Fukushima, Climate Change, Near-Term Extinction: Resignation Vs. Surrender

http://guymcpherson.com/2013/09/fukushima-climate-change-near-term-extinction-resignation-vs-surrender/

by Carolyn Baker

All things die and all things live forever;

But our task is to die,

To die making roads,

Roads over the sea.

~Antonio Machado~

Recently a reader of my website asked me to clarify the difference between resignation and surrender. When faced with catastrophic climate change, near-term extinction, and the worst emission of radiation in the history of the world from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, how should we respond? The reader found himself swimming in deep despair and feeling very much like giving up—perhaps even ceasing the breast strokes of vigorous swimming, plunging further into the despair, and intentionally inhaling as deeply as possible. Well, that would be suicide, and he didn’t feel ready for that—at least not in that moment, and the word “surrender” kept coming to mind, but isn’t that the same as giving up?

This morning’s Guardian headline reads “Fukushima Warning: Danger Level At Nuclear Plant Jumps To ‘Serious’,” and the Wall St. Journal states unequivocally that ‘TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) Has Lost Control.’ Just a few days ago I posted on my site Guy McPherson’s latest piece “19 Ways Climate Change Is Feeding On Itself,” and Washington’s Blog screams, “West Coast Of North America To Be Hit Hard By Fukushima Radiation,” complete with a detailed map of the ocean current called the North Pacific Gyre which is bringing Japanese radiation to the West Coast of North America. Why would I not want to give up? Why would I not want to ingest a large dosage of ‘Fuckidall’ or go eat 700 pounds of chocolate? Go to the gym today? Are you freakin’ kidding me?

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I occasionally hear people saying things like, “Well, we’re not going to be here after 2030 by which time near-term extinction is ‘guaranteed’ so what I eat or drink or smoke or do or don’t do doesn’t matter.”

That’s called resignation or giving up, and from my perspective, indulging in it, even if I feel compelled to do so, is a cowardly, delusional kind of devil’s bargain that essentially affirms that I have no purpose here except breathing air and ingesting food and water. Resignatio in Latin connotes submission, acquiescence, and compliance. Is this not the same as surrender? Actually, it’s not.

Hopefully, everyone reading these words, like me, is not willing to go gently, quietly, or complacently into the abyss that our species has created. If we do—if at this unprecedented time in the history of our planet we resign ourselves to defining our existence only in terms of the physical plane, as if we have absolutely no connection with anything eternal or constant, then we are inexorably as foolish as the purveyors of industrial civilization who are engaged in rendering this planet uninhabitable.

Surrender is fundamentally different from resignation because unlike the latter, it is not a passive act. Surrender is always a choice, and in our “dead man walking” status on planet Earth, we may be able to change nothing in the external milieu, but we have agency in how we meet our fate. Certainly we have the option and the right to muddle our way into oblivion like comatose inebriates, and countless millions will choose and are choosing that path.

Mentally, I keep returning to Nazi death camp survivors and the unspoken, seemingly feckless choices they made on a daily basis that allowed them to prevail. Perhaps a drawing made in the mud or jokes they furtively told to one another or a decision that every day they would find meaning somewhere, somehow in the hellish drudgery and brutality of their lives.

Giving up is easy. Surrender takes enormous courage and self-regard—an abiding conviction that one’s human dignity is worth it, even if one is bereft of family and friends. Surrender acknowledges that in the last half of 2013, the human species is marching obliviously in its own funeral procession and that perhaps one can choose instead to march consciously, all the while asking questions that matter. Questions like: What is left for me to do here? How do I most wisely use the time I have left? What is my work in these remaining years? What gifts do I have that I must give? What brings meaning to the lives of people around me? What brings meaning to me?

As people approach their own demise, life review is crucial. How did I live? How did I love? What were the very best moments? What were the worst? And most importantly: What did I learn? Who did I become as a result of the wise choices I made and the ones that weren’t so wise? Invariably, there will be grief, and impending funerals are the exact venues where it must erupt. But as William Blake said, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy,” and if we allow and follow the grief, joy will inevitably emerge from its depths.

At this moment we are confronted with a horrendous reality. Not only is climate change decimating the planet, but added to that catastrophe is one that, unlike climate change, we cannot measure because the facts pertaining to it are concealed. Fortunately, we have a plethora of data regarding climate change, but foolish and frightened humans have been concealing the realities of Fukushima from the world for more than two years. Our sense of powerlessness grows exponentially by the hour. Fukushima is out of control, and so are we.

In World As Lover, World As Self, Joanna Macy refers to the work of Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski who speaks of “positive disintegration” or the cracking of outgrown shells which he argues “permits the emergence of higher psychic structures and awareness.” What disintegrates in times of catastrophe is not the essence of who we are, the deeper self, but rather, our defenses, our notions about who we are, that is to say, the ego. I say, bring it on. No, not psychosis or madness but an authentic decomposition of ego.

While the human ego gets a lot of bad press, the reality is that we need one. I would ask anyone who tells me that they have lost their ego how it is that they can find their car keys or the door to the restroom. We cannot live without an ego, but unbeknownst to the fathers of industrial civilization, the ego is only one small aspect of who we are. Near-term extinction and Fukushima are the best and the worst that the ego can produce, and left to its own devices, the ego will always replicate such horrors.

The human ego has reached the end of the line, and our struggle with the difference between giving up and surrendering is to be celebrated as its last death gasp. It has taken us to the jaws of death where we must choose to die to at least the old paradigm, and yes, perhaps, choose to die literally. Thus, it is now time to stop investing 90 percent of our energy in logistical preparation and 10 percent in emotional and spiritual preparation—if we have time and if we feel like it. In fact, these proportions should be reversed. For so many reasons—go ahead and count them, we are marching in our own funeral procession. There is enormous work to be done emotionally and spiritually in preparing for what appears to be our certain demise. If anyone feels uncertain about what I’m referring to, please contact me.

The termination of the three-dimensional, Enlightenment-engendered, patriarchal, soul-murdering, planet-annihilating paradigm of industrial civilization is upon us, and we should not be railing and raging against it if we are not willing to do the emotional and spiritual work to buy out of it and transform consciousness as we surrender to the inevitable. What we all need now is not another permaculture course or another bucket of barley but rather, the soft touch and locked eye contact of each other. We need our hearts to be broken open and our tears to water and soak the earth and wash away the encrusted filth of civilization that pollutes and paralyzes our souls. That, dear reader, is not about giving up, but choosing to rise to the unprecedented, Herculean challenge of healing and transformation that the current catastrophes have thrown in our faces.

It may be time to die, but let us, as the poet Machado says, die making roads over the sea.

CAROLYN’S FORTHCOMING BOOK: Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths For Turbulent Times. Pre-order here: http://www.amazon.com/Collapsing-Consciously-Transformative-Turbulent-Activism/dp/1583947124/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377212856&sr=1-1&keywords=collapsing+consciously

Foreword by John Michael Greer

Release Date: November 19

_______________

This essay originally appeared at Speaking Truth to Power. It echoes this essay of mine from 19 September 2012.

________________

McPherson’s latest essay for The Good Men Project was published Tuesday, 3 September 2013:Questioning Culture: Our Addiction to Growth.

Humankind’s Most Dangerous Moment: Fukushima Fuel Pool at Unit 4. “This is an Issue of Human Survival.”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/humankinds-most-dangerous-moment-fukushima-fuel-pool-at-unit-4/5350779

By Harvey Wasserman

We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focused on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.

Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.

Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.

The one thing certain about this crisis is that Tepco does not have the scientific, engineering or financial resources to handle it. Nor does the Japanese government. The situation demands a coordinated worldwide effort of the best scientists and engineers our species can muster.

Why is this so serious?

We already know that thousands of tons of heavily contaminated water are pouring through the Fukushima site, carrying a devil’s brew of long-lived poisonous isotopes into the Pacific. Tuna irradiated with fallout traceable to Fukushima have already been caught off the coast of California. We can expect far worse.

Tepco continues to pour more water onto the proximate site of three melted reactor cores it must somehow keep cool. Steam plumes indicate fission may still be going on somewhere underground. But nobody knows exactly where those cores actually are.

Much of that irradiated water now sits in roughly a thousand huge but fragile tanks that have been quickly assembled and strewn around the site. Many are already leaking. All could shatter in the next earthquake, releasing thousands of tons of permanent poisons into the Pacific.

The water flowing through the site is also undermining the remnant structures at Fukushima, including the one supporting the fuel pool at Unit Four.

More than 6,000 fuel assemblies now sit in a common pool just 50 meters from Unit Four. Some contain plutonium. The pool has no containment over it. It’s vulnerable to loss of coolant, the collapse of a nearby building, another earthquake, another tsunami and more.

Overall, more than 11,000 fuel assemblies are scattered around the Fukushima site. According to long-time expert and former Department of Energy official Robert Alvarez, there is more than 85 times as much lethal cesium on site as was released at Chernobyl.

Radioactive hot spots continue to be found around Japan. There are indications of heightened rates of thyroid damage among local children.

The immediate bottom line is that those fuel rods must somehow come safely out of the Unit Four fuel pool as soon as possible.

Just prior to the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami that shattered the Fukushima site, the core of Unit Four was removed for routine maintenance and refueling. Like some two dozen reactors in the US and too many more around the world, the General Electric-designed pool into which that core now sits is 100 feet in the air.

Spent fuel must somehow be kept under water. It’s clad in zirconium alloy which will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Long used in flash bulbs for cameras, zirconium burns with an extremely bright hot flame.

Each uncovered rod emits enough radiation to kill someone standing nearby in a matter of minutes. A conflagration could force all personnel to flee the site and render electronic machinery unworkable.

According to Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with forty years in an industry for which he once manufactured fuel rods, the ones in the Unit 4 core are bent, damaged and embrittled to the point of crumbling. Cameras have shown troubling quantities of debris in the fuel pool, which itself is damaged.

The engineering and scientific barriers to emptying the Unit Four fuel pool are unique and daunting, says Gundersen. But it must be done to 100% perfection.

Should the attempt fail, the rods could be exposed to air and catch fire, releasing horrific quantities of radiation into the atmosphere. The pool could come crashing to the ground, dumping the rods together into a pile that could fission and possibly explode. The resulting radioactive cloud would threaten the health and safety of all us.

Chernobyl’s first 1986 fallout reached California within ten days. Fukushima’s in 2011 arrived in less than a week. A new fuel fire at Unit 4 would pour out a continuous stream of lethal radioactive poisons for centuries.

Former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata says full-scale releases from Fukushima “would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.”

Neither Tokyo Electric nor the government of Japan can go this alone. There is no excuse for deploying anything less than a coordinated team of the planet’s best scientists and engineers.

We have two months or less to act.

For now, we are petitioning the United Nations and President Obama to mobilize the global scientific and engineering community to take charge at Fukushima and the job of moving these fuel rods to safety.

You can sign the petition at: http://www.nukefree.org/crisis-fukushima-4-petition-un-us-global-response

If you have a better idea, please follow it. But do something and do it now.

The clock is ticking. The hand of global nuclear disaster is painfully close to midnight. 

Harvey Wasserman is Senior Editor of the Columbus Free Press and Free Press. He edits Nuke Free.

See also: 

The Lifeboat Hour 22 Sep 2013, Michael Ruppert and Guy McPherson discuss the ongoing crisis at Fukushima and 25 different positive feedback processes that can/will culminate with NTE (Near Term Extinction). 

Download (right-click, "save as") 

Otto Skorzeny Killed Nikola Tesla

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/09/24/270701/

See also: 
http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2013/05/wilhelm-reich-mans-right-to-know.html

The Rise of Quantum Resonance

http://www.realitysandwich.com/rise_quantum_resonance

Erwin Laszlo and Kingsley L. Dennis

The following is excerpted from Dawn of the Akashic Age: New Consciousness, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World,published by Inner Traditions. 

The New Paradigm in Science: What It Is

Albert Einstein captured the objective of scientists in his well-known saying that scientists seek the simplest possible scheme that can tie together the facts they observe. This phrase encapsulates the quintessence of the project of fundamental science. Fundamental science is neither technology, nor discovery: it is understanding. This is of great practical relevance. When our understanding of reality matches the nature of reality, we discover more and more about the reality that underlies our life. We then have a greater ability to cope with our own place and role in the scheme of life. Understanding is fundamental.

Genuine science seeks the scheme that can convey comprehensive, consistent, and optimally simple understanding. That scheme is not established once and for all; it needs to be periodically updated. The observed facts grow with time and become more diverse. Tying them together in an optimally simple yet comprehensive scheme calls for revising and occasionally reinventing that scheme. In recent years, the repertoire of observed facts has grown and has become highly diverse. We need a new scheme: a new paradigm.

This is how science evolves: through alternating phases of what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called normal science andrevolutionary science. Paradigm shifts are radical. Normal science treads water: it is only marginally innovative. It ties together the observed facts within an established scheme that is validated by consensus. If it encounters observations that do not fit that scheme, it extends and adjusts that scheme. This, however, is not always possible. If the attempt is not relinquished, the dominant scheme becomes unmanageably complex and opaque, as Ptolemaic astronomy did through the constant addition of epicycles to its basic cycles to account for the “anomalous” movement of the planets. When, in the growth of science, that critical point is reached, it is time to take a radical step.

The dominant scheme must be scrutinized, discarded, and replaced. A new paradigm must be found to ground the theories and interpret the observations that support them.

In the natural sciences, a paradigm-shift point has now been reached. A number of unexpected—and, for the current paradigm, critically -anomalous—observations have surfaced.

The series of critically anomalous observations can be traced to experimental findings that came to light in the early 1980s. A paper by French physicists Alain Aspect and collaborators reported on an experiment carried out under rigorously controlled conditions. This experiment was suggested by Einstein nearly half a century earlier. It involves splitting a particle and projecting the split halves some finite distance apart. Then some measurements are to be made on the distant halves. According to the “uncertainty principle” put forward by Erwin Schrödinger, we cannot observe all aspects of a particle at the same time; when we observe some, the others become blurred or go on to infinity.

Einstein suggested that we can overcome this limitation by making observations on the split halves. If we can observe some of the parameters on certain ones and some on the others, we would observe both, and have overcome the strange limitations encapsulated in Schrödinger’s principle. Aspect and collaborators managed to test the physical reality of this assumption and came up with a strange finding. It turned out that the split halves remain instantaneously connected over any finite distance. When we take a measurement on one half, it is as if we would have made that measurement on the other. The uncertainty principle holds even across space—and because the signal that connects the halves is instantaneous, it also holds over time. This, however, contradicts Einstein’s own relativity theory, which holds that the maximum speed of propagation of anything across space is the speed of light. 

Aspect’s experiment was repeated, and always produced the same result. The scientific community was baffled, but finally dismissed the phenomenon as not having any deep significance: the “entanglement” of the split particles, physicists said, is strange, but it does not convey information or “do” anything. But this, too, was called into question in subsequent experiments. It turned out that the quantum state of particles, and even of whole atoms, can be instantly projected across any finite distance. This came to be known as “teleportation.” Then instant quantum--resonance-based interactions were discovered in living systems, and even in the universe at large.

A related anomalous fact came to light in regard to the level and form of coherence found in complex systems. The observed coherence suggests “nonlocal” interaction between the parts or elements of the systems—interaction that transcends the recognized bounds of space and time. This kind of interaction surfaced not only in the quantum domain but, surprisingly, at the macroscopic level as well.

Yet another finding, inexplicable by the current paradigm, is that organic molecules are produced in stars. The received wisdom is that the universe is a physical system in which life is, if not an anomalous, at least a rare and most likely accidental phenomenon. After all, living systems can evolve only under conditions that are extremely rare in space and time. However, it turned out that the basic substances on which life is based are already produced in the evolution of stars. These are organic molecules, synthesized in the fiery process of stellar evolution and then ejected into surrounding space. They coat asteroids and clumps of interstellar matter, including those that subsequently fuse into stars and planets. It appears that the universe is remarkably well-tuned for life: its basic physical processes produce the very substances required for the evolution of living systems.

Observations of this kind are not amenable to being tied together by patching up the dominant scheme: they challenge not only the maximum velocity of effect propagation* in space, but our understanding of the most basic processes in nature. They call into question the paradigm of the Late Modern Age: the basic scheme by which contemporary scientists tie together the observed facts.

*Effect-propagation is the transmission of a physical effect, such as heat or kinetic energy, from an open point in space or time—the cause—to another, which is the effect produced by the cause.

This is not the first revolution to rock science. An analogous revolution took place at the turn of the twentieth century, with the shift from the Newtonian to the relativity paradigm, and again in the 1920s with the advent of quantum theory. More limited revolutions have unfolded in specific domains since then, among them in psychology, with the emergence of transpersonal theories, and in cosmology, with the advent of non–Big Bang, multicyclical-universe models.

The next revolution promises to be even more fundamental. Relativity theory changed our notions of space and time, but the strange relativistic effects came to light only at speeds approaching that of light. The quantum revolution seemed to affect only the supersmall world in nature. The everyday world did not and does not seem to be affected by these revolutionary findings. But this limitation will not hold in the next paradigm shift. The new paradigm affects everything we see and know in and about the world. 

What is the new paradigm? Grasping it calls for a veritable Gestalt switch. We normally think of the things we experience as real, and the space that embeds them as empty and passive, a mere abstraction. We need to turn this around. It is the space that embeds things that is real, and the things that take place in space that are secondary. They are the manifestations of space. More precisely, they constitute the underlying generative and interconnecting matrix that fills space.

This concept emerges from the findings of cutting-edge physics. Space, quantum physicists now realize, is not empty and passive; it is a filled and active plenum, even though physicists still refer to it as the “quantum vacuum.” In the emerging view, space is the ground, and the things we know as real things in the world are the figures on the ground. They are figures not just on a ground; they are figures of the ground. The things we consider real are manifestations of space—manifestations of the cosmic matrix that fills space.

There is a good metaphor for this concept of the world. Think of waves traveling over the surface of the sea. When you look at the surface, you see waves moving toward the shore, waves spreading out behind ships, waves colliding with waves. The waves move from one point on the sea toward another, yet there is nothing in the sea that would move that way: the molecules of water on the surface do not move from one place to another, they just move up and down. The motion of the waves is an -illusion—an illusion not in the sense that there would be nothing that would correspond to it, but in that it is not what it appears to be. The waves travel across the surface of the sea, but the water of the sea does not travel.

The same applies to the motion of things in space. Things do not move across or over space, they move in, or more precisely within, space. They are conveyed by space. Space is not empty and passive: everything that exists in the world exists within the dimension of the world we call space.

The vision the emerging paradigm gives us is very different from the still-dominant vision. The world that meets our eye is not an illusion, but it is not what it appears to be, either. The real world is not an arena of separate things moving across intervening space. All things are part of that matrix, and are conveyed in and by the matrix. The bare existence of things is not the illusion; their separateness is. All things are in and of the matrix, and in the final count are one with the matrix.

Fantastic? No—it’s science: quantum science. This world is a giant quantum system where all things, and not only supersmall, quantum things, are “entangled,” intrinsically and instantly interconnected. Recognizing this is vital for our own well-being and for the survival of the whole of humanity. But first a word on what this concept does to our habitual picture of the world.

The New Paradigm in Science: What It Means for Our Life and Times

Why is this new paradigm of such importance in regard to the thinking we need in our crisis-prone but rapidly evolving world? The answer is, first and foremost, because it gives us a sense of belonging. We are not separate individuals, pursuing our destiny in a strange, indifferent, and often hostile world. We belong to the world, and, in the final analysis, we are one with the world.

The Akashic paradigm turns our current picture of the world on its head. In the everyday context, we think that the things we see are real, and the space that embeds them is empty and passive. We now turn this around. It is the space that embeds things that is real, and the things that move about in space that are secondary. This is the deep dimension of the world the ancient rishis called Akasha. Their intuition is now confirmed at the cutting edge of the sciences.

The new Akashic paradigm is a holistic paradigm. All things interact with all other things, and all things are what they are through their interactions. Wholeness is the essence of the new concept of reality. The world is a coherent whole, made up of parts or elements coherently related each to the other.

The idea of coherence is fundamental. In any system, whether it is a molecule, a mouse, a human being, or a galaxy, the parts are finely tuned to one another: they respond to each other and to the rest of the world as one. They are instantly coherent. Life would not be possible in the absence of such coherence, nor would any other complex system. Ecologies need to be coherent to persist, and the web of life itself needs to be coherent. Only the societies of humans can exist in a state of partial incoherence, but they, too, cannot exist in that state for long. Incoherence in a system is unsustainable. It is at the root of the unsustainability of the human world in our time.

The holistic Akashic paradigm gives important guidance for us both individually and collectively. This guidance is based on the recognition that, since the coherence of the whole is a precondition of the functioning of the parts, maintaining the coherence of the whole is fundamental in sustaining a balanced system. When it comes to human beings, it is “the good”—that is, the right, the wise way to act and to be.

Coherence is not a purely individual attribute. The right way to act, and to be, is not merely to enhance our own, individual coherence, but to contribute to the coherence of the systems that sustain our life. This means safeguarding our coherence with our community, with the whole human community, and with the web of life that frames the whole human community. It calls for cooperation—embracing, systemwide cooperation.

Maintaining our individual coherence calls for cooperation between the cells and organs that make up our body. Despite the diversity of our cells and organs—indeed, because of and through their diversity—we can perform the almost miraculous feat of maintaining ourselves in life’s inherently unstable state far from equilibrium. This feat is achieved because in a healthy organism all cells and organs are effectively and precisely coordinated. Any breakdown in coordination is a sign of weakness, a prelude to disease.

A healthy organism is organically coherent, with all its parts tuned together to maintain the system in its environment. But for achieving and maintaining organic coherence, coherence with others and with nature is sine qua non. Health for a living system requires both internal and external coherence.

In today’s world, external coherence is highly constrained: many -people act as if they were separate from the world around them. They behave as if the world and they were categorically distinct and different. This is an error, and it has grave consequences. People who feel they are separate are prone to treat others and their environment as a means to satisfy their own ends and aspirations without regard for the health and well-being of others, disregarding the coherence of the system that supports life on the planet. This is a dangerous condition. Species that possess a higher nervous system cannot follow this dangerous path—they are more intrinsically connected with the world around them and cannot sever or ignore their web of connections. We, on the other hand, can fail to recognize our ties with each other and with nature and entertain the illusion of separateness.

Recognizing the paramount importance of coherence is a key to our individual health and well-being, as well as to the survival of our species. The Akashic paradigm highlights this fact, not as an arbitrary moral command, but as the basic law of life and existence in the biosphere. It gives us a consistent view of ourselves, of nature, and of the cosmos. It is a key to recovering the harmony that traditional people felt with each other and with their environment.

We have lost our sense of oneness, but have not lost it irrevocably. With the new vision that emerges at the cutting edge of the sciences, we can lend credence to our suppressed but still vital sense of oneness and belonging: this is not an illusion. When all is said and done, we are truly one with each other, with the biosphere, and with the cosmos.

Related: 

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/search?q=dean+radin+

Bradley Manning and the Gangster State

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bradley_manning_and_the_gangster_state_20130821

Posted on Aug 21, 2013

By Chris Hedges

FORT MEADE, Md.—The swift and brutal verdict read out by Army Col. Judge Denise Lind in sentencing Pfc. Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison means we have become a nation run by gangsters. It signals the inversion of our moral and legal order, the death of an independent media, and the open and flagrant misuse of the law to prevent any oversight or investigation of official abuses of power, including war crimes. The passivity of most of the nation’s citizens—the most spied upon, monitored and controlled population in human history—to the judicial lynching of Manning means they will be next. There are no institutional mechanisms left to halt the shredding of our most fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus and due process, or to prevent pre-emptive war, the assassination of U.S. citizens by the government and the complete obliteration of privacy.

Wednesday’s sentencing marks one of the most important watersheds in U.S. history. It marks the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or be forced, like Edward Snowden, and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, to spend the rest of their lives in exile. It marks the day when the country dropped all pretense of democracy, obliterated checks and balances under the separation of powers and rejected the rule of law. It marks the removal of the mask of democracy, already a fiction, and its replacement with the ugly, naked visage of corporate totalitarianism. State power is to be, from now on, unchecked, unfettered and unregulated. And those who do not accept unlimited state power, always the road to tyranny, will be ruthlessly persecuted. On Wednesday we became vassals. As I watched the burly guards hustle Manning out of a military courtroom at Fort Meade after the two-minute sentencing, as I listened to half a dozen of his supporters shout to him, “We’ll keep fighting for you, Bradley! You’re our hero!” I realized that our nation has become a vast penal colony.

If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose. He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the “Collateral Murder” video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.

The message that Manning’s sentence, the longest in U.S. history for the leaking of classified information to the press, sends to the rest of the world is disturbing. It says to the mothers and fathers who have lost children in drone strikes and air attacks, to the families grieving over innocent relatives killed by U.S. forces, that their suffering means nothing to us. It says we will continue to murder and to wage imperial wars that consume hundreds of thousands of civilian lives with no accountability. And it says that as a country we despise those within our midst who have the moral courage to make such crimes public.

There are strict rules now in our American penal colony. If we remain supine, if we permit ourselves to be passively stripped of all political power and voice, if we refuse to resist as we are incrementally reduced to poverty and the natural world is senselessly exploited and destroyed by corporate oligarchs, we will have the dubious freedom to wander among the ruins of the empire, to be diverted by tawdry spectacles and to consume the crass products marketed to us. But if we speak up, if we name what is being done to us and done in our name to others, we will become, like Manning, Julian Assange and Snowden, prey for the vast security and surveillance apparatus. And we will, if we effectively resist, go to prison or be forced to flee.

Manning from the start was subjected to a kangaroo trial. His lawyers were never permitted to mount a credible defense. They were left only to beg for mercy. Under the military code of conduct and international law, the soldier had a moral and legal obligation to report the war crimes he witnessed. But this argument was ruled off-limits. The troves of documents that Manning transmitted to WikiLeaks in February 2010—known as the Iraq and Afghanistan “War Logs”—which exposed numerous war crimes and instances of government dishonesty, were barred from being presented. And it was accepted in the courtroom, without any evidence, that Manning’s release of the documents had harmed U.S. security and endangered U.S. citizens. A realistic defense was not possible. It never is in any state show trial.

Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, read a brief statement from the 25-year-old after the sentencing:

The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy — the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps — to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.

We will pay for our criminality. We will pay for our callousness and brutality. The world, especially the Muslim world, knows who we are, even if we remain oblivious. It is not Manning who was condemned Wednesday, but us. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.” And that is the real reason Bradley Manning is being locked away. He is a just man.

Music: Atrium Sun - Abyss

See also:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2013/05/lights-out-asia-hy-brasil-music.html

Art Bell Interviews Michio Kaku on Coast to Coast

Disclaimer, I don't believe everything that is said on Coast to Coast (that Anthropogenic Climate Change is a hoax for example) and it sounds like a rehash of Alex Jones' information (he is often mentioned, usually by the guest callers) but I found this episode with Art Bell and Michio Kaku to be very informative and accurate and I even learned a few things (a potential Hyper-Nova and resultant life-ending gamma radiation burst among other things).

I happen to agree with Michio Kaku on nearly every issue, especially pertaining to the Human Experiment. What he says gels extremely well with others of both scientific and  mystical backgrounds such as Isaac Asimov, Edgar Cayce and a lot of disparate prophecy. Basically, that we are in for major bump in the road (if you can call Mass Extinction that) but that Humanity may ultimately survive, learn from the experience and that the "New Golden Age" that will follow will approximate Isaac Asimov's "Singularity".

Steven M. Greer says the same thing. When I begin to see similar, nearly identical ideas among many minds that I revere I lend significant importance to them. I think we are going to experience a Die-Off but the world that will follow will not resemble the present one paradigmatically. We are going to achieve an enduring, global, technological renaissance and as Greer says, we will become a space-faring people that will travel to and assist other sentient worlds facing similar challenges, just as we are now in the company of friendly off-world interstellar civilizations who are here to assist our departure from adolescence.

Fukushima Nightmare: The Animated Version

Mickey, like all civilizations, attempts to mitigate an emergent challenge or economize a system by way of adding complexity and gets in over his head (using nuclear fission to boil water is an attempt to run a technological island society in the face of an exponential decline in global carbon based energy).

Whether it is Mickey and the sorcerer's brooms, the Maya resorting to arroyo (canal/trench) irrigation without letting crop-field lay fallow or the American Empire playing around with Hydraulic Fracturing and Deep Sea Drilling for oil, even in the Arctic and carrying on with Geo-Engineering via Chem-trail spraying the end result is the same: a precipitous decline of return of investment in complexity and a drop to a less complex state of greater stability (collapse).

Joseph Tainter does a much better job of explaining this, it is his brilliant thesis that he is often cited for after after all.

The foundation of all mental illness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering - Carl Jung

Cosmic Deception: Let The Citizen Beware

http://www.siriusdisclosure.com/cseti-papers/cosmic-deception-let-the-citizen-beware/

by Steven M. Greer M.D.

Copyright 2002

Click here for the PDF version.

Imagine this. It is the summer of 2001, and someone presents you with a script for a movie or book that tells how a diabolical terrorist plot unfolds wherein both 110 story World Trade Center towers and part of the Pentagon are destroyed by commercial jets hijacked and flown into those structures.

Of course you would laugh, and if you were a movie mogul or book editor, reject it out of hand as ridiculous and implausible, even for a fictional novel or movie. After all, how could a commercial jet, being tracked on radar after two jets had already hit the World Trade towers, make it through our air defenses into the most sensitive airspace in the world, and in broad daylight on a crystal clear day, slam into the Pentagon! And this in a country that spends over $1 billion a day to defend itself! Absurd, illogical – nobody would swallow it!

Unfortunately, there are some of us who have seen these scripts – and of far worse things to come – and we are not laughing.

One of the few silver linings to these recent tragedies is that maybe – just maybe – people will take seriously, however far-fetched it may seem at first, the prospect that a shadowy, para-governmental and transnational entity exists that has kept UFOs secret – and is planning a deception and tragedy that will dwarf the events of 9/11.

The testimony of hundreds of government, military and corporate insiders has established this: That UFOs are real, that some are built by our secret ‘black’ shadowy government projects and some are from extraterrestrial civilizations, and that a group has kept this secret so that the technology behind the UFO can be withheld – until the right time. This technology can – and eventually will – replace the need for oil, gas, coal, ionizing nuclear power, and other centralized and highly destructive energy systems.

This 5 trillion dollar industry – energy and transportation – is currently highly centralized, metered, and lucrative. It is the stuff that runs the entire industrialized world. It is the mother of all special interests. It is not about money as you and I think of it, but about geo-political power – the very centralized power on which the current order in the world runs. The world is kept in a state of roiling wars, endless poverty for most of Earth’s denizens and global environmental ruin, just to prop up this evil world order.

As immense as that game is, there is a bigger one: Control through fear. As Wernher von Braun related to Dr. Carol Rosin, his spokesperson for the last 4 years of his life, a maniacal machine – the military, industrial, intelligence, laboratory complex – would go from Cold War, to Rogue Nations, to Global Terrorism (the stage we find ourselves at today), to the ultimate trump card: A hoaxed threat from space.

To justify eventually spending trillions of dollars on space weapons, the world would be deceived about a threat from outer space, thus uniting the world in fear, in militarism, and in war.

Since 1992 I have seen this script unveiled to me by at least a dozen well-placed insiders. Of course, initially I laughed, thinking this just too absurd and far-fetched. Dr. Rosin gave her testimony to the Disclosure Project before 9/11. And yet others told me explicitly that things that looked like UFOs but that are built and under the control of deeply secretive ‘black’ projects, were being used to simulate – hoax – ET-appearing events, including some abductions and cattle mutilations, to sow the early seeds of cultural fear regarding life in outer space. And that at some point after global terrorism, events would unfold that would utilize the now-revealed Alien Reproduction Vehicles (ARVs, or reversed-engineered UFOs made by humans by studying actual ET craft – see the book “Disclosure” by the same author) to hoax an attack on Earth.

Like the movie “Independence Day”, an attempt to unite the world through militarism would unfold using ET as the new cosmic scapegoat (think Jews during the Third Reich).

None of this is new to me or other insiders. The report from Iron Mountain, NY, written in the 1960s, described the need to demonize life in outer space so we could have a new enemy. An enemy off-planet that could unite humans (in fear and war) and that would prove to be the ultimate prop for the trillion dollar military industrial complex that conservative Republican President and five star general Eisenhower warned us about in 1961 (no one was listening then, either…).

So here is the post-9/11 script – one that will be played out unless enough people are informed and the plan can be foiled because they will be unable to fool a sufficient number of citizens and leaders:

After a period of terrorism – a period during which the detonation of nuclear devices will be threatened and possibly actuated, thus justifying expanding the weaponization of space – an effort will ramp up to present the public with information about a threat from outer space. Not just asteroids hitting the Earth, but other threats. An extraterrestrial threat.

Over the past 40 years, UFOlogy, as it is called, combined with a mighty media machine, has increasingly demonized ETs via fearsome movies like “Independence Day”, and pseudo-science that presents alien kidnappings and abuse as a fact (in some circles) of modern life. That some humans have had contact with ETs I have no doubt; that the real ET contact has been subsumed in an ocean of hoaxed accounts I am certain.

That is, real ET events are seldom reported out to the public. The Machine ensures that the hoaxed, frightening and intrinsically xenophobic accounts are the ones seen and read by millions. This mental conditioning to fear ET has been subtly reinforced for decades, in preparation for future deceptions. Deceptions that will make 9/11 look trivial.

I write this now because I have recently been contacted by several highly placed media and intelligence sources that have made it clear to me that hoaxed events and story-lines are imminent that will attempt to further ramp up the fear machine regarding UFOs and ETs. After all, to have an enemy, you must make the people hate and fear a person, a group of people, or in this case an entire category of beings.

To be clear: the maniacal covert programs controlling UFO secrecy, ARVs and related technologies – including those technologies that can simulate ET events, ET abductions and the like – plan to hijack Disclosure, spin it into the fire of fear, and roll out events that will eventually present ETs as a new enemy. Do not be deceived.

This hogwash, already the stuff of countless books, videos, movies, documentaries and the like, will attempt to glom onto the facts, evidence and first-hand insider testimony of The Disclosure Project, and on its coattails, deliver to the world the cosmic deception that falsely portrays ETs as a threat from space. Do not be deceived.

By commingling fact with fiction, and by hoaxing UFO events that can look terrifying, the Plan is to eventually create a new, sustainable, off-planet enemy. And who will be the wiser?

You will. Because now you know that after 60 years, trillions of dollars and the best scientific minds in the world pressed into action, a secretive, shadowy group – a government within the government and at once fully outside the government as we know it – has mastered the technologies, the art of deception, and the capability to launch an attack on Earth and make it look like ETs did it. In 1997, I brought a man to Washington to brief members of Congress and others about this plan. Our entire team at the time met this man. He had been present at planning sessions when ARVs – things built by Lockheed, Northrup, et al, and housed in secretive locations around the world – would be used to simulate an attack on certain assets, making leaders and citizens alike believe that there was a threat from space, when there is none. (Before he could testify, his handlers spirited him away to a secret location in Virginia until the briefing was over…) Sound familiar? Wernher von Braun warned of such a hoax, as a pretext for putting war in space. And many others have warned of the same.

Space based weapons are already in place – part of a secret parallel space program that has been operating since the 1960s. ARVs are built and ready to go (see the book “Disclosure” and the chapter with the testimony of Mark McCandlish, et al). Space holographic deception technologies are in place, tested and ready to fire. And the Big Media is a pawn, now taking dictation from the right hand of the king.

I know this all sounds like science fiction. Absurd. Impossible. Just like 9/11 would have sounded before 9/11. But the unthinkable happened and may happen again, unless we are vigilant.

Combine all of this with the current atmosphere of fear and manipulation and there is a real risk of suspending our collective judgment and our constitution.

But know this: If there was a threat from outer space, we would have known about it as soon as humans started exploding nuclear weapons and going into space with manned travel. That we are still breathing the free air of Earth, given the galacticly stupid and reckless actions of an out of control, illegal, secret group, is abundant testimony to the restraint and peaceful intentions of these visitors. The threat is wholly human. And it is we who must address this threat, rein it in and transform the current situation of war, destruction and secret manipulation to one of true Disclosure and an era of sustained peace.

War in space, to replace war on Earth, is not evolution, but cosmic madness. A world thus united in fear is worse than one divided by ignorance. It is now time for the great leap into the future, a leap that moves us out of fear and ignorance and into an unbroken era of universal peace. Know that this is our destiny. And it will be ours just as soon as we choose it.

Steven M. Greer M.D.

Cultural programming via Hollywood films going back decades depicting Islam as evil, primitive, lustful hyper-violent religious fanatics:

 

After viewing "Reel Bad Arabs by Jack Sheehan" and sufficiently sensitive to the way mind-control propaganda works, view the following trailer for a recently released video game, and think, this is what our younger, impressionable minds are consuming. They will be ripe for the lie that evil aliens have descended upon us.



Highly recommended reading:

Hidden Truth: Forbidden Knowledge by Steven M. Greer