Don’t be afraid of robots—be afraid of becoming one

I robot

finally someone ...factoring in ...EVIL :o

By Andrew Smart May 7, 2014

Andrew Smart is a research scientist and author of "Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing" and the forthcoming, "Beyond Zero and One."

One of us. Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

 

Our fantasies about becoming cyborgs are getting ever closer to reality. Recently in the resurrected version of Newsweek (which I suspect is a robot), Kevin Maney wrote an excited article on “brain apps” which monitor EEG signals and allow you to automatically detect when your brain is in a state of “peak productivity.” What’s more, the grandiose claim of these apps is that they will train you to be able to enter peak productivity at will. By analyzing brainwaves and teaching you how to mimic the brain activity of experts, these apps can make you into an expert with minimal training in a fraction of the time it normally takes.  In a few years this type of technology may be implanted, making us truly cyborgs.

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We have moved beyond creating robots and software to do work for us. We now want to become robots ourselves so that we can even more work – all the time, in a heightened state of “peak productivity.” Our cyborg fantasies have been completely co-opted by the cult of productivity.  The much-hyped Singularity, in which machine intelligence becomes superintelligence and surpasses human intelligence, and then merges with it (or something), is not about some deep philosophical and technological barrier—it’s about becoming a superworker: a cyborg of extreme productivity.

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Since the dawn of the robotic age we have dreamed of a utopian future where benevolent yet super powerful and intelligent robots do all of our menial jobs, handle our daily affairs and allow us to generally take it easy and explore the higher pleasures of leisure. Long before the digital revolution in 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote, “All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery.” Isn’t this why we invented robots in the first place?

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Wilde thought that the purpose of life was amusement, enjoying cultivated leisure, making beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world. He naively thought that the spread sufficiently advanced machinery would allow everyone, including and especially the poor, to be liberated from street sweeping and other degrading types of manual labor (like working at Starbucks today). Wilde continues, “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”

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Ever since the Czech playwright Karl Capek gave us the word “robot,” which means worker in Czech, humans have been tantalized by the idea that an intelligent machine could indefatigably and perfectly perform monotonous and dull labor. Indeed, robots now form a critical part of almost all forms of industrial production.

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There is a cruel irony in the fact that as machine intelligence increases, as robots become more human-like, one of the only growing job sectors even for university educated people is menial labor. What’s more we are busier than ever, and our working hours have been increasing. Which forces the question, what the hell are all the robots doing?

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Despite this we are warned that robots will replace 70% of occupations by 2020. This is often presented as a threat, but wasn’t this the intention all along? To build machines capable of doing our bullshit jobs for us?

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Apparently fearing the robot takeover and the potential for a society of  “cultivated leisure” we are now desperately trying to become robots ourselves in order to boost our productivity. While Silicon Valley pumps billions of dollars into realizing the Singularity, app developers, the military and many others are busy trying to decode our brains in order to hijack them into efficient robotic productivity.

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Could it be that we’ve been tricked into pouring our innovative energy into making ourselves better slaves? If the digital elite achieves its dream of a perfect union with machines, what becomes of the rest of us who either can’t afford cyborgification or who actually enjoy life as a regular human being? Would one Singularitized human be expected to handle the workload of 100 unenhanced workers? Robots will have of course taken the rest of the jobs.

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Robots were ostensibly meant to allow us to work less (I write about the many benefits of working less in my book Autopilot). Yet we seem now to be attempting a fusion with robots in order brute force our brains into a persistent state of “peak productivity.”  Not only is this questionable from a scientific perspective, but just because we can does not mean we should.

Technology Isn’t the Only Source of Innovation

ah, oh gee!  ...investing in each other !

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Charles Hugh Smith

The solution is to recognize the critical role of social innovation enabled by networked human and social capital.
This week I’ve addressed the structural reasons for the decline of the middle class. As with all complex systems, there is no one cause–instead there is an interconnected web of causes:
The Decline of Small Business and the Middle Class
The Changing Nature of Middle Class Work
How the Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable
The Destabilizing Truth: Only the Wealthy Can Afford a Middle Class Lifestyle
So what is the solution to this decline? We face a double-bind dilemma: we are constantly reassured that technological innovation can provide the solution to all problems–yet the problem here is that technological innovation is destroying the need for costly human labor. Technological innovation alone can’t solve the problem because it is a key cause of the problem.
As I have noted many times, the solution is not to limit technology–that only leads to impoverishment of the entire economy.
The solution is to recognize the critical role of social innovation enabled by networked human and social capital.
I have stressed that the purpose of work is to create value and solve problems. To understand what this means in the real world, let’s look at two small-scale examples of how value is created in the emerging economy with social innovation.
Studies have found that human creativity is largely the result of sharing ideas and transferring innovations in one field to other fields. Innovation may arise from a single person, but its application requires human and social capital.
These local-economy examples illustrate how human and social capital works in conjunction with infrastructure, community and financial capital.
Example 1: Farming as currently practiced is overwhelmingly industrial, and few would see any application of knowledge to the sector as being useful except to further the mechanization/automation of agribusiness. Yet highly educated people are profitably truck farming by applying their knowledge of marketing, food preparation and the restaurant business.
For example, the trend-setting restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., has a supply network of small farms, which in some cases are run by former employees of the restaurant. These small farmers are paid a good price for supplying very fresh organic produce. What is delivered daily sets the restaurant’s menu for that day’s lunch and dinner.
The key value creation in this arrangement is trust (social capital), attention to quality, and the ability to fashion menus around a variety of seasonal produce and meats (human capital). The labor of raising the produce is essential but it alone doesn’t create the value.
Example 2: Street-Level Cycles in Berkeley, Calif., is an organization that partners long-abandoned city property with private enterprise to offer classes in bicycle repair and free use of the shop’s tools to do-it-yourselfers who want to repair their own bikes. It also provides bike repair services and sells used bicycles. The income generated by the repair service and sales of used bikes supports a small staff and enables the free community use of the shop’s tools.
The amount of financial capital needed to start this enterprise was modest. The city-owned building was unoccupied for years. In exchange for use of the property, the city gets a self-funding, free community educational resource and service.
The enterprise serves a wide spectrum of the community: students, do-it-yourselfers, those needing bike repairs or an inexpensive used bicycle. In offering the free classes to students, the enterprise has no competitors. In selling repair services and used bikes, it competes with other local bike shops. If someone wants to learn how to repair bicycles, this organization offers a nexus of tools and opportunities to learn and practice.
This low-cost synergy of local government, private enterprise, education, community service and social and human capital did not require any technological innovation– it required social innovation. It illustrates that the profit motive–often held up as the only motivator within capitalism–is not the only motivation for either innovation or enterprise.
These small-scale examples illustrate that innovation often takes what already exists in terms of financial capital and infrastructure and combines these ideas and resources into new methods of value creation. They also show that the key role of human and social capital in creating value via social innovation does not necessarily require more financial capital or infrastructure–and indeed may require less. This can be summarized as doing more with less.
Value creation and problem-solving arise from many sources, not just the technological innovations that receive media coverage. If we combine the many sources of value creation unleashed by digital technologies, we realize that ours is one of the great transformative eras in human history.

How Convenient for the Military-Industrial Complex … The Boogieman Is Back!

Posted on May 9, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

Graphic and all text by Anthony Freda

Al Qaeda and Bin Laden came on the global stage to play the part of boogieman at the exact time the Soviet “Evil Empire” fell.
Now the Russian enemy has been resurrected right on the heels of
the death of Bin Laden.
The Military Industrial Complex gets a new/old enemy to justify their trillion dollar a year monstrosity.
How Conveeeeeeeenient.

The Americans’ Fear of Islamic Terrorists Has Worn Off, So the Government Pulls Out the EVIL RUSSIAN Card Again

Posted on March 4, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

New Ooga Booga No Longer Effective … So Government Switches Back to Tried-And-True Old-Timey Ooga-Booga

Preface: I’m not siding with Putin on the Ukrainian dispute. I don’t like Communism.  I was born in the U.S. and have lived here all of my life.  I hate Stalin with a passion – a man who killed countless protesters, and sent numerous others away to insane asylums – and have railed against the “useful idiots” who naively supported the Soviets. I also think that Putin is a corrupt kleptocrat.  I’m just pointing out that the U.S. Government is completely overreacting and fear-mongering. This is taking place on the other side of the world, and doesn’t effect America’s national security (although we may have heavily invested in the outcome).
Fear of terrorists made the American public afraid, gullible and easy to manipulate for more than a decade.
But now – despite the best efforts of the military-industrial complex to  intentionally whip up an exaggerated hysteria of Islamic terrorists -  Americans are starting to wake up from our fear-induced haze:

• We don’t buy the “justifications” for mass surveillance

• For the first time since 9/11, we value privacy more than anti-terror protections

• We’re more afraid of the government than of terrorists

• We’re sick of war … and no longer falling for the government’s pro-war arguments

Indeed, Americans are realizing that we’re more likely to be killed by lightning, toddlers, brain-eating parasites or bad government policy than terrorism.
So how can the poor lads in the military industrial complex keep the gravy train going?
The evil Russians!  That worked last time … it’ll work again!
All they have to do is re-demonize the Russians.  How long can it take to scrub the images of the peaceful Olympics – and Putin’s prevention of war against Syria – out of people’s minds, and re-instill the fear of the old Red Menace?
After all, in the 1970s, Cheney and Rummy generated fake intelligence exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to undermine coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union, which conveniently justified huge amounts of cold war spending.  And see this. That worked like a charm!
Surely, a few misrepresentations about Putin’s intention to start the next world war and take over the world will scare the daylights out of the American people!
Ahhh, the sweet smell of success …

Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is

The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted

• 
• • John Naughton
  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-internet
  • The Observer, Saturday 27 July 2013

While the press concentrates on the furore surrounding Edward Snowden's search for political asylum, it has forgotten the importance of his revelations. Photograph: Tatyana Lokshina/AP

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.
In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.
Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.
As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.
The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.
Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.
Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."
That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.
They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.
And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."
Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.

RUSSIA WANTS TO BE ON THE MOON BY 2030

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Joseph P. Farrell • Filed Under: Cosmic War • http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/05/russia-wants-moon-2030/

A few days ago in a little miniseries of blogs, I wrote about the strange space news that seems to imply that there is some sort of urgency afoot in space circles. Most especially, I pointed out that NASA administrator Bolden wants the USA to be on Mars by 2030, adding that he stated it was “essential to human survival.” This curious assertion raised the needle on my suspicion meter into the red zone: why the urgency? Were we going to run out of oil and gas in the next 14 years? I doubt it (I’m one of those pesky abiotic, non-peak oil people, not that I’m all that enamored of “fossil” fuels either). So why the urgency? I implied in my blogs that perhaps there was an urgency from quarters or for reasons we’re not being told, and that perhaps one of the reasons for the urgency was military: if one were to defend this little corner of space from “whomever,” one would want bases on the natural “defense zones,” the Moon, and Mars.
Now there’s more fuel for the speculative fires on this score, and once again, the fuel is being provided by the Russians, as many of you brought to my attention by sharing the following stories:
Russia to begin Moon Colonization in 2030
Russia Plans to Colonize Moon by 2030, Newspaper Reports
There’s that date again: 2030. Note the reasons given for the “urgency” in the first article:

“‘The moon is a space object for the future exploration by terrestrial civilization, and a geopolitical competition for the Moon’s natural resources may begin in the 21st century,’ said a report on a potential lunar program prepared by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Roscosmos space agency and Moscow State University.
“The program aims to build an inhabited moon base and testing ground by the middle of the century, which would allow mineral extraction on Earth’s only natural satellite.
“The project calls on developing a range of long-distance space technology to ensure the country can explore the moon independently from foreign partners. Earlier proposals for lunar exploration focused on strong international cooperation, as it was believed no single country could afford interplanetary projects on its own.”(Emphasis added)

Note the three implications of the Novosti article:

1. There is going to be (or really, already is) an “exo-geopolitical” contest under way for the development of off-planet resources;
2. The Russians intend (like the Chinese) to develop Moon bases for said commercial exploitation of lunar resources; and
3. They intend to do this unilaterally, abandoning internationalist “cooperation” models that have prevailed since the end of Cold War, Act One.

And that’s the rub: the Russians are announcing the end of the unipolar era, and doing so in space. We are looking, in other words, at more blowback from American aggressiveness in the post-Cold War era, and a new era of space competition beginning. The second article cites Isvestia, which in turn is citing the same Roscosmos study:

“The Russian document underlined the need for speedy lunar exploration, saying “leading space powers will expand and establish their rights to convenient lunar footholds to ensure future opportunities for practical use,” in the next 20 to 30 years, Izvestia cited the document as saying.
“The price tag of the mission is uncertain, but the first stage of the program is expected to cost around 28.5 billion rubles ($815.8 million), while earlier estimates indicated that developing and building a piloted spaceship would add 160 billion rubles or so, though Russia hopes to attract private investors to help bankroll the project, the report said.
“But while the program envisages international cooperation on the project, it stresses that the ”independence of the national lunar program must be ensured regardless of the conditions and the extent of the participation in it by foreign partners.”

Again, this is an intriguing “service of notice,” that Russia is not abandoning the private-international cooperation model completely, but rather, an announcement that if it cannot find such partners, it intends, as a matter of its national security, to develop the capabilities any way. It is a clear announcement, again, that commercial exploitation of space is entering an era of Cold War, Act Two.
But again, why the date of 2030? Given Bolden’s own use of that date, perhaps we are looking at the deliberate creation of a meme, a meme of “public competition” being pushed precisely in order to ratchet up public support for a new space race. Or perhaps both Roscosmos and NASA know something they’re not saying. In either case, watch developments closely, because the same processes of reasoning evident in the Russian study are bound to be echoed in Beijing, New Delhi, and Berlin.
Are where commercial interests go, weapons and militaries are not far behind…

Jail the Bankers? Obama Has Been Their Staunchest Defender

By Glen Ford

Global Research, May 09, 2014

Black Agenda Report 7 May 2014

Region: USA

Theme: Law and Justice

In the second half of his second term, Obama and his crew seek to rewrite the history of his administration. Attorney General Eric Holder now declares that no bank is too big to jail. But the reality is, Wall Street’s “impunity is infinite. Holder and Obama work for them.”
The Obama administration is in a makeover frenzy, cosmetically cleaning up its corporatist act for the sake of the lame duck president’s legacy and endangered Democrats in Congress. Evils must be reapportioned in the public mind, so that the balance between lesser and greater abominations is perceived to tilt in the Democrats’ favor – a tough trick, given the beating the party’s base constituencies have taken since 2008 at the hands of the duopoly Dem-Rep tag-team. Historical revisionism is, thus, the order of the day.
Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General who successfully intervened in federal court to prevent the retroactive release of thousands of mostly Black prisoners convicted under the old 100-to-1 crack cocaine laws, now acts as point man for his boss’s program of charitable sentencing commutations. Obama’s compassionate mood-swing occurred at whiplash speed; in his first six years in office, he had granted fewer clemencies than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. Obama’s brazenly hypocritical and slap-dash new program “will not represent any significant or permanent change to the nation’s universal policy of mass incarceration, mainly of poor black and brown youth,” as Bruce Dixon has written, but is designed purely to rehabilitate the president’s image among Black voters. With one empty gesture, the president’s record on criminal justice is revised.
Obama then takes his political theater troupe on a comedy tour. Attorney General Holder pretends to threaten Wall Street bankers with jail time – a notion so hilarious it should have had them rolling on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange. Jail the bankers? Obama has been their staunchest defender, the man who saved George Bush’s original bank bailout from defeat (weeks before the 2008 election), and has since configured the entire financial structure of the American State to the service of his most important constituents: Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs. “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Obamareminded the banksters in his Oval Office, back in 2009. He has never failed them, presiding over the infusion of roughly $30 trillion (2011 figures) directly into their accounts or as guarantees of their business transactions – roughly twice the Gross Domestic Product of the United States. Ain’t that love?
Eric Holder told his joke about jailing the bankers during a stand-up that was posted on the Justice Department’s website on Monday. Actually, it was only an inference – a bit of comic relief. “I intend to reaffirm the principle that no individual or entity that does harm to our economy is ever above the law. There is no such thing as ‘too big to jail,’” said Holder, clarifying his statement of last year, that “the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult to prosecute them.”
Has the Obama administration picked up the pitchfork? Could JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon, whom Obama called a “friend” and “one of the smartest bankers we’ve got,” be headed for the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado?
Does the Syndicate take orders from street hustlers? Barack Obama has a better chance of winding up behind bars than Dimon and his fellow oligarchs. Let’s not forget who the boss is, here in the U.S.A.
Holder failed to mention the names or corporate logos of those who might be targeted for doing “harm to our economy,” but his office no doubt encouraged the press to speculate that French bank BNP Paribas and some Swiss banks might be on the list – which makes sense. The French bank is charged with violating U.S. sanctions on trade with Iran and other targets of U.S. economic aggression. That puts them at odds with the national security state. The Swiss banks are alleged to have helped Americans hide their money from U.S. taxes, which is mainly a crime of individuals. Neither of the cases directly involve the Big Five U.S. banks that are the core institutions of U.S. finance capital, the guys that “are so large that it does become difficult to prosecute them,” as Holder said last year. They are the circle in the center of the Ruling Circles. Their impunity is infinite. Holder and Obama work for them.
Routine prosecutions of corporate crimes are actually at historically low levels under Obama, despite tsunamis of scandals, including several “Crimes of the Century.” Under the pressures of Obama history revisionism, Holder will snare some fat white faces to create the impression of a crackdown on corporate bad actors, confident that all Wall Street types look alike to the average consumer of news. Most people make little distinction between a Bernie Madoff, who lived like a king on a giant Ponzi scheme, and Jamie Dimon, who IS a king of the American Empire, with all the immunities accorded to those at the top of the Ruling Class. Bernie Madoff will die in prison. Jamie Dimon, whose bank turned ablind eye to Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and profited handsomely from it, remains on the top of the world (although JP Morgan Chase was fined $2 billion).
Throughout the whole of this administration – the past that Obama now wants you to forget – Holder “ruthlessly maneuvered every case against the oligarchs into his own jurisdictional arena, in order to protect the banksters from aggressive prosecution,” as we pointed out in BAR in November, 2013. Holder acted, not as a prosecutor, but as the Lords of Capital’s defender and guardian.
JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and each of his peers in the top U.S. banks could be sentenced to 20 years and $5 million fine for violating the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law passed following the 2001 recession that requires corporate chiefs to personally certify that documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission are accurate and that the corporation’s internal controls are adequate. Every case of bankster wrongdoing “settled” by Holder’s Justice Department is, almost by definition, proof of chief executive guilt under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
A report from the Real Economy Project shows how Wall Street’s (known) crimes are methodically decriminalized by Justice Department “settlements.” Holder uses his offices to immunize the big fish, and allow the corporations to escape with a fine. His own pattern of behavior is so clear as to also be indictable – if there were a State apparatus that was not controlled by the Ruling Class.
But, there is not, because Wall Street’s rule is “hegemonic”; both the Democrats and Republicans are their servants, as are the main media.
The history of the last six years tells us, unequivocally, that the five biggest banks, and the people who run them, are not just beyond the reach of the State, they control the State.
There can be no fundamental change without the utter destruction of the banks and the financial Ruling Class. Not broken into smaller pieces, but broken, totally. All else is reform and tinkering – which is worthwhile, but don’t call it Revolution or Social Transformation or Socialism.

The ID Entity: To Seek Out New Life

• Posted on May 7, 2014
• by Clyde Lewis
• in Articles

THE ID ENTITY:
TO SEEK OUT NEW LIFE

When Bill Clinton appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel Show last month, he opened up about the possibility of extraterrestrials and the disclosure that we are not alone. You may recall that in the program, before a live audience, Kimmel announced he would be asking about UFOs after a break. While Clinton concluded he found no evidence they exist, he said, “if we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
As he said it, he demonstrated a significant amount for apprehension and uncomfortable body language about the revelation. A month after his appearance on the show there is still a buzz on the internet about what he was trying to say, and whether or not he realized he was in over his head about announcements pertaining to the disclosure of extra-terrestrials.
From Area 51 to Roswell, Clinton claimed that he had an interest in the subject and that during his second term he demanded answers about the subject matter. He even claimed that the Area 51 personnel were required to wear special uniforms and take part in special procedures.
This had never been claimed by anyone before. Surely he has confused what was going on at Area 51 with some other secret project that was being carried out by one of the alphabet agencies.
There is some buzz going around the Internet that perhaps Clinton was not only aware of what was happening at Area 51 but he may have also been aware of a the secret Stargate Project that was used to create soldiers capable of communicating with possible extraterrestrial entities, and using their “remote viewing” tools to find missing soldiers and to also use mental power for remote assassinations.
There has always been a giggle factor amongst skeptics about mental powers, but your government used taxpayer money to carry out the same occult practices of out-of-body contact that was first carried out by the meeting of “The Founders.”
“The Founders” were actually the first group of oculists in the 1800’s that knew the power of the mind to open up dimensions for the sole purpose of astral projection, out of body experiences, clairvoyance, psychometry and communication with ascended masters – or what Dr. Larry Johns from The Western Way institute calls “mentor extra-terrestrials.” It was at that time that the Theosophical Society would meet in secret and later groups like the Thule Society and the Vril would meet in secret enclaves in Vienna and other European haunts.
At that time, séances were very popular. Entities would be contacted through these meet ups and most of the entities contacted were typically interpreted as being souls of the dead.
Later there were claims made that when certain tones are sung and certain images and hand signs are used human beings who had advanced to higher dimensions would appear and impart their wisdom.
It was later claimed that through causal engineering and intent of sheer will, beings from other planets would also appear and give their wisdom to “The Founders.”
This was the beginning of the first rudimentary contacts with “extra-terrestrials.” It was after World War II that former Nazi scientists and CIA psychologists experimented with the idea of mind expansion, telekinesis, ESP, remote viewing, and communication with “mentor extra-terrestrials.
It was Bill Clinton that declassified the Stargate Project and immediately the cloak of secrecy was pulled back in order to give people a glimpse of a program that for 25 years was training soldiers and civilian spies to be mind readers, psychics, remote viewers and alien contactees.
The object of “Stargate” was to use soldiers and civilian spies as conduits able to transcend the limitations of space and time.
“Stargate” was a CIA sponsored, military approved experiment utilizing psychic spies who, used their psychic and clairvoyant abilities (“remote viewing”), in order to track down Russian nuclear missile silos and missing American jets.
I once interviewed a Canadian man that said that he was also involved with a joint U.S./Canadian program similar to “Stargate” called the “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.” This was a CIA front group that used mind expansion and mind control experiments to create environments where the mind is programmed while under the influence of psychotropic drugs.
Keep in mind that many of these clairvoyant groups had a hand in counseling authorities in how to handle communication with aliens and other entities as mankind was edging closer to conquering space.
In the times of Hitler, the Vrill and the Thule counseled the Nazi SS and the Luftwaffe in how to create flying machines that needed no runways. Some people believe that the flying saucer designs that we know today were actually handed down from the “mentor extraterrestrials” to the military from groups like the Vril, the Thule, and the group known as the “Council of Nine.”
At precisely 9:00 PM on New Year’s Eve 1952 in a house deep in the woods of Augusta, Maine, the séance began. Among the participants was Dr. D.G. Vinod, a Hindu scholar and sage who was well known for channeling all sorts of entities.
Others in attendance were Bell helicopter inventor Arthur Young who abandoned his aviation career to focus on the paranormal and his wife Ruth who had ties to the Forbes dynasty and was learning Russian from the wife of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald had commented before the assassination of Kennedy that “new revelations” had impressed him about the aerospace industry and that he was planning on working at NASA.
Mary Bancroft of the Bancroft dynasty was also the mistress of Allen Dulles – the man whom JFK fired after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Also in attendance was Marcella Du Pont of the Du Pont family and Alice Bouverie who was born into the Astor dynasty.
This was considered a séance that in occult history would change the direction of the United States forever, especially with matters dealing with space and extra-terrestrials.
The intuitive seekers made contact with entities known as the Council of Nine. The Nine claimed to be the creators of mankind, and had informed the intuitive that they would be returning to Earth soon.
It was odd that in 1952, after the meeting and the channeling of the Nine, there was a turning point in the American mythos of UFO’s and alien mythologies. It was the era of the infamous swarm of UFO’s over the United States Capital in Washington DC.
It is also interesting to note that JPL, the company commonly known as Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is secretly referred to as Jack Parsons Laboratory. Parsons, who also was involved with the occult and a well-known sex magic ritual known as “The Babylon Working”, was killed in a lab accident six months after the contact with the Nine.
Is it so odd to consider that perhaps there has been a secret society of intuitive and scholars of the secret meetings that have been setting the agenda of what is to be believed when it comes to things like the UFO enigma and the real facts concerning the invoking of such beings?
Is the alien phenomena more than just so-called beings that travel light years – or are they beings who have been summoned for the purpose of supplying knowledge about new technologies and other sciences?
Well, the truth is that these “psychic” programs were being financed by tax dollars because intelligence reports that are being declassified suggest that the “Soviet Union” was also very aware of “mentor extra-terrestrials” and that the space race was not limited to who had the most rockets and space platforms in space but who could use psychic solders to communicate with alien entities if the opportunity ever presented itself.
The Soviets at the time made a great scapegoat for this research; however, there was financial backing from unknown sources that would encourage the “mental” contact with higher intelligences in 1952.
Did this mean that the US government somehow received intelligence that extra-terrestrials existed? Was there any truth to the Maury Island incident, the Kenneth Arnold sightings and the Roswell crash of 1947?
Were there important reasons why Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman were forced by strange ‘men in black’ to recant their stories of UFO encounters in the Maury Island area? Did Kenneth Arnold escape death to tell the world about the flying discs he saw over Mount Ranier just two weeks before the Roswell crash in New Mexico?
Were there really dead alien bodies recovered at Roswell in 1947? Is this the reason why these “psychic” groups created by the CIA? To some these questions maybe strange but think of the incidents that happened prior to Roswell. Think of the ritualism that may have led to the sightings Washington state in 1947.
Think of the further summoning of the ethereal entities and how they arrived to give us the Betty and Barney Hill case which sparked abduction cases and stories that in medieval times would be described as witch rides with the devil, and angel rides in chariots of fire.
Now we hear about how all of this relates to quantum physics and how we are told that there are many more dimensions than we experience. Where does all of this new information come from? Could it be that many of the best and earliest quantum physicists were part of the small circle that made up the Council of Nine?
Is it all just a coincidence?
Is it also a coincidence that now Bill Clinton spills the beans on disclosure after the general accounting office has received numerous requests from the likes of Diane Feinstein, Astronaut Gordon Cooper, Steven Greer and others about the incidents leading up to the Roswell incident in New Mexico?
UFO REALITY IS BREAKING THROUGH by Richard J. Boylan, Ph.D. states:
“When he first took office, President Carter tried to learn what the government knew about UFOs. President Carter was denied access to UFO information which the CIA had, by then-CIA Director George Bush, who told the President that he did not have clearance for that information. In similar fashion, President Clinton is not satisfied with the briefings he has gotten from the CIA on UFOs, because the CIA information conflicts with the information which the President’s Science Advisor Jack Gibbons has independently acquired.”
It was reported in 1995 that President Clinton made several pilot videos of proposed alternative public announcements about UFOs and the ET presence that he wanted to use if once again the opportunity presented itself.
In 1995, while in Belfast, Ireland, Clinton joked about aliens when a young boy named Ryan sent him a letter asking him if aliens crashed at Roswell in 1947.

Bill Clinton in Talks About Roswell in Belfast 1995

“Ryan, if you’re out in the crowd tonight, here’s the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it, either, and I want to know.”
Now it is important to note that after Clinton got wise to all of the clandestine “psychic contact” with extra-terrestrials and the Roswell incident, as WorldNetDaily reported n their article ‘What Has Bill Clinton So Stressed About UFOs?‘, “a 1995 General Accounting Office report…stated all administrative and communication files between 1946 and 1949 from Roswell Army Air Field had been destroyed.”
If anyone can remember during Clinton’s appearance with Kimmel, and after the grilling about Area 51 and Roswell—Clinton said an alien invasion would unite the planet. When Kimmel asks former president Clinton “Are you hinting to me that perhaps there are aliens?” Clinton does the most interesting thing: he nods to the affirmative — then says “no.”
When Ronald Reagan made the same statements he too was vague as to what the alien threat might be and when it will attack.
Perhaps it is time again to reinstate the mentalists that have had the opportunity to bring the consciousness to a level that the extra-terrestrials can appear.
If it worked then—perhaps it is time to reopen the old cases and use the old tools in order to seek out new life.
This may be one way to finding the truth about what has led up to the organized silence with regard to the alien question.

Frankenfoods – Modifying Your DNA

Tuesday, May 6th, 2014 http://steppingstonesliving.com/frankenfoods-modifying-your-dna/ 

Frankenfoods is a name that has been coined buy the true “foodies” in reference to GMO (Genetically Modified) foods.  GMO seems to be in the news everywhere and many people know that it is not good for them but do they really understand what a GMO food is?  Try asking someone and you will be met with “ahhh” and “ummm”  or “its a food that has been modified genetically”.  Great!  You are on the right path but to have a clear understanding of what GMO means you also understand the dangers associated with it.  Because food is the foundation of our health it is important to have a firm foundation-  let’s dig deeper.  What does healthy eating really mean?
I became a true foodie in 2006 when I had my 3rd recurrence of cancer.  It was at this point that I decided I had better start paying attention to my temple.  The bible tells us that our body is the temple of God and we are to treat it that way.  Feeding it sodas and mini donuts were not going to cut it.  My entire family began to make the change as I was seeing health issues with my then 3 and 5 year old children.  We began to train them about food.  They got it.  One particular story comes to mind in relation to my daughter.  She was 3 years old and our neighbor agreed to take care of our children while we were at a church meeting.  When we returned our neighbor told us that she had given our children macaroni and cheese with applesauce for dinner.  When she placed it in front of my daughter she said “Is this organic?”   Our neighbor asked her if she knew what that meant.  She smiled and quickly said “Raised with out chemicals and no GMO.”  Our children can teach us about the important things in life very quickly.  I believe God knew that children would be an example when he told us to have faith like a child.
So back to GMO foods.
Thirty years ago GMO plants were not on the horizon.   In 1987, the first field testing of tobacco and tomatoes that had been genetically modified arrived.  In 1992 the Calgene’s Favr Savr tomato was approved for commercial production.  Also in 1992, the FDA declares that genetically engineered foods are “not inherently dangerous” and do not require special regulation.  According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, today, more than 54% of the American crops contain GMOs and approximately 70 percent of processed foods contain at least one genetically modified ingredient.
What does it mean to “genetically engineer” something?
It is a process where you remove the genes from one organism- like a plant, animal or microbe – and then transfer that gene into another one.  Genes are blueprints or codes that tell the cell how to make proteins.   Our bodies are built upon proteins in order to create healthy DNA and RNA.  So adding foods that have been modified and are not in the form as God intended can only spell disaster because these altered proteins become part of our DNA.
In researching for this article I came across an interesting list of 65 Health Risks from GMO Foods on the Institute for Responsible Technology’s website.  A quick scan of this list will show you that our species is headed for disaster if this continues.  As you  review the data on the page  labelled “Health Risks” you will see that GMO’s cause allergies, liver damages and infertility.  Rats fed GMO foods were rendered infertile within 3 generations.  I recommend that you spend some time reading and learning on this website.  It may sound cliche but our children really are our future and this will destroy them.
Since the beginning of time man has believed that they are somehow more skilled than our creator in determining our true needs.
Proponents of GMO proclaim the benefits of  the process of genetic modification to have the potential for greatness in terms of addressing problems like food safety, malnutrition, security, and  efficiency in agriculture. Genetic modification can also be used to enrich crops through the introduction of nutrients and vitamins.  The need for enrichment has come from our overproduction and lack of care of the land that would normally be rich in nutrients that would provide the plant with nourishment that would be transferred to the foods.
With the list of GMO foods growing rapidly,  the best way to avoid them is to shop at local farmers markets and get to know your farmer.   Ask them if they use heirloom seeds and if their farming is sustainable.  You should also  purchase as many organic products as possible.  Some of the top GMO products to be avoided are canola oil, corn and corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, infant formula, margarine and shortening (use real butter!), papaya and soy / soy lecithin.
It’s time that we get back to the way that God instructed us to live.  He did not do this to deprive us of enjoyment but rather to give us an abundant life.  In a future blog I will share how we can see through science and the Bible that our body is the temple of God.  The more I learn the more amazed I am at the order of our creator.

Los Angeles Municipal Fraud, The Next Battle Against Wall Street?

By Tom Hayden

Global Research, May 10, 2014

tomhayden.com

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy

The next battle against Wall Street may be brewing and this one is in Los Angeles City Hall.

If it erupts, the soldiers will be a scrappy, wonky, and sophisticated phalanx of labor, neighborhood, and religious activists. Their research has exposed the fact that Wall Street banks were paid $200 million in fees alone last year by the City of Los Angeles; many millions more than the city spent on fixing its streets.
The comparison between City Hall and our streets makes City Hall officials wince; claiming it mixes apples with oranges. But there’s more than catchiness in the comparison. The new report, Fix LA, shows that at least $106 billion in public money overall, from airports, seaports, utilities and pension funds, goes to private financial institutions that profit from fees, lending and leveraging those funds.
Citizens and elected officials often are overwhelmed and under-qualified to understand the weird and complicated transactions – debt swaps and derivative trades, for example – that Wall Street employs to extract maximum profit from all that public capital. There is no single Los Angeles official mandated to bargain with Wall Street. No official consumer watchdog, no fledgling Elizabeth Warren or Ralph Nader. No inspector-general to investigate financial industry fraud. No mainstream investigative reporters on the case, not so far anyway. While insiders and advocates will pore over the city’s multi-billion annual budget this month, no single monitor is minding the hundreds of millions funneled to Wall Street’s predatory care, as the report charges.
City officials will have their chance to respond in public hearings over the next several weeks, based on a motion being introduced by Councilman Paul Koretz this Friday; one seconded by Council member Gil Cedillo. Budget and Finance Committee chair Paul Krekorian, waiving the report, promised thorough public scrutiny of its data and claims.
Koretz is challenging the prevailing notion that the main role of local government is to cut its budgets for essential services, embrace austerity as inevitable, and pray that Wall Street investors notice. The city’s budget already has been cut 19 percent per capita since the Wall Street crash. The city paid out $133 million in taxpayer money last year alone to Wall Street firms for managing its pension funds.
While labor contracts are always “on the table” in budget talks, no one ever suggests that the city should put its Wall Street contracts “on the table” for cuts or renegotiation.
While public employers are blamed perennially in the media and politics for making excessive wage demands, when was the last time anyone questioned Wall Street for making excessive fee demands?
While the public absorbs sixty percent cuts in the city budget for picking up debris and trash, who complains about banks charging $7.9 million for managing the city’s cash?
The Koretz motion calls on the city to either renegotiate or terminate a financial deal involving the City of Los Angeles and Bank of New York Mellon, which turned sour after the 2008 Wall Street crash. Koretz says the deals like this have cost the City $65 million since 2008.
According to a Brookings Institute report, “A growing body of evidence…suggests that borrowing costs are too high. Given that the value of municipal bonds outstanding is $2.9 trillion, municipal borrowers and their investors are leaving billions of dollars on the table every year because of borrowing costs, fees, and other transaction costs. These costs are a drain on state budgets; (and) make investments in education, infrastructure, health care and utilities more expensive…”
From a Wall Street perspective, cities look like large and inviting pools of public capital waiting to be privatized, just like Social Security on the national level. But in the progressive tradition, the role of government is to deploy public resources to maximize returns in the public interest. Progressive public officials are tasked with striking the best deal for their constituents. From the Wall Street perspective, financial transactions should be carried out in milliseconds, which leaves no role for public hearings, oversight or regulations. Campaign contributions are meant to lubricate the bureaucratic machine.
The Fix LA report just might force a debate over the role of a democratic government in a market economy because the report is potentially much more than fifteen pages plus an appendix. The research is sound enough to embarrass many observers who claim to “know” Los Angeles. The effort is led by the Coalition of LA City Unions, including SEIU Local 721 and AFSCME District Council 36, representing collectively 22,000 city workers with the resources of staff, structure, and a budget for organizing. Only last week they sent out tens of thousands of glossy campaign-style pamphlets complete with readable headlines and charts. Union members are pouring over the report’s findings. The question is whether their campaign takes root with a broader public. The issues are complicated. The injuries inflicted are harder to notice than home foreclosures. The ideological argument over austerity has divided even liberals. The power of campaign contributions can be chilling. The public mood may be too cynical at the moment.
A truly grassroots campaign might begin change all that. The Fix LA organizing effort, which already has sponsored a town meeting in South Central and advocates’ visits to Council offices, relies on neighborhood-based organizations like Community Coalition, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a roster of clergy with roots in the past and present campaigns for a living wage. If the forces that were aroused by Occupy Wall Street in 2011 are ready for ignition, there’s a possibility of bringing the fight with Wall Street to Main Street LA, the address of City Hall.
Update May 5, 2014
As promised, the City Council budget committee held a several-hour hearing Monday on the issues raised by the Fix LA Coalition’s research paper on Wall Street profits from LA city funds. Chaired by Council member Paul Krekorian, the hearing saw five Council members engaging intently with the report’s authors, labor leaders and community-based representatives. The hearing was uniquely significant in that the labor-community advocates for the first time were invited to have a seat at the table as part of the official city agenda. The hearing, which lasted several hours, was televised live on the LA city channel.
In a few weeks, the Fix LA Coalition will also hold another lengthy and detailed dialogue with City Controller Ron Galperin and experts from his office. Galperin, who is one of only three LA citywide elected officials, has independent audit powers. Recent Controllers’ reports have questioned whether the city has gotten the best return on its investments, and whether passively managed investments are sometimes perform better than actively-managed ones, which obtain the higher management fees.
Normally, Wall Street fees and management practice are evaluated by methods comparing other cities and pension funds. Therefore if all comparable fees are within the same range, they are considered acceptable. In the growing debate in LA, officials are being asked to compare Wall Street fees with budget cuts for essential services like street repair and with the long-term costs of downsizing urban services.
For full testimony, see A Balanced Plan to Fix LA and the Coalition of LA City Unions Presenation to the LA City Council Budget & Finance Committee