Callers: Barry In California, Ronni In Oregon
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome. Lark In Texas with you… on this Saturday – November 5th, 2011 – for the next hour.
Republic Broadcasting exists to bring forth real news and information… you’d be hard-pressed to find… anywhere else.
As are you, I’m Justa Numerican… concerned about the same things you’re concerned about… the separating of facts… from fiction… and the best investment value… for our time… spent together.
This is why… you too… are as reliable… a news medium – in what’s left of America – without a doubt.
And besides all else… you’re tuned to RBN… because you can handle the truth!
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If you’re from my neck-o-the-woods… and you're from the north central Texas area...
I’d especially like to hear from you!
For detailed program notes of this broadcast, currently posted – or any of those previous – refer to the web address http://larkintexas.blogspot.com… and you will find the web log… for Justa Numerican.
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“Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power.”
-Kalle Lasn
Occupy Wall Street Exposed
Meet Kalle Lasn – the man behind the occupier movement
According to the mainstream media, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is something of a spontaneous grassroots movement, similar to what we saw with Tea Party. But the truth is OWS has been in the works for a long time.
The man behind the movement is a radical Canadian leftist agitator by the name of Kalle Lasn. Lasn is founder of Ad Busters. A self-described group of anarchists and neo-Luddites, Adbusters are not merely environmentalists, animal-rights activists, anti-technology activists, or neo-Prohibitionists. They are all these things and more. In his book entitled Culture Jam, Lasn writes, “we will wreck this world.” And that is ultimately the goal of the organization he founded and runs.
A little research has uncovered the fact that the domain name www.OccupyWallStreet.org was registered by Lasn’s organization in June 2011, several months BEFORE the first protests began in New York City. What is a Canadian citizen doing registering a domain for a grassroots movement months before the protests began? It’s questions like this that are not being asked by our mainstream media.
A leftist British Columbia newspaper did a profile on Kalle Lasn earlier this month. Perhaps the mainstream media folks don’t know how to use GOOGLE?
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IEET – Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
Propaganda 2.0 and the Rise of ‘Narrative Networks’
The IEET is a 501(c)3 non-profit, tax-exempt organization registered in the State of Connecticut in the United States.
George Dvorsky, who serves on the Board of Directors for the IEET and heads our Rights of Non-Human Persons program, is Canada's leading agenda-driven futurist/activist.
DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced concepts think-tank, is looking to take propaganda to the next level, and they’re hoping to do so by controlling the very way their targets perceive and interpret the flow of incoming information.
The Pentagon believes that by engaging in ‘narrative control’ they can alter an individual’s grasp on reality and the way in which they evaluate current events. Simply put, DARPA is looking to shape minds with stories.
Now, this isn’t an entirely new concept. The notion of narrative control, or narrative networks, has been bunted around for a few years now.
It’s been said that history books are written by the victors. Well, these days hopeful victors are trying to write current events. State actors are increasingly disclosing information in a way that constructs a kind of story. It’s through the careful construction of desirable narratives that state actors are hoping to control the beliefs and actions of targeted audiences. It’s a classic case of the pen being mightier than the sword—but in this case it’s a pen that digs deep into the very psyche of the individual.
The United States has been engaging in narrative control for quite some time now. Most recently, during the Arab Spring, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weaved a tale that suggested a certain level of inevitability to the events unfolding in the Middle East. One by one, she contended, authoritarian and fundamentalist nations were being overthrown by angry and forward-looking populaces. It’ll only be a matter of time, Clinton argued, before the entire Middle East goes through a transformation that sees all its countries embrace democracy, secular institutions, and unprecedented freedoms.
Now I’m not suggesting that this isn’t a valid interpretation of events. It very well may be. But what’s important to understand here is that the U.S. is presenting this narrative in a very overt and calculated way. For many of those in the Middle East, the story is most certainly compelling and potentially inspiring. And for those sitting on the fence or considering radical action, this story of apparent inevitability may compel them to join the “winning team.” It’s through this kind of narrative control and reality building that the U.S. hopes to fight terrorism and the spread of radical Islam.
But now DARPA wants to take this further and make it more scientific and systematic. They recently put out a request for research proposals in the areas of:
• Quantitative analysis of narratives
• Understanding the effects narratives have on human psychology and its affiliated neurobiology
• Modeling, simulating, and sensing-especially in stand-off modalities-these narrative influences
DARPA would like to revolutionize the study of narrative influence by “advancing narrative analysis and neuroscience so as to create new narrative influence sensors, doubling status quo capacity to forecast narrative influence.”
This is pretty heavy stuff. They’re asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.” Once such a system is put into place, the Pentagon will be able to detect terrorists or other non-state actors who have been indoctrinated with a particular ideology or worldview, and then respond with a counter-message of its own. As Dawn Lim notes in Wired, “They can also target groups vulnerable to terrorists’ recruiting tactics with their own counter-messaging.”
Lim describes how the project will unfold:
In the first 18-month phase of the program, the Pentagon wants researchers to study how stories infiltrate social networks and alter our brain circuits. One of the stipulated research goals: to “explore the function narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how they can influence a person or group’s choice of means (such as indiscriminate violence) to achieve political ends.”
Once scientists have perfected the science of how stories affect our neurochemistry, they will develop tools to “detect narrative influence.” These tools will enable “prevention of negative behavioral outcomes … and generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building trust.” In other words, the tools will be used to detect who’s been controlled by subversive ideologies, better allowing the military to drown out that message and win people onto their side.
“The government is already trying to control the message, so why not have the science to do it in a systematic way?” said the researcher familiar with the project.
When the project enters into a second 18-month phase, it’ll use the research gathered to build “optimized prototype technologies in the form of documents, software, hardware and devices.” What will these be? Existing technology can carry out micro-facial feature analysis, and measure the dilation of blood vessels and eye pupils. MRI machines can determine which parts of your brain is lighting up when it responds to stories. Darpa wants to do even better.
DARPA is even calling for devices that detect the influence of stories in unseen ways: “Efforts that rely solely on standoff/non-invasive/non-detectable sensors are highly encouraged.”
“Stories are important in security contexts,” DARPA argues, “[stories] change the course of insurgencies, frame negotiations, play a role in political radicalization, influence the methods and goals of violent social movements.” Indeed, they’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, as indicated by their April workshop to discuss the neurobiology of narratives.
When it comes to security, little consideration is given to ethics. Now, while I’m somewhat partial to this approach on account of its bloodlessness, I have to admit that the potential for abuse is astonishing. Once these narrative networks reach full maturity they could be used to indoctrinate not just enemy populations, but more familiar ones as well. The very ways in which domestic affairs are perceived could be colored by a security department hoping to create a docile and abiding population.
That said, the efficacy of narrative networks has yet to be determined. The Internet and other communications networks may serve as a kind of prophylactic against narrow bands of information. Moreover, populations may become primed against such efforts in the same way current societies are (relatively) immune to traditional and obvious methods of propaganda.
As a final word, this topic interests me greatly as it relates to memetics, memetic engineering, and the whole concept of cultural health. In this context, the struggle against religious fundamentalism is a struggle against the onset and dissemination of bad memes. Fundamentalist memeplexes can be interpreted as information viruses that are running amok in the human population. Perhaps it’s not too outrageous to suggest that we should counter bad ideas with good ideas—or at least better ideas that lead to more rational thinking, criticality and independent thought.
The best defense against religious extremism is a mind primed to reject those ideas in the first place.
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Diogenes said, "The art of being a slave is to rule one's master.”
He also said, “I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.”
And, “He has the most who is content with the least.”
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Socialism is an ~ism, a sadistic school of thought whose devotees are bewitched by their vainglory. It is characterized by intense centralized planning… and top-down… hierarchical control… of their lessers – who themselves are compartmentalized... by their access to information (military-style)… on a need-to-know basis… and by their level of conditioning… to the fashionable dictums… of the day.
The model for socialist organization is the corporation. A kissin’ cousin of socialism is syndicalism – a school of thought which asserts that every formerly free-thinking [wo-]man must assign him- or herself to a collectivist group… and affix to one’s self… a label. Much like the cattleman brands his beeves with a hot iron; or a pet owner collars her pet dog or cat… and tags it with a stamp of obedience…
… A syndicalist is a trade unionist… or a member of a trade association. They are…
· Public school teachers/college and university professors
· Government bureaucrats
· US military personnel
· Law enforcement personnel
· Doctors, nurses, hospital administrators and their staffs
· Lawyers, attorneys, counselors-at-law, judges, politicians, and their staffs
· Bankers…
· Insurance agents…
These pillars of our communities… ladies and gentlemen... are also communitarians!
Remember: You are not what you think. You’re not what you say. You are what you do!
So ask yourself. Are these folks independent? Are they any longer possessive of free will (freedom of choice)? Do they have their liberty (locomotion, the capability of movement from one point to another, of their own power and volition)?
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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false. “
~William Casey, CIA Director from 1981 to 1987 (Quote from his first staff meeting in 1981)
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
~William Colby, CIA Director from September 1973 to January 1976
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFskGTkW9m8
"The driving force of society is not love, but fear."
--- Thomas O. Watson
Human Resources explores the rise of mechanistic philosphy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarchical systems.
Topics Include; behaviorism, scientific management, work-place democracy, schooling, frustration-aggression hypothesis and human experimentation.
Featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rebecca Lemov, Christopher Simpson, George Ritzer, Morris Berman, John Taylor Gatto, Alfie Kohn and others.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_(economics)
Human Resources: 'Social Engineering in the 20th Century'
documentary
"The driving force of society is not love, but fear."
--- Thomas O. Watson
Human Resources explores the rise of mechanistic philosphy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarchical systems.
Topics Include; behaviorism, scientific management, work-place democracy, schooling, frustration-aggression hypothesis and human experimentation.
Featuring interviews with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rebecca Lemov, Christopher Simpson, George Ritzer, Morris Berman, John Taylor Gatto, Alfie Kohn and others.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_(economics)
Capital (economics)
In economics, capital, capital goods, or real capital refers to already-produced durable goods used in production of goods or services. The capital goods are not significantly consumed, though they may depreciate in the production process. Capital is distinct from land in that capital must itself be produced by human labor before it can be a factor of production. At any moment in time, total physical capital may be referred to as the capital stock, a usage different from the same term applied to a business entity. In a fundamental sense, capital consists of any produced thing that can enhance a person's power to perform economically useful work - a stone or an arrow is capital for a caveman who can use it as a hunting instrument, and roads are capital for inhabitants of a city. Capital is an input in the production function. Homes and personal autos are not capital but are instead durable goods because they are not used in a production effort.
In Marxian economics, capital is used to buy something only in order to sell it again to realize a financial profit, and for Marx capital only exists within the process of economic exchange—it is wealth that grows out of the process of circulation itself and forms the basis of the economic system of capitalism.
In narrow and broad uses
In classical and neoclassical economics, capital is one of four factors of production. The others are land, labour and organization, entrepreneurship, or management. Goods with the following features are capital:
It can be used in the production of other goods (this is what makes it a factor of production).
It was produced, in contrast to "land", which refers to naturally occurring resources such as geographical locations and minerals.
It is not used up immediately in the process of production unlike raw materials or intermediate goods. (The significant exception to this is depreciation allowance, which like intermediate goods, is treated as a business expense.)
These distinctions of convenience have carried over to contemporary economic theory. There was the further clarification that capital is a stock. As such, its value can be estimated at a point in time, say December 31. By contrast, investment, as production to be added to the capital stock, is described as taking place over time ("per year"), thus a flow.
Earlier illustrations often described capital as physical items, such as tools, buildings, and vehicles that are used in the production process. Since at least the 1960s economists have increasingly focused on broader forms of capital. For example, investment in skills and education can be viewed as building up human capital or knowledge capital, and investments in intellectual property can be viewed as building up intellectual capital. These terms lead to certain questions and controversies discussed in those articles. Human development theory describes human capital as being composed of distinct social, imitative and creative elements:
Social capital is the value of network trusting relationships between individuals in an economy.
Individual capital, which is inherent in persons, protected by societies, and trades labour for trust or money. Close parallel concepts are "talent", "ingenuity", "leadership", "trained bodies", or "innate skills" that cannot reliably be reproduced by using any combination of any of the others above. In traditional economic analysis individual capital is more usually called labour.
Further classifications of capital that have been used in various theoretical or applied uses include:
Financial capital, which represents obligations, and is liquidated as money for trade, and owned by legal entities. It is in the form of capital assets, traded in financial markets. Its market value is not based on the historical accumulation of money invested but on the perception by the market of its expected revenues and of the risk entailed.
Public capital, which encompasses the aggregate body of government-owned assets that are used to promote private industry productivity, including highways, railways, airports, water treatment facilities, telecommunications, electric grids, energy utilities, municipal buildings, public hospitals and schools, police, fire protection, courts and still others.
Natural capital, which is inherent in ecologies and protected by communities to support life, e.g., a river that provides farms with water.
Spiritual capital, which refers to the power, influence and dispositions created by a person or an organization’s spiritual belief, knowledge and practice.
In part as a result, separate literatures have developed to describe both natural capital and social capital. Such terms reflect a wide consensus that nature and society both function in such a similar manner as traditional industrial infrastructural capital, that it is entirely appropriate to refer to them as different types of capital in themselves. In particular, they can be used in the production of other goods, are not used up immediately in the process of production, and can be enhanced (if not created) by human effort.
There is also a literature of intellectual capital and intellectual property law. However, this increasingly distinguishes means of capital investment, and collection of potential rewards for patent, copyright (creative or individual capital), and trademark (social trust or social capital) instruments. Capital (all types collectively) is often the tool that is leveraged in order to build wealth both personal and corporate.
In classical economics and beyond
Some thinkers, such as Werner Sombart and Max Weber, locate the concept of capital as originating in double-entry bookkeeping, which is thus a foundational innovation in capitalism, Sombart writing in "Medieval and Modern Commercial Enterprise" that:
The very concept of capital is derived from this way of looking at things; one can say that capital, as a category, did not exist before double-entry bookkeeping. Capital can be defined as that amount of wealth which is used in making profits and which enters into the accounts."
Within classical economics, Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, Book II, Chapter 1) distinguished fixed capital from circulating capital. The former designated physical assets not consumed in the production of a product (e.g. machines and storage facilities), while the latter referred to physical assets consumed in the process of production (e.g. raw materials and intermediate products). For an enterprise, both were types of capital.
Karl Marx adds a distinction that is often confused with David Ricardo's. In Marxian theory, variable capital refers to a capitalist's investment in labor-power, seen as the only source of surplus-value. It is called "variable" since the amount of value it can produce varies from the amount it consumes, i.e., it creates new value. On the other hand, constant capital refers to investment in non-human factors of production, such as plant and machinery, which Marx takes to contribute only its own replacement value to the commodities it is used to produce. It is constant, in that the amount of value committed in the original investment, and the amount retrieved in the form of commodities produced, remains constant.
Investment or capital accumulation, in classical economic theory, is the production of increased capital. Investment requires that some goods be produced that are not immediately consumed, but instead used to produce other goods as a means of production. Investment is closely related to saving, though it is not the same. As Keynes pointed out, saving involves not spending all of one's income on current goods or services, while investment refers to spending on a specific type of goods, i.e., capital goods.
The Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk maintained that capital intensity was measured by the roundaboutness of production processes. Since capital is defined by him as being goods of higher-order, or goods used to produce consumer goods, and derived their value from them, being future goods.
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Resource
A resource is a source or supply from which benefit is produced. Typically resources are materials or other assets that are transformed to produce benefit and in the process may be consumed or made unavailable. From a human perspective a natural resource is anything obtained from the environment to satisfy human needs and wants. From a broader biological or ecological perspective a resource satisfies the needs of a living organism (see biological resource).
The concept of resources has been applied in diverse realms, including with respect to economics, biology, computer science, land management, and human resources, and is linked to the concepts of competition, sustainability, conservation, and stewardship. In application within human society, commercial or non-commercial factors require resource allocation through resource management.
Resources have three main characteristics: 1) utility, 2) limited availability, and 3) potential for depletion or consumption. Resources have been variously categorized as biotic versus abiotic, renewable versus non-renewable, and potential versus actual, along with more elaborate classifications.
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What do I have to trade with another [or others] that will be perceived as valuable?
· Knowledge/Information
· Skill (Labor)/Service
· Commodity/Production-Harvest-Mining Unit
· Tool/Work Product/Finished Good
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Economy
Economy is the study of ergonomics and efficiencies related to the management of the physical (material) resources one employs to maintain and produce wealth, health (wellness) and a general feeling of well-being within one’s own household [sphere of influence]. Examines the relationships between the delineation [or hierarchical, utilitarian allocation of] needs/desires as they contribute toward well-being… and the actions (those things, in turn, related to energy) relative to obtaining efficient access to the resources necessary to human survival… and which contribute to the security and general well-being of all concerned within that household [or sphere of influence]. Here “well-being” is pointedly not “welfare” in the socialist sense; and “economy” supplants the [collectivist, statist] term, “economics”, altogether. ~Lark
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Ecology
1. a. The science of the relationships between organisms and their environments. Also called bionomics
b. The relationship between organisms and their environment.
2. The branch of sociology that is concerned with studying the relationships between human groups and their physical and social environments. Also called human ecology
3. The study of the detrimental effects of modern civilization on the environment, with a view toward prevention or reversal through conservation. Also called human ecology
[German Ökologie: Greek oikos, house + German -logie, study (from Greek -logiā, -logy).]
Ecology has spread rapidly in the 20th century from technical to general use to mean 'the study of the interaction of people with their natural environment'. An earlier spelling oecology, reflecting its origin in the Greek word oikos meaning 'house' (the same root as in economy), is hardly ever used. Ecology has also produced the prolific prefix eco-, as in eco-catastrophe (1969), eco-correct (1994), ecodoom (1973), eco-friendly (1989), eco-label and -labeling (1989), ecopolitics (1973), eco-terrorist (1988), eco-warrior (1987), etc.
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Wealth
Wealth is the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions. The word wealth is derived from the old English wela, which is from an Indo-European word stem. An individual, community, region or country that possesses an abundance of such possessions or resources is known as wealthy.
The concept of wealth is of significance in all areas of economics, especially development economics, yet the meaning of wealth is context-dependent and there is no universally agreed upon definition. Generally, economists define wealth as "anything of value" which captures both the subjective nature of the idea and the idea that it is not a fixed or static concept. Various definitions and concepts of wealth have been asserted by various individuals and in different contexts. Defining wealth can be a normative process with various ethical implications, since often wealth maximization is seen as a goal or is thought to be a normative principle of its own.
Although precise data is not available, the total household wealth in the world has been estimated at $125 trillion (USD 125 x1012) in year 2000.
About 90% of global wealth is distributed in North America, Europe, and "rich Asia-Pacific" countries (not including India), and 1% of adults are estimated to hold 40% of world wealth, a number which falls to 32% when adjusted for purchasing power parity.
Definition
For definitions of "wealth," see also The Wealth of Nations and Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Adam Smith, in his seminal work The Wealth of Nations, described wealth as "the annual produce of the land and labour of the society". This "produce" is, at its simplest, that which satisfies human needs and wants of utility. In popular usage, wealth can be described as an abundance of items of economic value, or the state of controlling or possessing such items, usually in the form of money, real estate and personal property. An individual who is considered wealthy, affluent, or rich is someone who has accumulated substantial wealth relative to others in their society or reference group. In economics, net wealth refers to the value of assets owned minus the value of liabilities owed at a point in time. Wealth can be categorized into three principal categories: personal property, including homes or automobiles; monetary savings, such as the accumulation of past income; and the capital wealth of income producing assets, including real estate, stocks, bonds, and businesses. All these delineations make wealth an especially important part of social stratification. Wealth provides a type of social safety net of protection against an unforeseen decline in one’s living standard in the event of job loss or other emergency and can be transformed into home ownership, business ownership, or even a college education.
'Wealth' refers to some accumulation of resources, whether abundant or not. 'Richness' refers to an abundance of such resources. A wealthy (or rich) individual, community, or nation thus has more resources than a poor one. Richness can also refer to at least basic needs being met with abundance widely shared. The opposite of wealth is destitution. The opposite of richness is poverty.
The term implies a social contract on establishing and maintaining ownership in relation to such items which can be invoked with little or no effort and expense on the part of the owner. The concept of wealth is relative and not only varies between societies, but varies between different sections or regions in the same society. A personal net worth of US $10,000 in most parts of the United States would certainly not place a person among the wealthiest citizens of that locale. However, such an amount would constitute an extraordinary amount of wealth in impoverished developing countries.
Concepts of wealth also vary across time. Modern labor-saving inventions and the development of the sciences have enabled the poorest sectors of today's society to enjoy a standard of living equivalent if not superior to the wealthy of the not-too-distant past. This comparative wealth across time is also applicable to the future; given this trend of human advancement, it is likely that the standard of living that the wealthiest enjoy today will be considered impoverished by future generations.
Industrialization emphasized the role of technology. Many jobs were automated. Machines replaced some workers while other workers became more specialized. Labour specialization became critical to economic success. However, physical capital, as it came to be known, consisting of both the natural capital and the infrastructural capital, became the focus of the analysis of wealth.
Adam Smith saw wealth creation as the combination of materials, labour, land, and technology in such a way as to capture a profit (excess above the cost of production).The theories of David Ricardo, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, in the 18th century and 19th century built on these views of wealth that we now call classical economics.
Marxian economics (see labor theory of value) distinguishes in the Grundrisse between material wealth and human wealth, defining human wealth as "wealth in human relations"; land and labour were the source of all material wealth.
Economic analysis
In economics, wealth is the net worth of a person, household, or nation, that is, the value of all assets owned net of all liabilities owed at a point in time. For national wealth as measured in the national accounts, the net liabilities are those owed to the rest of the world. The term may also be used more broadly as referring to the productive capacity of a society or as a contrast to poverty. Analytical emphasis may be on its determinants or distribution.
Economic terminology distinguishes between two types of variables: stock and flow. Wealth, as measurable at a date in time, is a stock, like the value of an orchard on December 31 minus debt owed on the orchard. For a given amount of wealth, say at the beginning of the year, income from that wealth, as measurable over say a year is a flow. What marks the income as a flow is its measurement per unit
of time, like the value of apples yielded from the orchard per year.
In macroeconomic theory the 'wealth effect' may refer to the increase in aggregate consumption from an increase in national wealth. One measure of it is the wealth elasticity of demand. It is the percentage change in the amount demanded of consumption for each one-percent change in wealth.
Wealth may be measured in nominal or real values, that is, in money value as of a given date or adjusted to net out price changes. The assets include those that are tangible (land and capital) and financial (money, bonds, etc.). Measurable wealth typically excludes intangible or nonmarketable assets such as human capital and social capital. In economics, 'wealth' corresponds to the accounting term 'net worth'. But analysis may adapt typical accounting conventions for economic purposes in social accounting (such as in national accounts). An example of the latter is generational accounting of social security systems to include the present value projected future outlays considered as liabilities. Macroeconomic questions include whether the issuance of government bonds affects investment and consumption through the wealth effect.
Environmental assets are not usually counted in measuring wealth, in part due to the difficulty of valuation for a non-market good. Environmental or green accounting is a method of social accounting for formulating and deriving such measures on the argument that an educated valuation is superior to a value of zero (as the implied valuation of environmental assets).
Sociological treatments
"Wealth provides an important mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of inequality." Approximately one half of the wealthiest people in America inherited family fortunes. But the effect of inherited wealth can also be seen on a more modest level. For example, a couple who buy a house with financial help from their parents or a student who has his or her college education paid for; in both scenarios the participants are benefiting directly from the accumulated wealth of previous generations.
Wealth and Social Class
Social class is not identical to wealth, but the two concepts are related (particularly in Marxist theory), leading to the combined concept of Socioeconomic status.
Partly as a result of different economic conditions of life, members of different social classes often have different value systems and view the world in different ways. As such, there exist different "conceptions of social reality, different aspirations and hopes and fears, different conceptions of the desirable. The way the various social classes in society view wealth vary and these diverse characteristics are a fundamental dividing line among the classes. According to Richard H Ropers, the concentration of wealth in the United States is inequitably distributed. In 1996, the United States federal government reported that the net worth of the top 1 percent of people in the United States was approximately equal to that of the bottom 90 percent.
The Upper Class
Upper class values include higher education, and the wealthiest people the accumulation and maintenance of wealth, the maintenance of social networks and the power that accompanies such networks. Children of the upper class are typically schooled on how to manage this power and channel this privilege in different forms. It is in large part by accessing various edifices of information, associates, procedures and auspices that the upper class are able to maintain their wealth and pass it to future generations.
The Middle Class
The middle class places a greater emphasis on income. The middle class views wealth as something for emergencies and it is seen as more of a cushion. This class comprises people that were raised with families that typically owned their own home, planned ahead and stressed the importance of education and achievement. They earn a significant amount of income and also have significant amounts of consumption. However there is very limited savings (deferred consumption) or investments, besides retirement pensions and homeownership. They have been socialized to accumulate wealth through structured, institutionalized arrangements. Without this set structure, asset accumulation would likely not occur.
The Lower Class
Those with the least amount of wealth are the welfare poor. (See underclass) Wealth accumulation for this class is to some extent prohibited. People that receive AFDC transfers cannot own more than a trivial amount of assets, in order to be eligible and remain qualified for income transfers. Most of the institutions that the welfare poor encounter discourage any accumulation of assets.
Distribution of Wealth
The distribution of wealth is a comparison of the wealth of various members or groups in a society. It differs from the distribution of income in that it looks at the distribution of ownership of the assets in a society, rather than the current income of members of that society.
Wealth is a person's net worth, expressed as:
wealth = assets − liabilities
The word "wealth" is often confused with "income". These two terms describe different but related things. Wealth consists of those items of economic value that an individual owns, while income is an inflow of items of economic value. (See Stock and flow.) The relation between wealth, income, and expenses is:
change of wealth = income − expense
A common mistake made by people embarking on a research project to determine the distribution of wealth is to use statistical data of income to describe the distribution of wealth. The distribution of income is substantially different from the distribution of wealth. According to the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, "the world distribution of wealth is much more unequal than that of income."
If an individual has a large income but also large expenses, his wealth could be small or even negative.
Wealth in the form of land
In the western tradition, the concepts of owning land and accumulating wealth in the form of land were engendered in the rise of the first state, for a primary service and power of government was, and is to this day, the awarding and adjudication of land use rights.
Land ownership was also justified according to John Locke. He claimed that because we admix our labour with the land, we thereby deserve the right to control the use of the land and benefit from the product of that land (but subject to his Lockean proviso of "at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.").
Additionally, in developed countries post-agrarian society (Industrial society) this argument has many critics (including those influenced by Georgist and geolibertarian ideas) who argue that since land, by definition, is not a product of human labor, any claim of private property in it is a form of theft; as David Lloyd George observed, "to prove a legal title to land one must trace it back to the man who stole it."
Many older ideas have resurfaced in the modern notions of ecological stewardship, bioregionalism, natural capital, and ecological economics.
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Is not the body the temple of one’s soul?
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Voluntaryism
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Agorism
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Counter-economics
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(A Peak Inside ZAG - this 5 minute read says it all!)
http://jesse.cyberphunkz.com/Jesse%27s%20ebooks/Business/Zag%20The%20Number%20One%20Strategy%20of%20High-Performance%20Brands.pdf
(This is the entire book)
(This is the entire book)
ZAG: The Number One Strategy for High Performance Brands
(Marty Neumeier)
One Sentence Persuasion Course:
27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding
27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding
(Blair Warren)
The No-Nonsense Guide to Enlightenment
(Blair Warren)
Poet Painter
(Stephen P. Anderson)
Top 50 Marketing Blogs
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What Type of Government Do We Live Under?
"We are witnessing an unprecedented transfer of power from people and their governments to global institutions whose allegiance is to abstract free--market principle, and whose favored citizens are soulless corporate entities that have the power to shape and break nations." -- Joel Bleifuss, In These Times magazine, September 2001, p1
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America Vanquished, Part 1: America as an Israeli Colony, by Dr. Lasha Darkmoon
America Vanquished, Part 2: America under Jewish Rule, by Dr. Lasha Darkmoon
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The Individual and the Community
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Aeon J. Skoble
Last May sociologist Amitai Etzioni participated in a debate hosted by the Cato Institute in which he argued against the classical-liberal theory as being too atomistic, excessively concerned with selfish individualism, and neglectful of the importance of community. He’s been making this point for 20 years, which is strange for two reasons: First, it isn’t true, and second, I have been refuting it for 20 years.
Okay, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Etzioni does not read my work. He’s a “celebrity” academic whose writings are discussed in The New York Review of Books and who is generally regarded as one of the leaders of the communitarian movement. He need not bother reading obscure philosophers. On the other hand, his arguments have also been rebutted by Stephen Holmes in The New Republic, as well as The Economist. So if writers of far greater prominence than me also engaged his arguments and he remains unwilling even to acknowledge this, one is led to believe he is deliberately caricaturing.
The communitarian movement was at its most popular in the mid-to-late nineties, although it has not gone away; it continues to repackage itself and appears like clockwork whenever classical liberalism comes up. Its flagship journal, The Responsive Community, went by the slogan “Rights and Responsibilities” and now uses “For Individual Rights and Social Responsibility.” With slogans like these, one might be forgiven for wondering why communitarians don’t like liberalism. The answer is, while classical liberals argue for negative rights and limited government, communitarians argue for positive rights and an expansive government that can limit rights on behalf of the common good.
“Negative rights” is another name for liberties, the sort of rights-claims that impose on others a duty of noninterference. “Positive rights” is another name for the sort of rights-claims that impose on others a duty to provide or perform, sometimes called entitlements. A key concept of classical liberalism is that a system of negative rights is internally consistent and does not lead to conflicts of rights, whereas positive rights can generate such conflict. If Smith has a right to be provided with something, then Jones must have a duty to provide it. If this is not a consensual arrangement, then Jones’s right to liberty is now in conflict with Smith’s right to be provided with the thing in question. Since liberalism (by definition) takes liberty seriously, this sort of conflict is a problem. For a nonliberal it is not necessarily a problem: Simply announce that other values trump liberty—equality, for example, or security, or salvation.
One interesting conundrum raised by the positive-rights model is, who exactly bears the corresponding duties? With negative rights this is easy: Everyone can abstain from interfering with a person’s pursuits. But if there is a right to be given food or a car, who has to provide it? If the positive right is the result of a contract, the contract will specify who has what obligations, but this won’t entail any conflict with negative rights since the arrangement is consensual. If the right is simply stipulated as part of “the common good,” then all members of the community must bear the duty of provision jointly (but nonconsensually).
The communitarian critique of liberalism gets its traction from a combination of a true observation and a false one. The true observation—hardly novel, Aristotle noted it two millennia ago—is that we are social creatures. We require social living to flourish. In a purely economic sense, it is obvious we cannot do everything ourselves if we’re to do much of anything at all. The division of labor and our capacity for specialization and trade allow us each to benefit from the talents of others and prosper far above the mere subsistence of other creatures. Beyond that there is a psychological dimension to our sociality as well. As Aristotle noted, we require friends to attain the happiness we’re capable of attaining. We require families within which to develop. As we mature we form distinct personalities as a result of the many relationships we have. “The self” does not emerge fully formed ex nihilo but rather is the result of many influences and relational associations and affiliations. When communitarians like Etzioni make this point, they’re noting something true.
The part of the equation that is false is the claim that classical liberals either disbelieve or are indifferent to the preceding account. Communitarians claim that liberalism presupposes an atomistic individualism—that it neglects the value of community and fails to see that there is a social component to the formation of the self and to human flourishing. None of this is true. Classical liberalism does not ignore these claims; it depends on them. It’s as if one tried to argue against pizza by claiming that cheese is good, but since pizza has no cheese, pizza must be bad.
Economically speaking, the straw man being employed here is virtually self-evident: The market is a social phenomenon. So you can’t have a theory about the ways in which the market benefits people and at the same time regard sociality as unimportant. The classical-liberal position is that we all benefit from our participation in the social phenomenon of the market—not merely financially, but in terms of the great diversity of our kind. Cooperation in a market system promotes, and in a way presupposes, heterogeneity and pluralism. This expands people’s horizons and shows them new ways to derive and create value.
Of course, for a particular sort of communitarian the heterogeneity and pluralism of the market are considered bad things. Karl Marx claimed that our identities are constituted entirely by our socioeconomic class and that autonomy was an illusion. The prevailing economic system determines how you think. The liberal project is flawed, Marx said, because it caused people to have false ideas about labor, capital, society, and even our own selves. Mussolini also claimed that the liberal project was flawed because it caused people to have false ideas about labor, capital, society, and our own selves, but his claim was that our identity was constituted and determined not by class but by our ethnicity. Communitarians today distance themselves from fascists and communists, and make the more generic claim that “the community” determines our identity, while still coming to the same conclusion: that liberalism is a flawed project. This enables them to defend some liberties while arguing for positive rights and for the right of the community to infringe on liberty.
Of course, we’re all members of many different communities simultaneously: family, town, ethnicity, region, nation, religion. In addition to these, we become members of communities through our interests and affiliations—professions, hobbies, sports loyalties, and other manifestations of preference. To be sure, all these different things play a role in helping shape who we become, but it’s a stretch to say that any one of them trumps the others, or that the process is deterministic. Communitarianism seems to elide the distinction between influencing and determining. We still make choices about our values and actions, despite the many influences on our thinking.
In his 1996 book, The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society, Etzioni makes the same criticisms of a liberalism that “neglects the role of community” that he made at Cato in May. But he also praises autonomy and explains that his ideal society wouldn’t be coercive. But a noncoercive community that respects individual autonomy sounds like liberalism, so this may be a case of wanting to have it both ways. Worse, it suggests that the best way to have a good life is to live in a community (which is true, but uncontroversial) and that individualism won’t allow for this (which is false).
In many cases, Etzioni’s prescriptions are vague and almost contradictory: We shouldn’t have too much autonomy because that’s bad for community; but we shouldn’t enforce community plans in tyrannical ways because that’s bad for autonomy. He explicitly calls for compulsory national service, which is hard to reconcile with a noncoercive society. He even invokes the expression “voluntary social order,” but is clearly not making a Hayekian argument: He explicitly rejects the free-market approach to economics. He specifically praises “symbolic displays” that promote community solidarity—does that mean requiring religious dissenters to recite the Pledge of Allegiance? It is true of course that some “community values” are incompatible with liberal individualism. Self-appointed spokesmen for the community might have an interest in suppression of dissent (mustn’t offend community sensibilities) or the subjugation of minority religious practices (mustn’t promote excessive individualism). But Etzioni stops short of taking his argument to this conclusion.
Even a cursory overview of liberal authors shows respect for human sociality and recognition of the importance of community. This is evident in Locke and Smith, Ricardo and Hayek, Nozick and Rothbard. Etzioni’s reliance on such obvious straw-man conceptions of liberalism suggests it is tactical rather than intellectual: How can we maintain some recognizably liberal framework, yet support positive rights and government control? By suggesting that the liberal project is based on a mistake. If the proponents of classical-liberal individualism and free markets are shown to be people who neglect the value of community, then communitarianism can gain traction. But there’s no easy way around what J. S. Mill called the “tyranny of the majority”: That a majority of the people want things a certain way is not enough to justify coercing the minority. Classical liberalism embraces social cooperation—indeed presupposes it—but distinguishes itself from its competitors by insisting that the communal projects and social arrangements be consensual. In Etzioni’s characterization this means we do not care about the community.
But caring about the community and respecting individuals as individuals are not contradictory aims. Yes, we’re social creatures, but one reason society has so much to offer is that we’re all a little different. The great diversity of human interests and preferences and talents is a testimony to our individualism, and “society” is just the manifestation of these differences as they are brought together. If everyone thought the same way and liked all the same things, society would be a much less interesting place. So the idea that, to protect community, we need to stop thinking of people as autonomous individuals gets it backwards. If we really care about the well-being of communities and preserving the way society contributes to human flourishing, we ought to keep in mind the unique and autonomous individuals that make it up, and respect them.
Aeon J. Skoble is professor of philosophy and chairman of the philosophy department at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.
Copyright © 2011 Foundation for Economic Education
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I am that I Am
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I think; therefore, I am.
--- Rene Descartes
"Is", "is" "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.
— Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus, as spoken by Sigismundo Celine
To be, or not to be – that is the question.
--- Hamlet
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Eat up, son, or go stand in the corner.
--- Anonymous
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I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisarkadatta Maharaj
Translated by Maurice Frydman
(1973)
A simple man, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was a house holder and petty store keeper in Bombay where he lived and died in 1981 at the age of 84.He had not been educated formally but came to be respected and loved for his insights into the crux of human pain and the extraordinary lucidity of his direct discourse. Hundreds of diverse seekers travelled the globe and sought him out in his unpretentious home to hear him. To all of them he gave hope that "beyond the real experience is not the mind, but the self, the light in which everything appears...the awareness in which everything happens."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj did not propound any ideology or religion but gently unwrapped the mystery of the self. His message is simple, direct and yet sublime.
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One can conceptualize [or intellectualize] a foundational rule [or a set of rules] which sticks in the brain; but it is quite another thing entirely that it is written on one’s heart.
When all else fails, trust your gut!
What face(s) do you wear when you sleep? Worry? Innocence? Peace? What is revealed? And what can we learn about our emotional and spiritual selves that might help us heal or continue to grow in the ways most beneficial to our future well-being?
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You're not what you think. You’re not what you say. But you are what you do.
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Pattern Recognition vs. Linear Thinking
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To Zig or to Zag – That is the Question
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ZAG: The Number One Strategy for High Performance Brands
By Marty Neumeier
(2007)
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A representation of an attempt... to narrow my own message down... into as few a word... as possible:
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Law
CO[U]NT[E](R)ACT
Élan Vital: Formulae
ECONO-ME
+
WELL-BEING-NESS
+
WELL-BEING-NESS
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Cannot that word currency mean much more than we’re told it means?
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Triune brain
(Reptilian complex)
The triune brain is a model of the evolution of the vertebrate forebrain and behavior proposed by the American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean. MacLean originally formulated his model in the 1960s and propounded it at length in his 1990 book The Triune Brain in Evolution.The triune brain consists of the reptilian complex, the paleomammalian complex (limbic system), and the neomammalian complex (neocortex), viewed as structures sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution.
The triune brain hypothesis became familiar to a broad popular audience through Carl Sagan's Pulitzer prize winning 1977 book The Dragons of Eden. Though embraced by some psychiatrists and at least one leading affective neuroscience researcher, the model never won wide acceptance among comparative neurobiologists. Comparative evolutionary neuroanatomists currently regard its claims about brain evolution to be outdated.
The reptilian complex
The reptilian complex, also known as the R-complex or "reptilian brain" was the name MacLean gave to the basal ganglia, structures derived from the floor of the forebrain during development. The term derives from the fact that comparative neuroanatomists once believed that the forebrains of reptiles and birds were dominated by these structures. MacLean contended that the reptilian complex was responsible for species typical instinctual behaviors involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays.
The paleomammalian complex
The paleomammalian brain consists of the septum, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampal complex, and cingulate cortex. MacLean first introduced the term "limbic system" to refer to this set of interconnected brain structures in a paper in 1952. Whatever the merits of the triune brain hypothesis, MacLean's recognition of the limbic system as a major functional system in the brain has won wide acceptance among neuroscientists, and is generally regarded as his most important contribution to the field. MacLean maintained that the structures of the limbic system arose early in mammalian evolution (hence "paleomammalian") and were responsible for the motivation and emotion involved in feeding, reproductive behavior, and parental behavior.
The neomammalian complex
The neomammalian complex consists of the cerebral neocortex, a structure found uniquely in mammals. MacLean regarded its addition as the most recent step in the evolution of the human brain, conferring the ability for language, abstraction, planning, and perception.
Current status of the model
MacLean originally formulated the triune brain hypothesis in the 1960s, drawing on comparative neuroanatomical work done by Ludwig Edinger, Elizabeth Crosby and C. J. Herrick early in the twentieth century. The 1980s saw a rebirth of interest in comparative neuroanatomy, motivated in part by the availability of a variety of new neuroanatomical techniques for charting the circuitry of animal brains. Subsequent findings have invalidated the traditional neuroanatomical ideas upon which MacLean based his hypothesis.
For example, the basal ganglia (structures derived from the floor of the forebrain and making up MacLean's reptilian complex) were shown to take up a much smaller portion of the forebrains of reptiles and birds (together called sauropsids) than previously supposed, and to exist in amphibians and fishes as well as mammals and sauropsids. Because the basal ganglia are found in the forebrains of all modern vertebrates, they most likely date to the common evolutionary ancestor of the vertebrates, more than 500 million years ago, rather than to the origin of reptiles. Sauropsids were shown to possess forebrain roof structures similar in connectivity and function to the cerebral cortex (MacLean's neomammalian complex) in mammals. Because these structures look different from the corresponding forebrain roof structures in mammals, they were originally mistaken for a part of the basal ganglia.
Recent behavioral studies likewise do not support the traditional view of sauropsid behavior as stereotyped and ritualistic (as in MacLean's reptilian complex). Birds have been shown to possess highly sophisticated cognitive abilities, such as the toolmaking of the New Caledonian crow and the language-like categorization abilities of the African Gray Parrot.[8] Structures of the limbic system, which MacLean contended arose in early mammals, have now been shown to exist across the whole range of modern vertebrates. The "paleomammalian" trait of parental care of offspring is widespread in birds and occurs in some fishes as well. Thus, like the basal ganglia, the evolution of these systems presumably date to a common vertebrate ancestor.
Finally, the third statement of the triune brain hypothesis, which is that the neocortex appears in modern mammals, is also clearly wrong. All recent studies based on paleontological data or comparative anatomical evidence strongly suggest that the neocortex was already present in the earliest emerging mammals. In addition, although non-mammals do not have a neocortex in the true sense (that is, a structure comprising part of the forebrain roof, or pallium, consisting of six characteristic layers of neurons), they nevertheless sometimes possess well developed pallial areas. While these areas lack the characteristic six neocortical layers, and sometimes lack lamination entirely, they make neuroanatomical connections with other brain structures like those made by neocortex and mediate similar functions such as perception, learning and memory, decision making, motor control, conceptual thinking, and tool use. Scientifically, the triune brain hypothesis was based on what is now recognized as a faulty interpretation of the anatomical organization and evolution of the vertebrate brain. The idea holds little favor in current neuroscience.
Continuing popular interest in the model
The triune model continues to hold interest for some psychologists and members of the general public because of its focus on the recognizable differences between most reptiles, early mammals, and late mammals. Reasons for the success are its simplicity; the theory in this form recognizes three major evolutionary periods in the development of the brain that are characterized by three recognizably distinct ways of solving adaptive challenges). Under this model, the "neocortex" represents that cluster of brain structures involved in advanced cognition, including planning, modeling and simulation; the "reptilian brain" refers to those brain structures related to territoriality, ritual behavior and other "reptile" behaviors; and "limbic brain" refers those brain structures, wherever located, associated with social and nurturing behaviors, mutual reciprocity, and other behaviors and affects that arose during the age of the mammals. The three brains are said to act in coordination or competition in this variation of the model. While there is no scientific consensus on the applicability of the model at a level other than the three distinct evolutionarily distinct brain systems, some people find this to be a helpful model because of its broad explanatory value.
The popularity of the model can also be seen in the way it parallels recurring themes in popular culture and the arts. For example, some languages have phrases which refer to speaking from the "head", "heart", or "gut", or philosophically of the three virtues of "wisdom, benevolence and courage"--or psychologically of "thinking", "feeling", and "willing". In The Wizard of Oz, for example, the quest for "a brain", "a heart", and "courage" play a central role. The three elements of the triune model map comfortably onto these more abstract conceptions.
In this sense, the triune brain (more properly, perhaps, the "triune mind") is seen as a highly simplified but powerful organizing theme. The statistician George E. P. Box once quipped: "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."
Howard Bloom, in his book The Lucifer Principle, references the concept of the triune brain in his explanations of certain aspects of human behavior.
See also
The Dragons of Eden, Pulitzer prize-winning 1977 book by Carl Sagan
The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role of Paleocerebral Functions, Paul D. MacLean, 1990, Springer.
Principles of Brain Evolution, Georg F. Striedter, 2005, Sinauer associates.
Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy, Second Edition, Ann B. Butler and William Hodos, 2005, John Wiley and Sons
References
^ Kazlev, et al., M. Alan (2003-10-19). "The Triune Brain.". KHEPER. Retrieved 2007-05-25
^ Panksepp, J. (2003). Foreword to Cory, G. and Gardner, R. (2002) The Evolutionary Ethology of Paul MacLean. Greenwood Publishing Group.
^ Patton, Paul (December, 2008). "One World, Many Minds: Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom". Scientific American. Retrieved 29 December 2008. "The traditional ideas about sequential brain evolution appeared, for example, in the late neuroscientist and psychiatrist Paul D. MacLean's triune brain model, formulated in the 1960s. MacLean's model promoted the belief that the human brain contains a “reptilian complex” inherited from reptilian ancestors. Beginning in the 1980s, the field of comparative neuroanatomy experienced a renaissance. In the intervening decades evolutionary biologists had learned a great deal about vertebrate evolutionary history, and they developed new and effective methods of applying Darwin's concept of the tree of life to analyze and interpret their findings. It is now apparent that a simple linear hierarchy cannot adequately account for the evolution of brains or of intelligence."
^ Hodos, William. "Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy: Evolution and Adaptation". "The extensive body of work in comparative neurobiology over the past three decades unequivocally contradicts this theory. First, homologs of the limbic cortical areas that MacLean considers to have been first present in early mammals have been found in non-mammalian vertebrates. Second, homologs of neocortical structures and of dorsal thalamic nuclei have also been found in nonmammals. Third, MacLean's observations on the behavioral differences between mammals and nonmammals are oversimplified and ignore the elaborate social and parental behaviors of some non-mammalian vertebrates, including birds and a variety of ray-finned fishes"
^ Reiner, A. (1990). An Explanation of Behavior, Science, 250:303-305
^ a b c d Striedter, G. F. (2005) Principles of Brain Evolution. Sinauer Associates
^ 2003 Avian Brain Nomenclature Tables
^ Patton, Paul (December, 2008). "One World, Many Minds: Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom". Scientific American. Retrieved 29 December 2008.
^ Butler, A. B. and Hodos, W. Comparative Vertebrate Neuroanatomy: Evolution and Adaptation, Wiley
^ Wikiquote: George E. P. Box
Further reading
Gardner, Russell; Cory, Gerald A. (2002). The evolutionary neuroethology of Paul MacLean: convergences and frontiers. New York: Praeger. ISBN 0-275-97219-4. OCLC 49649452.
Kral, V. A.; MacLean, Paul D. (1973). A Triune concept of the brain and behaviour, by Paul D. MacLean. Including Psychology of memory, and Sleep and dreaming; papers presented at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, February 1969, by V. A. Kral [et al, Toronto]: Published for the Ontario Mental Health Foundation by Univ. of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-3299-0. OCLC 704665
MacLean, Paul D. "Brain Evolution Relating to Family, Play, and the Separation Call" Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 42: 405-417, 1985
MacLean, Paul D. (1990). The triune brain in evolution: role in paleocerebral functions. New York: Plenum Press. ISBN 0-306-43168-8. OCLC 20295730
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Robert Anton Wilson
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Prometheus Rising
Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution
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Guide to the Clarence Streit Papers
(1913-1984)
Clarence K. Streit was born in California, MO, in 1896. At the age of 15 he moved to Missoula, Montana, where he founded the Konah, a high school paper that is now one of the oldest in continuous publication. Streit worked in the summers surveying in Alaska and the Rocky Mountains to finance his education at Montana State University, (now the University of Montana), where he edited the college newspaper, the Kaimin, and served on the debate team.
Streit left Missoula in 1917 and volunteered in the 18th Railway Engineers for war service. One of the first 50,000 American soldiers to land in Europe, he reached France in August of 1917. In 1918 he joined the Intelligence Service where for a time he served as one of the guards of President Wilson. After his time in the service, Streit returned to Missoula where he won a Rhodes Scholarship which enabled him to study history at Oxford. Once in England, Streit met Jeanne Defrance of Paris, and they married in 1921.
In 1925 he joined the New York Times as a foreign correspondent and in 1929 went to Geneva as a correspondent for the League of Nations, a post he held for nearly ten years. During his time as a journalist, Streit covered such prominent issues as the Sino-Japanese war, the depression and the rise of Nazi dictatorship. His interest in such international issues led Streit to resign his position at the Times in 1939 and publish his first book, Union Now, an appeal for a federal union of the democracies.
After the success of Union Now, which admirers hailed as democracy's answer to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, Clarence and Jeanne Streit continued to commit their lives to the cause of union. In 1940, the couple founded Federal Union, Inc., an educational organization committed to universal world government. Chapters opened in towns all over the nation, including the formation of a Missoula chapter in 1940. Streit served as president of Federal Union as well as editor of Freedom and Union, the organization's magazine. Streit was one of the founding members of the Atlantic Union Committee that merged with other organizations in 1962 to form the Atlantic Council. His works on behalf of world peace earned Streit a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Clarence Streit died in 1986.
The Streit Papers include correspondence between Streit and a number of the country's most influential figures in the fight for federal union of democratic nations, including: Theodore C. Achilles, former Director of Western European Affairs, William Clayton, whose efforts resulted in the Marshall Plan of 1947, former Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts and former Congressmen Paul Findley and Estes Kefauver. Other prominent figures include President F. D. Roosevelt, President Nixon, and former Senator Mike Mansfield. The collection includes documentation concerning Streit's personal involvement in organizations such as Federal Union, the Atlantic Union Committee and the International Movement for Atlantic Union. Records from these organizations, as well as his personal speeches and writings, make up the bulk of Streit's collection. Also included is the record of proceedings from the 1951 Conference of Strasbourg, a special meeting between European parliamentarians and US members of Congress, which Federal Union and the Atlantic Union Committee helped organize with the goal of creating a North Atlantic Assembly.
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“… and Puritanism was Talmudic… “– Veronica Clark
Spoken on Spingola Speaks, Wednesday, November 3rd
Sterling and Penny Seagrave interview on Tuesday, November 2nd
The Mind has No Firewall – Alan Watt – Cutting Through the Matrix
Road Warrior Radio – continuation of July newsletter reading from Bobby Garner
Subject matter included:
Bobby Garner's July 2011 newsletter (visit Congregator.net)
The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
The Road to Serfdom by FA Hayek
A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee
Abridgement by DC Somervell
Abridgement by DC Somervell
They Own It All Including You By Means of Toxic Currency
By Ron McDonald and Dr. Robert Rowan
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The Life of an American Jew in Racist Marxist Israel
Written in 1985 by Jack Bernstein
A CHALLENGE
THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK ARE EXPECTED TO BRING A STRONG REACTION FROM THE ZIONIST JEWS.
I am well aware of the tactics of you, my Zionist brethren, use to quiet anyone who attempts to expose any of your subversive acts.
If the person is a Gentile, you cry, "You're anti-Semitic" which is nothing more than a smokescreen to hide your actions.
But, if a Jew is the person doing the exposing, you resort to other tactics.
First, you ignore the charges, hoping the information will not be given widespread distribution.
If the information starts reaching too many people, you ridicule the information and the persons giving the information.
If that doesn't work, your next step is character assassination. If the author or speaker hasn't been involved in sufficient scandal you are adept at fabricating scandal against the person or persons.
If none of these are effective, you are known to resort to physical attacks.
But, NEVER do you try to prove the information wrong.
So, before you start your efforts to quiet me, I OFFER THIS CHALLENGE:
You Zionists assemble a number of Zionist Jews and witnesses to support your position; and I will assemble a like number of anti-Zionist, pro-American Jews and witnesses.
Then, the Zionists and the Anti-Zionists will state their position and debate the material in this book as well as related material — the debate TO BE HELD ON PUBLIC TELEVISION.
Let's explore the information and let the American people decide for themselves if the information is true or false.
ISN'T THAT A FAIR CHALLENGE?
Certainly, you will willingly accept the challenge if what I have written is false.
But, if you resort to crying, "Lies, all lies," and refuse to debate the material you will, in effect, be telling the American people that what I have written are the true facts.
Jack Bernstein
(This honest and courageous Jew was assassinated some years ago, by MOSSAD).
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The Invention of the Jewish People
By Shlomo Sand
(2009)
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Was Pope Paul VI Replaced by an Impostor?
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The Pope in Red
"We believe that the present hour is a dread phase of the events foretold by Christ. It seems that darkness is about to fall on the world. Humanity is in the grip of a supreme crisis." -Pope Pius XII
---
At the 1958 Conclave on October 26th:
"Siri, [according to FBI sources], obtained the necessary votes and was elected Pope Gregory XVII". (Declassified U.S. Department of State secret dispatch, "John XXIII", issue date: November 20, 1958, declassified: November 11, 1974 [Also see]
U.S. Department of State secret file "Cardinal Siri", issue date: April 10, 1961, declassified: February 28, 1994.)
"The Church has no enemies."
-Antipope John XXIII (Enemy #1), speech from the balcony of St. Peter's, Oct. 28, 1958. The perfidious media would coin him, "Good Pope John".
Antipope John XXIII wasted no time with his plan to subvert the entire Catholic Church with a "new gospel" which was inaugurated at his Apostate Vatican II Council; whose false teachings have thrown the "Church" and the temporal sphere into unprecedented chaos.
"The Hostage Pope", His Holiness, Gregory XVII
Although betrayed by His Cardinals beginning on the day of His Divine Election, October 26, 1958 A.D., put under constant surveillance,
a documented death-threat, and having absolutely no temporal arm to turn to for help- Pope Gregory XVII, by a near miraculous occurrence shortly
before His "unforeseen" death on May 2, 1989 A.D., did perform the proper actions to carry on the True Hierarchy (Petrine Mission) of the True Church.
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The One Percent: Gigantic Government + Gigantic Corporations = Massive Wealth Inequality In America
Today, there are protests all over America that are targeting "the one percent" and all of the wealth and power that they have accumulated. Unfortunately, many of the solutions that these protesters are advocating simply will not work and will not lead to less wealth inequality. To understand this, you have to understand how we got to this point. Over the past several decades, our federal government has exploded in size and our large corporations have exploded in size. In fact, we have seen this pattern happen pretty much all over the world. Governments and corporations all over the globe are getting much bigger. Whenever you have very, very large concentrations of money and power like that, it is going to lead to massive wealth inequality. The Occupy Wall Street protesters would like to frame this debate as "socialism vs. capitalism", but the truth is that wherever you find big government you will almost always find big corporations, and wherever you find big corporations you will almost always find big government. Sure, they spar once in a while, but the reality is that big government and big corporations work in tandem most of the time.
Sometimes big government has the upper hand and sometimes big corporations have the upper hand, but they are both collectivist institutions. Wherever you find collectivism in the world, you will find an elite that receives most of the benefits while the rest of the population suffers. In the United States today, our gigantic government is thriving and our gigantic corporations are thriving and the middle class is rapidly shrinking. The solution to this is not to replace one form of collectivism with another form of collectivism. Rather, what we need is to go back to what our founding fathers intended. They were extremely suspicious of large concentrations of wealth and power, and they intended for us to live in a capitalist system where individuals and small businesses had the freedom to compete and thrive.
Sometimes big government has the upper hand and sometimes big corporations have the upper hand, but they are both collectivist institutions. Wherever you find collectivism in the world, you will find an elite that receives most of the benefits while the rest of the population suffers. In the United States today, our gigantic government is thriving and our gigantic corporations are thriving and the middle class is rapidly shrinking. The solution to this is not to replace one form of collectivism with another form of collectivism. Rather, what we need is to go back to what our founding fathers intended. They were extremely suspicious of large concentrations of wealth and power, and they intended for us to live in a capitalist system where individuals and small businesses had the freedom to compete and thrive.
Today, Democrats tell us that we need an even bigger government and that we need to redistribute even more wealth to the poor. But the bigger the government gets, the more poor people we seem to have. As you will see below, the only people that seem to be thriving from big government are the bureaucrats.
Republicans tell us that we need to make life better for the big corporations. But the reality is that the bigger our giant corporations get, the faster the middle class shrinks. The big corporations are shipping millions of our jobs out of the country, and they are magnets for wealth and power. If you are not aware of how overwhelmingly dominant corporations have become in our society, just read this article.
Democrats should not be defending big government, and Republicans should not be defending the abuses of the big corporations.
Whenever big government and big corporations work together there is going to be massive income inequality, and massive income inequality is not a good thing.
Yes, there are always going to be some people that do much better than others (and there is nothing wrong with that), but we should not have a system which is designed to funnel almost all of the wealth and almost all of the power to a very small minority.
In essence, this article is arguing the following....
Gigantic government = bad.
Gigantic corporations = bad.
This was the view of our founding fathers, and this is what we need to get back to.
Let's take a look at some of the results of our current system. Let's start with income inequality caused by big government.
Today, the Washington D.C. region has the highest median household income in the entire nation. According to the most recent numbers, median household income in the D.C. area is $84,523.
So what is the cause of this?
Well, it is not because Washington D.C. is a great center of industry or finance. Rather, it is because the federal government is spending over 3 trillion dollars a year and is showering huge piles of cash on hordes of bureaucrats.
In a recent article, I noted some of the mind blowing statistics that show how bureaucrats in Washington D.C. are living the high life at our expense...
*When you total up all compensation (including health care and benefits), the average income for a federal worker in the Washington D.C. area last year was $126,369.
*In 2005, 7420 federal workers were making $150,000 or more per year. In 2010, a whopping 82,034 federal workers were making $150,000 or more per year. That is more than a tenfold increase in just five years.
*In 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense had just nine civilians earning $170,000 or more. When Barack Obama took office, the U.S. Department of Defense had 214 civilians earning $170,000 or more. In June 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense had 994 civilians earning $170,000 or more.
*Last year, federal employees "earned" approximately 447 billion dollars in total compensation.
As I have written about previously, our gigantic federal government also empowers the big corporations to continue to accumulate staggering amounts of wealth and power. This is one reason why the big corporations contribute so much money to political campaigns. The big corporations (and the elite that own and run them) have much more influence over the political process than we do. They have spent decades buying politicians and getting laws passed that tilt the rules of the game radically in their favor.
This is something that our founding fathers did not want to happen. In a 2010 article, Rick Ungar noted that there were very significant restrictions on corporations in the early days of America....
After the nation’s founding, corporations were, as they are today, the result of charters granted by the state. However, unlike today, they were limited in how long they were permitted to exist (typically 20 or 30 years), only permitted to deal in one commodity, they could not own shares in other corporations, and their property holdings were expressly limited to what they needed to accomplish their corporate business goals.
There was a lot of wisdom to that approach. Our founding fathers knew that corporations would become giant magnets for wealth and power if they were allowed to grow unchecked.
Today, multinational corporations completely and totally dominate the global economy. The following comes from a recent article I posted on The American Dream....
Corporations not only completely dominate the U.S. economy, they also completely dominate the global economy as well. A newly released University of Zurich study examined more than 43,000 major multinational corporations. The study discovered a vast web of interlocking ownerships that is controlled by a "core" of 1,318 giant corporations. But that "core" itself is controlled by a "super-entity" of 147 monolithic corporations that are very, very tightly knit. As a recent article in NewScientist noted, these 147 corporations control approximately 40 percent of all the wealth in the entire network.
These giant corporations are so dominant that it is nearly impossible to compete with them. The number of small businesses in America is shrinking fast.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006. Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.
This is exactly what we would expect to see under "corporatism", but under true capitalism we would expect to see the exact opposite.
As the federal government and the big corporations continue to grow, the middle class is being wiped out. If you doubt that the middle class is shrinking, just read this article.
Yes, there is a limited role for the federal government to play and there is a limited role for corporations to play. But right now things are radically, radically out of balance.
This is creating a tremendous amount of income inequality in the United States. The middle class is being systematically destroyed, and the growth of the gap between the one percent and the rest of us just continues to accelerate.
This was certainly illustrated by numbers that were recently released by the Congressional Budget Office. The very wealthy have done extremely well over the last 30 years. For the rest of us, things have not been so great. The following figures come from a recent blog post by the director of the Congressional Budget Office....
CBO finds that between 1979 and 2007:
For the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent (see figure below).
For others in the 20 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 65 percent.
For the 60 percent of the population in the middle of the income scale, the growth in average real after-tax household income was just under 40 percent.
For the 20 percent of the population with the lowest income, the growth in average real after-tax household income was about 18 percent.
Meanwhile, as a recent USA Today article noted, the middle class continues to falter in the majority of the communities around the United States....
A USA TODAY analysis of Census data found the Reno area was among 150 nationwide where the share of income going to the middle class — generally made up of households that make $20,700 to $99,900 a year — shrank from 2006 to 2010. Metro areas where the middle class' share of income dropped outnumbered those where it grew by more than 2-to-1.
So just how well is the top one percent doing compared to the rest of us?
The following statistics should be a wake up call for all of us....
*According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top one percent is the only group that saw its share of our national income increase between 1979 and 2007.
*According to a joint House and Senate report entitled "Income Inequality and the Great Recession", the top one percent of all income earners in the United States brought in a total of 10.0 percent of all income income in 1980, but by the time 2008 had rolled around that figure had skyrocketed to 21.0 percent.
*Between 1979 and 2007, the average household income of the top one percent of all Americans soared from $346,600 to $1.3 million.
*In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
*As the "one percent" thrives, the share of the pie being enjoyed by the middle class is shrinking. According to Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, about 53 percent of all income went to the middle class back in the 1970s, but today only about 46 percent of all income does.
*According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top one percent of all Americans.
*The wealthiest one percent of all Americans now own more than a third of all the wealth in the United States while the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
*The wealthiest one percent of all Americans own over 50% of all the stocks and bonds.
*The top 0.01% of Americans make an average of $27,342,212. The bottom 90% make an average of $31,244.
*This is all happening at a time when the United States as a whole is slipping. Ten years ago, the United States was ranked number one in average wealth per adult. In 2010, the United States fell to seventh.
*Income inequality is not just growing in the United States. Today, the wealthiest one percent of the earth's population controls 39% of the wealth.
There is certainly nothing wrong with being wealthy. If you and your family work really hard and provide great value to the community around you then you should greatly benefit.
But a system that is designed to systematically drain wealth from the general population and transfer it into the hands of an ultra-wealthy elite is not what our founding fathers ever hand in mind. At the time of our founding, England was dominated by big government (the monarchy) and by big business (the East India Company, for example). Our founders warned us over and over about the potential abuses that can happen when very large concentrations of wealth and power are allowed to dominate a society.
Unfortunately, the Occupy Wall Street movement has it all wrong. They recognize the overwhelming wealth and power accumulated by the one percent, but most of them are advocating even more collectivism as the answer.
Some of them even say that they want to "end capitalism" altogether. Michael Moore says that he is not part of the one percent and that he wants to "end capitalism", even though he has made millions upon millions of dollars from his various projects.
But socialism and communism never bring equality. Like other forms of collectivism, socialism and communism almost always bring more tyranny and they almost always funnel most of the financial rewards to a very small elite.
Others simply wish to see the U.S. government transfer more wealth from the hands of the rich to the hands of the poor.
Helping the poor is certainly a noble goal, and handouts can certainly ease suffering at least temporarily. But handouts are never a permanent solution and they can cause large numbers of people to end up becoming completely and totally dependent on the government.
Back in 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for 18.4% of all income.
So has the plight of the poor gotten better?
No, we now have more than 45 million Americans on food stamps, last year we had the largest increase in the number of Americans living in poverty in U.S. history and the middle class continues to shrink rapidly.
The truth is that what poor and middle class Americans really need are opportunities. Handouts will keep people alive, but they will not give people hope and a future.
What Americans really need is an environment where they can find jobs or start small businesses. Unfortunately, the environment for small businesses in this country is incredibly toxic and millions of our good jobs have been shipped overseas. The big corporations have discovered that they can make even bigger profits by sending jobs to countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. To say that we need big corporations because they are the ones that "create jobs" is simply not true anymore.
So now we have tens of millions of Americans that we have to take care of every single month. There is nothing wrong with helping them survive, but giving them even more handouts is not going to permanently solve anything.
We need to have a population that is empowered to work hard, produce wealth and create a bright future for their families.
Instead, what we have is a system that greatly rewards the top one percent and that is pushing all of the rest of us toward poverty.
Gigantic government plus gigantic corporations is always going to equal massive wealth inequality.
The bigger we allow government to grow and the bigger we allow corporations to grow, the worse it is going to get.
So is any of this going to change any time soon?
Well, considering the fact that the vast majority of our politicians are in the pockets of the big corporations, I would not be getting your hopes up.
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The Illuminati Mentality
In Europe, the French and Germans know the detailed history of Freemasonry and the Illuminati because they were major players in real politics and revolutions. Today they don't use the word "Illuminati" to describe what we in America are talking about. They refer to it as the Global Synarchy.
Somewhere during the Blair years in England, British conspiracy analysts noticed that the EU and Globalism was beginning to look an awful lot like Saint-Yves's Synarchy. He described a Federal Europe with a transnational corporate structure of cooperative departments - science, political, military, economics, education, entertainment (mind control) and spiritual (inner temple occult priesthood presiding an outer religion). These non-elected departments operate behind the visible administrative councils.
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How Freemasonry Controls Our Government and Our Courts
Great Britain
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Portrait of Zio Christian, Joel Rosenberg
BLAMING GOD FOR ILLUMINATI DEEDSElizabeth Dilling and Bella Dodd revealed the Illuminati Jewish (Communist) plan to de-Christianize Western Civilization. Now we see evangelical and fundamentalist churches infiltrated beyond recognition as a new form of propaganda has emerged:
Propaganda Through Prophecy.(Wikipedia) Joel C. Rosenberg (born 1967) has written five novels about terrorism and how it relates to Bible Prophecy. He has had his work published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Policy Review. His father had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and his mother was born into a Methodist family of English descent. His parents were agnostic and became born-again Christians when he was a child. At the age of 17, he became a born-again Christian and now identifies as a Jewish believer in Jesus. Rosenberg opened a political consultancy business, advising former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky and then-former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where he garnered much of his information on the Middle East that he would later use in his books.
By John Hubbard (henrymakow.com)[Hubbard reports on a Prophesy Conference called "Gathering Storm" hosted by Rosenburg]
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Propaganda Through Prophecy.(Wikipedia) Joel C. Rosenberg (born 1967) has written five novels about terrorism and how it relates to Bible Prophecy. He has had his work published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Policy Review. His father had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and his mother was born into a Methodist family of English descent. His parents were agnostic and became born-again Christians when he was a child. At the age of 17, he became a born-again Christian and now identifies as a Jewish believer in Jesus. Rosenberg opened a political consultancy business, advising former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky and then-former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where he garnered much of his information on the Middle East that he would later use in his books.
By John Hubbard (henrymakow.com)[Hubbard reports on a Prophesy Conference called "Gathering Storm" hosted by Rosenburg]
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Gilad Atzmon: Debating Greg Felton’s ‘Exploding Middle East Myths’
(Video)
Press TV: In this edition of the show we discuss the book: Exploding Middle East Myths, written by Greg Felton.
For nearly 63 years, since its creation in 1948, the state of Israel has carefully controlled what the Western world knows about the Zionist state.
As a result, what we have received from the mainstream media is reams of propaganda and little truth when it comes to the racist and bellicose state.
Against this backdrop of censored "news," one gutsy journalist took a dangerous stand and instead has been telling the truth about Israel for the last 15 years.
In Exploding Middle East Myths, you'll see the real Israel: brutal treatment of Palestinians, blatant disregard for Christians and Muslims, and parasitic control over foreign governments, especially the US.
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Banned from the Bibles: Books Banned, Rejected, and Forbidden
By Joseph B. Lumpkin
(2008)
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The Sin of Corban
Dorothea Jordan
Great grandson is David Cameron, current Prime Minister of Great Britain
Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America
(Documentary, 1/14)
Congregator (Bobby Garner)
Michael Maloney: We Pay Tax for the Privilege to Have Currency
Islamic Human Rights Commission: Communitarianism in France is Mainly a White Communitarianism
Interview with Ramon Grosfoguel, Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley
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Economic Cures: What is Wrong with our Economy?
Wealth Pump
No political democracy will work as long as our financial system is not also democratic. This quote by Thomas Jefferson says it all.
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
This is the main policy that needs to change right now or everything else we do will eventually fail again. Money is a utility that should serve the people to facilitate orderly exchange of goods and services in a way that maximizes Consumer satisfaction and efficiency with incentives for all. People should not be made to serve the captains of money who treat it as a commodity they own. We propose a workable model that is a radical departure from anything most of you have ever been exposed to - literally a Wealth Pump.
Please view the following video in three parts to learn about this new Wealth Pump.
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Loren Cordain - Origins and Evolution of the Western Diet: Health Implications for the 21st Century
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The Druids: What is Truth?
Amazing Discoveries: Total Onslaught
Walter Veith
Amazing Discoveries is a non-profit organization committed to exposing deceptions in the areas of science and creation, current world events, Bible Prophecy, the music world, health and nutrition.
You can learn about our projects and read informative articles at our main site: AmazingDiscoveries.org. Visit our site exclusively dedicated to your good health at: AmazingHealth.org. Our newest site, RekindlingTheReformation.com offers a growing archive of historical and current political exposés. Watch for our new site on the creation-evolution controversy at AmazingCreation.com.
LaRouche Publications Archive
Semitic Controversies: Socialist History Society Obsesses Over Jews (Again)
Watch Unto Prayer: Kabbalah Initiation
http://watch.pair.com/synarchy-1.html
http://www.oldthinkernews.com/
THE SYNARCHY
“JUDEO-CHRISTIAN” THEOCRACY
FRONTS FOR INTERNATIONAL BANKING CARTEL
“Synarchy...is ‘government by secret societies’,
or by a group of initiates who operate from behind the scenes.
It is an analogue of ‘theocracy’, or rule by a priesthood.”
~ Marquis Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre
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http://www.oldthinkernews.com/
Old Thinker News
Texas Entrepreneur Unconstitutionally Stripped of His Company, Assets, Liberty and Privacy
VIOLATIONS OF CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS AND CIVIL RIGHTS USHERS IN A POLICE STATE IN AMERICA
By Sharon Rondeau
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas is located on Commerce Street in Dallas, TX(Oct. 23, 2011) — The Post & Email as well as other organizations have been reporting on cases of judicial corruption throughout the country since its inception in August 2009, beginning with cases dealing, or rather, avoiding, the Obama eligibility question when precedent dictated that they should have been heard on the merits to determine if a usurper occupied the office of the presidency. It has become clear that the U.S. government is rife with corruption in all three branches.
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Occupy Wall Street Simplified
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David Icke: Essential Knowledge for a Wall Street Protester
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Conspiracy of Silence
(Banned Discovery Channel Documentary)
"Conspiracy of Silence" is a powerful, disturbing documentary revealing a nationwide child abuse and pedophilia ring that leads to the highest levels of government. Featuring intrepid investigator John DeCamp, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and 16-year Nebraska state senator, "Conspiracy of Silence" reveals how rogue elements at all levels of government have been involved in systematic child abuse and pedophilia to feed the base desires of key politicians.
Based on DeCamp's riveting book, The Franklin Cover-up, "Conspiracy of Silence" begins with the shut-down of Nebraska's Franklin Community Federal Credit Union after a raid by federal agencies in November 1988 revealed that $40 million was missing. When the Nebraska legislature launched a probe into the affair, what initially looked like a financial swindle soon exploded into a startling tale of drugs, money laundering, and a nationwide child abuse ring. Nineteen months later, the legislative committee's chief investigator died suddenly and violently, like more than a dozen other people linked to the Franklin case.
So why have you never heard of the Franklin cover-up? Originally scheduled to air in May of 1994 on the Discovery Channel, "Conspiracy of Silence" was yanked at the last minute due to formidable pressure applied by top politicians. Some very powerful people did not want you to watch this documentary.
You may find yourself becoming angry or upset while watching "Conspiracy of Silence." Many people do. However, consider that each of us has at times in our life acted out of selfish motives when it comes to sexuality and ended up hurting others in one way or another. Let us take this information not only as a call to stop this kind of abuse at the nationwide level, but also as a call to examine our own sexual relationships and make a commitment to deep honesty and integrity in our own lives around this most sensitive issue. Thanks for caring and may we all work together to build a brighter future for ourselves and for our world.
A copy of this videotape was furnished anonymously to former Nebraska state senator and attorney John De Camp who made it available to retired FBI Agent Ted L. Gunderson. While the video quality is not top grade, this tape is a blockbuster in what is revealed by the participants involved.
NOTE; This film had to be reassembled from remaining VHS fragments after an all-out effort was made to block the film’s release and destroy all extant copies. Every effort has been made to restore it to the original and complete "meant to be broadcast" version.
For additional information on this video, and download information:
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US Law Enforcement Chiefs to Israel
After 9/11, American law enforcement had to move quickly to get their expertise up to deal with terrorism.
Countering terrorism was nothing new to the Israelis, who have accumulated decades of experience trying to provide security for its citizens, who have suffered suicide bombings and armed attacks by militant Palestinians and others. During the so-called Second Intifada, over 1,000 Israelis were killed by suicide bombings, but in the last half dozen years the violence has dropped dramatically, largely due to actions by Israel’s security forces.
Israeli counter-terrorism is so effective that American law enforcement officials visit regularly visit to learn how to tighten homeland security. It’s an eye opener and an opportunity for networking that allows them to develop relationships.
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Living Under Israel’s Boot
By Stephen J. Lendman
Like occupied people everywhere, Palestinians understand oppression better than experts. Ask them. They'll explain.
In Gaza, it means living under siege and Israeli air, land and sea attacks. West Bank communities face day and night incursions.
In the week ending October 27, 58 were conducted, nearly 10 a day. Israel arrests Palestinians while releasing others. Every Palestinian wonders when their loved ones may be taken in middle of the night raids, including children young as ten.
International law doesn't restrain Israeli persecution. Peaceful protestors taste tear gas, rubber bullets, stun grenades, beatings and other abusive tactics to disperse them.
On October 27, Israel bombed three Khan Younis locations in southern Gaza. No deaths or injuries were reported. Central Gaza's Deir al-Balah was also struck, again with no casualties.
Israel claims provocations each time. Gazans mostly respond in self-defense as international law allows. Israel calls it terrorism. It intercepted two Gazan fishermen, opened fire, detained them and impounded their boats.
Attacks against other fishermen escalated. Boats were confiscated. Fishermen were detained. Tools and equipment were damaged or destroyed.
Gazans are prevented from fishing in their own waters. Violent assaults can come any time. On October 27, Israeli warplanes destroyed a container used for fishing equipment and tools. Nets and a water tank were burnt.
In 2011, 67 similar incidents occurred, involving live fire 40 times. Eight fishermen were wounded. Hospitalization was required to treat them.
Other incidents involved threats and harassment, causing damage and confiscation of boats. Since 2000, Israel denied Gazans the right to fish freely in their own waters. In 2008, their territory was reduced from 20 to six nautical miles, but none of it is safe.
Gazans fishing beyond three miles are attacked. Even close to shore risks interceptions, property damage and confiscation, and detentions. As a result, fishermen have lost 85% of their subsistence.
In early October, West Bank Qusra village farmers discovered about 200 of their fruit trees vandalized. Extremist settlers were responsible. Israel does nothing to stop them. Similar incidents happen regularly.
Despite repeated complaints by Qusra, Duma, Qaryut, Jalud, and other village residents, security forces violate their responsibility to protect them from settler attacks.
In recent weeks, multiple incidents occurred. Property was vandalized. Confrontations between residents and settlers occurred. In one incident, soldiers killed Issam Badran for defending his rights.
Elsewhere, a mosque was set ablaze after Hebrew graffiti was sprayed on it. In late September, multiple incidents destroyed over 900 trees. In 2011, 7,500 trees were vandalized. Perpetrators weren't held accountable. Investigations result in whitewashes. Israel affords Arabs no rights, including its own citizens.
On October 27, Aseel Ara'ra, age four, suffered quadriplegia after soldiers shot her in the neck. Surgery didn't help. She remains in intensive care. She'll never be the same again. Restitution never comes. Aggressors never say they're sorry. They commit other crimes as bad.
On October 26, Israeli police closed two NGO offices, claiming links to Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Jerusalem for Development head Khaled Zabarqa called his organization a "development institution" which closes social gaps in Arab East Jerusalem.
Closures accompany rising tensions. Since 2006, they've increased since Israel began implementing the Jerusalem E1 plan to replace East Jerusalem Palestinians with Jewish settlers. As a result, political activity was prohibited. Legitimate protests are called crimes.
On October 29, responding to Israeli air strikes, Gazans fired seven rockets at Ashdod, Gan Yavne, and west of Be'er Sheva in Israel.
One or more Israelis were wounded, several others traumatized. Later a mortar struck near the Eshkol Regional Council. No casualties were reported.
Israel always responds the same way. More air and ground attacks followed. Bogus reasons justified them. Nine Palestinians were killed. Nearly always, Gazans fire rockets only after Israel attacks. International law legitimizes self-defense.
On October 28, hundreds of Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces in multiple West Bank locations. Around Beit Omar, about 250 demonstrated and threw stones. Soldiers and police responded violently with tear gas, rubber bullets, stun grenades and other crowd dispersal measures.
About 80 Palestinians protested near Nabi Saleh. Some threw stones. Similar incidents occurred around Bil'in, Kedum, Beitunia, and Lita. Israel responded violently.
Throughout October, Israeli security forces disrupted villages and uprooted dozens of al-Walaja fruit trees to prepare land for Separation Wall construction. Palestinian land is stolen in the process.
In July 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled Wall construction illegal, ordered its removal, and compensation paid victims for damaged or destroyed property.
On October 3, soldiers began uprooting trees in Ein al-Hadfa, Khallet al-Samak, Ein Jweiza, and al-Walaja area land. About 90 dunums were affected, as well as 230 olive, almond, cypress and oak trees. Grapevines were also destroyed.
Other large sections were isolated, including an area cemetery. More Wall construction occurred around al-Ntouf and Ras Krimzan, east of al-Walaja village. When completed, it will be 2,000 meters long.
Villagers petitioned Israel's High Court to stop it. On August 23, they were rejected. The ruling stated:
"The route of the wall is necessary for the security of Israel and its citizens."
When begun, land theft, not security, was planned. When completed, about 12% of Palestinian land will be gone. Israel uses other ways to steal more land to secure all valued parts of Judea and Samaria it wants colonized and annexed.
Since 2009, about 4,500 meters were built east, west, and northeast of al-Walaja. About 2,100 olive, grape, almond and other trees were destroyed. About 500 dunums of agricultural lands and forests were uprooted. Another 2,000 dunums in al-Walaja village were isolated behind the wall. It surrounds its north, east and western sides.
From the south, an IDF security street encloses it. When sections under construction are completed, over half of village land will be isolated. Eventually, the Wall will completely isolate al-Walaja from other Palestinian villages and towns, service providing institutions, and vital Bethlehem governorate areas.
Life under occupation is oppressive and cruel. Palestinians want it ended. They also want recognized sovereignty, full UN membership and peace. Israel denied them for 44 years.
Nothing under consideration offers change. Palestinians are on their own like always, determined to overcome and live free. Their liberating struggle continues.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
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Showdown in America: Helping Banks Help Themselves… to your Money
(Animated short – Payday lenders – Parasitic, usurious, mafia-like profits)
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The Zionist Lobby’s First Lady in US Congress
By Alan Hart
In passing I have to say that I never cease to be amazed by the mind-blowing hypocrisy of almost all Americans in positions of political power. By far the most biased entity at the UN is the United States of America.
The Zionist lobby’s First Lady in Congress is the Cuban-American born Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. (Her maternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews from Turkey who became active in Cuba’s Jewish community. Her mother converted to Catholicism). She was the first Republican to be elected to the House of Representatives from Florida and she is today the chairwoman of its Foreign Affairs Committee. In that capacity she introduced the bill to cut off US funding to any UN organization that recognizes Palestinian statehood. She also advocates cutting funding to the Lebanese Armed Forces and the West Bank and Gaza.
That’s on the one hand. On the other is the fact that one of her major campaign funders was Irving Moskowitz, a Florida businessman who is a major funder of illegal Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem. Also a fact is that the J Street lobby group called on her to return campaign contributions from him because, it said, “he actively works to de-rail the chances for a two-state solution.”
Against that background it was entirely logical that she would take (as she did) the lead in demanding that the Obama administration “halt its condemnations of an indispensable ally and friend of the United States.”
Once upon a time it was only those seeking to be elected on the Democratic ticket who felt the need to kiss the Zionist lobby’s bottom. Now the Republicans are at it, too.
What chance does any American president have of confronting this lobby in order to be able to put American’s own real and best interests first? My answer (I never tire of giving it) is no chance unless and until enough American voters are informed enough to call and hold their Congressmen and women to account.
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Ros-Lehtinen’s history indicates that she is a fan of targeted assassinations, so presumably on this matter she thinks Obama is doing a better job than George “Dubya” Bush.
She appeared very briefly in 638 Ways to Kill Castro, a Channel 4 documentary film broadcast in the UK on 28 November 2006. It told the story of some of the many attempts by the CIA to kill the Cuban leader. Her contribution included this: “I welcome the opportunity of having anyone assassinate Fidel Castro and any leader who is oppressing the people.”
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When a 28-second clip of her saying that was circulated on the internet, she denied it by claiming that the production team had misrepresented her by splicing clips to make the sound bite. Director Dollan Cannell then released the unedited tapes of the interview with her, proving that she had twice welcomed an attempt on Castro’s life. It was the production team that had been misrepresented by her, not the other way round. Cannel asked for an apology but he didn’t receive one.
An inability to say sorry is, of course, one of the hallmarks of all who support Israel right or wrong.
<|>
What are Unalienable Rights?
By Russell D. Longcore
<|>
Limits to Growth
Club of Rome
(1972)
The Elite Plan for a New Social Order
By Richard K. Moore
The Babylonian Woe:
The Study of the Origin of Certain Banking Practices, and of their Effect on the Events of ancient History, Written in the Light of the Present Day
By David Astle
How the British Use the Media for Mass Psychological Warfare
By L. Wolfe
(1973)
(Executive Intelligence Review, LaRouche Publications)
The Pan-Angles:
A Consideration of the Federation of the Seven English-Speaking Nations
By Sinclair Kennedy
(1914)
Law and Order in Ancient Times
By D. J. Wiseman
(From Vox Evangelica)
(1973)
Thinking Fast and Slow
By Daniel Kahneman
(2011)
Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields—including economics, medicine, and politics—but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book.
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
