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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

5 April - Disaster Capitalism Backgrounder

Miami Beach, Florida Hand made sign advocating...Image via Wikipedia

OilLeaks

 BK Lim
http://bklim.newsvine.com


Ex-BP chief Hayward poised for energy fund launch - Citywire

Seeded on Tue Apr 5, 2011 8:33 AM EDT (citywire.co.uk)
According to reports late last night in the Financial Times, Hayward has been involved in discussions about the launch of an investment fund with Nat Rothschild, the well-regarded financier.  Rothschild already runs a London-listed natural resources acquisition vehicle fund, V …
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Shock: Gulf Truth Activist Shot At His New Orleans Home. | The Hive Daily Raw. Unfiltered. Fearless

Seeded on Mon Apr 4, 2011 4:47 PM EDT (thehivedaily.com)
Tucker Mendoza, a gulf truth activist, was shot early this morning 4 times through the door of his home in Laplace. He was hit 3 times in the chest and once across the forehead.
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Part 1 - In Reply To Deborah's Insinuations & Ian Crane's False Accusations

Sun Apr 3, 2011 9:41 PM EDT
(first written on 3 March, publication withheld on request, revised & updated 3 April 2011)
Continue reading this entry ...
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BP Slick: Un Freakin Believable!

Seeded on Sat Apr 2, 2011 2:53 PM EDT (bpoilslick.blogspot.com)
Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, awarded millions of dollars in bonuses to its executives after "the best year in safety performance in our company's history," according to an annual report and proxy statement released yesterday.
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Thailand floods | Tourists stranded in Koh Samui and other islands

Seeded on Thu Mar 31, 2011 3:02 PM EDT (theage.com.au)
"Realising how bad the situation was turning out to be, we decided to pull the pin on attending the wedding, even though it was still proceeding ahead with little power and some food that their housekeepers had managed to scrape together."
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BP Gulf oil spill: Former boss Tony Hayward 'may be charged with manslaughter' | Mail Online

Seeded on Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:06 PM EDT (the Mail online)
Possible charges include manslaughter, which carries up to ten years in prison.
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Signs of disaster were there to see | The Japan Times Online

Seeded on Sat Mar 26, 2011 8:16 PM EDT (search.japantimes.co.jp)
Tepco has so far refused to admit its precautions fell short. In the days after March 11, Tepco said both the Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear plants were designed to resist a 5.5-meter wave based on standards set by the Japan Society for Civil Engineers.
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Millions lost in AusAID foreign aid scam | News.com.au

Seeded on Wed Mar 23, 2011 11:54 AM EDT (Australian News Network)
AUSTRALIA'S $4.5 billion foreign aid program is plagued by record levels of fraud, with millions of dollars being stolen by corrupt officials and overseas agencies.
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Head of the Whistleblowing Airline Employees Association Goes Missing - Los Angeles Homeland Security | Examiner.com

Seeded on Fri Mar 11, 2011 11:34 PM EST (Examiner)
Concerned whistleblowers and family members of the former United Airlines Pilot Captain Dan Hanley report that this outspoken whistleblower advocate has seemingly vanished 3 weeks ago.
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Capt. Hanley "911 Inside job-No Muslims" shows WikiLeaks Psyop - National Human Rights | Examiner.com

Seeded on Fri Mar 11, 2011 11:29 PM EST (Examiner)
9/11 was an inside job and everyone in the world has a right to know the truth by all available means.  The members of the 'Whistleblowing Airline Employees Association' wish to go on public record with this statement.
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Prince Andrew and girl, 17, who sex offender friend flew to Britain to meet him | Mail Online

Seeded on Sun Feb 27, 2011 6:19 PM EST (the Mail online)
It should not be forgotten that Epstein is a registered sex offender after recently completing his sentence for offences relating to child prostitution.
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Halliburton to help Malaysia become hub for oilfield services

Seeded on Fri Feb 25, 2011 3:01 PM EST (thestar.com.my)
Oh no, Halliburton is going to help Malaysia become the top Asian hub for oilfield services.
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Silencing the Independent Voices Of Truth on the BP's Mega Oil Spill, GOM.

Sun Feb 20, 2011 10:06 PM EST
by BK Lim, Trisha Springstead et al (14 Feb 2011, updated 20 Feb 2011) Three things you can't hide: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth." ~ Buddha. All that is needed for evil to succeed is that decent human beings do nothing. - Edmund Burke
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Another Revelation by Ex-Schlumberger Man (Ian R Crane) on DWH disaster.

Fri Feb 18, 2011 5:46 PM EST
A series of videos presentation by Ian R Crane showing the Connection between V President Dick Cheney, Goldman Sachs, BP and Haliburton behind the Disaster. BP company man refused to shutdown the well although strongly recommended by Schlumberger team.
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Study finds massive flux of gas, in addition to liquid oil, at BP well blowout in Gulf

Seeded on Thu Feb 17, 2011 8:30 PM EST (PhysOrg.com)
A new University of Georgia study that is the first to examine comprehensively the magnitude of hydrocarbon gases released during the Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil discharge has found that up to 500,000 tons of gaseous hydrocarbons were emitted into the deep ocean.
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BP knew of problems, but left them unattended before Gulf oil well blowout, new report says | NOLA.com

Seeded on Thu Feb 17, 2011 8:13 PM EST (NOLA.com)
New evidence unearthed by investigators shows that in some key moments before the Macondo well blew out, BP leaders were disengaged from critical tests and even recognized major problems but failed to communicate their concerns or take corrective action.
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Dick Cheney's Deregulation to Blame for "Obama's Katrina"

Seeded on Wed Feb 16, 2011 4:32 PM EST (politicususa.com)
The question at this point is what will the Obama administration do about this, if anything? In other words, just how complicit were the Democrats in helping Dick carry out his Destroy America Plan? I have to ask myself why it always comes down to this: the moment when we all tur …
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BP Investors Say Company Misled Them on Safety Before Gulf Spill | oilspillaction.com

Seeded on Tue Feb 15, 2011 12:53 PM EST (oilspillaction.com)
BP Plc investors accused the company of lying about its commitment to safety, inflating company shares for three years before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon set off the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
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The Effects Of Our Toxic Environmental Bio-Terrain On Life

Seeded on Fri Feb 11, 2011 12:33 PM EST (Jeff Rense Program)
To the Truth Seekers and The Ones Who Suffer   On April 20th, 2010, the largest manmade disaster in the history of the United States of America blasted the Gulf of Mexico. The Explosion of the Deep Water Horizon murdered 11 men and injured 17 more.
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Phoenix Rising From the Gulf

The BP Gulf Oil Spill Revealed

 

World Awash In Environmental Armageddon

Posted on March 18, 2011 by concernedcitizensofflorida
 

Golden Wolf on Japan

There are so many mixed messages concerning Japan and the unfolding events. We wish to give you possibilities to ponder which are not being covered. There is a complete contradiction between the mainstream media, bought scientists and what is truly unfolding.  Your corporate sponsored leadership and mainstream media has lost all heart and soul.  Their drive is profit and their only allegiance is to power.  Your best minds and scientists go to the war industry or the major corporations and follow the corporate agenda.  The corporate agenda is profit at any expense.  Their goals are short sighted and based on instant gratification. Time is money, and any way they can cut corners to increase profits is the goal. The concerns for humanity and the earth are not factored in.  They create projects, use their scientist and spin doctors to sell it, and in many cases apply the problem-reaction-solution formula to generate vast wealth.  This is done with absolutely no regard for humanity and the earth.

I would read this above paragraph again; let it sink in because it is the key to almost all the ills of humanity and the earth. You do not have democracies.  The republics created for the people and by the people copied from our ancestors went by way of the corporations a long time ago.  There is no civilian oversight with any power and you do not have a say in your future, only the illusion acted out at the polls.  The splitting into adversarial positions by republicans and democrats is nothing but an elaborate show; they serve the corporate elite.  Your politicians tell you want you want to hear, then do what they are told by the mega corporations who fund their elections.  What you have is a corporate sponsored dictatorial democracy.  Now remember the goals of the heartless and soulless corporations and their regards to humanity and the earth; then you will see how and why events like the bankster bailouts, the gulf oil crises, nuclear meltdowns and other horrendous environmental disasters occur around the world, many of which you never hear about.  You will also see where your jobs went, and why you lost your homes.

The banksters are breathing a big sigh of relief because now everyone is focused on the nuclear meltdowns and not on them.  HAARP had a role in the Haiti quake and now it is looking like the Japan quake as well.  There was a HAARP signature in the ionosphere, strange cloud formations and Japan was bucking the takeover of their monetary system by the N.W.O. (new world order).  They were having meetings in their parliament about 911 and came to the conclusion it was an inside job.  They were snubbing their nose at the oil industry by building magnetic generators, cars running on water, fuel cells, magnetic engines, etc. They were a thorn in the goal of world domination and enslavement through dependency.  There are also other natural forces at play in this quake, yet those with agendas of world domination capitalize upon these forces.

The majority of humanity are completely unaware, dumbed down through chemicals in their water, food and now even the air with the chemtrails.  They are being led to slaughter like ignorant sheep.  Those with any integrity and courage are far and few between.  The very agencies put in place to protect and serve are protecting and serving the corporations and are the muscle for their agendas. This includes your military.  To make it very clear the war and disease profiteers, soulless corporations who care nothing for humanity and the earth, are in charge. I want you to reason this.  Your wars are very profitable for a select few.  The plagues are very profitable for a select few.  Most of the new viruses and bacteria are generated in labs, not occurring naturally.  You cannot get a human, swine and bird flu virus to combine outside a lab.  When the new vaccines come out with the emotional blockers designed to shut off the emotional receptors in the brain, there will be no hope for those who give in to them.  Why don’t you have the cure for cancer?  It was given in the 20′s.  Raise the PH and the blood oxygen and cancer goes away as well as many other diseases.  Our ancestors never experienced cancer or many of the other diseases now afflicting humanity.  It is a direct result of moving away from nature and giving mega corporations control over your food supply.

Cancer needs an acidic environment and low oxygen to exist; it is anaerobic. Why is almost all the processed food acidic?  Why is aspartame and corn syrup in almost everything along with a plethora of other toxic chemicals acidifying the body and having other serious negative impacts on the body?  Where is your FDA concerning this?  They are out attacking all safe and natural remedies and jailing those who promote them.  Yes, even farmers selling milk as well as organic foods.

Did you know heavy metal buildup is also a known cause for many of your illnesses?  They are spraying massive amounts of aluminum, barium, and strontium a radioactive material in an aerosol-spraying program (chemtrails) all of which are accumulative.  Did you know aluminum is a poison? Did you know it blocks the water intake in roots.  What is it doing to your crops, your forests, the fish and wildlife?  Did you know all of these heavy metals are measured in your snow packs at 6,000 times the hazardous levels?  This was sold to the world as a global project to prevent global warming with no – I repeat – absolutely no civilian oversight, and operated “BY THE MEGA CORPORATIONS.”  Excuse me, but our people and those close to the land find this to be a complete assault on humanity and the earth.

These, “accident” meltdowns, the poisoning of the air, land, lakes and oceans as well as the poverty, plagues and food shortages all come back to one root cause -RECKLESS CORPORATE GREED.  The complete disregard for humanity and the earth with an elite few, heart and soulless entities calling all the shots.  These soulless people own the majority of your politicians, and the people with heart and soul are just now waking up to the man behind the curtain.  There is a fail-safe mechanism to all of this.  It is within the soul of the people and it is called the Spirit/God/Creator within. It is also within the soul of earth herself. It is awakening, remembering, looking around at what has happened to Eden.  It is also looking at who is behind what happened to Eden.  The revolution will not just be the people; it will be the very earth herself along with the heavens saying enough.  It is finished.  The beast and its network are going to collapse.  Those that serve the beast will experience the same demise and it will be directly related to their actions against humanity and nature.  You cannot hide from action/reaction; wherever you go in your separate egotistical beliefs your soul is with you and it will deliver the lessons to bring balance.  The controllers know this, they feel it, they know a day of reckoning is coming and you are the enemy. They learned this from the last French Revolution.  No underground facility will save them, no amount of armed guards, or remote castles.  It is themselves they are running from.  I want you to imagine an underground facility filled with control freaks when all their fears, anger and unresolved issues come forward. Imagine their undergrounds breaking up and filling with water or gasses from the reeling and shaking earth.  As I said; not a very promising future.  Their only future is to come clean, shift their assets and energies to the awakening and healing process and start making restitution.  This is a Cosmic Event and there is nowhere to hide.


This leads us into the Star Nations.  They do exist and are observing all of these calamities.  As long as the masses support the tyrants and their leadership concerning the downward spiral of social, economic and environmental collapse, and continue to be willing participants, they will keep observing.  Humanity did not learn from Chernobyl.  The off-worlders intervened on that event changing the nature of the meltdown.  The Russian scientists observed a ship hovering over the event sending a beam of light straight into the meltdown.  The radiation levels dropped immensely.  Did this stop the building of new reactors and the use of depleted uranium in your wars?  Do you have any idea about the long-term consequences to the troops who used depleted uranium shells, the cities and villages they used them in?  The diseases and birth defects that followed?  Did you know these same reactors, which are presently melting down, are going to be built around the world?

Government contracts have been given despite the present meltdowns.  Do you know how to end this?  Send all the bought scientists praising how safe these reactors are, along with the CEOs of the companies that build them, to Chernobyl and Fukushima.  Then take all the nuclear waste and meltdown material and put it in their trunks and dump it on their front lawns.  Send the politicians as well and, while you are at it, send them to the front lines of the wars they sponsor. Have them all get inoculated in public first before forcing others to get inoculated.  Make them drink the pesticides and herbicides they create as well as eat the GMO foods.  That, in a nutshell, is the answer to the problem.  If they have a war and no one comes, if they create a vaccine and no one takes it, if they create a product or sponsor a project that is detrimental to humanity and the earth, have them step up and personally participate.  This puts an end to the nonsense. Humanity needs to rise up, as well as hold those accountable on all levels for their participation, and varying degrees of participation in actions, that are harmful to humanity and the earth.  The revolution has begun, the grand awakening with nothing hidden.  How it plays out is up to us.  I do not know the degree in which humanity will participate, but I do know nature will have the last word.

Osiyo, Golden Wolf

 

Our Manmade Disasters

Gulf oil rig owner apologizes for calling 2010 'best year' ever
By The CNN Wire StaffApril 4, 2011 -- Updated 1705 GMT (0105 HKT)The SEC report revealed a $200,000 salary increase for Transocean Pre...

 


Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
As a service organization assisting federal & state public employees, PEER allows public servants to work as "anonymous activists" so that agencies must confront the message, rather than the messenger

April 4, 2011 — GULAG EPA – REPORT FINDS DISCRIMINATION MELTDOWN
March 31, 2011 — STUPOR OVER STUPA AFFLICTS PARK SERVICE
March 30, 2011 — NOAA SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY PLAN HAS BIG GAPS TO FILL IN
March 28, 2011 — EPA CONTINUES TO PROMOTE COAL ASH WITHOUT KNOWING RISKS
March 22, 2011 — PARK SERVICE SCIENTISTS CLEARED AGAIN IN PT. REYES OYSTER FLAP 

April 5, 2011 — IS EPA LOOSENING SAFETY FACTOR FOR RADIATION?
Courier-Journal
April 5, 2011 — WORKERS PUSH U.S. PARKS TO DECIDE FATE OF RELIGIOUS MARKERS ON PUBLIC LAND
Denver Post
April 5, 2011 — GROUP SAYS PARK SERVICE STALLING ON RELIGIOUS DISPLAYS
Huffington Post
April 4, 2011 — WATCHDOG PRESSES NPS OVER RELIGIOUS DISPLAYS AT PARKS
The New York Times
April 1, 2011 — FEDERAL EMPLOYEES DEMAND POLICY RULING ON RELIGIOUS DISPLAYS IN NATIONAL PARKS
Denver Post

 5 Keys to Building Real Trust in a Virtual Group
http://learningpursuitsblog.com/2011/04/04/5-keys-to-building-real-trust-in-a-virtual-group

  1. Apr 04, 2011

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Rutgers (and Snooki) Further the Dumbing Down of America
    Snooki gets a $32,000 payday at Rutgers to speak about hair care and partying. Rutgers looks dumber for signing the check.
  2. Feb 15, 2011

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: America's Reading Comprehension Creates Controversy
    Paranoia wonders why America seems to have such a problem with reading comprehension and why the media continues to take advantage of it.
  3. Dec 22, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: The Repeal of DADT
    The repeal of DADT may have more far reaching consequences than we can fathom, or perhaps we're overthinking it. Paranoia weighs in on the subject.
  4. Nov 30, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Scanners & The Fat Wallets of Congress
    Are the scanners in airports a matter of national security, or a matter of politicians making a buck? Paranoia muses on the subject.
  5. Nov 18, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: TSA Offers Radiation or Groping
    The new TSA screening procedures are a clear violation of our Fourth Amendment rights. Paranoia says perhaps it's time for the people to stand up and revolt, and makes fun of the TSA some more.
  6. Nov 03, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: SOTB - Are Blogs Dead?
    Paranoia wonders, "are blogs dead?" And if they are, who killed them and buried the bodies? Should there be an investigation?
  7. Oct 21, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: NPR, Liberal Sissies
    NPR showed they are a unicorn-riding liberal powerhouse of political correctness and cowardice when they fired Juan Williams.
  8. Sep 29, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Wiretapping the Internet
    In this week's Paranoid Guide, Paranoia waxes poetic about the Government's proposal to wiretap peer-to-peer communications. Keen!
  9. Sep 22, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: The Flu Shot
    Hey hippies - get the flu shot for you and your kids. I don't want to get sick because you are too stupid and irresponsible with your families health.
  10. Sep 14, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Hikers or Spies?
    This week Paranoia wonders if the three hikers currently being held by Iran are really hikers or if they are really spies. Either way, we need to get them home now.
  11. Sep 07, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Church Plans to Burn Quran
    In this week's Paranoid Guide, Paranoia calls out The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainseville, Florida, who are unwittingly starting a holy war rooted in ignorance.
  12. Sep 01, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: John Cusack is Awesome
    John Cusack pisses off Fox News. Fox News gets confused and throws out their VHS copy of Money for Nothing.
  13. Aug 25, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Buying a Campaign
    In this week's Paranoid Guide, Paranoia discusses Rick Scott buying the GOP nomination for Governor in Florida - proving voters are really that stupid.
  14. Aug 19, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Obama is NOT a Muslim
    In this weeks Paranoid Guide, Paranoia reveals that Obama is not in fact - a Muslim.
  15. Aug 11, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Google is Skynet
    This week, Paranoia shares his belief that Google has aspirations to become Skynet, but is that a threat?
  16. Aug 04, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Proposition 8 & Gay Marriage
    Proposition 8 has been overturned by the U.S. District Court. Now Gays and Lesbians can argue with their spouses over the remote - legally - like the rest of us.
  17. Jul 29, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: The Doomsday Shelter
    In this weeks Paranoid Guide to Better Living Paranoia talks about Doomsday Shelters and why they are profiting off fear.
  18. Jul 21, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: The Destruction of Michael Steele
    In this week's Paranoid Guide to Better Living, Paranoia suggests Michael Steele move on from the RNC.
  19. Jul 14, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: Tossing Out the Nuclear Trash
    In this weeks Paranoid Guide to Better Living, Paranoia wonders what life would be like without a nuclear arsenal.
  20. Jul 08, 2010

    The Paranoid Guide to Better Living: The Sarah Palin Factor
    In this edition of The Paranoid Guide to Better Living, Paranoia takes a long, hard look at Sarah Palin.

Wildfires Fed By "Perfect" Conditions In Southwest
http://planetark.org/wen/61674


Delicious/OPIT/Network



2009: God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World / John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge ***
http://ldsfocuschrist2.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/2009-god-is-back-how-the-global-revival-of-faith-is-changing-the-world-john-micklethwait-and-adrian-wooldridge
 Human reason allows men to produce peace and prosperity, they argued; by contrast, “unreasonable” superstition and fanaticism produce war and misery. In 1784 Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment with a simple motto: Sapere aude, or “Dare to know.”6 Cast off the fetters of the past. Take your fate in your own hands. Dare to exercise your own talents. Above all, reject the superstition and fanaticism that conspired to kill reason and spread bloodiness. Every Enlightenment thinker had his favorite example of Christianity’s blood-soaked past: Voltaire claimed that he awoke from his sleep in a sweat every year on the anniversary of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

The second foundation was confidence in human goodness. The rejec­tion of original sin has been described as the “key that secularizes the world.”7 It set men fighting against obscurantism in thought and repres­sion in government. It transformed education from rooting out evil in God’s garden to tending to young shoots. And it freed people to pur­sue real virtues such as human sympathy rather than false ones such as saintly self-mortification. CA gloomy, hare-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in a calendar,” David Hume scoffed, “but [he] will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delirious and dismal as himself.”) This was a key that the philosophes turned whenever they could.

The philosophes did more than just argue with religion. They mocked it.
....The Catholic Church was one of the three pillars of the ancien regime, along with the aristocracy (which provided the church with many of its leading figures) and the monarchy. The church was one of the coun­try’s wealthiest institutions, fattened on both tithes and its clerical estates. Religious functionaries were omnipresent at royal occasions. Religious orders all but controlled education. At their coronations French kings were girded with the sword of Charlemagne, with which they were sup­posed to protect the church as well as widows and orphans.”
....By 1794 only about 150 of what had been 40,000 French parishes in pre­revolutionary days openly celebrated the mass.
.....Napoleon was much more pragmatic about religion than the first wave of revolutionaries. He once boasted the he had con­quered the Vendee by making himself a Catholic, and established himself in Egypt by making himself a Muslim. But he was really only happy when religion was subordinated to the state, by which he meant himself.
........................British Evangel­icals led most of the great British social reforms of the nineteenth century, from abolishing slavery to combating drunkenness and dissolution. The Duke of Devonshire, for example, celebrated the civilizing role of the Evangelical movement in a passage that is worth contemplating by anyone who has braved a modern British city late at night:

Can you imagine for one moment what England would have been like today without those churches and all that those churches mean? … Cer­tainly it would not have been safe to walk the streets. All respect, decency, all those things which tend to make modern civilization what it is would not have been in existence. You can imagine what we should have had to pay for our police, for lunatic asylums, for criminal asylums . the charges would have been increased hundredfold if it had not been for the work the church has done and is doing today.

Britain eventually produced a flourishing Christian socialist movement, with early Labor MPs boasting that their party owed more to Methodism than to Marxism. But these would prove to be exceptions. Religion was more often than not allied to the old order. And the successive religious revivals were too weak to overcome the most powerful intellectual tides of the era. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a succession of intellectual giants taking sledgehammers to the very foundations of faith.

Ironically, the man who did as much as anybody to start the sledge-hammering was one of religion’s most subtle defenders. G. W. F. Hegel’s deification of history–his conviction that it was the march of God on earth—had the paradoxical effect of opening the way to secular arguments. Ludwig Feuerbach, the most radical of Hegel’s followers, branded him­self as a second Luther.22 He argued that history was a tale of progressive disenchantment: the Christian God had displaced the parochial deities of earlier men with a universal abstraction; now the job of philosophers was to replace theology with anthropology, and put man in God’s place. Man had invented God as both a consolation and distraction from the sorrows of the world.23 For Feuerbach, God was a pretty thin consolation: religion distracts us from the real joys of the world and persuades us to focus on an illusion. Man is thus oppressed by the creation of his own mind—and the only way that he can end that oppression is to destroy his creation. Feuer­bach wanted to produce nothing less than a new Copernican Revolution—instead of man revolving around God, God would revolve around man.
......Marx's revolutionary teleology: the only way for man to free himself from the illusions of religion was to free himself from a ruling class—and the only way to rid himself of the ruling class was to rid himself of the illusions of religion. “The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.”as This is not only because the ruling class uses religion to dupe the workers into accepting their swinish lot; it is because class societies are by their nature alienated societies. End alienation and you kill the demand for religion.
Marx’s critique of religion was all the more powerful because it was a critique with a chaser: it provided a substitute, an alternative solution to many of the longings that religion tried to satisfy. The descendant of a long line of rabbis, Marx found it impossible not to think in terms of grand eschatologies. He offered an end to the problem of alienation, a word taken directly from the Christian vocabulary, and one redolent of emptiness and despair. He argued that history has a meaning and a destination—the meaning lies in the class struggle and the destination lies in communism, a world in which contradictions are overcome and paradise is created on earth. He employed numerous religious tropes—Communists are latter-day Gnostics, communism is heaven on earth, the revolution is the last judgment, workers are the saved and capitalists the damned. Having first punched a “God-shaped hole” in the heart of mod­ern man by deconstructing religion, Marx then offered to fill the hole by revealing the meaning of history.
....Since the mid-nineteenth century, a growing number of people have come to think that the “scientific” attitude and the “religious” attitude are incompatible. Reli­gion might provide consolation in bereavement. It might express wonder at the grandeur of the universe. But it no longer offers a coherent explana­tion of the origin of life.
The recent fuss about intelligent design reflects a deep Christian unease about the notion of a blind and purposeless universe.
....A Jew who was used to being looked down upon by the local Chris­tians, Freud was at his most coruscating about Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. For the author of The Future of an Illusion, religion was merely a shared neurosis, a personal malady made public and commu­nal. Freud compared the obsessive behavior of religious people—repeating prayers, performing rituals and so on—to the obsessive behavior of neu­rotics. He insisted that the belief in God was just another manifestation of the “father complex”: religious people cling to the idea of God because they haven’t managed to escape from their infantile belief in the almighty father? To be religious is to be trapped in childhood—taking comfort in an illusory protector and refusing to grow up. And, as if being childish is not bad enough, religious people are also female children: they want to be possessed by a masculine god. (Many of Freud’s most religious male patients fantasized about changing their sex) He argued that losing faith in religion is part of growing up: once we realize that our parents are not all-mighty and all-knowing, once we come to terms with our human limi­tations, we lose our belief in God.
....One solution to the loss of faith was to find an alternative in secular ideol­ogy. These ideologies were at once substitutes and antidotes: substitutes because they helped to satisfy the yearning for meaning; antidotes because for the most part they tried to marginalize religion still further. Four sec­ular faiths sprung to the fore in the nineteenth century: science, culture, the nation-state and socialism.

The most powerful was the cult of science. It is hard to recapture the force of this cult now that we have seen the dark side of science in the atomic bomb and Dr. Mengele. But for many Victorians and Edwardians science was an object of unqualified veneration. Science was explaining the world through such intellectual achievements as The Origin of Species. It was forcing men to give up their childish illusions and deal with the world as it actually is. (Science’s appeal to John Stuart Mill was precisely that of “good down-right hard logic, with the minimum of sentimentalism,” logic that enables you to “look facts in the face.”;’) It was also improving the world with a cascade of technological breakthroughs. Turn scientists into philosopher kings and war would be a thing of the past. Apply science to reproduction and you could bid farewell to stupidity and illness. H. G. Wells and many of his fellow Fabians believed that the world should be ruled by a scientific elite. Pablo Neruda, a Chilean writer and politician, summed up these feelings in his memoirs: “I shall never forget my visit to that hydroelectric plant overlooking the lake, whose pure waters mirror Armenia’s unforgettable blue sky. When the journalists asked me for my impressions of Armenia’s ancient churches and monasteries, I answered them, stretching things a little: ‘The church I like best is the hydroelectric plant, the temple beside the lake.’ “

One of the most instructive products of this cult was social Darwin­ism. Its most illustrious advocate, Francis Galton, one of Darwin’s cousins, wanted scientists to become a “new priesthood”—charged not just with officiating over wedding ceremonies but with preventing the unfit from getting married in the first place.
George Bernard Shaw thought, “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of man.”39

Shaw points to another religion substitute that flourished in the nine­teenth century: the cult of culture. Many people in that Age of Inno­cence—before modernism and postmodernism blurred the distinction between the sublime and the ridiculous–spelled culture with a capital C. They worshipped great artists, particularly Goethe and Beethoven, with the same reverence that religious people reserved for the prophets. They regarded great art as something that could forge a link between man and God—or, as Goethe put it, “He who possesses art and science has reli­gion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.” They treated great books as religious objects and concert halls as temples of worship. “One goes to the Conservatoire with religious devotion as the pious go to the temple of the Lord,” one French writer put it in 1846. And they believed that Culture could civilize and redeem mankind—spreading “sweetness and light” among a vulgar and materialistic people and binding together a fractured nation.
....In the twentieth century, many of these new secular faiths came together in a poisonous totalitarian cocktail. Communism didn’t just draw on Marx’s ideas. It also drew on Russian nationalism (“socialism in one coun­try”) and on the cults of science and culture. Stalin was keen on using sci­ence to solve man’s problems and on exploiting culture to burnish Russian nationalism. Likewise, Nazism didn’t just draw on “scientific” racism. It also drew on German nationalism and German cultural chauvinism, wor­shipping German gods such as Thor and German artists such as Goethe and (particularly) Richard Wagner. Both Hitler and Stalin owed a debt to Hegel’s idea that freedom lies in the “realm of necessity”—submerging the individual’s will into the will of the collective–and that history’s pur­poses justify the crushing of individual rights.


Why I Will Homeschool my Kids
http://trikonahealthworks.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/why-i-will-homeschool-my-kids
  This is an Excerpt from John Taylor Gatto’s book. It’s terrifying, evil and true. We have been participating in a national jailing system… and its not going to get better because, although it is considered a failure in terms of supporting us in becoming true human beings (and I mean that as a verb, not a noun), it is entirely successful when it comes to “efficient” socioeconomic domination of the masses, the “dumbing down” as Gatto would say, of the human spirit.
SOME LESSONS FROM THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
BY JOHN TAYLOR GATTO
This article first appeared in a recent (2003) book entitled Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies by Russ Kick (Ed.) and Richard Metzger.
Editor’s note: John Taylor Gatto was the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991 and has been named New York City Teacher of the Year three times.
.....From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, it was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political State needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people known to history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. This candor can be heard clearly in a speech Woodrow Wilson made to businessmen before the First World War:

    We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under control of a group referred to in the press of that day as “the Education Trust.” The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote the British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd in 1918, was to “impose on the young the ideal of subordination.” At first, the primary target was the tradition of independent livelihoods in America. Unless Yankee entrepreneurialism could be put to death, at least among the common population, the immense capital investments that mass production industry required for equipment weren’t conceivably justifiable. Students were to learn to think of themselves as employees competing for the favor of management. Not as Franklin or Edison had once regarded themselves, as self-determined, free agents.
Only by a massive psychological campaign could the menace of overproduction in America be contained. That’s what important men and academics called it. The ability of Americans to think as independent producers had to be curtailed. 
...I know how difficult it is for most of us who mow our lawns and walk our dogs to comprehend that long-range social engineering even exists, let alone that it began to dominate compulsion schooling nearly a century ago. Yet the 1934 edition of Ellwood P. Cubberley’s Public Education in the United States is explicit about what happened and why. As Cubberley puts it:

    It has come to be desirable that children should not engage in productive labor. On the contrary, all recent thinking … [is) opposed to their doing so. Both the interests of organized labor and the interests of the nation have set against child labor.

The statement occurs in a section of Public Education called "A New Lengthening of the Period of Dependence," in which Cubberley explains that "the coming of the factory system" has made extended childhood necessary by depriving children of the training and education that farm and village life once gave. With the breakdown of home and village industries, the passing of chores, and the extinction of the apprenticeship system by large-scale production with its extreme division of labor (and the "all conquering march of machinery"), an army of workers has arisen, said Cubberley, who know nothing.

Furthermore, modern industry needs such workers. Sentimentality could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. According to Cubberley, with "much ridicule from the public press" the old book-subject curriculum was set aside, replaced by a change in purpose and "a new psychology of instruction which came to us from abroad." That last mysterious reference to a new psychology is to practices of dumbed-down schooling common to England, Germany, and France, the three major world coal-powers (other than the US), each of which had already converted its common population into an industrial proletariat long before. 

noets_SPc

noviembre 25, 2009 a 1:40 am (Uncategorized)
noets-SPc
“The result of this tendency,” he says, “will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify.[2]Click to see. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it,[3]Click to see. the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.”

......the general scheme itself was as a whole objectionable to the interests grouped in the first grand division. The grounds of their dissatisfaction are obvious enough. When one bears in mind the vast prospect of the continent, one need use but little imagination to perceive that the national scheme was by far the more congenial to those interests, because it enabled an ever-closer centralization of control over the political means. For instance, leaving aside the advantage of having but one central tariff-making body to chaffer with, instead of twelve, any industrialist could see the great primary advantage of being able to extend his exploiting operations over a nation-wide free-trade area walled-in by a general tariff; the closer the centralization, the larger the exploitable area. Any speculator in rental-values would be quick to see the advantage of bringing this form of opportunity under unified control.. Any speculator in depreciated public securities would be strongly for a system that could offer him the use of the political means to bring back their face-value.. Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick to see that his bread was buttered on the side of a national State which, if properly approached, might lend him the use of the political means by way of a subsidy, or would be able to back up some profitable but dubious freebooting enterprise with “diplomatic representations” or with reprisals.
http://viajesdelmundo.wordpress.com  

20 Must-See Cathedrals for Architecture Buffs
http://www.webdesignschoolsguide.com/library/20-must-see-cathedrals-for-architecture-buffs.html

Solar Purchase
http://www.pioneersolar.ca/residential/solar-purchase.html
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