Charles Eisenstein and Rupert Sheldrake: The Crisis of Science

Highly recommended listening. Go here to download.

Graham Hancock Explores 'Magicians of the Gods' on Coast to Coast

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED LISTENING. 

Published on Nov 11, 2015

Coast To Coast AM - November 10, 2015 UFOs & Lost Civilizations

Adventurer, Author and investigator, Graham Hancock discussed his research into an advanced civilization that he believes was wiped out by a series of global cataclysms more than 12,000 years ago. According to Hancock, this ancient civilization seemed to be focused on exploring and developing the faculties of the human mind, such as psi abilities, rather than the technological prowess which is favored by our contemporary society. Despite seemingly being destroyed, Hancock surmised that this civilization "passed down an influence all around the world, which explain the common factors we find in many different cultures" as seen in both ancient lore about global catastrophes as well as mysterious monolithic structures.

Hancock posited that there were two distinct events which led to the demise of this civilization. First, he said, the Earth was struck by comet fragments around 12,800 years ago, resulting in massive natural disasters and radical changes to the climate. A subsequent blow to the Earth by another comet fragment 1,200 years later appears to have been the spelled the end of this once mighty civilization. However, in the interim, Hancock theorized, the survivors of the first event realized that they could be wiped out at any time and, therefore, "they set about a conscious project to preserve their knowledge and pass it down into the future." This can be seen, he said, in the megalithic structures which appear to have been constructed during that 1,200 year window between disasters.

Hancock expressed deep concern that there are additional comet fragments and other natural objects which could eventually hit the Earth and impact our world in the same way that it destroyed the ancient advanced civilization. Unfortunately, he lamented, it appears that very little is being done to prevent such a scenario from unfolding. "We're probably the first civilization on this planet that has the technological ability to sweep clean our cosmic environment," he said, "but right now we're spending the big bucks on military technology." Should such an event occur, Hancock suggested, our technologically-dependent society would likely crumble and the only survivors would be hunter-gatherer cultures. To those fortunate remnants of the human species, he mused, "we would be the lost civilization."
Apollo 17 UFO

In the first hour, researcher Robert Morningstar discussed footage that appears to show a UFO passing behind the Lunar Excursion Module as it was being deployed to the lunar surface from Apollo 17. "It is, to me, the most stunning piece of film to come out of the Apollo program," he marveled, noting that not only does the footage appear to show a UFO, but also contains a reflected reaction of an astronaut seeing the craft while aboard Apollo 17. Morningstar dismissed the possibility that the UFO is an illusion or reflection and stressed that it appears to be self-luminous in the film. While he hopes to have the footage available at his website around Christmas, Morningstar shared some stills of film for the first time with C2C. During his appearance, he also briefly discussed X-ray analysis of JFK which seemingly verified his own research into Kennedy's infamous assassination.

Time Is Running Out For Pax Americana's Apologists

Sounds a lot like Joseph Tainter's "Declining marginal returns on investment in complexity" theory, which is extremely sound and corroborated by others (Dmitry Orlov et al.).

http://orientalreview.org/2015/11/11/time-is-running-out-for-pax-americanas-apologists/

Wed, Nov 11, 2015

Editorial, Global Meltdown, Strategic Deterrence, United States

By Rostislav ISCHENKO (Ukraine)

The paradox of the current global crisis is that for the last five years, all relatively responsible and independent nations have made tremendous efforts to save the United States from the financial, economic, military, and political disaster that looms ahead. And this is all despite Washington’s equally systematic moves to destabilize the world order, rightly known as the Pax Americana.

Since policy is not a zero-sum game, i.e., one participant’s loss does not necessarily entail a gain for another, this paradox has a logical explanation. A crisis erupts within any system when there is a discrepancy between its internal structure and the sum total of available resources (that is, those resources will eventually prove inadequate for the system to function normally and in the usual way).

There are at least three basic options for addressing this situation:

1. Through reform, in which the system’s internal structure evolves in such a way as to better correspond to the available resources.
2. Through the system’s collapse, in which the same result is achieved via revolution.
3. Through preservation, in which the inputs threatening the system are eliminated by force, and the relationships within the system are carefully preserved on an inequitable relationship basis (whether between classes, social strata, castes, or nations).

The preservation method was attempted by the Ming and Qing dynasties in China, as well as theTokugawa Shogunate in Japan. It was utilized successfully (in the 19th century) prior to the era of capitalist globalization. But neither of those Eastern civilizations (although fairly robust internally) survived their collision with the technologically more advanced (and hence more militarily and politically powerful) European civilization. Japan found its answer on the path of modernization (reform) back in the second half of the 19th century, China spent a century immersed in the quagmire of semi-colonial dependence and bloody civil wars, until the new leadership of Deng Xiaoping was able to articulate itsown vision of modernizing reforms.

This point leads us to the conclusion that a system can be preserved only if it is safeguarded from any unwanted external influences, i.e., if it controls the globalized world.

The contradiction between the concept of escaping the crisis, which has been adopted the US elite, and the alternative concept – proposed by Russia and backed by China, then by the BRICS nations and now a large part of the world – lay in the fact that the politicians in Washington were working from the premise that they are able to fully control the globalized world and guide its development in the direction they wish. Therefore, faced with dwindling resources to sustain the mechanisms that perpetuate their global hegemony, they tried to resolve the problem by forcefully suppressing potential opponents in order to reallocate global resources in their favor.

If successful, the United States would be able to reenact the events of the late 1980s – early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global socialist system under its control allowed the West to escape its crisis. At this new stage, it has become a question of no longer simply reallocating resources in favor of the West as a collective whole, but solely in favor of the United States. This move offered the system a respite that could be used to create a regime for preserving inequitable relationships, during which the American elite’s definitive control over the resources of power, raw materials, finance, and industrial resources safeguarded them from the danger of the system’s internal implosion, while the elimination of alternative power centers shielded the system from external breaches, rendering it eternal (at least for a historically foreseeable period of time).

The alternative approach postulated that the system’s total resources might be depleted before the United States can manage to generate the mechanisms to perpetuate its global hegemony. In turn, this will lead to strain (and overstrain) on the forces that ensure the imperial suppression of those nations existing on the global periphery, all in the interests of the Washington-based center, which will later bring about the inevitable collapse of the system.

Two hundred, or even one hundred years ago, politicians would have acted on the principle of “what is falling, that one should also push” and prepared to divvy up the legacy of yet another crumbling empire. However, the globalization of not only the world’s industry and trade (that was achieved by the end of the 19th century), but also global finance, caused the collapse of the American empire through a policy that was extremely dangerous and costly for the whole world. To put it bluntly, the United States could bury civilization under its own wreckage.

Consequently, the Russian-Chinese approach has made a point of offering Washington a compromise option that endorses the gradual, evolutionary erosion of American hegemony, plus the incremental reform of international financial, economic, military, and political relations on the basis of the existing system of international law.

America’s elite have been offered a “soft landing” that would preserve much of their influence and assets, while gradually adapting the system to better correspond to the present facts of life (bringing it into line with the available reserve of resources), taking into account the interests of humanity, and not only of its “top echelon” as exemplified by the “300 families” who are actually dwindling to no more than thirty.

In the end, it is always better to negotiate than to build a new world upon the ashes of the old. Especially since there has been a global precedent for similar agreements.

Up until 2015, America’s elite (or at least the ones who determine US policy) had been assured that they possessed sufficient financial, economic, military, and political strength to cripple the rest of the world, while still preserving Washington’s hegemony by depriving everyone, including (at the final stage) even the American people of any real political sovereignty or economic rights.European bureaucrats were important allies for that elite – i.e., the cosmopolitan, comprador-bourgeoisie sector of the EU elite, whose welfare hinged on the further integration of transatlantic (i.e., under US control) EU entities (in which the premise of Atlantic solidarity has become geopolitical dogma) and NATO, although this is in conflict with the interests of the EU member states.

However, the crisis in Ukraine, which has dragged on much longer than originally planned, Russia’s impressive surge of military and political energy as it moved to resolve the Syrian crisis (something for which the US did not have an appropriate response) and, most important, the progressive creation of alternative financial and economic entities that call into question the dollar’s position as the de facto world currency, have forced a sector of America’s elite that is amenable to compromise to rouse itself (over the last 15 years that elite has been effectively excluded from participation in any strategic decisions).

The latest statements by Kerry  and Obama which seesaw from a willingness to consider a mutually acceptable compromise on all contentious issues (even Kiev was given instructions “to implement Minsk “) to a determination to continue the policy of confrontation – are evidence of the escalating battle being fought within the Washington establishment.

It is impossible to predict the outcome of this struggle – too many high-status politicians and influential families have tied their futures to an agenda that preserves imperial domination for that to be renounced painlessly. In reality, multibillion-dollar positions and entire political dynasties are at stake.

However, we can say with absolute certainty that there is a certain window of opportunity during which any decision can be made. And a window of opportunity is closing that would allow the US to make a soft landing with a few trade-offs. The Washington elite cannot escape the fact that they are up against far more serious problems than those of 10-15 years ago. Right now the big question is about how they are going to land, and although that landing will already be harder than it would have been and will come with costs, the situation is not yet a disaster.

But the US needs to think fast. Their resources are shrinking much faster than the authors of the plan for imperial preservation had expected. To their loss of control over the BRICS countries can be added the incipient, but still fairly rapid loss of control over EU policy as well as the onset of geopolitical maneuvering among the monarchies of the Middle East. The financial and economic entities created and set in motion by the BRICS nations are developing in accordance with their own logic, and Moscow and Beijing are not able to delay their development overlong while waiting for the US to suddenly discover a capacity to negotiate.

The point of no return will pass once and for all sometime in 2016, and America’s elite will no longer be able to choose between the provisions of compromise and collapse. The only thing that they will then be able to do is to slam the door loudly, trying to drag the rest of the world after them into the abyss.

Rostislav Ischenko is the President of Centre for System Analysis and Forecasting (Kiev) currently living in Moscow.

Source in Russian: Politexpert

Adapted and translated by ORIENTAL REVIEW.

Chris Hedges on What it Takes to be a Rebel in Modern Times

Related:

http://www.businessinsider.com/joseph-andrew-stacks-insane-manifesto-2010-2

We’re repeating Bush’s failure: An Iraq veteran despairs over our deepening climate-change denial

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/11/were_repeating_bushs_failure_an_iraq_veteran_despairs_over_our_deepening_climate_change_denial/

I watched American denial at work as a soldier in Iraq. I'm seeing it all over again in our global warming response

ROY SCRANTON

Enlarge(Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

It took me awhile to realize we were failing in Iraq. At first, despite what I considered a healthy skepticism, I thought we might just be able make it work. From May 2003 to June 2004, I had a grunt’s-eye view of the occupation, and even as late as January 2004 I held out hope. Yes, there was a growing insurgency, but many Iraqis seemed optimistic and supportive: they just wanted security, stability, and jobs. Sure, disbanding the Iraqi army put hundreds of thousands of men out on the street and de-Baathification left the government crippled, but there was such a powerful grassroots enthusiasm for democratic self-determination that a new order seemed almost inevitable. Okay, all that stuff about WMDs was a lot of smoke and mirrors, but we were building schools and helping small businesses—that was real, right?

By February I was dubious. By March I was worried. By April, after four U.S. mercenaries were killed and hung from a bridge in Fallujah, I knew we were flailing. By May, after reports of American torture at Abu Ghraib, I knew we’d lost.

Watching the war drag on for another seven years, watching the recent rise of ISIS, watching Iraq break apart into fragments and get sucked into the Syrian Civil War, I’ve thought a lot about how to make sense of my experience there, how my narrow perspective on the ground connected to bigger institutional and political realities, and what the whole debacle taught me. I like to think that if I can learn something from an experience, however awful, then some part of it might be redeemed. I like to believe that we can learn, adapt, and, even if we never achieve perfection, at least be better than we are.

If Iraq offered anything, it offered a lesson in political maturity. It taught me that good intentions matter a lot less than bad habits. It taught me that an organization was only as capable as its mid-level managers. It taught me that top-down directives don’t matter much without grassroots buy-in, and that grassroots agitation doesn’t matter much without systemic change. It taught me that politicians, business leaders, careerists, and hacks always tell the same story, the same story that always has the same happy ending, and it’s always some kind of a lie. It taught me that the real story was almost always about conflicting motives, miscommunication, greed, stupidity, and inertia. It taught me that the news back home almost always got the story wrong.

On this Veterans Day, as American soldiers redeploy to Iraq, redeploy to Afghanistan, and now head for Syria, these reflections are much on my mind. They’re on my mind every time I read a new story about ISIS. They’re on my mind as I watch the presidential election. But most of all, over and above everything else, they’re on my mind when I think about global climate change.

Every day brings new reports of increasing temperatures, threatening storms, drought, forest fires, rising seas, melting ice sheets, and leaking methane. Along with these reports come increasingly alarming warnings from scientists, sober in their language but shocking in their content, suggesting that feedback mechanisms such as permafrost and ice sheet melt are already kicking in, arguing that observed warming is consistently outpacing modeled predictions, and confronting us with the possibility that it may well be too late stop global warming from spiraling out of control. Adding a frightening drumbeat to the news reports and scientists’ warnings are policy statements by the World Bank, the Bank of England, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the US Department of Homeland Security, all of which identify climate change as a clear and present danger to global economic and political security.

I traveled to the Arctic for The Nation this August, where I saw firsthand the drastic effects of global warming, but I needn’t have gone so far: living through yet another year that will almost certainly be the hottest year ever recorded, we can see global warming in the weather shifts happening all around us. We can see it in the California drought and the Syrian Civil War. We can see it next catastrophic flood or category five hurricane. All we need to do is open our eyes.

Meanwhile, politicians and business leaders are telling us that climate change is an opportunity for green growth. Other politicians are saying that it’s not real, or not caused by humans, or not something that’s relevant to political decisions. Other people are saying we can fix the problem: all we need to do is invest in their tech start-up. A raft of dubious propositions are on the table to deal with climate change and the problems of resource scarcity, inequality, political instability, and overpopulation that it exacerbates, from cap-and-trade schemes to cold fusion to dumping sulfur particles in the atmosphere to undeveloped carbon extraction machines, while countless bright-eyed optimists hold out hope that solar and wind power will somehow become reliable enough and profitable enough that the magic hand of the market will drive out fossil fuels and inspire the wholesale renovation of global energy infrastructure.

This month the 21st Conference of Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will meet in Paris. These conferences, which have been happening since 1995, offer the best opportunity we have for global state action addressing climate change. They have, for the past two decades, failed: completely, predictably, repeatedly, spectacularly. Global coal consumption has increased from around five million short tons a year to around nine million short tons a year. Global oil consumption has increased from seventy million barrels a year to almost ninety million barrels a year. Carbon emissions have increased from around twenty-two billion tonnes a year to around thirty-two billion tonnes a year. The world has gotten hotter. This time, though, things are supposed to be different.

Much of the groundwork for the negotiations that will take place there is already laid out. The 146 parties involved have submitted their “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions,” which are voluntary, non-binding commitments promised by countries to decrease carbon emissions by 2030. According to Christiana Figueres, UNFCCC Executive Secretary, “The INDCs have the capability of limiting the forecast temperature rise to around 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100.” That means that even if all 146 parties involved keep to their commitments, which there’s no way of enforcing and has never happened yet, it’s still not enough to keep global warming below the 2-degree-Celsius tipping point beyond which risks of unstoppable, extinction-level global warming increase dramatically. Never mind the fact that the 2 degree Celsius limit was a bureaucratic fix which might already be too high.

Two years ago, I wrote an essay for the New York Times philosophy series The Stonetitled “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.” I expanded that essay into a book that was published this fall by City Lights. The argument I make in both the essay and the book is that it’s already too late: we’ve failed to stop catastrophic global climate change, and none of the technological fixes or moribund political machinery we have to work with is going to fix it. What we need to do now is accept our failure and learn from it. We need to learn to adapt, make better decisions, and move rapidly to keep catastrophic climate change from turning into genocidal climate change. Not much has changed in the two years since I published that essay except that more conflicts have exploded across the globe, the oceans and atmosphere have continued to warm, and our political situation has grown more extreme, more dangerous, and more terrifying.

What I wrote in that essay and in my book was that in order to do my job as a soldier in Iraq, I had to control my fear by accepting my mortality. In order to keep my fellow soldiers alive, I had to learn to die. We’re in the same situation now with global climate change: in order to save the human species, we need to learn to let fossil-fueled global capitalism die.

Every year around Veterans Day, I think a lot about my time in Iraq, my fellow soldiers, my fellow veterans, and the Iraqis I met in Baghdad. I think back to all the promises that were made before the war, all the times during the occupation when our leaders told us we’d turned a corner, and all the claims of peace and success that followed the American withdrawal in 2011. And I’ve begun to see, more and more, how our failures in Iraq are reflected in our failures to deal with climate change. The situations are different, of course, but also similar. At the heart of both, there’s oil. At the heart of both, there’s a denial of reality. At the heart of both, there are conflicting motives, miscommunication, greed, stupidity, and inertia. At the heart of both, there’s a refusal to face our failure.

We can’t turn back time. We can’t undo the past. The choice we face today, this Veterans Day, and every day, is whether we’ll learn from our mistakes—or make them worse.

Roy Scranton is Iraq war veteran whose new book is Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization

MORE ROY SCRANTON.

See also: 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denier-funding

And, as a neat segue from my last post, here's the Neo-Conservative action-plan summed up in a neat and concise excerpt:



When you finally recognize the confluence of power between giant industrial corporations, i.e. Exxon Mobile, The Military Industrial Complex, Religious Fundamentalism and Neo-Conservatism, the situation become crystal clear.

Fleshing out E.O. Wilson's phrase at the top of the last post here: these would be the Medieval Institutions paired together with god-like technology with an underlying religious fanaticism, an undying faith in the Sky God eschatological narrative, that the Apocalypse is "prophesied" and "unavoidable" so therefore, why not let "god's chosen people" have vastly more material wealth  than everyone else via the perpetuation of inefficient systems, even if it is insanely unsustainable (i.e. Standard Oil, Firestone Tire, and General Motors purchasing and then quickly dismantling public rail in Los Angeles in the 30's so that they could make vast sums of profit, the collective health of everyone and ensuing inequality be damned, prompting the knee-jerk creation of the Clean Air and Water act some 40 years later due to an Apocalyptic situation of brown skies over L.A. and burning rivers).

Dr. Steven M. Greer, among everyone else who has already pieced together this puzzle, also points out this confluence of power as behind the Shadow Govt.

I don't know about you but, I've just about had enough of Neo-Feudalism, it's time to kick this insane, delusional, psychotic group to the curb. Whether or not this can be accomplished with non-violence is the question. It's funny and ironic that, this most devout group of Religious Fundamentalism fails it's most central tenet in the run up to the Final Hour, that they are ready, lock, stock and barrel (who do you think set up the FEMA camps and purchased 40 million rounds of .40 caliber hollow point ammunition a few years back?) are ready to commit untold violence (what would Christ do?) yet those who seek to supplant them are largely secular humanistic in vision, and fiercely insist a path of non-violence.

This group believes in a fiery, manly Christ wielding a flaming sword descending from the Heavens above to smite the non-white's, the anarchists, those on the social fringe, the homosexuals and take the whisk the good white Christians away to paradise. I'm absolutely not kidding.

The New Holism: A Guide for the Preservation and Redemption of Human Life

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” - E.O. Wilson 

http://realitysandwich.com/318869/the-new-holism-a-guide-for-the-preservation-and-redemption-of-human-life/

Singularity or Mass Extinction? Both? 

---

The following is excerpted from One World Renaissance by Glen T. Martin, PhD, published by Institute for Economic Democracy Press. 

We are living during a time of fundamental paradigm-shift from fragmentation to holism. The great question of our time is whether the shift to holism will happen in time to save humanity from self-extinction. Will the human project be terminated through some forms of climate collapse or nuclear holocaust? Or will we transform our relationships with one another to the point where we create a holistic, just, loving, and sustainable planetary civilization? My new book, One World Renaissance: Holistic Planetary Transformation Through a Global Social Contract, from which this article draws, explores these issues at some depth.

Holism is the most fundamental discovery of 20th century science. It is a discovery of every science from astrophysics to quantum physics to environmental science to psychology to anthropology. It is the discovery that the entire universe is an integral whole, and that the basic organizational principle of the universe is the field principle: the universe consists of fields within fields, levels of wholeness and integration that mirror in fundamental ways, and integrate with, the ultimate, cosmic whole.

This discovery has overthrown the early-modern Newtonian paradigm in the sciences, which was predicated on atomism, causal determinism, mechanism, and a materialism that was discerned, it was thought, by a narrow empiricism. The holism of the ancient and medieval thinkers was superseded by this early-modern Newtonian paradigm in the 16th and 17th centuries. This development generated a host of assumptions about the world and human beings that became determinate for the basic world view that most people and institutions continue to hold today.

For many thinkers and religious teachers throughout this history, holism was the dominant thought, and the harmony that it implies has most often been understood to encompass cosmic, civilizational, and personal dimensions. Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Lord Krishna, Lao Tzu, and Confucius all give us visions of transformative harmony, a transformative harmony that derives from a deep relation to the holism of the cosmos. Human beings are microcosms of that holism and must seek ways to allow it to emerge within their lives and cultures. The early-modern paradigm reversed this holism and saw the world in atomistic and mechanistic terms. Human beings were not microcosms but rather the human mind, consciousness, and our needs for love and solidarity were seen as merely subjective epiphenomena not deeply related to the “cold, hard facts” supposedly discovered by science.

Today the holism of the ancients has been rediscovered on a higher level. We understand, very much more clearly than these ancient thinkers, that human beings are deeply historical beings, moving from a past, through a dynamic present, toward a future that we are deeply involved in creating. We create our future through a vision and comprehension of its possibilities. Revolutionary holism is just that: a holism that can transform everything from disharmony to harmony, from war to peace, from hate to love. Ethics, law, education, and government are all historically grounded aspects of human life. This means they are subject to holistic transformation, to “a new heaven and a new Earth,” that, indeed, has much in common with what the ancient teachers said about holism and harmony.

Holism is not simply an intellectual perception of harmony, for in holism we are included in the wholes, wholes that we discern at the deepest levels with our entire being. We both discern and embody the holism of humanity, of the earth, of the cosmos, and of the divine. Holism means not only reason but love, indeed, it involves the synthesis of reason, intuition, and love. If reason has discovered this pervasive holism through the sciences, the love taught by the ancient religious teachers complements and embodies that holism. Jesus taught the oneness of humanity within the embrace of divine love: “When you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren you have done it unto me.” In his teaching, recognition of our common humanity within the ontological love of God is the foundation for a transformed human community, the bringing of the kingdom of God to Earth.

The reality of ourselves as persons is not that of abstract, disconnected individuals possessing a priori rights against other people and society. This conception that human beings are a collection of individuals for whom civilization and the social order are second-order relationships is a product of the early-modern, Newtonian paradigm that forms the conceptual basis for both capitalism and the system of sovereign nation-states. Within capitalism, the fundamental nature of the social bond is ignored and denied. People and corporations are considered abstract atoms promoting their rational self-interest in competition with all other such entities. Under the nation-state system, the planet is divided into a multiplicity of militarized territorial units, each promoting its own national interests vis-à-vis the rest of humanity, again institutionally denying our common human reality and our holistic interdependence with all other persons and with nature.

The reality is that our individuality and our social-ontological bond with civilization and the rest of humanity arise simultaneously. We are connected to all others and the entire human project. From this connection comes about abilities for language, reason, love, compassion, social harmony, and transformative justice. Our fundamental reality is not that of abstract atoms within a fragmented world disorder in a Darwinian struggle for survival. Our reality is our common humanity, interdependent with one another, needing solidarity and mutual recognition, and living within a fragile planetary ecosystem in which all living creatures are also interdependent. The reasons why human beings continue to wallow in disharmony, violence, and chaos arise in large measure from our misunderstanding of who and what we are. We need to understand ever more clearly the tremendous significance of the emergent holism and our vital role within the new “universe story” (Swimme and Berry 1992).

A global consciousness has begun to emerge that was very rare in human beings prior to the mid-20th century. It is a consciousness that we now face global crises and global issues that threaten our existence on Earth. It began to dawn on thoughtful people everywhere that we are faced with impending climate collapse—the transformation of our planetary climate into forms that no longer sustain higher forms of life and that could, in the process of collapse, engender out of control patterns of devastation such as mass extinctions or pandemics that wipe out the human species and destroy civilization (Speth, 2005). “What we are experiencing today,” philosopher Hans Jonas writes, “is the paradox of excessive success that threatens to turn into a catastrophe by destroying its own foundation in the natural world” (1996: 53).

In his book Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethics, Hans Küng agrees that the early-modern paradigm must be replaced by a “holistic way of thinking,” by a “new covenant.” He calls into question “the modern paradigm” which consists of “a science free of ethics; an omnipotent macrotechnology; an industry which destroys the environment; a democracy which is purely a legal form.” “Modern scientific and technological thought,” he says, “has from the beginning proved incapable of providing the foundation for universal values, human rights, and ethical criteria” (1991: 41-42). In the modern conception, he says, “reason, which is not involved in any cosmos and to which nothing is sacred, destroys itself.” Harmony does not exist. On the other hand, in the new holism reason is again grounded cosmically and therefore can serve as a foundation for a new ethics of global responsibility.

Human life is clearly an evolutionary whole. But human institutions and consciousness have not evolved to manifest this wholeness. Rational loyalty and compassionate solidarity with the wholes of which we are a part is still missing. Rather, our institutions and ways of life are fragmented, broken, and endangering our future on the earth. If human institutions reflected the wholeness of humanity, the transformation of consciousness would soon follow in a pattern that has been repeatedly shown throughout human history. The kind of institutions in which we live influence the kind of persons we become and the ways in which we relate to one another. Changing the conceptual foundations of our laws and institutions can allow the spirituality of love and compassionate justice to enter society. Peter Gabel, for example, describes the goals of the Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics project within the United States:

Our aim is to transform law into the building of a binding culture in public space—in public rooms like courthouses and courtrooms, in written discourses like law books and legislation—that attempts to foster empathy and compassion and human understanding, a force of healing and mutual recognition, rather than the mere parceling out of rights among solitary and adversarial individuals. (2013: 180)

We need to establish planetary democratic world law on exactly these principles. According to the principle of holism on which the universe is constructed, if we want a future on this planet we must unite under democratic world law founded on the holistic principle of unity in diversity. Uniting humanity under democratic world law would engender a qualitative leap: the whole is more than merely the sum of its parts. New qualities would emerge with the wholeness of human institutions and consciousness that would be very powerful, liberating, and would give us our best prospect for a world based on peace, justice, and sustainability.

The new holistic paradigm must serve as the presupposition for the meaning of the parts on every level, from the cosmos to the planetary biosphere to human life. We must make a paradigm-shift from starting with the parts and trying to build wholes (peace, justice, sustainability, etc.) to an orientation that starts from the whole on every level. We must think of our individuality, our culture, our economics, and our nation as deriving from the holism of humanity, not the reverse. The transformation of primary perspective, of starting point, is one of the keys to human liberation. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth, written by hundreds of world citizens over a period of some 23 years from 1968-1991, is predicated precisely on this holism of planetary unity in diversity (Martin 2010). It starts from the whole, and then addresses the institutional means for governing the unity in diversity that constitutes human civilization.

The paradigm-shift to holism with respect to government and law requires that we recognize the illegitimacy of the global political-economic system that is today rapidly shredding the possibility for any viable future for human beings on Earth. The dominant political and economic system of the world today violates wholeness, and, focusing as both nations and corporations do on external relations, violates the possibility of harmony. For every nation today, national and sectarian interests take priority over planetary interests, but planetary interests are those of the whole of humanity and future generations. They arise from our holistic situation and require a holistic perspective and set of institutions to address them.

The holistic paradigm of law and government identifies a planetarycommon good, transcending the localized common goods of territorial nation-states. The clear principles of our planetary common good include peace, disarmament, ecological sustainability, and the elimination of the scourge of global poverty. It recognizes that the fate of all people is linked together, both because we are all human beings and because a globalized world has forced awareness of these rights to peace and a protected environment upon us all. Engendering a new global democratic order will establish government and law directed toward making the world a decent place for all its citizens, not just the one percent, and not just those in North America, Europe, or Japan. The very nature of holistic law demands this: the purpose of government and law is intrinsically moral and intrinsically demands universal application through compassionate justice and ecological sustainability.

It is important to be clear that the process of emergence of this world peace system, and the planetary social democracy it entails, is not simply one arbitrary option among the various possibilities that we encounter as we reflect on our common future. We have seen that a dynamic principle of holism is fundamental to all the processes of the universe including human evolutionary development. Democratic world law is implicit within our emerging human holism. We can, of course, derail this process through environmental collapse or nuclear war, but the potential for harmony and unity in diversity of a nonviolent planetary legal order is at the heart of the emergent ethics of holism and the unity of our human condition.

This new world-peace system will not abolish national administrative and governmental units but will substantially remove the conflict of national partisan interests. National governments under the Earth Constitution function more like states within the US or Pradesh within India. Holistic law recognizes that the cooperative governing of everyone together engenders “positive freedom,” a freedom for each that is so much greater than the so-called “freedom” of isolated units trying to serve egoistic interests while in conflict with others and while resisting governmental authority. The nations and peoples of Earth will begin working together in ways deemed unimaginable during most of modern history since the Renaissance. The redemption of humanity from war, chaos, and self-destruction requires that we unite together under a global social contract.

Capitalism and sovereign nation-states as institutions bring out our potential for fear, greed, conflict, and lust for power. They lead people to thoughts and actions presupposing external relationships, rather than internal (moral) relationships. A social democratic world government will bring out our potential for cooperation and mutual participation. The League of Nations was supposed to be a place for nations to talk out their differences and the world’s problems rather than go to war, but such a nonbinding framework for militarized sovereign nation-states in aggressive economic competition with one another will necessarily fail to fulfill that purpose. The same thing is true of the United Nations with its undemocratic and powerless General Assembly and Security Council veto. Under the system of sovereign nations, the General Assembly becomes little more than a forum for ideology, posturing, and recrimination, not a forum for genuine dialogue, and clearly not a public space for effective use of human intelligence to address global problems.

To actualize the universal a priori rule of law implicit in human sociality, rationality, and morality, we must begin with these presuppositions. You cannot succeed by presupposing precisely whatprevents universal law from actualizing itself, namely, sovereign nation-states and unrestrained global economic competition. That is why the Constitution for the Federation of Earth must be the presupposition of our endeavors to create a world parliament, a world court system, and to initiate the rule of universal positive law for humanity. By presupposing the holism and universality of law in all our endeavors (symbolized and concretized in the Earth Constitution), we bring our concrete, particular activities in the current state of fragmentation into a transformed actuality that recognizes our common humanity.

Legitimate sovereignty belongs to humankind, not to fragmented militarized state territories. Legitimate sovereignty is embodied in theEarth Constitution, resulting in the embrace of humanity and our planet in a governmental regime of compassionate justice, peace, and ecological sustainability. As philosopher Errol E. Harris expresses this: “If the implications of this scientific revolution and the new paradigm it produces are taken seriously, holism should be the dominating concept in all our thinking” (2000: 90). We must begin with the sovereignty and holism of humanity under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. From that beginning alone, follows the preservation and redemption of humanity.

Citations:

Gabel, Peter (2013). Another Way of Seeing: Essays on Transforming Law, Politics, and Culture. New Orleans: Quid Pro Books.

Harris, Errol E. (2000). Apocalypse and Paradigm: Science and Everyday Thinking. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Jonas, Hans (1996). Mortality and Morality: A Search for God after Auschwitz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Küng, Hans (1991). Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic.New York: Crossroad.

Martin, Glen T. (2010). A Constitution for the Federation of Earth: With Historical Introduction, Commentary and Conclusion. Appomattox, VA: Institute for Economic Democracy Press. On line at:www.radford.edu/gmartin/CEF.pdf.

________ (2016). One World Renaissance: Holistic Planetary Transformation Through and Global Social Contract. Appomattox, VA: Institute for Economic Democracy Press.

Speth, James Gustave (2005). Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas (1992). The Universe Story – From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

Bill Kristol Tried to Defend the Galactic Empire on Twitter

http://observer.com/2015/10/bill-kristol-tried-to-defend-the-galactic-empire-on-twitter/

'Star Wars' fans didn't like that very much

By John Bonazzo • 10/20/15 12:14pm


Bill Kristol, Darth Vader supporter. (Photo: Google Commons)

Fanboys around the world rejoiced last night as the final trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released and tickets for the movie went on sale.

But Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, a neoconservative opinion magazine, made waves of his own this morning when he tweeted that he supported the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars universe:

Although the two tweets were in response to a joke New York Times op-ed writer Ross Douthat tweeted about conservatives supporting the Empire, Mr. Kristol’s support of “the dark side” didn’t seem to be jest: The conversation didn’t end on Mr. Kristol’s feed, however—so many people tweeted out opinions on the Empire debate that “Bill Kristol” was one of Twitter’s top trends Tuesday morning: Rather than engaging the haters, Mr. Kristol’s response was to link to a 2002 Weekly Standard article called “The Case for the Empire.” The Force is strong with this one.

More:

http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/embracing-the-dark-side-a-short-history-of-the-pathological-neocon-quest-for-empire/

Any returning readers may remember my creative caricaturization of the Neo-Conservative movement, its movers and shakers and cheerleaders, the latter counting my biological father among their ranks; a staunch supporter of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman's insane dystopian vision where the future socio-economic arrangement is essentially one giant Wall Mart (everyone earns $10 an hour, works 60+ hours a week like human robots except 1% of the society living in a virtual utopia, think feudalism with high technology for the few that can appreciate it). These insane, stunted, sociopaths are literally frothing at the mouth for the privatization of the USPS among other public institutions. I recently called my father to relay some good news about gaining employment with the aforementioned institution and the conversation invariably moved toward the illumination of some anxiety with the new job due to severe budget constraints stemming from Republican legislation in 2006 that mandates the USPS pre-pay 75 years of health insurance in 10 years, most of which for future USPS employees that haven't even been born!

These kinds of onerous demands are nowhere to be found elsewhere in the federal govt. They are literally frothing at the mouth at the thought of Wall Mart or Staples buying out the USPS and all of it's employees earning a slave-wage-like $10 an hour with no union. The fact that the USPS is 100% self funded (through postage and fees for services) completely escapes them. They refuse to look at the hulking elephant in the room, The Military Industrial Corporate Congressional Complex, and the Permanent War Economy that has been foisted on all of us, to our peril. I'm so completely disgusted with this consciousness. Seriously though, will they be happy when everyone is earning minimum wage except less than 1% of the society? Then what? It's insane, I truly don't understand it.

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/03/open-letter-to-my-father-republican.html

and

http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-new-age-of-transhumanism-and-future.html

Caravan To Midnight - Space, Sky and Earth

Highly recommended viewing, the guests are on point in this one, the topics explored are the ET presence, actual state of aerospace technology, to include reverse engineered tech and the very real threat of Chemtrails: