michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Mar 19, 2007 18:17:08 GMT 4
Omnicidal Elitists: Their Killers, Their Science, Their Plan Part 1 of 2
The elitists referred to in this essay are not, in a sense, human...this goes beyond being sociopaths...it is more than that; they are different from us and have been with us throughout all of earth's history. They breed to keep their bloodlines pure...there is a reason for that and it hasn't anything to do with love of one's race, family, or, in a sense, even money....monetary systems were invented to control us. And control us they do, very well, for there are many within their systems, not their kind, who are willing to sell out all that is dear to them in exchange for wealth and power. Through their own inability to control their vices, they are kept in line, and do the dirty work for these elites spoken of.
For the rest of the masses, they have been roped into the dark plan by losing their connection to the Earth and their own inner Light, and their willingness to avoid personal responsibility in order to feel 'safe and protected.' The only problem is that our world is not safe anymore, no matter where you go. The tentacles of the dark reach into every area of our lives....everything is controlled.
We have exchanged Personal Freedom for comfort and luxury....and nearly everyone on this planet, the ones who have come into this world better off, have done this to some extent when they should have been tending to the plights of poorer, exploited populations. This can be done in so many small ways, to look after the less fortunate...responsible purchases, investing in companies which support and raise up populations/workers and not ones which exploit. The ways to stop fueling this madness are endless, if people would pay attention to where and who their money goes. This would also include environment awareness, personal health choices, the taking back of parental rights, and so on. I have lost my patience with people who say they can't be bothered, it's too time consuming to inform one's self.....Well, the planet is nearly out of time.
Personal Freedom is scary, folks, because you aren't assured of anything in your future...it is a gamble and a willingness to step into the unknown. To gain it you must be willing to accept that we are on are own, that there is no government or military to take care of things, and that we must look after each other when in need .....Michelle
Omnicidal Elitists: Their Killers, Their Science, Their Plan By Dhane Blue 3/14/07
Our economic system thrives on genocide. Corporate capitalism may simply be legitimized genocide by economic means. Because multi-national corporations often are the world economy, it is hard for governments seeking to be viable in the world market, to raise the issue of genocide at international law. Capitalism frequently involves the imposition of capital (the power of an elite) to "develop" - which has meant to control and subjugate - the resources of less technologically advanced countries. What resulting indigenous poverty means and leads to is gradual eradication and loss of peoples.” Is the U.S. Really a Signatory to the U.N. Convention on Genocide? by John Bart Gerald
“The military strategy of the war against Iraq involved a purposeful attempt to destroy the country's life support systems and the economy. Its goal was "post-war leverage" and an attempt to make life so intolerable for the people that they would overthrow their leadership. Trying to destroy leadership by destroying a civilian population is genocide. If half a million to a million Iraqis die(d) directly, indirectly or from "Sanctions," as a result of the Gulf crisis, compared to possibly 125 deaths within American forces, then that was not warfare but a policy of extermination.” Is the U.S. Really a Signatory to the U.N. Convention on Genocide? by John Bart Gerald
There exists a worldwide pogrom of population reduction being implemented by elitists who consider themselves in charge of the culling of the human species. These elitists are omnicidal predators who have been managing the killing fields of Planet Earth for generations after their careful creation of the industrialization of death. For these international and psychopathic serial killers and their families, death is just another enterprise to profit from and gain control over. It appears they finally feel secure enough in their monopolization of death to emerge from the shadows into the full light of the public eye. For the word death, substitute the words, humanity’s fear of the unknown. After all, death is just a door into the unknown that we all walk through sooner or later. The enemy here is our fear. It has been the primary weapon used by the elitists to manipulate us into acceptance of a worldwide slaughterhouse. The 9-11 event was the elitists’ announcement to the world of what they have planned for us, a wide open door of death. Perhaps, they think the human race will never wake up, face its fear, and fight back.
Part 1 – The Killers
The elitists themselves are not directly killers -- they hire others to do their ‘dirty’ work. The largest group of killers is obviously the military-industrial complex bringing us violent and messy death, closely followed by the pharmaceutical industry bringing us quiet and drugged death. Then, we have scientists bringing us bio-engineered diseases, cyborg killing machines and ‘god knows’ what other kind of Frankensteinian mayhem. Ultimately, the elitists would have us all become killers, ‘New World Order’ terminators hell-bent on our self-destruction. By having us all become involved in the ‘dirty’ work, the elitists are setting U.S. up for the kill.
“The Convention against Genocide does supersede the legal systems of all countries because the legal systems may function whether a genocide occurs or not. In other words, within the U.S. citizens are discouraged from concern yet under international law are liable. Domestically, individuals are denied any way to affect this issue in international court. The Convention against Genocide is a treaty between governments. So the citizen is vulnerable to paying for his/her government's policies beyond U.S. domains of power and influence. Genocidal policies by government put future generations of Americans at risk of retribution.” Is the U.S. Really a Signatory to the U.N. Convention on Genocide? by John Bart Gerald
Do the elitists think we’re going to thank them for their foresight by joining them in an international court of law, accused of genocide because we just stood by during their killing sprees? We’ve known that war has been waged by paid militias against civilians and civilization for a long time. What have we done about it? Now, it has become so organized and ‘in our face’ that it threatens the survival of U.S. citizens themselves as well as the rest of the human race.
The elitists need modern warriors to kill for them, but who eradicates the useless killers when their work has been done? Apparently, the elitists have this scenario covered as well. With modern military planning, killing continues on ‘automatic’ after a war is over. The whole planet has become a vast slaughterhouse. By arming soldiers with D.U. weapons, the elitists have ensured that when the fighting is over, no one will be left standing to take them on if their planned pogrom for the human race is revealed.
“The use of weapons in war are most effective when the weapons do not kill, but create long-term health and environmental consequences such as lingering illnesses which slowly destroy the health of the environment and productivity of a nation and the economy. Should humans be so stupid as to continue both technological escalation and wars between nation-states, radiological warfare might well be a far more safe and humane way to conduct extermination of large numbers of people, or the emptying out of troublesome political centers, than any of the various biological alternatives. D.U. is a permanent terrain contaminant with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, forms immense volumes of nano-sized particles (smaller than bacteria or viruses) which are lofted permanently as components of atmospheric dust traveling around the world until they are rained or snowed out of the air." The Kiss of Death –Nuclear Weapons Stealth Takeover by Leuren Morat
Even Prince Philip of Britain, a member of the Bilderberg Group, is in favor of depopulation:
"If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels." - Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund - quoted in 'Are You Ready For Our New Age Future?', Insiders Report, American Policy Center, December '95)
"Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We're in for a major disaster if it isn't curbed... We have no option. If it isn't controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation and war." -- HRH Prince Philip, interview "Vanishing Breeds Worry Prince Philip, But Not as Much as Overpopulation", People Magazine, Dec. 21, 1981
Does Prince Philip consider himself one of the elitists, the Black Nobility of Europe? The reader of this should decide for himself or herself how to answer that question. Not being an elitist, it is difficult to imagine how one thinks. I would only challenge one to pick up a weapon and do his work himself upon the planet’s killing fields or at least sit on an ammunition box of D.U. shells long enough to give his colon an irradiation he would never forget. The Black Nobility has already given us an indication of its ‘heart’ with the Queen of England and the Rothschilds controlling more than 80 percent of the world’s supplies of uranium.
The pharmaceutical industry may be even more efficient at genocide than the military-industrial complex. Thousands of people died from the toxic side effects of doctor-prescribed medicines last year. Thousands more died from doctors’ mistakes in hospitals. Even the World Health Organization admits that only 200 medicines are needed for most countries in the developing world. Of that 200, perhaps only a couple of dozen are absolutely essential to the health of people. So, why does the U.S.A. need 200,000 medicines for its population? Is it because the pharmaceutical corporation’s profits are more important than human life? Assuredly, so – the elitist CEO of that corporation would admit if forced to at the point of a gun. The side-effects of many of these drugs are unknown and doctors continue to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year – far more than the number of people killed on September 11, 2001. Ask a Gulf War veteran suffering from exposure to D.U. or toxins in an enforced Anthrax vaccination if he believes in the medical establishment.
“If we are to have significant and inexpensive medical treatment advancement we must not continue to turn ourselves blindly over to the current medical establishment. This current establishment is run by monopoly like vested interests. The allopathic medical schools are controlled by the AMA and are heavily lobbied by large research grants from pharmaceutical companies, which have very close ties to the AMA. Your average M.D. is trained to think generally only in terms of drug treatments and therefore becomes a licensed drug pusher for the pharmaceutical companies. ” Reasonable, Just, and Fair Medical Treatment by Gary Wade
Scientists are the next category of deadly killers – using their minds and intellectual creations to harvest human souls for the ‘Grim Reaper’. Technology kills, doesn’t it? Science kills our natural awareness of reality and replaces it with an artifice – the artificial world of the scientific mindset. Think not? When he was the “Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (was) proposing, funding, and building Bio-Weapons Level 3 and Level 4 labs at many places around the U.S. - even on university campuses and in densely populated urban locations. In a Bio-Weapons Level 4 facility a single bacteria or virus is lethal. For what purpose are these labs being developed, and who will make the decisions on where Bio-Weapons created in these facilities will be used and on whom? More than 20 world-class microbiologists have been murdered since 2001, mostly in the U.S. and the U.K. - nearly all were working on developing ethnic specific Bio-Weapons.” The Kiss of Death –Nuclear Weapons Stealth Takeover by Leuren Morat
“When Alexander (the Great) was rapaciously plundering the world and found himself in Persia, and some short time before he decided he was a god, he was told by a Persian seeking small favors, of a liquid that came from the ground and burned. Alexander summoned some of this liquid, and a boy to be brought to him. He ordered that the boy to be brought to him. He ordered that the boy to be covered with the liquid. And, then, Alexander lit him afire. That is what Aristotle (later) tutored (as science). It is no different from what all academics teach their students today. This is empirical reason at work systematically destroying the world.” Challenging Academia by Don Robertson
Can we now identify what an elitist is and how one may think. “Canada’s Red Pill press has recently published Andrew M. Lobaczewski’s book, Political Ponerology, (Red Pill Press, Canada, 1998 and 2006). (In this book) the author expounds on his observations that during his years of clinical work in Poland, he noticed a high correlation between acts that most people would label as ‘evil’ and various pathologies. The most apt diagnostic labeling of these individuals in modern psychological jargon would be sociopathic, the most important characteristic of which is the seeming absence of a conscience or empathy in relation to other living beings. Lobaczewski and some of his Eastern European colleagues working under Soviet rule decided to take this study to a higher level and researched how sociopathy was playing out in government, in business, and in other social groups.” Speaking Truth to Power by Carolyn Baker
“Unconscious psychological processes outstrip conscious reasoning, both in time and in scope, which makes many psychological phenomena possible. Thus the denial that prohibits some individuals from seeing the darkest truths of what a sociopath is trying to promote, i.e., Our government wouldn’t harm us; our government has our best interests at heart; no president could get away with that; the rule of law is still at work in America; fascism can’t happen here; the U.S. government couldn’t possibly have orchestrated the 9/11 attacks; if 9/11 were orchestrated by the U.S. government, too many people would have been involved for it to remain a secret, and on and on ad infinitum.” Political Ponerology by A. M. Lobaczewski
Elitists are powerful thinkers – they worship life-denial. They use their egos and empirical reason to construct an artificial replacement for life. They forget that such a world only exists in their mindset. Additionally, they lack empathy because they can not ‘resonate’ with life energy. They can’t imagine themselves as other humans do. They describe the rest of us as cattle or ‘sheeple’ with a herd mentality. To their way of thinking, culling of the human species is no different than culling the weak animals from a herd of cows. I guess they forget that ‘sheeple’ do think – and they do empathize with others of their own kind. WE ‘resonate’ with life – they don’t. If there is any culling to do, it should be of the genocidal mindset carefully nurtured by elitists who consider themselves in charge of the world. Elitists ARE killers – their weapon of choice is their mindset. Programmed by their criminal families since birth to think of this mindset as ‘normal’, of course they don’t recognize the pathology at work in their own minds. Or do they? Is that their ‘vampiric love of human blood’, their ‘alienated’ love-bite – that they only exist as parasites upon humanity?
Part 2 -- Their Science
The elitists employ a variety of schemes to implement their planned pogrom of population reduction but prefer the end results of engineered war, eugenics, and the spread of disease and famine. To engineer war between varied groups of humans and nation states is simple when resources are controlled by the elitists. Convince any one group of people that their livelihood depends on a resource that another group has and armed conflict eventually results. Elitists spend a lot of time brainwashing the rest of us into accepting a ‘scarcity’ paradigm when the opposite is the true reality of our planet – think Peak Oil myth, for example. Elitists want to reproduce their own kind and eliminate all others, thus eugenics is a perennial favorite with them. Eugenics is a philosophy attributed to Thomas Malthus in the 18th and 19th centuries. It espouses the creation of a master race through genetic manipulation and involuntary sterilization of undesirable target populations.
Planned disease and starvation rounds out the elitists’ methodology, eliminating the poor of the world through exploitation of their resources and denial of their right to life. What do the poor have that the elitists would want?
“Indonesia is an horrendous example of conflict creation for the purposes of eugenics and corporate control, while public bodies and the media remain obstinately silent. General Suharto took control of Indonesia in 1965 through a CIA-backed coup and has since been responsible for 500,000 murders in his own country. However, because his administration is subservient to Western corporations, allowing them to exploit the land and the people (e.g. Reebok), this appalling tragedy goes unchallenged in the media. In December 1975 Indonesia invaded the Portuguese colony of East Timor and, in the following years, proceeded to slaughter 200,000 people, a third of the Timorese population. This genocide (eugenics) has been carried out with arms from Britain (British Aerospace's Hawk Jets) and US, approval from the West (Kissinger and Ford were in Indonesia days before the invasion) and complete silence in the mass media. The simple reason is that oil and gas reserves had been discovered off the coast of East Timor which the multinational oil companies could exploit only if controlled by a corporate-friendly culture – like Indonesia.” The Brotherhood, Part 6, Population Control by Ivan Fraser and Mark Beeston.
Of course, in Indonesia, the natural resource being fought over was the vast reserve of oil and gas. In the minds of the elitists, the poor only had an imaginary right to the use of this resource to improve their plight. The only winner in that fight was the elitist military-industrial complex. The so-called corporate-friendly culture of Indonesia is best described as its Fascist government, not the culture of the Timorese. The Timorese were the population targeted for genocide in this local Asian pogrom. Whereas previously it was a pogrom in Cambodia, under the control of Kissinger, a shuttle diplomat for the elitists during the Vietnamese War, it will be another agent of their mindset in the next one. Remember that, according to this mindset, mass killings are a useful by-product of war. One could hypothesize about the Asian tsunami of two years ago in this vein, as there is some conjecture that the earthquake setting off this devastating wave of death was artificially induced by the underwater explosion of a hydrogen bomb. I will leave that hypothesis for another day’s writing.
Eugenics is a quiet pogrom. Elitists prefer the quiet of the shadows – war, after all, is a messy business and receives a lot of attention. Elitists don’t want that kind of attention – they are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Let their henchmen do the ‘dirty’ work and they can be eliminated once their usefulness is exhausted. War is good for weakening the will of humanity to resist elitist brainwashing. However, eugenics through genetic manipulation may seem like a more effective technique of culling to an elitist.
"The lowest strata... allegedly less well endowed genetically... must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive..." -- Julian Huxley, Galton Lecture at the Eugenics Society, 1936
"Thus, even though it is quite true that any radical eugenics policy of controlled human breeding will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care..." -- Julian Huxley, "UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy", 1947
Encouraging infant mortality has been experimented with on ethnic groups and racial minorities, even by the U.S. government, and supported as an idea by Rockefeller and the first president Bush. Genocide carried out continuously, quietly and efficiently in the background of more newsworthy events -- like war – is simply more efficient though not as profitable. Perhaps, the use of D.U. weapons has been deliberate. Birth defects and genetic damage are deniable, at least in theory, if most of the scientists and media have been bought and paid for. It’s easier to hide than the mess and carnage of an actively fought war, although this is also changing with embedded reporters, whose job seems to be to hide the genocide.
“Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government’s own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Referring to the extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of 46 international radiation expert authors of the (European Committee for Risk on Radiation) ECRR report, describes it as the concept of species annihilation mean(ing) a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide." Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of War by Leuren Morat.
continued....
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Mar 19, 2007 18:18:34 GMT 4
....continued:Omnicidal Elitists: Their Killers, Their Science, Their PlanPart 2 of 2Planned disease and starvation go hand in hand. They seem like more long-range plans of our friends, the elitists. To make this plan productive requires more science. Terminator genes in seeds ensure that poor people in developing countries will have to buy their future food resources (in the form of germinable seeds) from corporations who hold the power of life or death over their heads. Meanwhile, there are always bio-engineered diseases to create. Scientists who can do this for the elitists may yet earn their future survival as useful agents. Many scientists from around the world have already concluded that A.I.D.S. is not caused by H.I.V. and is one such bio-engineered disease. There is yet more money for the pharmaceuticals to make in this scam, selling toxic drugs that even cause the symptoms of A.I.D.S. and probably kill all A.I.D.S. patients treated with such. “The HIV 'virus' was intentionally bioengineered in government, military, and private laboratories right here in America. The American microbiologist who attempted to assume international credit for 'discovering' the AIDS virus, Dr Robert C. Gallo, was in fact the principal coordinator who was hired by the US Department of Defence (DOD) to develop and create the AIDS virus. The facts supporting the above allegations are brilliantly laid out in Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola, Nature, Accident, or Intentional? by Dr. Len Horowitz” The Sham of AIDS Research (www.educate-yourself.org)This is hardly an in-depth examination of the schemes the elitists use to reduce the human population and profit thereby. On the surface of it, the goal of population reduction is empirically sound. Many scientists, sociologists, and other engineers of society have agreed in principle that the Planet Earth can not support its present population of 6 billion something. It sounds like common sense. What most people conveniently forget is that the world CAN supply the basic needs of a much larger population, even a doubled one. What elitists ignore in their discussions at the Club of Rome is their own inability to manage the distribution of resources equitably. Most of the world’s ‘parasites’ produce nothing and live off the profits of the distributers – all those middlemen – and the producers themselves, the little guys at the bottom of the food chain! So, back to our would-be social engineers, the group of people amongst which no one is very forthcoming on the ‘methodology’ of how to reduce the human population to some ideal sum that supports the Status Quo with the elitists on top. The elitists’ predicament is that they can’t admit their mismanagement of Planet Earth and its resources. I guess it is easier to hide in a pyramid built of aeons of occult bullshit than it is to admit mismanagement and ask the rest of us for forgiveness. After all, in spite of their mindset, elitists are all too human! Don’t you find a bit of them in your own mind? Part 3 – Their PlanWith the 9-11 event announcing to the world the elitists’ willingness to sacrifice the human population upon the altar of their occult mindset, they have finally come into the open. I think they are telling the rest of us that they are confident that they are in the driver’s seat. What could produce such confidence? I would answer – the arrogance of their mindset coupled with a rogue military group’s power (of mind-control of us) or (an expendable patsy group mind-controlled by the elitists). Why else would a blackmailed and cowed (or mind-controlled) U.S. Government acquiesce in its own participation in omnicide? According to international law, a case could be made that the entire U.S. Government is guilty of crimes against humanity and its representatives are rabid dogs of war – omnicidal war criminals of the first order. But, then again, the brave researcher of government mind-control programs would already know that mind-controlled slaves of the elitists have always been considered expendable when they reach their expiration date. “The topic of mind control is elaborate, multifaceted, and multi layered. For the casual reader, it can quickly become numbing, overwhelming the senses and creating a desire to exit the topic, but avoiding this subject is the most foolish thing you could possibly do since your only chance of surviving this hideous and insidious enslavement agenda, which today threatens virtually all of humanity, is to understand how it functions and take steps to reduce your vulnerability. The plans to create a mind controlled workers’ society have been in place for a long time. The current technology grew out of experiments that the Nazis started before World War II and intensified during the time of the Nazi concentration camps when an unlimited supply of children and adults were available for experimentation. We've heard about the inhumane medical experiments performed on concentration camp prisoners, but no word was ever mentioned by the media and the TV documentaries of the mind control experiments. That was not to be divulged to the American public.” Mind Control – The Ultimate Terror by Ken Adachi.How else could the elitists hope to survive the world’s condemnation and judgement? I personally don’t think they’ll ever trust us to forgive them. Why, of course, survival for an elitist means doing away with the rest of the world’s human population, reducing it to a manageable entity by any patsy at least temporarily mind-controlled by the elitists. Where would elitists retreat with any surviving ‘praetorian guard’? Well, for more than the last 50 years, the elitists, using their profits from war, the sale of illegal drugs, and other scams have been building a network of Deep Underground Military Bases (D.U.M.B.S.). Deep underground and hidden away from public scrutiny or accountability, using U.S. Government black ops funding, (Where did that missing 2 trillion dollars from the U.S. Department of Defense go?) elitists have continued their experiments in mind-control with involuntary subjects kidnapped from the human population at large. Is it any wonder that Bush’s government has pressed for unlimited funds to conduct the war in Iraq? If the elitists never expect to have to pay back anyone but need continued war to implement the reduction of the planet’s human population (those people who would fight back against elitists), then they are already ‘beyond the pale’ and past all human forgiveness. Like Vice President Cheney, who had an underground chamber built below his house shortly after Bush’s government came into office, the elitists can scurry off to their holes in the ground. Hopefully, Planet Earth will swallow them whole and the rest of us will never see them again. “The ‘capitalist’ government of the U.S.A. over the past two generations or so, has squandered all of the funds the people paid into Social Security, Medicare, and all of the other so called government managed ‘trusts’. After using propaganda to scare the people, they have spent billions of dollars on the military and needless nuclear and biological weapons, said money going into the pockets of those who control ‘their’ government. I understand that the total debt and unfunded liabilities of the United States now exceeds eighty trillion dollars ($80,000,000,000,000). This means that the United States is essentially bankrupt. What those who did this to us fear is that something will happen that will expose one of the many frauds, lies, thefts of earnings of the people, and other crimes, such that we the people will begin to quickly see what has been done to us. If (when) this happens the people will take action against the establishment and with a "snowball effect" the rest of their treasonous, murderous activities will then be exposed. It would not be a good time to be considered among the elite. With this in mind, those who control the government are employing a scorched earth policy to destroy the ability of the people to understand their crimes or to fight back. Thus the plan is to destroy the United States of America so that the people will not be able to find those responsible for their plight and prosecute them appropriately.” What They Plan to Do to Us by Anon.The author is an American expatriate, working as a teacher in Thailand and living with a family of Burmese refugees. He can be contacted through his websites: www.freewebs.com/innernature and www.freewebs.com/littleschoolsSource:civillibertarian.blogspot.com/2007/03/omnicidal-elitists-their-killers-their.html
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Apr 17, 2007 11:37:22 GMT 4
STRANGE DAYS STRANGE SKIES 285 stunning pictures - a MUST MUST SEE!! LOTS of info in the captions!imageevent.com/firesat/strangedaysstrangeskies?z=3&c=4&n=1&m=-1&w=4&x=0&p=14YOU ARE NOW BREATHING ETHYLENE DIBROMIDE, NANO-PARTICULATES OF ALUMINUM AND BARIUM AND CATIONIC POLYMER FIBERS WITH UNIDENTIFIED BIOACTIVE MATERIAL: "We the people have not been warned, advised or consulted but are certainly vulnerable to the outcomes." chemtrailshallofshame.com "Biologic components have been reported in airborne samples that include: modified molds, desiccated red blood cells and exotic strains of bacteria" Welcome to the brave new world of toxic barium skies, weather control, mind control and population control through the use of chemtrails modulated with electromagnetic frequencies generated by HAARP. Our health is under attack as evidenced by the skyrocketing rates of chemtrail induced lung cancer, asthma and pulmonary/respiratory problems. Our natural environment and planetary weather systems are under attack resulting in freak lightening strikes, bizarre weather, 20% less sunlight reaching the Earth' surface, the alarming, nearly complete collapse in certain areas of the west coast marine ecosystem and the creation of some of the largest tornadoes and hurricanes on record. Our skies are increasingly hazed over with fake barium/ aluminum particulate, ethylene dibromide chemtrail clouds. Whether in the atmosphere or in the Ocean this added particulate matter is a hazard to the health of every living thing on this planet. My health and the health of my family has already been drastically affected. There is a main-stream media blackout on this subject so the only way to get the word out is by word of mouth.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE EARTH HAS STARTED TO GLOW - sample pictureimageevent.com/firesat/strangedaysstrangeskies?p=48&w=4&c=4&n=0&m=-1&s=0&y=1&z=4&l=0The Earth, as viewed from outer space has developed a striking new look. The Earth has started to glow. The chemtrail spray planes have saturated our global atmosphere with reflective metal particulates to such an extent that they have altered the actual appearance of the planet. The untold billions and billions of particles now floating in our atmosphere give off the glow of reflected sunlight, with the effect of veiling the world in a luminous mist. ONCE AT THIS URL click on "NEXT" in the upper left corner (or on previous) and you'll get another picture with this caption: "EARTH'S HAZY NEW LOOK - The entire global atmosphere has been polluted by the aerosol spray operations. So much so that the change is clearly visible in recent sat images. The earth is enveloped in a haze." and just keep going... Or star with the first picture: CHEMTRAILS HALL OF SHAME WINNER OF THE MONTH imageevent.com/firesat/strangedaysstrangeskies?p=0&n=1&m=-1&c=4&l=0&w=4&s=0&z=3And finally there is a picture of the spraying nozzle of one of the top secret planes at imageevent.com/firesat/strangedaysstrangeskies?p=260&n=1&m=-1&c=4&l=0&w=4&s=0&z=3------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A MEETINGClifford E Carnicom Jul 26 2003 Edited Aug 17 2003 A meeting has taken place recently between an investigative researcher and a well placed military source. The identity of both parties is to be protected. The source has intimate knowledge of at least one aspect of the aerosol operations, and asserts the following:1. The operation is a joint project between the Pentagon and the pharmaceutical industry. 2. The Pentagon wishes to test biological diseases for war purposes on unsuspecting populations. It was stated that SARS is a failure as the expected rate of mortality was intended to be 80%. 3. The pharmaceutical industry is making trillions on medications designed to treat both fatal and non-fatal diseases given to populations. 4. The bacteria and viruses are freeze-dried and then placed on fine filaments for release. 5. The metals released along with the diseases heat up from the sun, creating a perfect environment for the bacteria and viruses to thrive in the air supply. 6. Most countries being sprayed are unaware of the activities and they have not consented to the activities. He states that commercial aircraft flying are one of the delivery systems. 7. Most of the "players" are old friends and business partners of the senior Bush. 8. The ultimate goal is the control of all populations through directed and accurate spraying of drugs, diseases, etc. 9. People who have tried to reveal the truth have been imprisoned and killed. 10. This is the most dangerous and dark time that I have experienced in all of my years of serving this country. This information is relayed without qualification, as I am knowledgeable in the level of integrity of the researcher that has made this information available to the public. There is both risk and restraint that has been exercised in the preparation of this statement. Clifford E Carnicom Jul 26 2003 Source: www.carnicom.com/meeting.htm------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: www.mercola.com/2001/sep/8/mycoplasma.htmMycoplasma the Linking Pathogen in Neurosystemic DiseasesExtracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 8, Number 5 Part 1 of 2 (Continued Next Issue, References) by Donald W. Scott, MA, MSc Pathogenic Mycoplasma A Common Disease Agent WeaponizedAccording to DR Shyh-Ching Lo, senior researcher at The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and one of America's top mycoplasma researchers, this disease agent causes many illnesses including AIDS, cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, Crohn's colitis, Type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Wegener's disease and collagen-vascular diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer's. You may develop neurological diseases if the pathogen destroys certain cells in your brain, or you may develop Crohn's colitis if the pathogen invades and destroys cells in the lower bowel. Many doctors don't know about this mycoplasma disease agent because it was developed by the US military in biological warfare experimentation and it was not made public. The Special Virus Cancer Program, created by the CIA and NIH to develop a deadly pathogen for which humanity had no natural immunity (AIDS), was disguised as a war on cancer but was actually part of MK-NAOMI. USA uses of WMD on citizens The Pentagon released a document which confirms that the US government tested biological weapons on its own citizens : "Briefing on Cold War-era Chemical and Biological Warfare Tests" This report was released to the media on October the 8th, one day after President Bush outlined the Administration's main justification for waging war against Iraq, namely Saddam Hussein's alleged programme of weapons of mass destruction including biological weapons.
No public outcry, and very little media coverage. The US government used biological weapons against its own citizens, but this was justified, it was for a good cause.Crystalline Brucella They had produced a crystalline bacterial toxin extracted from the Brucella bacterium. The bacterial toxin could be removed in crystalline form and stored, transported and deployed without deteriorating. It could be delivered by other vectors such as insects, aerosol or the food chain (in nature it is delivered within the bacterium). But the factor that is working in the Brucella is the mycoplasma. Brucella is a disease agent that doesn't kill people; it disables them. Because the crystalline disease agent goes into solution in the blood, ordinary blood and tissue tests will not reveal its presence. The mycoplasma will only crystallize at 8.1 pH, and the blood has a pH of 7.4 pH. So the doctor thinks your complaint is "all in your head". Covert Testing of Mycoplasma Testing the Dispersal Methods Documented evidence proves that the biological weapons they were developing were tested on the public in various communities without their knowledge or consent. The government knew that crystalline Brucella would cause disease in humans. Now they needed to determine how it would spread and the best way to disperse it. They tested dispersal methods for Brucella suis and Brucella melitensis at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, in June and September 1952. Probably, 100% of us now are infected with Brucella suis and Brucella melitensis.CLIP Much more through www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/mycoplasma.html------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Coming Clean (04/04/2004) From an airline mechanicwww.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=1669"For reasons you will understand as you read this I can not divulge my identity. I am an aircraft mechanic for a major airline. I work at one of our maintenance bases located at a large airport. I have discovered some information that I think you will find important. (...) The next week we had three of our planes in our main hanger for periodic inspection. There are mechanics crawling all over a plane during these inspections. I had just finished my shift and I decided to have a look at the waste system on one of our planes. With all the mechanics around I figured that no one would notice an extra one on the plane. Sure enough, the plane I choose had the extra equipment! I began to trace the system of pipes, pumps, and tanks. I found what appeared to be the control unit for the system. It was a standard looking avionics control box but it had no markings of any kind. I could trace the control wires from the box to the pumps and valves but there were no control circuits coming into the unit. The only wires coming Into the unit was a power connection to the aircraft's main power bus. The system had 1 large and 2 smaller tanks. It was hard to tell in the cramped compartment but it looked like the large tank could hold 50 gallons. The tanks were connected to a fill and drain valve that passed through the fuselage just behind the drain valve for the waste system. When I had a chance to look for this connection under the plane I found it cunningly hidden behind a panel under the panel used to access the waste drain. I began to trace the piping from the pumps. These pipes lead to a network of small pipes that ended in the trailing edges of the wings and horizontal stabilizers. If you look closely at the wings of a large airplane you will see a set of wires, about the size of your finger, extending from the trailing edge of the wing surfaces. These are the static discharge wicks. They are used to dissipate the static electric charge that builds up on a plane in flight. I discovered that the pipes from this mystery system lead to every 1 out of 3 of these static discharge wicks. These wicks had been "hollowed out" to allow whatever flows through these pipes to be discharged through these fake wicks. (...) Well you already know what they are doing. I don't know what they are spraying but I can tell you how they are doing it. I figure they are using the "honey trucks". These are the trucks that empty the waste from the lavatory waste tanks. The airports usually contract out this job and nobody goes near these trucks. Who wants to stand next a truck full of sh--. While these guys are emptying the waste tanks they are filling the tanks of the spray system. They know the planes flight path so they probably program the control unit to start spraying some amount of time after the plane reaches a certain altitude. The spray nozzles in the fake static wicks are so small that no one in the plane would see a thing. Note: For more information, see related posts on chemtrails throughout this thread.....Michelle
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 23, 2007 15:59:46 GMT 4
I just knew it! I said here before that the powers that be would begin to tell us Chemtrails are good for us and it will stop global warming. Now they're brainwashing our kids about it via their textbooks; they're also suggesting burning coal is good for us!!!!!....MichelleChemtrail Sunscreen Taught In US Schoolsby William Thomas A is for Apple.
B is for Boy.
C is for Chemtrails.At least this is what one American father found while paging through his child's science book. SmT was astonished to find seventh graders being taught about chemtrails. And geoengineeering their home planet. Anyone with question about the "spray programs" he now says, "should perhaps just ask their kids." The chemtrails section is found in the Centre Point Learning Science I Essential Interactions science book. Under "Solutions for Global Warming", section 5.19 features a photo of a big multi-engine jet sporting a familiar orange/red paint scheme. The caption reads: "Figure 1- Jet engines running on richer fuel would add particles to the atmosphere to create a sunscreen". The logo on the plane says: "Particle Air". "I kid you not," SmT insists. "Why did I spend all of that time doing research when I could have just asked my kids?" Helping habituate children to a life under lethal sunshine and "protective" spray planes, this trippy textbook urges young readers to "Use Sun Block". But its authors are referring to a sunscreen spread across the sky. "Could we deliberately add particles to the atmosphere?" asks the text, before helpfully suggesting that "Burning coal adds soot to the air."
You might be old enough to recoil at such a notion. But in a country where down is up and wrong is right, your kids could be learning that what used to be bad and a bummer is a now good thing!RUNNING ON EMPTY"Be real interesting to see the politics of the folks putting this out." SmT suggests. In the current White House, those politics are as "crude" as invading oil-rich Iraq over a bogus nuclear threat - while permitting Pakistan to export atom bomb materials to terrorist organizations in return for the chance at an election-boosting capture of Osama bin Laden by US forces in the Hindu Kush later this month. [New Yorker Mar1/04] Why shouldn't the same petrol politics produce textbooks for children inheriting a nightmare? Led by a piggish petroleum president, with most major nations cutting back, US oil consumption is rising as steeply as supplies of cheap crude are collapsing.The coal connection is this: In order to briefly "stretch the glide" of the fast-looming end of cheap oil that will utterly transform life as we know it, America's unelected oil president recently revoked pollution regulations on more than 2,000 of the nation's biggest polluting coal-fired power plants. Ironically, this move - like so many others made by an oil-addled White House - will only hasten an Earthwreck as shattering to all onboard as a lurching square-rigger striking a rocky reef. Except our spaceship is surrounded by the cold, irradiated vacuum of deep space. It turns out that a single 150-megawatt coal-burning power plant produces more emissions than 300,000 cars. Termed an "Extreme Human health Hazard" by the EPA, microscopic coal particles also rot lungs, stop hearts, kill lakes, choke cities - and stunt the lives of school kids with deadly sulphuric acid rain. [AP Aug27/03; LA Times Aug28/03] Airborne soot also blocks sunlight, lowering greenhouse temperatures. Volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa and Pinatubo - and globe-circling soot from 1,000 burning oil wells during Desert Storm - belched enough sulphur into the stratosphere to cause a plunge in world temperatures, temporarily slowing global warming. World scientists looking at deliberately putting megatons more sulphur into a closed, recirculating atmosphere already smoggy enough to depresses orbiting astronauts, decided that a sulphur sunscreen is not a swift idea. But not this Jr. High science text. "Creating either kind of sunscreen would be cheap," it tells young readers. As if "cheap" is the only consideration. Even this claim is bogus. SmT says he looked, but the section on the downstream costs associated with the health and environmental effects of massive coal pollution - or the 10 million tons of a chemical sunscreen suggested by the late Edward Teller - "seemed to have been left out." Ditto "the cost to the solar industry". Or cumulative impacts on kids, critters and plants on which our future depends. DIMMING PROSPECTSSunlight is already on the way out. Repeatedly expressing shock at how quickly our space colony's life-support systems are failing, scientists are finding levels of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface decreasing by almost 3% a decade. "Global Dimming" is too small to detect with the eye. "But it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis," reports the Guardian. All those jet-propelled vacations and car trips to the corner store add up. Since 1960, 10% less sunlight has reached Earth's inhabitants. Levels of solar radiation reaching parts of the former coal-belching Soviet Union are down almost 20%. In any greenhouse, the rule of a green thumb is that every 1% decrease in solar radiation results in a 1% drop in plant productivity. "It's actually quite a big deal,” says Graham Farquhar, a climate scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. But get this: Farquhar doesn't think that identified pollutants, "by themselves would be able to produce this amount of global dimming." [Guardian Dec18/03] The baffled Aussie should check out the role of contrails in turning off sunlight. Since the Jet Age took off in the 1960s, normal condensation trails from five million jet flights every year have been found to block 10% of sunlight across Europe and the USA. Over heavily trafficked Atlantic and American air-routes, artificial cloud cover caused by jet engine pollutants has increased 20%. [Chemtrails Confirmed '04] Chemtrails are another major sunblock. Measurements taken with a calibrated photometer by Clifford Carnicom in Santa Fe show a rapid reduction in sunlight - from a value of 97% on a “clear day” to around 80% during the early stages of heavy chemtrailing. Using a simple UV radiation meter, this reporter has confirmed similar drops in sunlight beneath artificial "chemcasts" on Canada's west coast. WHAT JANE AND DICK DIDN'T LEARN IN SCHOOL TODAYIn a country whose self-appointed regime routinely censors scientific studies, at least some 7th grade science are more focused on indoctrinating kids with risky techno "quick-fixes" than conscious conservation and common sense. Forget science. SmT gazed in disbelief at another schoolbook picture showing a helicopter seeding the ocean with iron particles. These desperate "IronX" experiments did indeed trigger plankton "blooms" that, in turn, transferred tons of atmospheric C02 underwater as those carbon-inhaling critters eventually died and sank to the seafloor. But – oops! – his kid's science book fails to mention that the resulting ocean blooms also sucked all available oxygen from the seawater, suffocating all marine life in massive, spreading "dead zones". [Chemtrails Confirmed '04] Where are the picture, SmT wonders, "of people planting trees, or turning down thermostats, or bicycling, or any of the other ways not to add to the problem?" Though his family gave up the idea of home schooling, he says, "it's perhaps time to reconsider."
Perhaps it's also time to reconsider state-sponsored brainwashing. And other escalating consequences of our carbon addiction, as well.From: www.willthomas.net/Chemtrails/Articles/Chemtrails_In_US_Schools.htmLINKS TO TO THIS STORYCentrepoint Science 1 textbookwww.cplearning.com/SEIe.htmlChemtrails News NBC - Los Angeleswww.nbc4.tv/video/9265818/detail.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Jun 1, 2007 8:32:24 GMT 4
Cowering In The Suburbs of Berlin Part 1 of 2
God, I'm depressed; the small handful of congressional servants who actually listen to the people are up against a herculean opposition. And Cindy Sheehan quit, said she can't fight the Democrats too. David Michael Green sent the following intro to his latest essay....Michelle:
5/31/07 Greetings, Good People - I hope this message finds you well, happy and productive! Well, my friends, it turns out that there are regressives, and then there are regressives. There are those who do the worst of things to their fellow humans, and those who allow it to happen, knowing better. Last week, Democrats in Congress managed to jam themselves into an already way overcrowded American Hall of Shame by completely caving in to George Bush's unyielding war insanity. Worst of all, they did so whilst holding all the political cards. I couldn't even find a historical analogy for this act of criminal disgrace. Indeed, to do the Democrats justice, I had to make one up:
Cowering In The Suburbs of Berlin David Michael Green
Somebody needs to write the sequel to John Kennedy’s “Profiles In Courage”. Let’s call it “Profiles In Cowardice”. I know a really, really good case study for Chapter One.
Kennedy’s original book told the stories of senators who stood up to great political and social pressure, taking the courageous stands their hearts required. I always thought the point was perhaps a bit too well taken, given that we are talking here about legislators casting votes and thereby generally only risking their present careers – not soldiers at the front, or Gentiles hiding Jews from the Nazis. But it does take some real fortitude sometimes to be the lonely voice of sanity when everyone around you has completely flipped. Perhaps that is why we hardly see it happen anymore, ever since the sad day Paul Wellstone’s plane went down (high marks to Russ Feingold and Robert Byrd, though.)
It’s one thing not to be terribly courageous, and quite another to indulge in the worst imaginable cowardice, with the worst possible repercussions for other people’s lives. There’s a lot of room in between for your garden-variety member of Congress to attend fund-raisers, provide “access” to corporate lobbyists, and march in hometown Fourth of July parades, all without doing too horribly much damage to the country they’re meant to be serving.
This week, however, the leadership of the Democratic Party wrote Chapter One of “Profiles In Cowardice”. Of course, that wasn’t entirely a surprise. Most Democrats bought into this war, along with the rest of Bushism, from the very beginning. It turns out that this gang of mealy-mouthed nothing-burgers really is the party of effete Quislings that Republicans make them out to be. At a time of moral, constitutional, international, governmental, political and environmental crisis, the Democrats have taken a firm stand on the issue of trying not to offend anybody in America. And, of course, getting themselves reelected.
At least you can’t say that they have no principles. And at least you can’t say that they’re inconsistent. They never fail to fail. And they never disappoint while disappointing.
But what marks out the most recent act of shame is the sheer egregiousness of it. In 2002, Karl Rove arranged a congressional vote on the Iraq war resolution right before midterm elections. That alone was the height of political cynicism on his part, showing that nothing was beyond politicizing by the Bush administration. It was only one year after 9/11 (which history may yet show to itself have been the greatest act of political cynicism ever, or ever imaginable), Bush was riding high, people were scared, war seemed to many like an appropriate policy, and an Iraq marketing campaign of which Madison Avenue must have been in awe was in full swing. There was no excuse, even under such circumstances, for Democrats like Clinton, Edwards and the rest to vote for the war. Yet, you could at least understand why they did. You could partially excuse them if you were so inclined (I wasn’t), precisely because of the outrageousness of the situation they were placed in by regressive forces inside and out of the White House. Heck, you could even argue that they were fulfilling their role as faithful representatives of their constituents’ will, even as they were abdicating their responsibilities as leaders of those same citizens.
But this... This there is no excuse for. Not now, not ever. This is precisely the inverse of the situation in 2002, which makes it mind-boggling to contemplate just what would be required for Harry Reid to close the sale here. Just what is necessary for the Democratic leadership to acquire the political courage for doing what was the morally correct thing from the very beginning?
Do they need to wait until opposing the continuation of the war represents a popular opinion in America? Evidently not, since whopping majorities now believe that the war was based on lies, that it is making America less secure – not more – and that it is time to end it.
Do they need a mandate from the public? If the election of 2006 wasn’t that, then what was it? If the public didn’t send Democrats to Congress to supervise and clean-up after the GOP, then why did they? It certainly wasn’t because of the great mass appeal of the Democratic legislative agenda, assuming anyone could have figured out what it was.
Do they need a majority in Congress? You’d never know from watching them in action that they actually had one! Could you imagine New Gingrich or Tom DeLay laying down like this?
Do they need a position that is reasonable and patriotic? Only because of the complete and utter incompetence of the Democrats at articulating their policies (assuming they have any) and a sheer lack of moral courage has it come to pass in contemporary American discourse that voting more funds for Iraq is somehow equated with ‘supporting the troops’. If someone bought a first-class bus ticket to ship their child off in style for a visit with a pedophile, would we call that responsible parenting? Why can’t Democrats simply say, over and over again, that they are supporting our troops by removing them from the disastrous abattoir to which this heartless president consigned them for purposes of satisfying his own psychological inadequacies and his own pursuit of power? How is it that voting appropriations for the sole purpose of withdrawing the troops could be portrayed as not supporting them?
Do Democrats need to be in the driver’s seat in a legislative standoff? They were never more so. Imagine a game of chicken where one driver who doesn’t care whether he wins or loses, whether he wins or dies. Who do you think is going to bail out first? In situations like we saw last week, there is a huge disadvantage accruing to anyone going into the contest needing something more than his adversary. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer remarked that “Neither side can do something without the other. Democrats cannot adopt a policy without the president vetoing it … and the president cannot ignore the Congress as he did in the first six years” of his presidency. Hoyer (or is it Whoyer?) is right about that, but he has forgotten the more important part of the political calculus, the part concerning the stakes involved. It’s as though he were analyzing a poker game without considering the pot, and whose money was in it.
Bush desperately needed this bill. No more money, no more war. Congress did not. That means that the Democrats should have simply kept sending him the money, with their conditions attached, and let him continue to veto it. It was a perfectly viable strategy, and for once the conditions were all in their favor. Bush could not have kept vetoing war funding legislation with a popular provision attached to end the deployment while plausibly arguing that Democrats were not supporting the troops. This would have been particularly true if the Democrats had stood up every once in a while and explained themselves to an American public already sympathetic to their position. They could have turned the White House public relations strategy right on its head, and they even had the help of reality to assist them in doing so. All they had to do was say “We keep sending him the money, and he keeps rejecting it. We call on him now to sign this crucial legislation necessary to fund our troops in the field”. They could also have further painted him as petulant, arrogant, intransigent and childish (who, George W. Bush? – imagine that!) for being willing to sign only his particular version of the funding bill. How hard a sell would that be?
But maybe what the Democrats needed, finally, was an adversary who folds when pressed. Was that the problem? The truth is that is exactly what Bush is, as the Wolfowitz affair demonstrated again, and as has been shown often enough before, perhaps most notably in the UN Security Council when he yanked his DOA Iraq invasion resolution just days after the bluff in which he promised there would be a vote no matter what. This guy is the ultimate coward acting the part of the playground bully. Stand up to him and he collapses. How many of Bush’s eight years have to go by before Democrats learn to stop flinching? Granted, Iraq is different, and at first appearances would seem to be the one thing the Bush camp would never negotiate. But, let’s face it, the truth is that Bush is just waiting for another president to hand the war off to so that he can delude himself into believing that he didn’t lose it. If that’s the mentality, he might even secretly welcome a congressional funding cut-off to get it over with earlier rather than later, and still have someone else to blame.
So it’s beyond astonishing, really, if you think about it. Democrats had a morally correct and absolutely defensible position, even in terms of the whole supporting-the-troops mantra. They had popular support and a public mandate to act. They had majorities given to them for that precise purpose. And they had an adversary who needed the legislation far more than they did, and who has a history of bullying when allowed, but folding when pressed.
I’m wondering if I could have written a better prescription for success, given a blank piece of paper. Does Nancy Pelosi have to become president following a double impeachment for Democrats to end this war? And is there any reason to believe that a President Pelosi would actually do that? In one of the most amazing acts of political duplicity this side of Karl Rove, Pelosi claimed “I'm not likely to vote for something that doesn't have a timetable or a goal”, which, of course this bill did not. I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but Hey Nancy, aren’t you the Speaker of the House? Do you really expect us to believe that you didn’t actually engineer this bill wearing your Speaker hat, just because you later cast a single vote against it wearing your just-one-of-435-members-of-the-House hat?
The mind fairly reels looking for historical analogies in which defeat has been so flagrantly rescued from the jaws of victory. Indeed, you pretty much have to make one up. Keith Olbermann sees this as a Munich moment, with the Democrats playing the role of the ill-fated Neville Chamberlain. Much as I applaud his work as nearly the only voice of sanity on television, I think Olbermann is unintentionally too generous this time out. He has the right analogue, but the wrong analogy. For Chamberlain, however foolish he was later proven to be, at least thought he was getting something very big – nothing less than “peace for our time” – in exchange for those slices of Czechoslovakia he gave to Hitler (even if, of course, they weren’t his to give away). And so did a lot of other people. At the time, Chamberlain was a hero.
But the Democrats don’t even rise up to Chamberlain’s ultimate historical fate, that of being a naive appeaser who profoundly and tragically misunderstood his adversary. For they understand George Bush all too well. And what did they bring home in exchange for continuing to fund a war whose nature they equally well understand? The answer is nothing, save for their own humiliation. This was a total capitulation. It is as if Chamberlain had gone to Munich and given away not just the Sudetenland, but all of Europe.
But even that analogy doesn’t do justice to the magnitude of the crime, for the hand Chamberlain was playing was not a particularly strong one. To really understand what Harry and Nancy have wrought, one must look to the end of World War II, not its origins. Imagine it is May of 1945, and the greatest disaster in human history is coming to a close. Nearly fifty million people have been consumed by the unsurpassed brutality of World War II, and whole continents lie smoking in ruin. The Allies, having fought brutal battles for every inch of progress, have succeeded in marching the German army back from Stalingrad and Moscow and El Alamein and Sicily and Normandy, all the way to the gates of Berlin. One more push and it’s all over. But then, somehow, through some monstrous act of cowardice, through some monumental failure of judgement, what if they just decided to call it quits, and let Hitler and his regime go on? What if their two massive armies of the East and the West, facing only children and broken old men as remnants of the once vaunted Wermacht, decided not to finish the job but instead parked in the suburbs of Berlin, waiting to see what would happen next?
The Democrats could not possibly be more deluded about what they’ve done, and that is the most charitable definition. Far more likely is that they’ve simply learned well at the School of Rove, and believe they can fool the public too, just like the Big Liars. Harry Reid dropped jaws all across America when he exclaimed, “I don't think there's any way you can stretch what we've done in this supplemental as a defeat. Look how far we've come. … Nobody can say with any veracity that we haven't made progress. Even with the Warner language, the president is conceding to 18 benchmarks and two reporting requirements.”
Wow! Eighteen benchmarks, huh? Really? Say, Harry, that is impressive. But – Shhhh! – make sure you don’t tell ‘em the rest of the story. Don’t mention that you stripped all troop withdrawal timetables from the bill, which, of course, was always the central point of contention. Don’t tell people that you removed any language that required the proper training and resting of troops before they’re deployed. In the name of supporting them, of course. Don’t mention that the benchmarks (whoa!) and the reporting requirements (dang!) apply to the $6 billion going to the Iraqi ‘government’, not to the $100 billion you’re sending to Caligula as fuel to feed his Mesopotamian holocaust. And, of course, whatever you do, never tell the public anything about that “Warner language” you mentioned, which makes even these already pathetically anemic and irrelevant benchmarks subject to the Emperor’s waiver, anyhow, any time, at his whim.
No, Dude. Like you said, nobody can stretch what you’ve done here as a defeat. That’s because it massively and transparently is one, already. Who needs to stretch? Here’s what happened: You sat down to play poker with the president, all cards face up. You had a straight flush, he had nothing, seven high. He anted up a nickel. You folded. He won. You’re cowering in the suburbs of Berlin, losing a political war that has already been won (no thanks to you), over a real war that was long ago lost.
Continued....
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Jun 1, 2007 8:36:46 GMT 4
....continued:Cowering In The Suburbs of BerlinPart 2 of 2This puts Americans in a real quandary. Somebody once said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Interestingly, it wasn’t Karl Marx or even Jane Fonda. It was Jack Kennedy. I think he meant it as a warning for the reactionary right of his time, who could only envision more and more militarism as the sum total of US policy in Latin America. Today, it reads to me like an entirely apt warning for us here at home. And why shouldn’t it, discouraging as the comparison may be, given that this president has been busy turning America into a banana republic? What choices remain for Americans today? They have an administration which they despise, enacting policies they loathe. So they did what the good citizens of a democracy are supposed to do, they went out in large numbers and voted in a new government. We should make no mistake about what the landslide election of 2006 meant. Democrats had no agenda to put forth and were not chosen for the purpose of advancing any such non-agenda. They had one qualification going into last November’s contest, and it was the one which got them elected: They were the non-Republicans, the non-regressives. Their singular mandate was to curb the excesses of the insane kleptocracy which, by all manner of nefarious techniques, had seized control of the American democracy and was taking every step imaginable to destroy it. So what did the Democrats do? They immediately put impeachment off the table. We should understand clearly what that meant. By doing this, the Democratic leadership was saying that no matter what crimes might be uncovered, their sense of political expediency in serving their own personal interests would come before those of the country they were paid to be serving instead. Next, they have demonstrated the depth of their impotence by refusing to impeach Alberto Gonzales, despite the fact that his transgressions – which now manifestly also include perjury and obstruction of justice – are as obvious as they are deep, and despite that these crimes involve the Justice Department, a part of the federal government that is supposed to be most insulated from Rove style politics. Instead of impeachment we’re to be treated to a Senate vote of no confidence. Golly, that’s bold. Knowing that nice man in the White House as I do, I’m sure that will compel him to do the right thing about this darned vexing situation! What’s most astonishing about the whole affair is that Democrats still haven’t awakened to the fact that the core thrust of the entire scandal was yet another scheme to steal elections from them. Why don’t they just get it over with and form the Caspar Milquetoast Society for the Slow Suicide of Superfluous Political Parties? Just as in the case of the elections of 2000 and 2004, these guys don’t even put up a fight when it comes to the one issue you’d think even such self-serving sycophants might actually care about, namely, keeping their jobs. It’s absurd and it’s tragic that the Democrats will not touch Bush, Cheney or Gonzales, but this week’s caving on funding for the Iraq war is in a league by itself. When they took over Congress, these guys had just one thing they needed to get right. They didn’t. They had a moral responsibility to end a war which they’ve long known, and which Harry Reid has even publicly admitted, is lost. They wouldn’t. They had virtually all the right political conditions in their favor, from a public mandate to a despised president for a political opponent. Still, they couldn’t. Democrats now own this war as never before. They were already massively complicit. Many of them voted for it when any fool with the slightest bit of reasoning power could see that it made no sense and that the Bush junta was lying with every word they spoke. They were silent again when the O’Neill and Clarke memoirs, along with the Downing Street Memos, turned those obvious lies into proven facts. And now, when they had every opportunity to do what they know to be right and even what the public wants them to do, they have secured affirmatively their spot in what Dante aptly described as “The hottest places in hell ... reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality”. A thousand Americans have been murdered by their own government over the last year in Iraq. God only knows how many tens of thousands of faceless, nameless (to us) Iraqis are on that list. The funding bill which the Democratic Congress just passed will purchase thousands more needless deaths. How in the world do these people sleep at night? How do they manage to confront the monsters who stare back at them in the mirror each morning? Thinking and feeling Americans are at an impasse. They know unequivocally that the Bush administration is an utter disaster, a complete wreck of the ship of state. Yet for once in a very long time, it seemed that there was indeed more than a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties in American politics. While the Democrats may not have stood for anything, perhaps they could finally be trusted to stand against the worst crimes of the regressive right. Alas, that hope now seems as ephemeral as the Democrats are effete. And so, locked in the conundrum that JFK so succinctly described, only the prospects of third parties or street actions seem to remain as viable options for stopping the madness. But neither of these seem terribly promising. The truth is that both depend, ultimately, on a body politic which is fed-up. This one is not, or at least not yet. There are massive reasons to feel despondent today, and I do. But there are also reasons to have hope – which I also do – and it is crucial not to lose sight of those. It seems to me that three grand historical lessons have emerged from the Iraq war, two of them hopeful in nature. The one that is not is that presidents and prime ministers – no less than kings before them – can still engage in the sport of war, especially if they play the game wisely. Learning from the Vietnam experience, the American government employed fear, media cooptation and control, tax cuts, a ‘volunteer’ military and nearly an equal number of private mercenaries in order to almost completely insulate all but a fraction of the American people from the effects of the war. It worked. As one casualty of his government’s indifference – Robert Acosta, who sacrificed his legs and right hand in Iraq, and had to resort to duct tape to hold his prosthesis together when the VA couldn’t get the job done – put it: “People would just come up to me and say, ‘How'd you lose your arm?’ And I'd say, ‘In the war.’ And they would be like, ‘What war?’” So the first lesson is that, if you’re smart and cynical (the very description of Karl Rove, no less than Joseph Goebbels), you can still get away with a lot, at least in the short term. And imagine if the Iraq adventure had been the cakewalk that the administration believed it would be. Bush would still be a big hero, and Social Security would be a Wall Street piñata. But perhaps the second lesson is that the short term is one thing, and the long term is another. If you’re gonna do another Iraq, you better do it fast, because support won’t last under trying conditions, no matter how scared and insulated you’ve rendered the public. This is encouraging to see. This is social learning in progress. If we look at how long it took the American public to wise up to Vietnam and compare it to their relatively quicker apprehension of Iraq, even in the wake of 9/11 trauma, there is some reason for hope. Likewise there is reason for hope in our third lesson, which appears to be shaping up as something close to a law of modern history, suggesting that imperial-style invasions of the past just don’t work anymore. It can be seriously discouraging to consider the military, economic and political power that a country like the United States can bring to bear on smaller states like Iran, Iraq, Chile or Cuba. But somehow you know there’s some justice in the universe when you realize that invasions of those countries rarely succeed. Even the greatest military machines ever to bestride the planet can be humbled by stone age societies of pajama-clad guerilla fighters, and in fact they almost always are. Vietnam, Algeria, Vietnam again, Afghanistan, Iraq – rare indeed are the occasions on which the heavily outgunned anti-colonialists fail to defeat invaders on foreign turf. So there is still reason to be hopeful, even if the sheer bankruptcy of American politics has descended to new lows of yet deeper disappointment. The public will grow weary. The next president will end the war, or Congress, always two steps behind the people, will finally assert its prerogatives, just as it did – also far, far too late – over Vietnam. Bush will be gone and so will his war. But last week marked a truly sad moment for America and the noble experiment in democracy begun two centuries ago. As the parades go by and the lawn chairs are refolded this Memorial Day, I cannot help but notice that default legitimacy in any discussion of national security policy still belongs to the government, and – worse yet – still belongs to the most militarist among us. I long for the day when peace is the default position, tenaciously embraced by the American public. On that day, the lowest amongst us – the most frightened, cowardly and basest, the indulgers in the cheapest and most degrading political discourse – on that day these Bushes and Cheneys and Roves will have to move heaven and earth to detach us from our default common sense peacefulness. On that day, they will have to provide a mountain of evidence, and survive a withering interrogation by a real opposition party, an aggressive investigatory media, and a politically astute and engaged public before their war plans become policy. And on that day, they and their families will have to be the first in line to make sacrifices for any wars to which they beckon us. We are not there yet, and last week’s vote by the Democrats reminds us of just how far away we remain. But societies are subject to the learning process, just like individuals. (Of course, whether they actually learn or not is another question.) We won’t be there next Memorial Day, either, but I suspect we’ll be a fair bit closer. The direction of movement is positive, and one day our ‘leaders’ will follow the public far enough to approximate this default pacifism in our discourse and policymaking, much as the Europeans have now essentially done after singeing themselves one too many times on the white hot flames of war after fratricidal war. There are few good things to take away from the disaster of the last six years, and perhaps little that could ever be justified by the enormous attendant costs. But I do believe that Americans have looked into the eye of the regressive movement and that most have come away horrified, now seeing it for what it is – a collection of the very worst amongst us.Source:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Cowering_In_The_Suburbs_of_Berlin.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Jul 13, 2007 15:08:39 GMT 4
In The Last Throes, Judiciously Part 1 of 2
I so appreciate David Michael Green! His most thorough synopsis of what's going down in American politics should make you readers quite jubilant! After all these years of fighting against our corrupt government, how refreshing it is to watch all that is happening......Michelle
In The Last Throes, Judiciously
David Labowitz, an insurance salesman here [Narberth, Pennsylvania], said he voted for Mr. Bush in 2004 and was eager for the next election to come along so he could rectify what he called his mistake. “I am a registered Republican,” Mr. Labowitz said, “but I am so embarrassed to be a registered Republican.” (New York Times, July 9, 2007)
Imagine a burning building, with the people inside scrambling to find the exits.
Now imagine that building located on the deck of a large ship, isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, riddled with gaping holes and sinking fast.
Keep that image in your mind, and add to it the tsunami that is fast approaching the ship’s location.
It will get there soon, but not before the Enola Gay, which is buzzing overhead with a special delivery item in its payload.
Got that picture in your mind? Welcome to the Republican Party, July 2007.
Or, the “Grand Old Party”, as our regressive friends like to call it. Old? Sure – as old as greed itself. Party? Well, there ain’t a lot of celebrating going on in its vicinity, but if you mean a congregation of ever-narrowing numbers of people aggregated around certain political ideas, however ridiculous they may be, well then, sure, this is a party. But grand? Only in the scale of its current mess.
If you’ve got any political antennae at all, any sensitivity to the moods and trends of American politics, you can’t help but conclude that it is all collapsing fast, and with it as well many of the multiple enablers who have assisted in bringing us this ugliest of disasters these last years. It’s all coming apart now, bursting its tawdry seams, and doing so not only with a tremendous rapidity, but with even a tremendous increase in the rate of rapidity.
What a week it has been.
The most obvious signs of implosion, of course, are the Republicans in Congress who, one after another, are now ditching the president with sunrise-like regularity. It seemed like there was hardly a day this week when one or two more didn’t abandon the sinking ship of Bush’s Iraq catastrophe. Or should we say that you are “cutting and running”, my dear GOP friends? Should we now question your patriotism? Should we note that many of you are up for reelection next year and, having seen what happened last go-round, are now “playing politics with national security”?
If we were Karl Rove, George Bush or Dick Cheney, we would say those things, of course. If we were garden variety regressive fellow-travelers – much like, well ... you, actually – we would. If we were your attack dogs, like O’Reilly and Limbaugh, we most certainly would. But we needn’t do any of those things, because you folks have spoken for yourselves. You backed an insanely incompetent buffoon for president, little distinguishable from Caligula other than by the suit and tie where the toga once resided. You supported his administration’s every move even when you saw that it catered to the worst possible instincts of our country, and that it represented the very antithesis of American constitutional government. You stood by or piled on as its agents berated, vilified and destroyed any and every true patriot who showed the greatest courage by expressing the slightest objection to these toxic policies.
Now that you are seeking rescue from the burning building on the aforementioned sinking ship awaiting the fire of the gods to be quenched only by the great exhalation of Poseidon himself, you should count yourself lucky – Mr. Voinovich, Mr. Lugar, Mr. Domenici, Mr. Alexander, Ms. Snowe – if your too-little-too-late-mealy-mouthed-half-baked attempts to undo the tragedy you helped create in Iraq results only in the loss of your seats in Congress. How will you face the mothers of those who have lost so much more – who have lost everything – for your astonishing lapse in judgement, at best, and your raw political opportunism at (probable) worst, my proud Republican friends?
One by one, two by two, they bailed this week, so that sometimes it seemed that the only Republican senator who didn’t jump ship was that good old patriot, John McCain. I guess McCain must be a religious true believer, because after Bush and Rove sicced the sickest dogs on him in 2000, he’s done nothing since but love his former enemy. Indeed, so great is McCain’s Christian embrace of George Bush that he seems to have even adopted the latter’s delusional personality out of sympathy. The only week McCain’s presidential campaign has ever had that was worse than this week was last week. The guy has a whopping two whole million dollars left in the bank, hasn’t bought a single ad with the tens of millions already wasted on a caviar campaign, is slipping in the Republican polls behind a pro-choice guy with a lisp and another guy from Massachusetts, can no longer raise contributions for the campaign, and therefore had to lay off more than half his national staff. Then, on top of all that, this week he loses his two top operatives through what appears to have been a civil war going on inside the campaign. We can’t quite tell who quit whom, but either way, McCain’s bid for the White House nowadays looks rather more like an episode of ER than a presidential campaign.
Asked if he fired these guys, Big John said: “No, no, no, no. I’d describe the campaign as going well. I’m very happy with it. People are free to make their own assessments. I think we’re doing fine.” That’s scary. Of course, it also fully explains how McCain can be just about the only person this side of Dick Cheney who thinks things are going just fine in Baghdad. And isn’t that just what we need right now, another four or eight years of a ‘round-the-clock hallucinating chief executive? No matter. Like Don Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and the former Republican majority in Congress before him, McCain is being amply rewarded for his loyalty to The Wrecking Machine Formerly Known As George Bush, and for sharing the president’s megalomania. Twice McCain has been the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee for president, only to watch the little terror from Texas destroy his great life ambition, now for a second time as well.
[Last minute update as we go to press: It has been reported that McCain had a huge fight with Senator Voinovich on the Senate floor (the biggest row people have seen there in decades), that he illegally called campaign contributors from the Senate cloakroom (the very thing that he lambasted Al Gore for doing in 2000), that his two top people in Iowa have joined the exodus from his campaign, and that his campaign co-chair in Florida just got busted for offering to perform oral sex on an undercover cop for twenty bucks. You think I’m making this stuff up, don’t you? But I’m not. That’s the beauty of the regressive right – with these guys you don’t have to! That was today’s news, only. I wonder what tomorrow will bring. Oh, did I mention that McCain turns 71 next month?]
Looking across to the other side of the aisle, one could certainly be equally amazed at the ‘leaders’ of the majority party in Congress, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. If anyone could possibly be more ineffective at the job of opposing a reckless, dangerous and now publicly despised president, it is hard to figure how. Perhaps if they were to send Dick Cheney a dozen roses and asked him please to end the war he might feel more pressure than he has since January, when the Democrats gained control of Congress. It’s hard to know which would be more intense.
The most astonishing thing to know about Harry Reid is that he was reputedly once a boxer. Does that mean someone threw a punch at him on the schoolyard grounds in seventh grade and broke his horn-rim glasses? Is that what they mean when they say this guy was a boxer? I only ask because I desperately want the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate to be a fighter. But, today, everything about what Harry Reid says, does and even looks like to me telegraphs punching bag, not fighter. Or wet noodle. Under a doormat. You know – the one leading into the servants’ quarters.
I am therefore at least slightly pleased to see that Reid is apparently nearing the end of his rope on Iraq. Gee, could that be because Congress now has job approval ratings even lower than George Bush, and without having done anything to anger anybody except those who expected it to actually do something, especially on Iraq? Having utterly and unnecessarily capitulated a month ago on the supplemental appropriations bill for the war, Reid is supposedly now already gearing up for action rather than waiting for September as the White House wants. Whatever else the majority leader is, it would seem doubtful that he is so stupid that he’d aggravate his base to the point of frenzy by raising this issue again only to cave once more, so maybe we’ll actually see some action this time... But then, that’s what I expected last month, too.
If he wants to know how much is at stake, he can just ask his pal Nancy Pelosi next door. The most astonishing thing to know about her is that she represents one of the most liberal districts in America. So she becomes Speaker following an election, the clear message of which was ‘end this nightmare’, and the first thing she does is take impeachment off the table! What is it with these people? Do they go native in Washington and just lose all sense, including any sense of themselves and their own backgrounds? If Congress met on the moon, would they start acting like rocks?
Life just got a lot uglier for Nancy, and deservedly so, in what is undoubtedly the political highlight of the week, if not the decade. In the most clever and thrilling application of progressive politics we’ve seen since Larry Flynt brilliantly offered a million bucks to any mistress who would out her Republican hypocrite paramour during the Clinton impeachment, Cindy Sheehan has threatened to run against Nancy Pelosi for her San Francisco congressional seat unless Pelosi proceeds on impeachment against Bush within two weeks time.
I wish we progressives could do more of this sort of clever infighting, but here the circumstances are rather unique. Nevertheless, this maneuver by Sheehan is brilliant. Much like the campaign to embarrass China during their Olympics if they don’t put pressure on Sudan over the Darfur issue, it is a case of leverage on leverage. Sheehan is leaning on Pelosi to lean on Bush. If Pelosi isn’t crapping in her panties right now, she’s a bigger fool than would be the test-tube offspring of George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, carried to term by Paris Hilton. Pelosi’s district is perhaps the most progressive in the country. If angry sentiment against Bush and against his Iraq war doesn’t run at least 90-10 there, I’d be shocked. Pelosi’s already an enormous source of disappointment for anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman, and Cindy Sheehan – backed by an army of motivated volunteers and donations literally from across the world – would have an excellent chance of dethroning the New Queen of the House, only two years into her reign.
Sheehan has, with this single bold stroke, completely reshuffled the deck for Pelosi, Congress, Bush, America, Iraq and the world. A coldly dispassionate look at the new lay of the land suggests that Nancy Pelosi now has two options ahead of her. She can either become (the first female) president of the United States following the impeachment of Bush and Cheney (and perhaps even keep the job after the 2008 election), or she will likely lose both her Speakership and her seat in Congress. There probably is no in-between. That doesn’t seem like such a tough choice to me, especially because the only ones who pay in this scenario are Bush and Cheney. But it does require a certain boldness – even if its boldness driven by terror – which is a quality not exactly in abundance among Democrats in Congress these last, well, decades.
Continued.......
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Jul 13, 2007 15:10:55 GMT 4
......Continued from previous post:In The Last Throes, JudiciouslyPart 2 of 2There are two other beautiful aspects to impeachment that should be kept in mind. One is that the public is ready for it – as Dick Cheney might say, “big time”. Half of those polled – an astonishingly high number – believe that Bush should be impeached, and probably most of them don’t even quite know why they feel that way. For Darth Cheney the numbers are 54 percent in favor versus 40 percent against. In short, there is little political risk here for Pelosi to proceed. That is especially true given that ample evidence of the administration’s lies on Iraq is already in the public record, and that Bush has already admitted to both breaking statutory law and violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution with his illegal domestic spying program. He couldn’t be more guilty than he already is if he gave his next press conference in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit. But the juiciest joy of impeachment, besides of course conviction and removal (or better yet, conviction and removal of a disastrous president who also happens to be the leader of a party that wrongly impeached a Democratic president), is that the White House could no longer continue hiding evidence by invoking its bogus executive privilege or national security doctrines. Or, more precisely, they could, but only if they wanted to stand by watching themselves lose the trial in the Senate. Their position would be tantamount to an accused murderer refusing to present exonerating evidence at his trial because of devotion to some relatively obscure constitutional principle (I mean, how many Americans understand the doctrine of executive privilege?). You can do it if you want, but there will be a price to pay. You’ll lose badly. Of course, if the evidence you’re supposedly protecting on principle doesn’t actually exonerate you but in fact proves your guilt, well then that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish, isn’t it? Once the impeachment process begins, I see little hope for Bush and Cheney other than that enough Republicans and perhaps even a few Democrats would prevent the two-thirds vote necessary to convict. But given public sentiment right now, let alone later, and given the evidence (or unanswered accusations) that would be brought out via an effective prosecution combined with the mounting electoral vulnerability of Republicans generally and anyone supporting this White House specifically, even thirty-four votes in defense of the indefensible in the Senate might be hard to muster. Cindy Sheehan has started a pebble rolling down a mountainside. There is every possibility this could turn into a landslide of international proportions. The same failings of Congress must also be applied to the mainstream American media. Much like the preening blowhards on the Hill, the press is enormously culpable in the multiple tragedies of Bushism, for both utterly failed their assigned role in the American constitutional firmament as the watchdog and check against the accretion of executive power. The media’s guilt regarding the specific matter of Iraq is even more egregious, as they not only failed both in asking tough questions about the policy or even questioning the patently bogus claims of the administration before the war, but also frequently served as a mouthpiece for broadcasting precisely those lies. So the New York Times – which has the most to atone for, if only because it violated the most trust of all – began its week with an extended editorial calling for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. Yep, they’re fed up with Mr. Bush’s deceits, it would seem, and they’ve finally figured out that the succession of benchmarks and breakthroughs claimed by the administration are little more than smokescreens intended to delay any real action on Iraq until January 2009, when the agony of Bush/Cheney finally and mercifully comes to a halt (assuming Cheney doesn’t first rewrite that part of the Constitution as well). I couldn’t be more delighted to see a bit of wisdom from our national paper of record (still, however, mixed with naivete about the position and power of George Bush’s America in the world), but gee, would it have been too much to have asked for that back when it mattered? Would it have been too much for you guys to have covered, two years after the war was launched and when the rough extent of its utter foolishness was already clear, the Downing Street Memos, which proved beyond question that the war was based on lies? And while we’re at it, if you folks really want to atone for your sins, why don’t you do something slightly bold now, like call for the impeachment of the president and vice president? I suppose we should be thankful for the little we’ve gained in recent years, even if the emphasis truly is on the little. I have been reminded of this of late in reading coverage of the Bush administration in the media. Here’s a decent example, excerpted from an AP article by Jennifer Loven, entitled: “Bush Rips Democratic Lawmakers’ Failures”: President Bush accused Democratic lawmakers on Saturday of being unable to live up to their duties, citing Congress' inability to pass legislation to fund the federal government. “Democrats are failing in their responsibility to make tough decisions and spend the people's money wisely,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. “This moment is a test.” The White House has said the failure of a broad immigration overhaul was proof that Democratic‑controlled Capitol Hill cannot take on major issues. “We saw this with immigration, and we're seeing it with some other issues where Congress is having an inability to take on major challenges,” said spokesman Tony Fratto. The main reason the immigration measure died, however, was staunch opposition from Bush's own base—conservatives. The president could not turn around members of his own party despite weeks of intense effort. Here we see the White House in its usual Rovian posture, simply inventing reality out of whole cloth, never mind the mind-bending absurdity of it all. If it is advantageous to describe black as white, up as down, Kerry as coward and Bush as courageous, Iraq as necessary to our security and its opponents as America-haters – then just do it. They have very good reason to continue in this Wonderlandian mode. It’s worked brilliantly for years, and hardly anyone – certainly in the press – ever has the courage to inject silly stuff like facts and reality into the discussion. Moreover, if someone is ever foolish enough to do so, there’s always the politics of personal destruction to rely upon. Make an example out of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, and the rest will get the idea. If you want to see how far we’ve come, though, take a good look at the last paragraph in the passage quoted above. It’s what the nice folks in the media biz like to describe as “context”. Not so long ago, had this article run, that paragraph would have been missing – completely AWOL. The administration, and especially this ridiculous imbecile of a president (but wasn’t it just so endearing how he mangled words and didn’t know the name of the president of Pakistan?!) could make any claim, no matter how absurd, no matter how contrary to known fact, and you wouldn’t find such corrective context anywhere in sight, let alone in the same article. It was crucial that the nonsense go unchallenged, and so it did. Of course, to inject such contextual background into a story of this sort is arguably to add a political slant to it, something that a ‘neutral’ American press fancies that it doesn’t do. What they don’t tell you, however, is that failing to add such context in the face of known absurdities (like the notion that the Democrats spiked the president’s immigration bill) is just as much if note more of an act of politicization as is adding it. Worse, it is also an act of cooptation. And, speaking of absurdities, notice also how far we still haven’t come. Someday in the future, perhaps, there will also be some qualifying context behind this jaw-dropper: “Democrats are failing in their responsibility to make tough decisions and spend the people's money wisely”. Imagine how differently – and how much more honestly – the piece would have read if the next paragraph had said: “George Bush inherited America’s biggest budget surplus in history, and turned it into the biggest deficit in history, because of which the national debt is now at $9 trillion, or about $60,000 per taxpayer, and rising, and accumulating additional interest every day. When Republicans took control of government, they went on a spending spree that dwarfed anything Democrats had ever done. Bush never vetoed a single spending bill.” Of course, the media – like Congress – have been way behind the public at virtually every step of this process, and that continues to be the case today, so that even though the public views the administration (albeit still too generously, merely) as dishonest and inept, it will be some time before anyone inside the Washington establishment can hint at such a perception, despite that it is fully rooted in fact. Outward acknowledgment of any (and every, real or fabricated) pejorative quality is, of course, reserved for Democratic presidents only. And then, of course, there is Bush himself to consider. Fully seventy percent of the public are now reported to want the troops out of Iraq by April. My guess is that that number will skyrocket even further now that it has been revealed that the cost of the war is running $12 billion per month. The president is due to report to Congress this week on the progress made in Iraq, but there isn’t any. Literally. Reported one story, “The Iraqi government is unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals or timelines President Bush set for it in January when he announced a major shift in U.S. policy, according to senior administration officials closely involved in the matter”. Is it therefore any surprise with these guys that, as another headline put it, “Administration Shaving Yardstick for Iraq Gains”, and that they are furiously trying to lower expectations in advance of the report? In yet another media report, the categories they invented trying to gussy up the corpse of Iraq were described by one insider as “bizarre”. No doubt. Perhaps they’ll be citing the Iraqi government for increased efficiency in addressing the problem of the global population boom. Could that be a category? Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Robert Gates canceled his trip to Latin America this week and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley bagged his family vacation, both returning to Washington in a hurry. According to ABC, an insider described the White House as being in “panic mode” as members of Congress are trying to ditch Bush and Cheney faster than a nasty case of the clap picked up on some overseas junket. Meanwhile, the usual suspects from the rabid right are desperately trying their level best to keep the poison flowing, of course. The New York Times was attacked by conservative papers for capitulating to some very, very bad people in the Muslim world, while the Washington Times attacked both Democratic and Republican members of what it dubbed the “appeasement caucus”, who are “are poised to send another unmistakable message of weakness to the jihadists”. I had always thought that spending half a decade and half a trillion dollars only to see the entirety of your empire’s land forces get the shit kicked out of them was a pretty good definition of sending an unmistakable message of weakness to your enemy, but what do I know? The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, cautioned frightened Republican members of Congress that “their best prospect for making Iraq less important in 2008 is military progress that allows for a reduction in US forces with honor and a more stable Iraqi government”. Hmmm... “Peace with honor”, “Peace with honor” – where have I heard that gem before? In any case, the old magic doesn’t work anymore, especially when applied to former stalwarts from their own party. While we may have passed the point where anyone in the public cares enough about them that trashing wobbly GOP legislators appears at all unseemly, it nevertheless is certainly missing more than just a bit in the way of credibility. I don’t think many Americans are going to be angry at these Republicans for only supporting an insane and hated war for four-and-a-half years, instead of for “a generation”, as the White House has suggested. We have very far to go, to be sure, but the project of regressive politics and the Bush administration to which it has been intimately tied is crumbling before our eyes. Like David Labowitz, quoted at the top of this piece, voters have lately been clocked departing the GOP at speeds approaching Mach 5, horrified and shamed at their own foolishness for ever associating with such monsters in the first place. And still the worst tales of greed and deceit and murderous violence have yet to emerge from the bog that produced Bush, Cheney, Rove, DeLay and Scalia, of that I am as sure as can be. Imagine how it will look when more – and the worst – of the truth is revealed. It’s worth considering how far we’ve come, and how perilous was the fate of the republic, only a short time ago (and, unquestionably, still to some degree today). The most chilling words ever to emanate from this or any administration were surely also the most honest these guys ever spoke. In the summer of 2002, a “senior advisor” to Bush (my guess has always been that it was Rove) spoke off the record to reporter and author Ron Suskind, and in so doing revealed the true project of the regressive movement, now firmly lodged in the White House. Suskind reported this conversation in the following paragraph from his 2004 article, “Without A Doubt”, and the words have been frightening many a thoughtful reader ever since: The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality‑based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That's not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Fortunately for the entire world, it turned out a bit differently. History’s actors are now history’s acted upon. Perhaps they are stunned to find that they are mere mortals, like the rest of us. And the empire has gone the way of every other empire before it. Only a lot faster. And they did, indeed, create realities through their actions. Those realities are called Iraq, global warming, Katrina, the debt, and more. And we in the reality-based community did indeed study them, and increasingly, we did so rather judiciously.
And we don’t like what our studies have revealed. And we don’t want their empire, especially with them at the head of it. And we don’t want their reality creations.
And so we’re creating a new reality, ourselves, we pathetic peons in the reality-based community. [From Michelle: If you read my Wake Up World thread here, you'll know why I highlighted this part!]And they can study our reality. Judiciously, as they will. And they’ll have plenty of time to do so. In their jail cells. Source:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/In_The_Last_Throes,_Judiciously.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 5, 2007 12:46:03 GMT 4
David Michael Green sent the following introduction to his latest article. Even if you don't consider yourself a Peacenic, isn't it time Americans, one and ALL rise up together, circle the wagons, and confront our true enemy, the war makers?...MGreetings, Good People - I hope this message finds you well, happy and productive! Are you enjoying your social safety net, my friends? Aren't you pleased that the president vetoed healthcare for children this week? It is important that we keep our priorities straight. Especially since we have to feed a military machine with quite an appetite. Did you know that, while we can't afford to keep our kids healthy, our military budget considerably exceeds those of every single other country in the entire world - combined? That's right. While America has no national enemy anywhere in sight now, we are spending more than the sum of nearly 200 other countries on 'defense'. What does all that money really buy? And what does it cost? Find out in: Murdering Butter With Guns
A funny thing happened on the way to the White House in 1981.Ronald Reagan had been talking throughout the previous year’s campaign about taking a meat-axe to federal taxes (and therefore, also, revenue, but that part somehow never got mentioned), about massively increasing military spending, and about balancing the budget. And doing all at once, no less. Even a Republican could figure out – if they allowed themselves to – that the numbers couldn’t possibly add up. Indeed, no less a Goppy than Poppy (one George Herbert Walker Bush) referred to this preposterous suite of promises as “voodoo economics”. Er, he did that is, during the primaries, when he was competing with Reagan for the nomination. Once he had lost and was hungering for the newly nice and oh-so wise Saint Ron to offer him the vice-presidency, he all of a sudden became strangely silent on the topic, reminding the rest of us once again what is mankind’s second-oldest profession – a gig very much not unlike the first. The mystery of how Reagan could possibly do all of these things was finally solved when the administration proposed its first budget and he absolutely didn’t. It couldn’t, of course, and not only did Reagan fail to balance the federal budget as promised, he actually went on to quadruple the national debt, choosing instead to avidly pursue the two more important remaining goals of his troika, tax-slashing and military spending. Many people wondered at the time how the Republican Party could sustain this debt-crazed apostasy (not to mention hypocrisy), particularly after so many years of hammering the Democrats as “tax-and-spend liberals”. (Oh, and by-the-way Item Number One: The numbers involved would pale against those of today’s borrow-spend-and-giveaway Republicans.) (Oh, and by-the-way Item Number Two: Nevertheless, in an attempt to demonstrate that there truly is absolutely no bottom whatsoever to the well of GOP hypocrisy, this week we have Righteous George, Protector of the Purse, vetoing S-CHIP legislation and replaying the party’s tired old and now jaw-droppingly absurd tune as he claims that the Democratic Congress is being profligate with the public’s tax dollars. No-bid billions for the Blackwater black-hole? Absolutely. Money for sick kids? Irresponsible!) When Reagan first went down this path it was so weird that a conspiracy theory of sorts arose. The notion was that Republicans knew they could not possibly go through the front door to successfully kill popular programs like Social Security and Medicare, even if they were willing to risk political suicide to do so. So Reagan’s agenda was a back-door approach, instead. Driving up the debt to completely unsustainable levels, the story went, America would be faced with a series of uncomfortable choices as collectors came demanding their payments. The country could either raise taxes, cut military spending, or slash social programs. The idea was that, of the three, the last of these would seem to the public like the least worst choice. And then conservatives could surreptitiously achieve a long-held goal, best expressed by Grover Norquist, right-wing tax crusader extraordinaire: “I don't want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” By “government”, of course, he means the parts that help people, not the parts that kill people. For the right, those parts are okay. If not beloved. Perhaps this conspiracy was real all along. Boy Bush has made Reagan look like Leona Helmsley’s accounts-payable supervisor by comparison when it came to deficit spending, managing to borrow more than all other American presidents (that’s 42 of them, if you’re keeping score here), combined. Ouch. That’s a lot of cash, dude. Indeed, about nine trillion bucks or so now on the national credit card, and rapidly rising. Plus, of course, interest. Trust me, you don’t want to be handed the bill for this party of the millennium, and neither do your children (“Excuse me, you did what to us?”). But even if the alleged conspiracy was actually real, it seems likely to have been a bad bet all along. That is, I don’t think it’s a given that, presented with these three options, Americans would necessarily acquiesce to the destruction of the country’s social safety net, especially the massive cohort of Baby Boomers who are just now approaching the age where their hands are going to be extended outward, palm up. I think that given such a stark choice, something miraculous might occur. Americans might choose to finally give up their empire instead, just as the British did when they could no longer afford to pay for both guns and butter after the two world wars. This conservative plan, if it was ever real, could backfire quite nicely into forcing the country to think seriously about excessive military spending for the first time since World War II, and then perhaps to, in the words of Colin Powell, “cut it off, and then ... kill it”. To see what I mean, let’s pull Joe Six-Pack – or preferably, the Baby Boomer version of Joe Six-Pack (Joe Dime-Bag?) – off the street and ask him some basic questions about his priorities for American government: Joe, which would you prefer, to receive your Social Security payments, or to bring democracy to the Middle East (even assuming it could be done by American military force, which it quite clearly cannot)? Which would you prefer, Joe, to fully fund Medicare, or to protect the ability of American corporations to pillage third world countries unhampered by inconveniences like, say, the governments of those countries? Which would you prefer, education for your children and grandchildren, or continued tax breaks for Americans who are already fabulously wealthy? Which would you prefer, national infrastructure that isn’t crumbling, or corporate welfare programs for well-connected defense industry firms? These may seem like tongue-in-cheek pokes at America’s national priorities, but they will actually become very real choices in the near future, especially if there is a progressive party or other force in America able to articulate the obvious options, and provided the the word can get out. Given the performance of the Democratic Party and the media of late, these are far from foregone conclusions. (Heck, I’m far from even being convinced that Bush and Cheney will actually leave office on January 20, 2009. Watch for them to pull a Putin.) But apart from those major caveats, these questions will rapidly become all too real. When the bill for the fiscal blow-out comes due, hard choices are going to have to be made. Americans are not big on taxes, but they don’t support the idea of the rich getting a free ride. That hard choice is likely to be an easy choice. Americans will never accept a weak defense apparatus that leaves the country vulnerable to attack. But beyond that, they may well finally be open to some thoughtful discussion about what is needed to achieve that end – and where the rest of the money is going – especially if such a dialogue is prompted by the requirements imposed by an encroaching reality, forcing decisions like the ones posited above. Right now, it’s a safe guess that the public has only the vaguest notion of the costs and capacities of the American military, especially in any relative sense. Most people probably understand that the United States has the most powerful military in the world, and they support that. On the other hand, they might well be horrified to learn just how expensive that military is, how ridiculously disproportionate it is to the others in the world, and how removed those costs are from any real threat facing the country. In times of plenty – or faux plenty – when your government is giving you tax money back even while it is fighting two wars simultaneously, those questions don’t need to be asked (or at least one can be so deluded into thinking). But those days will soon be gone, and – as they say – payback’s a bitch. It’s harder than might be imagined to track federal expenditures, because there are lots of accounting choices (and nifty tricks, if you so desire to trick people) involved. But, near as I can tell, the US is now contemplating a budget of $672 billion this year for ‘defense’. That, by the way, is up from $385 billion in 2000, measured in constant (2007) dollars. And that, of course, is nearly a doubling, from what was already a huge amount. These numbers don’t include the costs of past wars (principally debt from loans), estimated in 2006 to be about $264 billion. If you add that figure to the $572 spent last year for last year’s military, you get $837 billion spent on the military in 2006, or 41 percent of the federal budget. How does that stack up comparatively? Social Security took $595 billion in 2006. Twelve percent of the budget went to poverty initiatives, five percent to community and economic development, and two percent to science, energy and environmental programs. How does that stack up internationally? In 2004, while the rest of the world’s military expenditures equaled $500 billion, the US was spending $534 billion. That is to say, more than all the rest of the entire world. Combined. Americans might even be fine with a military budget that dwarfs the sum total for entire rest of the world – nearly 200 other countries – assuming unlimited resources to provide butter as well as guns (though if they knew the relative figure was quite that big, they might choke a bit on the expenditures even with low taxes and adequate social spending). But when you reach the point where you start having to choose one or the other – a point we actually reached long ago, but have hidden from ourselves by borrowing – everything is different, hence the above alternatives for Joe Six-Pack to ponder. What is sorely missing today, and would be even more so at the moment when our fiscal recklessness is no longer sustainable even under conditions of mass societal hallucination, is simply a rational discussion of the purposes of the United States military. Once that happens, programmatic and budgetary choices then follow in the logical order which they should in any universe where people are even remotely in touch with reality. In fact, the current military budget could easily be slashed, because the only reason for its ridiculously bloated proportions is to pursue missions far beyond those Americans would support even during conditions of plenty, let alone when the alternative becomes giving up their expected benefits. If we think about military priorities from the ground up, without any built-in assumptions, and without the necessity of maintaining existing programs on the basis of inertia alone, I don’t think we’d get very far before the public would shout out “enough”, especially if they were faced with the choice of having their Social Security checks bounce in order to instead fund some obscure military objective on behalf of corporate interests in Burkina Faso. What do Americans want? They want defense, in the true meaning of the word. To begin with, I have little doubt that Americans would be willing to spend whatever it takes to defend American soil from foreign attack. When it comes to state-based violence, that need could be fairly easily addressed by a nuclear deterrent force a tenth of the size of the current one, along with a moderate contingent of land and naval forces. The cost of these represent a small fraction of the current total military budget. No country is ever going to attack the United States in either a traditional operation using conventional forces or by means of non-conventional weapons, of course, because to do so would mean their instant obliteration. Whatever else one can say about nuclear weapons and all the real and potential horrors of mass annihilation, they do give pause to those who would contemplate an attack, in all but the most dire conflicts or screw-ups. (And this works both ways, of course. It is no accident that the US never attacked the Soviet Union or China, for instance, or that Bush did go into Iraq, but not North Korea.) Perhaps some day nuclear weapons can be eliminated from the planet. In the meantime, though, a small quantity of them could form part of a defense structure that permitted the US to dramatically cut military spending while allowing Americans to feel secure from external threat. Americans would also support, I think, the military having the capability to respond to certain emergencies abroad – say, enough force for the early stages of a scenario where an ally was invaded, or US diplomats or nationals needed to be rescued from some sort of foreign incident. This means some special forces – again, a relatively small and inexpensive portion of the current military budget – and the same small to moderate land and naval forces charged with defending the national borders. Clearly, the public would also support whatever force is necessary to effectively attack and destroy non-state actors, such as al Qaeda, who seek to harm the United States through non-conventional assaults. John Kerry of course paid the price for speaking honestly about this in 2004, back when this country was still shaking off the hangover from the Bush Binge of 9/11 and beyond, but he was right in asserting that terrorist threats are best resisted by means of intelligence and law enforcement (and sometimes small scale military action, when useful), which is also a relatively low-cost affair, comparatively speaking. (Throw in a little global justice and economic development, moreover, and you might find you’ve eliminated most such threats before they ever come to exist. What a concept, eh?) Finally, unquestionably, there would be support in the United States for the capacity to rapidly increase US military capability in response to a major unexpected scenario. Americans will want a National Guard, Reserves, and the infrastructure necessary for a Post-Pearl Harbor-like draft and rapid militarization in the event of such an unanticipated attack. But again, maintaining this capacity – as opposed to the actual forces – is not a terribly expensive proposition. And that, I suspect, is it. A moderate base force, a small nuclear deterrent capability, the Guard and Reserves, and the capacity to rapidly add more as needed. In sum, a vastly smaller military than today’s. This is not World War II we’re in today, and it’s not the Cold War. There is no need for a massive military armada to be fielded or even to stand in readiness, as there is no massive implacable enemy to be vigilant against, let alone a massive implacable enemy which we would fight with conventional set-piece armies to be landed at places like Normandy, and to fight territorial struggles like the Battle of the Bulge. What is the difference, then, between this American military that the public would support and the one we’ve got, besides of course hundreds of billions of dollars per year? The short answer is the capacity to ‘protect’ American ‘interests’ abroad. Does the American public care whether Botswana is a democracy or not? Probably a little – not that anyone would have the slightest clue where or what it is – but not enough to invest their tax dollars in it, not enough to forego the government services they want at home, and not enough to spill their children’s blood there. Turns out their government doesn’t care either, though it may well pretend to on occasion. It doesn’t even care whether Botswana – democracy or autocracy – is particularly ‘pro-American’. What the American government cares about, above all, is that Botswana plays ball with those economic actors (who nowadays might not even necessarily be American-based) with a pipeline to power in Washington. Usually that means that a neat little dictatorship is in fact preferable to a democratically elected government, particularly one that makes the mistake of having the real interests of the local people in mind. Folks in Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua and beyond will be happy to verify this proposition, in case you have any doubt. Which brings us back to the absurd levels of military spending the United States has been indulging in latter years, like an insatiable crack addict. I hate to break up the acid test party with a mild dose of reality, but it’s pure lunacy to spend considerably more than all of nearly 200 other countries in the world on your national defense. I mean, isn’t it? Is there really no limit to the depths of America’s national paranoia? Well, as a matter of fact, it gets far stranger yet when you contemplate that none of those countries – not even North Korea, Cuba or Iran – have expressed anything approaching a genuine hostility toward your country which could plausibly lead to an attack on their part. Then it becomes the very definition of insane when you have a nuclear deterrent force that prevents any of those countries from attacking you even if they wanted to. And it makes the insane look downright wholesome when you spend these obscene sums to fight a non-existent enemy, but cannot afford a children’s healthcare program at home. If you needed to write a definition of a society gone mad, surely this would be the textbook case. Let’s face it, probably three-fourths of the Pentagon budget is spent to enrich contractors at home and bust down doors for corporate predators abroad. China spends about $60 or $70 billion a year on protecting the same geographical area as the US and more than four times the number of people. Who is going to mess with that country? Not even the United States, with tens times the military budget, would dare. Surely America could easily procure the same degree of security as the Chinese do for – let’s be generous – say, double their expenditure, if its true interests were purely defensive. Nor would such a formula be a prescription for disarmament or a wimpy defense posture. This is still double the amount of any other country in the world. Certainly many would argue that far less than even that much should be spent. I’m one of them, but right now I’d gladly settle for a 75 percent reduction in military spending. Of course, there are those who would claim that the United States is the ‘indispensable nation’, the one that provides the glue for keeping peace in the international system, and the only one capable of mounting an operation like the Iraq war. Let’s leave aside for the moment the poor performance of keeping peace during the ‘American century’, which often seemed rather more like the American adventure series, and let’s leave aside also the disasters of Afghanistan, Vietnam and Iraq. What a critique such as this actually reveals is three things. First, that other developed countries have been able to buy butter like national healthcare and such, while we have stupidly forsaken it for guns. Second, that the result of our spending the last decades undermining the creation of a legitimate and functional international force to clean up international messes is – surprise, surprise – that no such forces now exist to carry this burden. And third, that we’re too arrogant and narcissistic to pay attention to the wake-up call that non-interest in our wars among potential allies represents. This is where multilateralism comes into play in a crucial and cognitive fashion. If we can’t attract serious allied support for a war, it’s certainly worth asking whether we should be engaged in such a conflict at all. Neocon blowhards love to argue that Europeans have gone soft and are all from Venus, while tough-guy Americans are from Mars. The truth is that Europeans were fighting wars long before America was even in diapers, and they’ve learned more from the experience than have we. They’re not soft. Rather, it’s that they’re not indiscriminate. They went to Afghanistan. They didn’t go to Iraq. Or at least a lot of them didn’t. The others only went because they wanted to keep the hyperpower happy. The next stop was regret, followed by withdrawal of what were mostly token forces anyhow. In any case, for a legitimate threat or a legitimate emergency (the antithesis of Iraq), the Europeans and many others would stand shoulder to shoulder with America, as has happened many times previously, including those wimpy cheese-eating French who were there at America’s birth, and without whom, indeed, the country would likely not have been born at all. But wouldn’t cutting American military spending dramatically make the country weaker? To the contrary, our current approach makes us weaker. We have lost the capacity to exert soft power by over-reliance on hard power. Nobody follows us anymore unless they have to because we have twisted their arm nearly out of its socket, or unless they’re into committing career suicide, like Tony Blair did. And, increasingly, that simply means that nobody follows us anymore at all. The tauntings of Hugo Chávez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have been inconceivable not so long ago. Now they represent leadership to a resentful world where the arrogant and impotent superpower has hobbled itself, and can do nothing to respond. Meanwhile, China and Russia quietly build power and influence, wondering what they ever did to get so lucky as to have a rival apparently quite devoted to destroying itself. In addition to being so diplomatically, we are also weakened economically. Dollars spent on bombs instead of education mean a dummer ‘Muricah, bro. Dollars spent on napalm instead of education mean a sicker America. And ask the Soviets what happens to a national economy when it is dominated by military spending. If you can find the Soviets, that is, which you can’t (hint, hint). National security in the modern era depends on economic power as well as on legions and hardware. In a very real sense, therefore, we are diminishing our capacity to provide sustained military security should we need it tomorrow, by bloating it out of all recognition today. Finally, it is pretty impossible to argue that recent choices have made the America militarily stronger in even the most narrow sense. When all your land forces are bogged down in a worse than useless war, you’ve got a problem should a real crisis come ‘round the corner. When even a sycophant like Colin Powell can say that your Army is “broken”, surely it is and worse. When your own intelligence agencies affirm that your actions in Mesopotamia are actually creating terrorists with a vengeance (and with a vengeance), you screwed up bad, pal. When nobody believes you anymore including your own public, and you have to pay exorbitant sums to get people otherwise headed to jail to join your ‘volunteer’ military, it’s no longer clear which is scarier – your army or theirs. Hey everybody, raise your hand right now if you feel safer today than before Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld got hold of US national security policy. Yeah, that’s what I thought. All this obscenely exorbitant military spending represents one helluva lot of bad news, but the good news is that the entire scenario is unsustainable. One day, not long from now, Americans will have to make tough choices that they are avoiding (and therefore exacerbating) today. But in all probability, such choices may not actually wind up being so tough, after all. We want our MTV, and we want our Social Security. And if we have to sacrifice protecting Chiquita Brands’ exorbitant profits in Guatemala or Colombia to get them, we will. * see note belowSource:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Murdering_Butter_With_Guns.html*[please see our Labor Solidarity thread's posts For more on Chiquita and Dole here:]Re: Labor Solidarity « Reply #18 on Sept 19, 2007, 12:31pm » Chiquita fined 25 million dollars for payment to paramilitaries At:airdance.proboards50.com/index.cgi?board=generalworldaffairs&action=display&thread=1150798771&page=2
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 17, 2007 16:08:29 GMT 4
A Discussion on "Don't Tase Me Bro!"In our current world, the news moves very quickly. In fact, it comes and goes so fast that one barely has time to register the information before it is replaced with new items of doom and gloom, political sabotage, and international intrigue. Here we will discuss some rather old news, by today's standard, which was splashed all over the nightly news. It was also posted at a multitude of various blogs for the sole reason of.....what? I suspect many administrators of these various blogs, who feel they are doing a great service to the world by bringing attention to such items, posted it almost happily, proving that they were right in their dire warnings to anyone who cares to read their posts.
What I am discussing here concerns The Student Tasered at John Kerry's Speech. As I said this video was great news, for a short time....everyone watched it. Well, what if that was the plan....to have as many people as possible view it? You know, when you watch images on the TV or in videos, they never leave your brain....they are put in there to stay, whether you want them in your head or not. On the other hand, when you read the written word, it is you who decide whether you want that information in your head or not....it is not poured into your memory by someone else....when you read, you are the keeper of the gate to your mind.
Folks, we are at a crossroad where you can continued to get suckered into The Powers That Be's con game of implanting their constructed reality into your subconscious, thus replacing your own reality with theirs. Or, you can turn your back on it and them and free your mind. Sort of like in the movie Merlin, staring Sam Neil, where Merlin tells the people to turn away from Mab's enchantment and laugh....Laugh her, or in this case, The Powers That Be, into nothingness!
Free Your Mind! Michelle-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You Versus Tasers & The Matrix Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2007 7:17 pm Post subject: New Audio - You Versus Tasers & The Matrix The "Don't tase Me, Bro" Kerry-Meyer incident was a carefully-staged Psychological Operation based on a similiar campus event almost a year before at UCLA. Someone's been playing mind-games with you again. But the pervasive use of Psyop by the System is just the tip of the iceberg of your personal battle against the Matrix, for self-determination and personal self-expression of your own psychological individuation. It's time to crack out of the egg and win that battle. The Next Level Show - 26th September, 2007 [glow=red,2,300]LISTEN:[/glow] Broadband Mp3 Audio www.BreakForNews.com/audio/NextLevel070926a.mp3 Click to Play or Right-Click to 'Save As' and Download. Dialup Mp3 Audio www.BreakForNews.com/audio/NextLevel070926.mp3 Click to Play or Right-Click to 'Save As' and Download. Quote: SHOW GRAPHICS & LINKS Previous BFN Thread: I can't stop watching this guy get tazered breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3374 Quote: Student Tasered At Kerry Speech Revealing Second Camera Angle 'Suit' Giving Whisper to Cop to Make Brief Interruption See video above at 36 seconds in Another Camera Angle Quote: THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MEYER TASER PSYOP UCLA Taser incident Tabatabainejad in handcuffs, being removed from Powell Library by UCPD officers. On November 14, 2006, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, an Iranian-American UCLA student, was stunned multiple times with a Taser by campus police, for allegedly refusing to be escorted out of the College Library Instructional Computing Commons (CLICC Lab) at Powell Library. This was after refusing to provide his BruinCard (student ID) to a Community Service Officer during a routine check. Part of the incident was recorded on video by a camera phone. Tabatabainejad has said through his lawyers that he refused to identify himself because he believed himself a victim of racial profiling, and that the Tasing was an instance of police brutality. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCLA_Taser_incident UCLA Student Tasered by UCPD Police Andrew Meyer's Website www.theandrewmeyer.com The 'don't Tase me bro!' show's a real hit www.smh.com.au/news/unusual-tales/the-dont-tase-me-bro-shows-a-real-hit/2007/09/19/1189881563060.html Student Tasered for ‘Armed Madhouse’ Question to Kerry by Greg Palast - September 18th, 2007 “[Palast] said you won the 2004 election - isn’t that amazing? There were multiple reports of disenfranchising of Black voters on the day of the election in 2004 in Florida and Ohio. … How could you concede the election on the day?” www.gregpalast.com/student-tasered-for-armed-madhouse-question-to-kerry/ Greg Palast Offers Job to Tasered Journalism Student We just spoke with Greg Palast, whose Armed Madhouse paperback (or "mysterious 'yellow book,'" as lazy Washington Post blogger, Emil Steiner "reported" it), was being waved and alluded to by University of Florida student Andrew Meyer just prior to his being Tasered by UF cops earlier this week. Palast says he is offering the journalism student a job as a paid intern. Meyer had described Palast, in his question to Sen. John Kerry, asking why he conceded the 2004 Presidential Election so early, as "the top investigate journalist in America." www.bradblog.com/?p=5090 John Kerry vs. Andrew Meyer: Taser Student Cries for Attention By Lynda Johnson - Sep 20, 2007 John Kerry was speaking but Andrew Meyer wouldn't shut up. At an event on the University of Florida campus the 21-year old student was trying to tout a book by Greg Palast that is popular among the conspiracy crowd that is still smarting over the American elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004. They believe they were robbed, millions of votes were not counted and only they are wise enough to see this. The kid was a riot dropping F-Bombs and waving Palast's book. All off the fringe nuts were dealt a pretty bad blow when it was discovered that he had his own camera filming - it was obvious that he was ready for his YouTube moment in the sun. He got it - trouble is, now everyone other than his pals that are still stuck in 2000 and 2004 are mocking him and have figured out that he is a publicity hound. www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_272616171.shtml Kerry's Taser Lag: "It's All About Me!" Posted by: Kevin McCullough at 10:29 AM Like you I am a little stunned at the harsh over reaction by campus cops to the asking of John Kerry a few rather odd questions by one very strong supporter of liberals and liberal conspiracy theories (like Kerry actually winning in 2004.) kevinmccullough.townhall.com/g/9cdbe13c-b555-4d48-accd-78559fc18278 Andrew Meyer: 9/11 Truther The most famous man on the Internet this week, University of Florida student Andrew Meyer, is, according to a friend speaking on "The Alex Jones Show," a 9/11 truther. Red Dirt Report -Wednesday September 19, 2007 Meyer knew of taping, according to UPD report According to a University Police Department offense report, before Meyer began pelting Kerry with questions on Monday, he turned to a friend and said, "Are you taping this? Do you have this? You ready?" www.alligator.org/articles/2007/09/20/news/campus/pranks.txt Corporate Media Makes Light of Meyer Tasering Kurt Nimmo - Thursday September 20, 2007 prisonplanet.com/articles/september2007/200907Tasering.htm Two Univeristy of Florida Officers Suspended After Incident www.officer.com/web/online/Top-News-Stories/Two-Univeristy-of-Florida-Officer-Suspended-After-Incident/1$37999 _________________ Minds are like parachutes. They only function when open. As you listen to the audio, Fintan will refer you to various links and stills of the video posted here:Source:www.breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3404
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Oct 22, 2007 14:19:57 GMT 4
How Television Affects Your Brain Chemistry -- And That's Not All! I never watch TV unless there's something specific I want to watch, like Bill Moyers on PBS. Weeks may go by before I'll turn it on. I never plunked my kid in front of it to entertain him either....that's child abuse to me. We do watch some movies together for entertainment, but do this as a special event. I read, he reads, we have hobbies, and lots of pets to spend time with. If you can find a copy, read: Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television; I have spoken of this book a few times before, here at the forum.....MichelleHow Television Affects Your Brain Chemistry -- And That's Not All! Many of you believe watching TV is a harmless, entertaining activity worthy of your attention, but the video below will give you some eye-opening things to consider. In just under four minutes you’ll learn why television is essentially a platform for elite advertisers to peddle their wares, and how the steady stream of images could be making your life in reality seem dull and slow in comparison. If you watch TV, you owe it to yourself to watch this video:[Check out Dr. Mercola's Comments Also]tinyurl.com/25splx
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Feb 1, 2008 9:50:18 GMT 4
Meanwhile, Back in the Matrix ... I'm putting the following articles here because, if you will notice, I started this thread with following series of articles:The biggest con: Democrats & Republicans work together to destroy America, part 1 of 3I'm not going to devote a thread to the election race....it's not worth all the time or attention; you can go to many other sites to read up on the various candidates. I pushed Dennis Kucinich here because he is the 'ideal' rather than the 'real deal'. Although he has dropped out of the race, he has served the purpose of enlightening Americans to the truth of our politics...you are given certain persons who are groomed and approved by the PTBs. I won't discuss the Republicans; however, you may need to make a choice between who's left standing for the Democrats....Here are two articles for you to muse over.....Good luck making any sense of it all from here on.....MichelleClinton Reflux SyndromeDavid Michael Green 1/31/2008 11:22:33 PM Eastern Standard Time My god, I loathe the Clintons.The idea of Clinton redux gives me acid reflux. The idea of Clinton duplex gives me Clinton reflux. Look out – I really feel the need to hurl. And (almost) never more than during the last weeks. Since the days just preceding the New Hampshire primary these two have been insufferable. Nothing brings out their worst behavior than having their little personal joyride at the national expense threatened by the rest of us trying to grab back the keys to the battered car. Wanna know how much these two sicken me? They’ve gotten me to stop thinking lately about how much the little punk in the White House sickens me. That’s how much. It’s hard to know who is worse. Bush is as immoral as it gets, at least this side of the Third Reich. The Clintons are as amoral as it gets, this side of any bank in Switzerland. You want us to pretend to be liberals? Fine, we’ll do that. You want us to play conservative? No problem. We’ll do whatever it takes, just give us the White House. We have no more policy principles than did our cat, Socks. We have no other politics than ourselves. The ideology of the Clintons is the Clintons. There’s one hell of a lot of clean-up that needs to be done in America, and that includes some serious payback to the criminals (read Republicans) and their enablers (read Democrats) who have looted the country blind. That’s hardly news, but it was altogether too much to hope – after a quarter century of utter darkness in the country formerly known as the United States – that it could all come together in the 2008 election. One could imagine that the present perfect storm of perfect storms could finally wrest the White House out of the hands of the Republican Party, though history teaches us that even that would be foolish to assume. Democrats never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And, besides, even if they could finally prevail, what would it mean? Last time they held the White House it was full-on corporate rape, just at a slightly slower pace than when the GOP unzips. Only in a hallucination fueled by the finest collection of controlled substances – and plenty of them – could the mind imagine not only the demise of the worst criminals of our time, but also some tasty payback to all their accomplices who’ve facilitated the plundering of America these last years, starting with Hillary Clinton being denied the nomination for the presidency she obviously feels entitled to, and the scourge of Clintonism being purged forever from American politics, right along with Bushism. Now, all of a sudden, all of this looks like a possibility. This week, Hillary got absolutely shellacked in South Carolina, losing to Obama by more than two to one. And this, crucially, after the desperate HillBillies had made a trip to the outhouse to fetch their most vile weapons for purposes of derailing the Obama freight train. But when the dust had cleared, Obama had stomped them, and they were left standing there, stinking of racism, deceit, hypocrisy, desperation and cheap Rovian politics. And all for naught. At least when Rove or Lee Atwater did it, they won. Poor Bill Clinton. Now even his faux ‘legacy’ is toast. Not that there was ever anything to it, anyhow. As far as history is concerned, the best thing that ever happened to Wild Bill’s presidency was to have a Bush before it and a Bush after it. I like – if that’s the right word – seeing Democrats show that they can get down in the gutter and throw a political punch or two. That’s been all too necessary these last decades, and all too absent. But what Hillary seems to have forgotten is that such behavior is only admirable on the defensive. The invasion and destruction of Germany last century was a good thing only because Germany had already invaded and destroyed everybody else. That’s not a small distinction. If you do it first, you’re a scumbag. And the Clinton’s are scumbags. From The Cry That Saved New Hampshire, to the uncontrolled rage of Bill’s “fairytale” fairytale about Obama being inconsistent on the Iraq war (and even if he was, could anyone possibly have been more so than Hillary?), to suing in Nevada to block voting at casinos in order to disenfranchise black and union voters, to twisting into absurdity Obama’s Ronald Reagan comment, to using a complete non-sequitur in response to a reporter’s question as a vehicle for morphing Obama into Jesse Jackson – in all these ways, the Clintons have shown their willingness to do nearly anything to win the presidency again. Spell it with me now: s-c-u-m-b-a-g-s. This should hardly be a surprise to anyone. Just ask Ricky Ray Rector. He’ll tell you. Or he would if he wasn’t dead. He’s the poor SOB whom Clinton Bill flew home to execute during the 1992 campaign in order to show frightened Americans that Republicans aren’t the only viciously ambitious politicians who can pander to their fears, by golly. So what if poor Ricky Ray was so mentally impaired that he asked to have the dessert from his last meal saved so he could eat it later? What did one less retarded kid matter when there were so many electoral votes at stake? Anybody paying the remotest bit of attention could have figured out a long time ago what William Jefferson Clinton was all about. And you have to laugh at all those nice ladies six long years later clucking about how could Hillary stay with a guy who betrayed her by messing around with other women? Were they joking? My question is how do you sleep with a guy who fries somebody with the IQ of a gifted tuber in order to get into the White House? How do you stay with a guy who turns millions of welfare mothers out onto the street in order to pick up a second term that he already had in the bag anyhow? No, man, make no mistake – this is nothing new for the Clintons. But the thing is, it isn’t working so well anymore. Indeed, there is good evidence to suggest that it is backfiring. People really do seem to want something new and something better than this dreck. I used to have some small measure of sympathy for the Clintons, for the way they were incessantly hammered by the right clear across the length of their presidency. Not a lot, mind you – because they were fundamentally putzes, and because they were dumb enough not to fight back all through that time – but some. But watching Bill go all Rove on Obama, including the race-baiting, in order jam Hillary (oh, and a certain other individual) back into the White House was the complete end of the line for me. Seeing her now claiming Florida as a victory and vowing to fight to seat those delegates after previously trashing the state for scheduling its primary early back when she was campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire was just more of the same. This is just nauseating. But what to do now? I suspect Clintonism may be a spent force, and not a moment too soon. It’s bad enough that she’s the one hope that Republicans have of winning the White House for yet another term. (What a great idea to nominate that candidate, eh?!) But it’s worse the degree to which they degrade American politics and taint progressivism, even by their remotest proximity to it (being a Democrat doesn’t make any or all of your policies liberal – just ask the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese babies Lyndon Johnson napalmed). I really don’t know what cards they can play now, other than their money. Bill being Bill not only didn’t help, but hurt their campaign in South Carolina and nationally. What else can they do? Have Hill be Hill? Is there even any such thing inside the robot? And, besides, she already pulled out her hanky and tried that one in New Hampshire. How many times can you do that? It feels a lot like the presidential ship might have sailed for 2008 and they’re left standing on the dock. Bummer, eh? At the same time that the last shard of non-antagonism that I ever felt toward the Clintons has disappeared, I must admit that I’ve warmed up to Barack Obama a bit over the last week. I very much appreciate that he fought back against the Clintons. He’ll never get my endorsement unless he shows that he can, because he’ll most assuredly need to should he win the nomination. I’m about as interested in having another Kerry or Dukakis as the Democratic nominee as I am in contracting a nasty dose of the clap. Thanks, but no – I’ll pass. I’m also liking Obama better the more I see him because I think he is pretty authentic, at the end of the day. That ain’t hard to pull off when you’re standing next to John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, mind you, the latter of whom is the Mitt Romney of the Democratic Party. (I try not to envision the concept of the two of them having sex – fortunately, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t last long – but I can’t help thinking that their love child would look an awful lot like a stick of margarine. And would be about as yummy.) But Obama has a non-pandering seriousness of purpose that I do find authentic and therefore attractive. Watch him on stage before and during the delivery of a speech. He doesn’t do that plastic smile bit that other candidates do, or – worse – the ubiquitous and dreaded pointing gleefully at some member of the audience trick and mouthing some faux insider message. And his speeches are serious, not rah-rah. I still find them a bit airy, though on closer inspection he really does say a lot of the right things. I just wish he’d emphasize more the fight we’re in, and the depravity of the enemy, d.b.a. the Republican Party. This country and this world are in disastrous condition. It’s crucial now to name names, if for no other reason than to make sure we don’t come back this way again. The other wild thing is that a lot of Republicans actually like Obama, from what I can tell. That totally spooks me, and makes me wonder what I’m missing. But, truthfully, I don’t think he’s that much different than Hillary ideologically, and I do think he’d make a much stronger candidate against anyone they tossed up there, so I suspect it may be a genuine affection. Maybe Obama really could drag the country back together again. And I do think they’d have to be very careful how they went after candidate or president Obama, otherwise risking a boomerang of sympathy, the phenomenon henceforth to be known after last week as the “Bill Clinton effect”. Anyhow, there’s a party in deep trouble if ever you’ve seen one. Their only candidate who can win is hated by the kleptocratic establishment for only being willing to rip off three-fourths of the national wealth on behalf of the ruling class, rather than all of it. It’s truly delightful to see the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter foaming at the mouth when considering the prospect of McCain getting the nomination. The guy loves Clarence Thomas, loves the war, wants more of both, is down for making the tax cuts permanent, and opposes abortion across the board. But he is, alas, not conservative enough for this lot. Can you imagine? If you were ever inclined not to be afraid, very afraid, about the right in America, that notion ought to reorient your head just a bit. Their other choice is the real deal – Morphing Mitt himself – the true conservative, the man who never met a voter whom he couldn’t find a way to slobber all over. This guy’s a one-man pander-fest. Even Republicans hate him (but the money people, of course, never let sentiment get in the way of a healthy profit margin). What a looney, too. Did you see him riffing in his speech after losing (again) in Florida? About all the things America asked their government in Washington to do, and it didn’t. No doubt that’s because we’ve had a Democrat in the White House for 20 of the last 28 years! Right?! Er, wait a minute – did I get that backwards...? What a week it’s been in presidential politics. Hillary has become unglued. Obama is now imbued. McCain is back from the dead, while Giuliani and Edwards have gone off life-support. Even Kucinich is no more. And the only thing more frightening than the prospect of a Mitt Romney presidency – the actual current president – gave his state of the onion address this week, a pathetic yawner notable only for its sheer lack of ambition and a recounting of the distance we’ve fallen. All that remains now is the petulance. At least that hasn’t changed. Just the same, what the hell is with the Democrats giving this guy the warm treatment in the halls of Congress? This is not just some president who should be respected because of his office. This is a home-wrecker. This is a destroyer of the same Constitution that created the very Congress hosting him. This is a guy who has spent seven years turning Congress (with a lot of their own help) into the equivalent of the human appendix. You might as well give standing ovations to George III, you know? Both are equally anathema to American constitutional democracy. But now we’re down to four, and perhaps even less after Super-Duper Tuesday right around the corner. The bad news is that it looks a lot like McCain for the GOP. He is clearly their best chance at the White House. If the Dems are stupid enough to go with Hillary, I have a hard time seeing McCain losing. Only Democrats could find a way to fumble in 2008, when everything imaginable is going their way (everything except that they’re Democrats, of course). Maybe if George Washington himself came back and stumped for the Democratic nominee they could possibly have more going for them than they do now. Maybe. Maybe if Jesus showed up and ID’d Cheney as the anti-Christ might the Democrats have slightly better conditions for winning this year. Not necessarily, though. And yet still there’s something of a chance that they would blow it, and probably every chance they would if they pick Clinton as their standard-bearer. Progressives can hope that Romney pulls it out and buys his party’s nomination, which is still the best bet for Democrats locking it up. Short of that, it’s time to start thinking about the shape of these potential White Houses. Hillary is the most predictable of the three. She’ll be the epitome of safeness, moderation and poll-driven nickel-and-dime politics. Four years later, not a damn thing would have changed. McCain, on the other hand, could actually be a bit interesting as president. I see him as far less the captain of his party than its long-suffering captive. Given that he could put together a fat popular and governing coalition of independents and Democrats whilst taming elements of his own party, he could actually achieve some unexpected results, and he’d be in a hurry to do so, too. He’d be Unchained McCain, to be sure, and the DeLays and Limbaughs of this world would be crushed when they got in his way. No doubt he would make some horrendous choices for the federal courts, but otherwise – even on Iraq – I don’t think we know exactly what McCain would actually do, other than not sit still. Some of it could even be quite progressive. This could be an ‘only Nixon could go to China’ moment, times three or four. That leaves Obama, the obvious choice – though, unfortunately, for me still as much by default as the lesser of evils than on his own merits. I’m afraid my expectations for what he might do would be for something well less than bold initiatives, progressive or otherwise. The constant comparison to JFK may be more instructive than people realize or intend. The 35th American president to this day – especially today – was a lot longer on symbolism than real substance, especially of the progressive kind. My guess is that Obama would likely be the same, in both respects: Lots of aren’t-we-all-together-now rhetoric, little substantive change. It sure is true that we could do a lot better than that. But we also know that we could do one heck of a lot worse. Because we are. Source: www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Clinton_Reflux_Syndrome.html------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Selected From: Notes From the Trail - Jan 30, 2008 Date: 1/30/2008 9:12:50 PM Eastern Standard Time From: info@wakeuplaughing.com Meanwhile, Back in the Matrix ... by Steve Bhaerman As I've often said, there are two distinct political conversations in America that are going on simultaneously. They seem to be separate right now, but someday soon they will converge. One conversation focuses on the ideal, the other on the "real deal." It's the separation of these two that has given us at best government by "the lesser of two weasels," at worst government by "lowest common dominator." My personal mission -- and I suspect our collective one -- is to unite these two conversations into a congruent political movement based on the spiritual truths that 90% of us share, despite our ideological bent. Political elections are binary exercises in this country, meaning we are generally asked to choose "this" or "that." Those of us who understand the need for holism tend to cringe at the "assholism" expressed in these binary contests. Some folks I've spoken with choose not to participate for this very reason. Rather than taking yourself out of the game on account of not wanting to get any dirt on your clean uniform, it makes more sense to me to ask which of these binary choices is more likely to lead us where we want to go -- and act / vote accordingly. Now you may believe that before change can occur, everything must go down the toilet. Well maybe so, but what if that's not the case? If you were suffering from an illness, would you wish yourself more suffering or less? A speedier recovery, or one which you might not survive? And that brings us to the binary choices available to us, specifically next week on what's called Super Tuesday. From here on folks, everything I say will be purely my opinion. Please recognize it as such, and take it or leave it. As my friend Caroline Casey would say, it's an offering, not an imposition. So ... if you plan to vote in the Republican primary, my opinion is that your only worthwhile choice is Ron Paul. While his political perspective is limited in some ways, he of everyone still in the race is the individual with the most integrity, and despite his seemingly "old fashioned" views, the candidate who is most outside the box. But -- again, my opinion -- I wouldn't even bother with the Republican primaries. Though Ron Paul is doing better than his Democratic counterparts Dennis Kucinich (who is now fighting for his seat in Congress) and Mike Gravel (my personal favorite as all-around human being, who has sadly gotten little traction), he doesn't seem likely to capture the Republican nomination. In fact, as lame as the lame-ass Democrats have been, the Republicans more richly deserve a resounding thumbs down for falling in lockstep behind the current criminal regime on just about every issue. Should the Republicans lose overwhelmingly everywhere, it will be the thorny crowning achievement that will stand as George Bush's legacy. Again, a binary choice. I suggest throwing our weight on the Democratic side behind Barak Obama for several reasons. First of all, imagine another binary choice: Hillary vs. McCain. One neocon supporting the current policies (with some modifications) in the Middle East vs. another. In his most recent column, Robert Scheer offers evidence that key members of the Clinton White House used their influence to get other Democrats to support the invasion of Iraq. To put it more poetically, Hillary is a sheepowitz in wolfowitz's clothing. Then there's the electability factor. While Hillary has tried to rouse the support of women by suggesting she's hated because she's a woman, I would suggest exactly the opposite. Being a woman is one of the two things she has going for her, the other being the better half of the best politician of our generation. People dislike Hillary because she is Hillary. Yes, of course politicians are ambitious by nature. But her candidacy seems to be way more about herself than about the American people. She is the candidate least likely to get the independent vote, let alone disaffected Republicans. If she is elected, she will preside over four more years of bitter divisiveness. And that brings us to Barak Obama. Obama is inspiring. He is uniting, and -- despite of or maybe because of the race thing -- he has the potential to cross over and gain independents, Republicans, evangelical Christians who are ready for a leader who can bring us together. Obama doesn't play the race card. He is the product of a mixed marriage, one parent foreign born. He has the potential to be a uniting force worldwide. Hillary? She is part of the same establishment that brought us globalization and the war in Iraq. So, back to the binary choice next week. A vote for Obama is a vote for possibility of a breakthrough. A vote for Hillary is a vote for a known quantity that is likely to add up to either a loss in November, or a country divided and still on the wrong track. One of the saddest truths of the postindustrial age is that we've become so jaded that when we see something that might be "goodness," it's immediately suspect. Actually, it's ourselves we don't trust. What if we get duped? Think of it this way. Putting our energy behind the platform of possibility empowers our highest intentions. And by affirming these intentions, it strengthens the field -- and the probability of the possibility. As Swami's guru Harry Cohen Baba used to say, "Life is like a good deli. Even if it's not on the menu, if enough people order it, they have to make it." So, we have an inspiring political leader who has put it on the menu. It's up to us to order it. How they cook it is up to them. If we don't like it, we send it back. Remember the Age of Aquarius supposedly just around the corner? Well, we're right on schedule. We've just had seven years of the prerequisite Age of Nefarious (you know, "when the goon moves into Lincoln's house and stupider aligns with Mars"). I think we are more than ready for something new. Consider this. In astrology, the symbol for Aquarius is "the Water Bearer." Aquarius is a male, but the water he is bearing is feminine wisdom. The genuine and heartfelt call for unity, that represents feminine wisdom. Putting the structures of the mind in the service of the heart, that is feminine wisdom. Aquarius uses male energy to serve and protect the nurturer, not the predator. The healing forces in the world are building towards this understanding. Do we want a regime in place that is more likely or less likely to understand and reinforce this Aquarian reality? The new tell-a-vision program is Mission Possible. If ever there were a time to vote for possibility, this is it.
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 16, 2008 12:59:06 GMT 4
Hillary Clinton Is The Madonna of American Politics Another from David Michael Green [hey, I like this guy!], not just on Hillary...he has much to say on the nature of our politics. One thing he highlights which reverberates with me, is the way many U.S. citizens pick their candidates....Good God, you'd think this country is made up of complete imbeciles!!! I'm starting to think that some people just shouldn't be permitted to vote without a qualifying intelligence test!...MichelleHillary Clinton Is The Madonna of American Politics5/15/2008 5:04:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time The second casualty of Election 2008 will be the regressive right movement that has done so much damage to the United States and the world these last decades. The Republicans lost another bi-election this week in a district that should have been a cakewalk for them. That makes three of late, including the former seats of Speaker Dennis Hastert and Trent Lott. (The latter race was in Mississippi, y’all, and even featured use of the entire Republican playbook of liberal- and race-baiting – prominently featuring Obama and Reverend Wright, of course – to no avail. Did I mention it was in Mississippi?) Hurricane Bush has done a 180, and is circling back on Washington with an angry vengeance, building up a furious force as it nears land, hunting for anything and everything that moves and has an ‘R’ following its name. The GOP and their regressive agenda will be the second casualty of Election 2008, and it’s going to be a blowout the likes of which we’ve not seen since 1932. But, even before that happens, the first casualty will be the enablers par excellence of that regressive movement all these years, the Clinton Family. Indeed, they’re already finished, and all that remains is for them to further humiliate and ostracize themselves by refusing to let go, a project they seem only too willing to pursue to their own destruction. I like 2008. People like me get a lot of grief from other folks for being supposed Clinton-bashers. But, then, some of us also got a lot of grief (sometimes from a few of the same people) for being Bush-bashers in 2001 and 2002. I would submit that the reason is the same in both cases. We refused to buy into the mythology of the post-9/11 presidency, or of the wonderfully empathetic one which preceded it, and we were right not to. We just got there a little earlier than other folks. By 2007, just about everybody had figured out what a disaster George W. Bush was. Now they’re finally starting to grok the Clintons as well. Some people also accuse those of us who despise Hillary of being biased, or worse, against a female candidate, and Mrs. Clinton (the former Ms. Rodham, mind you – some feminist she) has more than once hinted at playing that convenient card. Talk about hiding behind a skirt. I resent that presumption, especially as a feminist (though I never particularly liked that appellation, for the same reason that I wouldn’t want to be labeled a ‘blackist’ because of my support of racial equality), and as a progressive who is anxious to broaden the ranks of those participating in American politics well beyond the class of straight, white, rich males who’ve been mucking it up for over two centuries now. For the record, I loathe Hill, but I also loathe Bill at least as much. Thatcher disgusted me, but no more or less than Reagan. I admire Eleanor Roosevelt deeply, rather much like I feel toward what’s-his-name?, that guy she was married to. In short, when it comes to politics, I don’t really care what you’re packin’ in your undies, but rather what you stand for and how willing you are to fight for it. Watching Hillary in action lately, I am reminded of nothing so much as her husband’s disorientation during his White House years, when everything came a cropper. You could see that Billbo assumed all along that he, like his hero JFK, would be getting laid two and three times a day during his presidency, without anyone knowing. That just seemed like one of the built-in perks of the job! You know, Air Force One, Secret Service, tons of babes. Like that. He seemed completely unprepared for the concept that neither the Republicans (themselves even more promiscuous) nor the media would wink and nod and keep his dalliances secret, as they’d done for every other American president. Similarly, Hillary now seems startled to have played by all the traditional rules of presidential politics, only to be denied that to which she most surely is entitled. She’s like Prince Charles. Or maybe Gordon Brown. It’s so freakin’ unfair. She played the hyperpower nationalist card, voting for a war that she knew was a total lie, because you had to do that to become president. Who gives a shit if a million Iraqis are dead? Who even cares if 4,000 Americans are in the same state and countless lives in this country have been shattered? Of course (and unlike where the Iraqis are concerned), you do have to pretend to care about these fallen soldiers. But let’s not lose sight of our priorities here, people. They gave their lives selflessly for a higher cause – namely, so that Hillary Clinton (or John Kerry or John Edwards) could experience the personal joyride of the presidency.Since then, Hillary The Inevitable has pandered to voters in every way imaginable, quaffing beers and knocking on doors, faking tears and pretending to care about the poor. Oh, and don’t forget the gas tax relief plan. You know, the one that demonstrates how much more in touch with the common people she is than her opponent.And then, of course, there’s race. We expect it when Karl Rove or Lee Atwater or their candidate marionettes play the race card in American politics, though there seems to be decreasing tolerance for that kind of disgusting garbage, especially where newly mobilized young voters are concerned. When a Democrat does it, or even a Potemkin Democrat like the Clintons or GOP-Joe Lieberman, it’s shocking to see. But the Clintons have in fact been doing it all year now, in a desperate attempt to salvage the fast-disappearing presidency to which only they have legitimate claim. In a recent interview, Hillary made reference to an AP survey and noted that it “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.” “There’s a pattern emerging here”, she added. Let’s leave aside for the moment (but more on this below) why you would ever want to brag about having locked up the uneducated racist vote in this country. That’s something to be proud of? That’s your argument for why everyone should break all the rules and give you the nomination? But, even apart from that idiocy, it must be noted that these are the most outrageous and shameful remarks from the most outrageous and shameful campaign. They show, at last, for even the most naive, what the Clintons are truly all about. But, what they really reveal, above all, is her frustration at having done all the things you’re supposed to do in order to fool stupid little people into electing you president. All the tedious meet-and-greets, all the endless handshakes, all the bogus smiles until you feel like your jaw is about to freeze forever in that position (and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it did), all the whoring for contributions from people you can’t stand, and all the lying. Okay, well, maybe the lying isn’t so tough. But you get the picture. So there’s poor Hillary this week, still trying to make the case for a lost cause. She might as well be trying to convince Catholic women not to use birth control. The old magic just isn’t working anymore, and she seems like nothing so much as a women who has stumbled into a parallel universe, where all the rules have changed. What she was really saying when she made those remarks this week was, “Look, I sucked up to stupid low-rent voters, the kind of people you’ll never see me within a thousand yards of other than when I have to go through this horrible prostrating ritual every four or six years. I gave them the war they love, the flag waving that makes them feel good about themselves, and the ubiquitous tax breaks so we can all pretend I’m a friend of the middle class. I even stooped so low as to feed them the racist rhetoric that allows them to momentarily forget their place in the social hierarchy. I did everything you’re supposed to do, okay? Now give me my goddamned presidency!”What I never understood is why anybody ever saw this pair (and now Chelsea, as well) in any other light. When you think of the principles and people they’ve thrown overboard in a relentless pursuit of their self-interest, it’s astonishing that anybody ever considers them in any other way. Think about it for a second. Let’s just leave aside all the damage done for the time being, and ask ourselves what they did right with eight years of the presidency. I personally tend to doubt the capacity presidents have to influence the economy – though they are nevertheless always judged on that basis by voters – and I think this is especially true in Clinton’s case, where he happened to be in the right place when the dot-com gusher went off. But, okay, let’s give Wild Bill a little bit of credit anyhow for presiding over a solid economy that even helped the middle class a bit for once. What else is on the list, after that? Seriously, I can’t think of anything. Advances in healthcare? Civil rights? Foreign policy successes? Great Supreme Court appointments? Environmental leadership? Moral leadership (and, no, I’m not talking about jive GOP sexual morality, which Vito Fosella proved yet again this week is simply a euphemism for complete hypocrisy)? Eight years wasted. Eight years, and there’s no there there.Except sell-outs and failures. You wanna understand the Clinton presidency? What is perhaps its greatest crime is also a walking metaphor for the whole enchilada of that administration. Remember how after the Holocaust everyone said “Never again!”? Turns out that that ‘again’ came in Rwanda while Bodacious Bill was in the White House. This one’s classic Clinton. While 800,000 people were getting hacked to death with machetes, he refused to come to their rescue. That would be bad enough, but it gets worse. He also made sure that the UN couldn’t come to their rescue either, presumably to protect his presidency from a potential Somalia-style quagmire if those forces had to be bailed out. That too would be worse, but still it gets worse yet. He had the sheer gall to go to Rwanda afterwards, and apologize for ‘not doing enough’. As if that was what happened. As if he had tried, but got waylaid by some other urgent problems elsewhere, like maybe failing to protect gays from discrimination, or doing Wall Street’s business by jamming through trade agreements that undercut workers and trash the environment.If you understand this, you understand everything about these people. I spoke at a conference on the Clinton presidency once, where sundry notables, pundits and former administration types were all a-agitating and a-cogitating, trying to figure out the mystery of Clinton’s ideology, given that when he was president he had tacked right, feinted left, then tacked right again, for eight years or more. As I noted then, it’s simple if you stop looking for real ideological commitments to ideas and policies, as those commitments are traditionally understood. Rather, the ideology of the Clintons is the Clintons. Once you get that, it all makes sense. Then you can understand why a Democratic president would throw welfare moms and their dependant children under the bus in order to win an election he already had in his pocket. Then you get why he would toss gay rights aside by signing the Defense of Marriage Act, or come up with the weasly Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy, in order to placate conservative voters. Then you see why he sat on Kyoto and the International Criminal Court treaties, sweeping them under the carpet until Bush could come along and annihilate them permanently. Then you know how Clinton could sell-out working class and middle class Americans by jamming through WTO and NAFTA, saying he’d come back later to fix the labor and environmental crimes in those treaties (still waitin’, Bill – any time now would be fine). Then you get why, in order to get himself reelected in 1996, he ran against his own party’s members of Congress, including many who had walked the plank for him on tax hikes, gun control and Hillary’s abortion of a healthcare plan. We could go on and on. Half a million dead in Iraq through failed sanctions, including on food and medicine – hundreds of thousands of them children. Ruby Ridge and Waco. Myriad appointees tossed overboard the minute right-wing lunatics characterized them as remotely controversial. And more and more and more.Get it? All benefits to the Clintons. All expenses externalized, including to loyal allies and the soldiers of their little army. All of which leaves me with just one question: Why in the world is anyone even remotely surprised that they are now absolutely willing to wreck the party, wreck its chances in November, wreck Obama, wreck the country by giving us a third Bush term under McCain, and use tactics as sick as racism to pursue their incredibly selfish goals? Man, I would have been shocked if they hadn’t. I’ll tell you one thing. In actuality, this ain’t nothin’. If it wasn’t for their (now rather stale) desire to preserve some (bogus) legacy, but especially for their desire to keep alive a possible run four or eight years from now, you’d actually be seeing a lot worse than even this garbage. This is the Alpha Family of the Me Generation, on irradiated steroids, my friends, and they don’t take prisoners. You’d have to go hang with the junta in Myanmar to find folks more willing to sacrifice others in order to serve their own interests. Or, of course, you could save the airfare and just join your local Republican Club. Given this combination of failures, sell-outs and nonexistent successes, how do we account for the degree to which the Clintons have been lionized by otherwise relatively sane Democratic voters? This may be the saddest part of all, but it is reflective of how deep go the roots of the American political tragedy of our time. Just one glance at the gossip rags in the supermarket checkout lines and their headlines (celebrities, sex, weight loss, celebrities, sex, weight loss) gives you a pretty quick reading of the intellectual state of the electorate. Why do we vote for dynastic idiots to lead the world’s only superpower for eight years, based on the criterion of who would be most fun to have a beer with? Because we’re seriously stupid, and we’re functional illiterates when it comes to reading politics. For the same reason, people love (or, for the right, hate) Bill Clinton on the basis of his personality, without any clue as to what he really did in office. And his wife is one step removed from even that. We’re a society that can no longer distinguish between substance and celebrity – indeed, there may no longer actually be a difference remaining anymore – and Hillary Clinton is the perfect candidate for our era. She is to American politics what Madonna has been to rock-and-roll. Remember when rock mattered? I was reminded this week of how far we’ve come by this photo www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/05/11/business/11gazCA02ready.html showing a beaming Dmitri Medvedev hanging with the jaded members of Deep Purple, the latter doing yet another private gig for yet another member of the überclass. Look at these people. Look at the suits, all happy on themselves. “Da! Deepski Purplenik! Da, Dudeski Dudovenich, we rock roll now!” You know Dmitri, don’t you? He used to be the head of Gazprom, like the biggest energy conglomerate anywhere, and nowadays pretty much the whole of Russia’s government, or at least the part that matters. Now he’s the new president of the country, picked by the old president of the country, who once was a nice KGB lad, until he was picked by the preceding president of the country to rule, including by assassination when necessary. Okay, fine, that’s politics on the big stage. And, sure, Deep Purple was never exactly pushing any serious boundaries back in the day, unless you consider proto-grunge stonerism a political statement. [The photo is too funny! Maybe the Russians are as stupid as Americans and ought to be tested before voting also!....M]And, yeah, I know that there was Wayne Newton well before there was John Lennon. And that the same folks in Jefferson Airplane who gave us “Volunteers” were not many years later selling glossy pop-rock to stadium-size crowds in their new corporate guise as Jefferson Starship. Trust me, my expectations aren’t that high here. But it’s still disappointing to look at rock-and-roll and see what is, and what it once was. And I blame Madonna for this. Of course, she’s hardly the only culprit. But no one, in my mind, so personifies the corporatization, the trivialization and the faux controversialization of the genre, and no one brought so much of this to bear on a vulnerable medium as early as she did. Madonna’s malefic skill was to turn rock music in to a profit-making center by substituting fake controversy for real political and social content. “Ooooooohhh, look, there she is pretending to kiss a woman!!” “Oooooooohhh, now she’s fooling with religious iconography!!” Oh, and by the way, there she is also selling millions of disks. And selling out an art form that once meant something. And so it is with the politics of our time. We’re so far from getting the right answers that we’ve long ago stopped even asking the right questions. Plastic Hillary is the complete personification of that sad state, though of course, her emoticon husband Bill was the master of all time. But it’s absolutely the same with either of them. They wouldn’t know a principle if it fell on their house like meteor full of molten heavy metals. They will be whatever you want them to be, whatever you need them to be, as long as they can get what they need – which is power and, especially, psychological validation, via your vote. Do you need her to be tough? Fine, she’ll vote for the war. Do you need her to be wise and prudent? Fine, then she’ll turn around and oppose your freakin’ war. Should we beat up on the poor by killing welfare, or the gays with the Defense of Marriage Act, or the blacks when they vote for Obama? Just what is it you need, ladies and gentlemen? An irresponsible gas tax holiday? No problem! Want fries with that? Can do! She’s a fighter!I truly hope this is the last column I ever write about the Clintons, though I doubt it, knowing them. They’re just not going away. And yes, as a matter of fact, that is grossly irresponsible of them, now that you ask, because, no, she doesn’t have a prayer at winning the nomination, and, yes, she is tearing down the presumptive nominee and therefore assisting the forces of darkness at obtaining another four years of destructive power. For some reason, with the Clintons, we suspend all the normal rules of the political sandbox, and give them all kinds of free passes. But imagine if someone else were doing this? Imagine if Obama was hanging in there when he could no longer win, trash talking her and effectively dragging down Clinton? Perhaps reminding voters about how she can’t seem to attract black voters, a vital Democratic Party constituency? The hue and cry from the Clinton camp would be deafening, and he would be ostracized from the party. We also suspend our common sense when it comes to these people, for some reason. Why is Hillary doing this? What greater cause is she serving by staying in this race? She talks all the time about fighting for healthcare and ending the war and all the other things that are important to do for all those fine little people out there. But there’s hardly a nickel’s worth of difference between her positions and Obama’s. Which means, since he’d be pushing essentially the same policy agenda she would, she’s really only fighting for herself and her need to be president. And, worse, the truth is that by doing this, she is actually quite literally fighting against those very principles, because she is helping to hand the election to the GOP, which has rather different ideas altogether. Yeah, I really hope this is the last column I ever have to write on the Clintons, because I’m sick of them, and I’m angry about the damage they’ve done and continue to do to American politics, especially by eviscerating our progressive national agenda as well as the former electoral vehicle (before Bill crashed it) of what little progressivism there actually is in America, namely, the Democratic Party. I blame them, above all, for turning the party of FDR into Republican Lite, just as I blame Madonna, above all, for trivializing rock-and-roll. The Clintons are truly DINOs (Democrats In Name Only), and they are truly political dinosaurs as well – so 1990s in every way. Sorry to break the news to you, kids: The era of small politics is over. I take pleasure in their comeuppance not because I’m mean-spirited, but because they are so amoral. I’m delighted that their dream has been denied, their name ruined, and their bank account deflated, because it’s about time we had some modicum of justice in this country for those who would lie to us, use us, and abuse us, in order to further their own personal agenda. All of that is playing right now at a theater near you, and I couldn’t be happier. One disaster of American politics down, one more to go. I like 2008. Source:www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Hillary_Clinton_Is_The_Madonna_of_American_Politics.html
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Jan 25, 2009 13:57:55 GMT 4
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