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Happy Thanksgiving Samples. :)
Completely off topic but I'm not on Ihub anymore.
As for my thoughts on that POS you asked about?.....I strictly play the ES and the NQ now.
Scanned the Ibox on DPLY. I saw mining in there?
Rio Tinto posted a 2% loss at 2am this morning. I believe China is well stocked on copper and there will be a nice correction soon if not starting today. be ready for a buying Op as the inflation trade isn't over by a long shot.
Happy trading.
Food
My pick 14-16-99 thanks and good luck to all
My picks, 11-24-29 GLTA
My picks please 5-24-48 thanka and GLTA
16-17-48 please
After throwing the smart darts...I came up with, 11-24-48
1-14-33 thanks
please give me 14-33-29 GLTA
My winning picks are 11-48-99 good luck
After considerable thought, here are my picks
14-48-99
GLTA
My picks, 14-24-48. good luck.
My picks for Pocono...14-24-29
My picks...5-24-48..thanks
My picks for this week...14-24-48..Thanks
Places to Intervene in a System
By Donella H. Meadows, Afterword by Donald E. Gray
Published August 23, 2005
The first essay in the Systems and Software series, "How Did This Happen?," by applied cybernetics and general systems thinking expert Don Gray, explored the concept of feedback loops and systems thinking. The essay you are about to read is the second in the series: "Places to Intervene in a System," by the late Donella Meadows (biography). Meadows writes about large, complex, even global-scale systems, the complexity of which can only be modeled by computer software, and only partially understood by humans.
"Places to Intervene" originally appeared in the Winter 1997 issue of Whole Earth magazine. The fact that Whole Earth is not a software magazine—coupled with the fact that on its surface the essay has nothing to do with computers or software—may explain why it has largely gone unnoticed in the software development world. We hope to change that with this publication in a new context.
A warning: Meadows gets into some politically charged subjects and does not withhold her opinions. Not everyone will agree with her positions. Our purpose in publishing this essay, however, is not to launch a political debate, but rather to explore the parallels between the systems and "places to intervene" identified here by Meadows and the systems—both human and technological—in the software world. (To help get the discussion started, we asked Don Gray to touch on some of the parallels he sees from his vantage point. Don’t miss Don’s Afterword.)
For the adventurous and open-minded reader there is much reward to be found here.
Each time I read this essay new thoughts occur to me. Right now I’m thinking about the ways in which the organization of and interactions within a software system relate to the human organizations the software touches. It seems they can either relate well and be compatible or they can clash and grate against each other. Perhaps if we can understand both the software and the surrounding social structures fundamentally as systems, we could continue to improve our ability to create not merely "usable" software, but rather software that enables and inspires humans to improve and innovate.
I hope Donella Meadows sparks new thinking for you also.
—Daniel Read, August 2005
Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in "leverage points." These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
The systems community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have absorbed one of his favorite stories. "People know intuitively where leverage points are. Time after time I've done an analysis of a company, and I've figured out a leverage point. Then I've gone to the company and discovered that everyone is pushing it in the wrong direction!"
The classic example of that backward intuition was Forrester's first world model. Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems—poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment—are related and how they might be solved, Forrester came out with a clear leverage point: Growth. Both population and economic growth. Growth has costs—among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction—the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth!
The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.
Counterintuitive. That's Forrester's word to describe complex systems. The systems analysts I know have come up with no quick or easy formulas for finding leverage points. Our counterintuitions aren't that well developed. Give us a few months or years and we'll model the system and figure it out. We know from bitter experience that when we do discover the system's leverage points, hardly anybody will believe us.
Very frustrating. So one day I was sitting in a meeting about the new global trade regime, NAFTA and GATT and the World Trade Organization. The more I listened, the more I began to simmer inside. "This is a huge new system people are inventing!" I said to myself. "They haven't the slightest idea how it will behave," myself said back to me. "It's cranking the system in the wrong direction—growth, growth at any price!! And the control measures these nice folks are talking about—small parameter adjustments, weak negative feedback loops—are puny!"
Suddenly, without quite knowing what was happening, I got up, marched to the flip chart, tossed over a clean page, and wrote: "Places to Intervene in a System," followed by nine items:
9. Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).
8. Material stocks and flows.
7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
6. Driving positive feedback loops.
5. Information flows.
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints).
3. The power of self-organization.
2. The goals of the system.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.
Everyone in the meeting blinked in surprise, including me. "That's brilliant!" someone breathed. "Huh?" said someone else.
I realized that I had a lot of explaining to do.
In a minute I'll go through the list, translate the jargon, give examples and exceptions. First I want to place the list in a context of humility. What bubbled up in me that day was distilled from decades of rigorous analysis of many different kinds of systems done by many smart people. But complex systems are, well, complex. It's dangerous to generalize about them. What you are about to read is not a recipe for finding leverage points. Rather it's an invitation to think more broadly about system change.
That's why leverage points are not intuitive.
9. Numbers.
Numbers ("parameters" in systems jargon) determine how much of a discrepancy turns which faucet how fast. Maybe the faucet turns hard, so it takes a while to get the water flowing. Maybe the drain is blocked and can allow only a small flow, no matter how open it is. Maybe the faucet can deliver with the force of a fire hose. These considerations are a matter of numbers, some of which are physically locked in, but most of which are popular intervention points.
Consider the national debt. It's a negative bathtub, a money hole. The rate at which it sinks is the annual deficit. Tax income makes it rise, government expenditures make it fall. Congress and the president argue endlessly about the many parameters that open and close tax faucets and spending drains. Since those faucets and drains are connected to the voters, these are politically charged parameters. But, despite all the fireworks, and no matter which party is in charge, the money hole goes on sinking, just at different rates.
The amount of land we set aside for conservation. The minimum wage. How much we spend on AIDS research or Stealth bombers. The service charge the bank extracts from your account. All these are numbers, adjustments to faucets. So, by the way, is firing people and getting new ones. Putting different hands on the faucets may change the rate at which they turn, but if they're the same old faucets, plumbed into the same system, turned according to the same information and rules and goals, the system isn't going to change much. Bill Clinton is different from George Bush, but not all that different.
Numbers are last on my list of leverage points. Diddling with details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably ninety-five percent of our attention goes to numbers, but there's not a lot of power in them.
Not that parameters aren't important—they can be, especially in the short term and to the individual who's standing directly in the flow. But they rarely change behavior. If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick-start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it.
Whatever cap we put on campaign contributions, it doesn't clean up politics. The Feds fiddling with the interest rate haven't made business cycles go away. (We always forget that during upturns, and are shocked, shocked by the downturns.) Spending more on police doesn't make crime go away.
However, there are critical exceptions. Numbers become leverage points when they go into ranges that kick off one of the items higher on this list. Interest rates or birth rates control the gains around positive feedback loops. System goals are parameters that can make big differences. Sometimes a system gets onto a chaotic edge, where the tiniest change in a number can drive it from order to what appears to be wild disorder.
Probably the most common kind of critical number is the length of delay in a feedback loop. Remember that bathtub on the fourth floor I mentioned, with the water heater in the basement? I actually experienced one of those once, in an old hotel in London. It wasn't even a bathtub with buffering capacity; it was a shower. The water temperature took at least a minute to respond to my faucet twists. Guess what my shower was like. Right, oscillations from hot to cold and back to hot, punctuated with expletives. Delays in negative feedback loops cause oscillations. If you're trying to adjust a system state to your goal, but you only receive delayed information about what the system state is, you will overshoot and undershoot.
Same if your information is timely, but your response isn't. For example, it takes several years to build an electric power plant, and then that plant lasts, say, thirty years. Those delays make it impossible to build exactly the right number of plants to supply a rapidly changing demand. Even with immense effort at forecasting, almost every electricity industry in the world experiences long oscillations between overcapacity and undercapacity. A system just can't respond to short-term changes when it has long-term delays. That's why a massive central-planning system, such as the Soviet Union or General Motors, necessarily functions poorly.
A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change (growth, fluctuation, decay) in the system state that the feedback loop is trying to control. Delays that are too short cause overreaction, oscillations amplified by the jumpiness of the response. Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained, or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long. At the extreme they cause chaos. Delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point, a range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and collapse.
Delay length would be a high leverage point, except for the fact that delays are not often easily changeable. Things take as long as they take. You can't do a lot about the construction time of a major piece of capital, or the maturation time of a child, or the growth rate of a forest. It's usually easier to slow down the change rate (positive feedback loops, higher on this list), so feedback delays won't cause so much trouble. Critical numbers are not nearly as common as people seem to think they are. Most systems have evolved or are designed to stay out of sensitive parameter ranges. Mostly, the numbers are not worth the sweat put into them.
8. Material stocks and flows.
The plumbing structure, the stocks and flows and their physical arrangement, can have an enormous effect on how a system operates.
When the Hungarian road system was laid out so all traffic from one side of the nation to the other had to pass through central Budapest, that determined a lot about air pollution and commuting delays that are not easily fixed by pollution control devices, traffic lights, or speed limits. The only way to fix a system that is laid out wrong is to rebuild it, if you can.
Often you can't, because physical building is a slow and expensive kind of change. Some stock-and-flow structures are just plain unchangeable.
The baby-boom swell in the US population first caused pressure on the elementary school system, then high schools and colleges, then jobs and housing, and now we're looking forward to supporting its retirement. Not much to do about it, because five-year-olds become six-year-olds, and sixty-four-year-olds become sixty-five-year-olds predictably and unstoppably. The same can be said for the lifetime of destructive CFC molecules in the ozone layer, for the rate at which contaminants get washed out of aquifers, for the fact that an inefficient car fleet takes ten to twenty years to turn over.
The possible exceptional leverage point here is in the size of stocks, or buffers. Consider a huge bathtub with slow in and outflows. Now think about a small one with fast flows. That's the difference between a lake and a river. You hear about catastrophic river floods much more often than catastrophic lake floods, because stocks that are big, relative to their flows, are more stable than small ones. A big, stabilizing stock is a buffer.
The stabilizing power of buffers is why you keep money in the bank rather than living from the flow of change through your pocket. It's why stores hold inventory instead of calling for new stock just as customers carry the old stock out the door. It's why we need to maintain more than the minimum breeding population of an endangered species. Soils in the eastern US are more sensitive to acid rain than soils in the west, because they haven't got big buffers of calcium to neutralize acid. You can often stabilize a system by increasing the capacity of a buffer. But if a buffer is too big, the system gets inflexible. It reacts too slowly. Businesses invented just-in-time inventories, because occasional vulnerability to fluctuations or screw-ups is cheaper than certain, constant inventory costs—and because small-to-vanishing inventories allow more flexible response to shifting demand.
There's leverage, sometimes magical, in changing the size of buffers. But buffers are usually physical entities, not easy to change.
The acid absorption capacity of eastern soils is not a leverage point for alleviating acid rain damage. The storage capacity of a dam is literally cast in concrete. Physical structure is crucial in a system, but the leverage point is in proper design in the first place. After the structure is built, the leverage is in understanding its limitations and bottlenecks and refraining from fluctuations or expansions that strain its capacity.
7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
Now we're beginning to move from the physical part of the system to the information and control parts, where more leverage can be found. Nature evolves negative feedback loops and humans invent them to keep system states within safe bounds.
A thermostat loop is the classic example. Its purpose is to keep the system state called "room temperature" fairly constant at a desired level. Any negative feedback loop needs a goal (the thermostat setting), a monitoring and signaling device to detect excursions from the goal (the thermostat), and a response mechanism (the furnace and/or air conditioner, fans, heat pipes, fuel, etc.).
A complex system usually has numerous negative feedback loops it can bring into play, so it can self-correct under different conditions and impacts. Some of those loops may be inactive much of the time—like the emergency cooling system in a nuclear power plant, or your ability to sweat or shiver to maintain your body temperature. One of the big mistakes we make is to strip away these emergency response mechanisms because they aren't often used and they appear to be costly. In the short term we see no effect from doing this. In the long term, we narrow the range of conditions over which the system can survive.
One of the most heartbreaking ways we do this is in encroaching on the habitats of endangered species. Another is in encroaching on our own time for rest, recreation, socialization, and meditation.
The "strength" of a negative loop—its ability to keep its appointed stock at or near its goal—depends on the combination of all its parameters and links—the accuracy and rapidity of monitoring, the quickness and power of response, the directness and size of corrective flows.
There can be leverage points here. Take markets, for example, the negative feedback systems that are all but worshiped by economists—and they can indeed be marvels of self-correction, as prices vary to keep supply and demand in balance. The more the price—the central signal to both producers and consumers—is kept clear, unambiguous, timely, and truthful, the more smoothly markets will operate. Prices that reflect full costs will tell consumers how much they can actually afford and will reward efficient producers. Companies and governments are fatally attracted to the price leverage point, of course, all of them pushing in the wrong direction with subsidies, fixes, externalities, taxes, and other forms of confusion. The REAL leverage here is to keep them from doing it. Hence anti-trust laws, truth-in-advertising laws, attempts to internalize costs (such as pollution taxes), the removal of perverse subsidies, and other ways of leveling market playing fields.
The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too.
A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day—but open all the windows and its corrective power will fail. Democracy worked better before the advent of the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications. Traditional controls on fishing were sufficient until radar spotting and drift nets and other technologies made it possible for a few actors to wipe out the fish. The power of big industry calls for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy makes necessary a global government.
Here are some other examples of strengthening negative feedback controls to improve a system's self-correcting abilities: preventive medicine, exercise, and good nutrition to bolster the body's ability to fight disease, integrated pest management to encourage natural predators of crop pests, the Freedom of Information Act to reduce government secrecy, protection for whistle blowers, impact fees, pollution taxes, and performance bonds to recapture the externalized public costs of private benefits.
6. Driving positive feedback loops.
A positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. The more it works, the more it gains power to work some more.
The more people catch the flu, the more they infect other people. The more babies are born, the more people grow up to have babies. The more money you have in the bank, the more interest you earn, the more money you have in the bank. The more the soil erodes, the less vegetation it can support, the fewer roots and leaves to soften rain and runoff, the more soil erodes. The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass, the more they knock into nuclei and generate more.
Positive feedback loops drive growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked positive loop ultimately will destroy itself. That's why there are so few of them.
Usually a negative loop kicks in sooner or later. The epidemic runs out of infectable people—or people take increasingly strong steps to avoid being infected. The death rate rises to equal the birth rate—or people see the consequences of unchecked population growth and have fewer babies. The soil erodes away to bedrock, and after a million years the bedrock crumbles into new soil—or people put up check dams and plant trees.
In those examples, the first outcome is what happens if the positive loop runs its course, the second is what happens if there's an intervention to reduce its power.
Reducing the gain around a positive loop—slowing the growth—is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening negative loops, and much preferable to letting the positive loop run.
Population and economic growth rates in the world model are leverage points, because slowing them gives the many negative loops, through technology and markets and other forms of adaptation, time to function. It's the same as slowing the car when you're driving too fast, rather than calling for more responsive brakes or technical advances in steering.
The most interesting behavior that rapidly turning positive loops can trigger is chaos. This wild, unpredictable, unreplicable, and yet bounded behavior happens when a system starts changing much, much faster than its negative loops can react to it.
For example, if you keep raising the capital growth rate in the world model, eventually you get to a point where one tiny increase more will shift the economy from exponential growth to oscillation. Another nudge upward gives the oscillation a double beat. And just the tiniest further nudge sends it into chaos.
I don't expect the world economy to turn chaotic any time soon (not for that reason, anyway). That behavior occurs only in unrealistic parameter ranges, equivalent to doubling the size of the economy within a year. Real-world systems do turn chaotic, however, if something in them can grow or decline very fast. Fast-replicating bacteria or insect populations, very infectious epidemics, wild speculative bubbles in money systems, neutron fluxes in the guts of nuclear power plants. These systems are hard to control, and control must involve slowing down the positive feedbacks.
In more ordinary systems, look for leverage points around birth rates, interest rates, erosion rates, "success to the successful" loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more.
5. Information flows.
There was this subdivision of identical houses, the story goes, except that the electric meter in some of the houses was installed in the basement and in others it was installed in the front hall, where the residents could see it constantly, going round faster or slower as they used more or less electricity. Electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the front hall.
Systems-heads love that story because it's an example of a high leverage point in the information structure of the system. It's not a parameter adjustment, not a strengthening or weakening of an existing loop. It's a new loop, delivering feedback to a place where it wasn't going before.
In 1986 the US government required that every factory releasing hazardous air pollutants report those emissions publicly. Suddenly everyone could find out precisely what was coming out of the smokestacks in town. There was no law against those emissions, no fines, no determination of "safe" levels, just information. But by 1990 emissions dropped 40 percent. One chemical company that found itself on the Top Ten Polluters list reduced its emissions by 90 percent, just to "get off that list."
Missing feedback is a common cause of system malfunction. Adding or rerouting information can be a powerful intervention, usually easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical structure.
The tragedy of the commons that is exhausting the world's commercial fisheries occurs because there is no feedback from the state of the fish population to the decision to invest in fishing vessels. (Contrary to economic opinion, the price of fish doesn't provide that feedback. As the fish get more scarce and hence more expensive, it becomes all the more profitable to go out and catch them. That's a perverse feedback, a positive loop that leads to collapse.)
It's important that the missing feedback be restored to the right place and in compelling form. It's not enough to inform all the users of an aquifer that the groundwater level is dropping. That could trigger a race to the bottom. It would be more effective to set a water price that rises steeply as the pumping rate exceeds the recharge rate.
Suppose taxpayers got to specify on their return forms what government services their tax payments must be spent on. (Radical democracy!) Suppose any town or company that puts a water intake pipe in a river had to put it immediately downstream from its own outflow pipe. Suppose any public or private official who made the decision to invest in a nuclear power plant got the waste from that plant stored on his/her lawn.
There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That's why there are so many missing feedback loops—and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen or go around them and make it happen anyway.
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints).
The rules of the system define its scope, boundaries, degrees of freedom. Thou shalt not kill. Everyone has the right of free speech. Contracts are to be honored. The president serves four-year terms and cannot serve more than two of them. Nine people on a team, you have to touch every base, three strikes and you're out. If you get caught robbing a bank, you go to jail.
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR and opened information flows (glasnost) and changed the economic rules (perestroika), and look what happened.
Constitutions are strong social rules. Physical laws such as the second law of thermodynamics are absolute rules, if we understand them correctly. Laws, punishments, incentives, and informal social agreements are progressively weaker rules.
To demonstrate the power of rules, I ask my students to imagine different ones for a college. Suppose the students graded the teachers. Suppose you come to college when you want to learn something, and you leave when you've learned it. Suppose professors were hired according to their ability to solve real-world problems, rather than to publish academic papers. Suppose a class got graded as a group, instead of as individuals.
Rules change behavior. Power over rules is real power.
That's why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution—the rules for writing the rules—has even more power than Congress.
If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.
That's why my systems intuition was sending off alarm bells as the new world trade system was explained to me. It is a system with rules designed by corporations, run by corporations, for the benefit of corporations. Its rules exclude almost any feedback from other sectors of society. Most of its meetings are closed to the press (no information, no feedback). It forces nations into positive loops, competing with each other to weaken environmental and social safeguards in order to attract corporate investment. It's a recipe for unleashing "success to the successful" loops.
3. The power of self-organization.
The most stunning thing living systems can do is to change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors. In biological systems that power is called evolution. In human economies it's called technical advance or social revolution. In systems lingo it's called self-organization.
Self-organization means changing any aspect of a system lower on this list—adding or deleting new physical structure, adding or deleting negative or positive loops or information flows or rules. The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience, the ability to survive change by changing.
The human immune system can develop responses to (some kinds of) insults it has never before encountered. The human brain can take in new information and pop out completely new thoughts.
Self-organization seems so wondrous that we tend to regard it as mysterious, miraculous. Economists often model technology as literal manna from heaven—coming from nowhere, costing nothing, increasing the productivity of an economy by some steady percent each year. For centuries people have regarded the spectacular variety of nature with the same awe. Only a divine creator could bring forth such a creation.
In fact the divine creator does not have to produce miracles. He, she, or it just has to write clever rules for self-organization. These rules govern how, where, and what the system can add onto or subtract from itself under what conditions.
Self-organizing computer models demonstrate that delightful, mind-boggling patterns can evolve from simple evolutionary algorithms. (That need not mean that real-world algorithms are simple, only that they can be.) The genetic code that is the basis of all biological evolution contains just four letters, combined into words of three letters each. That code, and the rules for replicating and rearranging it, has spewed out an unimaginable variety of creatures.
Self-organization is basically a matter of evolutionary raw material—a stock of information from which to select possible patterns—and a means for testing them. For biological evolution the raw material is DNA, one source of variety is spontaneous mutation, and the testing mechanism is something like punctuated Darwinian selection. For technology the raw material is the body of understanding science has accumulated. The source of variety is human creativity (whatever that is) and the selection mechanism is whatever the market will reward or whatever governments and foundations will fund or whatever tickles the fancy of crazy inventors.
When you understand the power of self-organization, you begin to understand why biologists worship biodiversity even more than economists worship technology. The wildly varied stock of DNA, evolved and accumulated over billions of years, is the source of evolutionary potential, just as science libraries and labs and scientists are the source of technological potential. Allowing species to go extinct is a systems crime, just as randomly eliminating all copies of particular science journals, or particular kinds of scientists, would be.
The same could be said of human cultures, which are the store of behavioral repertoires accumulated over not billions, but hundreds of thousands of years. They are a stock out of which social evolution can arise. Unfortunately, people appreciate the evolutionary potential of cultures even less than they understand the potential of every genetic variation in ground squirrels. I guess that's because one aspect of almost every culture is a belief in the utter superiority of that culture.
Any system, biological, economic, or social, that scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.
The intervention point here is obvious but unpopular. Encouraging diversity means losing control. Let a thousand flowers bloom and anything could happen!
Who wants that?
2. The goals of the system.
Right there, the push for control, is an example of why the goal of a system is even more of a leverage point than the self-organizing ability of a system.
If the goal is to bring more and more of the world under the control of one central planning system (the empire of Genghis Khan, the world of Islam, the People's Republic of China, Wal-Mart, Disney), then everything further down the list, even self-organizing behavior, will be pressured or weakened to conform to that goal.
That's why I can't get into arguments about whether genetic engineering is a good or a bad thing. Like all technologies, it depends upon who is wielding it, with what goal. The only thing one can say is that if corporations wield it for the purpose of generating marketable products, that is a very different goal, a different direction for evolution than anything the planet has seen so far.
There is a hierarchy of goals in systems. Most negative feedback loops have their own goals—to keep the bath water at the right level, to keep the room temperature comfortable, to keep inventories stocked at sufficient levels. They are small leverage points. The big leverage points are the goals of entire systems.
People within systems don't often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving. To make profits, most corporations would say, but that's just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. What is the point of the game? To grow, to increase market share, to bring the world (customers, suppliers, regulators) more under the control of the corporation, so that its operations become ever more shielded from uncertainty. That's the goal of a cancer cell too and of every living population. It's only a bad one when it isn't countered by higher-level negative feedback loops with goals of keeping the system in balance. The goal of keeping the market competitive has to trump the goal of each corporation to eliminate its competitors. The goal of keeping populations in balance and evolving has to trump the goal of each population to commandeer all resources into its own metabolism.
I said a while back that changing the players in a system is a low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old system. The exception to that rule is at the top, if a single player can change the system's goal.
I have watched in wonder as—only very occasionally—a new leader in an organization, from Dartmouth College to Nazi Germany, comes in, enunciates a new goal, and single-handedly changes the behavior of hundreds or thousands or millions of perfectly rational people.
That's what Ronald Reagan did. Not long before he came to office, a president could say, "Ask not what government can do for you, ask what you can do for the government," and no one even laughed. Reagan said the goal is not to get the people to help the government and not to get government to help the people, but to get the government off our backs. One can argue, and I would, that larger system changes let him get away with that. But the thoroughness with which behavior in the US and even the world has been changed since Reagan is testimony to the high leverage of articulating, repeating, standing for, insisting upon new system goals.
1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.
Another of Jay Forrester's systems sayings goes: It doesn't matter how the tax law of a country is written. There is a shared idea in the minds of the society about what a "fair" distribution of the tax load is. Whatever the rules say, by fair means or foul, by complications, cheating, exemptions or deductions, by constant sniping at the rules, the actual distribution of taxes will push right up against the accepted idea of "fairness."
The shared idea in the minds of society, the great unstated assumptions—unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone knows them—constitute that society's deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. There is a difference between nouns and verbs. People who are paid less are worth less. Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens . One can "own" land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our culture, all of which utterly dumbfound people of other cultures.
Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them come goals, information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows.
The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in an afterlife. We build skyscrapers, because we believe that space in downtown cities is enormously valuable. (Except for blighted spaces, often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless.) Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler showing that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein hypothesizing that matter and energy are interchangeable, or Adam Smith postulating that the selfish actions of individual players in markets wonderfully accumulate to the common good.
People who manage to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not the highest. But there's nothing physical or expensive or even slow about paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a new way of seeing. Of course individuals and societies do resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist any other kind of change.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you come yourself, loudly, with assurance, from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don't waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
Systems folks would say one way to change a paradigm is to model a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.
0. The power to transcend paradigms.
Sorry, but to be truthful and complete, I have to add this kicker.
The highest leverage of all is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to realize that NO paradigm is "true," that even the one that sweetly shapes one's comfortable worldview is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe.
It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into Not Knowing.
People who cling to paradigms (just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything we think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it a basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose one that will help achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe (or put in the name of your favorite deity here) and do his, her, its will, which is a lot better informed than your will.
It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.
Back from the sublime to the ridiculous, from enlightenment to caveats. There is so much that has to be said to qualify this list. It is tentative and its order is slithery. There are exceptions to every item on it. Having the list percolating in my subconscious for years has not transformed me into a Superwoman. I seem to spend my time running up and down the list, trying out leverage points wherever I can find them. The higher the leverage point, the more the system resists changing it—that's why societies rub out truly enlightened beings.
I don't think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.
/* end */
Afterword
By Don Gray
After you analyze a problem using systems thinking (see my developer.* article, "How Did This Happen?"), the question generally arises "So what can I do about it." This is where the essay you’ve just read comes in.
I first encountered "Places to Intervene in a System" several years ago, when my colleague Steve Smith arrived at a meeting saying, "There’s this great article on where to intervene in systems! You have to read it!" Each time I do, I come away with a better understanding of systems leverage points.
Donella Meadows uses general examples to illustrate the intervention points. Critically read the article and ask the question, "What exists in my software development world that parallels this?" The following thoughts occurred to me as I asked myself this question. I will proceed through the ten leverage points identified by Meadows.
9. Numbers. Software development numbers could include total defects, defect severity, and time left to delivery. The numbers tell current system state, but not what comes next. Changing software numbers often includes magic: "this Priority 1 defect is really a Priority 3 defect, so now we can ship on time." This leaves the underlying system intact and just a little more cynical than before the magic.
8. Material stocks and flows. Customers always want new features. These features create a "stock" to pull from. The features "flow" into the code base.
7. Regulating negative feedback loops. Having QA reject a software change due to defects is a definite negative feedback loop. This provides product stability. Delays in feedback loops cause systems to oscillate. Removing (or shortening) delays provides better response. Maybe you can detect more defects earlier by unit testing or pair programming.
6. Driving positive feedback loops. A positive feedback loop is self-reinforcing. The more it works, the more it has power to work. Like solving a difficult problem, and barreling into the next one full speed ahead.
5. Information flows. Examples of information flows include publicly placed burn-up charts, white boards and stand-up meetings. These artifacts and events are designed to get more information in front of more people.
4. The rules of the system. A friend working as the VP of Engineering unilaterally declared "No changes to the code base that haven’t been through critical review. And by the way, critical review means you have done the following...". By adding a constraint he changed the way the system operated. (The goal was to add stability.)
3. The power of self-organization. Googling self organizing software teams returns about 7.7 million hits.
2. The goals of the system. Is your goal "time to market" or "zero defects"? How does the difference affect software development?
1. The mindset out of which the system arises. What forms your organization’s culture? What does everyone know without saying? How does this generate the "goals, information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows?"
0. The power to transcend paradigms. We don’t realize the span of choices due to "systems" blindness. This blindness is both temporal (we don’t know the history of how we got here) and spatial (we don’t see the entire system). Overcoming these blind spots helps us recognize the choices we have in systems intervention.
http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/places_intervene_system.html
Book about killing gentile children becomes 'bestseller' in Israel
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – A Jewish rabbi has issued a book giving Jews permission to murder non-Jews, including babies and children, who may pose an actual or potential threat to Jews or Israel. “It is permissible to kill the Righteous among non-Jews even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, who heads the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement in the occupied West Bank, wrote in his book “The King’s Torah.”
He argues that goyem (a derogatory epithet for non-Jews) may be killed if they threaten Israel.
“If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments – because we care about the commandments – there is nothing wrong with the murder.”
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro – co-author of the book
Shapiro, who heads a small Talmudic school at the settlement of Yitzhar near Nablus, claims his edict “is fully justified by the Torah and the Talmud.”
The anti-goyem edict seems to come in response to the arrest by Israeli police of a Jewish terrorist who has confessed to having murdered two Palestinian shepherds in the West Bank.
The terrorist, an American-born immigrant named Yaakov Teitel, also confessed to have tried to assassinate leftist Jewish figures.
Police considered the arrest an important achievement in combating Jewish terrorism, which experts contend thrives on religious edicts issued by rabbis affiliated with the religious-Zionist camp.
Nearly 16 years ago, a Jewish terrorist named Yigal Amir assassinated then Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin.
Moreover, numerous innocent Palestinians have also been murdered in cold blood by Jewish terrorists.
In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a notorious Jewish terrorist, murdered 29 Muslim worshipers inside Al-Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank town of al-Khalil.
Non-Humans
The controversial edict is backed by numerous rabbis affiliated with the so-called national-religious camp as well as the Talmudic seminary in West Jerusalem, known as Merkaz Ha’rav.
Among the rabbis who have publicly supported the edict are Yitzhak Ginsburg and Ya’akov Yosef.
Ginsburg had written a leaflet glorifying murderer Goldstein and called him a “saintly figure.”
Shapiro’s views on how Palestinians and non-Jews in general ought to be treated according to Jewish religious law (halacha) are widely looked at as representing the mainstream not the exception in Israel.
During the Israeli onslaught against Gaza earlier this year, Mordecahi Elyahu, one of the leading rabbinic figures in Israel, urged the army not to refrain from killing enemy children in order to save the lives of Israeli soldiers.
He had even petitioned the Israeli government to carry out a series of carpet bombing of Palestinian population centers in Gaza.
“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after we kill a thousand, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop, we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to stop them.”
According to Israel Shahak, author of “Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand years,” the term “human beings” in Jewish law refers solely to Jews.
Many Jewish orthodox rabbis, especially within the national-religious sector, view international conventions incriminating the deliberate killing of civilians and destruction of civilian homes and property as representing “Christian morals” not binding on Jews.
In 2006, the Rabbinic Council of Jewish Settlements in the West Bank urged the army “to ignore Christian morals and exterminate the enemy in the north (Lebanon) and the south (Gaza Strip).
Such manifestly racist and hateful edicts don’t raise many eyebrows in Israel, neither among the intelligentsia nor in the society at large.
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1126131/pg1
Great place to visit every morning at 8am central time.
Love this guy. :)
http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm
Thursday, July 1, 2010USDA Reports Food Shortages: Wall Street 'Caught Off Guard' by Severity
Eric Blair
Several recent headlines indicate that food prices will continue their swift climb upward. These troubling new reports show that agriculture production and stored grains are critically low and experts are now predicting food shortages on a grand scale.
Look at a few mainstream headlines: Drought threatens global rice supply in the India Times; VA farmers say heat taking toll on crops, Associated Press; Severe food shortage follows lack of rainfall in Syria; and, finally, Corn prices bolt as USDA downsizes crop estimates, which states that, "Commodity professionals were caught off guard Wednesday by a U.S. Department of Agriculture report showing 1 million fewer acres of corn planted this year than earlier projected, and almost 300 million fewer bushels of corn in storage." And these articles don't begin to address crops being damaged by the toxic rain from the Gulf oil disaster.
We are back to recession economics and rapidly heading toward a deeper, longer “Third Depression.” With all recent economic indicators setting new record lows and deficits at record highs, this ship is only going one way folks, down, down to Chinatown. This WTC-Building 7-style-controlled-demolition of the U.S. economy has long been engineered by the borderless banksters and has been set in the same way to collapse at a free-fall rate. With all of the manufactured confusion it may be difficult to know where best to invest your limited assets, but it seems to be clear that Food is on the march.
There were several trend forecasters and financial firms predicting upwards of $200/barrel of oil before the Gulf oil gusher. The “analysts” said this would occur because of the perception of scarcity and a weakening dollar. The oil disaster and the subsequent outrage at Big Oil will surely take care of selling the perception of scarcity, while the Federal Reserve and Congress will surely take care of weakening the dollar.
We’ve seen this Beta test before when oil prices reached their peak of $147 in 2008 sending the price of food to the stratosphere. Food staples like rice nearly tripled in six months and at times increased 50% in just two weeks, primarily because of record oil prices and a weak dollar in 2008. During this run-up on prices, big box stores like Sam's Club and Costco were rationing the number of bags of rice customers could buy. You can bet that Food Crisis Beta 2.010 will be far more severe.
This third factor of actual Food Scarcity, coupled with high oil prices and a feeble dollar, will multiply the severity of increasing food prices. Whether this scarcity is being engineered to further cull the population or is a genuine imbalance in supply and demand is not important. The fact is that this is playing out in the matrix. Being aware of this triple-threat to food costs creates an opportunity to soften the recessionary blow, and perhaps offer some economic freedom from those who would like to reduce us all to serfdom.
You don’t have to be an End Times survivalist to believe that storing food is pragmatic. Everyone with expendable cash can and should design a good food storage and rotation system and buy bulk food as an investment -- in addition to creating self-sufficiency. Many rationalists are touting guns, ammo, and gold as good small-scale investments given the despicable agenda unfolding in our matrix. Certainly those are critical investments in an economy dwindling down to the rationing of necessity, but not everyone is into guns or can afford bundles of gold. And gold, at the end of the day, can only be traded for necessity.
These recent food alerts seem to indicate that food may be the best short-term investment for the “Average Joe.” It's simple: if the retail cost of rice doubles, as it did in 2008, then you (the investor) make 100% return in something that's immediately tangible and usable. It’s time to pay the tax penalty for cashing out your mediocre "I-bought-in-to-the-American-Dream" 401K and invest in Food.
http://www.activistpost.com/2010/07/food-shortages-reported-wall-street.html
The American People are Under Occupation
by Guest Post on June 11, 2010
The US Government is Occupied by an Elite Global Force that No Longer has the Interests of the American people. Will Americans Revolt and Take Back the Country?
Obama is NOT a Mahatma Gandhi Savior. Is the USA now the land of Marginalized Mediocrity?
In response to yesterday's worldwide condemnation of the Gaza Flotilla Massacre, our US government has decided NOT to stand for justice and has again chosen a path outlined and led by a Global Elite Force that is willing to put the interests of their agenda far ahead of interests of the American people and even the lives of American servicemen and women.
So far and blatant is their arrogance and contempt for our people, that when it's clear that an injustice is at play, they continue on as if nothing has happened and ignore it until the next news cycle sending us their PR reps to hit the mainstream media to soft land us back into our hypnotic political stuper.
The gambit has worked in the past because the American public was desensitized to the plight of oppressed peoples vis-a-vie its' propaganda media machine that delivers intentional sound bites demonizing real people when convenient instead of delivering hard facts and truths to it's public.
But is this Lack of Empathy Dynamic Changing?
U.S. Military Lives Lost Directly Related to Israeli Occupation:
Video link:
Massive Amounts Of Tar balls Cover Cocoa Beach And Cape Canaveral On The East Coast Of Central Florida
Massive amounts of tarballs are now hammering the Atlantic Coast of Florida and have left a large portion of Cocoa Beach in Central Florida literally covered in tarballs.
Meanwhile local Government officials have taken a move straight from the Pensacola Beach playbook and are already misleading the public into thinking that the beaches are safe.
Mellisa Cones, director of the the Cocoa Beach Chamber of Commerce, attempts to assure the public that the tarballs are not from the BP Gulf Oil Spill by saying “it’s just to thick to be coming from the west coast”.
The chamber says they’re not worried about scaring off sun worshipers.
The tar balls are being cleaned up and people are still enjoying the beach.
Their message is to come on down to the water.
“We’ve got a free beach. We’re the closest beach to Orlando.
It’s gorgeous, the weather is wonderful and we don’t have anything to worry about”, says Mellisa Cones.
Maybe she has been watching to much of the main stream media and just hasn’t seen for herself just how thick the tar balls on Pensacola Beach are.
At least one local resident isn’t buying that explanation and she tells the local news that she hasn’t seen tarballs on the beach in the probably the past 5 years or so.
Yesterday local officials were trying to play the tarballs off as being from a shrimp boat that recently sank.
It would take a very, very large shrimp boat to produce this quantity of tar balls.
Jacksonville’s new 4 has also reported that the Coast Guard has confirmed that tarballs did not come from the shrimp boat and the Coast Guard still “investigating” the source of the tar balls.
…
Beach Patrol said the biggest concentrations are washing up between Minute Man Causeway and Sixth Avenue.
People in Brevard County are fearing the worst — that the tar balls came from the Gulf.
“I’m just picking up the pieces and I can’t believe how big they’re coming in, and it’s all over the beach,” a beachgoer said on Tuesday.
Coast Guard members collected samples of the tar balls. Officials said it will take a week for tests to determine if the tar balls are related to the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
…
[Coast Guard] Officials have determined the tar balls did not come from a shrimp boat that sank in May.
Of course they didn’t come from a sunken shrimp boat. Just look at the tar balls on the beach.
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/07/08/massive-amounts-of-tar-balls-cover-cocoa-beach-and-cape-canaveral-on-the-east-coast-of-central-florida/
I am completely and irrevocably against it.
While I believe 9/11 was a false flag by our own government, the mear fact that same government would allow a mosque to be built on ground zero is insulting to all Americans.
Whether or not Muslims Extremists had a part in it or not is up for grabs still. But they surely had quite abit of help if they did.
And while I have nothing against the peoples of the muslim faith I do have a beef with their governments also.
Instead of spending the money to build a fancy new mosque, why don't they take said funds and help their own people in the Gaza strip?
I question whether or not the majority of muslims practice two faceness. Yes, it is in the Koran that they must. But I would bet you could find a similar passage in the Christian Bible.
Intolerance of other faiths is a common theme in any organized religion and has been used to spark wars, gain wealth and control the masses since the beginning of religion itself in whatever form it took through the ages.
LOL but I digress.......
Much more important than taking care of our own.......
U.S. pledges $15 million to preserve site of concentration camp
By the CNN Wire Staff
July 3, 2010
(CNN) -- The United States will donate $15 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, pending congressional authorization and appropriations, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Saturday.
Speaking at the Schindler Factory Museum in Krakow, Poland, Clinton said the contribution will go to preserve the site of the concentration camp and "demonstrates America's commitment to Holocaust education, remembrance and research," the State Department said.
Some 1.1 million people perished at the Auschwitz-Berkenau concentration camp.
Because the camp was initially constructed as a temporary place, the buildings and other artifacts at Auschwitz-Birkenau are deteriorating, the State Department said.
If approved, the funding would be provided over five years starting in 2012.
The United States encouraged other nations to follow suit and contribute to the fund to preserve the site for future generations, the State Department said.
More than 1.3 million people visited the museum and memorial at Auschwitz-Berkenau in 2009.
Also Saturday, Poland and the United States amended their missile defense agreement, formally aligning with the Obama administration's new plan to protect against attacks on the United States and its allies.
"This agreement marks an important step in our countries' efforts to protect our NATO allies from the threat posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction," a joint statement from both governments said.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in April by President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev cuts the total number of nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia by about a third. Specifically, it fixes a ceiling for each country of 1,550 nuclear warheads and 700 deployed nuclear delivery vehicles.
The United States abandoned the Nixon-era Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty under the Bush administration in 2001 and has been experimenting with missile defense systems extensively since then. While tests of short-range and sea-based systems have been largely effective, longer-range systems aimed at protecting the U.S. homeland have a mixed record of success.
The Obama administration scrapped the Bush administration's plan for a European-based missile defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic, proposing instead a more limited system aimed at defending against possible attacks from rogue states like Iran. Both proposals have drawn opposition from Russia.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/03/poland.clinton.auschwitz/index.html?eref=edition&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=cnni&fbid=rc9mpz6JABs
LOL with picks like these I need all the luck I can get. :)
The political whores of Washington
JNOUBIYEH | 9:42 PM
By Khalid Amayreh
Last week, 338 members of the US House of Representatives signed a petition calling on President Obama to veto any resolution by the United Nations denouncing the murderous Israeli raid on the Gaza freedom Flotilla on 31 May, in which 9 Turkish peace activists were brutally but needlessly killed.
“We urge you to continue to use US influence and, if necessary veto power, to prevent any biased or one-sided resolutions from passing.” The petition, sponsored by Ted Poe (R-TX) and Gary Peters (D-M) viewed the naked Israeli assault, which occurred in international waters, as an act of self-defense. “We believe that it is in the national security interests of the United States to unequivocally reiterate that the US stands behind its longtime fried and ally.”
A similar letter signed by 87 US senators was also sent to President Obama, urging him to uphold Israeli interests irrespective of any other consideration.
In fact, the two letters stopped short of demanding that the US back Israel right or wrong, even if that proves detrimental to American national interests, including national security.
In the final analysis, we are talking about a breed of unprincipled politicians who would have us believe that Israel makes no mistakes, does no wrongs, and commits no crimes.
This is an optimal embodiment of political whoredom in America. Nothing else can sufficiently describe the moral blindness plaguing the US government as a result of this rampant manipulation of American politics.
Congress is undoubtedly the citadel of Zionist power in the United States. After all, we are talking about a vicious, secretive clique that has succeeded in utilizing the most powerful country on earth in order to expedite the Nazi-like goals of Zionism, namely to annihilate the national existence of the Palestinian people by completing the process of swallowing up their ancestral homeland.
Congress does represent the core of political corruption in America where a few Jewish tycoons have thoroughly corrupted the American political discourse, by transforming most of America’s politicians into willing political whores without any modicum of moral conscience, readily bowing before Jewish money and Jewish pressure.
Congress is more than just blind and misguided when it comes to Israel. It is actually malicious and dishonest.
Having unhesitatingly backed every Israeli crime (Israel itself can be described as a huge crime against humanity) so consistently, so totally and so enthusiastically caricatures a body that is decidedly immoral, mendacious and nefarious.
Congress may occasionally come up with arguments justifying its total embrace of Israeli Nazism. However, most serious pundits know too well that these arguments are too superficial, bereft of truth, and void of substance.
I am quite sure that most of these senators and congressmen know deep in their hearts that Israel is a criminal state that murders innocent children and lies about the murder.
They know that Israel practices racism and apartheid in the most pornographic manner. They know that Israel deliberately and constantly breaks the rule of international law. They know that the modus operandi of Israeli policies is nearly totally incompatible with declared American ideals, such as the First Amendment freedoms and equality before the law. They should also know much more about the brutal ugliness of Zionism.
However, because of cheapness of character, moral cowardice and fear of standing up to the Zionist ghoul enslaving America, the American lawmakers just content themselves with being “yes-men and yes-women” in the service of the lobby. After all, when money appears, heads bow, as Saadi Shirazi said.
This clarion moral failure in upholding moral responsibility has already corroded and is corroding America’s moral standing throughout the world. True, America is still being viewed as an economic and military giant. But America is also increasingly being viewed as moral midget.
The robber barons of Israel have already succeeded in brining about the moral downfall of America. It is only a matter of time before they succeed in bringing about America’s final downfall.
Well, I know that many would think that I am indulging in hyperboles. None the less, it is amply clear that a country that either fervently supports or just keeps silent in the face of Nazi-like atrocities in Gaza has lost its moral compass.
And when a country does lose its moral compass, it is finished no matter how many years its demise is postponed. It doesn’t matter if the ultimate downfall occurs today or tomorrow or even the day after. The important thing is that it places itself on a sure track leading to self-destruction. Remember, the Soviet Union went down not for a dearth of missiles and tanks, but rather for the loss of a moral fabric.
I have no doubt that Israel and its tribal supporters in Washington are taking America to the moral abyss. In fact, the US is already languishing in an abyss of moral confusion as a result of the Zionist stranglehold on the American government.
Thanks to Zionist bullying and manipulation, the US was made to invade and occupy two sovereign countries, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of people, including many American young men and women.
Now, Israel’s firsters would like to see America declare war on a third Muslim country in order to enable Israel to retain nuclear supremacy in the Middle East.
In short, Israel and its tribal supporters are hell-bent on transforming the world’s estimated 1.6 billion Muslims into avowed enemies of the United States, all in order to enable Israel to arrogate more Palestinian land and liquidate the enduring and just Palestinian cause.
America can inflict a lot of damage on Muslims. However, a prolonged confrontation with the Muslims of the world would dissipate American power and squander American resources. This is how great empires meet their ultimate demise.
And America’s is looming.
http://www.jnoubiyeh.com/2010/07/political-whores-of-washington.html
The CDC Votes in Favor of a Flu Vaccination Assault on Americans’ Health
by RichardGale | July 1, 2010 - 8:25am
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Gale & Gary Null
Progressive Radio Network, June 30, 2010
A central principle of democracy is freedom of choice. We can choose our political party, our religion, and the food we eat, but this does not seem to be the case when it comes to our medical choices and our freedoms to make them.
The recent unanimous 11-0 vote by the members of the Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) favoring every American over the age of six months receive the flu influenza vaccine is one more attempt by our federal health officials to open up our bodies to the free market capitalism of pharmaceutical coffers. It is another step to mandate a vaccine across the nation, a policy that has many supporters in the pro-vaccine science community.
The vote raises an alarm about our federal government’s scientific integrity, and calls into question its true allegiance and purpose: to protect the health of American citizens or increase Big Pharma profits. If the recommendation were ever enforced, the US would be the only nation in the world with mandatory flu vaccination. However, what our investigations show and what differentiates the US health agencies from the health ministries in other nations, is that in the US federal health system Big Pharma money, lobbying and corporate favors are what shape drug and vaccine policies and this is rampant throughout the system.
Mandatory influenza vaccination has been tried before across a nation. During the 1980s, Japan had mandatory flu vaccination for school children. Two large scale studies that enrolled children from four cities with vaccination rates between 1 and 90 percent discovered no difference in the incidences of flu infection. As a result, in 1987, Japanese health authorities ruled that flu vaccination was ineffective and was no more than a serious financial and legal liability if it was to continue. The mandatory policy was quickly overturned. By 1989, the number of Japanese taking the flu vaccine dropped to 20 percent. A follow up study at that time found that there was statistically insignificant change in influenza infection rates compared to when the vaccine was mandatory.[1]
Now we are hearing that for the forthcoming 2010-2011 flu season, the H1N1 flu strain will be included in the seasonal flu vaccine. This will be a quadravalent vaccine comprised of four strains including the H1N1. As of this month, the World Health Organization (WHO) continues to evaluate the H1NI virus at a 5 level pandemic and issues warnings to deaf ears now that people realize the WHO’s word is disreputable. Nevertheless, we should still brace ourselves for another year of old yarn, fear-mongering, media spin and more voodoo science.
A brief overview of the past H1N1 pandemic boondoggle will help us to understand the addiction of denial permeating the ranks of the CDC’s advisory committee. It presents a picture of a delusional bubble, unrelated to medical facts, that the CDC has found comfort to float within. The simple fact remains that the CDC is disconnected from anything resembling legitimate science thereby making their recent decision ludicrous and criminally irresponsible.
The CDC’s predictions of particular strains during past flu seasons has never been especially accurate. In fact, often it has been extraordinarily dismal. The previous swine flu prediction in 1976 resulted in only one swine flu death but hundreds of people suffering permanent disabilities, including death, from the vaccine. For the 1992-1993 flu season, the prediction made for the virus used in the vaccine was off by 84 percent. For the 1994-1995 season, it was off by 43 percent for the primary strain targeted and off 87 percent and 76 percent for the other two strains. The Laboratory Center for Disease Control’s study comparing vaccine strains with the strains appearing during the 1997-1998 season found the match off by 84 percent. One would achieve a greater accuracy rate by simply flipping a coin.
An article published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 2005, “Are US Flu Death Figures More PR Than Science” is apropos for addressing the wildly inflated figures by the WHO and CDC to present their case for mass vaccination measures. The article begins, “US data on influenza deaths are a mess.” The study reviews the CDC’s own statistical data and finds numerous inconsistencies and incompatibilities between “official estimates and national vital statistics data.” Although the government’s predictions never came close to the “dire outcomes” stated by our health officials, the CDC’s own communication strategy was marked by high levels of fear.[2]
The US government’s assessment of the past H1N1 scare is another example of flawed science and incompetence. In last August’s issue of USA Today, the White House’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which receives its recommendations from the CDC, warned us that the H1N1 would kill between 30-90,000 American citizens. At the same time, the CDC was predicting 2 million people would be infected and as high as 40 percent of the entire population. The WHO, which sleeps in the same bed with the CDC in their shared complexes in Atlanta, was screaming figures of 7.5 million deaths worldwide. Consequently, the FDA fast-tracked swine flu vaccines manufactured by 5 different drug makers, none which met reliable standards of viable clinical testing and data to determine their efficacy and safety. And pregnant women, young children and the elderly were primary targets—those also most susceptible to serious vaccine adverse reactions. Over $1.6 billion tax dollars went to Big Pharma on orders of 229 million doses, of which only 90 million were actually administered and the remaining 71 million left to decompose on shelves or dump off on poorer nations out of the graciousness of the American philanthropic spirit.
However, as we witnessed in 2009 and the early months of 2010, people woke up to the false alarm of a swine flu pandemic. Often intuition is better suited to sniff out a hoax and scandal than the pseudo-science our federal health officials give obeisance to behind closed door conference rooms. And in the case of the so-called H1N1 pandemic, intuition proved correct. Our health agencies’ warnings and numbers propagandized over mainstream media simply did not add up and have been consistently found to be contrary to more medically reliable and unbiased facts generated by independent sources without ties to the private vaccine manufacturers.
Whenever the CDC, the FDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services post figures, it is a prudent rule of thumb to be suspicious and investigate their accuracy. The fact of the matter is that the CDC is completely clueless about this past season’s flu infection rate and the number of deaths due to the H1N1 strain. Let us explain why.
Immediately following the WHO’s decision in May 2009 to cease laboratory testing of samples to determine the actual biological cause of infectious cases with influenza-like symptoms, the US followed suit. Therefore, no matter what they tell you, no matter what Dr. Gupta and other tools of the media and establishment have to say, no proper testing was performed. Only PCR technology can determine the actual subset of a Type A flu strain, such as H1N1. But PCR diagnosis was not routinely performed in order to monitor and track rates and the spread of infection. By its own admission, a CDC report found that rapid influenza kits used in hospitals and clinics were wrong as much as nine out of ten times, and on average between 40-69 percent. The CDC determined that the instant tests are “not highly worthwhile for diagnosing H1N1 infections.”
So why would any organization responsible for the tracking of an infectious disease believed to be a global health threat, potentially threatening the lives of millions of people, make such a decision to not carefully monitor flu infections is beyond comprehension, unless it knowingly determined, with malice of forethought, that the H1N1 strain was mild and not a national danger. And many independent experts in infectious diseases had been stating this throughout the season but our health agencies preferred to ignore their warnings.
Yet it is the reported death rates due to H1N1 infection that seriously call the CDC’s integrity into question. According to the CDC reports, anywhere between 8,870 and 18,300 Americans died from swine flu. For the sake of simplicity, the health feds conveniently circulate the figure of 12,000 deaths.
Projections in the UK were equally off the mark. The British Ministry of Health was expecting 65,000 deaths, but reported only 500 towards the season’s end. British citizens, however, were better informed of the scandalous hoax and of the 110 million vaccine doses purchased, under contracts amounting to over $864 million to the drug makers (not including national preparatory measures bringing the total to over $1 billion for a small population), only 6 million Brits, approximately 10 percent, were vaccinated.
What figures does the World Health Organization report for the number of worldwide swine flu deaths? 18,036. That is correct, not millions. That is only 5 percent of the global figure for deaths associated with the regular seasonal flu. I don’t need an advanced degree to notice a grave discrepancy here, unless we are to believe that the H1N1 virus was on autopilot to target victims with American birth certificates or citizenship. But the reasons for the CDC’s erroneous numbers are quite easy to understand.
First, as mentioned, the CDC did not monitor the swine flu with any precision and accuracy. Our officials don’t have, and never had, the data to make any accurate determination.
Second, the CDC does not distinguish between deaths caused by an influenza virus and deaths due to pneumonia. The two are lumped together in their mortality statistics and pneumonia-related deaths are reported as having an initial influenza cause. For example, if we take the combined figure of flu and pneumonia deaths for the flu period of 2001, and spin the figures, we are left believing that 62,034 people died from influenza. The actual figures are 61,777 died from pneumonia and only 257 from flu. Even more amazing, in those 257 cases, only 18 were scientifically identified as positive for the flu virus. These are the CDC’s own figures. But does the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and all the others report this? No. Do any of the puppets that mumble on television, with access to official sources and data, actually do their homework? No. A separate study conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics for the flu periods between 1979 and 2002 reveals that the actual range of annual flu deaths were between 257 and 3006, for an average of 1,348 per year.[3] This is a far cry from the 36,000 annual flu deaths still found on the CDC’s website and vomited by the major media.
And here is the catch. If we apply the same criteria to determine the actual number of swine flu related deaths in 2009-2010, serious vaccine adverse effects, besides the hundreds of reported miscarriages, would far outweigh deaths and injury due to the virus.
Third, there are over 150 different viruses during any given flu season that can cause flu-like symptoms, such as adenovirus, parainfluenza, bocavirus, etc. Very few of these are ever tested. For example, in Canada where actual infection rates are more carefully monitored, during the 2004-2005 flu season, the Canada Communicable Disease Report showed that of the 68,849 laboratory tests performed for influenza, only 14.9% tested positive for a flu virus. The remaining 85.1% specimens were a result of other pathogens impervious to flu vaccines.[4] For the following 2005-2006 season, Health Canada received 68,439 tests for influenza like infections. Of these, only 6,580, or 10.4% confirmed positive for influenza. The rest, 89.6%, were other pathogens.[5] So no vaccine would have benefitted or protected those almost 90 percent in Canadians.
In the US, however, the CDC relies upon an esoteric witch’s brew of figures based upon various mathematical algorithms and speculative projections with no sound basis in reality. On one CDC site we find evidence of their flawed methodology: “Statistical modeling was used to estimate how many flu-related deaths occurred among people whose underlying cause of death on their death certificate was listed as a respiratory and circulatory disease.”[6] This is clearly an indication of policy turned dogmatic with utterly disregard for sound scientific evidence. It is all business as usual, negligent disregard for scientific reason, and full speed ahead.
And while the brilliant minds in the CDC decide to expose all Americans to the adverse risks of influenza vaccination— Guillain-Barre Syndrome, schizophrenia, neurological disorders, miscarriages, polyneuritis, encephalitis, multiple sclerosis, intense headaches suggestive or meningeal or brain irritation, aphasia (loss of speech), bronchopneumonia, sexual impotence, angor pectoris, anaphylactic reactions and death[7]—we should not lose sight of what is unfolding across the great pond in the European Union’s investigations into the CDC’s favorite bed partner—the WHO, an utterly corrupt organization at every level.
Two reports recently published have indicted the WHO for serious malfeasance and conflict in interests behind the fabrication and propagation of the 2009-2010 H1N1 swine flu pandemic and has been called a “momentous error” in global health oversight. The people at the WHO had as much accuracy in their predictions as the Bush administration did with WMDs in Iraq.
The British Medical Journal printed a research paper by its Features Editor, Deborah Cohen, and Philip Carter from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, charging the largest global health organization with exaggerating the HI1N1 flu and being steered in their decisions and fraudulent fear campaign by the pharmaceutical industrial complex. According to the authors, “credibility of the WHO and the trust in the global public health system” has been damaged.
A second devastating preliminary report released by the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (CE) found gross negligence and lack of transparency in the WHO’s handling of the swine flu scare. Throughout the WHO’s key advisory committees, particularly a secretive group known as the “emergency committee”, which steered the WHO’s assessment and predictions of the spread of H1N1 flu virus and advised them to announce a level 6 pandemic, were scientists entrenched in the morass of private vaccine and drug interests, particularly GlaxoSmithKline (H1N1 vaccine and Relenza anti-viral drug maker) and Tamiflu maker Roche AG. Even worse, the WHO never publicly disclosed widespread conflict of interests. Paul Flynn, the rapporteur for the CE’s report stated, “the tentacles of drug company influence are in all levels of the decision-making process,” and “they vastly over-rated the danger on bad science.” Following a lengthy investigation, a preliminary report, which still awaits a final version next month, states the result of the WHO’s negligence in proper oversight resulted in the “waste of large sums of public money and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public”
The WHO continues to withhold the names of the 16 members sitting on its secret “emergency committee.” However, this week, two of the members resigned, notably Dr. John MacKenzie from Curtin University in Australia, who was the WHO advisor who first urged the organization to call a pandemic and is well known to be entangled in financial interests and investments with the pharmaceutical cartel.
So far the CDC has weathered the WHO controversy in Europe unscathed. A fundamental oversight in the CE’s investigation and hearings has been solely targeting the WHO. It ignores the role of government health agencies’ complicity in promulgating the H1N1 hoax and the flushing away of billions of dollars into the drug industry, especially during an economic downturn and recession. As we witness the WHO’s indifference and denial of wrongdoing crumble, the question remains over whether or not the CDC was complicit in the propagandizing of the astronomically expensive H1N1 hoax.
Of course, the vaccine industry doesn’t give a damn about the investigations. Their vaccines, anti-viral drugs, and oligarchic rule over the medical caste system make them immune to independent international scrutiny. And we can be assured none of the lap dogs at the New York Times, MSNBC and other major media would expose their crimes. In the shadow of this medical charade, the drug makers are laughing their way to the banks. No Big Pharma executive is sitting before investigative committees to give an accounting of corporations’ role in the pandemic debacle. Instead, after scoring over $6 billion (Associated Press, May 19, 2010 ) it is again business as usual and another flu season ahead to further increase revenues.
Similar to the WHO, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Vaccination and Practice, which voted in favor of a flu vaccine-for-all policy, is equally stacked with individuals entrenched in financial ties with the vaccine and drug makers. The Committee’s Chair, Dr. Carol Baker from Baylor University, has consistently received research and educational grants and private donations from Big Pharma. She is also on the Board of Directors of the National Foundation of Infectious Diseases, a consulting body of scientists frequently wined and dined and provided perks by the pharmaceutical industrial complex. Another Baylor University committee member, Dr. Wendy Keitel, received clinical trial support from Novartis, the maker of the H1N1 vaccine most widely distributed in the US. Dr. Janet Englund at the Children’s University Medical Group in Seattle received financial support for clinical trials favoring vaccines made by Medimmune (the nasal flu vaccine), Novartis, and Sanofi Pasteur. Dr. Cody Meissner received Big Pharma support through Tufts University for his supporting clinical trials for Medimmune’s RSV vaccine and for participation in Wyeth’s streptococcus vaccine for children, Prevnar.
To put this into greater perspective, since the FDA relies on industry-funded clinical trials and subsequent data to approve vaccines and drugs, there also appeared in the news this month a critical finding from the German Institute for Quality and Efficacy in Health Care, published in the peer-reviewed journal Trials. The study investigated 90 approved drugs in the US (and let us make no mistake, vaccines are drugs! In fact, the flu vaccine is listed as a Category C drug; which means there are no adequate safety studies to determine whether flu vaccination adversely affects pregnant mothers and their fetuses.) and discovered that 60 percent of the 900 papers were unpublished and some were concealed from the federal regulatory agencies. Forty to sixty percent omitted clinical details or changed their final analysis. Among the pharmaceutical industry studies alone, 94 percent were unpublished, and 86 percent of the university studies sponsored by drug makers remained unpublished.
What does this tell us? If they were positive results, the drug companies would without hesitation publish their findings; but if the clinical studies’ results contradict their expectations negatively, thereby delaying and preventing regulatory approval and licensure of a product, then there is no incentive for their release. And they are under no regulatory obligation to publish or produce them. Hence the American public is denied approximately 90 percent of the actual clinical data performed on any given drug or vaccine. The German study concludes that drug makers intentionally “conceal unfavorable results or results that do not fulfill one’s expectations.” Therefore, the vaccine and drug makers are permitted to conduct their nefarious, quack science behind closed doors with full participation and cooperation from the WHO, CDC and FDA. Of course, the CDC and FDA condone this behavior because they are completely subservient to the power and wealth of the pharmaceutical industry.
The recent CDC vote continues a tradition of denial over independent studies and reports warning of the over-exaggerated alarm and the dangers of pushing forward with an H1N1 vaccine that was not given sufficient time to prove its safety and efficacy. They even deny their own voices.
Dr. Anthony Morris is a distinguished virologist and a former Chief Vaccine Office at the FDA. His view about influenza vaccines summarizes their efficacy well. In Morris’s opinion there is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza,’ Dr. Morris states, as a matter of record, “The producers of these vaccines know they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway.”
Canada’s Vaccination Risk Awareness Network (VRAN) website is a community of physicians, researchers and vaccine researchers and journalists reporting on vaccines’ flawed promises and pseudo-science. Among all vaccines, the flu vaccine is presented with “The Most Useless Vaccine Of-All-Time Award.”
Some of the most damning evidence about the efficacy of flu vaccines was reported in two studies performed by Dr. Tom Jefferson, head of the Vaccine Field Group at the prestigious independent Cochrane Database Group, published in The Lancet and the prestigious Cochrane Database Systems Review. The first study was a systematic review of the effects of influenza vaccines in healthy children.[8] The other was a review of all the available published and unpublished safety evidence available regarding flu vaccines.[9] The authors of the study had also contacted the lead scientists or research groups for all the efficacy and safety trial studies under their review in order to gain access to additional unpublished trial studies the corporations may possess. The conclusions are shocking. The only safety study performed with an inactivated flu vaccine was conducted in 1976. Thirty-four years ago! And that single study enrolled only 35 children aged 12-28 months. Every other subsequent inactivated flu vaccine study enrolled children 3 years or older.
Dr. Jefferson told Reuters, “Immunization of very young children is not lent support by our findings. We recorded no convincing evidence that vaccines can reduce mortality, [hospital] admissions, serious complications and community transmission of influenza. In young children below the age of 2, we could find no evidence that the vaccine was different from a placebo.”[10] With respect to adults, in 64 studies involving 66,000 adults, Jefferson noted, “Vaccination of healthy adults only reduced risk of influenza by 6 percent and reduced the number of missed work days by less than one day. There was no change in the number of hospitalizations compared to the non-vaccinated.”
And in another interview for the German magazine Der Spiegel on July 21, 2009, Jefferson seems to conclude his analysis of the H1N1 scare, “Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur. The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding.”
Clearly there is no rationale for submitting the American population to a vaccine with higher risks of adverse effects than its record of efficacy in preventing flu infection. If the CDC’s vote withstands and were to ever become the law in the land, we will witness one of the largest crimes ever inflicted upon the American public, solely for corporate gain. Aside from rampant adverse effects in children, many that will not appear until their later years due to the number of toxins contained in flu vaccines, there will also be thousands of women having miscarriages. We will have entered a new medical twilight zone, where true science, responsible medical practice, and reliable public health become virtually nonexistent.
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/richardgale/29813/the-cdc-votes-in-favor-of-a-flu-vaccination-assault-on-americans-health
18-24-48
The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order
The Technological Revolution and the Future of Freedom, Part 1
by Andrew Gavin Marshall
There is a new and unique development in human history that is taking place around the world; it is unprecedented in reach and volume, and it is also the greatest threat to all global power structures: the ‘global political awakening.’ The term was coined by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and refers to the fact that, as Brzezinski wrote:
For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.[1]
It is, in essence, this massive ‘global political awakening’ which presents the gravest and greatest challenge to the organized powers of globalization and the global political economy: nation-states, multinational corporations and banks, central banks, international organizations, military, intelligence, media and academic institutions. The Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), or ‘Superclass’ as David Rothkopf refers to them, are globalized like never before. For the first time in history, we have a truly global and heavily integrated elite. As elites have globalized their power, seeking to construct a ‘new world order’ of global governance and ultimately global government, they have simultaneously globalized populations.
The ‘Technological Revolution’ (or ‘Technetronic’ Revolution, as Brzezinski termed it in 1970) involves two major geopolitical developments. The first is that as technology advances, systems of mass communication rapidly accelerate, and the world’s people are able to engage in instant communication with one another and gain access to information from around the world. In it, lies the potential – and ultimately a central source – of a massive global political awakening. Simultaneously, the Technological Revolution has allowed elites to redirect and control society in ways never before imagined, ultimately culminating in a global scientific dictatorship, as many have warned of since the early decades of the 20th century. The potential for controlling the masses has never been so great, as science unleashes the power of genetics, biometrics, surveillance, and new forms of modern eugenics; implemented by a scientific elite equipped with systems of psycho-social control (the use of psychology in controlling the masses).
What is the “Global Political Awakening”?
To answer this question, it is best to let Zbigniew Brzezinski speak for himself, since it is his term. In 2009, Zbigniew Brzezinski published an article based on a speech he delivered to the London-based Chatham House in their academic journal, International Affairs. Chatham House, formerly the Royal Institute of International Relations, is the British counterpart to the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, both of which were founded in 1921 as “Sister Institutes” to coordinate Anglo-American foreign policy. His article, “Major foreign policy challenges for the next US President,” aptly analyzes the major geopolitical challenges for the Obama administration in leading the global hegemonic state at this critical juncture. Brzezinski refers to the ‘global political awakening’ as “a truly transformative event on the global scene,” since:
For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. There are only a few pockets of humanity left in the remotest corners of the world that are not politically alert and engaged with the political turmoil and stirrings that are so widespread today around the world. The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination.[2]
Brzezinski posits that the ‘global political awakening’ is one of the most dramatic and significant developments in geopolitics that has ever occurred, and it “is apparent in radically different forms from Iraq to Indonesia, from Bolivia to Tibet.” As the Economist explained, “Though America has focused on its notion of what people want (democracy and the wealth created by free trade and open markets), Brzezinski points in a different direction: It's about dignity.” Further, argues Brzezinski, “The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening.”[3]
In 2005, Brzezinski wrote an essay for The American Interest entitled, “The Dilemma of the Last Sovereign,” in which he explains the geopolitical landscape that America and the world find themselves in. He wrote that, “For most states, sovereignty now verges on being a legal fiction,” and he critically assessed the foreign policy objectives and rhetoric of the Bush administration. Brzezinski has been an ardent critic of the “war on terror” and the rhetoric inherent in it, namely that of the demonization of Islam and Muslim people, which constitute one of the fastest growing populations and the fastest growing religion in the world. Brzezinski fears the compound negative affects this can have on American foreign policy and the objectives and aspirations of global power. He writes:
America needs to face squarely a centrally important new global reality: that the world's population is experiencing a political awakening unprecedented in scope and intensity, with the result that the politics of populism are transforming the politics of power. The need to respond to that massive phenomenon poses to the uniquely sovereign America an historic dilemma: What should be the central definition of America's global role?[4]
Brzezinski explains that formulating a foreign policy based off of one single event – the September 11th terror attacks – has both legitimized illegal measures (torture, suspension of habeas corpus, etc) and has launched and pacified citizens to accepting the “global war on terror,” a war without end. The rhetoric and emotions central to this global foreign policy created a wave of patriotism and feelings of redemption and revenge. Thus, Brzezinski explains:
There was no need to be more precise as to who the terrorists actually were, where they came from, or what historical motives, religious passions or political grievances had focused their hatred on America. Terrorism thus replaced Soviet nuclear weapons as the principal threat, and terrorists (potentially omnipresent and generally identified as Muslims) replaced communists as the ubiquitous menace.[5]
Brzezinski explains that this foreign policy, which has inflamed anti-Americanism around the world, specifically in the Muslim world, which was the principle target population of ‘terrorist’ rhetoric, has in fact further inflamed the ‘global political awakening’. Brzezinski writes that:
[T]he central challenge of our time is posed not by global terrorism, but rather by the intensifying turbulence caused by the phenomenon of global political awakening. That awakening is socially massive and politically radicalizing.[6]
This ‘global political awakening’, Brzezinski writes, while unique in its global scope today, originates in the ideas and actions of the French Revolution, which was central in “transforming modern politics through the emergence of a socially powerful national consciousness.” Brzezinski explains the evolution of the ‘awakening’:
During the subsequent 216 years, political awakening has spread gradually but inexorably like an ink blot. Europe of 1848, and more generally the nationalist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reflected the new politics of populist passions and growing mass commitment. In some places that combination embraced utopian Manichaeism for which the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Fascist assumption of power in Italy in 1922, and the Nazi seizure of the German state in 1933 were the launch-pads. The political awakening also swept China, precipitating several decades of civil conflict. Anti-colonial sentiments galvanized India, where the tactic of passive resistance effectively disarmed imperial domination, and after World War II anti-colonial political stirrings elsewhere ended the remaining European empires. In the western hemisphere, Mexico experienced the first inklings of populist activism already in the 1860s, leading eventually to the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century.[7]
Ultimately, what this implies is that – regardless of the final results of past awakenings – what is central to the concept of a ‘political awakening’ is the population – the people – taking on a political and social consciousness and subsequently, partaking in massive political and social action aimed at generating a major shift and change, or revolution, in the political, social and economic realms. Thus, no social transformation presents a greater or more direct challenge to entrenched and centralized power structures – whether they are political, social or economic in nature. Brzezinski goes on to explain the evolution of the ‘global political awakening’ in modern times:
It is no overstatement to assert that now in the 21st century the population of much of the developing world is politically stirring and in many places seething with unrest. It is a population acutely conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree, and often resentful of its perceived lack of political dignity. The nearly universal access to radio, television and increasingly the Internet is creating a community of shared perceptions and envy that can be galvanized and channeled by demagogic political or religious passions. These energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches.[8]
Brzezinski explains that several central areas of the ‘global political awakening’, such as China, India, Egypt, Bolivia, the Muslims in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia and increasingly in Europe, as well as Indians in Latin America, “increasingly are defining what they desire in reaction to what they perceive to be the hostile impact on them of the outside world. In differing ways and degrees of intensity they dislike the status quo, and many of them are susceptible to being mobilized against the external power that they both envy and perceive as self-interestedly preoccupied with that status quo.” Brzezinski elaborates on the specific group most affected by this awakening:
The youth of the Third World are particularly restless and resentful. The demographic revolution they embody is thus a political time-bomb, as well. With the exception of Europe, Japan and America, the rapidly expanding demographic bulge in the 25-year-old-and-under age bracket is creating a huge mass of impatient young people. Their minds have been stirred by sounds and images that emanate from afar and which intensify their disaffection with what is at hand. Their potential revolutionary spearhead is likely to emerge from among the scores of millions of students concentrated in the often intellectually dubious "tertiary level" educational institutions of developing countries. Depending on the definition of the tertiary educational level, there are currently worldwide between 80 and 130 million "college" students. Typically originating from the socially insecure lower middle class and inflamed by a sense of social outrage, these millions of students are revolutionaries-in-waiting, already semi-mobilized in large congregations, connected by the Internet and pre-positioned for a replay on a larger scale of what transpired years earlier in Mexico City or in Tiananmen Square. Their physical energy and emotional frustration is just waiting to be triggered by a cause, or a faith, or a hatred.[9]
Brzezinski thus posits that to address this new global “challenge” to entrenched powers, particularly nation-states that cannot sufficiently address the increasingly non-pliant populations and populist demands, what is required, is “increasingly supranational cooperation, actively promoted by the United States.” In other words, Brzezinski favours an increased and expanded ‘internationalization’, not surprising considering he laid the intellectual foundations of the Trilateral Commission. He explains that “Democracy per se is not an enduring solution,” as it could be overtaken by “radically resentful populism.” This is truly a new global reality:
Politically awakened mankind craves political dignity, which democracy can enhance, but political dignity also encompasses ethnic or national self-determination, religious self-definition, and human and social rights, all in a world now acutely aware of economic, racial and ethnic inequities. The quest for political dignity, especially through national self-determination and social transformation, is part of the pulse of self-assertion by the world's underprivileged.[10]
Thus, writes Brzezinski, “An effective response can only come from a self-confident America genuinely committed to a new vision of global solidarity.” The idea is that to address the grievances caused by globalization and global power structures, the world and America must expand and institutionalize the process of globalization, not simply in the economic sphere, but in the social and political as well. It is a flawed logic, to say the least, that the answer to this problem is to enhance and strengthen the systemic problems. One cannot put out a fire by adding fuel.
Brzezinski even wrote that, “Let it be said right away that supranationality should not be confused with world government. Even if it were desirable, mankind is not remotely ready for world government, and the American people certainly do not want it.” Instead, Brzezinski argues, America must be central in constructing a system of global governance, “in shaping a world that is defined less by the fiction of state sovereignty and more by the reality of expanding and politically regulated interdependence.”[11] In other words, not ‘global government’ but ‘global governance’, which is simply a rhetorical ploy, as ‘global governance’ – no matter how overlapping, sporadic and desultory it presents itself, is in fact a key step and necessary transition in the moves toward an actual global government.
Thus, the rhetoric and reality of a “global war on terror” in actuality further inflames the ‘global political awakening’ as opposed to challenging and addressing the issue. In 2007, Brzezinski told the US Senate that the “War on terror” was a “mythical historical narrative,”[12] or in other words, a complete fiction.
Of Power and People
To properly understand the ‘global political awakening’ it is imperative to understand and analyze the power structures that it most gravely threatens. Why is Brzezinski speaking so vociferously on this subject? From what perspective does he approach this issue?
Global power structures are most often represented by nation-states, of which there are over 200 in the world, and the vast majority are overlooking increasingly politically awakened populations who are more shaped by transnational communications and realities (such as poverty, inequality, war, empire, etc.) than by national issues. Among nation-states, the most dominant are the western powers, particularly the United States, which sits atop the global hierarchy of nations as the global hegemon (empire). American foreign policy was provided with the imperial impetus by an inter-locking network of international think tanks, which bring together the top political, banking, industrial, academic, media, military and intelligence figures to formulate coordinated policies.
The most notable of these institutions that socialize elites across national borders and provide the rationale and impetus for empire are an inter-locking network of international think tanks. In 1921, British and American elite academics got together with major international banking interests to form two “sister institutes” called the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London, now known as Chatham House, and the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. Subsequent related think tanks were created in Canada, such as the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, now known as the Canadian International Council (CIC), and other affiliated think tanks in South Africa, India, Australia, and more recently in the European Union with the formation of the European Council on Foreign Relations.[13]
Following World War I, these powers sought to reshape the world order in their designs, with Woodrow Wilson proclaiming a right to “national self determination” which shaped the formation of nation-states throughout the Middle East, which until the war was dominated by the Ottoman Empire. Thus, proclaiming a right to “self-determination” for people everywhere became, in fact, a means of constructing nation-state power structures which the western nations became not only instrumental in building, but in exerting hegemony over. To control people, one must construct institutions of control. Nations like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, etc., did not exist prior to World War I.
Elites have always sought to control populations and individuals for their own power desires. It does not matter whether the political system is that of fascism, communism, socialism or democracy: elites seek power and control and are inherent in each system of governance. In 1928, Edward Bernays, nephew of the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, wrote one of his most influential works entitled “Propaganda.” Bernays also wrote the book on “Public Relations,” and is known as the “father of public relations,” and few outside of that area know of Bernays; however, his effect on elites and social control has been profound and wide-ranging.
Bernays led the propaganda effort behind the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, framing it as a “liberation from Communism” when in fact it was the imposition of a decades-long dictatorship to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, who had hired Bernays to manage the media campaign against the democratic socialist government of Guatemala. Bernays also found a fan and student in Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, who took many of his ideas from Bernays’ writings. Among one of Bernays’ more infamous projects was the popularizing of smoking for American women, as he hired beautiful women to walk up and down Madison Avenue while smoking cigarettes, giving women the idea that smoking is synonymous with beauty.
In his 1928 book, “Propaganda,” Bernays wrote that, “If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” Further:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society... Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . . In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.[14]
Following World War II, America became the global hegemon, whose imperial impetus was provided by the strategic concept of “containment” in containing the spread of Communism. Thus, America’s imperial adventures in Korea, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America became defined by the desire to “roll back” the influence of the Soviet Union and Communism. It was, not surprisingly, the Council on Foreign Relations that originated the idea of “containment” as a central feature of foreign policy.[15]
Further, following World War II, America was handed the responsibility for overseeing and managing the international monetary system and global political economy through the creation of institutions and agreements such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), NATO, the UN, and GATT (later to become the World Trade Organization – WTO). One central power institution that was significant in establishing consensus among Western elites and providing a forum for expanding global western hegemony was the Bilderberg Group, founded in 1954 as an international think tank.[16]
Zbigniew Brzezinski, an up-and-coming academic, joined the Council on Foreign Relations in the early 1960s. In 1970, Brzezinski, who had attended a few Bilderberg meetings, wrote a book entitled, “Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era,” in which he analyzed the impact of the ‘Revolution in Technology and Electronics,’ thus, the ‘technetronic era.’ Brzezinski defines the ‘technetronic society’ as, “a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics – particularly in the arena of computers and communications. The industrial process is no longer the principal determinant of social change, altering the mores, the social structure, and the values of society.”[17]
Brzezinski, expanding upon notions of social control, such as those propagated by Edward Bernays, wrote that, “Human conduct, some argue, can be predetermined and subjected to deliberate control,” and he quoted an “experimenter in intelligence control” who asserted that, “I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.”[18]
Brzezinski, in a telling exposé of his astute powers of observation and ability to identify major global trends, wrote that we are “witnessing the emergence of transnational elites” who are “composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men, and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries, their perspectives are not confined by national traditions, and their interests are more functional than national.” Further, writes Brzezinski, “it is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook.” However, warns Brzezinski, this increasing internationalization of elites “could create a dangerous gap between them and the politically activated masses, whose ‘nativism’ – exploited by more nationalist political leaders – could work against the ‘cosmopolitan’ elites.”[19] Brzezinski also wrote about “the gradual appearance of a more controlled and directed society,” in the “technetronic revolution;” explaining:
Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control. Under such circumstances, the scientific and technological momentum of the country would not be reversed but would actually feed on the situation it exploits.[20]
Further, writes Brzezinski, “Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the steppingstones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society.” Elaborating, Brzezinski writes, “The traditionally democratic American society could, because of its fascination with technical efficiency, become an extremely controlled society, and its humane and individualistic qualities would thereby be lost.”[21]
In his book, Brzezinski called for a “Community of the Developed Nations,” consisting of Western Europe, North America and Japan, to coordinate and integrate in order to shape a ‘new world order’ built upon ideas of global governance under the direction of these transnational elites. In 1972, Brzezinski and his friend, David Rockefeller, presented the idea to the annual Bilderberg meetings. Rockefeller was, at that time, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and was CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank. In 1973, Brzezinski and Rockefeller created the Trilateral Commission, a sort of sister institute to the Bilderberg Group, with much cross-over membership, bringing Japan into the western sphere of economic and political integration.[22]
In 1975, the Trilateral Commission published a Task Force Report entitled, “The Crisis of Democracy,” of which one of the principal authors was Samuel Huntington, a political scientist and close associate and friend of Zbigniew Brzezinski. In this report, Huntington argues that the 1960s saw a surge in democracy in America, with an upswing in citizen participation, often “in the form of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and ‘cause’ organizations.”[23] Further, “the 1960s also saw a reassertion of the primacy of equality as a goal in social, economic, and political life.”[24] Huntington analyzed how as part of this “democratic surge,” statistics showed that throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, there was a dramatic increase in the percentage of people who felt the United States was spending too much on defense (from 18% in 1960 to 52% in 1969, largely due to the Vietnam War).[25] In other words, people were becoming politically aware of empire and exploitation.
Huntington wrote that the “essence of the democratic surge of the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private,” and that, “People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.” Huntington explained that in the 1960s, “hierarchy, expertise, and wealth” had come “under heavy attack.”[26] He stated that three key issues which were central to the increased political participation in the 1960s were:
social issues, such as use of drugs, civil liberties, and the role of women; racial issues, involving integration, busing, government aid to minority groups, and urban riots; military issues, involving primarily, of course, the war in Vietnam but also the draft, military spending, military aid programs, and the role of the military-industrial complex more generally.[27]
Huntington presented these issues, essentially, as the “crisis of democracy,” in that they increased distrust with the government and authority, that they led to social and ideological polarization, and led to a “Decline in the authority, status, influence, and effectiveness of the presidency.”[28]
Huntington concluded that many problems of governance in the United States stem from an “excess of democracy,” and that, “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” Huntington explained that society has always had “marginal groups” which do not participate in politics, and while acknowledging that the existence of “marginality on the part of some groups is inherently undemocratic,” it has also “enabled democracy to function effectively.” Huntington identifies “the blacks” as one such group that had become politically active, posing a “danger of overloading the political system with demands.”[29]
Huntington, in his conclusion, stated that the vulnerability of democracy, essentially the ‘crisis of democracy,’ comes from “a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society,” and that what is needed is “a more balanced existence” in which there are “desirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy.”[30] Summed up, the Trilateral Commission Task Force Report essentially explained that the “Crisis of Democracy” is that there is too much of it, and so the ‘solution’ to the ‘crisis’ is to have less democracy and more ‘authority.’
The New World Order
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, American ideologues – politicians and academics – began discussing the idea of the emergence of a “new world order” in which power in the world is centralized with one power – the United States, and laid the basis for an expansion of elitist ideology pertaining to the notion of ‘globalization’: that power and power structures should be globalizaed. In short, the ‘new world order’ was to be a global order of global governance. In the short term, it was to be led by the United States, which must be the central and primary actor in constructing a new world order, and ultimately a global government.[31]
Anne-Marie Slaughter, currently the Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department, is a prominent academic within the American elite establishment, having long served in various posts at the State Department, elite universities and on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1997, Slaughter wrote an article for the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, “Foreign Affairs,” in which she discussed the theoretical foundations of the ‘new world order.’ In it, she wrote that, “The state is not disappearing, it is disaggregating into its separate, functionally distinct parts. These parts—courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and even legislatures—are networking with their counterparts abroad, creating a dense web of relations that constitutes a new, transgovernmental order,” and that, “transgovernmentalism is rapidly becoming the most widespread and effective mode of international governance.”[32]
Long preceding Slaughter’s analysis of the ‘new world order,’ Richard N. Gardner published an article in Foreign Affairs titled, “The Hard Road to World Order.” Gardner, a former American Ambassador and member of the Trilateral Commission, wrote that, “The quest for a world structure that secures peace, advances human rights and provides the conditions for economic progress—for what is loosely called world order—has never seemed more frustrating but at the same time strangely hopeful.”[33]
Gardner wrote, “If instant world government, [UN] Charter review, and a greatly strengthened International Court do not provide the answers, what hope for progress is there? The answer will not satisfy those who seek simple solutions to complex problems, but it comes down essentially to this: The hope for the foreseeable future lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis, as the necessity for cooperation is perceived by the relevant nations.”[34]
He then stated, “In short, the "house of world order" will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great "booming, buzzing confusion," to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”[35]
In 1992, Strobe Talbott wrote an article for Time Magazine entitled, “The Birth of the Global Nation.” Talbott worked as a journalist for Time Magazine for 21 years, and has been a fellow of the Yale Corporation, a trustee of the Hotchkiss School and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, the North American Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, and the American Association of Rhodes Scholars, and a member of the participating faculty of the World Economic Forum. Talbott served as Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001 in the Clinton administration and currently sits as President of the Brookings Institution, one of the premier American think tanks. In his 1992 article, “within the next hundred years,” Talbott wrote, “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.” He explained:
All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary. Through the ages, there has been an overall trend toward larger units claiming sovereignty and, paradoxically, a gradual diminution of how much true sovereignty any one country actually has.[36]
Further, he wrote that, “it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government. With the advent of electricity, radio and air travel, the planet has become smaller than ever, its commercial life freer, its nations more interdependent and its conflicts bloodier.”[37]
David Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, former managing director of Kissinger and Associates, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote a book titled, “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making.” As a member of that “superclass,” his writing should provide a necessary insight into the construction of this “New World Order.” He states that, “In a world of global movements and threats that don’t present their passports at national borders, it is no longer possible for a nation-state acting alone to fulfill its portion of the social contract.” He wrote that, “progress will continue to be made,” however, it will be challenging, because it “undercuts many national and local power structures and cultural concepts that have foundations deep in the bedrock of human civilization, namely the notion of sovereignty.” He further wrote that, “Mechanisms of global governance are more achievable in today’s environment,” and that these mechanisms “are often creative with temporary solutions to urgent problems that cannot wait for the world to embrace a bigger and more controversial idea like real global government.”[38]
In December of 2008, the Financial Times published an article titled, “And Now for A World Government,” in which the author, former Bilderberg attendee, Gideon Rachman, wrote that, “for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible,” and that, “A ‘world government’ would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.”[39]
He stated that, “it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a ‘global war on terror’.” He wrote that the European model could “go global” and that a world government “could be done,” as “The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.” He quoted an adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy as saying, “Global governance is just a euphemism for global government,” and that the “core of the international financial crisis is that we have global financial markets and no global rule of law.” However, Rachman states that any push towards a global government “will be a painful, slow process.” He then states that a key problem in this push can be explained with an example from the EU, which “has suffered a series of humiliating defeats in referendums, when plans for ‘ever closer union’ have been referred to the voters. In general, the Union has progressed fastest when far-reaching deals have been agreed by technocrats and politicians – and then pushed through without direct reference to the voters. International governance tends to be effective, only when it is anti-democratic.”[40]
The Global Political Awakening and the Global Economic Crisis
In the face of the global economic crisis, the process that has led to the global political awakening is rapidly expanding, as the social, political and economic inequalities and disparities that led to the awakening are all being exacerbated and expanded. Thus, the global political awakening itself is entering into a period in which it will undergo rapid, expansionary and global transformation.
This ‘global political awakening’, of which Brzezinski has explained as being one of the primary global geopolitical challenges of today, has largely, up until recent times, been exemplified in the ‘Global South’, or the ‘Third World’ developing nations of the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. Developments in recent decades and years in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Iran exemplify the nationalist-orientation of much of this awakening, taking place in a world increasingly and incrementally moving towards global governance and global institutions.
In 1998, Hugo Chavez became President of Venezuela, having campaigned on promises of aiding the nation’s poor majority. In 2002, an American coup attempt took place in Venezuela, but Chavez retained his power and was further emboldened by the attempt, and gained a great burst of popular support among the people. Chavez has undertaken what he refers to as a process of “Bolivarian socialism”, and has taken a decidedly and vehemently anti-American posture in Latin America, long considered America’s “back yard.” Suddenly, there is virulent rhetoric and contempt against the United States and its influence in the region, which itself is backed by the enormous oil-wealth of Venezuela.
In Bolivia, Evo Morales was elected President in 2005 of the poorest nation in South America, and he was also the first indigenous leader of that country to ever hold that position of power, after having long been dominated by the Spanish-descended landed aristocracy. Evo Morales rose to power on the wave of various social movements within Bolivia, key among them being the “water wars” which took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city, in 2000. The water wars were instigated after the World Bank forced Bolivia to privatize its water so that American and European companies could come in and purchase the rights to Bolivia’s water, meaning that people in the poorest nation in South America could not even drink rain water without paying American or European companies for the ‘right’ to use it. Thus, revolt arose and Evo Morales rose with it. Now, Morales and Chavez represent the “new Left” in Latin America, and with it, growing sentiments of anti-American imperialism.
In Iran, itself defined more by nationalism than ethnic polarities, has become a principal target of the western hegemonic world order, as it sits atop massive gas and oil reserves, and is virulently anti-American and firmly opposed to western hegemony in the Middle East. However, with increased American rhetoric against Iran, its regime and political elites are further emboldened and politically strengthened among its people, the majority of whom are poor.
Global socio-political economic conditions directly relate to the expansion and emergence of the ‘global political awakening’. As of 1998, “3 billion people live on less than $2 per day while 1.3 billion get by on less than $1 per day. Seventy percent of those living on less than $1 per day are women.”[41] In 2003, a World Bank report revealed that, “A minority of the world's population (17%) consume most of the world's resources (80%), leaving almost 5 billion people to live on the remaining 20%. As a result, billions of people are living without the very basic necessities of life - food, water, housing and sanitation.”[42]
In regards to poverty and hunger statistics, “Over 840 million people in the world are malnourished—799 million of them are from the developing world. Sadly, more than 153 million of them are under the age of 5 (half the entire US population).” Further, “Every day, 34,000 children under five die of hunger or other hunger-related diseases. This results in 6 million deaths a year.” That amounts to a “Hunger Holocaust” that takes place every single year. As of 2003, “Of 6.2 billion living today, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day. Nearly 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”[43]
In 2006, a groundbreaking and comprehensive report released by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) reported that, “The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.” An incredibly startling statistic was that:
[T]he richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.[44]
This is worth repeating: the top 1% owns 40% of global assets; the top 10% owns 85% of world assets; and the bottom 50% owns 1% of global assets; a sobering figure, indeed. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) report stated that in 2009, “an estimated 55 million to 90 million more people will be living in extreme poverty than anticipated before the crisis.” Further, “the encouraging trend in the eradication of hunger since the early 1990s was reversed in 2008, largely due to higher food prices.” Hunger in developing regions has risen to 17% in 2008, and “children bear the brunt of the burden.”[45]
In April of 2009, a major global charity, Oxfam, reported that a couple trillion dollars given to bail out banks could have been enough “to end global extreme poverty for 50 years.”[46] In September of 2009, Oxfam reported that the economic crisis “is forcing 100 people-a-minute into poverty.” Oxfam stated that, “Developing countries across the globe are struggling to respond to the global recession that continues to slash incomes, destroy jobs and has helped push the total number of hungry people in the world above 1 billion.”[47]
The financial crisis has hit the ‘developing’ world much harder than the western developed nations of the world. The UN reported in March of 2009 that, “Reduced growth in 2009 will cost the 390 million people in sub-Saharan Africa living in extreme poverty around $18 billion, or $46 per person,” and “This projected loss represents 20 per cent of the per capita income of Africa’s poor – a figure that dwarfs the losses sustained in the developed world.”[48]
Thus, the majority of the world’s people live in absolute poverty and social dislocation. This is directly the result of the globalized world order that has been and is being constructed. Now, as that same infrastructure is being further institutionalized and built upon, people are being thrown into the ‘awakening’ like never before. Their very poverty pushes them into an awakening. There is a seemingly lost notion of judging a society by how it treats it weakest members: the poor. Poverty forces one to look at the world differently, as they see the harsh restraints that society has imposed upon the human spirit. Life simply cannot be about the struggle to make payments week-to-week; to afford water, shelter, and food; to live according to the dictates of money and power.
Look to history, and you see that from some of the most oppressive societies can come the greatest of humanity. Russia, a nation which has never in its history experienced true political freedom for the individual, has managed to produce some of the greatest music, art, expression and literature as a vibrant outcry of humanity from a society so overcome with the need to control it. It the fact that such triumphs of human spirit can come from such tyrannies over human nature is a sobering display of the great mystery of human beings. Why waste humanity by subjecting it to poverty? Think of the difference that could be made if all of humanity was allowed to flourish individually and collectively; think of all the ideas, art, expression, intellect and beauty we aren’t getting from those who have no voice.
Until we address this fundamental issue, any notion of humanity as being ‘civilized’ is but a cynical joke. If it’s human civilization, we haven’t quite figured it out yet. We don’t yet have a proper definition of ‘civilized’, and we need to make it ‘humane’.
The West and the Awakening
The middle classes of the western world are undergoing a dramatic transition, most especially in the wake of the global economic crisis. In the previous decades, the middle class has become a debt-based class, whose consumption was based almost entirely on debt, and so their ability to consume and be the social bedrock of the capitalist system is but a mere fiction. Never in history has the middle class, and most especially the youth who are graduating college into the hardest job market in decades, been in such peril.[49]
The global debt crisis, which is beginning in Greece, and spreading throughout the euro-zone economies of Spain, Portugal, Ireland and ultimately the entire EU, will further consume the UK, Japan and go all the way to America.[50] This will be a truly global debt crisis. Government measures to address the issue of debt focus on the implementation of ‘fiscal austerity measures’ to reduce the debt burdens and make interest payments on their debts.
‘Fiscal austerity’ is a vague term that in actuality refers to cutting social spending and increasing taxes. The effect this has is that the public sector is devastated, as all assets are privatized, public workers are fired en masse, unemployment becomes rampant, health and education disappear, taxes rise dramatically, and currencies are devalued to make all assets cheaper for international corporations and banks to buy up, while internally causing inflation – dramatically increasing the costs of fuel and food. In short, ‘fiscal austerity’ implies ‘social destruction’ as the social foundations of nations and peoples are pulled out from under them. States then become despotic and oppress the people, who naturally revolt against ‘austerity’: the sterilization of society.
‘Fiscal austerity’ swept the developing world through the 1980s and 1990s in response to the 1980s debt crisis which consumed Latin America, Africa, and areas of Asia. The result of the fiscal austerity measures imposed upon nations by the World Bank and IMF was the social dismantling of the new societies and their subsequent enslavement to the international creditors of the IMF, World Bank, and western corporations and banks. It was an era of economic imperialism, and the IMF was a central tool of this imperial project.
As the debt crisis we see unfolding today sweeps the world, the IMF is again stepping in to impose ‘fiscal austerity’ on nations in return for short-term loans for countries to pay off the interest on their exorbitant debts, themselves owed mostly to major European and American banks. Western nations have agreed to impose fiscal austerity,[51] which will in fact only inflame the crisis, deepen the depression and destroy the social foundations of the west so that we are left only with the authoritarian apparatus of state power – the police, military, homeland ‘security’ apparatus – which is employed against people to protect the status quo powers.
The IMF has also come to the global economic crisis with a new agenda, giving out loans in its own synthetic currency – Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) – an international reserve basket of currencies. The G20 in April of 2009 granted the IMF the authority to begin phasing in the applications of issuing SDRs, and for the IMF to in effect become a global central bank issuing a global currency.[52] So through this global debt crisis, SDRs will be disbursed globally – both efficiently and in abundance – as nations will need major capital inflows and loans to pay off interest payments, or in the event of a default. This will happen at a pace so rapid that it would never be conceivable if not for a global economic crisis. The same took place in the 1980s, as the nature of “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs) could not be properly assessed as detrimental to economic conditions and ultimately socially devastating, for countries needed money fast (as the debt crisis spread across the developing world) and were not in a position to negotiate. Today, this will be the ‘globalization’ of the debt crisis of the 1980s, on a much larger and more devastating scale, and the reaction will be equally globalized and devastating: the continued implementation of ‘global governance’.
As austerity hits the west, the middle class will vanish in obscurity, as they will be absorbed into the lower, labour-oriented working class.[53] The youth of the western middle class, comprising the majority of the educated youth, will be exposed to a ‘poverty of expectations’ in which they grew up in a world in which they were promised everything, and from whom everything was so quickly taken. The inevitability of protests, riots and possible rebellion is as sure as the sun rises.[54]
In the United States, the emergence of the Tea Party movement is representative of – in large part – a growing dissatisfaction with the government and the economy. Naturally, like any group, it has its radical and fringe elements, which tend to draw the majority of media attention in an effort to shape public opinion, but the core and the driving force of the movement is the notion of popular dissatisfaction with government. Whatever one thinks of the legitimacy of such protestations, people are not pleased, and people are taking to the streets. And so it begins.
Even intellectuals of the left have spoken publicly warning people not to simply and so easily discount the Tea Party movement as fringe or radical. One such individual, Noam Chomsky, while speaking at a University in April of 2010, warned that he felt fascism was coming to America, and he explained that, “Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” as their attitudes “are understandable.” He explained, “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.” This constitutes ‘class resentment’, as “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels.” This same financial industry is directly linked to Obama, who is supporting their interests, and people are noticing.[55]
Another notable feminist intellectual of the left, Naomi Wolf, who wrote a book during the Bush administration on the emergence of fascism in America, and much of her message is being picked up by the Tea Party movement, as those on the right who were listening and agreeing with Wolf during the Bush administration (a considerable minority), then provided the impetus for the emergence of the Tea Party movement and many of its core or original ideas. In an interview in March 2010, Wolf explained that her ideas are even more relevant under Obama than Bush. She explained, “Bush legalized torture, but Obama is legalizing impunity. He promised to roll stuff back, but he is institutionalizing these things forever. It is terrifying and the left doesn’t seem to recognize it.” She explained how the left, while active under Bush, has been tranquilized under Obama, and that there is a potential for true intellectuals and for people more generally and more importantly, to reach out to each other across the spectrum. She explained:
I was invited by the Ron Paul supporters to their rally in Washington last summer and I loved it. I met a lot of people I respected, a lot of “ordinary” people, as in not privileged. They were stepping up to the plate, when my own liberal privileged fellow demographic habituates were lying around whining. It was a wake-up call to the libertarians that there’s a progressive who cares so much about the same issues. Their views of liberals are just as distorted as ours are of conservatives.[56]
In regards to the Tea Party movement, Wolf had this to say: “The Tea Party is not monolithic. There is a battle between people who care about liberty and the Constitution and the Republican Establishment who is trying to take ownership of it and redirect it for its own purposes.” Further, she explained that the Tea Party is “ahead of their time” on certain issues, “I used to think “End the Fed people” were crackpots. The media paints them as deranged. But it turned out we had good reason to have more oversight.”[57]
In time, others will join with the Tea Party movement and new activist groups, the anti-war movement will have to revitalize itself or die away; since Obama became President their influence, their voice, and their dignity has all but vanished. They have become a pacified voice, and their silence is complicity; thus, the anti-war movement must reignite and reinvigorate or it will decompose. The ‘Left’s’ distrust of corporations must merge with the ‘Right’s’ distrust of government to create a trust in ‘people’. Soon students will be joining protests, and the issues of the Tea Party movement and others like it can become more refined and informed.
When the middle classes of the west are plunged into poverty, it will force an awakening, for when people have nothing, they have nothing left to lose. The only way that the entrenched powers of the world have been able to expand their power and maintain their power is with the ignorant consent of the populations of the west. Issues of war, empire, economics and terror shape public opinion and allow social planners to redirect and reconstitute society. The people of the west have allowed themselves to be ruled as such and have allowed our rulers to be so ruthless in our names. People have been blinded by consumerism and entertainment. Images of celebrities, professional sports, Hollywood, iPods, blackberrys, and PCs consume the minds of people, and especially the youth of the west today. It has been the illusion of being the consuming class that has allowed our societies to be run so recklessly. So long as we have our TVs and PCs we won’t pay attention to anything else!
When the ability to consume is removed, the people will enter into a period of a great awakening. This will give rise to major new political movements, many progressive but some regressive, some fringe and radical, some violent and tyrannical, but altogether new and ultimately global. This is when the people of the west will come to realize the plight of the rest. This will be the era in which people begin to understand the realization that there is great truth in Dr. Martin Luther King’s words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Thus, the struggle of Africans will become the struggle of Americans: it must be freedom for all or freedom for none.
This is the major geopolitical reality and the pre-eminent global threat to world power structures. No development in all of human history presents such a monumental challenge to the status quo. As global power structures have never resembled such a monumental threat to mankind, mankind has never posed such an immense threat to institutionalized power. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Even if elites think that they truly do run the world, human nature has a way of exposing the flaws in that assumption. Human nature is not meant to be ‘controlled,’ but rather is meant to be nurtured.
A View From the Top
Again, it is important to go to Brzezinski’s own words in describing this new geopolitical reality, as it provides great insight into not only how the ‘global political awakening’ is defined; but more importantly, how it is perceived by those who hold power. In 2004, Brzezinski gave a speech at the Carnegie Council on his 2004 book, “The Choice”. The Carnegie Council is an elite think tank based in the United States, so Brzezinski is speaking to those who are potentially negatively affected by such an awakening. Brzezinski stated that America’s foreign policy in the wake of 9/11 – the “War on Terror” – is presenting a major challenge to American hegemony, as it is increasingly isolating the United States and damaging the nation’s credibility, as well as hiding the issues in virulent rhetoric which only further inflames the real and true challenge: the global political awakening. He states:
The misdiagnosis [of foreign policy] pertains to a relatively vague, excessively abstract, highly emotional, semi-theological definition of the chief menace that we face today in the world, and the consequent slighting of what I view as the unprecedented global challenge arising out of the unique phenomenon of a truly massive global political awakening of mankind. We live in an age in which mankind writ large is becoming politically conscious and politically activated to an unprecedented degree, and it is this condition which is producing a great deal of international turmoil.
But we are not focusing on that. We are focusing specifically on one word, which is being elevated into a specter, defined as an entity, presented as somehow unified but unrelated to any specific event or place—and that word is terrorism. The global challenge today on the basis of which we tend to operate politically is the definition of terrorism with a global reach as the principal challenge of our time.
I don’t deny that terrorism is a reality, a threat to us, an ugly menace and a vicious manifestation. But it is a symptom of something larger and more complicated, related to the global turmoil that takes place in many parts of the world and manifests itself in different ways.
That turmoil is the product of the political awakening, the fact that today vast masses of the world are not politically neutered, as they have been throughout history. They have political consciousness. It may be undefined, it may point in different directions, it may be primitive, it may be intolerant, it may be hateful, but it is a form of political activism.[58]
Brzezinski explains that literacy has made for greater political awareness, while TV has made for immediate awareness of global disparities, and the Internet has provided instant communications. Further, says Brzezinski, “Much of this is also spurred by America's impact on the world,” or in other words, American economic, political, and cultural imperialism; and further, “Much of it is also fueled by globalization, which the United States propounds, favors and projects by virtue of being a globally outward-thrusting society.” Brzezinski warns, “But that also contributes to instability, and is beginning to create something altogether new: namely, some new ideological or doctrinal challenge which might fill the void created by the disappearance of communism.” Brzezinski explains that Communism emerged in the last century as an alternative, however, today:
it is now totally discredited, and we have a pragmatic vacuum in the world today regarding doctrines. But I see the beginnings, in writings and stirrings, of the making of a doctrine which combines anti-Americanism with anti-globalization, and the two could become a powerful force in a world that is very unequal and turbulent.[59]
A question following Brzezinski’s speech asked him to expand upon how to address the notion of and deal with the ‘global political awakening’. Brzezinski explained that, “We deal with the world as it is and we are as we are. If we are to use our power intelligently and if we are to move in the right direction, we have no choice but do it incrementally.”[60] In other words, as Brzezinski has detailed his vision of a solution to world problems in creating the conditions for global governance; they must do it “incrementally,” for that is how to “use [their] power intelligently.” The solution to the ‘global political awakening’, in the view from the top, is to continue to create the apparatus of an oppressive global government.
On April 23, 2010, Zbigniew Brzezinski went to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations to give a speech at an event jointly-hosted by the Canadian International Council (CIC), the Canadian counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations in the US and Chatham House in the U.K. These are many of the intellectual, social, political and economic elite of Canada. In his speech, Brzezinski gives a breakdown of the modern geopolitical realities:
Let me begin by making just a thumbnail definition of the geopolitical context in which we all find ourselves, including America. And in my perspective, that geopolitical context is very much defined by new – by two new global realities. The first is that global political leadership – by which I mean the role of certain leading powers in the world – has now become much more diversified unlike what it was until relatively recently. Relatively recently still, the world was dominated by the Atlantic world, as it had been for many centuries. It no longer is. Today, the rise of the Far East has created a new but much more differentiated global leadership. One which in a nutshell involves a wanton hazard, an arbitrary list of the primary players in the world scene: the United States, clearly; maybe next to it – but maybe – the European Union, I say maybe because it is not yet a political entity; certainly, increasingly so, and visibly so, China; Russia, mainly in one respect only because it is a nuclear power co-equal to the United States, but otherwise very deficient in all of the major indices of what constitutes global power. Behind Russia, perhaps individually, but to a much lesser extent, Germany, France, Great Britain, Japan, certainly, although it does not have the political assertive posture; India is rising, and then in the background of that we have the new entity of the G20, a much more diversified global leadership, lacking internal unity, with many of its members in bilateral antagonisms. That makes the context much more complicated.
The other major change in international affairs is that for the first time, in all of human history, mankind has been politically awakened. That is a total new reality – total new reality. It has not been so for most of human history until the last one hundred years. And in the course of the last one hundred years, the whole world has become politically awakened. And no matter where you go, politics is a matter of social engagement, and most people know what is generally going on –generally going on – in the world, and are consciously aware of global inequities, inequalities, lack of respect, exploitation. Mankind is now politically awakened and stirring. The combination of the two: the diversified global leadership, politically awakened masses, makes a much more difficult context for any major power including, currently, the leading world power: the United States.[61]
Conclusion
So, the Technological Revolution has led to a diametrically opposed, antagonistic, and conflicting geopolitical reality: never before has humanity been so awakened to issues of power, exploitation, imperialism and domination; and simultaneously, never before have elites been so transnational and global in orientation, and with the ability to impose such a truly global system of scientific despotism and political oppression. These are the two major geopolitical realities of the world today. Reflect on that. Never in all of human history has mankind been so capable of achieving a true global political psycho-social awakening; nor has humanity ever been in such danger of being subjected to a truly global scientific totalitarianism, potentially more oppressive than any system known before, and without a doubt more technologically capable of imposing a permanent despotism upon humanity. So we are filled with hope, but driven by urgency. In all of human history, never has the potential nor the repercussions of human actions and ideas ever been so monumental.
Suddenly, global elites are faced with the reality of seeking to dominate populations that are increasingly becoming self-aware and are developing a global consciousness. Thus, a population being subjected to domination in Africa has the ability to become aware of a population being subjected to the same forms of domination in the Middle East, South America or Asia; and they can recognize that they are all being dominated by the same global power structures. That is a key point: not only is the awakening global in its reach, but in its nature; it creates within the individual, an awareness of the global condition. So it is a ‘global awakening’ both in the external environment, and in the internal psychology.
This new reality in the world, coupled with the fact that the world’s population has never been so vast, presents a challenge to elites seeking to dominate people all over the world who are aware and awakened to the realities of social inequality, war, poverty, exploitation, disrespect, imperialism and domination. This directly implies that these populations will be significantly more challenging to control: economically, politically, socially, psychologically and spiritually. Thus, from the point of view of the global oligarchy, the only method of imposing order and control – on this unique and historical human condition – is through the organized chaos of economic crises, war, and the rapid expansion and institutionalization of a global scientific dictatorship. Our hope is their fear; and our greatest fear is their only hope.
As Charles Dickens once wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That has never been so true as it is today.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19873
LOL and even I'm sleeping.
Have a good time at the fundraiser. :)
I really am sleeping.
2-24-48
LOL we must have the same watch list.
But yes...it made me think hard. I think the woman had it right.
What isn't insane these days?
I know you have your plan. Good luck with it.
I watched "The Road" the other night. Made me rethink some things.
And let us not forget....the BP disaster is a great distraction from the basic agenda
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, June 25, 2010
President Obama will be handed the power to shut down the Internet for at least four months without Congressional oversight if the Senate votes for the infamous Internet ‘kill switch’ bill, which was approved by a key Senate committee yesterday and now moves to the floor.
The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which is being pushed hard by Senator Joe Lieberman, would hand absolute power to the federal government to close down networks, and block incoming Internet traffic from certain countries under a declared national emergency.
Despite the Center for Democracy and Technology and 23 other privacy and technology organizations sending letters to Lieberman and other backers of the bill expressing concerns that the legislation could be used to stifle free speech, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed in the bill in advance of a vote on the Senate floor.
In response to widespread criticism of the bill, language was added that would force the government to seek congressional approval to extend emergency measures beyond 120 days. Still, this would hand Obama the authority to shut down the Internet on a whim without Congressional oversight or approval for a period of no less than four months.
The Senators pushing the bill rejected the claim that the bill was a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet, not by denying that Obama would be given the authority to shut down the Internet as part of this legislation, but by arguing that he already had the power to do so.
They argued “That the President already had authority under the Communications Act to “cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communication” when there is a “state or threat of war”, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.
Fears that the legislation is aimed at bringing the Internet under the regulatory power of the U.S. government in an offensive against free speech were heightened further on Sunday, when Lieberman revealed that the plan was to mimic China’s policies of policing the web with censorship and coercion.
“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley.
While media and public attention is overwhelmingly focused on the BP oil spill, the establishment is quietly preparing the framework that will allow Obama, or indeed any President who follows him, to bring down a technological iron curtain that will give the government a foot in the door on seizing complete control over the Internet.
As we have illustrated, fears surrounding cybersecurity have been hyped to mask the real agenda behind the bill, which is to strangle the runaway growth of alternative and independent media outlets which are exposing government atrocities, cover-ups and cronyism like never before.
Indeed, China uses similar rhetoric about the need to maintain “security” and combating cyber warfare by regulating the web, when in reality their entire program is focused around silencing anyone who criticizes the state.
The real agenda behind government control of the Internet has always been to strangle and suffocate independent media outlets who are now competing with and even displacing establishment press organs, with websites like the Drudge Report now attracting more traffic than many large newspapers combined. As part of this war against independent media, the FTC recently proposing a “Drudge Tax” that would force independent media organizations to pay fees that would be used to fund mainstream newspapers.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-can-shut-down-internet-for-4-months-under-new-emergency-powers.html
here's a follow up
BP oil spill Corexit dispersants suspected in widespread crop damage
181
1213
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.UPDATE: June 26, 2010 - Last May 24, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson promised, "We will conduct our own tests to determine the least toxic, most effective dispersant available in the volumes necessary for a crisis of this magnitude... I am not satisfied that BP has done an extensive enough analysis of other dispersant options."
As of today, those tests have not been completed, according to the EPA. In the meantime, BP has dumped 1.4 million gallons of Corexit on the gulf. Next week, we could have a hurricane pushing Corexit inland.
Promises... promises...
---ORIGINAL POST: June 10, 2010------------
Just when you thought the damages BP could cause was limited to beaches, marshes, oceans, people's livelihoods, birds and marine life, there's more.
BP's favorite dispersant Corexit 9500 is being sprayed at the oil gusher on the ocean floor. Corexit is also being air sprayed across hundreds of miles of oil slicks all across the gulf. There have been widespread reports of oil cleanup crews reporting various injuries including respiratory distress, dizziness and headaches.
Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco of Naperville, Illinois. Corexit is is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm).
In a report written by Anita George-Ares and James R. Clark for Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. titled "Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Three Corexit Products: An Overview" Corexit 9500 was found to be one of the most toxic dispersal agents ever developed.
According to the Clark and George-Ares report, Corexit mixed with the higher gulf coast water temperatures becomes even more toxic.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ybenjamin/detail?entry_id=65552#ixzz0s1YOm52Y
alot more with videos
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ybenjamin/detail?entry_id=65552
2-9-47 :)
How the ultimate BP Gulf disaster could kill millions
Disturbing evidence is mounting that something frightening is happening deep under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico—something far worse than the BP oil gusher.
Warnings were raised as long as a year before the Deepwater Horizon disaster that the area of seabed chosen by the BP geologists might be unstable, or worse, inherently dangerous.
What makes the location that Transocean chose potentially far riskier than other potential oil deposits located at other regions of the Gulf? It can be summed up with two words: methane gas.
The same methane that makes coal mining operations hazardous and leads to horrendous mining accidents deep under the earth also can present a high level of danger to certain oil exploration ventures.
Location of Deepwater Horizon oil rig was criticized
More than 12 months ago some geologists rang the warning bell that the Deepwater Horizon exploratory rig might have been erected directly over a huge underground reservoir of methane.
Documents from several years ago indicate that the subterranean geologic formation may contain the presence of a huge methane deposit.
None other than the engineer who helped lead the team to snuff the Gulf oil fires set by Saddam Hussein to slow the advance of American troops has stated that a huge underground lake of methane gas—compressed by a pressure of 100,000 pounds per square inch (psi)—could be released by BP's drilling effort to obtain the oil deposit.
Current engineering technology cannot contain gas that is pressurized to 100,000 psi.
By some geologists' estimates the methane could be a massive 15 to 20 mile toxic and explosive bubble trapped for eons under the Gulf sea floor. In their opinion, the explosive destruction of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead was an accident just waiting to happen.
Yet the disaster that followed the loss of the rig pales by comparison to the apocalyptic disaster that may come.
A cascading catastrophe
According to worried geologists, the first signs that the methane may burst its way through the bottom of the ocean would be fissures or cracks appearing on the ocean floor near the damaged well head.
Evidence of fissures opening up on the seabed have been captured by the robotic submersibles working to repair and contain the ruptured well. Smaller, independent plumes have also appeared outside the nearby radius of the bore hole itself.
According to some geological experts, BP's operations set into motion a series of events that may be irreversible.
more....
http://www.helium.com/items/1864136-how-the-ultimate-bp-gulf-disaster-could-kill-millions
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 07:20 ET
WikiLeaks founder has his passport confiscated
By Glenn Greenwald This is a reminder that one can't run around exposing the secrets of the most powerful governments, militaries and corporations in the world without consequences (h/t):
The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.
Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.
However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).
Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter -- which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list.
The Australian document was so damaging because the Australian government claimed that the to-be-banned websites were all associated with child pornography, but the list of the targeted sites including many which had nothing to do with pornography. That WikiLeaks was then added to the list underscores the intended abuse.
more...
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/19/wikileaks
An email I just recieved..........
DHIMMITUDE
Dhimmitude: I had never heard the word until now---Type it into Google and start reading. Pretty interesting.
It's on page 107 of the healthcare bill.
Someone looked this up on Google and yes, it exists! It's a REAL word. Amish are also excluded. I think I could become Amish a whole lot easier than to become a Muslim.
Word of the Day: Dhimmitude
Dhimmitude is the Muslim system of controlling non-Muslim populations conquered through jihad. Specifically, it is the TAXING of non-Muslims in exchange for tolerating their presence AND as a coercive means of converting conquered remnants to Islam.
The ObamaCare bill is the establishment of Dhimmitude and Sharia Muslim diktat in the United States . Muslims are specifically exempted from the government mandate to purchase insurance, and also from the penalty tax for being uninsured. Islam considers insurance to be "gambling", "risk-taking" and "usury" and is thus banned. Muslims are specifically granted exemption based on this.
How convenient. So I, Ann Barnhardt, a Christian, will have crippling IRS liens placed against all of my assets, including real estate, cattle, and even accounts receivables, and will face hard prison time because I refuse to buy insurance or pay the penalty tax. Meanwhile, Louis Farrakhan will have no such penalty and will have 100% of his health needs paid for by the de facto government insurance. Non-Muslims will be paying a tax to
subsidize Muslims. Period. This is Dhimmitude.
Dhimmitude serves two purposes: it enriches the Muslim masters AND serves to drive conversions to Islam. In this case, the incentive to convert to Islam will be taken up by those in the inner-cities as well as the godless Generation X, Y and Z types who have no moral anchor. If you don't believe in Christ to begin with, it is no problem whatsoever to sell Him for 30 pieces of silver. "Sure, I'll be a Muslim if it means free health insurance and no taxes. Where do I sign, bro?"
There's that. On the 4rth part now.
2012 may come early.
This is just mind blowing. They were shaking out the BP puts today bigtime.
I think I'll be going all in on Monday.