Sean Casteel on the Secret Space program and Tesla, Nazis, and biblical aliens

See also /http://www.examiner.com/article/sean-casteel-on-the-secret-space-program-and-tesla-nazis-and-biblical-aliens

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The Secret Space Program: Who Is Responsible? Tesla? The Nazis? NASA? Or A Breakaway Civilization?

Jeffery PritchettMarianna Paranormal Examiner

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July 17, 2012

Interesting interview with Sean Casteel one of the authors of The Secret Space Program: Who Is Responsible? Tesla? The Nazis? NASA? Or A Breakaway Civilization? Written also with Tim Beckley and Tim Swartz who helped contribute much to this interesting opus of a book about many diverse topics leading to the possible construction of the Secret Space program. We have discussed Tesla and the Nazis many times on my radio show The Church of Mabus and Timothy Beckley has been on the show a few times discussing high strange topics with us. Then Sean Casteel gets into alien life and his biblical views regarding it and life on Earth. An interview that becomes a smorgasborg of wisdom and knowledge to make the brain certainly go into hyper drive. Presenting.

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1. What inspired you to become involved in writing the book The Secret Space Program: Who Is Responsible? Tesla? The Nazis? NASA? Or A Breakaway Civilization?
Casteel: I wasn’t exactly “inspired” to join Tim Beckley and Tim Swartz in writing “The Secret Space Program.” The original idea was Tim Beckley’s, and he’s very good at that sort of thing. He never ceases to amaze me with his new ideas and new ways of packaging older stories. The idea of a Secret Space Program has gotten a lot of mention lately in the field and even hard-line nuts-and-bolts Ufologists like Richard Dolan have made statements recently about the possibility that we have at our disposal secret space-faring technology that the public has never been told about.
2. What can you tell us about the history of the Secret Space Program origins-wise?
Casteel: There are many different theories about that. Some experts trace it back to the early work of the legendary inventor Nikola Tesla. Our book “The Secret Space Program” also includes the complete text of a book we did a few years ago called “Nikola Tesla, Journey to Mars.” There’s so much that’s never been revealed publicly about Tesla’s research. Tesla went on record with the media of his time that he had heard intelligently controlled signals on one of his inventions that he believed were an attempt by Martians to communicate with the Earth. He felt it was the beginning of a long conversation with extraterrestrials, though he was ridiculed at the time for this belief. But those signals may have been the catalyst for him to pour himself into creating some form of space travel as a kind of self-defense response. We do know that in the early 1940s he announced that he had developed a device called a “death ray” that could shoot down any sort of airborne object, melting the engine of a plane, etc. With America’s entry into World War II looming, Tesla tried to sell his idea to the defense department, and was again simply laughed at. But it may have been as a defense against alien ships that really made the idea seem necessary.
3. What is a breakaway civilization? I've heard the term but honestly it's new to me.
Casteel: The term “breakaway civilization” was actually coined, I believe, by researcher and author Richard Dolan. He’s really well known for writing “UFOs and the National Security State,” and its sequel. We interviewed Richard for “The Secret Space Program,” and he told us that one of the ideas he’d been kicking around for the last few years was a “breakaway civilization,” the idea being simply that you have a secret group, a classified group of people, with access to radically advanced science and technology that they just don’t share with the rest of the world. One scientific breakthrough leads to another, and that leads to another and so on.
So the next thing you know, you’ve got a separate group of humanity that is very far ahead of the rest of the world. Richard likened the situation to, say, 200 years ago, when you compared the technology of Europe to Central Africa. You’re talking about two vastly different ways of understanding the world. He thinks it probably happened in the years since World War II, but he also thinks it is not impossible that it happened in the late 19th century, when Tesla was first grappling with the idea of intruders from space. The breakaway civilization may have even existed since ancient times and been responsible for things like the Great Pyramid of Giza or Macchu Picchu. So he leaves open the possibility that some great secret would be understood by a very small, elect group of people who would want to hide their knowledge from the world to maintain their power or just because they don’t want to “share.”
4. Where do extraterrestrials fit in to all of this? I hear you are well-versed on the Bible and angels and UFOs. Could you get into your beliefs a bit?
Casteel: Well, first let me say that I know my beliefs definitely put me in the minority camp of UFO believers. But a lot of people agree with the Ancient Astronauts approach, that the aliens have been with us since ancient times and may even be our Creators. There is so much in the Bible, the miracles and the angels appearing, that kind of thing, that translate easily into our 21st century more-technological perspective and makes it possible to connect the dots a little and say, well, UFOs and aliens can do that, too. But I don’t think most people go so far as to say that the grey aliens who do most of the abductions are angelic creatures themselves. People always focus on the fear, the terror of alien abduction.
But angels as depicted in the Bible are often terrifying entities, and there is a moral complexity to our relationship with both angels and aliens that makes it impossible to simply dismiss the greys as demonic or evil or hostile. Fear is often a major component of religious experiences, no matter who it’s happening too, and meeting something as “other” as the grey aliens would certainly shake a person up, but I believe it’s all about a transformation of both people and reality as we know it. I’ve written a couple of books where I discuss these ideas in more detail. One is called “UFOs, Prophecy and the End of Time,” and another is called “Signs and Symbols of the Second Coming.” I also wrote one called “The Excluded Books of the Bible” that looks at some of the Gnostic scriptures and touches on the aliens a bit.
5. How would the Nazis be responsible for the Secret Space Program?
Casteel: The Nazi angle is really quite interesting. Part of the mythos that has grown up around this idea involves the fact that, after the war was over and the Allies seized certain papers not destroyed by the fleeing or captured Nazi scientists, it was discovered that the Nazis had been trying to create a disc-shaped form of aircraft and had even been experimenting with antigravity technology. We of course don’t know to what degree they succeeded, but we at least know they were working along these lines until the war ended. Another factor in all that is something called “Project Paperclip,” which was a U.S. postwar program that brought several Nazi scientists here to this country to put their expertise to use working for us. The virtual “father” of our own NASA space program, Werner Von Braun, was one of the Nazi scientists they imported for his proven technological skills. So we obviously don’t know if Von Braun and his compatriots already knew how to fly us to the moon or Mars or not. But we do know they were working in secret on technology that was far in advance of what we’ve been told about, and they may have succeeded to a level beyond what we can even imagine.
6. Where does the genius-before-his-time Tesla fit in?
Casteel: I think I already dealt with that earlier in this interview. But to repeat, Tesla may have been right in assuming we were in danger of a hostile alien invasion and worked to create a “death ray” to defend us from attack from the skies. There is more to it, though. In the “Journey to Mars” portion of “Secret Space Program,” Tim Swartz talks about a secret society called the Aero Club, who were also receiving intelligently controlled signals identical to what Tesla had talked about. The story goes that, with the financial backing of J.P. Morgan, the Aero Club approached Tesla in the late 1800s about developing an aerial machine with a propulsion system that could fly them into space and on to Mars. Tesla may not have bought into the idea personally, but he likely considered that the money given for this flight-to-Mars fantasy would help finance other projects closer to his heart. According to Tim Swartz, however, Tesla and the Aero Club possibly did manage to make a craft that could fly based on antigravity propulsion and there have been secret flights to Mars and elsewhere ever since.
7. What about the Face on Mars and this lunar bridge I read about in the description of your book? Can you tell us about those and any other weird structures out there?
Casteel: Well, the Face on Mars is pretty well known. In 1976, the famous Viking space probe was sent to Mars by NASA and out of over 2000 photos the Viking took there, only a small fraction were shown to the public. One photo that was published showed what many researchers believed to be pyramids and a huge face carved into the surface of Mars. Of course a face, a human-looking face, being there has all kinds of implications. Did some ancient Martian race put it there? Did earthlings traveling in a secret spacecraft carve it out as a sign of their conquest of Mars? Whoever created the face most likely looked humanoid themselves and were making it in their own image.
As for the lunar bridge, that was first mentioned by an award-winning astronomer named John O’Neil, who in the early 1950s claimed to have observed a twelve-mile long “bridge” on the moon that appeared to be artificially and intelligently constructed. The bridge sighting was replicated by other witnesses before the structure was “dismantled” for unknown reasons. But it’s similar to the Face on Mars because there’s no logical way for it to appear simply by chance.
8. I would love to hear about some of these Masonic astronauts who have carried Masonic symbols to the moon and possibly Mars. Fascinatingly spooky.
Casteel: I thought that was interesting, too. There are a lot of paranoid theories about the Masons, but it’s still undeniable that so many of our Founding Fathers were Masons, as were several astronauts. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin was a Mason and he took a Masonic flag with him to the moon and returned it with him to Earth. So the flag went to the moon and back and I’m sure that gave it a great deal of symbolic worth. As for a Masonic presence on Mars, who can know that at this point? It’s among many possibilities.
9. What can you tell us about the Freemasons and their occult rituals involving ETs and their behavior patterns?
Casteel: Honestly, I don’t know the subject of Freemasons ands ETs well enough to even comment. I guess it’s possible that the Freemasons are part of that breakaway civilization that Richard Dolan talked about and certainly the Masons’ occult rituals could have links to ancient alien influences. But beyond that I wouldn’t hazard a guess.
10. When it comes to your perspectives on UFOs and angels and the Bible, do you think we are entering a climatic good versus evil scenario on Earth? Also, how do you feel about the “false flag” scenario involving UFOs and aliens that our government is maybe designing? How does this all tie in?
Casteel: I do think we are entering the time of a great final conflict between good and evil. I spoke on many occasions to Betty Andreasson Luca, a famous abductee who agrees with me that the greys are angelic. She told me once that humanity is the battleground on which angels and demons fight. We are the prize to be won. I also believe in the prophecies of the Bible about Armageddon, where Jesus Christ will defeat Satan and the antichrist on the field of battle.
Do I think the government intends to somehow falsify an alien invasion? To somehow take away our freedoms under the guise of protecting us from extraterrestrials? That one sounds like a long shot to me. I think they would have less bizarre ways than resorting to stories of alien invasion to keep us all in line or whatever. It would be too hard a sell compared to manipulating us with earthbound terrorists.
[If you enjoyed this interview with Sean Casteel, please visit his “UFO Journalist” website at www.seancasteel.com to read his articles or to purchase his books.]
For this and other fine books please visit www.conspiracyjournal.com
Jeffery Pritchett is the host of The Church Of Mabus Radio Show bringing you high strange stories from professionals in the carousel of fields surrounding the paranormal.

Federal Reserve: Mortal Agony on Day of Jubilee

Valentin KATASONOV | 23.12.2013 | http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/12/23/federal-reserve-mortal-agony-on-day-of-jubilee.html

The Federal Reserve Act was enacted December 23, 1913, a hundred years ago the bill was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson. Since then the Federal Reserve System has become a factor determining the US economy and politics.  Federal Reserve System illegitimate Many Americans believe that a bunch of international bankers got hold of power as the Federal Reserve System (FRS) came into being. President and Congress became servants of FRS main shareholders. The privately owned Federal Reserve Corporation belonging to a group of bankers became the only real power in America which then started to vie for world dominance. Numerous publications are devoted to the subject.  The book Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins was the first to see light in late 1940s to be followed by The Federal Reserve Conspiracy by Antony Sutton, The Syndicate: The Story of the Coming World Government by Nicholas Hagger, The Unseen Hand by A. Ralph Epperson and The Gods of Money by William Engdahl. There is a recent bestseller by US former Representative Ron Paul called End the Fed. The power of Federal Reserve in the XX century instilled a false feeling of its infinity just like the dollar it issued. These illusions get gradually evaporated as events unfold in the early days of XXI century… Ron Paul enumerates many cases when the Federal Reserve System has been in direct violation of the Federal Reserve Act. The most egregious one is granting by the Federal Reserve System incredibly huge credits for the total sum of $16 trillion to the largest banks of America and Europe during the recent financial crisis. I’m not talking about the fact that the very establishment of the Federal Reserve System was a blatant violation of American Constitution which puts it plainly that only Congress is authorized to issue currency, not some group of private owners.  «Escape from the dollar» scenario The Federal Reserve System has preserved its influence during the entire century because the US dollar produced by its printing press has been in demand in the country as well as beyond its borders. All US foreign policy efforts at the beginning of the XX - early XXI centuries were focused on the promotion of the commodity produced by the Federal Reserve printing press. That’s what led to unleashing two world wars and a lot of local conflicts. It was not a big thing to keep the Federal Reserve System production in demand after WWII when the world was getting the largest share of purchased goods from the United States giving dollars in return. The US was the largest shareholder of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which promoted the process of «dollarization». That is what the Marshall plan was about launching multiple US foreign aid programs.  Thanks to the Kissinger’s Middle East policy backed up by US military might, Washington managed to introduce the basics of oil-dollar standards in 1973-1975. The world started to sell the «black gold» for dollars only. The world financial markets started to thrive in the second half of the XX century and «financial instruments» were predominantly sold for US dollars too.  The demand for dollar started to fall down in the recent years. The competition with other currencies has been started. The euro, the yuan and the currencies outside the world reserve list challenged the greenback. Trying to get rid of the dependence on the dollar, the leaders of other countries ever so often make statements which are perceived by the Federal Reserve System’s owners as calls for the boycott of oil-dollar standard. In his time Saddam Hussein refused to sell the «black gold» for dollars and even switched to euro payments. Washington responded promptly; the revolt resulted in the Saddam Hussein’s overthrow and the following execution. Sometime later the same fate happened to be in store for Muammar Qaddafi who had planned to leave the dollar for golden dinar. The Washington’s plans flopped when it came to Iran. The US sanctions have been imposed since a long time ago (1979). But the country happened to be a hard nut to crack. Iran has totally refused to use the US dollar for foreign transactions (it should be noted that all transactions go through the US banking system and are controlled by the Federal Reserve System). This is a dangerous precedent, an example which other states may follow. The cautious steps to gradually get away from the dollar have been started to be taken by China. Beijing has concluded a string of agreements with other countries to use national currencies for foreign trade. For instance, an agreement is in force between Beijing and Tokyo which envisions the use of the yuan and the yen for China-Japan trade transactions keeping all other currencies aside, including the US dollar. These events could be characterized as gradual emancipation from the US dollar, the process which at any given moment may become a flight from the United States currency. In this case, the Federal Reserve System may not die as yet, but it will become nothing more than just an ordinary central bank with operations limited by the domestic economic developments only.  «The Federal Reserve System out of business» scenario Some years ago nobody could imagine a scenario which would envision the Federal Reserve System going bankrupt. But the FRS’s plight has started to rapidly deteriorate since 2010 due to the implementation of quantitative easing policy. Announcing the formal goal of restoring the national economy and boosting employment after the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve System goes on increasing the production of its printing press. The mechanism is as simple as it could be: the Federal Reserve System exchanges its paper production for different kinds of securities offered by American banks ($85 billion a month during the last year). The papers include US treasury bonds or mortgage securities. The last ones are nothing more but waste paper which the financiers call «toxic assets» using their professional jargon. The market price is extremely low (on and off it is fluctuating somewhere around zero), but the Federal Reserve System acquires them at face value or almost at nominal cost. The FRS can sell «toxic assets» only operating in the red. The accumulation of such «assets» will create a bubble to be blown out of proportions. There are real estate and exchange bubbles, now a new type of bubble will emerge. It’s not about mortgage papers only; treasury bonds may also cause problems. Today the Federal Reserve System pays a high price for treasury bonds but tomorrow their market price may plummet. So the FRS will operate in the red by selling them. Any commercial organization will use its own capital as a stand-by reserve to cover the losses. The same goes for the Federal Reserve System. But in this case it’s just a token capital accounting for only 3-4 percent of the current FRS assets. By the way, it must meet capital adequacy minimum requirements (the requirements are defined and the procedure stipulated by the special documents of the Committee on Banking Supervision of the Bank for International Settlements). At present the Federal Reserve System is far from complying with the requirements. Strictly speaking it should declare bankruptcy today. Experts know it well but the discussions never leave the narrow circle of savvies talking shop. Nobody among experts can come up with anything like a meaningful plan to rescue the Federal Reserve System from imminent bankruptcy.  «Government Bankruptcy» scenario The Federal Reserve System has acted as the savior of the US government. The FRS granted loans to the Treasury by buying out debt bonds. Of course, it was not the only entity to save the government. Many other US organizations have acquired the treasury bonds – commercial and investment banks, investment funds, insurance companies, pension funds. The other countries central banks and finance ministries had accounted for the acquisition of half of treasury bonds till recently. Today China, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia and some other countries with huge gold and foreign currency reserves are the leading creditors of US government. China and others are gradually losing the lust for adding «green paper» to their international reserves. In the fall of 2013 a Deputy Governor of the Bank of China made a sensational statement saying it was no longer in China’s favor to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves.  The Federal Reserve System has become the main money lender (donor) of US Treasury. At the third round of quantitative easing "QE3" the Federal Reserve System has started to buy out the lion’s share of the papers used by the government to cover the budget holes (to pay for the budget deficit). A vicious circle starts: the Federal Reserve gives the Treasury the «green paper»; in return the Treasury gives the Federal Reserve the bonds. It’s resembles a monetary perpetuum mobile. This «close» mechanism deprives the American and world economy of needed currency, it works for itself only. The lack of «green paper» will be exponentially compensated by other currencies and their surrogates.  Besides, there is one more trap in store for the United States government and the Federal Reserve System. The American government has to use the budget to pay off its debt. The interest rates currently set by the Federal Reserve System are about zero. The treasury bonds interest rates (oriented on the Federal Reserve System’s rates) are extremely low too. About 7 percent of budget money is spent on paying off government debts. It’s acceptable. But let’s imagine that the interest rates start to grow (sooner or later they will inevitably rise). The percentage of budget spent on paying off the debt (interest payments) will increase too. Experts believe it is possible that 50 percent of the entire budget will be spent to cover interest rates. In this case the financial perpetuum mobile will stop because it will hit a natural obstacle like the tax revenues filling the US state budget. Then the one and only client of the Federal Reserve System – the American government - will go bankrupt. After that the Federal Reserve System itself is to give up the ghost.  There are other scenarios to be offered for consideration, all of them related to the Federal Reserve System, the dollar and the United States – the three pillars of integrated financial and political system. All of them are unfavorable for the Federal Reserve System’s owners. By and large, the very same situation was faced in the first half of the XX century by the owners of the Bank of England when the US dollar began to rival the all-powerful pound sterling. The last chance to preserve «the place under the sun» for the Bank of England’s owners was to unleash a large-scale war. I’m afraid that is exactly what the current Federal Reserve System’s owners have in mind.

Tags: Federal Reserve China UK US

How Biological Farming Can Transform Your Food Supply for the Better

December 24, 2013 | By WakingTimes 

Dr. Mercola
Waking Times
Jerry Brunetti, an internationally renowned speaker, is the founder of Agri-Dynamics, a company that provides holistic animal remedies for farm, livestock, and pets.
He’s also a co-founder of EarthWorks Natural Organic Products, which provides products and consulting services. Brunetti is a cancer survivor who can say he saved his own life employing holistic methods.
He initially got involved with biological farming while studying animal science, also known as “animal husbandry,” at the University level.
“When I was in college, I saw the industrialization of agriculture accelerating. We were getting away from the Joel Salatin models and getting into the factory farm models because of: a) efficiency – Labor efficiencies and time efficiencies, and b) subsidies from the federal government that made it worthwhile to lock animals up and feed them concentrates,” he says.
What many fail to consider, however, is that purely focusing on production alone isn’t necessarily the most cost effective. Profits are frequently eaten up by increased diesel consumption, combating soil erosion, rising NPK fertilizer costs, and increased need for veterinary drugs to keep livestock healthy in an unnatural and unhealthy environment.
“Production was being, in effect, purchased off the farm with fertilizer inputs, feeds, and drugs. So, I got into the ecological model because we realized that ecology does equate the economics,” he says.

Dr. Mercola Interviews Jerry Brunetti About Biological Farming

We Need to Return to Ecological Principles

The ecological principles Jerry teaches apply no matter what you’re growing, because the soil systems all require very similar kinds of biology and chemistry.
According to Brunetti, you can take the same model that you use in crop production and apply it to cabbage, fruits, or any other food crop, and get the same kinds of outcomes in terms of reduced expenses and reduced dependence on agricultural chemicals such as pesticides.
The latter is becoming particularly critical as a number of pesticides have already been implicated in the mass die-offs of pollinating honey bees, which are essential for the growing of about 70 percent of our food supply. As stated by Brunetti:

“The United States right now has 1,200 pesticides approved for agricultural use, and the European Union only has 400. We’re losing our pollinators like crazy. I think there’s a very strong smoking gun connection between the honeybee implosion / the native pollinator implosion and the tremendous use of pesticides in this country.”

Soil health connects to everything up the food chain, from plant and insect health, all the way up to animal and human health. Health, therefore, truly begins in the soils in which our food is grown.
Forerunners like Weston Price, William Albrecht, Louis Bromfield, and Friend Sykes all found that there’s a strong correlation between having good mineralized soils with robust biological activity. As Brunetti states, the marriage of biology, chemistry, geology, and the physical structure of soils translates into increased quantity and improved nutrient-density in our foods.

Furthermore, plants that are properly nourished from good, healthy soils end up having tremendous all-natural resistance against fungal outbreaks and insect attacks. They’re also just as productive if not more productive than conventionally chemically-grown foods. The claim that you cannot produce as much food using ecological methods as you can using conventional chemical methods simply isn’t true.

Like You, Soil and Plants Need Microbes

In human health, we’ve come to appreciate that the maintenance of intestinal flora is really essential for health, both physical and psychological. Probiotics are even becoming widely accepted and adopted in the conventional medical community to support health. In soil, we have a similar process. The health of the plants, and those who eat those plants, all stand to benefit from the optimization of soil microbiology. As stated by Brunetti:

“Probably one of the most important things about living on this planet is the microbiotic community, our microbiome. We now know that there are millions of species of bacteria and half as many fungal species, of which we’ve identified less than five percent.
The same kind of things goes on in animals. We’re finding out that, for example, ruminants that forage or eat grass do not consume the nutrients that are in the forages; they ferment them in this rumen, this tank, where they’re growing tremendous numbers of microbes. Then they ingest these microbes.
We’re finding out that the actual ecology of the animal is predicated on what it’s fed. If you’re feeding an animal an abstract kind of feed like grain when it’s really a forage consumer, you’re going to end up changing the ecosystem of that rumen. You’re going to end up having a downward spiral of negative outcomes, where animals end up having all these metabolic disorders – immune implosion, reproductive failure, mastitis, calf deaths, mortality, and morbidity.”

The soil microbiomes work on the same principles. As explained by Brunetti, the root ball of the plant is the “gut” or intestinal tract of the plant. In botanical terms, it’s called the rhizosphere, and it houses microbes just like the human gut does, provided the soil system is healthy.

The Cycle of Life Begins with the Biome

The soil system contains both predator and prey kinds of organisms. Bacteria, Brunetti explains, are the prey. These “grazers” get eaten by “predators” like protozoa and nematodes. The process of this predator-prey relationship is very similar to what occurs in the Serengeti when lions eat the ungulates.
“There’s a conservation of nutrients and a strengthening of the gene pool of not just the microbiome but of the plants themselves,” he explains.
This results in a massive increase in fungal, bacterial protozoa and nematode populations, which in turn increase the organic matter—the carbon—of the soil. It also increases the water-holding capacity of the soil, which provides natural drought resistance, and helps to reduce and control soil erosion. Last but not least, it boosts nutrient uptake in the plants growing in the soil.
A fascinating aspect of this soil system is that there’s a fantastic amount of communication going on in the root ball. Plants actually “talk” to one another through aerial emissions—the volatile gasses they emit—and also through the mycelial networks in the soil. This is a major insight that deepens our understanding of the importance of nurturing and maintaining healthy soil microbiome. It also explains why you don’t really need synthetic chemicals to grow large amounts of food. On the contrary, the chemicals used in modern agriculture are killing the very foundation of health—the microbiome in the soil. As explained by Brunetti:

“The plants can tell their neighbors, ‘By the way, there’s a pest in the neighborhood. Amp up by changing your chemistry so that you have more resistance.’ They can do that provided that the soils are well-nourished. If you don’t have well-nourished, mineralized soils, the compounds necessary to fight off these adversaries are not there. The plants then are still vulnerable.”

Why GMOs Are Far from the Answer

This is one of the reasons why so many of us are concerned about genetically engineered crops, because one of the main characteristics of genetically modified plants is resistance to the potent herbicide glyphosate, which decimates the microbiome. Glyphosate is a potent chelator that sequesters valuable minerals, rendering them inaccessible and unusable for the plant.
“[Glyphosate] ties up minerals like manganese, zinc, or iron, which are critically essential for the plants’ immune system. By doing that, it takes those critical trace elements out of the soil solution, rendering an immune deficiency and basically creating an immune implosion because of the fact that the plants are undernourished. These minerals are critical raw materials for plants to synthesize protective compounds called Plant Secondary Metabolites (PSM’s). The PSM families consist of terpenes (carotenes and essential oils), phenols (flavonoids, tannins, salicylic acid, etc) and alkaloids (e.g. caffeine, nicotine, etc.) These compounds are essential to the plant’s immune system to repel pests.” he says.
Another problem, which applies to both genetically engineered (GE) and conventional hybridized plants, is that when a plant is altered it may lose its ability to emit the correct signals to warn its neighbors about impending attacks. Also, substances that are normally emitted in the root ball that defend the plant against the attacking pest have been found to be missing in certain hybrid and/or GE plants.
“Even when they seeded a field with high populations of predator, beneficial nematodes, they didn’t do their job of attacking western corn rootworm pests because they weren’t getting the sesqui-terpene signal from the [hybridized] corn plant,” he says.
“There’s a very intimate relationship between organisms that live on the plants and organisms that live in the soil nearby the plants. But there is a connection, a communication, that’s dependent upon the plant’s ability to have this communication ability. That’s one of the problems with GMOs: it’s turning hybrids into much more dependent plants that need everything [to be added]. Not just the glyphosate herbicide, but high rates of nitrogen and phosphorus as well.”

How Plant Growth Is Optimized in Biological Agriculture

In this interview, Brunetti expands on a variety of strategies for optimizing plant growth. Needless to say, it all begins with a comprehensive soil analysis. He uses a chemical extraction called Mehlich 3, which extracts the loosely attached mineral elements from the soil.
Soils have a negative charge whereas certain elements (cations) attached to the soil have a positive charge, and typically it is recommended to have a balance of these various positively-charged minerals. This includes calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and trace elements. The individual numbers and ratios are measured, and based on that data, soil amendments can then be recommended to optimize the ratios. Amendments might include limestone, rock phosphate, trace elements like boron, zinc, or copper, or manure for example.
Brunetti has a new book, The Farm as Ecosystem, published by Acres USA, which expands on everything discussed here. It should be available from them this week. Jerry was kind enough to give me a preview and it is one of the best books on biological farming I have read to date. Highly recommended if you are interested in this topic.
He also checks for soil compaction. A soil penetrometer is a useful tool for any farmer to have. It works like a pressure gauge—you stick the probe end into the soil, and the meter tells you how tight your soil is. If your soil is compacted, it will not contain air, and if it doesn’t have air, it cannot sustain microbial life.

The Farm as Ecosystem by Jerry Brunetti – Order Here

“If the soil doesn’t have life, you can throw all the minerals you want on that ground but you’re going to be wasting a lot of it because the limiting factor there is oxygen. The first nutrient for life in an aerobic environment that we live in is oxygen,”  he says.
Compacted soils can be treated in a number of ways. If you have livestock, you may need to manage your animals differently. A subsoiler may be used to break up compacted soils, or you could switch out your crop to a more deep-rooted plant like comfrey or chicory, which can penetrate and fracture deeper compactions, allowing critical air to enter into the soil. Once you get air back into the soils, you’ll start getting biology back into it.

Biological Stimulants and Soil Chemistry

Next, biological stimulants are considered. This includes rock dust powders like granite or basalt dust, which are excellent biological stimulants and have paramagnetic energies. They provide an excellent way to remineralize the soil in a balanced natural way supplying many if not all of the important trace minerals. Being susceptible to magnetic influence, they tend to energize plant growth.

“Dr. Phil Callahan did a lot of work on paramagnetism in soils, looking at archaeological sites, discovering that the most fertile were also highly paramagnetic. He invented a device that’s now available, called the PCSM meter, which measures the paramagnetism of the soil. That’s another tool in the box.”

Ormus minerals such as Dyna-Min have also become popular. According to Brunetti, Dyna-Min is primarily used in animal feeds for mineral nutrition and detoxification, but it can also be used to improve the mineral content of compost. Another good product is called Azomite. It’s a montmorillonite from Utah that contains a lot of valuable trace elements. Ormus minerals are also susceptible to energetic influences that help to stimulate microbiotic communities.

“It’s almost like Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator,” Brunetti says. “His accumulator was a layering of carbon and metal, which accumulated the vital force that he called orgone or what is also known in Ayurveda as prana or in Chinese as chi. I think when you take these minerals and you blend them with things like char in compost, you’re creating an orgone accumulator blanket in the soil. It attracts cosmic forces that the biodynamic people talk about…”

After looking at the chemistry of the soil, he evaluates the actual structure of the soil. Certain tests can also be used to measure different kinds of biology. He also takes samples of plant tissues, called a forage test, which is then analyzed for macro and micro elements, proteins, and energies. Again, just like the soil test, there needs to be certain minimum levels and ratios of minerals, carbon, and protein.
Sap testing may also be performed to measure the pH of the plant’s sap. Electrolytes like nitrates, potassium, sodium, and calcium can also be measured this way, as can chlorophyll. The level of chlorophyll in a plant is indicative of the plant’s overall health. Based on all of this data, additional strategies may be prescribed. For example, if the crop is low in magnesium, you could use a foliar spray of Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) on the crop. In summary, Brunetti likens the process to a three-legged stool, where each leg affects and depends on the strength of the other two.

“You can’t take one out without affecting the other. Biological systems affect the availability of chemistry or minerals. Minerals affect biologicals. What we’re trying to do is get the physical, chemical or mineral, and biological systems working in tandem, so that we have a three-legged stool that reinforces itself.
Let’s say, you have a really acidic soil that’s down below 5. This is typical in Australia and New Zealand. Their soils are very acidic. They’re even getting biological bounce-backs by using, let’s say, ecological practices. But you could speed that up tremendously by just giving the microbes what they need, which is a pH of somewhere between 6 and 7 by liming the soil. They like that pH much better than a pH of 5. If we can do that, you’re going to speed up biological processes.”

For those unfamiliar with chemistry, a pH change from 5 to 7 is a hundredfold difference of hydrogen ions—a massive change. The pH scale basically runs from 1 to 14, with 7 being neutral. Anything above 7 is alkaline; anything below 7 is acidic. According to Brunetti, soils should ideally be slightly acidic, or in the mid-6 range. Plant sap pH also tends to reflect that. A pH of 6 is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 7. So going from a pH of 7 down to 5 means increasing acidity by 100 times (10×10).

Biological Farming Is a Win-Win for the Environment

Besides soil nutrient depletion, top soil erosion, and water pollution, we also have rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to contend with. Biological farming is the obvious answer for virtually all of these concerns, including rising carbon dioxide levels. I’ve previously written about the usefulness of biochar, which is essentially agricultural charcoal once it’s added to the soil. According to Brunetti:

“I think the way biochar can help is if we particularly use it on small-scale, intensive horticultural beds. It’s probably not going to be as practical on large landscapes, although there is a belief that you might be able to put it in the seed row for row crops and get a benefit from that.”

Biochar has shown its usefulness in larger scale scenarios, however, it needs to be activated first with minerals and/or microbes or else it tends to decrease soil fertility for about a year. Terra preta, or “black earth,” is a type of dark, fertile soil found in the Amazon Basin. This soil has a very high charcoal content, and was created by mixing together charcoal, bone meal and manure to the native Amazonian soil. As explained by Brunetti, a key to the success of terra preta was the addition of biology to the charcoal.

“What they typically did was they used either human or animal waste and mixed it with the char, so that the poorest of the charcoal would absorb these biologically based nutrients that could then grow the microbes, which in turn could then grow topsoil. Some of the areas where they had terra preta areas were half a mile-wide by a couple of miles-long that could allegedly support anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 people. And these were soils that are [originally] completely useless for growing crops.”

The Future of Food Is Medicine—As It Was in the Past

The American health system is fatally flawed, and to quote Brunetti, the entire system is “about to implode because it’s just too costly, it’s too vast, it’s too bureaucratically encumbered, and it’s not dealing with the fundamental reasons of why we’re unhealthy.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. I also agree with him when he says that one of the fundamental reasons why Americans are so unhealthy is because we’re ignoring the fact that humans are agricultural beings. We’re supposed to be connected to the land that feeds and sustains us.

“We need to have an identification with the fact that soil systems and ecosystems at large are the breadbasket, and we’re destroying them. Until there’s some kind of campaign globally that says we have to stop the madness of destroying our ecosystem, which supports not just the many, many thousands of species that we’re annihilating every year but also ourselves, I’m not very hopeful. But by the same token, we can turn it around. What I am hopeful about is that we still have time to fix it.”

That window of opportunity is rapidly narrowing however. Brunetti, on his part, tackles the problem one farm at a time. He’s a long-time active member of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and takes every opportunity he can to educate his fellow man about the connection between health and the food system.
“There’s no doubt about it. The future doctors have to have relationships with people who produce the foods,” he says.

“There’s a gentleman out here who’s a physician. He has a mobile practice. One of the things that he does, his ‘prescriptions,’ is giving his patients a list of foods that they can get from Levi Miller’s Amish farm – you know, raw milk, pastured eggs, and things like that. This is part of his Rx for his patients. I think this is going to have to be more common instead of rare if we’re going to start turning around these health problems. Because food is the medicine, as you know. It’s the ultimate medicine, because it’s so complex. Taking supplements is great, but it doesn’t replace food in and of itself.”

More Information

If you’re a small farmer, or just a dedicated home-grower who would like to learn more, there are plenty of sources and support nowadays. Biological agriculture has come a long way in terms of building up a solid network over the past 30 years. The best thing to do is to find out who your local association or your regional association is, and join that. Once you’ve joined, you’ll be able to find out what kinds of conferences and workshops are available in your area throughout the year.
One way to find a local organization is to simply Google “sustainable agriculture.” Brunetti belongs to the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA), but there are many others, including but not limited to the:

• Northeast Organic Farming Association1  (NOFA) (NY, NJ, CT, VT, MA, NH)
• Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association (MOFGA)
• Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service2(MOSES)
• California Certified Organic Farmers3(CCOF)
• Tilth (OR & WA)
• Mid-Atlantic Food Cooperative Alliance4(MAFCA)
• Carolina Stewardship Project (NC)
• The Xerces Society
• Pesticide Action Network
• IFOAM
• Acres USA
• Graze
• The Stockman Grass Farmer
• Natural Farming

To learn more about Jerry Brunetti, or to hire him as a consultant, please see Agri-Dynamics.com. Other helpful resources include Savory Institute’s website,5 as well as permaculture institutes and permaculture websites. You can find many of them by using those search terms in Google. Jerry’s new book, The Farm as Ecosystem, can be purchased below.

Scientists Finally Admit There Is a Second, Secret DNA Code Which Controls Genes

December 16, 2013 | By WakingTimes | 

Michael Forrester, Prevent Disease
Waking Times
The fascinating and recent discovery of a new, second DNA code last week further lends credence to what metaphysical scientists have been saying for millennia — the body speaks two different languages.
Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, researchers have assumed that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins.
But biologists have suspected for years that some kind of epigenetic inheritance occurs at the cellular level. The different kinds of cells in our bodies provide an example. Skin cells and brain cells have different forms and functions, despite having exactly the same DNA.
No Such Thing As Junk DNA 
The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but it turns out that so-called junk DNA plays critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health and consciousness because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches.
As scientists delved into the “junk” — parts of the DNA that are not actual genes containing instructions for proteins — they discovered a complex system that controls genes. At least 80 percent of this DNA is active and needed. Another 15-17 percent has higher functions scientists are still decoding.
Recent findings in the journal Science may have big implications for how medical experts use the genomes of patients to interpret and diagnose diseases, researchers said.
The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. Dr Stamatoyannopoulos with co-authors were stunned to discover that some codons, which they called duons, can have two meanings. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled.
The newfound genetic code within deoxyribonucleic acid, the hereditary material that exists in nearly every cell of the body, was written right on top of the DNA code scientists had already cracked.
Controls Genes

Rather than concerning itself with proteins, this one instructs the cells on how genes are controlled.

Its discovery means DNA changes, or mutations that come with age or in response to vibrational changes within the DNA, may be doing more than what scientists previously thought.

“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said lead author John Stamatoyannopoulos, University of Washington associate professor of genome sciences and of medicine.

“Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture,” he said.

“Many DNA changes that appear to alter protein sequences may actually cause disease by disrupting gene control programs or even both mechanisms simultaneously.”

These two meanings seem to have evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made.
The discovery was made as part of the international collaboration of research groups known as the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project, or ENCODE.
DNA Responds To Frequency
The Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues explored the vibrational behavior of the DNA. The bottom line was: “Living chromosomes function just like solitonic/holographic computers using the endogenous DNA laser radiation.” This means that they managed for example to modulate certain frequency patterns onto a laser ray and with it influenced the DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language (as explained earlier) are of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary.
This finally and scientifically explains why affirmations, autogenous training, hypnosis and the like can have such strong effects on humans and their bodies. It is entirely normal and natural for our DNA to react to frequency. While western researchers cut single genes from the DNA strands and insert them elsewhere, the Russians enthusiastically worked on devices that can influence the cellular metabolism through suitable modulated radio and light frequencies and thus repair genetic defects.
Garjajev’s research group succeeded in proving that with this method chromosomes damaged by x-rays for example can be repaired. They even captured information patterns of a particular DNA and transmitted it onto another, thus reprogramming cells to another genome. So they successfully transformed, for example, frog embryos to salamander embryos simply by transmitting the DNA information patterns! This way the entire information was transmitted without any of the side effects or disharmonies encountered when cutting out and re-introducing single genes from the DNA. This represents an unbelievable, world-transforming revolution and sensation! All this by simply applying vibration instead of the archaic cutting-out procedure! This experiment points to the immense power of wave genetics, which obviously has a greater influence on the formation of organisms than the biochemical processes of alkaline sequences.

About the Author

Michael Forrester is a spiritual counselor and is a practicing motivational speaker for corporations in Japan, Canada and the United States.
Sources: 
washington.edu
preventdisease.com
sciencemag.org

Reflection on on-screen vs. print reading

Wednesday 9 October 2013 

http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2013/10/108151/reflection-on-on-screen-vs-print-reading/

morocco world news

By Omar Taky Eddine

Agadir- Have you ever asked yourself whether you read on-screen the same way you do on print? For instance, do you think that the process of reading this article on your computer will be equivalent or different if you read it on paper? Do you think the platform on which you read changes your reading speed, motivation, or even your comprehension? In other words, how exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read?

A lot of things have changed in our lives since the onset of ICT (information communication technology), and reading is no exception. People nowadays spend more time in front of their computers, laptops, and tablet computers than even before. There is notable evidence that people in general, and young people in particular, are doing more screen reading of web-based materials. There are even people who talk about the coming death of paper-based publications, speculating that one day all the works will be born digital. 

After all, one can claim that the mere change is in the medium. Well, this allegation is both misguided and misleading. Researchers and reading specialists have proved that on-screen reading is absolutely different from the digital one. The question is whether this dissimilarity has a positive or negative influence on our reading process. As a matter of fact, different stances from a number of reading specialists have emerged so far. Dillon (1994) conducted a study in which he found out that reading was some 20 to 30% slower from a computer screen than from paper. Many studies such as the ones conducted by Muter et al, (1982), Wright and Lickorish, (1983), and many others supported this conclusion. Accordingly, we can deduce that by the time you will have finished reading this article on your screen, you could have read more than one article on print! 

In the same vein, Naomi S. Baron (2011), a professor and researcher at the American University, came up with different drawbacks of on-screen reading such as the loss the physicality of the book, multitasking, and lack of concentration. I partly agree with the professor’s conclusions for I often tend to find myself bound to stop my reading process so as to answer a Facebook message or check my email. How often do you check your Facebook, Twitter, email, or another website while reading on-screen? In addition to this, the physicality of the book is another vital trait that is lacking in digitalized texts. Naomi S. Baron wrote these impressive lines criticizing digital reading: “It’s not a book. It doesn’t have a smell, you don’t touch it…, you’re plugged into the internet, you can’t concentrate, it hurts your eyes, and you lose the beauty of the words behind this screen. Life itself is in hard copy. … Not this treacherous digitalism, which has permeated our lives and our reality.” 

There are even researchers, like Nielsen (1997), who claim that “Reading” is not even the right word to describe how we process hypertexts! He stated that we rarely read screen pages word by word; what readers do instead is just “picking out” individual words and sentences. As well, Heppner (1985) analyzed the results of a reading test displayed by computer vs. Print and detected that reading performance scores were significantly better on the print form. 

Notwithstanding, onscreen reading is not that bad! This is not the conclusion I want you to draw from this article. Recent findings such as the ones conducted by Bolanos (2009), Mason (2001), and Weinberge (2001) reveal that the level of comprehension is equal regardless of the form of the text. 

In response to professor Baron’s quotation cited above, I would say that it is true the screen is not a book, but through the screen one can have access to countless hyper-books that are for the most part unaffordable. It is true the screen doesn’t have that unique smell that old books have, but I do touch my laptop, I can feel it, and I can concentrate. It does sometimes hurt my eyes, but I still sense the beauty behind the screen. It is intriguing and it becomes part of our lives, at least to digital natives’ lives. And who says we can’t highlight or jot down ideas and comments while reading on-screen. People can now save their PDF files with their notes and highlights included. No worry about that! 

Furthermore, screen reading is obviously not something that one can do without nowadays. The move from the page to the screen is evolutionary and inevitable according to Ellen (2011).  A recent study carried out by the UK National Endowment for Knowledge has revealed that Fifty percent of pupils (between the ages of sixteen and eighteen) opt for reading on screens whereas thirty percent still prefer reading paper books.

Unlike the first standpoint that criticized on-screen reading, many researchers in the arena contrarily affirm the positive influence of the latter on readers. Coiro (2003) described web-based texts as having three main criteria, which are being non-linear, interactive, and having multiple media forms. She stated that electronic texts are introduced with a set of interactive features that are not available in conventional print. According to her, the hyperlinks encourage readers to investigate their own path in a nonlinear way that may be different from the path of other readers. Thanks to the availability of a variety of electronic texts, students become actively engaged with the text in ways that are personally relevant to them.

In the same regard, Grams (2003) investigated students’ motivation in reading by providing each participating student access to a warless learning device. He concluded that all students seemed to be reading E-books faster. Rosalia (2002) also recognized this when she stated that technology attracts large number of young people. “Today’s students are the first digital generation fully comfortable with technology as a way of life,” she says. 

In short, the debate of screen vs. Paper is long and intricate. Broadly speaking, we can talk about two inconsistent schools of thought. The first one favors the traditional form of reading texts believing that it is quicker, healthier, and more beneficial than reading on screens. Paper cannot and should not be replaced by screens.  Contrariwise, the second school supports digital reading for they believe that young people are more positive towards it than paper, such as Horton and Lovitt (1994) and Hallfors et al (2000).  There are many more interesting studies from the tow schools that decidedly deserve to be scrutinized. 

So, which medium is better?  Which medium makes us “smart”?  Which medium should educators encourage? These are very critical questions that need an answer.  Definitive conclusions cannot be drawn. Richard C. Anderson (2003), the director of the Centre for the Study of Reading, stated that studies investigating the quality of comprehension and comprehension strategies in web-based environment are too limited. Therefore, more studies should be conducted, and more pedagogical recommendations based on experimental evidence needs to be asserted in this regard. 

© Morocco World News. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten or redistributed   //    http://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2013/10/108151/reflection-on-on-screen-vs-print-reading/

How the internet can make knowledge disappear and 2 ways to stop it

October 13, 2013 by Curt Rice 

Knowledge is vulnerable. It’s hard to come by and far too often, it disappears. Every researcher on the planet surely has some result lying in a drawer, not being shared, largely unknown. Maybe it’s not up to their standards yet, or perhaps it’s a negative result. More likely, they tried to publish it, but the process became too arduous.
The results are there. They are knowledge. And when they never get shared, they eventually disappear.
The internet offers some help. It makes it easier to preserve knowledge. There are new ways to communicate and document research results. It has also become easier to store and share data.
Risking the loss of knowledge
Some changes brought about by the internet initially appear superficial. For example, we are in the midst of a transition away from publishing articles on paper towards publishing online.
Ironically, one important consequence of the shift to digital publishing is that it leads to a potential loss of knowledge. This arises from an ambiguity in the way digital journals are sold and preserved. What exactly is a library buying from a publisher? Is it a product, as with paper journals or books? Or, is it a service, such as access to a database?
These questions become important not least of all when a library discontinues a subscription. If a digital journal is a product, the purchased issues should still be available. If, on the other hand, the library has purchased access to a database for a particular amount of time, then they likely won’t have access to anything when they stop paying, not even to the articles they could read when they did pay.
In Norway, some of the purchasing from publishers is coordinated at the national level. Because I head the board of the coordinating organization, I know that various publishers view this issue differently. We’re far from having achieved a standard solution.
The influential Finch Report in the United Kingdom puts it like this last year.

The role of research libraries in ensuring the long-term preservation of print does not readily transfer to digital content. We are still some way from robust arrangements for the long term preservation of digital journals so that they remain accessible for future generations.

The role of libraries
We might think that ongoing access to research articles could be preserved if libraries simply archived all the articles and journals that they subscribe to digitally, just like they archive earlier issues of paper journals.
Publishers generally don’t allow this, but even if they did, the quantity is unmanageable. The largest publishers no longer sell subscriptions to specific journals; instead, they make very large packages that the libraries must purchase, even if they only want a few of the journals in that package.
A consequence of buying in bundles, however, is that libraries end up with access to tens of thousands of articles, many of which are of no interest to their researchers. So even if they could, they may not want to use resources archiving that material.

Combining the various legal restrictions — which have different details at different publishers — with the technical and practical challenges, the preservation of scientific articles and the knowledge they contain has become a precarious enterprise.

Responsibility for archiving has been subtly transferred from libraries to publishers. This makes knowledge vulnerable. What happens when a publisher goes bankrupt? What happens if their systems break down? What happens if human error leads to large scale deletion? What if they can’t keep up with technical advancements? What if they decide to raise their fees?

Open access is part — but only part — of the solution
It is easy to imagine scenarios whereby an archive of knowledge that is primarily maintained in one place gets damaged or lost or somehow becomes inaccessible. When that happens, knowledge is lost.

Fortunately, there are at least two different steps that can radically reduce the chances of such problems.

First of all, there’s open access. When publishers implement open access strategies — and when researchers make use of them — articles become freely available and they can be archived locally.
But this isn’t enough. Even with open access, there are practical challenges. University archives must decide on a strategy and find technical solutions. Will they build an archive only of work produced by their own employees, or will they build an archive of all open access articles they subscribe to?
Another challenge with archiving open access articles comes from different approaches to open access. The so-called gold open access model is one in which the published versions of articles are put into the public domain.
Green open access
The green open access model is both more common and more complicated. In this approach, publishers allow authors to place in open archives a non-final version of their article. One problem with this approach is that two different versions of the article are then being used: the published version and the archived pre-publication version.
Another problem is variation in restrictions on archiving. Sometimes, the regulations that publishers impose become absurd. Consider, for example, what I like to call Elsevier’s anti-policy policy. Elsevier allows individual researchers to place a non-final version of their article in an institutional archive, e.g. at their home university.
They allow this, that is, unless the researcher’s home university has a policy requiring research results to be placed in an archive — which many do, to encourage increased public access to the results of publicly financed research. If you’re publishing in one of Elsevier’s journals, you can post a non-final version of your paper in an archive … unless you have to. In that case, you can’t.
The green open access model is not a good long-term approach. We need gold open access, and we need for big publishers to make the switch.
Massive independent archives
The second way to counter a potential loss of knowledge with digital publishing comes from creative new approaches to large-scale archiving. Libraries, publishers, and an independent archiving organization form a coalition to create archives of the publishers’ journals. Two prominent organizations doing this work are Portico and LOCKSS. They have different strategies, but both work to reduce the vulnerability of digital materials.
It’s hard to know how much of the material being published today is covered by Portico and LOCKSS. A few years ago, Rutgers University estimated that less than half the material they subscribed to was covered by one or the other. LOCKSS has about 500 publishers participating, while Portico has a little over 200. That probably covers a lot of what is produced, but it’s hard to know — or even guess — how many of the more than 50 million scientific articles that have been published are included here.
Archiving, too, has its challenges. Publishers have different ideas about the conditions under which they should join. And changing technologies introduce vulnerabilities, too; for LOCKSS and Portico to succeed, they have to have advanced technical skills and solutions.
Knowledge is vulnerable
The mere existence of the internet is not enough to prevent knowledge from disappearing. In fact, the internet actually introduces some new challenges for the preservation of research results. There are solutions but if they’re to work, we must engage and invest in them.
That’s worth doing, I believe, because research can lead us to a better future. But only if we hang onto it.
http://curt-rice.com/2013/10/13/how-the-internet-can-make-knowledge-disappear-and-2-ways-to-stop-it/

About Curt Rice
My interest in leadership development at universities affects most of what I do, whether it’s working on gender balance issues, developing policies about Open Access, promoting research-based education or just about anything else. I'm a professor at the University of Tromsø, where I've spent the last decade serving first as the head of a Center of Excellence (2002-2008) and then as the Vice President for Research & Development (prorektor for forskning og utvikling) (2009-2013). I'm currently a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.

The Internet – A Tool of Power and Control

Written by Muhammad Bilal Khalid on June 22, 2012. Published in Defending the global village on Iran, Middle East, Syria, United Arab Emirates.

Information wants to be free.

The world has discovered much over the course of time and people have evolved much more sophisticated social organs. However, the tendency for people never to fully trust each other has also increased over the course of history. Look at history and we are sure to notice a pattern of conspiracies and biased dialogue that has its roots in the network of spies that ancient kingdoms used to deploy to monitor the movements of both their allies and enemies. Such practices have remained unchanged and are not expected to change over time either. The name given to these special spies, though, has changed to ‘protected diplomats’. For any country it would surprising to discover that their ally’s protected diplomats had been sent there with the malicious purpose of spying or influencing interests. But are we all that naive?
It wouldn’t be fair to say that all countries stoop to this practice but I personally believe that every country does in one way or the other.  It would, perhaps, be shocking  for citizens of respected democratic states to discover that foreign forces were influencing their lives in small but meaningful ways. It’s a universal issue and one that is highly controversial by its nature and though its sheer audacity.
From its origins on the most accessible platform of the World Wide Web in 2006 ,Wikileaks has been bashing and thrashing American and Western reputations with hundreds of thousands of war diaries and death records and videos made public that had previously been secreted from the world as classified files seen only by scheming eyes. In 2011, the Wikileaks website along with its giant media partners released a series of diplomatic cables that affected almost every country in the Middle East directly or indirectly, and that might well have provoked shudders in many authoritarian dictatorships to judge from their flurrys of hasty press conferences and denials of the reports.
Wikileaks is just one source, but undoubtedly the most daring of those tools on the internet which uncover the menacing truth about your friendly neighborhood states and reveal conflict of interests. From how peace-loving Muslim countries and Israel want to end the controversial Iranian nuclear program by force to how the Pakistani government is but a puppet in the hands of its military.They also divulged how the mess created in Iraq and Afghanistan was covered up by Western nations and how cruel and inhumane actions were buried in the secrecy of the details. But what I find even more surprising is how the world’s worst crimes are only talked about in secret conversations and never mentioned in places where serious action could be taken against them.
Wikileaks also shows how the peace-keeping organizations are helpless puppets of those funding their activities.
The Internet has now become a weapon capable of creating and destroying. Knowledge is power and when this power becomes the weapon of ordinary people, great powerful authoritarians or monarchs cannot do much against its wrath. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt are only just two examples of such power – the power of knowledge and the power of the internet.
The internet has empowered people, it has empowered nations, bridged gaps and brought the world together. However it is now being used to tear the world apart. It is being used to instill hate into people, it is being used to defraud the population, it is being used to misled the people. There is a need to put a check on the internet but the question is not how to do it but rather who is going to do it? Do we trust each other? No I do not think we do. The majority of the world’s population is ignorant - ignorant of the fact that their lives are controlled by ideas. Ideas that are not their own anymore. They do not realize that they have been turned into tools. And the internet and many other forces are in control. So who do we trust? Who do we trust with this powerful weapon? Would it be wise to put a lock on the internet, but then again who can we trust with the key?
The hundreds of thousands of cables have endless stories and secrets to tell - secrets that were kept well off the public radar – and their effects has been predictable and far reaching. People were stirred by these cables and the secret documents illegally brought to public attention. Julian Assange the founder of Wikileaks even goes as far as to believe that many of the Arab revolts were due to the revelations he made to the world. So am I right in saying that Julian Assange in a way determined the course of history as he saw fit? Whatever the answer to this question may be, knowledge definitely shows its power here.
This truly shows that the world is on the verge of a new era. An era marked by global control.  What is being hidden today will sooner or later be made public for personal or social or economic gains - no one can be sure. All Gaddafi’s gold could not save him from the wrath of his own people when the internet gave them control. The oppression of the rulers of Egypt could not help them keep their authority when the internet fought for the rights of the people. So what controls us now?  Knowledge and ideas or the ideologies that are being thrust upon us.
Imagine if some years from now the internet speaks out about how democracy is only oppressing the people? What would we do then? Would we stand up for our rights and remove the politicians who are ruling us now? Yes, I think we might!
The Internet is a powerful weapon which has proven its capabilities. It has taken down regimes, helped prevent wars, has brought the whole world together and yet somewhat taken it apart. No matter how much you try to hide your secrets, the internet will let them all out or someone else will, and they will be let out in a manner that will surprise you. It will take lives, it will cause harm, it will help people but it will always be a tool of intellectual control. A tool open to everyone but then again not for everyone.

Tags: activism, arab revolt, arab spring, cyber activism, free speech, internet, julian assange, Wikileaks

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http://futurechallenges.org/local/a-game-of-power-and-control/

Muhammad Bilal Khalid

Muhammad Bilal Khalid is from Lahore, Pakistan. He is currently working as a volunteer and youth activist at various organisations including YES Alumni Pakistan and DFID empowering the nation and the youth of Pakistan through different projects and opportunities. He has been a part of a political party's student federation and has taken part in making policies that directly or indirectly would effect the future of youth in Pakistan. Muhammad Bilal has been actively participating in climate workshops and has volunteered briefly with WWF to preserve the endangered wild life. He also has been a Student Ambassador to England and the United States on two exchange programs representing the culture and norms of the Pakistani Society and exchanging ideas to bring about a better change in Pakistan. Bilal also takes part in Model United Nations to keep up with international events and he keeps on working to empower the youth and help them reach their maximum potential in Pakistan.