The Shift of Ages Series #11: Having a Fata Morgana Vision of the Future
Hello everysoul!
As we are entering a new year, and leaving behind a whole decade, it is usually a good moment to take stock of what happened and what we are heading into...
As the title of this compilation implies - Having a Fata Morgana Vision of the Future [Fata Morgana is a unique optical effect which, under certain conditions, allows us to see what is just beyond the horizon, as it's explained HERE], from the vantage position of Here and Now and with a little bit of intuitive insight and a fairly large bit of informational hindsight, it is possible to have a vision of what lies ahead. Of course, no one has a perfectly prophetic crystal ball to see in crisp details what the future will be – and who would like to have all the excitement of uncertainty borne of our free will to be taken out of the visionary equation anyway? – but it is always interesting to consider various speculative possibilities.
Are we headed for a catastrophic crash of everything or for some golden paradise with everything spoon-fed to us? As it usually goes, the true answer most certainly lies in between those 2 extremes. Nothing totally extraordinary will happen and yet something truly wonderful is going to happen. The trends set in motion will run their course - so what will happen can theoretically be predicted and it will thus be nothing out of the "ordinary"– but do we fully grasp the repercussions of all the current trends at play?... – which would indeed leave the door open for something really amazing to happen - ...most of which can be deciphered only by the most well informed, spiritually tuned-in observers.
We are experiencing one of the most exhilarating soul Journeys that this living universe has to offer right now to its inhabitants and we are lucky enough to have front row seats to what's happening – and many even have a direct hand in shaping things, which to me involves most if not all the subscribers to this list and certainly all those who have made a commitment over the past few years to studiously participate into the ongoing globally transformative soul communions that are proposed through this channel. To me that's were the real "action" is right now and it has nothing to do with "normal" thinking, low-balling everyday consciousness but everything to do with the New reality that is gradually dawning on us from the higher end of the vibrational scale of this multidimensional universe. You won't read any written report on what transpires during those momentous trek into the higher dimension for what happens there usually stays there... not because we cannot report back on it but because words and often conscious memory consistently fail us to properly describe what happens during these soul Journeys. Yet it is just, if not even MORE real than what happens in this 3D "reality".
So at this stage, all I feel like adding is hang on to your seats, and take an even more proactive stance as we enter the most turbulent AND exciting rapids of change any humanoid civilization has gone through in a long while and for many parsecs around.
There is no need to wish for anything other that a full realization of What Is and Who We Are... which is precisely what I wish for all of us now. ;-)
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IMPORTANT SUGGESTION
I received the following feedback from Lou Bognon (lou@loubognon.com) about the latest Meditation Focus #219: Anchoring and Co-manifesting Christic Consciousness (next Sunday January 2 is the 2nd of 4 global meditations on this theme): "Thank you beloved and as always I just love it. Would like to give you an unsolicited suggestion though for this one and all of them in the part where you always state for the next "every week for the next four weeks" etc add somewhere "and every single day" ... For indeed this is not a work any serious and dedicated soul can do only once a week but in fact every single instant or at least every day for a few hours/minutes. Ascension is only possible as and when we are all able to sustain and hold our awareness in every now firmly anchored in our Divine Christ Presence. It takes effort devotion and dedication to gain an ascended state and not just once a week as we all well know. Having the reach you do I have wanted to tell you this for a long time as our collective work has to come from a place of being the living example of a daily application of all we have learnt."
And my reply was:
This is an excellent suggestion and will weave it in as a stand alone permanent recommendation inserted after the current note in the summary section... something like...
Special Suggestion
As we enter the last 2 year stretch before the culmination of years of individual and collective training and clearing to prepare the spiritual ground for the transdimensional shift that is set to happen around the end of 2012, and as we focus ever more intently upon the key goals we have each chosen to achieve by then, it is incumbent upon each soul to make a point to not only dedicate time and attention to a collective spiritual practice such as what is being done during our weekly assemblies to elevate our souls as One in focused communion of intent and purpose around the suggested themes, but also to gradually bring our entire field of thinking and feeling in synchronistic alignment, in every waking moment, with the Higher Will of Creator Source we aim to serve every time we meditate globally, as One with All That is. Thus we shall remain aware that every day, every hour, every minute and every second is a sacred opportunity to further Be-come Who We Are. To facilitate an ever greater awareness of this full-time commitment, you may wish to use the Golden Moment of At-Onement, daily, at the top of any hour, or whenever it better suits you, as suggested in the Meditation Times section below.
TO WHICH LOU REPLIED: "PERFECT beloved - Thank You!!!!!! So happy you can insert such an addition as it is indeed most pressing at this hour that those of us already awake stay so - long enough - to be the living examples for those still looking for their bearings... Been reading the Ascended Masters teachings on energy exchange, i.e. what we do with what we have been given and it is clear that for those of us working towards ascension in this lifetime, daily application of the gifts they have taught us and in the moment correction of our patterns of thought word feeling and action is an imperative for any sustained progress on the Path... back to LIGHT."
WORTH NOTING RIGHT AWAY
Celebrate our ONENESS this New Year for 11 minutes at midnight (locally) on January 1st http://www.ekataa.net/
EKATAA is an invitation to every individual on Earth to light up the world in celebration of the unity we share as human beings and 'sound' as one on 1.1.11 at 00:00 hours (or at 11am) of respective countries. Credit 11 minutes of your Thought-sound to the World Account of Human Oneness on 1.1.11. CHECK ALSO World Meditation/Planetary Transmission An Action of Great Love January 1, 2011
Note from Jean: I don't usually share the content of my dreams with others - except with those closest to my heart - but I had such a compellingly powerful, quasi prophetic dream at the end of my night's sleep, Thursday morning January 30, and it ties up so clearly with what is announced below, that I'll make an exception and share with you all some relevant elements from it here. Take it as a foreboding, a most auspicious sign on the year of 2011. In this dream, which in my dreaming feeling was set in the near future in the linear time continuum, the whole planet was in the midst of an almost ecstatic celebration and the mood and deep feeling of nearly everyone on Earth was one of jubilant elation. The yoke of darkness had been lifted. Formal first contact had been achieved and, as I recall, a wise man with white short hairs was speaking on TV to a worldwide audience as one of the representatives of the highly advanced civilizations which had recently come to our assistance and were making good on the promises often repeated through various earthly channels to help us fix the many environmental ills of our world, and do much MUCH more to help us all evolve. That's all I wish to share on this dream, but it had such a reality-quality to it and our collective outlook for the future was so buoyant and joyful, as if ascension, in the sense of being lifted out of the morass of deep denial about Who We Are, had occurred or was in the process of happening, that it made a powerful lasting impression on me as I woke up from it.... And I'm glad I can at least share this part with all of you...
Truly formidable are the measures that the Galactic Federation have adopted to erode the internal structure of the negative forces and to return the control to the Light forces, who in the past governed humanity for thousands of years.
Possibly, this information I am giving you now will sound to you a little like “Star Wars” – but I can assure you that it is something that is happening these days, and it is as real as the economic crisis you are currently suffering.
In all likelihood, the world economic crisis will seem more real to you because you are suffering from it “in your own skin”, while the advances we are informing you about Ascension are, at the moment, based only on faith you may have in us, on our existence, our common battle (ours and yours, forming a common front) against the dark souls who have been subjugating you.
Well, then, we urge you anew to listen to your heart, and draw conclusions in accordance with the feelings flowing outside from within, from your spiritual heart to your lower mind. Allow yourselves to be led by your intuition, and I assure you that it will serve you well.
You must know that the moment for First Contact so wished for by us and by you advances more and more and will materialize soon, very soon because, as I already told you in the beginning, we have made great global strides, all the civilizations that are visiting you in unison.
The Sirian and Swan civilizations, who habitually work in unison in a common effort to re-establish the light, the peace and the harmony in all the Galaxy, have been the protagonists of a deed that will deal a hard blow to the secret government governed by a few powerful ones and that will destabilize them and cause them to feel disoriented, for they did not imagine that we would act with such swiftness and skill.
Kris-Won, my channel, is asking me telepathically to be more explicit relating the nature of the event; but unfortunately, it is not convenient that I give more details in this respect. Suffice what I told you for your hearts to be happy and for your hope to shine with more intensity in your tired minds, anxious to free yourselves from the dark’s oppressive yoke.
It is a delight for us to bring you good tidings, and we continue to urge you to work, you tireless human beings, towards the prompt establishment of the internal government of the Light of Planet Earth. Work, work, work so that the vibrational change takes place within a short period of your linear three-dimensional time.
The Light Workers of your humanity and our vast cosmic, celestial, angelic, intraterrestrial and astral hosts, united in a common front, will, just like a battering ram, bring down the wall of those who have taken refuge in their own selfishness and who try to oppose the change!
There will be no more space for those with a frozen heart and a greedy mind! The change promised by us will bring about a much more spiritual and altruistic humanity, one who will not be self-centered and focused only on their own well-being, but who will be interested in the betterment of society in general and who will champion for the raising of all humanity to heights unknown to men on this planet.
When our encounter becomes a reality, we will be able to help you to improve and evolve in a few short years, which otherwise would have taken you centuries and even millenniums to achieve if you had not had our help.
None of us know in depth the Plan God has conceived in His Cosmic Mind; but we do know that it will be successful in materializing on the physical plane where you live, and that our struggle against the darkness, which characterizes the dark beings in high spheres of power, will sooner or later be crowned with success.
You can be sure of that because God, being the Creator of all situations, cannot fail, can never fail!
We would like to ‘innoculate’ you with our optimism, which is born from our trust in the happy development of God’s Plans; that is why we would like to pass onto you that optimism so that you go forward with a solid faith and trust. Leave behind all fears and advance, advance more and more each day with a firm step, with your heads held high, and proud to know that you are going to be co-protagonists of the flourishing of the New Era on this planet.
I give you my blessing, given to you by the Supreme Being through me.
Peace and Love
Commander Sohin
(Channeler: Kris-Won)
Check also Is the ET Council 2015 ecology cleanup a prelude to 2025 ‘Paradise on Earth’? "Spanish author and artist Francisca Blazquez reveals her prediction that the reported 2015 cleanup of the Earth’s ecology by a regional galactic governance council is part of a sequenced preparation for the landing of enlightened unity consciousness in 2023 (‘Sophia/Christ consciousness’) and an objective condition of ‘Paradise on Earth’ in 2025. (...) In her ExopoliticsTV interview with Alfred Lambremont Webre, Ms. Blazquez indicates that ‘the coming of Christ’ means the coming of Christic consciousness, or ‘enlighted unity consciousness’. Statement of Francisca Blazquez: "The Etheric Temple of Archangel Michael is the preparation for the coming of Christ on the hills of Jerusalem in 2023. It opens a new era and considolara from 2025. Science and spirit become one, and Christic peace reigns in the hearts and minds of all people and beings of planet Earth. Darkness will disappear, since the light, love and power create good. You will soon see the reality of this new Earth. Humanity has developed into one perfect union and harmony, and happiness of the inner God reign in all locations. There will be no limits. We will create space platforms with plants and animal life in space. We will use all our mental capacity. Also, the souls who are here may travel to Paradise and those found in other dimensions will come to planet Earth so they so desire. We are walking next to the angels, as brothers of light as we have always been, with powerful divine powers will use for the common good."
---
Slow Me Down, God
Slow me down, God.
Ease the pounding of my heart
by the quieting of my mind.
Steady my hurried pace with a vision
of the eternal reach of time.
Give me, amid the confusion of the day,
the calmness of the everlasting hills.
Break the tensions of my nerves and muscles
with the soothing music of the signing streams
that live in my memory.
Help me to know the magical, restoring power of rest.
Teach me the art of taking minute vacations –
of slowing down to behold a flower,
to be and talk with a friend, to comfort an animal,
to contemplate a few lines from a sacred book,
and to listen to the song of birds...
Slow me down, God,
and inspire me to send my roots
deep into the soil of life's enduring values,
That I may grow towards the stars
and unfold my greater destiny.
- Wilfred Arlan Peterson
(Version adapted by an unknown source from the original version HERE)
---
Karl Anthony - One Prayer
(Suggestion: listen to this wonderful song and sing along with the help of the lyrics provided below) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQeeZDkMCUQ
If I had one prayer, I'd pray for people who hate
Maybe I'm out of my mind ...or deep in my faith
A man grows old ...when his soul's in pain
Only love can loosen that chain
But if I offer you grace, will it cause any change
And do I appear weak, if I calm my rage
I think of revenge, but will I become
The thing I despise, when a heart goes numb
I'll say a prayer, hoping it finds ...people who hate
I send it now, to heal the hearts ...of people who hate
If only one song ...could silence hate
And end all the war ...before its too late
If a cold mind ...could begin to feel
Then the fear in our world ...has a chance to heal
I'll say a prayer, knowing it finds ...people who hate
I send it now, to heal the hearts ...of people who hate
......pray for people who hate
All of our thoughts ...can set the stage
For the power of love ...is larger than rage
When we take revenge ...we will become
The hate we despise ...as our soul goes numb
I have One Prayer ...for the world to hear
It's a cry for mercy ...the last of our tears
Let hate dissolve ... let the past reveal
That love has shown us what is real
Prayer: Angels above, quiet the pain ...in people who hate
I'm sending One Prayer, to heal the hearts ...in people who hate
One prayer.....Pray!
Prayer: May all be loved, may all be blessed, may all feel peace .... pray for people who hate
I’m sending Love, to people who hate
I must be out of my mind ...or deep in my faith
---
Cedar's Eleven : Flourishing in 2011
with Cedar Rivers (cedars.circles@gmail.com)
1:1:2011
2011 begins a new decade, and promises to be a year like no other.
It looks set to be marked by extremes at many levels.
Spiritual epiphanies will bring remarkable revelations, clarity and perhaps changes in activity,
while arduous challenges may require you to be inventive and pro-active like never before.
Contemplate the following sub-headings and brief examples
and make of them what you will to have an exceptional year.
1. RESPECT YOURSELF: Everything that matters begins here.
2. REMEMBER: Who you are, and live it; what you are here to do, and do it.
3. SIMPLIFY: Live lightly, share what you have, and give what you can.
5. BE RESPONSIBLE: Balance your spending, whether an individual, business or government.
6. SELF-RELIANCE: Initiate. Grow your own food, extra for others, and for the animals and birds.
7. BE STILL: Use fewer words. Listen. Receive. Enquire. Review. Respond.
8. EVOLVE: Filter everything you think, say and do through your Heart and Higher Self.
9. THE SACRED: Raise your vibrations. Honour your purpose and your Divinity.
10. CREATE: Follow your passions and find solutions.
11. FREEDOM: Explore your wildness, skills, adventures and experiences.
Bright blessings to you all for a truly memorable and magnificent 2011.
Let's never miss an opportunity to be loving, resourceful and creative this year.
2011 asks for our kindness and thoughtfulness from the very depths of our hearts.
"I strongly hold that this WS-20 Declaration is a crucial document for the re-genesis of humanity and its societies. Taking a whole system approach for this, the most critical time in human history, the document makes plain that the decisions we make in the next few years will determine whether we grow or die, whether the 13.8 billion year experiment that resulted in our lives will end within the next century or two. (...) Finally, we are at that stage where the real work of humanity begins. This is the time and place where we partner with Creation in the recreation of ourselves, in the restoration of the biosphere, and in the assuming of a new kind of culture—what we might term a culture of kindness, where we live daily life in such a way as to be re-connected and charged by the source of our reality, so as to become liberated as to our inventiveness, and creatively engaged in our world and our new tasks. Now there is a quickening, an almost desperate sense of need for the possible human in us all to help create the possible society and possible world… if we are to survive our own personal and planetary odyssey and come safely home to the world that lies waiting in the sanctuary of the soul."
- Jean Houston (November 7, 2010) - Taken from The Planetary and the Possible - Jean is a long-time ERN subscriber as well as Jonathan Granoff (see his statement of support: Our Choice: Creativity or Destruction) and Barbara Marx Hubbard (A New Social Function) who, like Jean, were also involved in co-creating this WS-20 Declaration. The whole document is included below and is definitely worth everyone's attention. In a few years from now, we may remember this as one of the key turning points in our long progress towards global enlightenment and a peaceful, sustainable and love-filled future for all life on Earth. Let us not let the wonderful work of these 20 visionary leaders go to waste, but let us use it to leverage ourselves out of our current global impasse.
"Hello Jean! You have been very busy indeed. I wanted to share with you something unusual that happened to me one morning this week as I was waking up. Since I've been journaling my dreams for a class that I am currently taking, I thought at first that I was sleeping, but it wasn't a dream and I was very much awake and was experiencing more of a vision. When I opened my eyes I saw my room as it is, but everything was glittering as sparks of light. The solid forms were there, but they were formed from the light and the whole scene was like looking at sparkling snow or diamonds, as best as I can describe it. Then I was told that I was also made from this same glittering light. Of course I know this, but I haven't ever really seen it in this way. I've seen the moving energy of form before, but never the light. It was very beautiful and affirming in what I've been reading from messages that others have brought forward and I thought it worth sharing. We are truly living in changing times and becoming aware of the potential of what we are and how we are part of a whole that is very much wanting to be recognized."
- Suzanne Sjogren (sjogren@mwt.net) -- Taken from the ERN guestbook (2010-11-20)
"In order to make this incredible transition to the new Earth, only two factors for any human being will be necessary in order to prevail. Number one is overcoming the karma that has been accumulated from this lifetime on this planet. The Custodians have said this can be achieved simply by forgiving everyone and everything in one's life, including forgiving one's own self. It will also be necessary to align oneself with the higher frequency of the new Earth by letting go of lower consciousness negativity such as greed, violence, oppression, control and embracing the higher consciousness of love, open-heartedness and forgiveness, all of which will ultimately work in one's favor to make this transition. The second factor that is necessary to move to the new Earth is let go of fear –– fear of change, fear of the unknown and fear of the process of transitioning to a new Earth. Any fear that you may have. All of it. Fear has been rampant among the human race for lifetimes upon lifetimes and it is a very low consciousness vibration that robs one of their vital power. Yet now is this grand opportunity to rid yourself of that paralyzing emotion."
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell
"Your absolute dedication in keeping us informed of all the monumental changes happening at this crucial time in our history is greatly appreciated. Although there is a lot of stuff that I would rather not know about (metaphorically burying my head in the sand like an ostrich and hoping it all goes away!!), there are also great, bounding leaps of expanding consciousness that show that the scales of divine justice are in balance. No longer is anything that happens on our beloved Gaia, able to remain hidden. The light of Truth shines and exposes all. Thank you for this Solstice Meditation for December 21, 2010. I absolutely love what you wrote in "Following The Golden Thread". A realisation on fear that I came up with for myself a couple of months ago. I am now conscientiously working on noticing where and when they are/occur and then working through the fears enables me to release them. Notice here, Jean, that in order for me to do this I have had to take my head out of the sand and look with eyes of Truth!"
- Barbara Antrobus (ladihawk@mweb.co.za) from South Africa
"Wonderful times await you and every bit of effort you put in now will be well rewarded. Be aware of what is happening around you, but resist becoming emotionally involved if it is negative and due to the lack of Light, and send yours out to whoever is involved in it. Every individual can contribute in this way, and know that you have so much more power than you realize. When many of you get together with the same purposeful intent, the power becomes magnified many more times. Express that in terms of your whole civilization, and if you so desired you could bring peace and prosperity back to Earth very quickly."
"The invitation you've sent us - to let you know what the outgoing year has meant to us - presents a formidable challenge: To be blunt, 2010 has been grim and unrelenting for almost everyone I know. As long ago as 1977, Merlin described this planetary moment as "the grand Audit": "As we approach the end of this dispensation, the karmic blackboard must be wiped clean, so that all may step into the coming age without the kind of karmic luggage that has been slowing you down for centuries. Fasten your seat belts, boys and girls - you're in for a bumpy ride, as the lady once said. All debts must now be paid, at personal, family, group, tribal, racial and international levels. Uncomfortable though much of the journey will be for many of you, take comfort from the knowledge that when the next chapter begins, you will be stepping out, light of heart, mind, body and spirit. The travails you are now undergoing will seem like a rapidly-fading nightmare. That nightmare is soon to be replaced by the kind of happiness, fulfilment and peace of mind that you have always dreamed of." The most positive aspect of 2010 by a mile is the the ever-growing sense that 'the moment of Quantum Awakening' is so close now that we could almost reach out and touch it."
- Michael Dean (mikhailovich@me.com)
"Dear People of Planet Earth, Much attention has been placed at this time on the power of intention in manifesting our hearts' desires. Let me be very clear that I intend that this Earth be restored to a pristine condition, with clean air, clean water and healthy food, grown with love, for all. My incontrovertible vision is that all people live together in peace and creative endeavor-- with all having the opportunity to live according to their innate soul purpose and contributing their highest talents for the good of all. My belief is that by the sheer power of intention and focused will, this vision will be realized, for intention creates the path of life through our material realities. It is clear to me that there are more evolved intelligences, from other areas of the Universe, who are focused on our efforts at this time-- ones who are ready and waiting at the helm to offer guidance and advanced technology to support us in our efforts. However, the people of Earth must request this support with free will and earn its dispensation with the wisdom to utilize it for the highest benefit of all. When one looks directly at the monumental task of eliminating the greed and power struggles that keep this earth from returning to its paradisiacal form, things may appear overwhelming. However, I assure you that the sheer force of united intention holds the strength of Universal truth and, as we bond together in greater numbers and focused intention, we will attract the help of divine emissaries and change things almost in the blink of the cosmic eye. And so, I counsel you to be unwavering in your intention and support of a vision of peaceful people living co-creatively on a pristine planet. All else will fall away in the concerted path of illumined truth. It is the momentum created by our thoughts--based on our ability to hold the feeling of fulfillment within our being, that will transform this planet into the paradise it was certainly meant to be. Happy Holidays to all - please have faith and hold the feeling of what you want at this concerted hour of transformation. Angels are watching..."
- Lisa Rene Anderson (Electricgoddess33@yahoo.com)
BRILLIANT IDEAS AND INITIATIVES WORTH KNOWING ABOUT
Celebrate our ONENESS this New Year for 11 minutes at midnight (locally) on January 1st http://www.ekataa.net/
EKATAA is an invitation to every individual on Earth to light up the world in celebration of the unity we share as human beings and 'sound' as one on 1.1.11 at 00:00 hours (or at 11am) of respective countries. Credit 11 minutes of your Thought-sound to the World Account of Human Oneness on 1.1.11.
Global Alliance of Youth and Adults in Action (GAYA) http://www.gayainternational.org/
GAYA recognizes the Earth as intelligent consciousness; a sacred living being that is vibrant, responsive, and interactive. GAYA believes that in order for humanity to not only survive but to evolve, we need to reclaim our profound and inherent relationship within the complexities of the natural world. GAYA recognizes that every culture has a wisdom and knowledge that compliments the whole of humanity. Bound within Indigenous cosmologies are expansive pathways that illuminate the beauty and intelligence of the natural world, as well as practical ecological knowledge that can be blended with the ethical and sustainable sciences of today. GAYA respects youth as sources of vision, creative intelligence, and a vital part of our communities. GAYA serves the desire of young people to creatively express their individual talents, to be empowered to direct their personal future, participate more fully in the co-creation of our global society, and create more profound and meaningful experiences in their lives. GAYA recognizes and serves the understanding that we as individuals have tremendous power in influencing the world around us. Through our thoughts, intentions, choices, and actions we have the power to revision, remake, and rebalance our world-- to live a beautiful existence. CLIP- CHECK ALSO THEIR "EARTH Presentation" Earth Activist Restoring Their Home
Earth Guardians http://www.earthguardians.info/
We hope to inspire you to join our effort to stand up for our future. We of the younger generation will inherit this precious Earth, and like youth across the globe, we are working to make a difference now by educating ourselves and speaking up for the planet MAKE SURE TO WATCH THEIR SHORT INTRODUCTORY VIDEO! Check also their Facebook page
Children of the Sun - Building Grid Networks http://www.childrenofthesun.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=71:gridnetworks&catid=36&Itemid=101
People from all over the world are answering the call to participate in the new and full moon transmissions of high frequency energy across the planetary Crystalline Grid and New Earth consciousness matrix. The more that we build and strengthen this consciousness matrix, the more powerful the transmissions will be... for us individually, for our created networks, for humanity and for the planet. This is more than simply getting together for meditation. We are creating and sustaining a massive forcefield to conduct the qualified powers of the sacred alchemical fire through it and into the world at large. These are bi-monthly transmissions of harmonic New Earth energy to help all of us, as a unified whole, advance our skills into expanded consciousness perception, to activate our transfiguration into Light Body and to remain balanced and stabilized during the challenges of this planetary dimensional transition.As a collective, we can greatly assist in transmuting discordant energy and help bring accelerated peace and healing to areas of the world affected by the planetary shift during its necessary restructuring process. There are continual transmissions of New Earth energy occurring all the time. As we know, however, anytime there is heart centered group focus, the power of the intent and resultant effect is so much greater. And now we have a greatly activated Crystalline Grid as a strong pathway to effectively and efficiently reach the multitude. Let's pour our Love forth!! CLIP
Global BrainPaint - The Anatomy of a Minute http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5605115969331571580&hl=en#
This image was created as part of the Global Consciousness Project (GPC) data. It was process with algorithms created for EEG biofeedback purposes by the company BrainPaint. It is a time-lapse film of 8 minutes of data. More details on this through Global Brain Paint
Global Footprint Network http://www.footprintnetwork.org/Global
Footprint Network is an international think tank working to advance sustainability through use of the Ecological Footprint, a resource accounting tool that measures how much nature we have, how much we use and who uses what. By making ecological limits central to decision-making, we are working to end overshoot and create a society where all people can live well, within the means of one planet.
We’ve Got Time to Help http://wevegottimetohelp.org/
We started as a group of people, in Portland, Oregon and surrounding communities, that found some extra time on our hands. A lot of us are or have been laid off and are having a tough time finding a job in these hard economic times. We are using a small portion of that time to make our communities better places to live. We are willing to help anyone in need using our experience and skills. Although, due to our circumstances, we can not help financially, we donate time, energy, equipment and services to anyone less fortunate. We realize that every single one of us has something to offer. Every person on Earth has a skill or some experience that can help someone else. In these bleak times, we need to stand together, act together, and help one another in one of our greatest times of need.We started in Portland, Oregon but are expanding to other cities across the country as the need grows and knowledge of what we do spreads. If you feel your community needs a local chapter of WGTTH or if you would like to lead/volunteer for a chapter in your area please contact us at wevegottimetohelp@q.com -- To find out how this BRILLIANT INITIATIVE got started read Kick in the pants starts a volunteer avalanche (Dec 9, 2010) Portland website born in recession helps the unemployed spread good work globally. recommended byLance White (zanymystic@wildblue.net) who wrote: "Imagine a world in which all peoples are working together, building, creating and empowering one another. (...) This will literally pull the rug out of the unnatural/immoral decaying monetary system, fractional reserve banking, and "profits for the bottom line". Until we are all on the "same page", in a non-profit moneyless group as equals, there will continue to be vast discrepancies between those with no conscience and those with heart, who truly care."
Local food http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_food
Local food (also regional food or food patriotism) or the local food movement is a "collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies - one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place"[1] and is considered to be a part of the broader sustainability movement. It is part of the concept of local purchasing and local economies, a preference to buy locally produced goods and services. Those who prefer to eat locally grown/produced food sometimes call themselves locavores or localvores. CLIP
Locavores http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locavores
The locavore movement is a movement in the United States and elsewhere that spawned as interest in sustainability and eco-consciousness become more prevalent. (...) Those who are interested in eating food that is locally produced, not moved long distances to market, are called "locavores."(...) The food may be grown in home gardens or grown by local commercial groups interested in keeping the environment as clean as possible and selling food close to where it is grown. Some people consider food grown within a 100-mile radius of their location local, while others have other definitions. CLIP
Watch the official Locavore Trailer - A must watch! So true! http://www.locavoremovie.com/
Locavore is an inspiring new documentary about the inevitable return to the local diet. Less than a generation ago human beings worldwide traveled less than 10 miles to obtain the majority of the food they ate. Today the average conventionally grown vegetable has traveled more than 1500 miles by the time it has reached your pantry. Our food today is over processed, stale, and lacks nutrition. This new film, featuring some of the neo-pioneers of the Locavore movement will educate, inspire, and revitalize bringing health to our bodies AND our communities. - NOTE from Jean: I've grown my vegetables for my year-round needs for the past 30 years and can attest to the facts mentioned in this trailer. That's the way of the future!
Foodshed for Thought http://www.locavores.com/
(...) Why Eat Locally? Our food now travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our plates. This globalization of the food supply has serious consequences for the environment, our health, our communities and our tastebuds. Much of the food grown in the breadbasket surrounding us must be shipped across the country to distribution centers before it makes its way back to our supermarket shelves. Because uncounted costs of this long distance journey (air pollution and global warming, the ecological costs of large scale monoculture, the loss of family farms and local community dollars) are not paid for at the checkout counter, many of us do not think about them at all. What is eaten by the great majority of North Americans comes from a global everywhere, yet from nowhere that we know in particular. How many of our children even know what a chicken eats or how an onion grows? The distance from which our food comes represents our separation from the knowledge of how and by whom what we consume is produced, processed, and transported. And yet, the quality of a food is derived not merely from its genes and the greens that fed it, but from how it is prepared and cared for all the way until it reaches our mouths. If the production, processing, and transport of what we eat is destructive of the land and of human community -- as it very often is -- how can we understand the implications of our own participation in the global food system when those processes are located elsewhere and so are obscured from us? How can we act responsibly and effectively for change if we do not understand how the food system works and our own role within it? Eat Locally!Can we stay within a 100 mile radius? While corporations, which are the principal beneficiaries of a global food system now dominate the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food, alternatives are emerging which together could form the basis for foodshed development. CLIP
Mark Cullen on the growing 'local food' movement (Sept. 29, 2010) http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/CanadaAMColumns/20100929/cullen-blog-100929/
No one could have predicted five years ago where the 'local food' movement would go. Or that there would even be a 'local food movement'! For Canadian gardeners the idea of eating food that is grown within 100 miles/kilometers or meters from home is very exciting. Perhaps the very message of eating locally grown fruits and veggies is preaching to choir -- but in any case -- gardeners are fully on board, you can be sure.The benefits of eating locally produced food cannot be overstated: generally fewer chemicals [or none at all!] are needed to produce great food that does not have to endure long distances to get to market, it tastes better, is better for you and it supports the local economy. I might add that growing your own food is a great way to bring people together too. It is a poorly kept secret that gardeners are generous with information. Ask an experienced gardener how to grow most anything and you will gain the benefit of his or her knowledge without prodding. Conversation flows between gardeners with a shared interest in food gardening. In short you could say that the activity of gardening cures shyness!
Sonoma County GoLocal Cooperative (WITH A SHORT INTRODUCTORY VIDEO) http://sonomacounty.golocal.coop/stories/about_sonoma_county_golocal_cooperative/77/
The Sonoma County GoLocal Cooperative is a network of locally-owned businesses, residents, non-profit organizations, and government agencies working together to build a resilient, thriving, local economy by supporting local, independently owned businesses and encouraging sustainable practices. Sonoma County GoLocal is an affiliate network of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), promoters of the concept of "Triple Bottom Line" - people, planet and profit, and The American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA), working to advance the social, cultural and economic well being of communities. CHECK ALSO The Local Multiplier Effect AND Six Reasons to GoLocal
New Rules Project http://www.newrules.org/about-new-rules-project
A program of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the New Rules Project started back in 1998 and continues to bring fresh new policy solutions to communities and states to ensure that they are "designing rules as if community matters". (...) Why New Rules? Because the old ones don't work any longer. They undermine local economies, subvert democracy, weaken our sense of community, and ignore the costs of our decisions on the next generation. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) proposes a set of new rules that builds community by supporting humanly scaled politics and economics. The rules call for: Decisions made by those who will feel the impact of those decisions. Communities accepting responsibility for the welfare of their members and for the next generation. Households and communities possessing or owning sufficient productive capacity to generate real wealth. These are the principles of "new localism." They call upon us to begin viewing our communities and our regions not only as places of residence, recreation and retail but as places that nurture active and informed citizens with the skills and productive capacity to generate real wealth and the authority to govern their own lives. CLIP
Local Exchange Trading Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Exchange_Trading_Systems
Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) also known as LETSystems are locally initiated, democratically organised, not-for-profit community enterprises which provides a community information service and records transactions of members exchanging goods and services by using the currency of locally created LETS Credits. In some places, e.g. Toronto, the scheme has been called the Local Employment and Trading System. In New South Wales, Australia, they were known as Local Energy Transfer Systems.Michael Linton originated the term "Local Exchange Trading System" in 1983 and, for a time ran the Comox Valley LETSystems in Courtenay, British Columbia. The system he designed was intended as an adjunct to the national currency, rather than a replacement for it, although there are examples of individuals who have managed to replace their use of national currency through inventive usage of LETS. LETS networks use interest-free local credit so direct swaps do not need to be made. For instance, a member may earn credit by doing childcare for one person and spend it later on carpentry with another person in the same network. CLIP
The open money projects http://openmoney.org/
Open money is a means of exchange freely available to all. Any community, any association - indeed, any body - can have their own money. Open money is synonymous with LETS - an invitation to come inside and play, as in open door and open house; collaboration as in open hand and open for all; attitude as in open mind. The purpose of the open money project is to bring together and organize the people and resources necessary for the development and propagation of open money everywhere.The open money project remains a work in progress - a continuation of almost 25 years of LETSystem and community currencies development all over the world, two community way projects in Canada using smart cards, the Japan open money project, and, most recently, a community currencies services provider - ccsp. CLIP More through http://openmoney.info/
Lets.net http://archive.lets.net/
Links to most current LETSystem and open money resources and also to almost all the legacy LETSystem materials
The Transitioner http://people.thetransitioner.org/
The Transitioner is a network, a vessel of committed pioneers, a space for learning, a place for R&D and innovation. Last but not least we are committed to build the next free currencies.
The Blue Flag http://theblueflag.ca
Check the wonderful Blue Flag Prayer - This new flag designed to promote a peaceful, harmonious planet was co-created by ERN subscriber Ann Brennan (annbrennan@xplorenet.ca)
SnapGoods http://snapgoods.com/static/learnmore
SnapGoods is a place where good people meet, share, and put each other's stuff to good use. Make sure to check their FAQs at http://snapgoods.com/static/faq to better grasp this great concept. I discovered this through this article - Borrow, Don't Buy: Websites That Let Strangers Share - which gives more details and other useful resources such as RelayRides (Borrow cars from car owners in your neighborhood, by the hour or by the day - available only in Boston and San Francisco so far, but I'm sure it will expand!) and Rentalic which stands for Rental In Community, and is "the fastest growing renting & sharing community on the web." Much more on this through this LINK
How Real People Build Conscious Community (Oct 21, 2009 - 55 min video) http://www.voiceamerica.com/voiceamerica/vepisode.aspx?aid=41898
Peter discusses the development of conscious community with guest Richard Flyer who is the founder of the Conscious Community Network in Reno, Nevada; while outlining the similarities with Peter's own Conscious Centred Community in Victoria, BC, Canada. Richard explains how CCN has spent the last six years building a successful model that integrates spiritual awakening with social transformation in the local region. Taking into account historical perspectives, Richard will consider what the ideal conscious community looks like, why we haven't reached this ideal and why current approaches to changing the World fail to work. Find out what will work and become a weaver of health, sanity, love and functionality in your own community. For more information visit http://www.itstimereno.org
The Conscious Community Resource Website http://www.consciouslivingmixers.com/
(...) The Conscious Community Network is designed for people who are taking the lead on innovative new ideas for the future of mankind and choose to get going and take action to help others. Now is the time to get started, because "you" hold the master key to change the lives of everyone that you meet and influence. Individually and collectively we can get smart about how we will change our world. Life will transform on Earth if enough of us combine our intelligence and intellect to create a loving compassionate unifying spirit. Join us as we get away from the antiquated old paradigms of the past 25,000 years and focus on the enlightening new energy and emotions of the future, and the generations of the next Age. CLIP
The Conscious Media Network http://www.consciousmedianetwork.com/
Video interviews on consciousness, enlightenment and human potential. From the practical to the mystical.
TRANSCEND International http://www.transcend.org/
TRANSCEND has as its mission: To bring about a more peaceful world by using action, education/training, dissemination and research to transform conflicts nonviolently, with empathy and creativity, for acceptable and sustainable outcomes. By peace we mean the capacity to transform conflicts with empathy, without violence, and creatively - a never-ending process; By transforming conflicts we mean enabling the parties to go ahead in a self-reliant, acceptable and sustainable manner; By without violence we mean that this process should avoid any cultural violence that justifies direct or structural violence; By with empathy we mean the ability also to understand the conflict the way the parties understand the conflict themselves; By creatively we mean channeling conflict energy toward new realities, accommodating the parties and meeting basic human needs. Click here to read more about our modus operandi - Find out more on one of the 2 founders of this wonderful movement, Johan Galtung through this Wikipedia entry
The Foundation for a Better Life http://www.values.com/
Check their extensive list of Inspirational Values such as Compassion -- "We are called to a life of service to Humanity, I reckon that's the basis for Love. We must all strive in our own little way to be like Mother Teresa, by doing little act of kindness and showing love, for in doing this little things that we really attain greatness." - Dele U. from Lagos, Nigeria - "What an outstanding "educational" website. Over the past four months I was noticing the words "Leadership - pass it on" on a billboard. I finally looked up the website and WOW!!! This will mark my 14th year in education and I have yet to find anything on the internet as useful. GREAT JOB!! Thank you." - Jason H. from Fort Wayne, Indiana -- or Peace "My humanity is bound up in yours for we can only be human together." - Desmond Tutu -- or Stewardship - "Stewardship is a lesson that is spreading quickly. People are learning that a little effort can go a long way and that, as humans, we have a unique responsibility to leave the world better than we found it." - Christian B. from Richmond, Virginia
The Elders http://www.theelders.org/
The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. The Elders are Martti Ahtisaari, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Lakhdar Brahimi, Gro Brundtland, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Jimmy Carter, Graça Machel, Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu (Chair). Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi are honorary Elders. -- We need peace in the Middle East, not just process. "Israeli-Palestinian negotiations must be grounded in international law and human rights." - The Elders... The Elders have issued an urgent statement on the Middle East peace process, warning that without a renewed effort,the possibility of a two-state solution may slip even further away. Read their full statement here. (issued 13 December 2010 - AN EXCELLENT STATEMENT - CHECK THIS!) More information: Read the report from the Elders's 2010 visit to the Middle East. Read posts from the Elders, as well as those affected by the conflict, on the Elders' Middle East blog (READ THE MOST INSPIRING Messages for Peace POSTED THERE AND HERE BY CITIZENS FROM AROUND THE WORLD - Here is the one I posted there: "There is only one way ahead for our world and it is through peace among all nations, love between all human beings - and for all other beings - and a true commitment by everyone to live accordingly."). Following their trip to the Middle East, the Elders asked supporters to send in questions about the conflict. Their video responses were published on the Elders' YouTube Channel. Gandhi said "Be the change you wish to see in the world". The Elders are leading the way. Let us follow.
THE WORLD FORUM OF SPIRITUAL CULTURE http://www.astanaforum.kz/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=frontpage&Itemid=55
The Declaration A Sustainable Future through Spiritual Culture The World Forum of Spiritual Culture, held in Astana, Kazakhstan 18 - 20 October 2010 with participants from 70 countries, reviewed and discussed advancing a spiritual culture as necessary to achieve a peaceful, just, and sustainable future. Certain principles were salient in the presentations: we are all one - interconnected and interdependent, life is sacred and must be respected and honored in all its manifestations, and love is essential for all our endeavors. These principles can guide healthy personal and public policy and can change the pursuit of dominance and violence in world affairs to the achievement of disarmament, peace and tolerance. These principles can prevent the spoiling of the environment from market excesses to nurturing our interdependence and harmony with nature. CLIP
HERE IS AN INTERESTING EXCERPT FROM A BOOK I'VE RECENTLY TRANSLATED (Détails ICI sur ce livre) Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here)
"Johan Galtung, a Norwegian pioneer in peace and conflict resolution, made a career of finding what he called the fifth way, or fivers. Galtung recognized that every conflict has five potential resolutions: - I win. You lose. - You win. I lose. - Negative Transcendence in which the problem is solved by avoiding it entirely. - Compromise in which each wins by agreeing to lose a little. - Transcendence, which produces a resolution above and beyond the problem. Conventional politics seeks to resolve issues through compromise, which, at best, leaves everyone equally dissatisfied. In contrast, the transcendent fiver solution generates a positive feeling among all parties. The first step in bringing forth a fiver is the intention between two opposing polarities not to meet in the middle but to join forces and move forward together toward an optimal solution. CLIP - More on this through http://www.transcend.org/
Banque d'Échanges Communautaires de Services (BECS) Au Québec http://becs.ca
Organisme à but non lucratif, BECS est un réseau communautaire d'échanges de services. Les objectifs de l'organisme sont de permettre à ses membres actifs d'offrir et de recevoir des biens et des services ainsi que de favoriser les liens d'entraide et de solidarité entre eux et avec les membres des organismes affiliés. Au sein de BECS, les services ont une valeur égale, i.e. une heure de service rendu égale une heure de BECS. Tout mercantilisme (la recherche d'un profit monétaire) est prohibé. Voir leur excellent code d'éthique au http://becs.ca/code_ethique et les services offerts http://becs.ca/services
Terra economica N°40 - 09/12/2004 - Par ici, la monnaie ! (9 décembre 2004)
UN EXCELLENT ARTICLE AVEC PLEIN DE RESSOURCES http://www.selidaire.org/spip/article.php3?id_article=984
LE MOUVEMENT DES MONNAIES COMPLÉMENTAIRES, QUASI INCONNU EN FRANCE, EST DÉJÀ EN MARCHE AU JAPON ET EN ALLEMAGNE. IL POURRAIT ANNONCER UNE RÉVOLUTION ÉCONOMIQUE ET SOCIALE SANS PRÉCÉDENT.
Conspiracy Theory with Gov. Jesse Ventura- 911 Pentagon Attack (Full Episode) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrZ14NRbT-s
Jesse Blows the "official story" of the pentagon attacks on 9-11-2001 wide open. Aired 12-17-2010 In a TV show aired Dec. 17, 2010, Jesse Ventura accuses Vice-President Dick Cheney of ordering NORAD to stand down, investigates the missile theory of the Pentagon bombing, and generally lifts a lot of covers on 9/11. Check also GORDON DUFF: GOV. JESSE VENTURA PROVES 9/11 COVER-UP, WILL AMERICA’S GOVERNMENT FALL? - "Ventura cites, in an interview with a 9/11 commissioner, a possible motive for the Pentagon attack being included with the attacks on the World Trade Center. $2,300,000,000,000, yes 2.3 trillion US dollars had disappeared, cited only the day before in a televised statement by Secretary Rumsfeld, money “gone missing” from the Pentagon’s accounting. The area of the Pentagon hit by a missile or destroyed by explosives or both contained all records of this missing money. Ventura proves, beyond any doubt that no airplane every hit the Pentagon. (...) It isn’t as though the evidence presented by Governor Ventura and Geraldo Rivera or even the other stories, Judge Napolitano’s revelations of knowledge of the attacks as early as 1999, was new. All has been know, all highly credible and all systematically ignored, attacked by the press, suppressed by courts, officials at every level. 9/11 and the recent revelations aren’t proof of a conspiracy by 2 men, or Israel. It is proof that there never was an Al Qaeda and that the deaths, two wars, the 9/11 deaths and the carnage across the world wrought by the United States was part of a criminal conspiracy, one that could only be perpetrated by a dictatorship under the guise of representative democracy. Everything we have seen, and millions around the world have watched, nobody can ignore it anymore, it all says that what has happened is something no American would allow, not if this still were America. Jesse Ventura proved something startling to most, suspected by some. He proved that, at some point in our past, 10 years, more, we don’t know, our government was overthrown. The strongest and most vocal opponent of a new 9/11 investigation is Julian Assange of Wikleaks. If any individual outside the US government were to be named as most complicit in a 9/11 cover-up, it would be Julian Assange." SO FAR THERE HAVE BEEN 1,028 Responses TO THIS ARTICLE... VOIR AUSSI Jesse Ventura démontre la dissimulation du 11 septembre… (traduction de l'article de Gordon Duff)
John Schneider talks 911 & missing trade towers @ NY NY Hotel in Las Vegas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL7vNQqwuTM
TIS catches up with Smallville & Dukes of Hazard actor John Schneider as he questions 9/11 and makes note that the popular Hotel "New York, New York" in Las Vegas doesn't have the Twin Towers built into the Skyline... but the Hotel was open before 9/11. Why is that? Conspiracy?
A NEW GALACTIC SPIN CYCLE SYNCHRONIZES WITH CHRISTMAS DAY! http://www.13moon.com/new-galactic-spin.htm
Based on the ancient Maya Time Science, every 260-days we journey through a sacred spiral of time. Just as it takes 9-months for a baby to grow in the womb, so this sacred 9-month cycle of time is understood as a spiritual gestation cycle of growth and unfolding. (...) December 25, 2010 is Red Magnetic Dragon, Kin 1 the start of a new 260-day Galactic Spin cycle!This synchronization with a new Spin and Christmas day will only occur once every 52 years! The 260-day cycle that will be completing spanned from Gregorian: April 9, 2010 - December 24, 2010. And the new 260-day cycle will span:Gregorian: December 25, 2010 - September 10, 2011. Each time we begin a new Galactic Spin cycle it signifies that we have completed a journey through all of the 260 sacred permutations of creation's energies, and Now we begin again, travelling through the same 260 frequencies of movement and measure, yet at a new rung of experience on the ascending evolutionary Spiral. The perpetual unfoldment of the codes of creation spirals over and over, inviting new and current interaction, ever-revealing deeper layers of its Synchronistic Magic... CLIP - LISTEN ALSO TO the SkyTalkEarthWalk radio show: "2012: We are The Living Prophecy."
1914 – The Khaki Chum’s Christmas Truce – 1999 – 85 Years – Lest We Forget. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce
The Christmas truce was a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western Front around Christmas of 1914, during the First World War. Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the point that individuals would walk across to talk to their opposite numbers bearing gifts. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, many soldiers from both sides – as well as, to a lesser degree, from French units – independently ventured into no man’s land, where they mingled, exchanging food and souvenirs. As well as joint burial ceremonies, several meetings ended in carol-singing, or – famously – games of football. Occasionally believed to be quasi-mythical, the truce has become one of the most enduring popular images of the war, often seen as a symbolic moment of peace and humanity amidst one of the most violent events of modern history. It was not ubiquitous, however; in some regions of the front, fighting continued throughout the day, whilst in others, little more than an arrangement to recover bodies was made. The following year, a few units again arranged ceasefires with their opponents over Christmas, but to nothing like the widespread extent seen in 1914; this was, in part, due to strongly worded orders from the high commands of both sides prohibiting such fraternisation. CLIP
December 21 2010 Solstice Full moon Total Lunar Eclipse Synchronicity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BGWKyM5MKw
Superb production and stunning coincidence regarding Compassion as the key point of focus for a meditation suggested during the moon eclipse. There is only a minor mistake as it is said the maximum lunar eclipse time is at 2:17 am UT when it is in fact at 08:17 Universal Time (3:17 am on the East Coast of North America) which is just a few moments from now...
All You Need Is Love (From the 2007 movie "Across The Universe"– check the other related videos on the right) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLcC0os5ZR0
"There's nothing you can know that can't be known - Nothing you can see that isn't shown - No where you can be, that isn't where you're meant to be... It's easy..."
Tippi - Bridging the Gap to Africa TRAILER (2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLoN6pD_JeA
Tippi Degre, also known as "Tippi of Africa" has been living in France and Madagascar for the past 7 years. This is a documentary made last year on her returning to Africa, and bridging two completely different cultures, meeting old and new friends. Check also tippi and bushmen - tippi and a snake - tippi and cheetah
A Girl from Namibia Who Has a Special Bond with Animals - With several beautiful pictures! http://spluch.blogspot.com/2007/10/girl-from-namibia-who-has-special-bond.html
In 1990, Tippi Degré – daughter of Alain Degré and Sylvie Robert, a couple who chose to relinquish their lives in France for the freedom of nature in Southern Africa – was born in the newly independent Namibia. Her parents worked as freelance wildlife photographers and film makers. At 10 months the toddler was exploring the Namibian bush and desert. For 10 years, Tippi wandered the bush bare footed, making friends with all sorts of animals: leopards, caracals, mongooses, baboons and snakes. Her playground was the hills and the harsh desert tribe lands of southern Africa; as the family wandered the bush land, Tippi picked up all kinds of friends – like Abu, a five ton (28-year-old) elephant she calls “her brother”.She would ride to a water hole on top of Abu and splash with the elephants of the herd, cuddle giant bullfrogs, lion cubs or meerkats; and became a grasshopper hunting specialist with the chameleons she was so fond of. Tippi also befriended the Himba tribes people and the Bushmen of the Kalahari, who taught her how to survive on roots and berries and hence gave her practical experience of real life in the bush.Life as a bush baby came to an end after her last year of "freedom" in Madagascar when Tippi moved to the French capital with her mother six years ago. But both in fact and in her heart, she remained an African.
I Am Because We Are http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3awaN0nOwQ
The plight of millions of AIDS-orphaned children in Malawi brought into sharp focus by Madonna. More through http://www.iambecauseweare.com/ and http://www.youtube.com/user/iambecauseweare and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Because_We_Are - The film documents the concern over the millions of orphans in the African country of Malawi who have lost parents and siblings to HIV and AIDS, many of whom live on the streets. The film also shows the efforts with Madonna's charitable organisation Raising Malawi in helping with improving their lives and conditions. Madonna said about the film: "To say that this film is a labor of love is trivial. It's also the journey of a lifetime. I hope you all are as inspired watching it as I was making it."
Ubuntu - "I am what I am because of who we all are." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy)
Ubuntu, pronounced /ùbúntú/ (oo-BOON-too), is an ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other. The word has its origin in the Bantu languages of southern Africa. Ubuntu is seen as a classical African concept Ubuntu: "I am what I am because of who we all are." A translation offered by Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee. Similar to a saying: A single straw of a broom can be broken easily, but the straws together are not easily broken. Archbishop Desmond Tutu offered a definition in a 1999 book: "A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed." Archbishop Desmond Tutu further explained Ubuntu in 2008: "One of the sayings in our country is Ubuntu - the essence of being human. Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can't be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality - Ubuntu - you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity."
Deepak Chopra Introducing the WorldShift-20 Declaration at the Asia Consciousness Festival in Hong Kong http://worldshiftcouncil.org/2010/11/22/presenting-the-ws-20-declaration/
A lucid assessment of our global problems and a long, spiritually sound wish list of things we can all do to help turn things around. MAKE SURE to give a look at the WS-20 Declaration included below in this compilation.
Beyond Me http://vimeo.com/18217038
A new documentary on meditation, and about consciousness, evolution and instincts. "We are the Field!" - Note from Jean: If you cannot make time to watch this whole 50 min fascinating video, at least watch the 10 min part about reincarnation starting from 9 min 23 up. You may not be able to stop watching BTW and may want to get started from the beginning...
General Motors hy wire car of the future http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_pC2zIgff0
The GM Hy-Wire, a hydrogen-fuelled car with a replaceable body. Just ask your car dealer to bring around a van or pickup body and have him replace the existing one in front of your house. Flies by wire. The drive train switches from the right side to the left side as desired. Goodbye gasoline.
Stealth jets for peace? 'Israel blackmails the world' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFY1pqYzJA
The U.S. is trying to revive the stalled Middle East peace talks, by enticing Israel to extend its construction moratorium in occupied Palestinian territories. Washington's put 20 stealth fighter jets worth 3 billion dollars on the table - and a pledge to fight any international resolutions against Israel. In exchange, it wants the country to pause construction in the West Bank for three months, with a promise not to ask to prolong the freeze afterwards. Palestinians are criticizing the plan, pointing out it will NOT apply to East Jerusalem. To discuss this in more depth, RT talks to Dr. Hassan Abu Libdeh, Palestinian Autonomy Economics Minister and Chairman of the Palestinian campaign against settlements products.
EPIC BLAST http://www.spaceweather.com/images2010/06dec10/epicblast2.gif
As predicted, a "mega-filament" of solar magnetism erupted on Dec. 6th, producing a blast of epic proportions. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action as the 700,000-km long structure lifted off the stellar surface and--snap!!--hurled itself into space. The eruption produced a bright coronal mass ejection (CME) observed by the STEREO-A spacecraft: video. Earth was not in the line of fire; the cloud should sail wide of our planet. Earth-effects might be limited to pretty pictures. More through http://www.spaceweather.com - Checl also this spectacular picture
Stepping Away From the Trees For a Look at the Forest http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/insights2010/
Science's news staff takes a break from reporting to review some big ideas of the past 10 years and the technologies that made them possible.
Are we living in the end times? (12 Nov 2010) http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/rizkhan/2010/11/201011111191189923.html
Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher and cultural critic, on the collapse of society and the failure of capitalism. -- Is the world ignoring signs of the so-called "end times"? According to renowned philosopher Slavoj Zizek the capitalist system is pushing us all towards an apocalyptic doomsday. He points to the faltering economy, global warming and deteriorating ethnic relations as evidence. On Thursday's Riz Khan we speak with Zizek, who has been called the "most dangerous philosopher in the West", about his controversial theories and prognosis for the future.
Set to launch, our nuclear Leviathan: The enormous scale of the biggest submarine ever built in Britain (DEC 14, 2010) WORTH A LOOK! NO WONDER THE UK IS IN THE RED! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1338351/Set-launch-nuclear-Leviathan-The-enormous-scale-biggest-submarine-built-Britain.html
Her nuclear reactor could power a city the size of Southampton, she will never need refuelling and she can use her guided missiles to pulverise an enemy more than 1,000 miles away. (...) More complex than the U.S. Space Shuttles and able to circumnavigate the globe without surfacing, Ambush is 291ft long - the same length as a football pitch - as wide as four double-decker buses and 12 storeys high. A typical patrol lasts ten weeks, but she could theoretically stay underwater for her entire 25-year lifespan. (...) BAE Systems is building seven Astute-class subs. The £6.7 billion project is already £1.4 billion over budget, after being beset by problems and delays.
South Africa - Lake Chrissie Big Foot http://www.truthed.com/pictures/820_south_africa_lake_chrissie_big_foot.htm
This photo has shows a foot print deep into the rock which use to be sandstone/clay. This foot print is 6 foot from big toe to heel !The right foot is in Madagascar and this left foot Print is in the East Coast side of South Africa, in Pumalanga. Both match up and it just shows there were some very tall people living on the Earth a few thousand years ago !How these prints separated could only be due to Continental Drift !
DHS Implementing No Work List: Citizens Must Get Government Approval to Work in Private Sector Jobs (December 16, 2010) http://www.infowars.com/dhs-implementing-no-work-list/
You've heard of no fly and no buy lists - get ready for no work lists. Millions of workers now must apply to the DHS and prove they are not terrorists in order to be granted permission by the government to work.
Project Censored http://www.projectcensored.org/about/
The mission of Project Censored is to teach students and the public about the role of a free press in a free society – and to tell the News That Didn’t Make the News and Why - WHAT IS MODERN CENSORSHIP? At Project Censored, we examine the coverage of news and information important to the maintenance of a healthy and functioning democracy. We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions). CLIP - Check their petition Here "Stop the Crackdown on Wikileaks"
Epidemic of TSA screeners connected with rape, pedophilia and sexual perversion explodes (December 17, 2010) - 10,000 Child Porn Images Found On Ex-TSA Worker's Computer Epidemic of TSA screeners connected with rape, pedophilia and sexual perversion explodes!! http://www.prisonplanet.com/10000-child-porn-images-found-on-ex-tsa-workers-computer.html
Yet another TSA worker has been exposed as a pedophile to add the the epidemic of cases that prove those who are inclined to work in jobs that allow them to sexually molest children via invasive groping measures at airports are the most unprofessional, perverted and criminally-minded individuals imaginable.
(...) Airport security staff workers are among the least trustworthy people to operate these machines. Such individuals are routinely caught abusing their authority for their own ego trip or sexual perversion. TSA workers have also been caught in other abuses of power, including stealing laptop computers, sabotaging sensitive screening databases, and joking about planting drugs on travelers. The naked scanners are being manned by people like a TSA agent who flipped out and began screaming, "I am god, I'm in charge," shortly after he got off duty at LAX earlier this year. The TSA is a complete joke – while perverts and pedophiles are busy groping your children and ogling over their naked body scanner image, people with loaded guns are breezing through security while others are hiding in the wheels of Boeing 737s. The fact that the TSA temporarily mothballed their body scanners and invasive groping techniques in a political points scoring ploy designed to deflate the success of the national opt out day protest also underscores that their procedures are nothing more than security theatre, run by an army of ignorant morons following orders who are accompanied by a gaggle of hardcore sex perverts, pedophiles, and criminal predators. States and local authorities across the country need to follow the example of New Jersey and introduce legislation immediately to kick the TSA out of airports and replace them with private security who are professionally trained and who are actually interested in stopping terrorists rather than exercising their sexual deviancy through groping children and ogling naked body scanner images.
Full Spectrum Dominance: 8 Examples Of How The Government Is Attempting To Take Total Control Of Our Food, Our Health, Our Money And Even Our Dignity (November 21, 2010) http://www.benzinga.com/10/11/630702/full-spectrum-dominance-8-examples-of-how-the-government-is-attempting-to-take-total-co
Over the past several decades, no matter which political party has been in power the government has continued to become a larger part of our lives. These days many people are speaking of the "nanny state" that we have created, but the reality is far worse than that. The truth is that the government has become a gluttonous, out of control behemoth that is gobbling up everything in sight and that is attempting to exert full spectrum dominance over our lives. Today, the government seems to have an insatiable hunger to watch us, track us and control us. Now they even want to feel our private parts before we get on an airplane. No matter what politicians we send to Washington D.C., it just seems to get worse and worse. Anyone who still believes that we live in "the land of the free" is completely and totally delusional.It isn't just in one particular area that all of this government intrusion into our lives is so offensive. What we are witnessing is the government slowly digging its fingers even deeper into our lives in a thousand different ways. Sadly, most Americans see the government as the one who is supposed to take care of them from the cradle to the grave, as the one who is supposed to fix all of the problems in society and as the one who is their ultimate authority. This is in direct contradiction to the concept of a "limited government" that our Founding Fathers tried so desperately to enshrine in our founding documents. The American people need a big-time wake up call. The following are 8 examples of how the U.S. government is attempting to take even more control over our lives....
#1 Taking Total Control Of Our Food - S. 510 "The Food Safety Modernization Act"S. 510, "The Food Safety Modernization Act", is another huge power grab by the FDA and the federal government over our food supply. The bill is written so broadly and so vaguely that nobody really knows what it means. The potential for abuse of these vague new powers would be staggering. So will the government abuse these powers? Those who are in favor of the bill say that of course the government will be reasonable, but those who are opposed to the bill point to all of the other abuses that are currently taking place as evidence that we simply cannot trust the feds with vague, undefined powers.Fortunately, the Tester Amendment has been attached to S. 510 at least for now, but big agriculture is not happy about this, and they will be doing everything they can to get it kicked out of the final version of the law. In any event, if this food safety law does get passed, tens of millions of Americans will be left wondering what they are allowed to grow in their back yards, what seeds they are allowed to save and what can and cannot be sold at farmer's markets.In case you think this is paranoid, just consider what is already happening. It has been documented that the feds recently raided an Amish farmer at 5 AM in the morning because they claimed that he was was engaged in the interstate sale of raw milk in violation of federal law. If the feds are willing to stoop so low as to raid Amish farmers, do you think they will have any hesitation when the time comes to raid your home?
#2 Taking Total Control Of Air Travel - The Dehumanizing Full Body Scanners And "Enhanced Pat-Downs" - Totalitarian governments throughout history have always sought to dehumanize their subjects. Sadly, that is exactly what is happening in America today. If you want to get on an airplane in the United States, you will now be forced to either let TSA agents gawk at your naked body or let TSA agents grope your entire body including your genitals.What these TSA agents are being instructed to do to ordinary Americans is so bizarre that it is hard to believe. It is being reported that in many instances TSA agents are actually reaching down the pants of male travelers and up the skirts of female travelers. One retired special education teacher was left humiliated, crying and covered with his own urine after an "enhanced pat-down" by TSA agents. Quite a number of women that have been through these "enhanced pat-downs" have used the phrase "sexual assault" to describe the experience. So is this what America has become? A place that is so "dangerous" that we all must be treated like prison inmates? Large numbers of Americans are swearing that they will simply not fly anymore, but what happens when these "enhanced pat-downs" start showing up at our schools, our shopping centers and our sporting events someday?
#3 Taking Total Control Of Our Health Care - The Loss Of Our Health Freedom
(...) Our liberties and our freedoms are under attack from a thousand different directions and they are being stripped away from us at a blinding pace.It has gotten to the point where most of us just sit in our homes and enjoy the "freedom" of digesting the "programming" that is constantly being hurled at us through our televisions. Of course the vast majority of that programming is produced by just 6 monolithic corporations that control almost everything that we watch, hear and read. Power and money have become more highly concentrated in America today than ever before, and yet most Americans don't even realize it. Most Americans are so busy just trying to survive from month to month that they don't even have time to think about the deeper issues. At the end of the night most of them are so exhausted from serving the system that all they can do is collapse on the sofa and turn on some programming. But the American people desperately need to wake up. Without liberty and freedom our country cannot work. But our freedoms and liberties are being stripped away a little bit more each and every day.The America that so many of us grew up adoring is dying right in front of our eyes. If you plan on saying something about it, you better do so before it is too late. CLIP
Senate Bill 510 vote delayed until after Thanksgiving – Take action now to oppose food tyranny http://www.naturalnews.com/030462_Food_Safety_bill_FDA.html
(NaturalNews) If there’s one thing to give thanks for this year, it’s the fact that the Senate floor vote on the so-called “Food Safety Modernization Act” has been delayed until after the Senate’s Thanksgiving recess. This gives all of us — the commonsense opponents of S.510 who don’t want the FDA having authority over raw milk, seeds and backyard gardens — another week to flood the offices of U.S. Senators with calls, faxes and emails that express opposition to the bill. The jury is still out on the Tester-Hagan Amendment which would exempt small farmers from some of the more tyrannical requirements under the law. If this amendment were adopted, it would substantially improve the bill, but even with this amendment, the bill is just another overreaching expansion of Big Government into yet another area of incompetence. (If the government can’t run health care worth a darn, how are they supposed to manage the entire food supply?) CLIP
Machines of War: Blackwater, Monsanto, and Bill Gates http://english.pravda.ru/business/companies/14-10-2010/115363-machines_of_war_blackwater_monsanto_billgates-0
A report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation (Blackwater's Black Ops, 9/15/2010) revealed that the largest mercenary army in the world, Blackwater (now called Xe Services) clandestine intelligence services was sold to the multinational Monsanto. (...) No wonder that a company engaged in the "science of death" as Monsanto, which has been dedicated from the outset to produce toxic poisons spilling from Agent Orange to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), pesticides, hormones and genetically modified seeds, is associated with another company of thugs. Almost simultaneously with the publication of this article in The Nation, the Via Campesina reported the purchase of 500,000 shares of Monsanto, for more than $23 million by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which with this action completed the outing of the mask of "philanthropy." Another association that is not surprising. It is a marriage between the two most brutal monopolies in the history of industrialism: Bill Gates controls more than 90 percent of the market share of proprietary computing and Monsanto about 90 percent of the global transgenic seed market and most global commercial seed. (...) Like Monsanto, Gates is also engaged in trying to destroy rural farming worldwide, mainly through the "Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa" (AGRA). It works as a Trojan horse to deprive poor African farmers of their traditional seeds, replacing them with the seeds of their companies first, finally by genetically modified (GM). To this end, the Foundation hired Robert Horsch in 2006, the director of Monsanto. Now Gates, airing major profits, went straight to the source.
THE ET FILES
Stanley Fulham dies, warned ETs will intervene & save Earth’s collapsing ecology (December 23rd, 2010) http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/stanley-fulham-dies-warned-ets-will-intervene-save-earth-s-collapsing-ecology
(...) In an exclusive, in-depth interview on Exopolitics Radio with Alfred Lambremont Webre, former NORAD officer Stanley A. Fulham has stated that a regional galactic governance authority, (the ‘Council of 8’) made a dramatic decision in January, 2010 to put aside the law of non-intervention. At a solemn meeting, the Council of 8 decided to intervene with their technology to clean Earth’s atmosphere before an environmental collapse occurs on Earth, as has happened on many other inhabited planets with civilizations similar to our own. The Council of 8 did so, according to Mr. Fulham’s information, after reaching a conclusion that that our human technology could not now prevent an environmental collapse and species extinction on Earth from occuring. According to Mr. Fulham, this is a rare decision by the Council of 8, and is partly a result of Council members wishing to preserve the unique positive qualities of our human population. The Council of 8, according to Mr. Fulham’s information, consists of the intelligent civilizations of the Pleiades, Orion, Sirius, Bootes, Alpha Centauri, Comsuli, Zeta Reticuli, and Pouseti. This cleanup of the Earth’s atmosphere will, according to Mr. Fulham’s information, commence in 2015 after a 2014 speech at the United Nations by the Council of 8’s Pleiadian representatives. The Council of 8’s appearance in 2014 at the United Nation’s General Assembly may occur, according to Mr. Fulham’s information, following a collapse of the present world order and the emergence of a new way of living during the period 2010 – 2014. This transitional 2010-14 period may be accompanied by possible earth changes, monetary collapse, and governmental and nation state collapse. CLIP Check also Argentine Air Force announces committee to study UFO phenomenon
Are the UFOs appearing in Russia skies in Dec. 2010 Fulham’s predicted UFO wave? (December 29th, 2010) http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/are-the-ufos-appearing-russia-skies-dec-2010-fulham-s-predicted-ufo-wave
Russian Television (RT) is now reporting UFOs beginning to appear over the skies of Russia and has released a video and news article confirming these sighting. Click here to view a Russian Television report on the December 2010 UFO wave in Russia. RT also reported the following on December 29, 2010: UFOs begin to frequent Russian skies in December - In early December UFOs began to frequent the skies of the capital of the republic of Kalmykia, located in southern Russia. Every ten days the residents of Elista seen UFOs of unknown nature in different parts of the city. Latest information on this phenomenon appeared on 22 December when witnesses observed this type of flying objects in different parts of Elista. So some citizens say they have seen in the sky two concentric circles spinning in opposite directions. Others speak of a triangular object radiating light.Scientists can not give a rational explanation for these phenomena. For example, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Kalmykia, Mijaliáyev Badme does not rule out the possibility of the existence of an alien civilization, but also sees no clear evidence of the existence in the appearance of UFOs in Elista sky.Meanwhile, the ufologists say that UFOs appear in other parts of Russia. Stanley A. Fulham’s December 3, 2010 statement (...) In my last ‘Reading’ with the Transcendors on Tuesday, October 13th, 2010, the Transcendors advised me of the following predictions on the Pleiadian UFO displays: A. There will be a major UFO display over Moscow between the end of the first part of January 2011 and the second week of January 2011. B. This ‘display’ will be followed by a major display over London approximately seven-days later. C. Interventions will then accelerate, not so much over our cities, but dispersed over our continents with sightings increasing in duration. The intent of these interventions is to increase mankind’s acceptance of the alien phenomena, so that hopefully, we will be prepared to accept a face-to-face encounter and communicate, perhaps as early as next year (2011). D. Objective—a dramatic introduction of the alien reality—an appearance at the United Nations. CLIP
NEW JANUARY 2011 UFO DISPLAY PREDICTIONS by Stanley A. Fulham (December 3, 2010) http://sites.google.com/site/challengesofchange/
(...) In my last ‘Reading’ with the Transcendors on Tuesday, October 13th, 2010, the Transcendors advised me of the following predictions on the Pleiadian UFO displays: A. There will be a major UFO display over Moscow between the end of the first part of January 2011 and the second week of January 2011.B. This ‘display’ will be followed by a major display over London approximately seven-days later.C. Interventions will then accelerate, not so much over our cities, but dispersed over our continents with sightings increasing in duration. The intent of these interventions is to increase mankind’s acceptance of the alien phenomena, so that hopefully, we will be prepared to accept a face-to-face encounter and communicate, perhaps as early as next year (2011).D. Objective—a dramatic introduction of the alien reality—an appearance at the United Nations. The Alien ‘intervention process’ will provide a philosophical challenge to mankind as nothing else has ever done. It will challenge our most fundamental beliefs. Did Christ teach to this extraterrestrial world? Are they aware of Allah and his hatred for the heathens and infidels (which, of course, must include the aliens—they also have souls!). Do they have any religions?—or spiritualism? The UFO ‘intervention process’ will have a major impact on the U.S. and Russian governments. This will be the catalyst that will break the “conspiracy of silence.” CLIP CHECK ALSO UFOs predicted over Moscow and London in January 2011
Ice Age Civilizations & Atlantis - Underwater Archeology season 1 Episode 100 (50 min) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG29fMwsTzU
Scientists are now discovering at the bottom of the earth's oceans evidence of ancient advanced cultures that pre-date the last ice age. Discover the hidden secrets of a timeless mystery in this fascinating film about ancient advanced civilizations that existed thousands of years ago. Many new and amazing theories are now emerging about the origins of human civilization and Atlantis. Submerged megalithic sites have now been discovered in many places around the world including the remains of what is believed to be the lost ancient advanced civilization of Atlantis. One thing is certain, what you are about to see in this amazing film can only be described as miraculous. Evidence of ancient sea fairing cultures with advanced knowledge of astronomy, global mapping and complex mathematics. Includes spectacular underwater cinematography of ancient advanced city structures and a fascinating series of spellbinding interviews with researchers, scientists and the best known, most credible Ice Age authorities in the world today.
The Great Pyramid of Giza By Martin Gray - FASCINATING DESCRIPTION OF AN ANCIENT MYSTERY http://sacredsites.com/africa/egypt/the_great_pyramid_of_giza.html
(...) Herodotus, visiting in the fifth century BC, reported that inscriptions of strange characters were to be found on the pyramid's casing stones. In AD 1179 the Arab historian Abd el Latif recorded that these inscriptions were so numerous that they could have filled "more than ten thousand written pages." William of Baldensal, a European visitor of the early fourteenth century, tells how the stones were covered with strange symbols arranged in careful rows. Sadly, in 1356, following an earthquake that leveled Cairo, the Arabs robbed the pyramid of its beautiful casing of stones to rebuild mosques and fortresses in the city. As the stones were cut into smaller pieces and reshaped, all traces of the ancient inscriptions were removed from them. A great library of ageless wisdom was forever lost.
(...) Silt sediments rising to fourteen feet around the base of the pyramid contain many seashells and fossils that have been radiocarbon-dated to be nearly twelve thousand years old. These sediments could have been deposited in such great quantities only by major sea flooding, an event the dynastic Egyptians could never have recorded because they were not living in the area until eight thousand years after the flood. This evidence alone suggests that the three main Giza pyramids are at least twelve thousand years old. In support of this ancient flood scenario, mysterious legends and records tell of watermarks that were clearly visible on the limestone casing stones of the Great Pyramid before those stones were removed by the Arabs. These watermarks were halfway up the sides of the pyramid, or about 400 feet above the present level of the Nile River.
(...) Measurements throughout the pyramid show that its constructors knew of the proportions of pi (3.14...), phi or the Golden Mean (1.618), and the "Pythagorean" triangles thousands of years before Pythagoras, the so-called father of geometry, lived. Measurements show that the builders knew the precise spherical shape and size of the earth and had accurately charted such complex astronomical events as the precession of the equinoxes and the lunar standstill dates. The minute discrepancies of the lengths of the base of the pyramid (several inches over the 230 meter length of its base) reveal not an error on the part of the builders but an ingenious means of incorporating into the pyramid the "discrepancies" of the earth itself, in this case the flattening of the earth's globe at the poles. Shafts leading upward from the two main chambers, previously thought to be air shafts for ventilation, have been shown to have another possible purpose. A miniature electronic robot mechanically crawled sixty-five meters up the shafts and its findings suggested that the south and north shafts in the Kings Chamber are pointed to Al Nitak (Zeta Orionis) and Alpha Draconis respectively, while the south and north shafts of the Queens Chamber point to Sirius and Beta Ursa Minor. The scientists conducting this research believe that the layout of the three pyramids on the Giza plateau precisely mirror the position of the three main stars in the Orion constellation.
(...) Although much research remains to be done in these areas, legend, archaeology, mathematics, and earth sciences seem to indicate that the Great Pyramid was a monumental device for gathering, amplifying, and focusing a mysterious energy field for the spiritual benefit of human beings. CLIP - CHECK ALSO The Sphinx, Non-Corporeal Beings AND Connecting Meditation - This whole website is worth exploring - http://sacredsites.com - Incidentally I recently bought Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power and highly recommend it. - And check also The Orion Mystery - Archeo-Astronomy "The Orion Mystery presents startling facts about a star-correlation with the Giza Pyramids in Egypt. Why did the Egyptians align their monuments with such high precision? Why did the ancients put so much emphasis on astronomical alignments? The answers to these questions will shock and amaze you."
My mum talks to aliens - Part 1 (December 1, 2010) Part 2 HERE - Part 3 HERE - Part 4 HERE - QUITE UNIQUE! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51PCmvJ4feM
Mary Rodwell is Australia's leading authority on extraterrestrial phenomena, her son Chris Rodwell is a vet, a man of science and self-confessed alien skeptic -- their relationship has reached a critical point and something has to give. You can also download it in full HERE
Barack Obama to make UFO announcement in coming weeks http://www.allnewsweb.com/page1199999462.php
All News Web has received information from government insiders close to the US President that Barack Obama has been given the go ahead to make an important ‘off the cuff’ announcement regarding UFO visits and US contact with aliens. Allegedly DARPA has given this move the green light. The comments by the President will be made within the next month. Our sources claim this will not be outright admittance of UFO visits and contact with aliens, however the comments will come as close to admittance as any President has to date and will be made in the context of a speech on an entirely different matter.From what we understand The President will concede that there is ‘some evidence’ to suggest aliens might have attempted to contact Earthlings. All of this is said to be part of a warm up program leading to eventual outright admittance of knowledge of UFO and alien visitation by major world governments within three years.
Secret Kennedy Extraterrestrial Briefing http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvideo/49100/Secret_Kennedy_extraterrestrial_briefing/
A newly released video interview reveals that Robert Kennedy, while U.S. Attorney General, received a classified briefing on a crashed UFO that was extraterrestrial in origin, and whose technology was secretly being reverse engineered. According to Lt Colonel Philip Corso,who served as head of the U.S. Army’s Foreign Technology Desk from 1961-1963, he personally briefed Kennedy about the Army’s effort to seed extraterrestrial technologies into the private sector. Interviewed shortly before his death in 1998, Corso revealed for the first time that Bobby Kennedy contacted him for his knowledge on highly classified national security information. Corso from 1953-1957 had served in a number of National Security Council committees during the Eisenhower administration as the Army Liaison reporting directly to Lt General Arthur Trudeau who was head of U.S. Army Intelligence. Corso’s revelation is further evidence that President Kennedy was aware of the extraterrestrial origins of UFOs. Kennedy sought to gain information on UFOs from various sources in order to re-establish direct Presidential control. It is very likely that this is the reason Bobby Kennedy sought Corso out. Corso’s revelation adds to evidence that President Kennedy’s efforts to gain oversight over UFOs played a role in his 1963 assassination. Importantly, Corso provides an insight into how the UFO issue may have also been a factor in the death of Marilyn Monroe and the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy.
President John F Kennedy Secret Society Speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhZk8ronces
"Listen to this incredible audio recording of a speech made by JFK before the American Newspaper Publishers Association where he warns the press about the secret societies that are the real power in global affairs."
Giants 3 Meters Tall Found in Georgia (Caucasus) & France http://www.stevequayle.com/Giants/W.Europe/Georgia.France.html
In 2008 the bones of an ancient giant man were unearthed near Borjomi, in Georgia (Caucasus) and reported in the news. This giant was estimated at 2,50 to 3 meters tall (About 9 to 10 feet) and had a skull about 3 times normal size. The finding of giants in the Caucasus mountains is nothing new. A Four-meter human skeleton was found by two amateur archaeologist in Georgia near the village of Udabno in the summer of the year 2000, and skeletons of giants were also found at a cave near Gora Kazbek, Georgia in the 1920's, not to mention the discoveries by Soviet scientists in the 1950's. On October 30, 1945 The Soviet News Agency TASS, and the WASHINGTON POST through UNITED PRESS, reported:"The Skeleton of a giant, with a skull 33 inches around and a shin-bone 33 inches long, has been found in the Tien Mountains of Russian central Asia north of the Himalayas…"The fact that such giants were once reported in the mainstream press up until about 1950 is very interesting. But similar to other past discoveries such as the "Giant of Castelnau" they always seem to fade from public attention and gradually become forgotten (by design).
Are humans really beings of light? http://viewzone2.com/dnax.html
Dr. Popp exclaims, "We now know, today, that man is essentially a being of light."
The Arcturians -- Architects of a New Dawn by Clifford Stone http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/alien_races01a.htm http://tinyurl.com/2casdcm
Edgar Cayce has said in his teachings that Arcturus is one of the most advanced civilizations in this galaxy. It is the fifth-dimensional civilization that is a prototype of Earth’s future. Its energy works as an emotional, mental, and spiritual healer for humanity. It is also an energy gateway through which humans pass during death and rebirth. It functions as a way station for nonphysical consciousness to become accustomed to physicality. The Book of Knowledge: The Keys of Enoch describes it as the mid-way programming center used by the physical brotherhoods in this universe to govern the many rounds of experiments with “physicals” at this end of the galaxy. (...) The Arcturians work in close connection with the ascended masters whom they call the Brotherhood of the All. They also work closely with what they refer to as the Galactic Command. The Arcturians travel the universe in their starships, which are some of the most advanced in the entire universe. One of the reasons Earth has not been attacked by warlike negative extraterrestrials has been those civilizations’ fear of the advanced starships of the Arcturians. Their ships are state-of-the-art technology, far beyond anything I have mentioned so far. One of the starships circling the Earth is called the Starship Athena, after the Greek goddess. Arcturian society is governed by the elders, who are revered by the people of Arcturus for their advanced knowledge, wisdom, and extremely high vibrational frequencies. The higher the vibrational frequency, the closer one is to Light, or spirit, or God. (...) The Arcturian starships are the finest in the entire universe. They are propelled by crystals that do not come from that planet but from a planet in the Milky Way that has not been discovered by Earthly scientists. These crystals have a way of conducting light energy from the Great Central Sun. (...) Many souls are brought to the Arcturian starships during the dream state where they are worked on and helped, although the Arcturians never invade a person’s free choice as the Grays are doing. The Arcturians are here to assist humans in entering the fourth and fifth dimensions of reality and in raising their vibrational frequencies. They stand as the guardians and protectors of higher consciousness in the universe. They are based in every country on the planet and, and in fact, have bases all over the universe. They are here to educate humanity but have had a difficult time dealing with the government and the military, who are primarily interested in military technology, not spiritual enlightenment. The Arcturians could help in an even greater and more open capacity than they are now, but the people who govern the United States and the world are so materialistically and egoistically oriented that they resist the help of these incredibly advanced beings. Instead, the U.S. government made a deal with the Grays who are very selfish beings interested only in taking over the world for their own greedy purposes. - Check http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_3aneRPOg
More fulfilled, predicted UFO sightings over New York confirm ETs will intervene to clean Earth's ecology - By Alfred Lambremont Webre (Dec. 4, 2010) http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/more-predicted-ufo-sightings-over-new-york-confirm-et-will-intervene-ecology
In an exclusive Dec. 4, 2010 ExopoliticsTV interview, a former intelligence agent of the Spanish and NATO intelligence services has stated that New York City UFO sightings, which occurred on Nov. 24, 2010, were predicted by him 15 days earlier on Nov. 9, 2010, based in interdimensional information given to him by intelligent civilizations of the regional galactic governance authority known as the 'Council of 8'. The Nov. 24, 2010 New York UFO sightings were videotaped, and the videotape can be seen in the Examiner.com article below. (...) These exclusive reports come as Stanley A. Fulham, now ill with terminal pancreatic cancer, has issued a final prediction that Council of 8 UFO ships will appear over Moscow, Russia and London UK at the beginning of 2011, in an acceleration of planned extraterrestrial intervention on Earth to appear at the U.N. General Assembly and begin cleansing Earth’s ecology 2011-15. According to the Spanish-NATO intelligence agent/whistleblower, the prediction of a Nov. 24, 2010 UFO sighting over New York City was made to him on Nov. 9, 2010 in an ‘inter-dimensional information download’. The downloaded information also contained information as to the source of the prediction – a regional galactic governance council including the Pleiadians, the Alpha Centaurians, the Sirians, the Bootes Grays, and other races. According to the former Spanish-NATO intelligence officer, the interdimensional source behind the Nov. 9, 2010 prediction stated that ‘Council of 8’ intelligent civilizations intended appear more openly in 2011, and to speak in the U.N. General Assembly and to intervene openly to clean Earth’s environment in the 2014-15 time horizon if not before. The interdimensional source also indicated that the intelligent civilizations were already taking action against chemtrails, which they described as weapons intended to prevent humanity’s DNA structure from evolving with galactic consciousness energy waves. The source stated they would never allow a planetary nuclear war to take place on Earth. CLIP - Continued HERE - Check also Cleanse your body from Chemtrails (How to Detox Aluminum From the Body)
‘ET GO HOME’ vote outcome not helpful to ET plan to cleanse Earth’s environment (November 3rd, 2010) http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/et-go-home-vote-outcome-not-helpful-to-et-plan-to-cleanse-earth-s-environment
The outright rejection by Denver, CO. voters of Initiative 300 to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission by a projected 83 ‘no’ – 17 % ‘yes’ can reasonably read as a referendum by a representative sample of informed urban humanity on whether humanity wishes to establish rational interactive protocol-based relations with intelligent civilizations that are now not only visiting Earth, but concerned about the viability of our terrestrial ecology.According to press reports, ´´The ... proposal, which was defeated soundly during midterm voting, would have allowed residents to post their observations on Denver's city website and report sightings. Early results showed that Denver residents voted 106,776 to 20,162 against the proposal. Jeff Peckman, who originally proposed the measure, said that the government was already tracking alien sightings but refused to make the reports public. Mr Peckman is a meditation instructor and promoter of new technology, including something he says reduces the "chaos of electromagnetic fields." Mr Peckman claimed that the measure, known as the Denver initiative 300, had failed because opponents had greatly inflated the commission's projected cost. (...) If the results of the Nov. 2, 2010 vote by the population of Denver, CO. are a true indication of the attitude of representative sample of the human population toward other intelligent civilizations in the multi-verse, then the implications for the human population and for the future of our biosphere and our planetary ecology may be severe. The reason? The Denver, Colorado vote functionally represents a rejection by humanity of the opportunity to become interactively, consciously, and proactively involved in a reported positive plan by intelligent civilizations to intervene by 2015 to cleanse Earth’s atmosphere of excessive CO2, before inevitable collapse of the planetary ecology occurs. According to ex-NORAD officer Stanley A. Fulham, some of the principal intelligent civilizations concerned with the husbandry and guardianship of our young planet and civilization – the Pleiades, the Alpha Centaurians, the Sirians and others – decided in an unusual meeting around January 2010 (our time) to intervene because they reached the conclusion that Earth did not possess the technology to do so itself. This decision sets aside the law of non-intervention (which would let out planet and human race die) and is a rare one. These advanced races have allowed Earth to live because of the unusual qualities of humans, such as emotion. CLIP
PROJECT CAMELOT: KERRY CASSIDY INTERVIEWS ASHAYANA DEANE - PART TWO (2 hr 48 min) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-h_Qk4Z1SQ&NR=1
I went to Florida to interview A'shayana Deane, author of the Voyager books. Her previous work details the history behind the genetic engineering of the human race and the numerous ET races that have been interacting with and shaping our destiny here on Earth as well as throughout the many multi-verses. This information is highly complex and detailed. She and two other "speakers" as they call themselves are receiving this information via telepathic downloads. They have been trained by the Guardian Alliances, a group of ETs who protect the secrets of ascension and the stargates on this planet and others from what they call the self-interested Intruder races. This interview is the first part of several hours I spent with Ashayana Deane and the others working with her on bringing the science of Keylonta to the planet. CLIP Recommended by Judith Iam (brightlightbeing@comcast.net) who wrote: "I believe this is of great interest. Just last night, a friend, both grounded and ceaselessly spiritually exploring, described Ashayana Deane and this work as far beyond anything she'd encountered, in scope and extreme detail. Having watched the first video, I can see why. The first installment is the longest, just over 2 1/2 hours; 5 hours total for the three. There are very detailed charts and maps throughout." PART 1 HERE and PART 3 HERE - Note from Jean: Her concept of ascension codes that must be activated NOW in our DNA and the need to save at least some "samples" of our human angelic "species" through some of us going through the ascension gate/portal before 21 Dec 2012 is quite fascinating.
Series of earthquakes in the Gulf of Aden – Stargate Activation? (November 16, 2010) http://thetruthbehindthescenes.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/series-of-earthquakes-in-the-gulf-of-aden-stargate-activation/
A very unusual series of some 43 consecutive earthquakes recorded since yesterday morning by USGS in the Gulf of Aden, between Djibouti, Somalia and Yemen.Although a series of earthquakes in one place usually a normal phenomenon, in view of aftershocks that can be generated after a major quake, this series is still remarkable. On this spot has long been no seismic activity more measured, and never in such high numbers consecutive. The earthquakes range between 4.5 and 5.4 on the Richter scale and almost all are on or around 10 km depth. A few days ago reported that Spaceweater.com the expected date of securities by the eruption of solar flare around 14 to 15 November 1123 would reach the earth. Often this is accompanied by seismic activity. A connection between the two is possible. Stargate Activation? In early January this year we published the article “Events in Yemen and the Stargate in the Gulf of Aden,” the strange events in that region. There are more than 300 Navy ships around the “vortex” and the year before appeared suddenly news about Somali pirates and terrorists in Yemen, as a diversion or cover-up seems to be the presence of these vessels in the Gulf of Aden. It seems that the stargate again yesterday in strength is increased, or maybe even completely open, given the measured seismic activity at a depth of 10 km (7 miles), which exactly matches the depth of the acting power that among the Stargate located. CLIP Check also Wikileaks, the US secret bunker, the Gulf of Aden Vortex: Contact made? - NOTE from Jean: You can verify at http://www.iris.edu/seismon/ that this strange series on earthquakes in the Gulf of Aden are for real. You'll also see that there are a growing number of earthquakes worldwide - especially in 3 specific areas!... And for a bit of X-Files drama about this, here is the related comment of the ERN subscriber who brought this to my attention: "There is a Stargate there re-opened in full by the Light Forces in 2008 and the dark side has been trying to get it back --bombarding it-- ever since. Sounds like battle is reaching fever pitch what with this intensification in the energy vortex... Most important to know is that there is a family of stargates around the planet all interrelated. They are being opened in sequence. Aden was the 8.8.8. The most important gate is the one scheduled for 11.11.11 reactivation which will bring out the full might of the enemy to try to prevent it because they KNOW that once this 11th gate is fired, it will trigger automatic opening of all the remaining gates in one huge chain reaction signalling permanent downfall of the dark forces and there won't be one damn thing they can do to stop it. It's ballgame over for them, so they are feverishly doing everything in their power to launch counter attacks, one we're seeing now at Aden. Almine taught us that while many will fall into fear because all they will see is destruction, those who know the truth will remain calm, in their power, aware that this is a necessary chapter of restructuring (as opposed to destruction), reshaping the props of life and living so that real life and real living can be restored to a suffering humanity and a weary planet."
Is The Gulf Of Aden Stargate Opening? (15 November 2010) X-files type of story http://beforeitsnews.com/story/264/867/Is_the_Gulf_of_Aden_Stargate_Opening.html
Earthquakes of substantial intensity have been swarming in the gulf of Aden off the coast of Yemen the past 36 hours. The map below (which updates itself-more showing up now) showed 43 earthquakes the first 36 hours, and the report below lists the worldwide activity, showing how much is concentrated in that area.
SOME OF THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN THE WIKILEAKS SAGA
Assange: I'll reveal info that will spark Arab world coups (12.30.10) http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4006990,00.htm
WikiLeaks founder tells Al Jazeera leaked documents in his possession show top Arab officials disclose sensitive information to CIA - Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, said he holds the names of senior officials in the Arab world who visit US embassies in their respective countries voluntarily "to establish links" with the CIA. "These officials are spies for the US in their countries," Assange said in the second part of his interview with Arab television network Al Jazeera. He said the leaked documents in his possession show that Arab officials reveal sensitive information on their colleagues and respective countries. The WikiLeaks founder said the website would consider exposing the names of the Arab officials only if it would be certain it would not lead to their death. Assange warned that the revelations may lead to dangerous coups in the Arab world. He added that WikiLeaks plans to reveal some 7,000 documents related to Egypt and its president, Hosni Mubarak. Other leaked documents, he said, reveal information on the oil industry in the Arab world over the past few decades
The Wikileaks Documentary -- Full Version (50 min) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvmfOaZ34Pk
Recommended by Jonathan Eveleigh (jonathan@believeucan.eu) who wrote: "This item is so essential if we are to really claim Truth as our guide for living and for creating a better world for our children.I cannot imagine anyone not being moved and changed by watching this documentary. The truth is by the choice we make daily, to give our power away to people who choose to design our lives for us or to step into our own true power by knowing that we create our own reality every bit of it and that we can if we want be co-creators, to "Dream our Lives and Live our Dreams". For the positive new paradigm this also is essential viewing: Beyond 2012 - Evolving Perspectives
Cover-ups, coups, and drones - A Holiday Sampler of What Wikileaks Reveals about the US (Dec 19, 2010) WikiLeaks Cables For Dec. 14-18 (PHOTOS): Tom Cruise, Fidel Castro On Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi AND WikiLeaks & the Banks (Wikileaks founder reiterates intent to leak information on banks)
Wikileaks cable reveals U.S. conspired to retaliate against European nations if they resisted GMOs http://www.naturalnews.com/030828_GMOs_Wikileaks.html
Wikileaks continues to rock the political world by shedding light on conspiracies, corruption and cover-ups. The latest batch of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveals what can only be characterized as a U.S.-led conspiracy to force GMOs onto European countries by making those countries pay a steep price if they resist.
(...) Realization #1) Wikileaks is valuable for exposing the government lies in our world. Without Wikileaks, we never would have known about these cables which prove the existence of this GMO conspiracy.
Realization #2) US government diplomatic officials are working for the corporations! It's just as we've described here on NaturalNews numerous times -- Big Government is really just an extension of the most evil and most powerful corporations that now dominate our planet: The drug companies, the weapons manufacturers, the agricultural giants and so on. Here's what Jeffrey Smith had to say about governments conspiring with Monsanto:
(...) Above all, what these Wikileaks cables really reveal is that government conspiracies are, of course, not only real but that they are taking place right now. Diplomats and ambassadors are, in effect, government thugs who engage in the most unethical actions, full of threats and retaliation, in order to serve the financial interests of their corporate masters. That's how the world really works, despite the Disney-like image portrayed by the mainstream media. Behind the scenes, the U.S. government is literally plotting with Monsanto to take over the world's food supply. That is not an exaggeration. It's not conjecture. It is a statement of fact based on the words of the government's own operatives (who obviously didn't know their words would ever be made public). Through Wikileaks, we have been given a glimpse into the truth behind the Great Wall of government lies. And that truth, it turns out, is a lot uglier than most people could have imagined. CLIP
Architect John Young: WikiLeaks Fog of Infowar and its Ties to The Elite - Alex Jones Tv 2/3
(Part 1 HERE, Part 3 HERE) MUST WATCH!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzHRgJLgSm4
Comment by Steve Beckow (unity22@telus.net) on this video interview: "Architect John Young was involved in the early years of Wikileaks and has a fascinating story to tell about its origins. Apparently it was started by the military to induce secret-sharers to identify themselves as part of an entrapment scheme. It was set up as a spying scheme but it became a reverse-spying scheme. The military used Google to spy on us, Alec Jones says broadly and analogously, and we use Google to spy on them. The good news is Young says that Wikileaks will not be taken down because it will pop up in another way. The bad news is that Young believes Assange has taken the fix for a large bribe. I personally don’t believe that but Young does. Until one of our sources (Matthew, Hatonn, SaLuSa, etc.) tells us what is known from their more clear-sighted perspective, we may never know the truth." (Continued in Cypherpunk the Origin of Wikileaks) More through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
Iceland may ban MasterCard, Visa over WikiLeaks censorship (Dec 14, 2010) http://www.prisonplanet.com/iceland-may-ban-mastercard-visa-over-wikileaks-censorship.html
Credit card companies that prevented card-holders from donating money to the secrets outlet WikiLeaks could have their operating licenses taken away in Iceland, according to members of the Icelandic Parliamentary General Committee. Representatives from Mastercard and Visa were called before the committee Sunday to discuss their refusal to process donations to the website, reports Reykjavik Grapevine. “People wanted to know on what legal grounds the ban was taken, but no one could answer it,” Robert Marshall, the chairman of the committee, said. “They said this decision was taken by foreign sources.” The committee is seeking additional information from the credit card companies for proof that there was legal grounds for blocking the donations. Marshall said the committee would seriously review the operating licenses of Visa and Mastercard in Iceland.
Julian Assange http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037118_2037146,00.html
Whistle-blower or spy? His belief in the virtues of radical transparency has turned the diplomatic world upside down. - (...) WikiLeaks aimed at nothing less than the decline and fall of oppression by organized exposure of its secrets. "Governance by conspiracy and fear," the author wrote, depended on concealment. "We have come to the conclusion that fomenting a world wide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention."
(...) Nor was the threat of legal action the only way authorities responded. A sustained assault on the economic and structural foundations of WikiLeaks soon followed. The Swiss bank PostFinance closed WikiLeaks' account because Assange is not a full-time resident of Switzerland (as if that always mattered to Switzerland's famously discreet banking industry). Visa and MasterCard, which process payments for the Ku Klux Klan, cut off WikiLeaks — "pending further investigation," Visa said, "into the nature of its business." PayPal ejected WikiLeaks for promoting illegal activity, which has yet to be alleged in court. Amazon, a major Web-hosting provider, removed WikiLeaks from its servers after a telephone call from Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee.Because public access to the Internet relies on private companies, these precedents were alarming. "This is absolutely a tipping point," says Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "This should be a very clear call to anyone who takes freedom of speech online seriously." Many foreign leaders, even U.S. allies, agree. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged support for Assange and accused Washington of mounting a "siege on freedom of expression." Bolivian Vice President Alvaro García Linera responded by hosting WikiLeaks cables on his official government website.Assessing the real-world impact of WikiLeaks will take some time.
(...) Last July, it turns out, as controversy erupted over its release of the Afghanistan war logs, WikiLeaks had posted, without explanation, a 1.4-gigabyte encrypted file called "insurance.aes256." Some 100,000 people around the world have downloaded it. On Dec. 3, Assange said in an online chat with readers of the Guardian newspaper that the file contains the entire diplomatic archive, most of which has yet to be released, and additional "significant material from the U.S. and other countries." He added, "If something happens to us, the key parts will be released automatically."That cryptographic dead man's switch, poised to launch a missile of payload unknown, made for a fitting close to Julian Assange's year. Whatever his fate in courts British, Swedish or American, he had built a machine that no one knew how to stop and loosed it on the world. "I don't think this is a practice or a culture that will change," says Jennifer Robinson, one of his lawyers. "Julian has really started something. By taking him out, they're not going to stop it."
A Missing Wikileak - All roads lead to Tel Aviv (14. Dec, 2010) IS THIS THREAT MADE UP? DUNNO! http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/12/a-missing-wikileak/
Tickers on different news channels were running fast at the bottom of the television screen. It was the evening before the next batch of Wikileaks were due for publication. I made sure to buy The Guardian – one of five newspapers publishing the documents. With remote control in hand, I was browsing through Sky News, BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera and Press TV. To the best of my recollection, it was Sky News which caught my eye. The breaking news referred to a planned Israeli nuclear attack on two American cities, which were to be linked to Pakistan. America would have had a cause to respond in kind and take out Pakistani nuclear sites. I couldn't believe my eyes! I rewound the news to double check what I had just read. Thinking details would be published in the Guardian newspaper the following day I did not record it. Later, I rang a friend and told him about the mind boggling news. The bizarre news kept me awake most of the night.The next day I got the newspaper and went through it page by page. To my surprise, the “ticker news” could not be seen anywhere. I read it a couple of times but failed to find the particular piece. I could not understand how the newspaper missed such an important part of the leak?
(...) Natanyahu was proud that Israel maintained information security and that sensitive conversations were not conveyed in diplomatic cables but in face-to-face meetings or via secure telephones. For a split second that “mysterious ticker” flashed back and I thought if only Natanyahu knew that a blunder had been committed by someone somewhere exposing Israel's intentions to start a nuclear nightmare!He seemed content with the outcome of Wikileaks, ignoring what Huseyin Celik, the deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's AKP Party had said about Israel. Celic accused Israel of engineering the leaks, questioning how Israel could announce before the release that it would not suffer from its publication. He queried, “How did they know that?”Instead, Natanyahu was quoting Arab leaders from Egypt, Jordan and Persian Gulf States, that they were also fearful of the Iranian threat. He was right in his statement because Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi warned, “Iran will threaten Israel's existence should it go nuclear." He called Ahmadinejad a “Hitler”, proposing that “if air strikes will not do the job in Iran the ground troops should be sent in.” Similarly, Saudi King Abdullah wanted the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake”. Another UAE leader gave his reasons for Iran-bashing by saying that “Iran is establishing ‘sleeper emirates’ across the Muslim world including south Lebanon, Gaza, Kuwait, Bahrain and the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia with the mother of all ‘emirates’ in southern Iraq and now in Yemen.” Similar sentiments were heard from other pro-American leaders in the Arab world. One Israeli official stated, “the Arab countries are pushing United States towards military action more forcefully than Israel”. As opposed to these reports the American intellectual Noam Chomsky cited a Brookings Institution poll that 80 per cent of Arabs consider Israel as the main threat followed by the U.S. at 77 per cent. Only 10 per cent rated Iran as a danger. He concluded by stating, “When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts-Clinton and the media-have drawn.” CLIP
GORDON DUFF: ASSANGE ADMITS WIKILEAKS A FRAUD RUN BY PRESS FOR ISRAEL (December 23, 2010) http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/23/gordon-duff-julian-assange-wikileaks-a-fraud-run-by-press-for-israel/
Today, Julian Assange admitted that Wikileak material had been chosen by the press, not an independent organization after all. Wikileaks, in effect, admitted that it has always been a front for what Helen Thomas refers to as the Zionist controlled media. Assange, in a childish attempt at “spin” blamed the press for having too many “sensitivities ” to Israel and making Wikileaks look bad. The only reason we needed Wikileaks in the first place is that the press failed so utterly. Is it any secret that Assange turned total control of Wikileaks over to the press, the people who gave him “rock star” status? How utterly sick. Now Assange is telling us he has 3700 cables from the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, documents covering an Israeli assassination and the tail kicking they got when they last invaded Lebanon. Anyone who thinks they can expect to hear the embassy communications outlining American outrage at Israeli actions will die waiting. Expect the same “media sensitivities” we have seen all along. By “media sensitivities” we are simply saying that Israel controls Wikileaks and uses it to bash their enemies, the United States and their neighbors, some we now learn have been their friends all along. CLIP
WikiLeaks and the Power of Truth (December 13, 2010) http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/121310b.html
Editor's Note: It might strike some people as more than a touch ironic that Official Washington, which has been responsible for incalculable bloodshed around the world, is justifying the assault on WikiLeaks out of a concern for people's lives, claiming that the disclosures put some U.S. allies and collaborators at risk. Yet, few in Washington seem to grasp either the irony or the danger in that view. After all, virtually every newsworthy fact carries the theoretical risk of putting someone in danger, a risk that is cited by authoritarian regimes as justification to crack down on dissidents, as journalist Rory O'Connor notes in this guest essay: What do Richard Nixon, Liu Xiaobo and Julian Assange have in common? -- As lawyers for WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Assange began preparing for a possible indictment by US authorities, two recent, unrelated but highly relevant news items caught my attention.
(...) Nobel officials said this year's prize should be seen as similar to that given Dr. King while he was fighting for civil rights in America in 1964 - a selection that helped create change. They optimistically hope this year's choice of Liu will have a similar effect on China. Perhaps over time… But at the moment, Chinese authorities are doing everything they can simply to make Liu invisible and voiceless. Nevertheless, a statement by Liu, read aloud at the ceremony by actor and activist Liv Ullmann, proved they have yet to succeed. "Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth," Liu's statement noted in part. Let's try to remember that this week when trying to contemplate the fate of Julian Assange, who according to news reports may soon be prosecuted under the provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act (which was used unsuccessfully to try to stop the New York Times when it published the Pentagon Papers in the Nixon era) for the release of confidential diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks.
(...) Instead, as per a recent Supreme Court decision, we have now begun to criminalize not only Julian Assange and WikiLeaks - but also nonviolent First Amendment speech and advocacy as well if it is deemed to be "coordinated with" or "under the direction of" a foreign group listed by the Secretary of State as "terrorist."Where will the prosecution and persecution of Julian Assange end - and what will it mean for the rest of us who may be engaged in non-violent First Amendment speech or advocacy? Last year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama would do well to rein in his Attorney General and Justice Department - and to remember the words of this year's Nobel recipient: "Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth."
The Information Revolution: Wikileaks and Julian Assange - Wikileaks’ Association with Corporate Media - ASTROLOGICAL READING http://www.esotericastrologer.org/Newsletters/58%20Sagittarius%202010%20part%20I%20I%20wikileaks%20assange.htm
(...) Wikileaks is part of a phenomenon that has emerged to counter the excesses of the dis-information and propaganda age - by simply exposing millions of files of facts – from Afghanistan and Iraq, to Africa and China, to the mountain of US diplomatic cables laid bare. There are thousands of stories, many worthy of front page news headlines and it is going to take a while for the world to assimilate and integrate what has occurred. Currently it is a ‘deer in the headlights’ moment for governments scrambling to come to terms with the situation. Whether one condones with what is unfolding or not, the pairs of opposites are moving seriously into engagement over the issue of transparency in government and big business. It is probably the biggest and most exciting story that has emerged since 9/11. The winds of revolution, change and even anarchy are starting to gather force. The approaching square of Uranus to Pluto will bring these factors into sharp relief by mid 2012 through to mid 2014. The chart for Wikileaks is for the time and date when the URL was registered in 2006. In the author’s experience, these charts are no less relevant and accurate than a horoscope for any other entity. CLIP
Bradley Manning Suffering Extreme Isolation Prison Torture by Our Government -- Courageous Whistleblower 'Physically Deteriorating' (December 23, 2010) http://www.alternet.org/rights/149317/bradley_manning_suffering_extreme_isolation_prison_torture_by_our_goverment_--_courageous_whistleblower_%27physically_deteriorating%27
Bradley Manning is suffering inhumane isolation in prison that numerous experts say is a form of real torture. -- Last week, Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of giving classified materials to Wikileaks, spent his 23rd birthday in the brig of the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. He has been convicted of no crime, but endures the kind of highly restrictive detention that's usually reserved for the most dangerous criminals in America's "supermax" prisons. He is kept isolated in his cell 23 hours per day, where he is cut off from most human contact, denied reading materials and personal items, prevented by the guards from exercising and woken regularly from his sleep. He has been at Quantico for 5 months, following two months of detention in Kuwait. The circumstances of Manning's detention gained prominence last week after Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing exposé of what he called "conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture." As AlterNet's Sarah Seltzer noted, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture has started a probe to determine whether Manning's solitary confinement in fact constitutes torture under international law. The Pentagon reacted to the story by claiming that Manning is "a maximum custody detainee" who can "receive the same privileges that a detainee classified as general population may receive … [including] daily television, hygiene call, reading and outside physical activity without restraint." But David House, one of the few people able to visit Manning, said that Manning told him he'd only been allowed outdoors sporadically, and his exercise consisted of being placed in a room where he can only walk around in circles. Manning is not only a "maximum custody detainee," but also has a "Prevention of Injury" order (POI) that requires him to be constantly monitored by guards, and prevents him from having normal bedding. He has to strip down to his underwear and surrender his clothes to the guards each night before sleeping under a "suicide blanket" - he told House it's "similar in weight and heft to lead aprons used in X-ray laboratories, and similar in texture to coarse and stiff carpet." Manning "expressed concern that he had to lie very still at night to avoid receiving carpet burns." According to Greenwald, prison medical officials are administering him anti-depressants. POI orders are usually issued for brief periods of time for inmates who are judged to be suicidal or have not yet undergone a psychological evaluation. Manning has been evaluated, and there is no indication he is a threat to himself or others. He has been, by accounts, a model prisoner.
"We invoke that, at the appropriate time, and by whatever means, agency or authority is considered most appropriate, all governments on Earth will be reminded that they exist to serve, and not to control, their peoples; they will then be reminded of the will and desire of the majority of their peoples; and they will be instructed to make the freedom, safety and prosperity of their peoples their first priority. We ask that, as a result of these instructions, the sharing of resources and information will immediately replace the hoarding of resources; secrecy, espionage and coercion will be phased out; individuality and self-expression will become the foundation on which education will now be built; hostilities and ancient vendettas between countries and peoples will be exposed as malignant cancers - and will quickly be healed by practical alliances based on mutual advantage; and oppression of every kind will become a thing of the past."
Environmental catastrophe in the Gulf: The spilled oil has settled on the ocean floor (November 25, 2010) http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22105
PANAMA CITY — The oil is still there, sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and causing damage to the environment, a Florida State University professor who studies greenhouse gases, oceans and energy said Tuesday.Professor Jeff Chanton compared natural oil seepage in the Gulf of Mexico to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. About 1,000 natural ocean-floor leaks combine to trickle about 400,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf each year, Chanton said, but scientists estimate as many as 60,000 barrels of oil poured into the Gulf each day of the spill.“While natural seepage is a normal process, what happened this summer was totally overwhelming,” Chanton said.The professor said he thinks most of that Deepwater Horizon oil — as much as 70 percent to 79 percent of it —sank to the ocean floor, where it remains, sucking up oxygen and inhibiting life.He and his colleagues are working to determine how that layer of sludge might affect the Gulf and how long it might take for the ecosystem to recover. CLIP - CHECK ALSO Scientists Confirm that Dispersants Are Increasing Contamination in the Gulf - MUCH MORE BELOW ALSO IN "THE GULF BLUE PLAGUE - IT’S NOT WISE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE"
Help Prevent a Mega-Mine Disaster http://www.savebiogems.org/bristolbay/pebble/anglo-action-910.htm
Last spring we ratcheted up the pressure on Anglo American and its disastrous plan to build a mega-mine in Alaska's pristine Bristol Bay watershed. We presented a Petition -- signed by 100,000 concerned Americans -- at Anglo's Shareholder's Meeting on Earth Day! But in the wake of the Gulf oil spill disaster, we need to do more. It's time to tell Anglo American we're not buying its promises of environmental responsibility. BP made plenty of promises, too. Then it proved that corporate claims ring hollow and worst-case scenarios do happen. Tell Anglo American you don't want another corporate giant gambling with the future of a priceless ecosystem. Oil, gas and mining companies like to say, "Trust us." Anglo American is promising plenty of studies and environmental impact statements. They will claim that a massive release of mining waste is a "worst case scenario" that will never happen. They will claim that Bristol Bay -- the world's largest salmon fishery and home to abundant bears, moose and caribou -- is in no danger from the colossal Pebble Mine. How gullible do they think we are? Every large copper and gold mine on Earth has suffered spills and other disasters, including acid runoff and mercury contamination. Anglo American's own plans say that the Pebble Mine will spew some 10 billion tons of mining waste, laced with toxic chemicals, that must be stored behind massive earthen dams FOREVER in an active earthquake zone. Nothing lasts forever. The only question is, when will those dams fail? The wildlife, fishermen and Native communities of Bristol Bay cannot afford to find out the answer, because they stand to pay the ultimate price in a devastated ecosystem. Please stand in solidarity with them by telling Anglo American you won't let them roll the dice with Bristol Bay. Polluters like to think our attention spans are short. They believe they can wait until "the storm blows over," and then go back to business as usual. Let them know they're wrong. Tell Anglo that, after the Gulf spill, you're not buying any more corporate promises. WATCH Pebble Mine: Disaster Waiting to Happen
Blowout: Is Canada Next? THIS IS A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN AND THE FISCAL GLUTONY OF GOVERNMENTS (HARPER'S OIL INDUSTRY SERVANT AND NEWFOUNDLAND ALIKE) HAVE MADE THEM RELAX REGULATORY PRECAUTIONS AND PLAY OSTRICH WITH THE ENORMOUS RISK FACTORS INVOLVED. http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doczone/2010/blowout/index.html
On April 20, 2010, BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded unleashing 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. It has been nothing short of catastrophic, causing extensive damage to marine and wildlife habitat, as well as to the Gulf's fishing and tourism industries. In May 2010, Chevron began drilling Canada's deepest well off the coast of Newfoundland, begging the question: Could an oil spill of the same magnitude happen in Canada? Blowout: Is Canada Next? , is a documentary that tracks the aftermath of the worst oil spill in U.S. history, and transposes the oil spill to Canada's Grand Banks. By documenting the latest scientific findings in the Gulf, Blowout: Is Canada Next? builds a picture of what an offshore drilling disaster would look like on Canada's East coast.Just weeks after the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf, Chevron began drilling Canada's deepest oil exploration well off the coast of Newfoundland. Located 430 kms from shore, the Chevron well is twice as deep as BP's Deepwater Horizon well, six times further out to sea, and in much rougher seas. In the event of a blowout, it would take 11 days for emergency response ships to even reach the spill. An oil blowout off the coast of Newfoundland would decimate the world's last remaining Atlantic cod fishery, along with several species of whales, seals, turtles, coral habitats and seabirds that feed in the basin. These rich and fertile seas are the backbone to Newfoundland's tourism industry. An oil spill would create dead zones within the ocean and potentially devastate this economic mainstay that brings in over 1 billion tourist dollars annually. Canada has entered the race to drill oil in deeper and deeper waters, but safety procedures and cleanup techniques have not kept pace with the petrochemical industry's pursuit of oil. Is it only a matter of time before an oil catastrophe happens in Canada?
Facts about Oil Drilling in Canada
Canada is the 5th largest producer of oil in the world, with reserves second only to Saudi Arabia.
250 exploration wells have been drilled off the coast of Newfoundland.
On the Grand Banks, 3 rigs pump out 100 million barrels of oil a year.
Canada's deepest well will be twice the depth of BP's and six times further out to sea.
Even under the best weather conditions, only 15% of marine oil spils is ever recovered.
In 1982 the drilling rig, The Ocean Ranger, sank 267 km out to sea. It was built to withstand 36 metres waves. 84 men were lost.
Petro dollars account for 1/3 of Newfoundland's revenue and growing.
The world's oil giants have committed $850 million dollars to develop Newfoundland's offshore oil industry. YOU CAN WATCH THIS EYE-OPENING, WELL RESEARCHED DOCUMENTARY ONLINE...
All Against The Haul http://allagainstthehaul.org/
All Against The Haul is a homegrown effort working to stop the construction of a permanent industrial corridor for oversized loads to the Alberta Tar Sands through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana.
Learn more about the threat drilling for methane gas poses to fresh water - EXTENSIVE & REVEALING ! http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Water
Welcome to the water initiative of the Center for Media and Democracy, which includes a special focus on the threats to our rivers, watersheds, and fresh water supplies from drilling for methane gas, including ongoing efforts by oil and gas companies to "drill, baby, drill"--without adequate protections--in the Marcellus Shale region of the Northeastern U.S. and other states across the country.
Burning Water (October 18, 2010) WATCH THE FULL 45 MIN PROGRAM ONLINE http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/passionateeyeshowcase/2010/burningwater/
On Christmas Eve 2005, Fiona Lauridsen and her three children got chemical-like burns after taking showers in their home. Tests showed higher than normal levels of methane gas in their water coming straight from the aquifer, along with the presence of man-made chemicals. Where could this have come from? The Lauridsens think it may have been caused by the natural gas drilling that had begun in the region. Encana, Canada's biggest gas company, had just started drilling the underground coal seams on the Lauridsen farm to extract natural (...) The film also looks at similar situations in the USA where natural gas exploration causing water contamination led in to charges and convictions of the energy companies involved.
GASLAND in full (Part 1 of 8) YOU'RE OUT OF YOUR FRACKING MIND http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Moi54kyXG-k
There are already 450,000 gas well in the US and many more coming our way - Si vous êtes Québécois-e et que vous aimeriez connaître l'ampleur de la catastrophe environnementale que nous vivrons si jamais nous ne les arrêtons pas à temps, regardez ce film...
Russian president lauds U.S. passage of nuclear arms treaty (December 23, 2010) http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/23/start/
Washington (CNN) -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday congratulated President Barack Obama on the Senate's approval of a new nuclear arms control treaty between the countries, the White House said. According to a White House statement, the two presidents spoke by phone on the first day of Obama's Hawaiian holiday after Congress adjourned Wednesday in a flurry of legislative action, including the Senate vote to pass the treaty -- a major foreign policy objective of the Obama administration. President Obama and President Medvedev spoke by phone this morning to discuss the new START treaty and their continued close cooperation on a range of critical issues," the White House statement said. "President Medvedev congratulated President Obama on the Senate's approval of the new START treaty, and the two leaders agreed that this was an historic event for both countries and for U.S.-Russia relations."Obama cited issues of cooperation with Russia including Afghanistan, sanctions on Iran and World Trade Organization developments, the statement said. Obama added it was important for the two countries to work together "to support a peaceful referendum in Sudan and a resolution to the impasse in Cote D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) that respects the results of the recent democratic election," according to the statement. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, was passed on a 71-26 Senate vote, with several Republicans joining a unified Democratic caucus in support of the accord.The treaty will bring resumed inspections of each country's nuclear arsenal while limiting both the United States and Russia to 1,550 warheads and 700 launchers. It still needs to be approved by the Russian parliament. Signed by Obama and Medvedev in April, the treaty is considered a critical component of nuclear non-proliferation efforts and the administration's attempt to "reset" Washington's relationship with Moscow. "This is the most significant arms control agreement in nearly two decades," Obama said Wednesday after the Senate vote. It "will enhance our leadership to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and seek the peace of a world without them." Several senators were reassured by the last-minute passage of an amendment stating that the accord should not be interpreted in a way that would hamper U.S. missile defense plans. The amendment was sponsored by Republican senators John McCain of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, among others. Others said they had been assured of an administration commitment to modernize America's aging nuclear arsenal. CLIP
Senate Gives Success to Obama by Approving Arms Treaty (December 23, 2010) http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-23/senate-gives-success-to-obama-by-approving-arms-treaty.html
(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama scored a win on the last day of the 111th Congress on a key foreign-policy initiative after the U.S. Senate approved ratification of a treaty with Russia that cuts nuclear arms and renews weapons inspections.After eight days of debate, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty cleared its final hurdle and was approved 71- 26, exceeding the minimum threshold -- two-thirds of the senators present and voting -- needed to secure its passage. Thirteen Republicans joined 56 Democrats and two independents in the final vote held yesterday. "Democrats and Republicans came together to approve my top national security priority," Obama said yesterday at a year-end press conference at the White House. "With this treaty, our inspectors will also be back on the ground at Russian nuclear bases, so we will be able to trust, but verify."The positive outcome caps Obama's victories in the post- election lame-duck session. Other successes include the repeal of a law that banned openly gay individuals from serving in the military and, on the economic front, an $858 billion deal to extend tax cuts and unemployment assistance for the long-term jobless. (...) The treaty, replacing an agreement that expired last December, limits each side's strategic warheads to no more than 1,550, from 2,200 allowed previously, and sets a maximum of 800 land-, air- and sea-based launchers. 'Structured, Verifiable Way'"Obama's ambitions for nuclear reductions were pared down at the negotiating table, but he succeeded in bringing home an agreement that further reduced nuclear forces in a structured, verifiable way," Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, said in an e-mail.Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, may ratify a nuclear-arms reduction treaty with the U.S. as early as tomorrow, said Boris Gryzlov, the chamber's speaker. The treaty also needs the approval of the upper house, the Federation Council, which probably won't come until after the January holidays, Andrei Klimov, deputy head of the Duma's foreign affairs committee, said yesterday. The first working day in Russia in 2011 is Jan. 11. CLIP
"We invoke that all weapons and devices of mass destruction now be phased out, and that the huge resources that have so far been spent on their construction and maintenance be channeled into other, more life-enhancing enterprises."
Ivory Coast in 'civil war situation' (1 January 2011) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/cotedivoire/8234645/Ivory-Coast-in-civil-war-situation.html
Ivory Coast is already in a "civil war situation", according to the prime minister of the country's internationally recognised leader. -- The United Nations has said that the volatile West African nation, once divided in two, faces a real risk of return to civil war, but Guillaume Soro, the prime minister, said that the country is already at this point — "indeed in a civil war situation." "This is what's at stake: Either we assist in the installation of democracy in Ivory Coast or we stand by indifferent and allow democracy to be assassinated," Mr Soro said, adding that more than 200 people already have been killed and 1,000 others wounded by gunfire.The warning came as the EU said it had approved sanctions on 59 more people, in addition to the 19 already sanctioned last week, including Laurent Gbagbo, the embattled president. Britain has indicated it is prepared to support military action to force Mr Gbagbo to relinquish power in Ivory Coast, according to William Hague. Mr Hague, the foreign secretary, also confirmed that a British military officer has been sent to Ivory Coast to work on "contingencies" alongside France, the former colonial power. Mr Gbagbo's Ambassador to London has also been asked to leave the country, with the Foreign Office indicating they will officially recognise his opponent Alassane Ouattara's envoy instead.Ecowas, a 15-nation bloc of West African states, has suggested that military action could be taken to force Mr Gbagbo to stand down and allow Mr Ouattara, who is widely accepted as the legitimate victor in last month's poll, to take up the presidency. The body's defence ministers met on Friday and agreed they were prepared to use force if further talks planned for Monday fail.Mr Gbagbo's supporters have signalled that he is not backing down and are threatening an attack today on the Golf Hotel where Mr Ouattara is holed up.Mr Gbagbo, who faced calls to quit by midnight, appeared to offer some concession on Friday night by proposing a recount of the vote of the disputed election, although he did not elaborate on details.“We are negotiating. I ask myself why those who claim to have beaten me oppose a recount of the votes,” he said. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, called on Charles Blé Goudé, Mr Gbagbo's youth minister, to "refrain from such dangerous irresponsible action" amid fears that the 800 peacekeeping troops surrounding the hotel would be forced to repel the attack, sparking civil war. CLIP
UN rights chief says mass graves reported in Ivory Coast (DECEMBER 31, 2010) http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/rights+chief+says+mass+graves+reported+Ivory+Coast/4046641/story.html
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said Friday reports had been received of at least two mass graves in Ivory Coast amid fears of crimes against humanity."We have received reports of at least two mass graves; however, UN human rights teams have been denied access to the scenes of these atrocities in order to investigate them," Pillay said in a statement. Pillay said she had written to self-proclaimed president Laurent Gbagbo and other key figures in his regime warning they would be held personally responsible for human rights violations. Gbagbo is refusing to step down in favour of the internationally recognised winner of November 28 elections, Alassane Ouattara."The international criminal justice system that has developed over the past fifteen or so years has given us a tool of accountability we did not have before," Pillay said. "No longer can heads of state, and other actors, be sure that they can commit atrocious violations and get away with it." Earlier Friday UN human rights experts said they feared gross human rights violations being committed in Ivory Coast could amount to "crimes against humanity. "Evidence from credible sources suggested "enforced or involuntary disappearances, arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial or arbitrary executions and sexual violence had occurred and may still be occurring," they said in a statement. "When committed in certain circumstances, enforced disappearances amount to a crime against humanity," warned the UN’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. "Those who have perpetrated such horrendous acts shall be held accountable." CLIP
Red Cross appeals for help in Ivory Coast (DECEMBER 31, 2010)_ http://www.montrealgazette.com/Cross+appeals+help+Ivory+Coast/4043583/story.html
The international Red Cross said yesterday that it was "deeply concerned" about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Ivory Coast, noting that it has treated 590 wounded people over the past month. "With support from the ICRC, Ivorian Red Cross first-aid workers have treated 590 wounded people throughout the country since 26 November," said the International Committee of the Red Cross. "In about half of these cases they transferred the patients to medical facilities with serious injuries," it said. "The ICRC is deeply concerned by the current situation. CLIP - MORE RELATED NEWS THROUGH THIS LINK
North Korea 'prepared to launch sacred war' (23 December 2010) Video http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12067932
North Korea is ready for a "sacred war of justice" using the nuclear deterrent, its armed forces minister has said.Kim Yong-chun said exercises conducted by South Korea near the border were a preparation for war with the North. The drill is one of the largest in South Korea's history, involving tanks, helicopters and fighter planes. Tension has been high since North Korea shelled the South's Yeonpyeong island last month, killing four South Koreans. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has promised immediate retaliation to any further Northern attack. John Sudworth reports.
"Miami Rice" : The Business of Disaster in Haiti (12/09/2010) http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/another-haiti-possible/miami-rice-business-disaster-haiti
As we file this article, Port-au-Prince is thick with the smoke of burning tires and with gunfire. Towns throughout the country, along with the national airport, are shut down due to demonstrations. Many are angry over the government’s announcement on Tuesday night of which two presidential candidates made the run-offs: Jude Célestin from the widely hated ruling party of President René Préval and the far-right Mirlande Manigat. This is another obvious manipulation of what had already been a brazenly fraudulent election. A democratic vote is one more thing that has been taken from the marginalized Haitian majority, compounding their many losses since the earthquake of January 12. What is at stake in Haiti? What interests underlie the grab for power in the country? One answer is the large amount of aid and development dollars that are circulating. Among those benefiting handsomely from the disaster aid are U.S. corporations who have accessed U.S. government contracts. Below is the tale of one U.S. corporation and its subsidiaries, who have received contracts which involve both a conflict of interest and harm to one of Haiti’s largest and most vulnerable social sectors, small farmers.
“We were already in a black misery after the earthquake of January 12. But the rice they’re dumping on us, it’s competing with ours and soon we’re going to fall in a deep hole,” said Jonas Deronzil, who has farmed rice and corn in Haiti’s fertile Artibonite Valley since 1974. “When they don’t give it to us anymore, are we all going to die?”
(...) Haiti is the only country in the hemisphere which is still majority rural. Estimates of the percentage of Haiti’s citizens who remain small farmers – or peasants, as they call themselves - are 66% to 80%. Despite that, food imports constitute upwards of 50% of what Haitians consume.[2] And still the nation suffers under a dire food crisis, with more than 2.4 million of 9 million Haitians estimated to be food-insecure. Acute malnutrition among children under the age 5 is 9%, and chronic undernutrition for that age group is 24%. It didn’t used to be this way. In the early 1980s, Haiti was largely self-sufficient in food consumption and was even an exporter nation. The destruction of agriculture and food security came through policy choices. In 1986 and again in 1995, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave loans to Haiti with the condition that the government reduce tariffs on goods imported into the country. While previous tariffs on some staple foods had been as high as 150%, by 1995 the Haitian government, under pressure primarily from the IMF and U.S. government, cut import tariffs on food basics to as low as 3%. Unable to compete with imported goods and thus unable to survive, Haitian farmers have flocked into the overcrowded capital in search of a living. They have joined the ranks of the underemployed or been welcomed by sweatshops. And they have taken up residence in shoddily constructed housing built on insecure lands, like ravines and the sides of steep mountains. The devastating toll from the earthquake, with anywhere from 250,000 – 300,000 killed in and around Port-au-Prince, is in part due to farmers’ inability to remain in their rural homes. Rice is among the five most heavily subsidized crops in the U.S., with rice growers receiving $12.5 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2009. The subsidized production and the industrial scale, on top of the lowering of import tariffs in Haiti, combined to become a money maker: beginning in the early 1980s, rice grown in such places as Arkansas and California and shipped by boat to Haiti could be sold cheaper than rice grown in a neighboring field in the Artibonite Valley. With the U.S. television show Miami Vice in high popularity during the time the threat to local producers unfolded, Haitians named the imports ‘Miami rice.’Between 1992 and 2003, rice imported into Haiti increased by more that 150%, with 95% of the imports coming from the U.S. The USA Rice Federation claims on its website that 90% of the rice currently eaten in Haiti is from the U.S.
(...) In March, Bill Clinton formally apologized for his role in having promoted the import of U.S. rice into Haiti at the expense of Haitian farmers. "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake… I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else." Mea culpa notwithstanding, nothing has changed in U.S. foreign aid and trade policies. CLIP
US to spend $413bn more on Afghan war (Nov 21, 2010) http://www.presstv.ir/detail/151939.html
US soldier in Afghanistan walks past Afghan child. A decision by US President Barack Obama to extend the presence of American troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 is likely to increase the remaining cost of the unpopular war to USD 413 billion. The US president, who was expected to announce an exit strategy from Afghanistan at the recent NATO summit in Lisbon, pushed for an indefinite postponement of troop withdrawal instead. Obama declared in a nationally televised address in December that the transfer of the US forces out of Afghanistan would begin in July 2011. He, however, later redefined the previous timeline stating that Afghan forces would only begin taking the lead for security across Afghanistan by 2014. On Saturday, NATO Secretary General said the US-led military alliance will remain in Afghanistan for as long as it takes to finish off its enemies there. The newly defined deadline comes with a heavy price tag at a time when the US and many of its allies are facing increasing deficit cuts at home. “I don't think anyone is seriously talking about cutting war funding as a way of handling the deficit,” said Todd Harrison, a Defense funding expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Calculating costs based on USD 1.1 million per soldier per year, Harrison assesses that the new description of the deadline will cost the American taxpayers an additional USD 125 billion through 2014 alone. The remaining war cost had been estimated to be USD 288 billion assuming that the troops involved in Obama's surge would be withdrawn by 2012.
Pentagon issues grim review of Afghanistan war (26 November 2010) http://wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/afgh-n26.shtml
Violence has reached record levels in Afghanistan, and the resistance to the US-led occupation is more widespread than ever, according to a report issued by the Pentagon. The semiannual report, required by Congress, provides a grim assessment of the US war, now in its tenth year, giving the lie to rosy public statements issued by the Obama administration and senior military commanders. The report, released this week, is titled, "Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan," but its contents suggest that in doubling the number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan since taking office, President Barack Obama has only created a deeper quagmire for the US military. With nearly 100,000 American soldiers and Marines and another 50,000 other NATO and foreign troops participating in the occupation, the report found that security conditions in 124 districts viewed by NATO as "key terrain" remained "relatively unchanged."The report states, "Progress across the country remains uneven, with modest gains in security, governance and development in operational priority areas." It described progress as "slow and incremental."What has changed sharply, however, is the number of Afghans dying and the level of violence, which has risen in tandem with the increase in the number of foreign troops deployed in the country. The report, which covers developments from last April through September, cites a 300 percent increase in armed clashes since 2007 and a 70 percent rise since last year.Despite the US troop buildup, the report concedes that "The insurgency has proven resilient with sustained logistics capacity and command and control." It acknowledges that the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces have managed to "retain operational momentum in some areas."According to the Pentagon survey, the number of Afghans describing their security situation as "bad" has likewise risen to its highest level.
(...) Asked by a reporter about the US "exit strategy" for Afghanistan, a senior official briefing the media on the Pentagon report bristled. "We don't have an exit strategy," he said. "We have a transition strategy. The US commitment to Afghanistan is continuing, enduring, and long-lasting." In other words, the ruling establishment and its military have no intention of leaving Afghanistan. They are determined to continue their bloody efforts to annihilate the Afghan resistance in order to secure Washington's control of the country and further US designs on establishing hegemony in the oil-rich and strategically vital region of Central Asia.
Controversial Drug Given to All Guantanamo Detainees Akin to "Pharmacologic Waterboarding" (Dec 1, 2010) http://www.truth-out.org/controversial-drug-given-all-guantanamo-detainees-amounted-pharmacologic-waterboarding6558
The Defense Department forced all "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called "pharmacologic waterboarding." The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.Interviews conducted over the past two months with tropical disease experts and a review of Defense Department documents and peer-reviewed journals show there were no preexisting cases where mefloquine was ever prescribed for mass presumptive treatment of malaria.The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government's investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees.Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who was stationed at Guantanamo at the time of the suicides in 2006, and has presented evidence that demonstrates the three detainees could not have died by hanging themselves, noticed in the detainees' medical files that they were given mefloquine. Hickman has been investigating the circumstances behind the detainees' deaths for nearly four years. CLIP
Latest Israeli bombing plunges Gaza into darkness (10 December 2010 ) http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11670.shtml
Air strikes by Israeli warplanes at dawn on Thursday caused serious damage to the Gaza Strip's only power plant, plunging the territory -- which already suffers from frequent outages -- into darkness.Media reports said the air strikes hit two sites belonging to Hamas near the Gaza power plant in Moghraqa village, central Gaza.Engineer Darar Abu Sisi, director of operations for the Gaza plant, told The Electronic Intifada that at 2:47am an Israeli air attack on a Hamas site near the power plant scattered rocks and debris into the air. A rock crashed into the a current transformer and voltage transformer in a substation, causing the unit to shut down.The damage forced the plant to reduce production from its usual 65 megawatts daily to about 35 megawatts, Abu Sisi said, far short of current needs. Unless the damage is repaired it may lead to even longer outages than the power cuts people in Gaza already live with. "I believe that the Gaza power company has been able to coordinate with the Israeli side and we hope that this time they will be able to bring the needed spare part through Israeli land crossings, which are closed of course because of the Israeli siege," Abu Sisi told The Electronic Intifada. Even before Thursday's bombing, Gaza residents face prolonged power outages of six to eight hours per day, adding to the severe hardships caused by the prolonged Israeli siege that prevents people and goods from moving freely in and out of Gaza. Abu Sisi estimated that the outages would increase to eight to ten hours per day. The power shortages cripple daily life and the already devastated economy, and effect everything from students having no light to study, to households having no power for daily needs, and badly affect hospitals, sanitation and water supply systems.Another effect is severe noise and air pollution from ubiquitous gasoline-powered generators that people use to cope with the shortages. In 2009 alone, 75 persons died in Gaza from hazardous handling of generators. In 2006, Israel bombed and severely damaged the power plant's three turbines which supplies about a third of the electricity used by Gaza's 1.5 million residents. Since the 2006 bombing, Israel has further crippled electricity supplies by severely limiting the transfer of spare parts and fuel into Gaza.According to the UN-commissioned Goldstone report into Israel's winter 2008-09 attack on Gaza, approximately half of Gaza's electricity supply came from Israel, seven percent from Egypt and a third from the Gaza power plant, leaving a deficit of about eight percent. The electricity deficit reached up to 41 percent at times due to Israeli fuel restrictions, according to other UN sources cited by the Goldstone report.With no end in sight to the Israeli siege, Thursday's bombing has just made the lives of Gaza's population, half of them children, even darker as the longest nights of winter approach.
Israel fires on Gaza as it claims to "ease" siege (8 December 2010) http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11664.shtml
Israeli tanks opened fire east of Gaza City today, injuring three Palestinians near the so-called "buffer zone." A few hours earlier Israeli fighter jets launched two airstrikes in southern Gaza, where another man was wounded. Israeli missiles struck a poultry farm in Khan Younis, wounding a Palestinian man and damaging the farm, Bethlehem-based Ma'an News Agency reported. Another missile destroyed a tunnel along the Egypt border with Gaza ("3 injured by Israeli shelling in Gaza," 8 December 2010). The airstrikes and tank fire came after Palestinian armed resistance groups fired homemade rockets from the central Gaza area at Israeli military installations and soldiers, Ma'an added. On the evening of 6 December, Palestinian armed fighters launched several rockets into open areas across the boundary with Israel. CLIP
Israeli Government Documents Show Deliberate Policy To Keep Gazans At Near-starvation Levels (November 06, 2010) http://www.imemc.org/article/59843
Documents, whose existence were denied by the Israeli government for over a year, have been released after a legal battle led by Israeli human rights group, Gisha. The documents reveal a deliberate policy by the Israeli government in which the dietary needs for the population of Gaza are chillingly calculated, and the amounts of food let in by the Israeli government measured to remain just enough to keep the population alive at a near-starvation level. This documents the statement made by a number of Israeli officials that they are "putting the people of Gaza on a diet". In 2007, when Israel began its full siege on Gaza, Dov Weisglass, adviser to then Prime-Minister Ehud Olmert, stated clearly, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” The documents now released contain equations used by the Israeli government to calculate the exact amounts of food, fuel and other necessities needed to do exactly that.The documents are even more disturbing, say human rights activists, when one considers the fact that close to half of the people of Gaza are children under the age of eighteen. This means that Israel has deliberately forced the undernourishment of hundreds of thousands of children in direct violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.This release of documents also severely undermines Israel's oft-made claim that the siege is "for security reasons", as it documents a deliberate and systematic policy of collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza.Gisha's director, in relation to the release of documents, said, "Israel banned glucose for biscuits and the fuel needed for regular supply of electricity – paralyzing normal life in Gaza and impairing the moral character of the State of Israel. I am sorry to say that major elements of this policy are still in place." (...) Despite the disturbing nature of the documents, which show a calculated policy of deliberate undernourishment of an entire population, no major media organizations have reported the story.
US and Israel use sabotage and assassinations to thwart Iran's nuclear program (14 December 2010) http://wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/iran-d14.shtml
Last week's talks between Teheran and the P5 + 1 (representatives of the UN Security Council's five permanent members, plus Germany and the European Union) began with the Iranian delegation condemning the recent assassination of a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist-part of a widening covert campaign targeting the country's nuclear program.
(...) The London Telegraph has baldly asserted the November 29 attacks were organized by Israel's Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, commonly known as Mossad. On December 5, the Telegraph reported that personnel at the headquarters of Mossad celebrated news of the bomb attacks on the Iranian nuclear scientists by dubbing them "The Chief's Last Hit"-a reference to the fact that November 29 was Meir Dagan's last day as the head of Mossad. Mossad is notorious for summarily executing perceived enemies of the Israeli state.
(...) Under Barack Obama, Washington has expanded drone attacks in Pakistan against alleged Al Qaeda, Taliban and Taliban-allied leaders and asserted the right of the president to order the execution of US citizens who have been labeled terrorists without any judicial process whatsoever.In its report on the November 29 events, the New York Times signaled that the US national security establishment endorsed the twin bombings. After acknowledging that Israel and the US are "widely believed" to be using covert methods to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, the newspaper cited an unnamed US official declaring that the "targets of the attacks are bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb."
(...) The US campaign against Iran is utterly hypocritical and reactionary and fraught with grave dangers for the people of the Middle East and the entire world. While Washington denounces Iran as a "state sponsor" of terrorism for providing support to Hamas and Hezbollah, bourgeois nationalist-Islamicist movements that arose in response to Israeli aggression and expansionism, it practices state terrorism. The US government orchestrates assassinations, bombings and sabotage campaigns and arrogates the right to do so in all parts of the globe. Meanwhile, the corporate media acts as its accomplices, covering up for and excusing these crimes and demonizing their targets. CLIP
US-China tensions mount amid widening war exercises (2010-12-07) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22300
A late night Sunday telephone call between US President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao underscored the mounting tensions between the two countries in the wake of last month's military clash between North and South Korea. The White House and the Chinese Foreign Ministry each issued one-sided accounts of the telephone conversation, illustrating the deep gulf dividing Washington and Beijing over the crisis on the Korean peninsula.The White House statement stressed that Obama had condemned the artillery attack carried out by North Korea on Yeongpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea on November 23, in which two South Korean soldiers and two civilians died. The US president demanded that the North Korean government in Pyongyang "halt its provocative behavior." "He urged China to work with us and others to send a clear message to North Korea that its provocations are unacceptable," the statement said. "The president also highlighted the American commitment to the security of its allies in the region."For his part, Hu issued a stark warning. "Especially if not dealt with properly, tensions could well rise on the Korean peninsula or spin out of control, which would not be in anyone's interest," Hu was quoted as saying by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.According to this account, Hu told Obama that China was "deeply worried" about the situation in the region.
(...) Meanwhile, US and Japanese armed forces continued military exercises begun last Friday involving some 40,000 military personnel. The war games, led by the aircraft carrier USS George Washington and its battle group, include the simulated defense of an island-an exercise that seems pointedly directed at China, given the tensions between Beijing and Tokyo over disputed islands in the East China Sea. These tensions boiled over last September following Japan's arrest of a fishing captain after a collision between his boat and Japanese coast guard vessels.The exercises were significant for the participation of South Korean military observers. Relations between the two countries have been historically strained. Japan's 35-year colonial occupation of Korea ended only with the Japanese defeat in World War II. Tokyo is reportedly also preparing to issue a new rearmament plan directed against China and North Korea. According to Nikkei, the Japanese business daily, the new "National Defense Program Guideline," the first to be issued since 2004, will call for a "dynamic defense capability" directed at countering China in the East China Sea. It will include proposals for expanding the country's submarine fleet and increasing its number of warplanes. Formally Japan's post-World War II constitution forswears the maintenance of a military, but Tokyo has over the past five years introduced a series of constitutional and administrative changes paving the way for the military buildup of its Self-Defense Forces. CLIP
China advancing laser weapons program - Technology equals or surpasses U.S. capability (Nov 22, 2010) http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=1862
Not only is the Chinese military advancing rapidly in the field of anti-satellite, anti-missile laser weapon technology, but its technology equals or surpasses U.S. laser weapons capabilities currently under development, informed sources have told WorldNetDaily. (...) To underscore Beijing's fixation with laser weaponry, the Hong Kong Standard reported Nov. 15 that the Chinese have developed a laser-based anti-missile, anti-satellite system. "China's system shoots a laser beam that destroys the [guidance systems] and causes the projectile to fall harmlessly to the ground," the paper said.The report also noted that Beijing had "conducted tests of its new technology since August 1999," and said the system was "similar to the laser defense system technology being developed by the U.S. Air Force."Rick Fischer, a congressional Chinese military hardware expert, told WorldNetDaily that recent photographs of Chinese main battle tanks taken during military parades held in celebration of China's 50th anniversary of Communism in October showed "what was described as a photoelectric device that may have been a ground-based laser equivalent" of the same ASAT system. Fischer said the U.S. is currently developing a similar weapon, whereby "a ground-based laser would be capable of producing a 'dazzle'" strong enough to knock an incoming missile off course." CLIP
Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi 'has foot soldiers' support' (17 November 2010) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11775469
The BBC Burmese service says it has the first indication of support within the lower ranks of the military for pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Infantrymen from two Burmese army divisions confirmed reports that several hundred soldiers travelled to Rangoon to witness her release. They said they hoped she could talk to their superiors about supply shortages. Ms Suu Kyi's release came a week after a military-backed political party won Burma's first election in 20 years. The ballot was widely condemned as a sham. Ms Suu Kyi, 65, was freed after her latest period of house arrest expired and was not renewed by the military government. The extent of support for her in the army is not clear. A number of soldiers from battalions in Rangoon and Bago divisions and their families went to Aung San Suu Kyi's house on the 13 November to greet her on her release. "We went there to greet her because we believe the hardships the lower rank and file are facing can be solved if Ms Suu Kyi and the military commanders work together. "We have high hopes for Ms Suu Kyi," a soldier told the BBC Burmese service. It follows reports in September that soldiers in many areas were refusing to carry out routine tasks in protest at short rations and lack of access to their pay.In a series of BBC interviews, soldiers in garrison towns said their rations had been cut for weeks. They said commanders had barred access to money they had saved, which is kept in a central fund. The Burmese authorities have denied any disquiet in the military.
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US Congress approves defence spending legislation (22 December 2010) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12063166
The US Congress has approved a bill authorising the Pentagon to spend $160bn (£104bn) in Iraq and Afghanistan during this budget year. (...) This year's bill, which received largely bipartisan support in Congress, agreed to $725bn in defence proposals, including $158.7bn for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. (...) Other provisions in the legislation include: - $75m (£49m) to train and supply weapons to Yemeni counter-terrorism forces - $205m for a programme with Israel to develop a mobile defence system - $11.6bn toward the development of security in Afghanistan - $1.5bn to Iraqi security forces. In an atypical move, the measure was passed in the House with little debate on the war in Afghanistan. CLIP
2011: A Special Message to our Readers By The Global Research Team http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22572
As 2010 draws to a close, we take a moment to reflect on the past year and contemplate what may be ahead in the months to come. Undeniably, this has been a year of crisis, characterized by the plight of war, economic dislocation and environmental degradation.In a very direct way, the global economic and social crisis affects the livelihood of millions of people, as our authors have indicated through their research and news coverage, and our readers have observed through their own experiences. The global financial picture remains bleak for many who are struggling to support their families and worry about what the future holds. The current administration of the world's superpower has put forth copious promises for change, but as proof of change is not received, disillusionment is setting in. War continues to be waged across the globe at unprecedented rates, amassing immeasurable monetary, psychological and human costs which affect all citizens of the world. In turn, a large share of the nations' resources (particularly in the United States) is channeled towards the production of advanced weapons systems to the detriment of education, health and housing. CLIP
American Hypocrisy: Destruction of the Constitution, Collapse of the Rule of Law By Paul Craig Roberts (November 15, 2010) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21922
Ten years of rule by the Bush and Obama regimes have seen the collapse of the rule of law in the United States. Is the American media covering this ominous and extraordinary story? No the American media is preoccupied with the rule of law in Burma (Myanmar). The military regime that rules Burma just released from house arrest the pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. The American media used the occasion of her release to get on Burma‚' case for the absence of the rule of law. I'm all for the brave lady, but if truth be known, "freedom and democracy" America needs her far worse than does Burma. I'm not an expert on Burma, but the way I see it the objection to a military government is that the government is not accountable to law. Instead, such a regime behaves as it sees fit and issues edicts that advance its agenda. Burma's government can be criticized for not having a rule of law, but it cannot be criticized for ignoring its own laws. We might not like what the Burmese government does, but, precisely speaking, it is not behaving illegally. In contrast, the United States government claims to be a government of laws, not of men, but when the executive branch violates the laws that constrain it, those responsible are not held accountable for their criminal actions. As accountability is the essence of the rule of law, the absence of accountability means the absence of the rule of law. The list of criminal actions by presidents Bush and Obama, Vice President Cheney, the CIA, the NSA, the US military, and other branches of the government is long and growing. For example, both president Bush and vice president Cheney violated US and international laws against torture. Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union responded to Bush's recent admission that he authorized torture with calls for a criminal investigation of Bush's crime. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, the ACLU reminded the US Department of Justice (sic) that "a nation committed to the rule of law cannot simply ignore evidence that its most senior leaders authorized torture." Rob Freer of Amnesty International said that Bush's admission "to authorizing acts which constitute torture under international law" and which constitute "a crime under international law," puts the US government "under obligation to investigate and to bring those responsible to justice." The ACLU and Amnesty International do not want to admit it, but the US government shed its commitment to the rule of law a decade ago when the US launched its naked aggression--war crimes under the Nuremberg standard--against Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies and deception. CLIP
Almost Everything Is A Crime In America Now: 14 Of The Most Ridiculous Things That Americans Are Being Arrested For (Dec 30, 2010) http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/almost-everything-is-a-crime-in-america-now-14-of-the-most-ridiculous-things-that-americans-are-being-arrested-for
Doesn't it seem like almost everything is becoming a crime in America now? Americans are being arrested and charged with crimes for doing things like leaving dog poop on the ground, opening up Christmas presents early, not recycling properly, farting in class and having brown lawns. But is it healthy for our society for the police to be involved in such silly things? Every single day the United States inches closer to becoming a totalitarian society. While there are some that would welcome this shift, the truth is that throughout history the societies that have experienced the greatest economic prosperity have all had at least a certain level of freedom. Business thrives when people feel free to live and work. When a government tightens the grip too much many people just start shutting down. Just look at places like North Korea. Even though the rest of the world is sending them huge amounts of food starvation is still quite common in that totalitarian regime. That is why it is so disturbing that it seems like almost everything has become a crime in America now. As we continue to criminalize relatively normal behavior our slide toward becoming a totalitarian state will only accelerate.We are throwing anyone and everyone in prison these days. It is getting absolutely ridiculous. Today, the United States leads the world in the number of prisoners and in the percentage of the population in prison. The United States has 5% of the world's population, but approximately 25% of the world's incarcerated population. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, as of the end of 2009 a total of 7,225,800 people were either on probation, in prison or on parole in America. That is a sign of a very, very sick society. Either we have a massive crime problem or the "control grid" that our leaders have erected for us is wildly out of control. Or both.But how in the world are we supposed to have a healthy economy if our entire nation is being turned into one gigantic prison?Sadly, it is not just hardcore criminals that are being rounded up and abused by authorities these days. The following are 14 of the most ridiculous things that Americans are being arrested for.... CLIP
SCHOOL BANISHES STANDOUT HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT FOR LUNCHBOX MIX-UP (December 29, 2010) http://www.theblaze.com/stories/school-expells-high-school-standout-student-for-lunchbox-mix-up/
School officials in Sanford, NC have suspended* a young high school girl for the rest of the year because she accidentally brought her dad’s lunchbox to school, which contained a small paring knife used to cut an apple.17-year-old senior Ashley Smithwick, an academic and athletic standout who’s even won beauty pageants, was suspended from Southern Lee High School in October after school officials found the knife in her lunchbox during a random search for drugs.But as it turns out, the lunchbox wasn’t hers — it actually belonged to her father, Joe. Ashley and Joe have matching lunchboxes.“She got pulled into it. She doesn’t have to be a bad person to be searched,” Joe told WRAL-TV. “It’s just an honest mistake. That was supposed to be my lunch because it was a whole apple.”WRAL reports Ashley has now been charged with misdemeanor possession of a weapon on school grounds: CLIP
Bill Moyers: "Welcome to the Plutocracy!" (3 November 2010) http://www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-money-fights-hard-and-it-fights-dirty64766
(...) When she heard the news, Connie Brasel cried like a baby. For years she had worked at minimum-wage jobs, until 17 years ago, when she was hired by the Whirlpool refrigerator factory in Evansville, Indiana. She was making $ 18.44 an hour when Whirlpool announced earlier this year that it was closing the operation and moving it to Mexico. She wept. I’m sure many of the other eleven hundred workers who lost their jobs wept too; they had seen their ticket to the middle class snatched from their hands. The company defended its decision by claiming high costs, underused capacity, and the need to stay competitive. Those excuses didn’t console Connie Brasel. “I was becoming part of something bigger than me,” she told Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times. “Whirlpool was the best thing that ever happened to me.”She was not only sad, she was mad. “They didn’t get world-class quality because they had the best managers. They got world-class quality because of the United States and because of their workers.”Among those workers were Natalie Ford, her husband and her son; all three lost their jobs. “It’s devastating,” she told the Times. Her father had worked at Whirlpool before them. Now, “There aren’t any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?”And what about the country? Between 2001 and 2008, about 40,000 US manufacturing plants closed. Six million factory jobs have disappeared over the past dozen years, representing one in three manufacturing jobs. Natalie Ford said to the Times what many of us are wondering: “I don’t know how without any good-paying jobs here in the United States people are going to pay for their health care, put their children through school.” Now, if Connie Brasel and Natalie Ford lived in South Carolina, they might have been lucky enough to get a job with the new BMW plant that recently opened there and advertised that the company would hire one thousand workers. Among the applicants? According to the Washington Post; “a former manager of a major distribution center for Target; a consultant who oversaw construction projects in four western states; a supervisor at a plastics recycling firm. Some held college degrees and resumes in other fields where they made more money.” They will be paid $15 an hour – about half of what BMW workers earn in Germany. In polite circles, among our political and financial classes, this is known as “the free market at work.” No, it’s “wage repression,” and it’s been happening in our country since around 1980. I must invoke some statistics here, knowing that statistics can glaze the eyes; but if indeed it’s the mark of a truly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics, as I once read, surely this truly educated audience will be moved by the recent analysis of tax data by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They found that from 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation’s economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of l0 Americans was growing, too – from $17,719 to $30,941. That’s a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars. But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefitted. The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years. That’s wage repression. CLIP
$2tn debt crisis threatens to bring down 100 US cities (20 December 2010)
MAJOR BELT TIGHTENING COMING TO A BIG CITY NEAR YOU. SOBERING SITUATION... http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/20/debt-crisis-threatens-us-cities
Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe - Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble -- More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned. Meredith Whitney, the US research analyst who correctly predicted the global credit crunch, described local and state debt as the biggest problem facing the US economy, and one that could derail its recovery. "Next to housing this is the single most important issue in the US and certainly the biggest threat to the US economy," Whitney told the CBS 60 Minutes programme on Sunday night. "There's not a doubt on my mind that you will see a spate of municipal bond defaults. You can see fifty to a hundred sizeable defaults - more. This will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of defaults." New Jersey governor Chris Christie summarised the problem succinctly: "We spent too much on everything. We spent money we didn't have. We borrowed money just crazily. The credit card's maxed out, and it's over. We now have to get to the business of climbing out of the hole. We've been digging it for a decade or more. We've got to climb now, and a climb is harder."American cities and states have debts in total of as much as $2tn. In Europe, local and regional government borrowing is expected to reach a historical peak of nearly ¤1.3tn (£1.1tn) this year.Cities from Detroit to Madrid are struggling to pay creditors, including providers of basic services such as street cleaning. CLIP
A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Trading in Derivatives (December 13, 2010)
A SELECT COTERIE OF BIG BANKS DEALING DERIVATIVES IN THE SHADOW LIKE KINGPIN DRUG DEALERS... http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22386
On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan. The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable - and controversial - fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential. Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase , Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley , the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives, instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge risk. In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion-dollar market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks. The banks in this group, which is affiliated with a new derivatives clearinghouse, have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available. Banks' influence over this market, and over clearinghouses like the one this select group advises, has costly implications for businesses large and small, like Dan Singer's home heating-oil company in Westchester County, north of New York City.
(...) The precise amount that banks make trading derivatives isn't known, but there is anecdotal evidence of their profitability. Former bank traders who spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements with their former employers said their banks typically earned $25,000 for providing $25 million of insurance against the risk that a corporation might default on its debt via the swaps market. These traders turn over millions of dollars in these trades every day, and credit default swaps are just one of many kinds of derivatives. The secrecy surrounding derivatives trading is a key factor enabling banks to make such large profits. CLIP
BOB RUBIN: "US In Terribly Dangerous Territory," Bond Market May Be Headed For "Implosion" (Nov. 17, 2010) http://www.businessinsider.com/rubin-bond-market-implosion-2010-11
Warning of the risk of an "implosion" in the bond market, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin says the soaring federal budget deficit and the Fed's quantitative easing are putting the U.S. in "terribly dangerous territory."Speaking at an event at The Pierre Hotel in New York City honoring Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), Rubin joined the growing number of current and former officials (foreign and domestic) to criticize QE2. The Fed's plan to buy $600 billion of Treasuries "has a lot of risk," he said, calling the international reaction "horrendous."Rubin, who issued a similar warning about the bond market at The FT's "Future of Finance" conference in October, said Congress' vote on raising the deficit ceiling next spring could be the "trigger" for a rout in the Treasury market. Several Republican and Tea Party candidates vowed to not increase the government's debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to sharp cuts in spending that may not be politically tenable. A Congressional standoff on the debt ceiling could spook international investors, Rubin said, alluding to a market event similar to the Dow's 778-point plunge on Sept. 29, 2008, when the House initially voted no on TARP. While most pundits worry about the potential for China to dump its Treasury holdings, the former non-executive chairman of Citigroup said a financial version of the Cold War concept of Mutual Assured Destruction will likely prevent them from doing so. But he is worried about selling by the government's of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. "They could say 'the Chinese are stuck but we're not,'" Rubin predicts. Rubin's comments came during a panel discussion that also featured Sen. Conrad, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey and former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. The panel was moderated by former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson, the senior chairman and co-founder of The Blackstone Group as well as founder of the Concord Coalition.
U.S. Pursues Insider-Trading Probe - Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2010 http://tinyurl.com/2dxperc
The criminal and civil probes, which authorities say could eclipse the impact on the financial industry of any previous such investigation, are examining whether multiple insider-trading rings reaped illegal profits totaling tens of millions of dollars, the people say. Some charges could be brought before year-end, they say. The investigations, if they bear fruit, have the potential to expose a culture of pervasive insider trading in U.S. financial markets, including new ways non-public information is passed to traders through experts tied to specific industries or companies, federal authorities say. CLIP
Halliburton May Pay $500 million to Keep Cheney out of Prison: Report (December 10, 2010) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22362
Oilfield services company Halliburton is in negotiations with the Nigerian government to keep its former CEO, Dick Cheney, out of prison, according to a news report.Sources inside Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission told GlobalPost this week that a settlement keeping the charges against Cheney out of court could cost as much as $500 million.Nigeria filed charges against Cheney this week in an investigation of alleged bribery estimated at $180 million. Prosecutors named both Halliburton and KBR in the charges, as well as three European oil and engineering companies -- Technip SA, EniSpa, and Saipem Construction. The charges allege that engineering contractor KBR, until 2007 a subsidiary of Halliburton, was among companies that paid bribes to secure a $6 billion contract for a natural gas plant. KBR pleaded guilty to the same bribes in a US court in 2009, and agreed to pay a $382 million fine. The Nigerian charges appear to stem from the US case -- though, in that trial, Cheney was never directly charged. It's not clear from the GlobalPost report if the $500 million figure refers to the amount Halliburton will have to pay, or whether that amount would cover all the companies that have been charged. Further complicating the issue is that the negotiations appear to be an out-of-court settlement, because Nigerian law doesn't recognize plea bargaining. The idea that an out-of-court settlement could be used in a criminal case angered anti-corruption activist Adetokunbo Mumuni, who told GlobalPost, "There cannot be an out of court settlement. In a purely criminal matter like this, the full letters of the law should apply. Whoever is involved should be taken through the entire process to determine their guilt or not." The legal vagueness surrounding the reported negotiations will likely fuel accusations that Halliburton and the other accused companies are attempting to bribe their way out of a bribery prosecution. But the willingness of Nigerian officials to quote a dollar figure in the midst of negotiations could also fuel speculation that the Nigerian charges are an attempt to shake down the companies for cash."The issue should not be so much about the former US vice president, it should be to what extent the law will be properly applied," Mumuni told GlobalPost.
Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11 (November 18, 2010) YET MORE FODDER FOR THE MILLIONS WHO BELIEVE - AND FOR GOOD REASONS - THAT 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB. SOME EVIDENCE LEAD TO THE BUSH MOB. DON'T EXPECT THE CABAL-CONTROLLED MEDIA TO REPORT ON THIS! http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/11/18/evidence-for-informed-trading-on-the-attacks-of-september-11/all/1
Just after September 11th 2001, many governments began investigations into possible insider trading related to the terrorist attacks of that day. Such investigations were initiated by the governments of Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and others. Although the investigators were clearly concerned about insider trading, and considerable evidence did exist, none of the investigations resulted in a single indictment. That’s because the people identified as having been involved in the suspicious trades were seen as unlikely to have been associated with those alleged to have committed the 9/11 crimes. (...) German central bank president, Ernst Welteke, said his bank conducted a study that strongly indicated “terrorism insider trading” associated with 9/11. He stated that his researchers had found “almost irrefutable proof of insider trading.” Welteke suggested that the insider trading occurred not only in shares of companies affected by the attacks, such as airlines and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil. The extent of the 9/11-related informed trading was unprecedented. An ABC News Consultant, Jonathan Winer, said, “it’s absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the US to North America to Europe.” By October 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the four other options exchanges in the US had joined forces with the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate a list of 38 stocks, as well as multiple options and Treasury bonds, that were flagged in relation to potential informed trades. SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt gave testimony to the House Financial Services Committee at the time, saying, “We will do everything in our power to track those people down and bring them to justice.” Mary Bender, chief regulatory officer at the CBOE, stated “We’ve never really had anything like this, [the option exchanges are] using the same investigative tools as we would in an insider-trading case. The point is to find people who are connected to these heinous crimes.” The people ultimately found included an unnamed customer of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown (DBAB). This involved a trade on United Airlines (UAL) stock consisting of a 2,500-contract order that was, for some reason, split into chunks of 500 contracts each and then directed to multiple exchanges around the country simultaneously. When the 9/11 Commission report pointed to a “single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda,” it was referring to either DBAB or its customer in that questionable trade. Michael Ruppert has since written about DBAB, noting that the company had previously been a financier of The Carlyle Group and also of Brown Brothers Harriman, both of which are companies closely related to the Bush family. Ruppert also noted that Alex. Brown, the company purchased by Deutsche Bank to become DBAB, was managed by A.B. (Buzzy) Krongard, who left the firm in 1998 to join the CIA as counsel to director George Tenet. Krongard had been a consultant to CIA director James Woolsey in the mid 1990s and, on September 11th, he was the Executive Director of the CIA, the third highest position in the agency.
(...) The trading of Treasury bonds just before 9/11 was also flagged as being suspicious. Reporters from The Wall street Journal wrote that the “U.S. Secret Service contacted a number of bond traders regarding large purchases of five-year Treasury notes before the attacks, according to people familiar with the probe. The investigators, acting on a tip from traders, are examining whether terrorists, or people affiliated with terrorist organizations, bought five-year notes, including a single $5 billion trade.” Some reports claimed that the 9/11 informed trades were such that millions of dollars were made, and some of that went unclaimed. Others suggested that the trades resulted in the winning of billions of dollars in profits. One such suggestion was made by the former German Minister of Technology, Andreas von Buelow, who said that the value of the informed trades was on the order of $15 billion. CLIP
NOTE from Jean: George W Bush was on Jay Leno on Nov 18 as Bush continues his reputation-washing tour in the media. He was in high spirit and was funny to watch (second part HERE), had several good jokes to tell and all the right answers to Leno's probably carefully scripted questions designed to show W in his best possible Light... and all would have been fine if it was not for the fact that Leno didn't make the slightest reference to the disaster the 8 years of his stolen presidency were... (not to mention the countless war crimes committed under his administration) and Leno's cheering crowd made W appear just so charming and endearing. So I could not resist when I read the following article to bring this to your attention as a small reminder of the fact that a good part of the responsibility for the 2008 global economic meltdown can be placed squarely at W's doorstep - and to be fair at Bill Clinton's doorstep as well for he is the one who signed in 1999 the law repealing the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a move that opened the floodgates on the sub-prime loans bubble and the predatory lending mentioned below that led to the Global financial crisis of 2007-2010 with the entire world economic system still teetering on the edge of the abyss. Lest we forget... CHECK ALSO Hundreds of Masked Protesters Call For George Bush To Be Arrested For War Crimes As He Opens Presidential Centre in Dallas
Spitzer Destroyed Over Of Threat To Bush Cartel? (3-14-2008) http://www.rense.com/general81/spit.htm
Here is more and very credible info on why the plug was pulled on Spitzer. Read his oped piece from the Feb. 14, Post and you can see that he was pointing the finger at the Bush crime syndicate. See the last paragraph. So it seems that Spitzer's true crime was stupidity -- how could he think that he would visit high-priced call girls and also attack the Bushinistas at the same time without being counterattacked? - Jim
Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime: How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers
(The following oped by Eliot Spitzer was published barely a month prior to the unfolding scandal and his demise as Governor of the State of New York. Does the scandal bear any relationship to Spitzer's intent to reveal the criminal nature of the subprime mortgage scam and the role of the Bush adminstration. Was the scandal intended to silence Eliot Spitzer?)
By New York Governor Eliot Spitzer - The Washington Post (Feb. 14, 2008) Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets. Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers. Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices. What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no. Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye. (...) When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.
Europe’s dirty secret (19 November 2010) http://wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/pers-n19.shtml
In a revealing admission concerning the relationship between capitalist governments and international financial interests, the Financial Times on Tuesday wrote of “Europe’s dirty secret.” The newspaper editorialized against the plan of the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund to loan Ireland tens of billions of euros in order to guarantee in full the investments of international bankers and bondholders in the country’s failing banking system. Under the plan, Ireland will effectively surrender sovereignty over its economic policy to the EU and the IMF and agree to claw back the latest bailout of the global financial elite by imposing a new and even more savage round of attacks on the wages and living standards of the working class. The Financial Times argued that using the ¤440 billion European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) to cover the bad debts of the financial elite by propping up zombie banks, while driving the Irish state closer to default, would be “a fatal mistake.” The Times insisted that such a policy was shortsighted and self-defeating, since sovereign defaults would trigger new financial panics and bankruptcies. “It would,” the Times wrote, “keep the Irish people indentured to those who recklessly fund their banks: EFSF funds must, after all, be paid back by taxpayers. It would also give an official EU imprimatur on Europe’s dirty secret: public treasuries will do anything to make private bank creditors whole.”What the Financial Times calls a “dirty secret” is hardly news to those who have followed developments since the collapse of Lehman Brothers 26 months ago. What is remarkable, however, is the bluntness with which this organ of British finance capital acknowledges the existence of a dictatorship of the banks over government policy throughout Europe. Nor is it any different in North America, South America, Africa or Asia. The newspaper admits that a tiny financial elite, which it describes as “reckless,” is looting public treasuries in order to cover its speculative failures, reducing entire populations in the process to the status of “indentured” servants. It is this single-minded pursuit that drives the decisions of governments throughout Europe. Regardless the nominal political coloration of a particular government—whether “left of center” (as the social democratic PASOK regime in Greece and the Fianna Fail government in Ireland) or “right of center” (as the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in Britain and the Gaullist regime in France)—it takes its orders from the major banks. This is the meaning of the recurrent references by government leaders to “market realities.” CLIP
The horrible truth starts to dawn on Europe's leaders (November 16th, 2010) http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100008667/the-horrible-truth-starts-to-dawn-on-europes-leaders/
The entire European Project is now at risk of disintegration, with strategic and economic consequences that are very hard to predict. In a speech this morning, EU President Herman Van Rompuy (poet, and writer of Japanese and Latin verse) warned that if Europe's leaders mishandle the current crisis and allow the eurozone to break up, they will destroy the European Union itself. "We're in a survival crisis. We all have to work together in order to survive with the euro zone, because if we don't survive with the euro zone we will not survive with the European Union," he said. Well, well. This theme is all too familiar to readers of The Daily Telegraph, but it comes as something of a shock to hear such a confession after all these years from Europe's president.He is admitting that the gamble of launching a premature and dysfunctional currency without a central treasury, or debt union, or economic government, to back it up - and before the economies, legal systems, wage bargaining practices, productivity growth, and interest rate sensitivity, of North and South Europe had come anywhere near sustainable convergence - may now backfire horribly. (...) Greece is now under an EU protectorate, or the "Memorandum" as they call it. This has prompted pin-prick terrorist attacks against anybody associated with EU rule. Ireland and Portugal are further behind on this road to serfdom, but they are already facing policy dictates from Brussels, but will soon be under formal protectorates as well in any case. Spain has more or less been forced to cut public wages by 5pc to comply with EU demands made in May. All are having to knuckle down to Europe's agenda of austerity, without the offsetting relief of devaluation and looser monetary policy. As this continues into next year, with unemployment stuck at depression levels or even creeping higher, it starts to matter who has political "ownership" over these policies. Is there full democratic consent, or is this suffering being imposed by foreign over-lords with an ideological aim? It does not take much imagination to see what this is going to do to concord in Europe. CLIP - Check also March from Wood Quay Dublin to the GPO at 11am Saturday 27th "to voice our anger and concern over the actions of our politicians and what is happening to Ireland." - Jim Corr http://www.jimcorr.com/ (Nov 23, 2010) Articulate description of the "greatest act of theft in Ireland's history."
ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT: SHOWDOWN IN IRELAND. NOW !!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu9_Gqygn98
Ireland has become a singularity in the fight against the New World Order. Sovereign nations in the way and to be eliminated for global governance by Rothschild Inter Alpha Banking Group.
Is a storm brewing in Europe? http://english.aljazeera.net/photo_galleries/europe/2010112275625847519.html
On platform one at Bolton train station in England a mob of about 100 men punch the air in unison as a chant - "Muslim bombers, off our streets!'' - goes up. Their voices echo loudly, and as more men suddenly appear, startled passengers move aside. The protesters wave St George's Cross flags - the red and white English national emblem - and raise placards. Some wear balaclavas, others black-hooded tops. There is an air of menace.These are some of the most violent football hooligans in Britain and today they have joined in an unprecedented show of strength. Standing shoulder to shoulder are notorious gangs such as Cardiff City's Soul Crew, Bolton Wanderers' Cuckoo Boys and Luton Town's Men In Gear: a remarkable gathering given that on a match day these men would be fighting each other. But today they are not here for football; it is politics that has drawn them. Their destination is Manchester to support a protest by the newly formed English Defence League.
(...) The league seemed to spring from nowhere in 2009, but since its formation the far-right movement has held major protests in nearly all of Britain's cities. Although it claims to be a peaceful group, violence has erupted at most league demonstrations, with its supporters fighting on the streets against police, Muslim youths and a group called Unite Against Fascism, an umbrella organisation consisting mainly of students and trade unionists and formed in 2003 to oppose the far-right. During the fighting hundreds of people have been arrested, weapons have been seized and city centres have been brought to a standstill.Britain has not witnessed such street violence for many years and there are growing fears that the league - despite its official multiracial stance - has become a ready-made army for neo-Nazis who for years have operated underground and that tensions will erupt resulting in major disorder.All mainstream political parties in Britain have criticised the league, including John Denham, the former communities secretary, who compared the group to Oswald Mosley's Union of British Fascists, which ran amok in London during the 1930s.
(...) "For more than a decade now, there's been tension in Luton between Muslim youths and whites. We all get on fine - black, white, Indian, Chinese - everyone does, in fact, apart from some Muslim youths who've become extremely radicalised since the first Gulf War. Preachers of hate such as Anjem Choudary have been recruiting for radical Islamist groups in Luton for years. Our government does nothing, so we decided we'd start protesting against radical Islam, and it grew from there," he said.With Islam Europe's fastest-growing religion - Muslim populations are projected to expand rapidly in coming decades - the group's fear that traditional British culture is under threat have been exacerbated.Robinson could barely conceal his anger as he described radical Muslims protesting as the Royal Anglican regiment paraded through the town on its return from Afghanistan in May 2009. Following the incident, he and others set up a group called United People of Luton. After linking up with a Birmingham-based group called British Citizens Against Muslim Extremists and a group calling itself Casuals United, they realised there was potential for a national movement. Robinson said members wore balaclavas to protect their identities because league members had been targeted by Muslim extremists.But although the league publicly espouses peaceful protest, there is growing concern over its secrecy and quasi-paramilitary appearance - as well as some of its membership. According to the international anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, far-right British National Party activists and other fascist extremists are at the core of the league.
(...) What is concerning many people in Britain is that the movement is becoming more organised and stronger and feeding off growing Islamaphobia. With its anti-Islam stance, the EDL has been gaining support from abroad. Pamela Gellar, the woman leading the protest against the Islamic centre near Ground Zero in New York, has backed the movement and EDL members were welcomed when they flew to the US to oppose the Muslim community's plans on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.Leader Robinson was refused entry at JFK airport, however, and taken into custody and flown straight back to the UK.Support has also come from Europe and on October 30, the EDL joined forces with the newly formed French and Dutch Defence Leagues at an event in Amsterdam. The meeting, organised by the European Freedom Initiative, was promoted as a demonstration for freedom and in opposition to Sharia. It was planned to coincide with the end of Dutch politician Geert Wilders' trial for hate speech and inciting racism. The fears are, however, that European cities could soon be witnessing the widespread violence being experienced in Britain.
Tent Cities, Homelessness, Soul-Crushing Despair: Legacy Of Decades Of Government Debt, Mismanagement Of Economy (November 19, 2010) http://www.infowars.com/tent-cities-homelessness-soul-crushing-despair-legacy-of-decades-of-government-debt-mismanagement-of-economy/
For decades, our politicians have been deeply addicted to government debt, they have stood idly by as millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas and they have passed countless business-crushing regulations and they never thought that it would catch up with us. Well, it has. America has been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and now that bubble is starting to pop. There has never been such an extended period of unemployment in the United States since the Great Depression, and millions of Americans are losing their homes. Homelessness is skyrocketing, tent cities are popping up everywhere and countless numbers of American families are experiencing the soul-crushing despair that comes from desperately trying to hang on for month after month after month. Now, because of the horrific hole that our politicians have dug for us, we are faced with some heartbreaking choices. For example, right now the U.S. Congress is deciding whether or not to extend long-term unemployment benefits for the nation's jobless. Extending those benefits through the end of February would add another $12.5 billion to the U.S. national debt. But not doing it would cut off the only lifeline that many Americans have just in time for the holidays. The extension of jobless benefits that was passed last summer expires on December 1st. If these long-term benefits are not renewed, approximately 2 million unemployed Americans will lose their checks. But what can the U.S. Congress do? Just keep going into endless amounts of debt? As I have written about previously, the United States is never going to see another balanced budget ever again under the current system. The U.S. government is flat out broke. Somehow our politicians desperately need to find a way for the federal budget to stop hemorrhaging red ink. There is no more "extra money" to spend. The U.S. government has piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world and we are headed for a complete and total economic disaster because of it. But what are we going to do? Are we going to let millions of Americans starve in the streets? It's not just the rapidly rising number of homeless Americans that is the problem. Millions of Americans are not going to be able to heat their homes this winter. Millions of others are going to have to choose between buying medicine and buying food because they will not be able to afford both. How would you like to be at a point where you could not go to the doctor because you knew that you could not pay the deductible? How would you like to be at a point where you had to decide whether to buy diabetes medicine or to buy macaroni and cheese to feed your family? More than 42 million Americans are now on food stamps, and that number keeps going up month after month after month. Just think about that. 42 million Americans would not be able to eat if the U.S. government did not give them handouts. The safety net is getting awfully crowded.If you really want to see some soul-crushing desperation, go check out the flood tunnels under the city of Las Vegas. But do not do this alone - it is very dangerous down there. Today, there are hordes of "tunnel people" who call those dark tunnels home. Nobody knows for sure how many people are down there (some people say that it is well into the thousands), but everyone agrees that the number is rapidly growing. But in many major U.S. cities there are no flood tunnels to go to. Instead, in many areas of the United States huge tent cities have sprouted. The following is a video news report from the BBC about the tent cities that are popping up all over America…. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnnOOo6tRs8 CLIP
Obama and GOPers Worked Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe (Dec. 1, 2010) http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/12/wikileaks-cable-obama-quashed-torture-investigation
A WikiLeaks cable shows that when Spain considered a criminal case against ex-Bush officials, the Obama White House and Republicans got really bipartisan. -- In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A "confidential" April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution. The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain's National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, "creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture." (...) Several human rights groups filed a brief urging this judge to keep the case alive, citing the Obama administration's failure to prosecute the Bush officials. Since then, there's been no action. The Obama administration essentially got what it wanted. The case of the Bush Six went away. Back when it seemed that this case could become a major international issue, during an April 14, 2009, White House briefing, I asked press secretary Robert Gibbs if the Obama administration would cooperate with any request from the Spaniards for information and documents related to the Bush Six. He said, "I don't want to get involved in hypotheticals." What he didn't disclose was that the Obama administration, working with Republicans, was actively pressuring the Spaniards to drop the investigation. Those efforts apparently paid off, and, as this WikiLeaks-released cable shows, Gonzales, Haynes, Feith, Bybee, Addington, and Yoo owed Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thank-you notes. - RECOMMENDED BY Richard Keber (srkeber@msn.com) who wrote: "Sure, as a group, Americans are deeply in Denial about a lot of things - but sometimes it's so hard for even a cynic to believe the extent of deception, mis-representation, lies, betrayal, and out-and-out immoral behavior routinely practiced, in lieu of service to the public, by officials and members of our government, even at the highest level - then they vigorously protect each other's criminality from exposure or accountability."Hard not to concur. That is one of the good things about the disclosure efforts by Wikileaks.
Obama administration gives billions in stimulus money without environmental safeguards (November 28, 2010) NOTE FROM JEAN: Judging by the title it looks bad but in fact it seems most of the projects approved - quickly because they cut through all the red tape - are going to be good for the environment in the end. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/28/AR2010112804379.html?wpisrc=nl_politics
In the name of job creation and clean energy, the Obama administration has doled out about $2 billion in stimulus money to some of the nation's biggest polluters while granting them exemptions from a basic form of environmental oversight, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found. The administration has awarded more than 179,000 "categorical exclusions" to stimulus projects funded by federal agencies, freeing the projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. Officials said they did not consider companies' pollution records in deciding whether to grant the waivers. They said that creating jobs quickly was an important part of the stimulus plan, and that past environmental violations should not disqualify a company from pursuing federal contracts for unrelated projects. (...) In all, about three dozen of the country's biggest polluters with past environmental problems won NEPA exemptions for the stimulus grants totaling $2 billion from the Energy Department - about 6 percent of the department's total money awarded so far.Passed by Congress in 1969, NEPA provides one of the few proactive protections in an environmental enforcement system that typically relies on penalties after the fact. The law requires companies to study possible threats to the landscape, wildlife or human health before proceeding with a major federally funded project. Industry groups and their allies on Capitol Hill have long complained that the process can delay projects by months and even years, costing millions of dollars. Career employees who granted NEPA exemptions said that their screening process does not consider a company's environmental record as they lack the ability to easily access such information. Even so, they said that the NEPA process focuses on specific projects, and that a company's environmental record isn't pertinent to its stimulus work on unrelated projects.Environmentalists and people who have suffered from the companies' past pollution disagree and say the exemptions should not have been granted. "It's outrageous to give these companies these big breaks when they haven't earned a bit of trust from the communities around them," said Joe Kiger, a Parkersburg, W.Va., schoolteacher who lived in a neighborhood affected by drinking-water pollution traced to DuPont. "I'm all for the stimulus, and I'm all for job creation, but not at the expense of the environment and human health."Administration officials say the exemptions were essential to accelerate more than $30 billion in stimulus-funded clean-energy projects through the Energy Department, which already have created 35,000 jobs. In the long run, they add, the exempted activities will boost energy efficiency and curb pollution. CLIP
Ralph Nader Predicts Obama Will Face Democratic Primary Challenger in 2012 (Dec 9, 2010) http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/09/ralph-nader-predicts-obama-will-face-democratic-primary-challeng/
Calling the White House tax deal with Republicans the "last straw," Ralph Nader predicted that President Obama will face a primary challenger in 2012. Nader, a third-party presidential candidate in the four most recent elections, told The Hill a Democrat will step up in two years to represent the progressive wing of the party. It's "just a question of how prominent a person." The 76-year-old consumer advocate did not commit to running again himself, but said he hoped someone new would come along to stand for liberals. "Obama's position has been that the liberal, progressive wing has nowhere to go, therefore they can't turn their back on the administration," Nader told The Hill. "But a challenge will hold his feet to the fire and signal that we do have somewhere to go."Nader said Obama's decision to allow tax-cut extensions for the wealthy is considered a betrayal by his progressive supporters. He called the president "opportunistic" and lacking in principles. "He's a con man. I have no use for him," Nader said.
Obama: Letting Middle-Class Tax Cuts Lapse 'Unacceptable to Me' (Dec 11, 2010) OBAMA ADOPTED THE SAME STRATEGY AS THE DELEGATES AT THE CLIMATE CONFERENCE IN CANCUN. ACCEPT A COMPROMISE TO GET SOMETHING YOU NEED DONE. NOT EXACTLY THE MOST ENLIGHTENED APPROACH BUT PROBABLY THE ONLY POSSIBLE ONE IN THE CURRENT POLITICAL MORASS OF THE GRIDLOCKED US POLITICAL SYSTEM. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/11/obama-letting-middle-class-tax-cuts-lapse-unacceptable-to-me/
With the clock ticking on tax increases unless Congress acts this month, President Obama insisted Saturday that his compromise with Republicans is the best deal he could have gotten - and called on members of both political parties to "do the right thing" and pass legislation keeping federal tax rates at the low levels they've been since 2001."All told, this will not only directly help families and businesses," the president said in his weekly radio address. "By putting more money in people's pockets, and helping companies grow, we're going to see people being able to spend a little more, we're going to spur hiring - we're going to strengthen our entire economy."In a rare meeting of the minds, the Republican radio address sounded the same themes, a harmonic convergence that is likely to only further inflame disgruntled Democrats.
(...) As he has for the past week, Obama expressed solicitude for the liberals' frustration that the 2001 income tax reductions will remain in place for upper-income taxpayers, but he pointed out that if Democratic Party intransigence resulted in gridlock, the Bush tax cuts would lapse on Dec. 31, leaving almost all Americans with a significantly larger tax liability in the new year."If Congress doesn't act, tax rates will automatically go up for just about everyone in our country," the president said. "Typical middle-class families would end up paying an extra $3,000.""That's unacceptable to me," the president continued. "We know that it's the middle class that was hit the hardest by the recession, [and] taking this money out of the pockets of working people is exactly the wrong thing to do to get our economy growing faster. Economists tell us that this tax hike on working families could actually cost us well over a million jobs." CLIP
Obama Highlights American Dream with Steve Jobs (Dec. 23rd, 2010) http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/obama_highlights_american_dream_with_steve_jobs/
In a press conference Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama picked Apple CEO Steve Jobs to illustrate the importance of the "American Dream." The president was speaking to the importance of protecting the middle class and providing opportunities to all Americans, and he used Steve Jobs as an example of the benefits of doing so. The comment came when reporter Mark Knoller from CBS News asked the president if there is a divide between the middle class and wealthy Americans. As part of his reply, President Obama decried the accumulation of wealth into the hands of fewer Americans as an issue that affects the middle class. "What is also a fact," he said, according to a transcript of the press conference published by the White House, "is that people in the top 1 percent, people in the top 1/10th of 1 percent, or 1/100th of 1 percent have a larger share of income and wealth than any time since the 1920s. Those are just facts. That's not a feeling on the part of Democrats. Those are facts."He said that America's middle class has always been the greatest strength of the country, and that he believed it important for everyone in the country to, "have a shot at the American Dream." He added, "That should be what we're focused on. How are we creating opportunity for everybody? So that we celebrate wealth. We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products. We expect that person to be rich, and that's a good thing. We want that incentive. That's part of the free market." The question was framed by the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts (which is what started the questioning from Mr. Knoller) that included tax cuts for the wealthiest tiers of Americans. Mr. Obama's support for extending the full range of tax cuts angered many Democrats, while the president defended the measure as a compromise with Republicans that was the best way to ensure that the economy continues to grow going forward.In October, President Obama met with Steve Jobs. According to the White House at that time, Mr. Obama was, "eager to talk to [Mr. Jobs] about the economy, innovation and technology, education." White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs also said, "They discussed American competitiveness and education, especially reforms such as the president's Race to the Top initiative. They then talked about energy independence and ways to increase job creation."
Obama Prepares Executive Order For Indefinite Detention (December 22, 2010) http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-prepares-executive-order-for-indefinite-detention.html
First president Obama becomes Bush in all but name with respect to his predecessor's economic policies, and now he follows by espousing Bush's interpretation of "civil rights" as well. According to Pro Publica, the White House is preparing an Executive Order for indefinite detention. And while the premise behind a comparable draft has been circulating around for 18 months, the uptake was seen as problematic. The "humanitarian" premise behind the order is that it will "provide for the periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay… and allow for the possibility that detainees from countries like Yemen might be released if circumstances change." That's the theory. The "practice" is that the Order will, as the name implies, afford the administration the option of "indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial." In other words all those, and we assume that the Order is not merely targeting those involved in September 11, and is wider in its scope, who are perceived by the administration as "high value detainees" will be denied due process, and will be held in captivity essentially indefinitely with no legal recourse, for as long as the "review process" so deems fit. As for the "theory" aspect, Politico summarizes just how much of a bold lie Obama's promise two years ago to close Guantanamo has become: "Nearly two years after Obama's pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo, more inmates there are formally facing the prospect of lifelong detention and fewer are facing charges than the day Obama was elected." CLIP - Check also Why Indefinite Detention By Executive Order Should Scare the Hell Out of People
TSA screenings miss loaded handguns, bombs, says report (December 19, 2010) http://www.naturalnews.com/030778_TSA_handguns.html
(NaturalNews) Getting through the airport security line with dangerous weapons is far easier than most people might think, according to a recent ABC News report. Undercover government agents testing the effectiveness of common U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security protocols found that the majority of the time, TSA agents completely missed obvious weaponry like bombs and loaded handguns stowed in luggage. In the case of Farid Seif, an Iranian-American businessman who travels frequently out of Houston Airport, agents failed to identify a loaded Glock pistol in Seif’s bag that he allegedly forgot had been left inside. After he arrived at his destination, Seif was shocked to find that he has made it through the screening process and onto the airplane with a loaded handgun, and immediately let airport security officials know about the security failure. And according to the same ABC News report, Seif’s case is hardly isolated. Undercover agents who conducted a test at Newark Liberty International Airport in 2006 found that they were able to get concealed bombs through the screening system more than 90 percent of the time. And similar outcomes have occurred at various other airports as well, including Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has refused to release any more specific data about the checkpoint breaches, but insists they highlight the need for increased security measures. However, some say that the release of this new information is nothing more than propaganda to defend the invasive new enhanced pat-downs and back-scatter X-ray protocols that have received much flack in recent weeks for violating personal and civil liberties. MORE through Gaping Holes in Airline Security: Loaded Gun Slips Past TSA Screeners
End of Free Internet: US Senate Committee Approves Internet "Blacklist" Bill (November 19, 2010) http://www.activistpost.com/2010/11/end-of-free-internet-us-senate.html
It seems the lame duck Congressional session is becoming anything but unproductive. Yesterday, we saw the cloture of the Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), and today the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act was unanimously approved by the US Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday with a 19-0 vote. The COICA has been overwhelmingly viewed by bloggers as a corporate hijacking of the Internet by mega-media cartels. Indeed, its eventual passage will be the end of the free Internet as we know it. (...) This legislation may be the most dangerous weapon against free speech in modern history. The infringing activity that may land a website on the "Blacklist" is defined very broadly. It appears that the blacklist can be enforced without a court order via ISPs. This is total information tyranny and all independent voices need to stand up and protest or surely we'll face the arbitrary blacklist. David Segal reported on the blacklist regulations: COICA creates two blacklists of Internet domain names. Courts could add sites to the first list; the Attorney General would have control over the second. Internet service providers and others (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the good favor of the government) if they block domains on the second list. The lists are for sites "dedicated to infringing activity," but that's defined very broadly -- any domain name where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are "central to the activity of the Internet site" could be blocked. Segal has also established a petition against this hijacking of the free internet which can be signed here. However, given that this bill passed out of committee unanimously proves that our corporate-owned public officials will surely jam this legislation down our throats. It will likely change the Internet as we know it, essentially redirecting the flow of free information to media conglomerates. (...) This is very bad news for alternative voices and news aggregators. Although it may be futile, we encourage everyone to call the Senate switchboard and voice their strong objection to this legislation, or we and many other "truth" sites may be essentially finished. The U.S. Capitol Hill Switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. CHECK ALSO The End of The Internet as we Know It (May 5, 2010) "Obama FCC Expected to Abandon Net Neutrality, Universal Internet" and "Emergency Control" of the Internet and Food safety bill invokes Codex harmonization and grants FDA authority to police food safety of foreign nations " The more you read from this bill, the more surreal it all becomes. For example, did you know there's a global FDA power grab agenda hidden in the Food Safety Modernization Act?" AND check also Hundreds of Herbal Remedies to Be Banned in UK Next Year!!!..."Patients are set to lose access to hundreds of herbal medicines next year, as European regulations come into force. Sales of all herbal remedies, except for a small number of popular products for 'mild' illness such as echinacea for colds, will be banned to the public from May 1. Under the new law traditional products must be licensed or prescribed by a registered herbal practitioner. (...) At least six million Britons have consulted a herbal practitioner in the past two years, according to research. Leading medical herbalist Dr Ann Walker said: 'At present patients have access to top quality herbal products that are manufactured only for professional use, but we won't be allowed to supply them."
US Government seizure of the internet has begun; DHS takes over 76 websites By Mike Adams (November 27, 2010) http://www.naturalnews.com/030542_censorship_internet.html
(NaturalNews) As part of a new expansion of government power over information, the Department of Homeland Security has begun seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous "Department of Justice" logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com Over 75 websites were seized and shut down last week, and there is no indication that the government will stop such efforts. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim "violate copyrights," yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Google also links to copyrighted content -- does that mean the feds will soon seize Google, too? These seizures were conducted on the basis of language in the DMCA law, which is vastly overreaching in its powers (it was passed to appease the music recording industry and the RIAA). Even so, the U.S. Senate is right now considering passing yet another law -- COICA -- the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, a new law that would give the federal government even more power to shut down websites it opposed. Read more about COICA HERE And HERE Here's the list of 19 US Senators who voted to censor the internet via the COICA bill... Government could shut down alternative health websites - Where is all this going? Today the U.S. government is targeting websites focused on copyright violations, but if the public tolerates this government-sponsored censorship of the web, it's only a matter of time before these government powers are expanded to control the content of the internet. CLIP - Check also BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures "The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension."
Insider Reveals Diabolical Secrets Of The Rand Corporation (December 16, 2010) http://www.prisonplanet.com/insider-reveals-diabolical-secrets-of-the-the-rand-corporation.html
Cuban-born journalist and author Alex Abella was allowed exclusive access inside the RAND Corporation to view their archives. What he discovered was a plot driven by mad scientists, behaviorists, and generals who were intent on starting world war three and fleecing the American people in the process. Once he was a skeptic on the subject of conspiracy theories and the new world order, but after his work with the RAND Corporation he is now convinced that this top secret think tank has been pulling the strings of American government for at least 60 years. "We're all the bastard children of RAND and we don't even know it," remarks Abella, as he charts how RAND started off as an organization centered around building new weapons for the military but ultimately expanded into politics, science, history and economics and was closely allied with the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. RAND's decision in the 50?s to re-model the globe towards a new world order changed everything, with the development of "rational choice theory," which turned people from being citizens into consumers, as rights and responsibilities were replaced with choices and people's lives slowly came to be dominated not by integrity or what they stood for, but by what they spent their money on. RAND's ultimate goal was to have technocrats running every aspect of society in pursuit of a one world government that would be administered under "the rule of reason," a ruthless world where efficiency was king and men were little more than machines, which is why RAND studied the social sciences because they were at a loss to work out how to deal with people and how human beings did not always act in their own predictable self-interests. There is no place for love, empathy or selflessness in the new world order that RAND and the Ford Foundation are working to create, and patriotism and altruism are adversarial to their aims. Abella explains how RAND was instrumental in developing the strategy behind the use of nuclear weapons, and how they actively promoting nuking the entirety of Eastern Europe as well as China in case of problems in Western Europe, a policy that could easily have sparked off a catastrophic nuclear holocaust. RAND researchers believed that as long as 10 million Americans survived a nuclear war, the war was won. Abella notes how RAND saw the United Nations as a template for one world government but that a new organization controlled by the U.S. would eventually supersede the UN and become the de facto world government, which is why RAND researchers such as John Williams advocated pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union, to make sure the United States would be the only country with the supreme power to impose its will on the rest of the world. Speaking on the topic of false flag attacks, Abella notes that the staged Gulf of Tonkin attack and the planned Operation Northwoods false flag were both initially proposed in RAND documents, highlighting the total immorality with which RAND war games its scenarios, many of which are ethically repugnant in that they nonchalantly promote the genocide of entire populations with little regard for the consequences. Abella explains how RAND truly is a shadow government because it serves as a revolving door between the two, and how RAND is the cradle of the military-industrial complex and the birthplace of the technocratic elite that we are now fighting against.
NDP outraged as Senate kills climate change bill (NOVEMBER 17, 2010) http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/outraged+Senate+kills+climate+change+bill/3843546/story.html OTTAWA - Prime Minister Stephen Harper has turned back the clock on Canada's democracy after allowing unelected Conservative senators to use their majority to kill climate change legislation adopted by a majority of MPs in the House of Commons, NDP leader Jack Layton said Wednesday.Conservative senators used a procedural tactic Tuesday night to scrap the bill, adopted in the Commons last spring in a vote of 149 to 136, without allowing it to be examined in Senate hearings or debated in the Senate chamber."That is totally contrary to the constitutional tradition of this country," said Layton, standing with his caucus in front of the Senate chamber on Parliament Hill. "It is totally contradictory and every Canadian should now be worried because these senators are here for one heck of a long time. And what's going to be next? What bill, representing the will of Canadians, is this Senate going to stop next? This Senate should be abolished. It should be ashamed of itself."
(...) Layton compared the Harper government tactics in the Senate to the British regime that prompted rebellions in what was then Upper and Lower Canada in the 1830s."The Senate hasn't done that for a private member's bill on second reading in 70 years," said Layton. "Stephen Harper is turning back the clock on democracy in this country and he starts with the climate change bill . . . We must not as Canadians allow the Senate to get away with this, because it would re-establish a system of government that we had thrown out 200 years ago and it's got to stop. OK, maybe not 200 years - the rebellions of (1838) - I'll start there."He added that it also contrasts with Harper's previous criticism of the Senate when it was dominated by a Liberal majority."What's it going to be next?" Layton asked. "Is he saying it doesn't matter if Canadians throw Stephen Harper out of office in the next election. But he's now got his majority socked in here to make sure that his agenda gets established and that anything positive that the House of Commons wants to do can get blocked."Environmental groups said the legislation provided guidelines for meeting Canada's international climate change obligations in a clear and transparent manner."It would have been difficult to watch the Senate defeat this ground-breaking legislation under any circumstances," said Clare Demerse, associate director of climate change at the Pembina Institute, an Alberta-based environmental research group. "But to see it lost in this way is even tougher: C-311 was defeated without any debate, without the chance to call a single witness to explain what it offered, and at a moment when key supporters of the bill happened to be away from the Senate."
Jet Stream Gone Haywire! "Significant" Snow Falls for Europe Predicted by Mid-Week (22 Nov 2010) http://www.sott.net/articles/show/218245-Jet-Stream-Gone-Haywire-Significant-Snow-Falls-for-Europe-Predicted-by-Mid-Week
Comment: Looks like Europe is in for trouble weather-wise. Next weekend, freezing temps, snow and maybe even storms at the same time. The Jet stream appears to have stopped or broken down over Europe. Check out this image: ... You see the UK and Ireland, Northern France, Germany etc. and Scandinavia in the bottom center? Usually the Jet stream goes straight across Northern Europe acting as a buffer against the freezing Arctic weather. But now it has looped down over Spain with another arm over North Africa. Apparently that has never happened before. Here's an image from the US earlier this year: It's the same deal, "chilly air forced southward" because of a distortion in the normal flow of the Jet stream. Thing is, that happened over North America in June, it's happening over Europe in winter. Here's an article with a video explaining what happened in India, Russia and China this year as a result of a similar strange break down/up of the Jet Stream (ignore the 'global warming' nonsense). Russian Drought, Pakistan Floods, Chinese Landslides All Linked To Bizarre Jet Stream Change (...) HAARP is being used to modify the jet steam. I don't think this particular case is related to HAARP, but once you start messing with the jetstream, who knows what feedback you cause in the system. (...) What we perceive to be from the local star is actually from an interstellar current. It affects all bodies in our system, but mostly the sun. The current is weaker. There is a transistor effect at the sun, so out put is moderated to within 1% usually. But elsewhere .... The effect is to lower the plasmasphere which surrounds the earth. This means the jet stream, powered by EM energy, is lower in the sky. It is more affected by local EM prominences, invisible to us but not to instruments. It also has weakened the currents in the earth, so vulcanism and earthquakes are becoming more frequent. This is good as adjustments still continue to past events and earth expansion. Inevitably, there will be losses of life but overall, pressure is released. We should engage in deep drilling not just for oil and gas, but for heat capture and water injection to ensure more frequent, smaller earthquakes and vulcanism. If it continues, we are headed for a minimum that may last decades. Buy skis now before the rush!
How a freak diversion of the jet stream is paralysing the globe with freezing conditions (22nd December 2010) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1340436/Why-cold-warm-Greenland-Diverted-jet-stream-letting-icy-blast-Arctic.html
It's snowing in Australia and California yet 'warm' in GreenlandThe freezing conditions that have blasted Britain are being blamed on a series of weather patterns that are bringing Arctic temperatures to much of western Europe, California and even Australia. One of the main factors is a change in the position of the jet stream - the fast-moving current of air that moves from west to east, high in the atmosphere. Changes in the jet stream's path can cause massive changes in weather conditions across the globe and may be why Australians are now shivering their way through summer and the current freezing conditions in California.In a normal British winter - when conditions are mild and soggy - the jet stream lies over northern Europe, at an altitude of between 35,000 to 50,000 feet. During these grey winters, Britain's prevailing winds come from the west and south west, and bring with them warm and moist air from the sub-tropical Atlantic. This year a high-pressure weather system over the Atlantic is blocking the jet stream's normal path and forcing it to the north and south of Europe. The areas of high pressure act like stones in a stream - blocking the normal flow of milder air from the west and instead forcing colder air from the north down across the UK. In California more than 12 inches of rain has fallen in parts of the Santa Monica Mountains in the south and 13 feet of snow has accumulated at Mammoth Mountain ski resort.And Australians expecting to bask in early summer sun this Christmas are instead shivering as icy gusts sweeping up from the Southern Ocean have blanketed parts of east coast states New South Wales and Victoria with up to four inches of snow. When the jet-stream is blocked by high pressure it dips southwards and lets freezing air flood in from the Arctic regions. Other weather patterns are also causing havoc across the may also be affecting the weather, such as the current in the tropical Pacific Ocean, called La Nina, which is disturbing the jetstream over the north Pacific and North America. A combination of our usual wet Atlantic weather systems striking these freezing cold fronts results in huge amounts of snowfall - and brings Britain grinding to a halt. A Met Office spokesman: 'The problem is we are not getting the warmer Atlantic air that normally keeps our winters mild.' 'We can see that it is unseasonably warm over Canada and Greenland, this is where warm air has been diverted.' He said that any change in the pressure over the Atlantic would need to last for several days before we would notice any change in the weather in Europe.Freezing-cold winters and milder winters tend to cluster in groups, as the jet stream changes its path. Experts are still unsure why this is but suspect it may be related to the EL Nino weather system as well as changes in sea temperatures and solar activity.
Heavy snow hits airports and roads across Europe (Nov 30, 2010) http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5garZAi-d2n0MvHLadXqDawJi2cjQ?docId=CNG.505844057db44eb2069c50c57a41a522.271
LONDON - Snow and freezing temperatures severely disrupted airports in Germany and Britain and caused chaos and deaths on roads across Europe on Tuesday. More than 200 flights were cancelled at Frankfurt airport in Germany, the continent's third busiest, while southern German states were blanketed by snow. Large parts of Poland were covered in thick snow, causing hundreds of accidents on the roads and at least four people were killed on snowbound roads in the Czech Republic. It was so cold in France that electricity network RTE warned of cuts in the supply as the country looked set to top record demand levels while 20 percent of high-speed train services to the hard hit southeast were cancelled. Switzerland suffered its coldest November night for 45 years as temperatures plunged below minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit), according to national weather service Meteosuisse. Even Spain and Portugal were shivering after snow fell in the northern half of the Iberian peninsula. Britain has been taken by surprise by its earliest widespread snowfall since 1993, forcing hundreds of schools in Scotland and rural parts of England to close and causing treacherous conditions on roads and at smaller airports.Scotland and northeast England had fresh snowfall and the freezing weather has started moving down England's east coast while London had its first sprinkling of snow this winter. London City Airport, a popular departure point for business travellers, was forced at one point to suspend all flights because of snow and ice before resuming with a heavily interrupted service. CLIP - CHECK ALSO Earliest white winter for two decades could go on for 10 days (27 November 2010) "With snow drifts, black ice and biting winds, Britain woke up to the earliest white winter in almost two decades yesterday, with forecasters predicting that the cold snap could last ten days."
Global Warming Could Cool Down Northern Temperatures in Winter (Nov. 17, 2010) http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101117114028.htm
The overall warming of Earth's northern half could result in cold winters, new research shows. The shrinking of sea-ice in the eastern Arctic causes some regional heating of the lower levels of air -- which may lead to strong anomalies in atmospheric airstreams, triggering an overall cooling of the northern continents, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. "These anomalies could triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and northern Asia," says Vladimir Petoukhov, lead author of the study and climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "Recent severe winters like last year's or the one of 2005-06 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it." (...) An abrupt transition between different regimes of the atmospheric circulation in the sub-polar and polar regions may be very likely. Warming of the air over the Barents-Kara Sea seems to bring cold winter winds to Europe. "This is not what one would expect," Petoukhov says. "Whoever thinks that the shrinking of some far away sea-ice won't bother him could be wrong. There are complex teleconnections in the climate system, and in the Barents-Kara Sea we might have discovered a powerful feedback mechanism."Other approaches to the issue of cold winters and global warming referring to reduced sun activity or most recently the gulf stream "tend to exaggerate the effects," Petoukhov says. The correlation between these phenomena and cold winters is relatively weak, compared to the new findings referring to the processes in the Barents-Kara Sea. CLIP
EPA presents plan on greenhouse gases. Can next Congress stop it? (December 23, 2010) http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/1223/EPA-presents-plan-on-greenhouse-gases.-Can-next-Congress-stop-it
The EPA set out a timetable Thursday for curbing the emissions of greenhouse gases from power plants and refineries. But Republicans have signaled their steady opposition, and a battle looms. -- Setting the stage for a New Year battle royale between Congress and the White House over greenhouse gas emissions, the US Environmental Protection Agency Thursday laid out a timetable for the nation's largest carbon emitters - power plants and refineries - to begin curbing those pollutants. Republicans have said all year that they plan to pull out all the stops to keep the EPA from phasing in greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations beginning in 2011, saying they would damage the energy industry, raise prices, and cost jobs.
(...) Environmentalists lauded the EPA's move."By setting timetables for issuing standards to cut dangerous carbon pollution from power plants and oil refineries, EPA is doing precisely what is needed to protect our health and welfare and provide businesses certainty at a time when some would prefer to roll back the clock," David Doniger, policy director in the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate Center, said in a statement. Legal background to EPA move - The EPA's coming standards will be "based on available and affordable measures" that would enable the two industries responsible for the lion's share of US greenhouse gas emissions to begin cleaning up, Mr. Doniger noted. Boosting pollution control standards would help the utility and petroleum industries plan their future investments and create jobs. CLIP
Energy Companies' Big Plans to Exploit the American West to Feed China's Insatiable Appetite for Coal (27 November 2010) http://www.alternet.org/story/148983/energy_companies'_big_plans_to_exploit_the_american_west_to_feed_china's_insatiable_appetite_for_coal/
Coal production is becoming increasingly unpopular in the United States. Not a single coal plant has broken ground anywhere in the country in almost two full years. It's truly an unprecedented achievement for those seeking to put the breaks on global warming, a victory we all ought to be celebrating as coal incineration accounts for one-third of our country's entire CO2 emissions.Nonetheless, while the coal industry faces resistance at home, some in the fossil fuel business are maneuvering to capitalize on the growing demand for coal in China, where coal-fired stations are being constructed at the rate of about two midsized power plants every single week.In 2008, China topped 2.76 billion metric tons of coal output. That was over two times the production of the United States during the same time period.
(...) In a matter of a couple years China went from an exporter of coal to one of the world's leading importers. Most of this coal has been coming from Australia, which shipped out 231 million metric tons of coal to other countries in 2006. As Ted Nace notes in his book, Climate Hope: On the Frontlines of the Fight Against Coal, "[Even] if Australia were to sell its exports exclusively to China, it would amount to less than 10 percent of China's annual coal appetite."Based on the Natural Resource Council's estimates in 2005, the U.S. coal reserves were approximately 4,000 billion short tons. The coal-rich Powder River Basin, which straddles the Montana and Wyoming border, holds about 800 billion short tons of coal, or 20 percent of our nation's entire reserves. Coal from the area is highly desirable due to its low sulfur content, which often allows coal to be burned without exceeding air limits for sulfur emissions. As such, companies in the U.S. are working fast to figure out the best way to ship Powder River Basin coal to Asia, and China in particular. It's just a short rail journey from Wyoming to the Pacific Northwest, where a new port is being eyed to become coal ready. These companies are also working hard to open up additional mines in the region, as most of the coal available in the Powder River Basin has yet to be tapped.The days when coal was burned close to where it was mined are coming to an end. As the market in the U.S. is squeezed due in large part to environmental problems associated with coal-firing, the industry is simultaneously expanding its business into China. All the work to end coal use in the U.S. may be diminished if China continues to expand its energy appetite."This is a worst-case scenario," David Graham-Caso, spokesman for the Sierra Club, recently told the New York Times. "We don't want this coal burned here, but we don't want it burned at all. This is undermining everything we've accomplished." CLIP
It's Official: The Economy Is Set To Starve (November 23, 2010) http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/economy-set-starve/48474
(...) To balance everything out, the IEA has modeled the OECD as actually decreasing its consumption of coal and oil by significant amounts (that's what a negative 'incremental demand' requires: a decrease in current consumption). The difference is made up from a mix of renewables, biomass, nuclear, and natural gas. Never has such a thing happened in the entire industrial history of the OECD. Never. There are no models or examples to follow here. No guidance is offered to suggest how such a monumental feat will be accomplished, beyond tossing a few more bucks at renewables, as if money alone could correct for vast differences in energy quantity and quality. To suggest that the next 25 years for the OECD will be characterized by a significant reduction in the use of the two primary industrial fuels is an astonishing claim, and so it deserves to be carefully examined. But, speaking bluntly, this is not going to happen. Any suggestion that the OECD is going to reduce its use of coal for electricity and oil for liquid fuels has to be accompanied by evidence of massive programs of investment towards energy transitioning that, truth be told, have to have been started a decade or more before the arrival of Peak Oil. Hinting that it might possibly be a good idea to move these renewable dreams to the drawing board after the advent of Peak Oil is akin to playing tunes on a sinking ship; at best, you are providing a captivating diversion. Regardless, no such programs operating at appropriate scale are even remotely in sight.
Pentagon-NASA Fusion: Military Launches World's Largest Satellite (November 22, 2010) http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22049
Experts believe that the secret payload is a satellite capable of listening to a variety of transmissions from around the world. Such a satellite would have giant antennas stretching up to the size of a football field. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) released a press note saying that the Air Force has launched its spy satellite from Cape Canaveral station on Sunday at 5:58 p.m. The satellite is being dubbed as the largest satellite in the world. More details were not given as it is a classified mission. The unmanned 23-story rocket carried the classified spy satellite. CLIP
Sun TV News application approved (November 26, 2010) http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/11/26/sun-tv-news-application-approved/
News and opinion channel gets specialty license - Sun TV News has been green-lit by the CRTC after a long war with the regulator and critics who are opposed to the 24-7 news-and-opinion channel nicknamed “Fox News North.” The CRTC had previously refused to grant the Quebecor property a category one license that would force cable and satellite providers to carry the channel, like CTV News Channel and CBC News Network. Instead, it received a category two license, which is granted to most specialty channels. The channel is expected to be modeled after the right-leaning and opinion-heavy Fox News. In the past year, Fox News has regularly attracted more than three times the viewership of its main competitor, CNN. In September, Kory Teneycke, the former spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and chief spokesperson for Sun TV News resigned after prominent Canadians, including Margaret Atwood, signed their name to a petition trying to block the channel’s license. - More on this HERE
Senate votes to end ban on openly gay troops http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101219/ap_on_go_co/us_gays_in_military
(,,,) The Senate voted 65-31 to pass the bill, with eight Republicans siding with 55 Democrats and two independents in favor of repeal. The House had passed an identical version of the bill, 250-175, earlier this week. Supporters hailed the Senate vote as a major step forward for gay rights. Many activists hope that integrating openly gay troops within the military will lead to greater acceptance in the civilian world, as it did for blacks after President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order on equal treatment regardless of race in the military. “The military remains the great equalizer,” said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. “Just like we did after President Truman desegregated the military, we’ll someday look back and wonder what took Washington so long to fix it.” CLIP
Private space capsule's maiden voyage ends with splash (8 December 2010) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11948329
A private US capsule that could soon be hauling cargo and even astronauts to the space station has splashed down after its maiden flight. The Dragon ship launched from Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket at 1543GMT (1043 EST) on Wednesday. The capsule separated about 10 minutes after launch, reaching its 300km-high orbit shortly after. After completing several manoeuvres some 300km above Earth, the capsule splashed down in the Pacific. Dragon and Falcon 9 are both products of California's SpaceX company. The firm has a $1.6bn (£1bn) contract with the US space agency (Nasa) to provide 12 spacecraft with cargo capacity of at least 20 tonnes to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) through to 2016. The initiative is part of a much wider American policy to place the carriage of freight and crew transport to the ISS in the hands of the private sector. (...) The vessel completed almost two orbits of the Earth while demonstrating its onboard systems. A de-orbit burn brought Dragon back down through the atmosphere and a controlled splashdown via the assistance of three parachutes in ocean waters roughly 800km west of the coast of Mexico. US President Barack Obama hopes the private sector can help fill the gap left by the retirement next year of the space shuttle fleet. He envisages commercial ships ferrying astronauts and supplies to low-Earth orbit destinations like the ISS, while Nasa concentrates on developing a much more capable rocket and spaceship to venture out into the Solar System. CLIP
GM mosquito wild release takes campaigners by surprise (11 November 2010) http://www.scidev.net/en/news/gm-mosquito-wild-release-takes-campaigners-by-surprise.html
Experts in the safety of genetically modified (GM) organisms have expressed concern over the release of GM mosquitoes into the wild on the Cayman Islands, which was publicised internationally only last month — a year after their initial release.The trial of the OX513A strain of the dengue-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito, developed by UK biotechnology company Oxitec, was carried out on Grand Cayman island by the Cayman Islands' Mosquito Research and Control Unit (MRCU) in 2009, followed by a bigger release between May and October this year. Together they represent the first known release of GM mosquitoes anywhere in the world.Unpublished results of the trials, showing that the GM male mosquitoes competed with wild males, were presented at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene annual meeting in the United States, last week (4 November).T he male GM mosquitoes mate with normal females to produce larvae that die unless the antibiotic tetracycline is present. In tetracycline's absence an enzyme accumulates to a toxic level, killing the larvae. The developers hope the strategy could be combined with other mosquito control methods to reduce transmission in dengue-prone areas. Ricarda Steinbrecher, a geneticist and co-director of EcoNexus — a UK-based non-profit research organisation — expressed surprise that the trials had occurred, saying that they had not been mentioned at the fifth meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety — which addresses international safety issues relating to GM organisms — in Nagoya, Japan, last month.She described the lack of publicity surrounding the trials as "worrying, both from the scientific perspective as well as public participation perspective". Steinbrecher said that until a full, long-term environmental assessment of the Cayman trials has been carried out, the recently announced Malaysian trials of the same strain should not go ahead. Just over three million male mosquitoes were released in the Cayman Islands this year. Oxitec sent the GM eggs to the islands, which are a British overseas territory, and they were hatched and grown at the MRCU.
(...) The wild mosquito population in a 16-hectare urban area is believed to have been reduced by about 80 per cent. The next step for Oxitec, said Alphey, is to test the strategy in conjunction with other mosquito control methods. Kathy Jo Wetter, a researcher with the ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Cooperation), a Canada-based organisation that promotes the socially responsible development of technologies, said ETC was unaware of the release."Oxitec considers its trial 'successful' just days after the experiment has ended," she said. "But unintended impacts on the environment cannot be known, and Oxitec's unproven technology could make things worse in the long term. There is no possibility of recall if something goes wrong — who takes responsibility in that case?" "Extreme techno-fixes require extreme precaution," she added. Alphey said they are waiting for approval for the release of GM mosquitoes in Brazil, Panama and the United States.
Genetically Modified Mosquitos (December 13, 2010) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22385
While “scientists” have been genetically modifying insects for years, only in the last few have they begun to openly discuss releasing them into the environment. As always, the fact that public discussion has just now begun to take place on the issue means that the project has already been initiated. This much has been borne out by the facts in that the release of the insects has already been announced.Under the guise of eradicating Dengue fever, GM mosquitoes were released into the environment in the Cayman Islands in 2009. Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne, virus-based disease that has largely been non-existent in North America for several decades. Dengue fever can morph into a much more dangerous form of the illness known as Dengue Hemorrhagic fever. Symptoms of Dengue fever are high fever, headache, pain behind the eyes, easy bruising, joint, muscle, bone pain, rash, and bleeding from the gums. There is no known cure or treatment for Dengue fever besides adequate rest and drinking plenty of water. Generally speaking, it is one specific type of mosquito, Aedes aegypti, which transmits the virus.The publicly given method for using these GM mosquitoes in the eradication of Dengue fever was that the genetically modified mosquitoes were “engineered with an extra gene, or inserted bacterium, or have had a gene altered so that either their offspring are sterile and unable to spread dengue, or simply die.” More specifically, the male GM mosquitoes are supposed to mate with natural females which produce larvae that die unless tetracycline, an antibiotic, is present. Without the antibiotic, an enzyme accumulates to a level that is toxic enough to kill the larvae.
(...) What has been quite suspicious, however, is the fact that Dengue fever, which has been nonexistent in North America for decades, has recently surfaced in Florida. Initially, the fever was found in 2009, but by 2010 the cases had vastly increased. In July 2010, a CDC study was released to very little media attention indicating that about 10 percent of the population of Key West had been infected with Dengue fever. This had doubled from 2009 where 5 percent had been infected. One might wonder what caused a virus that had been almost entirely eradicated to suddenly reappear with such vigor. That is, one might wonder if the answer weren’t so blatantly obvious. Of course, official reports do not address whether or not the Dengue fever is connected to the millions of mosquitoes capable of carrying the fever which were released just miles away in the Cayman Islands. (...) There is a host of problems with this method that range from the moral to the scientific. First, the presence of antibodies does not necessarily mean immunity, and the transfer of them does not in any way provide immunization to the subject being injected with them. The science related to antibodies and immunity is still largely unsettled. Vaccines, themselves, are completely ineffective and have never been proven effective by a study that was not connected to a drug company or a pharmaceutical company. They are, essentially, faith-based medicine. Even more frightening is the potential of releasing genetically modified mosquitoes that contain actual diseases in their systems to purposely cause a human pandemic. Those who have weakened immune systems would be at the highest risk, but this would no doubt include everyone else as well since they would also be infected with the viruses when bitten. Person-to-person spreading would take over where the mosquitoes left off. Add to this the potential for simultaneous pandemics (if different versions of the insects were used simultaneously) and one has the recipe for genocide on a mass scale. Unfortunately, this is the scenario that many have envisioned for some time. Nevertheless, although Gates has invested so much money, and so many hardworking individuals and prestigious universities have invested so much time and effort, the general consensus of the media is that the flying syringes will never take flight. This is because, as Science NOW reports, The concept of a ‘flying vaccinator’ transgenic mosquito is not likely to be a practicable method of disease control, because ‘flying vaccinator’ is an unacceptable way to deliver vaccine without issues of dosage and informed consent against current vaccine programs. These difficulties are more complicated by the issues of public acceptance to release of transgenic mosquitoes.However, it is quite difficult to believe that the Gates Foundation distributed such a vast amount of money to researchers without first questioning whether or not their efforts were feasible for future use. It is likewise very hard to believe that once these issues were considered, that the Gates Foundation would simply throw away money on a project that was doomed to failure. In fact, anyone who actually believes this is unfortunately very naïve. Clearly, we are being conditioned to accept and expect these organisms to be released on the public on some future date. What the context will be, however, is anyone’s guess.
The Arctic Is Burning: Northern Wildfires Threaten Runaway Climate Change, Study Reveals (Dec 6, 2010) http://beforeitsnews.com/story/295/443/The_Arctic_Is_Burning:_Northern_Wildfires_Threaten_Runaway_Climate_Change,_Study_Reveals.html
Climate change is causing wildfires to burn more fiercely, pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study to be published in Nature Geosciences this week. This is the first study to reveal that fires in the Alaskan interior - an area spanning 18.5 million hectares - have become more severe in the past 10 years, and have released much more carbon into the atmosphere than was stored by the region's forests over the same period. "When most people think of wildfires, they think about trees burning, but most of what fuels a boreal fire is plant litter, moss and organic matter in surface soils," said University of Guelph professor Merritt Turetsky, lead author of the study. "These findings are worrisome because about half the world's soil carbon is locked in northern permafrost and peatland soils. This is carbon that has accumulated in ecosystems a little bit at a time for thousands of years, but is being released very rapidly through increased burning." The results of this study are important for countries currently meeting in Mexico for climate talks, added the integrative biology professor. CLIP
World is running out of places to catch wild fish, study finds (December 2, 2010) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/02/AR2010120205011.html
Global fisheries have expanded so rapidly over the past half-century that the world is running out of places to catch wild fish, according to a study conducted by researchers in Canada, the United States and Australia. The findings, published Thursday in the online journal PLoS ONE, are the first to examine how marine fisheries have expanded over time. Looking at fleets' movements between 1950 and 2005, the five researchers charted how fishing has been expanding southward into less exploited seas at roughly one degree latitude each year to compensate for the fact that humans have depleted fish stocks closer to shore in the Northern Hemisphere.During that same period the world's fish catch increased fivefold from 19 million metric tons in 1950 to a peak of 90 million in the late 1980s, before declining to 87 million tons in 2005. It was 79.5 million tons in 2008, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the most recent year for which figures are available. Daniel Pauly, a co-author who serves as principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, said the global seafood catch is dropping "because there's essentially nowhere to go." The fact that fish catches rose for so many decades "looks like sustainability but it is actually expansion driven. That is frightening, because the accounting is coming now." The authors - including lead author Wilf Swartz, who is a doctoral student at the university, and National Geographic Society ocean fellow Enric Sala - write that this relentless pursuit for seafood has left "only unproductive waters of high seas, and relatively inaccessible waters in the Arctic and Antarctic as the last remaining 'frontiers.' " "The focus should move from looking for something new to looking at what we have and making the most sustainable use out of it," Swartz said in an interview. Although the analysis largely confirms what researchers, activists and policymakers know, it could provide new ammunition to those seeking to curb fishing of some of the world's most imperiled species. Last week, for example, negotiators at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas - which oversees dozens of fish stocks in the Atlantic Ocean - imposed new restrictions on vulnerable species such as oceanic whitetip and hammerhead sharks. But it stopped short of deep cuts in the annual catch of imperiled bluefin tuna in either the eastern or western Atlantic. CLIP
S 510 Food Safety bill is still alive and may unleash a new army of FDA agents (December 09, 2010) http://www.naturalnews.com/030672_Food_Safety_bill_FDA.html
(NaturalNews) The U.S. government wants to know where your greenhouse is. Under Senate Bill 510 -- which is now back in the hands of the U.S. Senate after the House hid an amendment in an appropriations bill and passed it last night -- American food producers would be required to register their facilities with the U.S. government. The feds, it seems, want a database of food growers so they know who to target for surprise inspections (show me your papers!). (...) What this language shows is that the point of registration is so that government agents can conduct surprise inspections of food facilities. At least 4,000 new FDA agents will need to be hired if this bill becomes law, greatly expanding the FDA's agent presence in much the same way the TSA expanded over the last few years.Kangaroo courts for violatorsOnce an FDA inspection occurs, if the government believes the food grower is producing anything that might pose a risk to the public (and note carefully that "belief" is the only thing required, not actual scientific evidence of harm), that food grower is then "suspended" from producing food.After that, they get dragged into a kangaroo FDA court where a panel of FDA officials then decides their fate. This takes place with no due process, no attorney, no Constitutional protections and no rights whatsoever. This is, in every sense, a "King's court" where the King can simply decide that you're guilty and put you out of business. CLIP
The Arctic Is Burning: Northern Wildfires Threaten Runaway Climate Change, Study Reveals (Dec 6, 2010) http://beforeitsnews.com/story/295/443/The_Arctic_Is_Burning:_Northern_Wildfires_Threaten_Runaway_Climate_Change,_Study_Reveals.html
Climate change is causing wildfires to burn more fiercely, pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study to be published in Nature Geosciences this week. This is the first study to reveal that fires in the Alaskan interior - an area spanning 18.5 million hectares - have become more severe in the past 10 years, and have released much more carbon into the atmosphere than was stored by the region's forests over the same period. "When most people think of wildfires, they think about trees burning, but most of what fuels a boreal fire is plant litter, moss and organic matter in surface soils," said University of Guelph professor Merritt Turetsky, lead author of the study. "These findings are worrisome because about half the world's soil carbon is locked in northern permafrost and peatland soils. This is carbon that has accumulated in ecosystems a little bit at a time for thousands of years, but is being released very rapidly through increased burning." The results of this study are important for countries currently meeting in Mexico for climate talks, added the integrative biology professor. CLIP
How the world bounced back: Massive haul of 20,000 ancient fossils in China shows new life after biggest mass extinction of all time (22nd December 2010) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1340756/Massive-haul-20-000-ancient-fossils-China-life-Earth-bounced-biggest-mass-extinction-time.html
A newly-discovered treasure trove of ancient fossils are helping scientists understand how life on Earth recovered form the most catastrophic mass extinction of all time.A huge haul of nearly 20,000 fossils that belonged to ancient marine ecosystem have been found buried in a mountain in China.The perfectly preserved skeletons of shellfish, sea urchins and bigger sea predators belong to an entire ecosystem that emerged in the wake of a huge extinction that almost wiped all life off the face of the planet. Some 250 million years ago, at the end of the time known as the Permian, life was all but wiped out during a sustained period of massive volcanic eruption and devastating global warming. Only one in ten species survived, and these formed the basis for the recovery of life in the subsequent time period, called the Triassic.The new fossil site - at Luoping in Yunnan Province - provides a new window on that recovery, and indicates that it took about 10 million years for a fully-functioning ecosystem to develop. CLIP
Swarm Intelligence in Animal Groups: When Can a Collective Out-Perform an Expert? http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015505
(...) Studies of group decision-making lack testable, well-structured concepts and hypotheses centred on the very thing that is crucial to individual fitness: the accuracy of decisions. Our set of simple models demonstrate that both aggregated and expert rules can enable accurate collective solutions to challenging problems [9], as this has also been found in human group decision-making [27], [28]. Both choice rules we have considered do not necessarily require advanced cognitive abilities, but only that individuals have the potential to acquire information through social interaction, and respond positively to those who possess pertinent information CLIP - VOIR AUSSI L'intelligence collective à petite échelle
Movember aims to raise awareness of prostate cancer - with this video http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/300316
Slang for moustache, the 'Mo' and November unite each year to challenge men to change their appearance and the face of men's health by growing a moustache. They are reminding men that it is not too late to register. Started in 2003 over a few beers in Melbourne, Australia, Movember has grown into an international movement to bring back the moustache as a bit of a joke and also to raise awareness of men's health issues, in particular prostate cancer, says the group's website. Since then the Movember moustache movement has grown year after year, expanding to Canada, the US, UK, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, the Netherlands and Finland. The movement has raised over $100 million dollars for prostate cancer research. In 2009 Canadian Mo Bros and Mo Sistas came together for Movember and raised $7.8 million dollars, second only to Australia, for Prostate Cancer Canada. Companies are also getting involved. This year 1-800-GOT-JUNK, the world's largest junk removal company is vying to become the world's largest Movember team.1-800-GOT-JUNK? Founder and CEO, Brian Scudamore said in a press release, "It's a fitting initiative for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? as our company is comprised mostly of men; statistically speaking, 250 of us will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in our lives." The company has hundreds of staff and truck team members in three countries now sporting moustaches and has produced a music video trying to get out the message to "Get your junk checked." Today marks a huge milestone for Movember. The one millionth Mo Bro registration came from Andrew Braskic from Perth, Australia. Each year 25,000 men in Canada are diagnosed with the disease.
Swine flu pandemic outbreak sweeping through Britain even though 70 percent were vaccinated last year (December 27, 2010) http://www.naturalnews.com/030845_Britain_swine_flu.html
A swine flu pandemic is sweeping through Britain despite the fact that 70 percent of Britain's over-65 population was vaccinated against swine flu last year. This year, that number is nearly the same -- 68.5% -- but flu vaccine proponents insist that until everyone is vaccinated, the flu will continue to infect people.What these vaccine advocates absolutely will not admit, however, is how many of those who are sick with the flu this year also got vaccinated last year. This little detail is left out of every mainstream media report on vaccines and the flu. They simply refuse to mention this all-important number, leaving readers to leap to the incorrect conclusion that only those who were not vaccinated get sick with the flu. Most infected patients were previously vaccinated. That assumption is false. In fact, of the 450 critical care beds in England that are now occupied by flu patients, I have no doubt that most of those infected patients are people who received flu vaccines in the past.Such statistics are never made available to the public or the press, of course. To release such statistics would expose the Great Lie of the vaccine industry: That flu vaccines simply don't work on 99 percent of people! In fact, the people who are most susceptible to catching the flu are precisely the very same people who get vaccinated. Why is that? Because vaccines weaken the immune system in the long run, leaving you more vulnerable to future infections. They deny your immune system the opportunity to practice its own adaptive response to invading microorganisms or viruses, thereby causing your immune system to atrophy in the same way that a wheelchair-bound person will experience leg muscle atrophy. CLIP
CDC and ADA Now Advise to Avoid Using Fluoride http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/11/13/cdc-and-ada-now-advise-to-avoid-using-fluoride.aspx
A new study in the Journal of the American Dental Association finds once again that, contrary to what most people have been told, fluoride is actually bad for teeth. Exposure to high levels of fluoride results in a condition known as fluorosis, in which tooth enamel becomes discolored. The condition can eventually lead to badly damaged teeth. The new study found that fluoride intake during a child’s first few years of life is significantly associated with fluorosis, and warned against using fluoridated water in infant formula. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is of a similar opinion. According to their website: “Recent evidence suggests that mixing powdered or liquid infant formula concentrate with fluoridated water on a regular basis may increase the chance of a child developing … enamel fluorosis.” Sources: Journal of the American Dental Association (October 14, 2010) - CDC (May 28, 2010) (...) The United States is one of only eight countries in the entire developed world that fluoridates more than 50 percent of its water supply. It is added under the guise that it helps prevent and control tooth decay …This is in spite of the fact that there never been any demonstrated difference in tooth decay between countries with fluoridated and non-fluoridated water, and no difference between states that have a high - or low percentage of their water fluoridated.Even promoters of fluoridation concede that the major benefits are topical; fluoride works from the outside of the tooth, not from inside of your body, so why swallow it? The fluoride added to your drinking water is in fact a chemical waste product! It is NOT something you should use as a supplement to your diet.There are plenty of studies showing the dangers of fluoride to your health, such as: - Increases lead absorption - Disrupts synthesis of collagen - Hyperactivity and/or lethargy - Muscle disorders - Brain damage, and lowered IQ - Arthritis - Dementia - Bone fractures - Lowers thyroid function - Bone cancer (osteosarcoma) - Inactivates 62 enzymes - Inhibits formation of antibodies - Genetic damage and cell death - Increases tumor and cancer rate - Disrupts immune system - Damages sperm and increases infertility. As far as tooth decay is concerned, this is not caused by lack of fluoride. Tooth decay is caused by acids in your mouth, typically created from sugar being metabolized by bacteria (Streptococcus mutans), and as you may already know, the number one source of calories in the United States is high fructose corn syrup.
(...) Even though the ADA and the CDC have issued warnings that parents not use fluoridated tap water to make infant formula, neither of them has openly informed the public! So there are millions of parents out there using tap water to make up formula, oblivious of the fact that the agencies that promote fluoridation in this country have issued a specific warning against using fluoridated water for this purpose.Not only that, but by fluoridating the municipal water supply you doom many low-income families to fail to protect their young children from this dangerous drug, even if they have this information, as they simply don't have the resources to install a reverse osmosis system.This is why the only real solution is to stop the archaic practice of water fluoridation in the United States. The Fluoride Action Network is an absolutely phenomenal resource for further education, and they're doing much to pressure the US government for change. We will be working together to devise a complete game plan to tackle this issue head on. Once we reach the tipping point, which may be as little as 5 percent of the population, we will be able to reverse the policies of water fluoridation.Our strategy will begin with addressing Canada, because 60 percent of Canada is already un-fluoridated. If we can get the rest of Canada to stop fluoridating their water, we believe the U.S. will be forced to follow. CLIP
Electronic Mind Control via Cell Phone Towers (5 December 2010) http://beforeitsnews.com/story/294/933/Electronic_Mind_Control_via_Cell_Phone_Towers.html
The day is now approaching in which government mind control technologies will be directed at you, your neighbors, and your loved ones. Every single day, equipment is being erected and installed in this country with the hidden purpose of exerting mind control over the entire population. Everywhere in this country (and overseas), ELF/microwave transmission towers are being erected. No one is saying anything, but you're expected to presume that they're for cell phones. (Do you really think that we need that much 'cell phone' transmission capability, every few blocks? Do you realize how very little energy is used by genuine cell phone usage? Yet these towers are capable of putting out levels of power that exceed cell phone requirements by a wide margin. These mind control technologies have been in place for a long time. It's not an accident that the frequency band chosen for cell phone use just happens to match the second order waves that Wilhelm Reich discovered in the late1940?s to effect thought transmission and allow the mind to be manipulated without the victim realizing it. Reich worked on this project secretly for the CIA for over 5 years, from 1947-1952, until he realized who the CIA was planning to use the mind control on -the American people. He was outraged that he was deceived and used for such a treasonous motive and swore never to cooperate with the CIA, FDA, etc. again. Reich was covertly murdered in Federal prison in 1957, just a few weeks before he was due to be released, having been in prison for 2 years on a trumped up charge leading to a contempt of court citation. A method was discovered to disable these ELF towers from exerting their mind control functions by placing a simple device known as an orgone generator within a radius of 1,300 feet of these towers. These microwave towers are used in conjunction with HAARP based technology to not only affect subliminal mind control influences, but also to control the weather, the creation of artificially induced drought conditions are also greatly influenced by the population-reduction chemtrail spraying operations which take place daily over the skies in America and in many other countries) .
Antennes relais cellulaires: les preuves d'effets biologiques s'accumulent - LA VÉRITÉ SORT ENFIN! http://www.cyberpresse.ca/le-soleil/actualites/science-et-technologie/201011/12/01-4342185-antennes-relais-cellulaires-les-preuves-deffets-biologiques-saccumulent.php
À la lumière de ces études, les auteurs américains croient que les normes devraient interdire la construction d'antennes relais cellulaires à moins de 500 mètres de la population et à une hauteur minimale de 50 mètres. (Québec) De plus en plus d'études font état de problèmes de santé parmi la population vivant à proximité d'antennes relais cellulaires, concluent les auteurs d'un article que vient de publier le Conseil national de recherches Canada (CNRC). (...) Une étude réalisée sur une population de 1000 personnes, de 1994 à 2004, encore en Allemagne, a trouvé une hausse significative de l'incidence de cancers chez les personnes ayant habité plus de cinq ans à moins de 500 mètres d'une antenne. Le risque de cancer dans ce groupe était trois fois plus élevé que ce qu'on observait chez ceux qui étaient plus éloignés des antennes. Des résultats semblables ont aussi été obtenus par une équipe israélienne qui a comparé différents groupes à l'intérieur de la ville de Netanya ainsi que des groupes témoins à la grandeur du pays. Le risque de cancer était quatre fois plus élevé dans la zone la plus rapprochée des antennes cellulaires. À la lumière de ces études, les auteurs américains croient que les normes devraient interdire la construction d'antennes à moins de 500 mètres de la population et à une hauteur minimale de 50 mètres. Présentement, au Canada, aucune norme ne fixe de distance minimale entre une zone habitée et une antenne. On peut d'ailleurs trouver des antennes relais installées sur des façades d'immeubles d'appartements, à quelques mètres seulement des locataires.
Rapport final unanime du Comité permanent de la santé de la chambre des Communes-Ottawa (2 décembre 2010) Impact des micro-ondes sur la santé UN PAS DANS LA BONNE DIRECTION!! http://www.dangersemo.com/communiqu%E9%20hesa%20rapport%20d%E9cembre%202010.pdf
Désaveu de la norme de protection de Santé Canada par le Comité de la santé!
La conclusion et les recommandations faites à l’unanimité par tous les partis politiques fédéraux remettent en question la norme de protection de Santé Canada (Code de sécurité 6) pour la protection de citoyens des effets néfastes des micro-ondes. De plus, le Bloc Québécois dénonce l’imposition d’antenne relais cellulaire à proximité des populations. CLIP - TOUS LES CANADIENS DEVRAIENT LIRE CECI ET FAIRE PRESSION AUPRÈS DE LEURS ÉLUS POUR QUE CES RECOMMANDATIONS SOIENT APPLIQUÉES SANS DÉLAI !
Selon André Fauteux (a.fauteux@xplornet.ca) éditeur du Magazine La Maison du 21e siècle: "Le député de Québec Solidaire, Amir Khadir, est le premier médecin connu du grand public qui nous a fait par de ses préoccupations concernant le fait que les enfants québécois sont plus exposés aux champs magnétiques que ceux des autres provinces, et qu’ils affichent les taux les plus élevés d’incidence de cancer au Canada. Il nous a écrit : « Le ministère de la Santé devrait donner suite à l’avis très nuancé de l’Institut national de la santé publique du Québec (INSPQ) qui lui recommande de se doter d’une approche de précaution, notamment afin de protéger des enfants d’un risque possible de leucémie liée à l’exposition aux champs électromagnétiques. Il est désolant de constater que le Ministère refuse de prendre ses responsabilités dans ce dossier et renvoie la balle à Santé Canada. Il a le mandat et la prérogative de protéger la population du Québec. L'INSPQ lui demande uniquement de réunir une équipe impliquant toutes les parties en cause (fabricants d'appareils, Hydro-Québec, experts en santé) pour voir ce qu’il serait bon et raisonnable de mettre en place pour prendre nos responsabilités collectives. »
Ottawa s'éveille à la menace électromagnétique par Louis-Gilles Francoeur (18 décembre 2010) http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/sante/313307/ottawa-s-eveille-a-la-menace-electromagnetique
Le dossier des ondes électromagnétiques fait souvent penser à celui de la cigarette ou des BPC: des études généralement financées par les industriels contredisent celles de chercheurs indépendants. Et les gouvernements, comme la tour de Pise, penchent toujours du même côté, jusqu'à ce qu'on réalise un jour que... LIRE LA SUITE ICI
Électrosmog : les mises en garde pleuvent http://www.dangersemo.com/amir%20khadir%2021e%20si%E8cle.pdf
Les appels à la prudence en matière d’exposition aux champs électromagnétiques n’ont cesser de se succéder au cours des récents mois. En voici quelques exemples. Le Député de Québec solidaire, Amir Khadir, est le premier médecin connu du grand public qui nous a fait par de ses préoccupations concernant le fait que les enfants québécois sont plus exposés aux champs magnétiques que ceux des autres provinces, et qu’ils affichent les taux les plus élevés d’incidence de cancer au Canada. Il nous a écrit: « Le ministère de la Santé devrait donner suite à l’avis très nuancé de l’Institut national de la santé publique du Québec (INSPQ) qui lui recommande de se doter d’une approche de précaution, notamment afin de protéger des enfants d’un risque possible de leucémie liée à l’exposition aux champs électromagnétiques.
(...) Parents contre Wi-Fi - Fautes de preuves concluantes, Santé Canada persiste à affirmer que les micro-ondes émises par les appareils sans fil et leurs antennes sont sans danger. Pourtant, les preuves incriminantes s’accumulent. Dans certaines provinces, dont l’Ontario, des parents ont demandé que les routeurs Wi-Fi soient débranchés dans les écoles (détails sur dangersemo.com). Car depuis l’installation de l’Internet sans fil, plusieurs élèves ont éprouvé divers symptômes d’hypersensibilité électromagnétique : étourdissement, évanouissement, tachycardie, essoufflement, douleur thoracique, fatigue, sensation de battement dans la gorge ou le cou, etc. Le site du magazine américain Popular Science (popsci.com) rapportait même, le 22 novembre dernier, que les ondes Wi-Fi tuent la végétation. Enfin, le Dr Conrado Avendano, directeur du centre médical de reproduction Nascentis à Cordoba, en Argentine, a publié la première étude démontrant que les micro-ondes du Wi-Fi peuvent endommager le génome humain (l’ADN) et réduire la motilité des spermatozoïdes.
(...) Enfin, les antennes relais de téléphonie cellulaire ne devraient pas être installées à moins de 500 mètres des lieux habités ni à moins de 50 m de hauteur, selon une étude (http://tinyurl.com/cnrc-lai) publiée le 5 novembre dernier dans Environmental Reviews, une revue scientifique des Presses du Conseil national de recherches du Canada. Le biologiste Henry Lai et la journaliste scientifique Blake Levitt ont recensé plus de 60 études indiquant que les radiofréquences et les micro-ondes de faible intensité ont des effets sur la santé. La plupart des études portaient sur des effets à court terme. Les rares études à plus long terme réalisées en Allemagne et en Israël ont démontré que le risque de cancer est jusqu’à quatre fois plus élevé chez les gens vivant à moins de 500 mètres de ces antennes. De plus, des études au cours desquelles des souris étaient exposées à ces ondes ont révélé une baisse de fertilité dès la première génération et la stérilité chez certaines souris de la cinquième génération. CLIP
EMF-Omega-News 20. November 2010 http://www.buergerwelle.de/cms/content/view/518/70/
The High Tech-High Risk Wireless World - Magnetic fields have undeniable effect on the brain - The Dangers of Cellphone Radiation - London 2010: Dr Devra Davis on Phone Radiation - STARTLING ADMISSION OF HARM BY MAJOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANY - Radiation City: Mumbai - Lloyd's report explores links between electro-magnetic field (EMF) exposure and asbestos exposure - French Ministry of Health: Legislation concerning of the display of the SAR - Safety Code 6 Missing Critical Data - Debate over safety of wireless grows - Among Cell-Phone Junkies, Rash on the Rise - Uzbekistan can forbid use of mobile phones by children - JAPAN: First law suit seeking removal of a base station on grounds of Harm to Health - Mobile internet is bad for trees - Smart Meters Draw Complaints of Inaccuracy - Mother-of-three from Bushey slams 'shocking' plans for O2 and Vodaphone mobile phone mast near Little Reddings Primary School - Maidenbower residents' anger at phone mast outside their homes - CHINGFORD: Campaign against phone mast launched - Park protest as angry locals battle plans for phone mast - Mast for Whittington Park is experiment on our children, says mum - Residents raise concerns over power line upgrade - Professor cites dangers of airport body-scan radiation - Next-up News - News from Mast Sanity
EMF-Omega-News 27. November 2010 http://www.buergerwelle.de/cms/content/view/522/70/
New dementia research - NON-THERMAL EFFECTS AND MECHANISMS OF INTERACTION BETWEEN ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELDS AND LIVING MATTER - Talking to death: texts, phones kill 16,000 - Blood In the Mobile - David against Orange: in memoriam - How Cell Phones are Killing Birds - Seeing Where the Microwaves Are in a Microwave Oven - The Precautionary Principle and EMF exposures - Israel: Prevention of exposure of children to EMR in schools because of health effects - Wi-Fi the HPA research project - Technology Addiction and Virtual Reality - Humans may become 'wireless towers' in future - Wi Fi Parents Homeschooling Support Group - Mobile phone firms take on council over rejection of Broch mast plan - Health worries as plans for phone mast near to shops come under fire - Parksville council wants more information on Telus tower - Controversial phone mast plans are withdrawn - Power Line extension plan jolts neighborhoods - SmartMeter revolt persists
EMF-Omega-News 4. December 2010 http://www.buergerwelle.de/cms/content/view/524/70/
Extremely Low-Frequency Magnetic Field Decreased Calcium, Zinc and Magnesium Levels in Costa of Rat - Potential Health Impacts of Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Radiation - Risk of Brain Tumors From Wireless Phone Use - An Hypothesis on Neurosomatic Disorders - New Warnings about the Hazards of Cell Phones - Health effects of Electromagnetic Fields - November 2010: Science Update - Electro-magnetic fields from mobile phones: recent developments - Finally, Proof that Cancer is a Man-Made Disease - Track Wi-Fi reaction reports: MPs - Smart Meter kills Plants: What does it do to people? - Lawyer meeting at the European Parliament on January the 25th, 2011 - Parents told to put kids back in school, or risk expulsion - Open Letter to Schools and School Boards on Wi-Fi - Council rejects mobile phone mast for Southwark Bridge Road - Opinion divided over telecom mast plan - Vodafone scraps phone mast plans in Marshside for now - A Tower for Sherman? - Next-up News - News from Mast Sanity
EMF-Omega-News 11. December 2010 http://www.buergerwelle.de/cms/content/view/528/70/
New health worries about mobile devices - Cellphones may put your child at risk of brain tumor - Educating people about the dangers of EMR - Critics question safety of Wi-Fi in schools - The Monegasque government limit exposure to electromagnetic waves - If anyone wonders why Health Canada denies health effects - If cell phones were a drug, there would be a system for recording reports of problems - Chingford: MP opposes phone-mast plans - Mobile phone link to kids' bad behaviour revealed in Danish study of mothers - Doctors for Safer Skies and Safer Schools - Children pulled from school over Wi-Fi concerns - Fears over Leeds flowerbed mobile phone mast - Kilsyth South tower plan worries residents - Brickhill to get mobile phone mast - DoT exploring technology that would disable cell phones in cars
EMF-Omega-News 18. December 2010 http://www.buergerwelle.de/cms/content/view/532/70/
Critique of Interphone is reinforced - Research on occupational microwave exposure - Cordless Phone EMFs Trigger Heart Rhythm Abnormalities - Mobile phones 'harm blood cells' - Sick from Smart Meters - Invisible dangers from cell phones and electronics may cause cancer - Morality is modified in the lab - Wi-Fi Letter to School Principal - Camilla Rees on Living Dialogues with Duncan Campbell - Outrage at new utility lines for E. Vineland - Cedar Lake flag tower debate heats up - Planning application dropped for radio mast at Bray Garda station - Permission denied for mobile phone masts - Windham woman decries 'smart meter' installation - Danger is beckoning - Report favors CMP lines in Saco - HOW THOSE GIZMO GIFTS COULD WARP YOUR CHILD’S MIND - Next-up news - News from Mast Sanity
EMF-Omega-News 24. December 2010 http://www.buergerwelle.de/cms/content/view/534/70/
RF EMR sources, safety standards, and research - Short-term memory in mice is affected by mobile phone radiation - What Mobile Phones do to our Health - Cancer Cluster Investigation St Michael's School - We need to get to the bottom of what mobile phones do to our health - THE LEGISLATOR'S GUIDE TO WARNING LABELS ON CELL PHONES - Legal challenge in regards to PG&Es usage of smart meters - Wi-fi in schools: an invisible threat? - Planet Irth - New mobile phone masts concern Putney Hill residents - London Borough of Putney in Battle With Mobile Phone Companies - A New York Township Panel Says No to Cell Phone Antenna Plan - No cell towers atop buildings without PMC's nod - Battling neighbours set for another mast fight
1.
ASTONISHING SPEECH! Recommended - with this amazing video and the Gulf of Mexico Dying info included above - by Doreen Agostino (doreen@freetobewealthy.net) -- http://freetobewealthy.net -- who wrote: "I understand 2011 changes will be like no species has ever before experienced. Let us re-member that all is as it is. Our species and Planet are re-aligning with the Matrix of harmony and order. As another reality emerges, unity, cooperation and unconditional Love liberate what we require to find us easily. Only Love is real."
Nigel Farage - 'The Euro Game Is Up! Who the hell do you think you are?'
Speaker: Nigel Farage MEP, UKIP, Co-President of the EFD group;
Debate: European Council and Commission statements - Conclusions of the European Council meeting on economic governance (28-29 October)
Video Transcript:
Good morning, Mr van Rompuy,
You've been in office for one year and in that time the whole edifice is beginning to crumble, there's chaos, the money's running out - I should thank you; you should perhaps be the pin-up boy of the Eurosceptic movement.
But just look around this chamber, this morning. Just look at these faces. Look at the fear. Look at the anger. Poor old Barroso here looks like he's seen a ghost.
They're begining to understand that the game is up and yet in their desperation to preserve their dream, they want to remove any remaining traces of democracy from the system. And it's pretty clear that none of you have learnt anything.
When you yourself, Mr van Rompuy, say that the euro has brought us stability. I suppose I could applaud you for having a sense of humour, but isn't this, really, just the bunker mentality?
Your fanaticism is out in the open. You talked about the fact that it was a lie to believe that the nation state could exist in the 21st Century globalised world. Well, that may be true in the case of Belgium, who haven't had a government for six months, but for the rest of us, right across every member state in this Union - and perhaps this is why we see the fear in the faces - increasingly people are saying, 'We don't want that flag. We don't want the anthem. We don't want this political class. We want the whole thing consigned to the dustbin of history.'
And we had the Greek tragedy earlier on this year, and now we have this situation in Ireland. Now I know that the stupidity and greed of Irish politicians has a lot to do with this. They should never ever have joined the euro. They suffered with low interest rates, a false boom and a massive bust.
But look at your response to them. What they're being told, as their government is collapsing, is that it would be inappropriate for them to have a general election. In fact Commissioner Rehn here said they had to agree their budget first before they'd be allowed to have a general election.
Just who the hell do you think you people are?
You are very very dangerous people, indeed. Your obsession with creating this Euro state means that you're happy to destroy democracy. You appear to be happy for millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor. Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro dream can continue.
Well it won't work. Because it's Portugal next, with their debt levels of 325% of GDP, they're the next ones on the list, and after that I suspect it will be Spain. And the bailout for Spain would be seven times the size of Ireland's and at that moment all of the bailout money has gone - there won't be anymore.
But it is even more serious than economics. Because if you rob people of their identity. If you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the Euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens.
European Parliament, Strasbourg - 24 November 2010
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AN ABSOLUTE MUST WATCH!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmiFB9hJxus
Alex Jones explains how the austerity hammer is falling now on Europe, and will soon fall on the U.S. Fresh bailouts and buyouts by foreign banks are being forced on Ireland and other European nations, while officials in the United States are dropping news on Americans that pensions, insurance for veteran military personnel and more are being taken away.
The IMF and World Bank have essentially completed their phase I mission of absorbing and dominating 3rd World nations, and are now coming for so-called 1st World Nations-- the United States, Canada, UK, Europe and more.
How Our Trillion-Dollar Empire Is the Cause of Our 'Deficit Problem'
We could make the budget deficit disappear and fully fund Social Security and Medicare without raising taxes, if we only outspend our biggest military rival by threefold.
By Joshua Holland - December 8, 2010
The United States spends more on its military and security services than the rest of the world combined, yet in the midst of a major debate over our fiscal situation, that enormous drain on our national treasure isn't really "on the table" in any serious way. Obama's deficit commission recommended cutting the Pentagon's purse, but the thrust of its focus was on veterans' pensions and health-care -- rather than, say, maintaining costly bases to defend such imperiled allies as Italy and Germany -- and the spending reductions were largely symbolic relative to the level of bloat that plagues our security budget.
One often hears that, in very rough terms, about a fifth of the federal budget goes to national security, another fifth pays for Social Security, a fifth or so is spent on Medicare and Medicaid and everything else makes up about 40 percent. But that, like much of the discussion of "defense" spending, is misleading -- it only counts dollars allocated in the annual defense budget, and in "emergency" supplemental bills.
That belies the reality that spending on the American security state is dispersed throughout the federal budget. So while next year's defense spending, narrowly defined, is expected to come in at $711 billion, when you include all the extra dollars hidden away in other parts of the budget, that number will rise to as high as $1.45 trillion. That would represent around 40 percent of next year's budget.
With Washington in the grip of deficit hysteria, that's the elephant in the room whose name is never mentioned. As I wrote last week, the almost universally held belief that the the U.S. faces a deficit problem is wrong, and for two simple reasons. First, we have a very small government compared to the rest of the developed world -- between 2004 and 2007, the U.S. ranked 24th out of 26 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in overall government spending as a share of our economic output. And we also currently have one of the lowest tax burdens -- In 2008, we ranked 26th out of the 30 OECD countries in that category.
Nonetheless, America's elites have coalesced around the idea that in order to keep our tax rates among the lowest in the wealthy world, we'll need to swallow some painful "shared sacrifice" (which in Washington usually means working people sacrificing some economic security and the wealthy getting another tax cut). But it's important to recognize that it's an ideological choice to view the projected "budget gap" as a structural, economic problem driven primarily by the growth of "entitlements" -- it's not a belief grounded in objective fact.
Instead of the ubiquitous stories about our "deficit crisis," the media could just as easily frame the country's fiscal outlook as a problem of out-of-control health care costs fueled by the practices of the private insurance industry. As economist Dean Baker pointed out, "If the United States paid the same amount per person for health care as any of the 35 countries with longer life expectancies, we would be looking at huge budget surpluses for the indefinite future."
And they could also just as easily report that we face an unsustainably expensive overseas empire problem, made intractable by a deeply entrenched military-industrial-information complex. (The two areas of spending are intertwined -- well over a million Americans have served at least one tour in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and tens of thousands of them who returned grievously wounded will require costly care for years to come. Economists estimate that even excluding those costs, the tab for the Iraq and Afghanistan operations may come in at $3 trillion dollars.)
According to some estimates, 91 percent of our long-term public debt -- and the hundreds of billions we pay in interest on that debt annually -- accrued as a result of foreign military adventures of the past. Now contrast that with Social Security, which not only hasn't added a dime to the deficit but has run surpluses that have partially offset other spending -- in areas like "defense" --for almost 30 years.
Take a peek under the hood and check out what drives the engine of American empire. By no means are they all wasted dollars -- we live in a dangerous world and need a military. But ours remains fundamentally mismatched to the threats we face in the post-Cold War era, despite years of talk in the halls of the Pentagon about transforming the American military for the 21st century.
It still represents an enormous government agency whose big-ticket weapons systems suck up a fair amount of national treasure in order to be ready for a conventional war between great powers that will never materialize. It's an agency that's worked desperately hard to militarize efforts to combat drugs and terrorism in order to justify retaining, and since 9/11/01 increasing, its Cold War levels of funding.
Nobody talks about it, but our hugely bloated "defense" budget is laden with pork -- not only basing and construction dollars carried by members of Congress back to their districts, but big spending on things like protection for pipelines, shipping and other privately owned operations, and subsidized research and development given away for nothing. It includes billions in military assistance that subsidizes the conflicts of countries like Egypt, Israel, Pakistan and Colombia (or, in Egypt's case, a payoff to stay on the sidelines) and useless spending on hundreds of bases around the world bristling with fancy weapons systems that are ill-suited for the irregular warfare that the Planet's Only Superpower is likely to fight.
In large part, the status quo is maintained by the influence of the defense industry -- it lavished $136 million on law-makers last year. It's almost comical at times, like when money for a new jet engine was forced through Congress over the objections of the Pentagon, which insisted that the costly project was "unnecessary and a waste of money."
And in part, it's driven by what may be the greatest false dichotomy in our national discourse: that we must choose between cutting our military spending and "maintaining a strong defense." The flaw in that is a matter of simple math: we not only spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined, we spend six times what second-place finisher China does on its military.That means we could cut our military spending in half -- making the budget deficit disappear in a few years, without raising taxes and while fully funding Social Security and Medicare -- and we'd still outspend our largest rival by threefold.
That's more evidence that the federal deficit "problem" isn't a problem at all.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America).
After NATO Summit, U.S. To Intensify Military Drive Into Asia
Rick Rozoff - November 17, 2010
Barack Obama, the latest rotating imperator of the first global empire, will arrive in Lisbon on November 19 to receive the plaudits of 27 North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies and secure their continued fealty on issues ranging from the war in Afghanistan to a continental interceptor missile system, the continued deployment of American tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, participation in the Pentagon’s cyber warfare plans and expanded military missions in the planet’s south and east.
Perfunctory discussions of minor details notwithstanding, strictly pro forma to maintain the myth of NATO being a “military alliance of democratic states in Europe and North America,” the banners and pennants of 26 European nations, Canada and dozens of other countries contributing troops for the Afghan mission will be lowered in the presence of the leader of the world imperium.
No fewer than 38 European nations have supplied NATO troops for the Afghanistan-Pakistan war as well as providing training grounds and transport centers to support the war effort. As envisioned for at least a century, through peaceful means or otherwise, Europe has been united, not so much by the European Union as under the NATO flag and on the killing fields of Afghanistan. It is now relegated to the role of pre-deployment training area and forward operating base for military campaigns downrange: The Middle East, Africa and Asia.
So uncritically and unquestioningly compliant has Europe been in the above regards that Obama and the governing elite in the imperial metropolis as a whole have already looked beyond the continent for additional military partners. With the exception of fellow members of the NATO Quint – Britain, Germany, France and Italy (Britain more and Italy less than the others) – Alliance partners are accorded the same status and assigned the same functions as American territories like Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands: Geopolitically convenient locations for live-fire military training and for troop, warplane and warship deployments.
Two millennia ago the Pax Romana of Augustus brought roads and ports, aqueducts and irrigation, amphitheaters and libraries, and Greek writers from Aristotle to Aeschylus to occupied territories. Bellum Americanum burdens its vassals and tributaries with military bases, interceptor missile batteries, McDonald’s and Lady Gaga.
In Lisbon Obama will chastise his NATO and NATO partnership auxiliaries and foederati, as is the prerogative and wont of the global suzerain and as his predecessor George W. Bush has done recently, for being chary of expending more blood and treasure for the war in Afghanistan. However, he will also display the magnanimity befitting his preeminent stature by patting his European satraps on their bowed heads and intoning, “Well done, good and faithful servants. You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.”
With the European continent placed securely under the multi-circled Achilles shield of NATO, U.S. nuclear weapons, an interceptor missile system and a cyber warfare command, Washington is moving to realms as yet not completely subjugated.
Africa has been assigned to the three-year-old U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and perhaps only five of the continent’s 54 nations – Eritrea, Libya, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Sudan and Zimbabwe – have avoided becoming ensnared in bilateral military ties with the Pentagon and concomitant U.S-led military exercises and deployments.
The U.S. has also expanded its military presence in the Middle East: Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Yemen.
Two years ago Washington reactivated its Fourth Fleet for the Caribbean Sea and Central and South America and last year’s coup in Honduras and this September’s attempted coup in Ecuador are proof that the U.S. will not allow developments in Latin America to pursue their natural course unimpeded.
The U.S. has intensified efforts to forge and expand military alliances and deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, but there is still a small handful of countries there not willing to accept a subordinate role in American geostrategic designs. They are, to varying degrees and in differing manners, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Myanmar. Attempts to replicate the “color revolution” model used in former Soviet republics in Myanmar and Iran since 2007 have failed, “regime change” plans for North Korea are of another nature, and neither China nor Russia appears immediately susceptible to equivalents of the so-called Rose, Orange, Tulip and Twitter revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Moldova, respectively. The preferred technique being applied to Russia at the moment is cooption, though its success is not guaranteed as the U.S. and NATO military build-up around Russia’s borders continues unabated.
What’s left is the military expedient. In the first half of November the quadrivirate in charge of U.S. foreign policy – President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen – all toured the Asia-Pacific area. Collectively they visited ten nations there: India, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
Clinton and Gates were in Malaysia at separate times and both joined Mullen on November 8 for the annual Australia-United States Ministerial (AUSMIN) meeting in Melbourne, where the U.S. military chief called the 21st century the “Pacific century.” [1]
In India Obama secured what William Hartung, Director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, estimated to be the sixth largest arms deal in U.S. history. [2]
In Australia, Gates and Mullen won a backroom arrangement to move U.S. military forces into several Australian bases.
While in New Zealand, Clinton in effect renewed the Australia, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty as a full tripartite mutual defense pact after a 24-year hiatus in regard to her host country.
On November 13 Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan “thanked the United States…for supporting Tokyo in a series of recent disputes with Russia and China” [3], an allusion to a statement by Clinton on October 27 that the U.S. would honor its military assistance commitment to Tokyo over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands dispute with China and her spokesman Philip Crowley’s affront to Russia five days afterward over the Kuril Islands, which he identified as Japanese territory. [4]
In a tete-a-tete ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Yokohama, the Japanese head of state “sought US President Barack Obama’s assurance on defence in the Asia-Pacific region,” as “Tokyo’s territorial disputes with China and Russia are becoming high priorities for Kan, who told Obama through a translator, ‘The US military presence is only becoming more important.’” [5]
Verbatim, Kan said:
“Japan and the United States, at this meeting of APEC, of pan-Pacific countries, we shall step up our cooperation. So we agreed on doing that. And in Japan’s relations with China and Russia, recently we’ve faced some problems, and the United States has supported Japan throughout, so I expressed my appreciation to him for that.
“For the peace and security of the countries in the region, the presence of the United States and the presence of the U.S. military I believe is becoming only increasingly important.” [6]
In return, Obama “voiced support for Japan to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and reaffirmed the U.S.-Japan security alliance.”
He also assured Kan that the U.S.-Japan alliance is “the cornerstone of American strategic engagement in the Asia Pacific” and “the commitment of the United States to the defense of Japan is unshakable.”
According to a U.S. armed forces publication, “While Obama’s support for the continuing security alliance is no surprise, it comes amid tension in Japan over China’s…claims on territory in the East China and South China seas.” [7]
In less than five months the Pentagon has made its military presence felt throughout the Asia-Pacific area:
The U.S. Marine Corps and Navy participated in Exercise Crocodile 10 in East Timor (Timor-Leste) from June 19-26, which included “weapons firing skills, amphibious assault serials, jungle training, flying operations, and a helicopter raid on an abandoned prison” and provided “an opportunity for multi-national forces to work together in the planning and conduct of a complex military exercise.” [8]
In October of 2009 2,500 U.S. and Australian troops engaged in maneuvers in the country, which marked the first U.S.-East Timor joint military exercise.
This July the U.S. led the multinational Angkor Sentinel 2010 command post and field exercises in Cambodia with American forces and troops from the host nation, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mongolia and the Philippines.
For 40 days in late June and throughout July the U.S. led the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2010 war games in the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii with 32 ships, five submarines, more than 170 planes and 20,000 troops from all four branches of the American armed forces and from Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, South Korea, Singapore and Thailand.
From July 25-28 the U.S. conducted joint war games with South Korea, codenamed Invincible Spirit, in the Sea of Japan/East Sea with the involvement of 20 warships including the nuclear-powered supercarrier USS George Washington, 200 warplanes including F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, and 8,000 troops.
The next month U.S. Pacific Command and U.S. Army Pacific presided over the Khaan Quest 2010 military exercise in Mongolia. In the same month American and British troops ran the Steppe Eagle 2010 NATO Partnership for Peace exercise in Kazakhstan.
USS George Washington and the USS John S. McCain destroyer led the first-ever joint U.S.-Vietnam military exercise, consisting of naval maneuvers in the South China Sea, in early August.
Less than a week later the U.S. and South Korea began this year’s Ulchi Freedom Guardian military exercise in the latter country with 30,000 U.S. and 50,000 South Korean troops participating. [9]
In early September Washington and Seoul held an anti-submarine warfare exercise in the Yellow Sea.
At the end of the same month Indian troops joined U.S. marines and sailors in Exercise Habu Nag 2010, the fifth annual bilateral U.S.-India amphibious training exercise with that codename, in the East China Sea off the coast of Okinawa.
In October at least 3,000 U.S. troops participated in the nine-day Amphibious Landing Exercise 2011 in the Philippines. “The bilateral training exercise, conducted with the Armed Forces of the Philippines, is designed to improve interoperability, increase readiness and continue to build professional relationships between the two countries.” [10]
At the beginning of the same month U.S. warships and troops joined 6,000 Australian soldiers and counterparts from New Zealand for Exercise Hamel in northeast Australia, described in the local press as “massive war games.” [11]
Also in October, South Korea for the first time hosted a multinational military exercise with 14 members of the U.S.-created Proliferation Security Initiative, which included ships and military personnel from the U.S., Canada, France, Australia and Japan.
U.S. marines “conducted urban training exercises” in Singapore on November 6. A Marine Corps lieutenant present “gave a short class on identifying danger areas in a combat environment” and “talked about isolating them by sight, or suppressive fire, and the importance of gaining footholds in enemy territories.” [12]
On November 14 the U.S. and Indian armies completed the 14-day Yudh Abhyas 2010 military exercise in Alaska. Last year’s Yudh Abhyas featured the largest U.S.-India joint military maneuvers ever held.
100,000 American and another 50,000 NATO troops are fighting in the tenth year of their collective war in Afghanistan. The U.S. is escalating deadly drone missile strikes and NATO is increasing helicopter gunship raids in Pakistan.
The Pentagon has indeed marked this as its Asia-Pacific century.
THE GULF BLUE PLAGUE - IT’S NOT WISE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE
By Michael Edward - 24 Oct 2010
It’s not wise to fool Mother Nature. Those who think they can get away with it will abruptly learn that payback can be more than they bargained for. That’s because nature will always retaliate in subtle retorts that shake the very foundations of this earth as well as life itself. Playing the role of Creator is a very dangerous game.
As part of their new logo and corporate image campaign, British Petroleum (BP) wants the public to think of them as their new slogan says, “Beyond Petroleum”. BP is far more than a simple oil company. What is revealed below regarding BP and their ‘beyond petroleum’ activities, both prior to and including their Gulf of Mexico catastrophe, will create a picture for the reader one pixel dot at a time. Once the person who reads everything presented here connects all the dots of the picture, it will be more than obvious that BP has tried to fool Mother Nature… and she’s retaliating with a vengeance that is affecting the entire world. This is a perilous game that has now gotten out of control. What began in the Gulf of Mexico, in February 2010, has now escalated into a man-made biological nightmare of unknown proportions.
SYNTHETIC GENOMICS
On June 13, 2007, BP made a long-term research and development deal and an undisclosed equity investment into a company named Synthetic Genomics Inc. based in Rockville, Maryland. Synthetic Genomics was co-founded by Dr. J. Craig Venter to commercialize genomic-driven technologies. (1) Genomics is the scientific study of the entire DNA sequence of an organism's genome. A genome is all the genetic information in the chromosomes of an organism, including its genes and DNA sequences.
BP/Synthetic Genomics recovered the DNA from subsurface hydrocarbon substrates (biological organisms in crude oil) and applied DNA “sequencing methods” to them. (1) What this means is that they took the DNA from underground crude oil reservoir microbial cells, such as bacteria or viruses, and cultured them in a lab to identify, isolate, and interpret their chemical and genetic properties. Additional “sequencing methods” beyond the initial identity and isolation stages were also carried out.
A central part of the deal between BP and Synthetic Genomics was to create biological transfer processes for crude oil that would lead to improved recovery rates. (1) Their goal was to develop new microbes with lab created genomes that would improve the flow of gas and oil out of a reservoir. For an oil producer like BP, more oil and gas being recovered from a source translates into more profits. This process is known as Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery (MEOR).
Just a few more dots to connect and you’ll see the whole picture.
THE DISPERSANT FACTOR
It’s been puzzling to understand why BP has chosen to continually spray dispersants such as Corexit from airplanes and boats day and night since early May 2010. The spraying hasn’t just been over the Gulf, but along the coastlines as well. While it’s claimed that Corexit disperses oil by breaking it into smaller pieces, can this be the only reason for all this spraying?
In recent tests of rainwater originating from the Gulf of Mexico, natural mineral elements such as copper and iron were found along with nickel, aluminum, and manganese. (9) That’s very unusual for rain clouds originating from a saline ocean. The only logical explanation is that such elements were introduced to the Gulf water where they were drawn up by the rain clouds. The only way that could have happened is from aerial and surface spraying and/or below surface injection.
Are these ingredients of Corexit? Not according to Nalco, the manufacturer. Then these natural earth elements must be added to what is being sprayed along with Corexit, but why? What benefit is there to add elements like copper or iron to seawater? After all, these are natural elements and nutrients you would add to soil to make plants grow, so why add them to sea water?
Bacteria thrive in rich nutrient environments. Natural minerals are necessary building blocks for nutrients that bacteria thrive on. Think of it as hydro-fertilizing the Gulf to make it a better nutritional medium for hungry oil-eating bacterium. The so-called “dispersants” are not only breaking down the crude oil into smaller pieces, they’re adding needed enhancement minerals so that the bacterium can multiply more rapidly and eat up the oil faster. Such bacteria are called Bioremediators.
The dots are forming a big picture. You’re almost there.
SYNTHIA HAS A COUSIN
The only ingredient missing is a new and previously unknown genus of hydrocarbon-eating bacteria that can survive the cold water depths - where the lakes of oil and tar now sit - so it could degrade it faster than any known natural bacteria.
In a paper published in the journal Science, Terry Hazen and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory discovered in late May through early June 2010 that a previously unknown species of cold-water hydrocarbon-eating bacteria have been feasting on the underwater oil plumes degrading them at accelerated rates. (11)
We can now understand why, on May 15, BP/Synthetic Genome’s CEO Craig Venter hinted of a new hydrocarbon-eating synthetic genome. Prior to that date, JCVI had already applied for numerous additional patents (we were able to find seven) regarding synthetic bio-remediation, such as bacteria synthetic genomes which provide unique DNA information required for “replication of a free-living organism”. In layman’s terms, this means the BP and Synthetic Genome scientists had already created self-replicating bacteria “wherein the assembled DNA molecule is a [synthetic] genome” back in 2007. (13)
Just a few more connecting dots and the picture will be complete.
HURRICANES AND GENOMIC VACCINES
As I stated on WVP Radio during our premiere broadcast in August, there won’t be any hurricanes entering into the Gulf of Mexico this year. (14) There haven’t been and there won’t be. Otherwise, both the hurricanes and the jet stream will send the synthetic bacteria all around the world.
They have to isolate their biologically created nightmare until they can either find a way to control it or create a synthetic genome microbial vaccine to neutralize its effects. Could that have been their plan all along?
On October 7, 2010, Synthetic Genomics Inc. [the BP equity investment company] and JCVI announced the formation of a new company, Synthetic Genomics Vaccines Inc. (SGVI). The privately held company will focus on developing next generation vaccines using JCVI's genomic sequencing and synthetic genomic expertise, coupled with the intellectual property and business acumen of Synthetic Genomics Inc., to significantly advance and enhance vaccine development. (15)
How amazing that the BP/Synthetic Genomics alliance now has its own vaccine company for patented immunizations. But at what cost to humanity? It’s very profitable to not only create synthetic bacteria but to also offer a vaccine in case there are any problems. When you create the bacteria and control its DNA, you also know how to shut it down. Surely, BP is far Beyond Petroleum.
“We are excited to apply our advanced synthetic genomics technologies to revolutionize vaccine production" said Fernanda Gandara, President of SGVI. (15) Yes Fernanda, I’m sure you and BP are very excited.
HUMAN EFFECTS
The ETC Group is an international civil society organization based in Ottawa, Canada. They recently stated in a press release that
"Synthetic biology is a high-risk profit-driven field, building organisms out of parts that are still poorly understood. We know that lab-created life-forms can escape, become biological weapons, and that their use threatens existing natural biodiversity. Most worrying of all, Craig Venter is handing this powerful technology to the world’s most irresponsible and environmentally damaging industry by partnering with the likes of BP and Exxon to hasten the commercialization of synthetic life-forms."(12)
Now we have scientific confirmation of “a previously unknown species of cold-water hydrocarbon-eating bacteria” gobbling up oil in the Gulf. (11)
Nothing is known about how this new synthetic bio-remediation bacterium in the Gulf reacts with mankind. This is virgin and uncharted territory. We already know how sea mammals such as whales and porpoises have reacted. Those who haven’t escaped the affected areas of the Gulf have died… along with all other marine life and coastal vegetation. While human health effects from crude oil exposure are well known, the effects of dispersants containing oil-eating artificial bacteria are not known. It’s never been done before, let alone at the immense scale of operations now taking place.
There’s a reason the so-called “dispersants” are guarded by weapon-yielding soldiers and local armed law enforcement in warehouses and deployment yards along the Gulf coast. If a sample were to be analyzed by knowledgeable people, the biological and chemical anomalies it contains would be made public, right down to the unique DNA signature. BP keeps allowing their sorcerer’s brew to be called Corexit in order to hide the fact that it’s not just the name brand product any longer.
The physical symptoms of the BP Flu, BP Crud, Blue Flu, or whatever name you choose to call it, are as unique as the synthetic bacteria being used in the Gulf. Since mankind is carbon based, how do these synthetically created hydrogen and carbon hungry bacteria react to human flesh? Internal bleeding as well as ulcerating skin lesions are the physical signs of their computer created DNA signature.
BP and their paid minions have released a synthetic biological plague in the Gulf of Mexico and it’s out of control. The entire world is a victim of their greed and foolishness. By playing the role of creator, they have begun a very dangerous game with infinite repercussions for life as we know it.
Those who have permitted and agreed to this cover-up are just as responsible as BP. Those of us living on the Gulf coast must demand from every politician and government agency, from the national to the local level, an explanation as to why they allowed this to happen and why they are allowing it to continue. They are all responsible for lying to us and for covering up the truth.
Have you connected all the dots?
Do you see the complete picture now?
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Related articles:
The Oil Slick BP Tried To Hide Has Been Discovered (December 22, 2010) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22487
In Thick Layers On the Sea Floor Over An Area of Several Thousand Square Miles -- BP and the government famously declared that most of the oil had disappeared.But as I've noted, as much as 98% of the oil is still in the ocean.I have repeatedly pointed out that BP and the government applied massive amounts of dispersant to the Gulf Oil Spill in an effort to sink and hide the oil. Many others said the same thing. BP and the government denied this, of course.But the oil is not remaining hidden.Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal noted on December 9th: A university scientist and the federal government say they have found persuasive evidence that oil from the massive Gulf of Mexico spill is settling on the ocean floor. The new findings, from scientists at the University of South Florida and from a broad government effort, mark the latest indication that environmental damage from the blowout of a BP PLC well could be significant where it's hardest to find: deep under the Gulf's surface. Scientists who have been on research cruises in the Gulf in recent days report finding layers of residue up to several centimeters thick from what they suspect is BP oil. The material appears in spots across several thousand square miles of seafloor, they said. In many of those spots, they said, worms and other marine life that crawl along the sediment appear dead, though many organisms that can swim appear healthy. Tests now have started to link some oil in the sediment to the BP well could add to the amount of money BP ends up paying to compensate for the spill's damage. The test results also raise questions about the possible downsides of the government's use of chemical dispersants to fight the spill. Under federal direction, about 1.8 million gallons of dispersants were sprayed on the spilled oil in an effort to break it up into tiny droplets that natural ocean microbes could eat up.
(...) There is no practical way to clean up the spilled oil that has settled deep in the Gulf, officials said, adding that microbes in the water could eventually eat it up. The massive application of dispersants to hide the amount of oil spilled has caused major problems to the Gulf: The use of dispersants prevented clean up of the oil by skimming, by far the easiest method of removing oil from the water Dispersants make the toxins in crude oil more bioavailable to sealife, and scientists have found that applying Corexit to Gulf crude oil releases many times more toxic chemicals into the water column than would be released with crude alone. Dispersant might have caused some of the chemicals in oil to become airborne. The crude oil which does not become aerosolized sinks under the surface of the ocean, and can delay the recovery of the ecosystem by years or even decades. The overwhelming majority of studies find that dispersants slow the growth of oil-eating microbes. Dispersants cause Gulf fish to absorb more toxins and then make it harder for the fish to get rid of the pollutants once exposed. Dispersants may bioaccumulate in seafood. Blood tests show elevated levels of toxic hydrocarbons in Gulf residents CLIP
The Gulf of Mexico is Dying (December 1, 2010) THE SITUATION IS MUCH MUCH WORST THAN WE THOUGHT! http://phoenixrisingfromthegulf.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/the-gulf-of-mexico-is-dying/
It is with deep regret that we publish this report. We do not take this responsibility lightly, as the consequences of the following observations are of such great import and have such far-reaching ramifications for the entire planet. Truly, the fate of the oceans of the world hangs in the balance, as does the future of humankind.
(...) Just how bad is this situation? There are actually three different ongoing disasters – each more grave and challenging than the previous one – which must be considered when assessing the awesome destruction to the GOM by the Oil & Gas Industry.I. A single gushing well at 7o – 100,000 barrels per day of hydrocarbon effluent for 87 days into the GOM at the Macondo Prospect along with two smaller rogue wellsII. Numerous leaks and seeps within five to ten square miles of the Macondo well with an aggregate outflow of an unknown amount of hydrocarbon effluent per day into the GOMIII. Countless gushers and spills, leaks and seeps, throughout the Gulf of Mexico, where drilling has been conducted for many decades, with an aggregate outflow that can not even be estimated, but is well in excess of any guesstimate which would ensure the slow and steady demise of the GOM.
(...) Dire realities of the methane hydrate predicament. The Macondo Prospect in the GOM is just one of many throughout the oceans of the world where the seafloor has beds of methane hydrate locked in place by very high pressure and low temperatures. Likewise, there are myriad repositories and large “reservoirs” of methane clathrates in the sub-seafloor strata, and especially within the more superficial geological formations, which are being greatly impacted by all oil and gas drilling and extraction activities. It does not take much imagination to understand how the upsurging hydrocarbons (very hot oil and gas) are quickly converting the frozen hydrates to gas, thereby causing innumerable “micro-displacements”, the cumulative effect of which will translate to larger “macro-displacements” of rock, sediment and other geological formations.
(...) Seismic activity in the GOM and the uptick in earthquakes in the Mississippi River Basin and surrounding region
(...) Now then, the question remains just how vulnerable has the GOM been made to a truly catastrophic event, ending up with an overwhelming displacement of water producing tidal waves, in the aftermath of an undersea earthquake.There is no question that the ceaseless fracturing of the seafloor and fissuring of the sub-seafloor geology by the Oil & Gas Industry has set up a quite conducive environment for HUGE unintended consequences. We leave it up to the experts to conduct the necessary risk assessments, which will most assuredly let loose a sea of red flags about what Big Oil has done, and is currently doing, in the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, we are deeply concerned that, if a permanent moratorium on all new oil and gas drilling and extraction in the GOM is not put into place poste haste, the coastal communities will remain in a very precarious situation. Worsening GOM predicament is reflective of the status quo around the globe.Now consider the following scenario: that this very same predicament, which we have all witnessed in the Gulf of Mexico, is happening wherever oil and gas drilling is conducted in the various water bodies throughout the planet. Therefore we can multiply the Macondo Prospect disaster a hundred times and still not come close to the impacts that these ongoing gushers and spills, leaks and seeps are having the world over.Perhaps the BP Gulf Oil Spill was the defining moment in modern history when all the nations of the world community were called by Mother Earth herself to begin transitioning the planet away from the Hydrocarbon Fuel Paradigm. After all, we may never get another chance!
(...) #2 The deeper the geological source of the hydrocarbons, the more radioactive isotopes present in the oil and gas.
(...) There are two very significant topics, which have been not been discussed in this report, that beg for acknowledgement and further attention in light of the title:The Gulf of Mexico is Dying.Both of these problems are highly consequential and therefore merit separate papers in order to give them the treatment they deserve, if we are to understand why the GOM is slowly dying. Until those papers are completed, we offer the following short summaries: #1 The wanton and indiscriminate use of the dispersant, Corexit, turned an extremely serious regional disaster into an unmitigated global catastrophe
(...) “They’ve Literally Punched A Hole Into Hell: We Need A Crash Alternative Energy Program Now, Assuming We Even Survive”
(...) FIRST OF 100 COMMENTS: "Dr Tom, An excellent article that should spur the world to act and act fast. But do the govt of the first world countries care? Do the oil companies (other than BP) and the industry really care?In all honesty and through the countless efforts I have tried to bring up the safety and data fraud issues – first among fellow colleagues, within the geohazards companies, to the consulting QC companies, to the oil companies and lastly to the governments and regulatory bodies in Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Australia; all efforts have been unsuccessful. Even in the months before the Montara Mega Oil Spill in Australia in August 2009 and Macondo BP’s Mega Oil Spill on 20 April 2010, our warnings of oil-related disasters due to an industry-wide apathy to Health, Safety & Environmental (HSE) issues all fell on deaf ears. This is a risky business with high stakes. But all the companies (from contractors to QC consultants to Oil companies to Regulators) had all been blinded by greed and high oil prices. The higher the oil prices, the less regard to HSE." CLIP
US Government Sues All Companies Involved in BP Oil Spill... except one: Halliburton (December 17, 2010) http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22424
WASHINGTON - Attorney General Eric Holder announced Wednesday that the United States is filing a lawsuit against BP and its partners in the Deepwater Horizon oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming their negligence led to the massive spill that sent millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf during the spring and summer. Holder said a months-long investigation by the Justice Department had found that BP, which was the primary operator of the well, its partners in the well, which included Aandarko and the MOEX subsidiary of Mitsui & Co., and Transocean, which BP had hired to drill the well, had failed to secure the well properly, failed to maintain drilling equipment and failed to monitor the well, and that those failures had caused the spill. (...) Investigators also have found that the rig's last line of defense against a massive spill, the blowout preventer, had been altered and that BP engineers were unable to close its valves and seal the well.One company not named in the lawsuit is Halliburton, the Houston-based oil services firm that poured the concrete that was intended to seal the well. There was no immediate explanation for its exclusion. Holder noted that the case filed Wednesday was a civil suit and that it does not preclude future criminal charges.
TRENDING: Fox takes heat from left and right over analysts
December 1st, 2010
(CNN) – It's rare that two media watchdogs – one on the left and one on the right – ever agree when it comes to assessing coverage on the cable news outlets.
But both the conservative Newsbusters and liberal Media Matters are aiming fire at Fox News' Geraldo Rivera and Judge Andrew Napolitano for recently suggesting the third building to fall on September 11, 2001 – 7 World Trade Center- may have collapsed for reasons beside the widely held belief that fire from the two World Trade Center towers nearby was the ultimate cause.
In a segment that aired on his program more than two weeks ago, Rivera reported on those who claim the building's collapse was more consistent with that which would occur from explosive devices.
"I'm certainly much more open-minded about it than I was," Rivera said of the alternate possibility for the building's fall.
Days later Napolitano – a legal analyst for Fox – said of the theory:
"It's hard for me to believe that [7 World Trade Center] came down by itself. I was gratified to see Geraldo Rivera investigating it. I'm gratified to see the people across the border interested.
"I think 20 years from now, people will look at 9/11 the way they look at the assassination of JFK today," he added, in an interview with radio host Alex Jones. "It couldn't possibly have been done the way the government told us."
In a post on its Web site Tuesday, Newsbusters said the suggestion lacked any common sense and amounted to "moral repugnance."
"Just so Fox is clear about the people whom they've given soapboxes, Geraldo and the Judge are apparently unconvinced by physics, common sense, and the simple human decency of their elected officials," wrote Newsbuster's Lachlan Markay.
Meanwhile, Media Matters Eric Hananoki wrote: "Napolitano's belief in 9-11 conspiracy theories may make things awkward with his Fox News colleagues – especially Glenn Beck - who have denounced 9-11 conspiracy theories and those associating themselves with anyone making them."
A federal report in 2008 determined fires at the World Trade Center site ultimately spread to 7 World Trade Center and weakened critical floor beams and structural columns of the nearly-50 story building, leading to its collapse. The building– which housed offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service and the Giuliani administration's emergency response center - was completely evacuated at the time of its collapse.
Fox News did not respond to CNN's request for comment.
6.
A SOBER ASSESSMENT OF THE FAILINGS OF OUR CURRENT GLOBAL LEADERSHIP TO HELP STIR US AWAY FROM OUR CURRENT RUSH TOWARDS OBLIVION, AND A RECIPE FOR A SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION INTO A NEW ERA BASED ON A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS OF OUR GLOBAL ONENESS. A MUST READ AND SHARE!
Here is the complete text of the WS-20 Declaration. The document is also available in .pdf format.
The Mission of The Worldshift 20 Council
The Worldshift 20 Council is composed of twenty prominent global citizens from diverse cultures and religions worldwide. The mission of the Council is to give urgent attention to the new condition of the world emerging today and provide essential orientation so that an informed and determined movement toward a peaceful and sustainable planetary civilization could be brought into being.
The Council’s mission is to articulate the collective voice of humanity, drawing on the heritage of all peoples, cultures and religions. It is to transcend short-term and self-serving economic and political interests in recognition of the fact that thinking and acting in exclusive reference to narrow national or multi-national agendas cannot solve the problems currently confronting humanity. The pursuit of narrow interests are accelerating systemic breakdown in our presently unsustainable world.
The WS-20 Council intends to shift the attention of the global public and media from the increasingly intractable problems and deepening crises of our deteriorating world to the opportunities and vistas of a new world where seven billion and more human beings can live in peace, prosperity and harmony with each other and the Earth’s natural systems.
The WS-20 Declaration
Basic Premises
On-going efforts by the leaders of the industrialized states to re-adjust the collapsing systems of our unsustainable world are far from a sufficient response to the current crisis. Systemic collapse cannot be either wished away or ignored. Current global systems of economics, governance, societal organization and ecological relationships between humanity and nature must be urgently re-designed based on the consciousness, values and principles which can provide peace and long-term sustainability for the human community. The ‘window of opportunity’ to begin such a large-scale transition may only remain open for a few years from now.
However, the international community is the prisoner of ‘silo thinking’ in meetings such as those of the G20. Negotiators from leading economies build upon narrowly specialized agendas inherited from the past; acting in the name of creating more economic growth to make narrowly defined economic coordination problems more negotiable.
This thinking was very evident in the G20’s Seoul Summit. The Summit’s Declaration reads like an emergency report of Ministers of Trade and Finance, rather than a report on the deliberations on the wellbeing of the world community by the heads of government of our twenty most powerful nations. International trade disequilibria, discriminating exchange rate policies, and the threat of recurring financial crises occupied center stage, with scant attention to climate change, the global ecology, and the endemic poverty of nearly one half of the world’s peoples. While no attention whatsoever was given to the wealth, power, and consumption orientation that dominates the aspirations of the world’s influential governments, businesses, and populations.
A focus on short-term global economic and financial issues is crisis management and not an acceptable response by the world’s political leaders to humanity’s intensifying problems. The kind of economic growth that the G20 treats as a panacea merely bolsters the same unsustainable economic system that is now threatening the well-being and even the survival of vast underprivileged populations, and is altering the planet’s climate and damaging its ecology. Today’s looming climate, ecology, energy and nuclear threats are neither manageable by purely fiscal measures, nor can it be isolated into narrow specialty areas.
The human community needs comprehensive structural reform so that our children and grandchildren can live in peace with one another and with the ecological systems that sustain human life and existence. We need to redesign our societies so that they become ecologically and energetically viable. And we need to address the major twin threats to humanity’s continuing survival: global warming and nuclear weapons.
If unstopped, the climatic changes produced by global warming will come together with such profound synergies that no human power will be sufficient to resist them. They will inexorably synergize in spontaneous interactions and disastrous effects until, in the next 100 years, more than 80 percent of the human species would have perished due to climate-induced catastrophes, epidemics of diseases sweeping into new terrains, and human conflict and war as a result of the most massive migration of peoples in human history – hundreds of millions, even billions of climatic refugees moving across the continents. This prediction, made among others by pioneering biologist James Lovelock, merits sober consideration and urgent action.
The abolition of nuclear weapons, in turn, is no longer merely a lofty goal and noble aspiration: it is essential for human survival. Peace is impossible as long as the threat of nuclear war hangs over our heads. A Nuclear Weapons Convention prohibiting the production as well as the use of all nuclear weapons in all circumstances is urgently needed. In a democratic world, such a Convention must be constructed by awakening the public to the threat of maintaining vast arsenals of weapons that could destroy all life on Earth. Such an awakening is already in progress. In 21 countries, including the five major nuclear powers, polls show that 76 percent of people support negotiation of a treaty banning all nuclear weapons.
But opposition is still strong. Nuclear weapons are about power, and governments have not given up what they perceive as a source of their power. Powerful military-industrial complexes are trading on a fear that has been purposively foisted on the public. In the mainstream media there is a virtual blackout on this subject, which makes it difficult to bring about the consensus needed to democratically initiate measures that could eliminate the nuclear ‘Sword of Damocles’ that continues to hang over our heads.
An Alternative Philosophy
A Conscious Leadership
There is no longer any time to waste if civilization on this planet is to endure and prosper. It is the responsibility of the people to choose leadership that is knowledgeable and wise, and the responsibility of the leadership to move forward in ways that preserve the viability of the social structure into the future by respecting appropriate global principles.
Conscious leadership is called for by those in positions of decision-taking at every level of society today. National political leaders need the ability to bring what are seen as oppositional forces into collaboration; promoting new skills that can match our inner capacities to the outer complexities of life and integral solutions that honor psychological, biological, social, cultural and environmental dimensions so as to navigate the changes that are upon us; developing new skills, including cultural competencies, social and emotional intelligence that can make it possible to work well together.
We now have the capacities to create integrated planning processes that can lead to new perspectives on every aspect of human endeavor. A global system of enterprise can invite creative breakthroughs. A fresh new approach to governance can invite greater participation from all segments of society. An interconnected web of global commerce can be grounded in a set of priorities that allow for competition in the embrace of cooperation. Business can flourish by putting people first, designing systems of global synergy that can move our world’s cultures to new levels of prosperity. Through conscious leadership, we can encompass individual and global needs as an interrelated, interdependent whole.
The leaders of the developed countries need to ask a paramount question: “What good is it to be rich in a sick world?” Having done the most to increase their wealth at the expense of a depleted planet, the leaders of the G-20 should focus on bringing about a well planet for coming generations. Economies everywhere need to be peaceful, fair, sustainable and healthy on all levels. With global wellness in mind, we can unite to bring the ecology back into balance, eradicate pandemic disease, lift up the dispossessed, and curb military aggression.
Only global thinking can accomplish these ends, but to date the lingering effects of nationalism and tribalism block real progress. Nonetheless, even if we cannot yet think of ourselves as one people, we can agree that we live on one planet. A sick planet is just a few steps away from a dying planet. Once that truth sinks in, effective programs for global wellness have a chance. We may be able to survive in a drastically depleted world, but we cannot be fully human in such a world.
A New Consciousness
We need to leave everything we know behind in order to get to where we need to go. This might seem counterintuitive but it is actually essential, given Einstein’s observation that the consciousness that produced the problem cannot get us out of it; only a new consciousness can. This means that there must be a systemic thorough reinvention of every aspect of humanity – the birth of a new consciousness.
There are many crises affecting humanity and many others are yet to come. All these crises are effects of the same cause: the lack of a “planetary consciousness.” We lack a holistic perspective that embraces both humankind and the ecosystem. In a democracy the majority rules, decides and imposes its laws and behavior, and people with a planetary consciousness are still in the minority.
We need a consciousness that recognizes that wide-ranging cooperation based on solidarity and oriented toward fundamental transformation is the basic precondition for human peace and sustainability. We need a consciousness that inspires and motivates cooperation not only in the economic and financial domains, but also in the domain of the ecology, as well as in technology, education, public information, and cultural communication. We need a planetary consciousness that unambiguously apprehends the interdependence and the Oneness of all People on Earth, and the Oneness of our destiny.
The leaders of the G-20 did not create the world’s problems but perpetuate them by basing their interactions on a limited and narrow level of consciousness. A lack of gratitude toward the environment, exploitive treatment of animal life, plant life and the world of nature, discrimination against people, cultures, and nations – these kinds of destructive behaviors do not originate solely from the minds of a small group of leaders. They also arise from the consciousness of billions of individual human beings. We must support the efforts of each global citizen, whether in a leadership role or not, to take responsibility for uplifting their consciousness thereby safeguarding the future of our human society and the Earth.
Re-Orientation in the Public Sector
Since the publication of the Limits to Growth in 1972 many events and movements have rung the alarm bell in the world loud and clear, yet the situation of the planet has not changed for the better. We know that many authoritative international organizations, such as the United Nations and the G-20, have made efforts for bringing about change, and that countless NGOs and grassroots groups have done so as well. However, these efforts have been fragmented and have not been implemented quickly and effectively enough. A Concrete Action Plan is urgently needed for the passengers on Spaceship Earth for spreading and sharing planetary consciousness, and thereby producing the foundations for a new way of living and acting in society.
We need to replace the obsolete notions of nation-states, where national governments are in charge of ensuring the national interest, which they conceive as achieving the objective of bringing about “recovery,” “renewed stability” and “balanced growth” in their own economy. Instead of attempts to re-vitalize the current intrinsically unsustainable and terminally crisis-bound system, a thorough transformation of current structures and practices is required.
We need a new social function based on partnership between Governments, NGO’s and Civil Society to connect and communicate ‘breakthroughs’ wherever they occur in the global community. The requirement is for a new function to enhance social synergy and cooperation of all that is creative and emergent leading and able to motivate a whole-system shift. Through the Internet we can scan for, map, connect and communicate what is working in the world, country by country and community by community.
The debacle of Copenhagen last December demonstrated the inability of intergovernmental organizations to transcend national and corporate interests and deal objectively with critical global issues. This tragic failure was due to a lack of understanding that the global crisis is actually a whole-system crisis of the human spirit. By ignoring the spiritual dimension of human reality and continuing to reduce everything to economics, the world will only spiral toward greater and greater catastrophes. The G-20 perpetuates this failure of perspective. We are at a point in time when the spiritual dimension must become paramount in issues of decision making. World leaders should be committed in their decision-making processes to spiritual principles higher than monetary politics, and to the realization that the planet is a whole system and that, therefore, all decisions for the global good must be made on that basis lest the human species forfeit its future.
It is fundamental for leaders to encourage widespread support for the discovery of a deeper meaning of life, an inner joy that is not dependent on circumstances and a compassion that leads to care for other beings. We need to co-create a world in which we can live together free in harmony with our surroundings based on a collective awakening, and governed by wisdom and compassion rather than by greed and fear.
Governments need to consider whether the entire concept of spirituality needs to be rearticulated in the light of a global society. Spirituality cuts across barriers of race and religion, sex and nationality, and is therefore best suited for a global community. We need to re-articulate certain universal concepts that will enable us to cope with the challenges and hazards of globalization. Many of these concepts are in the great religious traditions of humanity. They need to be rediscovered and reaffirmed in the context of the contemporary world.
Urgent Institutional Steps
Nation-States must work together to address critical challenges. All states state should establish an office for the specific fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals and establish a regular reporting system on the progress of each state’s plan to fulfill its Millennium Development Goal commitments. Capital is a means to that end, not an end in itself. Capital must be protected as other property rights, but not in derogation of adverse impacts on the rights of individual people and biological systems that have existential value beyond the market. Life itself must be understood as sacred and revered.
A new bottom line must be established which incorporates the well-being of the environment and of people as part of the social bargain of society as a limited liability entity. We must implement a proper valuation of the natural world independent of human interests at all levels of wealth measurement. National sovereignty must be balanced with universal norms and values based on principles of harmony with nature, identification of shared interests in peace amongst states, and the rule of law.
We need to create a Social Harmony Index in every nation of the world. It is to consist of an environmental index, armament index, human rights index, honesty index, freedom index, democracy index, free flowing information index, government public affairs index, public security index, rich poor gap index, urban rural index, education popularization index, national physical condition index, creative ability index, social security index, as well as others. By integrating these data over decades we get the Social Harmony Index (SHI), a composite evaluation of every society and its rating in the world. By integrating the SHI of all countries, we get the World Social Harmony (WSHI) and can perceive its pattern of change year by year. These indices need to be evaluated, integrated and re-issued every year by a special organization attached to the United Nations or to the G-20. They will serve as a frame of reference for every country’s development and by spurring the rectification of deviations, enhance the impact of public opinion on the government. Every nation should now be looking to intensify SHI competition and weaken GDP competition in the world.
Everyone benefits from healthy eco-systems, financially sound institutions, and thriving human communities. Thus rethinking the design assumptions of the regulatory framework of capital markets and rebuilding trust is an urgent global priority. Principles to be urgently implemented include:
- democratizing finance and widening the debate on reform by including all stakeholders and the innovations of experts and groups advocating deeper re-structuring and reforms;
- reframing global finance as a commons;
- economic theory informed by breakthroughs in a wide range of social and biological sciences;
- a commons approach where markets, as tools, can be designed to allocate indivisible “non-rival” public goods and infrastructures for equitable access and opportunities for human development.
- drawing attention to the many innovations that serve our common needs in stabilizing climate and creating equitable tools;
- energy solutions may not be in the new production of renewable energy. They may come from research on energy efficiency. This could allow us to avoid the production of nuclear energy, to eliminate energy from coal and other non-renewable sources, and the need for production of new energy;
- creating a vision of the world in which the financial system serves a flourishing and sustainable human future.
We must make sure that the interdependence of financial markets become just, equitable, stable and sustainable. In this context, we need to shift to a more mature “invisible” form of capitalism. This means shifting:
- from an Operational Economy based on the concept of mechanical systems to a Complexity Economy based on living systems;
- from a Knowledge Economy based on visible capital to an Empathy Economy based on invisible capital generated by trust and empathy among people with an awareness of invisible “trade-offs” between present and future generations;
- from a Monetary Economy to a Voluntary Economy as the chief economic principle;
- from a Beneficiary Economy to a Participatory Economy reflecting the real needs of citizens; and
- from the illusion of an Unlimited Growth Economy to the shared reality of a Global Environment Economy.
Taking a whole system approach for this, the most critical time in human history, the decisions we make over the next few years will determine whether we grow or die, whether the 13.8 billion year experiment that resulted in our lives will end within the next century or two. What the world so desperately needs at this time is patterns for peaceful, passionately creative and effective societies. And with it peaceful, passionately creative and effective people – in other words the possible human in the possible society. In other words, the growth of consciousness as the paramount key to the necessary transition to a world that works for everyone and most particularly for the Planet.
We are called to take initiatives that until recently would have seemed unlikely, if not downright impossible. But now the world has been rearranged, the reset button has been hit. We no longer have the luxury of sloth or continuing in the same world destructive patterns. We must now become stewards of the planet filled with enough passion for the possible to partner one another through the greatest social transformation ever known.
We glimpse in this new century, the coming of a Planetary Society which heralds the end of ancient and modern enmities (including that towards Nature) and the birth of new ways of using and honoring our common Humanity and its various cultures. In fact, we need a gathering of the potentials of the whole human race and the particular genius of every culture if we are going to survive our time.
This is a tremendous change, and once it is in full flower, the world will have turned a corner. Sadly today, however, we have a situation where culture has become a satellite to economics instead of economics being a satellite to culture; where the economic and governance systems we have designed and implemented are effectively blocking our collective creative potential and the possibilities for the needed transformation; where national leaders remain the gatekeepers of the old and disintegrating rather than collaborative pioneers of the new and transformative.
For the first time in human history, planetary consciousness, world peace and global sustainability are attainable goals. There are more women now in decision-making positions, and non-physical participation is made possible by the modern technologies of communication. All together, we can now create the world of which we dream.
Worldshift 20 Council Members
Jose Arguelles (USA/Mexico)
Deepak Chopra (USA/India)
James Garrison (USA)
Jonathan Granoff (USA)
Hazel Henderson (USA)
Jean Houston (USA)
Barbara Marx Hubbard (USA)
Min Jiayin (China)
Ervin Laszlo (Hungary/Italy)
Federico Mayor (Spain)
Edgar Mitchell (USA)
Tomoyo Nonaka (Japan)
Paul Ray (USA)
Douglas Roche (Canada)
Marco Roveda (Italy)
Peter Russell (UK/USA)
Masami Saionji (Japan)
Marilyn Schlitz (USA)
Karan Singh (India)
Hiroshi Tasaka (Japan)
Worldshift 20 Council Administration
David Woolfson, Coordinator (Canada)
Carl Carpenter, Web Administrator (USA)
The Worldshift 20 Council Declaration was co-created with the input of all 20 Members, and co-crafted by Ervin Laszlo, David Woolfson and Claudia Welss.
The ancient Chinese symbol for crisis, wei-chi, combines two elements: danger and opportunity. The danger is that if one continues to pursue approaches that are no longer working, then disaster is imminent. The opportunity is to let go of the old patterns and find new ways of being that unleash new, and possibly unforeseen, potentials.
The many global crises we are now facing are symptomatic of a set of values and a mode of thinking that is no longer working. Our tools and technologies have given us unprecedented control of the world around us. We have thus fallen into the trap of believing that the path to human fulfillment lies in manipulating the world around us, manufacturing ever more things, and so creating ever more waste. This is clearly no longer working. Over consumption of resources and unbridled pollution of the oceans, atmosphere and soil are now threatening human civilization, if not humanity itself.
This approach also no longer works on an individual level. Despite all our burgeoning material comforts people as a whole are no happier than they were fifty years ago. The need to feel in control of events leads to greed, anxiety and fear, states of mind that, by their very nature, take us away from the peace and fulfillment we truly seek.
Many in the past have seen through the illusion that fulfillment comes from what we have and do. We call them the wise ones, the liberated, the enlightened. These are people who have discovered a deeper meaning to life, an inner joy that is not dependent on circumstances, and a compassion that leads to care for other beings. Such people are often revered as saints, yet there is nothing special about them — apart from the fact that they have woken up from the dream in which the rest of us live. They hold the key to our future. A world in which we can live together, free from unnecessary fear, and in harmony with our surroundings.
Our various crises are pushing us towards this shift in consciousness, calling us to a collective awakening, and to a world governed by wisdom and compassion rather than greed and fear. The time to wake up is now. The danger is too immense to risk. The opportunity is too good to miss.
7.
A GLOBAL LIFE-THREATENING ISSUE THAT WON'T GO AWAY UNTIL WE ALL JOIN TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT...
I've just returned from Hiroshima where Nobel Peace Laureates gathered for a three-day summit to renew their efforts to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. After hearing testimonies of hibakusha, or survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan, as well as a slate of inspirational speeches from international advocates and experts, the Laureates concluded that "the use of a nuclear weapon against any people must be regarded as a crime against humanity and should henceforth be prohibited," and they called for negotiations on a universal treaty banning them, as has been done with other weapons of mass destruction and indiscriminate effect, such as chemical and biological weapons.
Yet, back in the United States, small, modest arms control efforts are being thwarted by a debate that sounds like an echo from the Cold War. A few Senate Republicans are setting up roadblocks against ratification of START, the new treaty with Russia that would limit both of our deployed weapons to 1,550 and maintain important verification and inspection mechanisms. Anti-START op-eds abound, laden with all sorts of ludicrously misleading assertions and flawed assumptions.
Despite the fact that Republican leadership was essential in bringing into force the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the INF Treaty (eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons), START I (the foundation of the treaty at issue today), the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, and others, currently a small but significant number of pundits and politicians are using partisan politics to push a US unilateralist anti-arms control agenda. They strongly disagree with presidents Obama and Reagan, the latter of whom understood that nuclear weapons "are good for nothing but killing" and who came wondrously close to abolishing them at the 1987 Reykjavik Summit with President Gorbachev. Influential writers such as Charles Krauthammer fail to understand, as Nobel Laureates like former South African President F.W. de Klerk, the Dalai Lama, Mohamed ElBaradei, Jody Williams, Mairead Maguire and Shirin Ebadi do, that nuclear weapons pose more of a problem than any problem they seek to solve.
Krauthammer, in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, makes the dangerous assertion that, since Russia is not an existential threat to the United States anymore, such a treaty with them is not beneficial. Such a shortsighted view misses the real point of START. Through strengthening the rule of law, utilizing what is described in the US Constitution as the "supreme law of the land," -- treaties -- norms are set, confidence is built, verification is established and safety enhanced. These steps are necessary if we are ever to get the sword of Damocles that hangs over modernity removed. The use of a nuclear weapon by accident, design or madness keeps the threat real and present.
More than 20,000 of these horrific devices in existence cannot be lightly denied by cynical rhetoric. The fact is that nuclear weapons, in anybody's hands, are an existential threat to humanity. In a world fraught with terrorism, rogue regimes, shifting alliances and growing interdependence -- to say nothing of human error -- nuclear weapons pose, flatly, an unacceptable risk.
START will not cripple our existing defenses, nor is it, as Krauthammer preposterously suggested, an act of unilateral disarmament. 1,550 warheads, many of which are many times larger than those that destroyed the city where the Laureates just gathered, is still a high enough number to destroy the world, even a few times over. In other words, START does not abolition make. It is, however, a small, sensible and important security-enhancing step to take in the right direction.
The Nobel Peace Laureates emphasized the compass point that must direct our deliberations:
To ensure that the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki never reoccur and to build a world based on cooperation and peace, we issue this call of conscience. We must all work together to achieve a common good that is practical, moral, legal and necessary - the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Why Are You Here? A New Theory May Hold the Missing Piece
Robert Lanza, M.D.Scientist, Theoretician -- November 12, 2010
Why do you happen to be alive on this lush little planet with its warm sun and coconut trees? And at just the right time in the history of the universe? The surface of the molten earth has cooled, but it's not too cold. And it's not too hot; the sun hasn't expanded enough to melt the Earth's surface with its searing gas yet. Even setting aside the issue of being here and now, the probability of random physical laws and events leading to this point is less than 1 out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, equivalent to winning every lottery there ever was.
Biocentrism, a new theory of everything, provides the missing piece. Although classical evolution does an excellent job of helping us understand the past, it fails to capture the driving force. Evolution needs to add the observer to the equation. Indeed, Niels Bohr, the great Nobel physicist, said, "When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not 'measuring' the world, we are creating it." The evolutionists are trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They think we, the observer, are a mindless accident, debris left over from an explosion that appeared out of nowhere one day.
Cosmologists propose that the universe was until recently a lifeless collection of particles bouncing against each other. It's presented as a watch that somehow wound itself up, and that will unwind in a semi-predictable way. But they've shunted a critical component of the cosmos out of the way because they don't know what to do with it. This component, consciousness, isn't a small item. It's an utter mystery, which we think has somehow arisen from molecules and goo.
How did inert, random bits of carbon ever morph into that Japanese guy who always wins the hot-dog-eating contest?
In short, attempts to explain the nature of the universe, its origins, and what's really going on require an understanding of how the observer, our presence, plays a role. According to the current paradigm, the universe, and the laws of nature themselves, just popped out of nothingness. The story goes something like this: From the Big Bang until the present time, we've been incredibly lucky. This good fortune started from the moment of creation; if the Big Bang had been one-part-in-a-million more powerful, the cosmos would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies and stars to have developed. If the gravitational force were decreased by a hair, stars (including the Sun) wouldn't have ignited. There are over 200 physical parameters like this that could have any value but happen to be exactly right for us to be here. Tweak any of them and you never existed.
But our luck didn't stop with the laws, forces, and constants of the universe. Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Orrorin tugenensis, Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecus anamensis, A. afarensis, Kenyanthropus platyops, A. africanus, A. garhi, A. sediba, A. aethiopicus, A. robustus, A. boisei, Homo habilis, H. georgicus, and H. erectus -- among other hominid species -- all went extinct. Even the Neanderthals went extinct. But alas, not us! Indeed, we happen to be the only species of Hominina that made it.
Our special luck continues in the present time. Asteroids could strike Earth at any time, producing a surface-charring blast of heat, followed by years of dust that would freeze and/or starve us to death. Nearby stars could go supernova, their energy destroying the ozone layer and sterilizing the Earth with radiation. And a supervolcano could shroud the Earth in dust. These are just a few (out of billions) of things that could go wrong.
The story of evolution reads just like "The Story of the Three Bears," In the nursery tale, a little girl named Goldilocks enters a home occupied by three bears and tries different bowls of porridge; some are too hot, some are too cold. She also tries different chairs and beds, and every time, the third is "just right." For 13.7 billion years we, too, have had chronic good luck. Virtually everything has been "just right."
It's a fascinating story to tell children, but claiming that it's all a "dumb" accident is no more helpful than saying "God did it." Loren Eiseley, the great naturalist, once said that scientists "have not always been able to see that an old theory, given a hairsbreadth twist, might open an entirely new vista to the human reason." The theory of evolution turns out to be the perfect case in hand. Amazingly, it all makes sense if you assume that the Big Bang is the end of the chain of physical causality, not the beginning.
Indeed, according to biocentrism, it's us, the observer, who create space and time (which is the reason you're here now). Consider everything you see around you right now. Language and custom say it all lies outside us in the external world. Yet you can't see anything through the vault of bone that surrounds your brain. Your eyes aren't just portals to the world. In fact, everything you experience, including your body, is part of an active process occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the mind's tools for putting it all together.
Theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow recently stated:
There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world ... In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."
If we, the observer, collapse these possibilities (that is, the past and future) then where does that leave evolutionary theory, as described in our schoolbooks? Until the present is determined, how can there be a past? The past begins with the observer, us, not the other way around as we've been taught.
The observer is the first cause, the vital force that collapses not only the present but the cascade of past spatio-temporal events we call evolution. "If, instead of identifying ourselves with the work," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, "we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, pre-existing within us in their highest form."
"Biocentrism" (co-authored with astronomer Bob Berman) lays out Lanza's theory of everything.
"Blessed are the cracked… for they shall let the light in." That's what it said on a card I received a few years ago. I was being reminded that I am one of the cracked… letting the light in. I certainly hope so, for that is my intent. That's why I am willing, though I realize it pisses some people off, to be real, to tell my truth, whether labeled good or bad, safe or unsafe, to whoever takes time to discover whatever gifts I am offering. My purpose is to allow everything in my experience to teach me something of value, and therewith to become wiser, and to encourage others to know that they are not alone in the experiences that challenge them. We are all being challenged to go beyond our personal comfort zone.
It's not only in our personal lives and in WikiLeaks – cracks are appearing all over the world to let the light in. It's not that corruption has only recently appeared at the highest levels of our governments and corporations; it has been there all along. For centuries at least, positions of power have been filled by people of low consciousness that have the desire to rule over people of lower consciousness. It has been a symbiotic relationship perfectly suited to allow the rulers to feed both their greed and their lust for power. And the people being ruled have, for the most part, been complacent and totally unaware. That is changing.
As more and more people wake up, those in the ivory towers are becoming more and more desperate to complete their plan for world domination. They realize that an awakened populace cannot be controlled. In many cases, this makes the more enlightened ones among us seem to the rulers as enemies of the state (Google it!). In fact, there is documentation revealing that this is exactly how many of those in power look at the common people that were supposed to stay asleep in order to accommodate the nefarious plans of the elite. Too bad! It's not happening that way.
So what does this have to do with our personal lives? Lots! Yet nothing, if we fail to see the part that we play in it!
NATIONAL SECURITY
We all play ego games. By that I mean that we often go to great lengths to protect our current point of view, which is another definition of ego. People that operate the governments of the world, especially in the United States, call this egoic game: national security. It is a totally fear-based concept, in other words, proceeding from egos that perceive themselves as separate entities, the world as an unsafe place, and lack as a reality. What they really mean is that they do not want the general population to find out all of the secrets and conspiratorial plans and criminal activities in which they have been involved. It has very little to do with national security, and a lot to do with protection from discovery and prosecution. In fact, when the truth is finally understood, people will realize that the very people assigned to protect the rights of all are the very ones that seek to undermine those rights. They are the ones that have committed treason. It is not the dissidents and whistleblowers that are the problem.
Our leaders have made plans for what they call continuity of government . That is another one of their grand deceptions. What they mean is that they have a plan to regroup by whatever means necessary so that they can continue their conspiracy against the consciousness of humanity. Too bad! Consciousness is on the march – regardless of how it may seem to the average person. The continuity of human evolution, in fact, depends to a large extent on the discontinuity of government as we have known it. The powers that be, or at least their ruling ideology, must become the powers and ideologies that were. This includes our personal ego that sees itself as separate. There is no such thing either spiritually or scientifically as separation. That is the illusion. Life is interconnected. All solutions to all problems that we see in our world and in our personal lives will proceed from the mental annihilation of that false paradigm.
Yes, it can all take place in the mind alone. We do not need an Armageddon or some horrific cataclysm to wake us up if we are only willing to open our minds, our eyes and ears, and most especially our hearts. The truth is all around us ... and within us. Though it may seem hidden, once we see it, we wonder: how could I have ever missed it?
Yes, it is through our own apathy and ignorance that we have created the experience of the world that we live in. While it's easy to point the finger at the top of the pyramid from which the conspiracies seem to originate, only the base of the pyramid can support the top. The pinnacle cannot be grounded or remain in manifest form once the foundational causes are removed. It is not up to leaders that are blind to show us the way home. It is for us, we the people, to awaken and take personal responsibility. When we do, new leadership will arise. The old adage, "people get the leadership they deserve," is true. It is the consciousness, or lack thereof, of the people that determines the quality of leadership.
Now, having said what I just said and looking at the world as objectively as possible, my first thought is: we are in trouble! (That's my ego.) Yet, I know there is another principle at work. Call it the hundredth monkey or critical mass, it does not take a numerical majority to turn everything around. If that were the case, evolution would be impossible. However, evolution has been occurring from the very beginning of creation itself. That's the way of it. One crack in the way it is leads to another, and then another crack; and the light of transformation flows in. This is what is happening in our world.
Many are beginning to see with new eyes – eyes that are able to penetrate to the root cause of the manifest world. We are finally becoming able to grasp how it works. From my subjective point of view, that which seems to resonate in the deepest part of me, I feel (not think) that critical mass has not only been reached, it has been far exceeded. We have crossed the threshold and gone beyond the point of no return.
The cracked have not only let in the light for themselves individually, we have drawn in light from every corner of the cosmos. Helpers are here from throughout the universe to witness the shift of the ages occurring on planet Earth and reverberating again to the outermost reaches of both the known and unknown worlds beyond us. Together we are drawing in unseen forces that far exceed the visible power structures built by the ego consciousness of separation. This is why many are finally beginning to live without fear. While we may witness the saber rattling and hear the old mantras of war, we realize that it is merely the shaking of an old paradigm in its death throes. Rather than shrinking back in fear, we expand into laughter as we realize the joke we have played ourselves. Once you see it, you cannot go back to not seeing it.
The reality of life has always been hidden within the illusion of separation. We can see that we have used separation, first as a prison, then as a teacher to expand consciousness. We descended into the darkness of ignorance only so that we could arise into the brilliance of greater and greater light. This greater light is what is flooding in. Blessed are the cracked!
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Related article from Ron Van Dyke (paradoxman@cfl.rr.com) who introduced it this way in his Dec 31 email to me: "Thanks for all you do for everyone. Your efforts and faithfulness are appreciated, perhaps more than you realize. As another one who serves the community, I know how much work it is; and mine is no doubt dwarfed by yours. It amazes me how much information you provide to those who wish to know what's going on in our world. Rest is coming, but not yet. Unless I write something today, this will be my final article for 2010."
2011: A YEAR OF MASSIVE, VISIBLE CHANGES http://www.metagroups.info/Ron%27sArticles.htm#2011CHANGES
For those who think 2010 was a significant year of change, hang on! Before 2011 is over, we will look back at 2010 and think we were standing still. Many will rightly ask, "On what do you base this prediction?" According to the best interpretation of Mayan Calendar information, the entire ninth step in the evolution of consciousness will take place in 260 days: basically, from March through October 2011. Unlike most Mayan calendar teachers, Dr. Carl Calleman does not buy into the December 21, 2012 theories. He studied the information as a scientist, and came to a different conclusion, with October 28, 2011 being the completion date. Many other teachers who have looked at his information are in agreement. I am one of those, purely on the basis of resonance.
(...) The Creator has always had a purpose for Creation. That purpose has not always been easy to determine, and even more difficult to see. As the plan has unfolded, most of us have only been able to see the chaos. Conflict has seemed to rule the day; and making sense of the whole thing has been well-nigh impossible. Yet, those who have been able to see from the other side have always told us that there was meaning. These were able to see, if only in flashing glimpses, that a grand plan was underway. We've called them prophets or shamans; and each of them with an honest heart always told what they felt, saw or heard. They have spoken in every culture and in every age. They were the Voice of God, inspired to speak to their generation.
I'm not about to tell you that any of them were perfect – far from it. They were men and women, just like you and me, who had to deal with all of the perplexities of their individual lives and still make sense of their dreams and visions that often contradicted what they saw in the physical world. These are those that have held the dream alive within the human family. As the Spirit of the Living God brings these gifted men and women together, a new world will be born. These are the co-creators responsible for the time in which we live; for we are the ones that have searched for a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. We are the ones who have often been despised and rejected of men.
Yet, in a very real sense, we are only eyes in the body. We are important, yes, we are. However, we cannot do it alone. Everyone must find his and her part in this Body of Humanity that is being transformed, day by day, in ways that will manifest more clearly in 2011. We are talking about a new humanity here. That which was impossible before will be soon possible again. We're about to see the Son of God with new eyes; and as I look at this beautiful creature made without hands, my eyes fill with tears. The whole cosmos marvels at the magnificence of the Word Made Flesh, multiplied to infinity – a multitude that no man can number (or at least count). To me, this is the real meaning of the second coming of Christ. And all the world shall see Him, and be like Him.
Let each with eyes to see and a heart to love rejoice. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. 2011 is our year. "Behold, I make all things new!" says the Lord Most High. Namaste.
10.
Recommended by Roberta Shoemaker-Beal (Creatas@aol.com) Check also Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest and WiserEarth an excellent 6 min introductory video - Here are the salient points of this video:
By Paul Hawken: contributor to the BIONEERS Conference (November 14, 2010)
The Movement with No Name: How the Largest Social and Environmental Force in All of Human History is Re-Imagining the World from the Bottom Up
Over the past 15 years, I have given nearly 1,000 talks about the environment, and every time I have felt like a tightrope performer struggling to maintain perfect balance. To be sure, people are interested to know what is happening to their world, but no speaker wants to leave an audience depressed, no matter how frightening a future is predicted by studies that outline the rate of environmental loss. To be sanguine about the future, however, requires a plausible basis for constructive action: You cannot describe possibilities for that future unless the present problem is accurately defined.
Bridging the chasm between the two was always a challenge, but audiences kindly ignored my intellectual vertigo and in time provided me with ways to overcome this challenge. After every speech, a smaller crowd would gather to talk, ask questions and exchange business cards. These people were typically working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights. They came from the non-profit and non-governmental world, also known as civil society; they looked after rivers and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought against unfair trade policies, worked to green inner cities and taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they had dedicated themselves to trying to safeguard nature and ensure justice. Although this was the 1990s and the media largely ignored them, in those small meetings I had a chance to listen to their concerns. They were students, grandmothers, teenagers, tribal members, business people, architects, teachers, retired professors and worried mothers and fathers.
I would get from five to 30 such cards per speech, and after being on the road for a week or two would return home with a few hundred of them stuffed into various pockets. I would lay them out on the table in my kitchen, read the names, look at the logos, envisage the missions and marvel at the scope and diversity of what these groups were doing on behalf of others. Later, I would store them in drawers or paper bags as keepsakes of the journey.
Over the course of years, the number of cards mounted into the thousands, and whenever I glanced at them, I came back to one question: Did anyone truly appreciate how many groups and organizations were engaged in progressive causes? At first, this was a matter of curiosity on my part, but it slowly grew into a hunch that something larger was afoot, a significant social movement that was eluding the radar of mainstream culture.
So, intrigued, I began to count. I looked at government records for different countries and, using various methods to approximate the number of environmental and social-justice groups from tax census data, I initially estimated a total of 30,000 environmental organizations around the globe. And when I added social justice and indigenous peoples' rights organizations, the number exceeded 100,000. I then researched to see if there had ever been any equal to this movement in scale or scope, but I couldn't find anything, past or present. The more I probed, the more organizations I unearthed, and the numbers continued to climb as I discovered lists, indexes and small databases specific to certain sectors or geographic areas.
In trying to pick up a stone, I found the exposed tip of a much larger geological formation. I soon realized that my initial estimate of 100,000 organizations was off by at least a factor of ten, and I now believe there are over 1-and maybe even 2- million organizations around the world working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. By any conventional definition, this vast collection of committed individuals does not constitute a movement. Movements have leaders and ideologies. People join movements, study their tracts and identify themselves with a group. They read the biographies of the founders or listen to them perorate on tape or in person. Movements, in short, have followers. This movement, however, doesn't fit the standard model. It is dispersed, inchoate and fiercely independent. It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with. It is taking shape in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, companies, deserts, fisheries, slums-and yes, even fancy hotel conference centers. One of its distinctive features is that it is tentatively emerging as a global humanitarian movement arising from the bottom up. Historically, social movements have arisen primarily in response to injustice, inequities and corruption. Those woes still remain, joined by a new condition that has no precedent.
The planet has a life-threatening disease, marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change. As I counted these vast numbers of organizations, it crossed my mind that perhaps I was witnessing the growth of something organic, if not biologic. Rather than a movement in the conventional sense, could it be an instinctive, collective response to threat? Is it atomized for reasons that are innate to its purpose? How does it function? How fast is it growing? How is it connected? Why is it largely ignored? Does it have a history? Can it successfully address the issues that governments are failing to do: energy, jobs, conservation, poverty and global warming?
My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us.
If that is difficult to believe, think about winter; calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but co-operation must be on the planet’s terms.
The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions, including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and re-imagine the world from the bottom up, based first on principles of justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different. We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize our social and ecological fabric. It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers.
“We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is most harmful resides within us, the accumulated wound of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, a history of violence, and greed.
There is no question that the environmental movement is critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social-justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But it is the other way around; the only way we are going to put out the fire is to get on the social-justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus. Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally. What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name.
---
This is an edited excerpt from Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World by Paul Hawken (Viking). To continue reading more articles like this, download Ode Magazine's FREE special issue on climate change, from http://www.TheSolutionsWeNeedNow.org.
"We are in the midst of an unnamed movement that basically flies under the radar of the media. It is non-violent, grass roots. There is no cluster bombs, helicopters or warplanes. There is no ideology. A male vertebrate is not in charge. This is the most diverse movement the world has every seen. The word movement is too small to describe it. No one started it. No one is in charge of it. There is no orthodoxy. It is global, classless, unquenchable and tireless.
"The shared understanding is arising spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and sectors. It is growing and spreading world wide with no exceptions. It has many roots. Primarily, the roots are in indigenous cultures, the environment, and social justice movements. These 3 sectors and their sub sectors are intertwining, morphing, and enlarging. This is no longer simply about resources, or factions or injustice. It is fundamentally a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, and a democracy movement.
"It is the coming world! There is a minimum of 130,000 organizations working toward social and environment justice.
"It could be 200 or 500 thousand groups. We don't know how big this movement is. It is marked by kinship, community and symbiosis. It is Patcha Mama. It's mama. It's the Earth talking back, waking up.
"What you see is our kin (as a list is shown on the screen). To give you a sense of how big it is, if we left the list running all weekend (Friday night through Monday evening), we still would not have seen all the names of all the groups. It is so new we can't recognize it. We are familiar with armies and governments and war and churches and religions.
"There is no precedent for what we're doing. What you're creating is completely unknown. It is everywhere. There is no center. There is not one spokesperson. It is I every country and city on Earth . It is within every tribe, race, culture and every ethnic group in the world.
"It is the first time on Earth that a non-ideological movement has arisen. During the span of the 20th century, big ideologies were worshipped by religions and dominated our beliefs. The ideologies that dominated were capitalism, socialism and communism.
"In the words of Ed Hunt, “ideologies stalked the Earth clad in armor and fought for the control of our minds and our lands. It wasn't pretty.” We were told that salvation would be found in the domination of a single system.
"This (pointing to the list of organizations on the screen) is where salvation will be found. We know this as biologists; as community organizers; and as ecologists. It is found in diversity.
"This movement is humanity's renewed response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection and ecological corruption caused by ideologies. It is up to us to decide who we will be, how we will be. This is what we are building - the capacity to respond. It is about possibilities and solutions.
"HUMANKIND KNOWS WHAT TO DO!"
11.
NOTE from Jean: The following dates back to November 19 and I had initially intended to network this a while ago but it got bumped ahead several times for various reasons. Some people have already seen my comments on this through Steve Beckow's website and emails but I'm sure most of the ERN subscribers have not seen anything on this matter which started from a controversial mention of Colleen Thomas by SaLuSa through Mike Quinsey...
On Earth sensational news travels fast, and the truth about the missile that was shot down is no exception. A brave soul Colleen Thomas has allowed an interview to give the Pleiadian version of events. I am asking Michael to make the link known to you, and he will put it at the bottom of this message. Such news is a sign of the times indicating that people are no longer in fear of the authorities, and are intent on spreading the truth around. It will only be by such sharing of information, that the real purpose behind action being taken in your name will be revealed. For too long you have been lied to and treated as objects for use of the Illuminati, in their plan for your eventual enslavement.
Many people have in fact indicated their readiness to support the efforts of the likes of Steven Greer. He has amassed hundreds of testimonies that will confirm the truth of disclosure, which awaits official permission to recognize our presence. It will be just the start of a long series of revelations that will go back far longer than you will probably imagine. The mood upon Earth is changing rapidly and the people are mobilizing themselves, to put pressure where it is needed to get the truth out about the cover-ups. No longer do they blindly accept what the Governments tell them, and have long questioned their statements. With the increasing levels of consciousness this move to learn the truth will spread. For the time being the Internet is your only source of reliable information, but beware of those who for different reasons send out anything but the truth. If in doubt trust your intuition, and check the facts out by comparing it to websites you trust.
What is happening is speeding you towards the first real changes that are going to take most people unawares. However, there are enough awakened people to help ease them into an understanding of the reason behind such events. The most important reason is of course the ultimate completion of this cycle and finally Ascension. In the months leading up to it, much time will be given to explaining the manner in which people may prepare for it. It is largely a need to know how to centre yourself, and expand your consciousness to a point where the lower vibrations can no longer affect you. Ascension is a natural result of the culmination of the powerful energies that will bring it about.
It is easy for us to ask you to keep calm when Mother Earth becomes more active, but it is essential if you are to avoid experiencing fear. Fear quickly lowers your vibrational level, and if sustained will make you susceptible to illness. It also attracts to you the very thing that has brought it about in the first place. The Law of Attraction has no means of discerning whether what you are thinking strongly about is viewed as desirable or not. What you focus on is what you bring to yourself, and is the basis of self healing. It is possible to think yourself as healthy by taking such a positive attitude. In the distant future you will become powerful creators, and even co-creators with God. It may seem a long way off bearing in mind where you are now, but already such powers are already developing.
Most of you having been immersed in the lower vibrations for so long, have in fact forgotten your true potential. Opening your minds to it is part of the awakening process, and it will continue until you are fully conscious Beings. For so long you have been deliberately kept down, and had little realization of the great Being you really are. That is now all changing, and you are beginning to understand concepts that not too long ago would have baffled you. If you can identify with that description then you are surely experiencing an expansion in your consciousness. Telepathy will also start to grow and you will realize that, when you know what people are thinking and you are picking up their thoughts. You can develop it by projecting your thoughts to another person, and will be surprised to find it works. In time it will become the normal means of communication, which is what we of the Galactic Federation use.
You will find that in your dream state you will meet other souls also out of the body, but more importantly bring a waking memory back with you. Some of you will also be allowed to visit us, and that will most likely be because you are in fact related to our civilization. Many of you on Earth especially for this time are representing your real family, such as Colleen Thomas and the Pleiadians that we mentioned earlier in this message. You will at some stage get to know about your links with us, and may find that you have arranged to return to your home planet when this cycle ends. You are coming out of your dreamlike state which has been put upon you, and into an unrealistic position of believing the illusion that you have been living. That is why some emphasis is being placed upon getting the truth out into the public domain.
Dear Ones so much is happening your heads may be in a spin, which is why we so often emphasize the need to stay centered. Going with the flow is good advice, but use your advantage of knowing what is planned to stay grounded and calm. One day you will look back at these times and in seeing the big picture realize how privileged you were to be present, to experience the transition to the higher dimensions. It is a big event of such massive importance to all life in the Universe, and it will pass off as planned and represent a fantastic change that could only happen at the Creatorís command. Little Earth therefore becomes a very important cog in a very big machine, and it is why it is attracting a great deal of attention. Visitors to your solar system have to keep their distance, but many, many civilizations even from other Universes want to be present to record Ascension. That will give you an idea of what a great event is about to be played out, and it cannot be affected by anything that happens on Earth. The potential for such levels of interference has passed, and we are here to see that success is guaranteed.
I am SaLuSa from Sirius, and thrilled by your progress towards the real commencement of Ascension. Of course it started a long time ago, but it is only since the last 30 years that it has substantially picked up.
Special comment from Jean: Because the endorsement above of Colleen Thomas' statements by Mike Quincey/SaLuSa has stirred some heated reactions on the part of some people, I've decided to include below the elements of perspective I've offered in response to the criticism and words of caution that have been expressed on this matter.
"Thanks for sharing with me these latest reactions to SaLuSa/Mike's "endorsement" of Colleen Thomas. I'd like to pitch in some thoughts on this matter
I was also a bit puzzled that such an outright support would be offered to such a hot rod personality as Colleen and wanted to find out a bit more about her last night. So I did what I love to do: I did some web researches and found out much more on her (which you can review for yourself through Colleen Thomas' profile, Pleadian Shipmates, Wild Colleen Has Got Her Irish Up!, Stranger Than Fiction: The Alien Connection To The Story Of Creation And Our Slave Plane, http://www.wildcolleen.com and http://www.youtube.com/colesakick) and what I gather is that the picture is a bit muddled about Colleen. She is who she is, let's say, because of where she comes from in this lifetime as a human being but also because of the soul she is, which is a Pleiaidan if we are indeed to believe her assertions. When one listens to her videos and reads her material online, it is clear her human personality - being fairly new in the "Lightworker business" her personal illumination having taken place last February 14 on Valentine Day - still have LOTS of dross-like personal issues to work through. For one, her apparent involvement with the Tea Party in the US - which is vehemently opposed, brainwashed as they are, to anything connected with Obama - and perhaps her lack of access to alternative points of view about Obama's soul's background would easily explain why she has her current views about him.
And it would be fair to say that if one is to look solely from the outside at what his administration has achieved so far that would be in line with all the hopes that have been placed onto him (and here I would refer you Russ to the considerable volume of reliable information I keep networking in my compilations which you receive - all available through http://www.earthrainbownetwork.com - all of which chronicles the fact that very little has changed in the US stance militarily - the Pentagon budget keeps growing, the worldwide network of US military bases doesn't dwindle down, two costly overt military engagements continue (Iraq, Afghanistan) along with several covert ones - CIA-led Predator bombing of Taliban stronghold in Pakistan with at least 700 innocent civilian deaths caught in the crossfire so far this year and same thing with lower casualty count so far in Yemen, all of which is directly vetted by the White House, and all of this despite the abysmal US budget deficit; the creeping fascist policies in the US homeland - did you have a chance to read Russ any of the TSA-airport sexual abuse going on in my recent update and compilation, all of which is fully supported by the Obama's White House - and I could keep going for hours - did I mention his unrelenting unconditional support for the Zionist-controlled Israel? , so long is the litany of things that are incontrovertibly wrong under Obama's administration), and therefore anyone in Colleen's position and with her temperamental outspoken bent would make such derogatory remarks about Obama. I have personally often expressed serious concerns in my compilations about the apparent lack of tangible progress or the decidedly "un-cool" aspects of Obama's policies such as those listed below by Chris Hedges...
Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama (August 10, 2009) http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20090810_nader_was_right_liberals_are_going_nowhere_with_obama/
The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems. The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. CLIP
Of course, we can understand that from the moment Barack Obama entered the race to become the next US president, he had to accept dancing a very tight pas de deux with the Devil himself, accept to be trained and groomed by the Bilderberg Cabal and vetted by them for the US presidency when he almost secretly met them with Hillary in June 2008 in Northern Virginia (See Hillary & Obama In Secret Bilderberg Rendezvous). We want to believe - or 'know' - that he had to surround himself with Zionist operatives and advisers when he formed his first cabinet (see Change? Obama Inner Circle Filled With Bilderbergers) to reassure the Cabal that he was going to do their bidding, while using his podium and position to steer some positive reforms (like health care), reorienting some of the US policies towards less bellicosity, adopting a more conciliatory tone in international politics and forums, in short slowly and prudently implementing the changes his candidacy epitomized. And we understand that given the deep dark control exerted by the global shadow government over much of the US political system and politicians, not to mention the deep corruption that is rampant, almost by design, in every aspect of US politics, that probably no one could have done better than him so far.
But please let us not kid ourselves in thinking that he can, alone, change for the better a country so deeply entrenched into and burdened by many atrocities similar to those committed by the Nazis (a cliché of course) - think about Fallujah's abject atrocities, the depleted uranium worldwide and eternal pollution of the planet, and the millions of people whose violent death can be directly attributed to the US military policies since the end of World War 2...
Expectations that any savior can achieve alone, without our personal involvement, the world of our dreams is pure nonsense, and somehow encouraging people to maintain a waiting stance in that regard through not directly and repeatedly encouraging them to take a stand, even at their own peril, in direct support of the better, saner, more spiritual world we hope for is not really helpful and could be seen in some way to contribute to the status quo, or worst, to indirectly encourage people to remain uninvolved "because others will take care of everything". This physical realm is not a spectator sport. We came here to test our true mettle in the fire of such formidable challenges as the ones we face and we ought to be engaged, one way or another, in the travails that are now leading to a brighter future for all.
So even if some of Colleen statements are misguided or reflective of a lack of perspective, at least she is taking a courageous stand and has the balls to say what she stated in a TV report. In the context of the many shades of extremism observed in the US today, I prefer at this point in time to see a firebrand like her being supported as SaLuSa did instead of a thousand silent dreamers and hope-filled Light workers who just watch passively what's happening to their freedoms without daring - yet! - to be more outspoken about what they truly believe in. Remember, it is only because most people prefer to remain silent and passive that the dark cabalists have been able to have their way and impose their will. Of course, I'm not suggesting that we need to take up arms to defend our views. That is the LAST thing we should do. We can express ourselves, positively, constructively and even with a fiery passion through every available mediums - and there are plenty today with the Internet! - to stoke the desires for change that everyone now feels. We can initiate all kinds of local projects in line with greater environmental sustainability, social justice and peace on Earth. We can also go the route of subtle activism as I've been directed/inspired to do for nearly 30 years now, through harnessing the astounding power of collective meditations on Light and Love enhancing themes and thought-forms so as to empower from within, as living instruments of the Will of Creator Source, the changes now underway, and be actively involved in any way we can to build with millions of other souls the Golden Era of Light, Love and harmony we came here to cocreate.
And obviously, we also continue to need to hear from souls at higher stations, as Matthew would say, the unique and informed perspective that can be derived from those sources. But as we all know, there is only so much they can do. The name of the universal game is Free Will for All. So they - including all benevolent out-of-this-world, out-of-this-dimension sources of assistance - have to be careful NOT to infringe upon our own free will. Help yourself and Heaven will help you... as we all know... The universe if offering us a mighty helping hand... Shall me take it and climb back from this morass back to Source? I think we all know the answer and are now just so deeply enmeshed into this experience to fully make the shift into the full day Light of a bright future after way too long into the dark shadows of ignorance and/or rebellion. The next 2 years are going to be VERY interesting in this regard... NOT as mere by-standers but as fully engaged winners, deeply assured of our ultimate victory.
In the Light of Source
Jean
Final caveat: By making this statement above about Colleen Thomas, I do not mean to convey that I fully concur with everything she has expressed so far - which is a LOT! Relying on one's own intuitive discernment as to what resonates as true or fairly close to the truth and what is mere informational miasma, reflective of a not yet finely tuned delivery of intuitive insights, has to be the only final personal benchmark for assessing her views. Trust your own feelings, in short, and take only what feels right for you at this point.
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