Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians, and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.

I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favour. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H.G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Novel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and John Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus was alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation, and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of the theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.

The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful – and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing – that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well known to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.

The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the inferior ones – the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates, the unfit, and the “feeble minded.” Francis Galton, a respected British scientist, first speculated about this area, but his ideas were take far beyond anything he intended. They were adopted by science-minded Americans, as well as those who had no interest in science but who were worried about the immigration of inferior races early in the twentieth century – “dangerous human pests” who represented “the rising tide of imbeciles” and who were polluting the best of the human race. The eugenicists and the immigrationists joined forces to put a stop to this. The plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded – Jews were agreed to be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks – and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.

As Margaret Sanger said, “Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty… there is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles.” She spoke of the burden of caring for “this dead weight of human waste.”

Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against “ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens.” Theodore Roosevelt said that “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.” Luther Burbank: “Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce.” George Bernard Shaw said that only eugenics could save mankind.

There was overt racism in this movement, exemplified by texts such as The Rising Tide of Color Against the White World Supremacy, by American author Lothrop Stoddard. But, at the time, racism was considered an unremarkable aspect of the effort to attain a marvelous goal – the improvement of humankind in the future. It was this avant-garde notion that attracted the most liberal and progressive minds of a generation. California was one of twenty-nine American states to pass laws allowing sterilization, but it proved the most forward-looking and enthusiastic – more sterilizations were carried out in California than anywhere else in America.

Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset of World War II.)

Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably progressive. They set up ordinary looking houses where “mental defectives” were brought and interviewed one at a time, before being lead into a back room, which was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.

Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and killing of ten million undesirables.

After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.

But in retrospect, three points stand out. First, despite the construction of Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, despite the efforts at universities and the pleadings of lawyers, there is no scientific basis for eugenics. In fact, nobody at that time knew what a gene really was. The movement was able to proceed because it employed vague terms never rigorously defined. “Feeble-mindedness” could mean anything from poverty and illiteracy to epilepsy. Similarly, there was no clear definition of “degenerate” or “unfit.”

Second, the eugenics movement was really a social program masquerading as a scientific one. What drove it was concern about immigration and racism and undesirable people moving into one’s neighborhood or country. Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.

Third, and most distressing, the scientific establishment in both the United States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But none were necessary. In the words of Uze Deichman, “Scientists, including those who were not a member of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work through their modified behaviour and direct cooperation with the state.” Deichman speaks of the “active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race policy… where [research] was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine… no external pressure can be documented.” German scientists adjusted their research interests to the new policies. And those who did not adjust, disappeared.

A second example of politicized science is quite different in character, but it exemplifies the hazards of government ideology controlling the work of science, and of uncritical media promoting false concepts. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a self-promoting peasant who, it was said, “solved the problem of fertilizing the fields without fertilizers and minerals.” In 1928 he claimed to have invented a procedure called vernalisation, by which seeds were moistened and chilled to enhance the later growth of crops.

Lysenko’s methods never faced a rigorous test, but his claim that his treated seeds passed on their characteristics to the next generation represented a revival of Lamarckian ideas at a time when the rest of the world were embracing Mendelin genetics. Josef Stalin was drawn to Lamarckian ideas, which implied a future unbounded by hereditary constraints; he also wanted improved agricultural production. Lysenko promised both, and became the darling of Soviet media that was on the lookout for stories about clever peasants who had developed revolutionary procedures.

Lysenko was portrayed as a genius, and he milked his celebrity for all it was worth. He was especially skillful at denouncing his opponents. He used questionnaires from farmers to prove that vernilization increased crop yields, and this avoided any direct tests. Carried on a wave of state-sponsored enthusiasm, his rise was rapid. By 1937, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet.

By then, Lysenko and his theories dominated Russian biology. The result was famines that killed millions, and purges that sent hundreds of dissenting Soviet scientists to the gulags or the firing squads. Lysenko was aggressive in attacking genetics, which was finally banned as “bourgeois pseudo-science” in 1948. There was never any basis for Lysenko’s ideas, yet he controlled soviet research for thirty years. Lysenkoism ended in the 1960s, but Russian biology still has not entirely recovered from that era.

Now we are engaged in a great new theory, that once again has drawn the support of politicians, scientists, and celebrities around the world. Once again, this theory is promoted by major foundations. Once again, the research is carried out at prestigious universities. Once again, legislation is passed and social programs are urged in its name. Once again, critics are few and harshly dealt with.

Once again, the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science. Once again, groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears high-minded. Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once again, vague terms like sustainability and generational justice – terms that have no agreed definition – are employed in the service of a new crisis.

I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions on the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression.

One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are no longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticism.

In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called “the demon-haunted world” of our past. That hope is science.

But as Alston Chase put it, “when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.”

That is the danger we now face. And that is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.

- From the Appendix of “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton.

This is an excerpt out of Michael Crichton’s book, “State of Fear.” I avidly encourage everyone to read this book – mainly because it so clearly reveals to you that so much of what you have taken to be fact is infact media-driven-bogus. For instance, did you know that there is actually no greenhouse effect going on? What the author has done is taken an immensely wide range of information and studies and conclusions, and fashioned a novel using their conclusions – not forgetting to include the real footnotes of these findings for your personal research. Have a read:

“Within modern culture, ideas constantly rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something, and then, bit by bit, they stop believing it. Eventually, no one can remember the old idea, the way no one can remember the old slang. Ideas are themselves a kind of fad, you see.”

“I understand, Professor, but why-“

“Why do ideas fall out of favour, you are wondering?” Hoffman said. He was talking to himself. “The answer is simply – they do. In fashion, as in natural ecology, there are disruptions. Sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in a charred acreage. Accidental, haphazard, unexpected, abrupt change. This is what the world shows us on every side.”

“Professor…”

“But just as ideas can change abruptly, so, too, can they hang on past their time. Some ideas continue to be embraced by the public long after scientists have abandoned them. Left brain, right brain is a perfect example. In the 1970s, it gains popularity from the work of Sperry at Caltech, who studies a specific group of brain-surgery patients. Sperry denies any broader meaning. By 1980, it is clear that the left and right brain notion is just wrong – the two sides of the brain do not work separately in a healthy person. But in popular culture, the concept does not die for another twenty years. People talk about it, believe it, write books about it for decades after scientists have set it aside.”

“Yes, all very interesting –“

“Similarly, in environmental thought, it was widely accepted in 1960 that there is something called “the balance of nature.” If you just left nature alone it would come into a self-maintaining state of balance. Lovely idea with a long pedigree. The Greeks believed it three thousand years ago, on the basis of nothing. Just seemed nice. However, by 1960, no scientist believes in the balance of nature anymore. The ecologists have all given it up as simply wrong. Untrue. A fantasy. They speak now of dynamic disequilibrium, of multiple equilibrium states. But they understand now that nature is never in balance. Never has been, never will be. On the contrary, nature is always out of balance, and that means-“

“Professor,” Evans said, “I’d like to ask you-“

“That means that mankind, which was formerly defined as the great disrupter of the natural order, is nothing of the sort. The whole environment is being constantly disrupted all the time anyway. If you study the media, as my graduate students and I do, seeking to find shifts in normative conceptualization, you discover something extremely interesting. We looked at transcripts of news programs of the major networks – NBC, ABC, CBS. We also looked at stories in the newspapers of New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We counted the frequency of certain concepts, and terms used by the media. The results were very striking.” He paused.

“What did you find?” Evans said, taking his cue.

“There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster. For example, during the 1980s, the world crisis appeared in news reports as often as the word budget. In addition, prior to 1989, adjectives such as dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it all changed.”

“In what way?”

“These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. It’s use doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic.”

“Why should it have changed in 1989?”

“Ah. A good question. Critical question. In most respects 1989 seemed like a normal year: a Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdes; Salman Rushdie sentenced to death; Jane Fonda, Mike Tyson, and Bruce Springsteen all got divorced; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France, and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other. But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision in the autumns of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should coincide so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Which happened on November nineth of that year.”

Hoffman fell silent again, looking at Evans in a significant way. Very pleased with himself.

Evans said, “I’m sorry Professor. I don’t get it.”

“Neither did we. At first we thought the association was spurious. But it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet Empire. And the end of the Cold War that had lasted for half a century in the West.”

Another silence. Another pleased look.

“I’m sorry.” Evans said finally. “I was thirteen years old then, and…” He shrugged. “I don’t see where you are leading.”

“I am leading to the notion of social control, Peter. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the right side of the road – or the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.”

”Fear,” Evans said.

“Exactly. For fifty years, Western nations have maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of nuclear war. The Communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire. And within the Communist countries, the same in reverse. Fear of us. Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finished. Gone, vanished. Over. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something has to fill it.”

Evans frowned, “You’re saying that environmental crisis took the place of the Cold War?”

“That is what the evidence shows. Of course, now we have radical fundamentalism and post-9/11 terrorism to make us afraid, and those are certainly real reasons for fear, but that is not my point. My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before terrorism we feared the toxic environment. Before that we had the communist menace. The point is, although the specific cause of our fear may change, we are never without the fear itself. Fear pervades society in all its aspects. Perpetually.”

He shifted on the concrete bench, turning away from the crowds.

“Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialised nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increase fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in particular panic about things they can’t even see – germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it’s an extraordinary delusion – a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear. Amazing. How has this world view been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nations – France, Germany, Japan, the US – in fact, we inhibit exactly the same state, the State of Fear. How has that been accomplished?”

Evans said nothing. He knew it wasn’t necessary.

“Well, I shall tell you how,” he said. “In the old days – before your time, Peter – citizens of the West believed their nation states were dominated by something called the military-industrial complex. Einsenhower warned Americans against it in the 1960s, and after two world wars Europeans knew very well what it meant in their own countries. But the military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society. In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population – under the guise of promoting safety.”

“Safety is important.”

“Please. Western nations are fabulously safe. Yet people do not feel they are, because of PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. If it has no basis in fact at all. For instance, consider silicon breast implants.”

Evans sighed, shaking his head. “Breast implants?”

“Yes. You will recall that breast implants were claimed to cause cancer and autoimmune diseases. Despite statistical evidence that this was not true, we saw high-profile news stories, high-profile lawsuits, high-profile political hearings. The manufacturer, Dow Corning, was hounded out of the business after paying $3.2 billion, and juries awarded huge cash payments to plaintiffs and their lawyers. Four years later, definitive epidemiological studies showed beyond a doubt that breast implants did not cause disease. But by then the crisis had already served its purpose, and the PLM moved on, a ravenous machine seeking new fears, new terrors. I’m telling you, this is the way modern society works -  by the constant creation of fear. And there is no countervailing force. There is no system of checks and balances, no restraint on the perpetual promotion of fear after fear after fear….”

“Because we have freedom of speech, freedom of the press.”

“That is the classic PLM answer. That’s how they stay in business,” Hoffman said. “But think. If it is not at all right to falsely shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, why is it right to shout “Cancer!” in the pages of The New Yorker? When that statement is not true? We’ve spent more than twenty-five billion dollars to clear up the phony power-line cancer claim. “So what?” you say. I can see it in your face. You’re thinking, we’re rich, we can afford it. It’s only twenty-five billion dollars. But the fact is that twenty-five billion dollars is more than the total GDP of the poorest fifty nations of the world combined. Half the world’s population lives on two dollars a day. So that twenty-five billion would be enough to support thirty-four million for a year. Or we could have helped all the people dying of AIDS in Africa. Instead, we piss it away on a fantasy published by a magazine whose readers take it very seriously. Trust it. It is a stupendous waste of money. In another world, it would be a criminal waste. One could easily imagine another Nuremburg trial – this time for the relentless squandering of Western wealth on trivialities – and complete with pictures of the dead babies in Africa and Asia that result.”

He hardly paused for breath. “At the very least, we are talking about a moral outrage. Thus we can expect our religious leaders and our great humanitarian figures to cry out against this  waste and the needless deaths around the world that result. But do any religious leaders speak out? No. Quite the contrary, they join the chorus. The promote “What would Jesus Drive?” As if they have forgotten that what Jesus would drive is the false prophets and fearmongers out of the temple.”

Kathleen Stephens, US Ambassador to ROK, told a Chinese forum that US Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth will seek the DPRK’s return to the Six Party Talks and for the North Koreans to reaffirm the September 2005 joint statement.  This was to be expected, and it remains up in the air whether the DPRK will actually return to the Six Party Talks.

Chosun Sinbo carries an op-ed entitled “The First Step of Denuclearization is ‘Establishment of Peace Guarantee System’–an End to DPRK-US Hostile Relations, the Most Pressing Task” which says in part: “It has been long since the armistice agreement that was signed in the 1950’s last century lost its mission and function.  The armed clash between North and South that happened in the West Sea of Korea in November reconfirmed the Korean peninsula’s state of keen military tension.  As long as there is concern over incidental clashes and the recurrence of war, the DPRK side cannot unilaterally abandon its self-defensive war deterrent.  Beginning from 8 December, Special Representative Bosworth will visit Pyongyang in the capacity of President Obama’s special envoy.  If the United States really means to resolve the nuclear issue while facing the reality of the Korean peninsula, the only way is to reach the conclusion that the establishment of a system for guaranteeing peace is the most urgent matter.”

This essay echoes a report out of Yomiuri Shimbun which says that during the Jack Prtichard (et al) trip to the DPRK, MOFA Director-General Ri Gun asked the American delegation for a peace treaty and economic investments.  And according to an RFA interview with a member of the US delegation, Scott Snyder, Mr. Snyder was not certain whether the DPRK will return to the Six Party Talks.

All the while the ROK Foreign Ministry states that it will not accept a peace treaty between the US and DPRK.

So, one gets the sense there may be no room at the inn when US Special Envoy Bosworth arrives in Pyongyang on 8 December.

Entre 2010 y 2012, el gobierno de Felipe Calderón intensificará su proyecto castrense de “recuperación” de territorios controlados por el narcotráfico y por la guerrilla, revela el Programa para la seguridad nacional (2009-2012). A pesar de que México carece de una política de defensa, el plan tiene como prioridad el uso de la fuerza contra la delincuencia organizada y los grupos rebeldes. Expertos consultados prevén más controles sociales derivados del “espionaje” gubernamental

En los tres años que le restan, la administración de Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa se propone “anular” cinco amenazas a la seguridad nacional: la delincuencia organizada, el narcotráfico, la guerrilla, el terrorismo y la vulnerabilidad de las fronteras. Para ello, sus herramientas principales serán el “espionaje” y el uso de la fuerza castrense, se desprende del Programa para la seguridad nacional (2009-2012).

De acuerdo con el documento, del cual Contralínea posee copia, en México tanto los narcotraficantes como los guerrilleros controlan espacios territoriales. Por ello, las prioridades del gobierno son “recuperar el control pleno en territorios endémicamente afectados por las actividades delictivas” y “recuperar aquellos espacios que han sido cooptados de manera ilegítima por terceros subvirtiendo el orden constitucional”.

Jorge Luis Sierra, especialista en fuerzas armadas y seguridad nacional, explica que “a pesar de que los poderes de fuerza que tiene el Estado le permitirían controlar todo el territorio nacional, no es así, el documento lo está admitiendo. Está planteando como objetivo la recuperación de espacios perdidos a manos de la delincuencia organizada”.

La “recuperación” tendría distintas etapas e involucraría “el gran activo del país” en materia de seguridad nacional: los funcionarios y las instituciones que tienen a su cargo su preservación, indica el programa. Es decir, la Presidencia de la República y las secretarías de la Defensa Nacional, Marina Armada de México y Gobernación.

El documento, de 60 páginas, indica que las líneas estratégicas comienzan con un trabajo coordinado de inteligencia y contrainteligencia, “activa y pasiva”. En el primer caso, para “profundizar el conocimiento en torno a amenazas y riesgos específicos”; en el segundo, para “anticiparlos” y “limitarlos”.

El programa que entró en vigor el 20 de agosto de 2009, cuando fue parcialmente publicado en el Diario Oficial de la Federación, advierte que “a la generación y provisión de inteligencia (…) le debe seguir la oportuna toma de decisiones estratégicas que detonen, con la debida congruencia y contundencia, aquellas acciones gubernamentales necesarias para enfrentar el peligro detectado”.

Es entonces, en esa segunda etapa, cuando vendría el uso de la violencia institucional para “anular” las amenazas a la seguridad nacional, pues, a decir del gobierno federal en su propio documento, éstas “obligan” a “emplear recursos extraordinarios de la fuerza del Estado para su atención”.

Territorios controlados

El Programa para la seguridad nacional (2009-2012) “será recordado por enfatizar el tema de la recuperación de los espacios que está controlando la delincuencia organizada, particularmente el narcotráfico”, dice Jorge Luis Sierra.

Al respecto, el documento detalla: “En la vertiente de seguridad nacional, el factor esencial de todas las expresiones de la delincuencia organizada es su alta capacidad económica, que le permite penetrar las instituciones públicas y la estructura social. De este modo, la amenaza concreta consiste en el debilitamiento de la economía, la sociedad y las instituciones de gobierno, factores cuya combinación y persistencia menguan el control territorial del Estado”.

Información de la Procuraduría General de la República indica que al menos siete grandes organizaciones que trafican drogas se mantienen vigentes en México (Arellano Félix, Carrillo Fuentes, Guzmán Loera-Palma Salazar, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, Díaz Parada, Valencia Valencia, Amezcua Contreras). A éstas, la administración federal les atribuye la violencia que padece el país, y que ha cobrado la vida de más de 16 mil 500 personas en lo que va del sexenio calderonista.

Según el programa, “las acciones emprendidas por este gobierno para combatir al narcotráfico marcan un punto de inflexión en la presión del Estado sobre las organizaciones criminales, que han reaccionado escalando la violencia ejercida entre ellos, contra la población civil y contra la autoridad como una forma de desafiar al Estado”.

El mismo documento revela que el gobierno no sólo tendría por objeto la “anulación” de los narcotraficantes, sino también de los guerrilleros, a quienes considera como la tercera amenaza a la seguridad nacional. Además, plantearía la “recuperación” de los territorios controlados por los rebeldes.

Las labores contrainsurgentes han sido confirmadas ya por el Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo Insurgente (ERPI) en dos entrevistas con Contralínea (publicadas el 20 de septiembre y el 4 de octubre de 2009). El grupo armado reconoció haberse enfrentado con el Ejército Mexicano en una zona cercana a la comunidad Puerto Las Ollas, Coyuca de Catalán, Guerrero.

“La defensa de las ideas por la vía de las armas es una acción que quebranta el orden constitucional. La amenaza a la seguridad nacional implica actos violentos que ejercen dichos grupos, y que causan severos daños al desarrollo del país, especialmente por lo que se refiere a los ataques en instalaciones estratégicas de las que depende la planta productiva”, expresa el programa gubernamental.

En la actualidad, en el país podrían existir más de 40 grupos rebeldes, refieren datos publicados por el Centro de Documentación de los Movimientos Armados. Entre ellos, el Ejército Popular Revolucionario que en julio y septiembre de 2007 hizo explotar “los ductos de gas (…) mejor controlados y los que tenían mejor mantenimiento en todo el sistema” de Pemex Refinación, ubicados en Guanajuato, Querétaro y Veracruz (Contralínea 120).

Los actos de sabotaje, que afectaron a más de 2 mil 500 empresas, fueron parte de una “campaña nacional de hostigamiento contra el gobierno ilegítimo de Felipe Calderón” para exigir la presentación con vida de los militantes Edmundo Reyes Amaya y Alberto Cruz Sánchez, desaparecidos el 25 de mayo de ese año “por el Estado mexicano”, señaló el grupo guerrillero en un comunicado.

Para la Secretaría Técnica del Gabinete de Seguridad Nacional, esos actos tuvieron el carácter de “atentados” e implicaron “la comisión de delitos” que, “dada su naturaleza”, pusieron en “peligro la seguridad del Estado”, dice la respuesta a la solicitud de información ciudadana 0210000152207.

Contrainsurgencia militar

En sus líneas de acción, el programa indica que para “acotar la actuación de grupos armados” se tomarán como medidas, “entre otras”: “Mantener abiertas las vías del diálogo entre los grupos armados y el gobierno federal de cara a la sociedad civil, con la única limitación de hacer valer el estado de derecho en la totalidad del territorio nacional; (y) mantener una presencia disuasiva apoyada por el intercambio de información e inteligencia entre las instituciones nacionales”.

Advierte que el gobierno “efectuará las gestiones para que tenga lugar el fincamiento de las responsabilidades penales que en cada caso correspondan, conforme a derecho”, contra los mexicanos que se mantienen en rebelión.

La estrategia gubernamental privilegiará, sobre todo, el uso de la fuerza. Jorge Luis Sierra indica que, al igual que el narcotráfico, la guerrilla será combatida por la vía de las armas: “Lo único que veo que no sea el uso de la fuerza es el desarrollo de los programas de inversión en las comunidades donde hay movimientos armados. Pero nada más. Eso es lo único que dice el documento de cómo afrontar a los movimientos armados que no sea el uso de la inteligencia y la fuerza: hay un consenso clásico que está pensado más en términos de fuerza y no de desarrollo integral de las zonas, con el fin de evitar que la población simpatice con grupos insurgentes y pase a apoyarlos. No hay esa perspectiva de manera clara. En el documento está de manera tangencial”.

En su página 49, el programa hace la única y magra referencia: “Invertir en infraestructura para dotar de servicios básicos y promover actividades productivas en comunidades ubicadas en el área de influencia de grupos armados”.

Para Sierra, a pesar de que la guerrilla es la tercera amenaza en importancia de la agenda nacional de riesgos, “no hay un desarrollo integral de cómo afrontar el problema con otras vías que no sean la contrainsurgencia clásica”.

Lo que sí hay, en la práctica, son las acciones contrainsurgentes. Tan sólo la Secretaría de Marina cuenta con “fuerzas elites de infantería de marina orientadas a realizar operaciones de contraguerrilla”, reconoce la institución encabezada por el almirante Francisco Saynez Mendoza.

Datos publicados por la dependencia federal indican que dichas fuerzas son capaces de “incursionar y efectuar reconocimientos en áreas bajo control del enemigo (sic), desorientar sus actividades mediante operaciones de combate y sicológicas, estableciendo un perímetro de seguridad del área objetivo, negando la entrada y salida de los transgresores de la ley, así como dar cobertura y seguridad al ingreso del equipo de intervención”. Esas capacidades son desarrolladas en el Curso de Contraguerrilla, que imparte la propia institución.

Sierra indica que al apostar a la fuerza, las autoridades federales “estarán fallando, como fallaron hace 30 años y también hace 80 años. El país no ha logrado desarrollar el sur, que sigue estancado en la miseria, en la violencia de los caciques, en la injusticia, en el asesinato de los líderes y ahora con la presencia de la delincuencia organizada. Eso trae nuevos periodos: pasan 10 o 20 años y la violencia vuelve a surgir. Nuevas células, nuevos movimientos armados, nuevos enfrentamientos, en una espiral que se va desarrollando. La violencia no va retrocediendo: las zonas afectadas son cada vez mayores, los sabotajes que se hacen son cada vez más dañinos, más extensos, afectan más a la economía, y todo eso no ha terminado de resolverse”.

Agrega que “se ha pensado que por la vía de la fuerza, con la desaparición de los militantes de los movimientos armados de las décadas de 1960, 1970 y principios de 1980 se había eliminado el problema, pero no fue así. Las condiciones para el desarrollo de grupos armados ahí están todavía, el potencial ahí está. El hecho de que el Ejército y el gobierno estén tratando de combatir al ERPI en Guerrero demuestra que ahí sigue habiendo movimientos armados”.

Sin política de defensa

La destacada participación del sector castrense en la preservación de la seguridad nacional y sobre todo en la seguridad pública, se da a pesar de que México carece de una política de defensa que regule la actuación del Ejército y la Marina en labores concretas, como por ejemplo los operativos y los retenes.

Jorge Luis Sierra explica que “esto nos deja a los mexicanos en una debilidad de grandes dimensiones. Si México no tiene una política de defensa, ¿cómo va a ser pensada la actividad y la estrategia de las fuerzas armadas? y ¿cómo va a encajar la estrategia de las fuerzas armadas en el resto de las necesidades nacionales?”

Carecer de esa política significa, “simplemente, (que) no hay una guía para las fuerzas armadas y no hay una guía para el Estado mexicano para saber adecuar el trabajo de las fuerzas armadas en las necesidades del desarrollo político, económico y social. Esta parte es completamente deficiente”.

Sierra puntualiza que no puede haber un programa de seguridad nacional que no esté acompañado por uno de defensa; este último, dice, depende de la política de defensa nacional. De esos programas complementarios se debería derivar el presupuesto para la defensa nacional, “pero acorde con una visión más global, mucho más nacional de la seguridad y la defensa”.

En su página 48, el programa introduce la siguiente frase: “Establecer los postulados generales de una política de defensa nacional”. Identificada como la “línea estratégica 2.2.8”, ésta se desprende de la “línea de acción 2.2 Incidir, a través de políticas públicas sobre factores que desempeñan un papel crítico en la génesis de amenazas y de riesgos”, perteneciente al “objetivo específico 2 Atender integralmente las amenazas que ponen en peligro a la seguridad nacional, así como aquellos riesgos definidos como prioritarios que pudieran llegar a vulnerarla”.

El doctor Javier Oliva, experto en seguridad nacional, explica que, a juzgar por las decisiones que ha tomado, el equipo del presidente Felipe Calderón “ha confundido notable, estructural y conceptualmente” la seguridad nacional con la seguridad pública.

El académico juzga que “hay una impericia y un desconocimiento de la materia. Mi hipótesis central es que el gobierno anterior y éste han dado respuestas de manera táctica pero no estratégica. Es decir, hay respuestas a modo pero no hay una línea a largo plazo: nombran y quitan funcionarios, mandan la iniciativa, firman decretos, le cambian de nombre a la PFP (Policía Federal Preventiva, ahora Policía Federal). Eso demuestra una imprecisión en el objetivo”.

Oliva explica que la función, la misión y el instrumento de un soldado es la violencia. “Y la violencia fundamentalmente para aniquilar al enemigo, y aniquilar significa matarlo. No es que sean buenos o malos, sino que ésa es la filosofía de la guerra”.

Indica que “el tomador de decisiones está confundido, porque no sabe, no le han explicado, cuáles son las funciones de un soldado sea mexicano, colombiano, o el que sea”.

El académico de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México añade: “Cuando se echa mano de las fuerzas armadas debe ser de manera provisional, porque ésta no es su función y no debe ser permanente. Si el tema de la seguridad pública se convierte en un tema estructural, quiere decir que el Estado, no el gobierno en turno, está fallando. Ningún país puede decir, sin que esté en guerra o en un conflicto intenso como Colombia, que el tema de la seguridad pública es de seguridad nacional, porque entonces denota que está quebrada la impartición de justicia. En México, pareciera que el tomador de decisiones, al suponer que esto va a ser permanente, está aceptando el fracaso rotundo en la impartición de justicia y en la certeza jurídica. Entonces, ¿de qué sirve tener elecciones?”

Más “espionaje” y control social

Para Javier Oliva, “la seguridad nacional empieza por las carreteras, por el buen empleo, la certeza de un sistema educativo; no por políticas correctivas como las que hacen (Álvaro) Uribe, (Silvio) Berlusconi, gobiernos de derecha como el de Calderón en México. Si leemos la agenda de riesgos, la pobreza y la marginación aparecen en los últimos lugares, y deberían estar en los primeros”.

Además de las cinco amenazas, el programa apunta seis riesgos a la seguridad nacional. El último, o sexto riesgo, se conforma por los “desequilibrios en el desarrollo nacional” y abarca indistintamente los ámbitos de los “desarrollos social, económico y político”.

El académico señala que la agenda nacional de riesgos “indudablemente” se debe replantear. “Con qué criterios está hecha, ¿con criterios de control o de promoción de la justicia social?”

—De no atenderse la pobreza, la marginación, la impunidad, ¿qué le espera a los mexicanos?

—Intentos de control sobre el ciudadano. Toda esta idea de poner cámaras.

—¿La nueva cédula de identidad?

—Todos son controles. Es el miedo al ciudadano por parte de la autoridad. Una autoridad que carece de legitimidad, y no me refiero sólo al proceso electoral, sino que carece de legitimidad en el ejercicio de gobierno: una autoridad se legitima también gobernando. Cómo se legitiman los gobiernos en México, a través de programas como Oportunidades, de crear condiciones para la movilidad social. Pero qué pasa cuando el número de pobres va aumentando, pues es un gobierno que se está deslegitimando. Sí veo que éste puede ser un problema en el corto plazo. Apenas estamos a la mitad de la administración y ahí están los datos, los resultados de los programas sociales.

Al finalizar 2009, los mexicanos en extrema pobreza alcanzarán los 37 millones y los indigentes, los 12 millones, estima la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe. Al presentar el documento Panorama social de la pobreza 2009, el pasado 19 de noviembre, la comisión resaltó que México presentará la mayor caída del Producto Interno Bruto en toda la región, calculado en aproximadamente 7 por ciento.

“No hay segundas oportunidades”

La desatención a las problemáticas sociales conlleva la pérdida de espacios. Jorge Luis Sierra reflexiona que los territorios que ahora busca “recuperar” el gobierno se perdieron incluso desde antes de que llegara la delincuencia organizada.

“No había inversión estatal, construcción de hospitales, de carreteras, inyección para el fortalecimiento de los municipios, un reforzamiento para el sistema educativo, dinero para el pago de maestros, construcción de escuelas, etcétera. Ese territorio estaba abandonado por el Estado, estaba perdido. La suerte de esos mexicanos estaba prácticamente a la deriva. En esas condiciones, donde no hay políticas de Estado, donde el Estado prácticamente ha abandonado ese territorio, llega el narcotráfico y lo aprovecha para sus actividades.”

El experto en seguridad nacional indica que el problema viene de muchas décadas atrás e implica negligencia histórica respecto de esas regiones. “Para recuperar los espacios que ha perdido el Estado mexicano se necesita algo más que el uso de la fuerza, se necesita de todos los elementos del poder nacional. Todos los mexicanos estaríamos en la necesidad de contribuir con algo; pero si el gobierno está confiando solamente en las fuerzas armadas y en las fuerzas de la Policía Federal y no está contando realmente con el apoyo de los ciudadanos, entonces es una política que difícilmente puede tener éxito”.

—Sería éste el momento de hacer algo más y no sólo dejarlo en manos de los militares y en el elemento de represión. ¿O podrá postergarse dos o tres años?

—No hay segundas oportunidades, lamentablemente. Hemos estado, como país, desperdiciando muchas oportunidades y estamos dando pasos hacia atrás. En Honduras hubo realmente una posición muy crítica con el golpe militar porque ahí había problemas desde muchos años atrás.

Ése es el riesgo para el país, observa Sierra. “A eso es a lo que se refiere Estados Unidos cuando dice que hay un Estado fallido: a que haya una alianza en México de narcotraficantes con funcionarios y una parte de las fuerzas armadas, una parte de los partidos políticos que intenten dar un golpe de Estado. Ése sería el escenario más grave del país, ahí es donde estaríamos alcanzando un estado de ingobernabilidad y ahí desgraciadamente no tendríamos tiempo para poder resolverlo con herramientas teóricas”.

Respecto del Programa para la seguridad nacional (2009-2012), opina que, “desde un punto de vista objetivo, fue un trabajo enorme de la comunidad de seguridad nacional. Muchos de los conceptos que están ahí vertidos son resultado de reflexiones y del trabajo intenso. Pero en la realidad, el país no tiene las herramientas indispensables como para poder traducir el plan a resultados concretos”.

Seguridad nacional. Acciones destinadas de manera inmediata y directa a mantener la integridad, estabilidad y permanencia del Estado mexicano, que conlleven a:

I. La protección de la nación mexicana frente a las amenazas y riesgos que enfrente nuestro país;

II. La preservación de la soberanía e independencia nacionales y la defensa del territorio;

III. El mantenimiento del orden constitucional y el fortalecimiento de las instituciones democráticas de gobierno;

IV. El mantenimiento de la unidad de las partes integrantes de la federación (…);

V. La defensa legítima del Estado mexicano respecto de otros Estados o sujetos de derecho internacional, y

VI. La preservación de la democracia, fundada en el desarrollo económico, social y político del país y sus habitantes

Fuente: Programa para la seguridad nacional (2009-2012)

Amenazas a la seguridad nacional

El Programa para la seguridad nacional (2009-2012) define la amenaza como “fenómeno intencional generado por el poder de otro Estado, o por agentes no estatales (…), cuya característica es una voluntad hostil y deliberada que pone en peligro de vulneración particularmente grave a los intereses permanentes tutelados por la seguridad nacional, en parte o en todo el país, y cuestionan la existencia del mismo Estado”.

Fuente: Programa para la seguridad nacional (2009-2012)

Riesgos a la seguridad nacional

Riesgos. Antagonismo a la seguridad nacional, que no teniendo el carácter de amenaza, implica una condición interna o externa generada por situaciones políticas, económicas, sociales o agentes no estatales, así como por desastres naturales, de origen humano o epidemias, cuya presencia pudiera poner en entredicho el desarrollo nacional.

Fuente: Programa para la seguridad nacional (2009-2012)

http://contralinea.info/archivo-revista/index.php/2009/11/29/guerrilla-entre-los-objetivos-militares-de-calderon/

Daily NK reports that the DPRK “has revalued and replaced its national currency.”  Northeast Asia Matters carries the complete English variant of the article, as well as the Korean version of the article.  Northeast Asia Matters notes “One thing the Korean version mentions that the English version above does not is that the Ministry of People’s Security is on full alert to watch the people’s reactions and control any “problems” associated with the issuance of new money.”

That MPS may be on “full alert” may have been a policy Kim Jong-il brought with his guidance when he inspected the MPS headquarters last week.  General-Secretary Kim may have also provided Minister of Public Security, Gen. Ju Sang-song, a gentle reminder about the new North Korean currency policy during his inspection tour of the Taedonggang Combined Fruit Farm over the weekend.  The Taedonggang Combined Fruit Farm was constructed and under the direction of the Ministry of Public Security.

“It’s shocking to realize how seldom we change our basic beliefs or understanding when confronted with new information that normally would affect change. Instead, we bend or ignore facts to fit our established world view. John Maynard Keynes once said “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” Sadly most people don’t subscribe to this logical practice. Instead, conformation bias and denial are the tools we use to manage and manipulate information to our liking. And there are plenty of governmental, corporate and private citizens ready to help us accomplish this through deliberate and targeted propaganda. The most common personal warning sign that this is happening is the pain of cognitive dissonance, which is usually set off when new information is in conflict with long established and dearly held views.

Rarely do we push through this cognitive pain to reappraise our inventory of established truths for validity or relevance. It’s so much easier to discard ugly deviations, or cherry pick information that confirms our preferred vision, rather than conduct the top to bottom review that’s called for when the facts change. Intellectual laziness is the polite term for this phenomenon. I think a more honest explanation is deliberate and mostly conscious denial. However, even when I’m alert for and aware of this phenomenon, I’m still surprised how often I participate. It’s frightening to see how deeply conditioned we are in the art of self deception. The truth hurts, so I employ the most powerful pain killer know to man, that of denial. It’s extremely difficult to reject popular opinion and strike out on our own independent path. Group think is indoctrinated into us from birth and socially rewarded at every turn. It’s emotionally safer and more comfortable if you stay near the center of the pack. Herd mentality in all its glory, which is corralled by the public myth and which we too are the keepers.”

End of Empire – Propaganda and the American Myth

Zero Hedge by Cognitive Dissonance on 11/29/2009

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive”….ourselves. With apologies to Sir Walter Scott.

If only life were as neat and orderly as my ancient history text book showed it to be. There it was on glossy paper, spread out across two sets of adjoining pages, maps of the ancient and modern world. Including time lines top and bottom, with countries outlined and identified. Underneath their modern English names were one or two older names in smaller stylized script, often including exact beginning and end dates. I remember one in particular that caught my eye. “United States of America” followed by the year 1776. But with no end date indicated, it looked like unfinished business to me. You’ve got to love those historians and their exact dates.

Of course, in reality there are no exact dates for the birth and death of city/states, other than in the author’s mind. Children continue to be born, the old still die, and life goes on under different circumstances. But you’re rarely informed of the subjective nature of historical events when you’re young and impressionable, so they’re presented in the history books as fact. The last thing the reigning Empire wants is to appear uncertain about previous Empires. Even before we begin to read and comprehend on our own, we’re presented with the illusion of a beginning and end to everything, often with very clear lines of demarcation. This concept is continuously reinforced through our daily indoctrination of carefully scripted news stories, care of our modern media saturated existence. Naturally, critical thinking is optional and definitively not encouraged.

Mix in a healthy dose of hard core science, where you learn very early there are correct and incorrect answers to all your questions, and a pattern of social myth making emerges. Of course, the correct answers are held for public safekeeping by our cultural high priests and authority figures, be they academic, governmental, scientific or religious. Lest you forget, cultural icons and heroes must always be respected and deferred to. Maybe now’s a good time to remember that most history and science books are written and re-written by those very same keepers of the public mythology. What we believe as a culture, sometimes called our public myth, is usually determined by those whose pockets are the deepest or most powerful, not by those who are the wisest and most knowledgeable.

Have you ever read a book written by the survivors of the vanquished, the so called losers? I have, a number of times, and it’s usually very enlightening to see the world from the other side of the bloody divide. In their hands, our cultural myths aren’t treated with the same loving care and respect we afford them, nor should they be. But of course they must be lying because they have an ax to grind. Revisionist history is how those in power politely describe the writings of the defeated and the victims crushed in the head long rush of conquering empire. The public myth tells us that the losers can do nothing but taut the victorious with their lies. Ignore them and they’ll go away. Besides, the winners never lie about the facts, though we’re told there’s plenty of room for differences of opinion. And just about everything can be reduced to an opinion if you’re looking to obscure.

Of course, one of the unspoken duties of the winners is to distort the written and visual record, so that it conforms to the public myth. This is the principle reason why recently retired or replaced holders of powerful governmental and military positions are handed huge advances to write their memoirs. These sacred tomes of divine wisdom are quickly embraced by other propagandists as the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help their Gods of propaganda. Once in hand, it’s quickly woven into the fabric of the public myth as supporting documentation. Thus another slice of the propaganda cycle is complete and ready for its next rotation.

We possess extremely complex belief systems and world views. How they develop and evolve is greatly influenced by external information sources we rarely question or challenge. After all, these sources are our cultural authority figures, the experts, professionals and intelligentsia that form our cultural propaganda delivery and support system. These sources cannot be seriously questioned, particularly from within, without being declared a heretic. Just look at how Zero Hedge, and other non-conforming web sites, are treated as an example of how heresy is handled these days. While we may not pay much attention to everything we hear or see, our unconscious is absorbing it all, raw and unfiltered. This information feeds into and supports our world view with little conscious thought or scrutiny. This is the reason why repetition is so vitally important to effective propaganda. Our brain always absorbs even when we do not look and listen.

It’s shocking to realize how seldom we change our basic beliefs or understanding when confronted with new information that normally would affect change. Instead, we bend or ignore facts to fit our established world view. John Maynard Keynes once said “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” Sadly most people don’t subscribe to this logical practice. Instead, conformation bias and denial are the tools we use to manage and manipulate information to our liking. And there are plenty of governmental, corporate and private citizens ready to help us accomplish this through deliberate and targeted propaganda. The most common personal warning sign that this is happening is the pain of cognitive dissonance, which is usually set off when new information is in conflict with long established and dearly held views.

Rarely do we push through this cognitive pain to reappraise our inventory of established truths for validity or relevance. It’s so much easier to discard ugly deviations, or cherry pick information that confirms our preferred vision, rather than conduct the top to bottom review that’s called for when the facts change. Intellectual laziness is the polite term for this phenomenon. I think a more honest explanation is deliberate and mostly conscious denial. However, even when I’m alert for and aware of this phenomenon, I’m still surprised how often I participate. It’s frightening to see how deeply conditioned we are in the art of self deception. The truth hurts, so I employ the most powerful pain killer know to man, that of denial. It’s extremely difficult to reject popular opinion and strike out on our own independent path. Group think is indoctrinated into us from birth and socially rewarded at every turn. It’s emotionally safer and more comfortable if you stay near the center of the pack. Herd mentality in all its glory, which is corralled by the public myth and which we too are the keepers.

I often say all writers are essentially propagandists and that applies to me as well. I’m using this forum to cherry pick information which I then present in the most compelling manner to make my case. In effect, I’m feeding you my spin, which along with other pieces can be used to build a myth. The most effective propaganda is that whose basic premise is slipped by the reader or TV viewer so smoothly it’s never recognized. Once the premise is planted and accepted, the hard work is done and the fish is quickly reeled in. What’s that you say? You’re too smart to let the wool be pulled over your eyes? That you can discern truth from lies and would eventually figure it out given enough time and inclination? Honestly ask yourself, how much effort would you put into examining something you already believe to be true? Wouldn’t you deem it a major waste of your time? Consider the premise I put forth in the title of this article. Did you notice? Did you question? Or did you accept and start to read?

Most people see information as chunks of data that can be compartmentalized, examined and manipulated. But rarely do we recognize that many of the truths we hold as impeccable are based upon long lines of information. If at any point this information could be proven false, the entire line is suspect, along with your impeccable truth. Consider a long string of mathematical calculations. While there may be dozens of individual problems with separate answers, each answer then feeds into another calculation as a sum or variable. Make a mistake at any point in the line and the entire data stream is corrupt. How we view our world is based upon many preconceived notions and beliefs. Change just one small piece we previously thought correct and everything changes to some extent. Change two or three and suddenly we have a crisis of confidence and a cognitive dissonance. Yet when we feel that pain, how often do we reboot and reexamine everything? Why would you reexamine what you think you know to be correct, particularly when most everyone else is in agreement? Peer pressure and conditioning are hard to resist, even in the privacy of your own mind. “We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

My basic premise and the basis for this series of articles is that the American Empire is ending. In fact, it has peaked and is now in rapid decline. While I can’t offer an exact date for this change of direction, it doesn’t diminish my argument in the least. I’d be hard pressed to give you the date for the decline of the Roman Empire, but clearly it followed the same trajectory. Did Rome’s downward spiral start when the capital was moved to Constantinople in 330 AD? Or when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD? It matters little at this point, except to the historians. While America descends, China and India ascend.

Actually I would argue that while Empires come and go, the culture of environmental and human exploitation and destruction we call civilization has grown in efficiency over the past 3000 years. We Americans now stand proudly at the pinnacle of the insanity, picking up where the Romans and Europeans left off. I’ll leave that thought for another day but I think you get my point.

America as a social and financial entity ceased to function at peak efficiency decades ago. This rapid decline is the main reason behind the massive increase in financial engineering, which is now coming apart at the seams, deliberately in my view. To argue over this or that detail is to be in denial of the obvious. In fact, I consider the official bickering over these details as a deliberate attempt to distort and distract while the final looting and rape occurs. Using propaganda and other psychological operations, our leaders lie about the economic condition of America. They do so not because they expect the lie to withstand close scrutiny, but rather to enable those who wish to believe the lie a plausible excuse to do so. Remember our conditioning. When in doubt, defer to authority and suspend disbelief.

A classic sales technique is the assumed consent close. Rather than directly asking you to purchase this new car, I simply assume you are purchasing and begin asking you closing questions. “Do you prefer the red one we looked at first or the blue convertible with the beige interior? Could you please get your insurance card out of the glove box before you clean out your car? Just sign here and here. Thanks.” You’d be surprised how many new automobiles, rooms of household furniture, whole life insurance, variable annuities and pieces of expensive jewelry are sold in this manner. Something similar to this technique is being used by the mass media to sell us something we already wish to buy. Only they aren’t selling the death of America, but rather its remarkable resilience and miraculous comeback. We’re being sold false hope, disguised as assumed consent questions such as, should we audit the Fed, can we expand healthcare with a public option, will Son of Stimulus be rolled out by the first or second quarter of 2010, should we……..well, you get the picture.

False hope binds us to impossible conditions and situations. Please read that statement again and then let it sink in for a minute.

As long as we believe there’s residual value in keeping America on life support, we’ll continue to pour borrowed money into this mess, rather than roll up the derivatives, fire the managers and start over. We don’t wish to face the reality that we’re in way over our heads. As long as we’re not forced to look too closely at the horrible condition our country’s in, we’re all too willing to do our part and avoid applying critical thinking to the subject. Like an old bull unknowingly led to slaughter because he thinks he’s off to mount another cow, we’re desperately trying to keep alive the magical American myth of life, liberty and apple pie while shielding our eyes from the rotting corpse it’s rapidly becoming.

That’s probably too harsh for the average American’s sensibilities, but let’s ask ourselves a few questions in an effort to find the truth, or at least something approaching the truth as we know it. Let me be clear on something before I get flamed for my harsh tongue. I’m not America bashing in the least. I’m America myth bashing. The American myth of exceptionalism is enabling her destruction as we stand idly by, applauding the mythical facade our leaders and media display 24/7. As long as we cling to the hope that all she needs is a tune up and some minor repairs, we’re condemned to a long and painful death spiral. We’re being sold exactly what we want to hear when we need to hear it. To claim otherwise is to lie to ourselves and to each other.

America is crumbling from the foundation up, and yet we gather around the TV, talking about a fresh paint job and a new screen door, both bought on credit, while handing our grandchildren a bill they’ll never be able to pay. The only way we can live with this lie while perpetrating these despicable acts upon our own family members is to deny it’s even happening. The big lie, which we must continue to tell ourselves, has taken on a life of its own and is consuming everyone and everything in its path. We are addicted to our own public myth and to sustain the lie, we simply ignore the truth. The only way to break through this lie is to go back through decades of propaganda and myth and find out what went wrong. Since this would be too painful, both individually and as a society, we distort reality as quickly as we change cable channels. It’s not just our leaders who are corrupt but we as well.

We have become cowardly, unwilling to commit to the tough decision of setting aside instant gratification in order to assure our grandchildren a home to live in. This is the ultimate act of selfishness, compounded by the fact that we claim we’ve been hijacked by our leaders. Sadly, our leaders are doing exactly what we want them to do, which is to continue the lie. Did we really think we could put our toys and war machines on the charge card and not worry about the bill, just because some politicians said we could? What are we, 5 year olds, pointing our fingers elsewhere when asked who broke the vase? Even if we personally followed the path of fiscal prudence, why didn’t we scream bloody murder, demanding we stop this insanity before the country began its suicidal plunge? Why do we still remain silent? Our hands are bloody and the only question is, how much is yours and how much is mine. Citizenship is all about individual responsibility, something we’ve been avoiding for a while now, at least since we started calling ourselves consumers.

Look at the endless propaganda on TV that’s used to lull us back into a drugged stupor, so we don’t dwell on what we’re doing to our children’s children. American flags wave in the background as chiseled men and full breasted women expound on how wonderful we are for building and loving this great nation of ours. The great American love story, brought to you nightly on prime time TV. This is where the bad guys always loose, men are men and women are sexual objects to lust after. Watch closely children, this is the American dream. Why wouldn’t we love America the myth? It’s everything we want without the pain. Nationalism is our unifying religion, a potentially fatal addiction to our public myth that enables us to fiddle while America burns. More drugs over here doctor, the patient’s waking up.

So how do we deal with this, and what does this have to do with Zero Hedge? Well, I would say it has everything to do with ZH, but then again I’m just a propagandist, weaving my magical myth. But to be honest, in desperation I’m seeking another way, a different path. I’m tired of moving in and out of the various stages of loss and grief. One moment I’m screaming at my zombie neighbor, imploring him to wake up and see the insanity. The next I’m filled with self righteous indignation as another patsy banker’s head is placed on the public pike. Sometimes I start my morning bargaining with unseen powers, begging for a truce or cease fire, only to end my day crying in my hands in fear and frustration of it all. And I’m not alone.

Zero Hedge seems to be a refuge for the walking wounded, a safe haven inside occupied territory for the psychically damaged and demoralized. But we need more than rest and relaxation in order to regain our feet. We need to heal and grow our ranks, to find a way to help ourselves and those who follow us into the refuge. Surrounded by lies and deceit, we are indoctrinated to such an extent that we still speak the language of denial without realizing it. We have no choice but to start at the beginning. While Zero Hedge speaks truth to power, we need to speak truth to ourselves, to talk openly about what has happened and where we’re going. Part of the seduction of denial is the avoidance of personal responsibility. In my view this must stop, thus my declaration that we’re all responsible for this mess. I have no doubt America can be repaired but the process starts at the personal level.

From a financial point of view, I’m sure we’ve all held a winning trade past its prime, giving back money we should have booked. And who hasn’t kept a dog way too long, when we should have thrown it overboard months ago? While I’m certain there are multiple reasons for poor investment performance, a fearless and thorough examination often shows that bad investment decisions are the result of personal shortcomings, such as wishful thinking or denial. For myself, when this happens, I find I’ve violated one or more of my trading rules. They are as follows.

One, know myself, particularly my strengths and weaknesses. Two, know my trading environment or don’t play in the sandbox. Three, always consider the other side of trade. If I’m buying, why is the other guy selling? If I’m selling, why is the other guy buying? Look for weakness in my thinking. Four, from time to time, mentally clear my computer screen of existing positions and then follow step three with each holding. If I wouldn’t buy or sell it now, why am I holding it? Five, trust my instincts, not my heart. My heart lies to me all the time with plenty of help from my brain. Instinctually I usually know when to buy or sell but often I ignore my gut feeling and wind up screwing the pooch. Over the years I’ve found that too much thinking gets in the way and often makes things worse.

These trading rules, as with life itself, requires a clear eyed view and a deeper understanding of ourselves, our fellow man and the real world, not as we wish to see it but as it really is. Unfortunately we still engage in wishful thinking way too often, constantly pushing the hope “dope” button and regretting it afterwards. Considering the direction our world is headed, it’s going to be more difficult to think clearly unless we make personal changes. Old habits die hard because we desperately cling to them for emotional support. Understanding why we do this will go a long way to helping us jettison that old baggage. Even if we are trapped on the crazy train to hell, just because we can’t get off doesn’t mean we must participate in the insanity.

So with the active participation of my fellow Zero Hedge readers, I would like to continue this exploration in a series of “End of Empire” articles, each time focusing on a different aspect of the unraveling. We need to develop our intellectual, emotional and financial coping techniques. Of particular importance to me will be the comments and feedback I get from you, for I assure you I don’t have all the answers. This isn’t a rally to arms but rather a cry for help. Either we heal as a community or we continue to hemorrhage, alone and isolated. It’s going to be a wild ride so let’s buckle up and do this together. After all, there’s safety in numbers, inside the new herd mentality of Zero Hedge.

Cognitive Dissonance

Something has been niggling at the back of my mind for a few days. I couldn’t quite get at it. Then it finally came clear. The situation U.K. home educators find themselves in is, yes, similar to that of other minority groups that have experienced state-sanctioned persecution. But there is something even more insidious about it.

If the proposed Children, Schools and Families bill is passed, home educators in Britain will become the victims of state-sanctioned and -instigated abuse. The term “abuse” is chosen here for very specific reasons. This situation has many direct parallels to the established and observed pattern of domestic abuse.

Isolation

By using their superior access to and control of media and government processes, the government has attempted to isolate home educators from potential supporters and allies in both government and the general population. (Example: the trumpeting of false accusations and fudged statistics as “proof,” during press conferences and parliamentary testimony, that home-educated children are more at risk for abuse than traditionally schooled children.) Parallel: abusive partners frequently attempt to isolate their domestic abuse victims from any source of help.

Entrapment

The wording of the bill is such that, if passed, home educators may feel that they have no choice but to comply with an invasion of their homes, lives, and relationships with their children (see the discussion on the damage that this may cause to the parent/child bond here) that violates every choice they have made for their families, or risk losing everything. By everything I mean, of course, their children, for whom they would die. Because the ultimate threat is this: we are bigger than you are. You will comply or we will take your children away from you.

Why is the bill so draconian? Because home educators have resisted. Because they have already embarrassed this government. That is the way with abusers. If the victims resist, they must be punished. Ed Balls has repeatedly been called a bully. This draft legislation, more than any other evidence I have seen, is indicative of the truth of that epithet.

If the bill is passed the government is saying this to home educating families: We have blocked every exit and closed every loophole.

You must ask for permission to register your child as home-educated. We can refuse the permission, on any grounds we choose. If you don’t ask for permission, and we find you (and we will hunt you down, oh yes we will), then we promise you that such permission will be denied to you for all time. Any evidence that you can provide that you are doing an acceptable job of educating your child will be disregarded because you did not ask us for permission.

You must make a plan in advance that tells us how you propose to educate your child. This plan must be acceptable to us, and you will enforce it such that, when we demand access to your child alone, that child must prove to us that the plan was followed. You will be assessed by representatives of the very organizations that have either already failed your child, or that you have deemed less capable of meeting your child’s needs than you are.

If you try to deviate from the plan or refuse us access to your child, we will brand you as uncooperative, and will deny you permission to educate him/her at home. We will force you to alter your relationship with your child such that you are now the enforcer of our will, not the protector of your child.

If this legislation passes, you will be trapped. Just as the wife of an abusive partner may be trapped, physically, in her home, with no means of escape, and with her children observing that she, and they, are trapped.

Blaming the Victim and other Emotional Abuse Strategies

It strikes me most forcefully that the U.K. government is, in fact, employing all the classic strategies of emotional abuse that an abusive partner uses in a domestic abuse scenario. Here are some of the attributes of such abuse, as described by an Oregon crisis center for domestic abuse. I have replaced some words referring to individual victims of domestic abuse with words that refer to home educating families in the U.K.

According to this analysis of abusive behavior, the abuser (government):

• Makes hostile jokes about the habits and supposed faults of home educators.
• Ignores the feelings of home-educating families.
• Withholds approval as a form of punishment.
• Verbally abuses the victims.
• Labels the victim with generally insulting terms: uncooperative, hidden, antisocial.
• Repeatedly delivers a series of insults designed to inflict maximum psychological  and/or reputational damage–(might be child abusers, might force their children into marriage, might be denying their children access to social opportunities, might be terrorists).
• Repeatedly attempts to humiliate the victim in front of family members, neighbors, extended community, and others.
• Isolates the victim socially, perhaps geographically as well (for example, by forcing the victims to accompany their children everywhere, put “badges” on their children indicating that they are “properly registered,” or hide from the outside world for fear of being “reported”).
• Blames the victim for abuser’s failures.
• Threatens violence and retaliation against the victims and their children.
• Denigrates the victim’s abilities as a parent, educator, etc.
• Demands all the victim’s attention and refuses to let the victim meet the needs of their children.
• Tells the victim about the abuser’s successes in other abusive situations.
• Constantly accuses the victim of failure, in spite of the evidence of success.
• Gives the victim the “silent treatment.”
• Threatens to abuse the children and/or get custody of them.
• Tells the victim they must obey for their own good, and that they can’t survive without abuser’s approval.
• Accuses the victim of being violent if they act in any way to protect themselves.
• Questions the victim’s sense of reality.
• Attempts to force economic dependency: promises economic support in return for compliance.
• Puts down or denies the victim’s history, heritage, faith, values.

So, is it a valid analogy? I don’t know about you, but as I read through the above tactics, I could come up with examples that matched every one of them from the words and actions of Ed Balls, Delyth Morgan, Maggie Atkinson, Graham Badman, the DCSF, and the current New Labour government. (I must give credit where credit is due: in thinking about this I realize that I have been profoundly influenced by the groundbreaking work of Danae as she examined this government’s actions in terms of violence against women and terrorism against the governed.)

In the modern world, government is in a position of power with regard to minority groups in the population. Abuse of power leads to abuse of individuals.

As I understood the definition of democracy, growing up, it was that democratic government gives every individual the right and ability to express their wishes to their elected representatives. A democratic government should not, however, allow persecution of minority groups by the majority. It must respect the human and civil rights of all the the governed. Majority may rule, but the rights of the minority must be respected.

If the above definition of democracy is accepted, I must make the following comment. Based upon the proposed legislation that, if passed, will invade and control the lives of a minority group in the U.K., violating their human rights and ignoring the evidence they have amassed to support their demands for justice, the form of government the U.K. is currently suffering cannot be reasonably called democracy. It would appear to me to be a political model that is “based on a very powerful leader, state control of social and economic life, with no expression of political disagreement allowed.” Or in other words, according to the Cambridge dictionary–fascism.

But fascism never lasts for long.

The Happy Lion reads so obviously as an allegory of cultural and species dominance, it’s hard to believe it’s really meant to be solely a children’s book. Written in 1954 by Louise Fatio, the story features a lion whose home

… was not the hot and dangerous plains of Africa

where hunters lie in wait with their guns,

it was a lovely French town with brown tile roofs and gray shutters.

The happy lion had a house in the town zoo, all for himself,

with a large rock garden surrounded by a moat…

So right away the opposing virtues of the “dangerous” plains – read, wild, uncivilized – Africa vs. the “lovely” French town – read civilized, under control – are established. The lion has been removed from his home, out of the nature, into society, and he may be alone and enclosed, but he is safe, which is to be prized over freedom, over one’s own nature.

And while the lion remains corralled, the people who visit him from a safe distance are friendly, and he thinks of them as friends – which is why he is so shocked and dismayed when, after his keeper leaves the latch undone and the lion goes to visit his “friends” in their houses (read zoo), they faint and run from him in terror.

“I supposed,” he said, “this must be the way people behave when they are not at the zoo.”

Of course, the lion does not realize that people consider him dangerous. He doesn’t understand that the fire engine that shows up is meant for him; just in time, a little boy comes and kindly walks the lion back to his cage, which he never desires to leave again. His ignorance of how he is perceived by his “friends” – as a predator, a threat – speaks of something beyond the consciousness of a lion.

In contrast to the adults in the story, when the lion first leaves his enclosure, he is greeted by other animals, squirrels and birds, who take no notice that he is “loose,” but greet him with a familiar friendliness.

The story shows how the dichotomies of nature vs. society, animal vs. human, wildness vs. civilization, freedom vs. control – and Western/white culture vs. African/black culture – not only determine how the adults interact, but completely structure the lion’s thinking as well. He never longs to roam free; he is happy to be walled in; he is happy with politeness and civility. That he so innocently does not understand that he is trapped by society not only makes his enjoyment of his domination poignant, but mirrors the plight of the humans in the story, too. The houses and walls and structures of control are so easily dismissed, by an unlocked latch – and then their ability to behave politely, to treat the lion with their usual regard and civility, goes right out the window. It’s the adults who act out of terror, who scream wildly, who seem lost without the lion’s barriers in place – society’s controlling mechanisms are somewhat flimsy, easily dismantled, and the effect is, to me, truly chilling.

I have no idea if Fatio intended her little story to be quite so pointed in its message about the weaknesses implicit in humanity’s attempts to subjugate the wild forces of nature, both within and without ourselves. It’s hard to imagine, though, that any writing in the 1950s and 60s that includes the landscapes of France and Africa – and we have to mention the Babar series, here, as well – can be read without the context of the historical colonial situations taking place in those decades. The French hold on countries like Algeria started to collapse – in 1954, the same year as the publication of The Happy Lion. Interesting coincidence, no?

The European imagination that underscored its attempts to “civilize” so many parts of Africa plays out in the Babar books even more explicitly. The elephants start wearing human clothing and using human weapons to war with other animals; they adopt human systems of organization in the form of royal hierarchies, and this is AFTER a human hunter kills Babar’s mother while hunting – right in front of him.

As one blogger writes in the British Times Online,

The Story of Babar and Babar the King are, as several critics have already pointed out, potentially dangerous and racist tracts. Cute as he may appear, Babar is worse than an unwitting and unreconstructed colonialist: his blacks are all silly “savages”, targets of ridicule with no positive valuation at all; and his apparently utopian foundation of Celesteville is riven by class and gender discrimination, not to mention bearing a passing resemblance to Leopold’s Leopoldville.

Both Babar and the Happy Lion come to accept and value being dominated for the sake of safety and being civilized, despite the trauma inflicted upon them by their oppressors – a common white fantasy about the slaves/peoples they have oppressed.

And then there’s Curious George (who first appeared in 1941). The creepily nameless Man with the Yellow Hat captures the monkey and treats him like crap – in Curious George Gets a Job, the Man seems to have abandoned George at some point, and only comes to get him so that he can exploit him for a movie deal. The parallels between George and the audience for which his character has been written – curious toddlers and preschoolers – underline the message of the natural/wild/animal instincts within the child that must be tamed, mastered, battened down so that the child can become an accepted member of society.

I’m not the first person to ever have some questions about the underlying messages of these books. In fact, as I’ve poked around the internet, many commentators make fun of this kind of analysis:

Earnest literary types have interpreted the first book as a barely disguised slave narrative. Have you considered that the man’s weird outfit could be a send-up of a colonial officer’s uniform? Or that George is brown and lacks a tail? (Lots of monkeys are brown and most species have visible tails.) Or that he is abducted against his will from Africa and brought across the sea to a foreign land where he engages in high jinks when the master is away?

This interpretation–surely the subject of many half-baked teacher-college lectures--was not on the mind of the Reys as they fled from the Nazis. Perhaps it is helpful to remember something that Margret once said of her books: “I don’t like messages. . . . These are just stories.“

To which I say: Of course, they are “just stories.” All stories are “just” stories. At the same time, all stories use the material of the universe out of which they are created, and if we ignore that universe, we aren’t reading the whole story.

I don’t believe in banning books. In fact, I’m imagining that these stories will afford me the opportunity to ask some pretty hefty questions of my children as they get older, as well as to start some family research projects about the worlds that these stories describe. Where do these lions, elephants, and monkeys come from? Why do they want to live “here” and not in their homelands?

Am I worried that reading these stories to my children now will imprint them with colonial fantasies? That their ideologies of civilization – and their place within it -  will be structured by a value system that girds hegemonic practices?

Yes and no. As I read these books, I become more and more convinced that they aren’t stable narratives – meaning, the subtexts woven in these stories destablilize the seeming ‘message.’ Is the Happy Lion really happy – and could he be happy if he were free? Is the lion free? Is Babar really happy? George? I’m not so sure. And I think teaching my children, even at young ages, to sense those cracks in the wall of a story is more valuable than only providing them with a politically correct version of reality. Teaching them to read critically is key to teaching them to be individuals in a society that pumps out a lot of politically and culturally skewed messages.

And I want them, metaphorically speaking, to be like the kid who doesn’t flip out when the lion has left his moated cage. I want them to face the lions roaming on the street with the kind of kindness and civility that bounds across social and cultural divisions, that isn’t afraid of nature – and that isn’t afraid of themselves.

I first saw it on the plane home from London. It was the first episode. I watched it three times. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, it’s a BritCom about a young couple, Gavin and Stacey, obviously, who start talking on the phone through their jobs. Gavin lives in Essex, and Stacey is in Wales. They have so much fun talking that they decide to meet in London. That’s where we find them in the first episode. (Spoiler alert: don’t read on if you want to watch this and don’t want to know some of the things that happen in the first and second series.)

Finally, we got the first season at the local video store. The writing is brilliant, and the acting even better. I love these characters. But, what I want to know is, are there any people like this in Britain anymore?

Because from what I’m reading about how the government is regulating families and their behavior, families like Gavin’s and Stacey’s really shouldn’t be allowed to exist.

Let’s take Mick and Pam, Gavin’s parents. They argue in public! All the time! Yet they are very loving and caring toward each other as well. Sometimes maybe a little too loving and caring where people can see them. Pam drinks too much, eats too much, pretends to be a vegetarian, and is always over the top, as played by the wonderful Alison Steadman. Pam and Mick are crazy about their only son, Gavin, but they are always giving him inappropriate advice. Amazing that they got to keep him, as oblivious to proper Ofsted-approved parenting theory as they are. Of course their friends Dawn and Pete are even worse.

Then, there’s Stacey’s family. Her mother, Gwen, worries that her husband Trevor’s harshness toward Stacey’s older brother, Jason, “turned him gay.” Pam and Gwen have a chat about whether or not that’s a causal factor in homosexuality, cause Pam has a friend who didn’t get on with her daughter, and, now, her daughter is also gay (but of the lesbian persuasion, Pam hastens to add). Young Stacey listens to all this in amazement. As I’m sure most local education authorities would. What kind of attitudes are these parents passing on to their children?

Stacey’s uncle Bryn also seems to have some lurking sexuality issues, as he is fixated on how handsome Gavin is, and keeps hugging him a little too intensely. And there is some hint of a confrontation Bryn had with Jason when Jason was younger. What’s that about? Well anyway it’s enough to tell me that young Jason should have been taken into care for his own good.

No, it’s a comedy, really, I promise. And you haven’t even heard about Stacey’s friend Nessa yet, who is pregnant by Gavin’s friend Smithy. Nessa is a former drug smuggler, former roadie for the Who, former nanny for Richard and Judy, and former BBC news producer who now works in the slot shop in Stacey’s home town of Barry.

How can such people still exist in the dark, gray, regulated world of New Labour Britain? Where all children are meant to have lives free of risk, potential emotional harm, and crazy families and friends? Is Gavin and Stacey’s world just a fairy tale, meant to show us how horrible people might be if New Labour didn’t protect them from themselves? I wonder.

Because when I am in England, I do see a lot of people who look, act, and talk like Gavin and Stacey and their friends. And I like them. I don’t think they are quite all stamped out yet, thank God. Or as Nessa would say, crackin’.

No, I’m not quite ready for the impact assessment post yet. I woke up this morning thinking about autonomous education, and what it means to me. What would my home-educating family’s life have looked like, the past sixteen years, if some outside professional educational “authority” had been monitoring us to ensure that our provision for our children’s education was suitable?

I don’t think it would have been very nice. For one thing, the very idea of it would have stressed me out totally. I freely admit that I am an easily stressed person. Excessive stress, as we all know, creates a lot of bad things in the lives of parents and children, from physical illness to any variety of emotional/mental disorders. I have been privileged, living where I do, to be able to avoid this stress and just live and learn joyfully with my children.

But what if we had not? What would have happened to us if “authorities,” taking periodic snapshots of our lives, colored by their own prejudices, had had the power to challenge or even overturn the decisions we had made for our family, our children?

None of our sons has read fluently until they were about nine. That wouldn’t have suited an “expert authority” like Graham Badman. They spent very little time on any kind of formal lessons until they were about eleven. They spent many days playing with Playmobil or Lego all day, playing outside, drawing, or playing games. Playing, playing playing. We chose to live this way. Several hours of almost every day were occupied by some adult, usually me or my husband, reading aloud to them. Some years that reading aloud was the only thing that an “education authority” might have classed as “educational.” If we lived in the U.K., would our local authority have classed our home-educated children in that eight percent that they claim receive “no education at all”?

What were we doing with our time?

Attending playgroups, ceramics classes, music lessons, gymnastics, swimming, traveling to Europe six times, going to museums, starting astronomy groups, choir practice, shooting off rockets and flying remote control airplanes and kites, summer camps of many varieties, going to Shakespeare camp and seeing Shakespeare’s entire canon at a variety of Shakespeare festivals, art classes, making up and drawing our own comic books, observing baboons (two entire summers), being on basketball and baseball teams, sailing boats in charity regattas….I could make this a really, really long list but what would be the point? It’s our story, and not really very interesting to anybody else. Every family has their own story.

Our home-educating life has mostly been relaxed and fun, full of games of By Jove, readings of the Chronicles of Narnia and thousands of other books, and the kinds of activities I listed above. On many days I would feel at the top of my game, able to take on any “authority” and show them just how, and how well, my children were learning. But our family has had its fair share of financial, health and family stresses. Sometimes we have just had to buckle down, make sure the children were safe and fed, had lots of stuff to choose from in terms of books, games and art supplies, and let them get on with it because a. daddy was moving his business and mommy had to help him; b. grandpa was dying and mommy had to help grandma; c. we were moving across the country/province/city…

Life’s like that sometimes. Sometimes I worried that their education was being neglected. It wasn’t, but I felt guilt that I wasn’t always able to sit down with them, every day, and do “book work.” I am quite sure that if we had been monitored by educational “authorities” during those stressful times, they would have tried to force us to put the children into school. But in many ways, those were the golden times for my kids. If I had forced my vision, and “book work,” on them every day of their childhoods, they would have hated it. Life’s complexity allowed them much more time and freedom to pursue the things they wanted to do, their way.

Our children have grown up intelligent, capable, and with much better academic and extracurricular resumes than most traditionally schooled kids. They did get quite a lot of “book work” done, sometimes with my assistance and “teaching,” and sometimes on their own. Our older boys were both AP scholars (AP exams, run by the College Board in  the U.S., are roughly comparable to A levels in the U.K., and a high enough mark on the exams gets you university credit).  They both entered university with a significant amount of credit awarded through the AP system, cutting down considerably on the classes they have had to take to get their university degrees. Our third son, though grade nine age, is doing three university level AP exams this year.

And yet I’ve never been convinced that, even in the non-stress times, education “authorities” would have been supportive of our choices. Many of these “authorities” have no experience of how home-based learning works They are trained and indoctrinated in an educational methodology that is diametrically opposed to it. What if these “authorities” had had complete power to force our family to live according to their judgment and decisions, based on one, two, or three snapshot visits with us each year. I can imagine a scenario in which my children would have balked at “exhibiting their learning” to these strangers with their bizarre demands, while mommy was throwing up in the bathroom from anxiety and fear.

A bit of an overreaction, you say? How do I know what it would have been like, since I never had to face it?

Actually, I have faced it, vicariously. You see, we did once live in a jurisdiction in which the Ministry of Education decided that school boards, and not parents, would decide what “satisfactory instruction” of home-educated children was. They started conducting “inquiries,” and in some cases took families to court. I have sat in on some of these lovely “inquiry” sessions, when a Ministry “authority,” based on an anonymous “tip” or a school board complaint, decided that it was “concerned” about a family’s educational provision. I have held the nauseated mommy’s hand as she opened the door to the nice authorities with their clipboards. I have watched them dismiss a young girl’s incredibly detailed, artistic and passionate work as “unacceptable” because “it was done for Girl Guide badges, and not for educational purposes.” I’m not making this up. I have lived it. It didn’t happen to me, it happened to single women on disability benefits. Easy pickin’s for the “authorities.” That’s the strategy. Go after the most vulnerable first. Make an example of them, and terrify everybody else so they fall into line.

Home-educating parents who are waiting for their visits from the pleasant and thoughtful “education authorities” often spend a fair amount of time in the bathroom. Like Damocles, they have discovered that there is a sword hanging over their heads by a thread. Except that unlike Damocles, who was being taught a lesson by the tyrant Dionysius, they can’t get out from under the sword. And unlike the tyrant, who was making the point that power co-exists with the constant threat of violence, they have no power.

The problem with giving the nice “authorities” power over home-educating families is that these same “authorities” often arrive complete with the attitude that children educated by their parents are in a de facto child abuse situation. After all, the children are being deprived of the “normal” world of school! Home-educating parents know well that most education “authorities” are wedded to the system and methods of mass, public education.  They rightly fear and resist the interference of such “authorities” in their family’s life. They know what the stakes are. If these “authorities” are given power over them, they may decide a. to force their children into school against their will or b. worst-case scenario, that their children would be better off in care, while they wait for a nice set of “normal” parents or foster parents who will raise them properly.

Who wouldn’t resist that kind of interference in their life? Is it any wonder many U.K. parents are threatening to leave the country if they are forced to allow the “authorities” to “monitor” their educational provision?

And yet some, I am told, still don’t see the threat. They are convinced that the nice authorities have only their best interests at heart, and just want their children to have free access to exam centres and other great benefits.

Well I really don’t believe that this is about exam centres. I believe it’s about trying to control families that have chosen to think differently. And it is no wonder that families who choose alternative paths are feeling besieged.  Have an argument in front of your children, have an episode with depression, live your life, in other words, and allow your children to be participants in it, and run the risk of losing them. Maybe there are some parents who are willing to run that risk to get access to exam centres.

I hope they think again. No amount of freebies is worth giving someone else power over your children’s lives.

http://gangstalking.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/paranoid/

Please read the above post.

I made this into a full post, because I very firmly feel that whenever accusations of this kind come up, they must be addressed and set where they belong. A poster from the forum, found my blog posting, and left a comment. Now maybe the poster left it for good, as useful feedback, or maybe it’s just another informant, who is trying to make Gang Stalking sites look like they encourage delusions. As I have said before in dealing with now hundreds if not thousands of people who have come through the site, the long term feedback has been that they feel validated, most knew that something was happening, but did not know what. Some considered crazy as an option, but crazy did not match what they were seeing and most are people who kept looking for other answers to what was happening to them.

I don’t know what the situation was like in Russia when the state started saying that dissidents were crazy. I imagine that many tried to prove that they were not, and tried to also expose what was happening. I do know that in Russia part of what got the abuses exposed were target telling their stories, till there were enough that people started listening. I believe that targets must do similar if they are going to be heard and expose what our governments are now doing.

http://gangstalking.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/too-much-truth/

[quote]I am a member of that forum. The member being gangstalked that you mentioned has said that she is a diagnosed schizophrenic who doesn’t want to take her medication. I assume that you haven’t read any threads posted by her other than the gangstalking one. She said she is being gangstalked by evil or negative energies because she knows who the antichrist is. You were banned because you unknowningly reinforced her delusions.[/quote]

This is the reason the account was banned.

Gangstalking, stop spamming with your links. You seem to be here on a propaganda mission. We don’t allow those kinds of accounts.

Spamming, I was not, at least not intentionally and the links could have been removed. I was posting researched information, not a propaganda mission.

Just because she has been diagnosed as crazy, does not mean that she is. Gloria Naylor a famous target was diagnosed as crazy and is not.

Without knowing more about her case, it’s impossible to know if she really is crazy, or a target or both. The targeting can make you crazy. Just look at what happened in Russia. Targets of the state were consistently diagnosed as crazy.

In America today, the psychiatric reprisal is being used on more and more people who are not crazy.

http://www.harassment101.com/Article5.html

http://www.psychologistethics.net/
http://scientific-misconduct.blogspot.com/search/label/lisa

Good sources of info about people who the state tried to put away as being crazy. It does happen.

Most people choose to believe that someone who talks about being followed around are crazy first and then they ask questions. I do the opposite, I choose to believe that people are sane first and then I ask the questions.

If posting articles about, Cointelpro, The Stasi, and our current surveillance society is going to encourage people to go crazy, or encourage paranoid delusions, then it’s unfortunate, because it’s reality. We live in a surveillance society. Innocent people are being stalked and monitored.

As evidence was presented, questions were asked. She said she knew who the anti-christ was and that she could speak to the dead. Lot’s of people think that, without necessarily being crazy. I did ask her why she felt that way in both cases.

The only thing that I did further was share with her information that myself and others have discovered about the multi generational aspect of Gang Stalking, which is also a fact.

I deeply feel sorry, and concerned about people who think that having good solid information will make people fall further into delusions. God forbid she go to sites about surveillance operations, or read books on such, or watch a tv show on such. God forbid, because I guess that those would be guilty of feeding her delusions as well.

This came up last year interestingly enough. God forbid people read the bible and it fuel their delusions of an omnipotent being that controls the world who they can’t see, but who they believe others have talked to. God further forbid such people to to Churches, Mosques, Synagogue and find others who further their delusions.

Providing a person with credible information about a problem that is happening to others is just that, it’s information that is available in books, on T.V., Youtube, and in other places. This information about Cointelpro, Mobbing, The Stasi, and other forms of harassment were available for years, as long as crazy people have thought that they were being stalked, which in cases like John Lennon turned out not to be paranoia.

The girl might be a real target, that possibility exists. She might also be crazy, that possibility exists. She might also be an agent who specifically is trying to link crazy and Gang Stalking. We had so much of that on Youtube, and on forums. There are agents of the state on most forums. This is a fact. Let me know if you need articles.

You could be here trying to be helpful, but you could also be here trying to link Gang Stalking with enhancing and encouraging the delusions of others. Eg. It’s not the first time this has happened, but as pointed out, these websites do not encourage delusions, anymore than watching tv shows, reading books, or visiting other sites on topic such as Cointelpro, or Stasi website.

If you are here with good intention’s then I thank you, but based on the original posting, and a discussion I had with the webmaster of the forum, that is not why I was banned. If your intentions are to try to link Gang Stalking sites with encouraging the delusions of the crazy, then we have been there done that, and you failed then a well.

Read the links that I posted. People are being set up to be declared as crazy, by our democratic countries. This is sick and wrong like it was in Russia. Because someone is declared crazy does not mean that they are. The girl was being teased and bullied. Crazy or sane that was not right and I stepped in because that is the human thing to do, and I will never regret doing the right and just human thing, in trying to stop her from being picked on. I told her that my first instinct is to believe her and you don’t know how needful that is, but then of course as I get to know her, I would look at the facts in her case and give feedback accordingly.

Even with real targets if I feel that they can not handle their targeting, I will always recommend they seek a support circle. Now I ask you what is being being believed and listened to, or being picked on and put down. She told her story, As I told the girl, I don’t know her and can not judge her crazy. I would rather take her word till more of her case is presented. Wither that is that she turns out to be yet another informant, crazy, target, or something else.

I hope that helps.

Múm’s video for Rhubarbidoo (off Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, their latest album) is one of the most re-enchanting videos that I’ve seen for a long time.  If, as Max Weber has argued, Enlightenment rationalization, especially as it manifests itself in the bureaucratized capitalism of Western society, results in a disenchanted world where we are locked in an “iron cage” of social alienation and meaningless production, surely the 20th-century fascination with fantasy, science fiction, and the imaginative worlds brought to life by animation effectively functions as a kind of antidote.  Rhubarbidoo is the work of Jason Malcolm Brown and Aya Yamasaki Brown, a pair of illustrator/animators who seem to specialize in re-enchantment.  Their Overture project is just as otherworldly and beautiful as Rhubarbidoo and also foregrounds a represented natural space inhabited by creatures that are not of this world and yet, in their alien guises, somehow end up appearing as natural as nature itself.

Early 20th-century animation is rife with the idea of bringing things to life — not only inanimate objects like household objects or urban spaces, but also nature itself in a special kind of re-animation where life is brought back to life.  Disney’s 1932 cartoon Flowers and Trees is a perfect example of this type of animation.  It seems fair to wonder whether or not the deep fascination with nature evinced in these early animations is actually symptom of a society that is rapidly becoming so urbanized and industrialized that direct contact with the natural world has become a thing of the past.  In this case the ability of animation to bring this world to life as ’second nature’ is deeply ironic since it’s an artifact of the industrial revolution — the toothed-gear — that allows for the existence of the stop-motion technique in the first place.  There are more sophisticated readings of this dynamic that are possible as well, of course.  Marx would probably say that what we see when we see cups and saucers singing in Disney animation is the voice of alienated labor expressing itself in another register; the Adorno and Horkheimer of Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the other hand, might view the re-animation of nature as a kind of mystificatory screen that serves to block the fact that the animistic stage of society is long since dead and instead there is only the fact of nature as a purely objectified resource for human exploitation (including the pleasurable exploitation of nature in its cartoon form).

MGM’s Honeyland is a fantastic case study for the idea that animation that seems to be about natural space is actually about the social unconscious that’s at work behind the scenes.  The cartoon begins as a kind of pastoral idyll; the bee society is figured as a classic rural community with an economy based on cultivation and gathering.  By the middle of the 1850s, however, the mechanization of agriculture had already started in the United States — the McCormick reaper, the threshing machine, and a practical mowing machine were all in use well before even the invention of the horse-drawn combine in the 1880s.  By 1935, when Honeyland was made, agriculture in the U.S. was, for all practical purposes, fully industrialized.  The kind of rural life envisioned in the cartoon — a life of pleasant labor and natural bounty — was already nothing but a nostalgic fantasy.  This nostalgic fantasy, however, can’t maintain itself and soon we’re introduced to a second fantasy — the hive as happy factory.  At this point the (worker) bees are still depicted as deeply content, and they obviously have a large amount of autonomy and free time for pleasure.  It’s toward the end of the cartoon, when the spider attacks, that the social unconscious reveals itself in a manner that’s a bit more sinister.  What started off as a pastoral idyll has now devolved into industrialized militarism — the bees are controlled en masse via the electronic call of the centralized public announcement system and form themselves into single living klaxon within which all individuation has completely disappeared.  This may seem like a stretch, but perhaps it’s not as much of a stretch if you consider that the rationalization of industrial production has its roots in the standardized manufacture of interchangeable rifle parts.

All of these anxieties about the role of human agency within the highly commercialized and industrialized landscape that we’ve erected around ourselves and come to inhabit are at the forefront of this brilliant montage that combines scenes from the Fleischer Studio’s 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels and stock footage of the construction of what I think must be the World Trade Center buildings.  The way in which Rockwell’s video for Beholden juxtaposes the Lilliputians with scenes of the construction of the WTC raises the question of whether or not we have, in fact, created something that we can’t control.  The image at the end of the video is the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 treatise, Leviathan, which argues for the total control of (a willing) society by an absolute sovereign.  Ending the video with this image makes clear that the question being raised is one of control and sovereignty; as a society we may have the ability to construct wonders, but in the end isn’t it those wonders that control us?  Clearly there is another version of Weber’s iron cage at work here.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to subscribe to the view that somehow all attempts to re-enchant the world are, in the final analysis, nothing but an empty compensation for the fact that the disenchantment of the world we know has been made complete.  There are always gaps and fissures where enchantment can happen, despite the pessimism of theorists like Weber and Adorno.  The excess in homo ludens will always escape, at least partially, the clasp of the iron cage.  The force of play and invention, the possibility to explore and investigate new social potentialities and possibilities, is at least as much of a feature of any creative work as our inability to escape the social unconscious that must inform it in at least some way.  The playful space of vegetable fantasy in Rhubarbidoo is one form that this type of exploration may take, but another form that may be more directly useful for raising questions about the type of society that we might someday want to become can be found in lengthier works of animated fantasy and speculative fiction.  Although it’s not a particularly incisive film when it comes to unpacking the deep-seated contradictions of society as we know it, René Laloux’s 1973 film Fantastic Planet does a remarkable job of thematizing the human propensity to resist totalizing systems of control, while at the same expressing the force of the imagination at play in the form of the wild and surreal images that explode across the alien landscape presented in the film.

This video for Múm’s song “They Made Frogs Smoke ’til They Exploded” is by Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, and it embodies the idea of play in deeply interesting ways.  Firstly, the video is about child’s play and as such is as much about violently exploratory creative destruction as it is about the wonder of discovery.  Childhood feelings of powerlessness — of literally being overcome and torn apart by overwhelming emotional states — are expressed through images of disembodied limbs, bodies being opened up and bleeding, and animals that are both menacing and at the same time objects to be cut open and destroyed.  The play expressed in the first part of the video is dark and indicates thetransference and acting out of violent emotions onto a creative stage that’s filled with blood and crumpled paper.  And yet, as with all childhood imaginings, the cat that loses its head is able to be magically stitched back together and return to life.  The crux of this video, for me, is the sequence with the child holding up the drawing of a swan.  The image of the swan is filled with swathes of brilliant color at the same moment at the child’s teeth fall out, precipitating a full-scalerain of teeth.  The dream of teeth falling out is, of course, classically supposed to indicate a fear of the loss of control.  And yet, at the same time, the falling out of baby teeth is one marker of our entry into adulthood.  In this sequence the creative and wild imagination of childhood, including all of the horrors that come along with it, is represented as the necessary basis for the move to aesthetic maturity.  After this scene the types of creative images that appear are much more benign — flowers emerging from the swan’s mouth, leaves filling the soul-space of a child, and paper that turns into butterflies that fly away.  Perhaps the most delightful aspect of this video is the use of common classroom materials — those things we mostassociate with childhood and its attendant confusions and power struggles — as the medium through which the question of childhood imagination is realized.  It may be the case that as a whole our society has veered far from any real contact and understanding with nature — we may have become too good at making frogs explode — but there’s a second nature at work in all of these videos, a second nature that demands a space for play and exhibits an irrepressible desire to resist the final isolation of total alienation.

“Jesus for Paul was clearly a living and personal present reality who made himself known to him on the road to Damascus. But in other respects, and here we must be aware of the many senses of the word ‘revelation’, Paul received the gospel by means of human agency rather than directly or immediately. And that is the situation of most, if not all, of the rest of us. Wherever Jesus is now – that is, quite independently of what we happen to believe about the ascended Christ present in the church and the world – we do not have a direct, unmediated relation to him, at least in the sense that the words which communicate his reality are firmly anchored in the past. This means that because the texts are couched in the concepts of a particular historical context. God comes to language in the particularities of a culture. This means that the interpretation of the revelatory particulars is entrusted to particular people, who by handing on what they have received become what we call tradition. As we saw, tradition is, before it is anything else, a form of personal relation, and we need the mediation of a tradition of interpretation if we are to receive revelation for what it is.” (in A Brief Theology of Revelation, 108-109)

http://jonmackenzie.wordpress.com/

Brain microsurgery is rapidly advancing. Scientists are delighted over the prospect of re-mapping the brain. Parents and educators have been watching the developments closely. Imagine if your child or a child in your classroom does not behave as you would like. Take the child who questions your every move. Usurping your authority at every turn. Making you look like an idiot. No worries. Soon you can take the little rebellious child in for re-mapping. After surgery, viola, he will be a completely obedient child. The child every parent and teacher dreams of having.

One of the more recent developments came out of England’s University of Oxford… These scientists were able to plant artificial memories in the brains of fruit flies in order to make them afraid of events of which they were not previously afraid.

Paralleling the findings of scientists at Oxford is a finding by scientists at the University of Toronto. By removing certain brain cells of fruit flies, they were able to make gay fruit flies into straight fruit flies. Amazing.

Lately, several of my Canadian friends have asked me if things are getting any better for U.K. home educators. I don’t know what to say. No easy solutions seem to be presenting themselves, as the Labour government seems bound and determined to bring in legislation that will make the state the official parent of all children and give the state the power to refuse permission to home educate. But there are glimmers of hope.

First, there is the All-Party Parliamentary Group that has been set up to discuss Elective Home Education. And also, other people seem to be waking up to the dangers. Here’s an excerpt from a blog post by ex-BBC journalist Alan Pearce:

To my mind, [the government] crossed the Rubicon this month with the latest Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, signing a law that allows a host of town hall officials, quangos and agencies from the Royal Mail to the Rural Payments Agency – even civilian investigators – to force their way into our homes, seize cash, freeze assets and confiscate property to recover minor fines.

In one of the most audacious acts of ‘function creep’, laws aimed at confiscating the yachts and villas of the masters of the criminal underworld are now been turned against the ordinary citizen should they fail to pay a parking fine or fall behind with their council tax.

To make matters worse, those collecting the debts will get a share of the proceeds which makes a mockery of our independent legal system. Will anyone be surprised if they now set their sights on the easy targets?

This government has already introduced 430 laws allowing officials to enter our homes. Debt collectors and bailiffs have remarkable powers allowing them to determine the amount of violence necessary to recover debts. And woe betides the house-holder who tries to stop them, with fines of up to £2,500 and a year in prison.

It amazes me that while our troops are apparently exporting democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, we sit by and allow a minister to smash down the doors to our private castles by amending the Proceeds of Crime Act with a Statutory Instrument – effectively a flick of the pen that allows for no Parliamentary debate.

So, it’s not just home educators who are feeling the strangling tendrils of state control around their innocent lives. But home education is an interesting case study. Home educators are rather like mine canaries. If they can be brought into line with fascist control tactics, perhaps larger groups will also fold easily.

I am thankful that the U.K. home educators are not easily knocked out by the noxious fumes of state control, even if the government did think they would be “easy targets.” Just goes to show how wrong you can be. I am happy to report that home educators are still fighting, and that they intend to win this fight. But some say, what’s the big deal? Lots of jurisdictions in Europe and North America have rigid home education regulations. Why are the Brits throwing fits?

Well, I for one am thrilled that they are so upset. I’m sorry they are going through this stress, but I’m sure glad they are resisting. Because every loss of legitimate freedom for anyone, anywhere in the world, makes it that much easier for another government to use the same strategies and tactics somewhere else. And there is a twist to these regulations that I, for one, haven’t seen before. That is the requirement for access to the family home without cause, and the demand that young children be interrogated by government officials without their parents’ presence or permission. (The Ministry of Education in Ontario did try similar demands on for size some years ago, but fortunately, the government gave the out-of-control apparatchiks no support.)

If the U.K. government is forced to back down on these outrageous demands for control of private homes and families, then other governments may think twice before trying to exert that control in their own jurisdiction. Every person who cares about freedom should care about what is happening to U.K. home educators.

We must pay attention to what governments are doing, when it so clearly conflicts with what they are saying. Yesterday, U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown listened, apparently approvingly, to Barack Obama’s address at the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. In both the U.K. and the U.S., so closely tied by culture, language, and legal traditions, we are expected to believe that our leaders mean it when they say, “There could be no clearer rebuke of tyranny. There could be no stronger affirmation of freedom….Even in the face of tyranny. People insisted that the world could change….Even as we celebrate these values, even as we mark this day, we know the work of freedom is never finished….human destiny is what human beings make of it.”

I have been to the Berlin Wall. My son has a tiny piece of it in his bedroom. It really is a mind-blowing experience to go there and think, this is where people were shot as they ran for freedom. This is where they died.

You know, I don’t really care if Obama and Brown actually mean what they say. The fact is, what Obama said is true, whether or not the U.S. and U.K. governments honor these sentiments with their actions. All that matters is that ordinary people believe that these things are true, and refuse to give in or give up.

So don’t give up guys. In the long run, Obama is right. We can, and will, make our own destiny, and no one can take away your freedom. The human mind will always be a free agent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LciBRRkG_y8

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,561661,00.html

New iWatch Program Urges Citizens to Be ‘Eyes and Ears’ Against Terror Plots, iWatch is a nationwide community watch program

[quote]
A new program aimed at keeping Americans safe from terror attacks will rely on individual citizens to serve as “the eyes and ears” of their communities.

iWatch is a community watch program endorsed by police chiefs across the U.S. that teaches people how to detect suspicious behavior and report it to police.[/quote]

Other sutable names. Istasi, Istalk, Iharass, Iturninmyneighbour and many more.

[quote]

L.A. Police Chief William Bratton, who developed the program with Police Commander Joan McNamara, called it the 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch, a program that encourages local residents to stay alert and informed about their neighborhoods.

“A single observation, a single report can lead to actions that can stop a terrorist attack,” warns a Public Safety Announcement video released by the LAPD.[/quote]

A single report can do so much damage, just like in Russia or the Stasi Era.

[quote]When the chiefs of the 63 largest police departments in the U.S. and Canada met to endorse iWatch at a conference last Saturday, they cited the case of Najibullah Zazi — the Denver man suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda who has been accused of plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction within the U.S.[/quote]

Wow Big Brother Canada was also there what a surprise.

Anyways as I have said a billion times these types of programs will come to the public light, this one is a program that is nationwide, and Canada somehow seems to be taking apart. All we need now is one that is planet wide, coming soon to a one world government near you.

These programs will come to light, Gang Stalking will be proven, but will anyone care? See it won’t be proving it, I don’t think that will be the big hurdle, much of that has already been done and overcome. Getting the ameba to show any remorse will be the real challenge and I don’t really know that that will happen.

http://www.lapdonline.org/iwatchla

[quote]iWATCH, iREPORT, i KEEP US SAFE (iWATCH) is a community awareness program created to educate the public about behaviors and activities that may have a connection to terrorism.

This program is a community program to help your neighborhood stay safe from terrorist activities. It is a partnership between your community and the Los Angeles Police Department. We can and must work together to prevent terrorist attacks.

To learn about the iWATCH program and about the behaviors and activities that you should report, view the videos and review the list of examples. You can also read and download a brochure that explains the program.

Remember that the iWATCH program is about behaviors and activities, not individuals. [/quote]

Ipuke, Igag, I am sorry, but this sucks. If they are being so open about it then the snitch force is complete enough for them to be this open and this proud about.

Well I just thought it might be interesting to read.

“The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen — a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.” William Orville Douglas, United States Supreme Court Justice

“The ultimate aspect of the privacy issue is the possibility of complete social control.” Robert Ellis Smith

Who gets to be a parent? In science fiction books I read in my teens, the issue of the state having to approve parenthood before people would be allowed to conceive occasionally arose. It would send a little frisson of fear down my spine, and I would wonder, “Will this happen in my lifetime?” But I didn’t really believe it was possible.

It has taken me several days since reading the submission of Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) to the U.K. Parliamentary Select Committee of the Department of Children, Schools and Families to be able to articulate my horror. Several U.K. home educators have already blogged their distress and fear upon reading Ofsted’s recommendations, which include this paragraph:

Current guidance states that parents may employ other people to educate their children and that parents are responsible for ‘ensuring that those whom they engage are suitable to have access to children’. Registration would not of itself prevent those who have a conviction for offences against children, including parents, step-parents or privately-employed home tutors, from home educating children. Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks should be a requirement of registration.

This paragraph is very confusing, and it takes several readings to get it. Home educators have been asking each other, “Are they really saying that parents and stepparents should get Criminal Records Bureau checks before the government ‘allows’ us to take responsibility for our children during ’school hours’?” And the answer is yes. That is really what they are saying.

Here’s a little more of Ofsted’s great ideas on home education: “…parents should who choose to educate at home should be required to provide an education which equips their child for life in the national and global community.”

So, say goodbye to unschooling, child-led learning and autonomous education! You must prove to us that your educational methods will fit your child for life in the McWorld we are creating, and that they won’t rebel at the McJobs we force them into. Again, it really is all about social control.

I’m going to quote philosopher James Otteson again: “Educational practice is analogous to religious practice: one’s decisions about how to educate oneself and one’s children also arise from deep-seated beliefs about how one should live and what constitutes the good life, beliefs that therefore fall under the scope of the moral principle enunciated earlier and hence should be safeguarded in the same way one’s religious beliefs are (James R. Otteson, Freedom of Religion and Public Schooling, The Independent Review, Vol. 4, Number 4, Spring 2000, p. 604).”

Education is a fundamental freedom. It is an issue of conscience. But neither the U.K. government nor Ofsted seems able to comprehend that families have a right to fulfill the obligations of conscience in deciding how to educate their children. I suspect they do not understand the obligations of conscience in any area. And a government that does not respect freedom of conscience is heading down a very dark road.

Now, some have asked why an organization that is meant to set standards for, and inspect, institutions feels that they have anything at all to contribute to a discussion about parents educating their own children. The fact that they do is significant. It appears that Ofsted, and the U.K. government, consider the family and the private home mere “institutions.” Within this frame of reference, the government is making it very clear that they intend to control all such institutions. In this brave new world, privacy, conscience, and freedom of choice are things of the past.

Home educators are terrified. Much of the rest of the population doesn’t seem to recognize the threat. But that Ofsted comment makes it pretty clear. This government’s proposed home education regulation will not just force parents to get the state’s approval of their educational provision for their children. It will not just eliminate a parent’s power to act in the best interest of their child, or to give the child autonomous control over their own time and learning process. This legislation opens the door to a much bigger question.

Who gets to be a parent? That’s where this is heading. If the state can say that you must have a CRB check before you can take responsibility for your own child in daylight hours, and the state can tell you, “no, you aren’t a suitable person to educate your children,” then it is just one short leap to, “you aren’t a suitable person to be a parent.” What will come next? Enforced adoption for children with suspect parents? Enforced sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce?

Oh, I forgot. The U.K. is already there on half that equation. There has been a lot of media attention lately on families whose children have been removed by social services agencies on completely spurious grounds, and forcibly adopted. Some mothers have fled Britain, and have still been hounded all over Europe.

Yes, British parents are caught in an Orwellian nightmare. Home educators are kicking and screaming to wake everybody up, but will they be able to? I think it’s time for the rest of the world to start paying attention. Or is where we all are headed?

From C. Wright Mills:

Caught in the limited milieux of their everyday lives, ordinary men [and women] often cannot reason about the great social structures–rational and irrational–of which their milieux are subordinate parts. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any idea of the ends they serve.

From The Sociological Imagination: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 168.

The traditional view of the creation of the ten commandments is that Moses went up on a mountain, and God handed him two stone tablets for the benefit of His people.

That’s probably not what happened. To get a better idea of how it probably went down, let’s look at the background information surrounding the creation of the ten commandments. First of all this event supposedly took place after the Jews escaped from Egypt. There is no historical evidence other than the Old Testament that even suggests that a huge group of Jewish slaves defied the Pharaoh and escaped bondage after magical and epically atrocities befell the Egyptians.

We do know that the Jews from that time period were a nomadic people who passed down their history and tradition orally. We also know that this wasn’t always done in a formal school setting. OFten they’d sit around the camp fire and tell stories it to their kids and visitors. In the middle of the desert these stories were their television, and you had numerous camps all over the desert entertaining/educating their kids with these stories in their own way. Eventually the religious leaders (not objective historians) collected these stories and wrote them down. So the chances that the exodus and the writing of the ten commandments happened exactly how it says in the bible is slim to none.

Now, notice I said that the Jews were nomadic. At various times in their history they didn’t have a central government (or one that always made much of a difference to nomads in the middle of nowhere). So in the absence of a strong, reliable government to tell them what to do, religion served as their government.

This arrangement was convenient for the religious leaders because it made them the political leaders. This meant that if people stayed loyal to God they’d stay loyal to the government. Thaat meant they’d stay loyal to the men who ran the government. That meant the religious leaders could have all the power and money and honor any megalomaniac could ever want.

In the story of the exodus Moses was the religious leader, and he wrote the ten commandments. I don’t know if Moses was a real person, but I do believe that the ten commandments were written by a Jewish religious leader (or leaders). Now let’s look at the ten commandments and see who they benefit more: God or people in power.

Whenever I quote the bible I’m quoting the new international version.

1. “You shall have no other Gods before me.” If a modern day christian child were to ask their parents the question, “Why did god say you shall have no other God before me if He’s the only god?” A modern day christian parent would reply that it’s a figure of speech or a typo.

No, it’s not. We might be able to write it off as that, but two sentences later the author of exodus makes it clear that it’s not a mistake. Here’s god’s reasoning for why he only wants you to worship him: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

Why should you only worship yahweh? Because he’s jealous of the other gods. Not because he’s the only god. In the new testament jesus paints the picture that if you deny god then you are choosing to follow satan and wickedness, and god wants to protect you from that. In exodus chapter 20 it’s a different story. Yahweh is saying, “Worship me, or I’ll kick you and your family’s ass.” It’s a threat, not a compassionate plea. Why the difference between old and new testament? There’s a lot of stuff I don’t believe about jesus, but I do believe that he was an honestly compassionate person. The pre-biblical Jewish leaders couldn’t afford compassion. They needed control and were willing to threaten your family to get it. More importantly though, I believe the early Jews truly believed there were other gods. At some point in their history they wrote the book of genesis to eliminate the competition, but they didn’t always have the book of genesis.

And don’t miss the significance of threatening the family. In near prehistoric times (and especially for nomads) family life was all you had. Your family was absolutely everything. To threaten an ancient Jew’s family was a billion times harsher of a threat than to threaten a modern American’s family. Think about how serious that is. That’s how seriously the Jewish religious leaders wanted control.

2. “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.” This is pretty ingenious. First, it directly ends the problem the Jewish religious leaders had been having of people worshiping any shiny statue that impressed them. Secondly, if you don’t have a shiny statue to worship then how are you going to commune with god? Through the religious leaders of course.

3. “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.” Let’s simplify things, every time you see the word LORD, replace it with GOVERNMENT, because LORD is GOVERNMENT in the time and place were talking about. So this commandment is really saying, “You will not question the government or you will be punished.”

4. “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” The military has an ingenious way of constantly reinforcing the idea in its members that you are not your own. When you’re outside and in uniform you have to wear a hat. When you walk inside you have to take your hat off. The reasoning for that rule isn’t to keep the sun out of your eyes or to keep you from looking tacky inside. This rule exists, because it constantly reinforces the disciplined obedience that the military needs a soldier to possess. So the sabbath is a weekly reminder not to forget your theocracy. Plus, since it’s mandatory it consistently reinforces the disciplined obedience that the government needs its citizens to possess, but it’s more cleverly disguised than the military’s tactics because the sabbath is mandatory fun.

5. “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.” This commandment is a little misleading, because ancient Jewish society was matriarchal. Men had all the power. Women were second class citizens, which they justified by writing in the book of genesis how Eve’s stupidity ruined the world. So what this law really says is, “Obey your father or he will kill you. Oh, and do what you mom says unless it contradicts your dad.” This commandment doesn’t imply that god will magically reward you with a long life if you obey your parents. It implies that your dad will kill you if you disobey him.

Don’t think so? Yahweh fucking killed everyone. Go to biblegateway.com and type in the words “child” and “kill.” You’ll find a plethora of examples of yahweh killing children and ordering the killing of children. It’s more consistent with Yahweh’s actions to interpret this passage as a threat of death than a promise of reward.

Anyway, the purpose of this commandant is to do several things. It establishes the elder’s power over the young. It justifies and indoctrinates what their culture has already been doing, and since the religious leaders were all old men anyway it gives them a new facet to their authority.

6. “You shall not murder.” The first half of the commandments were dedicated to establishing who was in power. This is the first commandment that strictly lays down civil law, and what civil law is more important than not killing each other? It’s a great law. I’m not questioning that. But if a bunch of government officials were going to sit down and make rules for the governing of society this would be the first law every time. And that’s exactly what happened here. It’s more believable to say that this was agreed upon after an iota of thought and consideration than to say it was divinely inspired.

7. “You shall not commit adultery.” Here’s another commandment that betrays the illusion of divine inspiration by pandering to Jewish culture. Marriage is a human invention. And there are many different versions of it, which develop according to the external needs of the people. The nomadic Jewish version was between one man and one woman, and it’s for life. And that jived great for a nomadic society. A nomadic family is like a mountain climbing team. You have to work together to survive, and there’s not much room for variety or instability. Plus, since you had to buy your wife this commandment protected your investment. In other third world countries marriage developed differently. In places where survival was easy, like near prehistoric Hawaii, family life wasn’t so important. People slept around, and kids lived with whoever they wanted. In places where there aren’t enough of one of the sexes polygamy is practiced. If the judeo-christian version of marriage is so obviously, fundamentally, exclusively correct then how did the Hawaiians and thousands of other cultures get it wrong? They didn’t. Everyone did what they needed to do to get by, but one culture decided to push their way of life on others with disastrous effects.

8. “You shall not steal.” Another rule that makes good civic sense. Nothing profound here.

9. “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” This implies that you shouldn’t lie. But doesn’t it sound more like it’s saying, “Don’t talk shit about your neighbor.” That’s what it is saying. Read it again. It doesn’t say, “You shall not give false testimony to your neighbor.” It says, “against your neighbor.” You will not lie about your neighbor. Why is this? If someone gossiped about you it would piss you off, and in a worst case scenario you’d get in a fight, but in ancient times your reputation was as important to you as your family. In Rome people would carry around stone busts of their honorable ancestors to show how good their name was. Everyone’s heard of the Japanese killing themselves to preserve their family’s honor. It was just as important to the Jews. So important that they made a law against falsely shaming others. This law reveals yet again that the commandments are culturally (as opposed to divinely) inspired.

10. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” This has to be the most fucked up commandment of them all. First of all, your wife is secondary to your house, and she’s thrown in the same lot with a donkey. That’s how important women were in their society: A piece of property slightly more important than a donkey. Modern Christians write this commandment off as just being poorly worded. They’ll say, “Well when it says ‘wife’ it really means ’spouse.’” No, the ten commandments were supposed to be God’s almighty law. They were worded with an attention to detail that would make a lawyer proud. There’s no mistake. This commandment is addressed to men and refers to women as property because to the ancient Jews men were the only real people. So again, the commandment reveals that the whole thing is culturally inspired.

But this is all besides the real point of the commandment. Basically it says, “Don’t want anything. Don’t improve your lot in life. Don’t strive for anything other than what we tell you to strive for. Stay poor and helpless so you can never challenge your theocratic leaders.”

Whoever did write the ten commandments was an ingenious, manipulative, power hungry, (male) ass hole.

Kim Jong-il exchanges civilities with a manager of the Salmon Breeding Institute (Photo: Korean Central News Agency)

(n.b.  Kim Jong-il’s last appearance was at a music performance on 17 October)

The field guidance train (“the People’s train, the train of love”)  rolled along.  Kim Jong-il made three guidance visits this week.  Since China Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit, it may seem General-Secretary Kim has emphasized food production, home and cultural life and the environment.  But 2009 is a year which should end with North Korean citizens having participated in 250 days of labor mobilization “battle campaigns” and approximately 2/3’s of Kim Jong-il’s guidance tours relate to the North Korean domestic economy and quality of life issues.  Some of these visits have occurred at facilities administered or whose products are earmarked to the Korean People’s Army, Navy or Air Force, but the Propaganda and Agitation Department has rather cleverly folded songun chongch’i into the broader ideological narrative concerning the DPRK civilian population (including members of the Military Reserve Training Units).

Christmas card photo? Kim Jong-il grinning during his guidance tour of the Salmon Breeding Institute. (Photo: Korean Central News Agency)

On that note, General-Secretary Kim’s first guidance visit this week was to the KPA-related Salmon Breeding Institute.  The account implies that this was his first visit to the facility (“he noted that the institute stands in a good place and has been well-built as required by the new century”) which must be relatively new.  For a KCNA account, there was a surprising lack of detail as to the Salmon Breeding Institute’s actual location in the DPRK and an admittedly cursory check of various publications of North Korean press turned up little.  But from the tenor of General-Secretary Kim’s remarks, the institute was tasked with taking the lead on ALL salmon production in the DPRK: “In order to increase the production of salmon it is necessary to find out all places for the ecological environment of salmon for the purpose of building more salmon breeding farms.”  So, it seems the Salmon Breeding Institute is being held up as an archetype for all fish farming in the DPRK, particularly “freshwater fish [to] provide people with greater quantities of taste and nutritious salmon.”  One might take this guidance visit in conjunction with a visit earlier this month to the Catfish Farm as a sign that fish farming may be one of General-Secretary Kim’s pathway to boost the erratic (and likely depleted) North Korean food supply: “He earnestly called on all sectors and units to continue pushing ahead with the fish breeding in an effort to rapidly boost the production of freshwater fish and provide people with greater quantities of tasty and nutritious salmon in the era of the Workers’ Party.”

A fish-producing cadre or an employee at the newly constituted Ministry of Foodstuffs might only note the first part of this statement “freshwater fish” and view the last part as tacked on to a general policy.  Can’t put all the North Korean freshwater fish into one can, I suppose.  But the guidance train rolled along into Pyongyang.  Or perhaps, General-Secretary Kim decided a day or two  later to leave the office and stroll down to Mansudae Street, Pyongyang to visit recently constructed apartment buildings.

Kim Jong-il gesturing at an apartment building while Jang Song-thaek and the Capital City Construction Ministry officials look on. The tip of the Ryugyong Hotel is visible behind the tree. (Photo: Korean Central News Agency)

Kim Jong-il walked around what appears to be a rather large housing development (albeit not yet populated; get your housing permits ready, Pyongyangites).  The KCNA report singles out the Mansudae Street apartments’ construction to “members of the youth shock brigade.”  So, perhaps Pyongyang watchers should not compose eulogies on the ineffectiveness of Workers’ Organizations, but then again this is Pyongyang, the center of the revolution.  The complex also remains under construction and there are some buildings that will need to be demolished before the complex is complete.  He remarked that “All the apartment houses built in the street are the best ones as they were designed well and constructed at a high level.”  He then toured one of the new apartments with the Party Secretaries from the Capital City Construction Ministry.  While it was not a visit to a cooperative farm tour, General-Secretary Kim did go out onto one of the apartment balconies and afforded himself a bird’s eye view of the apartment complex.

Kim Jong-il formally introduced the KWP’s proposal to build 100,000 new housing units in Pyongyang, presumably to replace older apartments buildings built in the 1970’s and 1980’s: “It is necessary to build in Pyongyang. . .in a matter of a few years as an immediate task.”  He then alluded to “Pyongyang Speed,” a mobilization movement to reconstruct post Victorious Fatherland (Korean) War-Pyongyang which was leveled during the war.  There was also a reference to General-Secretary Kim’s own propaganda accomplishments of housing construction:  “. . .and as the people in the 1970s and 1980s opened up an ‘era of prosperity in Pyongyang’ by building modern streets and great monumental edifices in a matter of 15 years and thus demonstrate once again to the whole world the revolutionary spirit of the servicepersons and people of the DPRK, successors to the great history and tradition.”

Did an account in the North Korean press just use the “S” word?  For those on permanent succession watch, one can juxtapose General-Secretary Kim’s indirect use of “successor” with the “youth shock brigade.”  It does not actually mean much of anything, but it could create muted ideological conditions for a power transfer somewhere down the line.  Although it should be noted that Jang Song-thaek (who was present at this guidance tour) managed the youth construction units on the the building of the Kwangbok Street housing and sports facilities in the late 1980’s.  More interestingly from Kim Jong-il’s statement, is what is not included which is to say any reference to the 1990’s or the early 2000’s.  So, perhaps the

Kim Jong-il mounts his custom bird's eye view sans customized shades. (Photo: Korean Central News Agency)

new Pyongyang Speed will compensate for lost time, and  this is also the closest thing General-Secretary Kim will get to a product roll-out.

Kim Jong-il’s final trip for the working week was to two (2) “newly-built” hog farms (which is to say, a pork production facility), built by a KPA construction brigade tout suite: “He highly appreciated the feats of the shining feats of the soldier-builders, expressing great satisfaction over the fact that they successfully built this modern farm in a matter of one year.”   One might wonder if this facility qualifies as the product of the 150 Day Battle Campaign, even if construction of the place preceded the campaign’s official start.   As with the visits to the salmon farm and the apartment complex, General-Secretary Kim placed the two hog producers as an example for other hog and meat production facilities to emulate.  This guidance tour found Kim Jong-il holding forth on environment-related policy.  These accounts have references to “greenery” and “greening,” but in this instance he actually speaks to organic fertilizers: “It is very good that the farm is making a great contribution to the grain production by building a modern organic fertilizer composite fertilizer factory…”   We can only expect the guidance train to keep-a rolling into next week.

General-Secretary Kim, or whatever Personal Secretariat employee who coordinates these guidance tours, is on top of external reporting on the DPRK both in media and NGO sources.  It is well-established that he uses satellite television and web resources to circumvent the official reports he receives.  He also used this week’s guidance tours (and possibly tours held earlier this month) to play defense against a UN report about hunger and rights in the DPRK, or at least to create the pretense that he is involved in some attempt to do something.  This can also convey to hungry, alienated North Korean citizens that the General-Secretary is taking the lead (which he also demonstrated at last week’s appearance at Migok Cooperative Farm); of course, the bleary-eyed North Koreans can shrug their shoulders and ask where they have heard these assurances before.  In terms of ideological themes, General-Secretary Kim is moving away from a typically obdurate martial stance and trying to re-emphasize the figure of a kindly, caring leader, not a General pointing and shouting out impractical orders.  One may contrast this with some of the late President Kim Il-sung’s guidance tours (and indeed, General-Secretary Kim’s) where one is presented with vituperative scolds of local cadres and farm official alike.

While there are references and allusions to “the songun era” and “soldier-builders” there is little trace of the North Korean military in these guidance tours.  Perhaps with the recent celebration of the official 64th Birthday of the Korean Workers’ Party, October is Party month in the DPRK.  But these reports all contain references to the the “the WPK policy” or the “era of the WPK.”  One realizes that the “era of Songun” and “era of the WPK” are concurrent, so it is likely that references to the Party are something on which external observers can chew.  It can also establish to the North Korean population, or in the least create the illusion, that more basic resources may get to the civilian population and not gobbled up by the military.  If one want to see Premier Jiabao’s influence (and this is less likely) then in propaganda the DPRK is turning the volume down on military glorification: fight the resourcing battles at home, and not against fighting other nation-states.  Then again, Songun found its emphasis in a national two-day meeting in Pyongyang.

The Ryugyong Hotel received some attention when the KWP blasted fireworks around its perimeter this past Spring.  It is well known at this point that the Egyptian conglomerate Orascom has been working on the Ryugyong.  Yet this is the first occasion when the Ryugyong Hotel appeared, even subtly, in a guidance tour.  It was not the full pyramid, but only the structure’s tip which one can see rising from the tree line in the background of the photos from the apartments tour.  The Ryugyong guidance tour is certainly the one many a Pyongyangologist, and a general audience, longs to see.  This is most likely the first time since the reincarnation of the Ryugyong’s construction that General-Secretary Kim is seen in any context with the peculiar concrete giant.

Final guidance at the Mansudae Street apartments. (Photo: Korean Central News Agency)

And, to chase the will o’ the wisps of cohort analysis, several new players joined General-Secretary Kim in various travel parties this week.  Not seen since an early July guidance tour to a land reclamation is Organization and Guidance Department Senior Deputy Director Ri Je-gang, who participated in all three (3) of this week’s guidance tours.  Another personality on the July guidance tour, but who makes appearances in the North Korean press is Deputy OGD Director, National Defense Commission member and Second Economic Committee Vice Chair Ju Kyu-chang.  Mr. Ju was present only for the tour of the Mansudae apartment complex.  The final resurrected cadre in the guidance travel party, previously not seen or explicitly identified since May, was OGD Deputy Director Ri Jae-il, who appeared on the last two (2) tours this week.  The guidance tours are never complete these days without Secretary Kim Ki-nam, Financial Planning Director Pak Nam-gi, dos amigos Gens. Ri Myong-su and Hyon Chol-hae and General-Secretary Kim’s confidante and Party deputy Jang Song-thaek.

One is reluctant to read too much significance into the presence of the two Mr. Ri’s of OGD.  They were previously identified as rivals to Jang Song-thaek.  Then again Mr. Jang’s position as Director of the Central Committee’s Administration Department indicates that General-Secretary Kim decided a while ago to check the enormous (and potentially power threatening) influence of the Organization and Guidance Department.  It should be noted with a report given this week (here) that alleged the succession of Kim Jong-un may be temporarily sidelined (along, possibly, with Mr. Jang), that in 2004 Ri Je-gang and Ri Jae-il were said to be avid supporters of the Morningstar General.  Ri Je-gang and Ri Jae-il were also said at that time to be alleged rivals to Mr. Jang, and had initiated within OGD the accusations of factionalism (based on a grand wedding reception Mr. Jang and Kim Kyong-hui hosted in 2003) that got Mr. Jang suspended in 2003.  Where did Mr. Jang end up after his suspension?  The Party end of the Capital City Construction Ministry.  But, then again, Jang Song-thaek (unlike the two Mr. Ri’s) has membership on the NDC, is the most powerful conduit for Party personnel to General-Secretary Kim, so the presence of the senior leadership at Organization Guidance on a guidance tour is more a matter of General-Secretary Kim setting and settling policies for his subordinates, under the particular auspices of the 100-Day Campaign.  October is Party month, comrades.

Kim Jong-il at the 26 September Pig Farm. One may note Gen. Hyon Chol-hae at the far right (partially obscured) without his KPA uniform. (Photo: KCNA)

These “Guiding Essential Questions” are from the EDCI-886, Philosophy of American Education, Fall 2009 syllabus, taught by Dr. Kay Ann Taylor at Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS.

Guiding Essential Questions

A.  What is the purpose of education/schooling?

• social reproduction?
• social control?
• social efficiency?
• social mobility?
• making good citizens?

B.  What is

• truth?
• power?
• choice?
• democracy?
• freedom?

C.  What is the teacher’s role?  in the classroom?  in the school?  in the community?  in general?

D.  How do the Guiding Essential Questions above relate to your teaching and learning experiences and to your own personal educational experiences?  To you personally?  In the context of education?  In the context of school/schooling?  As a teacher?  As a student?  For your current or future students?

E.  How do A through D above manifest themselves in the classroom, curriculum, and instructon to promote or eliminate social justice?

Copyright 2009, Dr. Kay Ann Taylor.  As to this syllabus and all lectures, students are prohibited from selling (or being paid for taking) notes during this course to or by any person or commercial firm without the express written permission of the professor teaching thsi course.  That includes using the questions above without explicit, written permission from Dr. Taylor.

The DPRK knew that conducting tests on the KN-02 surface-to-surface missiles would attract external attention.  Despite brushing off the tests as routine military exercises, South Korea is entirely justified in its concerns.  The South Korean Foreign Affairs Ministry announced that it may raise the issue with the UN Security Council, under the pretext that the North’s missile test contravenes the UNSC’s resolutions/sanctions.  But this diplomatic maneuver may be a panacea for inadequacies in South Korea’s defense capabilities: concurrent to the Foreign Affairs Ministry blowing the whistle on the DPRK came an allegation from GNP Rep. Kim Dong-sung that South Korea’s internal communications system was outmoded.  Mr. Kim’s allegation was denied, and it also applied to early alert systems monitoring the DPRK’s artillery on the border between the two countries (hey, doesn’t the American presence in South Korea mean we have our Korean ally’s back in an exigency such as this?).  And yet, this allegation appeared at the same Dong-A Ilbo reported an SK National Police Agency report found broken radar equipment on Dokdo Island on South Korea’s east coast during the North Koreans’ April satellite/ballistic missile test.  The KN-02 missile seems to present strategic concern to South Korea because potentially decrepit communications equipment may not sound the siren for a missile that, once operational, has an estimated range of 130 km to 160 km (81 to 100 miles).

These were merely Seoul’s local circumstances surrounding the Columbus Day missile tests (insert your Marx-based notions of imperialism here).  In Belfast and Moscow,  US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conveyed that the missile tests did nothing to alter the US approach to nuclear negotiations (without, of course, joining Six Party Talk partners South Korea and China and saying they were routine).  Then again, in meetings with the Russians, Secretary Clinton learned the Federation was not as eager to immediately sanction Iran for its Qom adventures, as the US, UK or soon-to-be constituted EU.  Russia’s policymakers and elites are generally divided on how both to view and handle the Iranians, but the stated  preference for Iran is the P-5+1 forum (does P-5+1=Six Party Talks: Geneva Edition?).

This all presupposes that when the National Defense Commission authorized testing of the KN-02,the North Koreans were asking for external attention.  They know that amid motions to bi-lateral and multi-lateral negotiations over their nuclear program, external scrutiny and huffy speculation is a by-product.  Unlike previous strategic weapons tests in 2009, the DPRK did not precede the test of the KN-02 with a Rodong Sinmun editorial or the appearance of a KPA propaganda official reading a statement on KCTV.  This missile test came rather quietly and it is only reasonable to assume that it was (from a DPRK perspective) routine.  The April 2009 satellite launch, the May nuclear detonations in Kilju County and the July missile tests were conducted in the context of the 150 Day (Battle) Campaign.  The 12 October missile test occurs just as the Korean Workers’ Party begins another 100-Day (Battle) Campaign–these are labor mobilization campaigns intended to increase production in  light and heavy industry and complete badly-needed infrastructure projects (e.g., Huichon Power Plant).  They originated with post-war rebuilding efforts, and are correlated in current propaganda in the Chollima Movement of the 1950’s.

These campaigns’ current doctrine is the construction of the strong and prosperous fatherland  (kangson taeguk) in advance the 2012 anniversary of the birth of the late (and eternal) DPRK President Kim Il-sung.  Because the Battle Campaigns are labor-based, then arguably broad swaths of North Korean citizens are engaged in the prosperous half, and strategic weapons’ tests are the strong half.  As to prosperity, the results of the 150 Day Campaign were not what the Party and State wanted.  Production ceased in certain factories and construction projects were not completed.  There were reports of raw materials diverted through corruption or simply not delivered because the resources were not available when ordered.  Certain factories tasked with boosting production could not operate because of energy shortages, as well as high absentee rates among workers due to hunger and fatigue.  Local Party cadres and local Public Security officials were waiving age restrictions on market trading permits if they participated in the “volunteer” construction and road labor.  These Battle Campaigns, then, become a tool of population control.

The Korean Workers’ Party currently contends with waning influence in many North Korean quarters.  Since the economic collapse of the 1990’s, the communications and power monopoly the KWP previously enjoyed has dropped.  The formal gedogen policy of the 1 July Decree toward markets further undercut Party control on the minds, and the hearts, of North Korean citizens.  So, if your population has commenced to buying imported Chinese goods, is watching bootleg Chinese, South Korean and even US media and employees of state-owned factories are spending more time in the markets, then one solution is to make very attempt to relocate them away from such distractions.  The Battle Campaign has also become an opportunity for the DPRK’s internal security apparatus to commence audits of local agencies and offices tasked to monitor and control the population.  The KWP Organization and Guidance Department in coordination with the KWP Administration Department and the Central Public Prosecutor’s Office are using the campaigns as a pretext to investigate corruption within the Public Security Ministry and State Security Department, as well as their own subordinate officers.  These security agencies’ inspection regime are not responding with a light hand, and the number of forced labor sentences seems to be going up, as well as public, summary executions.

The announced detonation of a nuclear device or testing new missiles in Kangwon Province might attempt to placate a hungry, exhausted population, beset by official corruption and resorting to desperate means to earn money to purchase food.   North Korean citizens seem well aware that the DPRK’s military-defense industry expenditures are diverting badly needed materials and human resources from a population that need them the most.  Propaganda is only so useful in addressing the “strong” half of  “strong and prosperous” state.  But the Central Party could be gambling on a message that collective sacrifice to weapons’ programs always grabs the world’s attention and gains respect (or fear) for the DPRK.

That written, it is entirely a flight of fancy if one believes that Kim Jong-il can magically shut off the spigot of money and resources consumed by the military-defense industry in the form of the Second Economic Committee.  We should stop viewing the North Korean military as a monolithic, unitary institution, but as a group with diverse and competing interests.  The security and control mechanisms on the Korean People’s Army are likely quite effective.  When dealing with possible and powerful military factions in the DPRK, General-Secretary Kim is not concerned with the general-grade officers and NCO’s of the KPA.  Nor should is he likely concerned with the NDC Operations Department, commanded by loyalist Gen. O Kuk-ryol.  The Operations Department (formerly the KWP Operations Department) has been a constituency which General-Secretary Kim cultivated in the 1970’s, and recent reports say he is further building up.  Kim Jong-il is also well protected behind three concentric layers of security (Military Security Command-State Security Department-Guard Command) whose mission is thwarting any military coups against the Supreme Commander.

So, when a nuclear device is detonated or the KN-02 is tested, and Pyongyang watchers speculate that General-Secretary Kim is pacifying the hawkish elements of the KPA, the biggest known-unknown for him are the powerful managers of the Second Economic Committee.  Theoretically, the Second Economic Committee reports directly to General-Secretary Kim, and is organizationally subordinate to the constitutionally enhanced National Defense Commission.  It is also a constituency to which he has given his attention for almost thirty (30) years.  But the 2EC is a hybrid organization that draws its personnel equally from highly intelligent civilians who conduct its research and development and well-trained members of the KPA.  The 2EC has one-quarter (25%) of the NDC’s membership and its managers are long-term and politically entrenched individuals.  The 2EC’s  knowledge of North Korean weapons systems, its monopolizing the country’s finite resources and its access to military personnel certainly provide leverage and policy pressure it can exert on General-Secretary Kim.

Kim Jong-il has announced an intention to pursue a course of action that could portend decreasing the resources and attention for the Second Economic Committee.  It is more likely, however, that relations between General-Secretary Kim and the North Korean military-defense industry are hunky-dory.  But if an institution’s future becomes uncertain, and the masses support for the Suryong is shaky, perhaps a missile test is in order to pacify a more powerful constituency.  After all, the most capacious question mark when observing the DPRK Leadership is how these people and institutions truly interact with one another.

And you thought the Human Flesh Search Engine was confusing

http://jolienadine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/mary_kate_ashley_olsen_twins.jpg

Yesterday everyone was introduced to a new concept, well a concept that’s been on the net for the last few months, and that’s the violent person registry.

You were brought the story of Jane Clift who tried to inform on a drunken man who yelled obscenities at her, and got herself placed on a violent persons registry instead of him.

Here are some of the highlights and the recap.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/24/slough-jane-clift-libel-damages

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1195399/Woman-branded-potentially-violen t-council-complaining-damaged-flowerbed.html

[quote]But her efforts led to a surreal nightmare in which she was branded potentially violent and put on a council blacklist with thugs and sex attackers.

Her details were circulated to an extraordinary range of public and private bodies, including doctors, dentists, opticians, libraries, contraceptive clinics, schools and nurseries. Their staff were advised not to see her alone.

The 43-year-old former care worker was forced to withdraw an application to become a foster parent and, eventually, to leave the town where she had lived for ten years.

Now, after a bitter four-year legal battle with Slough Council, the stain on her character has finally been removed.

[/quote]

[quote]
She said that after the council acted, she sensed that everywhere she went, there was ‘whispering, collaboration, people scurrying about’.

‘One time I went to the contraceptive clinic and I felt that there were way too many people hovering about for me than should have been there, making me feel very insecure.

‘It did serve as a reminder that everywhere I went – hospitals, GPs, libraries – anywhere at all, even if I phoned the fire service, as soon as my name went on to that system, it flagged up ‘violent person marker, only to be seen in twos, medium risk’.’
[/quote]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1193210/Woman-sues-libel-council-labelle d-potentially-violent-complaining-vandalised-flowerbed.html

[quote]‘It has taken me four years to clear my name and I hope Slough and other councils never again misuse their registers.’ Simon Davies, from the human rights watchdog Privacy International, said: ‘This just shows the megalomania of these local authorities. This poor
woman was subjected to a Kafkaesque ordeal because of an incorrect allegation made by one official.

‘It is the sort of behavior that we would have condemned if it came from China or Russia. Our councils seem to be out of control.’ [/quote]

[quote]Jane Clift lived with the stigma of the violent persons register for three and a half years. Slough Borough Council refused to back down and maintained that she was a violent person. [/quote]

-She was blacklisted
-Forced to Move
-She is single and female
-When in public she felt surrounded by extra people who just should not have been there.
-Being placed on the list was used as an attempt to silence here.

So I have been getting the obvious question, but isn’t this Gang Stalking or Gang Stalking like, the answer is yes, very much so and very much similar. Thus why we have the picture of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. They look exactly alike, and for most of their life, I assumed that they were identical twins. They are not. They are in fact fraternal twins, but without the blood work, and to just look at them, they look exactly alike.

I believe the violent person registry is close enough that many of us can use that to say look, here is the story of a women, who was placed on a watch list. Look at what happened to her, she was followed in public, forced to move, and had her life disrupted. If you are looking to get people to believe you, I don’t see why you can’t use this. I also think you can use the existence of such lists, to get legal procedures or inquires going. At the onset it looks enough alike. Also since I have not had a chance to find out the total nature of her harassment, I don’t know how close a match this is yet. For the time being I am placing it in the fraternal twin category.

Where it differs. She was told that she was going to be placed on such a list. I have not come across one Gang Stalking target that was told they would be placed on a list. This means she had reasonable grounds and proof of who placed her on the list, the time frame, the incident that started this, and many of us will not.

When she moved it sounds like some of the harassment might of stopped. I don’t know this for sure, but based on the articles, it sounds like the point of entry onto the violent persons list was where her attack was most virulent, that and ofcourse having that title on her head.

She is a single female, they were using it to keep her quite, so I suspect there was other harassment ongoing, which she probably left out of the article to sound sane. To get the nitty gritty if there was more would require more digging.

With Gang Stalking, or what we are calling Gang Stalking and I plan to continue calling that, we get Gaslighting. They monitor our homes 24/7. I don’t know if that happened to Jane Clift or not. With Gang Stalking they try to make us look crazy, but I am sure that they also want us to look violent, pedophiles etc.

Based on the research, the article from the ACLU, other target testimony, things like the Buzzsaw, what happens with Gang Stalking is systemic. Many targets show a multi-generational aspect to the targeting. They kill targets, that goes beyond any kind of everyday list. What we see with Gang Stalking, is systemic destruction.

I however believe that a person unknowingly could end up on a list like Ms Clift did, and then have the same thing happen that we see in Gang Stalking. I believe that when this story came out, we were suppose to accept that this was all that there is to Gang Stalking and go on to our happy lives, that’s clearly not going to happen.

With Gang Stalking, we not only have electronic monitoring happening, which more times than not, constitutes torture. These people co-ordinate not just from city to city, town to town, but across country lines.

The informants are not just one and few people, the reports, research, shows that we are setting up Stasi States, or States like China, where the citizens are all snitches. Sorry I mean Citizen Informants.

With Gang Stalking, there is a systemic collaboration that happens. Ms Clifts name went out on a list and was spread far and wide, but if she had changed countries would she have been followed? I don’t have an answer, but targets like Jesus Mendez, Gloria Naylor, and so many others report leaving, country, moving, moving again, and it’s the same thing. Same coordination, same gaslighting, same systemic approach to the monitoring.

What we are looking at is a conspiracy, and it goes deep, and it is systemic. I have no doubts on this, proving it will be a bit of a longer road yet. Great strides have been made, and will continue to be made, God willing, people willing, etc.

For many of us however we just want our lives to get back to normal, whatever that is. Will using the methods Jane Clift used work? I don’t know, but it can’t hurt to try. As far as getting people to believe you, getting legal representation involved, then I don’t see why you can’t use this, it’s close enough that if people don’t look to deeply, they won’t know the difference. If you stick to the main points, leave out some of the gaslighting stuff, focus on the facts. Such registries exist, innocent people are being placed on them, investigations are happening, their lives are being disrupted, it’s a start.

For us who have lived this, we know the difference, this goes deeper. This is systemic, has been for sometime now, and people continue to be turned into informants for the state. They continue to have to be a part of the life disruption process that targets are harmed by. With the targeting we experience, it’s deep. 24/7 surveillance, neighbours on all sides monitoring, some get construction projects, street theater, psychological manovours that are used to try to destroy our lives. Our friends, families, co-workers, neighbors, customers, are all co-opted. I have worked at jobs where I was dealing with customers from multiple countries, and it’s the same thing. To even broach the subject sounds crazy, schizo crazy, that is the word right, but it’s not crazy, and it’s been like this for some time.

I have talked to enough people, but seen enough to know that I am correct in this, but do what works for you, this game has been about what we can prove, well targets, we have the ACLU stating investigations are happening.

http://blog.aclu.org/2009/04/30/mass-con-fusion/

[quote]

Quote:
Mass Con-Fusion

You mean to tell me that it is legal for corporations from the private sector to team up with local law enforcement officials in efforts to spy on innocent members of our society? You also mean to tell me that the synthesis of law enforcement authority and the drive of for-profit companies operate under little to no guidelines or restrictions and it is unclear to whom they are responsible to? [/quote]

We know that employees, councils, school officials, etc, can open or get people placed on monitoring lists. Proving the gaslighting and other psychological ops, or that they were designed to eliminate targets of the state, is another story. Do what works for your personal situation, always continue to do your own research.

For now I am calling these lists our fraternal twins. We are never told we are on lists, she moved and I think some of the harassment might have stopped, but she had information that many of us do not have, and I have no proof that her targeting went as deep as ours. I do however have good reason to believe that some would like the world to think that this was the extent of the targeting. It’s not. There are complete strangers following targets, little citizen informants that take turns doing everything to harass targets, people using their children in these skits, etc.

Though it’s not uncommon for a community to get together to get rid of a trouble maker or a dangerous person, this targeting goes wherever a person goes. 24/7, and the goal is to completely destroy the person. Don’t think doctors, or psychiatrists would take part in things like that? Guess again.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30273330/

[quote]WASHINGTON – When the CIA began what it called an “increased pressure phase” with captured terrorist suspect Abu Zubaida in the summer of 2002, its first step was to limit the detainee’s human contact to just two people. One was the CIA interrogator, the other a psychologist.

During the extraordinary weeks that followed, it was the psychologist who apparently played the more critical role. According to newly released Justice Department documents, the psychologist provided ideas, practical advice and even legal justification for interrogation methods that would break Abu Zubaida, physically and mentally. Extreme sleep deprivation, waterboarding, the use of insects to provoke fear — all were deemed acceptable, in part because the psychologist said so.

“No severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted,” a Justice Department lawyer said in a 2002 memo explaining why waterboarding, or simulated drowning, should not be considered torture.
[/quote]

Increased pressure phase? Separating him from others, like they do to us. Interesting. The sleep deprivation that we get due to the harassment, so we can have car accidents, or lash out. The psychologist provided ideas. I bet. Practical advise on how to torture someone, what would be most effective, and even legal advise and justification. Justification for human torture. If they would do this to them, what about us?

A psychologist providing information on what would break someone. The use of insects to provoke fear. No different, than when they sensitize a target and use that to make the person look like they are very sensitive or crazy. These are the type of people helping to run the zoo.

[quote]
Waterboarding was touted as particularly useful because it was “reported to be almost 100 percent effective in producing cooperation,” the memo said.

The agency then used a psychological assessment of Abu Zubaida to find his vulnerable points. One of them, it turns out, was a severe aversion to bugs.

“He appears to have a fear of insects,” states the memo, which describes a plan to place a caterpillar or similar creature inside a tiny wooden crate in which Abu Zubaida was confined. CIA officials say the plan was never carried out.
[/quote]

So if instead of bugs, he had an aversion to keys jangling, they would have used that, and it was the psychologists job to go in, probably build trust and find this out. So if this is what they deem legal, and they are supposedly held in high esteem, what about those who are held in lower esteem, would they do worst then?

Just proof that psychologists, would willingly be part of something like that. So proving some parts of our struggles remain, exposing this system for what it is, it’s already exposed, it’s just getting people to believe it, and accept it.

In situations like the Buzzsaw, there were no violent incidents, that’s another close cousin that we have, but it’s just one more branch of a systemic practice, that is being used to destroy and silence people.

http://gangstalkingworld.com/Forum/YaBB.pl?num=1240578323

[quote]
Prophetically, an acquaintance coolly said to me a year after I left the lab, “You are in a police net you will never get out of … for the rest of your life.” She was right, but I no longer care because now I am not afraid.

We are controlled by our fears until we have none left, and that happens when there is nothing left to lose. The journey to that realization took 12 years of pain, a sense of loss and humiliation, a feeling of abandonment and the lifelong emptiness and absence of being loved—not by any-one, not at any time. The experience and purpose of being mobbed, and what I did not known the isolation of the experience, is that I was not alone.“Mobbing” is the purposeful and strategic institutional gathering of all information about an individual by using any method—legal or illegal. Contact for this purpose is made with neighbors, classmates, former partners, family members, former employers, teachers, church members, good friends and even your family tree … everything must be known about the support system around you that makes your life possible. The assessment of strategic resources and future income (finances, mobility, cars, insur-ance, credit cards, bank safety deposit boxes, post office boxes, wills, health records, birth

Page 3
Uncovering the Truth About Depleted Uranium49certificates, transcripts and photographs) is made without your knowledge. The purpose ofmobbing is to drive the target individual out of the job force for the rest of their life; the big-ger goal is to drive them to the ultimate self-destruction: suicide. There are now laws made by European unions to prevent this cancer on society and productivity, but it is practically unknown in the U.S.The University of California, which had contributed so much to the State of California and to the global community through the benefits of education, had become a pathologi-cally dysfunctional institution through its mobbing practices.

I learned that more than 500 women and minorities had filed lawsuits against the University of California and had then experienced retaliation by the University of California apparatus of mobbing by employees, alumni and law enforcement.1The lawsuits were for denial of tenure, whistleblower retaliation and theft of intel-lectual property. These women had similar complaints about the destruction of their own lives and careers. The information gathered by the University of California is used to takeyour life apart; to destroy all that makes you feel safe; to bankrupt, isolate and alienate you from society and from yourself; and to attempt to make you look crazy.

Your children are harassed, they come home with belongings missing and stories of teachers harassing them and a weirdness takes over your lives. Slowly, documents disappeared from my house; porncharges appeared on my credit card; files, my purse and my keys disappeared; mail was lost. I was forced to carry my documents with me at all times. All of my university transcripts and diplomas have been stolen from my house.Two things kept me going and kept me alive. First, the warrior mother spirit guided me to protect Zephyr. That miracle of life taught me what it means to love unconditionally and completely. I began to learn to love myself. Second, my uncle had told me long ago, “No one can destroy you. Only you can destroy yourself.”

[/quote]

500 Additional cases that she was aware of, the majority woman, all to keep them silent. Please read over the other stories in the above link, and you will see what I mean by systemic.

http://www.crvawc.ca/documents/WorkplaceHarassmentandViolencereport.pdf

A great pdf, where woman talk about their harassment, and you see a pattern with lawyers, doctors, tribunals, etc. Systemic.

http://www.bullyonline.org/action/obstruct.htm

[quote]Many targets of bullying report that they seem to be obstructed every step of the way in their pursuit of justice. The management refuse to investigate, or use an untrained investigator, or whitewash the case. The union refuses to help, or initially shows interest but suddenly changes sides. The solicitor initially shows interest but then starts acting in a manner which suggests they have the other side’s interests at heart rather than yours.

The employer’s lawyers apply for, and obtain, adjournment after adjournment, then obtain a pre-hearing review which the tribunal chairman handles in favour of the employer. In the tribunal, favour is shown to the respondent (employer) and you get the impression that the verdict has been decided in advance. Your solicitor, the respondent’s lawyers and the tribunal chairman seem to know more about your case than you think they should.

After the tribunal you’re left with no option but to privately sue the employer, the union, and your solicitor, and appeal the tribunal decision, but by this time you have no job, no income, your savings are gone, so is your health, maybe your marriage too, and there’s no prospect of ever being employed again, especially in the professions.

Sound familiar? If so, you might be surprised to realise how often this happens. Mostly it’s in cases from the education sector, although it may happen in any public sector case, for example the NHS. Occasionally, but less often, it happens in private sector cases, and in rare cases from the voluntary sector.

Although there’s never any substantive proof, it seems that all the parties arrayed against you have been colluding in secret. The question is, what allegiance binds these individuals together, and where could they meet such that the normal rules of confidentiality do not apply? What fraternal obligation places their duty to support and protect each other above the moral, ethical and legal obligations by which the rest of us are bound?

Employers, unions, law firms, and employees of the justice system are part of society, and every group, professional or otherwise, contains a few poor performers and rotten apples. This ranges from inexperience through ineptitude and incompetence to collusion and corruption.

[/quote]

Many have touched on this. Tim Field passed away, before he could finish the research into the collusion. He was very smart, and had a large following with his bullying movement.

Anyways, it’s systemic, but each piece of the puzzle, helps our cause, that’s what it’s all about, gathering evidence. I think within the last week, a lot of really good material has come out, material that can help targets to get some relief from what is happening.

So again, I would stress awareness and exposure as our two key elements for fighting this. Awareness to the public friends family. Exposure, if you are being bothered bring up the fact that it’s now common knowledge that registries like the violent persons registry exist, and that innocent people are being placed on it, bring up the fact that the ACLU says investigations are happening, without any clarity of who takes care of what. Bring up the fact that there are national, regional, and local linked databases, that are being shared across country lines. Bring up mobbing, the human flesh search engine, use the info that is out there, that has been presented to make your case, and to expose your cause. I can’t guarantee you will win, but you will make a great case, and these people do not hold up well to scrutiny or to the light.

Do what works best for your own situation, if you read something and it does not sound right, research on your own, I always stress this point, maybe you will catch something that another has missed.

I leave you with the scene from my cousin Vinny. If you have not seen the video, watch it, it’s very good.

[quote]

Mona Lisa Vito: ‘Cause Chevy didn’t make a 327 in ‘55, the 327 didn’t come out till ‘62. And it wasn’t offered in the Bel Air with a four-barrel carb till ‘64. However, in 1964, the correct ignition timing would be four degrees before top-dead-center.
D.A.

Jim Trotter: Well… um… she’s acceptable, Your Honor.

Vinny Gambini: Ms. Vito, it has been argued by me, the defense, that two sets of guys met up at the Sac-O-Suds, at the same time, driving identical metallic mint green 1964 Buick Skylark convertibles. Now, can you tell us by what you see in this picture, if the defense’s case holds water?

[Lisa examines the picture]

Vinny Gambini: Ms. Vito, please answer the question: does the defense’s case hold water?

Mona Lisa Vito: No! The defense is wrong!

Vinny Gambini: Are you sure?

Mona Lisa Vito: I’m positive.

Vinny Gambini: How could you be so sure?

Mona Lisa Vito: Because there is no way that these tire marks were made by a ‘64 Buick Skylark convertible. These marks were made by a 1963 Pontiac Tempest.
D.A.

Jim Trotter: Objection, Your Honor! Can we clarify to the court whether the witness is stating opinion or fact?

Judge Chamberlain Haller: This is your opinion?

Mona Lisa Vito: It’s a fact!

Vinny Gambini: I find it hard to believe that this kind of information could be ascertained simply by looking at a picture!

Mona Lisa Vito: Would you like me to explain?

Vinny Gambini: I would love to hear this!

Judge Chamberlain Haller: So would I.

Mona Lisa Vito: The car that made these two, equal-length tire marks had positraction. You can’t make those marks without positraction, which was not available on the ‘64 Buick Skylark!

Vinny Gambini: And why not? What is positraction?

Mona Lisa Vito: It’s a limited slip differential which distributes power equally to both the right and left tires. The ‘64 Skylark had a regular differential, which, anyone who’s been stuck in the mud in Alabama knows, you step on the gas, one tire spins, the other tire does nothing.
[the jury members nod, with murmurs of "yes," "that's right," etc]

Vinny Gambini: Is that it?

Mona Lisa Vito: No, there’s more! You see? When the left tire mark goes up on the curb and the right tire mark stays flat and even? Well, the ‘64 Skylark had a solid rear axle, so when the left tire would go up on the curb, the right tire would tilt out and ride along its edge. But that didn’t happen here. The tire mark stayed flat and even. This car had an independent rear suspension. Now, in the ’60’s, there were only two other cars made in America that had positraction, and independent rear suspension, and enough power to make these marks. One was the Corvette, which could never be confused with the Buick Skylark. The other had the same body length, height, width, weight, wheel base, and wheel track as the ‘64 Skylark, and that was the 1963 Pontiac Tempest.

Vinny Gambini: And because both cars were made by GM, were both cars available in metallic mint green paint?

Mona Lisa Vito: They were!

Vinny Gambini: Thank you, Ms. Vito. No more questions. Thank you very, very much.

[kissing her hands]

Vinny Gambini: You’ve been a lovely, lovely witness.

Vinny Gambini: Mr. Wilbur, how’d you like Ms. Vito’s testimony?

George Wilbur: Very impressive.

Vinny Gambini: She’s cute too, huh?

George Wilbur: Yes, very.
[laughter]

Judge Chamberlain Haller: Mr. Gambini…

Vinny Gambini: Sorry, Your Honor.

Vinny Gambini: Sheriff Farley, uh… what’d you find out?
Sheriff Dean Farley: On a hunch, I took it upon myself to check out if there was any information on a ‘63 Pontiac Tempest stolen or abandoned recently. This computer readout confirms that two boys, who fit the defendants’ description, were arrested two days ago by Sheriff Tillman in Jasper County, Georgia, for driving a stolen metallic mint green 1963 Pontiac Tempest, with a white convertible top, Michelin Model XGV tires, size 75-R-14.

Vinny Gambini: Is that it?

Sheriff Dean Farley: No. A .357 Magnum revolver was found in their possession.

Vinny Gambini: Sheriff Farley, just to refresh the court’s memory, what caliber bullet was used to murder Jimmy Willis?
Sheriff Dean Farley: .357 Magnum.

Vinny Gambini: The defense rests.
[/quote]