The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Sampling from Anthology:
Global Economic Crisis and the Coming/Current Depression
Book:
THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS. The Great Depression of the XXI Century
Why We Allow the Destruction of Our Planet
It's not enough to point out that our political system is completely corrupted by money, including money from coal and oil and nukes and gas. Of course it is. And if we had direct democracy, polls suggest we would be investing in green energy. But saying the right thing to a pollster on a phone or in a focus group is hardly the extent of what one ought sensibly to do when the fate of the world is at stake.
Nor do we get a complete explanation by recognizing that our communications system is in bed with our political system, cooperatively pushing lies about our climate and our budget (defunding wars and billionaires is not an option, so there's just no money for new ideas, sorry). Of course. But when the planet's climate is being destroyed for all future generations, most of which will therefore not exist, the only sensible course of action is to drop everything and nonviolently overthrow any system of corruption that is carrying out the destruction.
Why don't we?
Misinformation is a surface-level explanation. Why do people choose to accept obvious misinformation?
The Warrior Destroyers Most of All Kill Hope
Jacob Barnett is a 14 year old physics prodigy who may be smarter than Einstein. He's the youngest person ever to be published in the prestigious physics journal: “Physical Review A.” He hopes to build on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. He's writing a book to help people overcome their fear of math. And he describes his thought process as thinking in the fourth dimension. What marvels of technology will spring from his eventual discoveries? No one knows.
But will humankind even be around long enough for us to find out? This is what's so frustrating about the destroyers of our times, like terrorists and megalomaniacal war-mongers like Bush and Cheney. It's hard to know just how much they are destroying. How many child geniuses did they kill in Iraq?
One way they are destroying is by keeping technology bogged down in finding more efficient was to kill and destroy, which is a waste of valuable time which would be better spent on creating rather than destroying, and on discovering peaceful uses for technology rather than destructive uses for technology. And they may well destroy the world before Jacob Barnett can discover the technologies that might make war obsolete.
Humankind is balancing on the edge of a precipice, and we need all the creative minds we can muster to help us solve all the looming problems we're faced with. There are certain key problems, which if solved might help humanity avoid self-destruction. For example, a cheap and efficient way of producing solar energy would change everything. Technological advancement has never been more important. And yet the destroyers of the world are delaying such advancements and making our self-destruction more likely.
Below is a very interesting summary of the political tensions among secularism and religion and modernism and tradition in Tunisia. I think the author, who I do not know but whose writings I have followed, is one of the most knowledgeable observers of the Arab Spring.
Chuck Spinney
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
April 2013, Pages 41-42
By Esam Al-Amin
THE SPARK THAT ignited the Arab Spring over two years ago came from Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. For 28 days people across the country revolted against the repression and corruption of the 23-year authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Finally, on Jan. 14, 2011 Tunisians celebrated their victory and resilience over tyranny and oppression when Ben Ali fled the country. But if getting rid of the dictator was relatively short and easy, the dismantling of his regime and its corrosive effects on society has proven to be very challenging indeed.
Americans deserve to hear the dirty secrets of the CIA’s war on terror. We’ll all be better off with the truth.
In April 1975, Sen. Frank Church impaneled a special investigative committee to look into shocking accounts of CIA dirty tricks. The Church Committee ultimately published 14 reports over two years revealing a clandestine agency that was a law unto itself — plotting to assassinate heads of state (Castro, Diem, Lumumba, Trujillo), carrying out weird experiments with LSD, and suborning American journalists. As a result, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning the assassination of foreign leaders, the House and Senate established standing intelligence committees, and the United States set up the so-called FISA courts, which oversee request for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign agents.
But the war on terror unleashed the CIA once again to carry out dark deeds against America's enemies — torture, secret detention, and “rendition” to “black sites” across the world. How have Americans reckoned, this time, with the immoral and illegal acts carried out in their name? They have not: the CIA has retained control over the narrative. As the Constitution Project's Detainee Treatment report describes in great detail, the CIA falsely reported — to the White House as well as to the public — that torture “worked” in wresting crucial information from high-level detainees, and thus needed to be an instrument available to interrogators. Officials like Vice President Dick Cheney repeated ad nauseum that the CIA's dark arts had saved thousands of lives. Is it any wonder that a plurality of Americans think the United States should torture terrorists?
I wrote last month about the detainee treatment report, but I find it incredibly frustrating — and all too telling — that the findings were overwhelmed by the tidal wave of coverage of the Boston bombing. Because we fear terrorism far more viscerally than we feared communism — certainly by 1975 — we are all too susceptible to the view that America cannot afford to live by its own professed values. But of course that's what Chileans and Brazilians thought in the 1970s. That's why Sri Lankans have granted themselves the right to slaughter homegrown terrorists wholesale, and react furiously to any hint of criticism.
People give themselves a pass unless and until they are forced to face the truth, which is why a public airing of history is so important — and so politically fraught. There's always a compelling reason to avoid facing the ugly truth. In early 2009, Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called for an independent commission to investigate allegations of torture. But President Barack Obama's spokesman said that the proposal would not be “workable.” We know what he meant: you can hardly blame the president for avoiding a colossal fight with Republicans over the past, especially, when he had so many fights he needed to wage over the future.
Obama probably thought that he could put the problem to rest by ending torture as well as the cult of secrecy surrounding CIA practices. He succeeded on the first count, but failed on the latter. In April 2009, he agreed to release the so-called “torture” memos written by President George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), as well as photos of prisoner abuse from Iraq and Afghanistan. But then, after a fierce debate inside the White House said to pit Obama's military commanders against his counselor, Gregory Craig, among others, the administration reversed itself. The president later signed legislation allowing him to withhold the pictures if he determined that the release would harm national security.
Once adopted, the logic of national security carries all before it. The release of the OLC memos, the detainee treatment report notes, was the high-water mark of Obama-era transparency on torture. CIA reports on the death of three prisoners in custody as well as on broad policy towards detainees remain classified; so do the results of inquiries by the armed forces criminal investigation division. The agency's ability to withhold information probably contributed to the Justice Department's decision not to pursue indictments on any of the 100 or so cases of CIA mistreatment which it investigated. Defense lawyers in the military trial of the “9/11 defendants” held at Guantanamo have had to work around a “protection order” which classifies entire subject areas — including anything related to the defendants' arrest or capture, the conditions in which they were held, or the interrogation techniques to which they were subjected. Whatever becomes of the defendants, Americans will learn nothing from the trials.
Read full article (free registration required).
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Call for US Torture Investigation and Eradication + Torture RECAP”
Below is a summary report by ABC News followed by the various versions of the Talking Points; (2) as a series of US Government actions, I don't think there is anything particularly unique in the sequential revision of the Talking Points except that, in this case, four lives were lost.
A failure of character of this magnitude corrodes the integrity of the state.
By Mark Steyn
EXTRACT:
Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m. call? Four years later, the phone rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.
Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Benghazi Lies Now Documented”
False Equivalencies and the Mediocrity of Nonlocal Consciousness Research Criticism
STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Columnist – Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Full article with footnotes below the line.
Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Media's Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy”
