Ex-PM takes Walden Pond to the Congo

 Paul Martin has a new constituency. This one is twice the size of France and home to 50 million people - as well as 10,000 species of plants, 655 species of birds and 400 species of mammals.

After 18 years in Canada's Parliament - the final two as prime minister - he was named co-chair yesterday of a major European initiative to conserve Africa's Congo River Basin rain forest, the world's second-largest.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the creation of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, with roughly equal contributions from Britain and Norway totalling $215-million.

The basin represents about a quarter of the planet's remaining rain forest cover, and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has estimated that deforestation is reducing its size annually by 940,000 hectares or roughly 1 per cent of its total. The loss is largely attributed to legal and illegal logging using unsustainable harvesting methods. The cutting of wood for fuel is also a factor.

Mr. Brown decided a year ago to create the fund after being approached by Kenyan environmental and political activist Wangari Muta Maathai, who in 2004 became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

~ read on... ~

 

'Thirteen years after the Srebrenica massacre, history is repeating itself for the UN's peacekeepers in Sudan'

It's déjà vu all over again. On the eve of the 13th anniversary of the massacres of some 8,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica, with the tacit connivance of the under-supported and demoralized Dutch peacekeepers, the Janjaweed, Khartoum's surrogate militia in Darfur killed seven African UN peacekeepers and wounded 19 more. The militia outgunned the peacekeepers – and escaped with impunity.

No one, except the several hundred thousand victims in Darfur has paid any price. We can take it for granted that any group that thinks it has the impunity to attack peacekeepers, assumes that it has a license to kill civilians too. While the seven dead UN soldiers hit the news, the continuing attrition of civilians has become so habitual that it would take another Srebrenica, and probably one recorded with cameras, to get any news recognition.

After Srebrenica, the phrase "Never Again" was again on everyone's lips. In international Diplo-Speak, maybe that phrase misses punctuation. Maybe it should be written "Never! Again?", meaning something like "Whoops."

Certainly, the UN's own reports on Srebrenica and Rwanda have a lot of
relevance to what is happening now in Sudan.

Touted as 26,000 strong with robust capacity, the UNAMID peacekeeping force is still at 10,000, under-equipped, underpaid, demoralized and deep into an action replay of the ineffectuality of Unprofor in Bosnia.

I doubt whether the Janjaweed militiamen who attacked the convoy had studied the Balkan wars, but certainly their masters in the Sudanese government have. They have emulated every trick that Slobodan Milosevic tried so successfully with the peacekeepers, including getting their international allies to invoke sovereignty to cover crimes against humanity.

Until the end when the international worm finally turned, the peacekeepers in Bosnia served the same function as those now in Sudan. They were there to send a message to the concerned electorates back home that governments were deeply concerned and doing their best. In Bosnia, confident of their governments' backing, the Scandinavian contingents took robust action when confronted with murderous militias, as later on did the French and British, but most of the force was there to protect itself and "monitor" crimes, not to prevent them.

~ read on... ~

 

The Top Ten things the Illuminati do that makes them better than the rest of us

by JK Ellis

 

The idea that there exists a secret cabal of power elite whose sole purpose is world domination has inspired untold numbers to cower in paranoia. If they even exist, this group, often referred to as The Illuminati, are so secretive that they can only be speculated upon. They are rumored to be the most powerful people in the world.

Based on these rumors lets see what things these people can teach us about becoming "enlightened".

Here is my list of the top ten things that the Illuminati do that make them better than the rest of us.

10. They start off rich and powerful.
This is number ten because it's the least important.
Having a good foundation to start from does make things easier but if you're smart, have a plan and be flexible, it's very likely that you can achieve anything. Poet Rob McCuen once said "I was born a poor bastard. All I had to go was up."

9. They build networks and trust the right people.
You may find that with all the people in the world there are a lot of them who are fun to hang around but few of them you can truly trust. That's because when asked to do something important most people avoid the responsibility or fail. The more important the responsibility the more trusted these people need to be and the only way to do that is to test them. Trust is earned slowly through progressive demonstrations.

Trusting the right people doesn't mean they trust family, or friends... they only trust the people who have proven themselves to be trustworthy.

You can be nice to almost anyone but you can trust only a few.

8. They build themselves up.
There is no lack of self esteem within the Illuminati. They consider themselves to be "The Enlightened Ones" and they act accordingly. Most people walk through life beaten down into submission groveling for the slightest bit of respect. They never consider the possibility that if they start to think of themselves as respected, honorable, loved and admired that they might feel better and get more done.

7. They do what works.
If something works they use it. If something needs to be done they put it into action. They don't resort to dreaming, wishing or hoping. This is unlike most people who rely on what they've always known and not looked for something better. Worse, when something doesn't work they resort to doing it more and harder.

They also don't resort to relying merely upon "divine intervention". Instead they take complete responsibility for where they are, and get to work going after what they want.

6. They keep secrets.
If you've ever revealed a magic secret you know how disappointing it can be. From that point on your secret is out and people will come to you not to be amazed at your magic but to steal your knowledge. Knowledge is power and the Illuminati know how to keep it. So should you.

Keeping your goals, plans and ambitions secret builds you up on the inside and help strengthen your resolve. It also prevents the petty and envious from sabotaging your efforts. No one can battle what they do not know.

You'll learn to reveal your secrets only to those you know can help you and to  reveal only as much as they need to know.

5. They use mind control.
Yet another reason to learn mind control. They don't rely on luck or hope. They use everything they know that works to get what they want. That means mind control in all its forms; hypnosis, NLP, persuasion and more. They use mind control on others to influence, seduce and persuade (Just another reason to learn NLP and hypnosis).They also use mind control on themselves to keep themselves focused. This means keeping abreast of any self improvement program that will train their minds as if they were world class athletes.

4. They keep calm.
One reason they can stay so calm is that they have a plan that details exactly what to do next. There is no guesswork. They also have been trained in how to respond to chaos and confusion. They know that a rash and emotional reaction to anything will do nothing for them and work against their greater goals. How many people do you know can do that?

It's easy to assume that the Illuminati are without emotion but in fact, they simply know what emotions help them and what emotions don't. They are overjoyed when they know that even the smallest step is made toward their goal. They reserve anger and fear as a tool of control for the rest of us because they know the vast majority have never given any thought as to how they will respond when under stress.

The old kung fu masters are always calm and unemotional when challenged by the young and ambitious students. They know how to apply the least amount of effort to kick anyone's ass.

3. They save.
The Illuminati know that to grow in money and power you can't spend it all at once. You must save a portion of all your profits and resources and let them grow.

What percentage of your annual income do you have in savings?

2. They invest.
The Illuminati know that money and power have to be cultivated and grown. This it done by investment in both time and money. Smart investing requires two things that most people lack: 1) a deep understanding of the investment process and   2) patience.

The Illuminati invest in what will make a profit: human nature. No one ever went broke when they built a business around the seven deadly sins.

1. They plan.
The Illuminati are working a plan that some will say is hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years old. While the plan may change slightly based on circumstances the end result always remains the same; world domination. They know that this plan will not come about in one fell swoop but only with the patient progress of time and always keeping their goal in mind.

This is completely different from those of us who start college with one dream or ambition only to change our major six times and graduate waiting tables.... hardly the plan we started with.

Final Note: The point of this tongue-in-cheek article was not to build up the self esteem of the power elite ... they are doing quite well in that area ... but to point out that anything they can do to prosper you can do too.

PS: If you are in the Illuminati, I'd like to submit my membership application. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.

 

 

http://mindcontrol101.blogspot.com

Because of the nature of what I propose you can guess why I'm anonymous. Some people don't like the idea of real power and think of it as a kin to offering hand grenades to teenagers. That said, have a read. A lot of people find my thoughts insightful, provoking, amusing and completely off the wall.
= = =
JK Ellis is a researcher and author on the field of mind control. He proposes that in itself mind control is neither good nor evil but a tool that can and should be used for self improvement.

~ OpEd News ~

 

Without Comment

Postdoc in Theoretical Condensed Matter and Quantum Information @ Salerno

 Postdoc: Postdoctoral Position in Theoretical Condensed Matter and Quantum Information At University of Salerno - Department of Mathematics and Informatics, Quantum Theory Group Field(s): condensed matter, optics and optoelectronics, quantum mechanics, theoretical physics Application deadline: Sep 30 (Tue), 2008 Submitted: Jun 14, 2008 Contact: Prof. Fabrizio Illuminati E-mail: illuminati@sa.infn.it Phone: +39 089 965 287 Fax: +39 089 963 303 Address: Prof. Fabrizio Illuminati, Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Via Ponte don Melillo, 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy. Job description: UNIVERSITY OF SALERNO

DEPT. OF MATHEMATICS AND INFORMATICS - QUANTUM THEORY GROUP

RESEARCH in: Theoretical condensed matter, quantum information, quantum optics, and fundamental quantum mechanics

POSITION: Postdoctoral research assistent

ANNUAL SALARY: € 20,000 - € 24,000. Subject to negotiations.

DURATION: Two years. Renewable for a third year.

STARTING DATE: Flexible between November 1st, 2008 and January 1st, 2009.

Aspirants are invited to submit applications for a postdoctoral research assistant to work with Professor Fabrizio Illuminati in the Quantum Theory Group at the Department of Mathematics and Informatics, University of Salerno, Italy. The position is financed within the European Project HIP (Hybrid Information Processing), coordinated by Prof. Illuminati, under the VII Framework Program of the European Union.
The successful applicant will have a strong track record in theoretical condensed matter and/or quantum information. Current topics of research in the group include:

1) Entanglement, factorization, and criticality in quantum spin models and quantum many-body systems.

2) Complexity, symmetries, and nonlocal quantum correlations: Effects of chirality, frustration, and topology.

3) Nonequilibrium evolutions and dynamics of quantum phase transitions in optical lattices, arrays of coupled optical cavities, and complex networks.

4) Theory of multipartite entanglement and other fundamental aspects of quantum information.

5) Quantum information with atomic and optical systems.

6) Quantum state estimation, quantum measurements, and quantum metrology.

Applications should include a curriculum vitae, a brief report on research to date, and the names and e-mail addresses of two or more potential referees that coul be contacted for assessment and recommendation.

Applications should be emailed to:
illuminati@sa.infn.it

or mailed to:
Prof. Fabrizio Illuminati, Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Via Ponte don Melillo, 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy.

 

~ QuBit News ~

 

American summer camps turn to espionage to entice today's teenagers

Like hundreds of thousands of American teenagers, Jennifer Babb went to summer camp last year. She learnt all about how to prime dynamite, stood close enough to a controlled explosion to feel its percussive blast and finally blew up a frozen chicken.

Forget about swimming and barbecues: American children's summer camps are increasingly turning to adult pursuits to entice a new generation of tech-savvy teenagers.

In place of traditional summer fare such as canoeing and volley-ball, the camps are offering ever more sophisticated pursuits, from computer programming courses to espionage - otherwise known as "spy camp".

At the Missouri University of Science and Technology (MST), a summer course in handling explosives has proved so popular that the 2008 sessions sold out months ago. "A bunch of my friends were really jealous when they found out I was going to explosives camp," said Babb.

Sceptics might think this the ideal training ground for a budding terrorist, but the organisers emphasise that the $500 (£250) week-long course is limited to teenagers who express an interest in studying engineering.

"You will have a behind-the-scenes look at how explosives are used in industry and entertainment," says the MST brochure. "But the number one thing you will do at the explosives summer camp is have fun!"

~ read on... ~

 

Obituary: Ruth Greenglass

Ruth Greenglass, who has died aged 84, provided crucial evidence in a notorious espionage trial that led to the execution of her sister-in-law, Ethel Rosenberg, in 1953; her testimony, and the conviction, was later called into question.

During the Second World War Ruth's husband, David Greenglass, had worked as a machinist on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

He was said by prosecutors at the trial to have been persuaded by his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, and her husband Julius, to give them top-secret data relating to atomic weapons, which Julius then transmitted to Moscow. Both couples were avowed Communists.

Following a tip-off by a Soviet defector, in 1950 Klaus Fuchs, head of the physics department of the British nuclear research centre at Harwell, was arrested and charged with espionage.

Fuchs confessed that he had been passing information to the Soviet Union since the Manhattan Project. It was clear that he had not worked alone and, during subsequent investigations by the FBI, suspicion fell on David Greenglass.

Greenglass was called in for interrogation and confessed. He claimed that the Rosenbergs had also been members of the spy ring and agreed to testify against them. It was important for the prosecution that Ethel Rosenberg should be implicated as it was thought that her husband might be persuaded to spill the beans if he felt he might spare her execution.

~ read on... ~

 

Israel unveils espionage aircraft at British show

The Gulfstream G550 has a range of 6,750 nautical miles, which would enable it to stay on station for hours above Iran and elsewhere in the region.

An IAI spokeswoman said the decision to display the aircraft had "no connection to the recent news" about Iran, and the timing was "completely coincidental."

~ more... ~

 

Amory Lovins: We must win the oil endgame

~ TED TALKS ~

Karl Rove a no-show, defies House subpoena

Former presidential adviser Karl Rove declined to appear before a U.S. congressional subcommittee Thursday, citing executive privilege and ignoring a subpoena.

Rove was to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law about allegations of politicization of the Justice Department as they related to the firings of U.S. attorneys and the prosecution of a former Alabama governor. Subcommittee Chairwoman Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., and Committee Chairman John Coyners, D-Mich., previously said Rove wasn't immune from testifying.

Sanchez Thursday argued Rove's claim of immunity was invalid, saying, "Mr. Rove is required pursuant to the subpoena to be present at this hearing and to answer questions or to assert privilege with respect to specific questions."

~ read on... ~

Photo of the day: Rove’s empty chair

Anti-war activists emerge to end US hostilities against Iran

July 8, 2008

By Dex A. Eastman, Press TV, Tehran

 

Among the many acts of aggression against sovereign nations, one committed by the US has carved an indelible blemish in the pages of history, the anniversary of which has been a day of awareness for American anti-war activists who have vowed to end Washington interference in the internal affairs of Iran.

A TRAGIC LOSS

On Sunday July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes commanded by Captain William C. Rogers III fired two SM-2MR surface-to-air missiles at an Iranian Airbus A300 while traversing through Iranian territorial waters.

The passenger plane, widely known as Iran Air Flight 655, was completely destroyed and all 290 people onboard were killed, 66 of whom were children.

Following the tragic incident, ranked seventh among the deadliest airliner fatalities, unapologetic US officials said their naval officers had mistaken the Iranian Airbus A300 for an F-14 Tomcat fighter.

Iran declared the incident an international crime. The matter was then taken to the United Nations Security Council, but the then US vice president George H.W. Bush defended the military action and said that given the situation, the officers in question had acted appropriately.

In August 1988, George H.W. Bush was quoted by Newsweek as saying, "I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are."

While the US government refused to apologize to the Iranian nation, it expressed the extent of its regret over the incident by awarding the Vincennes crew with combat-action ribbons.

US historian and investigative reporter Gareth Porter, the writer of Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, commented on the issue in a Press TV interview.

"It says something not just about US foreign policy but about the culture of this nation in relation to the rest of the world. [It says] that the United States does not apologize, generally speaking," says Porter.

While the White House describes the downing as a mere accident, the reality of the incident was revealed in an official Pentagon report prepared using information gathered by black boxes of both the Vincennes and the USS Sides (also stationed in the area at the time), entitled Formal Investigation into the Circumstances Surrounding the Downing of Iran Air Flight 655 on 3 July 1988.

Despite claims made by the Vincennes crew that Flight 655 was descending and decreasing speed in a way that suggested it planned to attack the ship, the report says the airliner took off from Bandar Abbas for Dubai at 10:17 am in the morning, climbing steadily to its cruising altitude while gradually gaining speed.

"The data from USS Vincennes tapes, information from USS Sides and reliable intelligence information, corroborate the fact that [Iran Air Flight 655] was on a normal commercial air flight plan profile, in the assigned airway, squawking Mode III 6760, on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas to shoot-down," reads the report, parts of which have been publicized.

While the USS Sides was able to identify the unknown aircraft as non-hostile and turned its attention elsewhere, the Vincennes captain ordered the missile attack.

"What we know is that he (Captain William C. Rogers III) had taken actions both before and after that, which indicated to those who investigated it later, that this was somebody who was deliberately reckless, that he was spoiling for a fight with Iranian forces, and that's really the story behind this," believes Porter, who is also a political analyst on US foreign and military policy.

"The real tragedy and the real scandal is the fact that the US Navy and the US military, in general, covered this up. They knew there was strong evidence indicating that he was at fault, that there was no excuse for it, and they chose to cover it up for political reasons obviously," he says.

A 20th anniversary commemoration of the incident held in the US, however, has raised hope that the tragic loss of life may not have gone unnoticed by the great nation of America and may be the basis for peace between the two countries.

THE RISE OF ACTIVISTS

Conducted on July 3 in Richmond, VA, Iran: Stopping the next war before it starts was organized by the Virginia Anti-War Network (VAWN), a statewide alliance of 22 anti-war, community and labor organizations dedicated to uniting the movement against US wars and interventions.

At the beginning of the 2008 event, organizer Phil Wilayto touched on the objective of the gathering. He said, "Iran refuses to bow down to the empire, and because under its feet is oil, that is why the United States government is hostile to it… So we are here tonight to say that the people of the United States are not hostile to the people of Iran, or to its government or to its sovereignty."

Phil Wilayto, editor of the Richmond Defender newspaper and one of the founders of VAWN, was a member of the People's Peace Delegation to Iran, a group of five anti-war activists who traveled to Iran in July 2007.

"The attempt by the US government and the media to demonize Iran has been pretty heavy and pretty successful," says Wilayto.

"What we have found was a country that has not attacked anyone else, any other country in over 200 years while it is surrounded by hostile countries. US domination in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel with 200 nuclear weapons and threatening to attack it, other nuclear-powers in the region, India, Pakistan. We don't think the people of Iran present a threat to the people of this country," the activist has said about his trip to Iran. "We think the threat to peace is coming from Washington."

According to Wilayto, Washington has a long history of hostilities toward the Iranian nation and therefore America needs a campaign to mobilize support against the imposition of sanctions and further US aggression.

"Unless we pay attention to what our government is doing in our name around the world, we will suffer again as we have suffered in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Vietnam and before that," says the activist, citing the coup against former Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and the downing of Flight 655 as tragedies brought upon the Iranian nation by the US government.

During the event, Wilayto addressed activists regarding 'US lies and threats' against Iran and how Washington is paving the way for a war against the oil-rich country.

Activists also watched Bam 6.6, a movie that explores the aftermath of a violent earthquake in southern Iran.

The movie depicts the disaster and rescue efforts through the eyes of two California tourists, one of whom is Jewish. The film strips away cultural and religious differences to provide a glimpse of the humanity of the Iranian people.

It was also announced that Troops Out Now Coalition will call for demonstrations around the country on the issue of Iran on August 2; United for Peace and Justice may also organization demonstrations in July.

A MOMENT OF INSPIRATION

Capt. Habib Ahmadzadeh

On the 10th anniversary of the killing of the 290 civilians, Iranian Naval Capt. Habib Ahmadzadeh was serving on a frigate in the Persian Gulf when his ship passed over the submerged wreckage of the civilian airliner. The Iraq-Iran War veteran used the occasion to write a letter to Capt. Rogers who, to date, has not responded.

His letter was a source of inspiration for the People's Peace Delegation to Iran and was read to the audience in the July 3 meeting.

Following is the full text of the letter that Capt. Ahmadzadeh dedicated to "all those who seek a genuine dialog among civilizations":

Mr. Will Rogers,
Senior officer in the US Navy and former captain of the USS Vincennes:

In the early evening of last night, our frigate here in the waters of the Persian Gulf, whose muggy climate you and the forces under your command might still remember, crossed the coast of Hengam Island silently and with a speed of less than two naval knots. At that time, silence loomed over us all and the sonar screen detected the electric waves of the wreckage of the shot-down Iranian airbus lying calmly on the coral reefs. Most certainly, one can still find the remains of 100 or more lost civilian martyrs among the coral islands. It was a deeply moving moment.

Mr. Will Rogers,

You may or may not find it surprising that an Iranian officer of your rank has decided to make such a contact and recount his feelings to you from this side of the earth and thousands of kilometers away from you.

Mr. Will Rogers,

Do you remember these words? "I will shoulder this heavy burden to the end of my life." This is the sentence the news agencies quoted from you the day after the explosion of the Iranian airliner. For years these words have made me, as an Eastern Muslim captain, think that if I were you at that disastrous moment and ordered such a firing, which direction would my thoughts and conscience would have taken in the future? As regards to you, as a Western man, who was responsible for such a horrible experience, I can only guess about your feelings.

Mr. Will Rogers,

Candor and sincerity constitute the basis of a real dialog. Like millions of other human beings who resort to tranquilizers to escape the small and big problems of life, have you also taken recourse to sleeping pills, alcohol or even drugs in order to push that moment into oblivion? Or have you gone to the other extreme and, in order to overlook your big responsibility in such an event, have you crept into seclusion and resorted to Nirvana with the help of seclusive schools such as Buddhism, Zen, etc.? Or maybe, like another officer of the US Army, who ordered the bombardment of civilians in Vietnam using napalm bombs, you have become a priest and knelt down in front of the iron cross and the tortured body of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) and are busy saying prayers?!

Mr. Will Rogers,

"I will shoulder this heavy burden to the end of my life." If that sentence was not pronounced from the depth of your heart or has slid into oblivion with the passage of time, you are now leading a comfortable life alongside your family. You have framed the medal of courage that President Reagan awarded you in front of the eyes of all at the pier after you returned from that excruciating mission. You are keeping it in the best place in your house and (though I do not like to apply this sentence to any other human being) you are proud of that bloody medal?!

Mr. Will Rogers,

I don't need or want to prove that what happened was wrong. Rather, I have come to open the gate of dialog so as to reach the truth of the event after these years -- the truth that will illuminate the cause of firing by the super-advanced Vincennes at a defenseless passenger plane in an international air corridor. I want to clarify whether, as the captain and commander of the Vincennes ship, you actually ordered the firing deliberately or, as presented by your propaganda apparatus, it was a hardware or software mistake in the computer system of the fleet that caused you to mistake the airbus with an F-14 Tomcat fighter plane? Or does the truth lie between these two answers? As a military captain, I seek the cause somewhere else.

Mr. Will Rogers,

You might at first be amazed at my words, but the main reason for ordering the firing of the two Standard missiles on July 3, 1988, stands on one pillar, contrary to all the one-dimensional analyses presented up to the present day. That pillar can be called, to put it tersely, the ideology of the "American Dream."

Mr. Will Rogers,

We had better go back some years ago for a better understanding of this ideology that has spun the entire warp and woof of the life of you Americans, so that we can better observe the application of this American Dream, at least in your military approaches. Americans always consider themselves as the heroes of freedom and democracy in the world. This fabulous savior came to the battlefield in two world wars after the exhaustion of the allied and coalition forces, thrusting the last sword like a matador at the last moment and being called the single victor of the war. This dream of fabulous savior gradually turned into a second habit of your military.

Mr. Will Rogers,

The popularity of television and the screening of bloody scenes of mass killings of Viet Cong and the villagers supporting them and setting fire to the huts by hand-held, fire-throwing guns as well as the chemical bombardment of rice farms by using wide-bodied B-52 planes that had been made for war with the northern bear (Soviet Union) - all this brought intense humiliation to your people, government and army. American soldiers who had rushed to war, inspired by the ideology of the American Dream, came to their senses after the tapering of their primary feelings. They sought those responsible for these crimes, just like any other cheated human beings. It was here that your militaristic designers thought of how to prevent this spiritual and mental repercussion of your soldiers.

Mr. Will Rogers,

After many years of military inventions, at last your sophisticated arms industry has discovered a new maxim: "Fire and Forget." With the invention of a new generation of propelled weapons that did not need to be controlled and guided after firing, a generation of "fire-and-forget" weapons was created. Your men fired the missiles and bombs to destroy the target after traveling kilometers away from the scene of battle. With this new generation, the Pentagon set up another column of that ideology - the American Dream -- in order to escape the reality as well as the casualties and damages. However, this generation of weapons with human and angelic appearance ended in a satanic creature, resulting in what I see corresponding to the words of the commander of the Nazi Air Force, Field Marshal Goring, who said, "Hitler was first a human being, then he became an angel, and at last he returned into the devil."

Mr. Will Rogers,

"Fire and forget." For years the US Army has used such weapons in any type of clash in different parts of the world. The pilot or artilleryman has not watched the result of his act directly. A glaring example of the satanic use of this apparently human invention is the missile attack by the US cruiser against the Iranian airbus.

Mr. Will Rogers,

Let's take a look at the issue from another angle. When you and the crew in charge of operating the radar system in the Vincennes were trained in military training centers, you repeatedly destroyed bogus targets on the simulators by pressing a key. But the designers of the simulators only provided two options for you: if the bogus aircraft or vessel sent familiar signals, showing that it was not an enemy aircraft or ship, shooting was not allowed. Otherwise, you were expected to fire at it. Now the question is, had the designers of the simulators provided you with a third option in case of non-military targets? The answer is certainly "no."

Mr. Will Rogers,

Thus you became addicted to a kind of psychological reaction. You became conditioned to firing, just like a person who has been practicing how to drive by playing a computer game. Now he starts to drive a real car in a crowded street. Consequently, in the Persian Gulf waters, on the world's most advanced cruiser, you waited for an accident to happen. Those tedious training hours had made you, like other servicemen, quite nervous. Unconsciously, you were all waiting for an opportunity to change yourself from a hero of computer games into a real hero of the battlefield.

Mr. Will Rogers,

In the years when the US fleet was in the Persian Gulf to support an aggressor state like Iraq, your marines were watching the waters around your ships and even the aircraft carrier through their binoculars to prevent the Iranian forces from attacking them in their small fiberglass speedboats. The US fleet, equipped with the most advanced weapons, had prepared for a sophisticated warfare, as if it were about to confront the former Soviet Union. However, the Pentagon strategists had offered no theories on how to deal with martyrdom-seeking Iranian fighters on speedboats. Thus, a thick fog, a dark night or the slightest reflection of light on the sea waters could be viewed as a serious threat, such as a speedboat carrying some Revolution Guards. Do you know why so much publicity about the technological advancement of your arms and aircraft carriers had lost its effectiveness in the face of our small boats?

Mr. Will Rogers,

I will try to clarify the matter through an example. You may probably have worked as a navigator under a clear night sky and have seen the glittering stars in the far distance. But one should accept the fact that your nation has, for many years, observed the world through your color TVs, and thus, is not able to appreciate the greatness and grandeur of the world. Also, observing the world through a medium is one of the main causes of your fear of death, the future and the lack of a proper relationship with nature and God. That is why you cannot bear to be alone and contemplate for even a single moment. This fear of death and a materialistic attitude towards life, which is part and parcel of the American Dream, was the main cause of the firing at the Iranian airliner.

Mr. Will Rogers,

When Iran Air Flight 655 took off from Bandar-Abbas Airport with a 15-minute delay at 10:17 am, you were in a state of alert. Some 35 days had passed since you were stationed in the Persian Gulf -- 35 days of continuous nightmare and fear of martyrdom-seeking operations. One of your crew anxiously told you that he had seen an airplane on the radar screen. At this stage, the tragedy took place. Later, you said that due, to some technical problems, the screen had shown the airbus smaller than usual, equal to the size of an F-14 fighter jet. But in fact, nothing was wrong with the equipment. The main problem was with your stress and fear that made you give the order to fire before identifying the airplane. The result of the American Dream coming into confrontation with reality was to see an airbus airliner as a diving fighter jet on the screen. Let me quote a beautiful saying from our first Imam Ali (AS) who observed, "Never-ending dreams lead man astray and leave him alone in the face of reality." Firing the missile put an end to the lives of 290 women, men, and children who never thought of such a destiny at that moment. But was that the end of the story? Not for you, at least.

Mr. Will Rogers,

I have also fought for several years, but prior to those years I used to read the memoirs of American soldiers, including the biography of the American pilot who dropped the A-bomb, Little Boy, on Hiroshima. And the biographies of those who burnt up the Vietnamese villages along with their residents. What was common in all these biographies was that such acts were always followed by remorse.

Mr. Will Rogers,

Why couldn't the "fire-and-forget" ideology solve their problems? What's your opinion in this regard? Haven't you found an answer after a decade of living and bearing such a heavy burden? One of your presidents once made an interesting statement: "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." After the Allies defeated Iraq, a party was held in the US Congress. All the senators claimed that they were present in Saudi Arabia, in order to have a share in the victory. Although such a presence was hundreds of miles far from the battlefields, even out of the reach of the Iraqi Scud missiles, they viewed themselves as the heroes. Did they also try to share the regretful event that happened to you and your friends? Didn't President Reagan portray you as the only hero in the event that was a sheer defeat, by conferring a medal on you? Isn't Ronald Reagan the only person who, thanks to his Alzheimer's disease, has forgotten about this event?

Mr. Will Rogers,

The bitter experience of the American soldiers who go to bed at night with a disturbed mind and, as soon as they wake up in the morning, remember what a heavy burden they should bear until the end of their lives, has caused me to think twice before I pull the trigger. One year of living in a besieged city that was under constant fire made me understand that the laboratory philosophy of Buddha is no more than a trick when facing a brutal enemy that knows no language but force. When man's 5,500-year-old written civilization records only 129 years without wars, how can one live with the philosophy of "never fire," while considering man's short life span? If Buddha passed through his quarantine in the mountains of Indochina and from behind several thousand years entered the internal war of Sarajevo at the present time, could he sit cross-legged and go into ecstasy as a responsible citizen in the face of the everyday massacre of the people of his city? Or he might have written a letter to Radovan Kradic to withhold genocide? When my country, Iran, with all its customs and beliefs, was disconcertingly attacked by its western neighbor, I had two options: the heroism of the Buddha type, remaining holy and, in a sense, escaping responsibility, or being briskly in the war and finally turning into a defeated hero of your kind. But an experience coming from 1,400 years ago could show me how to maintain equilibrium and find the only way leading to absolute happiness, by means of religion.

Mr. Will Rogers,

We Muslims have an Imam and hero named Hazrat Ali (AS). In the very early days when Islam began to propagate monotheism in the Arabian Peninsula among idolaters, a big army of the idol-worshipers in the city of Medina besieged the residence of the prophet of Islam (PBUH). The greatest warrior of the polytheists, Amr bin Abdevood, crossed a moat dug around the city and challenged a fighter. Despite the fact that Hazrat Ali (AS) was still too young, he rushed to the battlefield. No one, not even Amr bin Abdevood himself, had the slightest idea that Ali would return alive from the battlefield. Fighting erupted between the two. In the first minutes of the fight, to the amazement of all, our Imam knocked down the opponent. Then he moved away to a corner and minutes later returned to the scene and was again engaged in a man-to-man fight that ended with the death of Abdevood. After the battle, the Imam was asked about those few minutes of pause. Ali (AS) replied, "When I knocked him down, he threw spittle at me. I became angry for a moment and thus rose up so as not to kill the enemy of God on account of anger and my selfishness. After my anger waned, I returned and was again engaged in the fight."

Mr. Will Rogers,

What do you understand of this experience? A moment of contemplation for God's gratification and never considering one's passion. However, when your men at the Vincennes command became ensured of the fact that the fired missiles had hit the passenger plane, they shouted "Yoo-hoo." Does this echo the snort of the American infantry in the massacre of the Red Indians or the hanging of the Blacks by Ku Klux Klan? Yes, "Yoo-hoo."

Mr. Will Rogers,

The totality of these experiences taught me and my friends that, contrary to immoderate people like you and submissive ones like Buddha, we should clasp at our own religion and think before any firing and then pull the trigger, so that after eight years of presence in the front lines of defense that we aptly call sacred we would not need to take sleeping pills. In time of war, 4 million volunteers rushed to the battlefields and, under the canopy of religion, the invading country could not record even one case of rape to their girls or women, and this is one of the greatest human achievements in the defense. However, with the departure of American soldiers from the Far East, according to official statistics released by UN organizations, 20,000 prostitutes remained in Cambodia alone. This is a real record left by your army.

Mr. Will Rogers,

I am writing this letter now on the coast of the Persian Gulf in memory of 290 innocent martyrs whose remains are still resting in the depth of the sea, about whose memory Hollywood will never make a "Titanic" epic. In every moment when I look at the sonar screen, I think of you and what you can do to diminish this heavy burden. How, you may ask? In my opinion, it would suffice to show the American Marines the starry sky and nature without the hustle and bustle of the cities, the neon lights and the empty politicians, and only express that God of this mother nature is far greater than television or radar screens. Under the shadow of God are living other human beings who have hearts and feelings and whose hearts beat for other human beings, but who do not like to forget the truth of life in excessive pleasure-seeking. If we think this way, never will any other fleet move from San Diego (the cradle of the manufacture of the famous planes of Charles Lindbergh) to create one of the greatest air disasters of history, rather than Lindbergh's unforgettable flight over the ocean. In this way, a day will come that, by fulfillment of this enormous mission, the heaviness of this burden will be placed on every single human being, so that a man by the name of Will Rogers can also live a tranquil life with a clear conscience.

Let us hope for such a day to come.

 

~ Press TV ~

 

Why U.S. war resisters deserve refuge in Canada

The struggles through Canadian courts and prisons by young American soldiers opposed to the war in Iraq has naturally raised the memory of another time, the arrival in our midst of thousands of young men resisting the draft and Vietnam War.

Forty years ago, American conscription created a lottery that meant a generation – my exact contemporaries – did not have the luxury I had of expressing political opinions without having to disobey the law. Many were able to get their requirement of service deferred. Some enlisted and then deserted, others just came to Canada as visitors and never left.

It was a different time then. Immigrants were not legally barred from applying for landed immigrant status from within Canada, and immigration officials were given much discretion in allowing young men through without asking too many questions about draft status or military service. That is not to say that decisions were taken lightly.

At the time, those coming over as draft dodgers and deserters knew they would not be able to return home without facing arrest. It would be years before a general amnesty would allow that to happen, and it applied just to the draft dodgers; deserters are still arrested if they return.

There was a sense of a deep inner conflict in each decision. Families left behind, parents bewildered, loyalties and values divided, often in ways that proved impossible to resolve.

The Pearson and Trudeau governments kept the border open, despite U.S. objections, and refused to allow Canadian border officials to become agents of American military policy. It strained the relationship – as did public statements by Canadian officials about the war itself – but it did not break it.

The Vietnam generation has made an extraordinary contribution to the life of the country. In every walk of life, in every profession, in every community, Canada is a better place because we decided to become a place of refuge for those seeking a different political home, even those who were defying American military law to do so.

How different life seems today. The young Americans and their families who have come to Canada because of their refusal to obey military orders in Iraq are being given no quarter or refuge by the Harper government. Robin Long is being held in a prison cell in British Columbia. Corey Glass hopes for some solace from a renewed application for refugee status after a judgment of the Federal Court.

~ read on... ~

 

Longest Walk 2

Thirty Years After Historic Cross-Country March, Thousands Walk from San Francisco to D.C. for Native American Rights

 

JUAN GONZALEZ: Thirty years ago, some 40,000 Native Americans and their supporters participated in a historic cross-country march called "The Longest Walk." They marched from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. to protest congressional legislation that would have abrogated treaties protecting Native American sovereignty. As a result, eleven bills were defeated, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was passed.

This week marks the close of another cross-country march commemorating the original Longest Walk. Thousands are expected to gather in Washington, D.C. Friday after a five-month-long journey across the country to draw attention to the state of the environment and press for the protection of sacred Native American sites.

Starting out on February 11th of this year, participants walked, ran, camped and picked up piles of uncollected trash along two routes across the country, from Alcatraz to the nation's capital. Along the way, they've compiled a list of demands from Native communities that will be delivered to Congressman John Conyers on Friday.

This is a sampling of some of the voices from the second Longest Walk.

DENNIS BANKS: The Longest Walk is an environmental walk. It's also walking for issues of Native American interest, Native issues, the most important being sacred sites and the environment.


UNIDENTIFIED: We have protections for like the Liberty Bell, Statue of Liberty, Arlington National Cemetery. We don't have an equal protection for sacred sites for indigenous people here in America. And that just seems a little bit unreasonable and unfair. Why would we have them for other things, but not for the people, the First Peoples of America?


WAYNE CRUE: My name is Wayne Crue. I'm a Shoshone-Bannock from Fort Hall, Idaho. I'm twenty years old. I've been walking since February 11th.


BONITA EAGLEFAWN LEONARD: My name is Bonita Eaglefawn Leonard, twenty-seven years old, Warm Springs, Wasco, Umatilla.


RANDY BLAKELY: My name's Randy Blakely. I'm from San Francisco, Mission District, Fillmore District. I started February 11th on Alcatraz at the Sunrise Ceremony, and I'll be going to Washington, D.C. As we cross each reservation, each piece of land that we go through, we hear the people's struggles, each reservation that we go through. And I realize that that's probably the most—that is the most important thing, that our biggest mission is to build this manifest so we can present Washington, D.C. with the struggles that are out there, that are still out there, and that some were even around in the '78 walk, on the first walk.


WAYNE CRUE: The times are changing fast, and we have to adapt with them, so that's what we're trying to do on this walk, is to adapt with the changes that are going to happen.


BONITA EAGLEFAWN LEONARD: A lot of us weren't grown with the traditions, you know, and don't know the ceremonies, don't know our own language. And, you know, a lot of us don't care. Maybe we were born in the city, or maybe our parents lost it, because their parents lost it from boarding schools. And now, you know, I think it's our opportunity to take it back and start learning our language, learning our songs and standing up with pride.


UNIDENTIFIED: This is a wake-up call to the people, and I'm determined to walk to Washington, no matter what. I'm sixty years old—or sixty years young.


OI WAKO: I'm from the northern island of Japan called Hokkaido, where a lot of indigenous peoples are still living. They are called Ainu. And I'm here for represent some of their culture, as well.


CALVIN MAGPIE: Most of the main things that I noticed that Native Americans are facing in Kansas is—it has to do with water, has to do with their water, has to do with, you know, where their water is coming from and how they're using it, their water rights on the reservation. We're worried about our children, worrying about our children being able to—you know, being able to play and, you know, go swimming, being able to drink water, being able to bathe in the water. You know, and we're thinking about the next seven generations.

AMY GOODMAN: Some of the voices of those on the second Longest Walk. We're joined now in Washington, D.C. by veteran Native American leader, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, Dennis Banks, one of the organizers of the Longest Walk.

Dennis Banks, welcome to Democracy Now! How does it feel to have arrived in Washington, D.C., having left San Francisco in the middle of February?

DENNIS BANKS: Well, the journey was absolutely great, and it just—you know, we made a lot of contacts, thousands and thousands of contacts with people, one-to-one, group sessions, about the environment and about the issues that we're walking about. And it just feels absolutely great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about why you embarked on this second walk, the first march thirty years ago, and why this one?

DENNIS BANKS: Thirty years ago, we were facing eleven bills, eleven pieces of legislation, which would have terminated our relationship with the federal government. It would have abrogated all of the treaties, and it would have took away our hunting rights, fishing rights, all the rights that we have on the reservation. And so, we walked across this country, 3,600 miles, and we collected 1,500,000 signatures along the way, and we presented that and other evidence, and we defeated—we had—all these bills were defeated.

And then, this year, about five years ago, when we started the preplanning of this, we noticed on our reservation the global warming effect, and we realized then that we would—that would be a major part of our walk. So—and it's still raising some of the issues that face Native people. And so, this is an environmental walk first, and it's also raising the issues, critical issues, that face us.

The protection of the sacred sites—for instance, thirty years ago, we asked for protective legislation for the San Francisco Peaks out in Arizona; thirty years later, nothing is ever done. And they continue to disrupt the ceremonies that at least twenty different tribes go to, go up there. All of these, protecting sacred sites like Sand Creek, the massacre that happened, Wounded Knee.

We're asking for a great deal of protective legislation, because our graves are being trampled on. In 1990, we had over 1,200 graves dug up in Kentucky. And there's a lot of states which it's only a misdemeanor to disturb graves. But a lot of our bones are being kept in—you know, the artifacts and bones of our people are being kept in universities. University of California, Berkeley, they have 25,000 remains of our people, but many universities have that. So we're asking that these universities—that Congress tap on the shoulders of these universities and say it's time to put to rest the bones that you have in your boxes in your basements.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Dennis, can you talk to us about what you've seen from the ground, obviously, in this epic journey, the re-creation of the first one thirty years ago, in terms of the progress or lack of progress of Native American communities throughout the country? What's changed in the past thirty years?

DENNIS BANKS: Well, for one thing, in the thirty years, a lot of gaming has come, because we were able to defeat these bills. A lot of gaming institutions have been constructed on reservations. So, because of that, we see a lot of new infrastructures being built up and a lot of new roads, new hospitals, clinics, things that we didn't have before.

This walk, of course, has shown to us—we split the walk—as soon as we left San Francisco, we split it in two. The northern, which went straight across the States. And we took the southern route. We saw—we met a lot of indigenous people in the South, the southern route, and talked about the chromium seeping into the Colorado River, affecting the Fort Mojave tribes, the Walapai tribes, Havasupai, the Yavapai-Apache. And the exploratory drilling that's going on now for uranium, more uranium mining on the Navajo reservations, they, the Navajo Nation, have taken a strong position against the uranium mining. But we saw—we saw not only the proposed buildings of new plants, but we met with the grandmothers, people my age—I'm seventy-five—people older, like eighty-year-old grandmothers, and we heard their stories firsthand. Some of them wept openly in telling us their stories about how they felt the contamination of the water was affecting the ceremonies, how the contamination of the air was affecting, you know, the breathing. So, the global warming is honest.

We also heard from other tribal people in Oklahoma about what gaming is doing. And there's a lot of people who are concerned that the gaming is giving more power to the tribal councils, and they, in turn—some of them we saw, where there was actual misuse of their power in Oklahoma. But that's also in other states: Minnesota and also in California, where there's misuse of huge power, because they've got it from gaming. And community people aren't allowed to sometimes speak up against this big—the new power that we have. That's on the negative side.

On the positive side of gaming, as I said, we're building more schools, more hospitals, more clinics. The infrastructure is being built up. We see a lot of new relationships between the counties and the states where we have big casinos. We now—in some places, we employ more non-Indians than we do Indian people, and that's a good relationship that we have with a lot of the counties and states across the country.

But it's also moved us into another arena, where Native people are becoming the players, because of the finances that we're able to provide. We become courted. We become wined and dined. And they're after not so much the Indian vote, because in some places we don't—we're not—there's one percent of the vote across this country. But they're after some of the big bucks. And when they do that, then of course there's some trading going on, as in other arenas. When they come asking, we have to deal.

AMY GOODMAN: Dennis Banks, can you talk about the Longest Walk northern route going to the US penitentiary in Louisburg, Pennsylvania, and also the honoring of the Native American leader, Leonard Peltier, in jail for life?

DENNIS BANKS: We, of course—in 1978, we raised the issue of Peltier's innocence and how he was, I felt, wrongly committed, convicted, on fabricated evidence. And just, to me, it was just innuendos.

And now—but, well, I want to say about the '78 walk, again, just a little bit. The '78 walk was—we were joined by many, many tribes, and then also from Japan came the Buddhist monks and nuns of Nipponzan Myohoji. And I want to say "Namu myoho renge" to them, because again they're joining us, and we have approximately twenty-nine Japanese with us. And a lot of our people are learning to expand our horizon of people and culture worldwide. There's people from Australia, Germany, France. We have a big diverse group of people.

But again, we went to—we stopped in—thirty years ago we went to the federal penitentiary in Kansas at Leavenworth. And now, we—our northern walk attempted to visit Leonard in Pennsylvania. Peltier, over thirty-two years—and I was in the courtroom sixteen years after he was convicted, when the government admitted, contrary to what they said in the closing arguments, that Peltier shot—picked up his rifle and shot the agents. They said he shot them, and then, sixteen years later, they admitted they did not know who shot those agents in South Dakota. And the judge, of course, I felt—he said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Sixteen years ago, you said Peltier shot those agents. And now you're saying you don't know who shot them." We felt at that time that Peltier would be freed because of the error, but he still sits in prison.

And, of course, we still bring up his name. We still—we thought that maybe the prior president would have given clemency. We, of course, knew right away that—and it was struck down for a clemency hearing with President Bush, and so we know that that's out of the picture. So we have to rely on the American people to stand with us on this one. They have stood. A lot of—we've collected—at that time, thirty years ago, we collected over—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Dennis Banks, if I could just interrupt you, we have about a minute left. I wanted to ask you: you're going to be meeting with John Conyers on Friday; what are you going to be presenting to him in terms of the key issues? We have about a minute left.

DENNIS BANKS: OK. We have a manifesto for change that we've been developing across the country. We'll be representing that to Congressman John Conyers and other colleagues of his. This will be the first time that members of Congress have accepted from us a manifesto for change. They didn't—you know, they wouldn't accept it, but we took it around thirty years ago. But this time, they're accepting it, and we're very grateful for that.

And I also want to thank General Motors, because they have donated for the use of this walk three vehicles. They're hybrids. But they've helped us tremendously. All of—but the people across the country, the volunteers that helped us, tremendous volunteers, and I was going to rename the walk, Longest Walk, to the Longest Buffet, because of all the help they've given us.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Dennis Banks, we thank you very much for being with us. We will link at democracynow.org to your website, the public events you'll be involved with tomorrow. Dennis Banks, Native American leader, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, leader of the second Longest Walk. They have just arrived in Washington, D.C. from San Francisco, where they began in mid-February.

~ Democracy Now! ~

Emerging from the drug war dark age: LSD and other psychedelic medicines make a comeback

The return flight from Switzerland was a mix of hope and solemnity for Rick Doblin, the only American to attend the funeral of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD who had just died at the age of 102. Doblin, a Harvard-educated Ph.D and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization that conducts legal research into the healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics and marijuana, had spent his entire career trying to break through the virtually impenetrable wall of obstinacy that surrounds psychedelic compounds and their potential benefits to society.

More than anyone else in his field, Doblin is all too familiar with what he refers to as the "40-year-long bad trip" that researchers like him have faced in dealing with the fallout from the introduction of LSD and other psychedelic compounds to the Western psyche in the mid 1960s. This 40-year intellectual Dark Age, Doblin says, has been characterized by "enormous fear and misinformation and a vested interest in exaggerated stories about drugs to keep prohibition alive."

We've all heard the tales of kids jumping off rooftops because they think they can fly, of otherwise normal people taking a single hit of LSD and "going insane," and of course the all-pervasive myth of the "acid flashback." Although there were acid casualties, most were rare or aberrant tragedies, most often occurring in individuals with pre-existing mental health conditions who never should have taken LSD in the first place. Most of the tales are apocryphal at best, intentional propaganda meant to discourage use.

~ read on... ~

 

The Sheriff's stash

In 2005 the Montgomery County district attorney's office held a party at the county fair in east Texas. They had beer, liquor and a margarita machine. The district attorney, Mike McDougal, at first denied that this had been paid for by drug money. He acknowledged that his office had a margarita machine at the fair. In fact, he said, they won first prize for best margarita. But he insisted they came by it fair and square. In any case, he pointed out, the county's drug fund was at his discretion. Under Texas forfeiture law, counties can keep most of the money and property they rustle up.

 

[ ... ]

 

Mr Whitmire is mostly concerned with the waste of public money. But the asset-forfeiture programme has various problems. Some poorer counties have come to rely on drug money to pay for their basic operations. Even in counties that are not strapped for cash, there is an extra incentive for sheriffs to go after money, so they may have more interest in the southbound traffic than in people heading north.

Another concern is that the government has broad powers to seize assets. In criminal cases, forfeiture follows a conviction and so it requires a guilty person. In civil cases, the property itself is considered guilty, and the government has only to show by "a preponderance of the evidence" that the money or gun or car was somehow shady. That is a lower standard than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" used in criminal cases.

~ more... ~

 

World Bank secret report confirms biofuel cause of world food crisis

by F. William Engdahl

 

Global Research, July 10, 2008

 

A secret study by the World Bank, which reportedly has not been made public on pressure from the Bush Administration, concludes that bio-fuel cultivation in especially the USA and EU are directly responsible for the current explosion in grain and food prices worldwide. The US Government at the recent Rome UN Food Summit claimed that "only 3% of food prices" were due to bio-fuels. The World Bank secret report says that at least 75% of the recent price rises are due to land being removed from agriculture—mainly maize in North America and rapeseed and corn in the EU—in order to grow crops to be burned for vehicle fuel. The World Bank study confirms what we wrote more than a year ago about the madness of bio-fuels. It fits the agenda described in the 1970's by Henry Kissinger, namely, 'If you control the food you control the people.'

According to the London Guardian newspaper which has been given a copy of the suppressed report, the World Bank study was completed in April, well before the June Rome Food Summit, but was deliberately suppressed as "embarrassing to the position of the Bush Administration." The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, is a former top Bush Administration official. Washington is trying to use a crisis which its bio-fuel subsidies created, since a new Farm bill passed in 2005, to advance the spread of Genetically Manipulated Organisms such as GMO maize, soybeans, rice and other crops patented by Monsanto and other "gene giants."

Their strategy is to use the explosive rise in grain prices worldwide, a rise fuelled by hedge funds and troubled US and European banks and investment funds pouring billions of dollars into speculation that grain prices will continue to soar. In other words, the food "crisis" is a crisis of speculation in food futures. The planned EU and USA bio-fuel acreage quotas and the periodic droughts and floods in key growing regions such as the USA Midwest then provide backdrop for speculative price run-ups. But the main driver is that tens of millions of hectares of prime agriculture land in the world's two largest food export regions—the USA and the EU-- are being permanently removed from food production in order to grow raw material to be burned for vehicle fuel.

The suppressed study

The World Bank study, the most detailed analysis of the global food crisis so far, concludes that bio-fuels have forced "food prices up by 75%." That is far more than previous estimates. That is a damning refutation of the politically-motivated US Department of Agriculture estimate that plant-derived fuels add only 3% to food prices. The report is expected to increase pressure on the European Union governments as well as Washington to change their present bio-fuel subsidy and support policies.

The report has been leaked just days before the important annual Group of 8 industrial nation leaders' summit held in Hokkaido Japan. The food crisis will be a major topic there as pressure on governments grows to do something.

The World Bank report estimates that doubling and tripling of world food prices in the past three years have forced an added 100 million people below the poverty line. That has triggered food riots from Bangladesh to Egypt.

The report as well calculates that even the successive droughts in Australia and other major food regions have had only a "marginal" impact on food prices.

Within the EU, for example, as of April all vehicles in the UK must contain fuel with at least 2.5% bio-fuel. The EU has in place a target of mandatory 20% by 2020, a staggering amount.

George W. Bush has cynically claimed higher food prices are merely due to higher demand from India and China. The leaked World Bank study refutes that: "Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases."

"Without the increase in bio-fuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," the World Bank report states. The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140% between 2002 and February 2008. Higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15%. Bio-fuels have been responsible for a 75% jump over that period.

The study demonstrates that production of bio-fuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going to production of bio-diesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for bio-fuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

The real agenda behind the food crisis

The World Bank study is the first to include all three factors. What is missing from the World Bank study however is the longer-term geopolitical agenda behind the present global food and energy crises. As I document in great detail in my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, the long term agenda of powerful leading circles in the West, particularly represented in tax exempt private foundations such as the Rockefeller, Ford and Gates foundations and the private wealth behind them, is a long term agenda of population reduction, in the interests of the global economic and financial elites.

Food scarcity, higher prices for basic foods in developing countries as well as control of food seeds through patent and Terminator suicide seed sales by Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, Dow, BASF, Bayer and a few select agriculture chemical seed giants—the "horsemen of the GMO Apokalypse," have been developed to advance the agenda of massive depopulation of the developing world.

The policy goes back, as the book documents in detail, to the early years of the 20^th Century when Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Gamble, H.G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, and other wealthy circles backed the development of eugenics research.  The Rockefeller Foundation financed the eugenics and forced sterilization research at the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (today's Max Planck Institute) until it became too politically hot in 1939.

. After the end of the war, Rockefeller and others in the eugenics movement decided for political reasons to change the name of eugenics. The new name they chose was "genetics." GMO is a project, based on wrong science, financed with over $100 million of private money from the Rockefeller Foundation. The ultimate aim is for the first time in history to control life on the planet. As Henry Kissinger put in during the 1970's food crisis, "control the food and you control the people."

In this light it is worth noting that as a solution to a crisis which it deliberately created by its massive government subsidies to farmers to grow bio-fuels instead of food, the Bush Administration made and continues to make a major pressure at the Rome Food Summit in early June and after, to open the doors to GMO as the alleged "solution" to world hunger.

On June 13, just after the Rome UN Food Summit, John Negroponte, US Deputy Secretary of State, stated, ""We therefore are strongly encouraging countries to remove barriers to the use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology," adding, "Biotechnology tools can help speed the development of crops with higher yields, higher nutrition value, better resistance to pests and diseases, and stronger food system resilience in the face of climate change." Washington and the GMO companies now use the more deceptive term, "biotechnology" instead of the controversial GMO term, in a linguistic ploy to overcome opposition.

Independent scientific studies and countless farmer reports have shown that long-term planting of GMO or bio-tech crops as the gene giants prefer to call it, far from giving higher crop yields, lowers the yields and development of resistant "super-weeds" usually mean more, not less Roundup or other GMO-paired chemical herbicides and pesticides are needed. In short the glorious claims for GMO are marketing fraud.

According to highly informed reports, Washington had been told that Pope Benedict XVI would endorse the spread of GMO, something the Vatican until now has been strongly opposed to on moral and other grounds, as a solution to world hunger. At the last minute that endorsement did not happen for reasons only the Pope perhaps knows. Groups like Greenpeace and the London Independent newspaper in the days before the Rome UN summit reported interviews with senior Church figures stating that the policy reverse was expected.

There is strong circumstantial evidence that the entire Rome UN Summit was orchestrated by Washington, London's Gordon Brown and other Malthusian governments in part to try to convince the Pope to reverse its policy on GMO. The Roman Catholic Church today stands as one of the most important moral barriers to widespread acceptance of GMO in many developing countries such as the Philippines and Latin America.

The leak of the World Bank report adds a dramatic new element into what is becoming one of the major political issues along with oil price manipulation.

 F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of Seeds of Destruction, Global Research,2007 [see below], and the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order,' His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. 

 

He may be contacted via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. 

~ Centre for Research on Globalization ~

 

The Diaper Curtain drops on the UK

"In one example, a woman could not kiss her daughter goodbye on a school trip because she had not been vetted"

 

The launch of a new Government agency will see 11.3million people vetted for any criminal past before they are approved to have contact with children aged under 16.

But the increase in child protection measures is so great it is "poisoning" relationships between the generations, according to respected sociologist Professor Frank Furedi.

In a report for think tank Civitas, he said the use of criminal records bureau checks to ensure the safety of children and vulnerable adults has created an atmosphere of suspicion.

As a result ordinary parents - many of whom are volunteers at sports and social clubs - now find themselves regarded "potential child abusers".

The checks were introduced to tighten procedures to protect children after school caretaker Ian Huntley murdered 10 year olds Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Soham in 2002.

However, there are growing fears that the measures have now gone too far.

Professor Furedi said most adults now think twice before telling off children who were misbehaving, or helping children in distress for fear of the consequences.

He said that the need for the checks had transformed parents "in the regulatory and public imagination into potential child abusers, barred from any contact with children until the database gives them the green light".

From next year the new Independent Safeguarding Authority will require any adult who come into contact with children or vulnerable adults either through their work or in voluntary groups to be vetted.

But Prof Furedi's report, Licensed to Hug, highlighted examples of when adult-child relationships were distorted by the need for CRB checks already being required by schools and other organisations.

In one example, a woman could not kiss her daughter goodbye on a school trip because she had not been vetted.

In another, a mother was surprised to be told by another parent that she and her husband were "CRB checked" when their children played together.

In a third example, a father was given "filthy looks" by a group of mothers when he took his child swimming on his own in "a scene from a Western when the room goes silent and tumbleweed blows across the foreground".

Prof Furedi details how one woman was made to feel like a "second class mother" because she was barred from a school disco because she did not have a CRB check.

Prof Furedi, a sociology professor from Kent University, said that "adults are no longer trusted or expected to engage with children on their own initiative".

~ read on... ~

 

World Evolutionary Humanism, Eugenics and UNESCO

UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy Part 1

by Brent Jessop

Global Research, June 30, 2008

Knowledge Driven Revolution.com

 

"That [fundamental] task [of UNESCO] is to help the emergence of a single world culture, with its own philosophy and background of ideas, and with its own broad purpose. This is opportune, since this is the first time in history that the scaffolding and the mechanisms for world unification have become available, and also the first time that man has had the means (in the shape of scientific discovery and its applications) of laying a world-wide foundation for the minimum physical welfare of the entire human species. And it is necessary, for at the moment two opposing philosophies of life confront each other from the West and from the East, and not only impede the achievement of unity but threaten to become the foci of actual conflict.

You may categorise the two philosophies as two super-nationalisms; or as individualism versus collectivism; or as the American versus the Russian way of life; or as capitalism versus communism; or as Christianity versus Marxism; or in half a dozen other ways. The fact of their opposition remains and the further fact that round each of them are crystallising the lives and thoughts and political aspirations of hundreds of millions of human beings. Can this conflict be avoided, these opposites be reconciled, this antitheses be resolved in a higher syntheses? I believe not only that this can happen, but that, through the inexorable dialectic of evolution, it must happen - only I do not know whether it will happen before or after another war." - 61

As the first Director of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975) wrote a paper entitled UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946) [1] in which he outlined his vision for the newly created international organisation (which grew out of the League of Nations' Institute of Intellectual Co-operation). According to Huxley, the guiding philosophy of UNESCO should be what he termed, World Evolutionary Humanism. The following article describes this philosophy and its relation to eugenics.

Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist, humanist, and ardent internationalist held many titles including: Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-42), first president of the British Humanist Association (1963), Vice-President (1937-44) and President (1959-62) of the British Eugenics Society. He was also a founding member of the World Wild Life Fund, coined the term "transhumanism" (as a means of disguising eugenics) and gave two Galton memorial lectures (1936, 1962). Huxley also received many awards including the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society (1956), UNESCO's Kalinga Prize (1953) and the Special Award of the Lasker Foundation in the category Planned Parenthood - World Population (1959) to name but a few. He is also the Grandson of Thomas Huxley (Darwin's Bulldog) and brother of author Aldous Huxley.

UNESCO Philosophy of World Evolutionary Humanism

From UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy:

[Italicised text is original emphasis and bolded text is added by author.]

"But in order to carry out its work, an organisation such as Unesco needs not only a set of general aims and objects for itself, but also a working philosophy, a working hypothesis concerning human existence and its aims and objects, which will dictate, or at least indicate, a definite line of approach to its problems." - 6

"Its [UNESCO's] main concern is with peace and security and with human welfare, in so far as they can be subserved by the educational and scientific and cultural relations of the peoples of the world. Accordingly its outlook must, it seems, be based on some form of humanism. Further, that humanism must clearly be a world humanism, both in the sense of seeking to bring in all the peoples of the world, and of treating all peoples and all individuals within each people as equals in terms of human dignity, mutual respect, and educational opportunity. It must also be a scientific humanism, in the sense that the application of science provides most of the material basis for human culture, and also that the practice and the understanding of science need to be integrated with that of other human activities. It cannot, however, be materialistic, but must embrace the spiritual and mental as well as the material aspects of existence, and must attempt to do so on a truly monistic, unitary philosophic basis.

Finally it must be an evolutionary as opposed to a static or ideal humanism. It is essential for Unesco to adopt an evolutionary approach. If it does not do so, its philosophy will be a false one, its humanism at best partial, at worst misleading. We will justify this assertion in detail later. Here it is only necessary to recall that in the last few decades it has been possible to develop an extended or general theory of evolution which can provide the necessary intellectual scaffolding for modern humanism. It not only shows us man's place in nature and his relations to the rest of the phenomenal universe, not only gives us a description of the various types of evolution and the various trends and directions within them, but allows us to distinguish desirable and undesirable trends, and to demonstrate the existence of progress in the cosmos. And finally it shows us man as now the sole trustee of further evolutionary progress, and gives us important guidance as to the courses he should avoid and those he should pursue if he is to achieve that progress.

An evolutionary approach provides the link between natural science and human history; it teaches us the need to think in the dynamic terms of speed and direction rather than in the static ones of momentary position or quantitative achievement; it not only shows us the origin and biological roots of our human values, but gives us some basis and external standards for them among the apparently neutral mass of natural phenomena; and it is indispensable in enabling us to pick out, among the chaotic welter of conflicting tendencies to-day, those trends and activities and methods which Unesco should emphasise and facilitate.

Thus the general philosophy of Unesco should, it seems, be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and evolutionary in background. What are the further implications, practical as well as theoretical, of such an outlook? We must examine these in some detail before coming down to a consideration of Unesco's activity section by section." - 7

"Our first task must be to clarify the notion of desirable and undesirable directions of evolution, for on this will depend our attitude to human progress - to the possibility of progress in the first place, and then to its definition." - 8

"But once more a new and more efficient method of [evolutionary] change is available. It becomes available to man through his distinctively human properties of speech and conceptual thought, just as Natural Selection became available to life as a result of its distinctive properties of reproduction and variation. Objectively speaking, the new method consists of cumulative tradition, which forms the basis of that social heredity by means of which human societies change and develop. But the new method also has a subjective aspect of great importance. Cumulative tradition, like all other distinctively human activities, is largely based on conscious processes - on knowledge, on purpose, on conscious feeling, and on conscious choice. Thus the struggle for existence that underlies natural selection is increasingly replaced by conscious selection, a struggle between ideas and values in consciousness. [...]

Evolution in the human sector consists mainly of changes in the form of society; in tools and machines, in new ways of utilising the old innate potentialities, instead of in the nature of these potentialities, as in the biological sector. [...] Nor does it mean that man's innate mental powers could not be improved. They certainly were improved (presumably be [sic] natural selection) in the earliest stages of his career, [...] and they could certainly be improved further by deliberate eugenic measures, if we consciously set ourselves to improve them. Meanwhile, however, it is in social organisation, in machines, and in ideas that human evolution is mostly made manifest." - 9

Eugenics

In the philosophy outlined above, there is a lot of high sounding idealistic language about equality. For example the quote below.

"Further, that humanism must clearly be a world humanism, both in the sense of seeking to bring in all the peoples of the world, and of treating all peoples and all individuals within each people as equals in terms of human dignity, mutual respect, and educational opportunity." - 7

Of course, for eugenicists like Huxley, some are more equal than others.

"There are instances of biological inequality which are so gross that they cannot be reconciled at all with the principle of equal opportunity. Thus low-grade mental defectives cannot be offered equality of educational opportunity, nor are the insane equal with the sane before the law or in respect of most freedoms. However, the full implications of the fact of human inequality have not often been drawn and certainly need to be brought out here, as they are very relevant to Unesco's task. [...]

Still more important, any such generalisations will give us a deeper understanding of the variations of human nature, and in doing so will enable us correctly to discount the ideas of men of this or that type. [...]

There remains the second type of inequality. This has quite other implications; for, whereas variety is in itself desirable, the existence of weaklings, fools, and moral deficients cannot but be bad. It is also much harder to reconcile politically with the current democratic doctrine of equality. In face of it, indeed, the principle of equality of opportunity must be amended to read "equality of opportunity within the limits of aptitude." " - 18

"Biological inequality is, of course, the bedrock fact on which all of eugenics is predicated. But it is not usually realised that the two types of inequality have quite different and indeed contrary eugenic implications. The inequality of mere difference is desirable, and the preservation of human variety should be one of the two primary aims of eugenics. But the inequality of level or standard is undesirable, and the other primary aim of eugenics should be the raising of the mean level of all desirable qualities. While there may be dispute over certain qualities, there can be none over a number of the most important, such as a healthy constitution, a high innate general intelligence, or a special aptitude such as that for mathematics or music.

At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilisation is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved. Thus even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for Unesco to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable." - 21

"To adjust the principle of democratic equality to the fact of biological inequality is a major task for the world, and one which will grow increasingly more urgent as we make progress towards realising equality of opportunity. To promote this adjustment, a great deal of education of the general public will be needed as well as much new research; and in both these tasks Unesco can and should co-operate."

"It is, however, essential that eugenics should be brought entirely within the borders of science, for, as already indicated, in the not very remote future the problem of improving the average quality of human beings is likely to become urgent; and this can only be accomplished by applying the findings of a truly scientific eugenics." - 37

"The Age of the Common Man: the Voice of the People: majority rule: the importance of a large population: - ideas and slogans such as these form the background of much of our thinking, and tend, unless we are careful, towards the promotion of mediocrity, even if mediocrity in abundance, and at the same time, towards the discouragement of high and unusual quality." - 15

Evolutionary Values and the Quest for a Restatement of Morality

"Of special importance in man's evaluation of his own position in the cosmic scheme and of his further destiny is the fact that he is the heir, and indeed the sole heir, of evolutionary progress to date. When he asserts that he is the highest type of organism, he is not being guilty of anthropocentric vanity, but is enunciating a biological fact. Furthermore, he is not merely the sole heir of past evolutionary progress, but the sole trustee for any that may be achieved in the future. From the evolutionary point of view, the destiny of man may be summed up very simply: it is to realise the maximum progress in the minimum time. That is why the philosophy of Unesco must have an evolutionary background, and why the concept of progress cannot but occupy a central position in that philosophy.

The analysis of evolutionary progress gives us certain criteria for judging the rightness or wrongness of our aims and activities, and the desirability or otherwise of the tendencies to be noted in contemporary history - tendencies of which Unesco must take account." - 12

"Thus Unesco's activities, while concerned primarily with providing richer development and fuller satisfactions for the individual, must always be undertaken in a social context; and many of its specific tasks will be concerned with the social means towards this general end - the improvement of social mechanisms or agencies, such as educational systems, research organisations, art centres, the press, and so forth. In particular, Unesco must clearly pay special attention to the social mechanism of cumulative tradition in all its aspects, with the aim of ensuring that it is both efficient and rightly directed in regard to its essential function of promoting human evolution." - 17

"Unesco cannot be neutral in the face of competing values. Even if it were to refuse to make a conscious choice between them, it would find that the necessity for action involved such a choice, so that it would be driven eventually to the unconscious assumption of a system of values. And any such system which is unconsciously assumed is less likely to be true than one which is consciously sought after and studied." - 39

"Unesco must accordingly promote the study of philosophy as an aid in the clarification of values, for the benefit of mankind in general. It must also do so in order to have its own clearly thought-out scale of values to guide it in its own operations, both positively in what it should undertake or assist, and negatively in what it should avoid or discourage.

Here it will be guided by the philosophy of evolutionary humanism which I adumbrated in my first chapter. Such a philosophy is scientific in that it constantly refers back to the facts of existence. It is the extension and reformulation of Paley's Natural Theology and those other philosophies which endeavour to deduce the attributes of the Creator from the properties of his creation. [...]

It will accordingly relate its ethical values to the discernible direction of evolution, using the fact of biological progress as their foundation, and shaping the superstructure to fit the principles of social advance. On this basis, there is nothing immutable and eternal about ethics, yet there are still ethical values which are general and lasting - namely those which promote a social organisation which will allow individuals the fullest opportunity for development and self-expression consonant with the persistence and the progress of society.

The social aspect of this dual function imposes itself because social mechanisms provide the chief basis for rapid human evolution, and it is only through improvement in social organisation that progress can be secured. [...]

Further, even if there are broad ethical principles which are general and lasting, yet their detailed formulation will and must change from age to age. The ethics of tribal life differ inevitably from those of feudalism or of industrial civilisation. Our ethical systems to-day are still largely predicated on a pre-scientific and nationally fragmented world. We have to relate them to our new knowledge and our new closeness to each other. [...] In general, we may say, it is becoming necessary to extend our personal ethical judgements and responsibilities to many collective and apparently impersonal actions - in other words to undertake a considerable socialisation of ethics.

It will be one of the major tasks of the Philosophy division of Unesco to stimulate, in conjunction with the natural and the social scientists, the quest for a restatement of morality that shall be in harmony with modern knowledge and adapted to the fresh functions imposed on ethics by the world of to-day.

Still more generally, it will have to stimulate the quest, so urgent in this time of over-rapid transition, for a world philosophy, a unified and unifying background of thought for the modern world." - 39

Conclusion

The next part of this series describes the purpose of UNESCO, as outlined by Huxley, to mentally prepare the world for global political unification under a single world government. The remaining three parts of this series describe the major mechanisms used by UNESCO: education, science and the creative arts, and the mass media.

[1] Quotes from Julian Huxley, UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1946). Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. pdf from UNESCO.

Brent Jessop is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

 

~ Center for Research on Globalization ~