to whom it may concern:

The Regressive Antidote

vidourle — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:12:58 GMT

by David Michael Green http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/The_Fire_This_Time.html Any American who’s been on the planet for more than a few years has lived through a series of economic ups and downs – what economists call the business cycle. These booms and busts seem to follow one another as inevitably as sunset does sunrise. Phil Gramm hasn’t apparently noticed, but we’re now pretty deep into an economic downturn – whether or not it officially qualifies as a recession yet or is simply on the way to becoming one. But two things are especially striking about this particular iteration of our economic malaise. One is that we never quite seem to have had the boom we were supposed to get in between this bust and the last one. Gross domestic product, the key single indicator of economic health used to measure the state of the economy, has done reasonably well since the downturn that began in 2000. So has the stock market, and so, especially, have the one percent or so of the richest Americans, who have lately transitioned from being ridiculously rich to obscenely rich. Most of the rest of us, on the other hand, may be excused for wondering when the good times hit, ‘cause we somehow missed it. It’s funny (hah-hah, right?), but in the go-go late 1990s, some economists were wondering whether Alan “The Second Coming” Greenspan and Robert “Token Wall Street Pseudo-Democrat” Rubin hadn’t actually killed the business cycle forever, with only good times to come for generations on end. Ironically, the subsequent decade may be considered to have posed the same question, only with a very different meaning. Given the absence of any serious recovery content in the latest alleged recovery, maybe the business cycle is dead – only not with permanent boom, but permanent bust, instead. In truth, though, we may come to look upon years like 2004 or 2005 as the good ol’ days. That’s because the second unique thing about the present downturn is the depth of down to which we may now be turning. I’m sure somebody was relieved when George Bush recently informed the country that the economic fundamentals are solid, but it sure wasn’t me. Hard as it is to imagine that this president could get something wrong or speak, uh, somewhat less than candidly, my fear is that conditions are quite the opposite of those the cheerleader-in-chief portrayed. I remember well the recessions of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. This one doesn’t feel anything like those. It seems a lot bigger. My fear is that the bottom may be falling out. My fear is that it’s the fire this time. I’m not an economist (not that economists so very often know what the hell they’re talking about either), so I will readily admit that I don’t have a lot of expertise on this question. But I will say one thing with confidence, however, even as a economics dilettante (in political science we call those people ‘angry voters’). And that is that there are incredible signs of economic thin ice almost anywhere you turn today. The national debt has never been higher. Consumer debt has never been higher. Savings have never been lower. The trade deficit has never been higher. The dollar is spectacularly weak. Foreclosures are mushrooming. Quality jobs are disappearing in droves. People are working longer to maintain the same standard of living, or often less. Employers are economizing, among other ways, by cutting healthcare benefits. Real estate values are plummeting. Sure, it’s a great time to be a bankruptcy lawyer or a repo man, but probably most of us would agree that keeping people in those two fields well employed isn’t worth the trade-off of having an economy in the toilet. George Bush has laughingly admitted that he got “gentlemen’s C’s” when he was in college (those are what the rest of us, whose daddies don’t endow library wings at Ivy League schools, refer to as F’s ), so perhaps that explains his misreading of the economy. For us folks not laughing quite so hard at his little riff out of the “Humor for Plutocrats” textbook, the real question, given the above-referenced indicators, is what in the world would it take for the Boy Wonder to finally say that the fundamentals of the economy are not sound? Does China have to start actually mailing him a monthly rental invoice for use of the White House? Does real estate have to lose fully half its value, rather than ‘merely’ 25 percent? Does the dollar need to become even more worthless than the 1930s Deutschmark for him to be concerned (“Get your wheelbarrows while they’re hot, ladies and gentlemen, right over here!”)? Or must low-hanging billionaires have to painfully downscale their lifestyles into those of impoverished multi-millionaires before he could perceive the hurt? You wanna talk fundamentals, George? Let’s talk about some really fundamental fundamentals. And, no, I don’t mean yields-per-acre, pork belly futures or worker-productivity-to-energy-input ratios, dude. There’s no question that America has historically been an industrious, innovative and hard-working country. We still are today, though the hard-working part has gotten simultaneously more hard, less rewarding, and less driven by desire for advancement than need for survival. Perhaps the paradigmatic moment of our time was Clueless George on the campaign trail in 2004, gushing over a woman he met who said she worked three jobs to keep afloat. For Bush, it was an ‘only in America’ moment – completely oblivious, as he seemed to be, that this represents almost nobody’s vision of the good life. Well, almost nobody. One imagines that Dick Cheney was smiling in the wings of that event, thinking to himself: “Once we get all of them doing that, our work here will be done!”. Nowadays, no industrialized country in the world has workers who put in more hours per year than the US. None has such a glaring absence of economic support programs as America does, either. But we’ve worked hard here, historically, like the good Protestants we are, and we’ve been technologically innovative and admirably determined in achieving our far-reaching aspirations. That’s all good stuff, but just the same, though, there’s been an undeniable dark side to the phenomenal success of the American economy. We’ve worked hard to produce a lot, true, but we’ve also – in a word – stolen a lot as well. We stole from indentured servants from the beginning. We stole from Native Americans within minutes of landing here, and never stopped until we’d grabbed all the land and resources we wanted, leaving them casinos and poverty in return. We harnessed yokes around Africans and imported them as if they were agricultural beasts of burden, and continued to do so for centuries. We built our economic accomplishments on the backs of near-slave immigrant laborers, from Chinese coolies to Mexican wetbacks, along with Irish, Italian, German, Jewish and a whole lot of other nationalities in-between. We stole fully half of Mexico following a trumped-up war no less bogus than the current one in Iraq, then we did the same for Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines and more. We broke the backs of labor movements in order to enrich a few owners while grinding ‘human resources’ into impoverishment and early death. We exploited the entire continent-and-a-half of Latin America, installing local dictators in country after country who got personally wealthy by doing the oppressive and murderous dirty work for American resource extraction corporations. We assigned to women endless domestic chores without the slightest compensation, nor political power, nor even ownership of family wealth. These are the obvious thefts – and there is no more accurate word for it – by which we’ve massively enhanced our wealth over a period of centuries. But there are less obvious ones as well. We have raped the environment for precisely the same purposes. You can get a lot wealthier a lot faster by not concerning yourself (or even paying compensation for) the environmental destruction caused by manufacturing, mining, drilling and more, than you would by having to be responsible for those very real costs of your enterprise. Economists like to gently refer to such factors as ‘externalities’. That’s a polite way to describe a process by which the rich get even richer through offloading the costs of their business to you and me, and keeping the profits for themselves. Not content with any of that, however, we’ve also lately been engaged in other, new and improved, more subtle forms of national wealth theft. Rampant consumerism based on little plastic cards is quite effective, leaving costs to others, like our children. So is – as exhausted consumerism now heads for the ditch – turning our houses into piggy banks to keep an economy artificially afloat, until that can no longer be sustained either. Or running incredible trade deficits, or radically deflating the value of our currency to keep sales of American goods abroad halfway viable. Another nice trick you can do is run up the national debt and leave that to your kids as well. You can also ignore your infrastructural repair and development needs so people can party on now, instead of paying the taxes necessary to keep the economy strong for the next generation. Talk about eating your young. One of the best of all these games over last decades has been the uninhibited agenda of economic globalization which has now managed to successfully export American white collar jobs to India, right behind the blue collar ones that previously went to China. That was supposed to make us all richer, remember? Some people indeed are. Those without jobs, or working for half what they used to make, aren’t in that small group however. What all of these ploys have in common is that they are all methods allowing one to live larger than we’re rightfully entitled to. Slavery is the most obvious example. You wanna live the good life? The most basic formula ain’t that hard to figure out. Kidnap some dude from a less technologically developed part of the world, terrorize him with overwhelming force and psychological violence to go along with the real kind, then watch as he plows your field while you sit on the porch sipping Mint Juleps. Then, repeat. This is the most obvious example, yes, but really no different in principle from ripping off your own kids with tax ‘cuts’ unaccompanied by spending cuts, which drive up the national debt and hand the next generation the bill. Plus interest. Or stealing in the form of externalizing costs for remediating environmental destruction while the eco-evildoers go off scot-free with grossly inflated profits (indeed, in some cases, these would be non-existent profits, were the real costs to have been factored in). And so on, and so on. The work of Reaganism-Bushism is nowadays finally beginning to be recognized for what it is. Americans have not felt such economic insecurity since the Great Depression. Whether the epiphany will come in time for them to finally recognize and give leave to the kind folks who dismantled the Good Times of previous generations, is unclear. A very possible scenario is that McCain barely wins in November – on the strength of fear, racism and the usual Rovian smear tactics – literally just months before economic anxiety finally crests over into newfound consciousness and rage. That would feel like a giant version of 2005, when Americans were frightened into re-electing the Little Tyrant, and almost immediately began to regret their choice. This was truly another paradigmatic moment, as Bush did his usual blustering performance, bragging about his mandate and the political capital he now planned to start spending. As he quickly found out when he tried to rip-off the Social Security system, and as his job approval ratings continued to sink until just about nobody other than a few crackers in the Texas Hill Country still thought he was doing a good job, the only mandate he had actually garnered was to be someone other than the cartoon caricature of a would-be president that Rove had turned John Kerry into (with the latter’s ample assistance). If McCain once again drags the spent and stinking carcass of kleptocratic robber baron public policy across the finish line in November, while the economy continues to deteriorate, he’ll have only two choices on coming to office. One would be to abandon his party once and for all in a sort of reverse version of the U-turn Francois Mitterrand famously executed, moving from socialism to mixed economy capitalism during the 1980s. McCain might actually relish that notion. He probably hates the crap he’s had to take from the bastards who rule his party nearly as much as the rest of us do. Plus he may know he’s a one-term president no matter what, so what’s he got to lose? And we know that he admires Teddy Roosevelt most of all the former presidents, and such a move would be right out of TR’s playbook. His other choice would be to continue to hew closely to right-wing orthodoxy while the ground disintegrates below our feet. This would surely please Grover Norquist and all the billionaires whose massive earnings are maybe off by ten percent lately (boo-hoo, fellas), but if he did this my guess is that the rest of the country might well turn on him with some caged-animal ferocity raging behind bared teeth. For reasons which still entirely elude me (though which nowadays probably have a lot to do with simply waiting it all out), the public massively disapproves of the Bush administration, but does nothing about it. My gut tells me, however, that having their hopes quashed once again as things get worse, and the guy they’ve just reluctantly chosen president continues the same destructive policies of doing nothing but making the rich richer, is a bridge too far. At the risk of mixing metaphors, I wouldn’t want to be John McCain on the day that particular dam breaks. But the bigger point is simply this. Americans historically did well by working hard, educating themselves and bringing clever innovation to the table. But for just as long they got really rich by stealing the extra wealth, whether from someone else’s labor, from their neighbors, from the environment in which we live, or from the future. What if there are no more piggy banks from which to steal? What happens if the US economy has finally hit the wall of remorseless reality, and can only produce what it can honestly produce? What happens to the American economy and American standards of living if all the gimmicks have been exhausted? The fire this time?

“The world is changing. The old ways will not do…It is time for a new generation of leadership.”

vidourle — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:13:10 GMT

I use the following on quote every page of Exquisite Safaris: "If you are coming to help me, you are wasting your time but if you are coming because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." -Indigenous Saying I believe it represents the exact message that Barack Obama is communicating when he asks you to believe in hope. Please consider the possibility of a world where everyone collaborates in peace. -Vidourle Learn More: http://tinyurl.com/3xjyxs ~~~~~~~ Ted Kennedy Monday January 28, 2008 So let us reject the counsels of doubt and calculation. Let us remember that when Franklin Roosevelt envisioned Social Security, he didn’t decide—no, it was too ambitious, too big a dream, too hard. When John Kennedy thought of going to the moon, he didn’t say no, it was too far, maybe we couldn’t get there and shouldn’t even try. I am convinced we can reach our goals only if we are “not petty when our cause is so great”-- only if we find a way past the stale ideas and stalemate of our times – only if we replace the politics of fear with the politics of hope – and only if we have the courage to choose change. Barack Obama is the one person running for President who can bring us that change. There was another time, when another young candidate was running for President and challenging America to cross a New Frontier. He faced public criticism from the preceding Democratic President, who was widely respected in the party. Harry Truman said we needed “someone with greater experience”—and added: “May I urge you to be patient.” And John Kennedy replied: “The world is changing. The old ways will not do…It is time for a new generation of leadership.” So it is with Barack Obama. He has lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now. I believe that a wave of change is moving across America. If we do not turn aside, if we dare to set our course for the shores of hope, we together will go beyond the divisions of the past and find our place to build the America of the future. My friends, I ask you to join in this historic journey -- to have the courage to choose change. It is time again for a new generation of leadership. It is time now for Barack Obama. Caroline Kennedy Monday January 28, 2008 "Over the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wish they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This longing is even more profound today. Fortunately, there is one candidate who offers that same sense of hope and inspiration and I am proud to endorse Senator Barack Obama for President. I am happy that two of my own children are here with me, because they were the first people who made me realize that Barack Obama is the President we need. He is already inspiring all Americans, young and old, to believe in ourselves, tying that belief to our highest ideals - ideals of hope, justice, opportunity and peace – and urging us to imagine that together we can do great things". Learn More: http://tinyurl.com/3xjyxs

Goodbye to all that.

vidourle — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:49:20 GMT

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can. The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation. This latter point is the most salient. The act of picking the next president will be in some ways a statement of America’s view of Iraq. Clinton is running as a centrist Democrat—voting for war, accepting the need for an occupation at least through her first term, while attempting to do triage as practically as possible. Obama is running as the clearer antiwar candidate. At the same time, Obama’s candidacy cannot fairly be cast as a McGovernite revival in tone or substance. He is not opposed to war as such. He is not opposed to the use of unilateral force, either—as demonstrated by his willingness to target al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani government. He does not oppose the idea of democratization in the Muslim world as a general principle or the concept of nation building as such. He is not an isolationist, as his support for the campaign in Afghanistan proves. It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war: I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars. ~~~~~ ...The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable. But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable. We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama. Learn More: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

Principles of Spiritual Activism

vidourle — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:27:43 GMT

The following principles emerged from several years' work with social change leaders in Satyana's Leading with Spirit program. We offer these not as definitive truths, but rather as key learnings and guidelines that, taken together, comprise a useful framework for "spiritual activism." 1. Transformation of motivation from anger/fear/despair to compassion/love/purpose. This is a vital challenge for today's social change movement. This is not to deny the noble emotion of appropriate anger or outrage in the face of social injustice. Rather, this entails a crucial shift from fighting against evil to working for love, and the long-term results are very different, even if the outer activities appear virtually identical. Action follows Being, as the Sufi saying goes. Thus "a positive future cannot emerge from the mind of anger and despair" (Dalai Lama). 2. Non-attachment to outcome. This is difficult to put into practice, yet to the extent that we are attached to the results of our work, we rise and fall with our successes and failures—a sure path to burnout. Hold a clear intention, and let go of the outcome—recognizing that a larger wisdom is always operating. As Gandhi said, "the victory is in the doing," not the results. Also, remain flexible in the face of changing circumstances: "Planning is invaluable, but plans are useless."(Churchill) 3. Integrity is your protection. If your work has integrity, this will tend to protect you from negative energy and circumstances. You can often sidestep negative energy from others by becoming "transparent" to it, allowing it to pass through you with no adverse effect upon you. This is a consciousness practice that might be called "psychic aikido." 4. Integrity in means and ends. Integrity in means cultivates integrity in the fruit of one's work. A noble goal cannot be achieved utilizing ignoble means. 5. Don't demonize your adversaries. It makes them more defensive and less receptive to your views. People respond to arrogance with their own arrogance, creating rigid polarization. Be a perpetual learner, and constantly challenge your own views. 6. You are unique. Find and fulfill your true calling. "It is better to tread your own path, however humbly, than that of another, however successfully." (Bhagavad Gita) 7. Love thy enemy. Or at least, have compassion for them. This is a vital challenge for our times. This does not mean indulging falsehood or corruption. It means moving from "us/them" thinking to "we" consciousness, from separation to cooperation, recognizing that we human beings are ultimately far more alike than we are different. This is challenging in situations with people whose views are radically opposed to yours. Be hard on the issues, soft on the people. 8. Your work is for the world, not for you. In doing service work, you are working for others. The full harvest of your work may not take place in your lifetime, yet your efforts now are making possible a better life for future generations. Let your fulfillment come in gratitude for being called to do this work, and from doing it with as much compassion, authenticity, fortitude, and forgiveness as you can muster. 9. Selfless service is a myth. In serving others, we serve our true selves. "It is in giving that we receive." We are sustained by those we serve, just as we are blessed when we forgive others. As Gandhi says, the practice of satyagraha ("clinging to truth") confers a "matchless and universal power" upon those who practice it. Service work is enlightened self-interest, because it cultivates an expanded sense of self that includes all others. 10. Do not insulate yourself from the pain of the world. Shielding yourself from heartbreak prevents transformation. Let your heart break open, and learn to move in the world with a broken heart. As Gibran says, "Your pain is the medicine by which the physician within heals thyself." When we open ourselves to the pain of the world, we become the medicine that heals the world. This is what Gandhi understood so deeply in his principles of ahimsa and satyagraha. A broken heart becomes an open heart, and genuine transformation begins. 11. What you attend to, you become. Your essence is pliable, and ultimately you become that which you most deeply focus your attention upon. You reap what you sow, so choose your actions carefully. If you constantly engage in battles, you become embattled yourself. If you constantly give love, you become love itself. 12. Rely on faith, and let go of having to figure it all out. There are larger 'divine' forces at work that we can trust completely without knowing their precise workings or agendas. Faith means trusting the unknown, and offering yourself as a vehicle for the intrinsic benevolence of the cosmos. "The first step to wisdom is silence. The second is listening." If you genuinely ask inwardly and listen for guidance, and then follow it carefully—you are working in accord with these larger forces, and you become the instrument for their music. 13. Love creates the form. Not the other way around. The heart crosses the abyss that the mind creates, and operates at depths unknown to the mind. Don't get trapped by "pessimism concerning human nature that is not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature, or you will overlook the cure of grace." (Martin Luther King) Let your heart's love infuse your work and you cannot fail, though your dreams may manifest in ways different from what you imagine. http://www.satyana.org/principles.html

Trust the US Government?

vidourle — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 06:38:37 GMT

Areas of Continental U.S. crossed by 3 or more nuclear clouds, 1951-62. Reprinted with permission of Richard L. Miller, Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing. Nevada Test Site on Google Earth: http://snipurl.com/1vq61 Fallout from the April 25, 1953 test named Simon blanketed upstate New York during a particularly violent rainstorm. During the storm, scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York documented alarmingly high levels of radioactive fallout. **** 8 months later my grandfather died from a fast moving cancer in Troy, New York. His wife, my grandmother died from cancer in 1972. In a town nearby my cousin, died at 12 from a brain tumor in 1978. Her mother from breast cancer in 1983. ***** Simon's picture: http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/LANL/image59.shtml Learn More: Chapter 1: Thunderstorm in Troy, New York http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/SFchp1.html ON MONDAY MORNING, April 27, 1953, the small group of students in Professor Herbert Clark's radiochemistry class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute walked into the metal shack that served as their laboratory, located high on a hill overlooking the city of Troy in upper New York State. The students set about making preparations for the day's experiments, but then Professor Clark interrupted to draw their attention to something unusual. All the Geiger counters were registering radiation at many times the natural rate. Since instruments nearest the outer walls were giving the highest readings, several students immediately went outside with a portable Geiger counter. At once they found that wherever they walked, the count rate on the ground was far above normal, in some places a thousand times as high. In particular, beneath the spout of the gutters that carried the rainwater down off the roof of the shack, the needle gave a disconcertingly high reading. Evidently the previous night's heavy rains had brought down large amounts of radioactivity. Dr. Clark quickly guessed the source. Such high readings could only have come from heavy deposits of fallout, the drifting clouds of radioactive debris created by the explosion of a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere. To verify his guess, he phoned John Harley, a friend and former colleague who now worked for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Health and Safety Laboratory in New York City. As one of Dr. Clark's students recalled the story many years later, Harley's first reaction was that Clark must be kidding, and, expressing amused disbelief, he hung up. But a few minutes later, New York called back. Dr. Clark summarized the details of the morning's measurements: how the count rate from the gamma radiation on the ground was anywhere from ten to five hundred times normal, how the activity from beta rays had gone up even more, and how "hot spots" beneath rainspouts and in puddles on the pavement showed still higher readings, much higher than he had ever observed after other nuclear tests, when it had been hard to measure any additional radioactivity at all. Thoroughly alarmed, the director of the New York Laboratory, Dr. Merrill Eisenbud, promised to check personally into the situation, to send some of his top people to make their own measurements on the spot, and to take any steps that might be called for to protect the public health. For, as Dr. Clark had just learned, there had indeed been a recent atomic bomb test, conducted by the AEC in Nevada two days earlier. The bomb, code-named Simon and equivalent in power to 43,000 tons of TNT, had been detonated in the atmosphere some 300 feet above the desert. The upper portion of the mushroom cloud had reached an altitude of about 30,000 or 40,000 feet and then drifted 2300 miles across the United States in a northeasterly direction, passing high over Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania before it encountered a severe thunderstorm in progress over most of upstate New York, southern Vermont, and parts of Massachusetts. The storm was an extraordinarily violent one, accompanied by extremely high winds, hail, and torrential rains that flooded streets and basements, undermined foundations, and caused heavy damage to trees and houses. It was one of the heaviest flash storms Dr. Clark could remember. The sudden cloudburst, he surmised, had probably brought much of the fallout down in concentrated form. Dr. Clark quickly put his students to work in an effort to determine just how serious and widespread the danger might be. Students set out with portable radiation detectors and began measuring the radioactivity on the pavement, on pieces of cloth, on asphalt roof shingles, on burdock leaves and other vegetation -- any place it would be likely to collect and adhere. Samples were also taken of water from reservoirs and household taps. Within a matter of hours the students were reporting back from such nearby towns and cities as Watervliet, Mechanicville, Saratoga Springs, Albany, and Schenectady that everywhere the radiation levels were about the same as on the campus. Typical readings were twenty to a hundred times normal, with hot spots up to ten times higher than that. Now knowing the radiation levels as well as the source and age of the fallout, Dr. Clark could calculate that during the next ten weeks the total gamma radiation dose to the population from the radioactivity in the environment would be, on the average, roughly equivalent to that received from a typical diagnostic X-ray exposure. This was reassuring, since such a dose was not very different from what most people in the world receive each year from the naturally occurring cosmic rays that penetrate the earth's atmosphere. And it was well below the maximum permissible dose limits set by government agencies. However, there was also the high radioactivity in the rainwater, which was certain to contaminate the reservoirs and thus the tap water. The samples of rainwater collected from a puddle on the campus had shown a radioactivity level of 270,000 microcuries per liter, thousands of times higher than the maximum levels then permitted by AEC standards, which were set at 100 microcuries per liter. Normal drinking water usually had an activity of about 1 microcurie per liter. There was, accordingly, much apprehension among the students until the samples of actual drinking water from the taps and reservoirs could be analyzed early the next day. When this was done, the first of the tap water samples, taken Monday night, showed an activity of 2630 microcuries per liter -- not as great as was feared, yet still well in excess of the limit. But by that evening, the same tap gave a sample with a greatly decreased activity of 1210 per liter, while samples from nearby Tomhannock Reservoir ranged from 580 to 960. The radioactive rain was evidently becoming heavily diluted in the reservoir before reaching the taps in the households of Troy. Thus, all concerned were greatly relieved that the total radiation doses received by the populace would probably turn out to be relatively small. It would not be necessary to filter the drinking water or decontaminate the streets and rooftops by means of elaborate and costly scrubbing procedures, a monumental task in view of the tenacity with which the radioactivity had been found to cling to rough surfaces such as pavement, asphalt shingles, and burdock leaves, and especially to porous materials like paper and cloth. Dr. Clark and his students found that even treatment with hot, concentrated hydrochloric acid -- an extreme method -- was only partially effective in removing the radioactivity from the objects to which it clung. The class also conducted tests to determine the strength of this radioactivity. Surprisingly, they found that it was comparable to that reported the previous year by the AEC's New York Laboratory for fallout in desert areas only 200 to 500 miles from the point of detonation at the Nevada test site itself. But the possible health effects of any internal doses that might result from eating, drinking, or breathing the radioactivity were considered negligible by the New York State Health Department and the AEC. And so it was decided that nothing further need be done. An editorial in the local newspaper expressed some concern, but soon the whole incident was forgotten. Meanwhile, however, Dr. Clark, under contract to the AEC, continued to monitor the levels of radioactivity in the reservoirs, while AEC physicists, using an extremely sensitive gamma-ray detector mounted in an airplane, conducted extensive surveys of the entire region. Detailed reports on the findings were written by the staff of the New York Lab, but, since they were classified "secret," the public never learned of their contents. All that appeared was the following brief statement in the 14th Semi-Annual Report of the Atomic Energy Commission for the first half of 1953: After one detonation, unusually heavy fallout was noted as far from Nevada as the Troy-Albany area in New York. Following a heavy rain in that area on the second day after the detonation, the concentration of radioactivity was from 100 to 200 curies per square mile. It is estimated that this level of radioactivity would result in about 0.1 roentgen exposure for the first 13 weeks following the fallout. The exposure has no significance in relation to health. One fact the AEC did not announce, and the general public did not learn, since it was later published by Dr. Clark in the obscure, highly specialized Journal of the American Water Works Association, was that, as the AEC continued its nuclear testing in Nevada during the spring of 1953, further rainouts repeatedly raised the radioactivity in the reservoirs serving Troy to levels comparable to those measured by Dr. Clark and his students the morning after the "Simon" rainout in April. Excerpted: Chapter 4: A Ray of Hope http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/SFchp4.html BY THE SPRING of 1963, when the article finally appeared in Science, the levels of radioactivity in milk were reaching unprecedented heights all over the United States. Extreme concern was being voiced both by scientists and the general public regardless of the repeated reassurances by local public health officials and the AEC that no danger existed. The intensified pressure began to penetrate to the highest levels of government, and in June 1963 President John F. Kennedy announced that this country, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain had agreed to negotiate a treaty to end all atmospheric testing. He further stated that he had ordered an end to all such testing by the United States. In July the President delivered an address to the nation in which he urged the ratification of the treaty by the U.S. Senate. In this address, he referred to the threat of fallout as follows: . . . the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards, but this is not a natural health hazard -- and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby -- who may be born long after we are gone -- should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent. It appeared that the issues involved in the question of fallout hazards were at last receiving widespread public recognition. In Congress, hearings on low-level radiation effects were being held by the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and for the first time citizens' groups and private scientists with no government affiliations were invited to testify on this subject. In August I received a letter from John T. Conway, executive director of the Joint Committee, requesting my presence at the hearings. Leafing through the transcript of the first half of the hearings held in June, I found a reprint of my Science article. It was followed by a lengthy critique prepared by the AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine. On examination, the AEC critique proved to be strikingly similar in wording and theme to the negative review for Science. It denied that any effects from low-level radiation had been proven to exist, stating that I had ignored the studies which showed no effects. The AEC critique, however, went further and cited figures showing an actual reduction in childhood cancer rates after the heavy atmospheric testing in 1957. But the figures were only for children who were less than two years old when they died, a peculiar restriction, since Stewart and MacMahon had specifically demonstrated that cancer caused by the irradiation of unborn children only showed up after the age of two. No figures for older children were given by the AEC.... Knapp wrote a report containing these conclusions in 1960, but the AEC did not release his report for publication until August 16, 1963, just a few days before the second half of the Joint Committee hearings began, by which time it was evident that the independent scientists from Utah and St. Louis were going to make public their own similar findings. Thus, during the entire early effort to achieve a test-ban treaty, this shocking and vital information was kept from the people and political leaders of the world, while hundreds of megatons of bombs were exploded by the U.S. and Russia during 1961-62. And since Knapp's report had not even been made public by the AEC and the Joint Committee by the time of the first half of the low-level radiation hearings in June of 1963, it had still been possible for the AEC to mislead Congress and the public until just before the end. From page 225 of the proceedings of the June hearings: REPRESENTATIVE HOLIFIELD: And the testimony before this committee has been that tolerable permission dose has not been reached by the amount of radiation that comes from manmade fallout radiation, is that not true? DR HARLEY: Yes, Sir. Dr. Harley was John Harley, the former colleague whom Professor Clark had telephoned at the time of the Albany-Troy incident. At that time a scientist with the AEC's Health and Safety Laboratory in New York City, Harley had since become head of the lab, which had been responsible for the classified reports on the Troy fallout during the spring of 1953. Excerpted: Chapter 5: The Evidence Begins to Emerge http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/SFchp5.html The data consisted of a table that included all reported fatal leukemia cases among children under fifteen years of age in the Albany-Troy-Schenectady area between 1952 and 1962, together with the years in which these children were born. Examination of the table showed that, beginning in the fourth to fifth years after the 1953 rainout, the yearly number of reported leukemia cases quadrupled. This was strikingly similar to the delay in onset observed in the studies of Stewart and MacMahon and among the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the Troy area, after the eighth year, the number of cases began to decline once more, as they also did in the two Japanese cities. During the years 1952-55, before any radiation-caused leukemia cases would be expected to appear, there were a total of nine cases among children under age ten for whom the data was complete. During the years of expected peak incidence, 1959-62, there were a total of thirty cases. Statistical estimates demonstrated that the chances were less than one in a billion that this increase of twenty-one cases could be regarded as purely accidental. And when the cases were examined according to the year of birth, there was a very noticeable sudden increase in leukemia among the children born in 1953 and 1954, the period when the fallout radiation would have been strongest. When grouped in two-year periods, the figures in Lade's table for children under ten showed the following: Birth Years No. of Cases ----------- ------------ 1943-44 4 1945 46 5 1947-48 8 1949-50 5 1951-52 6 1953-54 13 Excerpted: Chapter 7: Death before Birth http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/SFchp7.html "But when I reached 1964, I found the most extraordinary figure of all. In a single year the number of reported fetal deaths in New York State had jumped by 1500 cases. After this it declined once more -- the exact same pattern as in the Troy area. In the single year 1964, then, there must have been some ten times this number of reported cases, or, ten to fifteen thousand additional children lost by miscarriage or stillbirth in New York State alone. This tremendous steplike increase for the entire state was clearly connected with the 1961-62 test series, from which large peaks in iodine and other short-lived radioactivity resulted when the spring rains came down in 1963. Unlike the local rainouts of the 1950s, the fallout from these extremely large tests came down much more uniformly over large areas of New York State. Thus there would have been few, if any, unexposed sections, and the state as a whole would show the kind of sharp increases that earlier had been seen only in localities like Albany-Troy. But could this extraordinary figure be the result of some statistical fluctuation, or a sudden improvement in reporting methods that happened to coincide exactly with the period of the highest fallout levels ever recorded? There was one way to check this very quickly. Unlike the number of fetal deaths, more than 95 percent of all live births are reported to the public health authorities, since nearly all of them take place in hospitals. So if there had really been an increase of some 15,000 fetal deaths in New York State in 1964, then there would have to have been a corresponding sudden drop in the number of children born live the following year. And this is exactly what happened. For 1962, the total live births in New York State were listed as 354,152. For 1963, the number had increased to 355,760. For 1964, there was a drop to 351,602. But for 1965, there was a sudden decline to 335,628. This was a drop of 15,974 live births, or almost exactly the number of babies lost in 1964 through stillbirth or miscarriage. The rise in fetal deaths must therefore have been real. It was imperative to make still another test. New York State in the early 1960s was more or less typical of the United States as a whole with respect to the levels of fallout in milk, food, and water. Therefore, the entire country should have shown the same effect: some ten to fifteen times as many fetal deaths in 1964, and a corresponding sharp drop in live births in 1965. It took only a few minutes to find the figures for the children born live in the United States during these years. For 1964 the number was 4,027,000, and for 1965 it had declined to 3,760,000, a sudden drop of 267,000, the sharpest single decline in the entire history of the United States. And for the entire country the year before, fetal deaths showed a corresponding jump. It seemed that if there had been about twenty times as many bombs detonated during the 1961-62 test series, there would probably not have been many children born live in 1965.... Excerpted: Chapter 18: Too Little Information Too Late -Three Mile Island http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/SFchp18.html But in which direction was the wind blowing during the period of highest release rates? Was there any way to find out how much was coming out at any given moment? After all, according to a story sent out by the Washington Post News Service and published on April 22, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had been told by one of its staff people, Albert Gibson, that the radiation monitors in the stack went off scale on the morning of the accident. Thus, in answer to Commissioner Victor Gilinsky's question, "So we don't really know what went up," Gibson replied, "That's correct." The story went on to say that as much as 365 millirems per hour of beta and gamma radiation were recorded on the ground some 1000 feet from the stack, and a helicopter had recorded three times this level in the air over the vent, confirming once again that the dose rates were far higher than the public had been told at the Senate hearings when the beta radiation that accounts for most of the internal dose from inhaled gases is taken into account. But Gibson went on to say that "those measurements were very inconclusive," and that "without knowing the precise weather patterns, we don't know if they were made at the appropriate locations." However, leafing through the report of Met Ed's environmental consultants, I found that these were all completely misleading statements. Contrary to what the NRC commissioners and the public were being told, there were radiation monitoring instruments in the plant that never went off scale, namely in the auxiliary building, whose readings were directly related to the amount of radioactive gas being released. Here was the way the utility's consultants described how it was possible to know how much gas was being released every moment: Strip chart records from all noble gas radiation monitors in the plant ventilation exhaust show no significant radiation levels during the first three hours of the accident. Since these monitors are in the most probable pathway for release, it is concluded that no significant releases occurred before 0700 March 28. Shortly after 0700, however, these monitors, which are designed to read normal low levels, indicated rapidly increasing radiation concentrations. Within a few minutes, they went off scale on the high side. At about the same time, the in-plant building area monitors which measure radiation levels inside the fuel handling and auxiliary buildings began to record increasing levels from about 1 milliroentgen to 100 milliroentgen per hour at 0740. At about 0900 the readings began to increase again to reach about 100 milliroentgen per hour at 1000 hours. They continued to fluctuate at high levels for about four days. One or more of these area monitors continued to read on scale during the course of the accident. The report went on to explain in detail that by means of these measuring instruments it was possible to know what went out the stack because: . . . radiation levels measured by area monitors in the auxiliary and fuel handling buildings are proportional to the rate at which airborne gamma activity was released to the environment . . . In table after table and chart after chart, the releases and gamma radiation doses in different directions were worked out in detail. For every hour of the accident from 4 A.M. on March 28 until midnight of the fourth day, the readings of the area monitors were given together with the hourly wind direction and wind speeds. It showed that during the period of highest releases, from 10 A.M. on Wednesday the 28th to 7 A.M. on Thursday the 29th, the winds were blowing north, northwest, and west at 6 to 9 miles per hour, sending the radioactive gas toward upstate New York and western Pennsylvania. Only later, when the rate of release had decreased tenfold, did the winds shift briefly to the south, becoming more variable thereafter. By the time the winds were blowing toward the northeast on Saturday, the fourth day of the accident, the intensity had dropped to less than one-twentieth of its peak value, thus largely sparing the most densely populated areas of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York City. No wonder the NRC staff did not want to let the public know that they knew exactly in which direction the most radioactive clouds had moved, since this information could then be used to tie any later localized rises in fetal deaths, infant mortality, and cancer to the radioactive gas clouds from Three Mile Island. In fact, I remembered only too well the attempts of some of the same individuals formerly working for the AEC to discredit my findings on the rises of infant mortality across the southeastern United States following the first nuclear-bomb test at Alamogordo by claiming that the winds were not blowing in that direction. And they certainly did not want any of this to become known before the Kemeny Commission was scheduled to complete its report in early November. Once again, as in the case of the Nevada tests, it was essential to keep such knowledge from the public and the scientific community at large. The NRC, the EPA, and all the other federal and state agencies knew full well that the doses were comparable with those experienced by the people of Utah, Montana, Wyoming, and the other states across the northern United States as far as New York and New England during the period of the Nevada tests, or for releases from some of the largest and most heavily emitting reactors, such as Millstone in New London, Connecticut, over a period of a year or two. SECRET FALLOUT Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass http://www.ratical.org/radiation/SecretFallout/SF.html#TOC "Professor Sternglass's courageous voice has helped keep alive the debate on the health effects of low-level radiation, a debate that the military, the nuclear industry, and even some biologists and physicians have tried to bury. His new book, Secret Fallout: Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island, is an important new contribution to that debate and should be required reading for all who are concerned with their own health, the health of their children, and of their children's children." Victor W. Sidel, M.D. Professor and Chairperson Department of Social Medicine Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center Albert Einstein College of Medicine Dr. Ernest Sternglass is Professor of Radiology, specializing in radiological physics, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, as well as Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is past president of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Federation of American Scientists, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Radiological Society of North America and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. He has testified on low-level radiation before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and many other groups both here and abroad. Introduction by Dr. George Wald, Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine, is Professor of Biology at Harvard.

New York Times on Philanthropic Travel

vidourle — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 19:00:04 GMT

When a Luxury Vacation Cultivates Philanthropy by Jennifer Alsever -New York Times Sunday December 9, 2007 Doing charity work while on vacation no longer has to mean backbreaking labor and dorm-like accommodations. A new kind of philanthropic travel lets wealthy vacationers do good works while still enjoying plush hotel suites and fine restaurants. More luxury tour operators now offer philanthropic-minded trips to places like Kenya, Cambodia and Vietnam that incorporate visits to local schools, hospitals or wildlife centers. Travelers also go on traditional sightseeing tours and safaris that may cost $300 to $1,000 a day, not including airfare. Even in remote African plains, tour operators pamper guests, who may stay in deluxe cottages with all the amenities. Travelers may leave those accommodations for part of their stay to visit charitable operations and get a first-hand look at how financial donations can be put to work. "Just one person can make a world of difference for a community," said David Chamberlain, owner of Exquisite Safaris, a tour operator based in San Francisco that offers top-of-the-line services while incorporating visits to schools, health clinics and neighborhoods with hopes that clients will make a donation or become more involved. The idea is that travelers who meet the people and see how they live can become long-term, passionate donors and proponents for change. Not surprisingly, nonprofits are lining up to become part of such tours, with the hope that wealthy vacationers may be more willing to make long-term financial commitments long after the trip is over. For many years, international aid groups organized their own tours for big supporters. "Those people who have actually been in the field are our biggest donors," said Lisa Giaretto, managing director of the Village Enterprise Fund, a group based in San Carlos, Calif., that offers entrepreneurship training to people in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Next July, the Village Enterprise Fund will be part of Exquisite Safaris tours of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Guests will visit farmers, tailors and bike-repair workers who have benefited from training by Village Enterprise. Chuck Ebeling, a retired vice president of the McDonald's Corporation, had a similar goal when he took a nine-day tour of Tanzania in the spring of 2006. He paid $500 a day to stay in a tented camp where a chef prepared dinners and staff members delivered coffee at dawn. His trip inspired him to become involved in the country's wildlife conservation efforts and led him to pay $500 to help a conservation group raise a bongo, a rare mountain antelope, with the goal of reintroducing it into the wild. Some travelers who work charity into their trips prefer to rough it alongside the people they are helping. However, "I don't just travel to help others," said Mr. Ebeling, 64. "I enjoy some of the comforts and luxuries. I enjoy seeing the world. And the experience in east Africa was eye-opening." John Kay, the lead singer of the band Steppenwolf, came home from a luxury 2003 vacation to Cambodia so inspired that he started his own charity, the Maue Kay Foundation. Mr. Kay, who lives in West Vancouver, British Columbia, was struck by the lingering devastation from Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, which left 1.7 million people dead in the late 1970s. He donated $50,000 to build a primary school there with its own water well and vegetable garden, and he also paid for teacher salaries, books and computers with satellite e-mail access. Later, Mr. Kay and his wife, Jutta Maue Kay, gave thousands of dollars more to support the Gijedabung school, to protect African wildlife and to support food banks in Puerto Rico. "The old cliche that travel broadens the mind is very true," Mr. Kay said. "We were able to have a glimpse of certain things that go beyond staying in a hotel and a day excursion." http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/new_york_times_philanthropic_travelers/

Empowering Feminine Energy: Travelers Philanthropy

vidourle — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 07:01:35 GMT

<- Future President of a free Burma So often in our world we tend to think of strength as a quality that arises from a place of firm determination and a will to succeed no matter the cost. Even though we might want to think of a strong woman as being defined in this way, what really makes a woman confident is her capacity for listening to her true self and being able to call upon her feminine wisdom to any situation that may arise. A woman does not need to step into an assertive role or act like a man in order to be effective at what she does -she simply needs to get in touch with her insight and sense of compassion to truly demonstrate the depth of her strength. Listening to the feminine side of ourselves may not seem easy at first for this type of energy is something that is often overlooked in many aspects of our everyday lives. If we can connect with this part of who we are, however, we will find that there is an unlimited wellspring of strength available to us. Our capacity to tap into our intuition and listen to our inner guides, to take into account the needs of those around us, and to view a situation with compassion and love are ways that we can show the world the true power that is part of our feminine nature. When we learn to integrate this source of strength into our daily tasks and decision-making, we will find that we can be more flexible and open to the things that happen around us and more receptive to new ideas. Not only will we see the world in a different light, but we will truly start to realize the potential for this form of energy to both empower ourselves and those around us. As we cultivate our feminine energy we can redefine the meaning of strength. By embracing our feminine power as something that is strong in its own right, we are able to use it with true assurance and determination and draw upon what truly belongs to us. Learn More: http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/empowering_feminine_energy_travelers_philanthropy/

Approaching the Omega Point..

vidourle — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:29:36 GMT

xlr8r "Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire." -Teilhard de Chardin There are times when we share with others a special, fully interconnected consciousness. When great music thrills us, or we are mutually inspired by an awesome sunset, or when we fall in love, we are transported temporarily into a shared world which is remarkable. This state of true intermingling is rare, for most of us, but it is experiential, and that means we know it for what it is; we feel it immediately as real and filled with meaning. When such an experience is past and we return to our normal, separated perceptions, the experience becomes a vulnerable memory, and our educated personality may reject the consciousness that knew this deeper connection. Yet, the suspicion remains that there is something of mind that is not just inside our heads. We feel interconnected with each other and the world in a profound and important way. We know at some level that we are not isolated, but interdependent, so that a subtle energy of mine can reach out and mingle with yours, allowing us to share a moment that is important to both of us. If we think of this potential extending beyond the two of us to a world full of living beings, we have the foundation for a model for global consciousness. Maybe, as Teilhard de Chardin believed, the world ultimately needs that shared consciousness and is actively growing toward it. The research described here points to subtle indications that we do live in an interconnected, potentially conscious world, in which we surely play an important role. We have shown immense capacities for both destructive and creative impact, and this implies that the future is ours to mold. It will be a desirable future in proportion to our level of consciousness, individually and globally.

The Meadow Across the Creek

vidourle — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:27:30 GMT

I was a young person then, some twelve years old. My family was moving from a more settled part of a Southern town out to the edge of town where the new house was still being built. The house, not yet finished, was situated on a slight incline. Down below was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in May when I first looked down over the scene and saw the meadow. The field was covered with lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something, I know not what, that seems to explain my life at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in an otherwise clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do. Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet, as the years pass, this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes that I have given my efforts to, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life. This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion and whatever. That is good in economics that fosters the natural processes of this meadow. That is bad in economics that diminishes the capacity of this meadow to renew itself each spring and to provide a setting in which crickets can sing and birds can feed. Such meadows, I would later learn, are themselves in a continuing process of transformation. Yet these evolving biosystems deserve the opportunity to be themselves and to express their own inner qualities. As in economics so in jurisprudence and law and political affairs: That is good which recognizes the rights of this meadow and the creek and the woodlands beyond to exist and flourish in their ever-renewing seasonal expression even while larger processes shape the bioregion in the larger sequence of transformations. Religion too, it seems to me, takes its origin here in the deep mystery of this setting. The more a person thinks of the infinite number of interrelated activities taking place here the more mysterious in all becomes, the more meaning a person finds in the Maytime blooming of the lilies, the more awestruck a person might be in simply looking out over this little patch of meadowland. It had none of the majesty of the Appalachian or the Western mountains, none of the immensity or the power of oceans, nor even the harsh magnificence of desert country; yet in this little meadow the magnificence of life as celebration is manifested in a manner as profound and as impressive as any other place that I have known in these past many years. It seems to me we all had such experiences before we entered into an industrial way of life. The universe as manifestation of some primordial grandeur was recognized as the ultimate referent in any human understanding of the wonderful yet fearsome world about us. Every being achieved its full identity by its alignment with the universe itself. With indigenous peoples of the North American continent every formal activity was first situated in relation to the six directions of the universe: the four cardinal directions combined with the heavens above and Earth below. Only thus could any human activity be fully validated. The universe was the world of meaning in these earlier times, the basic referent in social order, in economic survival, in the healing of illness. In that wide ambiance the muses dwelled whence came the inspiration of poetry and art and music. The drum, heartbeat of the universe itself, established the rhythm of dance whereby humans entered into the very movement of the natural world. The numinous dimension of the universe impressed itself upon the mind through the vastness of the heavens and the power revealed in thunder and lightning, as well as through springtime renewal of life after the desolation of winter. Then, too, the general helplessness of the human before all the threats to survival revealed the intimate dependence of the human on the integral functioning of things. That the human had such intimate rapport with the surrounding universe was possible only because the universe itself had a prior intimate rapport with the human. This experience we observe even now in the indigenous peoples of the world. They live in a universe, in a cosmological order, whereas we, the peoples of the industrial world, no longer live in a universe. We live in a political world, a nation, a business world, an economic order, a cultural tradition, in Disneyworld. We live in cities, in a world of concrete and steel, of wheels and wires, a world of business, of work. We no longer see the stars at night or the planets or the moon. Even in the day we do not experience the sun in any immediate or meaningful manner. Summer and winter are the same inside the mall. Ours is a world of highways, parking lots, shopping centers. We read books written with a strangely contrived alphabet. We no longer read the book of the universe. Nor do we coordinate our world of human meaning with the meaning of our surroundings. We have disengaged from that profound interaction with our environment inherent in our very nature. Our children do not learn how to read the Great Book of Nature or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens. We have indeed become strange beings so completely are we at odds with the planet that brought us into being. We dedicate enormous talent and knowledge and research to developing a human order disengaged from and even predatory on the very sources whence we came and upon which we depend at every moment of our existence. We initiate our children into an economic order based on exploitation of the natural life systems of the planet. To achieve this perspective we must first make them autistic in their relation with the natural world about them. This disconnection occurs quite simply since we ourselves have become insensitive toward the natural world and do not realize just what we are doing. Yet, if we observe our children closely in their early years and see how they are instinctively attracted to the experiences of the natural world about them, we will see how disorientated they become in the mechanistic and even toxic environment that we provide for them. To recover an integral relation with the universe, planet Earth, and North America needs to be a primary concern for the peoples of this continent. While a new alignment of our government and all our institutions and professions with the continent itself in its deep structure and functioning cannot be achieved immediately, a beginning can be made throughout our educational programs. Especially in the earlier grades of elementary school new developments are possible. Such was the thought of Maria Montessori in the third decade of this century. In speaking about the education of the six-year-old child, Maria notes in her book To Educate the Human Potential that only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin. For the universe, she says, "is an imposing reality." It is "an answer to all questions." "We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity." This it is that enables "the mind of the child to become centered, to stop wandering in an aimless quest for knowledge." Then the writer mentions how this experience of the universe creates in the child admiration and wonder and enables the child to unify its thinking. In this manner the child learns how all things are related and how the relationship of things to each other is so close that "No matter what we touch, an atom or a cell, we cannot explain it without knowledge of the wide universe." The difficulty is that with the rise of the modern sciences we began to think of the universe as a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects. We frequently identify the loss of the interior spirit-world of the human mind and emotions with the rise of modern mechanistic sciences. The more significant thing, however, is that we have lost the universe itself. We achieved extensive control over the mechanistic and even the biological functioning of the natural world, but this control itself has produced deadly consequences. We have not only controlled the planet in much of its basic functioning; we have, to an extensive degree, extinguished the life systems themselves. We have silenced so many of those wonderful voices of the universe that once spoke to us of the grand mysteries of existence. We no longer hear the voices of the rivers or the mountains, or the voices of the sea. The trees and meadows are no longer intimate modes of spirit presence. Everything about us has become an "it" rather than a "thou." We continue to make music, write poetry, and do our painting and sculpture and architecture, but these activities easily become an aesthetic expression simply of the human and in time lose the intimacy and radiance and awesome qualities of the universe itself. We have, in the accepted universe of these times, little capacity for participating in mysteries celebrated in the earlier literary and artistic and religious modes of expression. For we could no longer live in the universe in which these were written. We could only look on, as it were. Yet the universe is so bound into the aesthetic experience, into poetry and music and art and dance, that we cannot entirely avoid the implicit dimensions of the natural world, even when we think of art as "representational" or "impressionist" or "expressionist" or as "personal statement." However we think of our art or literature, its power is there in the wonder communicated most directly by the meadow or the mountains or the sea or by the stars in the night. Of special significance is our capacity for celebration which inevitably brings us into the rituals that coordinate human affairs with the great liturgy of the universe. Our national holidays, political events, heroic human deeds: These are all quite worthy of celebration, but ultimately, unless they are associated with some more comprehensive level of meaning, they tend toward the affected, the emotional, and the ephemeral. In the political and legal orders we have never been able to give up invocation of the more sublime dimensions of the universe to witness the truth of what we say. This we observe especially in court trials, in inaugural ceremonies, and in the assumption of public office at whatever level. We still have an instinctive awe and reverence and even a certain fear of the larger world that always lies outside the range of our human controls. Even when we recognize the psychic world of the human we make everything referent to the human as the ultimate source of meaning and value, although this mode of thinking has led to catastrophe for ourselves as well as for a multitude of other beings. Yet in recent times we begin to recognize that the universe itself is, in the phenomenal order, the only self-referent mode of being. All other modes of being, including the human, in their existence and in their functioning are universe-referent. This fact has been recognized through the centuries in the rituals of the various traditions. From paleolithic times humans have coordinated their ritual celebrations with various transformation moments of the natural world. Ultimately the universe, throughout its vast extent in space and its sequence of transformations in time, was seen as a single multiform celebratory expression. No other explanation is possible for the world we see around us. Birds fly and sing and perform their mating rituals. Flowers blossom. Rains nourish every living being. Each of the events in the natural world is a poem, a painting, a drama, a celebration. Dawn and sunset are mystical moments of the diurnal cycle, moments when the numinous dimension of the universe reveals itself with special intimacy. Individually and in their relations with each other these are moments when the high meaning of existence is experienced. Whether in the gatherings of indigenous peoples in their tribal setting or in the more elaborate temples and cathedrals and spiritual centers throughout Earth these moments are celebrated with special observances. So, too, in the yearly cycle the springtime is celebrated as the time for renewal of the human in its proper alignment with the universal order of things. The proposal has been made that no effective restoration of a viable mode of human presence on the planet will take place until such ritual rapport of the human with the Earth community and the entire functioning of the universe is reestablished on an extensive scale. Until this is done the alienation of the human will continue despite heroic efforts being made toward a more benign mode of human activity in relation to Earth. The source of Norden's confidence that the present is not a time for desperation but for hopeful activity he finds in the writings of indigenous peoples such as James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, and David Seals, all authors with profound understanding of the ritual rapport of humans with the larger order of the universe. In alliance with such authors as these I would give a certain emphasis here on the need to understand the universe primarily as celebration. The human I would identify as that being in whom the universe celebrates itself and its numinous origins in a special mode of conscious self-awareness. That spontaneous forms of community ritual, such as the All Species Festivals inaugurated by John Seed, have already been developed gives promise for a future with the understanding, the power, the aesthetic grandeur, and the emotional fulfillment needed to heal the damage that has already been wrought upon the planet and to shape for Earth a viable future, a future with the entrancing qualities needed to endure the difficulties to be encountered and to evoke the creativity needed. Here I would suggest that the work before us is the task, not simply of ourselves, but of the entire planet and all its component members. While the damage done is immediately the work of the human, the healing cannot be the work simply of the human any more than the illness of some one organ of the body can be healed simply through the efforts of that one organ. Every member of the body must bring its activity to the healing. So now the entire universe is involved in the healing of damaged Earth, more especially, of course, the forces of Earth with the assistance of the light and warmth of the sun. As Earth is, in a sense, a magic planet in the exquisite presence of its diverse members to each other, so this movement into the future must in some manner be brought about in ways ineffable to the human mind. We might think of a viable future for the planet less as the result of some scientific insight or as dependent on some socio-economic arrangement than as participation in a symphony or as renewed presence to the vast cosmic liturgy. This insight was perhaps something that I vaguely experienced in that first view of the lilies blooming in the meadow across the creek. Thomas Berry December 1993 http://www.thomasberry.org/Biography/

T.S.O.G. The Creature That Ate the Constitution

vidourle — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 06:10:04 GMT

Tsarism represents an intermediate form between European monarchism and Asian despotism, being, possibly, closer to the latter of these two. Leon Trotsky, Russia's Social Development and Tsarism by Robert Anton Wilson How, how, how did we ever get ourselves in a predicament where an Oriental-style despot controls American medicine and most doctors fear to prescribe what they think best for their patients? Why, over 200 years after a war to liberate ourselves from a half-mad king, have we allowed our lives and health to come under the rule of a totally mad Tsar? And has this monstrous tumor destroyed most of the Constitution only "by accident," or did its creators have that intent all along? Well, here's my theory: Most people think the TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government] began its infestation of America with George Bush Sr., when he appointed a Tsar to discombobulate our previously democratic form of government; but Bush had a long C.I.A. career behind him and the C.I.A. had a long, long Tsarist history before they came out in the open with a public and blatant Tsar, a functionary not endowed or permitted by any clause in our Constitution. Actually, the TSOG began replacing representative democracy in the U.S. way back in 1945, when Gen. Rheinhard Gehlen, Hitler's Chief of Soviet Intelligence, surrendered to the U.S. Army, after first prudently burying several truckloads of "inside information" about the Soviet Union at a secret location. Gehlen was not only a master spy but a wizard negotiator. Within a week, he was out of his Nazi uniform and into a U.S. Army General's uniform; the U.S. intelligence services, in return, got the info about the Soviets, including access to Gehlen's agents in the Soviet government -- a group of Mystical Tsarists who had infiltrated both the Red Army and the KGB. You see, their leader and Gehlen's major "asset," General Andrei Vlassov, had a fervent belief, not just in common or garden Tsarism, but especially in the "mystical Tsarism" espoused in the later half of the 19th Century by the anti-Semitic novelist Dostoyevsky and even more by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an advisor to two Tsars [Alexander III and Nicholas II]. Pobedonostsev, popularly called "The Grand Inquisitor" because of the vast platoons of spies, snoops, agents provocateur and informers he unleashed upon the Russian people , combined theological obsessions with reactionary politics, always an explosive and nefarious mixture. "Mystical Tsarism" deserves a whole book in itself. especially since it now rules our own country; but we must be brief here. This holy religion, or superstition -- as you will --has two major tenets: (1) The Tsar is guided by God and can do no wrong (2) Reason is "cold" and inhuman, faith is "warm" and human; therefore we should ignore reason and guide ourselves by faith in the Tsar, our "Little Father." I don't think any of Pobedonostsev's crew actually believed in the Tooth Fairy, though. Besides, Roman Catholics of the old school have similar attitudes, but merely prefer a Pope to do their thinking for them instead of a Tsar, and most of us consider them sane, but just "weird." Gen. Gehlen and Gen. Vlassov formed what became the Gehlenapparat, the CIA's main source of info on Soviet affairs; Gehlen became the fulcrum of the CIA's "Soviet penetration" sector, working under James Jesus Angleton, Chief of Counter-Intelligence, breeder of prize orchids, lover of the arts, and a devout Catholic. Since the U.S. government based its foreign policies on CIA reports, and the CIA based its Soviet reports on Gehlen and some other former Nazis, plus a crew of Mystical Tsarists, as filtered and interpreted by a Papist intellectual, the U.S. government's ideas and actions became increasingly "weird, " bizarre and frightening, in the view of the rest of the world. The results are very sad and very funny. In a nutshell, most of the world thinks we've gone batshit crazy. "Tsarists and Nazis and spooks, oh my!" Although James Jesus Angleton was Gehlen's alleged supervisor, data indicates that the Gehlenapparat engaged in many activities, including kidnapping, extortion, murder etc. about which Angleton either did not know or devoutly did not want to know. But James J. Angleton was a pathological case of some sort himself; he often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, I.A. Richards, e e cummings and other SuperStars of Modernism; he met most of them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton's fascination with multiple perspectives, labyrinthine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all inferences and "interpretations." These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After all, modernism really begins with Wilde's "The Reality of Masks" and Yeats's hermetic mystique the world we know emerging from interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit all of us or all the world but certainly fits the world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created. Another CIA officer, Edward Petty, described Angleton as "a lone wolf" and "a strange bird"; every other source I have found bluntly calls him "paranoid." He suspected everybody else in the CIA, and in "our" government generally, of being KGB moles, and operated with so much modernist ambiguity and hidden trapdoors that, in Petty's words, "nobody really knows" what he was doing most of the time. In short, he became as esoteric as the poets he admired, and remade the C.I.A. and, increasingly, our whole nation into a theatre of impenetrable mystery. A.J. Weberman, a leading Kennedy assassination buff, thinks Angleton personally organized the JFK hit, an idea also strongly hinted at by Norman Mailer's documentary novel, Harlot's Ghost, in which Angleton appears as "Hugh Montague." [Angleton's father was named Hugh; Angleton's code name was "Mother," and Montague's is "Harlot."Work on that, ye seekers of multiple meaning. ] If James Jesus really arranged the JFK assassination, he had probably decided that Kennedy was the top Soviet mole of all. Why not? Angleton had Tsarist agents in all sorts of nooks of the Soviet system, and he knew the KGB was smart enough and tireless enough to reciprocate by planting their own Masks and Anti-Masks in his own backyard, or maybe under his bed at night. According to Edward Jay Epstein, J.J.A.s endless search for Soviet moles nearly destroyed the C.I.A. itself. Certainly, everybody in "the Company" learned to distrust everybody else. Imagine a U.S. Caine with not one Queeg as captain, but a whole crew of Queegs, each worrying about what the others might be plotting. Angleton created that ship of shape-shifters in the C.I.A. and then by osmosis it spread through the government, evolving into the TSOG. In short, the government cannot trust us, because it can never know with absolute certainty what mischief we may hatch; and every sentence we speak into a bugged phone may have as many possible meanings as Eliot's "The rose and the fire are one." In William F. Buckley Jr.'s docu-novel Spytime: The Undoing of James Jesus Angleton occurs a scene that epiphanizes the TSOG's looped and relooped logic. Angleton and an associate discuss 17 or 37 possible interpretations of a bit of information [or disinformation] passed on by a possible Soviet defector [who might be a Soviet mole.] At the end of the discussion, J.J.A. points out one more "reading" that the associate hadn't considered: namely, that Angleton himself might be the top Soviet mole of all. You can't learn more about ambiguity and irony in a seminar on the poetry of Empson. In the same vein, after the death by drowning of "Montague"[Angleton] in Harlot's Ghost, the CIA systematically investigates such alternative scenarios as: he's not dead, and another water-rotted corpse has been foisted on them; the Soviets did it and have him full of truth serums already; he went over to the Soviets willingly; he was working for the Reds all along. "Trust No One," the motto of X Files, seems the only safe rule in the world Angleton created. In any case, Angleton had an alliance with Italian fascists and the Mafia, dating from 1944 when he was an O.S.S. officer in Italy. "Operation Gladio," a CIA project to control Italian elections, was based on Angleton's fascist-Mafia connections, and employed techniques as varied as hiring Sophia Loren to do TV commercials for politicians the CIA liked, bribing liberal/left politicos to move toward more right-wing positions, and employing the Mafia to assassinate some who couldn't be bribed, e.g. Prime Minster Aldo Moro. In recruiting for Gladio, Angleton had a secret meeting with his old friend Ezra Pound, in Genoa. Pound, under indictment for radio broadcasts that he called "personal propaganda on behalf of the U.S. Constitution" and the Department of Justice called "treason," did not get recruited into Gladio and instead spent 13 years in a hospital for the criminally insane, for expressing his views about bankers over the wrong radio station. J.J.A. had better luck with a former Gestapo informant named Licio Gelli, who formed a secret society called P2 within the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry and eventually infiltrated over 950 agents into the Italian government. Through P2 connections and Roberto Calvi, a P2 member and president of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan, Gladio merged the Mafia's drug laundering system with ongoing CIA projects, using as screens the Vatican Bank and 200 "ghost banks" which existed only in Calvi's ledgers. The Tsarist-CIA-Mafia chieftains then had almost total control over both the multi-billion dollar illegal drug business and the even more profitable anti-drug business. It worked like this: among the 200 "ghost banks" that existed only as a postal drops, a few real, or tangible, banks existed. One, the Cisalpine Bank in the Bahamas, jointly owned by Roberto Calvi of Banco Ambrosiani and Archbishop Paul "The Gorilla" Marcinkus, served as the major funnel for money laundering. Its primary links were the Franklin National Bank, owned by fellow Gladio asset Michele "The Shark" Sindona, and the World Finance Corporation, owned and managed by 8 "former" [or allegedly "former"] C.I.A. officers. Cocaine profits generally went through the World Finance Corporation, in Miami, and thence via Cisalpine, into the maze of ghost banks, and thence through Ambrosiano and the Vatican to numbered Swiss bank accounts. Heroin profits ran through the Nyugun Hand Bank, also run by "former" C.I.A. agents and thence into the same labyrinth. Some of the drug money bought guns for terrorists and generally financed what Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward called "the undeclared wars of the C..I.A." The rest was sheer gravy, for those high in the TSOG, and it ran into billions a year for the Gladio group alone. Meanwhile, the TSOG drug cartel scored psycho-political gains as well as stuffing those numbered bank accounts. By flooding the U.S with crack, they were able to create a mob hysteria that surpassed McCarthyism and now ranks beside the medieval witch-hunts; in the smoke and mirrors, only a few noticed that the Constitution is being dismantled plank by plank. As William S. Burroughs wrote 30 years ago, "Drug control is a thin pretext, and getting thinner, to increase police powers and to brand dissent as criminal." A voice crying in the wilderness..... Angleton was finally removed from the CIA in 1974 when caught meddling in U.S. elections -- something that the CIA is only supposed to do in other countries. Calvi of Banco Ambrosiano was assassinated by the Mafia, for unknown reasons, in 1982. His secretary fell or was thrown out of her office window the same day Calvi was found hanged. Michele "The Shark" Sindona, another of the Gladio/P2/Mafia inner circle--remember? -- was convicted of 64 counts of stock and currency fraud in New York, and of murdering a bank examiner in Rome; he was poisoned in prison while awaiting trial on other charges. Archbishop Paul "The Gorilla" Marcinkus was replaced as president of the Vatican Bank, when his role in Gladio drug-money laundering was revealed in the trials of lesser culprits, and later he got booted out of the Vatican entirely. Licio Gelli stood trial for conspiracy but was acquitted. Later, evidence showed that Gelli was working for the KGB as well as the CIA; which side he double-crossed most often remains unknown. But then Gelli had worked for the Communist Underground in WWII, while also on the payroll of the Gestapo, and nobody claims to know which side he betrayed most often in that case either. Mino Pecorelli, the first journalist to expose Gladio/P2 infiltration of the Italian government, was killed on a street in Rome, shot through the mouth -- the sasso in bocca, traditional Mafia punishment for informers. The same fate befell Sam Giancana,Mafia boss of Chicago, when subpoenaed by a congressional committee on assassinations -- another sasso in bocca. Johnny Roselli, another Mafioso often involved in Tsarist/CIA projects, simply disappeared when he got his subpoena. His body was found floating in a barrel in the Gulf of Mexico. The major open functions of Mystical Tsarism now are the Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA] and the Food and Drug Administration [FDA.] You all know about the DEA and its vast army of snoops and informers -- a vision to gladden the heart of Pobedonostsev himself. The FDA operates similarly but with less publicity; it was described in these terms by Saul Kent of the Life Extension Foundation: "The FDA's strong-arm tactics are used to intimidate and terrorize Americans into toeing their police-state line on health care and medicine." In 1957, the FDA burned all the books of dissident physician Wilhelm Reich, M.D., smashed his laboratory equipment with axes, and threw him in jail, where he died. Lately, their major targets have been midwives, herbalists and others who offer safer and cheaper health care than the TSOG itself. Although our first official and open Tsar was appointed during the brief, bloody reign of George Bush, the Tsar's powers only reached tyrannical status under Bill Clinton, a hillbilly with a perpetual hard-on. Our recent Tsar, General Barry McCaffrey, recently stated the theology of Mystic Tsarism in an article for the Denver Post. I condense a bit because, like most Tsars, Mac the Knife is a bit of a windbag: "Each week, millions of Americans attend religious services to seek guidance, reaffirm moral values, offer charity and obtain a sense of community. Each of these four elements underscores the importance of faith-based organizations .... Educating young people ... requires us to guide them and teach them values. .....On May 10, I traveled to Colorado Springs to stand with Dr. James Dobson and the Young Life Christian Ministry. The ministry's youth programs are model efforts for how faith-based organizations can play a critical role in helping our young people choose the right path....[blah blah blah]... The One Way 2 Play program of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes is another example of how faith groups help young people ..... The One Way 2 Play program uses sports to teach the importance of a healthy lifestyle and a commitment to faith. .. ... As British Theologian Dean William Inge said: 'If we are to safeguard our children and communities, rabbis, priests, clerics, deacons, sisters, brothers and cantors must help lead the way'" ...[emphasis added] Faith and docility are the bulwarks of Tsarism; any hint of scientific knowledge, rationality or even plain "horse sense" among the serfs are its major worries, and it blocks them every way it can. No Tsar will ever lavish such praise on scientists or other professional skeptics as McCaffery lavishes on the faithful and the sheep-herders who lead and fleece them. And so, the Constitution in tatters, spies everywhere, we inhabit "one nation under surveillance with wiretaps and mail covers for all;" and everybody is terrorized about whether their houses and property will be seized next. In short, we find ourselves, as Trotsky found the Russians a century ago, midway between European monarchism and Asiatic despotism. It comes as no surprise that McCaffery stands accused of war crimes, under the Nuremberg rulings. Bill Clinton may be 77 kinds of sonofabitch, as most of us now agree, but he is no fool. When he picks a Tsar he finds the right kind of man for the job. The only way Bore or Gush can improve on Mac the Knife is if, with further advances in genetic engineering, they dig up the bones and clone the most famous, mystical and murderous Tsar of them all, Ivan the Terrible, who alternated between murdering masses of people and retiring to monasteries for meditation and prayer. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For more info on the Gehlenapparat, see The Yankee and Cowboy War by Carl Oglesby, Berkeley Medallion, NY, 1977; and Everything Is Under Control by RAWilson, Harper, NY, 1998. The best overview of TSOG/CIA operations in general is Norman Mailer's docu-novel Harlot's Ghost, Random House, NY, 1991, in which Angleton appears as "Hugh Montague" and Gehlen has a walk-on under his own name. On the Gladio/P2 side of the TSOG, excellent books include The Strange Death of God's Banker, Foot and della Torre, Orbis, London, 1984; The Calvi Affair, by Larry Gurwin, Pan, London, 1984; The Brotherhood, by Stephen Knight, Grenada, London, 1984. The Calvi "ghost banks" and their strange links with real banks, including Chase Manhattan, are discussed amply in In Banks We Trust, Doubleday, NY, 1984, by Penny Lernoux, who leaves open the question of how many of the real banks were unwitting accomplices and how many knew what was going on and just kept mum while raking in the profits. In God's Name, by David Yallop, Cape, London 1984, covers all this in greater depth, and also explores Licio Gelli's role in creating fake ID for Nazi war criminals, whom he later farmed out to the CIA death squads. It also adds Pope John Paul I to the list of mysterious deaths involving the Vatican Bank, along with Pecorelli, Moro, Calvi et. al. My current acceptance that the Mafia killed Calvi [in previous writings I was unsure] rests on the confession of Calogero Ganci, a Mafia hitman turned informant, who says he strangled Calvi himself. See London Times, 20 June 1996. Ganci was never told why the mob wanted "God's banker" dead; his job was to kill people, not to ask rude questions. Mrs. Calvi, the widow, still claims the orders came from the Vatican. Our current Tsar's war crimes are documented in "Overwhelming Force," by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 22 May 2000. The best depth analysis of Mystical Tsarism remains The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich, M.D. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1970. Although Dr Reich doesn't analyze Tsarism in particular, he relates Fascism to the dogmatic religions, faith in "leaders" ["little Fathers"]and sexual misery of all the "Patriarchal Authoritarian" regimes throughout history, and his major bio-psychological theorems describe both Russian and American Tsarism as neatly as they fit the Holy Inquisition or German-Italian Fascism. Or -- you can find most of this data, in one form or another by simply surfing the web. Set your search engine for "Rheinhold Gehlen," "Cisalpine Bank,""Licio Gelli," "Gladio" and all the other individual and group names in this synopsis, and you'll be astounded at how many Dirty Secrets are now open to the light of day.

The dawning age of intuition and spirit: Generosity. Wisdom. Respect. Integrity. Strength. Fortitude. Collaboration. Humility.

vidourle — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 05:31:53 GMT

The Prophecy of the Condor and the Eagle "Nearly every culture I know prophesies that in the late 1990's we entered a period of remarkable transition. At monasteries in the Himalayas, ceremonial sites in Indonesia, and indigenous reservations in North America, from the depths of the Amazon to the peaks of the Andes, and into the ancient Mayan cities of Central America, I have heard that ours is a special moment in human history, and that each of us was born at this time because we have a mission to accomplish. The titles and the words of the prophecies differ slightly. They tell variously of a New Age, the Third Millennium, the Age of Aquarius, the Beginning of the Fifth Sun, or the end of old calendars and the commencement of new ones. Despite the varying terminologies, however, they have a great deal in common, and “The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle” is typical. It states that back in the mists of history, human societies divided and took different paths: that of the condor (representing the heart, intuitive and mystical) and that of the eagle (representing the brain, rational and material). In the 1490's, the prophesy said, the two paths would converge and the eagle would drive the condor to the verge of extinction. Then, five hundred years later, in the 1990's a new epoch would begin, one in which the condor and the eagle will have the opportunity to reunite ad fly together in the same sky, along the same path. If the condor and eagle accept this opportunity, they will create a most remarkable offspring, unlike any seen before. “The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle” can be taken at many levels — the standard interpretation is that it foretells the sharing of indigenous knowledge with the technologies of science, the balancing of yin and yang, and the bridging of northern and southern cultures. However, most powerful is the message it offers about consciousness; it says the we have entered a time when we can benefit from the many diverse was of seeing ourselves and the world, and that we can use these as a springboard to higher levels of awareness. As human beings we can truly wake up and evolve into a more conscious species." From Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (page 209) by John Perkins

The flow of drug money into and through Wall Street and corporate stocks like RJR Nabisco...

vidourle — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 05:11:48 GMT

Excerpt From European Lawsuit Against RJR Nabisco Learn more: http://www.dunwalke.com/3_RJR_Nabisco.htm Footnotes: http://www.dunwalke.com/resources/footnotes.html#13d If you like spy novels, you will find that the European Union’s presentation of fact to be far more fascinating than fiction. One of the complaints filed in the case describes a rich RJR history of business with Latin American drug cartels, Italian and Russian mafia, and Saddam Hussein’s family to name a few. The Introduction reads as follows: 1. For more than a decade, the DEFENDANTS (hereinafter also referred to as the “RJR DEFENDANTS” or “RJR”) have directed, managed, and controlled money-laundering operations that extended within and/or directly damaged the Plaintiffs. The RJR DEFENDANTS have engaged in and facilitated organized crime by laundering the proceeds of narcotics trafficking and other crimes. As financial institutions worldwide have largely shunned the banking business of organized crime, narcotics traffickers and others, eager to conceal their crimes and use the fruits of their crimes, have turned away from traditional banks and relied upon companies, in particular the DEFENDANTS herein, to launder the proceeds of unlawful activity. 2. The DEFENDANTS knowingly sell their products to organized crime, arrange for secret payments from organized crime, and launder such proceeds in the United States or offshore venues known for bank secrecy. DEFENDANTS have laundered the illegal proceeds of members of Italian, Russian, and Colombian organized crime through financial institutions in New York City, including The Bank of New York, Citibank N.A., and Chase Manhattan Bank. DEFENDANTS have even chosen to do business in Iraq, in violation of U.S. sanctions, in transactions that financed both the Iraqi regime and terrorist groups. 3. The RJR DEFENDANTS have, at the highest corporate level, determined that it will be a part of their operating business plan to sell cigarettes to and through criminal organizations and to accept criminal proceeds in payment for cigarettes by secret and surreptitious means, which under United States law constitutes money laundering. The officers and directors of the RJR DEFENDANTS facilitated this overarching money-laundering scheme by restructuring the corporate structure of the RJR DEFENDANTS, for example, by establishing subsidiaries in locations known for bank secrecy such as Switzerland to direct and implement their money-laundering schemes and to avoid detection by U.S. and European law enforcement. This overarching scheme to establish a corporate structure and business plan to sell cigarettes to criminals and to launder criminal proceeds was implemented through many subsidiary schemes across THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY. Examples of these subsidiary schemes are described in this Complaint and include: (a.) Laundering criminal proceeds received from the Alfred Bossert money-laundering organization; (b.) Money laundering for Italian organized crime; (c.) Money laundering for Russian organized crime through The Bank of New York; (d.) The Walt money-laundering conspiracy; (e.) Money laundering through cut outs in Ireland and Belgium; (f.) Laundering of the proceeds of narcotics sales throughout THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY by way of cigarette sales to criminals in Spain; (g.) Laundering criminal proceeds in the United Kingdom; (h.) Laundering criminal proceeds through cigarette sales via Cyprus; and (i.) Illegal cigarette sales into Iraq.[13a] The European Union goes on to explain the role of cigarettes in laundering illicit monies: V. THE LINK BETWEEN RJR’S CIGARETTE SALES, MONEY LAUNDERING, AND ORGANIZED CRIME Money-Laundering Links Between Europe, The United States, Russia, and Colombia 20. Cigarette sales, money laundering, and organized crime are linked and interact on a global basis. According to Jimmy Gurule, Undersecretary for Treasury Enforcement: “Money laundering takes place on a global scale and the Black Market Peso Exchange System, though based in the Western Hemisphere, affects business around the world. U.S. law enforcement has detected BMPE-related transactions occurring throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.” 21. The primary source of cocaine within THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY is Colombia. Large volumes of cocaine are transported from Colombia into THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY and then sold illegally within THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY and the MEMBER STATES. The proceeds of these illegal sales must be laundered in order to be useable by narcotics traffickers. Throughout the 1990s and continuing to the present day, a primary means by which these cocaine proceeds are laundered is through the purchase and sale of cigarettes, including those manufactured by the RJR DEFENDANTS. Cocaine sales in THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY are facilitated through money-laundering operations in Colombia, Panama, Switzerland, and elsewhere which utilize RJR cigarettes as the money-laundering vehicle. 22. In a similar way, the primary source of heroin within THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY is the Middle East and, in particular, Afghanistan, with the majority of said heroin being sold by Russian organized crime, Middle Eastern criminal organizations, and terrorist groups based in the Middle East. Heroin sales in THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY and the MEMBER STATES are facilitated and expedited by the purchase and sale of the DEFENDANTS’ cigarettes in money-laundering operations that begin in THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY and the MEMBER STATES, Eastern Europe, and/or Russia, but which ultimately result in the proceeds of those money-laundering activities being deposited into the coffers of the RJR DEFENDANTS in the United States. Background on the Convergence of Narcotics Trafficking and Money Laundering 23. This complaint is about Trade and Commerce or, more correctly, illegal Trade and illegal Commerce, and how money laundering facilitates the financing and movement of goods internationally. Merchants engaging in global trade often turn to the more stable global currencies for payments of goods and services purchased abroad. In many markets, the United States dollar is the currency of choice and, in some cases, the United States dollar is the only accepted form of payment. Merchants seeking dollars usually obtain them in a variety of ways, including the following three methods. Traditional merchants go to a local financial institution that can underwrite credit. Private financing is usually available for those with collateral. A third and least desirable source of dollar financing can be found in the “black markets” of the world. Black Markets are the underground or parallel financial economies that exist in every country. Criminals and their organizations control these underground economies, which generally operate through “money brokers.” These “money brokers” often fulfill a variety of roles not the least of which is an important intermediate step in the laundering process, one that we will refer to throughout this complaint as the “cut out.” 24. The criminal activity that provides the dollars for these black market money laundering operations is often drug trafficking and related violent crimes. South America is the world leader in the production of cocaine, and the United States and the European Union are the world’s largest cocaine markets. Likewise, Colombia and countries in the Middle East produce heroin. Cocaine and heroin are smuggled to the United States and Europe, and are sold for United States dollars as well as in local European currencies (and now the Euro). Russian drug smugglers obtain heroin from the Middle East and cocaine from South America, and sell both drugs in large quantities in the United States and in Europe. Retail street sales of cocaine and heroin have risen dramatically over the past two decades throughout the United States and Europe. Consequently, drug traffickers routinely accumulate vast amounts of illegally obtained cash in the form of United States dollars in the United States and Euros in Europe. The U.S. Customs Service estimates that illegal drug sales in the United States alone generate an estimated fifty-seven billion dollars in annual revenues, most of it in cash. 25. A drug trafficker must be able to access his profits, to pay expenses for the ongoing operation, and to share in the profits; and he must be able to do this in a manner that seemingly legitimizes the origins of his wealth, so as to ward off oversight and investigation that could result in his arrest and imprisonment and the seizure of his monies. The process of achieving these goals is the money-laundering cycle. 26. The purpose of the money-laundering cycle is to establish total anonymity for the participants, by passing the cash drug proceeds through the financial markets in a way that conceals or disguises the illegal nature, source, ownership, and/or control of the money. Background on Black Market Money Exchanges 27. Within Europe, the United States, South America, and elsewhere, a community of illegal currency exchange brokers, known to law-enforcement officials as “money brokers,” operates outside the established banking system and facilitates the exchange of narcotics sale proceeds for local cash or negotiable instruments. Many of these money brokers have developed methods to bypass the banking systems and thereby avoid the scrutiny of regulatory authorities. These money exchanges have different names depending on where they are located, but they all operate in a similar fashion. 28. A typical “money-broker” system works this way: In a sale of Colombian cocaine in THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY, the drug cartel exports narcotics to the MEMBER STATES where they are sold for Euros. In Colombia, the cartel contacts the money broker and negotiates a contract, in which the money broker agrees to exchange pesos he controls in Colombia for Euros that the cartel controls in Europe. The money broker pays the cartel the agreed-upon sum in pesos. The cartel contacts its cell (group) in the European Union and instructs the cell to deliver the agreed-upon amount of Euros to the money broker’s European agent. The money broker must now launder the Euros he has accumulated in the European Union. He may also need to convert the Euros into U.S. dollars because his customers may need U.S. dollars to pay companies such as RJR for their products. 29. The money broker uses his European contacts to place the monies he purchased from the cartel into the European banking system or into a business willing to accept these proceeds (a process described in more detail below). The money broker now has a pool of narcotics-derived funds in Europe to sell to importers and others. In many instances, the narcotics trafficker who sold the drugs in THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY is also the importer who purchased the cigarettes. Importers buy these monies from the money brokers at a substantial discount off the “official” exchange rates and use these monies to pay for shipments of items (such as cigarettes), which the importers have ordered from United States companies and/or their authorized European representatives, or “cut outs.” The money broker uses his European contacts to send the monies to whomever the importer has specified. Often these customers utilize such monies to purchase the DEFENDANTS’ cigarettes in bulk and, in many instances, the money brokers have been directed to pay the RJR DEFENDANTS directly for the cigarettes purchased. The money broker makes such payments using a variety of methods, including his accounts in European financial institutions. The purchased goods are shipped to their destinations. The importer takes possession of his goods. The money broker uses the funds derived from the importer to continue the laundering cycle. 30. In that fashion, the drug trafficker has converted his drug proceeds (which he could not previously use because they were in Euros) to local currency that he can use in his homeland as profit and to fund his operations; the European importer has obtained the necessary funds from the black market money broker to purchase products that he might not otherwise have been able to finance (due to lack of credit, collateral, or U.S. dollars, and/or a desire for secrecy); the company selling cigarettes to the importer has received payment on delivered product in its currency of choice regardless of the source of the funds; and the money broker has made a profit charging both the cartel and the importer for his services. This cycle continues until the criminals involved are arrested and a new cycle begins. Money laundering is a series of such events, all connected and never stopping until at least one link in the chain of events is broken. 31. Many narcotics traffickers who sell drugs in THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY now also purchase and import cigarettes. In particular, as the trade in cigarettes becomes more profitable and carries lesser criminal penalties compared to narcotics trafficking, the “business end” of selling the cigarettes has become at least as attractive and important to the criminal as the narcotics trafficking. Finally, it makes no difference whatsoever to the money laundering system whether the goods are imported and distributed legally or illegally. Regardless of whether he sells his cigarettes legally or illegally, the narcotics trafficker has achieved his goal in that he has been able to disguise the nature, location, true source, ownership, and/or control of his narcotics proceeds. At the same time, the cigarette manufacturer (in this case RJR) has achieved its goal because it has successfully sold its product in a highly profitable way.[13b] Particularly endearing, the European Union alludes to one of the most important secrets of money laundering — that the attorney-client privilege of lawyers and law firms, particularly the most prestigious Washington and Wall Street law firms, are a preferred method for the communication of corporate crimes: “RJR has been aware of organized crime’s involvement in the distribution of its products since at least the 1970s. On January 4, 1978, the Tobacco Institute’s Committee of Counsel met at the offices of Phillip Morris in New York City. The Committee of Counsel was the high tribunal that set the tobacco industry’s legal, political, and public relations strategy for more than three decades. The January 4, 1978 meeting was called to discuss, among other things, published reports concerning organized crime’s involvement in the tobacco trade and the tobacco industry’s complicity therein. The published reports detailed the role of organized crime in the tobacco trade (including the Colombo crime family in New York) and the illegal trade at the Canadian border and elsewhere. RJR’s general counsel, Max Crohn, attended and participated in the meeting. All of the large cigarette manufacturers were present at the meeting and represented by counsel, such as Phillip Morris (Arnold & Porter, Abe Krash) [Author's note: Arnold & Porter is a firm that will come up several times later in our story] and Brown & Williamson (Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, Martin London). The Committee of Counsel took no action to address, investigate, or end the role of organized crime in the tobacco business. Instead, the Committee agreed to formulate a joint plan of action to protect the industry from scrutiny of the U.S. Congress.”[13c] More information on the RJR and other tobacco company lawsuits is provided at the Resource Page at this website. The reader can access directly by linking through this footnote.[13d] You will find an update in the litigation section in the SEC annual report for 2004 for RJR’s successor corporation, Reynolds American, as well as other updates on litigation cases involving smuggling and slavery reparations.[14] According to Dillon Read, the firm’s average return on equity for the years was 29%. This is a strong performance, and compares to First Boston, Solomon, Shearson and Morgan Stanley’s average returns of 26% , 15%, 18% and 31% respectively.[15] Given what we now know from the European Union’s lawsuit and other legal actions against RJR Nabisco and its executives, this begs the question of what Dillon’s profits would have been if the firm had not made a small fortune reinvesting the proceeds of — if we are to believe the European Union — cigarette sales to organized crime including the profits generated by narcotics flowing into the communities of America through the Latin American drug cartels. To understand the flow of drug money into and through Wall Street and corporate stocks like RJR Nabisco during the 1980s, it is useful to look more closely at the flow of drugs from Latin America during the period — and the implied cash flows of narco dollars that they suggest. Two documented situations involve Mena, Arkansas and South Central Los Angeles, California.

National ID Number: United States

vidourle — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 03:31:08 GMT

Learn More: http://www.epic.org/privacy/id_cards/ http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B2GGGL_enUS206US206&q=National+ID+Card&btnG=Search Operator: Thank you for calling Pizza Hut. May I have your national ID number? Customer: Hi, I'd like to place an order. Operator: I must have your NIDN first, sir. Customer: My National ID Number, yeah, hold on, eh, it's . Operator: Thank you Mr. Smith. I see you live at 1742 Meadowland Drive, and the phone number is . Your office number over at Lincoln Insurance is 745- 2302 and your cell number is . Email address is smith@home.net Which number are you calling from? Customer: Huh? I'm at home. Where'd you get all this information? Operator: We're wired into the HSS, sir. Customer: The HSS, what is that? Operator: We're wired into the Homeland Security System, sir. This will add only 15 seconds to your ordering time. Customer: (sighs) Oh well, I'd like to order a couple of your All Meat Special pizzas. Operator: I don't think that's a good idea, sir. Customer: Whaddya mean? Operator: Sir, your medical records and commode sensors indicate that you've got very high blood pressure and extremely high cholesterol. Your National Health Care provider won't allow such an unhealthy choice . Customer: What?!?! What do you recommend, then? Operator: You might try our low-fat Soybean Pizza.I'm sure you'll like it. Customer: What makes you think I'd like something like that? Operator: Well, you checked out 'Gourmet Soybean Recipes' from your local library last week, sir. That's why I made the suggestion. Customer: All right, all right. Give me two family-sized ones, then Operator: That should be plenty for you, your wife and your four kids. Your 2 dogs can finish the crusts, sir. Your total is $49.99. Customer: Lemme give you my credit card number. Operator: I'm sorry sir, but I'm afraid you'll have to pay in cash. Your credit card balance is over its limit. Customer: I'll run over to the ATM and get some cash before your driver gets here. Operator: That won't work either, sir. Your checking account is overdrawn also. Customer: Never mind! Just send the pizzas. I'll have the cash ready. How long will it take? Operator: We're running a little behind, sir. It'll be about 45 minutes, sir. If you're in a hurry you might want to pick'em up while you're out getting the cash, but then, carrying pizzas on a motorcycle can be a little awkward. Customer: Wait! How do you know I ride a scooter? Operator: It says here you're in arrears on your car payments, so your car got repo'ed. But your Harley's paid for and you just filled the tank yesterday. Customer: Well, I'll be a #%#^^&$%^$@# Operator: I'd advise watching your language, sir. You've already got a July 4, 2003, conviction for cussing out a cop and another one I see here in September for contempt at your hearing for cussing at a judge. Oh yes, I see here that you just got out from a 90 day stay in the State Correctional Facility. Is this your first pizza since your return to society? Customer: (speechless) Operator: Will there be anything else, sir? Customer: Yes, I have a coupon for a free 2 liter of Coke. Operator: I'm sorry sir, but our ad's exclusionary clause prevents us from offering free soda to diabetics. The New Constitution our country started using in 2006 prohibits this. Thank you for calling Pizza Hut!

Li Wei Chih Chio

vidourle — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 05:20:17 GMT

Someone asked whether consciousness (chih chio) is an inward stirring of something spiritual (hsin shih ling) or due to the activity of Chhi (chhi chih wei)? The philosopher answered: 'It is not entirely a question of Chhi (matter-energy), because the principle of consciousness exists already. Li (essence) has no consciousness (li wei chih chio), but when Li is combined with Chhi, then consciousness arises'.” (Chu Hsi Chhuan Shu, 12th cent. A.D.“

The Other World

vidourle — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:28:08 GMT

We are told that documentaries should be produced objectively, never-mind that the camera itself merely provides a proxy of subjective experience, and can lie through omission just as easily as our eyes can. Apparently Jan Kounen didn’t come in to school that day, and for that we can be happy: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1503 Though The Other World provides some interesting and rather traditional “talking head” interviews with the likes of Alex Grey, Moebius, Jeremy Narby (the author of The Cosmic Serpent), and many others, the most unique aspect of this documentary is that it attempts to provide a first person perspective of a very subjective experience. That is, the use of psychedelics in shamanism, and the function of the shaman as a guide through exploration of our oft-forgotten interior world. This is not common territory for a documentary, and some stylistic fumbling is to be expected as a result. In an attempt to bring us along with him in his journeys, Jan often gives us long passages of people tripping their faces off, surrounded by chanting, murmuring shamans and tribesmen. Though surprisingly more engaging than one might think, and augmented by some CG passages, it still is not a medium well suited to bring us in. As a result, we are left somewhat in the dark as to what is actually occurring. This may have been helped either through editing or other narrative devices. (In this way, this documentary may make a better companion or “special features” piece, accompanying his film Blueberry, rather than a stand alone.) Regardless, this remains one of the most genuine portrayals and explorations of the psychedelic experience that I have yet encountered. There is also none of the “psychedelics for everyone!” enthusiasm that poisons a lot of these pieces, a clear knee-jerk response against the categorical denial of psychedelics as the status quo. As the artist Moebius points out, a bunch of kids doing psychedelics at a rave club is a lot like having a group of surgeons perform heart surgery on the weekend just for kicks. So what’s all the fuss about? It has been acknowledged by many social scientists that most Westerners are almost neurotically afraid of self analysis. The inner world, to many of us, is a complete mystery, terrifying and absolute darkness. There are some of us, to be sure, who can’t help but go spelunking in there, fewer still who live there all the time. There are no absolute guides in this path. Psychologists of past generations began to open these doors, only to have them slammed shut when the institution, indeed the industry, went pharmaceutical. The experiential practitioners went private. Many went underground, and you are forced to sort the wheat from the chaff by trial and error or word of mouth alone. Artists, too, are natural explorers of the interior psychological spaces, but in our mass market culture, many of them are forced to either pander to the outside, surface world of fashion and appearance, or languish in dark caves themselves. When an artist expresses psychological truths, the commonly seem to fall on deaf ears with an audience so obsessed with plot, action, and everything else external. To many other cultures, this “fear of the mirror” is more than a psychological affliction. It is a spiritual one. And it is an affliction that shamans, yogis, and the like have long served to help cure. How strange we must seem to them, coming to their lands in khakis, asking for a brief tour of ourselves, so we can return to the Village and tell our friends about our Ayahuasca visions over sushi. We obsess, and ask whether such a thing could be “real.” Cracking open our heads must be a true challenge for them when dealing with us. We are civilization who have come so far, in terms of capability in the outside world, and as a result have left ourselves behind. This is where the discussion about shamanism usually gets derailed. We are still so caught up in proving that what a shaman does is “real,” comparing it to the scientific method, exploring case studies, still focused on the exterior world, that we lose sight of what it is that they do. The Other World makes a fairly strong case for this, despite the necessary pandering to our ‘rational’ worldview: that which is experienced is real. How can we even pretend to speak of “reality” when we don’t know what’s going on inside our heads?

Burning Man 2007

vidourle — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:45:16 GMT

Burning Man is a cosmic happening, taking place every year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Pictures from Burning Man 2007 http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/burning_man_2007/ Geoff Dyer in his book Yoga For People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It attempts to explain the Mystery of Burning Man at the tearful climax of his book: "A friend once described Burning Man as a place where everyone can become whatever they want to be. It was the sexiest, the most glamorous, the funniest, the kindest, the wildest, the politest, the freest place on earth: a place where all your dreams can come true." Daniel Pinchbeck in his book Breaking Open the Head says: "Like the effect of certain chemicals, Burning Man changes one's sense of time, revealing the mythic underpinnings, the whispers of eternity, underneath the most ordinary moment... 'I found out there is a way your consciousness can go beyond what we call Now, and I rode the shockwave of inverse time.'" Quotes from BurningMan.Com Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind." The Burning Man project has grown from a small group of people gathering spontaneously to a community of over 25,000 people." The impact of the Burning Man experience has been so profound that a culture has formed around it."

Adventures In Philanthropic Luxury: Travel Has Never Felt So Good

vidourle — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:24:28 GMT

Read: http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/money-mission-meaning/episode011-david-chamberlain-philanthropic-adventures.html http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/adventures_in_philanthropic_luxury_travel/ Listen: http://media.personallifemedia.com/MoneyMissionMeaning/MoneyMissionMeaning_011_DavidChamberlain.mp3 In this episode Mark Michael Lewis, CEO of SmartPowerDrinks.com, interviews David Chamberlain from ExquisiteSafaris.com about combining luxury travel to exotic destinations with philanthropic adventures. Listen as David describes how he guides private groups to some of the most beautiful and interesting places on the globe, integrating enjoyment, education, and enlightenment. Discover how you can turn your travel experience into a face to face, heart to heart experience of connection and contribution you will never forget. Plus, get a sense for the mission and vision that motivates this fascinating and charming man.

Gemini June 2007 :: Belden, California

vidourle — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:51:45 GMT

Pictures by Vidourle: http://picasaweb.google.com/exquisitesafaris.com/Gemini?authkey=2jxmBWaoi4w Ancient Tribal Ritual for the 21st Century http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/ancient_tribal_ritual/ Rama http://www.ramaquotes.com/ One who practices meditation is learning to still their thoughts and trying to get on a regular schedule with meditation, which may take a while. If you are starting to meditate, I suggest that you set up a schedule for yourself. It is good to meditate twice a day, once a day is good to start. Sit and meditate a couple of times a day. Stop the body. Sit up straight and practice a meditation and concentration exercise. Clear your mind of all the garbage that runs through it and enter into a higher level of perception. The best time to mediate is when you first get up in the morning or evening. Take a shower and sit down and meditate. When you meditate in the morning you pick up a lot of energy, focus, and awareness. That will be with you throughout the day. It brightens the subtle physical body so you won't pick up as much negative energy. Sit down in the morning. If you can't make it in the morning, try the evening to start out with. Do the late show. But you meditate best in the morning; the mind has not been active yet. As soon as you get up meditate. Your mind is most receptive at this time, even though it may seem more difficult to meditate. Never leave the house until you have meditated. It doesn't really matter what time you get up, but whenever you do get up, set aside enough time before you leave the house to have a good meditation. Doing this will clear your mind and put you into a very sharp and aware state of consciousness. The morning practice of meditation increases the aura to ward of negative energy. I always try to mediate every day at noon, the time when the kundalini is the strongest. If you have to work at noon, at least try to think about eternity, think about your ideals, and what you're trying to do with your life. It is very easy to meditate at sunset. There is a doorway that opens between the worlds at the time of the setting sun. Try to meditate before you start your evening. If you've been out in the world working, meditation will clear off all the unhealthy energy you've picked up during the day. Mediate at sunset or night. It’s easiest to meditate at night. Night is eternal.

Moral Outrage?

vidourle — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 01:05:38 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Ruscha by Dean Chamberlain http://www.deanchamberlain.com Learn More: http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/the_red_pill_philanthropic_travel/ By Jason Miller 6/10/07 Each day untold millions of US Americans unwittingly immerse themselves in an intellectual, social, cultural, economic, political and spiritual cesspool so rancid and toxic that even microbes with the most voracious appetites for human waste, vomit, and inanimate flesh would shun this infinitely repulsive sewer. Many highly qualified and intelligent researchers, analysts, and authors have written books, essays, and reports documenting the astounding multitude and variety of crimes committed by the United States throughout its history. Since a nation is an entity comprised of numerous elements and dynamics, we can’t simply blame the government, the Republicans, the Religious Right, the Democrats, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or any one particular component. Therefore, nearly all US Americans bear a degree of responsibility. Obviously, some (i.e. Bush and Cheney) are far more culpable than others because they wield such tremendous power and act with a conscienceless, cynical awareness of the suffering they are inflicting on the Earth and its sentient inhabitants. Since only about 4% of the population shares Bush’s sociopathic inability to experience empathy or guilt, what is this powerful siren call that motivates so many inherently decent human beings to repeatedly lacerate their souls upon the jagged rocks of complicity in acts that inflict unnecessary suffering upon billions of humans and animals? How did we become a statistical aberration to the extent that we are a nation of resource-rich, technologically-advanced, mean-spirited, intellectually-stunted moral barbarians where a significant percentage of the population behaves as sociopaths by directly supporting or apathetically ignoring the evils in which they are complicit? Is it something in our water? Are we genetic misfits? Does our population represent the vanguard of the next step in humanity’s moral “evolution”? Sarcasm aside, the underlying cause of our depravity is our false, skewed and fractured consciousness which our malignant system begins hammering into our minds as we draw our first breath. This relentless psychological assault persists until we take our final gasp of air. Nearly unshakeable illusions and delusions enable a relative handful of ruthless corporations and plutocrats to manipulate nearly 300 million people into helping them pursue their objective of world domination and exploitation, as out-lined in the Project for the New American Century. Let’s deconstruct but a few examples of the nearly innumerable strands in the tangled web of pernicious lies comprising our false consciousness: The Founding Fathers were noble, saint-like champions of the “common” people who forged a nation affording freedom and equality for all. Our founders were mostly aristocrats who formed a constitutional republic of, by and for land-owning white males. Native Americans, the poor, and women were excluded. Chattel slavery was recognized as a legal enterprise. Many of our revered founders advocated and facilitated the Native American Genocide in the interest of expanding our borders. Greed and selfishness are virtues. Capitalism, which has evolved into its utterly reprehensible advanced stages here in the United States, is intellectually buttressed by the ridiculous notion that people acting on two of the most despicable traits of humanity, greed and selfishness, will enhance the commonweal. The current state of affairs in the United States demonstrates otherwise. Despite the slight doses of socialism which have mitigated the abject suffering inflicted by relatively unfettered capitalism during the Gilded Age, and despite the fact that we are the wealthiest nation in the history of humanity, there are still over a million homeless human beings, millions experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly fifty million lack a viable means to obtain our outrageously expensive medical care, our leading indicators of health are amongst the lowest of industrialized nations, urban public school systems are in a state of crisis and decay, and, as Katrina so clearly indicated, we are content to spend most of our hard-earned tax dollars on industrialized murder, blame victims, and leave the suffering to die, even here at home. America is the land of opportunity. Are many of us better off than most of the people on the planet? In a material sense, yes. However, bear in mind that the principal reasons many US Americans enjoy a degree of prosperity is that we stole a large chunk of a resource-rich continent (which is geographically situated in a way that makes a mass invasion nearly impossible), and that we built much of our prosperous economy on the backs of black slaves. Rapacious capitalism has enabled us to economically colonize and exploit many nations in the developing world, which explains the utterly nauseating gluttony we exhibit by representing 5% of the world’s population and consuming 25% of its resources. Oink, oink! Is there economic upward mobility in our society? Yes. Yet rags to riches stories are extremely rare. Aristocratic dynasties are alive and well in the United States. One need look no further than George W. Bush or Paris Hilton to recognize that we are far from being the meritocracy that media shills like Oprah would have us believe. Beloved Oprah is ostensibly a benign and benevolent self-made billionaire emblematic of the “boundless opportunities” in the US. Certainly there is merit to her philanthropy. However, she erases her positive contributions many times over by promoting the notion that if a black woman like her can make it, anyone can. (And by the way, you who haven’t “made it” like Oprah, what the hell is wrong with you?) Her glowing endorsement of The Secret and its wholesale promotion of employing “magical thinking” to attain the “American Dream” was beyond the pale. America saved the world from fascism during World War II Let’s set the record straight here. A number of large US corporations and dynastic plutocrats, including Bush 43’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, made significant financial contributions to the Nazi cause before the Trading with the Enemy Act became law in 1942. We also need to remember that the United States refused to lift a finger to help the poor and working class in Spain as they fought to preserve their democratically-elected government from the fascist onslaught of Franco, the Church, and the moneyed elite. We lost about 500,000 people battling fascist imperialist forces in World War II. Russia sacrificed 20 million human beings. Were it not for Russia, we would probably be speaking German right now. Besides, the United States is now in the prefigurements of fascism. We are becoming the very threat from which we allegedly saved the world. America needs to maintain its leviathan military industrial complex to ensure its security and to spread freedom and democracy The United States spends more money on “defense” each year than the rest of the world combined. With the vast arsenal of weaponry we possess, it is beyond farcical to suggest that our security is seriously threatened at the existential level. We maintain military bases in 130 countries. We invaded Iraq and Afghanistan preemptively (which is a war crime for which we hanged Nazis). Yet we tenaciously strive to perpetuate the inane assertion that we are not an empire. Capitalism demands perpetual growth, meaning capitalist nations inevitably engage in imperialism to expand their markets, enhance their profits, and find cheaper wage slaves. We utilize the legions of the empire to spread the misery of “free markets,” consumerism, exploitation, and environmental rape. America is a Christian nation. While many argue endlessly over the separation of church and state, or whether or not the United States was founded as a Christian nation, an equally profound question receives far too little attention. What is the nature of the Christianity that our nation, in which a large number of denizens label themselves as Christians, collectively manifests? Our rigid Puritanical roots still maintain a tenacious grip on our psyches. This impedes our capacity to overtly experience life’s carnal, sensual pleasures without experiencing guilt at violating taboos. Denying ourselves reasonable indulgence triggers the bacchanalian excesses that lead to rampant addiction to pornography, drugs, and alcohol. The isolation, rage, and spiritual emptiness engendered by our consumerist, narcissistic, and violence-obsessed culture catalyze events like the ones at Columbine and Virginia Tech. With lamentations and hand-wringing, the mainstream media repeatedly expresses its utter astonishment when people snap to such an extent. After all, human beings living in a spiritually vacuous, hyper competitive environment have an infinite capacity to absorb insults, loneliness, rejection, exclusion, bullying, and hatred without reacting violently, don’t they? One of the basic principles Christ espoused was to practice the Golden Rule. Whoops. Slaughtering millions of human beings throughout our history leaves us well short of the mark on that one. Perhaps the most inspiring spiritual wisdom the Jewish carpenter conveyed to humanity came in the form of the Beatitudes. How do we manifest them in the United States? The poor in spirit are considered to be impotent and irrelevant in a culture that thrives on egoism and self-promotion. Those who mourn over moral injuries and tragedies are instructed to “get over it,” take some pills to mask the pain, and “move on”. The meek are crushed by aggressive, acquisitive mobs. Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness find that their efforts to satisfy, slake or quench are in vain as they wander a seemingly endless spiritual wasteland. The merciful are considered weak and fall prey to those who abuse their compassion for their own personal gain. The pure in heart are exploited as a reward for their decency. The peacemakers are ridiculed as idealists, cowards, and collaborators with the latest enemy our plutocracy has created to justify its endless wars. Despite the brutal nature and seemingly insurmountable power of this juggernaut of a nation, there is still hope for humanity and the world. While the opulent class, military careerists, fundamentalist Christian leadership, corporatists, AIPAC, “elected” officials, and the prostitutes in the corporate-dominated media propagate a sociopathic agenda through maintaining the simulacrum of the United States as the “leader of the free world,” there is abundant evidence of an increasing awareness of their perfidy and malevolence. Simmering beneath the surface for years, moral outrage now threatens to reach full boil thanks to the increased awareness facilitated by the Internet. The people of the United States are not freaks or anomalies. 96% of us have a conscience and can act empathetically. It is simply a matter of time, and perhaps a few more doses of pain, before reality obliterates what is left of the fiction we have been inculcated to embrace as the United States of America. Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at JMiller@bestcyrano.com

No Nukes: Period

vidourle — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 05:23:50 GMT

http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/no/ http://www.truemajority.org/signup.php "Experience teaches only the teachable". -Aldous Huxley The Bush administration is adamant about developing and building a new generation of nuclear weapons (they're calling it the "Reliable Replacement Warhead" (RRW) program). There's a chance to kill that terrible idea, but it's up to the Senate. Right now, Senate leaders are drafting their spending bill that could terminate the nuclear weapons program entirely. This is our best shot to end funding of new nuclear weapons. Email your Senators and tell them to support an Energy and Water Appropriations bill that cuts all spending for new nuclear weapons. http://www.truemajority.org Recently, the House threw a wrench in the administration's expensive and unnecessary nuclear program by denying the President's funding request for new nuclear weapons.1 The Senate should follow the lead of the House by cutting all funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program in their spending bill. We should be working to make the world a safer, more peaceful place, not funding and building more nuclear weapons. Decisions about this bill are being made now. So be sure to email your senators today and ask that they do everything they can to call for a bill that cuts all funding to the nuclear weapons program. We have a real chance to end funding for nuclear weapons, but the Senate needs to hear from as many of us as possible. After you've taken action, be sure to send this message onto your friends so they can get involved. TrueMajority.org is a grassroots group of citizens who believe in America's true values of openness, fairness and compassion. We believe participating in an effective government is the best way to be mutually responsible for our community.

Understanding Travel Philanthropy

vidourle — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 23:40:09 GMT

Travel Philanthropy is more than a mere luxury or diversion; it is a source of deep personal fulfillment, providing a powerful connection to the world in which we live. Learn more: http://travelmatters.wordpress.com/about/

Nobel Peace Prize for Tourism Urged

vidourle — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 23:11:02 GMT

Noting the UN World Tourism Organization was forecasting a billion annual arrivals in just four years, LeLaulu said poorer countries "had the most desirable destinations but needed help to ensure tourism revenues could benefit local people." The best way to ensure visitor income went to the local people, he added, "was to help communities at destinations develop the skills and capacity needed to attract tourists." http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/nobel_peace_prize_for_tourism_urged/ http://www.philanthropictravel.org

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, WORLD PEACE, WORLD POVERTY AND THE HUMAN FUTURE

vidourle — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:35:40 GMT

A BRIEF SUMMARY http://www.disclosureproject.org/ES-DisclosureImplications-2.htm Copyright Steven M. Greer,M.D. – March 2001 For most people, the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe is a mere philosophical musing — something of academic interest but of no practical importance. Even evidence that we are currently being visited by non-human advanced life forms seems to many to be an irrelevancy in a world of global warming, crushing poverty and the threat of war. In the face of real challenges to the long-term human future, the question of UFOs, extraterrestrials and secret government projects is a mere sideshow, right? Wrong — catastrophically wrong. The evidence and testimony presented in the following pages establishes the following: Ø That we are indeed being visited by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations and have been for some time; Ø That this is the most classified, compartmented program within the US and many other countries; Ø That those projects have, as warned in 1961 by President Eisenhower, escaped legal oversight and control in the US, the UK and elsewhere; Ø That advanced spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin, called extraterrestrial vehicles (ETVs) by some intelligence agencies, have been downed, retrieved and studied since at least the 1940s and possibly as early as the 1930s; Ø That significant technological breakthroughs in energy generation and propulsion have resulted from the study of these objects (and from related human innovations dating as far back as the time of Nikola Tesla) and that these technologies utilize a new physics not requiring the burning of fossil fuels or ionizing radiation to generate vast amounts of energy; Ø That classified, above top- secret projects possess fully operational anti-gravity propulsion devices and new energy generation systems that, if declassified and put to peaceful uses, would empower a new human civilization without want, poverty or environmental damage. Those who doubt these assertions should carefully read the testimony of dozens of military and government witnesses whose testimony clearly establishes these facts. Given the vast and profound implications of these statements, whether one accepts or seriously doubts these assertions, all must demand that Congressional hearings be convened to get to the truth of this matter. For nothing less than the human future hangs in the balance. Implications for the Environment We have identified insiders and scientists who can prove, in open Congressional hearings, that we do in fact possess classified energy generation and anti-gravity propulsion systems capable of completely and permanently replacing all forms of currently used energy generation and transportation systems. These devices access the ambient electromagnetic and so-called zero point energy state to produce vast amounts of energy without any pollution. Such systems essentially generate energy by tapping into the ever-present quantum vacuum energy state — the baseline energy from which all energy and matter is fluxing. All matter and energy is supported by this baseline energy state and it can be tapped through unique electromagnetic circuits and configurations to generate huge amounts of energy from space/time all around us. These are NOT perpetual motion machines nor do they violate the laws of thermodynamics — they merely tap an ambient energy field all around us to generate energy. This means that such systems do not require fuel to burn or atoms to split or fuse. They do not require central power plants, transmission lines and the related multi-trillion dollar infrastructure required to electrify and power remote areas of India, China, Africa and Latin America. These systems are site-specific: they can be set up at any place and generate needed energy. Essentially, this constitutes the definitive solution to the vast majority of environmental problems facing our world. The environmental benefits of such a discovery can hardly be overstated, but a brief list include: Ø The elimination of oil, coal and gas as sources of energy generation, thus the elimination of air and water pollution related to the transport and use of these fuels. Oil spills, global warming, illnesses from air pollution, acid rain etc can and must be ended within 10-20 years; Ø Resource depletion and geo-political tensions arising from competition for fossil fuel resources will end; Ø Technologies already exist to scrub manufacturing effluent to zero or near zero emissions for both air and water-but they use a great deal of energy and thus are considered too costly to fully utilize. Moreover, since they are energy intensive, and our energy systems today create most of the air pollution in the world, a point of diminishing return for the environment is reached quickly. That equation is dramatically changed when industries are able to tap vast amounts of free energy (there is no fuel to pay for — only the device, which is no more costly than other generators) and those systems create no pollution. Ø Energy-intensive recycling efforts will be able to reach full application since the energy needed to process solid waste will, again, be free and abundant. Ø Agriculture, which is currently very energy dependent and polluting, can be transformed to use clean, non-polluting sources of energy. Ø Desertification can be reversed and world agriculture empowered by utilizing desalinization plants, which are now very energy intensive and expensive, but will become cost-efficient once able to use these new, non-polluting energy systems. Ø Air travel, trucking and inter-city transportation systems will be replaced with new energy and propulsion technologies (anti-gravity systems allow for silent above surface movement). No pollution will be generated and costs will decrease substantially since the energy expenses will be negligible. Additionally, mass transportation in urban areas can utilize these systems to provide silent, efficient intra-city movement. Ø Noise pollution from jets, trucks and other modes of transportation will be eliminated by the use of these silent devices. Ø Public utilities will not be needed since each home, office and factory will have a device to generate whatever energy is needed. This means ugly transmission lines that are subject to storm damage and power interruption will be a thing of the past. Underground gas pipelines, which not infrequently rupture or leak and damage Earth and water resources, will not be needed at all. Ø Nuclear power plants will be decommissioned and the technologies needed to clean such sites will be available. Classified technologies do exist to neutralize nuclear waste. Utopia? No, because human society will always be imperfect — but perhaps not as dysfunctional as it is today. These technologies are real — I have seen them. Anti-gravity is a reality and so is free energy generation. This is not a fantasy or a hoax. Do not believe those who say that this is not possible: they are the intellectual descendants of those who said the Wright brothers would never fly. Current human civilization has reached the point of being able to commit planeticide: the killing of an entire world. We can and we must do better. These technologies exist and every single person who is concerned about the environment and the human future should call for urgent hearings to allow these technologies to be disclosed, declassified and safely applied. Implications for Society and World Poverty From the above, it is obvious that these technologies that are currently classified would enable human civilization to achieve sustainability. Of course, in the near term, we are talking about the greatest social, economic and technological revolution in human history — bar none. I will not minimize the world-encompassing changes that would inevitably attend such disclosures. Having dealt with this issue for much of my adult life, I am acutely aware of how immense these changes will be. Aside from the singular realization that homo sapiens are not the only — or most advanced — creatures in the universe, this disclosure will cause humanity to be faced with the greatest risks and opportunities in known history. If we do nothing, our civilization will collapse environmentally, economically, geo-politically and socially. In 10 – 20 years, fossil fuel and oil demand will outstrip supply significantly — and then it is the Mad Max scenario where everyone is warring over the last barrel of oil. It is likely that this geo-political and social collapse will precede any environmental catastrophe. The disclosure of these new technologies will give us a new, sustainable civilization. World poverty will be eliminated within our life times. With the advent of these new energy and propulsion systems, no place on Earth will need to suffer from want. Even the deserts will bloom… Once abundant and nearly free energy is available in impoverished areas for agriculture, transportation, construction, manufacturing and electrification, there is no limit to what humanity can achieve. It is ridiculous — obscene even — that mind-boggling poverty and famine exists in the world while we sit on classified technologies that could completely reverse this situation. So why not release these technologies? Because the social, economic and geo-political order of the world would be greatly altered. Every deep insider with whom I have met has emphasized that this would be the greatest change in known human history. The matter is so highly classified not because it is so silly, but because its implications are so profound and far reaching. By nature, those who control such projects do not like change. And here we are talking about the biggest economic, technological, social and geo-political change in known human history. Hence, the status quo is maintained, even as our civilization hurtles towards oblivion. But by this argument, we would have never had the industrial revolution and the Ludites would have reigned supreme to this day. An international effort to minimize disruption to the economy and to ease the transition to this new social and economic reality will be needed. We can do this and we must. Special interests in certain oil, energy and economic sectors need to be reigned in and at the same time treated compassionately: Nobody likes to see their power and empire crumble. Nations very dependent on the sale of oil and gas will need help diversifying, stabilizing and transitioning to a new economic order. The United States, Europe and Japan will need to adjust to a new geo-political reality as well: As currently poor but populous countries dramatically develop technologically and economically, they will demand — and will get — a meaningful seat at the international table. And this is as it should be. But the international community will need to put in place safeguards to prevent such potential geo-political rapprochement between the first and third world from devolving into bellicose and disruptive behavior on the part of the newly empowered. The US in particular will need to lead through strength — but avoid the current trend towards domination. Leadership and domination are not the same, and the sooner we learn the difference the better off the world will be. There can be international leadership without domination and hegemony, and the US needs to realize these distinctions if it is to provide much-needed leadership on this issue. These technologies, because they will decentralize power — literally and figuratively — will enable the billions living in misery and poverty to enter a world of new abundance. And with economic and technological development, education will rise and birth rates will fall. It is well known that as societies become more educated, prosperous and technologically advanced — and women take an increasingly equal role in society — the birth rate falls and population stabilizes. This is a good thing for world civilization and the future of humanity. With each village cleanly electrified, agriculture empowered with clean and free energy and transportation costs lowered, poverty will dramatically fall in the world. If we act now, by 2030 we will be able to effectively eliminate all poverty in the world, as we know it today. We only need the courage to accept these changes and the wisdom to steer humanity safely and peacefully into a new time. Implications for World Peace and Security A few years ago I was discussing this subject with the former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Claiborne Pell. He explained to me that he had been in Congress since the 1950s but had never been briefed on this subject. I told him that the nature of these black projects has resulted in most of our leaders being left out of any decision making on this subject, and what a shame this is. I said, "Senator Pell, all that time you were Chairman of Foreign Relations, you were deprived of the opportunity to deal with the ultimate foreign relations challenge…" and I pointed to the stars above our heads. He said, " You know Dr. Greer, I am afraid that you are right…" It is true that our great diplomats and wise elders, such as Senator Pell, President Jimmy Carter and other international leaders have been specifically and deliberately prevented from having access to or control over this subject. This is a direct threat to world peace. In the vacuum of secrecy, operations supervised by neither the people, the people’s representatives, the UN nor any other legitimate entity have taken actions that directly threaten world peace. Testimony, corroborated by multiple military witnesses who do not know each other and who have had no opportunity for collusion, will show that the US and other countries have engaged these ETVs in armed attack, in some cases leading to the downing of these vehicles. As I said to Mrs. Boutros Ghali, wife of the then Secretary General of the UN, if there is even a 10% chance that this is true, then this constitutes the gravest threat to world peace in human history Having personally interviewed numerous credible military and aerospace officials with direct knowledge of such actions, I am certain that we have done this. Why? Because these unknown vehicles have been in our airspace without our permission and because we wanted to acquire their technology. Nobody has asserted that there is an actual threat to humanity from these objects: Obviously, any civilization capable of routine interstellar travel could terminate our civilization in a nanosecond, if that was their intent. That we are still breathing the free air of Earth is abundant testimony to the non-hostile nature of these ET civilizations. We have also been informed that the so-called Star Wars (or National Missile Defense System) effort has really been a cover for black project deployment of weapon systems to track, target and destroy ETVs as they approach Earth or enter Earth’s atmosphere. No less a figure than Wernher Von Braun warned on his death-bed of both the reality and the madness of such a scheme, apparently to no avail (see the Testimony of Carol Rosin, former spokesperson for Wernher Von Braun). Well, unless we change directions we are likely to end up where we are going. With the types of weapons currently in the covert arsenal — weapons more fearsome even than thermonuclear devices — there is no possibility of a survivable conflict. Yet in the darkness of secrecy, actions have been taken on behalf of every human that may endanger our future. Only a full, honest disclosure will correct this situation. It is not possible for me to convey in words the urgency of this. For 10 years I worked as an emergency doctor and saw how every possible object can be used as a weapon. Every technology, unless guided by wisdom and a desire for that good and peaceful future – the only future possible — will be used for conflict. Super-secret projects that answer to no legally constituted body- not the UN, not the US Congress, not the British Parliament — must not be allowed to continue to act in this way on behalf of humanity. One of the greatest dangers of extreme secrecy is that it creates a hermetically sealed, closed system impervious to the free and open exchange of ideas. In such an environment, it is easy to see how grave mistakes can be made. For instance, the testimony here will show that these ETVs became very prominent after we developed the first nuclear weapons — and began to go into space. There were multiple events — corroborated here by numerous credible military officials — of these objects hovering over and even neutralizing ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles). A closed, military view of this might be to take offense, engage in counter-measures and attempt to down such objects. In fact, this would be the normal response. But what if these ET civilizations were saying, "Please do not destroy your beautiful world — and know this: we will not let you go into space with such madness and threaten others…" An event showing concern and even a larger cosmic wisdom could be construed over and over again as an act of aggression. Such misunderstandings and myopia are the stuff wars are made of. Whatever our perceptions of these visitors, there is no chance that misunderstandings can be resolved through violent engagement. To contemplate such madness is to contemplate the termination of human civilization. It is time for our wise elders and our levelheaded diplomats, like Sen. Pell, to be put in charge of these weighty matters. To leave this in the hands of a clique of un-elected, self-appointed and unaccountable covert operations is the greatest threat to US national security and world security in history. Eisenhower was right, but nobody was listening. In light of testimony showing that covert actions have been taken that involved violent engagement of these visitors, it is imperative that the international community in general and the US Congress and President in particular do the following: Ø Convene hearings to assess the risks to national and international security posed by the current covert management of the subject; Ø Enforce an immediate ban on weapons in space and specifically ban the targeting of any extraterrestrial objects since such actions are unwarranted and could endanger the whole of humanity; Ø Develop a special diplomatic unit to interface with these extraterrestrial civilizations, foster communication and peaceful relations; Ø Develop a suitably empowered and open international oversight group to manage human-extraterrestrial relations and ensure peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions; Ø Support international institutions that can ensure the peaceful use of those new technologies related to advanced energy and propulsion systems (see below). In addition to the above, a less obvious — but perhaps equally pressing — threat to world peace arises from the fact that the covert control of this subject has resulted in the world being deprived of the new energy and propulsion technologies discussed earlier. World poverty and a widening gap between rich and poor are serious threats to world peace that would be corrected by the disclosure and peaceful application of these technologies (see above). The real threat of war over a shrinking supply of fossil fuels in the next 10-20 years further underscores the need for this disclosure. What happens when the 4 billion people living in poverty want cars, electricity and other modern conveniences — all of which depend on fossil fuels? To any thinking person, it is obvious that we must transition quickly to the use of these now classified technologies — they are powerful solutions already sitting on a shelf. Of course, a number of insiders have pointed out that these technologies are not your grandfather’s Oldsmobile: They are technological advances, like any other, that could be put to violent uses by terrorists, bellicose nations and madmen. But here we enter a catch 22: If these technologies are not forthcoming soon, we will face a certain meltdown in human civilization and the environment; if they are disclosed, immensely powerful new technologies will be out there for possible destructive uses. In the near future, it is prudent to view humanity as likely to use any new technology violently. This means that international agencies must be created to ensure — and enforce — the exclusive peaceful use of such devices. The technologies exist today to link every such device to a GPS (Global Positioning System) monitor that could disable or render useless any device tampered with or used for anything put peaceful power generation and propulsion. These technologies should be regulated and monitored. And the international community must mature to a level of competence to ensure their exclusive peaceful use. Any other use should be met with overwhelming resistance by every other nation on Earth. Such a pact is the necessary next step. Maybe someday, humanity will live in peace without the need for such controls. But for now, the situation is like that of chained dogs — some strong leashes are warranted and are essential. But such concerns cannot be a rationale for further delaying the disclosure of these technologies. We have the knowledge and means to ensure their safe and peaceful use — and these must be applied soon if we are to avoid further degradation of the environment and an escalation of world poverty and conflict. In the final analysis, then, we are faced with a social and spiritual crisis that transcends any technological or scientific challenge. The technological solutions exit — but do we possess the will, wisdom and courage to apply them for the common good? The more one contemplates this matter the more it is obvious that we have one possible future: Peace. Peace on Earth and peace in space — a universal Peace, wisely enforced; for every other path leads to ruin This then is the greatest challenge of the current era. Can our spiritual and social resources rise to this challenge? Nothing less than the destiny of the human race hangs in the balance.

GoaGil Memorial Day Meltdown 2007

vidourle — Tue, 29 May 2007 18:30:05 GMT

Meltdown Memories: http://picasaweb.google.com/exquisitesafaris.com/GoaGilMemorialDayMeltdown2007?authkey=_G9LDuBxpxs http://www.goagil.com/albums/memorialmeltdown2007/MOV09220.mpg http://www.jantima.it/GoaGil-MemorialDay26-28May07.html http://www.goagil.com/photogallery/memorialmeltdown2007?page=1 Redefining the Ancient Tribal Ritual for the 21st Century http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/ancient_tribal_ritual/ Future Kontact: http://di.onys.us/2007-festival-guide/ http://sanfrancisco.tribe.net/event/JUNE-151617th-GEMINI-ARTS-MUSIC-AND-DANCE-GATHERING-2007/san-francisco-ca/d4032c84-4a88-408b-a311-ff36b97a3652?nextpage=http%3A%2F%2Fsanfrancisco.tribe.net%2Fhome http://people.tribe.net/willowrage/blog/f5bd001a-57a2-4ad2-b409-444ae0e8af74#309f9029-5eec--113bf http://goagil.com/schedule.html http://www.goatrance.de/goabase/parties.php3?saAtt[country]=United+States http://forum.isratrance.com/viewforum.php/forum/28

Philanthropic Intersections

vidourle — Fri, 11 May 2007 05:09:16 GMT

Intersections of Inspiration at the Azama Project -Ecuador by DC At its most basic, money is a tool that enables us to meet our individual needs. As a form of potential energy that empowers us to generate change, it is neither good nor bad. Yet many people react emotionally to issues concerning finances, unconsciously condemning currency itself, the manner in which money is spent, and people who live lives of financial abundance. Individuals who are rich in gifts such as high intelligence are acknowledged for their positive traits while those who have acquired material riches or aspire to become wealthy are frequently judged harshly. However, wealth is not a trait upon which judgment can be legitimately passed. It tells us nothing about how a person lives, what they believe in, whom they care for, or the scope of their values. Like any blessing, wealth is merely an instrument of purpose that can be used both constructively and destructively. From an early age, people learn to court wealth while simultaneously associating money with greed, selfishness, and unethical behavior. Consequently, this idea becomes entrenched in their hearts as envy. To attain a balanced and rational comprehension of money, as well as a fairer perspective of wealth, we need to recognize that outward manifestations of wealth tell us little about the individuals enjoying those blessings. When we feel the finger of jealousy prompting us to draw unflattering conclusions about people whose lives seem more financially secure than our own, we should remind ourselves that there are many elements of their circumstances we cannot see. Their wealth may be the result of long hours of taxing labor, they may donate a large percentage of their resources to charitable causes, or their bounty may be an incidental aspect of a life spent doing what they love. Ultimately, we can heal our hurtful associations with money by turning a blind eye toward both wealth and poverty when interacting with others and instead focusing on the individual before us. If you take a moment to consider you own feelings regarding money and wealth, you may discover that you equate financial prosperity with happiness, power, security, independence, or self-indulgence. Money itself, however, is none of these things. You can begin developing a healthier view of wealth by simply accepting that while some possess great wealth and others do not, we all have the potential to create lives of beauty, substance, and wisdom using the resources we have been granted. <b>Learn More:</b> "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/philanthropic_travel/" title="Understanding Philanthropic Travel" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/fast_company_philanthropic_travel/" title="Fast Company Magazine on Philanthropic Travel" "http://dailyom.com/" title="Daily Om" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/philanthropic_travel_zambia/" title="Philanthropic Traveler funded High School opens near Victoria Falls, Zambia" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/luxury_philanthropic_travel/" title="The Fable of Stone Soup" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/my_first_philanthropic_travel/" title="My First Philanthropic Travel Experience" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/exquisite_safaris_10_profits_10_equity_and_10_employee_time/" title="Exquisite Safaris Donates 10% profit + 10% employee time + your loose change.." "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/affluent_parents_dedicated_to_instilling_strong_values_in_their_children/" title="Affluent Parents Dedicated to Instilling Philanthropic Values in their Children" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/giving_while_living_the_deeper_news_about_the_new_philanthropy/" title="Giving while Living: The Deeper News About the New Philanthropy" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/interview_jeffrey_d_sachs/" title="Dr. Jeffrey Sachs on the Strategic Steps Out of Poverty" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/travelers_philanthropy/" title="Are We Talking about Philanthropy Yet? No, We Are Not" <b>Philanthropic Travelers:</b> "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/travel_philanthropy1/" title="Milton & Fred Ochieng: Philanthropic Travelers" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/makuni_village_zambia_a_philanthropic_travel_success_story/" title="Jane Kaye- Bailey: Philanthropic Traveler" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/richard_branson_philanthropic_traveler/" title="Richard Branson: Philanthropic Traveler" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/philanthropic_traveler_angelina_jolie/" title="Angelina Jolie: Philanthropic Traveler" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/karen_jacobsen_philanthropic_traveler/" title="Karen Jacobsen: Philanthropic Traveler" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/oprah_winfrey_philanthropic_traveler/" title="Oprah Winfrey: Philanthropic Traveler" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/journal/more/palm_beach_life_philanthropic_travel/" title="Palm Beach Life Magazine: Philanthropic Travelers" "http://www.exquisitesafaris.com/index.php/main/faq/" title="Why Exquisite Safaris?" "http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http%3A//feeds.feedburner.com/ExquisiteSafariJournal"><img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif" width="104" height="17" border="0" alt="Add to Google" "http://us.rd.yahoo.com/my/atm/Exquisite%20Safaris%20Philanthropic%20Travel%20Worldwide/Exquisite%20Safari%20Journal/*http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http%3A//feeds.feedburner.com/ExquisiteSafariJournal"><img src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/my/addtomyyahoo4.gif" width="91" height="17" border="0" align="middle" alt="Add to My Yahoo!"