Shady Companies With Ties To Israel Wiretap The U.S. For The NSA

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy year — hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7, 47 conference rooms and VTCs, and “22 caves,” according to an NSA brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s giant satellite listening post in Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68 million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of the NSA’s headquarters, including a cybercommand complex and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.

The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA’s mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in the agency’s decade-long building boom, it will be the “cloud” where the trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.

 

Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and that it takes the Constitution and the nation’s privacy laws seriously.

But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.

And with some of the key companies building the U.S.’s surveillance infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services, it’s not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even if its current agency chief claims he doesn’t approve of extrajudicial spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping program.

Until now, the actual mechanics of how the agency constructed its highly secret U.S. eavesdropping net, code-named Stellar Wind, has never been revealed. But in the weeks following 9/11, as the agency and the White House agreed to secretly ignore U.S. privacy laws and bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, J. Kirk Wiebe noticed something odd. A senior analyst, he was serving as chief of staff for the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), a sort of skunkworks within the agency where bureaucratic rules were broken, red tape was cut, and innovation was expected.

“One day I notice out in the hallway, stacks and stacks of new servers in boxes just lined up,” he said.

Passing by the piles of new Dell 1750 servers, Wiebe, as he often did, headed for the Situation Room, which dealt with threat warnings. It was located within the SARC’s Lab, on the third floor of Operations Building 2B, a few floors directly below the director’s office. “I walk in and I almost get thrown out by a guy that we knew named Ben Gunn,” he said. It was the launch of Stellar Wind and only a handful of agency officials were let in on the secret.

“He was the one who organized it,” said Bill Binney of Gunn. A former founder and co-director of SARC, Binney was the agency official responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring networks. Troubled by the unconstitutional nature of tapping into the vast domestic communications system without a warrant, he decided to quit the agency in late 2001 after nearly forty years.

Gunn, said Binney, was a Scotsman and naturalized U.S. citizen who had formerly worked for GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, and later become a senior analyst at the NSA. The NSA declined Wired’s request to interview Gunn, saying that, as policy, it doesn’t confirm or deny if a person is employed by the agency.

Shortly after the secret meeting, the racks of Dell servers were moved to a room down the hall, behind a door with a red seal indicating only those specially cleared for the highly compartmented project could enter. But rather than having NSA employees putting the hardware and software together and setting up walls of monitors showing suspected terrorism threats and their U.S. communications, the spying room was filled with a half-dozen employees of a tiny mom-and-pop company with a bizarre and troubling history.

“It was Technology Development Corporation,” said Binney.

The agency went to TDC, he says, because the company had helped him set up a similar network in SARC — albeit one that was focused on foreign and international communications — the kind of spying the NSA is chartered to undertake.

 

“They needed to have somebody who knew how the code works to set it up,” he said. “And then it was just a matter of feeding in the attributes [U.S. phone numbers, e-mail addresses and personal data] and any of the content you want.” Those “attributes” came from secret rooms established in large telecom switches around the country. “I think there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says.

Formed in April 1984, TDC was owned by two brothers, Randall and Paul Jacobson, and largely run out of Randall’s Clarkesville, Maryland house, with his wife acting as bookkeeper. But its listed address is a post office box in Annapolis Junction, across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway from the NSA, and thecompany’s phone number in various business directories is actually an NSA number in Binney’s old office.

The company’s troubles began in June 1992 when Paul lost his security clearance. “If you ever met this guy, you would know he’s a really strange guy,” Binney said of Paul. “He did crazy stuff. I think they thought he was unstable.” At the time, Paul was working on a contract at the NSA alongside a rival contractor, Unisys Corporation. He later blamed Unisys for his security problems and sued it, claiming that Unisys employees complained about him to his NSA supervisors. According to the suit, Unisys employees referred to him as “weird” and that he “acted like a robot,” “never wore decent clothes,” and was mentally and emotionally unstable. About that time, he also began changing his name, first to Jimmy Carter, and later to Alfred Olympus von Ronsdorf.

With “von Ronsdorf’s” clearance gone and no longer able to work at the NSA, Randy Jacobson ran the company alone, though he kept his brother and fellow shareholder employed in the company, which led to additional problems.

“What happened was Randy still let him have access to the funds of the company and he squandered them,” according to Binney. “It was so bad, Randy couldn’t pay the people who were working for him.” According to court records, Ronsdorf allegedly withdrew about $100,000 in unauthorized payments. But Jacobson had troubles of his own, having failed to file any income tax statements for three years in the 1990s, according to tax court records. Then in March 2002, around the time the company was completing Stellar Wind, Jacobson fired his brother for improper billing and conversion of company funds. That led to years of suits and countersuits over mismanagement and company ownership.

Despite that drama, Jacobson and his people appeared to have serious misgivings about the NSA’s program once they discovered its true nature, according to Binney. “They came and said, ‘Do you realize what these people are doing?’” he said. “‘They’re feeding us other stuff [U.S.] in there.’ I mean they knew it was unconstitutional right away.” Binney added that once the job was finished, the NSA turned to still another contractor to run the tapping operation. “They made it pretty well known, so after they got it up and running they [the NSA] brought in the SAIC people to run it after that.” Jacobsen was then shifted to other work at the NSA, where he and his company are still employed.

Randall Jacobsen answered his phone inside the NSA but asked for time to respond. He never called back.

In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network.

According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters.

At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.

What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.”

Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.

“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said. “For access.”

But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later, four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”

Narus was formed in Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’sFortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.

A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.” The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet Protocol] calls.”

Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature, lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications.”

In a rare and candid admission to Forbes, Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”

According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”

Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin, were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and penalties.

When asked about these contractors, the NSA declined to “verify the allegations made.”

But the NSA did “eagerly offer” that it “ensures deliberate and appropriate measures are taken to thoroughly investigate and resolve any legitimate complaints or allegations of misconduct or illegal activity” and “takes seriously its obligation to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and comply with the U.S. laws and regulations that govern our activities.”

The NSA also added that “we are proud of the work we do to protect the nation, and allegations implying that there is inappropriate monitoring of American communications are a disservice to the American public and to the NSA civilian and military personnel who are dedicated to serving their country.”

However, that statement elides the voluminous reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wired on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Also not reflected is that in the only anti-warrantless wiretapping lawsuit to survive the government’s use of the “state secrets” privilege to throw them out, a federal judge ruled that two American lawyers had been spied on illegally by the government and were entitled to compensation.

So take the NSA’s assurances as you will.

But as NSA director Alexander flies around the country, scissors in hand, opening one top-secret, outsourced eavesdropping center after another, someone might want to ask the question no one in Congress seems willing to ask: Who’s listening to the listeners?

Source: Wired

Power Without Blessing

A Conversation of Tyranny…

The “Daily Bell” is a Libertarian internet site that provides news and commentary.  Anthony Wile is editor and the page has an impressive list of Libertarian advisors.  DB is a foundation that solicits donations.

Libertarian Pages like “Freedom Phoenix”, “Lou Rockwell”, “The Daily Bell” and others provide sources for monitoring the advancement of tyranny in America and throughout the world.  I am a Christian, I am not a Libertarian, but the common quest for truth often brings us together.

Some of the DB editorials are marked “Staff report” and although they speak for the site are not signed by a particular writer.  DB frequently presents their opinion on the Jewish phenomenon; one article was entitled “The Conversation of Freedom is Not Jewish”.

The writer takes issue with Henry Makow’s opinion that Libertarianism has a Jewish character.  DB gives the Philosophy an umbrella that would cover Ayn Rand at one end and Gary North at the other.  The DB model is described with a small “L”, different from the formal Libertarian Party.  To the accusation that Libertarians eschew social justice DB sites a previous article where they recommended a return to private justice where “people avenge their own via duels, feuds and the like” and “organize around various forms of private theology”.  It goes on to chide the antediluvian nature of some of the Jewish conspiracy theories.

However, DB makes a huge error at the outset by labeling Jewish conspiracy theories as “anti-Semitic”.  The a-S label squelches all attempts to bring veracity to the Jewish phenomenon allowing the truth to remain hidden.  If we allow the a-S label to censor truth we fertilize the common contemporary practice of allowing fantasy to pose as reality.  Attempts to squelch free speech by refusing to acknowledge truth creates insoluble problems by making proper understanding impossible.

That said consider this:  Jews are a very small minority in the United States.  They make up less than 3 percent of our population.  However, if I shop at Home Depot I am shopping at a Jewish owned store; if I go to Lowes it is also Jewish owned; Walgreens is Jewish owned as is CVS; every department store carries several product lines that are Jewish owned; Google was a Jewish brainchild; Facebook was developed by a Jewish Harvard student; Jewish interests control money worldwide; education, particularly higher education, has been co-opted by Jewish intellectuals; from the beginning of the Twentieth Century to the present every U. S. president has been surrounded by Jewish advisors; congressmen cannot get elected without supporting Israel and Jewish interests; T. V. commentators, movie actors, producers, consultants etc. are predominately Jewish; book reviews on C-Span are mostly by Jewish authors; the book publishing industry is controlled by Jews; the media – newspapers, movies, TV, radio, and records – are under Jewish control; and, the intellectual base for classic Libertarianism is Jewish,  Rothbard, Mises, and Rand were all Jewish and Mise’s student, Hayek, had Jewish blood through the Wittgensteins. According to one source 87 percent of Jewish children attend college while the United States average is about 40 percent.  A third or more of the students at Harvard are Jewish and in my current favorite TV drama the two major characters are played by Jewish actors and all positions of power are held by Blacks or women or both.  The facts are astounding – only severe myopia could obscure them.    Read more here.

Dr. Stephen Steinlight a respected Jewish thinker has been pilloried by militant Jewish partisans for attempting to ameliorate the immigration debate.  In one of his monographs he describes his upbringing: “I’ll confess it, at least: like thousands of other typical Jewish kids of my generation, I was reared as a Jewish nationalist, even a quasi-separatist. Every summer for two months for 10 formative years during my childhood and adolescence I attended Jewish summer camp. There, each morning, I saluted a foreign flag, dressed in a uniform reflecting its colors, sang a foreign national anthem, learned a foreign language, learned foreign folk songs and dances, and was taught that Israel was the true homeland. Emigration to Israel was considered the highest virtue, and, like many other Jewish teens of my generation, I spent two summers working in Israel on a collective farm while I contemplated that possibility. More tacitly and subconsciously, I was taught the superiority of my people to the gentiles who had oppressed us. We were taught to view non-Jews as untrustworthy outsiders, people from whom sudden gusts of hatred might be anticipated, people less sensitive, intelligent, and moral than ourselves. We were also taught that the lesson of our dark history is that we could rely on no one.”

Part of the problem is that many Jews among us tend to think of themselves this way: “I am not anAmerican citizen of the Jewish faith, I am a Jew. I have been an American for sixty-three sixty-fourths ofmy life, but I have been a Jew for 4000 years.”  Quote from Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, speaking before a rally in New York in 1938.

In our Jewish dominated society complicity with Jewish interests is often a successful business strategy.  World Net Daily has become popular and successful supporting Zionism while truthtellers Pat Buchanan and the team of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have dropped from prominence.  The erstwhile anti-Zionist publication “Spotlight”, assiduously exposed Jewish shenanigans. It was forced into bankruptcy and silenced.  There is tremendous pressure from powerful Jewish quarters to suppress the truth.

Wealth and power are usually products of consistent work to obtain knowledge and to conduct ones affairs in an orderly and profitable manner.  Jews have worked hard to get where they are.  There is diversity in their ranks but there is also cohesion.  They have extensive control of the world’s money supply.  From outsiders they extract interest but to their fellow Jews loans are free.  Individually they are knowledgeable and interesting to know and claim as friends.  If they vested their power in the One True God and were obedience to His Commandments the world would be a far better place.  But instead there is a huge downside to their astounding racial success.

Dr. Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State University–Long Beach, is a prolific author who has suffered some nasty episodes for carefully compiling a trilogy of books on the Jewish phenomenon.  For anyone interested in studying Jewish history his books are excellent.  The Webpage is here.  In “The Culture of Critique” MacDonald quotes Walter Kerr, “The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly.  It has been taught to, and it was ready to.  After the entertainers and novelists came the Jewish critics, politicians, and theologians.  Critics and politicians and theologians are by profession molders: they form ways of seeing.” MacDonald goes on to describe Jews as being ambitious, persistent, cohesive, and group oriented; he cites their “dazzling verbal skills”, their high level of energy, and their strength of conviction, claiming “these traits have been central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy throughout history”.

Henry Makow’s use of the word “Illuminate” is an apt description but is meaningless to most Americans.  Evangelical Christians imbued with the cultish Dispensational theology consider Jews to be God’s Chosen People.  With gossamer piety they proclaim the Second Coming using the man-made nation of Israel as an impetus.  With no understanding of Judaism and a tiny, often distorted, knowledge of the Bible they frantically support the theology Jesus condemned.  It is the Talmud (Satanic theology) with its hate for the Goyum, its Jewish racial superiority, its promotion of deception, and its gross immorality that guides Zionist leadership.

The impact of Jewish hegemony is not overtly evident in the everyday life of American citizens.  It is not understood that the agendas for the major segments of our society are always set by the Jewish mind. No one seems upset that we are never exposed of the genocide of neo-Israel’s Palestinian captives. We have been so thoroughly brain washed that our sympathies automatically go to the Holocaust and the suffering inflicted on Jews by the Third Reich.  While neo-Israel steals their land, imprisons them in a gulag, and kills them at will, most Americans believe it is the Palestinians that are culpable.

The brain washing has been so successful that we are not aware that more Christians than Jews were murdered during WWII.  There is no lament for the millions of Christians murdered by a mostly Jewish cadre in Russian and by Hitler’s regime in Germany.  No movies have been made about the suffering of Christians and few, if any, books have been published on this subject.  The emphasis has always been on the Jews.  Movies have been presented, a museum has been erected, and a constant bombardment of propaganda has accompanied the Holocaust while Christians and Russian Jewish involvement in their murder has been completely erased from the minds of the public and removed from current history.

Our universities have experienced a similar Jewish brain washing.  Multiculturalism, racial factions, sexual liberation, feminism, homosexuality, socialist politics, and politically correct speech have become part of University life.  Free speech and freedom of association have been curtailed disallowing the discussion of forbidden subjects.  Brain washing in colleges has resulted in a politically correct environment that distorts justice, vies with reality, and fails to provide a full orbed education. MacDonald writes that John Dewey, who was a major influence in forming the American educational system, was “promoted by Jewish intellectuals” and helped establish the New School of Social Research and the America Civil Liberties Union “both essentially Jewish organizations”.

The Christian Church has been the bulls eye of the Jewish target in America. Since the Church forsook its duty to censor the products of Hollywood motion pictures have become progressively more immoral and attacks on Christianity more frequent and severe.   Practices forbidden in the Bible are favorably depicted on movie screens; adultery, fornication, infidelity, divorce, and homosexuality are routine. Christian ministers are shown as lustful charlatans, wimps, or fools while secular characters are compassionate, long suffering, and altruistic.  The legal attack on the Church has been devastating. Christianity and all of its symbols have been banned from the public square and shoved into captivity behind church walls.  One Jewish atheist can destroy Christian traditions that have existed for centuries.

The United States is not the first nation to be overcome by Jewish power.  Before WWII Jews were a powerful faction in Germany.  Dr. MacDonald quotes I. Deak: “Jews were responsible for a great part of the German culture.  The owners of three of Germany’s greatest newspaper publishing houses; the editors of the “Vossische Zeitung” and the Berliner Tageblatt; most book publishers; the owners and editors of the Neue Rundschau and other distinguished literary magazines; the owners of Germany’s greatest art galleries were all Jews.  Jews played a major part in theater and in the film industry as producers, directors, and actors.  Many of Germany’s best composers, musicians, artists, sculptors, and architects were Jews.  Their participation in literary criticism and in literature was enormous: practically all of the great critics and many novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists of Weimar Germany were Jews.  A recent American study has shown that thirty-one of the sixty-five leading German ‘expressionists’ and “neo-objectivists’ were Jews.”

The Russian writer Igor Shafarevich writes “that Jews were critically involved in actions that destroyed traditional Russian institutions, particularly in their role of dominating the secret police and the OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate).  He stresses the Jewish role in liquidating Russian nationalists and undermining Russian patriotism, murdering the Czar and his family, dispossessing the kulaks, and destroying the Orthodox Church.”  Kevin MacDonald says of Shafarevich, “He views Jewish ‘Russophobia’ not as a unique phenomenon, but as resulting from traditional Jewish hostility towards the Gentile world considered as “tref” (unclean) and toward Gentiles themselves considered as sub-human and as worthy of destruction —.”

It is not difficult to relate the results of Jewish domination in Russia and Germany with what is happening in the United States.  The arts and the media is under complete Jewish domination and our culture is being decimated with multiculturalism and massive immigration both promoted by Jewish intellectuals and the organizations they have created.  Jews control our government and foreign policies as well as the Federal Reserve which is swimming in profits while our nation faces bankruptcy. America’s moral columns have been destroyed with the banning of social Christianity and the enforced legal status for abortion, homosexuality, and gay marriage.  Jews have decimated America!

In 2002 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his last major work “Two Hundred Years Together”.   It has been translated and published in Europe but has been blocked by Jewish partisans in America. Solzhenitsyn was a hero.  He died in 2008 but during his life he was an ardent seeker and purveyor of truth.  I suspect his book would corroborate the work of Dr. MacDonald.

Americans tend to think these highly talented people are close to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, The One True God, and to think of them as intrinsic in His plans for His creation.  Evangelical Christians provide Jews with substantial monetary and spiritual support.

Michael Hoffman’s book “Judaism’s Strange Gods” shatters this illusion by delving deeply into the beliefs that are promoted by the Rabbis.  It liberates “the reader from the accumulated shackles of decades of misinformation and shows that Judaism’s god is not the God of Israel, but the strange gods of Talmud and Kabbalah, and the racial self-worship they inculcate”; in the process it shatters the DB opinion that the Talmud and Kabbalah are paper tigers.

Keeping these facts under wrap and destroying honest critiques is not good for our nation nor is it good for Jews.  Vishal Mangalwadi, an East Indian Christian, has written a book entitled “Truth and Transformation”, a “Manifesto for Ailing Nations”.  His examples of the contagious nature of dishonesty and the devastating results of institutionalized theft on the prosperity of societies breaks new ground in support of God’s overarching moral code.  The moral code God gave to those who enjoyed His first love should be their gift to His creation but instead it has been forsaken and replaced with the clandestine cloak of Devilish, Talmudic lies.

Vishal Mangalwadi begins his book by relating a story about his own experience with honesty. Someone told him that a particular country was a good place to do business because its people trusted each other.  At first he did not understand why trust was important but later, in Holland, a friend took him to a dairy farm where milk was sold on the honor system with the customer trusted to put the required cost into a bowl;  there was not attendant.   Vishal said to his friend  “if you were an Indian, you would take the milk and the money”.  Later Vishal told this story at a meeting in Indonesia where and Egyptian gentleman laughed and said, “We are cleverer than Indians.  We would take the milk, the money, and the cows.”

Vishal then began to understand that if people took the milk and the money the owner would need to hire an attendant and the cost of the milk would then go up to cover the cost of the attendant.  Further, he concluded “if customers are dishonest, why should the supplier be honest?  He would add water to the milk to increase the volume.  Being an activist, I would protest that the milk was adulterated; the government must appoint milk inspectors.  But who would pay for the inspectors?  Me, the taxpayer.”

“If the consumer and the suppliers are dishonest, why would the inspectors be honest?  They would extract bribes from the suppliers.  If they didn’t get the bribes, they would use one law or another to make sure the sales is delayed enough to make the nonrefrigerated milk curdle.  Who would pay for the bribes?  Initially the supplier, but ultimately the consumer.”

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” – attributed to Abraham Lincoln, a hero for many Jews.  The historic results of Jewish illegitimate hegemony, subterfuge, manipulation, apartheid, and racial arrogance have always been disastrous.  It would be a great blessing to world Jewry as well as to Gentiles if Jewish leaders would squelch the self pity, learn humility, and begin to use their considerable talents to bring the world peace, justice, and personal freedom by obeying the Commandments of the God that created them and without Whom they would never have existed as a people. It was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that fulfilled His promise to make them a great nation and it was the same long suffering and merciful God that scattered them at the Diaspora because of their disobedience.  Obedience would bring reconciliation, the Talmud and the Kabbalah will not.

DB is right the conversation of freedom is not Jewish; however, it is often tyrannical.

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.”

Mayer Amschel Rothschild   Does DB understand who controls the money and the results of that control?

The Brotherhood of The Free

One of my all-time favorite pieces of literature is this section from Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell:

“By this fair light which greeteth us, before
Those other nations, that, beneath us far,
In noisome cities pent, draw painful breath,
Swear we the oath of our confederacy!
A band of brothers true we swear to be,
Never to part in danger or in death!

“We swear we will be free as were our sires,
And sooner die than live in slavery!

“We swear, to put our trust in God Most High,
And not to quail before the might of man!”

Another personal favorite is the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V:

“This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother, be he ne’er so vile.
This day shall gentle his condition.

“And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

Schiller and Shakespeare called it “Band of Brothers.” The Apostle Peter called it “Brotherhood.” (I Peter 2:17) Call it what you will: without it, no cause will prevail. And that is one of the biggest problems we face in America today: there is very little brotherhood among brothers.

No, not all brothers are part of the brotherhood. The Scripture acknowledges this in Proverbs 18:24, “There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” And again in Proverbs 27:10, “Better is a neighbor that is near than a brother afar off.” A brother that doesn’t “stick close” is certainly not part of the brotherhood. Neither is a brother that is “afar off.”

The sad truth is, even in the vast majority of churches, brotherhood is virtually unknown. Sitting in a church congregation is no more indicative of brotherhood than sitting in a crowded football stadium. In fact, there might even be MORE brotherhood at a football game than there is in the average church today.

Churches today are literally eaten up with malice, jealousy, gossip, slander, backbiting, faultfinding, ad infinitum. (But the same is true with other establishment organizations as well.) For all intents and purposes, today’s churches make a mockery of all that Jesus taught regarding Christian love and brotherhood. On the whole, it simply does not exist today.

This past Sunday, I delivered a message simply entitled, “Brotherhood.” I encourage readers to watch or download this message at:

http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/redirection2/go2/?WPNTHJ

For the sake of this column, and for the freedom movement especially, let me issue a clarion call for all of us who call ourselves Patriots. It is absolutely critical that we recognize The Brotherhood of the Free.

After signing the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin said, “We must hang together, or we most assuredly will hang separately.” How right he was!

Our patriot-forebears, this “Band of Brothers,” were as diverse a group of men as would ever be found. They represented virtually every Christian denomination that existed in Colonial America. They also included men who identified with no Christian church or denomination. While most of our Founding Fathers were Christians, not all of them were. But they all joined shoulder-to-shoulder in the fight for liberty and independence. Christians were fighting for the freedom to worship God as they pleased, and non-Christians were fighting for the freedom to not worship God if they pleased. But both fought side-by-side for freedom. Why do Christians today have such a blind spot in this regard?

It doesn’t matter that Mitt Romney is a Mormon, or that Newt Gingrich is a Catholic, or that Rick Santorum is a Catholic. What matters is that not one of them is part of The Brotherhood of the Free. Not one of them has a clue as to what the real principles of liberty and constitutional government are all about. Not one of them recognizes the New World Order, the emerging police state, or the foolhardiness of perpetual war–whatever church they attend notwithstanding!

And that’s the problem with most of our Christian “brothers”: They just don’t get it! And when push comes to shove, most of them will join with the forces of darkness in persecuting real Patriots and freedom lovers. Don’t believe it? Look at how they are treating Ron Paul.

Say what you want about Ron Paul, he is an elder statesman in The Brotherhood of the Free. Ron Paul is in the Brotherhood. He knows what’s going on. He sees the danger. He cares about liberty. He understands the Constitution. He is my brother in the fight!

Do I agree with Dr. Paul about every issue? No! We will never agree with our fellow Patriots about every single issue–neither should we have to. We agree on the basics. We each love liberty and independence. We believe in constitutional government. We despise globalism, corporatism, socialism, and fascism. We recognize a police state when we see it. We recognize the right of free moral beings to make their own personal moral choices. As Christians, we know that only Christ can change the hearts (and thereby, the conduct) of men–NOT GOVERNMENT!

Does anyone find it more than interesting that men such as John Adams, Sam Adams, and George Washington joined with Benjamin Franklin in signing the Declaration of Independence? The Adams boys and Mr. Washington were well known far and wide as men of intense piety and personal morality, while Mr. Franklin was known by everyone to be an incurable ladies man–even in his old age. If John and Sam and George would have behaved as so-called Christians do today, they would have said, “If Ben is signing this document, count me out!” But there they were, side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, fighting for liberty and independence.

I, too, will gladly stand with my fellows in The Brotherhood of the Free. It doesn’t mean that I approve of all that they do. It doesn’t mean that I believe all that they believe. But it does mean as long as they are part of the Brotherhood and are willing to fight for the principles of liberty, I will stand with them!

Joining Ron Paul are thousands of men and women who should be recognized as part of this noble Brotherhood. As did our Founding Fathers, we come from varied walks of life, varied religious persuasions, varied belief systems, etc., but we all share a love of liberty and independence that burns deeply in our breasts.

Accordingly, I am glad to stand with (and to have stood with) Patriots such as Montana State Legislator Rick Jore, John McManus, Dr. Stan Montieth, Howard Phillips, Larry Pratt, Paul Walter, Herb Titus, Bill Olson, Ed Vieira, Judge Darrell White, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Pat Buchanan, Chelene Nightingale, Charley Reese, Scott Bradley, Joel Skousen, Tom DeWeese, Ezola Foster, Sheriff Richard Mack, Alex Jones, Governor Jesse Ventura, Sam Bushman, the late Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage, the late William Shearer, the late Joseph Sobran, the late George Putnam, and thousands like them.

My dear fellow Patriots, we are part of a Brotherhood. As Franklin said, “We must hang together.” If we do, the cause of liberty will prevail. If we do not, the cause of liberty will most assuredly perish.

Would The Son of God Contradict The Father?

Is it true that Jesus never mentioned anything about homosexuality? That He never brought it up, even once? Most of us have heard the line that in the Gospels there’s no record of Jesus condemning homosexuality. There are individuals, especially from the militant homosexual rights movement, who utter this fabrication with all the raw hostility of liberals who think abortion is their God given right.

The “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality” argument is meant to bully people into believing that Jesus actually took a benign attitude towards same-sex acts. Liberal’s reason that if Jesus disapproved of homosexuality, He would have said so. Since He never mentioned gay sex, He didn’t condemn it.

Most people, including some Christians, don’t have a clue what Jesus did or did not say on any given subject, let alone what He thought about same-sex practices, so they fall for the “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality” lie, hook, line and sinker.

So, do homosexual relationships have the approval of Jesus?

At the very heart of the Christian view of God is the Holy Trinity. (This is not an essay on Christian doctrine, so bear with me.) Classical Christianity has believed that God exists in Holy Trinity, or tri-personality — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is not three gods in one. Each Person of the Trinity is fully God. They are one in essence with three separate and distinct personalities. All are infinite and eternal. Jesus Christ, the Son, is the Second person of the Trinity. The Son is in perfect union with the Father and the Holy Spirit. They are never, nor could they ever be out of union with one another. Jesus said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). The deity of the Holy Spirit is also evident. In Acts 5:3-4 Peter told Ananias that by lying to the Holy Spirit, he had lied to God. Dan Corner offers an excellent way to illustrate the Trinity:

“H2O…is common water-two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen. You can freeze H2O and you would have the solid, or ice. You can turn on your faucet and you would have the liquid H2O. You can hear the whistle of H2O that comes out of the tea kettle spout which is steam, but it would still be H2O. H2O can and does exist in solid, liquid and gas. The solid is not the liquid; the liquid is not the gas; and yet all three are of one nature: H2O. And that is exactly how it is with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is not the Son, the Father is not the Holy Spirit, and Jesus is not the Holy Spirit.”

Here’s the crux of the matter. Those who try to make their case by arguing, “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality” are either ignorant of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, or they ignore it for the purpose of supporting a hollow argument.

The late Lehman Strauss offered the following insight into the Apostle Paul’s clear teaching on homosexuality:

“In Romans 1:26-31 twenty-three punishable sins are listed with homosexuality leading the list. Paul wrote, “For this cause God gave them up into vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet” (Romans 1:26, 27). These verses are telling us that homosexuals suffer in their body and personality the inevitable consequences of their wrong doing. Notice that the behaviour of the homosexual is described as a “vile affection” (1:26). The Greek word translated “vile” (atimia) means filthy, dirty, evil, dishonourable. The word “affection” in Greek is pathos, used by the Greeks of either a good or bad desire. Here in the context of Romans it is used in a bad sense. The “vile affection” is a degrading passion, a shameful lust. Both the desire…and the act of homosexuality are condemned in the Bible as sin.”

In Galatians 1:11-12 Paul provides his qualifications to speak for God: “I want you to know brothers that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” Later he tells how he went to Arabia to be trained “in the school of the Spirit in order that he might receive greater revelations concerning the mysteries of the Gospel of the glorified Christ.”

Paul’s ideas were more than his own speculations. He says his thoughts came directly from the Second and Third members of the Trinity.

What does God the Father say about homosexuality? “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable” (Leviticus 18:22). By their very nature the Son and the Holy Spirit agree with the Father that for a man to lie with a man is detestable.

“It is significant,” says Harold Janz, “that while virtually nothing is written in ancient literature about female homosexual activity, Paul in Romans 1 does. He treats both homosexuality and lesbianism the same and understands both to be wrong for the same reasons. It is important to note…that Paul echoes the words of the creation account in Romans. He speaks of those who substitute images of the creation for the Creator and go “against nature” in committing unnatural acts with one another. Those who do so, he says, are both females and males, using not the usual Greek words for women and men, but the words used in Genesis, “female” and “male.” Paul is saying that we must look back toward the order that God established in creation to recognize where we’ve gone wrong.”

Those who commit unnatural sexual acts with one another go against God’s moral order for humanity. Sadly, men and women who indulge in moral anarchy don’t give a hoot what God thinks! Essentially they’re saying to Him, “Stay out of my life!

Why would God hang around if He’s not wanted?

God weeps over our indiscretions. He wept over Jerusalem because her people killed the prophets and would not turn to Him. Our disobedience also angers Him. The God who wept over Jerusalem is the same God who destroyed Sodom because most of its citizens were moral degenerates.

In Romans 1:25-28 Paul blames moral depravity on men and women who “exchange the truth of God for a lie,” and those who “did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God.” When you come right down to it, the immoral individuals Paul was talking about dethroned God and deified themselves! Consequently, He punished their sin by delivering them over to it.

“Yet these men speak abusively against whatever they do not understand; and what things they do understand by instinct, like unreasoning animals—these are the very things that destroy them.” (Jude 1:10)

It’s worth noting that the Bible speaks of no “gay” role models. When homosexuality is spoken of it’s always in the negative. Because the Gospels have no record of Jesus mentioning homosexuality the “gay” rights movement would have us believe that He must not have opposed it. From His silence they conclude that sodomy is “normal and healthy.” First of all, sexual relations between a man and a woman exemplify normal behavior. Second, there is nothing healthy about engaging in sodomy. The sexual practices of homosexuals have serious health risks and illnesses.

Although sin shouldn’t be taken lightly, it is imperative for Christians to hate the sin but love the sinner. Even if we disapprove of someone’s lifestyle and/or choices we are expected to treat them with kindness and respect. Bear in mind, though, that withholding what the Bible teaches on homosexuality from someone who’s indulging in risky behavior isn’t loving it’s cowardice, even hateful.

“He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” (1 John 4:8-9)

Recommended Reading
On Solid Rock Resources – many articles on homosexuality

Giuliani on WTC7 Questions: Get a Haircut, Take a Shower

When confronted with questions about World Trade Center 7 at a speech on Thursday at the University of Florida, bald Rudy Giuliani told long-haired radio host Bob Tuskin, “You are too rude to be entitled to an answer. May I suggest a haircut and a shower?”

Filmed by The Intel Hub, Tuskin was escorted from the auditorium.

Another audience member began questioning the former New York City mayor’s honesty, to which he responded, “Oh, get lost,” reports The Alligator, calling him a “clown.”

The Alligator, a small, independent news outlet in Gainesville, endorses Ron Paulfor President in 2012. Paul does not believe 9/11 was an inside job, but he does support a new and independent investigation, as related on Coast to Coast AM on March 25, 2008. In his Sept. 13, 2011 blog, Paul wrote that we should have “targeted our response to only the thugs and criminals who attacked us…” adding that “Blaming Islam alone is grossly misleading.”

Though Giuliani referred to 9/11 five times during his $65,000 speech paid for by UF’s student-run speaker bureau, the ACCENT, answering uncomfortable questions about 9/11 apparently threatened the man’s overblown sense of entitlement.

Tuskin’s question is not unreasonable. The St Louis Post-Dispatch’s Harry Levins wrote in 2009 that 9/11 Commission senior counsel, John Farmer, stated that, “what government and military officials had told Congress, the Commission, the media, and the public about who knew what when — was almost entirely, and inexplicably, untrue.”

Support my work by reading the full piece at Activist Post. Thanks!

Wondering about the Wandering Who

[Book Review by Israel Shamir of Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who?: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics]

Gilad Atzmon is larger than life; no delicate and sensitive artistic soul, he is rather a living volcano, a titan with a Rabelaisian sense of humor and enough energy to power a city. Nights, you will find him entertaining his fans in every corner of the globe with his masterful saxophone playing: tonight in Mexico City, tomorrow night in Sheffield. His days are spent producing a vast quantity of writing and blogging, sending out at least two letters a day to his many readers. His previous book,  My One and Only Love, is a very funny novel with more than a touch of the macabre and grotesque. It features a roving Israeli orchestra smuggling Nazis in double bass cases. It also contains kosher pigs, sexy spies, smelly underwear, casual killings, and a row of Israeli national leaders, all with their trousers down.

The best writings of Gilad Atzmon firmly belong to the realm of Israeli literature. His preference for writing in English attennuates his essentially Israeli character, just as Beckett remained a British writer while writing in French. His merciless goading of tender Jewish sentiments recalls the much-loved Israeli playwright, Hanoch Levin; this explains why Atzmon is enjoyed more by his country-mates than by Diaspora Jews. His newest book, The Wandering Who?  is a collection of essays that revolve around Jewish-identity politics. This subject (“what does it mean to be a Jew”) holds much fascination to people of Jewish origin. Many contemporary Jewish writers indulge in this sort of reflection, usually slipping into woe and whine mixed with self-adoration, and coated over with treacle and romanticism.

Being no delicate flower (see above), Atzmon delivers robust and forceful opinions with both hands. He regains some of the lost honesty once expressed by free thinkers and Zionists of the fin-de-siècle. Early Zionists from Nordau to Herzl provided some very frank and critical assessments of Jewish society. Yet even more critical was Otto Weininger (1880 – 1903), the tragic Viennese writer who dared to connect sex and Jews in his great bestseller Sex and Character; he followed up his success by committing suicide at the age of 23. Weininger has long been forgotten in Europe, and yet he holds a fascination for Israelis. A play by prominent Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol, Weininger’s Night (subtitled “The Soul of a Jew”) was a great hit in 1983; it was responsible for opening up Israeli theatre to the world. It was the first Israeli play ever staged in Moscow’s MXAT theatre (in 1990), directed by talented Gedalia Besser.

Atzmon has a loving and thoughtful essay about him. He provides some valuable insights. He turns Weininger’s “I dislike what I am” into “I dislike what I do”.  Atzmon sees Weininger’s suicide as an impetuous reaction against his womanly/Jewish side. Atzmon sympathizes with Weininger’s feeling that “Jewishness” is somewhat similar to “queerness”, and this provides a key to the book’s understanding.Jewish-identity musings, like gender-identity discussions, tend to fluctuate between the vulgar and the brazen; both can seem boring and repetitious unless the reader is directly involved, and perhaps even then.

The first essay of the collection has the freshness and sincerity of true testimony. The story of a young man trying to break free from his fiercely nationalist non-religious Jewish family background is akin to any man’s escape from stifling gender politics. Imagine a virile young man conceived in vitro and brought up by a sorority of lesbian activists, who has finally come of age and broken out into a rich and satisfying world of natural love. Clearly one might expect and forgive such a young man his unflattering depictions of “dykes” and “butches”, but such transgressions could never be forgiven by the sanctimonious gay activists and PC wardens who decide for us what is permissible and what is not.

This in fact has happened with Atzmon’s book: it has generated a significant amount of heated controversy. This kind of publicity is never bad for book sales. As for the author, he is no shrinking violet and quite up to the task; in fact, he is a pugnacious fellow, able to defend himself and always ready for a good brawl. Many of Atzmon’s critics seem to think that when we talk about Jews we must speak as we do about the dead: say something nice, or don’t say anything at all. And yet who should critique the activities and attitudes of the dead but the living? Banning all outsiders from the debate is a recipe for insipidity.

And yet, Atzmon is no outsider. An (ex-) Israeli, he has some first-hand knowledge, and he introduces us to a long obscured side of Jewishness, just as Jean Genet once reminded us about the backside of queerness. In Genet’s oevre we see the gender-confused men who are not saintly martyrs on their way to Auschwitz, but brutal criminals who kill and betray their friends in the hellish darkness of a jail. Though art is perhaps a better mode for such delivery.

One of his problems is that the Jewish subject is over-explored, and one treads on the footsteps of predecessors, even if one does not give them credit. The most interesting essay in the book contains Atzmon’s reflections on an essay by Milton Friedman. Friedman was curious as to why so many Jews had abandoned their historically Left-leaning socialist ways. To avoid the conclusion that Jews used to love Justice and Mercy, and now they have traded it for Power, Friedman instead posits that Jews are most naturally creatures of the Right. Friedman declares that while pure capitalism is the environment in which Jews thrive best, for one hundred years Jews were kept out of right-wing politics because the Right stood with the Church; the Left, anti-clerical and atheist, accepted them as they were. It was only after the Right was separated from the Church that Jews began to stream back into right-wing movements, and they ended up wholeheartedly embracing capitalism of the most brutal kind. This is a valuable observation, something that has yet to be learned by leftist philosemites like Seumas Milne, and by the Christian Right. The mass participation of Jews in a movement has a price, and this price is the rejection of the Christian Church.

Atzmon rejects Friedman’s conclusions: he would rather walk us through all the hypocrisies of the Jewish Left, as though a change in leadership would solve the problem. This attitude is very common among educated Israelis who have lived through the great betrayal of humanism by the left-wing parties, climaxing with labour leader Ehud Barak carrying water for Sharon and Netanyahu. Since the destruction of the Israeli Left can be directly attributed to these “traitors to the cause”, Atzmon might be forgiven for thinking that but for a crisis in leadership the Left would be still ruling the roost.

Atzmon gets carried away by his own rhetoric when he proclaims that the Jewish Left wants to seize assets of the rich just because Jews do not respect Goyim property rights. This is plainly not true: radical leftists everywhere call for the expropriation of all banks, Jewish or otherwise, and Jewish leftists are no different in this aspect. Jews are the wealthiest minority in the world; they have the most to lose in a leftist revolution. It’s apparent to everyone except Atzmon that the Jewish move to the Right is as natural as bacon.

With zeal of a born-again Christian, Atzmon offers not the smallest fig leaf of hope for good-hearted Jews. If a Jew supports the Left, he is doing it because he wants to rob wealthy Goys with Talmudic impunity. If a Jew supports the Right, it is because he wants to steal land. If a Jew supports Palestine, he is doing it in order to take over the Palestinian movement. This is a bridge too far. This sort of self-criticism should be reserved for confession. Not all Jews are that self-serving. Yes, there are hopeless wretches like Tony Greenstein and Roland Rance, leftist British Jews whose main participation in the Palestinian struggle is constrained to battling phantom antisemitism and Holocaust rhetoric, but not all Atzmon’s adversaries are paper tigers.

However, as Atzmon wrote in his essay on Weininger, one condemns one’s own faults, so perhaps this is a form of his contrition.

Atzmon is tough on Jewish tribalism, no endearing feature to be sure, but something not all rare in the Middle East. Jews are not any more tribalist than are Armenians, and no more nationalist than Georgians. This clannishness may be less common in British/American culture, but the tribal setup of immigrant croups is well known even there. Jewish success in the US and the UK cannot be explained by expounding upon Jewish insularity; a better explanation is traditional Jewish fidelity to power.

We could do with less psychologism and Portnoy’s complaints. Discussion of English or American identity and mentality does not lead to better understanding of British and American imperial policies. Likewise, policies of the World Jewry are very relevant for us, while Jewish mental attitudes are not. Who cares what Jews feel towards their neighbours? We care what the Jews do. Instead of dealing with bees, we need to know of swarms, and this is what Atzmon fails to deliver, because this brave man gets cold feet.

Atzmon is least convincing and most dull when he pedantically constructs his castle of exceptions and explanations intended to ward off the inevitable accusations of ‘hate’ and ‘racism’. He declares his preference for “accidental Jews”, i.e. people who are Jews by accident of birth. This alibi is designed to fortify his position against attack. It is as if Nietzsche added to his famous dictum (“You are going towomen? Do not forget the whip!”) a caveat “but beware some women are able to use the whip, too”. An allegoric poetic quality of writing has been ruined, and now nobody is happy. We admire Atzmon’s fierce and fearless qualities, and it’s kind of a let-down when he chooses to be prudent now and then.

One can point out several errors of fact in his book. For instance, he claims that Jews did not write any histories until the 19^th century. This is not true: Abraham Zacuto produced his History of the Jews (“Sefer Yohassin”) in the last decades of the 15^th century, and this book is available on Amazon. Still he builds some castles on this factual error, and they collapse like straw houses.

However, Atzmon’s greatest fault is narcissism, or perhaps it is a myopic solipsism. Atzmon remains locked in the very Jewish dichotomy of Jews vs. Gentiles. He does not seem to appreciate the marvellous variety of the Gentiles; he cannot recognize that the Nations of the Earth are quite different from each other. The British are not the same as the Palestinians, nor are they as French as France. And yet for Atzmon, they are all one happy crowd without specific features. In vain shall we seek to learn what are the qualities of the Palestinians that have attracted him (except perhaps the ability to make good hummus). The one all-redeeming quality that they all share is that they are not Jewish. For this reason he suggests that Jews fully adapt to the modern, generic, global cosmopolitan monoculture of multiculturalism. This is absolutely unnecessary. While we applaud acculturation, Jews should adopt the culture of the land they inhabit, become one with the folk they live with. There is no shortcut to universality. I would like to read about Atzmon hanging out with average Brits, Scouses, and Brummies, or about his adventures with Palestinian shepherds, but they are not to be found: in a diverse world, he sees only Jews.

Another problem is the absence of God. Indeed, all discourse on Jews sine God is quite useless. I am aware that in the modern British climate, if Atzmon were to publish his thoughts on God and Jews, he would not find a publisher. You may use every obscenity, but you should not mention Christ. And yet Jews are first of all a religious community; a valid analysis of Jewish identity must take religion into account. Atzmon purposely adds a disclaimer declaring he will not criticise Judaism, but this simply ducks the issue.

He does give himself permission to use the Bible against them, but his literal readings are too primitive for the sophisticated readers of the 21st century. One can’t quote bloody stories of the Conquest of Canaan from the Book of Joshua like one quotes the admissions of a criminal. So many wonderful minds have discussed these tales, from St Jerome to Edward Said, and all of them had more valuable thoughts than Atzmon has to share. Indeed, when God says: you will inherit houses you did not build and vineyards you did not plant, Atzmon says: “that’s why the Jews seized Palestine!” This is trite. We live in houses we did not build, most especially in the houses of our bodies, built by God. We enjoy many wonderful things we did not produce. For instance, we enjoy Atzmon’s saxophone, though we didn’t built it. God’s grace gave us these things. This Biblical verse reminds us all that we receive a lot of undeserved things, and that we should all work harder to justify God’s trust in us.

The bottom line is that identity musings are dry and boring stuff; Atzmon is actually a much better writer than one would conclude from reading this book. He wanted to get it off his chest. Fine! Now let us see more of his witty novels.

P.S. Naturally I side with Atzmon in his polemics against his numerous detractors, but their arguments are so senile that it would be a waste of reader’s time to dwell time and time again on the endless and fruitless assertions of ‘hate’ and ‘self-hate’. What we do is soul-searching, not hate. Non-Jews have become so over-sensitised to allegations of race hatred that they swarm with the rest even when it’s an honest discussion between Jews.

FDA Sued Over Lack of Nanotech Oversight, Labels

The first ever lawsuit concerning risks of nanotechnology was filed in federal court last month when several groups jointly sued the US Food and Drug Administration for its lack of response to a 2006 petition demanding that products with nanomaterials be labeled and their affects tested for safety. [Image]

Led by the International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), plaintiffs also include Friends of the Earth, Food and Water Watch, the Center for Environmental Health, the ETC Group, and the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy (IATP).

“It is unacceptable that the FDA continues to allow unregulated and unlabeled nanomaterials to be used in products consumers use every day,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.  “It is past time for this agency to live up to its mission and protect public health by assessing the health and environmental risks of nanomaterials, and to require labeling so that consumers know where these new materials are being used.”

Based on the scientific literature so far, several hundred products should be recalled due to their toxicity to lab animals and bacteria. Much of the 2011 complaint argues that because nanomaterials are patented, and exhibit novel characteristics unique to their size, they clearly represent new substances requiring regulation and safety tests. Plaintiffs demand a recall on all such products until their safety is proven.

Consumer groups including some of the same plaintiffs in the current lawsuit also filed petitions urging nanotech regulation with the Environmental Protection Agency back in 2006 and 2008, reports the Chemical Regulation Reporter.

Nanotechnology is the science of manipulating materials on an atomic or molecular scale, measured in billionths of a meter. Nanotech-engineered materials (NEMs) are used in food, cosmetics (including toothpaste and sunscreen), drugs, fertilizers, and home cleaning products with little regulation in the U.S.  They are found in ice cream and the coating sprayed on fruits and vegetables, and even line bottles and cans, reported Andrew Schneider in his 2010 exposé on the subject.

NEMs are also used in industry processes and military applications including drones, combat gear and miniature devices.  The Dept. of Defense has spent billions on nanotech R&D.  Per its 2007 report, nanotech is used in “chemical and biological warfare defense; high performance materials for platforms and weapons; unprecedented information technology [like smart clothes]; revolutionary energy and energetic materials; and uninhabited vehicles and miniature satellites.”  (Also see the2011 National Nanotechnology Initiative Strategic Plan.)

In June 2011, both the FDA and the EPA issued draft guidelines on NEMs.  Though nano-pesticides are already on the market, the EPA made its first approval last month.  The Swiss firm, HeiQ, now sells its composite nanosilver and nano-silica for use in clothing (to reduce microbial odor) with EPA approval.

Upon publication of the FDA’s voluntary guidlines, the Alliance for Natural Healthimmediately demanded that nanomaterials be banned from organic certification, as they are in Canada.

The FDA has done nothing on NEM regulation since last June. Prior to that, the FDA absurdly denied that any nanofoods were being sold in the U.S.

“Not true, say some of the agency’s own safety experts, pointing to scientific studies published in food science journals, reports from foreign safety agencies and discussions in gatherings like the Institute of Food Technologists conference,” reports Schneider.

Several of the plaintiffs have issued public reports on nanotech, including IATP.  InRacing Ahead: U.S. Agri-Nanotechnology in the Absence of Regulation, IATP notes that as of March 2011, there were over 1,300 products known to contain NEMs.  That’s up from 200 in 2006, but the number is conservatively expected to rise to 3,400 by 2020.  The ETC Group estimates well over 1,600 products in its 2010 report, The Big Downturn? Nanogeopolitics.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), a partnership of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a U.S. government research center, notes that there is no registry of nano-scale ingredients and materials used in products or industrial processes.

“Establishing such a registry, as well as consumer products registry,” advises IATP, “would be necessary components of the eventual regulation of nanotechnology.”

Meanwhile, some products containing nanomaterials can be found with PEN’s iPhone application for using the Nanotechnology Products Inventory.

Size Matters

“There is a dependent relationship between size and surface area and nanoparticle toxicity; as particles are engineered smaller on the nano-level, they are more likely to be toxic,” plaintiffs wrote in their 2006 petition. “Many relatively inert and stable chemicals, such as carbon, pose toxic risk in their nano-scale form.”

That small of a size makes nanoparticles capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier noted food research scientist Ellin Doyle.  In 2006, she published a literature review on nanotechnology advising, “Nanoparticles are readily taken up by many types of cells in vitro and are expected to cross the blood-brain barrier that excludes many substances that might harm the brain.”

Despite this, in 2006, the FDA ruled that “particle size is not an issue” for regulation.  Basic chemistry teaches the opposite.  At that small of a scale, a particle’s electrochemical features more heavily influence its interactions with nearby substances, including viruses, bacteria and DNA.  The small nanosize means there are more atoms on its surface than inside the particle.

Both the US Patent Office and the National Nanotechnology Initiative, an agency of the US National Science Foundation, refuted the FDA’s stance, explaining that the small size of nanoparticles enable “unique and novel characteristics” that impact not only electrochemical interactions, but also their optical, photoreactive, magnetic, persistence, bio-accumulation, toxicity and explosiveness features.

Nanosized aluminum, a suspected ingredient in chemtrails, has been shown to spontaneously combust, reports ETC.  Texas-based Quantum Logic Devices holdsPatent No. 7,338,711, which is an “enhanced nanocomposite combustion accelerant” used in fuels, propellants and explosives.

In its 2007 Nanotechnology Task Force Report, the FDA finally reversed itself admitting that, “at this scale, properties of a material relevant to the safety and (as applicable) effectiveness of FDA-regulated products might change repeatedly as size enters into or varies within the nanoscale range.”

Nanohazards

In addition to several studies showing nanosize-induced harm cited in the 2006 petition, ETC listed ten studies from 1997 through early 2004 that showed DNA and brain damage, lung dysfunction, and bioaccumulation (whereby earthworms and other creatures absorb, inhale or ingest the nanoparticles and pass them up the food chain).

This is especially significant as nanopollution grows with the release of thousands of pounds of nanomaterials into the environment, notes Friends of the Earth in its 2006 report, Nanomaterials, sunscreens and cosmetics.  (More studies can be found at this companion FOE report.)

ETC also pointed to studies showing that nanoparticles can break down in the body causing metal poisoning, and can cross the placenta from mother to unborn fetus.

A 2010 British study confirmed that anything smaller than 100 nm poses even greater health risks because it can “access all areas of the body” and can even penetrate the nucleus of cells where DNA is located.

Stronger than steel, carbon nanotubes look and act like asbestos, which causes lung cancer.  This FOE report also cites reduced kidney growth in lab animals exposed to nanomaterials.

Under its 2011 guidelines, the FDA will consider particles that are from 1 to 100 nanometers in size, but up to one micron if the end products “exhibit properties or phenomena, including physical or chemical properties or biological effects, that are attributable to its dimension(s).”

By dragging its feet on nanotech regulation for the past several years, the FDA and EPA have allowed the proliferation of nanomaterials into consumer products without disclosure.  Similar to the federal government’s refusal to label genetically modified foods, US consumers are once again lab animals for the biotech industry.  Hopefully, this lawsuit will spur appropriate safety testing and the removal of unsafe products from the market.

A Greeting for 2012: Looking Back at Durban and “Occupying” Ourselves

This is the time for New Year’s resolutions. Notwithstanding occasional gains like President Obama’s promise to delay approval of the Keystone XLpipeline, a promise now whittled down to 60 days by his signature on recent legislation, we are losing the fight against global warming decisively, and with it, losing

- the homelands of a number of the world’s nations,

- the productivity and reliability of global agriculture, and

- likely more of the world’s biodiversity, and faster, than in any other period in geological history,

Maybe there are physical forces making disaster inevitable, or maybe what is happening is within the control of human free will, but the window of opportunity for the latter is rapidly closing. Hopefully it is not entirely shut yet.

Global warming may be lethal, but it is still only one of Earth’s illnesses. A debt-ridden, overpopulated, hungry and warring humanity is shredding the biosphere, home to billions of beautiful and innocent creatures like the family of mergansers you see, and at the same time facing “peak everything,” with fossil fuels at the top of the list, along with many of the minerals essential for agriculture and high technology. (1) Our erstwhile governments and most of the seven billion or if you prefer, the 99%, are sitting in a stupor as if paralyzed. Some, last spring’s Middle Eastern protesters and the Occupiers around the world in recent months, were awoken by a Middle Eastern fruit vendor who immolated himself. This appeal is made by one of the seven billion, from a tiny American town not far from the home of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, explaining why he went to jail rather than pay his head tax to support the Mexican-American War, wrote, “It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.” That was also the message of the fruit vendor who sacrificed his life for us all. There is very little evidence that the world’s governments are willing or capable of taking decisive action, so it is up to us, the 99%, or however many of us are willing, to “leaven the lump” and bring back the world from the precipice.

This article will argue that we the people, and more specifically those of us who call ourselves “green,” are losing the battle to stop global warming, and many other battles largely because we all or at least too many of us have been indoctrinated

- to forget Mr. Thoreau’s other reminder, that ‘The government is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will.”

- to forget what “conservationists” understood before Earth Day 1970, that every environmental problem has its roots in “too many people using too much stuff.”

- to forget what Thoreau and Gandhi and many others have taught us, that relinquishment of material wants is empowerment, not self-sacrifice.

- to forget the foremost teaching of religion and spiritualism and ethics for at least four millenia: the Golden Rule.

We are all guilty. So we need to resolve now to reinstate those principles in our personal lives and the life of society, not tomorrow but today. It’s a tall order, but in fact we are coming so close to destroying civilization and the earth, that only a rethinking of fundamental values will save us.

What is more difficult to understand than that we have been losing the battles against environmental and human injustice, is that the people of the Baby Boom, now in power ’round the world or at least in the United States, grew up in the shadow of a great man, John Kennedy, who said, “Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.” (2) We believed him then, and indeed it seems self-evident, doesn’t it? So we can believe him now. Yet most of us sit as if paralyzed.

On the global warming front in particular, the test case for survival of the Earth, all the talk and agreements and campaigns since the eighties have not even created a “blip” in the seemingly inexorable rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, never deviating in the slightest from a course followed for half a century (3):

If the cacophony since the eighties has resulted in any progress, it is not apparent in the physical world, is it? There are those who say that the talk alone is a sign of progress, and they may be right. But not for Mama Nature.

Look what’s happened in the last few weeks. This is what you already know if you’ve been paying attention.

1.International Energy Agency (IEA) scientists, the ones the world pays to know, announced that we have about five years (that’s until 2016, just around the corner) to put a stop to increased greenhouse-gas emisssions before global warming gets completely out of control. Their reasoning was economic. When you build a power plant or tar sands oil pipeline or widget-manufacturing facility, you expect to pay for the investment out of the sale of electricity or tar sands oil or widgets. So the construction locks everyone in to producing the widgets or oil or electricity, and if that causes CO2 emissions, the economics makes it much harder to cut the emissions than before the construction happened.. Five years from now the expenditures will have been made that lock us into emissions that will cause more than 2 degrees C of warming. The time to halt the emissions is now, not after many costly new CO2-generating plants and pipelines have been built, which must somehow be paid for.. “The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, says. “If we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.” (4) Forever.

2. The IEA scientists also announced that global warming is happening much faster than expected; and unless practices and policies change very rapidly, global warming could easily be 3 degrees C by 2050, 6 degrees C (11 degrees F) by 2100. The politicians had made an official finding at Copenhagen that anything more than a 2-degree warming, any time sooner than the end of the century, would have unacceptable environmental and economic impacts. Three times the warming by century’s end or 50% more in less than half the time? We’re in trouble. The unacceptable is becoming the inevitable. It’s getting so warm in the arctic that (a) the ice is rapidly disappearing, which causes more sunlight to be absorbed and less reflected, which in turn means the earth heating up rapidly just because of that regardless of how how much more CO2 we put into the sky, and (b) methane is bubbling up from under where the ice used to be and from formerly frozen peat – LOTS of methane, which is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful. than CO2 on a 100-year average basis, and even several times worse than that on an immediate short-term basis The methane emissions will just keep coming faster, and like the missing ice, they’ll create their own global warming without regard to CO2.

3. There was also agreement at Copenhagen that for the protection of the more vulnerable countries that will be annihilated by rising seas, the 2-degree ceiling should be reconsidered no later than 2015 to be possiby lowered to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F),

4.. As the politicians were about to fly into Durban on highly-polluting planes to talk about global warming, it was announced thaqt 2010 had seen a 5.6% increase in world CO2 emissions, the largest gross increase in human history. And that’s with the Kyoto protocols in effect as much as they have ever been. The problem is, of course, that China and the US, the biggest emitters, don’t have to do anything at all under Kyoto, and Europe, which at least gives lipservice to it, uses paper emissions trading said by some to be 90% fraudulent (5).

5. The politicians flew into Durban

- knowing that Kyoto is hardly working at all and in particular that under Kyoto we just saw the largest increase in CO2 emissions in history. , .

- knowing that we’ve got five years to put into effect something that will halt further commitments to emissions increases;

- knowing that they had promised to reconvene in 2015 to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees to protect the more vulnerable nations, and

- knowing that warming is now happening much more and much sooner than the maximum they had declared acceptable at Copenhagen..

6. What was their response? .

- They agreed to extend Kyoto, due to lapse next year.
.
- They agreed to try to come up with a new plan in 2020, already four years after the scientists say it will be too late, five years after they had promised to consider lowering the ceiling to 1.5 degrees, and thirty years after Kyoto…

- They declared a victory and went home for the holidays.

7. As soon as the folks in Durban announced the extension of Kyoto, Canada announced it was going to walk out of the treaty. Bad medicine. Why? because Canadian tar sands oil is just as polluting as conventional oil when it is consumed, but more polluting in the refining process and the greater source of emissions for tar sands oil is where it’s gotten out of the ground rather than where it is ultimately used. Tar sands oil will

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is produced in Canada, where the emissions will be completely uncontrolled with Canada out of the treaty, and

- produce vast quantities of CO2 emissions where it is consumed – in the US if the Keystone XL pipeline is built, or elsewhere via a Pacific Coast pipeline if the Keystone XL pipeline is not built..

There are those who say that if the pipeline is built, the battle to halt global warming is lost forever, and they are likely right. (6) The same is true by the same logic, of course, if the pipeline is not built but the oil is sent elsewhere.

2010 was a bad year for CO2 emissions? You ain’t seen nothin’.

8. In the meantime, the govenment and industry have been busy working to bring Canadian tar sands oil into the US, for all the world as if we should never cease burning oil.. . Back in Washington, thanks to 350.org and William Mckibben surrounding the White House with protesters, President Obama said he would postpone approval of the pipeline until there had been further environmental studies done. Good. Of course if the pipeline is blocked, the oil will likely go out to the Pacific Coast by a much more environmentally damaging pipeline route, and will be used elsewhere. (7) Oh well, at least the US won’t be blamed for the inevitable massive increases in emissions, even if Mama Nature can’t tell the difference.. So 350.org declared a victory and the protesters went home for the holidays..

9. And then there is “fracked” shale gas, an immense new source of natural gas, which will become its own immense new source of greenhouse gas emissions. Anyone who cares about global warming knows that the only thing to do with new fossil fuels is to leave them in the ground at least until there is a global warming treaty, and not make investments in their exploitation that will have to be repaid through their sale. “Fracking,” even if it could be done “cleanly,” is for economic reasons, one more pound of nails in the earth’s coffin.

10. Last but perhaps more appropriately first, the UN recently admitted for the first time that its projected world population of 9 billion by mid-century, already more than can be fed sustainably under any plausible scenario without corresponding increases in fossil fuel consumption,, is going to keep spiralling upward to over 10 billion by the end of the century. The farther we go in that direction, the more locked in we will be to impossubly destructive CO2 emissions, not to mention impossibly destructive losses of remaining forest lands. As was pointed out years ago, the really “inconvenient truth”about global warming is that uncontrolled population growth means uncontrolled global warming.(8)

Of course we should have known that our efforts at Durban would fail. The politicians flew to Copenhagen, accomplished very little, declared victory and went home. With both the United States and China refusing to commit to anything legally binding, the possibility of meeting the 2 degree ceiling is receding into fantasy-land.. Talks began before 1990, and now the earliest we could even hope for a treaty binding on the largest emitters is more than 30 years later. And the biosphere hangs in the balance.

To this writer what is more difficult to understand about the present state of affairs is this. We greens will have been hard at work over thirty years trying to convince the governments to do the only thing that can be done about global warming: at this point: to tell us to stop putting so much CO2 in the air. What we have to show for it is thirty years of steadily increasing emissions with no end in sight. If we fail to get the governments to order us to stop polluting, what stops us from doing it ourselves.without orders, however difficult that may be what more realistic alternatives do we have, and why does there seem to be resistance to the idea?

The mainstream environmental groups are very vague about who will in fact have to stop polluting, and how much, but the truth is that to reach the goals we assert to be needed, we will have to decrease our driving radically, decrease our consumption of electricity radically, decrease our consumption of home heating fuels radically, etc.. How much? Probably at least 80%, because in the thirty years between Kyoto and our next meeting date, huge volumes of CO2 will have been added to the atmosphere, making additional heating for the next century inevitable.. You and I have to make those cuts or leave an almost unlivable earth to our descendants, yet we go on using whatever fossil fuels are available as if there were no concerns, making small efforts like purchase of hybrid vehicles, which fail to show up on the chart. “Alternatives” (eg solar electricity, biofuels, “hybrids,” etc. are there, but they appear at this point to be too little, too late. And when environmentalists talk about decreasing emissions, there are always two fundamental approaches – conservation (e.g. drive less) or efficiency (e.g. fuel efficiency standards). We hear proposals for the latter, (which have not been shown to be sufficient soon enough, not to mention that they are fleeting at best because they will be negated by population increases), but not proposals for the former.

Forty years ago, it was gospel that the root causes underlying almost all deterioration of the environment were “too many people using too much stuff.” The fundamental solutions, then, were fewer people using less stuff. For close to four decades, however,the mainline environmental organizations have had a conspiracy of silence about the “too many people” part. And when it comes to “stuff,” there is a lot of talk about “sustainable alternatives” ( clean energy, hybrid vehicles, etc). but very little talk about “less stuff” – before Earth Day we called ourselves “conservationists,” but now the major environmental groups hardly talk about conservation at all. It’s as if the former “conservationists” have acquired a conspiracy of silence about conservation itself as well as population.

From people who saw the root cause as “too many people using too much stuff,” mainstream professional environmentalists have become folks who won’t say there are too many people and won’t say they use too much stuff.. Of course the GDP is measured by how many people there are and how much “stuff” they create in monetary terms, so “too many people using too much stuff” is almost the same thing as too high a GDP. Admitting that in today’s world is trouble,. so we seek “sustainable growth,”

As has been observed, “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron. In the global warming context the weakness of the “alternatives” approach (which is also the “sustainable growth” approach) is self-evident. You build a car with greater fuel efficiency, and that just allows more driving or a larger population of drivers. The amount of fuel used has to be addressed head-on, but that doesn’t seem to be happening in active programs among the mainline environmental groujps. No wonder we lose. This blindness shows up directly when it comes to global warming – a refusal to talk about people actually using less of what generates greenhouse emissions. We don’t want to talk about conservation, yet expect the government to impose it. Huh?

The primary stumbling block to implementation of the Copenhagen goals was that both the United States and China refused to make any legally binding commitment at all. Wen this writer reviewed Copenhagen from his personal point of view (9), he pointed out that there was little on the horizon that would make the outcome different in future attempts to reach an accord, and said (I’ll repeat verbatim, italicized, because the facts above only demonstrate that what was apparently true then is unquestionably true now, two years deeper into the hole.For the reader’s convenience, endnotes and interlineations are provided for further clarification.)

We are left with the two largest GHG emitters, the United States and China, unwilling to commit to binding goals for reduction. All the while, there’s little hope that the public can introduce any sort of meaningful change in this situation. At the same time, the rest, the signers of the Kyoto accords, increased their emissions when the protocols called for decreases. So much for governments.

All considered, we have lost twenty years [now 31, since the parties at Durban postponed further discussions until 2020] for bringing about meaningful climate change mitigation and we have little time left because every year that the atmospheric CO2 load increases, there is even a lesser chance that the dangerous processes can be reversed. Meanwhile, we, clearly, face governments in the hands of corporations and corporations blind to any need that could adversely affect the next quarterly report. Are these conditions going to change in the few years we have? It is unlikely. The concerned public has thus far proved incapable of accomplishing meaningful governmental and corporate programs to halt global warming, so how can we have confidence except in more of the same until time runs out?

Is it hopeless? Apparently so if we are going to depend on the governments and the corporations. Yet in taking that position, we are putting aside an “inconvenient truth” – inconvenient because we might rather put responsibility on irresistible forces out there in the universe than on ourselves.

The inconvenient truth is that there are few if any human CO2 emissions not the result of our own individual and collective consumer decisions. There are our direct uses of fossil fuels for transportation and home heating, there is the electricity we consume that is generated by burning fossil fuels or, more recently, biofuels and biomass. There is the energy consumed in production and transport of our food and consumer products. Why – the catalogue is in fact the same catalogue that would have to be dealt with under a global treaty!

So in fact, we the people, in the United States and all over the world, have no need to wait until we are forced by government programs to take the steps necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. We can do what we’ve been waiting for the governments and corporations to do, and because they are doing nothing, we no longer have any alternative except to make the changes, ourselves.

Are we so childish that we can do nothing except whine that we haven’t been told what to do, when the future of the earth, the future of humanity, depends upon action? Maybe the answer is yes – I don’t know what you will do, and I don’t know what I will do. Yet if we do not want to be responsible, individually and collectively, for the horrors to come, then we must, individually and collectively, say no to any more greenhouse emissions than the scientists say are safe.

Henry Thoreau and Mohandas Gandhi taught us that our needs are much less than our wants and that we can peacefully bring down governments and corporations by refusing to accept their measures of our needs.

[Thoreau is widely viewed as the originator of civil disobedience as a moral and civic duty, especially in all societies aspiring to democracy. .He believed that the Mexican-American war was immoral, yet he found himself requested to pay a head tax to finance the war. So he said no, and went to jail. We shall never know how far he would have taken the experiment, because his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, over his objection, paid the tax and got him released. In explaining why he viewed refusal to pay the tax as his duty, he said, "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support " (7) Obviously we have not wiped our handsof global warming when we buy the fuels or the electriciy or consumer goods and not only create emissions but finance our opponents as Thoreau's head tax financed the war. We will not by ourselves have stopped global warming, but the example will be seen, and our willingness to make sacrifices for reductions in emissions will for the first time be unquestionable. As Thoreau explained, "It is not so important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing;" Rather, if substantial numbers of people refuse to pay the profiteers or to engage in throwing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it will demonstrate their sincerity in a manner that cannot be accomplished by just asking the government to do something. We shall, hopefully, "leaven the whole lump," and ideally, slow the growth of demand for products destroying the earth. There will be less profit in building the power plants and pipelines about to lock us in to failure, and we can sleep better in the knowledge that we "washed our hands of it." BESIDES, NOTHING ELSE THAT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED WILL WORK.

The core teaching of "Civil Disobedience" is, as Martin Luther King saw it, "Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good." As consumers and users and financial contributors to the makers of the pollutants that are destroying the earth, its biodiversity, and its agricultural productivity for millions of years to come, we must demonstrate our opposition with noncooperation. Why?

- Because it is a moral duty,

- Because it will "leaven the whole lump,"

- Because nothing else is working at all.

Another important part of Thoreau's teachings is his examination of our ability and responsibility to reduce our material consumption to the core at which we can carry on our lives as principled members of the community without either imposing on others, depriving ourselves of freedom or violating our own moral beliefs. That is Walden, which forces us to understand that consumerism locks us out from living our lives with integrity and freedom. It's a message essential for giving up the material "needs" for which we are destroying the earth.

Gandhi's self-imposed poverty gives us the same message - that abandonment of material needs is empowerment, not self-sacrifice. It's a view, of course, that is anathema to the global corporations that control our lives through the culture of materialism. Without that understanding, it is unlikely that Americans can voluntarily relinquish their "rights" to a standard of living Russia's President Putin and undoubtedly millions or billions of others have rightly called parasitism. As long as Americans maintain that view, they are playing with the danger that the world will quickly and painfully take away the material "rights" they enjoy at everyone else's expense - "rights" that will soon be gone in any event as "peak everything" imposes itself on us.. To fail to make a virtue of a necessity is the height of folly.

Remember Gandhi's spinning wheel? It was a simple declaration of independence from British capitalism, a statement that India could do without the capitalists. "Mahatma Gandhi Album: the Man and the Wheel," http://www.kamat.com/mmgandhi/wheel.htm To the extent we liberate ourselves from the causes of global warming, so will we also liberate ourselves from the corporations of Wall Street,which act in arrogant confidence that we are ever their dependents and ever in debt to them. If we step away from the shiny things they produce, they will have no power over us, so it is time to do it in small ways and large.].

It is time to stop waiting for governments to act as we expected them to act at Kyoto long ago and at Copenhagen [more than two years ago and at Durban most recently.]

At this point, exclusively focussing on government action is little more than avoidance of the inconvenient truth of our individual and collective responsibility. So we must get on with the show – convincing and helping ourselves, convincing and helping our neighbors, convincing and helping humanity to reduce CO2 emissions by all means within our power, to reach the goals and timelines the scientists are telling us we must meet. . We must do it with the good will and generosity so lacking in Copenhagen because our “leaders” showed us in Copenhagen [and Durban] that the needed changes, assuredly, will not happen otherwise.

There is a little catch. The fundamental rule of social behavior, raised to a pinnacle by “free-market” economics, has been for generations, in the words of 1952 U.S. Progressive Party Presidential nominee Vincent Hallinan, “Fuck you Jack, I got mine!” That is unnatural and unsustainable.

Every major religious text, back at least as far as the Egyptian Book of the Dead [four millenia ago], has taught us in substance, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

[For specific wording of the rule in twenty of the world's religions, see "Universality of the Golden Rule," http://www.edminterfaithcentre.ca/goldrule.htm. The rule explicitly dictates behavior towards all things living among the Jains, Native Americans, and Nigerian Yoruba, and this writer submiots, implicitly does so among others. It is hard to seen how a universally accepted rule of behavior can be, as asserted by our colleagues in the corporate world, genetically impossible, and it is of course a necessary rule for survival among the hunter-gatherer tribes from which we descend.

The corporate anti-Christ has tried to tell us otherwise for centuries. That is hardly surprising, because it is increasingly coming to be understood that the structure of large corporations, indeed probably all large integrated organizations, regardless of stated mission, automatically draws to the top, psychopaths, people who, generally through factors of nature and nurture beyond their control, lack the ability to empathize. (9)

Look where it has gotten us.] There are reasons why the free market rule has repeatedly brought down the US economy, destroyed the Copenhagen and Kyoto efforts and will make our efforts to stop global warming, with or without the aid of the governments, an impossibility .No other rule than that taught by universal religion, will work to leave a world to future living beings in which they can, actually, survive and thrive.

We certainly have our work cut out for us, but we have no choice. And the governments and corporations are welcome to join us all if they see fit. If the offenders find themselves boycotted, they should not be surprised. So think about this message, start saying no to carbon, along with unnecessary consumption of goods and services. Instead, share the vision for a low carbon footprint with your neighbors, friends, other associates, congregations, nonprofit organizations, everyone. Then ever so nicely, ask them to get with the program post haste, because the responsibility is now with us.

We the seven billion are well-meaning folks on the whole, but with all due respect we are also all the righthand men and women of Wall Street. Want to bankrupt the global corporations, one or all? Just stop consuming what they sell, and stop producing future consumers. I,It’s that simple, and within decades it will in any event be forced upon us by the limits to growth. t’s all about “too many people using too much stuff,” so if we fail to do now what the limits to growth will force us to do tomorrow, future generations, if they survive, will pay dearly.. We allowed ourselves to be indoctrinated by the corporate psychopaths into believing that we are like them, constitutionally unable to care for our fellow beings. That’s not us, or wasn’t until they took over control of our minds and our religions. Things might be different if we decided to “occupy” ourselves without abandoning the occupation of Wall Street, and having done so, to implement the Golden Rule, the central teaching of every major religion on earth, and the principle that conservation is empowerment, not self-sacrifice..

Think of these things, please, but with humor and good will, as you honor in your own way the religious and spiritual holidays. And to be effective, the nonprofits need to change course too, and stop knocking their heads against walls that will remain unmoved until we all change our ways.

(1) Vernon, 2007, “Peak Minerals,” Oil Drum Europe, http://europe.theoildrum.com:80/. Thee appears to be consideable uncertainty as to the supplies of key minerals, which have not been studied in nearly the detail of oil, so this writer will not vouch for the current accuracy of Vernon’s work.

(2) American University Speech, June 13, 1963.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkamericanuniversityaddress.html

(3) Farley, The Scientific Case for Modern Anthropogenic Global Warming, Monthly Review

(4) “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns
If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change,” Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 November 2011 05.01 EST http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-change

(5) “Carbon offsets have already run out of credit,” http://tgrule.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/carbon-offsets-have-already-run-out-of-credit/. See also Carbon Trade Watch, which reports, “Carbon trading schemes are awash with paper “reductions” that do not correspond to actual reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in the real world, and this is a systematic problem.” http://www.corporateeurope.org/sites/default/files/publications/LettingTheMarketPlay.pdf

(6) Why? because of tar sands oil’s “EROEI” (energy recovered over energy in.) When the energy recovered in extracting a fuel from the ground is less than the energy needed to extract it (ie EROEI < 1) , getting it out is pretty much worthless, and when EROEI is only a little over 1 (as when you pull 4 barrels of oil out of the ground but burn the equivalent of three of them to get them), you’ve already expended several times the net recovery to get there, which means the oil from tar sands has already caused more CO2 emissions before it even reaches the refinery than it or conventional oil causes after it’s burnt. Really bad medicine. Additionally, meeting recognized scientificly-established goals for reduction of CO2 emissions requires using less than the total reserves of “conventional” oil and gas. Once development of “unconventional” sources (tar sands oil, shale oil, deep sea oil and “fracked” shale gas) are initiated in full scale, it will become virtually impossible to halt their use, since the investors will fight to retrieve their investments.

(7) See http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/sclefkowitz/pipeline_and_tanker_trouble_ne.html
Pipeline and Tanker Transport Trouble: New report shows the impact to British Columbia’s communities, rivers and Pacific coastline from tar sands oil http://www.climateark.org/blog/2011/12/release-another-tar-sands-pipe.asp December 12, 2011 RELEASE: Another Tar Sands Pipeline Postponed in Major Victory for First Nations and Ecological Internet, http://www.wcel.org/our-work/tar-sands-tankers-pipelines TarSands,Tar Sands, Tankers & Pipelines.

(8) See, eg, Diane Francis, “The Real Inconvenient Truth,” http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=2314438 See also, “Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?”. www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau310710.htm, one of many discussions of the need to maintain growth of fossil fuels to maintain growth of food production.

(9) “Copenhagen Failed Us. What Do We Do Next?” http://www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau150210.htm

(10) end of “Civil Disobedience” Part One, http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil1.html

(11) Brian Basham Thursday, 29 December 2011″Beware Corporate Psychopaths – They Are Still Occupying Positions of Power.” Basham cites some of the recent peer-reviewed academic literature on the subject http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/brian-basham-beware-corporate-psychopaths–they-are-still-occupying-positions-of-power-6282502.html

Interview with Mark Kingwell

Prof. Mark Kingwell is a world renowned Canadian author and philosopher. He is the associate chair at University of Toronto’s Department of Philosophy. Kingwell is a fellow of Trinity College. He specializes in theories of politics and culture. Kingwell has published twelve books, most notably, A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue, and the Politics of Pluralism, which was awarded the Spitz Prize for political theory in 1997. Spitz Prize is annually awarded by a panel based in the Department of Political Science of Columbia University to the author of the best book in liberal and/or democratic theory.

Kingwell is the contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine. His articles on philosophy, culture, journalism, art and architecture have appeared on the New York Times, Utne Reader, Adbusters, Harvard Design Magazine, Toronto Life, the Globe and Mail and the National Post.

His main areas of interest are political philosophy, cultural criticism, philosophy of art and continental philosophy.

Mark has been the editor of “The Varsity,” the second oldest student newspaper of Canada from 1983 to 1984 and the “University of Toronto Review” from 1984 to 1985.

Prof. Kingwell’s works have been translated into ten languages and among his notable books are ” Dreams of Millennium: Report from a Culture on the Brink,” “Practical Judgments: Essays in Culture, Politics, and Interpretation” and “Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams.”

Prof. Kingwell kindly joined me in an exclusive interview and answered my questions about philosophy, popular culture, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street Movement and ethics in journalism.

Kourosh Ziabari: Philosophy, journalism and architecture. How do you make a connection between these three? As to what I have noted, you were enthusiastically interested in journalism since you were very young. Please tell us about your journalistic experiences in the days of youth. Certainly, it’s a fantastic opportunity to work with Globe and Mail. Am I right?

Mark Kingwell: I don’t consider myself a journalist, just someone who writes for newspapers and magazines as well as academic journals and literary quarterlies. It’s true that I edited my university’s student newspaper, and worked as a city desk reporter and editorial writer at a big national paper, The Globe and Mail. This was invaluable experience in how to write concisely and accessibly, and also a fast-track education in how cities work. I hung out at city hall and the harbour commissioner’s office. I saw dead bodies, fires, and corrupt landlords. I interviewed the survivors of plane crashes. I called the police desk sergeant every night to get crime updates. It was exciting, and very illuminating. But to be honest I liked the romance of it more than the reality, and enjoyed writing more than reporting.

I once had to choose between a fairly secure career in journalism and the uncertainty of a doctoral program. I chose the latter because I knew I could always write magazine or newspaper articles as a philosopher, but I could not philosophize — not, at least, with any rigor — as a journalist. I’ve never regretted the choice.

Philosophy and architecture is a more recent conjunction of interests, growing out of my work in political theory. Too many political philosophers write as if the subjects of their theories were not real people at all, living and working and raising families in actual places, but abstract bundles of interest, or of decision. At the same time, too many architects use philosophy as casual window-dressing for their work, without actually struggling with the details of the views in question. I have written two books so far that try to address these related gaps: one about a single building, the Empire State in New York (Nearest Thing to Heaven, 2006) and one that is a sort of phenomenological meditation on the built environment and its social dimensions (Concrete Reveries, 2008). I have also edited a collection of essays (Rites of Way, 2009, with Patrick Turmel) which address the issue of public space—a key point of contact between political philosophy and architecture.

KZ: I know that you’ve focused on the questions of social obligation and the role of citizenship in sustaining a just and democratic society. In the developing societies, like Iran, the citizenship rights are not observed to the full and people have a long way to understand the principles of decent citizenship, neighborhood and social interaction. Can we conclude that one of the reasons why democracy is not institutionalized in such countries is this lack of citizenship culture?

MK: I think we can. At least since Aristotle it has been argued that political institutions will function to foster justice if and only if there is some substantial bonds of ethical life between persons—what Hegel called Sittlichkeit. The focus on the virtues of citizenship in my book The World We Want (2000) was an attempt to join Aristotelian insights about virtue, character, friendship, and justice—the main topics of the Nicomachean Ethics—with a liberal-democratic idea that there could be a distinction between my obligations as a good citizen and my non-conflicting but separate obligations as a good person.

This attempt was perhaps only partially successful, but what remains clear to me is that citizenship is an essential category of political theory. Even the most elaborate theory of social justice or democratic procedure will need to address issues of motivation, fellow feeling, and shared vulnerability. There are numerous ways to do this—Adam Smith’s sympathy, Herder’s einfuhlen, Derrida’s hospitality—but they all make a similar point. Unless and until I see the other as someone to whom I am obliged in some profound way, there can be no political justice.

One form of trouble for this prospect lies in cultural differences concerning fellowship, neighborliness, civility, and the like. I have tried to write about these, especially civility, many times; but it can be very hard to deploy persuasive arguments when the issue comes down to differences in perception. Something I find offensive may not even raise your eyebrows. As philosophers, where do we go from there? Indeed, as members of political bodies—nation-states, regions—how can we forge minimal bonds of connection across such differences?

I am lately exercised by a sense of vulnerability, the shared capacity for suffering, as a start. But that, too, is always open to question. Maybe the pain you feel at the pain of another is just a socio-biological trick that your neurons play on you! Well, maybe. But even so, it creates opportunities to cooperate and coordinate our actions, such that even a confirmed Hobbesian can see the point.

KZ: You have surely taken note of the popular uprisings in the Middle East, instigated by the self-immolation of a young Tunisian vendor before the municipality office. What are the peoples of the region looking for? Are they after improved living conditions, social freedoms and civil liberties? If they’re fed up with their authoritarian regimes, why hadn’t they taken any step to bring down the autocratic despots in the past years?

MK: It’s not for me to say what people in theMiddle Eastwant, except that I see, as everyone must, that there is growing dissatisfaction with the very idea of authority, especially if it is suspected to be aligned with decadence, hereditary privilege, or corruption. People will put up with a lot of hardship, and go about their business even in poverty, if they feel that things cannot be better. But if the hardships are perceived as unnecessary, or wedded to the privileges of others, they will resist. This was as true in 1776 and 1789 as it is now.

As for why it has taken this long, I would only suggest that we recall just how capacious is the human spirit. Most people just want to get on with their lives, to make do. It’s only an assault on their basic dignity, as in the case of Mohamed Abouazizi that you mention, which can make someone adopt extreme measures of resistance. This shows something essential about us: we mostly desire to be left in peace, but no peace is worth the cost of feeling debased, or degraded, or subject to contempt.

KZ: What are the features of an inclusive, effective and comprehensive democracy? Is democracy confined to holding elections and giving people the chance to elect president or parliament members?

MK: ‘Democracy’ is the opaque signifier of our political moment: it means everything and nothing at once. I’m rather with Derrida on this: democracy is always to come, not yet here. One could articulate the basic features of a democratic system—free elections, independent media, strong participatory citizenship, and so on— and still fall short of democracy. Some people, for instance Carl Schmitt, even think that democracy is only present when a being is united against a common enemy in a struggle for survival, and hence democracy is incompatible with liberalism.

Obviously I think is not only extreme, but mistaken. Let us suffice with two very basic points. In emerging democracies, such as those that might be burgeoning in your region, the most important thing is the public enactment of franchise, that is, free and fair elections. In developed democracies, however, the most important thing is to try and minimize the corruption that attends our allegedly free elections, the way they are held hostage by large donors and other corporate interests. There is a cautionary tale in this contrast: one can have apparently open elections, with universal franchise, and still not have democracy.

KZ: What’s your analysis of the Occupy Wall Street movement? Do you think that it was inspired by the Arab Spring? Why the American protesters call themselves the 99% of the population and question the authority and supremacy of the 1%? Is there anything wrong with capitalism and corporatism that has exhausted the people? What’s your view about the police crackdown on the protesters?

MK: I’m certain there was some inspiration taken from the Arab Spring, yes. The very topic of OWS’s connection to the Arab Spring became a contentious issue here, however. Critics of OWS—who grew more repressive and condescending by the day, until the parks were forcibly cleared—were vehement that no comparison with Arab Spring was valid, or even allowed. It was if popular uprising were democratic, and wonderful, but only if they happened somewhere else. One particularly loathsome journalist labeled the OWS protesters as ‘capitalism’s spoiled children’, as if they had no right to object to a system than does not work, that is grossly unjust, and that is sustained by only a sham politics of puppet candidates permanently indebted to the monied interest. Shut up, and get back to shopping for gadgets! It was a disgusting spectacle of provincial, toy-time fascism.

I was especially upset about the police crackdown because of the cavalier way in which ‘health and safety concerns’ became a blanket justification for police action. The books in the OWS library—including a small volume I co-write, The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011, with Joshua Glenn)—were tossed in garbage containers. In a strange way, this blithe trashing of books was worse than setting fire to them. For this neo-liberal police state, books are not even dangerous or important enough to burn. A depressing thought.

It remains to be seen what political upshot there is from OWS. My own feeling is that the objections to corporate capitalism will not be as easy to eradicate as were a few tents and bodies. They used to say to us left-wingers, when we were young, that socialism is a nice idea, only it doesn’t work. Here’s an update: capitalism doesn’t work either, and it’s not even a nice idea.

KZ: Would you please give us a gist of some of your important tips for better living which you proposed in your book “Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness From Plato to Prozac”? Why are some people so unfriendly with the self-help books? Is it really possible to realize a better living by practicing what the self-help books prescribe? Some people argue that the lifestyle is something inherent and inborn and cannot be changed by practice and exercise, because it’s related to one’s mindset and ideology. Do you agree?

MK One of my favorite reviews of Better Living called it “the self-help books for people who hate self-help books.” In one broad sense, all books of philosophy, at least in the so-called wisdom tradition, are self-help books: they offer a kind of therapy, in book form, whose basic message is that same as that found in Rilke’s musing on the Archaic Torso of Apollo: You must change your life! But the therapy is intellectual and ethical, often ironic and prickly, and not delivered in twelve easy or even twelve hard steps. So I wanted to criticize the recent fad of lifestyle guidance by, once again, revisiting some basically Aristotelian insights in a modern form. That’s why I used personal narrative, some cultural criticism, and different forms of ironic discourse in the book.

I can’t distill the book into tips, but the most obvious take-away is the old insight that a happiness worth having is not a matter of feeling good all the time, or achieving constant joy or bliss, but of cultivating personal virtue, contributing to causes and structures larger than yourself, and exploring human possibility. In a way, Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics makes the best version of the argument: contemplation is the most divine experience we know. The point of our striving, indeed of all our institutions, is finally to give us the space to enjoy the most amazing thing about us, namely that we can play, create art, have philosophical conversations, and enjoy each other’s presence.

I have little patience with the idea that lifestyle is inherent, by the way. Most people simply take cues from the cultural surround, follow the herd, and try not to think too much—and then call this a lifestyle. It’s always been the job of philosophers to knock them off-course a little, to shake things up. Self-help, maybe, but of a peculiarly challenging sort.

KZ: What’s your definition of media ethics? How should the mass media cling to the codes of morality in disseminating the news and publishing the reports? Are the media permitted to publish whatever they want, without having any restriction? From one hand, one may argue that restricting the media and defining limits for their performance is contrary to the freedom of speech which is a prominent value of the democratic societies; however, we should also take note of respecting the privacy of people, avoid directing ad hominem attacks against them and distinguishing between criticism and personality attack. What’s your take on that?

MK: I’m one of those paranoid people who think there is already too much information, too much surveillance, and too much revelation of the personal in our world. I find most social media distasteful because it is predicated on a narcissistic trumpeting of the usually banal individual, but I fall on the individual’s side when it comes to the media. Short of some pressing political interest, there is no possible justification for an invasion of privacy, and even there the burden of proof must be overwhelming since it is so easily corrupted. The Murdoch papers phone-tapping scandal was an appalling spectacle of media self-righteousness allowed to grow to a pathological level. I can’t help thinking sometimes that the arrogance of newspaper and media people is in direct proportion to their slipping sense of actual influence. They’re not nearly as important as they think they are.

At the same time, no political system can function without a free press. What this means in practice, then, is that the media are not unlike other bodies of professional workers. They need to police themselves first, maintaining the strictest standards of fairness and respect; and then there must be recourse in the public forum for those whose privacy has been violated. This gets especially tricky underU.S.law where corporations are legally like persons, and have similar protections and abilities. In an ideal world, those decisions would be repealed. Not only would it improve democratic oversight of corporate actions, now sometimes impossible to investigate; it would also limit the amount of corporate money spent, and hence influence bought, in the centers of political power.

KZ: What’s your prediction for the future of television in the wake of the growing influence of web-based media and social networking websites? In your book the “Practical Judgments,” you accurately pointed out that television is still the dominant medium of information and entertainment of the age. Don’t you believe that with the growing penetration of internet in the families, television will be debased and lose its position? I think that internet, with its multimedia attractiveness and dynamic atmosphere will even eliminate the traditional newspapers and magazines. Don’t you think so?

MK: The essays in Practical Judgments (2002) were gathered from work I published in the previous decade or so, and the claims about television must now be revised somewhat. In some important sense, television is over. People may still use the sets to watch programs, but the programs have been downloaded, or selected via pay-per-view, or recorded on Blu-Ray or DVD. Even cable television involves self-selection to the point where is no longer any such thing as a television audience. This is great in some ways, since we have more entertainment options; but it comes with the usual price imposed by the tyranny of choice, namely that feeling of ennui or boredom when there are so many options that, somehow, none of them seem worth committing to.

Beneath this, television of a certain sort (The Wire, Game of Thrones, Mad Men) now begins to function more like visual literature. You find yourself discussing it with someone who is also a devotee, the way you might discover another Pynchon or Updike enthusiast at a party or dinner. It helps that some of these programs are as narratively complex and emotionally satisfying as any first-rate novel.

Television news, meanwhile, is floundering in the contradictions of a medium whose primary purpose—entertainment—has always afflicted its attempts at seriousness. Political news shows, at least inNorth America, are a running joked of extreme positions, brain-dead rhetoric, and baggy oratory. The only good news here is that most people no longer look to television to gather their political views, or track current events. The bad news is that the places where they do so, because self-selected, may be even more polarized and worse!

KZ: What’s your idea about using media for the purpose of black propaganda? Is it moral to demonize those who we consider enemies, especially at the level of governments, by publishing misinformation about them and blackening their public image? Do you consider state-sanctioned propaganda an intrinsic and natural function of the mass media?

MK: One word answer here: never. Propaganda is worse than falsehood; it is, as in the analysis of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, bullshit. That is, it does not even heed the norm of truth enough to violate it. Therefore, propaganda is even more dangerous than lies, which at least are violations whose existence confirms the idea of truth. (You can compare my earlier remark about why throwing books in dumpsters is actually worse than burning them.)

KZ: In your book “Concrete reveries: consciousness and the city,” you analyzed the relationship between urbanism and personal identity. Do you believe that urban construction gives people certain identities and bestows upon them special characteristics? Then, is there any difference between the personal characteristics, demeanors and deportments of people in a city like New York in which the most prominent incarnations of modern architecture can be found, and a city like Tehran (the capital of Iran) which is actually an emerging city and is gradually embracing the new modes and styles of urban construction?

MK: Yes, the material environmental absolutely conditions the consciousness of a person. It can be as obvious as how one walks—how fast, with what demeanour, dodging or bumping into people, looking at a phone or not, and so on. But even less obvious things are quite central to how we experience ourselves. So large cities have many similarities but it is easy, when one travels, to see subtle differences in self-presentation: clothes, gestures, the way space is occupied. These in turn are symptoms of the experience of consciousness we call selfhood. The aim of Concrete Reveries, as I mentioned earlier, was to bring political philosophy and architecture closer together, somewhat in the manner of Hannah Arendt. But it turned out that the common term between them was really phenomenology, especially in our aspects of embodied consciousness. They we inhabit rooms, cross thresholds, mount staircases—these are all forms of thought as well of physical deportment.

In the book I try to get at these somewhat abstract insights by contrasting the feeling evoked by two very different large cities,New YorkandShanghai. The provided, as it were, phenomenological case studies for my larger argument. They also allowed me to re-introduce some of the first-person and second-person styles I had used in other writing. I wanted to produce a book with something of the feeling (if not the grace!) of Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. I was really happy that the publisher allowed me to include dozens of images that leaven the text, and make the book itself a kind of phenomenological flanerie, an intellectual stroll through the complex of ideas concerning what cities are, and how they work. In a very roundabout way, this actually ties me back to those days spent as a city-desk reporters, encountering the city’s corners, margins, and undersides day after day. . .

KZ: As my final question, I want to ask you about the course of globalization and the future of local, traditional cultures. Will the process of globalization abolish local cultures, vernacular languages and ancient customs and rituals of different peoples around the world? Do you see any chances for their survival in the wake of the domination of Western culture over the developing world?

MK: I suspect we have already witnessed the worst of the globalization cultural bulldozer. What is happening everywhere is the hybridization of culture, such that local traditions, practices, and vernaculars are folding in elements of global culture—not really a culture at all, just an economic expansion program—and creating unique human customs that will continue to evolve. This is precisely what humans have always done with culture, especially in times and places with lots of mobility. My main wish for these ‘bottom-up’ hybrids is that they include elements of the best in Western culture, especially the discourses of philosophical justification for human rights and social justice. The West has exported lots of awful things, but there are some good things too!

David Landy and his ‘Israel Critic Jews’- A Book Review

David Landy, an Irish-Jewish academic and a Palestinian solidarity activist has written a book about Jewish Identity and Jewish dissent in the Diaspora. The book,  published on 7th July 2011, was largely ignored by most pro-Palestinian outlets and dissident journals. Almost four months later, Landy’s book was re-launched by JFJFP (Jews for Justice for Palestinians), in the hope, presumably, that it might divert attention from my own The Wandering Who.

Following the JFJFP’s enthusiastic endorsement, I was looking forward to reading Landy’s book, expecting to find, for the first time, some arguments that may counter my own take on Jewish identity politics.  But I was disappointed: Landy’s findings only supported my reading of the subject in general, and confirmed my critical take on Jewish anti Zionism in particular.

Like me, Landy, makes a clear distinction between ‘Palestinian solidarity’ and ‘Jewish anti Zionist activism’: “I do not call them (the Jewish anti Zionists) Palestinian solidarity either” (pg. 6).  He prefers to refer to his ‘Jewish Diaspora dissident voice’ as ‘Israel-Critical Jews’. Landy has grasped that Jewish dissent is actually more about ‘Jewish liberation’ than about liberating others. It is largely about Jewish secular craving for identity as opposed to any attempt to really change the reality in Palestine: “Few, if any, of my interviewees thought that they were working exclusively for the Palestinians” says Landy and goes on to explain that “This is partly because some participants think they’re protecting the Jewish collectivity from anti Semitism by promoting peace in the Middle East” (pg. 26.)

Such an observation should have alerted Landy to the possibility of something slightly dishonest within the ‘Jewish anti Zionist’ cell. After all, we know that Landy’s ‘Israel-Critical Jews’ completely fail to confront the Jewish Lobby in the UK or the USA. And if that were not enough, they will even join forces with Zionists and hasbara, and are clearly willing to use every possible means to stop others from  attempting to expose the lobby and the extent of its political influence.

Despite Landy’s attempt to portray a growing, vibrant Jewish dissent, he is at least honest enough to admit that the Jewish Diaspora is largely supportive of Israel, and that ‘Israel critical Jews’ are still no more than a marginal calling.

But this is more or less where the good news ends, for unfortunately, on every other front Landy’s book is totally lacking in substance. .

For some reason, Landy has completely failed to address the criticism leveled by a rapidly growing number of Palestinian solidarity activists and intellectuals against his protagonists, the ‘Jewish anti Zionists’

In the last few months in the UK, more and more exiled Palestinians and solidarity activists have been  kicked out from PSC and other solidarity organisations, thanks to relentless pressure from the so-called ‘Israel Critical Jews’. Francis Clark- -Lowes, former Chair of the National PSC was thrown out of the PSC a few months ago due to demands mounted by the infamous Jewish activist Tony Greenstein.  Admired Palestinian poet and writer Nahida Izatt was also cleansed . This time it was no Israeli or a ‘Zionist’ who barred her from her local Palestinian solidarity group – it was  a Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist Greg Dropkin who had been harassing her and other intellectuals for years. A similar fate was awaiting Gill Kaffash, an admired London activist,  who was asked to resign from being  Camden PSC’s Secretary.  Sammi Ibrahem, Palestinian activist and radio journalist, originally from Gaza, was Chair of Birmingham PSC – at least he was, until he too was expelled due to Jewish ‘anti’-Zionist pressure.

Landy fails to address the embarrassing fact that here in Britain, there is now a wide awareness of the negative and subversive input of some of his ‘Israel critical Jews’. Through the years, Jewish ‘anti’-Zionist Roland Rance achieved a reputation as a leading figure amongst the notorious ‘Wikipedia Jews’. Rance specialises in vandalising Palestinian Solidarity entries on the free online encyclopedia.  Tony Greenstein is famous for repeatedly harassing, smearing and defaming an endless list of both Palestinians and solidarity icons. Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, the leader of J-BIG (Jew Only Boycott Campaign) has been exposed numerous times for running clandestine operations against myself and other pro-Palestinian activists. Earlier, in 2005 I myself exposed the ceaseless activity of JPUK members intent on blocking free and vibrant discourse.

One is entitled to ask: how could Landy, a supposedly impartial academic, possibly fail to address the growing fatigue that so many of us feel towards this bunch of ‘Israel critical Jews’? How did Landy manage to miss the glaringly obvious fact that the subjects of his research are regarded by so many of us as being little more than a bunch of AZZ (anti-Zionist Zionists), people who are on the verge of actually being Israeli sayanim [1]? Landy’s failure to address the subversive McCarthyite nature of the Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist operation is indeed disappointing – but it is hardly surprising.

‘Identity Construction’

Landy spends a lot of time elaborating on the need for an alternative ‘Jewish identity construction’; yet he fails to ask the most crucial question -is such an identity a viable concept?

‘Identity construction’ only becomes meaningful once ‘identification’ comes into play, once one is consciously and practically ‘identifying’ with the ‘constructed identity’, yet such a mental or intellectual process can only carry one away from authenticity or authentic realisation.

Moreover, Jewish anti-Zionism may aspire to ‘universalism’ – but Jewish culture is fundamentally tribal, ethno-centric and, in most cases, racially oriented. It represents categorically, the direct opposite of universalism.  So it is not clear how an inherently tribal, political, ethno-centric and exclusive setting can genuinely uphold a universalist standpoint.

Thus, it was inevitable for Zionism to become the voice of world Jewry and a dominant Jewish identity political discourse.

As opposed to the ‘anti Semitic’ early Zionist school of thought[2], post-1948 Zionism is shaped as  a wet dream – it is supremacist; it is tribal; it is expansionist; but most importantly, it is saturated with self-love. Zionism provides the Diaspora Jew with an opportunity to love oneself against all odds.  Israeli military and technological power, for instance, can be realised from a Jewish perspective, as a valid verification of chosen-ness and superiority.

Yet, from an identity perspective, anti-Zionism offers the Jew very little, if anything at all. None of the alleged ‘Jewish anti Zionist’ values are in any way truly Jewish. Solidarity with others is certainly not Jewish (Jewish solidarity is based on clannish brotherhood); universalism is far from being Jewish; and peace, harmony and reconciliation are certainly no Jewish inventions.

Landy provides us with some quotes from his ‘critical Jewish’ interviewees. They all speak in the name of ‘Jewish universal values’ and ‘Jewish justice’; and yet, neither Landy nor anyone else ever provides us with a single reference to a text that actually portrays or explicates Jewish secular universal standpoints. Instead, Landy refers to Jewish ‘diasporist identity’. He tries to draw lessons from Jewish Marxist intellectual Isaac Deutscher, who regarded himself as a ‘non-Jewish Jew’.  But Deutscher was the complete opposite of Landy’s ‘Israel Critical Jews’: Deutscher had little time for ‘Jewish politics’ joining the Communist Party in Warsaw rather than the ‘Jews only’ Bund whose ‘Yiddishist’ views he so opposed. Unlike Landy’s ‘Israel Critical Jews’ who are largely driven by Jewish self-interests, Deutscher was captivated by, and adhered to a universal thought. He believed in unconditional solidarity with the persecuted. Deutscher didn’t need a secular synagogue, a ‘Jews only’ cell or a Jewish party. He was a successful product of Jewish emancipation, an individualist who shaped his ethical views by means of judgment rather than by adherence to any orchestrated ‘identity’ with a ‘constructed emblem’.

The 2nd Category Jews Vs. Landy’s Israel-Critical Jews’

In The Wandering Who I divide Jews who identify themselves as Jews into three categories:

1. Those that follow Judaism.

2. Those who regard themselves as human beings that happen to be of Jewish origin

3. Those who put their Jewishness over and above all of their other traits.

I have no doubt that Isaac Deutscher belongs to the 2nd category; while Landy’s ‘Israel critical Jews, who all operate within ‘Jews only’ political cells, fall into the 3rd category. .

Here, I am about to make a most arrogant suggestion. I’d better just come out with it. My guess is that Landy could have done with reading a bit of Atzmon. It would have saved him from many categorical blunders. And it would certainly have made his text more relevant.

Landy has systematically managed to miss the significant contribution of the 2nd category Jews – those who are genuinely  interested in universalism and ethical thinking, yet refuse to operate within ‘Jews only’ political and spiritual cells. It is clear that those amongst those ethically driven Jews who express solidarity and empathy with Palestinians, operate as ordinary human beings by stripping themselves of any trace of Jewish exceptionalism and exclusivity. Amongst those Jews you will find some of our leading thinkers and writers such as Lawrence Davidson, Jeff Blankfort, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, and many others.

It is also true that Landy’s ‘Israel Critical Jews’ have produced a rather limited body of intellectual work, if any at all.  They certainly write enough about ‘anti Semitism in the movement’; they tell us what is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ for Palestine, and they spend a lot of time pursuing any activists who don’t fit into their kosher vision of Palestinian solidarity. They, consciously and enthusiastically, use hasbara tactics – smear, defamation and misinformation – and, if necessary, are not averse to joining forces with their Zionist brothers and sisters. But still, they write little, if anything, about their own identity or ideology.  They don’t produce any music, poetry, cinema, plays, literature, plastic art or indeed anything that could be seen as a uniquely Jewish cultural contribution, something that could  be considered as offering an alternative ‘identity construct’. That Landy has managed to miss this obvious and crucial fact is staggering.

This lack of Jewish anti-Zionist culture is particularly significant when compared to the wide and varied cultural contributions of Israeli and ex-Israeli dissident voices. Laor, Avnery, Weitzman, Yoav Shamir, Gideon Levy, Shahak, Israel Shamir, Tzabar, Beit-Halahmi, Pappe, Abarbanel, Bereshit and many others are at the forefront of the discourse and in the vanguard of the cultural anti-Zionist battle. Unlike Landy’s ‘Israel-Critical Jews’ (noticeably uncreative culturally and lame intellectually) the ‘Israel-critical Israelis’ operate as a fountain of ideas, using their creativity to push forward the Jewish  Diaspora identity discourse. .

I suppose Landy has failed because he was just too engaged in sociological jargon and mired in postmodernist clichés without understanding the true uniqueness of his subject matter; i.e. Jewish identity.  Philosophical thinking also seems alien to Landy so he is unable to grasp the metaphysical depth of questions connected to identity, identification and authenticity in the context of Jewish culture and ideology.

But most important, Landy fails because he is a politically motivated activist, and his reading of his subject matter is shaped by political considerations and political ‘correctness’ rather than by a desire for genuine truth seeking.

Though the aspiration of this book is promising and challenging, the result is slightly disappointing.

–

 

To buy Landy’s Book Jewish Identity & Palestinian Rights  on Amazon.co.uk

 

 

 

 

The Wandering Who-A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics, available on  Amazon.com  or Amazon.co.uk

    

 

[1] Sayanim – Diaspora Jews who provide assistance to Israel and the Mossad.

[2] Early Zionism may be viewed as a unique critical moment in Jewish history. It was often defined as a promise to ‘civilise the Diaspora Jew’ by means of re-settlement, labour and productivity.

Socialism, Communism and Cultural Marxism: Spiritual Diseases of Our Time

“In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary. He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary. Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated (traditional) family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow, Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools. Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority. All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters.”    “Hungary’s youth, having been fed a steady diet of values-neutral (atheism) and radical sex education while simultaneously encouraged to rebel against all authority, easily turned into delinquents ranging from bullies and petty thieves to sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths.”  (Cultural Marxism, L. Kimball)

Today the words Marxist, communist, and fascist have devolved into essentially meaningless, emotionalized epitaphs brandished by people whose understanding of their true meaning is so lacking as to be on a par with “I hate you!” and “you miserable scum bag!”

So just what are Fascist Socialism, Marxist Communism and its contemporary version, Cultural Marxism?

At the deepest, most important level of all, these ideologies are really about the human condition after the Fall and the causes of evil and suffering as defined by fallen mankind.

From the moment that Adam and Eve were ushered out of paradise, men began complaining:

“Why must we die? Why must there be decay? Why must we work? Why does he have (fill in the blanks) but I do not? That’s unfair! Why can’t we say, do and have whatever we desire? If it feels good (libidinous impulses) then why shouldn’t we do it? Why must there be authority, rules, norms, absolutes, and consequences? Why does it have to be this way? Why can’t it be the way we want it to be?” 

And finally: Who or what is the cause of our suffering?

From Nimrod to Karl Marx and contemporary rebels and apostates, the answer is the transcendent Authority of God the Father Almighty together with the fallen condition of man and the world:

“Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God.”    He “changed the government into tyranny” in order to turn them away from God and make them dependent upon his own power.   He also would be revenged upon God “if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach!”  And he would ”avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers.”    (Jewish historian Josephus cited in” Who was Nimrod?”  Dr. David Livingston)

Karl Marx dreamt of ruining the world created by God the Father and proclaiming himself ‘god.’  In his poem “Human Pride,” he writes that after ruining the world:

“I will wander godlike and victorious /Through the ruins of the world/ And, giving my words an active force/ I will feel equal to the Creator.”  ((Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand, pp. 30-31)

Marx’s comrade in arms, Mikhail Bakunin, aligned himself with the Devil and declared:

“The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority….Socialists recognize each other by the words, “In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done….Satan (is) the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds.” (Mikhail Bakunin, ibid, p. 27)

After confessing to his ‘cosmic authority’ problem, New York University professor Thomas Nagel admits:

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.  It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God (but) that I hope there is no God!  I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”  (The Rage Against God, Peter Hitchens, p. 150)

It is when the terrible-willed and their followers–most generally pleasure-seeking hedonists– become possessive of the things of this world and resentful of the “way things are” that they rebel against God the Father and raise up new Towers of Babel—separate paradises— here on earth.   With Nimrod it was Babylon.   Marx’s Tower was the materialist Communist worker’s paradise while Hitler’s Babel was his socialist Third Reich.    Today’s occult New Age heralds the coming of  the final Tower—a planetary communist paradise, but it will be blatantly Luciferic rather than materialist.

In the preface to “The Silmarillion,” the all-important creation account that sets the stage for the subsequent Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien observes of the terrible-willed:

“…. (they) will rebel against the laws of the Creator—especially against mortality.” Possessiveness toward the things of this world alone or together with hatred of death and decay “will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective–and so to the Machine (magic).” (p. xiii)

Tolkien defines magic as the abuse of God-given talents and powers fueled by the:

“corrupted motive of dominating: bull-dozing the real world, or coercing other wills” by way of ideologies designed for the unmaking of the world as it is.

In other words, when pride, wrath, lust and envy inflate to monstrous proportions it is then that the terrible-willed declare the death of God, usurp His powers, declare themselves gods and  invent reality-denying ideologies such as rationalism, materialism, liberalism, secularism, determinism, green environmentalism, socialism, and evolutionism to seduce and coerce other wills:

“Darwinism came at the desired time; Darwin’s theory that man is the descendant of a lower animal destroyed the entire foundation of Christian dogma. ”  (Anton Pannekoek, Marxism And Darwinism, Translated by Nathan Weiser. Transcribed for the Internet by Jon Muller, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr & Company Co-operative Copyright, 1912 by Charles H. Kerr & Company)

And of course straight-forward questions are absolutely forbidden lest they expose the corpus of lies, hate, hypocrisy, deceit and delusion underlying and fueling the ‘Machine.’

On the subject of the Machine, Herbert Schlossberg perceptively observed:

“Exalting mankind to the status of deity…dates from the farthest reaches of antiquity, but its development into an ideology embracing the masses is a characteristic of modernity.” (Herbert Schlossberg, cited in The Seduction of Christianity, Dave Hunt and T.A. McMahon)

Ex-Communist atheist Alexander Solzhenitsyn described the terrible-willed god-men as the masters of the world who, bearing no evil within themselves, have declared that all the evils of the world are caused not by man’s fallen human condition but by deterministic external or natural causes— unjust, unfair systems.

In his book, “Cry Havoc: The Great American Bring-Down and How it Happened,” Ralph de Toledano identifies the unfair, unjust systems:

“the morality that derives from the Old and New Testaments, the traditional family, the respect for the past as a guide to the future, the restraint of man’s baser instincts, and a socio-political organization which guaranteed freedom without license. Of these obstacles, the two greatest were God and the family.” (p. 26)

Former atheist Peter Hitchens notes that throughout the West the Left’s hostility to Christian theism is specific because orthodox Christianity:

“….is the religion of their own homes and homeland, the form in which they have encountered—and generally disliked and resented—the power of God in their own lives…..the Left sympathizes with Islam because (it is) the enemy of their (own enemy, the Christian culture).”   (Hitchens, p. 131)

Hostility to God and Christianity is not confined to just the Left but shared equally with GOP atheist insiders.    Because of their hostility to God and Christianity they hold in utter contempt the middle-class, mainly Christian constituents they must rely upon to be re-elected.

Solzhenitsyn summarized the whole meaning of Fascism, Marxist Communism and Cultural Marxism when he described their three main causes as rebellion against God the Father quickly followed by apostasy and denial of man’s fallen condition, allowing the rebels and apostates to comfortably “forget” that evil cuts right through the hearts of all men, themselves included.

Peter Hitchens writes that atheists and antitheists who have the good fortune to live in a society governed by religious belief:

“….may feel free from absolute moral bonds, while those around them are not.  This is a tremendous liberation for anyone who is even slightly selfish.  And what clever person is not imaginatively and cunningly selfish?”   (Peter Hitchens, p. 148)

Modern ideologies and the murderous utopian systems spawned by them are spiritual diseases of fallen  men.  The only cure is spiritual regeneration through submission to God the Father Almighty.

Are They Really ‘The People Of The Book’?

Ahead of the publication of my “The Wandering Who” the entire Zionist network is in a total panic. Veterans Today’s senior Editor Gordon Duff  commented yesterday that just a ‘few books have been opposed as this one has’. He may as well be right.

It started last  Friday, with the Hasbara mouthpiece “Jewish Chronicle” of London attacking Professor Mearsheimer for endorsing a book ‘by an antisemite’.

I don’t know how many times do I have to mention that I am not an antisemite for I really  hate everyone equally. For some reason, my detractors refuse to take this simple message on board.

Then, the Islamophobic agent-provocateur “Harry’s place” — who never miss a chance to muddy the water — joined in, intimidating and harassing  a London academic  just because she tweeted that she likes Atzmon’s book

Just before London Tea Time, America woke up. Within the hour, her Zionist stooges were ready to join the campaign. EX- IDF concentration camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg* had a clear plan to chew Professor John J. Mearsheimer circulating the same banal andunsubstantiated accusations.

At that stage, it appeared to be a campaign that was run by hundreds of Zionist enthusiasts – but if one scratches the surface, it was actually an orchestrated move of barely more than five Jewish bloggers, who have managed to mobilise another twenty or so book burners or shall we call them ‘wandering  sockpuppets’ that habitually attack in different areas of the net and the press, co-coordinating to harass, bully and intimidate, with the same dull, repetitive, accusations, ‘arguments’ and smears.

By Sunday night the Guardian published an appalling piece by oneAndy Newman of Swindon , who, according to one of his “Socialist Unity” editors, attacked Atzmon simply to appease the relentlessly Islamophobic “Harry’s Place” public.

Top columnist and Middle East analyst Jonathan Cook reacted to the Guardian smear saying, “whatever one thinks of Atzmon, this is clearly a smear job of him (and Alison Weir). Where is the evidence, or even convincing argument, for the claims being made?  It is pure Pravda.” Not exactly a flattering comment on the Guardian.

By then it was clear that  Islamophobic Award winning Harry’s Placewasn’t going to stop.

In fact Harry Place’s, Goldberg and JC collective shameless tantrum is exploredin The Wandering Who. I define it as ‘Pre Traumatic Stress Syndrome,’ as opposed to Post Traumatic stress syndrome. They are all terrorized and genuinely traumatized by a book they refuse to read with the hope that the Goyim may surrender and ban it on their behalf.

On Monday afternoon, Professor Mearsheimer published acomplete expose  of  Goldberg’s lameness and the  tactics he and his ilk use against myself and others. They quote out of context, they ‘copy and paste’, they forge paragraphs, they deliberately and consciously attribute misleading meanings. In fact, none of those who reacted to the book negatively has read the book or any of my papers. They all refer to quotes that were picked arbitrarily from the ‘Amazon Lookinside page’. I find myself wondering, are these people really the ‘People of the Book’? I guess that People of  the ‘Copy & Paste’ is a much  better description for  Goldberg  and his wandering sockpuppets.

Within minutes after Mearsheimer revealed the typical deceitful operation, the wandering sockpuppets were called in to fight Mearsheimer and Walt at the “Foreign Affair Journal” site. By the time they finished posting their filth, the respected magazine comment section looked indeed like a cyber shtetle.

In a final  desperate attempt to jeopardize the publication of the book and to silence its author. Richard Seymour AKA ‘Lenin Thumb’,  authored a new antiAtzmon manifesto  

I read Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour’s  text with interest and found out that for some reason, both ‘avant-garde revolutionary’  Seymour’s text, and Guardian’s ‘socialist’  Andy Newman’s drivel are suspiciously far too similar to the unforgettable ‘Aaronovitch Reading Atzmon’ performance at the Oxford Literature Festival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc371iqJ5Jk

One may wonder how come Seymour, an alleged revolutionary radical Marxist, Andy Newman, a mediocre socialist  and Neocon pro war Aaronovitch are caught together naked holding ideological  hands.

How is it that the three try  to prevent myself and others from criticising Jewish political lobbying. For some reason they also don’t want us to look closely into the events that led to the financial turmoil. How is it possible that a hard core Zionist and ultra radical leftists are not only employing the same ideological argument but also performing the exact same tactics?  Clearly, there is an obvious ideological and political continuum between Aaronovitch, Newman and Seymour. The Wandering Who  scrutinizes this very continuum.

Zionism clearly  maintains and sustains  its ‘radical left opposition’ and the logos behind such a tactic is simple- ‘revolutionary’ left is totally irrelevant to both the conflict and its resolution. Hence, Zionists cannot dream of an easier opposition to handle. When the Zionists detect a dangerous rising intellect who aims at the truth, they obviously utilize and mobilize the Jewish left together with the few willing Sabbath Goyim executioners to gatekeep the emerging danger. Seymour, Newman and a just few others are always happy to slay the emerging intellect.

Indeed they were effective for years. From an intellectual perspective our movement is pretty much a desert. Every deep thinker we have ever had has been targeted and destroyed by the Jewish Left and their Sabbath Goyim.  But for some reason, they somehow failed with me. My views on Palestine and Israel are now circulated on most dissident journals and my book The Wandering Who is endorsed by the most important people scholars and activists in our discourse.

So far, all efforts to stop the book have fallen apart . There is no sign of anyone pulling the book out but there are clear signs that the Hasbara orchestrated campaign has backfired. No one surrendered to the Zionist campaign and its stooges. As they said in Tahrir Square, ‘we have lost our fear.’   The Wandering Who is now a best seller for more than a week (as far as Amazon ranking can tell). On the Jewish best seller list, it is even more popular than the Babylonian Talmud and the Torah. I guess that this is indeed a great concern for Zionists and  their stooges, but there is nothing they can do about it.

My 9-11 Detective Novel: Investigating the Broken Chain of Custody of Evidence

At a recent BoucherCon (http://bouchercon2011.com) murder-mystery writers’ and fans convention held in St Louis this year, I’m still getting all fired up by the “Who Dun It” question.

     When we first arrived, everyone who attended was given a ton of free books — nothing better than that. Then at one event I attended, they honored Robert Randisi, an excellent crime-novel writer who, among other things, has written 550 books.  “At one point, I could finish an entire book in only three days,” he told me later, “but I’m getting older now and can only manage writing a couple of books a month.”  The man wears out four keyboards a year, he types that fast.  Genius.

Next, I went to an interview with Charmaine Harris, a gentle kindly well-mannered typical Southern lady — who also just happens to write vampire books.  She is the creator of that hot new HBO series, “True Blood”.  And she doesn’t feel bad about killing off any of her characters either, “because it’s fun to write death scenes.”  But sometimes she resurrects them if she likes a particular character a lot.  “In vampire mysteries, you can always do that.”  Plus her kids now think that she’s actually cool.

Then I went to a panel discussion on how to write books in the post-9-11 era.  That was interesting, sure, but I think perhaps that the panelists missed one very important point.

One author stated, “I’m British.  We are used to terrorism in Britain.  But Americans before 9-11 lived in LaLa Land.”  Too true.

Another author said, “People have an arc to their lives and some of them who worked at the Twin Towers never finished that arc.  And that’s one way of approaching a book on this subject.  But whatever you write on this subject, someone is going to misinterpret it.  No matter what you write, you will be in for a kicking by someone because 9-11 is still too fresh and too new.  Like Vietnam, we have to distance ourselves from the event before it can be approached through literature unemotionally.”

A third panel member said, “With all the coverage it has received, there is little to add to the actual event per se — but you can tell individual stories about people who were involved.”  Another author was disgusted by the rampant commercialism of the recent tenth anniversary events.

    One of the authors also said that, “As writers, we have chosen to make things up in order to put life events into perspective.  So isn’t it our duty to write about 9-11?  It is our job as writers to make sense of things that happen.  And things have changed irrevocably after 9-11. It’s much darker now.  For instance, we all had to go through security lines at the airports in order to get here.  Writing has become much darker since then.”

Someone also commented that, “It is the job of a writer to take you where you cannot go in real life.  The best example of this is still ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’.  If you can’t be inside a war, this books shows you the absolute horrors of war.  Your characters can bring these events to life and give your readers a better feel for what it was like on September 11, 2001.”

Another comment:  “Detective novels are written at street level — which is why detective novels don’t work for big-themed events.”

And, “The real book waiting to be written is about how we now live in a world where there is always a war — where for young Americans, being a soldier is now a common career choice.  And returning soldiers are now becoming a new under-class, violent, perhaps with drug problems.  You could also write about what happens when the vets come back home.”

These are all good observations.  But no one on the panel nailed it regarding what could possibly be the greatest detective story of all, the ultimate Who-Dun-It — who was really responsible for 9-11.  For all too many thoughtful American citizens, this question has never been answered satisfactorily.  So I started outlining my own detective novel on this subject.

“Jane Stillwater, hard-boiled NY private detective, was hired by a mysterious stranger to investigate what actually occurred on 9/11/01.  Stillwater was dubious abut this assignment but started rounding up the usual suspects — the Saudis, Osama bin Laden, the CIA, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

      “Stillwater, just another street-level down-on-her-luck gumshoe, had grudging taken on this difficult task for several reasons — her love of justice, her love of country, being patriotic as hell, and her burning desire to finally discover once and for all what actually had happened at the Twin Towers that day — but, most importantly, her rent was due and this huge new retainer would keep her landlord from throwing her out in the street.

“The first thing Stillwater did was check out the chain of custody of evidence: What kind of evidence was involved here and who had been in charge of it.  ‘Time to start doing some legwork,’ she sighed, starting with obvious — the New York Stock Exchange.  Who had bought up all those put-options on United and American stocks right before 9-11?  The banks?  Weapons dealers?  Oil companies?  The Saudis?  The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Papa-Bush rat pack?  Who had motive, means and opportunity?  Dead end trail there.  The chain of custody of evidence had been broken.

“Stillwater would have just loved to have grilled Osama bin Laden about 9-11, but the chain of custody trail was broken there too.  Now the only ones who can give OBL the third-degree are some fishes.

“Next Stillwater went out to the landfill at Fresh Kills to see if she could find any evidence from the WTC building material itself.  Clearly the chain of custody had been highly contaminated here.  Burial in a landfill will do that.  Plus how can one maintain a chain of custody of evidence after it has been hauled around Staten Island in a dump truck?

“‘What about all those airplane black boxes?’ Stillwater next asked herself. Maybe she could get her hands on a Black Box?  But apparently American citizens’ right to know stops somewhere far short of the chain of custody of evidence here.  And, frustrated, Stillwater couldn’t get a hold of any videotapes of a plane hitting the Pentagon either.

    “But what about that L.A. Times report that Mohammed Ata and others had been training at U.S. military installations?  That Saudis were flown out of the country after the attacks?  Or the bizarrely-coincidental NORAD training exercises staged the very same day?  Who even HAS the chain of custody there?  And, since the chain has obviously been broken many times, then who broke it?

“Next, Stillwater tried to put a tail on Dick Cheney — but that trial led nowhere.  That trail was as covered up as a Yeti in a snowstorm.  That trail was cold.  And unbeknownst to Congress, Cheney had already put a shadow government in place just hours after the attacks.  How could Stillwater possibly shadow a government that was already a shadow itself?

“Next Stillwater tried to check out the air traffic controller interviews right after the attacks.  Broken chain of custody of evidence there too.  They’d disappeared without a trace.”

So.  How is my new 9-11 crime novel going to end?  Can’t tell you that!  Because if I did, I would be instantly labeled a conspiracy theory nutcase instead of the next Dashiell Hammett.  Or else I would have to be killed.  So you’re just gonna have to wait until after my new book comes out (if I can ever find a publisher, that is.)

No wonder nobody ever writes murder-mystery novels about 9-11!

Time on the Brain

How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception…

I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory. Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Like Sabine, I spend my days thinking about planets, dark matter, black holes—they have become mundane to me. But brains—now there’s something exotic. So I sat rapt during the neuroscientists’ talks as they described how our minds perceive the past, present, and future. “Perceive” maybe isn’t strong enough a word: our minds construct the past, present, and future, and sometimes get it badly wrong.

Neuroscientist Kathleen McDermott of Washington University began by quoting famous memory researcher Endel Tulving, who called our ability to remember the past and to anticipate the future “mental time travel.” You don’t use the phrase “time travel” lightly in front of a group of physicists for whom the concept is not a convenient metaphor but a very real possibility. But when you hear about how our minds glide through time—and how our memory provides a link not only to the past but also to the future—you see Tulving’s point.

McDermott outlined the case of Patient K.C., who has even worse amnesia than the better-known H.M. on whom the film Memento was based. K.C. developed both retrograde and anterograde amnesia from a motorcycle crash in 1981. (The literaturedoesn’t say whether he was wearing a helmet, but let this be a lesson.) He can’t remember anything that happened more than a few minutes ago. He retains facts and skills, but can’t remember actually doing anything or being anywhere.

Tellingly, not only can he not recall the past, he can’t envision the future. When researchers ask him to picture himself somewhere he might go, he says that all he sees is “a big blankness.” Another patient McDermott has worked with can explain the future in the abstract, but says he can’t imagine himself in it.

To investigate the perception of past and future in people without brain injuries, McDermott did fMRI brain scans of 21 college students, asking them to recall a specific incident in their past and then envision themselves in a specific future scenario. Subjectively, the two feel very different. Yet the scans showed the same patterns of activity. Areas scattered all over the brain lit up; our temporal perception is distributed. As a control, McDermott also asked the students to remember events involving Bill Clinton (presumably, ones they were not personally involved in), and the patterns were very different. In a follow-up study, McDermott asked 27 students to anticipate an event in both a familiar and an unfamiliar place. The brain scan for the familiar one resembled the one for the act of remembering; the unfamiliar one was the odd man out.

The bottom line is that memory is essential to constructing scenarios for ourselves in the future. Anecdotal evidence backs this up. Our ability to project forward and to recollect the past both develop around age 5, and people who are good at remembering also report having vivid thoughts about the future.

McDermott’s colleague Henry Roediger studies metacognition—thinking about thinking. We express varying degrees of confidence in our memories. How we do this is clearly an issue for the court system. The N.J. Supreme Court recently tightened standards on the consideration of eyewitness testimony, citing the risk of false positives. Roediger pointed out that false negatives get less attention, but are equally bad. The worst eyewitnesses are full of passionate intensity, and the best lack all conviction. In both cases, innocent people can be sent to death row while the guilty walk.

Cognitive psychologists find that confidence sometimes correlates with accuracy, sometimes not. Roediger gave volunteers a memory word test. They had to study a list of words; afterwards, they were presented with a series of words and had to indicate whether each had been on the original list. They also had to say how confident they felt about their answer.

Whenever I hear about such tests, I brace myself for bad news. But Roediger said people actually did pretty well, and their confidence scores tracked the accuracy of their recall. Their blind spots were predictable. They systematically messed up, both in recall accuracy and self-assessment, when presented words that weren’t on the list but were synonyms of ones that were. The findings match what happens with eyewitnesses. We get things broadly right, but are easily confused by similar situations and faces.

It’s not that our memory is a glitchy wetware version of computer flash memory; it’s that the computer metaphor just doesn’t apply. Roediger said we store only bits and pieces of what happened—a smattering of impressions we weave together into feels like a seamless narrative. When we retrieve a memory, we also rewrite it, so that the time next we go to remember it, we don’t retrieve the original memory but the last one we recollected. So, each time we tell a story, we embellish it, while remaining genuinely convinced of the veracity of our memories.

So go easy on your friend who caught the 150-pound catfish. He wasn’t consciously lying, which is why he spoke with conviction, but that still doesn’t mean you should swallow his tale. To confuse is human; to accept we confuse, divine.

Speaking of fish, as neuroscientistMalcolm MacIver of Northwestern once put it to me, electric fish are the fruit flies of neuroscience—model organisms for studying how we sense the world. MacIver told the FQXi conference about his astoundingly comprehensive, leave-no-stone-unturned study of a species of Amazonian electric fish, using everything from supercomputer fluid simulations to an working model of the fish (captured in this video) and even an art installation.

The fish generates an electric field of about 1 millivolt per centimeter at a frequency that ranges from 50 to 2000 hertz. Water fleas, its prey, give themselves away by disrupting the field. (You can build a proximity sensor based on this concept. I use one to control the lights in my study.) What gets ichthyologists flapping is that, when this fish is out hunting, it doesn’t swim straight ahead, but at a 30-degree angle to the axis of its body—a seemingly cuckoo behavior that nearly triples the water drag force.

But MacIver demonstrated that the orientation also increases the effective volume of water sensed by the electric field. The fish strikes a balance between mechanical and sensory efficiency. Generalizing this insight, he distinguished between two distinct volumes around an organism: its sensory volume (the region it can scan for prey) and its motor volume (the region it can directly reach). For this fish and most other aquatic animals, the two are comparable in size—there’d be no point in looking out any farther. A fish’s reach does not exceed its grasp.

For land animals, though, things are quite different: their sensory volume is much bigger than their motor volume, since light travels much farther in air than in seawater. So when our ancestors crawled out of the sea, they gained the opportunity to plan their behavior in advance. No longer restricted to reacting to immediate stimuli, they had time to take in the scene and deliberate before moving. Animals that could arbitrage the difference in sensory and motor volumes gained an evolutionary advantage.

MacIver speculated that this set the stage for the evolution of consciousness. After all, what is consciousness, but the ability to make plans and gain some advantage over our environment, rather than lurching from crisis to crisis? Psychologist Bruce Bridgemanproposed this view of consciousness in the early 1990s. MacIver elaborated in a poston his blog, Science Not Fiction, earlier this year.

The fun thing about neuroscience is that you can do the experiments on yourself.David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine proceeded to treat us as his test subjects. By means of several visual illusions, he demonstrated that we are all living in the past: Our consciousness lags 80 milliseconds behind actual events. “When you think an event occurs it has already happened,” Eagleman said.

In one of these illusions, the flash-lag effect, a light flashes when an object moves past it, but we don’t see the two as coincident; there appears to be a slight offset between them. By varying the parameters of the experiment, Eagleman showed that this occurs because the brain tries to reconstruct events retroactively and occasionally gets it wrong. The reason, he suggested, is that our brains seek to create a cohesive picture of the world from stimuli that arrive at a range of times. If you touch your toe and nose at the same time, you feel them at the same time, even though the signal from your nose reaches your brain first. You hear and see a hand clap at the same time, even though auditory processing is faster than visual processing. Our brains also paper over gaps in information, such as eyeblinks. “Your consciousness goes through all the trouble to synchronize things,” Eagleman said. But that means the slowest signal sets the pace.

The cost of hiding the logistical details of perception is that we are always a beat behind. The brain must strike a balance. Cognitive psychologist Alex Holcombe at Sydney has some clever demonstrations showing that certain forms of motion perception take a second or longer to register, and our brains clearly can’t wait thatlong. Our view of the world takes shape as we watch it.

The 80-millisecond rule plays all sorts of perceptual tricks on us. As long as a hand-clapper is less than 30 meters away, you hear and see the clap happen together. But beyond this distance, the sound arrives more than 80 milliseconds later than the light, and the brain no longer matches sight and sound. What is weird is that the transition is abrupt: by taking a single step away from you, the hand-clapper goes from in sync to out of sync. Similarly, as long as a TV or film soundtrack is synchronized within 80 milliseconds, you won’t notice any lag, but if the delay gets any longer, the two abruptly and maddeningly become disjointed. Events that take place faster than 80 milliseconds fly under the radar of consciousness. A batter swings at a ball before being aware that the pitcher has even throw it.

The cohesiveness of consciousness is essential to our judgments about cause and effect—and, therefore, to our sense of self. In one particularly sneaky experiment, Eagleman and his team asked volunteers to press a button to make a light blink—with a slight delay. After 10 or so presses, people cottoned onto the delay and began to see the blink happen as soon as they pressed the button. Then the experimentersreduced the delay, and people reported that the blink happened before they pressed the button.

Eagleman conjectured that such causal reversals would explain schizophrenia. All of us have an internal monologue, which we safely attribute to ourselves; if we didn’t, we might think of it as an external voice. So Eagleman has begun to run the same button-blink experiment on people diagnosed with schizophrenia. He reported that changing the delay time did not cause them to change their assessment of cause and effect. “They just don’t adjust,” Eagleman said. “They don’t see the illusion. They’re temporally inflexible.” He ventured: “Maybe schizophrenia is fundamentally a disorder of time perception.” If so, it suggests new therapies to cajole the brains of schizophrenic patients into recalibrating their sense of timing.

In the experiment for which Eagleman is best known, he sought to find out why time passes more slowly when we’re scared. Does something really happen in the brain—for instance, the time resolution of perception speeds up—or do we just think it does, in hindsight? After brainstorming scare tactics that probably wouldn’t have passed muster with a university ethics committee, he hit upon asking volunteers to take one of those Freefall or Demon Drop rides you find in amusement parks. They wore a special watch whose digits counted up too quickly for people to register them under normal conditions—thinking that, if perception really did speed up, people would be able to read the digits.

Alas, they couldn’t. Although they consistently reported that the ride took about a third longer than it really did, this must have been a trick of memory; their hyperacuity was a mirage.

Our memory becomes distorted because our brains react more strongly to novelty than to repetition. Eagleman investigated this effect by asking volunteers to estimate the duration of flashes of light; those flashes that were the first in a series, or broke an established pattern, seemed to last longer. This feature of consciousness, like the 80-millisecond rule, explain so much about our daily experience. When we’re sitting through a boring event, it seems to take forever. But when we look back on it, it went by in a flash. Conversely, when you’re doing something exciting, time seems to race by, but when you look back on it, it stretched out. In the first case, there was little to remember, so your brain collapsed the feeling of duration. In the second, there was so much to remember, so the event seemed to expand. Time flies when you’re having fun, but crawls when you recollect in tranquility.

I suspect that this inverse relation in our perception of time also explains how our experiences shift as we age. When you’re a kid, you wake up and say to yourself: “I’ve got a whole day ahead of me. How will I possibly fill it all?” But when you’re an adult, it’s more like: “I’ve got a day ahead of me. How will I possibly get it all done?” And don’t get me started on how people swear that the first year of their baby’s life went by so fast. (A second child is usually enough to disabuse them.)

You can probably tell from my lengthy description of Eagleman’s talk that it seemed to zip by at the time. The physicists in attendance found it one of the highlights of the conference. Not only was it engrossing in its own right, it had some professional interest for them. All theories of physics begin with sense-data. As Eagleman said, “We build our physics on top of our intuitions.”

We also build our physics on a recognition of the limits of perception. The whole point of theories such as relativity is to separate objective features of the world from artifacts of our perspective. One of the most important books of the past two decades on the physics and philosophy of time, Huw Price’s Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point, argues that concepts of cause and effect derive from our experience as agents in the world and may not be a fundamental feature of reality.

Time plays a variety of roles in physics, from defining causal sequences to giving a direction to the unfolding of the universe. How many of these roles are rooted in the contingent ways our brains perceive time? How might an alien being, who perceives time in a radically different way, formulate physics?

 

Source: George Musser | ScientificAmerican.com

The Israeli Landlord Wannabe Protest

It is almost amusing to find out that some of the most clichéd Marxists around are so taken by the current Israeli popular protest, which they foolishly interpret as a manifestation of the ‘Israeli revolutionary spirit’. They are convinced that now that the Israeli ‘working class’ are rising, peace will necessarily prevail.

Yet in fact, what we are really seeing unfold in Israel (at least for the time being) is the total opposite of a ‘working class’ re-awakening. Indeed, some in Israel  are calling it the ‘Real Estate Protest,’ because basically, those protesting want assets: they all wish to have property, a house of their own. They want to be landlords. They want the key, and they want it now. What we see in Tel Aviv has no similarity whatsoever to the struggles taking place in al-Tahrir or in Athens. At the most, the Israeli demonstrations mimic some manifestations of a struggle for justice or Socialist protest.

But that is where the similarities end.

Motti Ashkenazi (a legendary Israeli anti establishment figure) wrote in ynet yesterday that “another Left is needed (in Israel), a Left that is primarily concerned with the poor of its country rather than with the plight of our neighbours.” In clear terms that cannot be interpreted otherwise: Motti Ashkenazi is exploring what he considers to be a necessary shift in Israeli ‘progressive’ thought, and what he appears to conclude is, forget about Palestine; let’s once and for all concentrate on  ‘us,’ the Jews.  Ashkenazi continues,  “we need another Left, a modest one. Instead of a vision for the entire Middle East, it had better present a vision of the State of Israel.”

Professor Nissim Calderon (a  lecturer in Hebrew literature ) also presented a similar line:  “We have erected a Left that has been focusing on the fight for peace, and peace only.   But there is a huge hole in our struggle- we failed to  struggle for social justice.”  Again  ‘Lefty’ Calderon refers to the social struggle within the Israeli Jewish population.

The mass protest in Israel is, in fact, the complete opposite of a genuine social revolution: whilst it may present itself as a popular protest, in practice, it is a ‘populist festival’. According to reports from Israel, the leaders of the emerging protest are even reluctant to call for Netanyahu’s resignation.  The same applies to security matters, the occupation the defence budget- the organizers wouldn’t touch these subjects in order not to split their rapidly growing support.

What we see in Israel is neither a socialist revolution; nor is it a struggle for justice. It is actually a ‘bourgeoisie wannabe revolution’, and the Israelis took to the street because each of them wants to be a landlord, to own a property. They do not care much about politics, ethics, or social awareness, and neither do they seem to care much about the war crimes they are collectively complicit in.  Malnutrition in Gaza is really not their concern either. They seem to not care about anything much at all, except themselves becoming property owners.

But why do they want to own a property? Because they cannot really rent one. And why can’t they rent? It is obviously far too expensive.  But why is it too expensive? Because Israel is the ultimate  embodiment of a corrupted, hard speculative, capitalist society.  And I guess that this is the real untold story here. If Zionism was an attempt to solve ‘the Jewish Question’ , as the author Shahid Alam so insightfully explores, it has clearly failed since it has only managed to relocate ’the Jewish Question’ to a new place, i.e. Palestine.

Zionism promised to bring about a new productive and ethical Jew as opposed to what it defined as the ‘Jewish Diaspora speculative capitalist’(1). It clearly failed, and the truth of the matter is, that in the Jewish State, Israeli Jews are now being  subjected to the symptoms of their own very problematic culture.(2)

Israel, that was supposed to be the state of the Jewish people, has become a  haven  for  the richest  and most corrupted Jews from around the world: according to The Guardian, “out  of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia’s economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish.”  During the last two decades, many Russian  oligarchs  have acquired  Israeli citizenship. They also secured their dirty money by investing in the Blue & White financial haven.  Wiki leaks has revealed lately that “sources in the (Israeli) police estimate that Russian organised crime (Russian Mafia) has laundered as much as US $10 billion through Israeli holdings.” (3) Mega-swindlers such as Bernie Madoff  have been channeling their money via Zionists and Israeli institutions for decades.Israel is also a leading trader in blood  diamonds. Far from being surprising, Israel is also the fourth biggest weapon dealer on the planet. Clearly, blood diamonds and guns are proving to be a great match. And it doesn’t stop there — every so often, Israel is caught engaging in organ trafficking and organ harvesting.

Increasingly, Israel seems to be nothing more than a vast  money-laundering  haven for Jewish oligarchs, swindlers, weapons dealers, organ traffickers, organised crime, and blood-diamond traders. But on top of that, rich Jews buy their holiday homes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: there are reports that in Tel Aviv alone, thousands of holiday properties are empty, all year round, while native Israelis cannot find a roof.

The Israeli people are yet to understand their role within this horror show: the Israeli people are yet to grasp that they are nothing but the foot soldiers in this increasingly horrendous scenario. They do not even gather that their  state maintains  one of the world’s strongest armies, to defend the assets of just a few of the wealthiest and most immoral  Jews around.

I actually wonder whether Israelis can grasp it all. Yet the truth of the matter is, that the leaders of the present Israeli ‘real estate revolution’ want to maintain the struggle as a material seeking adventure, and they are clearly avoiding politics: the driving sentiment and motivation here is, obviously, ‘give us the keys to our new homes and we clear the square.’

I guess that it is not surprising that within such an inherently greedy and racially oriented society, the dissent that manifests will inevitably, also be reduced to sheer banal materialism.

It seems the Israelis cannot rescue themselves from their own doomed fate, , because  they are blindly  hijacked by their own destructive culture.  As myself and a few others have been predicting for a decade or more, Israeli  society is about to implode. It is really just a question of time.

Gilad Atzmon’s latest book is The Wandering Who.

1. Marxist Zionist Ber Borochov (1881-1917) argued that the class structure of European Jewry resembled an inverted ‘class-pyramid’, a structure in which a relatively small number of Jews occupied roles within the ‘productive layers’ of society as workers, whilst a significant number were settled in capitalist and speculative trades such as banking.

2. In Haaretz today Beni Ziper wrote, “I saw on television people shouting against the rich, or tycoons who control the country. Seemingly everyone thinks it’s exciting and daring and nobody reflects on  the chilling historical  equivalence with the Depression in Germany at the time of  Weimar Republic, when the ‘rich Jews who control us’ were targeted by everyone.”  Ziper is clever enough to notice a close and disturbing repetition in Jewish history. However, Ziper is also very critical of his countrymen.  “So I’m all for protests against the state, but in no way against people or groups of people, be they ‘rich’ or ‘ (Jewish) Orthodox’ or even ‘settlers’.  Whoever gives privileges to the settlers in this country and it’s not that the settlers come and rob the cashier at gunpoint.” Whether we agree with Ziper or not, it is clear that he also admits that there is a similarity between the arguments voiced in Israel against the rich, and the German right wing’s anti Semitic attitude towards Jews in the 1920’s-30’s

3. For more information about global organised crime connections with Likud or other major Israeli political parties, follow this linkhttp://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/topic.php?tid=147

Still Positive After All These Years!

Tony Robbins Then And Now!

Yes, you too can be optimistic and successful in this Post-Apocalyptic World!

Motivational speaker Tony Robbins as he was in 2011 (above)

Tony as he is now, in 2025! (left)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankiepierce/3119517633/

Having trouble coping with the collapse of our civilization?

Has terrorism, biological, chemical and nuclear war ruined your day?

Has the die-off of your friends, loved ones and 6.99 billion other people gotcha down?

Has the fact that you are now living in Cormac McCarthy’s nightmare (“The Road”) made you depressed because you refused to see it coming two decades ago and that as a consequence you might end up on somebody’s menu?

Has the fact that you were complicit in these events by imbibing the idiot techno-optimism of the green movement made you wracked with guilt and moral culpability?

Has the thought that your gullibility made you really believe that there were “alternative” energy solutions to the increasing shortfall of non-renewable resources that enabled our profligate lifestyle, that we could continue to grow our numbers and our appetite and offset the negative impacts with cosmetic green lifestyle changes? Are you kicking yourself because you were one of those fools who believed that we could “de-couple” growth from environmental consequences?

Has the shame of buying into the “It’s not how many of us there are but how we live” catechism become too much for you?

Has the memory of contributing so much time, money and energy into the pointless quest to reduce your personal footprint while not addressing the population growth that wiped out those gains filled you with paralyzing remorse?

Has the fact that instead of adopting a child, you choose to add another to the 350,000 that were born every day come back to haunt you? Are you guilty that as the economic pie was shrinking you brought another diner to the table? Does it still hurt to remember that you channelled your efforts and resources to environmental organizations that ignored population growth rather than support organizations dedicated to fighting it?

If so, you are not alone.

But guilt, shame, remorse and regret won’t make amends for your criminally irresponsible choices and stupidity. These are useless emotions. Civilization is history. It’s done.  It is time to move on. Time to set positive goals.  So you live in toxic waste dump, with no visible plant life or fauna—- and no marine biota either—-  a planet ruined by our temporary flirtation with industrialism and agriculture. So what? Why should that be an impediment to a life of self-actualization and personal fulfillment? Why should the lack of nutrition, shoes, clothing, housing, books, art, literature, music, science, and good health hold you back? Why should you let things that are “out there” affect what is “inside” you? Life is what YOU make it. Your reality can be anything that you PERCEIVE it to be! Marx was wrong and Hegel was right! We are moved by ideas, not by the material world.

With positive visualization, you can imagine yourself to be the exemplary hunter-gatherer that you have the potential to become.  And it doesn’t have to happen all at once. The goal is to make one adjustment. Just one adjustment, one step toward this new lifestyle—today— and then be content with it. Then you can make that ‘little’ accomplishment the springboard to the next adjustment.  And so on and so forth.  Put a string of days like that together and presto!— in just 6 months you will look back and say, “Wow!  I can’t believe I got this far! After the holocaust I thought I would spend the rest of my numbered days as a starving marauder and cannibal, but now look at me! I may be a filthy shadow of my former self but I’m getting by. One day at a time. The sky is the limit!”

I am living proof that you can survive damn near everything, pick yourself up and move forward.

If I can do it, so can you!

For the promise of just one meal, you can send away for one of my guest campfire lectures, scheduled this nuclear winter, as I tour your region on foot pushing my shopping cart of tattered bedding and odds and ends. For more information please get in touch with someone at my lean-to shelter where Beverly Hills used to be.

Best regards,
Tony Robbins, Director
Amory Lovins School Of Delusional Thinking

Tim Murray, secretary.

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