Story of Jesus Christ was ‘fabricated to pacify the poor’, claims Biblical scholar

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10/12/2013

Christianity was a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of a the Roman Empire, claims scholar

A controversial American biblical scholar is set to make his first appearance in London next week to present a discovery that he claims proves the story of Jesus Christ was invented as a system of mind control to enslave the poor.

Joseph Atwill, who is the author of a book entitled ‘Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus’, asserts that Christianity did not begin as a religion, but was actually a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.

At the ‘Covert Messiah’ conference, to be held at the Conway Hall in Holborn a week on Saturday, Mr Atwill will present his theory that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they entirely fabricated the story of Jesus Christ.

Outlining his ideas in a blog posting on his website Mr Atwill writes: “Christianity may be considered a religion, but it was actually developed and used as a system of mind control to produce slaves that believed God decreed their slavery.”

Mr Atwill says that acts of insurrection by Jewish sects, who were awaiting the arrival of a so-called ‘warrior Messiah’ in Palestine, were a perpetual problem for the Roman Empire and that after the Empire had exhausted all traditional means of dealing with the problem they resorted to psychological warfare.

“They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system,” Atwill told PRWeb.com

“That’s when the ‘peaceful’ Messiah story was invented.

“Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to ‘give onto Caesar’ and pay their taxes to Rome.”

Mr Atwill continues: “Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history.

To this day, especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the Middle East.”

Elsewhere, Mr Atwill also writes: “In fact he [Jesus] may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there’s simply nothing left.”

Atwill says he made his discovery when while studying the New Testament alongside the ‘War of the Jews’ by Josephus – the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea.

Mr Atwill claims that he began to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts.

“What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus,” Atwill claims.

“This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern”, he continues.

“The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar.”

Richard Dawkins, the English evolutionary biologist and author, well known for his anti-religion views, yesterday tweeted a link to the press release advertising the event in London.

However, he later tweeted: “RT doesn’t imply endorsement. I’m not qualified to judge Atwill’s thesis. Just thought it might be worth a look.”

Mr Atwill’s theory is simply one of a number of what are known as Bible conspiracy theories.

These theories commonly include the suggestion that secret societies, mystery schools and other religions used the fictional story of Christ to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion.

(The Independent)

History of Freemasonry and the Creation of the New World Order

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TGE News

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10/11/2013

The creation of the New World Order (NWO) agenda was put in motion by the infamous character, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the one who decided to control the entire planet by any means necessary. Of course, this meant: deception, control, financial enslavement, blackmail and murder… but also far graver things, like: wars, famine and depopulation… a genocide unlike any other before it.If you want to better understand just how powerful and black-hearted the Rothschild family is, then you must read their complete history HERE. They are the richest clan in the world, and their empire was built on mountains of bones and sufferance.

1773 – Mayer Amschel Rothschild assembles twelve of his most influential friends, and convinces them that if they all pool their resources together, they can rule the world. This meeting takes place in Frankfurt, Germany. Rothschild also informs his friends that he has found the perfect candidate, an individual of incredible intellect and ingenuity, to lead the organization he has planned – Adam Weishaupt.

May 1, 1776 – Adam Weishaupt (code named Spartacus) establishes a secret society called the Order of the Illuminati. Weishaupt is the Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, part of Germany. The Illuminati seek to establish a New World Order. Their objectives are as follows:

1) Abolition of all ordered governments
2) Abolition of private property
3) Abolition of inheritance
4) Abolition of patriotism
5) Abolition of the family
6) Abolition of religion
7) Creation of a world government

July, 1782 – The Order of the Illuminati joins forces with Freemasonry at the Congress of Wilhelmsbad. The Comte de Virieu, an attendee at the conference, comes away visibly shaken. When questioned about the “tragic secrets” he brought back with him, he replies: “I will not confide them to you. I can only tell you that all this is very much more serious than you think.” From this time on, according to his biographer, “the Comte de Virieu could only speak of Freemasonry with horror.”

The insignia of the Order of the Illuminati first appeared on the reverse side of U.S. one-dollar bills in 1933. One can read, at the base of the 13-story pyramid, the year 1776 (MDCCLXVI in Roman numerals). The eye radiating in all directions is the “all-spying eye” that symbolizes the terroristic, Gestapo-like, agency set up by Weishaupt.

The Latin words “ANNUIT COEPTIS” mean “our enterprise (conspiracy) has been crowned with success.” Below, “NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM” explains the nature of the enterprise: a “New Social Order” or a “New World Order”.

1785 – An Illuminati courier named Lanze is struck by lightning, and killed while traveling by horseback through the town of Ratisbon. When Bavarian officials examine the contents of his saddle bags, they discover the existence of the Order of the Illuminati, and find plans detailing the coming French Revolution. The Bavarian Government attempts to alert the government of France of impending disaster, but the French Government fails to heed this warning. Bavarian officials arrest all members of the Illuminati they can find, but Weishaupt and others have gone underground, and cannot be found.

1796 – Freemasonry becomes a major issue in the presidential election in the United States. John Adams wins the election by opposing Masonry, and his son, John Quincy Adams, warns of the dire threat to the nation posed by the Masonic Lodges: “I do conscientiously and sincerely believe that the Order of Freemasonry, if not the greatest, is one of the greatest moral and political evils under which the Union is now laboring.”

1797 – John Robison, Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University in Scotland, publishes a book entitled “Proofs of a Conspiracy” in which he reveals that Adam Weishaupt had attempted to recruit him. He exposes the diabolical aims of the Illuminati to the world.

1821 – George W. F. Hegel formulates what is called the Hegelian dialectic – the process by which Illuminati objectives are achieved. According to the Hegelian dialectic, thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis. In other words, first you foment a crisis. Then there is an enormous public outcry that something must be done about the problem. So you offer a solution that brings about the changes you really wanted all along, but which people would have been unwilling to accept initially.

1828 – Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who finances the Illuminati, expresses his utter contempt for national governments which attempt to regulate International Bankers such as him:

“Allow me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who writes the laws.”

1848 — Moses Mordecai Marx Levy, alias Karl Marx, writes “The Communist Manifesto.” Marx is a member of an Illuminati front organization called the League of the Just. He not only advocates economic and political changes; he advocates moral and spiritual changes as well. He believes the family should be abolished, and that all children should be raised by a central authority. He expresses his attitude toward God by saying:

“We must war against all prevailing ideas of religion, of the state, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keynote of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed.”

Jan. 22, 1870 – In a letter to Italian revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini, Albert Pike – Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry – announces the establishment of a secret society within a secret society:

“We must create a super rite, which will remain unknown, to which we will call those Masons of high degree of whom we shall select. With regard to our brothers in Masonry, these men must be pledges to the strictest secrecy. Through this supreme rite, we will govern all Freemasonry which will become the one international center, the more powerful because its direction will be unknown.”

This ultra-secret organization is called The New and Reformed Paladian Rite. (This is why about 95% of the men involved in Masonry don’t have a clue as to what the objectives of the organization actually are. They are under the delusion that it’s just a fine community organization doing good works.)

1875 – Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founds the Theosophical Society. Madame Blavatsky claims that Tibetan holy men in the Himilayas, whom she refers to as the Masters of Wisdom, communicated with her in London by telepathy. She insists that the Christians have it all backwards – that Satan is good, and God is evil. She writes:

“The Christians and scientists must be made to respect their Indian betters. The Wisdom of India, her philosophy and achievement, must be made known in Europe and America.”

1884 – The Fabian Society is founded in Great Britain to promote Socialism. The Fabian Society takes its name from the Roman General Fabius Maximus, who fought Hannibal’s army in small debilitating skirmishes, rather than attempting one decisive battle.

July 14, 1889 – Albert Pike issues instructions to the 23 Supreme Councils of the world. He reveals who is the true object of Masonic worship:

“To you, Sovereign Grand Instructors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the Brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: The Masonic religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the Luciferian doctrine.”

1890-1896 – Cecil Rhodes, an enthusiastic student of John Ruskin, is Prime Minister of South Africa, a British colony at the time. He is able to exploit and control the gold and diamond wealth of South Africa. He works to bring all the habitable portions of the world under the domination of a ruling elite. To that end, he uses a portion of his vast wealth to establish the famous Rhodes Scholarships.

1893 – The Theosophical Society sponsors a Parliament of World Religions held in Chicago. The purpose of the convention is to introduce Hindu and Buddhist concepts, such as belief in reincarnation, to the West.

1911 – The Socialist Party of Great Britain publishes a pamphlet entitled “Socialism and Religion” in which they clearly state their position on Christianity:

“It is therefore a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion. A Christian Socialist is in fact an anti-Socialist. Christianity is the antithesis of Socialism.”

1912 – Colonel Edward Mandell House, a close advisor of President Woodrow Wilson, publishes “Phillip Dru: Administrator”, in which he promotes “socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx.”

Feb. 3, 1913 – The 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, making it possible for the Federal Government to impose a progressive income tax, is ratified. Plank #2 of “The Communist Manifesto” had called for a progressive income tax. (In Canada, the income tax is introduced in 1917, as a “temporary measure” to finance the war effort.)

1913 – President Woodrow Wilson publishes “The New Freedom” in which he reveals:

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

Dec. 23, 1913 – The Federal Reserve (neither federal nor a reserve – it’s a privately owned institution) is created. It was planned at a secret meeting in 1910 on Jekyl Island, Georgia, by a group of bankers and politicians, including Col. House. This transfers the power to create money from the American Government to a private group of bankers. The Federal Reserve Act is hastily passed just before the Christmas break. Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. (father of the famed aviator) warns:

“This act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this act the invisible government by the money power, proven to exist by the Money Trust Investigation, will be legalized.”

1916 – Three years after signing the Federal Reserve Act into law, President Woodrow Wilson observes:

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

1917 – With aid from Financiers in New York City and London, V. I. Lenin is able to overthrow the government of Russia. Lenin later comments on the apparent contradiction of the links between prominent capitalists and Communism:

“There also exists another alliance – at first glance a strange one, a surprising one – but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.”

(Remember the Hegelian dialectic?)

May 30, 1919 – Prominent British and American personalities establish the Royal Institute of International Affairs in England and the Institute of International Affairs in the U.S. at a meeting arranged by Col. House; attended by various Fabian socialists, including noted economist John Maynard Keynes.

1920 – Britain’s Winston Churchill recognizes the connection between the Illuminati and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. He observes:

“From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, to those of Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg, and Emma Goldman, this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.

It played a definitely recognizable role in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century, and now at last this band of extra- ordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads, and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”

1920-1931 – Louis T. McFadden is Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Curency. Concerning the Federal Reserve, Congressman McFadden notes:

“When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by International Bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure.

Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is – the Fed has usurped the Government. It controls everything here, and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will.” Concerning the Great Depression and the country’s acceptance of FDR’s New Deal, he asserts: “It was no accident. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. The International Bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as the rulers of us all.”

1921 – Col. House reorganizes the American branch of the Institute of International Affairs into the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). (For the past 60 years, 80% of the top positions in every administration – whether Democrat or Republican – have been occupied by members of this organization.)

December 15, 1922 – The CFR endorses World Government in its magazine “Foreign Affairs.” Author Philip Kerr states:

“Obviously there is going to be no peace nor prosperity for mankind as long as the earth remains divided into 50 or 60 independent states, until some kind of international system is created. The real problem today is that of world government.”

1928 – “The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution” by H. G. Wells is published. A former Fabian socialist, Wells writes:

“The political world of the Open Conspiracy must weaken, efface, incorporate, and supersede existing governments. The Open Conspiracy is the natural inheritor of socialist and communist enthusiasms; it may be in control of Moscow before it is in control of New York. The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It will be a world religion.”

1933 – “The Shape of Things to Come” by H. G. Wells is published. Wells predicts a second world war around 1940, originating from a German-Polish dispute. After 1945, there would be an increasing lack of public safety in “criminally infected” areas. The plan for the “Modern World State” would succeed on its third attempt, and come out of something that occurred in Basra, Iraq. The book also states:

“Although world government had been plainly coming for some years, although it had been endlessly feared and murmured against, it found no opposition anywhere.”

Nov. 21, 1933 – In a letter to Col. Edward M. House, President Franklin Roosevelt writes:

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

March 1942 – An article in “TIME” magazine chronicles the Federal Council of Churches (which later becomes the National Council of Churches, a part of the World Council of Churches) lending its weight to efforts to establish a global authority.

A meeting of the top officials of the council comes out in favor of:

1) a world government of delegated powers;
2) strong immediate limitations on national sovereignty;
3) international control of all armies and navies.

Representatives (375 of them) of 30-some denominations assert that “a new order of economic life is both imminent and imperative” – a new order that is sure to come either “through voluntary cooperation within the framework of democracy or through explosive revolution.”

June 28, 1945 – U.S. President Harry Truman endorses world government in a speech:

“It will be just as easy for nations to get along in a republic of the world as it is for us to get along in a republic of the United States.”

October 24, 1945 – The United Nations Charter becomes effective. Also on October 24, Senator Glen Taylor (D-Idaho) introduces Senate Resolution 183, calling upon the U.S. Senate to go on record as favoring creation of a world republic, including an international police force.

Feb. 7, 1950 – International financier and CFR member James Warburg tells a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee:

“We shall have world government whether or not you like it – by conquest or consent.”

Feb. 9, 1950 – The Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee introduces Senate Concurrent Resolution #66 which begins:

“Whereas, in order to achieve universal peace and justice, the present Charter of the United Nations should be changed to provide a true world government constitution.”

1952 – The World Association of Parliamentarians for World Government draws up a map designed to illustrate how foreign troops would occupy and police the six regions into which the United States and Canada will be divided as part of their world-government plan.

1954 – Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands establishes the Bilderbergers: international politicians and bankers who meet secretly on an annual basis.

1961 – The U.S. State Department issues Document 7277, entitled “Freedom From War: The U.S. Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World.” It details a three-stage plan to disarm all nations and arm the U.N. with the final stage in which “no state would have the military power to challenge the progressively strengthened U.N. Peace Force.”

1966 – Professor Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University, authors a massive volume entitled “Tragedy and Hope” in which he states:

“There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.

I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims, and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies, but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

April 1972 – In his keynote address to the Association for Childhood Education International, Chester M. Pierce, Professor of Education and Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University, proclaims:

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being. It’s up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.”

July 1973 – International banker and staunch member of the subversive Council on Foreign Relations, David Rockefeller, founds a new organization called the Trilateral Commission, of which the official aim is “to harmonize the political, economic, social, and cultural relations between the three major economic regions in the world” (hence the name “Trilateral”). He invites future President Jimmy Carter to become one of the founding members. Zbigniew Brzezinski is the organization’s first director.

There are three major economic areas in the world: Europe, North America, and the Far East (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.). If, under the pretext of having to join forces to be able to face economic competition with the two other economic regions, the member countries of each of these three regions decide to merge into one single country, forming three super-States, then the one-world government will be almost achieved. Like Fabian socialists, they achieve their ultimate goal (a world government) step by step.

This aim is almost achieved in Europe with the Single European Act (Maastricht Treaty) that was implemented in 1993, requiring all the member countries of the European Community to abolish their trade barriers, and to hand over their monetary and fiscal policies to the technocrats of the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium.

In January, 2002, all these European countries abandoned their national currencies to share only one common currency, the “Euro”. Moreover, the Nice Treaty removed more powers from countries to give them over to the European Commission. What begun innocently in 1952 as the EEC (European Economic Community, a common authority to regulate the coal and steel industry among European nations), finally turned into a European super-state.

Jean Monnet, a French socialist economist and founder of the EEC, had this in mind when he said: “Political union inevitably follows economic union.” He also said in 1948:

“The creation of a United Europe must be regarded as an essential step towards the creation of a United World.”

As regards the North American area, the merger of its member countries is well under way with the passage of free trade between Canada and the U.S.A., and then Mexico. In the next few years, this free-trade agreement is supposed to include also all of South and Central America, with a single currency for them all.

Mexico’s President Vucente Fox said on May 6, 2002, in Madrid:

“Eventually, our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union.”

1973 – The Club of Rome, a U.N. operative, issues a report entitled “Regionalized and Adaptive Model of the Global World System.” This report divides the entire world into ten kingdoms.

1979 – FEMA, which stands for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is given huge powers. It has the power, in case of “national emergency”, to suspend laws, move entire populations, arrest and detain citizens without a warrant, and hold them without trial. It can seize property, food supplies, transportation systems, and can suspend the Constitution.

Not only is it the most powerful entity in the United States, but it was not even created under Constitutional law by the Congress. It was a product of a Presidential Executive Order. An Executive Order becomes law simply by a signature of the U.S. President; it does not even have to be approved by the Representatives or Senators in the Congress.

A state of “national emergency” could be a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, or a stock market crash, for example. Here are just a few Executive Orders associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for nearly 30 years, and could be enacted by the stroke of a Presidential pen:

# 10995: Right to seize all communications media in the United States.

# 10997: Right to seize all electric power, fuels and minerals, both public and private.

# 10999: Right to seize all means of transportation, including personal vehicles of any kind, and total control of highways, seaports, and waterways.

# 11000: Right to seize any and all American people and divide up families in order to create work forces to be transferred to any place the Government sees fit.

# 11001: Right to seize all health, education and welfare facilities, both public and private.

# 11002: Right to force registration of all men, women, and children in the United States.

# 11003: Right to seize all air space, airports, and aircraft.

# 11004: Right to seize all housing and finance authorities in order to establish “Relocation Designated Areas”, and to force abandonment of areas classified as “unsafe”.

# 11005: Right to seize all railroads, inland waterways, and storage facilities, both public and private.

# 11921: Authorizes plans to establish Government control of wages and salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institutions.

1991 – President George Bush Sr. praises the New World Order in a State of the Union Message:

“What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea – a new world order… to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind… based on shared principles and the rule of law… The illumination of a thousand points of light… The winds of change are with us now.”

(Theosophist Alice Bailey used that very same expression – “points of light” – in describing the process of occult enlightenment.)

June, 1991 – World leaders are gathered for another closed door meeting of the Bilderberg Society in Baden Baden, Germany. While at that meeting, David Rockefeller said in a speech:

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

Oct. 29, 1991 – David Funderburk, former U.S. Ambassador to Romania, tells a North Carolina audience:

“George Bush has been surrounding himself with people who believe in one-world government. They believe that the Soviet system and the American system are converging.”

May 21, 1992 – In an address to the Bilderberger organization meeting in Evian, France, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declares:

“Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence.

It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.”

July 20, 1992 – “TIME” magazine publishes “The Birth of the Global Nation,” by Strobe Talbott, Rhodes Scholar, roommate of Bill Clinton at Oxford University, CFR Director and Trilateralist (and appointed Deputy Secretary of State by President Clinton), in which he writes:

“Nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single global authority… All countries are basically social arrangements… No matter how permanent or even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary… Perhaps national sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all… But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government.”

1993 – A second Parliament of World Religions is held in Chicago on the 100th anniversary of the first. Like the first convention, this one seeks to join all the religions of the world into “one harmonious whole,” but it wants to make them “merge back into their original element.” Traditional beliefs of monotheistic religions such as Christianity are considered incompatible with individual “en- lightenment”, and must be drastically altered.

July 18, 1993 – CFR member and Trilateralist Henry Kissinger writes in the “Los Angeles Times” concerning NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement):

“What Congress will have before it is not a conventional trade agreement but the architecture of a new international system…a first step toward a new world order.”

1994 – In the Human Development Report, published by the UN Development Program, there was a section called “Global Governance for the 21st Century.” The administrator for this program was appointed by Bill Clinton. His name is James Gustave Speth. The opening sentence of the report said:

“Mankind’s problems can no longer be solved by national government. What is needed is a world government. This can best be achieved by strengthening the United Nations system.”

May 3, 1994 – President Bill Clinton signs Presidential Decision Directive 25, and then declares it classified so the American people can’t see what it says.

(The summary of PDD-25 issued to members of Congress tells us that it authorizes the President to turn over control of U.S. military units to U.N. command.)

Sept. 23, 1994 – The globalists realize that as more and more people begin to wake up to what’s going on, they have only a limited amount of time in which to implement their policies. Speaking at the United Nations Ambassadors’ dinner, David Rockefeller remarks:

“This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long… We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order.”

March 1995 – U.N. delegates meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss various methods for imposing global taxes on the people of the world.

Sept. 1995 – “Popular Science” magazine describes a top secret U.S. Navy installation called HAARP (High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) in the state of Alaska. This project beams powerful radio energy into the earth’s upper atmosphere. One of the goals of the program is to develop the capability of “manipulating local weather” using the techniques developed by Bernard Eastlund.

(The program has been underway since 1990.)

September 27, 1995 – The State of the World Forum took place in the fall of this year, sponsored by the Gorbachev Foundation located at the Presidio in San Francisco. Foundation President Jim Garrison chairs the meeting of who’s-who from around the world, including Margaret Thatcher, Maurice Strong, George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, and others.

Conversation centers around the oneness of mankind and the coming global government. However, the term “global gov- ernance” is now used in place of “new world order” since the latter has become a political liability, being a lightning rod for opponents of global government.

1996 – The United Nations’ 420-page report “Our Global Neighborhood” is published. It outlines a plan for “global governance,” calling for an international “Conference on Global Governance” in 1998 for the purpose of submitting to the world the necessary treaties and agreements for ratification by the year 2000.

2003 – The world is on the verge of another global war, the “state of emergency” looked for by the one-worlders to impose martial law and the universal microchip under the skin… But with the global shift in awareness, they will not have the last word!

Published in 2002 by Michael, MichaelJournal; additions by Alexander Light, HumansAreFree.com

Pentagon faked arrival ceremonies honoring fallen soldiers

By

TGE News

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10/11/2013

The Pentagon has been holding phony “arrival” ceremonies for fallen soldiers at a base in Hawaii for over seven years, according to recent statements made by the United States Department of Defense to NBC News.

For nearly a decade, military personnel transported flag-draped coffins containing the bodies of troops killed in action from seemingly just-arrived cargo planes during ceremonies near hangar 35 at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

In reality, however, the remains of those soldiers may have spent upwards of months in military custody before being paraded out during partially-fabricated ceremonial presentations carried out by the government’s Joint Prisoner of War Accounting Command, or JPAC.

Bill Dedman, an investigative reporter for NBC, said that the Pentagon confirmed this week “that no honored dead were in fact arriving, and that the planes used in the ceremonies often couldn’t even fly but were towed into position.”

The Pentagon has since released a statement of its own clarifying the falsity of such events.

“These pre-planned ceremonies are symbolic in nature, with the purpose of honoring those Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in support of our nation,” the Pentagon admitted.

“Part of the ceremony involves symbolically transferring the recovered remains from an aircraft to a vehicle for follow-on transportation to the lab. Many times, static aircraft are used for the ceremonies, as operational requirements dictate flight schedules and aircraft availability. This transfer symbolizes the arrival of our fallen service members. It is important to note that recovered remains ceremoniously transferred from the aircraft to the CIL vehicle have been in the lab undergoing forensic analysis to determine identity,” the statement continued.

World War II veteran Jesse Baker told Dedman that he attended at least 50 of the ceremonies, and always thought the bodies of his fellow servicemen were being saluted as soon as they returned on US soil from abroad.

“If I have been fooled, I am going to be a very pissed-off citizen, because I’ve been going for years,” Baker said. “And I know a lot of guys who are going to be pissed off. … They’re out there honoring warriors.”

Rick Stone, a former deputy chief with JPAC who spoke with Dedman for the NBC report, said the reality regarding the troops’ final arrival was much less sensational that the ceremonies suggest.

“When remains are brought back by JPAC staff, Stone said, they arrive from the airport in a plastic box in an employee’s private vehicle, with no ceremony,” Dedman reported after meeting with him.

“It’s an open fraud inside JPAC,” Stone said of the ceremonies. “But it’s more than just the arrival ceremony. The fraud is really their inability to bring closure to more families. Our noble mission is to go find some of these kids, and this thing is so fouled up we don’t even recognize the mission.”

Source: RT

‘March against Monsanto’: Global movement plans 2nd protest

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TGE News

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10/11/2013

Joining six continents, 52 countries and over 500 cities, ‘March against Monsanto’ is planning its second mass rally Saturday against the biotech giant and genetically modified food. A number of Agent Orange victims are expected to join the protest.

“Saturday is a big day of action against Monsanto. We took our lights out to a local cornfield. Monsanto is bad for our food and bad for our planet,” the March against Monsanto’s movement posted on its Facebook page.

The rallies, which come four days ahead of World Food Day on Oct. 16, will call on millions of activists to boycott “Monsanto’s predatory business,” genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and other harmful pesticides, which threaten “health, fertility and longevity.”

On October, 5, Movement against Monsanto launched a global ‘Twitter storm’ asking people to tweet and post certain hashtags as frequently as possible.

#MAM USDA agreements allow Monsanto to test their own crops: USDA agreements allow Monsanto to test t… http://t.co/51M60EIyYE #FB #O12

— MarchAgainstMonsanto (@MarchAgainstM) October 11, 2013

“The goal of this Twitter storm is to get the March and info about GMOs trending on Twitter and Facebook and to build awareness about Monsanto and their dangerous products and policies,” the organizers said in a statement.

Citing scientists, activists insist that health risks include organ damage, sterility, infant mortality, birth defects, auto-immune conditions, allergies and increased cancer risks.

What makes this Saturday’s rallies different is that this time victims of Agent Orange and Dioxin Exposures (all members of Children of Vietnam Veterans Health Alliance) will be participating in the events in several cities across the US.

“Never before will so many Children of Vietnam Veterans be speaking out at the same time, on the same day,” the movement said in its statement. “October is Agent Orange Awareness Month; please support those trying to make a difference in their own lives.”

March Against Monsanto – October 12th Worldwide. Find your local event http://t.co/JBt6dVbc6t #MAM #O12 @MarchAgainstM

— MarchAgainstMonsanto (@MarchAgainstM) October 11, 2013

Monsanto is one of the seven chemical companies who manufactured the toxic herbicide Agent Orange, which the US government massively sprayed in the Vietnam War.

“Almost as soon as Vietnam Veterans came home and started their family, reports began to surface about multiple miscarriages and birth defects in their children,” the statement said.

Forty years later, reports still indicate that untold numbers of Vietnamese civilians, former soldiers and others exposed to the highly toxic chemical back in the 1960s and 1970s continue to develop terminal illnesses such as cancer, and to suffer from all kinds of other herbicide-induced health horrors.

Although Monsanto is not the only company that uses pesticides, herbicides and GMOs, its global dominance means that it is the biggest target of public protests.

Started as a small event, the first March against Monsanto on May 25 turned into a global campaign with over 2 million people in 436 cities, across 52 countries, joining the rallies.

The protest is being organized on Facebook and Google Documents, where users can find a list of events near their location.

On social networks, the movement has started the hashtags: #MarchOct12 #MarchAgainstMonsanto, #O12.

Meanwhile, despite public fears and accusations, Monsanto insists it does not pose any unacceptable risk to human health or the environment, but, on the contrary, improves agriculture since it helps farmers to produce more from their land while saving resources such as water and energy.

The US biotech giant insists that research into GMO crops is “inconclusive” and lobbies to continue manufacturing lab-made foods.

In March, the US Congress passed a law dubbed the “Monsanto Protection Act” by its critics, which allowed companies that use GMOs to plant and sell genetically altered products, ignoring judicial rulings.

On September, 27, the assistance to GMO companies was removed from a Senate spending bill, despite the fact that the US House of Representatives approved a three-month extension earlier in the month.

For extensive coverage of the demonstrations worldwide, check back with RT.com throughout the weekend.

Source: RT

How The NSA Deploys Malware: An In-Depth Look at the New Revelations

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TGE News

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10/10/2013

We’ve long suspected that the NSA, the world’s premiere spy agency, was pretty good at breaking into computers. But now, thanks to an article by security expert Bruce Schneier—who is working with the Guardian to go through the Snowden documents—we have a much more detailed view of how the NSA uses exploits in order to infect the computers of targeted users. The template for attacking people with malware used by the NSA is in widespread use by criminals and fraudsters, as well as foreign intelligence agencies, so it’s important to understand and defend against this threat to avoid being a victim to the plethora of attackers out there.

How Does Malware Work Exactly?

Deploying malware over the web generally involves two steps. First, as an attacker, you have to get your victim to visit a website under your control. Second, you have to get software—known as malware—installed on the victim’s computer in order to gain control of that machine. This formula isn’t universal, but is often how web-based malware attacks proceed.

In order to accomplish the first step of getting a user to visit a site under your control, an attacker might email the victim text that contains a link to the website in question, in a so-called phishing attack. The NSA reportedly uses phishing attacks sometimes, but we’ve learned that this step usually proceeds via a so-called “man-in-the-middle” attack.1 The NSA controls a set of servers codenamed “Quantum” that sit on the Internet backbone, and these servers are used to redirect targets away from their intended destinations to still other NSA-controlled servers that are responsible for the injection of malware. So, for example, if a targeted user visits “yahoo.com”, the target’s browser will display the ordinary Yahoo! landing page but will actually be communicating with a server controlled by the NSA. This malicious version of Yahoo!’s website will tell the victim’s browser to make a request in a background to another server controlled by the NSA which is used to deploy malware.

Once a victim visits a malicious website, how does the attacker actually infect the computer? Perhaps the most straightforward method is to trick the user into downloading and running software. A cleverly designed pop-up advertisement may convince a user to download and install the attacker’s malware, for example.

But this method does not always work, and relies on a user taking action to download and run software. Instead, attackers can exploit software vulnerabilities in the browser that the victim is using in order to gain access to her computer. When a victim’s browser loads a website, the software has to perform tasks like parsing text given to it by the server, and will often load browser plugins like Flash that run code given to it by the server, in addition to executing Javascript code given to it by the server. But browser software—which is becoming increasingly complex as the web gains more functionality—doesn’t work perfectly. Like all software, it has bugs, and sometimes those bugs are exploitable security vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to gain access to a victim’s computer just because a particular website was visited. Once browser vendors discover vulnerabilities, they are generally patched, but sometimes a user has out of date software that is still vulnerable to known attack. Other times, the vulnerabilities are known only to the attacker and not to the browser vendor; these are called zero-day vulnerabilities.

The NSA has a set of servers on the public Internet with the code name “FoxAcid” used to deploy malware. Once their Quantum servers redirect targets to a specially crafted URL hosted on a FoxAcid server, software on that FoxAcid server selects from a toolkit of exploits in order to gain access to the user’s computer. Presumably this toolkit has both known public exploits that rely on a user’s software being out of date, as well as zero-day exploits which are generally saved for high value targets.2 The agency then reportedly uses this initial malware to install longer lasting malware.

Once an attacker has successfully infected a victim with malware, the attacker generally has full access to the user’s machines: she can record key strokes (which will reveal passwords and other sensitive information), turn on a web cam, or read any data on the victim’s computer.

What Can Users Do To Protect Themselves?

We hope that these revelations spur browser vendors to action, both to harden their systems against exploits, and to attempt to detect and block the malware URLs used by the FoxAcid servers.

In the meantime, users concerned about their security should practice good security hygiene. Always keep your software up to date—especially browser plugins like Flash that require manual updates. Make sure you can distinguish between legitimate updates and pop-up ads that masquerade as software updates. Never click a suspicious looking link in an email.

For users who want to go an extra step towards being more secure—and we think everyone should be in this camp—consider making plugins like Flash and Java “click-to-play” so that they are not executed on any given web page until you affirmatively click them. For Chromium and Chrome, this option is available in Settings => Show Advanced Settings => Privacy => Content Settings => Plug-ins. For Firefox, this functionality is available by installing a browser Add-On like “Click to Play per-element”. Plugins can also be uninstalled or turned off completely. Users should also use ad blocking software to stop unnecessary web requests to third party advertisers and web trackers, and our HTTPS Everywhere add-on in order to encrypt connections to websites with HTTPS as much as possible.

Finally, for users who are willing to notice some more pain when browsing the web, consider using an add-on like NotScripts (Chrome) or NoScript (Firefox) to limit the execution of scripts. This means you will have to click to allow scripts to run, and since Javascript is very prevalent, you will have to click a lot. For Firefox users, RequestPolicy is another useful add-on that stops third-party resources from loading on a page by default. Once again, as third-party resources are popular, this will disrupt ordinary browsing a fair amount. Finally, for the ultra paranoid, HTTP Nowhere will disable all HTTP traffic completely, forcing your browsing experience to be entirely encrypted, and making it so that only websites that offer an HTTPS connection are available to browse.

Conclusion

The NSA’s system for deploying malware isn’t particularly novel, but getting some insight into how it works should help users and browser and software vendors better defend against these types of attacks, making us all safer against criminals, foreign intelligence agencies, and a host of attackers. That’s why we think it’s critical that the NSA come clean about its capabilities and where the common security holes are—our online security depends on it.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

Home Remedies for High Blood Pressure

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TGE News

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10/09/2013

High blood pressure is experienced by nearly 68 million adults in the United States alone — that’s 1 in 3 adults. Often accompanied by excess weight, high blood pressure is a major risk factor for stroke, congestive heart failure, kidney disease, and the leading killer — heart disease. If you are someone who has high blood pressure, the mainstream medical industry wants nothing more than your eternal business, buying their pharmaceutical drugs that never really cure anything. But instead of doing that, try utilizing one of these home remedies for high blood pressure.

Natural Alternative – Home Remedies for High Blood Pressure

Drink Coconut Water to Combat High Blood Pressure

Coconut water is a tasty and nutritious beverage which has also been shown to be effective at lowering blood pressure. In one study where authors investigated the effects of coconut water when regularly consumed, they found that coconut water was able to significantly lower blood pressure in 71 percent of the study participants. This refreshing beverage has also been shown to rise above sports drinks in hydration while causing not nearly as many stomach pains. This is only one of many coconut water benefits.

Apple Cider Vinegar

Effectively helping thousands of health ailments such as strep throat and acid reflux, the benefits of apple cider vinegar also extend to treating high blood pressure. Just a few tablespoons a day for one month could have a dramatic impact. I have seen people’s blood pressure go from 150/80 to 130/80 in just a month while taking 2 tablespoons of ACV a day. Many others have experienced the same scenario, and blood pressure medications are often chucked. This is one of many home remedies for high blood pressure that could help you too.

Vitamin D

Research points out that vitamin D can be an effective solution to lower blood pressure, promote vascular health by helping blood vessels, and contribute to healthy arteries. While helping to lower blood pressure, this powerful cancer fighter can also protect you from the flu 800% better than any flu vaccine.

Aloe Vera, Hibiscus Tea, Cayenne Pepper

To add to the home remedies for high blood pressure, aloe, cayenne pepper, honey, and tea are all fabulous for helping with a whole host of health problems. They are often used in combination to treat anything from strep throat to lowering insulin levels to boosting overall health. Not surprisingly, some individuals have also found this combination to effectively lower blood pressure.

An edited statement from EarthClinic:

“One year ago I started having headaches and my Dr. found that I had high blood pressure – 187/100. Yikes. I was told I needed to take meds for life. I refused to believe that and have been searching for a natural cure since then. I have found it drinking fresh Aloe every morning. I take a medium leaf wash and remove thorns, put it in the blender, with one lemon and one tablespoon raw honey. Strain and drink on an empty stomach after one month I am off meds and my readings are 109/65! I also drink one cup of hibiscus tea a day and eat cayenne pepper with meals. My friend also tried this and she is a diabetic her blood sugar is now an average 80, and off insulin.”

In addition to all of these solutions, living an overall healthy lifestyle with some exercise will also help greatly. This means avoiding fructose, which has been shown to up the risk of having blood pressure levels of 160/100 mmHg by 77 percent with the consumption of 74 grams (2.5 sugary drinks). Maintaining a healthy weight while reducing fructose intake to no more than 20g per day are excellent preventative measures. Although there are many home remedies for high blood pressure, start with these and measure the results!

About the author: Mike is the co-founder, editor, and researcher behind Natural Society. Studying the work of top natural health activists, and writing special reports for top 10 alternative health websites, Mike has written hundreds of articles and pages on how to obtain optimum wellness through natural health.

Source: NaturalSociety.com

You Are The Last Hope

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TGE News

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10/08/2013

A plea issued to his readers by one of the most authoritative voices in the United States, as he sees his country hurtling towards a Gestapo police state.

If there is hope, dear readers, you are it.

You are motivated to find truth.

You can think outside the box. You can see through propaganda.

You are the remnant with the common sense that once was a common American virtue. You come to this site, because you get explanations that are not agenda-driven, that are not BS, that are not right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat. You get explanations based on my lifetime of unique education and experience. Some of you are young enough to be equipped with the energy and courage to organize whatever resistance there may be to the Gestapo State that is descending on the United States of America.

Until the George W. Bush Regime, I never thought that it could happen here. I could not imagine law professors and Department of Justice (sic) officials writing legal memos justifying, in the name of a hyped “war on terror,” the termination of civil rights for United States Citizens. We were the land of the free. The Constitution was our bedrock. Yet, the Constitution and Bill of Rights were easily taken away from the inattentive American people.

The Constitution did not protect native inhabitants and slaves who were not considered part of the American population, but the universal suppression in the US of non-whites’ rights produced in the end the civil rights movement that brought moral awareness of the wrongs and successfully hitched its cause to the founding documents of the country.

Where today is moral awareness as Washington bombs civilian populations around the globe? Where is the moral conscience of the civil rights movement as the First Black President, the first member of the oppressed class to sit in the Oval Office, validates the Bush Regime’s assertion of the right of the unaccountable executive to ignore habeas corpus and due process? Not satisfied with this crime, Obama asserted the right of the executive branch to murder any citizen suspected, without proof being offered to a court, of undefined “support of terrorism.” Today all Americans have fewer rights than blacks had prior to the Civil Rights Act.

Anything, including a column critical of war and the police state, can be declared to be “in support of terrorism.” As the tyrant Bush put it: “You are with us, or you are against us.”

The print and TV media and many Internet sites got the message: Serve Washington’s agenda, and will you will prosper. Advertisers and the CIA will pump money into your coffers. Challenge us and you will be demonized and could face a military tribunal, indefinite detention, or assassination. Bradley Manning and Julian Assange are being persecuted for telling the truth.

So far, Washington has convinced the public that Washington’s terror is mainly limited to Muslims, who are obligingly demonized by print, TV, and much of the Internet media. However, if Muslim American citizens lack civil liberty, so do all other American citizens. Those who are safe are those who ally with the tyrant and remain subservient.

To ally with the tyrant, a United States citizen must have no moral conscience, no sense of justice, no compassion for the innocent and dispossessed. These are the worst kind of Americans; yet, they are the only ones who can succeed in the present environment.

Every time I write a column that is the truth or the truth as I am able to discover it, instead of hawking the propaganda line, I move up on the list of those who are persona non grata in the Empire.

A writer can find himself demonized and declared a kook simply by reporting findings from distinguished scientists, high-rise architects, structural engineers, first responders, and an international collection of high government officials. Not too long ago a writer or reporter for the Huffington Post discovered to his surprise that Pat Buchanan and I disagreed with all the wars that had been launched to protect us from terrorism. He asked me for an interview, and I agreed.

An hour or so after the interview was posted on the Huffington Post, I received an emergency call or email. He had been criticized for interviewing me, “for giving you a forum when you are a 9/11 sceptic.” He was unsure that it was possible for a Reagan presidential appointee to be a 9/11 sceptic and asked if I was.

I replied that I had reported the findings of scientists, architects, engineers, and the public testimony of first responders, because I thought these were qualified people whose opinions at least ranked equally with the politicians on the 9/11 Commission and the talking heads on Fox “News” and CNN, none of whom could pass a high school test in the laws of physics, much less high-rise architecture and structural engineering.

The Huffington Post writer panicked. Instead of taking down the interview, he felt impelled to assure readers and his boss that he had been deceived. He wrote at the beginning and ending of the interview that he did not know he was interviewing someone about the Iraq War who had given ink to those conspiracy theorists who raised questions about the truthfulness of the US government. He wrote that my views on the wars should be disregarded, because I wrote that scientists, architects, engineers, and first responders provided evidence contrary to the government’s claims.

And there you have it.

The Huffington Post has far more readers than I do, and far more money. There is no limit on the ability of the Huffington Post to tell and sell the lies of the Agenda.

I can remember when I was a Wall Street Journal editor and columnist, a Business Week columnist, a Scripps Howard News Service columnist and appeared regularly in the major mainstream print media and even from time to time on TV talking head programs. Today, the editor or producer who gave me a forum would be fired instantly, and they all know it.

It is discouraging that after so many transparent lies and orchestrations–weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda connections, Iranian nukes–the majority of Americans still believe the government. Americans are even buying into the line that Syria is ruled by a brutal dictator whose overthrow justifies Washington’s alliance with its 9/11 enemy, al-Qaeda, in order to overthrow a secular ruler who constrains al-Qaeda.

Washington has come full circle. Its enemy is now its ally. Washington wasted trillions of dollars and countless lives in eleven years of war and constructed a domestic police state all in order to combat al Qaeda with whom Washington is now allied against the Syrian government.

The public’s response to the Boston Marathon Bombing is even more discouraging. Not even King George and his Redcoats could achieve what Homeland Security just pulled off–locking down 100 square miles of Boston and its suburbs with heavily armed troops tramping through citizens’ homes barking harsh orders, all justified by a hunt for one 19-year old suspect. It was the Third Reich’s Gestapo in operation right here in “freedom and democracy” America. Ron Paul is correct that the suspension of civil liberty is a greater threat than the bombing. Note the government’s euphemism for martial law–”shelter-in-place.”

Two brothers have been convicted in the media and by the Obama Regime, including the president’s own words, of a bombing without the public ever being presented with any evidence except anonymous unattributed reports and a film of the alleged brothers walking with backpacks, which were ubiquitous.

I am old enough to remember when it was impermissible for government and media to convict a person prior to the jury’s verdict. Americans once lived in a free country governed by the rule of law in which a person was innocent until proven guilty.

What was the reason or evidence for naming the brothers suspects? Was any reason given, or was the film of the two walking with backpacks simply shown over and over, hour after hour, day after day, with the media reporting that these are the suspects. In other words, was it beat into your brain that they were suspects because there they are in the film? If not, why was the same film shown repeatedly? Fox “News” was still showing the film on April 26, eleven days after the bombing and might still be showing it. Did you experience: “Here are the suspects. See them. They have backpacks. See. We know that they are suspects, because, see, there they are.”

When is the last time the media investigated anything? A good candidate for investigation is the post-bombing rampage the brothers allegedly went on, robbing a 7/11 store (later contradicted by local police), killing a campus policeman, shooting a transit cop, high-jacking a SUV and releasing the owner.

Why would terrorists seeking to escape in order to strike again call attention to themselves in such outlandish ways and release a car-jacked owner to alert the police of the tag number? If the brothers were willing to kill police with gunfire and innocents with bombs, why release the guy whose vehicle they stole so he could inform the police of the license plate and make the brothers’ capture easier? What is the evidence, other than “reports from authorities,” that these events occurred or had any more connection to the brothers than the falsely reported 7/11 robbery that local police disavowed? Why does the US media simply accept whatever government authorities say?

Where is the evidence of a first shoot-out and a second shoot-out? The second shoot- out consisted of the authorities bombarding a motionless youth bleeding from wounds in a boat with multiple volleys of stun grenades and then multiple gunshots. The unconscious 19 year old was unarmed and unable to respond to the boat owner who discovered him. As he lies there, he is shot many times, including through the throat, and is on life support. But the very next day, according to the presstitute media, he is providing hand-written confessions.

Was the purpose of the reports of a murderous rampage to create fear among the population so that they would accept martial law and home invasions by armed troops ordering American citizens out of their homes with hands over their heads on the pretext that they might be harboring the Boston Marathon Bomber?

The videos of the street celebration in which Bostonians thank the police and of the two Boston families, if not scripted by actors, shows Americans who far from opposing the police state welcome it. A father says that he with his daughter in his arms was forced out of his home by troops pointing automatic rifles at their heads, but that he was thankful for the safety the police provided him by violating every civil right that the Constitution gave him. A woman says it was scary but that “the police are just doing their jobs.” Are Americans now so brainwashed that they attribute their safety to the presence of a Gestapo Police State?

Why have detention facilities been built? Why did Homeland Security purchase a billion or more rounds of ammunition? Why does Homeland Security have 2,700 tanks and a para-military force? Why aren’t these questions being investigated?

The US Constitution is the product of 900 years of human efforts to restrain brutal government and to make government subject to law. It only took Bush and Obama eleven years to get rid of it.

About the Author

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available. This article was first published over at Paul Craig Roberts.org

US moves Marines to Italy as situation in Libya becomes tense

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TGE News

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10/08/2013

Two hundred United States Marines are being mobilized from a base in Spain to an Italian site neighboring Libya where an Army raid over the weekend resulted in the capture of suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist, Abu Anas al-Libi.

CNN reported early Tuesday that a US military official confirmed the repositioning of 200 heavily armed Marines to the naval base at Sigonella, Italy, a Sicilian fort south of Catania that sits on the opposite side of the Mediterranean from Libya.

According to the military source, the US Department of State aided in the troop movement and considers the maneuver “a prudent measure” following Saturday’s raid in Tripoli. There is now the potential for a security crisis to arise at the US Embassy in Libya, CNN reported, should tensions worsen as a result of the capture.

Al-Libi, 49, was picked up from his Tripoli home on Saturday and is currently being held on the USS San Antonio in international waters. He was charged previously with the 1998 bombings that targeted US embassies in Tanzania in Kenya, which resulted in the deaths of 224 people, including a dozen Americans.

US Secretary of State John Kerry responded this week to the capture, by calling al-Libi a “legal and appropriate target” for the US, and senior officials have linked him with high-ranking members of the al-Qaeda organization formerly led by Osama bin Laden.

“I hope the perception is in the world that people who commit acts of terror and who have been appropriately indicted by courts of law, by the legal process, will know that the United States of America is going to do anything in its power that is legal and appropriate in order to enforce the law and to protect our security,” added Kerry.

But LANA, the official news agency of Libya, reported that government officials are referring to Saturday’s incident as an abduction, and the US ambassador has been summoned to speak with authorities regarding the raid.

“Our relationship with the USA is important, and we care about that, but we care too about our citizens, which is our duty,” Libya Prime Minister Ali Zeidan told reporters on Tuesday.

Libyan groups are now protesting the raid and the subsequent capture of al-Libi, and are reportedly seeking to avenge the event. According to Reuters, a Facebook page called “Benghazi is Protected by its People” has instructed Libyans to kidnap US citizens if possible and close off the entrances and exits to Tripoli.

Last September, the storming of a US consulate building in Benghazi, Libya ended in the death of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. A State Department travel warning last updated in June warns US citizens against traveling to Libya, citing a still unpredictable security situation.

While a surge of Marines has been deployed across the Mediterranean from Libya in the event of another incident targeting American facilities, military, intelligence and Department of Justice officials have reportedly been sent to the USS San Antonio to interrogate al-Libi while he remains detained in international waters.

“As a general rule, the government will always seek to elicit all the actionable intelligence and information we can from terrorist suspects taken into our custody,” National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the Associated Press. “Determining when and where to prosecute individuals is a traditional and important executive branch authority that has long been exercised on a case-by-case basis, taking into account all relevant factors — such decisions are not made arbitrarily.”

Source: RT

Supreme Court Hears Case That Could ‘Empower Super-Rich to Buy Elections’

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TGE News

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10/08/2013

mccutcheon_publiccitizen — Outside the U.S. Supreme Court today. (Photo: Public Citizen/cc/flickr)

Oral arguments heard in case that could have biggest impact on elections since Citizens United

The case is McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a case that challenges the limits on contributions an individual can make to federal campaigns, and that opponents say could give even more power to the super-rich to corrupt democracy.

In a primer on the case, the Center for Responsive Politics explains:

Many people are familiar with limits on how much individuals can give to a campaign; in the 2014 cycle, gifts are capped at $2,600 per candidate per race ($5,200 including both the primary and general election). In addition, they can give up to $5,000 per year to a PAC.

However, there is also an overall limit: No individual can give more than $123,200 in a two-year cycle. Of that amount, only $48,600 can be given to candidates and only $74,600 can be given to PACs. This means that a donor can only give the maximum allowable donation to nine candidates and seven PACs in the 2014 election cycle.

Alabama businessman and Republican donor Shaun McCutcheon, joined by the Republican National Committee, assert in the case that the aggregate caps infringe on free speech.

“A single individual could spend as much as $3.6 million on a single election.” -Common Cause

The Washington Post adds this background:

At the heart of the current case is the framework created by the court’s seminal 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which upheld limits on campaign contributions that Congress put in place two years earlier in response to the Watergate scandal. That ruling drew a distinction between contributions, which the court said could be limited to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption, and expenditures, which the court determined were a form of direct personal expression.

Lyle Denniston explains at SCOTUSblog that

As the case has developed since the Court took it on, it has enhanced the prospects for a close new look at the constitutional distinction drawn between campaign contributions and spending. If that distinction is erased, and the First Amendment shields donors as much as it does spenders, the contribution side of campaigns for the presidency and for members of Congress may become as wide open as the spending side has been in the wake of the Citizens United decision in January 2010.

“If the Court sides with the plaintiff in McCutcheon v. FEC and overturns aggregate contribution limits, a single individual could spend as much as $3.6 million on a single election, enough to buy the attention of the president and every single member of Congress,” warned citizen advocacy group Common Cause.

“The potential for corruption—indeed its inevitability— if those limits are removed is clear and present and more than sufficient to justify keeping them in place,” the group added.

Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen, echoed the warning, saying that “If the court decides to strike down limits on what an individual can give directly to candidates, parties and PACs, the real-world impact is plain enough. A few hundred people will be empowered to spend millions to buy elections.”

If the caps are struck down, Weissman says “the entire political system will shift still more to favor the super-rich.”

Already, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted on Tuesday, “We are living in a society where a handful of people with incredible sums of money like the Koch brothers and others are undermining what this democracy is supposed to be about.”

Weissman said that if the caps are struck down, “We will see a rise in corruption both as the public understands the term – meaning the entire political system will shift still more to favor the super-rich – and as the Supreme Court defines it – meaning quid pro quo corruption.”

News agencies are reporting that the Court “appeared closely divided on Tuesday” in the case, and McClatchy reported that “The tenor of the hour-long oral argument suggested that an eventual 5-4 decision could result that strikes down the aggregate limits.”

If that happens, caution Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap and Keyan Bliss of the Move to Amend Coalition, “the political voice of ordinary Americans will be swept away and with it policies that benefit the public interest.” In so doing, they write, “it could spark a national revolution.”

This article was first published at CommonDreams.org

Image Source: Outside the U.S. Supreme Court today. (Photo: Public Citizen/cc/flickr)

5 Big Signs The Global Engine of Deceit, Lies and Control Are Coming To End

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TGE News

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10/08/2013

If you don’t see it coming, you may have been hiding in a very dark place for the last decade. The lies, deceit, fear-mongering and illusions portrayed by elite controlling entities of the world are slowly crumbling right in front of their eyes as the world is awakening. Here are 5 signs that the era of deception and duplicity is coming to an end.

1. Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex Has Been Exposed
Perhaps one of the biggest controlling entities of the world is the pharmaceutical industrial complex who has deceived billions for almost two centuries. Their corruption, fabrications and outright deceit has enveloped almost every nation on Earth. In the last decade alone, millions have outcasted drugs and vaccines from their circle of trust. More people are coming to discover that this powerful group of criminals will stop at nothing to sell their snake oil to the public. Over the last several years, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Novartis — and all other pharmaceutical giants, which once seemed unassailable are slowly drowning. Drug discovery jobs have disappeared by the thousands in the United States and by the hundreds in Europe as the industry has cut costs in order to adjust to what is widely perceived as the end of the blockbuster-drug era.

People are getting it. From the H1N1 scandal to HPV….from Lipitor to Vioxx, the public is catching on that most modern day diseases are man-made to sell us more poison in a vicious cycle which perpetuates until our death. Research is now showing that natural health products are as effective as man-made drugs and for the first time in history, the natural health industry is aiming to amend legislation to allow physicians to include natural health products in their practice–a change that could revolutionize the allopathic treatment model.

2. The Media Is No Longer Capable of Instilling Trust
Recent polls now show that an overwhelming 80% of the population no longer trusts mainstream newscasts. From the lies and promotion of wars to our health, the mainstream media is incapable of generating any unbiased newsworthy content without corporate or government propaganda. Conan O’Brien easily revealed how mainstream media’s scripted taking points are just a farce. This happens almost everyday on any issue you can imagine, across all networks at any time. The media, as they say “is a joke” branded to program the minds of millions though manipulation and deception. But their dominion and monopoly has been thwarted by the alternative media who are now fully engaged in exposing every lie one at a time….and we are achieving great success.

3. The Conventional Food Industry is Collapsing
By observing the chess match between anti-GMO camps and Monsanto (and their lobbyists), we see a clear indication that big agriculture, biotech and the entire food industry is in turmoil. Trade agreements currently being drafted in developed nations are attempting to secure legislation dictating all GMO labeling as illegal. Resistance against GMOs are being defined as “anti-free trade practices” that governments are attempting to enforce in the form of economic sanctions against nations that attempt to ban GMOs. Labeling initiatives spawned by various groups are being exposed as controlled opposition and the true intentions and transparency of these organizations is inevitable. Food giants are being held accountable for their manufacturing processes, toxic ingredients and lack of credibility.

All of these things are sure signs that the biotech industry is losing control as the entire world is awakening to the dangers of genetically modified foods and the conventional food supply. Technology is coming forward that will soon allow on-the-spot tests for environmental toxins, GMOs, pesticides, food safety and more with their smartphones and other hand-held devices as a defiant public will stop at nothing to regain independence within the food supply.

4. The Freedom Movement Is Gaining Momentum
De facto foreign administrations of unelected industrialists, financiers, academics, military leaders along with representatives from our elected government officials have been very busy the past century implementing changes into nations who were once sovereign and free. However, they have no real authority to restrict public mobility, free trade or limit access to anything. That means that everybody is free to drive without insurance, driver’s license, license plates, free to trade any articles of exchange including vitamins, supplements, healing modalities and free to consume and ingest anything they wish without restriction. This is a right of all people born on any land, and the movement to educate millions on these issues is rising across the globe. Mass populations are starting to see the reality that there is no longer sovereignty within nations. The people of these nations have lost their ability to write their own laws, avoid arrest, injury and damage from corporations which seek to remove all the freedoms from the people.

The elite societies of the world are now petrified of the awakening of these fundamental human rights. This is the fear of every official who deems their opinion can be enforced over others through artificial laws that don’t hold any weight in the highest courts. We are now declaring those rights more than ever and every beneficiary of the corrupt system is sending the police to insist that we are in wrong and they are right. It is about knowing what absolute sovereignty truly is and embracing the power to express that right regardless of anybody else’s interpretation. Police are being held accountable for these injustices and their homes and possessions are being taken from them in the highest courts as the people fight for their rights to be free and will accept no damage by illegal enforcement (the police) in the interim.

5. The Liberation of Nature and Abolishment of All Things Toxic Is Now Inevitable
More than a dozen U.S. states have now completely decriminalized the act of possessing marijuana and both Colorado and Washington have made it legal to possess, sell, transport and cultivate the plant. But soon it may be legalized across the entire country. That is quite the 180 from the federal government’s tune in 2011 when they decreed that marijuana had no accepted medical use and should remain classified as a highly dangerous drug like heroin. Nobody has the right to criminalize or restrict anybody from possessing a plant or smoking it for that matter. The rights of people to interact with nature are being recognized on all levels and cannabis liberation is a amazing step forward.

The restoration of clean drinking water through the removal of toxic fluoride is another example of how governments can no longer contain their lies, in this case the 60-year old deception of fluoride. Almost the entire world is now coming full circle to the health consequences of poisoning the water supply with fluoride. Most developed nations, including all of Japan and 97% of western Europe, do not fluoridate their water. Israel was recently added to that list. Many communities, over the last few years, stopped fluoridation in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Recently, both Wichita, Kansas and Portland, Oregon rejected fluoridation 60% to 40%. Hamilton, NZ, councilors voted 7-1 to stop 50 years of fluoridation after councilors listened to several days of testimony from those for and against fluoridation. Windsor, Ontario, stopped 51 years of fluoridation. Sixteen regional councils have halted or rejected fluoridation in Queensland since mandatory fluoridation was dropped there in Nov. 2012.

The news is spreading and a renaissance is blooming worldwide. There is no stopping it. The potential war in Syria which has no support from the American public, is a beautiful reminder that people are tuning into their own hearts and wisdom as they come to understand that war will never accomplish anything but create more war.

Get ready my friends because we are headed for an incredible ride as we pave the way for a new consciousness as we rebuild the Earth, take back our power as united and free citizens of this wonderful planet.

Marco Torres is a research specialist, writer and consumer advocate for healthy lifestyles. He holds degrees in Public Health and Environmental Science and is a professional speaker on topics such as disease prevention, environmental toxins and health policy.

This article was first published over at Preventdisease.com

The hornets of your nightmares: Swarms of massive insects kill more than 40 and injure 1,600 in China

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TGE News

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10/08/2013

Swarms of deadly hornets have killed more than 40 people and injured more than 1,600 in northern China.

At least 37 patients are in a critical or serious condition in hospitals, according to Shaanxi provincial government.

Victims of the attack have been left with deep, dark craters in their skin the size of bullet wounds.

Scroll down for video

Swarms of deadly hornets have killed more than 40 people and injured more than 1,600 in northern China

Deadly:

Victims of the attack have been left with deep, dark craters in their skin the size of bullet wounds

Terrifying: One victim told local media that 'the more you run, the more they want to chase you'

Terrifying: One victim told local media that ‘the more you run, the more they want to chase you’

Over the past three months the cities of Angkang, Hanzhong and Shangluo have been worst affected.

The Chinese term for hornets is ‘hu feng’ and local experts believe the culprit is the Asian giant hornet or Vespa mandarinia, which grows up to 5cm long with a 6mm sting.

The insects’ highly toxic stings can lead to anaphylactic shock and renal failure.

(Watch the video below)

Horror: Some victims described being chased about 200 metres (656 feet) by a swarm

Horror: Some victims described being chased about 200 metres (656 feet) by a swarm

The hornets pick on honeybees as they leave their hive until the colony is so exhausted that the hornets can move in and ransack it.

Groups of Asian hornets hover in front of a beehive, picking off single honeybees, decapitating them and stripping off their wings and legs before making off with the ‘meat ball’ to feed their young.

It is a further problem for the British honeybee, which is struggling to cope with changes in farming and climate and already has one Far Eastern invader to contend with – the varroa mite, which feeds on the bees and makes their hives more vulnerable to disease.

The Chinese term for hornets is ‘hu feng’.

hornet bites Those behind the deadly attacks this summer appear to be the Asian giant hornet, or Vespa mandarinia.

The Asian giant hornet grows up to 5cm long with a 6mm sting which injects a large amount of potent venom.

The hornet sting can be extremely painful to humans and has been compared to a hot nail being hammered into the body,

The head of the hornet is orange and quite wide in comparison to other hornet species.

The Asian giant hornet is intensely predatory; it hunts medium- to large-sized insects, such as bees, other hornet species, and mantises.

Hornets are most aggressive in behavior when they mate and migrate in September and October.

Attacks are difficult to prevent because hornet nests are usually in hidden sites.

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America’s Path to Revolution Is Rapidly Escalating

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TGE News

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10/08/2013

__Revolution_Wallpaper___by_Jeevay — Image by Jeevay

Part one of this series demonstrated the beginnings of a spirit of civil disobedience against the tyranny of the federal government ranging from three governors who are saying no to the Obama administration, to the veterans who defy the National Park Service to visit the war memorials, to average everyday people who are consciously defying the federal government which has been hijacked by the central bankers.

Three Stages of a Revolution

Any revolution contains three stages, and it is always the same regardless of the country or political system. Initially, a revolution consists of the elite, who are characterized by blatant, but disguised abuses of power, versus a few vocal people who openly challenge the status quo of the elite in a public forum. This article is about the apparent transition that is ongoing in this country in which America is progressing from stage one, self awareness of persecution, to stage two, characterized by civil disobedience, on the path to stage three, which is revolution.

The three stages of revolution manifest in the following manner:

1. A minimum number of the persecuted population becomes aware that they are victims and share a collective consciousness with their fellow victimized citizens. Ten percent is the minimum number needed to successfully complete stage one (see below for documentation).

2. Awareness leads to action in the form of civil disobedience.

3. Civil disobedience is met with opposing force by the power elite and the conflict leads to open hostilities culminating in revolution.

It is the hypothesis of this paper that America is transitioning between stage one and stage two.

Stage One

In stage one of a revolution, each side of the conflict engages in a war of ideas and words and feverishly campaigns for their version of the truth. The elite, who control the government and, more importantly, the media, initially win the war of words. However, the dissidents often engage in alternative methods for winning the propaganda war.

In America, the elite control 98% of the media through five corporations, which leaves the dissidents at a distinct disadvantage. The vocal minority has countered with turning the Internet into a news dissemination device. This is why Senators’ Feinstein and McCain have tried multiple times to get control over the Internet and to decide who is a journalist and who is not. They fear our message because they have much to hide in their role of working for the criminal elite.

The fact that the elite are trying to silence the vocal minority of dissidents speaks to the fact about how effective the alternative media has become. The elite know something that most of us have failed to realize: the alternative media is beginning to win the hearts and minds of the American public and the elite are panicking and moving quickly to silence the alternative media. However, it is too late. America has reached a tipping point. Recent research in the field of social psychology demonstrates why.

Rutkowski et al., have demonstrated that group cohesiveness is a primary determining force which determines whether or not a protest movement will go forward and gain momentum. The Obama administration, on behalf of the global elite (i.e. Rothschild banksters) has attacked America on so many fronts, that there a re a lot of like-minded victims who are beginning to see the federal government as their enemy. As many of you know, it is actually the Obama administration who are merely the representatives of the real enemy, they only play the role of the errand boy. However, it is the alternative media which is providing the disenfranchised with a voice constituting a gathering point for dissident voices. The resistance against the New World Order now has a collective consciousness.

Scientists from the prestigious Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have determined that if just 10% of any given population holds to an unshakable idea, that the idea will become adopted by the majority of the country. I contend that this threshold has been met. How can I be so sure? I am certain that people of America are in the midst of redefining its relationship with its government because we are seeing defiance against federal government edicts at every level of our society.

Stage Two

Stage two of a revolution consists of civil disobedience or nonviolent resistance. Thanks to Obama, he has given Americans the perfect pretext to begin to resist our criminally controlled government and America is presently sitting on the edge of being immersed in stage two of a three-stage path to revolution.

In Part one of this series, I identified three governors, many veterans and average citizens who are defying various aspects of the government shutdown, the implementation of Common Core and just the general encroachment of tyranny into our lives. America is indeed transitioning from stage one to stage two, characterized by civil disobedience.

I predict that we are going to see more acts of civil disobedience on a widespread scale. The word of our discontent is spreading like wildfire. I was recently a guest on a liberal talk show. I knew I was walking into the lion’s den, but I was surprised that the liberal talk show host was agreeing with me on nearly every point from the need to abolish the Federal Reserve to the need to eliminate corporate campaign donations to politicians. Most surprising, this program and host wanted to protect the alternative media from Feinstein’s attempt to silence its journalists through an amendment to Senate bill 588. I see signs every day, that despite the globalists trying to divide and conquer humanity, that the awakening is occurring and is growing exponentially. Even so-called traditional liberals are joining forces with the alternative media in an attempt to preserve what is left of America.

The slumbering giant is indeed awakening and is coming to life. This is cause for celebration. However, the American people and reporters in the spirit of the Michael Hastings and the Andrew Breitbarts are in grave danger, as the elite are not going to sacrifice their hold over all of us without a fight.

The more that we show that humanity is awakening, the harder the elite are going to push back. We know that on October 1st, FEMA had just completed training 386,000 troops in FEMA Region 3. Their primary focus was on urban warfare and teaching the troops to speak English. They are coming for our guns and we cannot let that happen, because every genocide in the 20th century was preceded by gun confiscation. Gun confiscation is a hallmark “push back” by the elite in response to a rising tide of opposition.

False flag attacks are also a prominent part of the transition between stage two and stage three rebellion. Elite-sponsored false flag attacks also provide the justification and also galvanizes the pro-governmental forces to a point in which they begin to enslave the people on the pretext of protecting them from some kind of bogeyman (i.e. terrorists). I recently documented no less that nine disaster preparedness and disaster drills which are being carried out in the period between September 25 through November 13th which will culminate with the Grid Ex II simulating a total grid blackout. Every one of these drills consists of the potential for a false flag event. We have seen this with 9/11, the 7/7 bombings and most recently in the Boston Marathon Bombings.

Conclusion

DHS is arming to the teeth and is preparing to go to war with the American people as evidenced by their purchase of 2.3 billion rounds of ammunition and 2700 armored personnel carriers. Their agents target practice against average Americans on their target cutouts.

Stage three is outright revolution. The elite are going to do their best to ensure that this rising tide of opposition never reaches this level. This is why many of us in the alternative media believe that there will be false flags in our immediate future followed by a brutal martial law crackdown.

Although I celebrate America’s rising tide of awareness, I have a foreboding feeling about what lies ahead. Will the elite effectively stamp out any opposition? Will the coming push back by the elite result in an escalation of violence? Perhaps it makes more sense as to why the local police have been federalized and why we are seeing unprecedented acts of police brutality. These are questions that will soon be decided. We are truly living in historic times.

Dave Hodges is an award winning psychology, statistics and research professor, a college basketball coach, a mental health counselor, a political activist and writer who has published dozens of editorials and articles in several publications such as Freedoms Phoenix, News With Views and The Arizona Republic.

The Common Sense Show features a wide variety of important topics that range from the loss of constitutional liberties, to the subsequent implementation of a police state under world governance, to exploring the limits of human potential. The primary purpose of The Common Sense Show is to provide Americans with the tools necessary to reclaim both our individual and national sovereignty.

Image Source: Jeevay

10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier, Backed By Science

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TGE News

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10/08/2013

Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It’s also no surprise that it’s the Nr.1 value for Buffer’s culture, if you see our slidedeck about it. So naturally we are obsessed with it.

I would love to be happier, as I’m sure most people would, so I thought it would be interesting to find some ways to become a happier person that are actually backed up by science. Here are ten of the best ones I found.

1. Exercise more – 7 minutes might be enough

You might have seen some talk recently about the scientific 7 minute workout mentioned in The New York Times. So if you thought exercise was something you didn’t have time for, maybe you can fit it in after all.

Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it’s actually been proven to be an effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage, three groups of patients treated their depression with either medication, exercise, or a combination of the two. The results of this study really surprised me. Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels to begin with, the follow up assessments proved to be radically different:

The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent!

You don’t have to be depressed to gain benefit from exercise, though. It can help you to relax, increase your brain power and even improve your body image, even if you don’t lose any weight.

A study in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies, even when they saw no physical changes:

Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females before and after both 6 × 40 mins exercise and 6 × 40 mins reading. Over both conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image, however, improved after exercise compared to before.

We’ve explored exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains, such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier, as you can see in the image below.

2. Sleep more – you’ll be less sensitive to negative emotions

We know that sleep helps our bodies to recover from the day and repair themselves, and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out, it’s also important for our happiness.

In NutureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects our positivity:

Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine.

In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81% of the words with a negative connotation, like “cancer.” But they could remember only 31% of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like “sunshine” or “basket.”

The BPS Research Digest explores another study that proves sleep affects our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task over the course of a day, the researchers studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap became more sensitive late in the day to negative emotions like fear and anger.

Using a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified reactivity to anger and fear emotions across the day, without sleep. However, an intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to anger and fear while conversely enhancing ratings of positive (happy) expressions.

Of course, how well (and how long) you sleep will probably affect how you feel when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole day. Especially this graph showing how your brain activity decreases is a great insight about how important enough sleep is for productivity and happiness:

Another study tested how employees’ moods when they started work in the morning affected their work day.

Researchers found that employees’ moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to customers’ moods.

And most importantly to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance, including both how much work employees did and how well they did it.

Sleep is another topic we’ve looked into before, exploring how much sleep we really need to be productive.

3. Move closer to work – a short commute is worth more than a big house

Our commute to the office can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to do this twice a day, five days a week, makes it unsurprising that its effect would build up over time and make us less and less happy.

According to The Art of Manliness, having a long commute is something we often fail to realize will affect us so dramatically:

… while many voluntary conditions don’t affect our happiness in the long term because we acclimate to them, people never get accustomed to their daily slog to work because sometimes the traffic is awful and sometimes it’s not. Or as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, “Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”

We tend to try to compensate for this by having a bigger house or a better job, but these compensations just don’t work:

Two Swiss economists who studied the effect of commuting on happiness found that such factors could not make up for the misery created by a long commute.

4. Spend time with friends and family – don’t regret it on your deathbed

Staying in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying. If you want more evidence that it’s beneficial for you, I’ve found some research that proves it can make you happier right now.

Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family makes a big difference to how happy we feel, generally.

I love the way Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it:

We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.

George Vaillant is the director of a 72-year study of the lives of 268 men.

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

He shared insights of the study with Joshua Wolf Shenk at The Atlantic on how the men’s social connections made a difference to their overall happiness:

The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger.

In fact, a study published in the Journal of Socio-Economics states than your relationships are worth more than $100,000:

Using the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase in the level of social involvements is worth up to an extra £85,000 a year in terms of life satisfaction. Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness.

I think that last line is especially fascinating: Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness. So we could increase our annual income by hundreds of thousands of dollars and still not be as happy as if we increased the strength of our social relationships.

The Terman study, which is covered in The Longevity Project, found that relationships and how we help others were important factors in living long, happy lives:

We figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or she had friends and relatives to count on when having a hard time then that person would be healthier. Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live the longest.

Surprise: our prediction was wrong… Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others. Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age.

5. Go outside – happiness is maximized at 13.9°C

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness:

Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory…

This is pretty good news for those of us who are worried about fitting new habits into our already-busy schedules. Twenty minutes is a short enough time to spend outside that you could fit it into your commute or even your lunch break.

A UK study from the University of Sussex also found that being outdoors made people happier:

Being outdoors, near the sea, on a warm, sunny weekend afternoon is the perfect spot for most. In fact, participants were found to be substantially happier outdoors in all natural environments than they were in urban environments.

The American Meteorological Society published research in 2011 that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average temperature over the course of a day. It also found that happiness is maximized at 13.9°C, so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading outside for your 20 minutes of fresh air.

6. Help others – 100 hours a year is the magical number

One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours per year (or two hours per week) is the optimal time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives.

If we go back to Shawn Achor’s book again, he says this about helping others:

…when researchers interviewed more than 150 people about their recent purchases, they found that money spent on activities—such as concerts and group dinners out—brought far more pleasure than material purchases like shoes, televisions, or expensive watches. Spending money on other people, called “prosocial spending,” also boosts happiness.

The Journal of Happiness Studies published a study that explored this very topic:

Participants recalled a previous purchase made for either themselves or someone else and then reported their happiness. Afterward, participants chose whether to spend a monetary windfall on themselves or someone else. Participants assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier immediately after this recollection; most importantly, the happier participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on someone else in the near future.

So spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. What about spending our time on other people? A study of volunteering in Germany explored how volunteers were affected when their opportunities to help others were taken away:

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German reunion, the first wave of data of the GSOEP was collected in East Germany. Volunteering was still widespread. Due to the shock of the reunion, a large portion of the infrastructure of volunteering (e.g. sports clubs associated with firms) collapsed and people randomly lost their opportunities for volunteering. Based on a comparison of the change in subjective well-being of these people and of people from the control group who had no change in their volunteer status, the hypothesis is supported that volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life satisfaction.

In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman explains that helping others can improve our own lives:

…we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.

7. Practice smiling – it can alleviate pain

Smiling itself can make us feel better, but it’s more effective when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to this study:

A new study led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But workers who smile as a result of cultivating positive thoughts – such as a tropical vacation or a child’s recital – improve their mood and withdraw less.

Of course it’s important to practice “real smiles” where you use your eye sockets. It’s very easy to spot the difference:

According to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks:

Smiling makes us feel good which also increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically. When this idea was tested by Johnson et al. (2010), the results showed that participants who smiled performed better on attentional tasks which required seeing the whole forest rather than just the trees.

A smile is also a good way to alleviate some of the pain we feel in troubling circumstances:

Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation. Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile when we don’t feel like it is enough to lift our mood slightly (this is one example of embodied cognition).

One of our previous posts goes into even more detail about the science of smiling.

8. Plan a trip – but don’t take one

As opposed to actually taking a holiday, it seems that planning a vacation or just a break from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal, Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as employees enjoyed the sense of anticipation:

In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks.

After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people.

Shawn Achor has some info for us on this point, as well:

One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.

If you can’t take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar—even if it’s a month or a year down the road. Then whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.

9. Meditate – rewire your brain for happiness

Meditation is often touted as an important habit for improving focus, clarity and attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It turns out it’s also useful for improving your happiness:

In one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. The study, published in the January issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, parts of the participants’ brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, and parts associated with stress shrank.

Meditation literally clears your mind and calms you down, it’s been often proven to be the single most effective way to live a happier live. I believe that this graphic explains it the best:

According to Shawn Achor, meditation can actually make you happier long-term:

Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. And, research even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness.

The fact that we can actually alter our brain structure through mediation is most surprising to me and somewhat reassuring that however we feel and think today isn’t permanent.

10. Practice gratitude – increase both happiness and life satisfaction

This is a seemingly simple strategy, but I’ve personally found it to make a huge difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you’re grateful for, sharing three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, and going out of your way to show gratitude when others help you.

In an experiment where some participants took note of things they were grateful for each day, their moods were improved just from this simple practice:

The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits.

The Journal of Happiness studies published a study that used letters of gratitude to test how being grateful can affect our levels of happiness:

Participants included 219 men and women who wrote three letters of gratitude over a 3 week period.

Results indicated that writing letters of gratitude increased participants’ happiness and life satisfaction, while decreasing depressive symptoms.

Quick last fact: Getting older will make yourself happier

As a final point, it’s interesting to note that as we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to grow happier naturally. There’s still some debate over why this happens, but scientists have got a few ideas:

Researchers, including the authors, have found that older people shown pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on and remember the happier ones more and the negative ones less.

Other studies have discovered that as people age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods — for instance, pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down. Still other work finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and disappointment over unachieved goals, and hew their goals toward greater wellbeing.

So if you thought being old would make you miserable, rest assured that it’s likely you’ll develop a more positive outlook than you probably have now.

Want to chat about this article? Leave a comment below or send me an email with your thoughts.

Oh and before I forget, we’ve recently launched the new Buffer for Business. Take a look, it’s the most powerful Buffer yet to help you better manage your social media everywhere.

Photo credit: Spencer Finnley

Source: Bufferapp.com

Via RiseEarth.com

5 Depressing Ways That 1%’s Huge Profits Have Broken the Back of America

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TGE News

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10/07/2013

pooramerica — Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Vepar5

The American middle class is broken, and poverty is spreading.

The middle class, once the backbone of a strong American society, has been broken, beaten down, pushed further and further toward poverty levels. Here are five well-documented ways that this has happened.

1. Income Redistribution is Worse than Usually Reported

We are told that the richest 1% doubled its share of income in the past thirty years. But from 1980 to 2006, according to both IRS and CBO figures, they nearly TRIPLED their share of income — and that’s after-tax income.

After 2006, the recession set everyone back temporarily, but in the first two years of the recovery, the richest 1% captured an incomprehensible 121% of the income gains (others saw debt rise faster than income).

2. Wealth Redistribution is Even Worse than Income Redistribution

In 1983 the poorest 47% of America owned about 2.5 percent of the nation’s wealth, an average of $15,000 per family.

In 2009 the poorest 47% of America owned ZERO percent of the nation’s wealth (their debt exceeded their assets).

Hard to believe it could get even worse. But because of the housing crisis and recession, the median family net worthdropped 40% between 2007 and 2010, while the richest Americans were regaining all their losses, and beginning an even steeper climb to the top.

Perhaps the biggest reason for this wealth redistribution is that the richest 10% own almost 90 percent of stocks excluding pensions. Since the recession, as the U.S. economy has “recovered,” almost two-thirds of the gain was due to growth in the stock market.

3. The Redistribution of Productivity: Boosting Profits rather than Wages

From 2001 to 2011, total corporate profits more than doubled, to almost $2 trillion, while the corporate federal income tax rate was cut in half.

Incomes for 99% of Americans have declined since the recession, with the median household income dropping by 7.3 percent. Low-income jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) made up 1/5 of the jobs lost to the recession, but accounted for 3/5 of the jobs regained during the recovery.

4. Finance is Outrunning Society, and Taking the Money with Them

Americans once trusted the financial industry to safeguard their retirement money. But high tech has transformed high finance, at a much faster rate than the average investor can understand the changes.

Rolling Stone reports on the loss of $2.3 billion in pension money in Maine — and the simultaneous billing of $2.1 billion by the hedge funds, private-equity funds and venture-capital funds. Another report tells of local funding crises caused by indecipherable “structured finance” deals sold by bankers with promises of big returns. In 2007 a hedge fund manager ( John Paulson) made $3.7 billion by conspiring with Goldman Sachs to create packages of risky subprime mortgages, so that in anticipation of a housing crash he could use other people’s money to bet against his personally designed sure-to-fail financial instruments.

The high-speed high-tech chicanery continues in the stock market, where programs can intercept ‘buy’ orders and in a few nanoseconds purchase the stock and then complete the ‘buy’ order for a few pennies more.

The bankers and hedgers and hustlers have made up new rules for making money, and our government representatives don’t know what’s going on, or don’t care, or don’t want to stop the financial games that ultimately generate campaign funds. Finance is quickly printing its own new money. In less than ten years, the world’s wealth has approximately doubled, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion. Much of that is sheer speculation: the derivatives industry is worth over $1 quadrillion. But those speculative transactions get cashed in as real money.

It’s a dizzying high-speed fantasyland that redistributes the real money of the middle class to the super-rich while inventing new forms of fees and bonuses along the way.

5. Redistribution through Government Manipulation

There are numerous ways the very rich have cajoled and coerced and connived their Congressional partners to redistribute money in their direction. Like the lower capital gains rate. An astonishing 75 percent of dividend and capital gain subsidies go to the richest 1%. That’s still not enough for hedge fund managers, who call their income “carried interest” instead of “income” to keep their tax rate at the capital gains rate. And even this small amount may not be paid. Hedge fund managers with incomes in the billions can pay ZERO income tax by deferring their profits through their companies indefinitely.

About two-thirds of nearly $1 trillion in individual “tax expenditures” (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers.

Banks have arranged to get lower interest rates, saving them $83 billion per year.

The U.S. federal government spends $100 billion a year on corporate welfare, almost half for big agriculture and the fossil fuel industry.

Another $150 billion per year goes for excessive pharmaceutical expenditures, as the drug companies have lobbied for laws to keep cheaper medications out of the hands of Americans.

Better to Call it Pre-Distribution

The term ‘pre-distribution’ better represents, according to political scientist Jacob Hacker, “the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.” Unregulated free-market capitalism simply makes the rich richer. Even if they have to break the backs of productive middle-class Americans to get their way.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, a writer for progressive publications, and the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org).

Source: AlterNet

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Vepar5

Bionics, Transhumanism, and the end of Evolution (Documentary)

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TGE Media

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10/06/2013

Transhumanism is an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as study the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies. They predict that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label “posthuman”.

The contemporary meaning of the term transhumanism was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught “new concepts of the Human” at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and worldviews transitional to “posthumanity” as “transhuman”. This hypothesis would lay the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990, and organizing in California an intelligentsia that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement.

Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives. Transhumanism has been characterized by one critic, Francis Fukuyama, as among the world’s most dangerous ideas, to which Ronald Bailey countered that it is rather the “movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative, and idealistic aspirations of humanity.

Obamacare: here come the toxic psychiatrists

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TGE News

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10/06/2013

The toxic psychiatrists are already here, but under Obamacare their mission will expand.

A recent Washington Post article parroted the usual unscientific statistic on numbers of people in America with mental disorders: 20% of all adults have “experienced a mental-health issue.”

Propaganda focuses heavily on children, with claims that “half of all mental-health disorders first show up before a person turns 14.”

“Three-quarters of mental-health disorders begin before 24. But less than 20% of children and adolescents with mental disorders receive the treatment they need.”

Obamacare has an “essential list” of services, and “mental-health treatment” is one of them. You can be sure the targeting of children will expand.

More and more children will be brought into the system and receive diagnoses of mental disorders and the toxic drugs psychiatrists routinely prescribe. More kids will be screened for depression and undergo “behavioral assessments.”

The influence of psychiatry in young children’s lives is going to expand beyond anything we’ve yet seen. America is going to experience another sea change: the medicalization of children’s behavior will blanket the country.

First of all, as I’ve established many times, NO so-called mental disorder is defined scientifically. There are no physical diagnostic tests: no blood tests, no urine tests, no saliva tests, no genetic tests, no brain-scan tests.

If there were, you would find them in the DSM, the bible of the psychiatric profession, which lists the, yes, 300 mental disorders.

Instead, disorders consist of menus of behaviors assembled by committees of psychiatrists, who decide which clusters of behaviors rate a disorder label.

In a PBS Frontline interview, during the episode called “Does ADHD Exist?”, Russell Barkley, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, was asked about the lack of a blood test for ADHD. He made this extraordinary statement:

“That’s tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn’t have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid. There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn’t make them invalid.”

Dr. Barkley has his own definition of science. If, say, physics surrendered the need for physical tests, it could claim the sun revolves around the Earth, all oceans end in steep cliffs, and unexplored forests automatically contain dragons.

But “psychiatry is different.” Committees of men can assemble lists of behaviors and call them disorders. 300 and counting.

This is why all assessments of numbers of people who have mental disorders are useless. The disorders themselves are arbitrarily concocted.

But there are very serious consequences: drugs and more drugs.

When it comes to their toxicity and behavioral effects, I recommend several sources. The website “SSRI stories” presents a number of studies of the SSRI antidepressants (e.g., Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft). Consult the work of Dr. Peter Breggin, David Healy, and Robert Whitaker. Read Breggin’s essential book, Toxic Psychiatry.

Here is important information about one psychiatric drug: Ritalin.

In 1986, The International Journal of the Addictions published a most important literature review by Richard Scarnati. It was called “An Outline of Hazardous Side Effects of Ritalin (Methylphenidate)” [v.21(7), pp. 837-841].

Scarnati listed a large number of adverse affects of Ritalin and cited published journal articles which reported each of these symptoms.

For every one of the following (selected and quoted verbatim) Ritalin effects, there is at least one confirming source in the medical literature:

Paranoid delusions
Paranoid psychosis
Hypomanic and manic symptoms, amphetamine-like psychosis
Activation of psychotic symptoms
Toxic psychosis
Visual hallucinations
Auditory hallucinations
Can surpass LSD in producing bizarre experiences
Effects pathological thought processes
Extreme withdrawal
Terrified affect
Started screaming
Aggressiveness
Insomnia
Since Ritalin is considered an amphetamine-type drug, expect amphetamine-like effects
Psychic dependence
High-abuse potential DEA Schedule II Drug
Decreased REM sleep
When used with antidepressants one may see dangerous reactions including hypertension, seizures and hypothermia
Convulsions
Brain damage may be seen with amphetamine abuse.

Ritalin and other speed-type drugs are given to kids who are slapped with the ADHD label. Speed, sooner or later, produces a crash. This is easy to call “clinical depression.”

Then comes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft. These drugs can produce temporary highs, followed by more crashes. The psychiatrist notices the up and down pattern—and then produces a new diagnosis of Bipolar (manic-depression) and prescribes other drugs, including Valproate and Lithium. (To see some of the toxic and dangerous effects of these two drugs, read my article, “The lying liars who lie about psychiatry.”)

In the US alone, there are at least 300,000 cases of motor brain damage incurred by people who have been prescribed so-called anti-psychotic drugs (aka “major tranquilizers”). Source: Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Peter Breggin, St. Martin’s Press, 1991

This psychiatric drug plague is accelerating across the land. Under Obamacare, with psychiatry firmly placed on a par with other branches of medical practice, the plague is going to spread further, as previously uninsured people enter the system.

At the website, “SSRI stories”, you can also read numerous reports of antidepressants’ links to violent behavior, including suicide and homicide. The correlation is not meant to establish a perfect causative chain, but the shocking number of incidents is more than suggestive.

After commenting on some of the adverse effects of the antidepressant drug Prozac, psychiatrist Peter Breggin notes, “From the initial studies, it was also apparent that a small percentage of Prozac patients became psychotic.” Paxil and Zoloft are in the same class of drug as Prozac.

Prozac, in fact, endured a rocky road in the press for a time. Stories on it rarely appear now. The major media have backed off. But on February 7th, 1991, Amy Marcus’ Wall Street Journal article on the drug carried the headline, “Murder Trials Introduce Prozac Defense.” She wrote, “A spate of murder trials in which defendants claim they became violent when they took the antidepressant Prozac are imposing new problems for the drug’s maker, Eli Lilly and Co.”

Also on February 7, 1991, the New York Times ran a Prozac piece headlined, “Suicidal Behavior Tied Again to Drug: Does Antidepressant Prompt Violence?”

In his landmark book, Toxic Psychiatry, Dr. Breggin mentions that the Donahueshow (Feb. 28, 1991) “put together a group of individuals who had become compulsively self-destructive and murderous after taking Prozac and the clamorous telephone and audience response confirmed the problem.”

Breggin also cites a troubling study from the February 1990 American Journal of Psychiatry (Teicher et al, v.147:207-210) which reports on “six depressed patients, previously free of recent suicidal ideation, who developed “intense, violent suicidal preoccupations after 2-7 weeks of fluoxetine [Prozac] treatment.” The suicidal preoccupations lasted from three days to three months after termination of the treatment. The report estimates that 3.5 percent of Prozac users were at risk. While denying the validity of the study, Dista Products, a division of Eli Lilly, put out a brochure for doctors dated August 31, 1990, stating that it was adding ‘suicidal ideation’ to the adverse events section of its Prozac product information.”

An earlier study, from the September 1989 Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, by Joseph Lipiniski, Jr., indicates that in five examined cases people on Prozac developed what is called akathesia. Symptoms include intense anxiety, inability to sleep, the “jerking of extremities,” and “bicycling in bed or just turning around and around.” Breggin comments that akathesia “may also contribute to the drug’s tendency to cause self-destructive or violent tendencies … Akathesia can become the equivalent of biochemical torture and could possibly tip someone over the edge into self-destructive or violent behavior … The June 1990 Health Newsletter, produced by the Public Citizen Research Group, reports, ‘Akathesia, or symptoms of restlessness, constant pacing, and purposeless movements of the feet and legs, may occur in 10-25 percent of patients on Prozac.’”

The well-known publication, California Lawyer, in a December 1998 article called “Protecting Prozac,” details some of the suspect maneuvers of Eli Lilly in its handling of suits against Prozac. California Lawyer also mentions other highly qualified critics of the drug: “David Healy, MD, an internationally renowned psychopharmacologist, has stated in sworn deposition that ‘contrary to Lilly’s view, there is a plausible cause-and-effect relationship between Prozac’ and suicidal-homicidal events. An epidemiological study published in 1995 by the British Medical Journal also links Prozac to increased suicide risk.”

When pressed, proponents of these SSRI drugs sometimes say, “Well, the benefits for the general population far outweigh the risk,” or, “Maybe in one or two tragic cases the dosage prescribed was too high.” But the problem will not go away on that basis. A shocking review-study published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases (1996, v.184, no.2), written by Rhoda L. Fisher and Seymour Fisher, called “Antidepressants for Children,” concludes: “Despite unanimous literature of double-blind studies indicating that antidepressants are no more effective than placebos in treating depression in children and adolescents, such medications continue to be in wide use.”

In wide use. This despite such contrary information and the negative, dangerous effects of these drugs.

Under Obamacare, mental-health professionals are looking forward to a much larger piece of the “treatment pie.” Huge numbers of previously uninsured people, including vulnerable children, will now move under the psychiatric umbrella, and their futures are at extreme risk.

Psychiatry has deeply troubling similarities to the Surveillance State. It profiles people and labels them. However, it then treats them with highly toxic and dangerous drugs.

In the wake of recent mass killings, Obama has shown his preference for psychiatric treatment in a number of statements. He’s also launched the so-called “brain mapping project,” which aims to detect more “mental problems” that need fixing by drugs and other invasive methods, and he’s promised to establish new community mental-health centers across the nation.

This, taken together with Obamacare, signals a catastrophe, and spells out the need for public resistance.

Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can see more articles like this and sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Humanity is Waking Up to the Intelligence of Nature

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TGE News

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10/05/2013

There’s a heightening level of awareness within the human race with regards to nature and all that is contained within it. Everything from the discoveries of the rudiments of language in monkeys, metacognition in dolphins, self-awareness of elephants, the ability for animals to tell “right” from “wrong”, to the creation and extension of the bills of rights for animals and plants by countries such as Switzerland and Ecuador, as well as the acknowledgment of dolphins as being non-human persons.

There’s a growing awareness by humanity that nature and its inhabitants are not as primitive and simple as it may have been believed to be the case in the past. With this growing awareness, comes growing understanding of the unity that humanity has with the environment within which it exists. This sense of unity with nature is not something new and indeed has been the primary position of awareness for many societies in existence before their industrialization.

In today’s post-modern societies, there is a resurgence of that connection with the biosphere and interconnected organism that is the planet and all that exists within its domain. As more discoveries are made, greater awareness shines down on humanity’s collective consciousness and thereby, allowing us to evolve the transpersonal consciousness to a level where the ego is no longer the dominator of the Self.

Science can be a wonderful thing. It can prove without a doubt what may have been suggested in times past, but was not completely understood as being the absolute truth, which always left a bit of doubt or confusion. However, with continuous scientific discoveries occurring all the time, it is of great fortune that we are able to attain substantial data and knowledge concerning the environment and all that it encompasses.

With these new discoveries, it is being quite apparent that humans have mistakenly been ignorant and arrogant concerning the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms with respect to their levels of sophistication, evolution, consciousness, and awareness. If we were to start looking at the mineral kingdom, much can be seen from recently-made discoveries.

Of course, there has been such an influx of findings that they would be able to fill up an entire book. However, just a few will be looked at in order to demonstrate the point at hand. All of the discoveries and findings mentioned within this article have been announced publicly within the last few years.

Rocks have been looked at as generally non-living, inanimate, unconscious, and completely devoid of any life-like characteristics, even though everything in nature possesses self-organization. However, stunning new evidence shows the incredible diversity of crystals and minerals after the rise of life on this planet and points to the reality that rocks, like plants and animals, have been evolving all this time, and we did not even realize it until now. This idea is being called “mineral evolution,” which is the concept that many of the our planet’s rocks, minerals and crystals are dynamic species which emerged and transformed over time.

Of course, the evolution of the mineral kingdom is not exactly the same as the evolution of the plant and animal kingdoms, since minerals do not mutate, reproduce or complete like other living organisms, at least to our knowledge. However, the vast variety and abundance of all the various minerals on Earth have changed quite dramatically over the 4.5+ billion years of Earth’s past. US geologist Robert Hazen, who led the research team for this finding, said that “for at least 2.5 billion years, and possibly since the emergence of life, Earth’s mineralogy has evolved in parallel with biology.”

This should not be too big of a surprise to us, however. It makes quite a bit of sense that evolution is all-encompassing…everything from our consciousness, to galaxies, to rocks. Everything is in a constant state of be-ing and become-ing, and the condition that the various aspects of Reality are static does not find much underlying evidence. It looks more and more as if Reality is dynamic and extropic in nature.

Stepping out of the mineral kingdom, we make our way to the plant kingdom. Although it has been known for quite some time that the rainforests of the world act as lungs for the planet, it has recently been discovered that they act as a heart as well. What this implies is that not only are rainforests giant carbon sinks of the planet (acting as lungs), but they may also be responsible for moving many of the weather patterns that we see all around the globe (just as the physical heart moves blood throughout the entire body).

The new study researching this subject suggests that rainforests, such as the ones in Africa and South America, create winds that circulate water around the planet. It is known that more than half the rainfall in rainforests evaporates and recirculates, which then keeps the upper air moist. New findings show that rainforests are also moving the air around them, which also has the effect of moving the water around.

It turns out that as important as plants and trees are to ensure that there is enough clean oxygen for all sentient beings on the plante to thrive and survive, they are now acknowledged as being even more important by affecting the very weather patterns of our biosphere.

Perhaps as a response to the various discoveries concerning the plant kingdom, there have been governments across the planet that have taken it upon themselves to become trailblazers in the area of plant and ecosystem rights. This higher awareness has been most recently demonstrated in the countries of Switzerland and Ecuador.

In the case of Switzerland, the Swiss Government’s Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology has come to the consensus that plants have rights and that they have to be treated appropriately. Making our way to Ecuador, we can see that the country has changed its constitution to say that nature has “the right to the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” The basis of these rights “change the status of ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities.”

The idea of plants having a degree of consciousness is very well documented, and so it is not unreasonable for a government to come up with such a conclusion in respect to the plant kingdom. However, the perceptions of humans are not always quick to shift and change. It is demonstrations such as these which show that there is indeed a higher awareness being experienced by humanity with relation to its biosphere neighbors.

Emerging out of the plant kingdom and into the animal kingdom, a myriad of recent discoveries exemplify humanity’s growing awareness of the sophistication and higher level of be-ing at which animals exist. The latest and most well-known finding is concerning dolphins. Dolphins have been perceived as being very intelligent beings for at least several thousand years. In ancient Greece, it was punishable by death to kill or harm a dolphin.

Much mythology revolves around dolphins. However, concerning the scientific data being research and analyzed, it has been found without doubt that human language and dolphin movement patterns show similarities in brevity. The law of brevity in human language, according to which the most frequently-used words tend to be the shortest, extends to dolphins, as well as other animal species. It was observed that when dolphins move on the surface of the water, they tend to make the simplest movements, in the same way that humans tend to use words comprised of fewer letters when they are speaking or writing.

Perhaps it is discoveries such as these and others that are altering the positions of awareness that humanity has concerning dolphins to the point where they are being described by scientsts as being non-human persons and, as a result, should be treated as such. Dolphins are recognized as being the most intelligent beings on our planet, after humans. The signs are numerous, such as: the anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence; and studies showing that dolphins have distinct personalities, strong sense of self, and the ability to think about the future. Dolphins are also cultural animals, which means that new types of behavior can be quickly picked up by one dolphin from another.

More stunning research has discovered that dolphins, as well as other animals such as macaque monkeys, have shown to have conscious metacognition. There is a growing amount of evidence that animals share functional parallels with human conscious metacognition. Metacognition is essentially the ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate various states of mind, and, although this was once considered solely the domain of humans, it is now seen as evident in some animals as well. J. David Smith, Ph.D., a comparative psychologist who has conducted a study on this topic, has concluded that “metacognition rivals language and tool use in its potential to establish important continuities or discontinuities between human and animal minds.”

Metacognition aside, animals are also now known to possess self-awareness. First seen in gorillas and then later in elephants and dolphins, self-awareness is no longer solely recognized as being the domain of the human being. When most animals see themselves in a mirror, they will interpret what they see as another animal, possibly a threat, and may attack the image or be scared away. After a while, the animals habituate and ignore the reflected image entirely. However, an animal that is self-aware will recognize the image as its own reflection, which is something that requires a degree of abstract thought and cognitive association.

As fascinating as these things may be, new research has discovered that several species of animals, such as monkeys, wolves, coyotes, elephants, chimpanzees, rodents, bats, and whales, have a sense of what is called “morality”, in that they are able to subjectively tell “right” from “wrong”. In a series of studies, scientists have found that monkeys and apes can make judgments about fairness, offer altruistic help and empathize when a fellow animal is ill or in a difficult situation. The existence of a conscience is also apparent, and remembering obligations also exists. Even when there is no obvious reward for an an altruistic action, chimpanzees were still observed as willing to help others. The conclusion of this observation led to the statement by one of the researchers that “chimpanzees spontaneously help both humans and each other in carefully controlled tests.”

Perhaps the most interesting point in this discovery is that everything else being equal, animals such as chimpanzees prefer to reward a companion together with themselves rather than just themselves alone. The act of giving by the monkeys is self-rewarding and can be said as being a demonstration of the interconnected consciousness of monkeys, just as humans, within their interconnected transpersonal consciousness, will experience the same effect. As the old adage goes: what you do to another, you do to/for yourself.

Language among animals is the one final demonstration, at least in this article, of the elevated level of consciousness and be-ing in other aspects of nature. It has been recently found that the rudiments of language exist among monkeys. Certain monkeys that have been studied have been seen to combine the same calls in different ways, using rules of grammar that turn sound into language. Alban Lemasson, a primatologist at the University of Rennes in France, has stated that “this is the first evidence we have in animal communication that they can combine, in a semantic way, different calls to create a new message.”

As it stands, it seems that humans are no longer the sole users of language in the sophisticated manner in which we use it. Although nowhere as complex as the syntax of human beings, monkey calls are more advanced and complex than we have ever previously been aware.

All these discoveries have occurred within a few years and are demonstrative of the incredibly accelerated rise in awareness that humanity is experiencing with respect to the level of consciousness of the various aspects of nature, as well as how primitive nature and all its various aspects seemed to be in times past. There is an awakening to a more intelligent nature than has ever been previously acknowledged. This is a step towards a new age in which humans and the rest of nature will hopefully have a more symbiotic and unifying relationship, and more respect will be given to the environment. Baby steps, for sure, but baby steps towards a positive future, nonetheless.

About the Author

Paul Lenda is a conscious evolution guide, author of The Creation of a Consciousness Shift, and co-founder of SHIFT>, a social community focused on anchoring in the new paradigm and assisting the positive transformation of humanity. With the drive to be aware of and experience the wider horizon of Reality, Paul has developed an extensive background in the spiritual and transformative elements of life; one that is both knowledge and experienced-based. Visit his website www.shift.is, follow him on Twitter or visit the Shift Facebook community.

Source: Waking Times

Genetically Modified Society (Documentary)

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TGE Media

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10/04/2013

A documentary covering the topics of (GMO’s) Genetically Modified food and Weather Modification.

”If you control the food supply, you control the people” – Henry Kissinger

Vaccine damage, hidden truth: not on the controlled corporate media news

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TGE News

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10/04/2013

120,000 adverse effects from vaccines every year in the US? 1.2 million?

What??

Read on.

The reference here is “In the Wake of Vaccines,” by Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center. Her article was published in the Sept./Oct. 2004 issue of Mothering Magazine.

Gathering information from several sources, Fisher makes a reasonable estimate of vaccine damage—actual figures are not available or carefully tracked or vetted. In other words, the system for reporting adverse effects is broken.

Fisher: “But how many children have [adverse] vaccine reactions every year? Is it really only one in 110,000 or one in a million who are left permanently disabled after vaccination? Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler observed in 1993 that less than 1 percent of doctors report adverse events following prescription drug use. [See DA Kessler, “Introducing MEDWatch,” JAMA, June 2, 1993: 2765-2768]

“There have been estimates that perhaps less than 5 or 10 percent of doctors report hospitalizations, injuries, deaths, or other serious health problems following vaccination. The 1986 Vaccine Injury Act contained no legal sanctions for not reporting; doctors can refuse to report and suffer no consequences.

“Even so, each year about 12,000 reports are made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System; parents as well as doctors can make those reports. [See RT Chen, B. Hibbs, “Vaccine safety,” Pediatric Annals, July 1998: 445-458]

“However, if that number represents only 10 percent of what is actually occurring, then the actual number may be 120,000 vaccine-adverse events. If doctors report vaccine reactions as infrequently as Dr. Kessler said they report prescription-drug reactions, and the number 12,000 is only 1 percent of the actual total, then the real number may be 1.2 million vaccine-adverse events annually.”

Knowing all this, it’s easy to figure out why researchers don’t do large controlled double-blind studies on vaccines.

They say they don’t compare large groups of people (vaccinated vs. unvaccinated) in studies because, get this, it would be unethical to deprive volunteers of vaccines during the length of the clinical trial.

Nonsense.

That’s the cover story.

The real reason is spelled out above. The group receiving vaccines would incur so much damage, it would be visible for all to see.

Memo to Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, and Dianne Sawyer:

If you want to be an actual journalist, try getting at the truth and reporting it.

Try ignoring the arrogant doctors who assure you everything is fine.

Oh, wait. You can’t. Your bosses won’t let you. And you don’t care.

Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com

DC Political Plutocracy has US Government in Stranglehold

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TGE News

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10/04/2013

A Shadow Government now runs the USA … into the ground

As it was recently reported in the HuffPo, the Washington, DC area is now home to four of the five wealthiest counties in the country. That their report of this factoid was so casual and lacking in insight is testimony to the mainstream media’s contribution to this very unfortunate state of affairs.

The Washington, DC area now has 4 of 5 richest counties in the nation according to a recent article by The Huffpost:

“Great government! Four of the five wealthiest counties in the United States are in the D.C. area. (The fifth is in New Jersey.)”
– The Huffington Post

When the concentration of wealth is so great in the political epicenter of American politics it can only mean that the People‘s business is not getting done. Only the corporations of the world, as well as other nations looking to buy influence here, have the money in the current ongoing recession to maintain such a high standard of living.

Therefore, wherever corporate money and influence predominate through the agency of high-powered lobbyists, lawyers, ex-politicians, bankers, etc., the people’s interest almost always suffers. Considering the many wealthy enclaves located in Florida, New York, California and Texas, this little factoid becomes all the more telling.

Top 1% Getting 95% of Income Gains: Is Washington Responsible?

The amount of money that it takes to grease legislative agendas has become quite staggering. Only the top 1% has the wherewithal to conduct such expensive campaigns against the interest of the American people. Only the top 1% has a high enough incentive to build a cadre of agents and functionaries large enough to see those lobbying efforts through.

The revolving door between government and the private sector is well known. This incestuous relationship has assured that the political plutocracy will only continue to grow and get even stronger. The stranglehold that this political class has on everything that happens in DC is what must be broken if the American people are to get their constitutional republic back.

Three Branches Of Government Work For Them(selves), Not We The People

The most powerful members of the executive branch, legislative branch and judicial branch all live or work in these richest counties and surrounding areas. The 535 voting members of Congress, for instance, are under constant ‘surveillance’ by those lobbyists whose mission it is to ensure specific legislative outcomes, especially when Congress is in session. Consequently, because of the extremely high cost of doing business in the DC area, the peoples’ agenda rarely gets heard.

The real reason for such a high cost of housing in Washington lies in the too cozy relationship between the government sector and the corporate sector. Even doing business in DC has risen to a level of financial cost that is prohibitive to all but the wealthy elite. It is in these evolving and insidious institutional arrangements that the citizenry finds obstacles so formidable that they are now impossible to overcome.

Simply put, the people’s business will always be subordinated to the corporate interests as long as these institutional arrangements stay entrenched. Each successive election cycle has only served to validate the extraordinary influence that corporations and their lobbyists have on the campaigns and voting results.

Conclusion:

Perhaps the time has come for the electorate to address this profound and fundamental systemic issue once and for all. After all, the very existence of the Republic lies in the balance. As does the Constitution and the democracy which gives voice to it.

It was John F. Kennedy who said:

“A revolution is coming – a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough – but a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.”

There is no question that JFK was a unique kind of modern day prophet. Hopefully, those to whom he was speaking understand that the day is now upon us. Otherwise, JFK’s other prognostication (as follows) will likely manifest in the not-too-distant future.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

References:
Peek Inside The Most Expensive Homes In America’s Richest Counties
CHALLENGING AMERICA’S PLUTOCRACY: The Power of Individual Voters to Transform Their Government

Michael Thomas
State of the Nation 2013
September 29, 2013
admin@stateofthenation2012.com

Source: StoryLeak.com

Dr. Mercola Interviews Dr. Huber about GMOs

By

TGE Media

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10/03/2013

Natural health physician and Mercola.com founder Dr. Joseph Mercola interviews Dr. Don Huber!

World Bank Whistleblower Karen Hudes Reveals How The Global Elite Rule The World

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TGE News

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10/02/2013

Karen Hudes is a graduate of Yale Law School and she worked in the legal department of the World Bank for more than 20 years. In fact, when she was fired for blowing the whistle on corruption inside the World Bank, she held the position of Senior Counsel. She was in a unique position to see exactly how the global elite rule the world, and the information that she is now revealing to the public is absolutely stunning. According to Hudes, the elite use a very tight core of financial institutions and mega-corporations to dominate the planet. The goal is control. They want all of us enslaved to debt, they want all of our governments enslaved to debt, and they want all of our politicians addicted to the huge financial contributions that they funnel into their campaigns. Since the elite also own all of the big media companies, the mainstream media never lets us in on the secret that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that our system works.

Remember, this is not some “conspiracy theorist” that is saying these things. This is a Yale-educated attorney that worked inside the World Bank for more than two decades. The following summary of her credentials comes directly from her website…

Karen Hudes studied law at Yale Law School and economics at the University of Amsterdam. She worked in the US Export Import Bank of the US from 1980-1985 and in the Legal Department of the World Bank from 1986-2007. She established the Non Governmental Organization Committee of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association and the Committee on Multilateralism and the Accountability of International Organizations of the American Branch of the International Law Association.

Today, Hudes is trying very hard to expose the corrupt financial system that the global elite are using to control the wealth of the world. During an interview with the New American, she discussed how we are willingly allowing this group of elitists to totally dominate the resources of the planet…

A former insider at the World Bank, ex-Senior Counsel Karen Hudes, says the global financial system is dominated by a small group of corrupt, power-hungry figures centered around the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve. The network has seized control of the media to cover up its crimes, too, she explained. In an interview with The New American, Hudes said that when she tried to blow the whistle on multiple problems at the World Bank, she was fired for her efforts. Now, along with a network of fellow whistleblowers, Hudes is determined to expose and end the corruption. And she is confident of success.

Citing an explosive 2011 Swiss study published in the PLOS ONE journal on the “network of global corporate control,” Hudes pointed out that a small group of entities — mostly financial institutions and especially central banks — exert a massive amount of influence over the international economy from behind the scenes. “What is really going on is that the world’s resources are being dominated by this group,” she explained, adding that the “corrupt power grabbers” have managed to dominate the media as well. “They’re being allowed to do it.”

Previously, I have written about the Swiss study that Hudes mentioned. It was conducted by a team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. They studied the relationships between 37 million companies and investors worldwide, and what they discovered is that there is a “super-entity” of just 147 very tightly knit mega-corporations that controls 40 percent of the entire global economy…

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

But the global elite don’t just control these mega-corporations. According to Hudes, they also dominate the unelected, unaccountable organizations that control the finances of virtually every nation on the face of the planet. The World Bank, the IMF and central banks such as the Federal Reserve literally control the creation and the flow of money worldwide.

At the apex of this system is the Bank for International Settlements. It is the central bank of central banks, and posted below is a video where you can watch Hudes tell Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com the following…

“We don’t have to wait for anybody to fire the Fed or Bank for International Settlements . . . some states have already started to recognize silver and gold, the precious metals, as currency”

Most people have never even heard of the Bank for International Settlements, but it is an extremely important organization. In a previous article, I described how this “central bank of the world” is literally immune to the laws of all national governments…

An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that “it is not accountable to any single national government.” The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another “Global Economy Meeting”. During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.

This system did not come into being by accident. In fact, the global elite have been developing this system for a very long time. In a previous article entitled “Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Is Pulling The Strings“, I included a quote from Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley from a book that he authored all the way back in 1966 in which he discussed the big plans that the elite had for the Bank for International Settlements…

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.

And that is exactly what we have today.

We have a system of “neo-feudalism” in which all of us and our national governments are enslaved to debt. This system is governed by the central banks and by the Bank for International Settlements, and it systematically transfers the wealth of the world out of our hands and into the hands of the global elite.

But most people have no idea that any of this is happening because the global elite also control what we see, hear and think about. Today, there are just six giant media corporations that control more than 90 percent of the news and entertainment that you watch on your television in the United States.

This is the insidious system that Karen Hudes is seeking to expose. For much more, you can listen to Joyce Riley of the Power Hour interview her for an entire hour right here.

(Via The Economic Collapse Blog)

These Are Not the Normal Activities of a Government Planning for Peace and Stability

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TGE News

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10/01/2013

Something is amiss. Most Americans know this – they can feel it deep down inside – even if they don’t know what it is, things just don’t seem right.

The signs are everywhere. The headlines are true.

The global economy is faltering. The United States has become wholly dependent on the Federal Reserve injecting nearly $1 trillion dollars a year into financial markets and the U.S. government just to stay afloat. Over one hundred million Americans are living in poverty and dependent on government disbursements just to make ends meet.

Across the world the cold war between the U.S., Russia, China and regions in the middle east is heating up. Just last month our President brought the entire planet to the very brink of what could have easily devolved into conflict on such a scale that even global leaders were suggesting that World War III was imminent. War mongers in Congress were so adamant about launching a middle east strike on Syria that one of them even suggested a nuclear weapon could be detonated over South Carolina if we failed to act.

On the domestic front, homeland security preparations and exercises have accelerated to the point that the government has now said that a cyber attack capable of taking down the national power grid is a 100% certainty. They’ve stocked tens of millions of emergency ration and supplies, and nearly 2 billion rounds of ammunition. They’ve trained for the last decade for scenarios that include economic collapse and the subsequent civil unrest that would follow.

These are not the normal activities of a government planning for peace and stability.

In the following interview with SGT Report, Dave Hodges of The Common Sense Show connects the dots in a way that will leave most of our countrymen stunned.

There’s a plan in place and it involves political leaders, business conglomerates, the military industrial complex and a massive global agenda. And one day soon that plan will be executed. Once that day comes, look out, because everything you’ve ever imagined going wrong will, and the world will delve into one of its darkest periods in history.

“Anything is possible. I wouldn’t put anything past them,” notes Sean of SGT Report.

Indeed.

Pay attention to this amazingly insightful interview, because it details how the elite think, what their priorities are, and how far they are willing to go to accomplish their goals.

What are they preparing for?

Look at what’s going on today with regard to DHS and FEMA. There are no less than eight disaster drills planned between the period of time which started September 25th and goes through November 13th.

I suspect within one of these drills we will see a false flag drill, because it follows the old familiar pattern of having a drill and then having the event within the drill – 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, the Boston Marathon bombing, and so forth.

So, this is what I think is coming guys. I don’t think we’re going to wait long to see some dramatic shifts in our country.

(Watch at Youtube)

There is a collapse that is coming.

The banks have been preparing for it for over a year now, and I go back to last year when the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that when you deposit your money in the bank that money belongs to the bank and they may do with it what they will.

An then you move forward and start looking at the Bank of International Settlements [the central bank of central banks] in which they most recently told the central banks around the world basically to stop loaning. They want to cut the amount of money in circulation dramatically.

If I was running a bank, and I knew a collapse was coming, I would want to gather all my nuts for the winter and store them, and I wouldn’t want them outside of my confines.

Well, that’s exactly what the banks are doing… The banks are gearing up for the collapse.

…

I really expect that, if this grid drill doesn’t attract more attention than it is currently receiving, this will be the false flag. But we have other possibilities.

In October… there’s a cyber attack drill involving 1000 banks… Well there’s another opportunity to take it down.

But my favorite here would be the Grid-X drill… This has to do with Syria and Iran. The globalists that support the Petro dollar need to make Iran stop selling their oil for gold to China, Russia and India; and now Brazil is threatening to get into this game, too.

The Petro dollar will crash. Now, the globalists are going to crash the Petro dollar and the Federal Reserve note at some point. But they want to do it at a time of their choosing.

Obama is under extreme pressure to get this war started in the middle east. This is why I believe in the month of May the globalist corporate controlled central media essentially ran five Watergate type scandals on Obama in a ten day period. That was orchestrated to get him off dead-center. He wasn’t able to get the job done.

So, they may be saying, maybe we can’t save the Petro dollar, so let’s go ahead and collapse the whole thing.

Let’s go forward to the Grid-X drill and see how this ties in… If you take down the power, by the third day people are going to be rioting in the streets, there going to have no food, and it’s going to be absolute and total chaos.

Within that false flag event could lie another one.

The globalists may have made the decision to collapse the economy at that point by taking down the banks.

And who’s going to be caring about how many digits are on your computerized bank account on the third day of a black out if you do not have food on the table?

This… is a likely possibility if Obama is not able to break the quagmire and attack Syria.

…

The difference with what will happen with the grid if they turn this into a false flag event and these isolated events like Hurricane Sandy, is the fact that there was still outside help being rendered.

If we have the entire grid go down across the country the cavalry will not come, there’s no 9-1-1- to call, the police will not respond, people are totally on their own.

As noted in the interview by SGT Report:

All of these things that we’re seeing in Cyprus, in Panama, in Greece… These things are essentially the model for what I think will eventually come here to our own shores. That’s why we want to rattle the cage and we want to inform as many people as we can about tangible assets, hard assets.

Hard assets. Those are the only things you’ll be able to depend on if the grid goes down, or if your bank collapses, or if the government rolls tanks down your neighborhood street.

You’ll need stores of food and access to water. You’ll need firearms and ammunition to defend yourself. You’ll need gold and silver as a medium of exchange. And you’ll need barterable goods and trade skills.

If you haven’t done so already, prepare a contingency plan for a long-term event that essentially destroys the life you have come to know in the consumer society.

How likely is it that such events will come to pass? Every century we’ve seen widespread war, famine, and destruction. Thus, the odds are pretty good we’re going to see it again in our lifetimes.

Give yourself and your family a fighting chance and prepare for the worst.

This article is brought to you by Mac Slavo here at SHTFplan.com

INFOGRAPHIC: Profiting Off U.S. Prisoners

By

TGE News

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10/01/2013

With some politicians arguing private prisons help states save money and other politicians arguing the system is rife with corruption, there can be no debate about this basic fact: The private prison system has surged in size since the U.S. began experimenting with private prisons in 1984. Between 1990 and 2009, the inmate population housed in private prisons grew by more than 1,600 percent.

– 1,598,780
– Total number of state and federal prisoners
– 128,195
– Number of state and federal prisoners housed in private facilities
– 37%
– Increase in private prison population between 2002 and 2009

Following the Money

– $3.4 billion
– Combined revenue in 2011 for two largest private prison corporations; that�s more than the GDP of Greenland and the U.S. Virgin Islands combined.
– Corrections Corporation of America – $1.74 billion
– GEO Group – $1.61 billion
– $5.7 million
– Executive compensation for CCA CEO George C. Zoley in 2011
– $3.7 million
– Executive compensation for GEO Group CEO Damon T. Hininger in 2011

Side-by-Side

– Take a closer look at the two largest private prison companies in the U.S.
– Corrections Corporation of America
– Facilities: 66
– Beds: 90,000
– Where they are:
– Texas: 11
– Tennessee: 7
– Arizona: 6
– Georgia: 6
– Florida: 5
– California: 4
– Colorado: 4
– Oklahoma: 4
– Kentucky: 3
– New Mexico: 3
– Mississippi: 2
– Ohio: 2
– Montana: 1
– Nevada: 1
– New Jersey: 1
– Idaho: 1
– Louisiana: 1
– Minnesota: 1
– Indiana: 1
– Kansas: 1
– D.C.: 1
– GEO Group
– Facilities: 56
– Beds: 61,000
– Where they are:
– Texas: 13
– Florida: 3
– California: 4
– Georgia: 4
– Arizona: 3
– New Mexico: 3
– Colorado: 2
– Indiana: 2
– Louisiana: 2
– Washington: 1
– Oklahoma: 1
– New York: 1
– Pennsylvania: 1
– North Carolina: 1
– Virginia: 1

Clean Record

– Safety
– Both companies have faced allegations of unsafe conditions at some of their facilities.
– Inmate-on-inmate assaults in Idaho (2007-2008)
– CCA-run Idaho Correctional Center State-run Idaho State Correctional Institution
– 132 42
– Both facilities held about the same number of inmates, 1,500.
– $6.5 million
– Damages awarded in wrongful death lawsuit against GEO Group in beating death of an inmate by his cellmate at a GEO Group-run prison in Oklahoma
– $1.1 million
– New Mexico Department of Corrections fine against GEO Group for inadequate staffing
– Race
– In addition to safety-related accusations, private prisons also face criticism over racial concerns. According to one analysis, minorities are over-represented in private prisons compared to government-run facilities.
– Percentage of inmates of color
– State Private Public
– California 89% 75%
– Texas 71% 66%
– Arizona 65% 60%
– Immigration status
– Immigration detainees now number about 400,000 a year, and about 1 in 2 are held in private prisons.
– Immigration detainees held in private prisons
– Today 50%
– 2003 25%
– 457%
– Increase in immigration detention since 1994

Boon to Local Economies?

– Despite claims that state budgets can be bolstered by turning to private prisons, studies in several states have found just the opposite. And in the case of Hardin, Montana, the promise of a new private prison never panned out, wasting the town millions.
– $27 million Bonds issued by the town to fund the project
– 67: People offered jobs at facility that never opened
– $8,000 Cost to fix leaky pipes in new building
– $10,000 Monthly gas bills at empty facility

Sources

– http://www.huffingtonpost.com
– http://www.policymic.com
– http://www.cca.com
– http://www.geogroup.com
– http://www.sec.gov
– http://www.propublica.org
– http://www.bjs.gov
– http://www.aclu.org

Source: http://www.topcriminaljusticedegrees.org/private-prisons/

Are You Prepared For An Extremely Bitterly Cold Winter? Solar Activity Is At A 100 Year Low

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TGE News

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09/27/2013

Are you ready for bone-chilling cold this winter? The Old Farmer’s Almanac and other weather forecasters that rely on solar activity as a factor in their weather forecasts are projecting that this upcoming winter will be bitterly cold. Solar activity is at a 100-year low, and even though we were supposed to be in the midst of a solar maximum this year, our sun has been eerily quiet. So precisely what in the world is going on?

There have been other periods throughout history when solar activity has been extraordinarily quiet, and those times have corresponded with periods of extreme cold. For example, the “Maunder Minimum” which stretched from 1645 to 1715 corresponded with the most bitterly cold period that the earth experienced in the last 1000 years. So could we be heading toward another “mini-ice age”? That is a question that some scientists are now beginning to ask.

Clearly, something unusual is happening with our sun. The following is from a Universe Today article that was posted back in July…/p>

Our nearest star has exhibited some schizophrenic behavior thus far for 2013.
By all rights, we should be in the throes of a solar maximum, an 11-year peak where the Sun is at its most active and dappled with sunspots.

Thus far though, Solar Cycle #24 has been off to a sputtering start, and researchers that attended the meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Solar Physics Division earlier this month are divided as to why.“Not only is this the smallest cycle we’ve seen in the space age, it’s the smallest cycle in 100 years,” NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center research scientist David Hathaway said during a recent press teleconference conducted by the Marshall Space Flight Center.

In a previous article, I noted that scientists are absolutely baffled by this. So far, nobody can explain why this solar cycle is so weak…

The Sun is acting weird. It typically puts on a pageant of magnetic activity every 11 years for aurora watchers and sungazers alike, but this time it overslept. When it finally woke up (a year late), it gave the weakest performance in 100 years.

The good news is that this kind of thing has happened before.

The bad news is that when solar activity slows down dramatically it tends to correspond with extremely cold weather as the Times of India recently explained…

Predictions that 2013 would see an upsurge in solar activity and geomagnetic storms disrupting power grids and communications systems have proved to be a false alarm. Instead, the current peak in the solar cycle is the weakest for a century.

Subdued solar activity has prompted controversial comparisons with the Maunder Minimum, which occurred between 1645 and 1715, when a prolonged absence of sunspots and other indicators of solar activity coincided with the coldest period in the last millennium.

Certainly solar activity is just one of the factors that influences our weather and many other factors are involved as well.

But it is undeniable that during the last “Little Ice Age” in Europe there were very few sunspots…

Times of depressed solar activity seem to correspond with times of global cold. For example, during the 70-year period from 1645 to 1715, few, if any, sunspots were seen, even during expected sunspot maximums. Western Europe entered a climate period known as the “Maunder Minimum” or “Little Ice Age.” Temperatures dropped by 1.8 to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Conversely, times of increased solar activity have corresponded with global warning. During the 12th and 13th centuries, the Sun was active, and the European climate was quite mild.

And the lull in solar activity that we are experiencing now is causing many, including the Old Farmer’s Almanac, to project that we have a bitterly cold winter ahead of us…

The Farmers’ Almanac is using words like “piercing cold,” “bitterly cold” and “biting cold” to describe the upcoming winter. And if its predictions are right, the first outdoor Super Bowl in years will be a messy “Storm Bowl.”

The 197-year-old publication that hits newsstands Monday predicts a winter storm will hit the Northeast around the time the Super Bowl is played at MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands in New Jersey. It also predicts a colder-than-normal winter for two-thirds of the country and heavy snowfall in the Midwest, Great Lakes and New England.
“We’re using a very strong four-letter word to describe this winter, which is C-O-L-D. It’s going to be very cold,” said Sandi Duncan, managing editor.

That doesn’t sound very fun.

So has the Old Farmer’s Almanac been accurate in the past?

According to their website, they claim an 80 percent accuracy rate…

The Old Farmer’s Almanac, first published in 1792 during the first term of George Washington, has always watched the weather. Our famous long-range weather forecasts are traditionally 80 percent–accurate.

We will see what happens this year.

For North America, the Almanac is predicting that we will see “below-normal temperatures” and “above-normal snowfall”…

According to the newest edition of North America’s oldest continuously published periodical, a decline in solar activity combined with ocean-atmosphere patterns in the Pacific and Atlantic will result in below-normal temperatures and above-normal snowfall during most of the winter across much of the United States.

“This winter is shaping up to be a rough one,” says Janice Stillman, editor of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. “Sweaters and snow shovels should be unpacked early and kept close by throughout the season. The good news is that the extra precipitation—which will fall as rain or snow depending where you are—will help with any drought issues left over from the summer.”

So if you like winter weather, it looks like this will be a good year for you.

For the rest of us, we will just have to wear lots of warm clothing and stay inside a lot.

But of course the much bigger story is what this could mean for the years ahead.

Are we now moving into a time similar to the “Maunder Minimum” when solar activity will be very low and global temperatures will decrease?

Could it be possible that Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory and others are correct and that we are heading into a new mini-ice age?

Let’s certainly hope not, but without a doubt something very strange is happening to our sun.

Only time will tell what that means for our future.

This article was written by Michael Snyder and originally published at The Truth Wins

The Global Elite’s Crimes Against Humanity: The Subversion Of Happiness And Truth

By

TGE News

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09/27/2013

For thousands of years, people have been writing about happiness. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus concluded that happiness lies in the pursuit of external pleasure. Other philosophers, from Antisthenes to Buddha, have stressed that looking inwards and leading an ascetic life based on virtue, simplicity and inner peace is the route to happiness. And then there are others who seem to think that we can only be occasionally happy in what is essentially a miserable world. The German philosopher Arthur said that all happiness is an illusion and that life oscillates like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.

Happiness is, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a state of well-being and contentment: a pleasurable or satisfying experience.”

For some, happiness runs much deeper than merely being content. Aristotle held that being virtuous was only one aspect of happiness. In the absence of say wealth and intelligence, virtue could only bring about a form of contentment.

But that’s not enough for others. They strive to achieve an ongoing state of bliss, of feeling at one with the universe and everything in it. Through years of meditation, self-reflective practice or consciousness development, they can learn to transcend the illusion of existence and live life on a higher reality. A case of ignoring reality while striving to live out an illusion?

However, let’s not get too caught up in cynicism here. Illusion is all around us – both on a personal level and on a wider political level. The type of society we live in has a huge bearing on happiness or well-being. Perhaps Schopenhauer’s view is increasingly apt in this age of austerity and war-driven advanced capitalism.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

From Bernays to Albright: ‘their’ happiness, our misery

Virtually every government in the world creates an illusion for its people. Take economic policy. Government policies might hurt us in the short term, but we are all on a one way route to the ‘promised land’ of happiness, or so we are told by the politicians, the corporate media and spokespersons for the ones who make us suffer to ensure they never have to – the privileged elite, the ruling class.

Western governments set out to con ordinary working folk by bringing us war in the name of peace, austerity in order to achieve prosperity and suffering to eventually make us happy. Is there any room for truth? Politicians never like to tell the public the truth. The feel-bad factor is never a vote winner. Best to keep the public in the dark and rely on positive spin. If people knew the truth, they just wouldn’t be happy.

And selling the feel-good factor is all pervasive. In this age of irretrievable materialism, the route to happiness is more goods, better goods, newer goods. A never-ending smorgasbord of commodities to be craved for, which will bring us happiness. In league with private corporations, governments have learnt to play on our desires to create a one-dimensional type of happiness based on consumerism.

In part, Edward Bernays is responsible for this. The father of modern public relations and propaganda, he was expert in manipulating human perceptions of pain and pleasure, misery and happiness. Tap into or shape people’s desires in a certain way, and you can sell virtually any notion of happiness (or reality), regardless of how bogus it may be.

Whether it was whipping up mass fear in the US about the bogeyman of communism or selling the ‘American Dream’ of happiness through consuming goods, Bernays and the advertising industry, which took its cue from him, were able to marry misery and happiness together – if you do not buy into consumer capitalism, the alternative will be misery; if you do not buy this or that product, life will be terrible; if you do not join in the celebration of capitalism, those awful Soviets will take over and impose a fundamentally unhappy system of equality on each and every one of us.

Under American capitalism, the lie was that everyone would all live happily ever after because of, not in spite of, gross inequality, massive privileges and disadvantages and exploitation of labour, which all went under the notion of meritocracy and a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.

Bernays’ propaganda techniques set the stage for con-trick of ‘liberal democracy’. The US government quickly learned that angels and demons could be manufactured out of thin air and, from Guatemala, Congo and Vietnam to Iraq, wars and destabilisations could be built on packs of lies – lies about evil-doers about to kick down the door, lies about the impending misery they would inflict on the US and on far away countries and lies about the government delivering us from impending doom.

Of course, it is best to arm ourselves to the teeth with nuclear weapons to ensure no one imposes their miserable regimes or awful ways of life on us. And to prevent us all shuddering with the fear of the threat of nuclear Armageddon on a daily basis, it’s a case of don’t worry, be happy, forget about it and watch TV. Even the very real danger of near-instant annihilation of the species is shoved to one side for the sake of a feel-good culture.

And the best way to instil that feeling is to have us endlessly treading around a wheel in a cage. Millions are locked into the pursuit of the Bernay’s model of happiness. They are locked into addiction. Addicted to the pursuit of acquisition, of hedonism, of chasing the dream. Addicted to the belief that there is a point to it all, where happiness is achieved by acquisitive materialism.

But, to paraphrase a sentiment from Buddhism: someone, somewhere, may well be suffering on our behalf for this happiness, this hedonism. There is no ‘may be’ about it.

So much blood has been spilled by those unfortunate enough to have been born in certain parts of the world on behalf of people in other parts of the world who deem the need to possess resources to be more worthy than the lives destroyed in order to grab them. Recall Madelaine Albright saying the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was a price worth paying for furthering the geo-political interests of US corporations. And yes, a drone attack here, some ‘collateral damage’ there, and those boys in the US control centres are happy with a hard days killing.

In the US Declaration of Independence, there is the phrase “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom and happiness (or the pursuit of it) is central, albeit built on the misery of others.

‘Life’, ‘liberty’ and ‘happiness’ have become debased. Fed to the masses, happiness has been confused with excessive individualism and the never-ending pursuit of material goods. It became hijacked by the likes of Bernays. With his knowledge of psycho-analysis (Sigmund Freud was his uncle), he knew it was relatively easy to manipulate desires and get people hooked on indulging in certain behaviour, even if ultimately they don’t really want or need those consumer products, those ‘false needs’, they strive to acquire. Getting them hooked is what really counts.

You have no time to think about the disillusionment because you are all too busy buying the next quick-fix for happiness product. It’s called retail ‘therapy’ for good reason. A therapy that has no long-term benefit. It’s a feel-bad, feel-good then feel bad again spiral.

But who needs this form of ‘happiness’, this type of ‘liberty’, ultimately underpinned by an Albright-esque view of life and death? No one. Yet the masses are encouraged to swallow the lies. The propaganda is pervasive.

Look no further than all those feel-good Hollywood trash films, passed off as ‘blockbusters’, that gloss over or usually ignore all the mundane, miserable aspects of life in working class ‘America’. Little wonder half the world seems to want to live in the US. The need to portray a bogus notion of happiness has served to kick reality into touch. The Hollywood propaganda machine has seen to that.

The ‘wealth creators’ and their crimes against humanity

The great ‘American Dream’ was built on craving and propaganda. It was built on stripping the environment bare, on the unsustainable raping of nature to fuel profits, perpetual war and misery and suffering. The sociologist C.Wright Mills noted the existence of a post-war power elite in the US back in 1956. An integrated power elite of big corporations, the military and the political establishment. Fast forward 57 years and it is responsible for a body count of ten million dead and counting (1), a statistic, a dirty secret that Hollywood will never tell. Ten million slaughtered in US-backed wars and by death squads, covert ops and destabilisations (2). Drug-running and the exporting of terror and murder, glorified by countless Hollywood icons, commentators and politicians under the banner of championing freedom and democracy.

The system in place exists to benefit not the majority, but small a minority of just 6,000 to 7,000 people (3). These are the extremely wealthy of the world who have cemented their position on the back of their ancestors and hundreds of years of capitalism. These are the people setting the globalisation and war agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO. They are from the highest levels of finance capital and transnational corporations (4,5). These billionaires, this transnational capitalist class, dictate global economic policies and decide on who lives and who dies and which wars are fought and inflicted on which people. Although they are having a bit of difficulty in kick-starting it right now, with their see-through lies and hypocrisy, Syria is a case in point.

Their crimes against humanity are never mentioned as such. Instead, these people are called ‘wealth creators’. They are the self anointed role models and captains of industry. The high flyers who have stolen ordinary people’s wealth, who have stashed it away in tax havens, who have bankrupted economies because of their reckless gambling and greed and who have imposed a form of globalisation that results in devastating destruction and war for those who attempt to remain independent from them, or structurally adjusted violence via privatisation and economic neo-liberalism for millions in countries that have acquiesced.

Little wonder then that attempts to redress the balance, to snatch control away from this criminal class, have been brutally suppressed over the decades. From democratic leftist organisations to any government pursuing a socialist alternative, this class has used intelligence agencies or military might to attempt to subvert or annihilate any opposition.

From El Salvador and Chile to Egypt and India’s tribal belt, ordinary folk across the world have been subjected to policies that have resulted in oppression, poverty and conflict. But this is all passed off by politicians and the corrupt mainstream media as the way things must be. And anyone who stands up to this lie is ridiculed at best or spied upon, tortured and killed at worst in order to prevent the truth from emerging. And that truth is that many of us know what ‘happiness’ really is, the type of society necessary to establish it – based on communality and economic equality – and that the immensely wealthy people who stand in its way do all things necessary to prevent us from having it. Socialism is not a dirty word.

Various well-being surveys indicate that happier societies invest heavily in health, welfare and education, are more equal and live within the limits imposed by the environment. Many less wealthy countries (and wealthy) do well in such surveys because cultural priority is placed on family and friends, on social capital rather than financial capital, on social equity rather than corporate power. It’s no coincidence that people in places like Britain and the US appear to be less happy than they were 40 years ago (6).

Karl Marx knew that self actualisation was to be truly achieved in a society that makes it possible for someone to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as he has a mind. Being ‘happy’ is state of being, a state of worthwhile endeavour freely chosen and not imposed. It is not achieved through the pursuit of an ultimate unattainable elusive goal on a never ending treadmill of drudgery, a never ending treadmill of control. Not a fixed end point to be achieved by possessing a hundred latest, cutting edge consumer gadgets and indulging in the individualised competition of conspicuous consumption that proclaims ‘look at me, I’m better than you, I’m elevated from the crowd’. And by elevating oneself in such a way, the gregarious human animal is cut off from the wider group and may ultimately become rather unhappy.

And yet it is ordinary working class men (and women) who sign up to join the military and support this system on behalf of these immensely wealthy people. Such people have however always been adept in manipulating the masses to rally around flag and nation, evoking an emotive misplaced sense of patriotism to pursue their militarism or justify their exploitation.

In his book ‘A people’s History of England’, The Marxist academic AL Morton documented how ordinary people, over many hundreds of years, set out to challenge these rulers and often paid with their lives. Nothing ever came for free and ordinary working people fought tooth and nail for any rights that they managed to obtain.

Such a travesty then, that today, ordinary people are denied economic opportunities because this class has sold their jobs to the lowest bidder in India, China or elsewhere. This class and its ‘think tanks’ were determined to shatter the post-war Keynesian consensus based on a robust welfare state and government intervention in the economy to help secure full employment. Any notions of ‘fairness’ and the benefits to be derived from the welfare state were to be substituted for positive notions about the free market and individual responsibility in order to justify the real intention of shifting the balance of power towards elite interests.

With workers’ wages having been depressed over a period of decades, demand having thus been propped up by debt and bankers demanding to be bailed out, how convenient that the lie of ‘austerity’ is being used as a bettering ram to finish off what the likes of Reagan and Thatcher did in the 80s with their pro-big business, pro-privatisation, anti-union, anti-welfare policies.

And we are supposed to thank ‘them’ for this? To vote for ‘their’ politicians, to join in a media circus to celebrate the birth of another royal parasite, to support their killing in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere?

Yes, we are supposed to back them and take in the poisonous lie that ‘we are all in it together’. And ordinary young men (and women) are supposed to sign up to fight their wars.
The working classes, the great, great grandchildren of the cannon-fodder ‘heroes’ sacrificed en masse on the blood-soaked battlefields of countless other wars that have gone before can now join up to fight again. For what? Austerity, powerlessness, imperialism, propping up the US dollar. For whom? Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, BP, JP Morgan, Black Rock, Boeing and the rest.

The US economy has been hollowed out. Much of manufacturing has been shipped abroad. For those who benefitted, the US can go to hell in a handbasket, and it has. Meanwhile, for them, record profits ensue. It’s the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to them, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements (7) which open the gates for plunder, or through coercion and militarism (8) which merely tear them down.

In places like India, it cuts both ways. ‘Free’ trade and a state enforced militarism that both result in countless deaths and the forced removals of hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest folk from their lands and villages for the benefit of powerful corporations and a bogus notion of development. “I love my India” well-off ordinary urban dwellers often say. Patriotism has always been a distraction, a tool to be ignited by the oppressors at will among the masses.

As societies become hollowed out, with empty echoes of patriotism ringing out, they increasingly resemble boxes. The only thing inside however is a giant, brutal mechanical hand. There is nothing else apart from it. And it’s only function is to pull the lid shut if anyone ever dares to tear it open and shed light into the box. If successful, they will see the immorality, the lies, the hypocrisies. The social control based on the subversion of life, liberty and happiness.

Notes
1) http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cias-hollywood-release-zero-dark-thirty-or-how-people-lose-their-humanity/5318368
2) http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/US_Interventions_WBlumZ.html
3) David Rothkopf, SuperClass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008).
4) William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004).
5) Peter Philips and Brady Osbourne, Exposing the Financial Core of the Transnational Capitalist Class, Global Research, September 13, 2013.
6) http://www.deccanherald.com/content/112464/in-pursuit-happiness.html
7) http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-eu-india-free-trade-agreement-corporate-driven-neocolonial-plunder/5338049
8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

About the author:
Originally from the northwest of England, Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India. He has written extensively for the Bangalore-based Deccan Herald, New Indian Express and Morning Star (Britain). His articles have also appeared in many other newspapers, journals and books. His East by Northwest site is at: http://colintodhunter.blogspot.com

This article first appeared at GlobalResearch.ca

10 Easy, Natural Remedies for Conquering the Common Cold

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TGE News

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09/26/2013

Persistent coughing, runny nose, stuffed up sinuses, headaches — these are among the many symptoms that can drag you down and leave you feeling helpless to make it through your day and fulfill your responsibilities when you catch a cold virus. But rather than reach for those chemical-laden cough syrups and mind-numbing antihistamines, why not instead try one or more of these 10 natural remedies for conquering the common cold?

1) Vitamin D. Vitamin D is perhaps the most overlooked, and yet arguably one of the most effective, remedies for treating the common cold. Although it works better as a preventive regimen, taking higher than normal doses of vitamin D3 daily — some experts recommend taking 10,000 international units (IU) or more of vitamin D3 every day — can help reduce cold and flu symptoms and get you back to normal health much more quickly than without them. (http://www.lef.org)

2) Apple cider vinegar. Cold viruses tend to put the body into an overly acidic state, which makes it that much more difficult for the immune system to fight disease. But taking apple cider vinegar, a powerful alkalizing food, will help not only kill a cold but also squash its miserable symptoms. Mixing a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar with warm water, honey, and lemon, and drinking the concoction several times a day will have you back to health in no time. (http://www.rd.com/slideshows/8-health-benefits-of-apple-cider-vinegar/) Read also: Can You Use Apple Cider Vinegar For Weight Loss?

3) Vitamin C. A powerful immune booster, vitamin C is a go-to remedy for both preventing and treating colds. Some experts recommend taking up to 2,000 milligrams (mg) or more of non-genetically-modified (non-GMO) ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate every two hours while suffering cold symptoms. Other vitamin C options include camu camu and acerola cherry powders, as well as “liposomal” vitamin C preparations. (http://www.naturalnews.com/034591_vitamin_C_mega-dose_healing.html)

4) Honey. A powerful soothing and healing agent, raw honey from untainted bees can go a long way in boosting immunity and treating cold symptoms. Its diverse array of antioxidant, antiviral, and antibacterial nutrients make honey an excellent cold medicine that mixes well with other cold remedies such as apple cider vinegar and lemon. (http://www.naturalnews.com)

5) Ginger. Another powerful, soothing agent, ginger root is a powerful healer with amazing anti-inflammatory properties. Because it targets stomach upset, those suffering from cold symptoms that involve digestion can experience dramatic relief from taking ginger. Ginger also helps warm the body, which is highly effective at promoting perspiration and the expelling of toxins and other harmful invaders. (http://www.naturalnews.com/030318_cinnamon_colds.html)

Related: Juicing For The Common Cold

6) Zinc. Often sold in syrup or lozenge form for such purposes, zinc has been scientifically shown to help combat the sniffling, sneezing, and coughing symptoms typically associated with colds. Zinc is also a powerful immune-boosting trace element that facilitates the proper function of more than 3,000 proteins in the body, as well as the promotion of healthy digestive function, which is where the bulk of immunity lies. (http://renegadehealth.com/blog/2011/03/16/zinc-keystone-to-immunity)

7) Echinacea. A 2007 study out of the University of Connecticut found that supplementing with echinacea herb not only reduces your chances of developing a cold by more than 50 percent, but can also shorten the duration of cold symptoms by several days. Because it stimulates the immune system and promotes the activation of T-cells, echinacea is an excellent cold remedy, especially when combined with many of the other remedies listed in this report. (http://natsci.edgewood.edu)

8) Neti pot. If stuffed-up sinuses are one of your primary ailments, using a neti pot to clear them out is an easy, natural way to help you get back on your feet. Just fill a sanitized neti pot with warm water and about one teaspoon of sea salt, and gently pour it down your sinuses. Besides clearing out your nasal passages, the cleansing salts will also help eliminate bacteria and other harmful pathogens. (http://www.naturalnews.com/029600_neti_pot_sinus_infections.html)

9) Oil of oregano. Rich in four specific groups of chemicals that synergistically promote healing and strong immunity, essential oil of oregano is unparalleled in its ability to both prevent harmful viruses from taking hold, and eradicating existing viruses such as the common cold. The natural terpene chemicals found in oil or oregano exhibit powerful antiviral and anti-inflammatory activity, while carvacrol, the primary active ingredient in oil of oregano, fight off harmful pathogens. (http://www.naturalnews.com/024685_oregano_oil_of.html)

10) Coconut oil. This elixir from the coconut palm is one of the most powerful, natural antiviral compounds known to man. Coconut oil has an amazing ability to target virtually any virus, including cold viruses. Rich in medium-chain fatty acids (MCFAs), coconut oil absorbs directly into viral cells where it breaks apart and disintegrates the protective coating of the virus, effectively killing it. Take a tablespoon or two daily of extra virgin coconut oil, particularly at the onset of cold symptoms, can effectively thwart the virus from taking hold and running its course. (http://www.naturalnews.com/026624_oil_coconut.html)

About the Author:

Jonathan Benson is a staff writer at NaturalNews.com where this article was first published.

Then and Now: The Sky Before and After Chemtrails

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TGE News

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09/26/2013

The following is a comparison between stock photography images that predate the year of 1999 and environmental photographs that have been published by the public on the internet after that same date. The reader can make his or her own determination, from both environmental and health perspectives, as to the source and impact of the significant changes that have taken place. Please show this page to your children so that they may understand what has been stolen from them. By Clifford E Carnicom

Pre 1999 Stock Photography Images		Post 1999 Public Internet Images

Source: carnicominstitute.org

The Cancer-Causing Metal Millions Eat, Wear or Have Injected Into Their Kids

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TGE News

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09/26/2013

Aluminum is considered by most health authorities perfectly acceptable to eat, wear as an antiperspirant, and inject into your body as a vaccine adjuvant, but new research indicates it has cancer-causing properties, even at levels 100,000 times lower than found in certain consumer products.

A concerning new study published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry demonstrates clearly that exposure to aluminum can increase migratory and invasive properties of human breast cancer cells. This has extremely important implications, because mortality from breast cancer is caused by the spread of the tumor and not from the presence of the primary tumor in the breast itself. This profound difference, in fact, is why a groundbreaking new National Cancer Institute commissioned expert panel recently called for the complete reclassification of some types of non-progressive ‘breast cancer’ and ‘prostate cancer’ as essentially benign lesions – bittersweet news for the millions who were already misdiagnosed/overdiagnosed and mistreated/overtreated for ‘cancer’ over the past 30 years.

Another recent relevant study, also published in the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, found increased levels of aluminum in noninvasively collected nipple aspirate fluids from 19 breast cancer patients compared with 16 healthy control subjects. The researchers commented on their findings: “In addition to emerging evidence, our results support the possible involvement of aluminium ions in oxidative and inflammatory status perturbations of breast cancer microenvironment, suggesting aluminium accumulation in breast microenvironment as a possible risk factor for oxidative/inflammatory phenotype of breast cells.”[1]

A key implication of this research is that the common ingestion (food additive), injection (as a vaccine adjuvant), and topical application (antiperspirant) of forms of aluminum may be contributing to the burgeoning cancer epidemic in exposed populations. Given this possibility, the further use of aluminum in foods, cosmetics and drugs should be halted until adequate risk assessments can be made thoroughly proving its safety. (Since we do not use the precautionary principle to guide risk assessments and their regulation in the US, instead opting for a chemical and drug-industry favoring “weight of evidence” standard, this likely will not happen; however, we can use this information to apply the precautionary principle in our own lives)

When it comes to aluminum’s presence in antiperspirant formulas, a very concerning study published last year in the Journal of Applied Toxicology identified the primary form of aluminum used in underarm cosmetics – aluminum chloride – as capable of altering breast cancer cells in a way indicative of ‘neoplastic transformation,’ or, the transformation of a healthy cell into a cancerous one:

“These results suggest that aluminium is not generically mutagenic, but similar to an activated oncogene [cancer-causing gene], it induces proliferation stress, DSBs and senescence in normal mammary epithelial cells; and that long-term exposure to AlCl(3) generates and selects for cells able to bypass p53/p21(Waf1) -mediated cellular senescence. Our observations do not formally identify aluminium as a breast carcinogen, but challenge the safety ascribed to its widespread use in underarm cosmetics.”

Even more disturbing was their finding that these changes, which included “contact inhibition and anchorage-independent growth” (two markers of malignancy), were caused by concentrations “…up to 100 000-fold lower than those found in antiperspirants, and in the range of those recently measured in the human breast.”[2]

This new study dovetails with recent research demonstrating that aluminum binds to cellular estrogen receptors, indicating it may disrupt and/or drive proliferation within hormone-sensitive tissues. One research team coined a new term – “metalloestrogen” – to describe an entirely new class of metal-based endocrine disrupters, including aluminum, antimony, arsenite, barium, cadmium, chromium (Cr(II)), cobalt, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenite, tin and vanadate. This reclassification of what were formerly perceived to be hormonally inert substances should help to alert consumers to the significant health risk associated with the use of ‘unnatural’ products containing these elements.

While there is little extant animal research demonstrating aluminum’s cancer causing properties, which is why it has not yet been classified with respect to carcinogenicity, “aluminum production” has been classified as carcinogenic to humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).[3] There is also a 2011 study published in the Journal of Applied Toxicology that found aluminum content is higher in nipple aspirate fluid of breast cancer-affected women versus healthy controls.

Aluminum, of course, is widely distributed within our environment (reaching, at present, the highest level in documented history), and has even been implicated in atmospheric aerosols (i.e. geoengineering/ ‘chemtrails’); which, incidentally, may be one reason why our soils are becoming saturated with the metal to levels toxic to plants, and why biotech corporations are presently working on developing aluminum-tolerant GM plants.

Because our regulators consider aluminum perfectly ‘safe to eat,’ apply topically, and inject into our bodies to “improve natural immunity,” the emerging view of aluminum as possessing cancer-causing effects will put additional responsibility on consumers to educate themselves and make choices to protect themselves from avoidable exposure.

Education equals empowerment. Learn more about how to protect yourself against aluminum by reading the following articles:

Is Eating and Injecting Aluminum Safe As Our Regulators Say?

Can We Continue To Justify Injecting Aluminum Into Our Children?

[1] F Mannello, D Ligi, M Canale. Aluminium, carbonyls and cytokines in human nipple aspirate fluids: Possible relationship between inflammation, oxidative stress and breast cancer microenvironment. J Inorg Biochem. 2013 Jul 12. Epub 2013 Jul 12. PMID: 23916117

[2] André-Pascal Sappino, Raphaële Buser, Laurence Lesne, Stefania Gimelli, Frédérique Béna, Dominique Belin, Stefano J Mandriota. Aluminium chloride promotes anchorage-independent growth in human mammary epithelial cells. J Appl Toxicol. 2012 Jan 6. Epub 2012 Jan 6. PMID: 22223356

[3] Daniel Krewski, Robert A Yokel, Evert Nieboer, David Borchelt, Joshua Cohen, Jean Harry, Sam Kacew, Joan Lindsay, Amal M Mahfouz, Virginie Rondeau. Human health risk assessment for aluminium, aluminium oxide, and aluminium hydroxide. J Toxicol Environ Health B Crit Rev. 2007 ;10 Suppl 1:1-269. PMID: 18085482

About the author:

Sayer Ji is an author, researcher, lecturer, and advisory board member of the National Health Federation. He founded Greenmedinfo.com in 2008 in order to provide the world an open access, evidence-based resource supporting natural and integrative modalities. It is widely recognized as the most widely referenced health resource of its kind.

This article first appeared at GreenMedInfo. Please visit to access their vast database of articles and the latest information in natural health.

Propaganda mind control: turning truth backwards

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TGE News

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09/25/2013

Now and then, if you take a popular advertising or PR slogan and turn it backwards, you get something more interesting.

Remember GE’s “Progress is our most important product”? Try “Product is our most important progress.”

Or “There’s no I in team” becomes “There’s no team in I.”

More esoteric? If you have a little surrealism in your blood, you can do a Zen koan with “Think outside the box,” making it, “Box outside the think.”

Propaganda mainly exists to put the truth backwards, because for some reason people like it that way.

The Vatican has some high-level propaganda pros working for it. They float the idea that in-house pedophiles are just occasional wanderers from the ethical status quo.

Whereas the priesthood is closer to an ad for men who like little boys.

“You can wear an official robe and we’ll protect you. If you get caught, we’ll move you around from diocese to diocese until you disappear, and you’ll never have to serve a day in jail or pay a fine. Ask yourself if this profession is right for you…”

The government wants us to believe that alternatives to oil are extremely difficult to come by (except for nuke reactors that can destroy life on Earth).

Presidents will always pay lip service to gaining independence from foreign oil.

But this is all backwards propaganda. The truth runs more like this: “We want to fight wars and control land and kill people and blow up whatever we can. We need a reason to do that. So, when we talk to influential corporate types and insiders, we focus on energy. We say we have to keep the oil flowing, that’s why we go in there and destabilize countries and set up new puppets and kill, kill, kill.”

What? Energy isn’t the real reason?

No it isn’t. The real reason is lunatics want to kill people and control land.

Here’s how you make energy. You turn a wheel. Call it a turbine. Set up the wheel in conjunction with magnetic fields, and you can produce energy. Electricity.

Those huge dams? Those nuke plants? They end up turning wheels. Water, steam. They spin the wheel.

Well, there is this thing called the ocean. You may have heard of it. And then there are smaller narrower versions called rivers.

The water moves. It flows. It’s strong. Small turbines in rivers and larger ones in coastal inlets, where the ocean tide varies from quite high to low—and you can turn the wheel.

It’s not that perplexing.

If you want to get fancy, you can build plants offshore and split water into hydrogen and oxygen and use the hydrogen for energy.

Here’s where the domeheads enter the scene and exclaim this is all about “cost-effectiveness.”

No it isn’t.

If you need to, check out the history of government subsidies and loopholes that exist for people who make oil in the ground into energy and nuke factories hum.

Do you think these industries survive on pure free-market capitalism? Kidding? They’re supported. All sorts of deals shore up their back-end.

So, on a far, far lesser scale, ocean/river turbines and hydrogen from sea water might need a subsidy boost, but compared to oil and nukes, we’re talking pennies on the dollar.

Energy independence has been there for us, for a long time, but that isn’t the point. The military industrial complex doesn’t want it. They want to fight wars, and they need a reason they can give to “people in the know”: oil.

It’s all backwards.

The propaganda is enormous. It includes numerous psyops designed to make the public believe in energy shortages, as well as “necessary wars.”

These people and their allies are inventing, day by day, a reality that implies the need for war.

Read “The Dream of Passamaquoddy,” the story of the Maine tidal electricity project JFK supported for many years. It’s a prime illustration of how a feasible source of energy was stalled, deflected, wrapped in red tape, politicized, and undermined.

To understand war, start with the psychology of the men who make it happen. They may talk about geopolitics and energy, but they’re obsessed with attacking, destroying, and killing.

They’re Attila the Hun in suits and military uniforms.

In the delusion called consensus reality, whole populations admire these gangsters, who represent the generalized desire for some kind of revenge against life-as-it-is.

“Okay, boys, all of us in this room here are on the same page. We can let down our guard. We know we love to kill and maim and bomb and enslave and take over land. That’s what we live for. So we need to ID some valuable thing we say is very, very scarce, without which life as we know it wouldn’t exist. Get it? And we privately tell Presidents and legislators and heavy hitters we have to go to war to safeguard this very scarce thing and make sure we can still obtain it. Ha-ha. And for our purposes, the thing is ENERGY. Right? We do whatever it takes to make everybody believe energy is scarce and hard to come by and limited and so on, and war is okay because we fight to make sure we have access to energy. It’s all backwards…but who cares?”

WE NEED TO FIGHT WARS TO SECURE ENERGY SOURCES is really WE NEED ENERGY TO FIGHT WARS BECAUSE WE WANT TO FIGHT WARS.

Jon Rappoport the author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Visit his blog at www.nomorefakenews.com.

The People Living At The End Of The Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline Are Already Sick And Dying

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TGE News

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09/24/2013

Port-Arthur-TX — The Total refinery in Port Arthur, TX

Port Arthur, Texas, is an oil town, home to massive refineries that process 900,000 barrels of crude oil each day, occasionally burping up columns of thick black smoke. It’s where the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — after pulling tar sands down from Alberta, Canada, and across the American midwest — would end. And its residents are sick and dying.

In a new feature story in On Earth, author Ted Genoways goes down to Port Arthur, and gets a look at what’s happening to the people — largely low income, and almost entirely African-American — who call it home. Residents and activists are fighting hard to relocate from where they currently live, close to the refineries. It’s desperately needed. Thanks to occasional flare-offs of toxic gas, along with the incessant pollution caused by such a major refinery and ‘incidents’ that only worsen that effect, residents are experiencing staggeringly high rates of death and disease:

In a state that regularly records in excess of 2,500 toxic emissions events per year, Port Arthur is near the top of the list of offending cities. Data collected by the Texas Cancer Registry indicates that cancer rates among African Americans in Jefferson County are roughly 15 percent higher than they are for the average Texan. Shockingly, the mortality rate from cancer is more than 40 percent higher. And cancer is only part of the story. A study by the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that residents of Port Arthur were four times more likely than people just 100 miles upwind to report suffering from heart and respiratory conditions; nervous system and skin disorders; headaches and muscle aches; and ear, nose, and throat ailments.

Genoways also spoke to those who are deeply worried that the health risks won’t disappear when they move. Many residents use respirators or other medical assistance to breathe. They’ve grown up in the shadow of the refineries.

Sadly, the Keystone XL pipeline could only intensify these health problems. It would bring an additional 830,000 barrels of crude into the town. There it would remain, until the refineries convert it into diesel or petroleum coke. The latter is a carbon-rich, high-sulfur tar sands byproduct whose effects are shrouded in mystery but can’t be good. Earlier this year, a mysterious black cloud appeared over Detroit, a byproduct of petroleum coke. The cloud’s dust contained “the metal vanadium, which is believed to cause cancer in high concentrations and prolonged exposures.”

Discussion of fossil fuels often focuses on big, down-the-road, effects of a changing climate. Sadly, the stories of those who bear the brunt of the current state of dirty energy tend to go under-reported. That’s because many of these communities don’t have even a fraction of the bargaining power of the big oil companies. They are often low-income people just struggling to get some political involvement. Or they are communities of color who the government has simply left behind.

Source: ThinkProgress.com

$17 Trillion U.S. National Debt? Try $211 Trillion

By

TGE News

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09/24/2013

Gold has been up and down in choppy trading in London today as investors digest the U.S. Fed’s decision to wait on tapering until perhaps next month. Comments on Friday from James Bullard, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President affected the markets. He said, “a reduction of the Fed’s $85 billion monthly bond purchase program beginning in October was possible and that the Fed can be patient in deciding when to scale back its pace of asset purchases”.

In Germany’s elections, Chancellor Angela Merkel is on her way for a third term as German leader after her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) scored its best federal election result since 1990. However, it appears likely she has lost her coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) as they failed to secure the required 5% threshold necessary and will be without Bundestag representation for the first time in its 65-year history.

Gold is finding support by the increasing consensus that the current Federal Reserve Vice Chair, Janet Yellen, will take over from Bernanke. Gold got a boost Thursday after a senior White House official’s remarked that Yellen is a leading candidate to replace Bernanke when he steps down.

Yellen, a strong supporter of Bernanke’s policies, should keep U.S. interest rates low for an extended period of time and she is very dovish, contrary to recent revisionism.

The U.S. national debt continues to surge higher every day and is now at $16.95 trillion and will soon surpass the $17 trillion mark.

When Standard & Poor’s reduced the U.S.’s credit rating from AAA to AA-plus, it was the first time the U.S. ever suffered a downgrade to its credit rating. The S&P took this action despite the plan Congress passed last week to raise the debt limit.

The downgrade, S&P said, “reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.”

It’s those medium- and long-term debt problems that also worry economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served as a senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He says the national debt, which the U.S. Treasury has accounted at about $14 trillion, is just the tip of the iceberg.

“We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt,” Kotlikoff tells David Greene, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered. “We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books.”

Kotlikoff explains that America’s “unofficial” payment obligations — like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits — jack up the debt figure substantially.

“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” he says. “That’s our true indebtedness.”

We don’t hear more about this enormous number, Kotlikoff says, because politicians have chosen their language carefully to keep most of the problem off the books.

“Why are these guys thinking about balancing the budget?” he says. “They should try and think about our long-term fiscal problems.”

According to Kotlikoff, one of the biggest fiscal problems Congress should focus on is America’s obligation to make Social Security payments to future generations of the elderly.

“We’ve got 78 million baby boomers who are poised to collect, in about 15 to 20 years, about $40,000 per person. Multiply 78 million by $40,000 — you’re talking about more than $3 trillion a year just to give to a portion of the population,” he says. “That’s an enormous bill that’s overhanging our heads, and Congress isn’t focused on it.”

“We’ve consistently done too little too late, looked too short-term, said the future would take care of itself, we’ll deal with that tomorrow,” he says. “Well, guess what? You can’t keep putting off these problems.”

To eliminate the fiscal gap, Kotlikoff says, the U.S. would have to have tax increases and spending reductions far beyond what’s being negotiated right now in Washington.

“What you have to do is either immediately and permanently raise taxes by about two-thirds, or immediately and permanently cut every dollar of spending by 40 percent forever. The [Congressional Budget Office’s] numbers say we have an absolutely enormous problem facing us.”

UBS has updated their short-term gold targets today, increasing their one-month forecast to $1,450/oz from $1,250/oz and three-month to $1,375/oz from $1,350/oz citing the U.S. Fed’s decision not to reduce its QE program as positive for gold. Additionally the U.S. fiscal and debt ceiling debates are imminent. Oct. 1st is the U.S. government shutdown date to be avoided and the market rhetoric will increase gold’s safe haven status. Finally, UBS analyst Edel Tully noted the upcoming wedding and festival season in India followed by the Chinese Lunar New Year will all increase physical demand for the yellow metal.

This article was written by Mark O’ Byrne and originally published at GoldCore.com

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