Multidimensional food for thought...
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security… This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.” ~Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45
Brace yourself.
There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware. Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware. And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
The world has been down this road before.
As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free, “Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.”
We are at our most vulnerable right now.
The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism—delivered by way of sovereign citizens or radicalized Muslims—but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.
Nero fiddled while Rome burned.
America is burning, and all most Americans can do is switch the channel, tune out what they don’t want to hear, and tune into their own personal echo chambers.
We’re in a national state of denial.
Yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
If the team colors have changed from blue to red, that’s just cosmetic.
The playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots.
Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state is alive and well and continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the American people.
“We the people” are no longer living the American Dream.
We’re living the American Lie.
Indeed, Americans have been lied to so sincerely, so incessantly, and for so long by politicians of all stripes—who lie compulsively and without any seeming remorse—that they’ve almost come to prefer the lies trotted out by those in government over less-palatable truths.
The American people have become compulsive believers.
As Nick Cohen writes for The Guardian, “Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.”
While telling the truth “in a time of universal deceit is,” as George Orwell concluded, “a revolutionary act,” believing the truth—and being able to distinguish the truth from a lie—is also a revolutionary act.
Here’s a truth few Americans want to acknowledge: nothing has changed (at least, not for the better) since Barack Obama passed the reins of the police state to Donald Trump.
The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing…
Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families. Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.
The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police. Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. In training police to look and act like the military and use the weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government continues to turn the United States into a battlefield.
Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.
For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense. States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison cells full and corporate investors happy.
Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”
The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state. The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests. They have run the gamut from suppressing free speech activities and justifying suspicionless strip searches to warrantless home invasions and conferring constitutional rights on corporations, while denying them to citizens.
Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and its corporate allies.
The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether it’s your local police, a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking you…
Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Is the DHS capable of plotting and planning to turn the national guard into a federalized, immigration police force? No doubt about it. Remember, this is the agency that is notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.
The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our so-called representatives…
And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: Our freedoms are steadily declining.
…once a free people allows the government to make inroads into their freedoms, or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government…
In the American police state that now surrounds us, there are no longer such things as innocence, due process, or justice—at least, not in the way we once knew them. We are all potentially guilty, all potential criminals, all suspects waiting to be accused of a crime.
So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past 50 years, it will be just another lie.
The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie. They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them… The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs…
Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “On the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”
In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls…
Freedom demands that people stop sleep-walking through life, stop cocooning themselves in political fantasies, and stop distracting themselves with escapist entertainment.
Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings…
Freedom demands that we not remain silent in the face of evil or wrongdoing but actively stand against injustice.
Freedom demands that we treat others as we would have them treat us…
OneLoveRevolution247
*read entire essay @ http://www.wakingtimes.com/2017/02/28/illusion-freedom-police-state-alive-well/
Replies
...and the spraying of chemtrials,heat waves,drought,wildfires,animals,birds,mammals,fish and rare species of life forms continue to decline or disappear all together.Large corporations such as Monsanto have created GMO crops,the clothing industry is a sham and many of these products sold on the market are laced with toxic substance and many people are living in shelters or have created tent communities or have created small living spaces especially among the older generation.The Mining Industry is another issue i remember some folks up the Northern region of Canada have talk about creating a border fence ...Why?,well, because they have invested interest in raw material such Gold,Copper,Gems,Diamonds ..etc. and because of the increase debt indigenous people there are selling their land to corporations but while these issues ongoing there is much more going here and if people would just see the wildfires spreading across the globe and causing more people to become homeless including those who live in the cities and towns.and i have notice levels of lakes,rivers,streams,ponds ..etc have either disappeared or have gone deeper into the ground and less food to grow.Chile is going through the worst wildfires in decades and heatwaves are killing not just the elderly or children there are healthy people dying from heat stroke .For 25 years i was in a state of depression and anxiety but i remember an incident that suddenly occurred i guess it was so easy to miss but years later i remember this white light lifted above my head and i felt much better after but i never remembered this until another 20 years.Then in 2006 i met this being in cased this light i felt very different after meting him i needed a lot healing then but i had other issues with him as well it was not an easy relationship because i did not like the way he had treated me then.When i was ten years old i had seen two sliver colored spaceships behind the railway tracks this incident occurred in 1967.My mother couldn't understand why i was so depressed then and i discovered i had anxiety and i had to limit my activities and i never told anyone.The reason why i tell people this is because they control the human race here and they have the technology to appear any where and they can make people sick and do all sorts of unhealthy things ..Whenever i went out to my hangouts he would follow me but he kept himself invisible and if anyone noticed he would control their minds.When i met him i felt so home sick i could figure out why i felt this way and i didn't question it source.These beings create their civilizations using technology millions of years ahead of us and can do anything they please and then decades later give their technology to humans ..A great many things took place here and at times it seems almost hopeless and its no wonder people are having many health problems .I have nose bleeds,and had a stroke last summer i saw this crimson red color covering my head and i knew something was seriously wrong and i had to go to the emergency and i still have side affects from this brain injury.Thank You for posting this article ..
~Thank you for b e i n g You, dear Hellen... Love, Light & Respect!!!
Blueprint for the Future: An Interview with Daniel Pinchbeck
& Susan Connie Marsh
The following interview was conducted for and published in the UK print magazine Under the Influence.
Susan Connie Marsh: How Soon is Now? is the title of your new book. You talk about reaching a critical threshold as a species and needing to bring about an evolutionary leap in order to overcome the imminent threat of climate change, mass extinction, ecocide and even the extinction of humankind. How do you go about tackling such critical subjects in the book?
Daniel Pinchbeck: First of all, I believe we need a new, more coherent story – or myth – about who we are as a species and how we reached this precipice. I propose we are on the cusp of realizing ourselves, humanity, to be a planetary super-organism that is in a symbiotic relationship with Earth’s ecology as a whole system. From that vantage point, I then seek to offer a ‘blueprint for the future’, reviewing our technical and social systems – how they function now and how we would have to redesign and reprogram them to create what I call a ‘regenerative society’. This includes areas such as energy, agriculture, industry, and also government and finance. We need to conceive a new operating system for human society that overcomes the current ideology of hyper-individualism and consumerism and works for the collective good, while repairing, as much as we can, the damage to our ecosystems and also removing excess greenhouse gasses through every means possible.
In your documentary, “2012: Time for Change” you state that we’re facing ‘a multidimensional crisis on Earth’ – that we’re running out of fresh water, food supplies and the fossil fuels upon which our current system relies. You refer to the ecological crisis facing us as a sort of ‘initiation for humanity’. Can you explain what you mean by that? How immediate is this crisis and what will it take to persuade people to act now?
The crisis is very immediate. The Syrian refugee nightmare, which has destabilised Europe and was partially responsible for Brexit, is due to climate change. In particular, a long drought, exacerbated by destructive government policies, forced many Syrians from their homes. We will see many more such disasters in the next decades. We don’t know how fast sea levels will rise – James Hansen, formerly the chief climate scientist at NASA, believes we may see a rise of several meters by mid-century. That would make many coastal cities uninhabitable. We are already seeing massive increases in forest fires, which release excess CO2 and stop helping us as ‘carbon sinks’ once they are gone. There are many dangerous feedback loops in the climate system that are already being engaged decades before they were predicted. We are already in deep trouble, in other words. The biggest threat is methane eruption – vast deposits of methane are frozen in the Siberian permafrost and beneath the oceans. Ocean acidification is another major danger – it is estimated that the world’s coral reefs will disintegrate by mid-century because we are changing the PH balance of the oceans.
In How Soon Is Now?, I propose we can see the situation as a collective initiation or rite of passage which will force a transition in human consciousness from adolescence as a species to adulthood – a shift from self-centered greed to collective altruism. For those of us in the wealthier developed world, we need to understand the necessity of accepting this as our initiation – as the challenge we need to actually embody the ideals of the world’s ancient spiritual traditions. I believe that is the only choice for us if we want to avert mega-catastrophe.
Experts have now declared that the last 12,000 years of the Holocene epoch is to be replaced by a new geological epoch — called the Anthropocene — that is defined by humankind’s profound impact on shaping the planet. How does this declaration of a new geological epoch frame your concerns in the book?
It is extraordinary to step back and consider how fast this has occurred. A few centuries ago, humanity had no idea that we could become a geological force, reshaping the evolutionary destiny of Earth as a whole. Even a few decades ago, the idea that we could fish out the oceans – which are now more than 90% empty of large fish – seemed preposterous. The dams we have built on rivers around the planet have actually shifted Earth’s rotation. We must come into a new awareness of our impact on Earth as a whole system and realise that, until now, we have been swept up in the unconscious inertia of our historical processes and, most recently, hypnotised by our technological capacities. We can now make a rapid shift from an unconscious to a conscious evolution, and seek to restore balance while we reduce our negative impacts on the ecosystems. This needs to become our focus in the decades ahead.
Does the declaration of the Anthropocene bear any relation, in your opinion, to the Mayan prediction of 2012 as the end of a calendar cycle of over 5,000 years?
You are referencing my previous book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which took seriously the knowledge systems of traditional cultures like the Maya in the Yucatan and the Hopi in Arizona. I do believe it is not an accident that these cultures, with their deep connection to nature and the Cosmos, and their understanding of time as cyclical and rhythmic, were aware of this time we are in now as a transformative epoch. The Aztecs called it the transition from the Age of the Fifth Sun to the Sixth Sun, while the Hopi saw it as a shift into the Fourth World, which would be accompanied by ecological catastrophe and end with a unification of global consciousness. I continue to believe we have a great deal to learn from indigenous people around the world – which doesn’t mean accepting everything they say as ‘Holy Writ’, but means recognizing there are other ways to approach the nature of reality that are more holistic than our reductively scientific, too-left-brain, techno-culture.
You view the ecological crisis as a kind of ‘positive destruction’ to enable us to see the crisis and mobilize. Do you believe that this mobilization is working on a vast enough scale? Is enough being done to educate people about the seriousness and immediacy of the situation?
I tend to believe that we are in an evolutionary crucible and what is happening, on the level of our planetary civilization, is akin to what happens on the level of an individual organism as it undergoes the process of gestation and birth – or, as with the caterpillar to butterfly transition, metamorphosis. The simultaneous development of the internet with the unfolding of the ecological crisis does not seem accidental to me – and there are many other pieces of this puzzle. It is only our arrogance that allows us to think we are separate from nature just because we possess individuated consciousness and the capacity to process abstract signals and build machines. In fact, much of what we do with technology on a macro-scale, nature already does on other levels. For instance, viruses transfer genetic material around the planet, like an information system.
It definitely doesn’t seem that enough is being done yet – at the same time we see many positive developments like the rapid evolution of solar energy and storage systems which could allow for a ‘solar singularity’ where we can make a complete transition to renewables within a few decades. Most likely, the transformation we need to ensure our survival can’t and won’t happen incrementally. It will have to happen exponentially, as solutions are discovered and then scaled globally. The interactive communications network of the internet and new tools like 3-D printers may help to accelerate the distribution of solutions, such as sustainable technologies or modular villages able to produce food, energy, fresh water, and compost waste without needing centralised power structures.
You talk about ‘now’ being a crucial time of transformation on the Earth. Last year, the US and China ratified the Paris climate deal, although the US under Trump may pull out of it. How far away is this commitment from the actual mass transformation that needs to take place to make a meaningful change?
Scientists have criticized the Paris climate accord because it did not mandate rapid, or immediate, reductions in CO2 emissions. Instead it ‘kicked the can down the road’. The big obstacle right now is that the kinds of severe reductions we need to make in our industrial output will have a visceral impact on our postmodern lifestyles – and it seems political suicide for any government to mandate them. Instead, with Trump’s election, we are going totally in the wrong direction. I believe that we must use social networks and social technologies to educate people in a hurry while providing them with tangible ways to make change on local and bioregional levels. For instance, social networks such as Facebook and Google could help people share resources and provide tools and even programs for retraining people to be connected to the Earth’s ecosystems. Through the internet, people can be retrained to be stewards of their local ecology, if this is accompanied by a global media campaign that explains what is happening and what needs to take place.
We have to make serious changes, what are these?
The easiest ‘low hanging fruit’ is a global moratorium or massive reduction in the consumption of meat and fish. Animal agriculture produces a surprising amount of CO2 and methane. Also, 30% of the Earth’s surface is currently animal grazing land, which could be reforested or replanted. Other low-hanging fruit would include a transition away from private car ownership, mandating ride-shares, and a severe reduction in the amount of air travel for the time being. I know this sounds difficult if not impossible – but there are other thresholds where humanity came together, such as what happened in the United States after the Pearl Harbor attack, when we shifted all of our manufacturing and taxed the wealthy at 94%, and this happened in just a few months. We could see this as a huge opportunity to come together as one human family, to share the burden, and instead of sacrifices we could collectively undertake this as a path toward global peace, harmony, and individual self-actualization. This is the radical potential that I explore in my new book.
Much of our activity as a species currently has no relationship to the Earth’s ecology and in fact subtracts from the natural resources. For instance, people drive to work in offices where they use Styrofoam cups, toner cartridges, etc. As Buckminster Fuller realized in the 1960s, it would be much ‘cheaper’ from the perspective of the Earth, to subsidize people to live in communities where they grew their own food and produced their own energy. We will also have to begin the construction of ‘eco-cities’ at higher elevations where large populations can move as sea levels rise. There are all sorts of massive issues but there are also tools and technologies we know can be applied already – it is a question of mobilizing and inspiring people to want to change, and also raising awareness of what needs to happen over the next few years...
*read entire interview @ http://realitysandwich.com/321481/blueprint-for-the-future-an-inter...
AsWithin... SoWithout