Onwards and upwards...

For all those suffering pain or loss, the road is long but don't give up. Your voice counts.

Former President World Bank, James Wolfenson lets slip Elite fears....

Interesting video (except for the goofy intro) This one shows how the "Elite" mindset is preparing for "tectonic shifts". And he's very, very unhappy about the ascendency of China and India...Someone isn't going to have his share of the cake anymore? Awwww...

 

Ex Member of The Global Elite Tells All

Are all the details true? Doubtful. Is the basic framework correct? Pretty much.

Massive rally swamps Tel Aviv

RT

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Tel-Aviv and across Israel to protest against economic injustice. The protest’s organizers are demanding that the Knesset rewrite the 2012 budget "taking into account the demands of the people."

The latest rally comes after a wave of social protests swept Israel over the summer and culminated in September, when half a million Israelis came out onto the streets. But since then, the movement has slowly died out as protesters returned to their daily lives. 

Israeli police say more than 30,000 people marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, and thousands more protested in Jerusalem.

As RT’s Paula Slier reports, many protesters are concerned that their story of social protest will be missed by the international community and media, which is now focused on unfolding events in Gaza.

In the past few hours, multiple rockets have been fired from Gaza into southern Israel. Several people have been injured. It came as retaliation after Israeli aircraft struck Palestinian militants in southern Gaza on Saturday, killing five.

Due to the latest exchange of fire, a planned protest in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba was canceled.

Paula Slier reports that people on the street say the timing of the Israeli airstrikes against Gaza is very convenient for the government, as it helps distract attention from Israel’s own domestic problems.

Read more

Anonymous - A Storm Is Coming

Not sure what to think about Anonymous but this video is rather inspiring....

Occupy Wall Street Outing The Media Shills

Daily Bail

This is brilliant.

http://twitter.com/jsmooth995

A few thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, I've been watching it and going down there for a while now but hadn't had a chance to speak on it.

By the way when I say some news media people are "ringers," I don't necessarily mean that they deliberately obfuscate, or get orders from some shadowy figure to do so. I think they'll often just have a personal investment in the system and status quo that's being critiqued/threatened, so they'll naturally--without any need to conspire--have their perception skewed by an instinct to protect the status quo they're invested in. So though it's quite possibly not their intention to play the ringer, it's the function they wind up serving nonetheless.

Secret Societies? Not so secret.

Much as many would love to think that secret societies are firmly in the land of the delusional and paranoid I'm afraid they are simply part and parcel of daily life at the top of the hierarchical pyramids in this world. Have a look at some of these varied reports from the last few years if you need some proof:

Inside the secretive Bilderberg Group
2005-09-29, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4290944.stm

How much influence do private networks of the rich and powerful have on government policies and international relations? One group, the Bilderberg, has often attracted speculation that it forms a shadowy global government. Every year since 1954 [they have brought] together about 120 leading business people and politicians. At this year's meeting in Germany, the audience included the heads of the World Bank and European Central Bank, Chairmen or Chief Executives from Nokia, BP, Unilever, DaimlerChrysler and Pepsi ... editors from five major newspapers, members of parliament, ministers, European commissioners ... and the queen of the Netherlands. The chairman ... is 73-year-old Viscount Etienne Davignon. In an extremely rare interview, he played down the importance of Bilderberg. "I don't think (we are) a global ruling class because I don't think a global ruling class exists." Will Hutton ... who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1997, says people take part in these networks in order to influence the way the world works, to create what he calls "the international common sense". And that "common sense" is one which supports the interests of Bilderberg's main participants. For Bilderberg's critics the fact that there is almost no publicity about the annual meetings is proof that they are up to no good. Bilderberg meetings often feature future political leaders shortly before they become household names. Bill Clinton went in 1991 while still governor of Arkansas, Tony Blair was there two years later while still an opposition MP. All the recent presidents of the European Commission attended Bilderberg meetings before they were appointed. Informal and private networks like Bilderberg have helped to oil the wheels of global politics and globalisation for the past half a century.

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'Bonesmen' for president
2004-03-10, MSNBC News
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4500423

Pres. Bush and John Kerry were both members of the secret organization. ‘Skull and Bones’ dates to 1832. It was in fact a reaction to a secret society, the Masons. Founder William Huntington Russell thought of his little enclave as sort of anti-Masons and as a home for the wealthy and the powerful ... who would do anything for another Bonesman. Each year, 15 young undergraduate seniors are tapped for membership. Members of ‘Skull and Bones’ gather on High Street in the Yale campus at the tomb. New members, the neophytes, are expected to do things like lie in coffins, wrestle in mud, kiss a skull, and confess their sexual histories in front of the group to bond themselves together. Once you‘re in, you‘re in: ‘Skull and Bones’ is for life. There are a lot of [famous] Bonesmen ... Henry Luce, who created “TIME” magazine; Harold Stanley, founder of Morgan Stanley; William F. Buckley; Averell Harriman, long-time governor of New York. And then there are the presidents: William Howard Taft, whose father, Alphonso, had helped found the group; George Herbert Walker Bush, whose father, Prescott, was a Bonesman and a senator; the current President Bush. [And there's] John Kerry, Bonesman class of ‘66. His wife Teresa Kerry‘s first husband, John Heinz ... was ‘Skull and Bones.’ Both Bush and Kerry refused to answer ‘Meet the Press’ host Tim Russert when asked about the organization. Alexandra Robbins, author of “Secrets of the Tombs" [said] "The sole purpose of Skull and Bones is to get members into positions of power and then to have those members hire other members to prominent positions, which is something that President Bush has done."

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Political ties to a secretive religious group
2008-04-03, MSNBC News
http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/03/857959.aspx

For more than 50 years, the National Prayer Breakfast has been a Washington institution. Every president has attended the breakfast since Eisenhower. Besides the presidents ..... the one constant presence at the National Prayer Breakfast has been Douglas Coe. Although he’s not an ordained minister, the 79-year-old Coe is the most important religious leader you've never seen or heard. Scores of senators in both parties ... go to small weekly Senate prayer groups that Coe attends, [including] senators John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Observers who have investigated Coe’s group, called The Fellowship Foundation, [describe] a secretive organization. Coe repeatedly urges a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. It’s a commitment Coe compares to the blind devotion that Adolph Hitler demanded. "Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler. Think of the immense power these three men had.” Coe also quoted Jesus and said: “One of the things [Jesus] said is 'If any man comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, his own life, he can't be a disciple.’" Writer Jeff Sharlet ... lived among Coe's followers six years ago, and came out troubled by their secrecy and rhetoric. “We were being taught the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin and Mao. Hitler’s genocide wasn’t really an issue for them. It was the strength that he emulated,” said Sharlet, who ... has now written about The Fellowship, also known to insiders as The Family, in [a] book called The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

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Connections And Then Some
2003-03-14, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A25...

The Carlyle Group [is] an investment house famous as one of the most well-connected companies anywhere. Former president George H.W. Bush is a Carlyle adviser. Former British prime minister John Major heads its European arm. Former secretary of state James Baker is senior counselor, former White House budget chief Richard Darman is a partner, former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt is senior adviser -- the list goes on. Those associations have brought Carlyle enormous success. The Washington-based merchant bank controls nearly $14 billion in investments, making it the largest private equity manager in the world. It buys and sells whole companies the way some firms trade shares of stock. But the connections also have cost Carlyle. It has developed a reputation as the CIA of the business world -- omnipresent, powerful, a little sinister. Media outlets from the Village Voice to BusinessWeek have depicted Carlyle as manipulating the levers of government from shadowy back rooms. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) even suggested that Carlyle's and Bush's ties to the Middle East made them somehow complicitous in the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It didn't help that as the World Trade Center burned on Sept. 11, 2001, the news interrupted a Carlyle business conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel here attended by a brother of Osama bin Laden. Former president Bush, a fellow investor, had been with him at the conference the previous day. Bush['s] primary function is to give speeches for Carlyle that attract wealthy foreigners in places where the former president is especially revered, such as Asia. The company has rewarded its faithful with a 36 percent average annual rate of return.

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Davos: Wealth, power and a sprinkling of stardust
2008-01-22, The Independent (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/davos-wealth...

For a few days an obscene proportion of the world's wealth and clout will be concentrated in one normally obscure Alpine town, [Davos, Switzerland]. Some 27 heads of state or government; 113 cabinet ministers; hundreds of chief executives, bankers, sovereign wealth fund managers, economists and the media: about 2,500 participants in all. So who's coming and what will they be chattering about? The official co-chairs of the Forum are mostly well-known names: Tony Blair, of JP Morgan; James Dimon, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan; KV Kamath, MD and CEO of India's ICICI Bank; Henry Kissinger, chairman of Kissinger Associates; Indra K Noovi, chairman and CEO of PepsiCo; David J O'Reilly, chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation; and Wang Jianzhou, CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation. The prominent role allotted to Mr Wang, while not entirely novel, is nonetheless significant. In 2008, for the first time, China will contribute more to the growth of the world economy than the United States. Double-digit growth in China should still just be possible this year, and it alone seems to stand between the world and a full-blown recession. Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) from China and elsewhere have already been busy re-capitalising the West's stricken banks. The recycling of trillions of dollars of trade surpluses and petro dollars means that such deals will become more prevalent.

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Protesters challenge the powerful at exclusive California retreat
2006-07-22, San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/07/22/state/n163157D01.DTL

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside an exclusive California retreat for government and business leaders Saturday to challenge the right of a "ruling elite" to make policy decisions without public scrutiny. The annual Bohemian Grove retreat has attracted powerful men such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, philanthropist David Rockefeller, former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It's also become a magnet for all types of activists who increasingly use the event to network and organize their campaigns. The men who attend the Bohemian Grove retreat spend two weeks performing plays, eating gourmet camp grub, listening to speakers and power-bonding at the 2,700-acre compound near the Russian River in Sonoma County. The retreat is organized by the exclusive San Francisco-based Bohemian Club. The club and event are shrouded in mystery, much like Yale University's most-famous secret society, Skull and Bones, whose members include President George W. Bush and his presidential rival Sen. John Kerry.

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Washington's C Street House at Congress Run by Secretive 'The Family'
2009-07-13, MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31890176

The secretive religious group, the Family, ... appears to be the connective tissue of the Senator Ensign sex scandal and the Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina sex scandal. It‘s a mystery that concerns this house at 133 C Street Southeast in Washington, D.C. This building‘s financial paper trail [shows] that it‘s actually considered to be a church. That designation makes C Street a convenient tax-free haven for the secretive organization that runs it, an organization known as the Family. Members of Congress who live there are sworn to secrecy. This powerful, poorly understood religious group ... and the house at C Street have ended up reluctantly in the headlines now because of the two major politicians‘ sex scandals. Embattled Nevada Senator John Ensign lives at the C Street house. Prominent members of the Family ... as well as other members of Congress who live at C Street—were both aware of Ensign‘s secret affair and were involved in his efforts to pay off the mistress and her family. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford mentioned C Street by name in his long public statement of regret about his affair with a woman in Argentina. Jeff Sharlet ... secretly infiltrated the family to write a book [The Family] about them. SHARLET: They like to call themselves the Christian mafia. They mean this in the sense of money moving quietly behind the scenes. Where the money goes they believe God goes. Douglas Coe, "The Family" leader, ... again and again [uses] the model of Hitler as an ideal of strength. It‘s not that he‘s a neo-Nazi. It‘s that they fetishize strength. They look for the leader who they believe is chosen by God. Evidence [of this] is his power, his wealth, and his willingness to align himself with their version of American power.

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The people who control the world
2003-01-30, CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/01/30/ronson.them

The Middle Ages had the Knights Templar. The 18th century had the Masons and the Illuminati. Our modern age has golf-playing businessmen. [Jon] Ronson, a 35-year-old British writer, humorist and documentarian, kept reading and hearing about the "tiny elite [that] rules the world from inside a secret room" -- so he decided to go in search of it. He met with extremists of many stripes: Ku Klux Klansmen with a PR bent, Muslim rabble-rousers ... and others convinced that a New World Order meant the end of the world. He sought out the industrialists of groups such as the Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove. He wrote about his experiences in "Them." Ronson's extremists seem rather normal. Some are very much aware of how their views marginalize them. The people of "Them" are people who are all too human -- even if they would deny others their humanity. As the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not out to get you. Ronson doesn't deny that many of the extremists in "Them" are, well, extreme. Many have put together half-baked theories that blame the troubles of the world on wealthy businessmen, usually a code word for Jews. Ronson, who's Jewish himself, sometimes found it awkward to listen to their views. Conspiracy theorists tend to be fearful, less educated, less tied in to the power structure. Meanwhile, the leaders of corporations and countries do meet as part of conferences sponsored by organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group. While researching a Bilderberg Group meeting, [Ronson] was chased through parts of Portugal by shadowy security men. He found out just how thin the membrane between "us" and "them" may be. 

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The Global Ruling Class: Billion-dollar Babies
2008-04-24, The Economist magazine
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11081878

Who rules the world? The rise of nation states produced national ruling classes. It would be odd if the current integration of the world economy did not produce new global elites — business people and financiers who run global companies and global politicians who steer supra-national organisations such as the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund. David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that these elites constitute nothing less than a new global “superclass”. They have all the clubby characteristics of the old national ruling classes, but with the vital difference that they operate on the global stage, far from mere national electorates. They attend the same universities. They are groomed in a handful of world-spanning institutions such as Goldman Sachs. They belong to the same clubs — the Council on Foreign Relations in New York is a particular favourite — and sit on each other's boards of directors. Many of them shuttle between the public and private sectors. They meet at global events such as the World Economic Forum at Davos and the Trilateral Commission or — for the crème de la crème — the Bilderberg meetings or the Bohemian Grove seminars that take place every July in California. Mr Rothkopf is anything but a crank, and he is right when he says that, these days, the most influential people around the world are also the most global people. He is also admirably ambivalent about his subject. He worries about surging inequality — the richest 1% of humans own 40% of the planet's wealth — and about the rumbling backlash against so much unaccountable power.

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Bilderberg: The ultimate conspiracy theory
2004-06-03, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3773019.stm

The Bilderberg group, an elite coterie of Western thinkers and power-brokers, has been accused of fixing the fate of the world behind closed doors. As the organisation marks its 50th anniversary, rumours are more rife than ever. On Thursday the Bilderberg group marks its 50th anniversary with the start of its yearly meeting. For four days some of the West's chief political movers, business leaders, bankers, industrialists and strategic thinkers will hunker down in a five-star hotel in northern Italy to talk about global issues. What sets Bilderberg apart from other high-powered get-togethers, such as the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), is its mystique. Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted. A former journalist, Mr Gosling runs a campaign against the group from his home in Bristol, UK." One of the first places I heard about the determination of US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks that came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting," says Mr Gosling. 

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What Power Looks Like
2008-04-14, Newsweek magazine
http://www.newsweek.com/id/130637

[In] speaking [with New York Federal Reserve Bank president Timothy] Geithner while I was doing the research for my recently published book Superclass, he sketched in fascinating detail how the world's power elite rallies when the markets quake. Recalling an earlier crisis in global securities markets that he helped to manage, Geithner said the Fed brought together the leaders of the world's 14 major financial firms, from five countries, representing 95 percent of all the activity in global markets. The Swiss were there, the Germans were there, the British were there. Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein "jokingly called them 'the 14 families,' like in 'The Godfather'," says Geithner. "And we said to them, 'You guys have got to fix this problem. Tell us how you are going to fix it and we will work out some basic regime.' You ... need a critical mass of the right players. It is a much more concentrated world." Geithner's description of the financial elite in crisis mode came many months before the recent meltdown of Bear Stearns, yet foreshadowed [it] in an uncanny way. The people ... described by Geithner, plus a few thousand more like them, not only in business and finance, but also politics, the arts, the nonprofit world and other realms, are part of a new global elite that has emerged over the past several decades. I call it the "superclass." They have vastly more power than any other group on the planet. Each of the members is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power, and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members.

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1934: The Plot Against America
2007-07-28, Harper's magazine
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651

In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. An alert FDR shut it down but stopped short of retaliatory measures against the plotters. A key element of the plot involved [Smedley Butler], a retired prominent general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 men from unemployed veterans and who blew the whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. The plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only recently been made available. The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was ... deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government. The role of the most powerful political dynastic family in the nation’s history in this whole affair is shocking.

Police chiefs 'authorised undercover police officers to give false evidence in court'

 I hope this puts the doubts to rest that police and intelligence are not extremely active in the environmental movements in promoting violence, unthinking, reactionary dynamics as well bad science. This is eco-Intelpro at its most obvious. 

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Telegraph

The claims led to Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary delaying a report into undercover police tactics at the last minute. 

It had been due to be published today and was thought to be critical of the police.

Lawyers for a convicted protester claim a Metropolitan Police officer called Jim Boyling, posing as an activist, was prosecuted alongside their client and lied under oath to conceal his true identity.

Solicitors from the law firm Bindmans claim Boyling pretended to be Jim Sutton between 1995 and 2000 and joined the non-violent organisation Reclaim the Streets, the Guardian newspaper reported.

As part of his role, Bindmans claim, he was prosecuted at Horseferry Road magistrates court in London in 1997 for disorderly behaviour in a three-day trial. 

He maintained his fiction during the entire prosecution, they allege, giving a false name and occupation and lying under oath.

Bindmans are appealing on behalf of John Jordan, an activist who was convicted of assaulting a police officer and given a one-year conditional discharge.

They claim Boyling would potentially have been able to use his knowledge of the activists’ defence to boost the prosecution’s case.

It has previously been claimed that Boyling married an activist he met while undercover in the environmental protest movement, and that he went on to have children with her.

Peter Black, another police officer who worked in the same undercover unit as Boyling, said the case was not unique.

Black said occasional prosecutions for regular involvement in public disorder were allowed to go ahead because it helped to build their credibility with activists.

A spokesman for the Met Police said the force was already reviewing issues regarding the deployment of undercover officers.

He added: “The Metropolitan Police Service acknowledges that these are serious matters and is continuing to review the situation, and will take account of any additional information that becomes available.”

A spokeswoman for HMIC said their report had been delayed to “consider the relevance” of the new claims.

She added: “We will be writing to The Guardian and Newsnight [which also ran the story] to invite them to provide any additional information they may have.”

Three different inquiries have been launched following the controversy surrounding Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer who spent seven years working undercover before turning against his seniors.

Some of the HMIC materiel expected to be published on Thursday was to have examined his role and those of his controllers.

Global Protests: A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma

David Icke

I am seeing the mentality of what is called the political 'Left’ – which includes the core of the ‘Greens’ – much in evidence in these protests. This mentality thinks it is informed and streetwise about global events when its myopia makes it a manipulator’s party trick.

It sees the world in black and white when the world is multi-coloured. It sees an ‘us’ and ‘them’ on either side of an easily definable line based on background, income bracket and voting preference. Filmmaker Michael Moore is a classic, or at least that is the persona he promotes. Democrats good (or better) and Republicans bad; The Left is good, the Right is bad.

The fact that all these different political ‘sides’ are directed by the same force to give the illusion of ‘choice’ is beyond them to comprehend, not least because they don’t want to comprehend it. To do so would shatter their black and white world view of Left v Right and that is the comfort zone they don’t want to surrender. But they must to take this forward.

Michael Moore and so many others of his ilk – including many of those in the Wall Street-type protests – will have enthusiastically supported Barack Obama in 2008 when he was the most obvious fraud you could ever imagine.

If they are continuing with that same black and white ‘us and them’ naivety today – and some are because I have seen them – then they may as well go home. The system will have them for breakfast, dinner and tea.

The Left mentality cannot see the global conspiracy because it can only see the us and them. To accept the existence of a Hidden Hand they would have to accept that the Left is being manipulated by the same force that manipulates the Right and the Centre. Many can’t handle that and so it is dismissed by reflex action.

Americans: Awash In Spin

Activist Post

I have come to the conclusion that Big Brother’s subjects in George Orwell’s 1984 are better informed than Americans.

Americans have no idea why they have been at war in the Middle East, Asia and Africa for a decade.  They don’t realize that their liberties have been supplanted by a Gestapo Police State.  Few understand that hard economic times are here to stay.

On October 27, 2011, the US government announced some routine economic statistics, and the president of the European Council announced a new approach to the Greek sovereign debt crisis.  The result of these funny numbers and mere words sent the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to its largest monthly rally since 1974, erasing its 2011 yearly loss. The euro rose, putting the European currency again 40% above its initial parity with the US dollar when the euro was introduced.

Read more

New Blacklist Bill Set To Crush The Internet

Demand Progress

REP. ZOE LOFGREN CALLS BILL "THE END OF THE INTERNET"

It's alive!  And it's a nightmare.

The rumors were true: The new Blacklist Bill could effectively destroy YouTube, Twitter, and other sites that rely on user-generated content by making the sites' owners legally responsible for content their users post.

It also includes provisions that would make it a felony to stream unlicensed content -- including cover band performances, karaoke videos, video game play-throughs, and more.

It's a grab-bag of Halloween goodies for a handful of big corporations -- but for us it's Frankenstein's monster, cobbled together from half-born bills, set to suffocate free speech and innovation and terrorize consumers and Internet users.

Will you use the form at right to ask your Congressmember to oppose the legislation?

GO HERE to send the letter

Foxes and Reptiles: Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown

Reality Sandwich

The present financial meltdown  may only be the latest example of the incalculable harm done to civilization, and countless individual lives, by psychopaths, a subspecies of Homo sapiens.  The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, I will provide a brief tour of the psychopath subspecies so that you understand who they are and how they operate. You probably already know psychopaths, and it is overwhelmingly likely that at some point in your life a psychopath that you encounter personally will try to harm you. Second, I will draw the correlative between psychopathy and the present financial meltdown and provide a suggestion of a relatively simple change that could decrease the likelihood of the sort of abuses that could lead to future meltdowns. 

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Breaking Free from Subservience

Activist Post

When in Poland I gain a certain perspective on England; and when in England, a certain perspective on Poland. In Poland many grapple from day to day with the nitty gritty of survival, easing their load with a cheery cynicism concerning anything and everything 'political'. Whereas in England, it seems somehow disreputable to be struggling with the basics of life, and there remains a naively wishful trust that the political regime of one's choice will eventually deliver some appropriate solution to the problems of the day.

Which leads one to recognise that different cultures have different perspectives on the same basic problems and different ways of dealing with them. So let us be wary of a “European Union” that tries to bring about a standardised European super state in which all countries involved are expected to conform to the same (largely financial) goals. It doesn't work. But that doesn't mean that those at the top end of the power pyramid aren't determined to make it work; just as 'The United States of America' is projected as a unified entity ruled by a caring President, when just under the surface a very different reality is easily visible. The 'United' States and the European 'Union' are covert tools for the acquisition of power for those at the top of the pyramid. They are global trading blocks that operate as cartels for big business and corporate enrichment while maintaining a veneer of cultural cosmopolitanism and commonality.

How is this grand subterfuge brought about?

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Billionaire French hotelier shot dead 'in professional hit'

Another bites the dust....

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Telegraph

The lifeless body of Claude Dray, 76, was found with three bullet holes in the neck in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Paris suburb where President Nicolas Sarkozy built his career and still owns property.

A butler found Dray's corpse at 9am on Tuesday following a death that had all the hallmarks of a professional hit.

Dray, one of the most prominent Jews in France, had been the subject of threats in the past. His palatial villa – which was called Madrid – was considered one of the most secure in the French capital.

It was regularly surrounded by police and private security guards, and is equipped with anti-intruder measures including cameras and infra-red alarms. 

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Women Dethrone Malthus

Dissident Voice

The 7 Billion Person Halloween Scare

This Halloween the neo-Malthusians, many dressed up as environmentalists, will have a big scare for us – the birth of the 7 billionth person on “space ship” earth.  We will hear again of the demographic disaster sure to befall us with yet another mouth to feed.  But a wondrous antidote to such fear mongering is one of the best books of the last year, The Coming Population Crash, by Fred Pearce.  The book begins with a sound thrashing of Malthus and satisfyingly exposes the historical and conceptual links between his failed ideas and some unsavory strains of the current environmental movement such as the Carrying Capacity Network and Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization, an anti-immigrant group.

At its heart the book conveys a simple fact.  The rate of population growth has been decelerating for decades – well before the publication in the 1970s of Paul Ehrlich’s alarmist, implicitly racist, and dead wrong neo-Malthusian tract, The Population Bomb.    It is amazing that many environmentalists are unaware of the crucial fact of slowing population growth, and that some react with hostility to it.  Further, somewhere between 2050 and 2100, growth will stop and then come crashing down.  It is not the sky that will be falling but the population.  From Eastern Europe to Southern Italy to Singapore, that day has already arrived and sooner or later it will come to all parts of the planet.  In fact, it may well be that in the next century the problem will be a population that is not large enough to be optimal; but that will be for the 22nd century humans to decide and act on.

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Libya & Gaddafi - The Truth you are not supposed to know

What the West has done through NATO is beyond tragic, and all the people who have bought the latest round of lies and manipulation will look to Libya as they now look to Iraq, and they will see another disaster that most can never imagine.

The Robin Hood Tax: Occupy Movement now Marching Straight Off the Globalist Cliff

Global Research

It was inevitable that a movement which has struggled to agree on a manifesto, would in the end, do the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they are demonstrating against to begin with.

Instead of achieving freedom from Central Bank debt enslavement, naive Occupiers appear to have taken the bait, pulling the mob towards endorsing a global taxation system, and one to be administered…by a brand new global government body.

As the Occupy Movement sets its sights on the upcoming G20 Summit in France on November 3-4, its globalist handlers behind the scenes have succeeded in carefully directing its crowds towards the Holy Grail of all socialist super-states - the celebrity supported, trendy “Robin Hood Tax”, also known as a Tobin Tax, a financial transaction tax levied on all transactions involving shares, bonds and derivatives. Or so the plan goes…

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Next Stop Syria and Then Iran Former 4-star U.S General Admits to America Foreign Policy Coup

Former four star general and NATO commander Wesley Clark talks about the neocon plan to invade seven countries in five years. Included in the plan was an attack on Libya. Clark mentions the plan at two minutes, 26 seconds into the video.(Posted September 14, 2011)

Real Wimps go to Tehran via Baghdad

Asia Times 

The new Holy Trinity mythology peddled by Washington to an unsuspecting world is that the Libya war is over, the Iraq war will be over by New Year's Eve, and the Afghan war will be over by 2014.

Oh yes; and Lindsay Lohan is a reincarnation of the Virgin Mary.

Let's focus on Iraq. There is one real reason for the United States troop withdrawal in December; the Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad bluntly denied blanket immunity from prosecution of war crimes to US soldiers. This implies, crucially, the Maliki government evicting the Pentagon from very convenient military bases in Iraq out of which a strike on Iran could be conducted.

It's essential to remember that this Shi'ite-majority Iraqi government - which inherited a totally devastated country - was arrived at via US-approved democratic elections. Now that entails two poetic justice developments; a democratic Iraq getting closer to the Islamic Republic of Iran; and democracy expelling the militarized face of empire.

No wonder Washington is dazed and confused. Naturally the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department and/or all of the above are already working around the clock to come up with any number of mischief scenarios.

Expect reams of think-tank Middle East "experts" suggesting a US withdrawal as a diversionist tactic; the creation of a false flag/black ops gambit, such as the suicide bombing of a Saudi ambassador (oops, already tried this one); blaming the "terror" on Tehran; and then reshipping thousands of troops back to keep Iraq "safe from terror".

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Dr Thomas Campbell - My Big TOE

Physicist and consciousness researcher, Thomas Campbell, Discusses the nature of reality in terms of consciousness -- this video logically and scientifically explains the normal and the paranormal, mind and matter, physics and metaphysics, philosophy and theology.

Obama to Leno: Libya ‘A Recipe for Success’

Cryptogon

A recipe for success?

The grinning, shill, international terrorist President of the United States talks up the regime’s atrocities on a late night comedy show, with the host, audience and millions of people out in TV land going along with it…

Holy shit.

To me, Obama’s “recipe for success” looks and sounds like a child with the lower half of his face blown off. The child’s horrifying screams emerge through a pulpy, gaping cavity where his mouth and jaw used to be. You shouldn’t watch that video, if you know what’s good for you, but it reminds me of the words of Harold Pinter:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

This is why that sack of shit president can sit there and talk about saving civilians as their shredded bodies gurgle and shriek in terror.

Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening.

Via: AP / NPR:

President Obama defended the U.S. role in bringing down Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, rejecting assessments that the international coalition he helped assemble amounted to “leading from behind.” “We lead from the front,” he told late-night television host Jay Leno on Tuesday.

Laying out an argument for his emerging foreign policy doctrine, Obama distinguished the U.S. steps in Libya from the invasion and nine-year war in Iraq. He argued that by building a broad international alliance of European and Arab nations against Gadhafi, the United States saved American lives and money and achieved its goal.

“Not a single U.S. troop was on the ground,” he said. “Not a single U.S. troop was killed or injured, and that, I think, is a recipe for success in the future.”

Lethal Injection: The Story Of Vaccination

Occupy Oakland Raided by Police, Reports of Tear Gas, Rubber Bullets

Alternet

 

Today, Oakland occupiers were swept out of two encampents amid claims of excessive force. The livestream, which is going in and out, is embedded at the bottom of this post. 

Here's the tweet from Occupy Oakland sent out just after it happened early this morning:

occupyoakland : #occupyoakland attacked by 500 cops in suprise assault. tear gas, rubber bullets, shotguns, flash bang grenades. Many injured.

The Oakland occupation's website goes into some more detail, saying over 70 (some reports now say 85) were arrested: 

This morning at 5am over 500 police in riot gear from cities all over central California brutally attacked the Occupy Oakland encampment at 14th & Broadway. The police attacked the peaceful protest with flash grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets after moving in with armored vehicles. Apparently the media was not allowed in to document this repression, and the police established barricades as far apart as 11th and 17th. Over 70 people were arrested and the camp gear was destroyed and/or stolen by the riot police. 

Here is a series of stunning pictures of the raid which show the sheer numbers of officers compared to protesters.

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Racial Profiling on an “Industrial Scale”: FBI Using Census Data to Map and Police Communities By Race

Alternet

New documents obtained by the ACLU show that the FBI has for years been using Census data to “map” ethnic and religious groups suspected of being likely to commit certain types of crimes.

Much is still not known about the apparent large-scale effort in racial profiling, partly because the documents the ACLU obtained through public records requests are heavily redacted.

The FBI maintains that the mapping program is designed to “better understand the communities that are potential victims of the threats,” but the ACLU says it is plainly unconstitutional.

To learn more about the FBI program, its implications for civil liberties and the questions that remain unanswered, I spoke to Michael German, policy counsel at the ACLU’s Washington office and a former FBI agent.

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Eckhart Tolle and Ego Part II: Extracts from "New Earth"

I don't usually go in for self-help books and those that could be categorized as "New Age". However, Eckart Tolle has offered some simple insights into the nature of the human condition that I'd like to share. 

Yes, he has been commercially successful and has been lauded by those I'd want to run a mile from on the spiritual stakes. And yes, you may think that this is well and truly the stuff of New Age distraction; putting one's self to sleep with "word salad" and cliches. But this would be far too harsh and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Granted, there are some problems with Eckhart Tolle's teachings. For instance, he often presents the thinking mind as the overall problem rather than the aspect of circular, useless thinking without awareness. He doesn't state the difference nearly enough so that the impression is that thinking per se is to be avoided and that you just have to "feel" and cultivate awareness from Joy, acceptance and enthusiasm. In the end this represents a vast simplification that amounts to the sin of omission.

He also places everything on the idea of the collective ego as the source of all ills. Well, maybe that's true but again, this amounts to a rather dangerous simplification. "The devil is in the details" after all. For example, I do think it is  essential to have a solid grounding in psychological principles regarding oneself, the family and society with special attention to psychopathology as it manifests in the world today. Otherwise, quite simply, your awareness can be led down pathways of illusion, deception and falsity without you ever knowing it. You  can't just suddenly leave a wholly subjective reality that we have been conditioned to accept just like that. It takes time and a lot of cold examination of the ego and it's wiley ways. As such Tolle vastly overstates the ease of leaving behind ego control and what Castaneda called: The "Predator's Mind". All these principles of ego awareness, cultivating happiness, learning how to release the past and know the "Power of now" are not much good if you are confronted with a psychopath or sub-categories of psychopathology. It has to be a parallel practice otherwise, putting it bluntly: you are simply lunch. 

Nevertheless, Eckhart Tolle's Book: New Earth is a valuable and rich contribution to attaining a more balanced and authentic communion with reality in our lives. It's especially good for those who have been brought "down to earth" somewhat and need to start simply and carefully and not jump straight into high esoteric principles. It's an excellent primer in that regard for those starting out or just emerging from years of dysfunction. Tolle's insights on the ego are especially useful in this context. It is largely on that subject that I'd like to include some extracts for you. I hope it proves useful. (These posts will be in several parts).

*****

"Ego takes everything personally.... Every ego confuses opinions and viewpoints with facts. Furthermore, it cannot tell the difference between an event and its reaction to that event. Every ego is a master of selective perception and distorted interpretation. Only through awareness - not through [ego-based] thinking - can you differentiate between fact and opinion. Only through awareness are you able to see: There is the situation and here is the anger I feel about it, and then realise there are other ways of approaching the situation, other ways of seeing and dealing with it. Only through awareness can you see the totality of the situation or person instead of adopting one limited perspective." [...]

"...the human ego in its collective aspect as 'us' against 'them' is even more insane than the 'me', the individual ego, although the mechanism is the same. By far the greater violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego. One can go as far as to say that on this planet 'normal' equals insane. What is it that lies at the root of this insanity? Complete identification with thought and emotion, tat is to say, ego." [...]

"Recognise the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, an insanity of thr human mind. When you recognise it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as someone's identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive towards it. You don't take it personally anymore." [...]

"What is commonly called 'falling in love' is in most cases an intensification of ego wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person or rather the image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever." [...]

"What does it mean to be confused? ....Is it possible to let go of the belief that you need to know who you are? In other words, can you cease looking to conceptual definitions to give you a sense of self? Can you cease looking to thought for an identity? When you let go of the belief that you should or need to know who you are, what happens to confusion? Suddenly, it is gone. When you fuilly accept that you don't know; you actually enter a state of peace and clarity that is closer to who you truly are than thought could ever be. Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself."

If you are awake enough and aware enough, to be able to observe how you interact with other people you may detect subtle changes in your speech, attitude, and behavior depending on the person you are interacting with. ....Why is that? You are playing roles. You are not yourself, neither with the chairman nor with the janitor or the child. ....A range of conditioned patterns of behavior come into effect between two human beings that determine the nature of the interaction. Instead of human beings, conceptual mental images are interacting with each other. The more identified people are with their respective roles, the more inauthentic the relationships become. [...]

"Suffering drives you deeper. The paradox is that suffering is caused by identification with form and erodes identification with form. A lot of it is caused by the ego, although eventually suffering destroys the ego. - but not until you suffer consciously. [...] Suffering or negativity is often misperceived by the ego as pleasure beacuse up to a point the ego strengthens itself through it."

"In Zen they say: 'Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions.' What does that mean? Let go of identification with your mind. Who you are beyond the mind then emerges by itself."

"...We need to differentiate between positive emotions that are ego-generated and deeper emotions that emanate from your natural state of connectedness with Being. Positive emotions generated by the ego already contain within themselves their opposite into which they can quickly turn. Here are some examples: What the ego calls love is possessiveness and addicted clinging tta can turn into hate within a second. Anticipation about an upcoming event, which is the ego's overevaluation of future, easily turn into its opposite - let down or disappointment - when the event is over or doesn't fulfil the ego's expectations. Praise and recognition make you feel alive and happy one day; being criticised or ignored make you dejected and unhappy the next. The pleasure of a wild party turns into bleakness and a hangover the next morning. There is not good without bad, no high without low.

Ego-generated emotions are derived from the mind's identification with external factors which are, of course, all unstable and liable to change at any moment. The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites. States of Being can be obscured but they have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy and peace that are aspects of your true nature.

Pain-Body

The pain-body is a semi-autonomous energy-form that lives within most human beings, an entity made up of emotion. It has its own primitive intelligence, not unlike a cunning animal, and its intelligence is directed primarily at survival. Like all life-forms it periodically needs to feed - to take in new energy - and the food it requires to replenish itself consists of energy that is compatible with its own, which is to say, energy that vibrates at a similar frequency. Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain-body. That's why it thrives on negative thinking as well as drama in relationships. The pain-body is an addiction to unhappiness.

It may be shocking when you realise for the first time that there is something within you that periodically seeks emotional negativity, seeks unhappiness. You need even more awareness to see it in yourself than to recognise it in another person. Once the unhappiness has taken you over, not only do you not want an end to it, but you want ot make others just as miserable as you are in order to feed on their negative emotional reactions.

In most people the pain-body has a dormant and an active stage. When it is dormant, you easily forget that you carry a heavy dark cloud or a dormant volcanoe inside you, depending on the energy field of your particular pain-body. How long it remains dormant varies from person to person: a few eeks is the most common, but it can be a few days or months. In rare cases the pain-body can lie in hibernation for years before it gets triggered by some event.

pp. 58 - 144