utorok 19. januára 2010

The Superconscious Mind

http://www.mind-power-for-success.com/superconscious-mind.html
Is Your Unlimited Source of
Abundance, Happiness and Prosperity


All creation is the result of consciousness. The superconscious mind contains within itself the infinite possibility of anything that can be conceived with mind.

What is superconscious mind?

A long time ago Emerson wrote:

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this Universal Mind, is a party to all that is or can be done, for is the only and sovereign agent.”


Some people called it God, Universal Mind, Higher Intelligence, Supreme Energy, Higher Source, Higher Mind, Inner Mind, Universal Intelligence, etc. The scientific community refers to it as "The Unified Field" or "Infinite Field Of Potentiality."

It does not matter what label it is given, what really matter is: This is the one and only force that both science and spirituality have acknowledged as the mastermind behind all the creations in the universe.

Here, we shall call it the superconscious mind or super consciousness. It holds the power to create any conceivable outcome. It has no boundaries or limitations in its power to create - from the infinitely large to the infinitely small, from the microscopic to the greatest of the universe.

In some organized religion, it is known as The Alpha, The Omega, The Beginning, The End. The All in All. The I Am.

While it is impossible to precisely describe something that is infinite and holds no boundary, some people have described The super consciousness in the following ways:

* It consists of all things in the past, now and future.

* It is omniscient and omnipresent.

* It encompasses all things both the seen as well as the unseen.


All that already exist in physical form or are still being conceptualized in the mind are within the super consciousness.

From the emotional perspective, the superconscious mind contains all feeing and emotion such as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control as well as fear, sadness, turmoil, anger, greed, etc. It has everything that you choose to experience through your individual consciousness.

Given that the superconscious mind consists of everything in the universe, it therefore consists of all individual consciousness.

In follows that you as well as every other individual, exist as an individual consciousness yet an integral part of the whole superconscious mind, with the right of free will to exercise choices to determine what you want out of the "Infinite Field Of Potentiality."

The right of free will is what differentiates your individual consciousness with that of the superconscious mind. Your ability to choose your thoughts, beliefs, emotions and actions gives you the unique power to shape your own life.

How do you make this choice? Through your individual consciousness!

More specifically, you make your choice through your conscious mind, while your subconscious mind acts on the direction from the conscious mind to establish connection with the super conscious mind, which then avail to you all its unlimited power of creation.

It is clear now that both minds have their own unique and crucial role in the process of creation. Both work together to establish the connection with the superconscious mind, which is the ultimate source of unlimited power.

The entire business of our life is to establish the connection with the super consciousness, where all richness and abundance flow.

The activities that have greatest impact on our life happen at the mind level! And this refers to the subconscious mind – which is responsible for making that connection.

This explains why most people are only using 10% of their mind’s capability – because most of their mind work operates at the conscious level. They have not been utilizing their subconscious mind, which accounts for 90% of the mind’s capability.
The great German physicist Nerst found that the longer an electric current was made to flow through a filament of oxide of magnesium, the greater became the conductivity of the filament.

In the same way, the more you call upon and use your subconscious mind, the greater becomes its conductivity in passing along to you the infinite resources of superconscious mind.

Think of this power as something that you can connect with any time. It has the answer to all of your problems. It can sets you free from fear, worry, sickness, and accident. Other than yourself, no man can ever deter you from the use of this power or rob you of any share of it.

Success does not happen by accident. It happens under the operation of the Law of Cause and Effect: Your mind, working through your brain and body, creates your world. As Don Carlos Musser said aptly in “You Are”:

"Because of the law of gravity the apple falls to the ground. Because of the law of growth the acorn becomes a mighty oak. Because of the law of causation, a man is ‘as he thinketh in his heart.’ Nothing can happen without its adequate cause."



As you will read in the Law of Vibration, everything, including thought or consciousness exists as a vibration frequency, which is broadcast into the Superconsciousness.

The superconscious mind makes no distinctions or judgments as to whether the energy is lower form or higher form, whether it is good or bad, whether it is supposed to manifest them. They simply act on whatever energy they receive, attract more of the like energy and commence its manifestation process.

Remember we have mentioned earlier that it is the subconscious mind that makes connection with the super conscious mind. The problem is that most of the time people desire something desperately in their conscious mind, yet in their subconscious mind they have intense emotion on things that they do not desire.

In another word, there is a disharmony between their conscious and subconscious mind.

Taking job for example, people wanted a secured job and hence a secured source of income. However, what they focus on is the fear of losing their job.

Fear become a very intense emotion that occupies the subconscious mind most of the time, and as a result get broadcasted to the super consciousness continuously to reinforce its manifestation.

The way around this problem will be to let go of the fearful emotion, and replace it with an unshakable sense of confidence that your career will make progress in the way you had desired and visualized. The more often you experience emotions of anxiety and fear, the higher the chance of manifesting those that you fear and anxious about.

This aspect of mind control is never easy. It takes practices and determination to make it works. However, with the right mind control tools and resources, the process of mastering this important skill set can become more efficient and effective. When you are able to master the control of your mind, you master the world in you. The reward of mind mastery would be bountiful and life changing.

The promise of the super consciousness (some call it the God) is beyond doubt, as Jesus said in the Bible:

"If ye abide in me, and my word abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you."

"For verily I say unto you, that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he said shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith."

"The kingdom of God is within you."



For the skeptics, these are indisputable words of promises that one would only ignore at his own risk.

The writings are all over the wall. The power that abides in the super consciousness, or rather the God, is simply awesome and boundless. The beauty is, everybody has the divine heritage to this power and richness.

With the understanding that the conscious, subconscious, and the super conscious mind collectively form an integrated mind power system that is our divine birthright, you know very well now that the most important thing you can do for your life is to find the key to this unlimited source of happiness and prosperity!

piatok 15. januára 2010

Imagine if America were Occupied




Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe" or "promoting democracy" or "protecting their strategic interests."
Imagine that they operated outside of U.S. law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence.
Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers' attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but instead, for every American killed, 10 more would take up arms against them, resulting in perpetual bloodshed. Imagine if most of the citizens of the foreign land also wanted these troops to return home. Imagine if they elected a leader who promised to bring them home and put an end to this horror.
Imagine if that leader changed his mind once he took office.
The reality is that our military presence on foreign soil is as offensive to the people that live there as armed Chinese troops would be if they were stationed in Texas. We would not stand for it here, but we have had a globe-straddling empire and a very intrusive foreign policy for decades that incites a lot of hatred and resentment toward us.
According to our own CIA, our meddling in the Middle East was the prime motivation for the horrific attacks on 9/11. But instead of reevaluating our foreign policy, we have simply escalated it. We had a right to go after those responsible for 9/11, to be sure, but why do so many Americans feel as if we have a right to a military presence in some 160 countries when we wouldn't stand for even one foreign base on our soil, for any reason? These are not embassies, mind you, these are military installations. The new administration is not materially changing anything about this. Shuffling troops around and playing with semantics does not accomplish the goals of the American people, who simply want our men and women to come home. Fifty thousand troops left behind in Iraq is not conducive to peace any more than 50,000 Russian soldiers would be in the United States.
Shutting down military bases and ceasing to deal with other nations with threats and violence is not isolationism. It is the opposite. Opening ourselves up to friendship, honest trade, and diplomacy is the foreign policy of peace and prosperity. It is the only foreign policy that will not bankrupt us in short order, as our current actions most definitely will. I share the disappointment of the American people in the foreign policy rhetoric coming from the administration. The sad thing is, our foreign policy will change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.
by Rep. Ron Paul

štvrtok 14. januára 2010

Teddy Pendergrass- Can't we try

Teddy Pendergrass, soul singer, masculine voice and passionate love ballads singer  died Wednesday at age  59....
If I die today
Let me be the wind that dries your tears
If I die today
Let me be the gentle lullaby by your ears
If I die today
Let me walk by your side and lend you my shoulder
If I die today
Let me see you smile as I am here....



Thanks for the great music TEDDY! we'll miss you deeply :-(

utorok 12. januára 2010

Imagination


What is it that we spend most of our imagination on?
The future!
Our imagination is simple an “image” we create
of that which isn’t a reality yet.
It is what we think will be.
If we use our imagination to think that our future is going to be bad,
we call that pessimism,
and pessimism will never help you to become a success.
When we use our imagination to think of a great future,
we call that optimism
and optimism is the thing that will give your life flight.
When you have positive imagination,
when you can see all of the possibilities,
and see them as good,
then will your life take flight on the wings of optimistic imagination!

Since what we imagine is simply a choice of the will,
take some time today
to begin to foster optimism in your life.
Take a situation you think is going to turn out poorly
and begin to change how you think of it.
Use your imagination to see how that situation could turn out great!

source:http://www.tenmillionclicksforpeace.org

nedeľa 10. januára 2010

Rogue State- Introduction

  American journalist and writer - William Blum wrote in the third edition of his book "Rogue State" as follows:


"If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently...

1) I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism.

2)Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America's global interventions have come to an end,

3) and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but now -- oddly enough -- a foreign country.

I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims. There would be more than enough money.

One year's military budget of 330 billion dollars is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.

That's what I'd do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I'd be assassinated."

..... next I immediately started to looking for something more about William Blum and his book "Rough state" . Introduction of it I read on one breath and what could I say ...breathtaking reading.....



For 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that 1 there was an international conspiracy out there. An International Communist Conspiracy, seeking no less than control over the entire planet, for purposes which had no socially redeeming values. And the world was made to believe that it somehow needed the United States to save it from communist darkness. "Just buy our weapons," said Washington, "let our military and our corporations roam freely across your land, and give us veto power over whom your leaders will be, and we'll protect you."
It was the cleverest protection racket since men convinced women that they needed men to protect them-if all the men vanished overnight, how many women would be afraid to walk the streets?
And if the people of any foreign land were benighted enough to not realize that they needed to be saved, if they failed to appreciate the underlying nobility of American motives, they were warned that they would burn in Communist Hell. Or a CIA facsimile thereof. And they would be saved nonetheless.
A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still saving countries and peoples from one danger or another. The scorecard reads as follows: From 1945 to the end of the century, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life ~f agony and despair.
As I write this in Washington, DC, in April 1999, the United States is busy saving Yugoslavia. Bombing a modem, sophisticated society back to a pre-industrial age. And The Great American Public, in its infinite wisdom, is convinced that its government is motivated by "humanitarian" impulses.
Washington is awash with foreign dignitaries here to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, three days of unprecedented pomp and circumstance. The prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers, despite their rank, are delighted to be included amongst the schoolyard bully's close friends. Private corporations are funding the opulent weekend; a dozen of them paying $250,000 apiece to have one of their executives serve as a director on the NATO Summit's host committee. Many of the same firms lobbied hard to expand NATO by adding the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, each of which will be purchasing plentiful quantities of military hardware from these companies.
This marriage of NATO and the transnationals is the foundation of the New World Order, the name George Bush gave to the American Empire. The credibility of the New World Order depends upon the world believing that the new world will be a better one for the multitude of humanity, not just for those for whom too much is not enough, and believing that the leader of the New World Order, the United States, means well.
Let's have a short look at some modem American history, which may be instructive. A congressional report of 1994 informed us that:
Approximately 60,000 military personnel were used as human subjects in the 1940s to test two chemical agents, mustard gas and lewisite [blister gas]. Most of these subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments and never received medical followup after their participation in the research. Additionally, some of these human subjects were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed these experiments with anyone, including their wives, parents and family doctors. For decades, the Pentagon denied that the research had taken place, resulting in decades of suffering for many veterans who became ill after the secret testing.
Now let's skip ahead to the 1990s. Many thousands of American soldiers came home from the Gulf War with unusual, debilitating ailments. Exposure to harmful chemical or biological agents was suspected, but the Pentagon denied that this had occurred. Years went by while the Gls suffered terribly: neurological problems, chronic fatigue, skin problems, scarred lungs, memory loss, muscle and joint pain, severe headaches, personality changes, passing out and much more. Eventually, the Pentagon, inch by inch, was forced to move away from its denials and admit that, yes, chemical weapon depots had been bombed; then, yes, there probably were releases of the deadly poisons; then, yes, American servicemen were indeed in the vicinity of these poisonous releases, 400 soldiers; then, it might have been 5,000; then, "a very large number", probably more than 15,000i then, finally, a precise number-20,867; then, "The Pentagon announced that a long awaited computer model estimates that nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers could have been exposed to trace amounts of sarin gas..."
Soldiers were also forced to take vaccines against anthrax and nerve gas not approved by the FDA as safe and effective, and punished, sometimes treated like criminals, if they refused. (During World War II, US soldiers were forced to take a yellow fever vaccine, with the result that some 330,000 of them were infected with the hepatitis B virus.3) Finally, in late 1999, almost nine years after the Gulf Wars end, the Defense Department announced that a drug given to soldiers to protect them against a particular nerve gas, "cannot be ruled out" as a cause of lingering illnesses in some veterans.4
The Pentagon brass, moreover, did not warm American soldiers of the grave danger of being in close proximity to expended depleted uranium weapons on the battlefield.
If the Pentagon had been much more forthcoming from the outset about what it knew all along about these various substances and weapons, the soldiers might have had a proper diagnosis early on and received appropriate care sooner. The cost in terms of human suffering was incalculable. One gauge of that cost may lie in the estimate that one-third of the homeless in America are military veterans.
And in the decades between the 1940s and 1990s, what do we find? A remarkable variety of government programs, either formally, or in effect, using soldiers as guinea pigs-marched to nuclear explosion sites, with pilots then sent through the mushroom clouds; subjected to chemical and biological weapons experiments; radiation experiments; behavior modification experiments that washed their brains with LSDi exposure tO the dioxin of Agent Orange in Korea and Vietnam...the list goes on...literally millions of experimental subjects, seldom given a choice or adequate information, often with disastrous effects to their physical and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even monitoring.
The moral of this little slice of history is simple: If the United States government does not care about the health and welfare of its own soldiers, if our leaders are not moved by the prolonged pain and suffering of the wretched warriors enlisted to fight the empire's wars, how can it be argued, how can it be believed, that they care about foreign peoples? At all.
When the Dalai Lama was asked by a CIA officer in 1995: "Did we do a good or bad thing in providing this support [to the Tibetans]?'', the Tibetan spiritual leader replied that though it helped the morale of those resisting the Chinese, "thousands of lives were lost in the resistance" and that "the U.S. Government had involved itself in his country's affairs not to help Tibet but only as a Cold War tactic to challenge the Chinese."
"Let me tell you about the very rich," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. "They are different from you and me."
So are our leaders.
Consider Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter. In a 1998 interview he admitted that the official story that the US gave military aid to the Afghanistan opposition only after the Soviet invasion in 1979 was a lie. The truth was, he said, that the US began aiding the Islamic fundamentalist Moujahedeen six months before the Russians made their move, even though he believed-and told this to Carter-that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention".
Brzezinski was asked whether he regretted this decision.
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it' The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.7
Besides the fact that there is no demonstrable connection between the Afghanistan war and the breakup of the Soviet empire, we are faced with the consequences of that war: the defeat of a government committed to bringing the extraordinarily backward nation into the 20th century; the breathtaking carnage; Moujahedeen torture that even US government officials called "indescribable horror"; half the population either dead, disabled or refugees the spawning of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who have unleashed atrocities in numerous countries; and the unbelievable repression of women in Afghanistan, instituted by America's wartime allies.
And for playing a key role in causing all this, Zbigniew Brzezinski has no regrets. Regrets? The man is downright proud of it! The kindest thing one can say about such a person-as about a sociopath-is that he's amoral. At least in his public incarnation, which is all we're concerned with here. In medieval times he would have been called Zbigniew the Terrible.
And what does this tell us about Jimmy Carter, whom many people think of as perhaps the only halfway decent person to occupy the White House since Roosevelt? Or is it Lincoln?
In 1977, when pressed by journalists about whether the US had a moral obligation to help rebuild Vietnam, President Carter responded: "Well, the destruction was mutual."9 (Perhaps when he observed the devastation of the South Bronx later that year, he was under the impression that it had been caused by Vietnamese bombing.)
In the now-famous exchange on TV between Madeleine Albright and reporter Lesley Stahl, the latter was speaking of US sanctions against Iraq, and asked the then-US ambassador to the UN: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And-and you know, is the price worth it."
Replied Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it."
One can give Albright the absolute full benefit of any doubt and say that she had no choice but to defend administration policy. But what kind of person is it who takes a job appointment knowing full well that she will be an integral part of such ongoing policies and will be expected to defend them without apology? Not long afterwards, Albright was appointed Secretary of State.
Lawrence Summers is another case in point. In December 1991, while chief economist for the World Bank, he wrote an internal memo saying that the Bank should encourage migration of "the dirty industries" to the less-developed countries because, amongst other reasons, health-impairing and death-causing pollution costs would be lower. Inasmuch as these costs are based on the lost earnings of the affected workers, in a country of very low wages the computed costs would be (much lower. "I think," he wrote, "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." Despite this memo receiving wide distribution and condemnation, Summers, in 1999, was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Clinton. This was a promotion from being Undersecretary of the Treasury-for international affairs.
We also have Clinton himself, who on day 33 of the aerial devastation of Yugoslavia-33 days and nights of destroying villages, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, the ecology, separating people from their limbs, from their eyesight, spilling their intestines, traumatizing children for the rest of their days...destroying a life the Serbians will never know again-on day 33 William Jefferson Clinton, cautioning against judging the bombing policy prematurely, saw fit to declare: "This may seem like a long time. [But] I don't think that this air campaign has been going on a particularly long time." And then the man continued it another 45 days.
Clinton's vice president, Albert Gore, appears eminently suitable to succeed him to the throne. In 1998, he put great pressure on South Africa, threatening trade sanctions if the government didn't cancel plans to use much cheaper generic AIDS drugs, which would cut into US companies' sales. South Africa, it should be noted, has about three million HlV-positive persons among its largely impoverished population. When Gore, who at the time had significant ties to the drug industry, was heckled for what he had done during a speech in New York, he declined to respond in substance, but instead called out: "I love this country. I love the First Amendment."
It's interesting to note that when Madeleine Albright was heckled in Columbus, Ohio in February 1998, while defending the administration's Iraq policy, she yelled: "We are the greatest country in the world!"
Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, though Gore's and Albright's words don't quite have the ring of "Deutschland uber alles" or "Rule Britannia".
In 1985, Ronald Reagan, demonstrating the preeminent intellect for which he was esteemed, tried to show how totalitarian the Soviet Union was by declaring: "I'm no linguist, but I've been told that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for 'freedom'." In light of the above cast of characters and their declarations, can we ask if there's a word in American English for "embarrassment"?
No, it is not simply that power corrupts and dehumanizes.
Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel.
It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.
There's a sort of Peter Principle at work here. Laurence Peter wrote that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Perhaps we can postulate that in a foreign policy establishment committed to imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees tend to rise to the level of cruelty they can live with.
A few days after the bombing of Yugoslavia had ended, the New York Times published as its lead article in the Sunday Week in Review, a piece by Michael Wines, which declared that "Human rights had been
elevated to a military priority and a preeminent Western value...The war only underscored the deep ideological divide between an idealistic New World bent on ending inhumanity and an Old World equally fatalistic about unending conflict...there is also a yawning gap between the West and much of the world on the value of a single life."
And so on. A paean to the innate goodness of the West, an ethos unfortunately not shared by much of the rest of the world, who, Wines lamented, "just don't buy into Western notions of rights and responsibilities." The Times fed us this morality tale after "the West" had just completed the most ferocious sustained bombing of a nation in the history of the planet, a small portion of whose dreadful consequences are referred to above.
During the American bombing of Iraq in 1991, the previous record for sustained ferociousness, a civilian air raid shelter was destroyed by a depleted-uranium projectile, incinerating to charred blackness many hundreds of people, a great number of them women and children. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, reiterating US military statements that the shelter had been a command-and-control center, said: "We don't know why civilians were at that location, but we do know that Saddam Hussein does not share our value for the sanctity of human life."~8
Similarly, during the Vietnam War, President Johnson and other government officials assured us that Asians don't have the same high regard for human life as Americans do. We were told this, of course, as American bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and helicopter gunships were disintegrating the Vietnamese and their highly regarded lives.
And at the same time, on a day in February 1966, David Lawrence, the editor of US News & World Report was moved to put the following words to paper: "What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times."
I sent Mr. Lawrence a copy of a well-done pamphlet entitled American Atrocities in Vietnam, which gave graphic detail of its subject. To this I attached a note which first repeated Lawrence's quotation with his name below it, then added: "One of us is crazy", followed by my name.
Lawrence responded with a full page letter, at the heart of which was: "I think a careful reading of it [the pamphlet] will prove the point I was trying to make-namely that primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence."
The American mind-as exemplified by that of Michael Wines and David Lawrence-is, politically, so deeply formed that to liberate it would involve uncommon, and as yet perhaps undiscovered, philosophical and surgical skill. The great majority of Americans, even the most cynical, who need no convincing that the words that come out (of a politician's mouth are a blend of mis-, dis- and non-information, and should always carry a veracity health warning - appear to lose their critical faculties when confronted by "our boys who are risking their lives". If love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.
To the extent that the cynicism of these Americans is directed toward their government's habitual foreign adventures, it's to question whether the administration's stated interpretation of a situation is valid, whether the stated goals are worthwhile, and whether the stated goals can be achieved-but not to question the government's motivation. It is assumed a priory that our leaders mean well by the foreign people involved-no matter how much death, destruction and suffering their policies objectively result in.



author:  William Blum
source: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Intro_RogueState.html

sobota 9. januára 2010

What is Wrong?













In answer to the question "What's wrong?"

The wife says: The same old thing.
The wife means: Nothing.


The wife says: Nothing.
The wife means: Everything.

The wife says: Nothing, really.
The wife means: It's just that you're an idiot.

The wife says: I don't want to talk about it.
The wife means: I'm still building up steam.

štvrtok 7. januára 2010

Retirement






















For over 40 years, my grandfather put in long hours at his job, so I was more than a little curious about the way he filled his days since his retirement. "How has life changed?"

A man of few words, he replied, "Well I get up in the morning with nothing to do, and I go to bed at night with it half done."

pondelok 4. januára 2010

The Great American Bubble Machine - Matt Taibbi

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine



The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumercredit rates, halfeaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them. read all article>>>>


translation/preklad>>>>>>

sobota 2. januára 2010

Paul Craig Roberts: Relocating Guantanamo

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12222009.html
Relocating Guantánamo



By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises--the closing of the Guantanamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.

In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process and ceasing to torture them in violation of US and international laws.

All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the US government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantanamo to a prison in Thomson, Illinois.

Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the US government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of US legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.

The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantanamo. Now the prisoners are up against two US senators, a US representative, a mayor, and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.

Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan war lords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” in order to collect a proffered bounty. It was enough for the public and the media that the Defense Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantanamo detainees to be the “780 most dangerous people on earth.”

The vast majority have been released after years of abuse. The 100 who are slated to be removed to Illinois have apparently been so badly abused that the US government is afraid to release them because of the testimony the prisoners could give to human rights organizations and foreign media about their mistreatment.

Our British allies are showing more moral conscience than Americans are able to muster. Former PM Tony Blair, who provided cover for President Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, is being damned for his crimes by UK officialdom testifying before the Chilcot Inquiry.

The London Times on December 14 summed up the case against Blair in a headline: “Intoxicated by Power, Blair Tricked Us Into War.” Two days later the British First Post declared: “War Crime Case Against Tony Blair Now Rock-solid.” In an unguarded moment Blair let it slip that he favored a conspiracy for war regardless of the validity of the excuse [weapons of mass destruction] used to justify the invasion.

The movement to bring Blair to trial as a war criminal is gathering steam. Writing in the First Post Neil Clark reported: “There is widespread contempt for a man [Blair] who has made millions [his reward from the Bush regime] while Iraqis die in their hundreds of thousands due to the havoc unleashed by the illegal invasion, and who, with breathtaking arrogance, seems to regard himself as above the rules of international law.” Clark notes that the West’s practice of shipping Serbian and African leaders off to the War Crimes Tribunal, while exempting itself, is wearing thin.

In the US, of course, there is no such attempt to hold to account Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the large number of war criminals that comprised the Bush Regime. Indeed, Obama, whom Republicans love to hate, has gone out of his way to protect the Bush cohort from being held accountable.

Here in Great Moral America we only hold accountable celebrities and politicians for their sexual indiscretions. Tiger Woods is paying a bigger price for his girlfriends than Bush or Cheney will ever pay for the deaths and ruined lives of millions of people. The consulting company, Accenture Plc, which based its marketing program on Tiger Woods, has removed Woods from its Web site. Gillette announced that the company is dropping Woods from its print and broadcast ads. AT&T says it is re-evaluating the company’s relationship with Woods.

Apparently, Americans regard sexual infidelity as far more serious than invading countries on the basis of false charges and deception, invasions that have caused the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent people. Remember, the House impeached President Clinton not for his war crimes in Serbia, but for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Americans are more upset by Tiger Woods’ sexual affairs than they are by the Bush and Obama administrations’ destruction of US civil liberty. Americans don’t seem to mind that “their” government for the last 8 years has resorted to the detention practices of 1,000 years ago--simply grab a person and throw him into a dungeon forever without bringing charges and obtaining a conviction.

According to polls, Americans support torture, a violation of both US and international law, and Americans don’t mind that their government violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spies on them without obtaining warrants from a court. Apparently, the brave citizens of the “sole remaining superpower” are so afraid of terrorists that they are content to give up liberty for safety, an impossible feat.

With stunning insouciance, Americans have given up the rule of law that protected their liberty. The silence of law schools and bar associations indicates that the age of liberty has passed. In short, the American people support tyranny. And that’s where they are headed.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, How the Economy was Lost, will be published next month by AK Press / CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

...still not end of all days!...ešte nie je všetkých dní koniec!



No, there is still  not end of all days!
still the light occasionally visits  us,
though the sky mostly cloudy is and dark,
the sun always enough strong  and glowing is,
as to at least a hint of the warm and light to gratify us,
as to pours a sparkle of flame into the our veins ,
tremblement of delight, in the soul an ebullience...

No, there is still  not end of all days!
though from behind dark clouds cannot see the stars,
even only the vague features of moon could recognize,
here and there still a guttered light of lantern leaks out,
when in the dark on your path you hang around,
and a strong impression sprouts in your mind...

No, there is still  not end of all days!
When you alone sit in  dark dwelling,
a flame in the fireplace burned out and rotted,
when the inner and outer dark get fused together,
is here still a candle which dim up the darkness,
are here the sparkles, which strike through us both...

If we chase out the fear, which in the blackness us leads,
when we overcome our inner selfish ego,
when we each other give hand by hand,
not allowing to be clouded our sight,
when will inflame fire in our hearts,
with love we overcome the darkness and the cold.


...ešte nie je všetkých dní koniec!

nie ešte nie je všetkých dní koniec
ešte svetlo ku nám sem-tam zavíta
aj keď obloha zväčša temná je a zatiahnutá
slnko ešte stále dosť sily ma
by troškou svetla, teplá obdarilo nás
by do našich žíl vlialo iskierku jasu,
záchvev radostí a do duše elán...

nie ešte nie je všetkých dní koniec
aj keď spoza temných mrakov hviezdičku nevidíš,
len nejasné kontúry mesiaca rozoznáš.
Ešte kde-tu sliepňavé svetielko preniká
keď po tme svojím chodníčkom sa potĺkáš
 silné tušenie v myslí tvojej klíči...

nie ešte nie je všetkých dní koniec,
keď sám v temnom sedíš svojom obydlí,
keď oheň v pahrebe dotlie a dohorí,
keď zvonku a zvnútra temnota dovedna zliali sa,
ešte je tu sviečka čo rozvidní temnotu,
sú tu ešte iskry, čo presvitajú z nás ...

keď zaženieme strach, ktorý nás do temnôt zaháňa,
keď premôžeme v sebe svoje vlastné sebectvo
keď ruky si navzájom všetci podáme,
nedovolíme by zrak sa nám zakalil,
keď rozhorí sa oheň v našich srdciach
láskou premôžeme temnotu a chlad...

(c) shipka