings. This time it will be in a square to Pluto, in Capricorn, ( last time it was in square to Saturn, in Capricorn ). Capricorn stands for temperance, responsibility, sober restriction.

Pluto symbolises underground forces/energy. ...

In 1929 Neptune was in Virgo, the sign of discrimination, of sorting the wheat from the chaff. This time it will be in Pisces, which represents sacrifice, universality, and dissolving of boundaries.

I suggest that this Uranus return will correspond with the event called Peak Oil, the moment when extraction and production of Petroleum becomes more expensive than its energy value, and which has been variously predicted by experts as due in 2008-2012, ( the most pessimistic ), or 2030 or thereabouts, according to the more optimistic.

Pluto could be said to represent oil/petroleum, as it is an energy from underground. And its position in Capricorn, ( during this Uranus return ), could be said to indicate that restriction will be in order. Petroleum has been the world's most important source of energy since the 1950's.

Okay, here I leap a bit. People on or near the Autism spectrum are hyper-sensitive, ( see Emma Ashwin's recent study on almost preternatural visual acuity in AS, among other things ). We also think a lot about things, whereas many/most NTs seem happy to live without considering and analysing all the time.

I think that we may be a bit like intestinal villi, digesting material and absorbing/transforming it into our/the human social body. Scientists, many of whom are AS, are perhaps like the sense organs of the human social body, but many AS digest and/or absorb, and spend a lot of their time and energy on it.

For the last 50 years, ( or more ), we seem to have been increasingly treated like foreign bodies, alien, as if we were the villi in someone with coeliac disease, which are attacked by their body's own immune system/defences, when they are exposed to gluten. The repeated attacks gradually flatten them out, so they can no longer do their job, leading to diarrheoa, among other things.

I am proposing that perhaps petroleum is to the human social body as gluten is to a coeliac's body, and that people on or near the spectrum are suffering particularly from the effects of petroleum, ( vastly increased noise, almost constant exposure to chemicals, much haste/speed, rapid changes, hypermobility, etc etc, etc ) .

And in the same way as a coeliac's intestinal villi only recover when gluten is excluded, perhaps the coming exclusion/drying up of petroleum will enable us to recover our strength and resume our normal functioning as highly sensitive digesters and absorbers for the human social body.

The effect of Peak Oil will be like going on a fast/exclusion diet, with the associated withdrawal symptoms, ( Neptune in Pisces indicating sacrifice etc ), followed by a quieter, slower, less chemically saturated world.

or ...
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Last edited by ouinon on 15 Jan 2009, 10:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

People on the autism spectrum may be like cells in the parts of the body which are attacked by auto-immune reactions when the body consumes too much of something which it is allergic to/intolerant of.

That is not just the intestinal villi, but also the liver, ( to do with cleaning the blood etc, removing pollution ), the thyroid, ( to do with rates/speeds of activity, energy levels, reactivity, etc ), the kidneys, ( to do with filtering ), and other essential organs, which develop auto-immune disorders.

It may not be an accident that many more AS suffer from auto-immune problems than the general population.

It could be that AS are expressing with their bodies their experience of the reaction of the human social body towards parts of itself when the body is exposed to something, like petroleum, to which it is perhaps fundamentally "allergic", ( not in a physical sense so much as in the way its excessive consumption affects society ).

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Mercury Rx has your natal Mercury, Uranus and Pluto in overdrive ouinon...with currently transiting Saturn-Uranus opposition only adding fuel to the fire. It's hard to keep up with the intense analysis of your brain as it approaches the lightspeed barrier! which conceivably may be less impossible for some of us after Mercury goes direct again.

Having doubts about my capacity to sort out the profundities of your ground breaking ideas..I remain limited at this time to some rather unspectacular commentary..

While the general idea is amazing, I got distracted by some details in particular...for instance Pisces representing sacrifice, universality and the dissolving of boundaries...that is an excellent summation. Virgo being the sign of discrimination [can we add 'precision' to that?] also of mental processing and ruling intestinal assimilation.

Your remark that following our withdrawal symptoms we will have a quieter, slower, less chemically saturated world---I can only hope this will be the case. According to my prognostication it will be decades before we wind down and calm down. And I see no evidence that the stresses we are currently experiencing will be abating any time soon. If we are to transform our heightened states of stress into heightened states of consciousness, it looks as though the transition stage involves varying degress of going beserck for most of us. And following that transformation IMO it will take at least a generation to become stabilized and well adjusted. Not to mention it may take our planet considerably longer to heal from the environmental devastation we are inflicting upon it.

As regards the nature of petroleum, I personally find it repugnant and disgusting. Drained engine oil is especially unpleasant. Many people have allergies to petroleum derived products which are in just about everything. I am deathly allergic to diesel exhaust and have been known to pass out from inhaling its fumes...ack..

Hey, Virgo is the sign of discrimination...? That's what my mum is, and she discriminates against me all right. And the ruling planet of Virgo is Mercury, which is a deadly poison that drives you insane then kills you dead.

That had nothing to do with anything, just my random observations, LOL.

Astrology is utter and complete nonsense.

ruveyn

Thank you very much.


Yes, I didn't mean to stress the physical/purely chemical aspect of intolerance to petroleum, but I have read that many people have acute/visible reactions to it, ranging from mild to severe, to plastics aswell, and even pine/fir tree sap. ie: allergies to pine-scented air-fresheners, ( because petroleum is pine trees compressed over millions of years ), and to kreosote on fences, etc. And there are probably many more who don't even know that they are suffering from habitual, chronic, reactions to it.

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Crude comes from a diversity of plants and animals and not only from pine trees--is what i always thought.....According to the Energy Information Administration, Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government: "Crude oil is formed from the remains of plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago."
www.eia.doe.gov

You're right. I read the connection made a while back between allergies to pine and to petroleum on that basis, but as you say it is a mixture. It is mainly coal, and only certain inland fossil-fuel-fields, which are the compressed remains of pine and giant fern; the majority of oil/petroleum sources are several 100 million year old layers of phytoplankton and other dead sea plants and animals.

It's weird to think that in 100 years people may talk about the 20th century ( plus a bit ) as "The 100 years of petroleum, ( and plastic )", and of the social changes engendered by that and the internal combustion engine as a turbulent transition period, ( to cleaner, more sustainable energy-use ), during which certain groups suffered from the "fast-everything" consumer-culture which resulted from it.

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How are allergies and autoimmune diseases different?

It seems that while we on the spectrum are being attacked by the metaphorical immune system of the human social body.....we, in turn, are allergic to the human social body itself. So there's this other side of the assimilation process. We are being attacked as the villi are attacked in Celiac Disease. But if the villi were allergic to the body's immune system, it might cause the immune system to see the villi as invaders. Does that make any sense? It may be helpful to explore this dynamic in some detail.

When our immune system attacks our own body, it's very similar to what a bully does, except in that case the bully is an integral part of us. It's the epitome of an internal conflict.

Socially, externally, bullies aren't just picking us off for being more susceptible to the negative influences of fast everything consumer culture [although being irritable may cause them to search for scapegoats]. They primarily target us because (1) we aren't friendly and appear to be self-absorbed. Our attempts at clothing ourselves in emotional suits of armor don't insulate us from attack as we've planned, and only serve to further our despair.

Autistics become the targets of bullies because (2) we are vulnerable. And their radar is set to seek and destroy [torment] the vulnerable. It isn't necessarily our mental, physical and emotional sensitivity that makes us vulnerable. Nor our tendency to over-analyze everything. What makes us vulnerable is (3) our lack of willingness to play by the rules, especially the pecking order rules. (4) It's also the awkward, fearful, resentful, ungracious, untactful [any of the above] ways in which we communicate that unwillingness.

We especially can't handle, or don't handle well, being backed into a corner. And we require more personal space than most NTs. When backed into a corner, we can often feel like cornered wild animals....which we then feel compelled to hide while our own immune systems are flailing about, frantically fighting off the invaders....So when we finally escape to our sanctuary, we can lick our wounds, collapse in exhaustion..and slowly, very very slowly, regain our composure as our immune systems recuperate. Thus we have shown how we are allergic to social interaction.

Apparently autistics in general, demand a more level playing field. We hate being judged. Also, we are suspicious of people who don't think for themselves and/or think things through sufficiently to separate themselves from the herd mentality - not just occasionally - but on a regular basis. We are wired differently from NTs but we may also be allergic to them....until we find an effective strategy with which to confront them and successfully engage with them.

Ignoring bullies rarely works. By default I found a way around the bullies' seek and torment radar, and also a way of avoiding becoming offfensive to NTs even while still refusing to play the games. It is through sending out extremely clear and unambiguous signals of intent. Such clear signals, when communicated in a friendly non-threatening way, are not only well understood by NTs but that kind of signal will also earn their respect. The bonus is that this is what pack leaders do, those at the top of the NT pecking order.

Clear intent is a very important leadership quality. And it helps in every way to make one's life simpler and easier while jumping through the social hoops. Clear intent makes for less hoops, less requirement to jump through them, and much less or no bullying. While signaling clear intent to others, what is happening on an unconscious level is that clearly delineated boundaries are being set--the mental equivalent of inpenetrable 3 foot thick concrete walls. The opposite of Neptunian confusion and the Piscean dissolving of boundaries There is a time and a place for the dissolving of boundaries and it is absolutely not in the presence of strangers and bullies.

We on the autism spectrum have been taught that we don't fit in. And if we didn't get it as young children, by the time the school system has done with us, it's drummed in ad nauseum......We've learned we can't meet expectations and many of us give up trying to do so. Feeling like outcasts, realizing we will never fit in, we unconsciously project total confusion and abhorence of social settings. Our boundaries are fuzzy and our intentions unclear. It's from difficult to impossible for us to mask our fear when we have had negative social experiences pounded into us until we accepted the fact that we are sub-par.

Nevertheless few of us really believe we are sub-par. We just play along with it because we've learned that is what's expected of us. It's a self defeating, self perpetuating dynamic. There's no way we can win unless we throw the whole thing overboard.

Without realizing it, that's what the more successful of us have done - thrown our social conditioning overboard. I only came to it by default through sincerely wanting to avoid alienating my acquaintances.

In coeliac disease it is the presence of gluten which causes the body's immune system to attack the villi.

As far as I am aware the villi do not respond ( very much ) to the rest of the body as such, ( except that apparently when the body has enough protein to be going on with the villi cut back on protein/amino-acid absorption ).

The role of villi is principally that of "collecting", digesting, and absorbing those things/food molecules in the intestines which they are programmed to consider useful.

In that sense you could say that they are relatively unconcerned with what the rest of the body is getting up to, except for conveying material to it, and are mainly interested in material/"data" coming from "outside" the body.

However this food/material will already have undergone significant processing by other organs by the time it reaches them, processing which will depend on the general state of the body, ( a stomach ulcer or stress will increase acidity, low saliva production for whatever reason will mean more undigested starch, etc ).

So you could say that the villi have to deal with, "digest", the body's condition aswell as the food, but at one or two removes, indirectly, through the state of the food when it reaches them.

In comparison even skin is more directly responsive to the general body state, with far more two way interaction with the rest of the body, ( I think ).

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Last edited by ouinon on 17 Jan 2009, 2:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Perhaps the autism spectrum corresponds with the whole digestive process from mouth, ( taste buds, saliva production which breaks down starches, and absorbs simple sugars ), through the stomach, ( breakdown of proteins, but no absorption at all, apart from caffeine, aspirin and alcohol anyway ), to the small intestine which does less digestion but almost all the absorption.

( "Body" language ) indications that digestion could be their role are that AS are often picky eaters, suffer from a lot of GERD, ( gastric acid reflux ), and have a higher than average number of food intolerances.

A frantically "consumer culture" is almost bound to have a drastic effect on AS if digestion and absorption is the role of AS in the human social body, ( which at the moment seems to be suffering from serious diarrhoea ).
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Last edited by ouinon on 17 Jan 2009, 4:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Been reading about the intestines, ( shocked and embarrassed to realise how much I didn't/don't know ), and found this :

"Embedded in the intestinal wall at 2 levels are two layers of nerve cells, called the myenteric plexus and the submucosal plexus, which operating together comprise what is in effect an independent subdivision of the autonomic nervous system, the so-called enteric division."

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Apparently small glands in the first part of the small intestine, ( the duodenum ), called Brunner's Glands, secrete an " alkaline material to neutralise the acidic chyme" entering from the stomach, to protect the villi from being digested along with the food.

Even so "billions" of epithelial/intestinal membrane cells from the villi are shed daily, "making up as much as half of the fecal mass".

I had no idea that digestion was so "violent", ( not just for the food but for our own cells ). Excessive secretion of stomach acids, as a result of large meals or constant snacks/"grazing" etc, causes more damage.

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While I'm skeptical about astrology, I think it's a result of confirmation bias, where people will make a sufficiently vague prediction and then find something that seems to fit after the fact (or take a sufficiently vague scientific prediction and try to map it in the stars).

That being said, Peak Oil is a very real concern. While we certainly won't actually run out of oil for many decades, possibly centuries, it will soon be impossible to pump it out of the ground fast enough to meet demand. Hopefully we'll be able to switch energy sources quickly enough, however I should make it a point to say that a government study showed that it would take 20 years to fully switch.

The 2012 date also seems to have some importance. Peak Oil could hit then, another possibility is the Earth getting hit by a massive solar flare (2012 is supposed to contain a particularly violent solar flare cycle).

An interesting third possibility is a technological singularity. If someone can build a computer smart enough to build a slightly smarter computer, you've just created the last invention mankind will ever have to make.

I just found an interesting site about Peak Oil, at:

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

and the discussion forum that goes with it at:

http://www.doomers.us/forum2/

and there is also:

http://www.transitiontowns.org/ which has lots of positive suggestions about how best to approach the changes we will face.

It is beginning to look very real.

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That Oil Crash website-I've seen it before-looks like it's trying to sell something, either dried food or books. The American doomsday milieu is full of scam artists. "The dollar will soon become worthless, so buy my pre-1933 gold coins at a 30% markup over today's spot price, which will soon be a bargain!" Of course, the massive markup goes directly into the hawker's pocket as profit.

Other people sell self-published books that supposedly tell you how to survive the crash. Usually the books are worthless as information goes and exist to pad the writer's pocketbook. There are a few legit survival manuals, including the SAS Survival Manual, but most of the survival books floating around have little value. Some people sell dried food, or storable food like wheat grain or white beans. The stuff tastes awful and/or requires extensive milling/cooking, which would be difficult without fuel for cooking.

In the 1970s the Mormons would stock up on wheat, and then buy something called a Magic Mill to render it edible. Not only did the Magic Mill run on 120v AC wall current (where will the electricity come from?), it produced a form of cracked wheat cereal that was edible only in the technical sense. Many apostates who grew up in the 70s still remember that awful wheat cereal they were forced to eat.

Americans tend to have wildly unrealistic ideas about how to survive a depression or energy crisis, they are usually several generations removed from the family farm and have zero clue how to raise their own food. Most Americans can't even change a flat tire on their cars, they will wait on the side of the road for somebody to save them, sometimes for hours on end. I would take any American survival site with a huge mountain of doubt. You're French, so you likely don't know anything about the "survival industry" in the US that rests on odd assumptions and half-facts.