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We’re Never Gonna Survive Unless…

July 25, 2008 by luminaria

-Copyright © 2008 Knocking on the Sky. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or if you are reading it posted on a different site in its entirety other than on http://luminaria.wordpress.com, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. DMCA Complaints will be notified for immediate legal action.

How can we dance when our earth is turning;
How do we sleep when our beds are burning?
–Midnight Oil

Of all the torments that we’re enduring, pf all the many crises that we face, the one that’s most critical is the inability of the planet to sustain human life, let alone any life, at the rate of destruction we are causing.

Pick-up line guaranteed to get you snubbed: “So, what’s your brand of argument on the economically/politically charged environmental debate?”

And how do you see yourself, honestly? (If you can even be honest with yourself, that is)

Are you one of those who see everything “green” as a conspiracy whipped up by the UN, the Club of Rome, or other super-sinister secret organizations? Are you part of a corporation that greenwashes us into thinking we’re actually “helping the environment” if we buy your product or service? Are you one of those in flat-out denial who debunks anything to do with climate change because god is taking care of everything? Or maybe you’re one of those who sees the decimation of the planet as a means to gain profit and/or you have some political agenda to debunk the obvious; one who regards the planet as an endless slot machine, or a stupid whore to be beaten down?

Or, are you one of the distraught and questioning few who has simply looked around your world and seen what we’ve lost, what we’re losing, and you genuinely yearn to heal what has been so badly obliterated? Are you distraught at the extent that humans abuse the earth, oblivious to the consequences of their actions? Do you get that we’re all sitting on the evolutionary branch that we’re sawing off at the trunk?

Recently I touched on the subject of the Anthropocene, which is the epoch we see unfolding as the Holocene melts away. The prefix anthro- ἄνθÏωπος (anthrÅpos), means “human.” The human epoch. But what does that mean, exactly? Judeo-Christianity has nitro-phied the anthropomorphism that humans have wrought on creation by pushing religious texts on us, principally with two old testament commands, supposedly made by an invisible deity. You know them well: “Go forth and multiply and subdue the earth.”

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of uniquely human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings. This sense that everything is human-centered has been around since the earliest times, and its central idea is that human beings are “special.” It seems obvious to me that the attitudes spawned from anthropomorphism goes a long way to explain why human beings have done such a job destroying the earth, its creatures, and peoples who don’t count money as their principle measure of worth.

I remember watching Disney feature-length animation films and feeling disgusted by the way that forest animals, fish, even trees happily deferred to humans with adoring, helpful, self-sacrificing attitudes. “Humans are gods,” they seemed to say. Like Christianity stole from pagan traditions, like the right-wing sanitizes history, Disney stole from traditional fairy tales and sanitized them to suit warped Caucasian Christian values. The main characters are always Caucasians with Caucasian values. These fantasies speak in code and sit on an enormous underground vat of poison. All of these feature-length animations, to the extent that animals play roles, show animals soft-shoe-ing to support the humans. Yas massah! Yas massah!

Homo sapiens became the first species to stop living inside local ecosystems. All other species, including our ancestral hominid ancestors, all pre-agricultural humans, and remnant hunter-gatherer societies still extant exist as semi-isolated populations playing specific roles (i.e., have “nichesâ€) in local ecosystems. This is not so with post-agricultural revolution humans, who in effect have stepped outside local ecosystems. Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on ecosystems - converting land to produce one or two food crops, with all other native plant species all now classified as unwanted “weeds†— and all but a few domesticated species of animals now considered as pests.–The Sixth Extinction

Here are some facts found on the Sixth Extinction site:

About 30,000 species go extinct annually The previous mass extinctions were due to natural causes The current mass extinction is caused by humans We are bringing about the massive changes in the environment Human beings began disrupting the environment as soon as they appeared on earth Wherever early humans migrated, species became extinct The invention of agriculture accelerated the pace of the Sixth Extinction Humans don’t live with nature, but outside it Earth can’t sustain the trend in human population growth. It is reaching its limit in carrying capacity Overpopulation, invasive species, and overexploitation are fueling the extinction Only 10% of the world’s species survived the third mass extinction. Will any survive this one?

The total number of organisms within a species is limited by many factors-most crucial of which is the “carrying capacity†of the local ecosystem: given the energetic needs and energy-procuring adaptations of a given species, there are only so many squirrels, oak trees and hawks that can inhabit a given stretch of habitat. Agriculture had the effect of removing the natural local-ecosystem upper limit of the size of human populations. Though crops still fail regularly, and famine and disease still stalk the land, there is no doubt that agriculture in the main has had an enormous impact on human population size:

Estimates vary, but range between 1 and 10 million people on earth 10,000 years ago. There are now over 6 billion people. The numbers continue to increase logarithmically — so that there will be 8 billion by 2020. There is presumably an upper limit to the carrying capacity of humans on earth — of the numbers that agriculture can support — and that number is usually estimated at between 13-15 billion, though some people think the ultimate numbers might be much higher.

I encourage you to read the data on the Sixth Extinction Site. Enlighten yourself. You may not be able to pick up a date with what you learn, but at least you won’t get sucked in to some bogus agenda fuelled solely by callous self-interest.

Any shaman or healer will confirm what I’m about to write. We’re each going to have to remain tender, sensitive, and open, full of questions rather than answers if we’re ever going to turn our greed, fear, ignorance and callousness into kindness and caring for all of life.

The first step is finding a way to heal ourselves. Without that, we are stuck. With it, everything else can begin to heal. Good lord, that’s enough to freeze the brain all by itself. You ask, What do you mean, Heal Myself? How the hell am I supposed to heal myself? I’m glad you asked. That’s the first step. Keep asking. The way will open to you.

But remember, true healing can be extraordinarily painful. In alternative medicine, symptoms must often get worse before health can be restored. It’s past time to stop masking the pain with pallatives–especially distraction, rage, denial and oblivious ignorance. It’s time to undergo the agonizing process of undoing what we’ve done.

How does that Seal song go? No we’re never gonna survive, unless…

Posted in Earth 911, Environment, Overpopulation, Politics, Sustainability, Urgent | No Comments »

Public Poison

July 24, 2008 by luminaria

First, you can watch/read the speech Barak Obama delivered in Berlin on July 24, 2008 here.

Now, compare that with the coverage of the speech bush delivered to the NAACP on July 24, 2008 here.

GOP Insider Eviscerates Bush And Party: Just “Phenomenal Arrogance”
Huffington Post
24 July 2008

There is wide-spread acknowledgment, even within the party itself, that the Republican brand is currently poisonous. Faced with massive losses in November, GOP leadership has green-lighted a save-yourself mentality, allowing its endangered members to go against the party line if it means helping their electoral chances.

But if the situation seems bad on the electoral level, insiders warn that it’s even worse when you get down to infrastructure and machinery. Facing an avalanche of losses, the GOP is stuck with an antiquated system of fundraising, a tired leadership, and a president many Americans loathe.

“There is a phenomenal arrogance like a fog that has clouded people’s thinking and ability to see what is real,” said Nicole Sexton, a longtime Republican fundraiser and former Director of Finance for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We have to go down in history as some of the worst messengers. And President Bush has been horrible. Everything he does deems calculated and insincere. The same was true with Bill Clinton but he at least had the ability to seem sincere. With Bush, people are throwing stones and tomatoes at him [and he hasn't changed].” Read the rest>>

Uh, yeah. And compare the above article with this speech:

[T]here are a few among us who have deliberately and consciously closed their eyes because they were determined to be opposed to their government, its foreign policy and every other policy, to be partisan, and to believe that anything that the government did was wholly wrong.

To those who have closed their eyes for any of these many reasons, to those who would not admit the possibility of the approaching storm–to all of them the past two weeks have meant the shattering
of many illusions.

They have lost the illusion that we are remote and isolated and, therefore, secure against the dangers from which no other land is free.

In some quarters, with this rude awakening has come fear, fear bordering on panic. It is said that we are defenseless. It is whispered by some that, only by abandoning our freedom, our ideals, our way of life, can we build our defenses adequately, can we match the strength of the aggressors.

I did not share those illusions. I do not share these fears.

Today we are now more realistic. But let us not be calamity-howlers and discount our strength. Let us have done with both fears and illusions….

Today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack.

The Trojan Horse. The Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery.

Spies, saboteurs and traitors are the actors in this new strategy. With all of these we must and will deal vigorously.

But there is an added technique for weakening a nation at its very roots, for disrupting the entire pattern of life of a people. And it is important that we understand it.

The method is simple. It is, first, a dissemination of discord. A group–not too large–a group that may be sectional or racial or political–is encouraged to exploit its prejudices through false slogans and emotional appeals. The aim of those who deliberately egg on these groups is to create confusion of counsel, public indecision, political paralysis and eventually, a state of panic.

Sound national policies come to be viewed with a new and unreasoning skepticism, not through the wholesome political debates of honest and free men, but through the clever schemes of foreign agents.

As a result of these new techniques, armament programs may be dangerously delayed. Singleness of national purpose may be undermined. Men can lose confidence in each other, and therefore lose confidence in the efficacy of their own united action. Faith and courage can yield to doubt and fear. The unity of the State can be so sapped that its strength is destroyed.

All this is no idle dream. It has happened time after time, in nation after nation, during the last two years. Fortunately, American men and women are not easy dupes. Campaigns of group hatred or class struggle have never made much headway among us, and are not making headway now. But new forces are being unleashed, deliberately planned propaganda to divide and weaken us in the face of danger as other nations have been weakened before.

These dividing forces are undiluted poison. They must not be allowed to spread in the New World as they have in the Old. Our morale and our mental defenses must be raised up as never before against those who would cast a smokescreen across our vision.

The development of our defense program makes it essential that each and every one of us, men and women, feel that we have some contribution to make toward the security of our nation.

At this time, when the world–and the world includes our own American Hemisphere–when the world is threatened by forces of destruction, it is my resolve and yours to build up our armed defenses.

We shall build them to whatever heights the future may require.

We shall rebuild them swiftly, as the methods of warfare swiftly change.

For more than three centuries we Americans have been building on this continent a free society, a society in which the promise of the human spirit may find fulfillment. Commingled here are the blood and genius of all the peoples of the world who have sought this promise.

We have built well. We are continuing our efforts to bring the blessings of a free society, of a free and productive economic system, to every family in the land. This is the promise of America.

It is this that we must continue to build–this that we must continue to defend.

It is the task of our generation, yours and mine. But we build and defend not for our generation alone. We defend the foundations laid down by our fathers. We build a life for generations yet unborn. We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind. Ours is a high duty, a noble task.

Day and night I pray for the restoration of peace in this mad world of ours. It is not necessary that I, the President, ask the American people to pray in behalf of such a cause–for I know you are praying with me.

I am certain that out of the hearts of every man, woman and child in this land, in every waking minute, a supplication goes up to Almighty God; that all of us beg that suffering and starving, that death and destruction may end–and that peace may return to the world. In common affection for all mankind, your prayers join with mine–that God will heal the wounds and the hearts of humanity.

–from President Franklin Delano Roosvelt’s May 26, 1940 Fireside Chat

Fox News is one of the biggest disseminators of poison. Rapper Nas is taking them down.

Rapper Nas on The Color of Change

This page contained an embedded video. Click here to view it.

Rapper Nas’s Takedown of Fox News

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

Next President? What Next President?

July 23, 2008 by luminaria

-Copyright © 2008 Knocking on the Sky. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or if you are reading it posted on a different site in its entirety other than on http://luminaria.wordpress.com, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. DMCA Complaints will be notified for immediate legal action.

“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”
— bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2000

No one in bushcorp seems to be giving the slightest signal that they intend to leave office. Can you, in your wildest imagination, imagine them relinquishing the iron grip they have on America? After all their manipulation and secrecy to institutionalize corruption, all the time and money spent since Regan to get them to this point of control, all the resources, not to mention the multi-billion dollar embassy built in Bagdhad? bush himself appears gleefully recalcitrant as ever. There’s something extremely disturbing about these signals. And the hallmark brutality behind his dysfunctional rhetoric and good-ol’-boy jokes isn’t even close to winding down. (See Profile of the Sociopath)

The rest of us are so busy trying to survive the economic crisis, working one or more jobs, withstanding the onslaught of global and domestic warfare carpet bombed on us by the White House and Congress that we hardly have time or energy to focus on turning around the forces that are destroying our security, our freedoms, our planet. People sadly still think that a new administration is going to halt the madness. All Americans seem able to do is to whine and bitch and wring our hands.

More and more we’re seeing that Obama isn’t the change he talks about. Sure, he’s a black man in America, for god’s sake. What the hell is he supposed to do and say to “fit in” to the corporate mercenary mentality to groom himself for election? But I have to wonder if this entire election is nothing more than a collusive dog and pony, a distraction to hide what’s really going on: there are Cheney-backed forces that intend to make bush “president for life.”

For those who didn’t catch it, the issue was publicized back in 2007 in a now-deleted article written by Phillip Atkinson for Family Security Matters, a neo-conservative think tank. British-born Atkinson is FamilySecurityMatters.org’s contributing editor, founder of ourcivilisation.com and author of A Study of Our Decline. He is a philosopher who focuses on the preservation of Western civilization. How telling. The article stimulated an outcry all over the Internet.

Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy
By Philip Atkinson 3 Aug 2007
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.

President George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States. He was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2005 after being chosen by the majority of citizens in America to be president.

Yet in 2007 he is generally despised, with many citizens of Western civilization expressing contempt for his person and his policies, sentiments which now abound on the Internet. This rage at President Bush is an inevitable result of the system of government demanded by the people, which is Democracy.

The inadequacy of Democracy, rule by the majority, is undeniable – for it demands adopting ideas because they are popular, rather than because they are wise. This means that any man chosen to act as an agent of the people is placed in an invidious position: if he commits folly because it is popular, then he will be held responsible for the inevitable result. If he refuses to commit folly, then he will be detested by most citizens because he is frustrating their demands.

When faced with the possible threat that the Iraqis might be amassing terrible weapons that could be used to slay millions of citizens of Western Civilization, President Bush took the only action prudence demanded and the electorate allowed: he conquered Iraq with an army.

This dangerous and expensive act did destroy the Iraqi regime, but left an American army without any clear purpose in a hostile country and subject to attack. If the Army merely returns to its home, then the threat it ended would simply return.

The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. Then there would be little risk or expense and no American army would be left exposed. But if he did this, his cowardly electorate would have instantly ended his term of office, if not his freedom or his life.

The simple truth that modern weapons now mean a nation must practice genocide or commit suicide. Israel provides the perfect example. If the Israelis do not raze Iran, the Iranians will fulfill their boast and wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Yet Israel is not popular, and so is denied permission to defend itself. In the same vein, President Bush cannot do what is necessary for the survival of Americans. He cannot use the nation’s powerful weapons. All he can do is try and discover a result that will be popular with Americans.

As there appears to be no sensible result of the invasion of Iraq that will be popular with his countrymen other than retreat, President Bush is reviled; he has become another victim of Democracy.

By elevating popular fancy over truth, Democracy is clearly an enemy of not just truth, but duty and justice, which makes it the worst form of government. President Bush must overcome not just the situation in Iraq, but democratic government.

However, President Bush has a valuable historical example that he could choose to follow.

When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.

Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president†Bush or he can become “President-for-Life†Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.

Good god.

We all know that about 20 percent (I’m beginning to think more?) of Americans have allowed far-right corporate talk-show hosts and Fox News to step on their feet, flip up their skulls, and dump a shit-load of toxic sludge into their brains. These brain-dead zombies don’t have a clue about how to think. As long as the government-sponsored dreck keeps them fed, they will forever be the wall that keeps all Americans divided because they will never understand the critical urgency to pry out the neo-nazi clan in the White House and Congress. I myself am hyper-aware that statements like that could get me disappeared.

You’re misinformed if you think that the United States is the new empire.

Naoimi Klein writes about states of shock and states of acceptance in her book The Shock Doctrine.

Talk about wiping out minds, making them blank slates: Donald Ewen Cameron and MKULTRA

Talk about wiping out our economy: Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman

Talk about wiping out true environmentalism with globalized greenwashing by an unbelievably robust campaign of deception.

But this dictatorship could never have stolen so much from us if it weren’t for people like Edward Bernays, known as the “father of public relations.”

Born in Vienna and raised in America, Bernays was Freud’s nephew and used his psycho-savvy to pioneer the PR industry’s use of psychology and other social sciences to design its public persuasion campaigns. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” Should you have any doubt that everything that’s happened to the Fourth Estate since 2000 was borrowed from Hitler’s playbook, read this quote from Sourcewatch:

Bernays recalls a dinner at his home in 1933 where “Karl von Weigand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, an old hand at interpreting Europe and just returned from Germany, was telling us about Goebbels and his propaganda plans to consolidate Nazi power. Goebbels had shown Weigand his propaganda library, the best Weigand had ever seen. Goebbels, said Weigand, was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me. … Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign.”

Nevertheless, Bernays was clearly impressed by Goebbels strategy. The Der Spiegel Article, Master of Deception shows how the lucrative PR industry, which highly regards Bernays, has become. It shows how PR continues to manipulate our perception of the world and how the professionals from the industry assist in staging wars. They are masters of framing and the zombies who support bush and his fraudulent activities just don’t get see that bushcorp is succeeding in its plan to shrunk America’s greatness down to the size where they’ve drowned it in the bathtub. Now, if you follow the business headlines, you can see how American companies are increasingly up for grabs.

Related to all of this is the five-part series video, Money as Debt.

Sure, you registered to vote because you get how critical it is that we finally become proactive citizens and that we take measures to salvage whatever is left of our freedom. But lest you forget, bush neatly wrapped up any threat that might lead to his stepping down with his Presidential Directive 51.

Cheers!

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

Draconian H.R. 1955 & Free Internet RIP

July 22, 2008 by luminaria

Are you ready for this?

H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007: To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes. Makes Homeland Security look like a romp in the park and voted for by 95 percent of the House, sponsored by Jane Harman (D-CA), and it will probably pass Senate and Bush will giddily pass it. An extremist belief and ideological violence are so loosely defined in this that we all have bulls eyes on our foreheads. Means that when this passes, if you’ve written anything that displeases the government online, you could be disappeared.

Okay. The seriously damaged human beings who intend to control everything on earth are taking steps to close in on what’s left of our free speech. The plan is to make the Internet off-limits for anyone who can’t afford to move freely across its vast network of sites. Brace yourselves. Fascism means to shut us down. The irony is that the only tool we can use to stop this is the same tool that is being taken away.

The Canadian site Global Research tells us:

In the last 15 years or so, as a society we have had access to more information than ever before in modern history because of the Internet. There are approximately 1 billion Internet users in the world B and any one of these users can theoretically communicate in real time with any other on the planet. The Internet has been the greatest technological achievement of the 20th century by far, and has been recognized as such by the global community.

However, when there are potential profits open to a corporation, the needs of society don’t count. Take the recent case in Canada with the behemoths, Telus and Rogers rolling out a charge for text messaging without any warning to the public. It was an arrogant and risky move for the telecommunications giants because it backfired. People actually used Internet technology to deliver a loud and clear message to these companies and that was to scrap the extra charge. The people used the power of the Internet against the big boys and the little guys won.

However, the issue of text messaging is just a tiny blip on the radar screens of Telus and another company, Bell Canada, the two largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Canada. Our country is being used as a test case to drastically change the delivery of Internet service forever. The change will be so radical that it has the potential to send us back to the horse and buggy days of information sharing and access.

In the upcoming weeks watch for a report in Time Magazine that will attempt to smooth over the rough edges of a diabolical plot by Bell Canada and Telus, to begin charging per site fees on most Internet sites. The plan is to convert the Internet into a cable-like system, where customers sign up for specific web sites, and then pay to visit sites beyond a cutoff point. Read the rest>>>

Posted in Complicity, Exposure, Fascism, Greed, It's Worse Than You Think, Politics | No Comments »

The Bread & Circus Buffet

July 21, 2008 by luminaria

-Copyright © 2008 Knocking on the Sky. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or if you are reading it posted on a different site in its entirety other than on http://luminaria.wordpress.com, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. DMCA Complaints will be notified for immediate legal action.

Remember back in 2002 when a nameless senior advisor from Arrogance Central told Ron Suskind that bushcorp created the reality that we’ve endured since 2000 and probably long before?

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. (from “Without a Doubt” by Ron Suskind, New York Times, 2004)

He was referring to the handful of terribly rich and faceless multinational suits who’ve been feverishly manipulating the levers with their tiny white hands to bring America to its knees. But the Dali Lama says that bush lacks an understanding of reality.

You cannot look in one direction. In order to see reality, (you) have to see in three or four or seven dimensions” and that this applies in the economical field, political field and international relations.

Exactly.

But oh doo-doo poopy. The Kool-Aid is wearing off just as the wings fly off the plane. Only 20 percent of the nation still drink the bush brand of “reality.” I mean, he and his machine are just so yesterday.

Here are a few links from the bread and circus buffet:

More details on Leichtenstein tax haven scandal

Phil Gramm’s UBS Bank BUSTED in $18B Major International Tax Scandal

Send Karl Rove to Jail

All Roads Lead to Rove

Rove Skipped Town to Avoid Testifying

George W. Bush Sewage Plant on November Ballot

Help speed the collapse of the whole rotten financial structure

Jesus, Debt Counselor

UK “Must Check” US Torture Denial

Domestic Spying Quietly Continues

They Knew Those Trailers Were Toxic


Posted in Corporate Crime, Economy, Exposure, Politics | 1 Comment »

Need to Burn Furniture to Stay Warm this Winter?

July 20, 2008 by luminaria

-Copyright © 2008 Knocking on the Sky. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or if you are reading it posted on a different site in its entirety other than on http://luminaria.wordpress.com, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. DMCA Complaints will be notified for immediate legal action.

This weekend my family and I drove up into The Wildernessâ„¢ (i.e., the Disney-fication of our national forests–everything on Earth has been commodified for profit, right?) to go camping. We drove two hours and searched innumerable campsites, but all were full. The park Hostâ„¢ (before the corporate fascists took control of our National Forests, weren’t these entities called “Rangers”?) assured us that was the case. Well, what did we expect without reservations and in the middle of the summer?

But considering the claustrophobic conditions of the campgrounds, people crawling all over each other between the trees and everywhere else, with massive amounts of cars, powerboats, trailers, RVs and motorcycles, I’m not really sorry we had to turn around and go home.

Besides the well-used feel to The Wildernessâ„¢ out there, the number of trees dying from some kind of blight and the swathes of clear-cut forest…and everyone basically acts as though everything is totally fine. I dared to bring up the subject of the dying trees and got the rolled eyes and the “It’s nothing” response. And when I mentioned the vital need for people to start thinking in terms of co-operation, I got a unanimous “That Will Never Happen” in reply. And looking around me at humans doing what they do, I had to admit that I agreed with the verdict.

What I saw yesterday pretty much sums up the larger picture. Everyone wants the same thing: ESCAPE. But there’s nowhere to run. And there are about five billion too many people doing things all at the same time. And despite the outward denial, we all know we’re standing over an abyss with nowhere to fall with the deepening oil-economic-housing-health care-environmental crisis. Anyone with a pulse can sense its looming shadow over us all.

Watched much television lately? Seen those incredibly seductive car commercials? It’s like they nearly jump off the screen to caress your genitals. But if you’ve driven to work or paid a credit card lately, you’re beginning to see a huge gap between what’s on the tube and what’s in your life. Even if you can afford to buy a new car, how’s it feel to empty your wallet into the fuel pump every time you fill up? Starting to “get it” yet? We’ve not only been had, we’ve been raped, ravaged, and reamed, dude.

The Chinese have always said America would destroy itself from within. Their prediction was once laughable; now it’s being served to us on a platter in 3D spectroscope.

The video below was made around 1997, some four years before 911.

This page contained an embedded video. Click here to view it.

Scoff as you will at Alex Jones (he is admittedly a sensationalist fearmonger, seen as part of the “lunatic fringe” by some), no one has yet convinced me that those who overthrew the American government in 2000 didn’t plan the incremental and total destruction of America in advance. And this destruction is hitting home in a real way for an increasing percentage of the American people. Here’s a letter to Senator Bernie Sanders from a single mother who somehow got through last winter in Vermont city:

I am a single mother with a 9-year-old boy. To stay warm at night my son and I would pull off all the pillows from the couch and pile them on the kitchen floor. I’d hang a blanket from the kitchen doorway and we’d sleep right there on the floor. By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother’s dining room furniture. I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub. I’d like to order one of your flags and hang it upside down at the capital building… we are certainly a country in distress.

I’ve got 23 words for you: It’s a Class War, Stupid: Election season will be packed with distractions, but the real issue is a matter of life and death.

Posted in Another Rant, Economy, It's Worse Than You Think, Just My Opinion, Overpopulation, Politics, The Horror Show, Weary Thoughts | 2 Comments »

Learned Helplessness of Americans

July 18, 2008 by luminaria

-Copyright © 2008 Knocking on the Sky. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or if you are reading it posted on a different site in its entirety other than on http://luminaria.wordpress.com, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. DMCA Complaints will be notified for immediate legal action.

Today I have a head full of bees and I’m letting them buzz up on my screen. I’m thinking about how we must un-learn our learned helplessness and dependence on a government that has gone beyond corrupt and into the toxic zone, and has compromised our very survival.

I’d say that as a government this democratic republic called “The United States of America” did work from time to time for some people, but it was doomed to failure from the beginning because it built itself on the ashes of genocide and enslavement, the colonization of the Indian nation and the enslavement of entire generations of African Americans, the two screaming skeletons in the American closet.

Our human (as opposed to nationalistic) imperative now is to dedicate ourselves to re-creating our reality from the ashes of what was stolen from us. We have to re-create community, solidarity, and mutual aid if we expect to survive the days, months, and years ahead. If we fail to do this, we will surely perish.

Jane Meyer reveals in her book The Dark Side that the bush administration’s policies on interrogation have utilized methods of coercion including “learned helplessness.”  We know now that there were psychologists at Guantanamo to observe these methods put into action to break people down. So, the detainees, most who are innocent, underwent unspeakable suffering and torture, both physical and mental.

Here at home, we’ve also been coerced into learned helplessness, the fact now driven home by a weak dollar, inflation, a ridiculous amount of home foreclosures, bad job market, over-extended credit markets, banks going broke and so on. This coercion is what the GNP (not Gross National Product, but Grand New Party) is all about. We always get stuck paying for their platinum parachutes. It is our imperative to not let this happen. It is our imperative to fight our way out of this sleep of learned helplessness. Continue Reading »

Posted in Activism, CircleA/DIY, Economy, Just My Opinion, Politics, Question Authoritarians, Weary Thoughts | No Comments »

Dubai-Disneyland Could Shelter Super Rich Tax Cheats

July 17, 2008 by luminaria

-Copyright © 2008 Knocking on the Sky. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or if you are reading it posted on a different site in its entirety other than on http://luminaria.wordpress.com, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. DMCA Complaints will be notified for immediate legal action.

UBS named names as part of an ongoing investigation into its offshore accounts this week. The New York Times reported back in June that UBS might reveal the names of up to 20,000 of its American clients to the IRS as part of the investigation into alleged “tax irregularities.â€

The US government believes that private bankers at the Swiss headquartered UBS may have helped American clients hide as much as $100 billion in offshore accounts to avoid paying tax. The cost to US taxpayers for the scams? $300 million in lost taxes (this number has been adjusted upward since June).

UBS has been under investigation by the US government since May. The bank has indicated that it would cooperate with US officials. Specifically targeted are private bankers in the “wealth management divisionâ€.

At least one criminal plea is expected: last week, Bradley Birkenfield, a former director at UBS, indicated that he intends to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiring to defraud the United States. Birkenfield faces up to five years in prison. He had previously pleaded not guilty to charges that he helped billionaire investor Igor Olenicoff hide $200 million from US tax authorities. Olenicoff, worth an estimated $1.6 billion has already pleaded guilty to tax charges and has agreed to pay $52 million in back taxes, plus penalties and interest. Olenicoff also received two years probation and must perform 120 hours of community service; the light-ish sentence lead insiders to believe that Olenicoff told authorities what he knew as part of a deal.

Yeah, watch as 6,000 Humpty Dumpties fall.

Make no mistake. There are clear ties between UBS, Saudi Arabia and the subcrime crisis, according to Reuters.

Now that the names of up to 20,000 super-wealthy American tax evaders have been released to the IRS, they will no doubt be fleeing to places like Dubai. In this Arab Emirate these tax evaders can enjoy the fabulous, tax-free “Dubai Lifestyle” (see videos below).

While they roll in unbelievable amounts of stolen money and bush assures us there is no recession, the rest of us languish in foreclosures, inflation, job loss, collapsing dollar, rising food prices, non-existent health care, and extorted prices at the gas pump–a perfect storm, it all comes tumbling down–while our loved ones are dying in bush’s obscenely profitable “war on terror.” Even more hideous is that a million of our names now sit on bush’s fraudulent “terrorist watch list.“  Halliburton and others have already settled into the “Dubai Lifestyle” enjoying the fruits of their looting.

bush says he can do nothing about the subcrime crisis. Why lift a finger when he’s part of the aristocracy, ferociously doing everything to help his friends amass mind-boggling wealth? What we’ve been seeing as we slept through every presidency since the Regan years is unmitigated manipulation, the privatization of profits and the socialization of loss.

Dubai is an United Arab Emirate. We already know that bush has ties to Saudi financiers and Osama Bin Laden, and despite the fact that it was Saudi Arabians who “hijacked” the planes that flew into the WTC, the Iraqis have been paying the price for the past five years. The reek of this stench continues to sicken us all. Odd, isn’t it, how Bin Laden is getting what he wanted: to bankrupt America? And isn’t it even more odd that what Bin Laden wanted is exactly the same thing that Abramoff, Norquist, and DeLay, et al wanted to do to America ever since they bullied their way into the bowels of the White House?  So. They all got what they wanted.

At the tip of the countless repercussions as America comes tumbling down is that the West Nile Virus is now spreading in California due to the soaring number of foreclosed homes with untended swimming pools.

Contrast your sorry-ass life with the fabulous world of the world’s top one-percent of the super rich people who continue to steal your tax dollars and your soldiers’ lives and our nation’s natural gifts (forests, minerals, mountains, rivers, lakes, coastal waters, animals, plants…) to live lives that defy imagination. The Palm Dubai video below illustrates this unspeakable truth.

Burj Dubai official video

If that doesn’t nauseate you enough, try this one, The Palm Dubai

This page contained an embedded video. Click here to view it.

Or this: Dubai in 2009 (there are other similar videos on Youtube)

Posted in Corporate Crime, Exposure, Greed, Politics | No Comments »

Super Rich Tax Cheats Outed by Bank Clerk

July 16, 2008 by luminaria

Poor Heinrich Kieber is in hiding, but no doubt news of his horrible demise by a hit-man or other means will soon hit European news because that’s how the super-rich mafia has always run things.

Technician in Liechtenstein Turns Over Names of Americans With Secret Bank Accounts
July 15, 2008
By BRIAN ROSS and RHONDA SCHWARTZ
ABC News

Hundreds of super-rich American tax cheats have, in effect, turned themselves in to the IRS after a bank computer technician in the tiny European country of Liechtenstein came forward with the names of US citizens who had set up secret accounts there, according to Washington lawyers investigating the scheme.

The bank clerk, Heinrich Kieber, has been branded a thief by the government of Liechtenstein for violating the country’s bank secrecy laws.

He is now in hiding but scheduled to testify to the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Thursday via a video statement from a secret location, according to Congressional investigators.

Aides for committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) are scheduled to provide reporters with a background briefing later this morning in Washington on the committee’s investigation of tax haven banks in Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

Aides say the hearing will also focus on the role of the giant Swiss bank UBS and its alleged efforts to help wealthy Americans hide their money from the IRS through shell companies in Liechtenstein.

Liechtenstein’s veil of secrecy was pierced five years ago when the disgruntled technician, Kieber, downloaded the names of foreign citizens connected to the secret accounts.

Kieber reportedly sold three CD’s full of names and data to tax authorities to 12 countries including Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States.

Tax authorities in Italy published the full list of names.

In Germany, the disclosures led to the arrests of several prominent CEO’s on charges that had evaded millions of dollars in taxes.

A former UBS private banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, has agreed to a plea deal and is reported to be cooperating with US authorities in bring charges against American citizens on tax evasion charges.

The Liechtenstein bank, LGT, is owned by the tiny country’s ruling family led by Prince Hans-Adam II.

Kieber’s Washington lawyer, Jack Blum, says Kieber should be considered a whistleblower and a hero, not a thief, for revealing how the super rich hid billions of dollars using the Liechtenstein bank.

The names of the US citizens are now in the hands of the IRS and Senate investigators.

Washington lawyers say a number of prominent citizens have been subpoenaed to testify but have already indicated they will refuse to testify, asserting their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

It is not yet clear whether Senator Levin will insist they appear in front of the committee anyway.

If you want to read more extensively about this five-year-old case that surfaced on U.S. news sites yesterday, do a search for “Liechtenstein bank.”

But all these millionaire and billionaire tax cheats will slither out of prosecution, just you watch.

Hundreds of Super Rich Under Investigation
Senate Committee Wants To Question Secret Account Holders and Bank Officials

Hundreds of rich Americans whose names and secret foreign bank account information were turned over to US tax authorities could face criminal prosecution. A Senate committee is scheduled to convene tomorrow and among those called to testify are foreign bank account holders, including one of the wealthiest men in Los Angeles.

48 year-old Peter Lowy and his family own the giant Westfield shopping center fortune and will control the retail space in the rebuilt World Trade Center in New York. Bob Bennett, a lawyer for Lowy, who is a prominent contributor to both Democratic and Republican candidates, told ABC News that Lowy’s name was on the list of secret accounts from a Liechtenstein bank but that Lowy did nothing wrong.

Bennett said Lowy is out of the country tomorrow and will not be available to testify.

July 17 Updates:

Dubai-Disneyland Could Shelter Super-Rich Tax Cheats

Senate: UBS, Liechtenstein aided US tax cheats
Bradley S. Klapper

A U.S. Senate subcommittee accused banks in Switzerland and Liechtenstein of helping wealthy Americans evade billions in taxes each year, and urged the establishment of tougher laws to combat offshore tax havens around the world.

In a report released late Wednesday, the Senate subcommittee on investigations estimated that offshore abuses were costing U.S. taxpayers about $100 billion a year.

It recommended a range of reforms to squeeze tax cheats, including more stringent U.S. requirements for foreign banks and harsher penalties for financial institutions failing to provide the Internal Revenue Service with details on all accounts their American clients are holding.

Senate Report Examines Role of Banks in Tax Evasion
By LYNNLEY BROWNING

The secrecy surrounding offshore bank accounts was pierced Wednesday by a Senate report that examined how UBS helped wealthy individuals evade American taxes.

Posted in Corporate Crime, Economy, Exposure, Greed, Politics, Special Human Beings | 1 Comment »

The End of the Age of Man

July 15, 2008 by luminaria

-Copyright © 2008 Knocking on the Sky. This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, or if you are reading it posted on a different site in its entirety other than on http://luminaria.wordpress.com, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. DMCA Complaints will be notified for immediate legal action.

There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
and the ones who say there isn’t.
Why don’t you come on back to the war, that’s right, get in it, why don’t you come on back to the war, it’s just beginning.
–Leonard Cohen

So this is what the End of the World® feels like. I always wondered. Signs that It Is Here are so everywhere I don’t know where to turn my head and look at any given minute. There is literally no organized system, natural or man-made, that isn’t ripping apart and sliding away like virtual melting iceberg as we all stand and stare in comatose disbelief.

And this collective and individual coma is understandable, really. When the brain goes into shock and grief, it doesn’t function so well. It goes into brain lock, shocklock, to coin a term. Maybe shocklock  is nature’s means to come to terms and, finally, to heal. The Buddhists will tell you that doing Nothing is always preferable to doing Something, which will only fuck things up worse. Maybe comas are the only means the body (individual and collective) has of shutting down the brain so it can heal, which might help explain our inaction for the past eight years.

The sign that really brought this comatose reality home for me was as I listened to NPR at 3 a.m. this morning. For a brief moment someone off-mic (or slipped through on recorded media–I couldn’t really tell) clearly yelled, “Fucking shit! Fuck that shit!” And the show host calmly continued speaking as if no FCC rule had been breached (well it was NPR, after all, quintessentially PC; or maybe she thought no one was listening at 3 a.m?). And my comment to NPR (as if NPR would even care): This is good. This is really good. It shows something is happening. That momentary lapse was probably the one spark of truth that’s come through from NPR since its launch. It’s refreshing to finally hear our own true sentiments slip over the airwaves without censorship.

The ideological abyss that’s divided this nation (no longer into right and left but into wealth class and servant class) gives me this image of mitosis where the two sides have separated from each other, have polarized from the equator (equality) to the point where each class now sees the other as toxic. This finalized polarization demands that we really, finally see what side of the abyss we are on.

Those of us on the left pole see that we’re living on subsidized time in corporatized space while everything is unraveling around us. Despite their most insidious plans, the end of the world means that the stasis that so characterizes the wealth class will be annihilated by the bombardment of oxymorons and paradoxes, by exponential picoseconds of astonishment that bursts into infinite fractals.

In other words, up until now their stasis couldn’t be stopped. But despite its best efforts and ours to stop it, thanks to the End of the World®, it is melting and eroding and will continue to melt and erode. That’s because their servants are good with change. That’s because change is the law of the universe, which is diametrically opposed to the stasis of wealth, those who fear change more than anything they know. They’ve been profiting from our shock for eight years (far longer, really, but let’s go with eight years for now).

The polarization pundits demand to know who you are going to vote for (and we already know this is going to be the dirtiest and most contentious election that America has ever witnessed). The question serves only as another distraction. The shock waves generated by the End of the World® ripple far beyond any electoral process or anything else the wealth stasis class could ever dream up.

In “times like these” (for lack of a better description; human beings have never ever encountered “times like these”) everything that once seemed bizarre is now shruggable, ordinary happenstance. And this is exponentially promising for those of us in the servant class who know only uncertainty.

Anyone who still believes he is in control of the processes of life (those who comprise the tiny percentage of the static wealth class) will sooner or later be torn away from this belief. While they cling to their crumbling banks, we here in the servant class are learning to let go, let go, let go of the riverbank and let the river carry us, however painful it is. Yes, the grief is sometimes overwhelming. We’ve been taught to deny our grief for far too long. But on this leg of the journey we must allow grief to wash over us. Grief is an essential part of life to heal. We can’t escape it if we really want to live. Let’s face it. Grief is our container, our crucible.

Yeah, I know. This all reads like I’m getting all New Agey on your ass. My response to that is that anyone with a pulse has to make sense out of all this grief somehow. So as a writer, I can only fly by the seat of my pants and listen to my intuition, and this is what I came up with. So maybe you’d call it “New Age,” but tough shit. It’s my bloggy and I can fly if I want to.

Anyway, like I said in the opening of this post, so this is what the End of the World® feels like. The word “world” is rooted in a compound of the obsolete words were, “man”, and eld, “age”; thus, its etymology may be rendered as “age or life of man.” Back in the day, women were just a bunch of wombs walking around while men stomped around (like kindergartners stomp on bugs) dominating and domesticating and “man” trumped and engulfed “woman” in everything, even in language. So yes, in this sense we’re at the end of “man’s” age. Finally. Of course it really could be the end of the age of the entire race of men and women. There’s that.

And yes, change is scary. Ends are scary.

But the left pole of this polarization, the servant class (as opposed to the right pole of this polarization), is all about riffraff, unpredictability, veritable unherd-able cats and frogs in wheelbarrows. We are the resilient pole of the species, capable of appreciation and joy and transcendence. Speculators, hedge funders, and CEOs, you can take this to the bank: It’s impossible to know something until you’ve also known its opposite. You can never know joy unless you’ve known grief.

Call it whatever you want, regardless of your religion or ideology, and sorry to have to break it to you, but this Ending of the World® is necessary if we’re ever going to get to the next level, whatever it is. Apparently humans and huwomans can’t cheat with quick fixes. They must undergo geologic epochs to evolve. In any case, this world (this age of man) is truly disintegrating, and that can only be good.

Why don’t you come on back to the war, don’t be a tourist,
why don’t you come on back to the war, before it hurts us,
why don’t you come on back to the war, let’s all get nervous.–L.C

Posted in Just My Opinion, Politics | No Comments »

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