MEGATRENDS•••Only You Can Prevent Max Headroom From Taking Over Planet Earth•••2011-01-20T17:19:37ZUser 308http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/OrgSpace NewsLogAho Mitakuye Oyasin
WHAT ONE CAN DO
Before A Man Can Become Free, He Must Choose Freedom
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
~Stephen Biko, anti-apartheid activist tortured to death by State police (Derrick Jensen, Endgame, 2006).
"To what e...WHAT ONE CAN DO
Before A Man Can Become Free, He Must Choose Freedom
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” ~Stephen Biko, anti-apartheid activist tortured to death by State police (Derrick Jensen, Endgame, 2006).
"To what end, our mad destruction? How shall we live, if not by love? If by hatred and destruction, what then? We must let go of fear in order to love. It has been done. It can be done. Let us do it." - CMDR Jeff Knaebel WHAT ONE CAN DO
Before A Man Can Become Free, He Must Choose Freedom
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” ~Stephen Biko, anti-apartheid activist tortured to death by State police (Derrick Jensen, Endgame, 2006).
I (Jeff Knaebel) write out of my longing for relatedness and meaning, and that I may contribute something to prevent the suicidal self-destruction upon which our human species is embarked.
States have murdered more than 230 million human beings in the past 100 years, many their own citizens. States have a monopoly on “legal” violence within their territories, and they use it to rape, murder, confiscate and destroy.
There are two means of livlihood for human beings. One, the “economic means,” is to work and produce. The other, the “political means,” is to plunder and steal. The State is the “organization of the political means.” This system of organizing a society of six billion human beings doesn’t work. Its institutionalized structural violence is destroying humanity and the earth.
The biggest - and most destructive - modern States are sham “democracies,” controlled by Corporations and Central Banks, themselves creatures of the State. This “Corporatacy” (John Perkins, 2004) directs - and profits from - the endless war racket. Its agents are protected from retribution by so-called “law,” which establishes corporate Limited Liability and State Sovereign Immunity.
No matter who you vote for, the elite members of the Establishment’s Corporatocracy get elected. Corporate money power everywhere rules. We have lost control of our lives, our liberties, our labor, and our destiny. We have allowed ouselves to degenerate into cannibals, consuming the lives of others. Coerced and manipulated by the Corporatocracy, we are killing ourselves in a mad scramble for diminishing resources, instead of learning to share. The life of our human species has itself now become the “tragedy of the commons.”
Mindlessly we kill, moving to the war drum’s dirge of death. The dead eat the living. We leave behind rivers of blood and poison as our effluent. As the inheritance of our grandchildren, we leave these.
“Civilization does not mean electric lights. It does not mean producing atomic bombs, either. Civilization means not killing people.” ~ Nichidatsu Fujii, Buddhist Nihonzan Miyoji Temple, quoted by J.D. Forbes, PhD (Professor Emeritus, University of California), 1992.
Our so-called “democracy” has not produced a civilization. A system that places the power of planetary incineration into the hands of a few psychopathically aggressive tyrants is clearly insane. It is impossible to reform an institution whose very foundation is organized criminal violence, lies and deceit. Institutions of corporation and State are being used as tools by the minds of the powerful to maintain the emoluments of power at any cost, including unspeakable atrocity.
No species which thus destroys its ecological support system can survive long term. To survive, a species must enhance both itself and its environment.
We must evolve to a higher level of consciousness. Change begins in the mind.
If I lose my mind in love of life, how will they employ it to kill?
How does one come to peace with his hiring of murder?
How does one negotiate with liars?
If I refuse to pay taxes, then I am not an accomplice to the murdering State. I have become free to respect the lives of others, and to love.
I was born free by Nature. Why should I accept the yoke of an involuntarily assigned “citizenship,” which sweats me at law in order to finance its murder? The Constitution of a State has no inherent authority unless as a contract between man and man, and obviously can be binding only upon those then living who acknowledged it. (Spooner,1882)
The fact that no man can delegate or give away his own natural right of liberty, nor any other person’s natural right of liberty, proves that he can delegate no legislative power whatsoever - over himself or anyone else - to any man or body of men. Each man owns only himself - he owns no other. Nor can any other, or group of others calling themselves a “constituted authority,” own him.
The principle of self-ownership shows that Constitutions and Legislatures are - on the basis of common sense, ordinary justice, and morality - invalid at inception. We delude ourselves to think we are governed in any manner except by force.
In a culture where true madness masquerades as sanity, my public denunciations in a foreign nation of the US wars in Iraq and elsewhere will be labled as “treason” by the State.
On 17 July 2007, President Bush enacted an Executive Order titled “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.” This Act makes criminal the use of “disloyal or abusive” language about the U.S. government.
By coerced and fearful silence, against whom shall I commit treason? The brotherhood of man? My own rational mind and conscience? The universal commandment against murder?
Or, shall I commit treason against the State by speaking out against the depraved madness of organized mass murder as a State industry?
Why should I have more faith in war criminals - like George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld - than in my own conscience, to make life and death decisions? Why should my life, and yours, and uncountable others, be subject to the decisions of money power, of who to kill and who to let live? Who is criminally insane - these psychotic nuclear-weapon-brandishing tyrants, or us?
If I voluntarily violate my personal integrity and abdicate my conscience to these criminals, and keep on financing their mass murder and torture by paying my taxes, what does that say about me? And if I participate in a sham election - by secret ballot, so there can be no contract, no acknowledgement of responsibility - to choose one of the next two carefully groomed war criminals-to-be, put up and financed by the Corporate Establishment, what kind of fool am I?
On the scale of the Corporate State, murder is no crime. It is just another business deal. Life itself has become a consumable, bought and sold in the marketplace. The market for murder is there, and we are selling ourselves into it.
All of the foregoing are manifestations of moral degeneration that has a deeper root cause.
Origin of our problem is fear. Its cause in turn is the paradoxical, ambiguous, unsolvable inevitability of the human condition. Fear is based upon our misidentification of the Self with the body. It seems obvious that the path of fear leads deeper into darkness. Institutions such as State arise in response to fear.
A solution exists. All beings love life and fear death, just as I do. Therefore, it is good that respect for life guide my actions, that I should take not life, but that I should nurture and enhance life, if only for my own self-interest. If the precept is not to kill, and the means employed is always nonviolent, the end must be peace. We let go of fear in order to love.
There is no well-marked intellectual road map to a solution that will work for six billion individuals. The way out of our dilemma must be sought one by one, yet working together, in respect. Out of this regenerative organic growth, an evolution of consciousness may erupt to save us. We must work for it. Most of the work is an inside job, within each one’s conscience.
I can offer only my own experience and my stated intentions as - hopefully - a small contribution toward a human community of love and reason. So far, I have learned four fundamentals.
One -it is crucial to do the inner work first, in order to gain clarity and strength. One must de-condition the mind in order to free it.
Two - alignment of thought, word, and deed is essential. To think one thing, say another, and do a third is to lie, to dis-integrate. Strong adherence to truth (Satyagraha) requires active engagement in nonviolent resistence against the State. Absent active engagement, one is doing only talk without walk, and this corrodes self respect.
Three - in order to avoid burn-out and psychological implosion, one must engage in proactive constructive projects of social upliftment. This keeps you in touch with love and nurturance. Resistance alone leads to battle fatigue, a kind of bitter weariness that fosters cynicism.
Fourth - give up all hope. Let go of all hope that anyone except you will do anything. I am grateful to Derrick Jensen (Orion Magazine) for bringing this inchoate realization to conscious awareness. Absence of hope is the courage to act against all odds as a matter of preserving your personal integrity.
To work against the State, just ignore it. Nonviolent methods include tax refusal, boycott of State “services,” withdrawing from participation in functions of the State. Become independent and self-reliant. Avoid identification documents, work for barter or cash, shun credit cards and banks. Convert depreciating fiat currency into physical gold in personal possession: quit letting the State embezzle your svings with its printing press inflation. Form local service organizations, community support groups, and local direct unregulated exchange markets. And, importantly, educate others. Spread the word. Return self government control to local level, beginning at home.
Ignore the State. Don’t fight it - that only feeds its expansion. Don’t petition or plead, just quit paying for it, quit cooperating with it. Starve it of energy and cash. Simply leave it. Build your own ark, join others in forming islands of light in a sea of darkness.
Each must work out his own destiny if he is to reclaim his conscience and personal integrity. One must never give in to power. Live by your own lights and your own wits, and face the consequences. You will enjoy the happiness of the free and the brave.
I have chosen tax refusal and exile in a foreign land, together with radical renunciation of rules and laws - a renunciation that is escalating with time and disgust at what we have become. I have set myself against blind obedience to traditional authority and patriarchal domination, as well as bureaucratic legalistic usurpation of individual rights. I renounce the State and declare my right to ignore it. I renounce any “authority” that demands violation of my conscience.
My next personal intersection with Power is the expiry of passport, which I will not renew, foreign domicile notwithstanding. Since freedom of movement - a basic human right - is required to maintain a livlihood, these documents amount to legislation that a human being has “permission-to-live” only at the discretion of some faceless bureaucrat. This is slavery. The State has usurped my right to life itself.
I don’t know what the Nice Government Men will do. My working hypothesis is that if they detain me, imprison me, harm me, or kill me - all of which are possible, and even likely, pursuant to current U.S. law and policy - they will have advanced my cause.
The face-off amounts to this test. Does a physically more powerful individual have the right to put a collar on me, track me, restrict my movements except by his permission, and extract from me the product of my labor? Does a group of thugs have this right? Does a group of “lawmakers,” placed in power over me against my will, have this right?
With my own unarmed, unaided body I will say “No.” No other man or group of men owns my conscience. These legislators - many are outright criminals individually - were elected by secret ballot, so there is no man-to-man contract of representation. In this anonyminity, is insulation from responsibility. Once installed, they hold me in thrall only by the raw power that comes out the barrel of a gun, of which they are the trigger-pullers.
We don’t know who, or what, created this Universe - what intelligence connected Spirit to breath and flesh. But we do know that its physical manifestation on our behalf is this precious blue-green planet that allows us to play in the Fields of the Lord.
We might be wise to consider some attempt at gratitude and respect for this Great Benevolence that supports us, rather than tearing it apart and smashing it to the last atom in a vain and arrogant attempt to gain control over life and the Mystery.
To what end, our mad destruction? How shall we live, if not by love? If by hatred and destruction, what then? We must let go of fear in order to love. It has been done. It can be done. Let us do it.
May you live long, live free. Aho Mitakuye Oyasin,
Jeff Knaebel, Pune, 6 August 2007
http://www.freeofstate.org/new/?page_id=1005]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000512.htm2011-01-20T17:19:37Z2011-01-20T20:33:14Z10 Trends for 2011After the tumultuous years of the Great Recession, a battered people may wish that 2011 will bring a return to kinder, gentler times. But that is not what we are predicting. Instead, the fruits of government and institutional action – and inaction – on many fronts will ripen in unplanned-for f... Trends we have previously identified, and that have been brewing for some time, will reach maturity in 2011, impacting just about everyone in the world.
10 Trends for 2011
by Gerald Celente
Previously by Gerald Celente: 'Off With Their Heads 2.0'
After the tumultuous years of the Great Recession, a battered people may wish that 2011 will bring a return to kinder, gentler times. But that is not what we are predicting. Instead, the fruits of government and institutional action – and inaction – on many fronts will ripen in unplanned-for fashions.
Trends we have previously identified, and that have been brewing for some time, will reach maturity in 2011, impacting just about everyone in the world.
1. Wake-Up Call In 2011, the people of all nations will fully recognize how grave economic conditions have become, how ineffectual and self-serving the so-called solutions have been, and how dire the consequences will be. Having become convinced of the inability of leaders and know-it-all "arbiters of everything" to fulfill their promises, the people will do more than just question authority, they will defy authority. The seeds of revolution will be sown….
2. Crack-Up 2011 Among our Top Trends for last year was the "Crash of 2010." What happened? The stock market didn’t crash. We know. We made it clear in our Autumn Trends Journal that we were not forecasting a stock market crash – the equity markets were no longer a legitimate indicator of recovery or the real state of the economy. Yet the reliable indicators (employment numbers, the real estate market, currency pressures, sovereign debt problems) all bordered between crisis and disaster. In 2011, with the arsenal of schemes to prop them up depleted, we predict "Crack-Up 2011": teetering economies will collapse, currency wars will ensue, trade barriers will be erected, economic unions will splinter, and the onset of the "Greatest Depression" will be recognized by everyone….
3. Screw the People As times get even tougher and people get even poorer, the "authorities" will intensify their efforts to extract the funds needed to meet fiscal obligations. While there will be variations on the theme, the governments’ song will be the same: cut what you give, raise what you take.
4. Crime Waves No job + no money + compounding debt = high stress, strained relations, short fuses. In 2011, with the fuse lit, it will be prime time for Crime Time. When people lose everything and they have nothing left to lose, they lose it. Hardship-driven crimes will be committed across the socioeconomic spectrum by legions of the on-the-edge desperate who will do whatever they must to keep a roof over their heads and put food on the table….
5. Crackdown on Liberty As crime rates rise, so will the voices demanding a crackdown. A national crusade to "Get Tough on Crime" will be waged against the citizenry. And just as in the "War on Terror," where "suspected terrorists" are killed before proven guilty or jailed without trial, in the "War on Crime" everyone is a suspect until proven innocent….
6. Alternative Energy In laboratories and workshops unnoticed by mainstream analysts, scientific visionaries and entrepreneurs are forging a new physics incorporating principles once thought impossible, working to create devices that liberate more energy than they consume. What are they, and how long will it be before they can be brought to market? Shrewd investors will ignore the "can’t be done" skepticism, and examine the newly emerging energy trend opportunities that will come of age in 2011….
7. Journalism 2.0 Though the trend has been in the making since the dawn of the Internet Revolution, 2011 will mark the year that new methods of news and information distribution will render the 20th century model obsolete. With its unparalleled reach across borders and language barriers, "Journalism 2.0" has the potential to influence and educate citizens in a way that governments and corporate media moguls would never permit. Of the hundreds of trends we have forecast over three decades, few have the possibility of such far-reaching effects….
8. Cyberwars Just a decade ago, when the digital age was blooming and hackers were looked upon as annoying geeks, we forecast that the intrinsic fragility of the Internet and the vulnerability of the data it carried made it ripe for cyber-crime and cyber-warfare to flourish. In 2010, every major government acknowledged that Cyberwar was a clear and present danger and, in fact, had already begun. The demonstrable effects of Cyberwar and its companion, Cybercrime, are already significant – and will come of age in 2011. Equally disruptive will be the harsh measures taken by global governments to control free access to the web, identify its users, and literally shut down computers that it considers a threat to national security….
9. Youth of the World Unite University degrees in hand yet out of work, in debt and with no prospects on the horizon, feeling betrayed and angry, forced to live back at home, young adults and 20-somethings are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. Filled with vigor, rife with passion, but not mature enough to control their impulses, the confrontations they engage in will often escalate disproportionately. Government efforts to exert control and return the youth to quiet complacency will be ham-fisted and ineffectual. The Revolution will be televised … blogged, YouTubed, Twittered and….
10. End of The World! The closer we get to 2012, the louder the calls will be that the "End is Near!" There have always been sects, at any time in history, that saw signs and portents proving the end of the world was imminent. But 2012 seems to hold a special meaning across a wide segment of "End-time" believers. Among the Armageddonites, the actual end of the world and annihilation of the Earth in 2012 is a matter of certainty. Even the rational and informed that carefully follow the news of never-ending global crises, may sometimes feel the world is in a perilous state. Both streams of thought are leading many to reevaluate their chances for personal survival, be it in heaven or on earth….
December 18, 2010
Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/celente/celente59.1.html]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000511.htm2010-12-19T02:19:49Z2010-12-19T02:19:49ZUS Embassy CablesWell, I guess Assange is out on bail now, though Pfc. Bradley Manning certainly isn't and never will be, and wikileaks has yet to cough up the promised $50,000.00 for Pvt Mannings Defense Fund, and, and, and...
The so called Secret Cables do make for some interesting reading. So I thought I'd p... The so called Secret Cables do make for some interesting reading. So I thought I'd put a few links up here at the old NCN where, as we all know, the truth is sacrosanct though it's methods are still very much in question.
Don't think for one moment that I believe in any of this State Department Posturing. To me it is all a Psyop engeandered for effect.
When you first enter truth's temple at Langley there it is, can't miss it:
"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."
Sure Julian, sure it will...
Global defense of sources and press freedoms, circa now—
Have documents the world needs to see?
We help you safely get the truth out.
http://mirror.wikileaks.info/
PS: Safely? Wonder if Pfc. Manning feels that "safely" is merited now?
THE “WIKI-WEASEL” VINDICATES BUSH, WAR, TORTURE AND…? “Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet”….F. William Engdahl “supporting WikiLeaks founder, Julius Assange and..calling for revolution due to government cover-ups are intended results of a counterintelligence reverse tactic”…Bob Levin, FBI whistleblowerSecret US Embassy Cables
http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html
Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.
The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.
The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.
The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.
This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.
Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments -- even the most corrupt -- around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.
The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of "The Iraq War Logs", the world's previously largest classified information release).
The cables cover from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.
Groups to contact for comment
How to explore the data
Search for events that you remember that happened for example in your country. You can browse by date or search for an origin near you.
Pick out interesting events and tell others about them. Use twitter, reddit, mail whatever suits your audience best.
For twitter or other social networking services please use the #cablegate or unique reference ID (e.g. #66BUENOSAIRES2481) as hash tags.
Iraq most discussed country – 15,365 (Cables coming from Iraq – 6,677) Ankara, Turkey had most cables coming from it – 7,918 From Secretary of State office - 8,017
According to the US State Departments labeling system, the most frequent subjects discussed are:
External political relations – 145,451 Internal government affairs – 122,896 Human rights – 55,211 Economic Conditions – 49,044 Terrorists and terrorism – 28,801 UN security council – 6,532
Graphics of the cablegate dataset
http://wikileaks.ch/static/gfx/graphic.png
Downloads
Click link to download full site in single archive (torrent file). http://88.80.16.63/torrent/cablegate/cablegate-201012151420.7z.torrent
Magnet links for all released torrents. http://wikileaks.ch/magnet.txt
Please also read our FAQs http://wikileaks.ch/static/html/faq.html
=========
Global defense of sources and press freedoms, circa now—
Have documents the world needs to see?
We help you safely get the truth out.
http://mirror.wikileaks.info/
Yo Bradley, feel 'safe?'
=============
http://en.reddit.com/domain/wikileaks.org
=============
Got Cable?
"Safely!" Sure, Julian, sure... ☺
The New York Times: A Curious Case of Change of Heart? (Sybel Edmonds on the wikileaks non sequitor)
“Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet”….F. William Engdahl
http://1l2.us/crF
==============
Mwuhahahahahahahahahahaha!
Yeah...]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000510.htm2010-12-16T19:39:51Z2011-01-20T20:50:06ZThe Wikileaks PSYOP
By now I'm sure you've all heard/read about the furor over wikileaks. So I thought I'd pop this in here just for the fun of it. The wikileaks PSYOP, my opinion, isn't going to go away but I would caution that you look beyond Project Mockinbirds' MSM into the core of the presentation and it's i... By now I'm sure you've all heard/read about the furor over wikileaks. So I thought I'd pop this in here just for the fun of it. The wikileaks PSYOP, my opinion, isn't going to go away but I would caution that you look beyond Project Mockinbirds' MSM into the core of the presentation and it's intended target. YOU! ;)
How the Globalist’s PR Agents Use the Wikileaks Psyops Program: Assange partying at state dept... http://bit.ly/h1cxRT
Ron Paul defends Wikileaks on House Floor Friday, December 10, 2010 - 11:26Congressman Ron Paul addressed the house about Wikileaks. He stated that the attack on Julian Assange is like killing the messenger for bringing bad news and gave them nine questions to consider:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised 'Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed'
"Some Questions To Consider" Ron Paul Defends WikiLeaks "Killing The Messenger For Bad News"
Rudyard Kipling was one of the millions of parents to lose a son in the first world war, considered one of the most wasteful and meaningless wars in history.
He wrote a poem about it that consisted of two lines:
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
A revealing transcript. Wiki what? http://1l2.us/cbL
Hehehe!
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years.” - David Rottenfellow]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000509.htm2010-12-13T02:18:40Z2010-12-13T20:54:14ZAmericas' Top 20Yeah, just stuffing the 'Top 20 Facts of (Law)' here till I figure out what to do with it &/or if I even want to do anything with it at all. Like? Oh, get angry, cause a riot, go out and s***t someone... you know, slave rebellion.
One thing we can all do with it is have fun with it & i... One thing we can all do with it is have fun with it & imagine what must have been in the minds of the framers when they all framed us! I didn't sign any constitution...did you? A constitution is basically a contract & the rules of the Corporation.
What Corporation? Aha! The United States of America! Not a nation, as the liars in school - who preach the doctrine of the legal fiction called the Corporate State - would like us to be-lieve - but a bloody (very bloody) Corporation! Who owns this Corporation? Not the debt slaves, that's what they call us. that's for sure.
Well, with a little solid research you can find out... On with the game, then, but don't forget the rights of a Thetan:
1: The right to your own self determination.
2: The right to leave a game.
3: The right to create for yourself a new game to play, or not.
4: The right to the Omni experience (Stepping outside the game to get a looksee at the larger picture & where you may fit into it, or not.)
Shall we have a look then at the Top 20 Facts of (Law)? Americas Top 20 Facts of (Law) Believe it or Not Quote
1. The IRS is not a U.S. Government Agency. It is an Agency of the IMF (Diversified metal Products v. IRS etal. CV-93-405E-EJE U.S.D.C.D.I.
, Public Law 94-564, Senate Report 94-1148 pg. 5967, Reorganization Plan No. 26, Public Law 102-391.)
2. The IMF is an Agency of the UN. (Black’s Law Dictionary 6th Ed. Pg 816)
3. The U.S. has not had a Treasury since 1921 (41 Stat. Ch. 214 pg. 654)
4. There are no judicial courts in America and there has not been since 1789. Judges do not enforce Statutes and Codes. Executive Administrators enforce Statutes and codes (FRC. V. GE 281 US 464, Keller v. PE 261 US 428, 1 Stat. 138-178) http:; llcaselaw._lp_findlaw, comlscriptsl.getcae.pl?_court=us&_vol+261&invol+248
5. There have not been any Judges in America since 1789. There have just been Administrators. (FRC v. GE 281 US 464, Keller v PE 261 US 428 1Stat. 138-178)
6. New York City is defined in the Federal Regulations as the United Nations. Rudolph Giuliani stated on C-Span that “New York City was the capitol of the world” and he was correct. (20 CFR chapter 111, subpart B 422.103 (b) (2) (2) (also check out Rev. 14 in reference to what happened on 9/11)
7. You own no property, slaves can’t own property. Read the Deed to the property that you think is yours. You are listed as a Tenant. (Senate Document 43, 73rd Congress 1 st. Session)
8. You cannot use the Constitution to defend yourself because you are not a party to it. (Padelford Fay & Co. v. The mayor and Alderman of the City of Savannah 14 Georgia 438, 520)
9. The King of England financially backed both sides of the Revolutionary war. (Treaty at Versailles July 15, 1782, Treat of Peace 8 Stat 80)
10. America is a British Colony. (THE UNITED STATES IS A CORPORATION, NOT A LAND MASS AND IT EXISTED BEFORE THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR AND THE BRITISH TROOPS DID NOT LEAVE UNTIL 1796). Republican v. Sweers 1 Dallas 43, Treaty of Commerce 8 Stat 116, The society for Propagating the Gospel & c. v. New Haven 8 Wheat 464, Treaty of Peace 8 Stat 80, IRS Publication 6209, Articles of Association October 20, 1774.
11. Britain is owed by the Vatican. (Treaty of 1213).
12. The Pope can abolish any law in the United States (elements of Ecclesiastical Law Vol. 1 53-54)
13. We are slaves and own absolutely, nothing not even what we think are our children (Tillman v. Roberts 108 So. 62, Van Koten v. Van Koten 154 N.E. 146, Senate Document 43 & 73rd Congress 1 Session, Wynehammer v. People 13 N.R. REP 378, 481)
14. “The People” does not include you and me. (Barron v. Mayor & City Council of Baltimore. 32 U.S. 243)
15. It is not the duty of the police to protect you. Their job is to protect the Corporation and arrest code breakers. Sappv. Tallahasse, 348 So. 2nd 363, Reiff v. City of Philadelphia, 477 F. Supp. 1262, Lynch v. N.C. Dept. of Justice 376 S.E. 2nd. 247.
16. Everything in the “United States” is for sale: roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, water, prisons, airports, etc. I wonder who bought Klamath Lake? Did anyone take the time to check? (?Executive Order 12803)
17. We are Human capital (Executive Order 13037)
18. The FCC, CIA, FBI, NASA and all of the other alphabet gangs were never a part of the United States government. Even though the “US government” held shares of stock in the various Agencies. (U.S. v. Strang, 254 US 491, Lewis v. U.S. 680 F. 2d, 1239) [Bad link to: ca_selaw.Ip.findlaw.co/scripts/.qetcase.pi?Court=us&vol=254&invol=491.
19. A 1040 form is for tribute paid to Britain. (IRS Publication 6209 IMF decoding manual)
20. We are enemies of the State (Trading with the Enemy Act 1933 Act of 1917 & 1933) Trading with the Enemy Act 1933 Act of 1917 & 1933 (People declared the Enemy) Oct. 6, 1917, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, Section 2 subdivision ( c ) Chapter 106 – Enemy defined “other than citizens of the United States…” March 9, 1933, Chapter 106, Section 5, subdivision (b) of the Trading with the Enemy Act of Oct. 6, 1917 (40 Stat. L. 411) amended as follows: “…any person within the United States.” See H.R. 1491 Public No. 1.
I learned a lot a little too late-Do not learn as I did, take care & beware-FTG The sun shineth upon the dunghill, and is not corrupted. We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them. Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis.
==========
Larger version:
Factoids?* This will blow your mind.
1. The IRS is not a U.S. Government Agency. It is an Agency of the IMF. (Diversified Metal Products v. IRS et al. CV-93-405E-EJE U.S.D.C.D.I., Public Law 94-564, Senate Report 94-1148 pg. 5967, Reorganization Plan No. 26, Public Law 102-391.)
2. The IMF is an Agency of the UN. (Blacks Law Dictionary 6th Ed. Pg. 816)
3. The U.S. Has not had a Treasury since 1921. (41 Stat. Ch.214 pg. 654)
4. The U.S. Treasury is now the IMF. (Presidential Documents Volume 29-No.4 pg.113, 22 U.S.C. 285-288)
5. The United States does not have any employees because there is no longer a United States. No more reorganizations. After over 200 years of operating under bankruptcy its finally over. (Executive Order 12803) Do not personate one of the creditors or share holders or you will go to Prison.18 U.S.C. 914
6. The FCC, CIA, FBI, NASA and all of the other alphabet gangs were never part of the United States government. Even though the "US Government" held shares of stock in the various Agencies. (U.S. V. Strang , 254 US 491, Lewis v. US, 680 F.2d, 1239)
7. Social Security Numbers are issued by the UN through the IMF. The Application for a Social Security Number is the SS5 form. The Department of the Treasury (IMF) issues the SS5 not the Social Security Administration. The new SS5 forms do not state who or what publishes them, the earlier SS5 forms state that they are Department of the Treasury forms. You can get a copy of the SS5 you filled out by sending form SSA-L996 to the SS Administration. (20 CFR chapter 111, subpart B 422.103 (b) (2) (2) Read the cites above)
8. There are no Judicial courts in America and there has not been since 1789. Judges do not enforce Statutes and Codes. Executive Administrators enforce Statutes and Codes. (FRC v. GE 281 US 464, Keller v. PE 261 US 428, 1 Stat. 138-178)
9. There have not been any Judges in America since 1789. There have just been Administrators. (FRC v. GE 281 US 464, Keller v. PE 261 US 428 1Stat. 138-178)
10. According to the GATT you must have a Social Security number. House Report (103-826)
11. We have One World Government, One World Law and a One World Monetary System. *
12. The UN is a One World Super Government. *
13. No one on this planet has ever been free. This planet is a Slave Colony. There has always been a One World Government. It is just that now it is much better organized and has changed its name as of 1945 to the United Nations. *
14. New York City is defined in the Federal Regulations as the United Nations. Rudolph Gulliani stated on C-Span that "New York City was the capital of the World" and he was correct. (20 CFR chapter 111, subpart B 422.103 (b) (2) (2)
15. Social Security is not insurance or a contract, nor is there a Trust Fund. (Helvering v. Davis 301 US 619, Steward Co. V. Davis 301 US 548.)
16. Your Social Security check comes directly from the IMF which is an Agency of the UN. (Look at it if you receive one. It should have written on the top left United States Treasury.)
17. You own no property, slaves can't own property. Read the Deed to the property that you think is yours. You are listed as a Tenant. (Senate Document 43, 73rd Congress 1st Session)
18. The most powerful court in America is not the United States Supreme Court but, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. (42 Pa.C.S.A. 502)
19. The Revolutionary War was a fraud. See (22, 23 and 24)
20. The King of England financially backed both sides of the Revolutionary war. (Treaty at Versailles July 16, 1782, Treaty of Peace 8 Stat 80)
21. You can not use the Constitution to defend yourself because you are not a party to it. (Padelford Fay & Co. v. The Mayor and Alderman of The City of Savannah 14 Georgia 438, 520)
22. America is a British Colony. (THE UNITED STATES IS A CORPORATION, NOT A LAND MASS AND IT EXISTED BEFORE THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR AND THE BRITISH TROOPS DID NOT LEAVE UNTIL 1796.) Respublica v. Sweers 1 Dallas 43, Treaty of Commerce 8 Stat 116, The Society for Propagating the Gospel, &c. V. New Haven 8 Wheat 464, Treaty of Peace 8 Stat 80, IRS Publication 6209, Articles of Association October 20, 1774.)
23. Britain is owned by the Vatican. (Treaty of 1213)
24. The Pope can abolish any law in the United States. (Elements of Ecclesiastical Law Vol.1 53-54)
25. A 1040 form is for tribute paid to Britain. (IRS Publication 6209)
26. The Pope claims to own the entire planet through the laws of conquest and discovery. (Papal Bulls of 1455 and 1493)
27. The Pope has ordered the genocide and enslavement of millions of people. (Papal Bulls of 1455 and 1493)
28. The Pope's laws are obligatory on everyone. (Bened. XIV., De Syn. Dioec, lib, ix., c. vii., n. 4. Prati, 1844)(Syllabus, prop 28, 29, 44)
29. We are slaves and own absolutely nothing not even what we think are our children. (Tillman v. Roberts 108 So. 62, Van Koten v. Van Koten 154 N.E. 146, Senate Document 43 & 73rd Congress 1st Session, Wynehammer v. People 13 N.Y. REP 378, 481)
30. Military Dictator George Washington divided the States (Estates) into Districts. (Messages and papers of the Presidents Vo 1, pg 99. Websters 1828 dictionary for definition of Estate.)
31. "The People" does not include you and me. (Barron v. Mayor & City Council of Baltimore. 32 U.S. 243)
32. The United States Government was not founded upon Christianity. (Treaty of Tripoli 8 Stat 154.)
33. It is not the duty of the police to protect you. Their job is to protect the Corporation and arrest code breakers. Sapp v. Tallahasee, 348 So. 2nd. 363, Reiff v. City of Philadelphia, 477 F.Supp. 1262, Lynch v. N.C. Dept of Justice 376 S.E. 2nd. 247.
34. Everything in the "United States" is For Sale: roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, water, prisons airports etc. I wonder who bought Klamath lake. Did anyone take the time to check? (Executive Order 12803)
35. We are Human capital. (Executive Order 13037)
36. The UN has financed the operations of the United States government for over 50 years and now owns every man, women and child in America. The UN also holds all of the Land in America in Fee Simple. *
37. The good news is we don't have to fulfill "our" fictitious obligations. You can discharge a fictitious obligation with another's fictitious obligation. *
38. The depression and World War II were a total farce. The United States and various other companies were making loans to others all over the World during the Depression. The building of Germanys infrastructure in the 1930's including the Railroads was financed by the United States. That way those who call themselves "Kings," "Prime Ministers," and "Fuher,"etc could sit back and play a game of chess using real people. Think of all of the Americans, Germans etc. who gave their lives thinking they were defending their Countries which didn't even exist. The millions of innocent people who died for nothing. Isn't it obvious why Switzerland is never involved in these fiascoes? That is where the "Bank of International Settlements" is located. Wars are manufactured to keep your eye off the ball. You have to have an enemy to keep the illusion of "Government" in place. *
39. The "United States" did not declare Independence from Great Britain or King George. *
40. Guess who owns the UN? ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000508.htm2010-11-11T02:31:20Z2010-11-11T02:31:20ZRewire Your Brain
Let's start with this premise: The human brain adapts with astounding speed. We all know our thinking adapts quickly in order to deal with new input but what isn't widely recognized is that this adaptability goes further: Our brains can quickly adjust the processing protocol itself. Problem is, ...Let's start with this premise: The human brain adapts with astounding speed. We all know our thinking adapts quickly in order to deal with new input but what isn't widely recognized is that this adaptability goes further: Our brains can quickly adjust the processing protocol itself. Problem is, although it's an easy thing to do and positive results come quickly, most of us haven't consciously attempted to rewire our thinking for maximum efficiency. Rewire Your Brain
She's doing critical-thinking calisthenics
Today, unlike thirty years ago, a good 'now' is available by just turning off and plugging in. For too many of us, slowing down to examine things is not entertaining, and that's too bad because it is mandatory we understand the machinery of our lives if we are to modify that machinery to produce the results we want."
That's a quote from the Preface of my book, Work the System. I stand by those words but there's an equally simple yet deeper physiological reason why so many of us struggle to "slow down to examine things." It has to do with the physical wiring in our heads. And that's a problem because if we don't process input efficiently, our desired life-results won't materialize.
Let's start with this premise: The human brain adapts with astounding speed. We all know our thinking adapts quickly in order to deal with new input but what isn't widely recognized is that this adaptability goes further: Our brains can quickly adjust the processing protocol itself. Problem is, although it's an easy thing to do and positive results come quickly, most of us haven't consciously attempted to rewire our thinking for maximum efficiency. Following are personal experiences that helped convince me of the rapid adaptability of the brain:
Many years ago an accountant friend told me the numeral four should be written with the two upper legs parallel to each other and not the way I was doing it, with the left leg keeled over to join the right leg at the top. He added that he was sure I would never be able to change the habit since I had been doing it the incorrect way all my life. He was wrong. In that very moment I began writing the number four in the correct way and since then have not once done it the old way.
Twenty years ago I read an article in a personal finance magazine in which the author said, "If someone is in the habit of bouncing checks they will live their entire life bouncing checks. The proclivity to write a bad check is a hard-wired character issue and can't be changed." I was a check-bouncer extraordinaire until undergoing an adjustment in insight ten years ago. I haven't bounced a check since that moment.
One summer morning, at the age of 23, I quit using recreational drugs and never went back.
The topic of my book Work the System describes how I instantly changed my life due to a single late-night revelation. In that moment I made an enormous and permanent change in how I process the daily events of my life.
It's my bet you could add your own examples.
Here's something more in-depth about the rewiring of our neural pathways, a newly published book entitled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. See this excerpt from the latest Wired Magazine.)
Carr makes the point that long hours spent on the Internet transforms our brains into flighty mechanisms that have lost the ability to deep-think. He says, "The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate, but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains." He goes on to say, "When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."
He has a particular beef with hyperlinks:"Navigating linked documents...entails a lot of mental calisthenics-evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats that are extraneous to the process of reading. Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension." In all fairness, and Carr points this out, net-surfing promotes adaptability in our thinking process. Although our ability to deep-think is compromised and memory retention is reduced, we become efficient at processing varied input quickly. Carr explains that the rewiring happens very, very quickly. It's not something that occurs over a period of months or years. It happens over days or even hours.
And so, beyond the slightly shocking disclosure that we have unwittingly programmed ourselves to be shallow thinkers, here lies the flip-side salvation: It's my interpretation that since the modification of our brain-wiring happened with astounding speed, the process of reversing that modification can be equally fast. It's great news: One might indulge a bad thinking habit for years but that doesn't mean the bad habit took years to develop or will take years to unwind. Indeed, thinking protocol can be changed instantly. (For you NLP practitioners, I know you are nodding your collective heads in agreement.)
Carr says, "...people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links." Discussing what he calls cognitive overload, Carr enlists an analogy to illustrate how our working memory can only download tiny incremental doses of information into our long-term memory. (Think emptying a bathtub with a thimble). In order to develop a richer and deeper thinking process, one must enter information into long-term memory in a slow and orderly way.
So how do we reverse shallow thinking without renouncing our web-habit? Especially by reading books. Spending time with the non-hyper linked written page encourages deep thinking and critical analysis. As I see it, there are also other exercises that will stretch our linear-thinking apparatus. An innocuous example is walking down the street without the iPod plugged in. Another: Avoid multitasking. In any case, reading is probably the most potent antidote to computer-generated flighty thinking.
Ultimately, it's a trade-off as we leave the computer to pick up a book: To spend less time preoccupying ourselves short-term in order to spend more time satisfying ourselves long-term.
I try hard to complete one hardcover book per week and now realize it hasn't been simply a luxury, it's been an inadvertent therapeutic countering of the hours I spend gyrating on the Internet. In the cognitive sense, reading combined with web exploration makes thinking both linear and adaptable. In an exercise regimen, it's much like combining long distance running with weight-lifting in order to gain both resiliency and strength. Contrast the body of the elite long-distance runner with that of the professional body builder. Wouldn't something in between be superior to one or the other extreme?
Congruent with Carr's work and published a couple of years ago, is another terrific book that discusses our society's general decline in critical thinking. Read The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein. No surprise that Bauerlein also lays the blame on the Internet as it delivers an unlimited supply of wasteful entertainment and inane social connection.
It's true, the Work the System method requires a linear, critical-thinking mindset. But if one can work through the method patiently, the process will naturally render the mindset. It's what happened to me.
Being able to quickly hone our thinking to be more deliberate and less flighty is an advantage for those of us who make our living in the business world. With so many of our competitors unable to focus and think critically - while wastefully expending huge gobs of time being entertained - our task of being the best in what we do becomes that much easier.
Go ahead. Pick up that book. It's good for you.
Contact Information ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Phone: 800-664-7448 Comment on this post: workthesystem.com Website: workthesystem.com Contact Us: info@workthesystem.com Facebook: facebook.com/workthesystem Twitter:twitter.com/workthesystem ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000507.htm2010-10-29T05:20:16Z2010-10-29T05:20:16ZEARTH IS HIRING!" It is a child's ultimate values of truth, beauty, justice, love and faith, which, when fully developed in his understanding, make him not only a citizen, but civilized and human. To the extent man believes in truth, beauty, justice, love and faith ~ to this extent, do we say he is truly man." - ...( The Permanent Agenda Of Man / Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich / New York 1971 )
Freedom's name is mighty sweet And soon we're gonna meet Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
I got my hand on the gospel plow Won't take nothing for my journey now Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Hold on, hold on Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Only chain that a man can stand Is that chain o' hand on hand Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Now only thing we did was wrong Stayin' in the wilderness too long Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
The only thing we did was right Was the day we started to fight Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
Hold on, hold on Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/6240880-july-5-2010-36-nonviolent-resisters-arrested-at-y12-national-security-complexUniversity of Portland, May 3rd, 2009
" When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” Boy, no pressure there.
But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation ~ but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.
Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.
This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food – but all that is changing.
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to de code it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, "So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world." There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.
You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.
Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.
There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice," is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.
Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown – Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood – and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.
The living world is not "out there" somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.
The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe – exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a "little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven."
So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a 20 deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it."
In other words, Hawken is saying that we cannot escape our destiny and it is divine. It is written within us ~ but it depends on each of us listening and responding to this deep inner humanitarian calling and then fulfilling our part in a loving plan ~ but always in sync with our ultimate teacher ~ Nature.
Allen L Roland http://allenlrolandsweblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/ultimate-commencement-address.html ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000506.htm2010-08-02T06:23:25Z2010-08-20T20:54:30ZRead The Book
Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.1
— George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
Take at hazard one hundred... Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.1 — George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality—and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated. — Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children" (1862) Fifty children of different ages are teaching each other while the schoolmaster hears lessons at his desk from older students. An air of quiet activity fills the room. A wood stove crackles in the corner. What drove the nineteenth-century school world celebrated in Edward Eggleston’s classic, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, was a society rich with concepts like duty, hard work, responsibility, and self-reliance; a society overwhelmingly local in orientation although never so provincial it couldn’t be fascinated by the foreign and exotic. But when tent Chautauqua with its fanfare about modern marvels left town, conversation readily returned to the text of local society.
Eggleston’s America was a special place in modern history, one where the society was more central than the national political state. Words can’t adequately convey the stupendous radicalism hidden in our quiet villages, a belief that ordinary people have a right to govern themselves. A confidence that they can.
Most revolutionary of all was the conviction that personal rights can only be honored when the political state is kept weak. In the classical dichotomy between liberty and subordination written into our imagination by Locke and Hobbes in the seventeenth century, America struggled down the libertarian road of Locke for awhile while her three godfather nations, England, Germany, and France, followed Hobbes and established leviathan states through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Toward the end, America began to follow the Old World’s lead.
For Hobbes, social order depended upon state control of the inner life, a degree of mental colonization unknown to the tyrants of history whose principal concern had been controlling the bodies of their subjects. But the sheer size of an America without national roads or electronic networks ensured that liberty would be nurtured outside the ring of government surveillance. Then, too, many Americans came out of the dissenting religious sects of England, independent congregations which rejected church-state partnerships. The bulk of our population was socially suspect anyway. Even our gentry was second and third string by English standards, gentlemen without inheritances, the rest a raggle-taggle band of wastrels, criminals, shanghaied boys, poor yeomanry, displaced peasants.
Benet, the poet, describes our founding stock:
The disavouched, hard-bitten pack Shipped overseas to steal a continent with neither shirts nor honor to their back.
In Last Essays, George Bernanos observes that America, unlike other nations, was built from the bottom up. Francis Parkman made the same observation a century earlier. What America violently rejected in its early republic was the Anglican "Homily On Obedience" set down by English established-church doctrine in the Tudor state of 1562, a doctrine likening order in Heaven with the English social order on Earth—fixed and immutable:
The sun, moon, stars, rainbows, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all the birds of the air do keep their order. The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts keep themselves in order.... Every degree of people in their vocations, callings and office has appointed to them their duty and order.
By 1776 the theocratic utopia toward which such a principle moves, was well established in the Britain of the German Georges, as well as in the three North German states of Prussia, Saxony, and Hanover. Together with England, all three were to play an important role in twentieth- century forced schooling in America. The same divine clock, superficially secularized, was marking time in the interlude of Enlightenment France, the pre-revolutionary utopia which would also have a potent effect on American school thought. Hobbes and his doctrine of mental colonization eclipsed Locke everywhere else, but not in America.
1This is Toynbee's paraphrase of Orwell's "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
Read The Book:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000505.htm2010-07-07T11:28:48Z2010-07-12T05:52:09ZRewire Your BrainShe's doing critical-thinking calisthenics...
Many years ago an accountant friend told me the numeral four should be written with the two upper legs parallel to each other and not the way I was doing it, with the left leg keeled over to join the right leg at the top.
He added that he wa...
Many years ago an accountant friend told me the numeral four should be written with the two upper legs parallel to each other and not the way I was doing it, with the left leg keeled over to join the right leg at the top.
He added that he was sure I would never be able to change the habit since I had been doing it the incorrect way all my life. He was wrong. In that very moment I began writing the number four in the correct way and since then have not once done it the old way.
Twenty years ago I read an article in a personal finance magazine in which the author said, "If someone is in the habit of bouncing checks they will live their entire life bouncing checks.
The proclivity to write a bad check is a hard-wired character issue and can't be changed." I was a check-bouncer extraordinaire until undergoing an adjustment in insight ten years ago. I haven't bounced a check since that moment.Rewire Your Brain June 1, 2010
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She's doing critical-thinking calisthenics
Today, unlike thirty years ago, a good 'now' is available by just turning off and plugging in. For too many of us, slowing down to examine things is not entertaining, and that's too bad because it is mandatory we understand the machinery of our lives if we are to modify that machinery to produce the results we want."
That's a quote from the Preface of my book, Work the System. I stand by those words but there's an equally simple yet deeper physiological reason why so many of us struggle to "slow down to examine things."
It has to do with the physical wiring in our heads. And that's a problem because if we don't process input efficiently, our desired life-results won't materialize.
Let's start with this premise: The human brain adapts with astounding speed. We all know our thinking adapts quickly in order to deal with new input but what isn't widely recognized is that this adaptability goes further: Our brains can quickly adjust the processing protocol itself.
Problem is, although it's an easy thing to do and positive results come quickly, most of us haven't consciously attempted to rewire our thinking for maximum efficiency.
Following are personal experiences that helped convince me of the rapid adaptability of the brain:
Many years ago an accountant friend told me the numeral four should be written with the two upper legs parallel to each other and not the way I was doing it, with the left leg keeled over to join the right leg at the top.
He added that he was sure I would never be able to change the habit since I had been doing it the incorrect way all my life. He was wrong. In that very moment I began writing the number four in the correct way and since then have not once done it the old way.
Twenty years ago I read an article in a personal finance magazine in which the author said, "If someone is in the habit of bouncing checks they will live their entire life bouncing checks.
The proclivity to write a bad check is a hard-wired character issue and can't be changed." I was a check-bouncer extraordinaire until undergoing an adjustment in insight ten years ago. I haven't bounced a check since that moment.
One summer morning, at the age of 23, I quit using recreational drugs and never went back.
The topic of my book Work the System describes how I instantly changed my life due to a single late-night revelation. In that moment I made an enormous and permanent change in how I process the daily events of my life.
It's my bet you could add your own examples.
Here's something more in-depth about the rewiring of our neural pathways, a newly published book entitled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. See this excerpt from the latest Wired Magazine.)
Carr makes the point that long hours spent on the Internet transforms our brains into flighty mechanisms that have lost the ability to deep-think. He says, "The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate, but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains." He goes on to say,
"When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain."
He has a particular beef with hyperlinks:"Navigating linked documents...entails a lot of mental calisthenics-evaluating hyperlinks, deciding whether to click, adjusting to different formats that are extraneous to the process of reading.
Because it disrupts concentration, such activity weakens comprehension." In all fairness, and Carr points this out, net-surfing promotes adaptability in our thinking process. Although our ability to deep-think is compromised and memory retention is reduced, we become efficient at processing varied input quickly.
Carr explains that the rewiring happens very, very quickly. It's not something that occurs over a period of months or years. It happens over days or even hours.
And so, beyond the slightly shocking disclosure that we have unwittingly programmed ourselves to be shallow thinkers, here lies the flip-side salvation: It's my interpretation that since the modification of our brain-wiring happened with astounding speed, the process of reversing that modification can be equally fast.
It's great news: One might indulge a bad thinking habit for years but that doesn't mean the bad habit took years to develop or will take years to unwind. Indeed, thinking protocol can be changed instantly. (For you NLP practitioners, I know you are nodding your collective heads in agreement.)
Carr says, "...people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links." Discussing what he calls cognitive overload, Carr enlists an analogy to illustrate how our working memory can only download tiny incremental doses of information into our long-term memory.
(Think emptying a bathtub with a thimble). In order to develop a richer and deeper thinking process, one must enter information into long-term memory in a slow and orderly way.
So how do we reverse shallow thinking without renouncing our web-habit? Especially by reading books. Spending time with the non-hyper linked written page encourages deep thinking and critical analysis. As I see it, there are also other exercises that will stretch our linear-thinking apparatus.
An innocuous example is walking down the street without the iPod plugged in. Another: Avoid multitasking. In any case, reading is probably the most potent antidote to computer-generated flighty thinking.
Ultimately, it's a trade-off as we leave the computer to pick up a book: To spend less time preoccupying ourselves short-term in order to spend more time satisfying ourselves long-term.
I try hard to complete one hardcover book per week and now realize it hasn't been simply a luxury, it's been an inadvertent therapeutic countering of the hours I spend gyrating on the Internet. In the cognitive sense, reading combined with web exploration makes thinking both linear and adaptable.
In an exercise regimen, it's much like combining long distance running with weight-lifting in order to gain both resiliency and strength. Contrast the body of the elite long-distance runner with that of the professional body builder. Wouldn't something in between be superior to one or the other extreme?
Congruent with Carr's work and published a couple of years ago, is another terrific book that discusses our society's general decline in critical thinking. Read The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein.
No surprise that Bauerlein also lays the blame on the Internet as it delivers an unlimited supply of wasteful entertainment and inane social connection.
It's true, the Work the System method requires a linear, critical-thinking mindset. But if one can work through the method patiently, the process will naturally render the mindset. It's what happened to me.
Being able to quickly hone our thinking to be more deliberate and less flighty is an advantage for those of us who make our living in the business world. With so many of our competitors unable to focus and think critically - while wastefully expending huge gobs of time being entertained - our task of being the best in what we do becomes that much easier.
This email was sent to stormulf@freecomusa.com by info@workthesystem.com.
Work the System 141 NW Greenwood Ave. Suite 200 Bend,OR 97701]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000504.htm2010-06-27T17:49:40Z2010-06-28T00:55:36ZGulf Oil GeyserZeitgeist
guardian.co.uk
Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world
The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubr... guardian.co.uk
Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world
The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism...
"Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to," the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions. Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world
The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism
Oil-soaked pelicans huddle in a cage at a research centre in Buras, Louisiana ‘Obama cannot order pelicans not to die (no matter whose ass he kicks). And no amount of money – not BP’s $20bn, not $100bn – can replace a culture that’s lost its roots.’ Photograph: Lee Celano/Reuters
Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from BP and the federal government. These fine folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster in US history.
"Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to," the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.
And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to "doing better" to process their claims for lost revenue – then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.
But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that "the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up".
"Put it in writing!" someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O'Brien approached the mic. "We don't need to hear this anymore," he declared, hands on hips. It didn't matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, "we just don't trust you guys!" And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you'd have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.
The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston and London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would "make it right". Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would "leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before", that he was "making sure" it "comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis".
It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish – will be poisoned.
It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like hurricane Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.
How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be "restored and made whole" as Obama's interior secretary has pledged to do? It's not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It's not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.
We do know this. Far from being "made whole," the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast's legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages – much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company's Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal". Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like "make it right".)
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP's recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."
This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.
BP's mission statement
In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate "the mother", including mining.
The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature's mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be "put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man".
Those words may as well have been BP's corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called "the energy frontier", it dabbled in synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that "a new area of investigation" would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had "the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry" – as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.
Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: "I don't think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we're faced with now." Apparently, it "seemed inconceivable" that the blowout preventer would ever fail – so why prepare?
This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: "If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?" Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent "$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year."
These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase "little risk" appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks to "proven equipment and technology", adverse affects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, "Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels". The effects on fish, meanwhile, "would likely be sublethal" because of "the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons". (In BP's telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)
Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, "little risk of contact or impact to the coastline" because of the company's projected speedy response (!) and "due to the distance [of the rig] to shore" – about 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean's capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km away.)
None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry's four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. "It's better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way," she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, "in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty". By the time the infamous "Drill Baby Drill" Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced." That wasn't enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration's plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. "My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death," she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. "Let's drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!" And there was much rejoicing.
In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: "We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event." And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the "Drill Now" crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster – at the corporate and governmental levels – has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.
The ocean is big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward in the early days. While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water system, because "nature has a way of helping the situation". But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has bust out of all BP's top hats, containment domes, and junk shots. The ocean's winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. "We told them," said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. "The oil's gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom." Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that "70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all".
And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m gallons dumped with the company's trademark "what could go wrong?" attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil – but in the process they also absorb the water's oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine life.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, ""Y'all work for BP?" When we said no, the response – in the open ocean – was "You can't be here then". But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. "You cannot tell God's air where to flow and go, and you can't tell water where to flow and go," I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.
Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company's claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August – repeated by Obama in his Oval Office address – is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.
The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama's temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that "no human endeavour is ever without risk", while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a "statistical anomaly". By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in "wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld".
Make the bleeding stop
Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity's power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP's live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as "rainbow sheen", he observed what many had felt: "The Gulf seems to be bleeding." This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an "oil spill" and instead says, "we are haemorrhaging". Others speak of the need to "make the bleeding stop". And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.
The experience of following the oil's progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba – then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub – everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.
It's one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It's another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: "The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined." Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while "unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual". And just in case we still didn't get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don't even mention what a hurricane would do to BP's toxic soup.
There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature's circulatory systems by poisoning them.
In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U'wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, "the blood of Mother Earth". They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn't as much oil as it had previously thought.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth "sacred" is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.
If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping precipitously, down 22% from the peak of the "Drill Now" frenzy. The issue is not dead, however. It is only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the deep sea, even in the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than the one underway in the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won't be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.
Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama's undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminium particles into the atmosphere – and of course it's all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP's former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP's supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, "You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash."
The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward's "If you knew you could not fail" credo, the precautionary principle holds that "when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health" we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation cheques. "You act like you know, but you don't know."
Naomi Klein visited the Gulf coast with a film-crew from Fault Lines, a documentary programme hosted by Avi Lewis on al-Jazeera English Television. She was a consultant on the film...