Libya – Another poster country for empire

Ever since the launch of Odyssey Dawn, I have been keeping my pulse on Libya. In fact, I admit that I didn’t know much about Libya before. Gaddafi was simply a weird, conceited man that who looked like a combination of Keith Richards and one of those guys who sang YMCA. And he is supposed to have been a brutal dictator who abused and killed his people indiscriminately.

At least that’s what we’re told. But if know anything of my journey the last several years, it gets harder and harder to believe anything we’re told. Why do we anyways? We were lied to repeatedly (as one tiny example) about those WMDS in Iraq.  Can we trust anything the media says anymore? There’s only 4 major multinational corporations that are all tied together with other corporations, oil, and governments. Shouldn’t we take a little more discriminating look at the facts before we pass judgment on Libya? A little late now, but the purpose of this article is to set the record a little straighter than “Take the mad dog out!”

Libya has (had….) the highest standard of living in the entire African continent. That’s a fact. As well,

1. Libya is Africa’s largest exporter of oil, 1.7 million tons a day,
which quickly was reduced to 300-400,000 ton due to US-NATO bombing.
Libya exports 80% of its oil: 80% of that to several EU lands (32%
Italy, 14% Germany, 10% France); 10% China; 5% USA.

2. Gaddafi has been preparing to launch a gold dinar for oil trade with
all of Africa’s 200 million people and other countries interested.
French President Nickola Sarkozy called this, “a threat for financial
security of mankind”. Much of France’s wealth—more than any other
colonial-imperialist power—comes from exploiting Africa.

3. Central Bank of Libya is 100% owned by state (since 1956) and is thus
outside of multinational corporation control (BIS-Banking International
Settlement rules for private interests). The state can finance its own
projects and do so without interest rates

4. Gaddafi-Central Bank used $33 billion, without interest rates, to
build the Great Man-Made River of 3,750 kilometers with three parallel
pipelines running oil, gas and water supplying 70% of the people (4.5 of
its 6 million) with clean drinking and irrigation water.

5. The Central Bank also financed Africa’s first communication satellite
with $300 million of the $377 cost. It started up for all Africa,
December 26, 2007, thus saving the 45-African nations an annual fee of
$500 million pocketed by Europe for use of its satellites and this means
much less cost for telephones and other communication systems.

The fact that our newly elected official oppostition, the NDP party of Canada, those saviors of the regular blue collar worker, voted unanimously to support Canada’s role in bombing Libya just serves to remind us that government is no longer to be trusted. I’m a little bitter because I voted NDP this last election. My own MP, when I asked him about this, informed me that the NDP decided to support this mission after being taught by Ed Broadbent, Alexa McDonagh, and Stephen Lewis that this was in the best interest of the world and of Libya, to remove Gaddafi from power.

And, let the drums roll please!!!!! (or are those war drums….), the same scenario is happening all over again with Syria and Iran.

I have a message for the war mongers – we don’t buy it anymore. Take our tax money, fight your wars, kill innocent people. Go ahead. We do not support these wars – we are against them. The blood which you desire so strongly will stain your clothes, your offspring, and your very heart, and the God of Justice will require it all of you. Their blood will cry out from the earth and will not bring what you think it’s going to bring.

Prepare.

March 9, 2009

On March 7, David Wilkerson wrote what he called an urgent message. To summarize, he writes, “AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO BE SO FRIGHTENING, WE ARE ALL GOING TO TREMBLE – EVEN THE GODLIEST AMONG US.”

About two years ago, my wife and I began a journey of information that began with the realization that slavery is still going on in the world today. It moved to Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine”, which reveals the depths of evil the US and British governments have gone in order to being about our current state of globalization. From there, we found ourselves delving into a labyrinth of information and disinformation that has truly rocked our understanding of the world.

People we were listening to saw this economic crisis coming last May, and yet I still hear the MSM saying how no one saw it coming. Poppy cock. It’s been forecast for about a decade by people with sense who saw that the greed and deception would have to lead to collapse. We just never heard about it, because all the media is owned by four major corporations.

I gave a presentation at a school here to their Social Justice club around April 08. The question always is, when you start learning how the earth is really being run, how does one respond? My answer was then and is now to keep talking about it, keep reading, keep writing. But finally, we need to all disconnect ourselves from the machine and learn to look after ourselves. I mean, wow, in one single generation, we’ve basically forgotten how, as a society, to grow our own food! That by itself is simply incredible. Why? Because we’ve allowed others to do it for us. It’s easier. It’s simpler. It’s cheaper. And it’s costlier. It’s costing us our freedom, our health, and in the end our very lives.

We bought chickens.

We cut off our TV subscription, and were able to cut a $100/month communication bill to $50.

So as my wife and I were living day to day, we were keeping our spiritual ears wide open. And we knew, that soon, we didn’t know when, something was going to be coming down the pipe. Something big, something bad, something earth changing. I sat down last summer with a local politician to get their viewpoint on local food production. She was telling me then how over the last year she had met with scores of people who all felt that something was changing, something in the air. Already we were preparing, slowly.

As Christmas approached, and we turned our hearts toward the New Year, I knew things were going to get bad. I made serious financial decisions that I carried through with in January. And the time came for us to get serious about the thought that had been growing in our heart.

Prepare. It’s time to prepare. The word for us has been that if we are not prepared, in our lives, in our souls, in our heart and spirit, then we are going to be laid waste by what is going to happen. We don’t know what, but we have set our face and feet like a flint towards our soon and coming King.

Preserving humanity

The idea that humans are to be considered special is more vulnerable than you would think

Photograph by: Chung Sung-Jun, Getty Images, Citizen Special

By Margaret Somerville, Citizen Special August 20, 2010 (The Ottawa Citizen)

___________________________________________________________________________________

Wrestling with difficult questions is routine work for ethicists. But some are much more difficult than others. Recently, an editor asked me one that falls in the former category: What did I believe was presently the world’s most dangerous idea?

I replied, “The idea that there is nothing special about being human and, therefore, humans do not deserve ‘special respect,’ as compared with other animals or even robots.” My response might seem anodyne and a “cop out,” but I’d like to try to convince you otherwise.

Whether humans are “special” — sometimes referred to as human exceptionalism or uniqueness — and, therefore, deserve “special respect” is a controversial and central question in bioethics, and how we answer it will have a major impact on many important ethical issues.

Although I will frame this discussion in a very limited context of whether humans merit greater respect than animals and robots, it should be kept in mind that not seeing human beings and human life as deserving “special respect” would have very broad and serious impact far outside this context. It could affect matters that range from respect for human rights, to justifications for armed conflict, how we treat prisoners, how we run our health-care and aged persons’ care systems, the ethical and legal tones of our societies, and so on.

Although all living beings deserve respect, which certainly excludes cruelty to animals, traditionally, humans have been given special respect, which brings with it special protections, especially of life. In practice, we have implemented this special respect through the idea of personhood, which embodies two concepts: all humans are persons and no animals are persons. But the concept of “universal human personhood” — the idea that all humans deserve special respect simply because they are human — and excluding animals from personhood are both being challenged.

Some philosophers are arguing that at least certain animals should be regarded as persons in order to give them the same rights and protections as humans. Alternatively, they argue that humans should be regarded as just another animal, which results in the same outcome, a loss of special respect for human beings.

Princeton philosopher, Peter Singer, takes this latter approach. He believes that distinguishing humans from other animals and, as a result, treating animals differently, is a form of wrongful discrimination he calls “speciesism.” In short, he rejects the claim that humans are special and, therefore, deserve special respect.

Rather, he believes the respect owed to a living being should depend only on avoiding suffering to it, not on whether or not the being is human. That means that what we do not do to humans in order not to inflict suffering on them, we should not do to animals; and what we do to animals to relieve their suffering and regard as ethical, we should also do for humans. Consequently, we don’t eat humans, therefore, we shouldn’t eat animals. We allow euthanasia for animals, therefore, we should, likewise, allow it for humans.

To such philosophers, the attribution of personhood should not depend, yet again, on being human, but on having certain characteristics or capacities to function in certain ways — for example, being self aware; having a sense of one’s history and, perhaps, of a future; and possessing a capacity to relate to others.

Following logically on that, these philosophers then argue that some seriously mentally disabled humans and babies, who are among the most vulnerable, weakest and most in need members of our societies, are not persons, and, therefore, do not have the protections personhood brings, for instance, protection of their right to life. And, likewise, they propose that at least some animals should be regarded as non-human persons on the basis that these animals have some of the characteristics of personhood that the humans they regard as non-persons lack. They propose that animals which are self-conscious, intelligent, and have free will and emotions comparable to those of humans, should be treated as non-human persons.

But this idea that simply being human does not mean one deserves “special respect,” rather, the respect owed to a “being” depends on its having certain attributes, is not only a serious danger to vulnerable humans. It could also lead to situations in which robots would be seen to deserve greater respect than humans and ethical restrictions on what we may do to change human life would become inoperative.

People who believe the kind and degree of respect owed to an entity depends on its intelligence, would argue that some super-intelligent robots will deserve more respect than humans. They define intelligence narrowly, as logical, cognitive mentation and, for them, these robots are more “intelligent” than any humans. This approach has far-reaching and serious implications, well beyond the degree of respect that should be shown to an individual human, as compared with an individual robot.

If there is nothing special about being human, there is no essence of our humanness that we must hold in trust

for future generations. That means we are free to use the new technoscience, as the transhumanists advocate we should, to alter humans so that they become “post-human,” that is, not human at all as we know it. In other words, there would be many less or perhaps no ethical barriers to seeking the transhumanists’ utopian goal, that humans will become an obsolete model. This would be achieved through our redesigning ourselves using technoscience — or perhaps robots doing

so. Instead of our designing them, they could redesign

us!

We used to regard humans as special on the basis that they had a soul, a divine spark, and animals did not. But, today, far from everyone accepts the concept of a soul. Most people, however, at least act as though we humans have a “human spirit,” a metaphysical, although not necessarily supernatural, element, as part of the essence of our humanness. Some philosophers see the ethical and moral sense humans have as distinguishing humans from animals, which also have consciousness. They believe humans are “special” because of this moral sense and, therefore, deserve “special respect.”

I’m an incurable optimist and I believe that open-minded persons of goodwill, whatever their beliefs, will conclude that humans deserve special respect in the sense that there are some things we should not do to humans, even if we might do them to animals or robots, although what we currently do to animals needs very careful ethical consideration.

Implementing and maintaining “special respect” for humans will require that we recognize humans as having innate human dignity that must be respected, and that we regard as unethical interventions that contravene that dignity, such as designing our children, making a baby from two same-sex people, creating human-animal hybrids, cloning humans, using human embryos as a “manufacturing plant” to produce therapeutic agents, euthanasia, and, with the new neuroscience, perhaps most worrying of all, designing, controlling or intervening on our minds.

It’s true that we need to have greater respect for all life, not just human life. But implementing that respect should not be by way of denigrating respect for humans and human life, which equating humans to animals and to robots does. We are not just another animal in the forest or another robot in the laboratory and promoting the idea that we are is, indeed, a very dangerous one.

Postscript: After writing this article, I was curious to know what some of my friends and colleagues would consider to be the world’s most

dangerous idea at present. When I asked them, a large majority answered, without hesitation, “religion.” That caused me to ponder how their choice correlated with my choice.

Whatever they believe, the adherents of militant fundamentalist religions, or any other militant fundamentalism, certainly do not act according to a principle that all humans deserve “special respect.” Like the secularists, they also categorize people, in their case, as believers or infidels and believe only the former deserve respect. To the extent that my colleagues see religion as a root cause of this lack of respect for some people and view that as a serious harm, my most dangerous idea and theirs are concordant. But, over millennia, most religions have been the main institutions carrying and passing on to future generations the idea that humans are “special” and deserve “special respect.” So, from that perspective, our most dangerous ideas are in direct conflict.

This “dual use” potential sounds an important warning. As with all ideas, even the idea that humans are “special,” or the practice of religion, can be used not only for good, but also for harm. We need to be aware, always, that we must seek to maximize the former and to minimize the latter.

Margaret Somerville is director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, and author of The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

The Growing Tree of Knowledge

There’s a famous story we all know that goes like this. A woman lived in this beautiful place. Everything she had need of was there. She was in love with her husband, and with her God. She was content, for all her needs and wants were met, even though there was one restriction – she was not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But this creature, this serpent, this being of light, came and told her, “Why be content? Of course you can eat this fruit. Your God doesn’t want you to be like Him, for God knows that in the day you eat it, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as a god, knowing good and evil.”

Now think – if that were true, why did God place this fruit in the garden in the first place? He didn’t have to create it. Adam and Eve never would have eaten it, never gained that knowledge, and never have lost their place. Yet Yahweh did place the tree there, the temptation, the possibility of disobedience, and there it was. Perhaps it was a cruel trick, meant to torment Adam and Eve for eternity, to torture them as they saw the delectable fruit, day after day, calling to them, “Eat me! I’m juicy, and sweet, and will make you wise beyond your wildest imaginations.” Or perhaps creating this plant had a different purpose. It all depends on what character we think God has. Is He good, or does He like to torment us? Are there boundaries for us, or are we limitless, as…..a god?

As my entire faith was laid waste in the “Believe-nothing-question-everything” environment of university, there were two truths I could not reason away – God exists, and God is good. Nature alone tells me this, just as Paul espouses in his letter to the Romans. So I lean completely towards the former choice. If so, then what is the problem with knowing good and evil? Well, there is something I am seeing, and watching, and I am putting out a clarion call to anyone that has the ears to hear it. The clamouring after knowledge, of all types and kinds of knowledge, and the breaking of boundaries, is growing, and leaping beyond anything we could have ever imagined. The “bringer of knowledge” is tickling the ears of those who are listening, and it is leading us towards another Tower of Babel. God said then that “nothing will be restrained from (us), that we have imagined to do.” We are now at another day, when mankind is becoming one again, and the thoughts of men’s hearts are continually bent towards evil.

Whatever the result is, it will be cataclysmic, and that’s not an understatement.

What is this knowledge moving towards? Is it moving towards:

• finding sustainable energy for all peoples of the earth to use?
• growing quality food for all peoples of the earth to eat?
• providing cheap, long lasting shelter for all peoples of the earth to live in?
• providing quality health care, though most health problems would easily deteriorate with the improvement of the above topics?

The answer is no. Until you finally open your blasted eyes and realize that your leaders do NOT have your best interests at heart, that they are NOT simply making stupid mistakes, you will continue to sit around watching LOST (how appropriate) and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, or vainly attempt to elect another powerless local representative to “Christianize” Ottawa or Washington.  Why can I say this? Consider what we see instead, MASSIVE funding and time going towards:

• particle smashing – the CERN collider cost a staggering 9,000,000,000 dollars, and more because of cost overruns and breakdowns. The yearly operating budget is on top of this. Theoretically, it could create miniature black holes, or even open portals to other dimensions.
• space research – why do we spend so much time and resources on something that is simply so far off? Don’t we have enough to clean up down here? Do we really think that most of the earth will ever see the benefits? Or will it go only to the few that can afford it?
• nanotechnology – Vaccines have been produced that deliver the dose through a “nano-patch”, and robots have been developed that are smaller than the eye can see. Man is literally learning how to create things at the atomic level, building structures atom by atom.
• robotics – The ability to navigate surfaces, walk more human like, shake a hand, and use garbage, or dead corpses in the battlefield, as biofuel (like a stomach…) are examples of how robotics is changing rapidly. Visions of Neo gazing out over millions of fellow humans batteries rise here.
• cybernetics – the merging of man and machine is taking off. There are toys now that allow the user to manipulate objects on a screen, or even the airflow that causes a ping pong ball to rise, with just their brain. This is now old news in the field, as the reverse engineering of the body is growing every day.
• genetically modified foods – in the name of feeding the earth, corporations like Monsanto, arguably one of the most evil corporations ever to become a person (and here), has created and monopolized the world’s food industry with their genetically modified seeds. Watch “The World According to Monsanto“. Just so you know, Monsanto created PCBs and Agent Orange. Instead of helping to form farming practices like Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms, or Vandana Shiva of India, Monsanto would rather control it all.
• cloning – cloned meat is now in the American food supply and in the British food supply.
• DNA research, leading to things like bringing back extinct species. Soon there will be a DNA store, where you can purchase pieces of DNA for your own basement laboratory.
• DNA manipulation, mixing animals with plants, and even humans. Now think: if scientists have mixed animals and humans, what haven’t they done? Or if they haven’t done it, where will they stop? They already have patents on 20% of your own genes!!!
• Studies that are seeking out any beings that are not of this world – the SOPHIA project

Billions of aid, the world over, was raised for Haiti. Yet the country is still in squalor. The people have hardly seen any of it. And this is symptomatic of the whole system. Money is not being spent on making people’s lives better. It’s being spent on the ever growing tree of knowledge.

Consider Technocalyps, a mind blowing documentary that summarizes extremely well the burgeoning Transhumanism movement. From the website: “The accelerating advances in genetics, brain research, artificial intelligence, bionics and nanotechnology seem to converge to one goal: to overcome human limits and create higher forms of intelligent life and to create transhuman life.”

Transhumanism is a fledging movement, and so is hard to pin down concretely. According to Wikipedia, it

“is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities. The movement regards aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death as unnecessary and undesirable. Transhumanists look to biotechnologies and other emerging technologies for these purposes. Dangers, as well as benefits, are also of concern to the transhumanist movement.

The term “transhumanism” is symbolized by H+ or h+ and is often used as a synonym for “human enhancement”.^[2] Although the first known use of the term dates from 1957, the contemporary meaning is a product of the 1980s when futurists in the United States began to organize what has since grown into the transhumanist movement. Transhumanist thinkers predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label “posthuman”. Transhumanism is therefore sometimes referred to as “posthumanism” or a form of transformational activism influenced by posthumanist ideals.”

Another transhuman guru is Nick Bostrom. From his paper Transhumanist Values:

“Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.”

According to Ray Kurzweil, “There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.” Knowledge is doubling faster and faster. It only goes to reason that at some point, it will grow so fast that it will break a “barrier”. This is called the Singularity. It is that moment in time when man ceases to be man, and begins to be transhuman, post human, greater than human…..a god.

This summer, there is going to be a conference in San Francisco called The Singularity Summit. It’s now a yearly conference, and by no means the only one of it’s kind. A brief look at some of the offerings include, AI Against Aging, Reverse Engineering Brains is Within Reach, Modifying the Boundary Between Life and Death, and Nonhuman Intelligence: Where we Are and Where We’re Headed. Lest you think that this is just the gathering of a bunch of quacks, Transhumanism and all its components not only have huge amounts of dollars to work with, but also some of the greatest minds in the world working towards its goals.

What are we doing? What is all this about? Why in God’s green earth should we care? Because what God created isn’t good enough. God’s ways aren’t enough. We can do it better. We can do it better than our own Creator.

Let’s look again at the Tower of Babel – “Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Those are God’s words – as we become one on this earth, nothing that we imagine to do will be impossible for us. If we can dream it, we can do it. There’s only one problem; we still have this heart of flesh that is bent towards evil, a result of that first fruit eating that Adam and Eve had.

The feathered serpent, the dragon, the snake, Lucifer, is traditionally, in most cultures of the world, recognized as the bringer of wisdom and knowledge. I quote from a satanic site:  “Satan is the bringer of knowledge. The goal of Spiritual Satanism is to apply this knowledge and transform our souls into godhead, as was originally intended by our Creator God Satan.”

This is the goal. If one looks into many cultures of the past, whether they be Sumerian, Egyptian, Mayan, or Aztec, this is where the gods lead, to an enlightenment that brings mankind into godhood.

Man is dabbling, nay, actively pursuing….no, even that is too weak. Man is now locating and opening doors,  in all the areas that God has set limits on. “Every animal after its kind” is no longer on the table. It’s goats with spiders. The very genetic code of life is in jeopardy. GMO corn is now out in the biosphere, and we’re never going to be able to remove it. What are the long term implications? The scientists, and those who fund them, don’t care. The entire earth is now one giant laboratory, and we are all part of the experiment.

Is it just greed? I learned awhile back now when I read The Shock Doctrine that greed is not enough to explain the moral vacuum of the decisions that are made on this globe. Is it just lust for power? That’s much closer.

In the end, it is the desire of certain people to open more and more doors, so that finally, doors can be opened to usher in the darkest age ever known to man, when the gods of the ancients will return once again.

It’s not time to be Kingdom building. The Kingdom of God is within people’s hearts – it’s internal, not external. It’s not time to be saving for your retirement. There’s not going to be one. It’s not time to plan vacations, or build a new house, or remodel the bathroom, or purchase the next gizmo from China (please click this one if you think our lifestyle here is Godly), or look forward to the next Super Bowl Party. It’s time to purify ourselves. It’s time to humble ourselves and repent of the blood on our hands, of our casualness, of our sin against Father’s pure and holy, and simply much better, ways. Our Bridegroom is coming. He’s coming for a Bride without spot or wrinkle, one that is anticipating His return, looking for His coming, and knows His voice.

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” Matthew 16:25

http://www.singularitysummit.com/program

The Stranger

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“A few months before I was born, my dad met a stranger who was new to our small Tennessee town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer, and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around to welcome me into the world a few months later.

As I grew up I never questioned his place in our family. In my young mind, each member had a special niche. My brother, Bill, five years my senior, was my example. Fran, my younger sister, gave me an opportunity to play ‘big brother’ and develop the art of teasing. My parents were complementary instructors– Mom taught me to love the word of God, and Dad taught me to obey it.

But the stranger was our storyteller. He could weave the most fascinating tales. Adventures, mysteries and comedies were daily conversations. He could hold our whole family spell-bound for hours each evening.

If I wanted to know about politics, history, or science, he knew it all. He knew about the past, understood the present, and seemingly could predict the future. The pictures he could draw were so life like that I: would often laugh or cry as I watched.

He was Iike a friend to the whole family. He took Dad, Bill and me to our first major league baseball game. He was always encouraging us to see the movies and he even made arrangements to introduce us to several movie stars. My brother and I were deeply impressed by John Wayne in particular.

The stranger was an incessant talker. Dad didn’ t seem to mind-but sometimes Mom would quietly get up– while the rest of us were enthralled with one of his stories of faraway places– go to her room, read her Bible and pray. I wonder now if she ever prayed that the stranger would leave.

You see, my dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions. But this stranger never felt obligation to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our house– not from us, from our friends, or adults. Our longtime visitor, however, used occasional four letter words that burned my ears and made Dad squirm. To my knowledge the stranger was never confronted. My dad was a teetotaler who didn’t permit alcohol in his home – not even for cooking. But the stranger felt 1ike we needed exposure and enlightened us to other ways of life. He offered us beer and other alcoholic beverages often.

He made cigarettes look tasty, cigars manly, and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (probably too much too freely) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes sugestive, and generally embarrassing. I know now that my early concepts of the man-woman relationship were influenced by the stranger,

As I look back, I believe it was the grace of God that the stranger did not influence us more. Time after time he opposed the values of my parents. Yet he was seldom rebuked and never asked to leave.

More than thirty years have passed since the stranger moved in with the young family on Morningside Drive. He is not nearly so intriguing to my Dad as he was in those early years. But if I were to walk into my parents’ den today, you would still see him sitting over in a corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.

His name? We always just called him TV.”

-Told by Keith Currie

I’m glad I see it this way now too. I watched WAY too much TV in my life. This last summer, that stopped.

9/11 – The Precedence of False Flag Incidents

“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” – Plato

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” – U.S. President James Madison

“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”. – Adolph Hitler

It is crucial to begin a critique of 9/11 by putting it in the context of history. When it is seen that these type of operations have taken place throughout recent history in many different forms, 9/11 no longer becomes unique. It becomes simply another facade in a long line.

A false flag incident, accoridng to Wikipedia, is a “covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own.” So some government or organization creates a problem situation, and then blames the problem on the enemy, providing the motivation and passion to then go after that enemy. Naomi Klein wrote a whole book on this concept – The Shock Doctrine, David Icke dubbed this Problem-Reaction-Solution, and, if you’re willing to go there yet, the motto of the Freemasons is “Ordo Ab Chao” – Order out of Chaos. chaos is created, and the established powers that be work hard to create a new order. Consider the present economic crisis. Whole new laws are being created and enacted to create a new world economic system, one that helps the PTB’s (Powers That Be), and really does nothing for the common man.

For the sake of this blog, let’s list several of the historical moments (main resource: Wikipedia)where false flag terrorism has taken place:

1. One of the most famous  – the burning of Rome. It’s unclear who or what actually caused the fire, but Nero took the opportunity to deflect all blame directly on the shoulders of the Christians, who became quite persecuted afterwards.
2. 1898 – The sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor was immediately pinned on the Spanish and the rallying call became, “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain.” William Randolph-Hearst enflamed anti-Spanish sentiment in his papers by claiming definitively that it was a Spanish plot. No reliable evidence was ever produced linking Spain to the event. It is now widely believed that the event was a mechanical failure or false flag operation. (www.truthmove.org)
3. It is widely known that the Nazis, in Operation Himmler, faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. (eg. Gleiwitz incident)
4. The Reishstag Fire – William Shire proved that the fire was set by Hitler’s government. Even if one disagrees with Shire, and others, any historian agrees that at the very least the fire was used quite conveniently to bring about the type of Nazi government that Hitler desired. (also see Jerry Russell – talk given 11/9/03)
5. In the 1931 Mukden incident, Japanese officers fabricated a pretext for annexing Manchuria by blowing up a section of railway.
6. Six years later, they falsely claimed the kidnapping of one of their soldiers in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident as an excuse to invade China proper.
7. In 1953, the U.S. and British-orchestrated Operation Ajax used “false-flag” and propaganda operations against the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddeq. Information regarding the CIA-sponsored coup d’etat has been largely declassified and is available in the CIA archives.^[3]
8. In 1954, Israel sponsored bombings against US and UK interests in Cairo aiming to cause trouble between Egypt and the West.^[4] This operation, latter dubbed the Lavon Affair cost Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon his job. Israel (where it is known as “The Unfortunate Affair”) finally admitted responsibility in 2005.^[5]
9. The planned, but never executed, 1962 Operation Northwoods plot by the U.S. Department of Defense for a war with Cuba involved scenarios such as hijacking a passenger plane, sinking a U.S. ship, burning crops and blaming such actions on Cuba. It was authored by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, nixed by John F. Kennedy, came to light through the Freedom of Information Act and was publicized by James Bamford. A reading of the actual document is quite telling, and consider that this government was willing to perpetuate these type of acts.

Take some time, check out the links included above and below. Much better research has been done than what I can offer here or have time for.

The conclusion is unmistakable – if governments have done this before, they’ll do it again.

Another one is coming – I hope we can tell when it does.

If His kingdom were of this world……

Every day, I become less and less attached to this world, this world’s system, this world’s stuff, this world’s ways. The more I learn, the more I realize that there is absolutely nothing this world has for me.

I bought Switchfoot’s “Nothing is Sound” album recently. Playing it in my minivan rather incessantly, their lyrics mesh very well with what’s been going on in my heart lately.

“Nothing in the world could fail me now” – I love that. Nothing in this world can fail me. Why? Because if I don’t place my trust in any of it, then it can’t fail me. I haven’t rested on it in the first place, because “It’s empty as an argument.” It has no substance.

“Everything is bleeding. Everything is bleeding. Everything is breaking down, breaking down” – everything, piece by piece, stone by stone, the very earth itself is crying out. So are the people, the whole earth over. And yes John-Boy, that does include North America too.

“I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians” – I pledge allegiance to the only country worth supporting, the last country, the holy country, God’s country. So does it mean to be Canadian? From God’s point of view? From the wealthy’s point of view? My view is certainly changing.

Ok, sounds pretty depressing. But it’s not. As I continue to place less and less of my faith in this life and it’s stuff, as Switchfoot so aptly expresses, the things that are real, tangible, and eternal become brighter and brighter, and brighter, like in their lyrics “The shadows prove the sunshine”. Father God, family, relationships, and healed/ransomed/restored hearts. That’s it. That’s all there is. My house means nothing. My van means nothing. My career. My computer. RRSPs. CDs. Vacations. Movies. It’s all a pile of dung, refuse, and rot.

But this process has been interesting. And I feel I must attempt to ask some of you along for a ride, if you’ll let me. Because if you can come and see some of the things I’m seeing, then your faith in society, in merchandise, in governments, in systems, in the culture, even in certain leaders (not all of course), will die an essential death.

It started for me in watching “Amazing Grace”, the movie, as I realized that slavery is still going on today in our “modern” world. Why? How could that be? I thought we had outgrown that kind of debauchery. And I started reading. And watching. Clicking and searching and reading and listening. One thing led to another, and another, and the myriad of dots I was encountering began to line up. And as so many writers I have encountered rhetorically ask, I had to ask as well, “How deep does this rabbit hole go?”

Pretty deep it seems.

So I have a lot to write about. But I have to start somewhere, so I’m going to start at 9/11, because every major part of present day society can look back at that day as its turning point – national budgets, foreign policy, domestic security. It was an epically historic day. We all said at the time that the world would never be the same. We were right.

Point blank, 9/11 was an inside job. Not negligence. Not incompetence. Not run by men in turbans. Ok, I lost some of you right there, but hear me out. I mentioned this fact/theory to a colleague one day last year, and he thought that it might be remotely possible, but he didn’t believe it. I asked him why, and his answer was that he couldn’t believe that the U.S government could be that evil. It didn’t make sense to him that they would deliberately carry out that kind of an act.

Well, as Christians we know that that kind of evil does exist, we just don’t usually believe that it’s in our leaders, here in the 21st century. However, when we study history, we see again and again, that it is there, and for us to believe that the world today has outgrown the capacity for that kind of evil better think about it again.

Why 9/11? Because it’s recent, the emotion is still tender, the day has influenced every major political decision of the last 7 years, and, surprisingly in some ways, the evidence to prove the official story is a bunch of bunk is so obvious and simple, that any of us can see it if we just open our eyes. Then if we can get past the initial shock as I did last year when I started on this journey, we will have to start asking even more questions:

1) If a government could do that to its own people, what else are they capable of? If they are complicit that act, what else are they complicit in?
2) How does this event fit into the bigger picture? Who else is involved?
3) How does knowing this change the way we live?

So that’s where I’m going to start. To be honest, I’m writing just as much for me, because I really want to nail this stuff down in my brain. I find that it’s so easy to let myself get distracted again by movies, shows, parties, books, work, sports, housework, games, whatever. So I am taking deliberate steps to crystalize the facts. But I hope you take some time to read, to think, to pray too. It’s amazing really. When all the distractions, the voices of this culture, begin to be seen for what they truly are, begin to be felt with the malice of their source, they no longer take much hold. They can’t fail me. And that sweet, still, small voice of Father God, Abba, Daddy, is a lot louder, and easier to follow, than it used to be.

A Murderous Theatre of the Absurd – John Pilger

Posted by sakerfa on September 11, 2008

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger (one of my favourite journalists) examines news as parody as those prominent in the British media seek to justify the official versions of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

By John Pilger

11/09/08 “ICH” — –

Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.

First question: Why are “we” in Afghanistan? Answer: “To try to help
in the country’s rebuilding programme.” Who says so? Huw Edwards, the
BBC’s principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.

Second question: Why are “we” in Iraq? Answer: To “plant a
western-style open democracy”. Who says so? Paul Wood, the former BBC
defence correspondent, and his boss Helen Boaden, director of BBC News.
To prove her point, Boaden supplied Medialens.org with 2,700 words of
quotations from Tony Blair and George W Bush. Irony? No, she meant it.

Take Andrew Martin, divisional adviser at BBC Complaints, who has
been researching Bush’s speeches for “evidence” of noble democratic
reasons for laying to waste an ancient civilisation. Says he: “The ‘D’
word is not there, but the phrase ‘united, stable and free’ [is]
clearly an allusion to it.” After all, he says, the invasion of Iraq
“was launched as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’”. Moreover, says the BBC
man, “in Bush’s 1 May 2003 speech (the one on the aircraft carrier) he
talked repeatedly about freedom and explicitly about the Iraqi
transition to democracy . . . These examples show that these were on
Bush’s mind before, during and after the invasion.”

Try to laugh, please.

Laughing may be difficult, I agree, given the slaughter of civilians
in Afghanistan by “coalition” aircraft, including those directed by
British forces engaged in “the country’s rebuilding programme”. The
bombing of civilian areas has doubled, along with the deaths of
civilians, says Human Rights Watch. Last month, “our” aircraft
slaughtered nearly 100 civilians, two-thirds of them children between
the ages of three months and 16 years, while they slept, according to
eyewitnesses. BBC television news initially devoted nine seconds to the
Human Rights Watch report, and nothing to the fact that “less than
peanuts” (according to an aid worker) is being spent on rebuilding
anything in Afghanistan.

As for the notion of a “united, stable and free” Iraq, consider the
no-bid contracts handed to the major western oil companies for
ownership of Iraq’s oil. “Theft” is a more truthful word. Written by
the companies themselves and US officials, the contracts have been
signed off by Bush and Nouri al-Maliki, “prime minister” of Iraq’s
“democratic” government that resides in an air-conditioned American
fortress. This is not news.

Try to laugh, please, while you consider the devastation of Iraq’s
health, once the best in the Middle East, by the ubiquitous dust from
British and US depleted uranium weapons. A World Health Organisation
study reporting a cancer epidemic has been suppressed, says its
principal author. This has been reported in Britain only in the Glasgow
Sunday Herald and the Morning Star. According to a study last year by
Basra University Medical College, almost half of all deaths in the
contaminated southern provinces were caused by cancer.

Try to laugh, please, at the recent happy-clappy Nurembergs from
which will come the next president of the United States. Those paid to
keep the record straight have strained to present a spectacle of
choice. Barack Obama, the man of “change”, wants to “build a
21st-century military . . . to stay on the offensive everywhere”. Here
comes the new Cold War, with promises of more bombs, more of the
militarised society with its 730 bases worldwide, on which Americans
spend 42 cents of every tax dollar.

At home, Obama offers no authentic measure that might ease America’s
grotesque inequality, such as basic health care. John McCain, his
Republican opponent, may well be a media cartoon figure – the fake “war
hero” now joined with a Shakespeare-banning, gun-loving, religious
fanatic – yet his true significance is that he and Obama share
essentially the same dangerous prescriptions.

Thousands of decent Americans came to the two nominating conventions
to express the dissenting opinion of millions of their compatriots who
believe, with good cause, that their democracy is evaporating. They
were intimidated, arrested, beaten, pepper-gassed; and they were
patronised or ignored by those paid to keep the record straight.

In the meantime, Justin Webb, the BBC’s North America editor, has
launched a book about America, his “city on a hill”. It is a sort of
Mills & Boon view of the rapacious system he admires with such
obsequiousness. The book is called Have a Nice Day.

Try to laugh, please.

Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20733.htm

The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein

When I was handed The Shock Doctrine by a fellow colleague, I wasn’t expecting to read it right away. I had just seen the movie Amazing Grace and was in the process of learning more about modern day slavery, being very curious as to why slavery still exists in the world. But when I got home with my stack of slavery books, this red and white cover with its “shocking” title was staring me in the face. I couldn’t resist. Maybe it was the fact I’m Canadian and couldn’t resist something that’s red and white. And maybe it was the words themselves calling to me. To be honest, some were screaming.

Naomi Klein’s thesis is simple – “This book challenges the central and most cherished claim in the official story – that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as countless individual bodies. The history of the contemporary free market – better understood as the rise of corporatism – was written in shocks.” (p.22)

Klein’s first task is to show us the essence of shock, and where the modern form originated. In the 1950’s, a Canadian psychiatrist named Ewen Cameron began some experiments at McGill University in Montreal. He received funding from the CIA, as they were very interested in his results. Cameron’s hypothesis was in order to cure his patients of their problems, he would “unmake” them, reverting them back to a childlike state, and then begin to remake them in the order that he saw fit.

Cameron’s theory was that in order to unmake a person’s brain, a series of shocks needed to be inflicted upon the brain. Shocks included disorientation as to time and place (eg. inconsistent meal times, inconsistent lighting and darkness), drugs, and electro therapy. Indeed, his shocks did reduce his patients to a childlike state. The interesting fact is that none of them ever became better afterwards than before. Cameron’s experiments were a bona fide failure. When his experiments and links with the CIA finally broke in a scandal, it was clear that “the CIA and Ewen Cameron had recklessly shattered lives with their experiments for no good reason – the research appeared useless.” (p.42). But the CIA was more interested in what purposes they could use Cameron’s research for.

Klein’s next step is to introduce us to Milton Friedman, a man lauded by President George Bush as “a hero of freedom” (May 9, 2002 – Eisenhower Executive Office Building). Friedman’s main tenet of economics was a completely free market, wholly outside of government control, a market that included massive privatization, deregulation of prices (lack of governmental control), and large cuts to government services. Government companies would be privatized and bought up by the “free market”. The free market would determine its own prices, and the shrinking of government services would be taken up, again, by the free market. The only problem, a rather large one, is that the free market is almost completely controlled by massive multinational corporations.

Throughout his extensive career, Friedman and/or his ideas helped to push the economies of several countries as close to that precipice as possible. As Klein shows, he was a utopic visionary in regards to his theories, but where they led and who used them was a different story. Klein quotes Eduardo Galeano on this point: “The Theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize. They gave Chile Pinochet.”

On September 11, 1973, Pinochet launched a coup against President Salvador Allende and the freely elected socialist government of Chile. He then proceeded to arrest around 13 500 civilians. Thousands ended up in two large football stadiums, which became “places of death” (p.89). Hundreds were executed, and their bodies would show up on the sides of highways or in canals.

The Chicago Boys , which Bush mentioned in his speech about Friedman, worked feverishly after the coup to deliver a long economic document to the military leaders. Known as “The Brick”, it “bore a striking resemblance to …Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom: privatization, deregulation, and cuts to social spending” (p.90), the hallmarks of Friedman’s economic philosophy. Now this philosophy may not be evil in and of itself, but it seems that wherever in the world these hallmarks are desired to be implemented, it takes shocks such as a coup, or shocks such as torture, to make them happen, because as Klein shows, the people, normal everyday human people, will not normally put up with them.

The pattern was repeated in several other South American Countries during this time – Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Bolivia. White American men were known to show up in torture rooms, helping the torturers with specific techniques. Chicago trained economists (more Chicago Boys, or “Friedmanites”) were in the back rooms of each new government, helping to push forth Friedman’s tenets. And in each country, the poor grew poorer, unemployment was rampant, and money lined the pockets of the rich and those in power (p.102-110). One curious symbol of change was in Argentina, where the Ford Falcon was used by the new government to pick people up off the streets, or to drop off the dead bodies (p.105).

The philosophy is simple: open the markets up, and within time, “the ‘natural’ laws of economics would rediscover their equilibrium.” (p.92). This didn’t happen. In 1974, inflation in Chile reached 375 percent, twice what it had been under Allende. Local businesses closed, unemployment hit an all time high, and hunger became widespread. The experiment was a disaster. The remaking, again, didn’t work. But not according to present day President Bush, or Friedman.

Klein, throughout the rest of the book, shows how the shock doctrine has been used again and again the world over during the last 40 years :

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela and the ANC won the political war, but lost the economic one as laws were penned in the background that “pinned down the limbs of the new government” (p.244). They had the state, but no power.(p.243) Some privatized companies were even bought with South Africa’s own money.

In Poland, Solidarity won the election, but quickly succumbed to Chicago School economic policies as well. “Now in the grip of Chicago School economists, the IMF and the U.S. treasury saw Poland’s problems through the prism of the shock doctrine. An economic meltdown and a heavy debt load, compounded by the disorientation of a rapid regime change, meant that Poland was in the perfect weakened position to accept a radical shock therapy program.” (p. 211)

In Russia, “Gorbachev knew that the only way to impose the kind of shock therapy being advocated by the G7 and the IMF was with force – as did many in the West pushing for these policies (p.264). Yeltsin provided the answer after he came into power. And in order toget the kind of foreign aid that Russia desperately needed, free market thinking had to be instituted. The Russian press even called Yeltsin’s economists/ “fans of Milton Friedman” (p.267) “the Chicago Boys”.

In the coasts of the tsunami of 2004, people were kept off of their homelands for many spurious reasons, only to find that huge resorts had been built up where they used to live. Some land grabs were even twinned with armed private security (p.483). The shock was natural, but for the business men and politicians, the “open land” was the answer to their prayers. (p.483)

And in Iraq, the shock of all modern shocks, everything that could possibly in any way, shape or form was contracted out to private companies, a Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axiom . “Mohammed Tofiq..made repeated requests for generators, pointing out that Iraq’s seventeen state-owned cement factories were perfectly positioned both to supply the reconstruction effort with building materials and to put tens of thousands of Iraqis to work. The factories received nothing…American companies preferred to import their cement, like their workforce, from abroad, at up to ten times the price.” (p.420)

The Shock Doctrine has sickened me. I had heard anecdotes before, and stored the info in the back of my brain, but now it is finally there in black and white. I have read about corporations before, and have been struck with their greed. But it has become more than greed. Greed has turned into blood; the issues have turned from green to red. When governments, and in this book mainly the US government, speak one thing (democracy, freedom, free markets, forces of good), and then behind the scenes they take down, or highly contribute to the demise of, freely elected governments, and allow, nay, desire, corporations to come in and swallow up the people’s and country’s resources, allow new governments to torture and kill people, and it is ALL done (let’s not kid ourselves that any other motives exist) in the name of Mammon and Power, greed has turned into blood. In the words of Davison Budhoo, in his letter of resignation after 12 years as a senior economist with the IMF,

“…resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of starving peoples…. The blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things I did do…” (p.313) (commentary at www.newint.org)

What The Shock Doctrine has shown me is that there is real blood, dripping all over our continent, our buildings, our organizations, our markets, our democracy, our fingers. The resources and money of country after country has been pillaged and brought back to North America. And we have allowed it to happen. Who votes for these automatons? Whose cultures did these imperialists come from? Who buys all of the stuff? Who allows themselves to be entertained in the Coliseums of movie theatres, living rooms, and sports stadiums, and who reads the gossip magazines, plays the video games, tans their skins, and intoxicates themselves on disposable cash? We have. We have willingly allowed ourselves to become slaves in many respects – mostly because we never knew that the poverty we’ve seen on TV is our own passive fault. The Shock Doctrine doesn’t allow that ignorance to exist any longer. The words are right there in red and white. And they’re so loud I can’t ever ignore them again.

Luke 6

A funny thing happened to me as I was reading Luke 5 and 6 today.

I haven’t been to church in quite a while, at least consistently. Three years ago I stopped attending Sunday mornings with the body I grew up with. I Participated with another group for about a year, and also went to a few services with another large group in town. But there is no attachment, no drawing. I ask Father why He does not lead me to be connected with the rest of the body in some way. There is simply no desire that comes from Him at this time. Not yet, not now, He tells me. I have things to teach you. I have things to show you. Return to Me. Draw near to me.

So as I was reading today, a funny thing happened. I felt a faith in the actions of Jesus that I haven’t felt before, or maybe for a long time. The healings seemed more possible. Speaking out felt more likely. Faith grew inside. And I know your asking, why can’t that happen while being committed to part of the body of Christ? I don’t know actually. Maybe it can. But not for me now.

What I do know is this. I see the body far too focussed on doing great things in the world, far too focussed on being salt and light. There isn’t nearly enoguh focus on repentance, on relationship. I needed to leave in order to get centred on Him. And I am no where near where I need to be in that regard.

These last 2 months I taught at a school in town, a secular school. And it was so good. There was fruit. There was satisfaction. And it came from me being simply focussed on obedience and love for the Father, and love for fellow human beings. There was no pressure to be salt and light within me. No pressure to have fruit. It simply was, because He was, because I was. No more, no less.

I don’t know how much sense this all makes. In many ways I am thinking out loud here. All I know is that God is leading me into an obedience and repentance that I haven’t known before, and committed solely to Him and my family, and nothing more, is helping that come about.

But I still long for brethern to dwell together in unity with.

To everything, there is a season.