5 Reasons Why Some People Insist on Discussing Collapse, and Even Extinction

http://guymcpherson.com/

by Jamey Hecht, PhD

• Truth-telling. American civilization is an abusive parent who provides more material goods than most, but lies about just how violently he acquired those goods. With hundreds of military bases abroad, American authority is like a Mafioso who brings home big bags of toys and candy with blood all over them, and strictly forbids any discussion of where it all came from. In such a family, some kids will prefer to keep the stuff and repress their own guilt and terror. This is not just so they can keep the presents! They do it because if they don’t, their Dad’s illusory goodness will disappear; their necessary idealization of him will collapse, and they will be flooded with a painful ambivalence that they are not equipped to process or contain. Also, with more citizens in prison than any other country on Earth, America is also a disciplinarian to be feared by his dependents.
  The abusive parent has an addiction: oil. The analogy with alcoholism expresses the links among the addiction, the violence, the hypocrisy, and the deterioration. But the analogy breaks down when we consider that oil doesn’t just drive the bully in charge, it also powers the profligate lifestyle that is all the kids have ever known.
  While some kids will need to stay with the abuser’s program, other kids will find a way to speak the truth. This doesn’t just happen because they are older kids (sometimes they aren’t), but because of temperament, or insight, or some external source of support, like a mentor whose values are different (say, Shakespeare), or friendship with a family down the street who live in a far different and better way (say, Denmark or Cuba). Speaking that truth will both risk the wrath of the abusive father, and alienate the kids who are still trying to love him. But in a regime of endless lies and unacknowledged open secrets, speaking the truth can feel so important as to drive us to risk ostracism and punishment. We have to do it.
• Orientation. Mammals are wired to orient themselves in their environment, periodically doing threat assessment by scanning the place with open eyes and ears. Think of meerkats on their hind legs, peering at the horizon so they can know what’s coming. Climate change is not a discreet entity that we can track with our eyes, like some leopard who’s in one place at a time and can be present one moment and gone the next. It’s an entirely different sort of threat from the kind we are equipped to find and to confront. But that doesn’t change our nature, part of which is this need to look at what dangers are out there as they approach. It is still absent because the worst of its hardships (e.g., sea level rise in the tens of meters, and temperatures so high the human body can’t thermo-regulate anymore) are yet to come; yet it is also already present as Katrina and Sandy, epic wildfires, droughts, and floods, lethal heat waves, falling crop yields, mass extinctions, sea ice loss, and all the other anomalies of the past ten years. People with a strong orientation drive will continue to assess threats—even those which they are relatively powerless to stop, because what prompts me to orient myself is not only the nature of the threat (in which case I might say, “well, this great white shark is too big for me to stop, so I may as well ignore it”) but my own need to try and protect myself, whether that is possible or not.
• Integration. The false story costs a lot. In order to continue believing in it and enjoying its advantages in relative comfort, I have to make and maintain a deep split right down the middle of my psyche (there are other solutions besides this splitting, such as sociopathy, but this essay is about bleedingheart doomers such as myself). To stay happy inside consumerism’s nationalist culture of endless growth on a finite planet, I have to repress not only the giant ethical issues raised above (see # 1), but also the tide of evidence that precisely because of these living arrangements the world is rapidly becoming inhospitable to human life (see # 2). Unless this repression is so complete that I am unaware of it, it will cost me much of my energy and some of my mental health just to maintain it. If I turn toward the truth instead, I will be forced to endure an awareness of it; in return, I will be free of the need to split and compartmentalize and pretend.
• Erasure. When I’m confronted with the evidence of possible near-term human extinction (NTHE) from pollution, depletion, and climate change (especially when the story includes methane, not just CO2), part of me indulges in the thought that such an apocalypse would take with it much of what I hate, including illegitimate authoritarian power, militant stupidity, cruel poverty for billions of people, for-profit prisons, torture, and so on. Make it stop. Let it stop. In Scorcese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is so disgusted with the pervasive crime and depravity of the city, that he fantasizes about a great cleansing: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” The Biblical precedent is Noah’s flood. Like Job or Ecclesiastes, one gets heartsick of entrenched injustice—waste, fraud, and abuse—until the most soothing thought is to have something just smash it all, vaguely hoping for a better outcome in some other time (whether future or past!) or place. For example, whoever feels the obvious emotional reality that elephants are non-human persons (they have self-awareness, love their children, mourn their dead, live by matriarchy, form deep social bonds, weep when sad, play joyfully, communicate, and so on) cannot bear the unbearable knowledge that these people are now being rapidly murdered out of existence. According to some sources, the African Lion population is down 90% since 1980. That stings so bad that I find myself thinking this world is so far gone and so perverse that it should be finished off.  This is a totally irrational thought which I do not endorse, but there it is.
• Displacement. Threats make us want to act defensively in the protection of ourselves and those we love. But the state of the whole world is so vast a predicament that I can’t discharge the powerful impulse to “do something” that will fix it. I can take a 99.9% symbolic kind of action and reduce my carbon footprint. But I can’t stop the timber industry from cutting down every last tree; I can’t stop Monsanto from poisoning every inch of ground with patented horrors like Agent Orange (“Roundup”); I can’t bring flood relief to Bangladesh or Biloxi, restore the toxic Gulf of Mexico, undo Fukushima, alkalize the seven oceans, or conjure with a wand the replacement of a century of car culture with a whole new infrastructure of local production, bikes, and handicrafts. The helplessness is overwhelming. So my mere awareness (though from a social point of view, there in nothing “mere” about it) of the dire facts comes to substitute for the impossible improvements I yearn to make. I do make (or try to make, or plan to make) the infinitesimal improvements I can make, but the helplessness is barely diminished. I stopped eating beef for a year, but the industry never reduces the size of the factory farms’ herds in response. I cut down on my plastic use, but Somebody keeps on refining petroleum into gasoline and using the byproducts to make cheap plastic. When I reach for the feelings of well-being that would come from an experience of personal agency and instead feel totally powerless, I turn to the only thing left on the shelf: my awareness. I can’t fix reality, but at least I can keep acknowledging it.

These thoughts come from my personal experience (I’ve written about the issue before, in “Collapse Awareness and the Tragic Consciousness”), and they’re informed by several excellent books on the psychology of climate change, including: Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall (2014); Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives edited by Sally Weintrobe; several books by Guy McPherson including Killing the Natives: Has the American Dream Become a Nightmare? (2009) and Walking Away from Empire (2011); and Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed, and What It Means for Our Future by Dale Jamieson (2014).
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Catch Nature Bats Last on the radio with Mike Sliwa and Guy McPherson. Tune in every Tuesday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, or catch up in the archives here. If you prefer the iTunes version, including the option to subscribe, you can click here.
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McPherson’s forthcoming book is co-authored by Carolyn Baker. Extinction Dialogs: How to Live with Death in Mind has been submitted to the publisher and is scheduled for release before 1 October 2014.
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Find and join the Near-Term Human Extinction Support Group on Facebook here
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If you have registered, or you intend to register, please send an email message to guy.r.mcpherson@gmail.com. Include the online moniker you’d like to use in this space. I’ll approve your registration as quickly as possible. Thanks for your patience.
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Going Dark is available from the publisher here, from Amazon here, from Amazon on Kindle here, from Barnes & Noble on Nook here, and as a Google e-book here. Going Dark was reviewed by Carolyn Baker at Speaking Truth to Power, Anne Pyterek at Blue Bus Books, and by more than three dozen readers at Amazon. 

The Joe Rogan Experience - Dr. Steven M. Greer

Highly Recommended: Hidden Truth: Forbidden Knowledge by Steven M. Greer

Alternative Media Success Panics Neo-Cons

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/09/25/alt-media/

Here’s my latest Press TV piece, followed by Ian Fantom’s intervention in today’s UK parliamentary debate about going to war for/against ISIS. The thread connecting the two articles: The neocons are “fleeing forward” towards wider war in the Middle East as the forces of truth are slowly closing in on them.  -KB

 … Still Launching Wars with Lies

 Alt Media Success Panics Neo-Cons

By Kevin Barrett, Veterans Today Editor, for Press TV

A funny thing happened on the way to dystopia.

As Western mainstream media fall into the hands of lying billionaires, Zionists, and intelligence agencies (three categories with significant overlap) – and as neoconservatives script big media’s ignoble lies – a surging internet-based alternative media has arisen to challenge the elite’s false narratives. Thanks to alt-media, fewer and fewer people are buying the simplistic feel-good myths peddled by the mainstream.

While most old people still cling to the corporate media worldview, the young are skewing ever-harder toward alternative perspectives. In Thursday’s Scottish independence referendum, for example, the London Daily Mirror reported that 71% of 16-17 year olds voted “yes” while those over 65 voted “no” by a 73%-27% margin.

Why does the vast majority of Scottish young people favor independence, while an equally crushing majority of old people opposes it?

Short answer: Old people still believe BBC propaganda, while the young do not.
During the run-up to the referendum, huge crowds of young people gathered to protest the BBC’s biased coverage of the campaign. John Robertson, Professor of Media Studies at the University of the West of Scotland, said: “My research indicates that our public broadcaster, funded as much by Yes as by No voters, has betrayed its charter on impartiality.”

Older Scots grew up inside the bubble of the mainstream media monopoly. Most do not understand how the BBC and other mainstream outlets used subliminal cues as well as blatant bias to push for a “no” vote; nor do they realize how utterly corrupt their government and media have become.

Younger Scots, by contrast, grew up in the internet era and follow alternative media. Many know that the BBC covered up the Jimmy Saville pedophilia scandal in order to protect Tony Blair and other leading politicians. They know that the BBC reported the “collapse” of World Trade Center 7 twenty minutes before it happened. They know the BBC has worked overtime covering up not only 9/11-anthrax, but also follow-up false flag attacks including the 7/7/2005 London bombings. They know the BBC mis-portrays conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. And they realize that the Western “democracies” are rotten with election fraud – which makes the mainstream’s refusal to sponsor the usual exit polls in the Scottish referendum highly suspicious.

Just as young people disproportionately support European independence movements while opposing NATO and the EU, they also break with their elders in supporting the Palestinians rather than the Zionists. According to a July 23rd Gallup poll, Americans in the 18-29 years old range opposed Israel’s attack on Gaza by a two-to-one margin; while Americans over 65, who are less likely to use the alternative media, supported Israel’s assault by a 5 to 3 margin.

The neoconservatives – Straussian Zionists who believe the elite should control the masses with Big Lies – are panicked by the success of alternative media. Demonstrating their anguished desperation, America’s two most influential neoconservative publications, Commentary (the hard-line neocons) and Atlantic Monthly (the moderate neocons) just issued a coordinated salvo against alternative media. Both magazines, reading from the same script, are striving to portray the rising alternative media as enemies of the US and the West – an exquisite irony, since the neocons themselves are dual-loyalists at best, traitors at worst, while most of their alternative media enemies are honest patriots.

In the Atlantic Monthly’s new article “Russia and the Menace of Unreality: How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare” Peter Pomerantsev falsely charges alternative media outlet Russia Today (RT) with doing what the neocon-dominated Western mainstream media is actually doing. Specifically, Pomerantsev charges that RT “reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action.” He says RT is spitting out “outlandish stories about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July” in order to create “a virtual reality that can no longer be mediated or debated by any appeal to ‘truth.’” And he adds: “RT also focuses on conspiracy theories—from 9/11 truthers to the hidden Zionist hand in Syria’s civil war.”

Contrary to Pomerantsev’s thesis, RT has all of these stories right – and is thereby striking a blow against the reality-reinventing, mass-hallucination-creating Western mainstream media. Putin and RT are revolutionizing information warfare not by lying but by seeking the truth.

For the neocons, truth-telling is an abomination. The founder of neoconservatism, Leo Strauss, taught that truth is too dangerous to be shared with the masses. Strauss even applauded the execution of Socrates for the crime of telling the truth in the public square! According to Strauss and his neoconservative disciples, the elite (meaning themselves) must control the masses with feel-good lies – otherwise known as what 9/11 scriptwriter Philip Zelikow proudly calls “public myths.”

Deepening the irony, Pomerantsev cites a top George W. Bush official widely assumed to be Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Rove was vaunting the ersatz “war on terror” reality the neoconservatives created with their 9/11 inside job. Today, the alternative media is shooting that ridiculous hallucination full of holes. Yet Pomerantsev shamelessly quotes Rove in support of his thesis that it is the independent media, rather than Rove and the lapdog mainstream media, that fabricates false realities.

While the Atlantic Monthly was insinuating that the alternative media is a Russian propaganda operation, the other neocon journal Commentary was doing the same thing – except it was trying to blame Iran rather than Russia. On September 12th Commentary ran an article by Michael Rubin headlined “Iran Promotes 9/11 Conspiracy on Anniversary.” Rubin falsely and libelously attributed my Press TV article “Arrest Kissinger for Both 9/11s” to the government of Iran, insinuating that I am somehow taking orders from the Leader of the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian president when I write op-eds for Press TV!

The neoconservatives, panicked by the alternative media’s success, have evidently launched a coordinated propaganda campaign. They are trying to persuade the Western public that the alternative media is not just foreign, but tied to such “enemy” countries as Russia and Iran.

In fact, the Western alternative media is Western – and patriotic. In the USA, the alternative media seeks to expose 9/11 treason and take back America from the dual-citizen Zionists and New World Order globalists. Such outlets as Veterans Today, a hornets’ nest of former military and intelligence professionals appalled by the treasonous 9/11 false flag operation, proudly wave the American flag as they seek to restore such traditional American values as freedom, democracy, and respect for the Constitution.
Likewise European alternative media outlets oppose the Zionists and EU globalists, and support their own nations’ struggles against the forces of global tyranny.

Foreign English-language news outlets like Press TV and Russia Today are simply surfing a wave of patriotism and critical thinking that is rising in Western countries.

So when the neoconservatives tell you that my articles are “enemy propaganda,” please keep in mind that these people are cult followers of the Straussian philosophy of the big lie.

And please take some time to investigate who the neoconservatives are and where they came from. You may wish to consult such documents as Shadia Drury’s book Leo Strauss and the American Right, David Ray Griffin’s 9/11 exposé The New Pearl Harbor, James Petras’s The Power of Israel in the United States, and Stephen Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal.

By simply reading these four books, you will gain lifetime immunity from the lies of the neoconservatives.

A philosophy that exalts lies, and demonizes truth, cannot possibly endure. The emergence of “weaponized truth” in the alternative media represents an ineluctable backlash against the neocon-Straussian big lies epitomized by the false flag operation of September 11th, 2001. As younger critical thinkers replace the aging generation of sheeple, the mendacious mainstream media and the neoconservative liars who dominate it will go the way of the dodo and the dinosaur.

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“Lies”, says Cameron, as he launches another war

by Ian Fantom, UK

(2014-09-25) – Britain is again on the verge of war. Every time they say it’s different this time, and it never is. They say the first casualty of war is truth, but it’s not true; the truth is dead before the war even begins. War is the result of lies, and this war is no exception.

A 93-year-old said to me: “I’m getting confused on who’s fighting who”. I replied, “We’re all confused. It’s ludicrous”. Who is ISIS? No-one seems to know. Has a war ever been won by bombing alone? No-one seems to know. “What could be the purpose of posting videos of beheadings?” No-one seems to know. What is the long-term strategy for winning this war? No-one seems to know. It’s as if the political establishment together with mainstream political journalists have gone into premature dementure.

Clearly, the purpose of the public beheadings can only be to enrage public opinion in the West to such an extent that they will allow their governments to send in their armed forces into the areas said to be controlled by ISIS. Who would want to do that? Would Middle-Eastern Islamicists intent on setting up an Islamic State in Syria and Iraq want to provoke and enable the mightiest military force the world has ever known to move in and obliterate them? Of course not.

Many people now think that ISIS is in all probability a creation of the US, or at least of the Neoconservative-Likud-CIA-MI6 alliance that seems to be running the Military Industrial Complex. It is said to be an offshoot of Al Qaeda, which originated as a US database of fighters opposing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The case for war is being fabricated, and David Cameron is every bit as bad as Tony Blair, when he fabricated the myth of Weapons of Mass Destruction in order to give a pretext to invade Iraq. He is every bit as bad as Tony Blair when he told the House of Commons that he had proof that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, but that he wasn’t going to tell them what that proof was, but would deposit it in the House of Commons Library; he didn’t. David Cameron is every bit as bad as Adolf Hitler when his men burned down the Reichstag and blamed it on the Communists. Mercifully we haven’t yet had a Kristallnacht in the UK, but I fear that’s where we’re heading.

On 24 September David Cameron made a speech to the UN Security Council, which was posted on the Prime Minister’s website under the title: “Only a coherent, coordinated response can tackle what is a truly global and indiscriminate threat”. It’s a rehash of the Policy Exchange stuff, in which he links Islam with terrorism through constant use of the word “extremism”. What, I wonder, is the “poisonous ideology of extremism” he refers to? Is it not extremist to go to war? Then he spews out the Policy Exchange stuff about non-violent extremism: “But as the evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by preachers who claim not to encourage violence, but whose world view can be used as a justification for it”. What evidence? After his Munich speech, saying that multiculturalism had failed, I gave a talk to our Keep Talking group in London, tracing his speech to Policy Exchange. I listed all those convicted of terrorist offences. I could see no evidence of these people being influenced by preachers. Look at the wording, “convicted of terrorist offences”. That has to exclude all alleged suicide bombers, the most notorious of which would be the four alleged Muslim terrorists behind 7/7 – the terrorist attacks on the London transport system of 7 July 2005. They were just declared guilty by the coroner before the inquest opened, and because they were guilty they were excluded from the inquest. Were they fanatical Muslim extremists? Well, no. This is pure deception on David Cameron’s part.

But then he accuses the truth movement of telling lies: “And we know what this worldview is–the peddling of lies: that 9/11 was a Jewish plot or the 7/7 London attacks were staged; the idea that Muslims are persecuted all over the world as a deliberate act of Western policy; the concept of an inevitable clash of civilisations. We must be clear: to defeat the ideology of extremism we need to deal with all forms of extremism – not just violent extremism. That means banning preachers of hate from coming to our countries. It means proscribing organisations that incite terrorism against people at home and abroad. It means stopping extremists whether violent or non-violent from inciting hatred and intolerance in our schools, in our universities and even sometimes in our prisons. In other words, firm, decisive action – to protect and uphold the values of our free and democratic societies”.

Who is making the allegation that 9/11 was a Jewish plot? Certainly evidence has been appearing that extremist Israeli nationalists were involved, but I have been at pains to point out in my newsletters, that it’s not “the Jews”; most British Jews were against the setting up of a Jewish state in Palestine, and many have been protesting more recently about the genocide in Gaza. David Cameron is putting out a straw man argument, in order to deflect from the blatent lies in the 9/11 cover-up. He is now maliciously using 9/11 in order to justify yet another post-9/11 war.

He accuses us of telling lies about 7/7. How could 7/7 not have been staged? Note the careful use of language here. The plain fact is that the government’s version of events just does not tie up. They even took a year to acknowledge that the train from Luton to London by which MI5 claimed the terrorists had travelled had in fact been cancelled that day. Are MI5 seriously incompetent, or was that blatent deception? How could the government simply dismiss that as a mistake, with no consequences?

Having gone to the UN Security Council to tell them that some of his own citizens are liars, when all they want is to know the truth about 9/11 and 7/7, he is now recalling Parliament on Friday 27 September, in order to get the go-ahead for war – or at least to pacify Parliament, because he doesn’t formally need Parliament’s approval; in the case of 9/11 there was just an adjournment debate, in which there was no substantive motion. Only the Prime Minister and the Queen can decide to take Britain into war. On the Prime Minister’s website there is no motion, but just a statement that the purpose of the recall is “to debate the UK’s response to the request from the Iraqi government for air strikes to support operations against ISIL in Iraq”.

I should have thought that any political journalist in the UK would be able to understand such elementary points. One has to wonder who their paymasters are.

Miktek - Song of the Burning Mountain (Music)

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism. - Albert Einstein 

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. - Alan W. Watts

Lights Out Asia - Eye of All Storms (Music)

See also:

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2013/12/sudaya-patience-music.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2014/03/uok-save-planet-music.html

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2013/09/music-atrium-sun-abyss.html

What is Wrong With Our Culture - Alan Watts

9/11 After 13 Years

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2014/09/911-after-13-years.html

[An excellent article by Paul Craig Roberts. In case you didn't know, Amerigo Vespucci was a big fat liar. And so are the leaders of the country that stole his name.]

The tragedy of September 11, 2001, goes far beyond the deaths of those who died in the towers and the deaths of firefighters and first responders who succumbed to illnesses caused by inhalation of toxic dust. For thirteen years a new generation of Americans has been born into the 9/11 myth that has been used to create the American warfare/police state. 

The corrupt Bush and Obama regimes used 9/11 to kill, maim, dispossess and displace millions of Muslims in seven countries, none of whom had anything whatsoever to do with 9/11. 

A generation of Americans has been born into disdain and distrust of Muslims. 

A generation of Americans has been born into a police state in which privacy and constitutional protections no longer exist. 

A generation of Americans has been born into continuous warfare while needs of citizens go unmet. 

A generation of Americans has been born into a society in which truth is replaced with the endless repetition of falsehoods. 

According to the official story, on September 11, 2001, the vaunted National Security State of the World’s Only Superpower was defeated by a few young Saudi Arabians armed only with box cutters. The American National Security State proved to be totally helpless and was dealt the greatest humiliation ever inflicted on any country claiming to be a power. 

That day no aspect of the National Security State worked. Everything failed. 

The US Air Force for the first time in its history could not get intercepter jet fighters into the air. 

The National Security Council failed. 

All sixteen US intelligence agencies failed as did those of America’s NATO and Israeli allies. 

Air Traffic Control failed. 

Airport Security failed four times at the same moment on the same day. The probability of such a failure is zero. 

If such a thing had actually happened, there would have been demands from the White House, from Congress, and from the media for an investigation. Officials would have been held accountable for their failures. Heads would have rolled. 

Instead, the White House resisted for one year the 9/11 families’ demands for an investigation. Finally, a collection of politicians was assembled to listen to the government’s account and to write it down. The chairman, vice chairman, and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission have said that information was withheld from the commission, lies were told to the commission, and that the commission “was set up to fail.” The worst security failure in history resulted in not a single firing. No one was held responsible. 

Washington concluded that 9/11 was possible because America lacked a police state.
The PATRIOT Act, which was awaiting the event was quickly passed by the congressional idiots. The Act established executive branch independence of law and the Constitution. The Act and follow-up measures have institutionalized a police state in “the land of the free.” 

Osama bin Laden, a CIA asset dying of renal failure, was blamed despite his explicit denial. For the next ten years Osama bin Laden was the bogyman that provided the excuse for Washington to kill countless numbers of Muslims. Then suddenly on May 2, 2011, Obama claimed that US Navy SEALs had killed bin Laden in Pakistan. Eyewitnesses on the scene contradicted the White House’s story. Osama bin Laden became the only human in history to survive renal failure for ten years. There was no dialysis machine in what was said to be bin Laden’s hideaway. The numerous obituaries of bin Laden’s death in December 2001 went down the memory hole. And the SEAL team died a few weeks later in a mysterious helicopter crash in Afghanistan. The thousands of sailors on the aircraft carrier from which bin Laden was said to have been dumped into the Indian Ocean wrote home that no such burial took place. 

The fairy tale story of bin Laden’s murder by Seal Team Six served to end the challenge by disappointed Democrats to Obama’s nomination for a second term. It also freed the “war on terror” from the bin Laden constraint. Washington wanted to attack Libya, Syria, and Iran, countries in which bin Laden was known not to have organizations, and the succession of faked bin Laden videos, in which bin Laden grew progressively younger as the fake bin Laden claimed credit for each successive attack, had lost credibility among experts. 

Watching the twin towers and WTC 7 come down, it was obvious to me that the buildings were not falling down as a result of structural damage. When it became clear that the White House had blocked an independent investigation of the only three steel skyscrapers in world history to collapse as a result of low temperature office fires, it was apparent that there was a coverup. 

After 13 years people at home and abroad find the government’s story less believable.

The case made by independent experts is now so compelling that mainstream media has opened to it. Here is Richard Gage of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth on C-SPAN:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zbv2SvBEec#t=23 

After years of persistence a group in New York has secured the necessary number of valid signatures to put on the ballot a vote to investigate the cause of the collapse of the three WTC buildings. The official account, if correct, means that existing fire and building codes are insufficient to protect the public and that all other steel high rise structures are subject to the same failure. The group has been clever to frame the issue in terms of public safety and not in terms of 9/11 truth. 

New York authorities, of course, continue to oppose the initiative. The question now rests on a judge’s ruling. It is difficult to imagine a judge going against the government in such a major way, but the group will have made the point that the government has no confidence in the truth of its own story. 

Over these 13 years, physicists, chemists, architects, engineers, and first responders have provided massive evidence that completely disproves the official account of the failure of the three skyscrapers. The response to experts has been for non-experts to call experts “conspiracy theorists.” In other words, the defenders of the government’s story have no scientific or factual basis on which to stand. So they substitute name-calling. 

9/11 was used to fundamentally alter the nature of the US government and its relationship to the American people. Unaccountable executive power has replaced due process and the checks and balances established by the US Constitution. In the name of National Security, executive power knows no restraints. Essentially, Americans today have no rights if the government targets them. 

Those Americans born after 9/11 were born into a different country from the rest of us. Having never experienced constitutional government, they will not know what they have lost. 

The anthrax attacks of October 2001 have been forgotten, but Professor Graeme MacQueen in The 2001 Anthrax Deception (Clarity Press, 2014) shows that the anthrax attacks played an essential role in setting the stage for the government’s acquisition of unaccountable police state power. Two Democratic Senate committee chairmen, Thomas Daschle and Patrick Leahy, were disturbed by the Bush regime’s overreach for carte blanche power, and were in a position to block the coming police state legislation and the ability of the executive branch alone to take America to war.

Both senators received anthrax letters, as did major news organizations. The TV network news anchors, such as Dan Rather, who compared the collapse of WTC skyscrapers to buildings brought down by controlled demolition, had not yet been fired by Republicans on framed-up charges. 

Initially, the anthrax letters, which caused the deaths of some USPS employees, were seen as the second stage of the 9/11 attack. Fear multiplied. The senators and media shut up. Then it was discovered that the anthrax was a unique kind produced only by a US government military facility. 

The response to this monkey wrench thrown into the government’s propaganda, was the FBI’s frame-up of a dead man, Bruce Edwards Ivins, who had been employed in the military lab that produced the anthrax and was driven to suicide by the false charges. The dead man’s colleagues did not believe one word of the government’s false story, and nothing in the dead man’s past indicated any motive or instability that would have led him to such a deed. 

Initially, the US government tried to frame up Steven Jay Hatfill, but despite the best efforts of the New York Times and Nicholas Kristof the attempt to frame Hatfill failed. Hatfill received $5 million from the US government for the false accusation that ruined his life. So the corrupt US government moved on to Ivins. 

Ivins was dead and couldn’t defend himself, but his colleagues did. 

The entire episode stinks to high heaven. Justice is something that exists outside the borders of the United States. Never expect to find justice within the United States. 

Most Americans are unaware of the extent to which the federal government owns the experts who can contradict its fairy tales. For example, no competent physicist can possibly believe the official story of the destruction of the three WTC buildings. But physics departments in US universities are heavily dependent on federal money. Any physicist who speaks his mind jeopardizes not only his own career but also the career of all of his colleagues. Physicist Steven Jones, who first pointed to the use of thermite in the destruction of the two towers had to agree to having his university buy out his tenure or his university was faced with losing all federal financing. 

The same constraints operate in the private sector. High rise architects and structural engineers who express doubts about the official explanation of the collapse of three skyscrapers are viewed by potential clients as Muslim apologists and conspiracy kooks. The clients, of course, have no expert knowledge with which to assess the issue, but they are indoctrinated with ceaseless, endless, repetition that 9/11 was Osama bin Laden’s attack on America. Their indoctrination makes them immune to facts. 

The 9/11 lie has persisted for 13 years. Millions of Muslims have paid for this lie with their lives, the destruction of their families, and with their dislocation. Most Americans remain comfortable with the fact that their government has destroyed in whole or part seven countries based on a lie Washington told to cover up an inside job that launched the crazed neoconservatives’ drive for Washington’s World Empire.

Canaries in the Climate Despair Coal Mine

I came across this must-read piece on Guy McPherson's new radio show, "Nature Bats Last" on PRN.fm:

http://prn.fm/nature-bats-last-081914/

https://medium.com/@davepaiz/canaries-in-the-climate-despair-coalmine-202a57f6b3f9

While we debate what tragic mix of nature and nurture ultimately killed Robin Williams, largely missing from the conversation is any mention of the dark tide of scary shit that’s sweeping the globe as a possible motivating factor.

Why is it that when someone chooses to end their own life, in nearly every case the debate is always about what a poor, tortured soul they were, and how terrible and sad it was that they couldn’t find the help they needed, and NEVER about how maybe, just maybe, they opted out because the world we live in is going down the shitter at maximum warp and it’s getting harder and harder for many among us to come up with good reasons to stick around and watch this horror show unfold.

How can we continue to separate discussion of suicide from a discussion of context?

Why does it always become a debate about access to mental health services? Or about having the courage to reach out and admit that you’ve fallen into shadow and are pondering the pro’s and con’s of not being here anymore?

How can we continue to live in such a state of denial about what’s going on all around us and the impact that these things are having on our state of mind?

By all means, let’s talk about suicide.

Let’s talk about what’s worth living for in modern-day America.

Let’s talk about what we accept as normal, right, good and true.

Let’s talk about traffic jams, migraines, school shootings, full-spectrum state surveillance, Black Friday shopping stampedes, Xanax, Reality TV, perpetual debt treadmills, genetically modified food, chronic exhaustion, sleep deprivation, overmedication, constant distraction, infantile techno-fetishization, hyper-stimulation and the other touchstones of the insane hall of mirrors we’ve created for ourselves.

Let’s talk about what hope means on a planet that’s warming far more rapidly than scientists predicted just a few short years ago.

Let’s talk about arctic amplification, methane clathrate destabilization, ocean acidification and abrupt climate change.

Let’s talk about everything we do every day that only makes things worse.

Let’s talk about the chasm that separates the unfolding horrors manifesting in the natural world from the ongoing parade of grim meathook absurdities that defines our political world.

Let’s talk about how everything is falling apart at warp speed while our so-called leaders do nothing.

Let’s talk about how, as the planet spins out of control, we are being urged to continue putting our faith in the same toxic, dead-end cultural narratives that have delivered us and the rest of the planet into the loving arms of the Sixth Great Extinction.

Let’s talk about how the planet is screaming FIRE!!!! while our corrupt, ineffectual leaders keep telling us to remain calm, cast our votes, shut the fuck up and keep bleeding ourselves dry to feed this sad, broken, world-eating Machine.

Let’s talk about how everything will work out fine, because we’re Americans, after all, and we have the gods of progress and technology on our side, and plenty of time to figure out how to un-fuck all the things we’ve managed to fuck up in our brief time on the planet.

Let’s talk about what brought Robin Williams to such a terrible end, and while we consider what personal demons he was fighting, let’s also have the courage and maturity to confront the reality of our times with open eyes, not to justify suicide, but to stop kidding ourselves about the rapidly deteriorating state of the world, and the effect this is having on the human psyche.

See also: 

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-irreconcilable-acceptance-of-near.html

http://guymcpherson.com/