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70's global cold map compared with cold map today. 
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Jan 6, 2010; 8:40 AM ET
Lengthy but so worth the time to read.
"Here In The Long Solemn Dark: An Examination Of Global Elitism
By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press - 1/02/2010
"Inherent in every human being lurk the qualities that make us capable of indelible and enduring good, or astounding and catastrophic evil. Many of us struggle with these natural inborn psychological dualities every day of our lives. With the help of conscience; the ever present voice of the unconscious which guides us towards balance, many of us survive the internal battle without inflicting too much damage on the innocent bystanders around us.
I used to believe that all people endured this same struggle equally, that everyone wanted to eventually achieve that ever elusive self awareness that cuts through the fog of life and makes us feel whole. I believed that all men who committed terrible crimes and injustices against others did so out of ignorance and blindness. Surely, they had lost their way, and did not fully understand the implications of their actions. This did not make them any less responsible, but could they not be redeemed? Had they not let their own shadows run wild in the daylight without knowing the consequences? Weren’t all of us, even the worst of us, deep down still striving to do what was right?
In this belief I must now admit, if I am to remain true to my conscience, I was terribly mistaken…
What I did not comprehend when I was younger was that not all men struggle against the dark corners of their own hearts. Some men revel in them. Some men embrace their failings, their hatred and their envy, their vicious desire for control over their environment and those in it, and they do it deliberately, completely aware of the imbalance and pain they are inflicting on others. Where I see weakness of character, they see untapped strength; the strength of cold and unrestrained malevolence. They were not “victims” of their own ignorance. These men had traversed the River Styx and glimpsed the mythological gates of hell, the psychological barrier between saints and madmen. They stood at the edge of reason and truth, looked out into the nightmarish abyss at the back of their own psyches, and liked what they saw!
If there was ever anything closer to the definition of “evil,” I have not heard of it.
This methodology, this philosophy of embracing one’s darker nature, is ever present in an organized group of people we have come to label “Global Elites.” They have existed in various forms for centuries but their goals have always been the same. In this article, we will examine some of the early influences that gave birth to the elitist philosophy, as well as some possible explanations as to why they do what they do.
Plato: Catalyst For Elitism
Elitism has existed perhaps as long as man has existed, but was not implemented on a broad social scale until the formation of empires such as Babylon. It later blossomed into a full fledged brand of “spiritualism” under the watchful eyes of the Greek aristocracy and the tutelage of Plato, or as elitists sometimes dub him, “The Divine Plato.”
It is hard to say so many centuries later what the real intention of Plato’s Dialogues were. Did he mean them to stand only as metaphorical sociological examinations, as questions designed to promote healthy debate? Or, did he write them as a blueprint for society expecting them to be translated literally and then implemented in the real world? Whatever he originally intended, his views on social structure became the underlying foundation for the monstrous organized brand of Global Elitism we now know today. These views are most prominent in Plato’s “Republic,” however, they are present in nearly all of his works.
Plato had a very low opinion of the majority of the human populace, often stating that the concept of Democracy; rule by the common man, was far less than ideal. In one of Plato’s famous arguments, he proposes that it is better to be ruled by a bad tyrant, than be a part of a bad democracy, since in a bad democracy, all the people would be responsible for the terrible deeds of a nation, rather than one individual (of course, Plato fails to realize that by letting a “bad tyrant” come to power in the first place, the people are still ALL responsible for any terrible act that tyrant commits). Instead, he believed, there were several levels in which society could form itself, and he listed them in order of significance:
Aristocracy (rule by the best)
Timocracy (rule by the honorable)
Oligarchy (rule by the few)
Democracy (rule by the people)
Tyranny (rule by one person, rule by a tyrant)
Plato seems to see no threat in the idea of Aristocracy, and the possibility of a group of men labeled “best” reverting to tyranny appears to have never dawned on him. This is even more evident in his idea of the “Philosopher Kings”; a “guardian class” who are so steeped in knowledge and wisdom as to be nearly infallible and ideally suited to rule over the lives of others. The elites of today salivate over such concepts, because they provide an easy avenue for the justification of their own political ideals of feudal rulership. In fact, Plato and his Philosopher King scenario were often expounded by University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss. Strauss’ teachings went on to become the political linchpin for what we now call “Neo-Conservatism:”
http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-iraqwarphiloshophy/article_1542.jsp
http://www.jeetheer.com/politics/strauss.htm
Strauss promoted many of Plato’s more questionable tenets, including the idea of the “Noble Lie.” In his book “Persecution and the Art of Writing”, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals (reprisals they likely deserve). He also believed that the only true balance in human nature was the will of the strong; the idea that morality is built upon the views of those who are strongest. The weak had no choice but to adopt the implicit morality of the strong.
Strauss often talked of the need for a moral imperative and even a benevolent God, but interestingly, Strauss was not only an atheist (according to some of his own colleagues), but also a moral relativist. Young and naïve students of Neo-Conservatism often argue that Strauss was a promoter of high morals because he mentions them so often in his books, but they do not seem to understand the context in which he uses them. Strauss felt that a moral framework was a useful tool in manipulating the masses, and nothing more. He was in no way a man of conscience. Religion or any other system that focused on the development of conscience was meant for the lowly serfs, while the elite “Philosopher Kings” would rule with their own set of virtues, virtues to which the commoners were supposedly not equipped to mentally grasp.
What Plato accomplished, and Strauss later expanded on, was the mutation of elitism from a mere political movement with many undesirable consequences, into a full fledged philosophy bordering on cultism. Elitists were no longer simply an overprivileged class of tyrants and sadists making the lives of common men miserable, now, they were “necessary” to the very mechanics of society. They were “guardians” with the godlike responsibility of molding and directing the course of all humanity. Without them, we would be “lost.”
The weaknesses of this methodology are numerous and obvious. It promotes the concept of “equality as illusion,” which may have some legitimacy since all people are born with inherent and unique qualities. However, men like Strauss take this fact and twist it, claiming that because we are all different, this means that some of us must be naturally “better” than others, and therefore, elite. This is an extremely childish interpretation of inborn dynamics.
According to the archetypal discoveries of Carl Jung, we are all born with the same psychological constructs, however, each person has a unique relationship to these constructs, meaning, the way in which we embody the archetypes we are born with is particular to each individual. This means that while every person may develop a different brand of intelligence, unless there is a physical brain impairment, we are ALL capable of being intelligent. The elitist philosophy extolled by Plato and Strauss claims that some people are simply born far more intelligent than others, and that these people, being so naturally advanced, should be given free reign to make our decisions for us.
Who is qualified to categorize human beings into such narrow labels? Who decides what intelligence truly is? While one group may focus more on intellect and critical thought, prizing logic above all else, another may see intuition and emotional advancement as true brilliance. How can one determine if a person is hindered rationally and emotionally to the point of being incapable of progress? Does the theory of Plato not limit all men into static states of being? Have people not proven century after century, generation after generation, that we have the ability to change, adapt, and grow?
Some may argue that the lack of intelligence in the average man is blindingly apparent if one only looks around himself. But this way of thinking is based on an invalid assumption; the assumption that because a man acts unintelligent, he is therefore incapable of ever being intelligent. One contradiction I find most interesting about elitists is that they often preach about the natural stupidity of common people, yet, they place most of their massive resources into keeping the public unaware and “out of the loop.” If the average man is so “naturally inept,” then why have elitists put so much energy into trying to keep us stupid? Why do they keep information, data, the truth of the world, to themselves? Are we not so mentally handicapped that we would not understand the truth even if we knew it?
The fact is, they KNOW we are intelligent, why else would they feel the need for secrecy and lies?
While given the appearance or the dressings of wisdom, the elitist ideal is actually a mish-mash of highly flawed theories and biases flung together so that they may absolve themselves of their crimes against conscience and against mankind. By the standards of logic alone, they have proven themselves to be far less intelligent than they wish others to believe.
Machiavelli: The Methods Of Control
If any historical figure wholly embodies the elitist ethic, it would have to be Niccolo Machiavelli. Most famous for his political treatise entitled The Prince, Machiavelli was an aristocrat extraordinaire, counseling numerous monarchies on the best methods for controlling their respective populace. He was also a military advisor and writer of strategies on war, giving his ideas for social manipulation a cold and violent edge.
Some historians argue that Machiavelli’s works on political subversion and tyranny are actually a form of satire, because no one would reveal his secrets of control in the way Machiavelli did unless he was trying to expose the horror of elitism. I find this theory highly unlikely. Machiavelli was an advisor to kings, not a revolutionary with any desire to rock the boat he had been sitting in his whole life. I think it much more likely that he was simply an egomaniac, perfectly willing to speak openly about his disdain for the masses, as many elites are.
The most important (and dangerous) philosophy Machiavelli put forward was his view on good results accomplished by evil deeds. Machiavelli lived at the edge of the Renaissance, and perhaps saw before many that the world was changing. In the past, elites could easily abuse the people through force of arms, and there was no need to paint a kinder picture on their own despotism. However, a sense of revolution, a hatred of monarchy was growing in the populace. The need to manipulate the public through rhetoric instead of only violence was becoming more evident. The people now had to be tricked into going along with their slavery, and Machiavelli was perfectly willing to devise strategies for this eventuality.
He did this by promoting the idea of “the end justifies the means.” That is to say, if elites wanted to remain in control of the public, they had to convince the public that evil deeds were necessary in order to achieve a “greater good.” This was the first truly cognizant formation of what would be later called “Moral Relativism,” although, Machiavelli was more of the opinion that rather than being amoral, all men were inherently bad. Here are some quotes from Machiavelli on these points:
“Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.”
“As all those have shown who have discussed civil institutions, and as every history is full of examples, it is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity; and if such malignity is hidden for a time, it proceeds from the unknown reason that would not be known because the experience of the contrary had not been seen, but time, which is said to be the father of every truth, will cause it to be discovered.”
“The people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison and in servitude, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.”
Among other things, Machiavelli taught that a tyrannical ruler must offer up a proxy, a sacrificial lamb to the public in order to maintain their complicity. In his time, rulers would execute former leaders, councilmen, advisors, and others who were expendable in order to satisfy the public’s need for justice, while at the same time maintaining control over them. This strategy has been honed to perfection in the U.S. political system, in which the elites control both major parties. By sacrificing the public image of George W. Bush, the elites were able to stave off the growing discontent among Americans over the government. They then replaced him with Barack Obama, a man whose policies are nearly identical to Bush’s. In this way, Machiavelli has influenced the cultures of today.
The problem with the “ends justify the means” argument is that it treats the “means” as a sine qua non.
Say my goal is world peace, but I use lies, war, genocide, and oppression to achieve it. Then, I make the claim afterwards that all this death and destruction is vindicated because world peace was in fact achieved. My assumption here is that world peace could not have been achieved without the destruction. What grounds do I have for this assumption? The answer is none, because no other method was attempted to achieve peace. I have also assumed that there are no new methods for achieving peace, methods which I had not thought of. Therefore, the “ends” DO NOT justify the “means,” because there are many means to an end, some far more honorable than others.
So, what point of reference do we have to determine whether means are justifiable? The answer is conscience, something we will discuss greatly in the next section.
The Marquis de Sade: Do What Thou Wilt
Many people have a tendency to become preoccupied with the elements of sexual perversion when examining the work of the Marquis de Sade, but this is really a side note to the bigger issues at hand. The real root of the Marquis’ message is one of corruption, dominance, and amorality. His sexual escapades were merely a means by which he expressed these “values.” He said:
“There is nothing either fundamentally good, nor anything fundamentally evil; Everything is relative, relative to our point of view.”
From this single rationalization, all the horrors of Global Elitism can be attributed. Through the philosophy of Moral Relativism, any crime, any injustice, any infliction of pain or death on others, can be easily placated as “natural” to the specific viewpoint or circumstance of the man committing the terrible act. The Marquis de Sade’s nihilist worldview can be summed up as follows:
(1) God’s nonexistence reduces the universe to a purely materialist Nature, a self-running mechanism; “the perpetual motion of matter explains everything.”
(2) People are determinist machines, which annuls moral responsibility. You cannot help it, then, if you are sexually perverse or depraved.
(3) There is no afterlife, so your conduct does not matter.
(4) Merely the child of local custom, morality is relative to culture and geography, and therefore fictive.
(5) Nature is our only ethical guide; humans are no more significant to Nature than insects. And since Nature uses matter from dead life forms to create new ones, crime, destruction, and death are necessary and pleasing to her. Therefore murder is good, and the mass murderer is the highest human type.
(6) Born isolated, the individual is solely important, with obligations to nobody and only selfish motivations. Each individual is pitted against all others. His only maxim is to “Enjoy myself, at no matter whose expense.”
(7) Man tends naturally to dominate others and inflict pain, which he enjoys.
(8) Ordinary people are utilitarian objects, the playthings of the wealthy, powerful and godlike libertines, who are utterly unloving.
(9) Beauty and innocence inspire only diabolical cruelty. Since materialism makes pleasure proportional to stimulus, the greater your cruelty, the greater your pleasure.
(10) Maximum selfishness and cruelty are therefore the proper course.
The key to the entirety of Moral Relativism is the belief that we are born as “blank slates,” and therefore our belief in right and wrong is completely dependent upon our environment, meaning, morality is an empty product of cultural taboo. This is, of course, entirely false, and has been proven incorrect by numerous scientists and psychologists. Watch the film linked below for an in-depth analysis of the failings of Blank Slate Theory:
Setting the debate over the existence of God aside, the psychological reality is, all human beings have an inherent archetypal sense of what we call good and evil, and this sense is common to every culture regardless of environmental conditions, proving The Marquis de Sade’s conclusions false. Conscience is the messenger, or the interpreter if you will, of the archetypal sense of balance.
Although the Marquis’ philosophy is logically impractical not to mention psychotic, it does illustrate very well the elitist mindset.
A rapist, for instance, often does not derive much pleasure from the sexual act itself, but the control involved over others. Thinking of elitists in such a way helps in understanding the warped reasoning behind their actions. Like the Marquis de Sade, elites are so possessed by their unlimited desire for power and control that they themselves fall into their own pattern of self created determinism. Finding that they will never have enough control to satiate their desires, and discovering that such power over the environment is unreachable, they turn towards thoughts of complete destruction. For them, destruction is the pinnacle of control.
What we also find is that the egotism of elites causes them to strive for what they feel is “true individualism.” They see conscience as psychological bondage, a will imposed on them by society, or the universe itself. By breaking free of conscience, they believe they have achieved ultimate freedom, and elevated themselves to a plane beyond the common man. This is called “transcendence through evil.”
But by disowning their inborn qualities, they have actually lost everything that gives them individuality, as well as humanity. They have essentially made themselves inwardly dead, soulless dolls driven by nothing but base desire. Instead of self-destructing under the weight of such ambition, they have focused it all into a single collective goal….
The New World Order: Destined For Failure
The New World Order which the Global Elites speak of so often is not just a political shift, or a social reformation; it is an attempt to subvert the human psyche. It is an attempt to defy nature. Controlling the lives of the masses is not enough. What they want most, is to transmute the human heart and bend it in any manner they wish until all traces of conscience and individualism have vanished from the species. Such an act could take centuries, perhaps millennia, and even then it may still be impossible.
When examining the shift towards the NWO, I often take into account the elitist fascination with the game of chess. Zbigniew Brzezinski makes this fascination laughably obvious in his book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives.” I am an avid chess player myself, and I understand the game well.
In order to win consistently in chess, one must above all things become exceedingly ruthless. There can be no momentary lapses of compassion. This is something the elites strive for. You must also be willing to sacrifice any piece in order to meet the greater objective; another elitist trait.
In the game of chess, the greatest players do not win so much by attacking their opponent; they win by forcing their opponent to move in the way they want, until, in effect, the opponent defeats himself. This is a fulcrum point for the strategy of Globalism. They set the noose upon our necks, but it is our aimless struggling that tightens it until we suffocate.
The problem is, life is NOT a chess game. People do not follow straightforward patterns laid out beforehand. Some of us walk off the board entirely. Some of us make our own rules. Sometimes, the pawns change the entire dynamic of the game, and this is why the elites will fail. We aren’t playing anymore.
The elites often boast of possessing an unparalleled wisdom, an awareness that supercedes all others. If they had attained any wisdom, however, they would have already realized the futility in attempting to control the destinies of other men. Such power is in itself an illusion, for the only power over us is that which we give away. Therefore, the elites only have power over us in so much as we give them explicit consent. All it takes is for one man to say “no,” and the entire web begins to unravel. Control of the world is a fantasy, a cartoon, a cabaret, a childish whimsy that those with legitimate wisdom grow out of. The farce can only continue so long as everyone submits to deception.
Here humanity waits, standing still in the long solemn dark, poised to step from the cold cast shadow into daylight. The great threat to elitism has been and always will be the so called “common man.” We are the honest and faithful explorers of the soul, unhindered by presumptions of superiority or fixations of malice. We are the antithesis, the counterweight, the opposing force, for we seek no power, no dominance, no control over the world; only understanding. We are the future, not the elites. Their time is nearly over, and with their passing, may we see all the horrors they have wrought undone, until life can be lived the way it desperately needs to be lived; with wide eyes, with honor, with sincerity.
Strength, real strength, comes not from the exile of conscience, or surrender to the murky waters of amorality; it comes from trust in one’s own heart. It comes from that intuitive knowing, knowing without calculation or observation. It comes from the utter invincibility of truth; a force against which even the most depraved of elites cannot stand."
Posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 1:47 pm "Muliple photos of train having to be dug out of snow.
Chinese site, Babelfish translation of first photo below.
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"On January 4, the fire soldier receives nearby the passenger train which in the Inner Mongolian business the storm sieges to remove snow the emergency. On January 3 18:00, the Inner Mongolian area has the heavy snow suddenly, when sends out Baotou's 1814 train line by Harbin to Ulanchap city Chahar right wing north banner Ben Hongzhi the Shangdu County 18 kilometers place, is sieged by the heavy snow in the big ravine, on the vehicle 1500 passenger is stranded.
http://shehui.daqi.com/editor/huandeng/ent_huandeng/2786059/1.html
Hat tip to my son for this video.
Take a listen at 12:58, Mike Kim .... Cash for Clunkers was a Chinese brainchild program. The US "had to send them a bunch of metal and steel instead of US dollars for them [Chinese] to give any type of credit to the US."
Overwhelm to the breaking point. Here comes amnesty and automatic citizenship ...... shoving law abiding applicants for citizenship to the back of the line.
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"Obama Readying Immigration Overhaul Despite Political Risks
Source Baltimoresun.com
http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/sns-dc-immig29-final,0,5744314,full.story
Ran across this last night.
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OBAMA AND BIDEN: Analyze the body language. From the White House Flickr page.
UPDATE: No, I don’t think Obama’s facial expression is just a fluke of when the shutter went off. His eyes aren’t closed, as some with poor displays seem to think. Here’s a detail from the frame:
Interesting article.
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"Wikipedia's Climate Doctor
Posted: December 19, 2009, 2:53 AM
Source Network.Nationalpost.com
"How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles
By Lawrence Solomon
"The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.
The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.
The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.
The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.
But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”
Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.
The Climategate Emails showed, for example, that some members of the band were uncomfortable with aspects of their work, some even questioning the need to erase the existence of the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years earlier.
Said Briffa, one of their chief practitioners: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
In the end, Briffa and other members of the band overcame their doubts and settled on their dogma. With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.
But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.
Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties.
Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear."
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/12/18/370719.aspx#ixzz0aLKdiueC
Well worth a 10 minute listen.
Something non-political for a change. Found this interesting, hope you do also.
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"Instant Gratification-The Trap That Avoids Building Real Wealth
By Julian Burke January 3rd, 2010
Source Dream Manifesto
"Instant gratification is wanting everything now, and its converse is deferred gratification. Low impulse control provides short term satisfaction but causes long term chaos, imbalance, and personal failure, while high impulse control causes short term dissatisfaction but provides long term order, balance, and personal success.
Here are some classic examples of how the impulse of instant gratification works in real life:
- If you are seeking a relationship, you want it to unfold as magically as in the movies, and you’re impatient about building rapport and getting to know someone. Beguiled by Hollywood, you believe that romance is as simple as locking eyes across the room, talking breathlessly, and effortlessly plunging into a whirlwind of pleasurable experiences.
- If you are looking for prosperity, you want a complete business-in-a-box that tells you how to get rich quick, and you’re impatient about studying the many facets of business and the rules of sound money management.
- If you are not well, you want medication or surgery that will provide an instant cure so that you can get back to your normal life, and you’re impatient about carefully selecting the foods you eat, reducing your stress levels, and considering a holistic exercise routine.
- If you are worried about signs of aging, you may consider a botox injection to get firm skin and instant youth, and you’re too impatient to bother learning the facts about botox–thus, failing to discover that it is a botulinum toxin, a complex protein produced by a bacteria whose effect is as toxic as food poisoning.
- If you believe in the value of instant gratification, you believe that faster is better, and you want fast food, fast technology, fast education, and fast service. It can’t be much good, you reason, if it’s slow. You equate slow with inefficiency.
Overstimulated By Technology
Partially to blame for the cult of instant gratification is technology, in particular the technology of mass communication and rapid transportation.
Technology was supposed to make life easier. With more labor saving devices, we were supposed to have more time, not less. What technology has done is make us addicted to stimulation. People feel an urgent need to be dialing someone on their cell phone instead of merely driving or walking down the street. Faxes and email make ordinary mail into snail mail. Everything is faster, not only digital connectivity, but how fast we communicate and how fast we travel. We constantly hope to do more in less time.
Hollywood, The Entertainment Industry And Role Modeling
Although amplified by technology, the impulse of instant gratification has always been a part of human nature. In the past it used to be considered a character weakness, but today it is considered a sign of personal efficiency.
Nowadays, people who subscribe to instant gratification are often, fast-talkers, fast-thinkers, and fast-movers. They idealize a fast life. They believe that they are modern people, hip to technology, savvy, cosmopolitan. Even lighting up a cigarette is considered too time-consuming. Why use a match when you can use a lighter?
The modern self-image owes a lot to the stereotypes of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, which has created a subliminal pattern of mass role modeling. In Hollywood, for example, heroes and heroines glorify the hyped-up personality and extol the virtues of a volatile lifestyle.
The average viewer is primed for five times the action than previous generations of movie-goers. Why, settle for a few fist fights as in the old Westerns when your new screen hero can blow up a fleet of police cars, cause multiple car pileups and ruin numerous lives in the same time frame? Blockbusters are not built on people simply talking and behaving normally. Celluloid adventures without massive disasters are no adventures at all.
A Change In Perspective
In the earlier part of this century, according to Sigmund Freud‘s Theory of Personality, the urge of instant gratification was considered a symptom of poor impulse control, an expression of weak ego boundaries.
Since the superego represented the principle of morality, the ego the principle of reality, and the id the principle of pleasure, an inability to delay gratification was the result of a reckless id that could not be controlled by the ego or the superego.
Today, these ideas are considered quaint. Life is not about staying balanced but about getting the most satisfaction in the shortest amount of time.
The Brain And Instant Gratification
Besides the pervasive influence of digital technology and the entertainment industry, Neurobiologists, scientists interested in learning how the brain and nervous system work, have discovered some interesting things about how low impulse control often starts in childhood.
One of these findings is the effects of drugs and alcohol on children.
Due to the stress of modern life, women tend to drink more alcohol than during previous generations. In the United States, 15 percent of women admitted in a survey that they drank alcohol, and of that number, 30 percent admitted that they drank during pregnancy. Drinking during pregnancy causes harm to the embryo.
The alcohol crosses the barrier of the placenta and damages the growing brain of the embryo. Many children are born with mental health problems due to alcohol ingestion in the womb, a condition called fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Children with FAS are often impatient and find delayed gratification almost impossible. However, alcohol is only one cause of stunted mental development in babies.
Drugs, ingested by pregnant mothers, both prescriptive and recreational, have also created havoc on the brain and nervous system of children. The cumulative effect, culturally, of drug and alcohol abuse by pregnant mothers has been a new generation of children less equipped to handle the stresses of modern life and more inclined to seek instant gratification whenever they can.
Another discovery by neurobiologists is that children who are able to demonstrate delayed gratification are more intelligent than those who demand instant gratification.
One study, conducted during the 1960s, has been a landmark in showing the correlation between delayed gratification and intelligence. It has been called the marshmallow experiment.
Walter Mischel, a researcher at Stanford University, worked with a test group of four year old children. He offered each one a marshmallow, but promised another one if the child could wait for twenty minutes before eating it. Some waited, others did not. The researchers kept track of the children into adolescence and found that those who had the capacity for delayed gratification scored about 210 points higher in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
Exploitation Of Instant Gratification By Industry
In any modern city, industrial interests, wishing to promote more wealth through consumerism fully exploit low impulse control.
In any city, billboards, slogans, banners, and shop signs assault the innocent pedestrian. The invisible fingers of the market manipulators are forever seeking to stimulate trivial desires and separate consumers from their hard-earned money, even enticing them to spend much more than they have through a credit system.
If people have a tendency to consume too many soft drinks, eat too many fast meals, take too many medications, and buy too many things that they simply don’t not need for their well-being, it’s because their sense of instant gratification is perpetually exploited. Neon signs, repetitive trigger words, colorful logos, and jingles influence consumers. This assault comes from gigantic billboards and electronic signs as well as from radios, commercials, computers, and print ads.
This exploitation of a need for instant gratification, does more harm than merely empty bank accounts. All kinds of aberrant behavior arises from distraught people, including domestic abuse, suicide, and criminal activity to compensate for cash shortages.
Instant Gratification And Emotional Intelligence
Daniel Goleman, the creator of the concept of emotional intelligence, believes that a person can handle difficult life situations well if they have emotional maturity – because they can clearly think about things, make the best decisions, and take the right action.
Positive emotions create positive thoughts and behaviors, and this is high emotional intelligence. Negative emotions, likewise, create negative thoughts and behaviors, and this is low emotional intelligence.
Emotions, triggered by the consequences of dealing with what happens after satisfying a moment of instant gratification, usually escalate problems. The fleeting happiness of consumption is followed by numerous negative emotions, spiraling from anger to despair
After dissipating income, people feel frustrated, and frustration leads to feelings of anger, and anger leads to acts of destruction, either through self-sabotage or lashing out at other people.
It is difficult to make sound decisions about self-worth, discipline, and proactive action in the grip of negative emotions. Those who feel negative emotions precipitate negative experiences for themselves and other people.
The higher a person‘s need for instant gratification, the lower their emotional intelligence.
How The Money System Has Changed And How To Think Long Term
The global recession is a symptom of how the money system has changed. The traditional money system is causing the human race to run out of resources, from fuel to food.
People need meaningful occupations. They also need to live within their means, avoiding irresponsible consumer spending. By reducing both national and personal debt, and by working on building goods and services of tangible value, it is possible to change for the better.
Although the modern world has been created by the ingenuity of generations of hard working people, few modern people have the patience to study, practice, and perfect skills. Young people want to have in a decade the level of wealth it took their parents a lifetime to acquire. This has resulted in people taking all sorts of economic shortcuts, including fraudulent practices in corporate boardrooms that affect stock exchanges.
Understanding the value of change, how do human beings turn their back on a culture of instant gratification that is causing havoc with the money system across the world?
How Thinking Long Term Can Lead To More Success For All
The most startling solution to date has come from the city of São Paulo. According to Business Week, in June, 2007, Brazilian populist mayor, Gilberto Kassab, did something unprecedented in the history of the modern world: he banned all advertising in São Paulo–making it the first city in the world to say no to advertising.
Although this sounds like a myth perpetuated by the radical magazine, Adbusters, a glossy American magazine that details how advertising perpetually feeds the neurosis of instant gratification, in São Paulo, Brazil, this dream has become the new reality.
The clean city laws brought down eight thousand billboards. A Brazilian can walk through the city streets without encountering manipulative messages from posters, flyers, billboards, and advertising on buses and trains.
Populist writer Roberto Pompeu de Toledo hailed it as “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash.”
The president of the city council, Roberto Tripoli, said, “What we are aiming for is a complete change of culture. Yes, some people are going to have to pay a price but things were out of hand and the population has made it clear that it wants this.”
Is Instant Gratification Short-circuiting Civilization Itself?
While it may seem rather dramatic to blame the ills of the world on something as simple as instant gratification, reviewing the story of how mass communication and transport technology, the sublime influence of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the neurological problems caused by drug and alcohol on babies, and the brainwashing nature of modern advertising, the impulse of instant gratification does seem to heavily contribute to the foundations of reckless living on this planet.
With the virulence of commercialism reduced, people have a chance of establishing meaningful personal and cultural goals, spending more time getting to know each other better, and regaining an emotional maturity that will lead to long term benefits, like ideas on how to allocate resources so that everyone in the world can meet their basic needs for shelter, food, and drinkable water.
Long term success for all is only possible when intelligent thinking, feeling, and behavior is reintroduced to the world. Instant gratification is a trap that avoids building real wealth."
"Spy chiefs turn on President Obama after seven CIA agents are slaughtered in Afghanistan
By David Gardner
Last updated at 8:40 AM on 02nd January 2010
Source DailyMail.uk
"Barack Obama was accused of double standards yesterday in his treatment of the CIA.
The President paid tribute to secret agents after seven of them were killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.
In a statement, he said the CIA had been ‘tested as never before’ and that agents had ‘served on the front lines in directly confronting the dangers of the 21st century’.
He lauded the victims as ‘part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow citizens and for our way of life’.
Yet the previous day he had blasted ‘systemic failures’ in the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies for failing to prevent the Christmas Day syringe bomb attack.
Backlash: Agency officials are angry at the president's about face
‘One day the President is pointing the finger and blaming the intelligence services, saying there is a systemic failure,’ said one agency official. ‘Now we are heroes. The fact is that we are doing everything humanly possible to stay on top of the security situation. The deaths of our operatives shows just how involved we are on the ground.’
But CIA bosses claim they were unfairly blamed at a time the covert government agency has been stretched further than ever before in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
They point to the murder of seven operatives at a remote mountain base in Afghanistan’s Khost Province as an example of how agents are putting their lives on the line at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.
The agents – including the chief of the base, a mother-of-three - were collecting information about militants when the suicide bomber struck on Wednesday.
The attack was the deadliest single day for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut.
The base targetted by Wednesday’s suicide bomber was a control centre for a covert programme overseeing strikes by remote-controlled aircraft along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.
‘Those who fell were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism. We owe them our deepest gratitude,’ CIA Director Leon Panetta said.
Some CIA officials are angry at being criticised by the White House after Abdulmutallab, 23, was allowed to slip through the security net and board a US-bound flight in Amsterdam despite evidence he was a terror threat.
The president complained that a warning from the former London engineering student’s father and information about an al Qaeda bomb plot involving a Nigerian were not handled properly by the intelligence networks.
But CIA officials say the data was sent to the US National Counterterrorism Centre in Washington, which was set up after the 9/11 attacks as a clearing house where raw data should be analysed.
Agents claim that is where the dots should have been connected to help identify Abdulmutallab as a threat."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1239941/Spy-chiefs-turn-President-Obama-seven-CIA-agents-slaughtered-Afghanistan.html
"Key Theme In Interview With ShadowStats' John Williams - (You Guessed It) Hyperinflation And The Death Of The US Economy
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/30/2009 13:38 -0500
Source Zero Hedge
"If you thought John Williams, who a month ago prophesied that the US could be facing hyperinflation as soon as 2010, has changed his tune, think again. In an interview conducted by Phil Maymin of the Fairfiled Weekly, the man who has made a business out of debunking the government's data fabrication machine, dishes out some very hard to swallow truths about the US economy and where the fiat world is headed. As always, Williams' perspectives are debate-worthy by all, whether inflationist or deflationist: in a field of media sycophants, JW is not afraid to speak what we all know, yet rarely wish to acknowledge.
Maymin: So we are technically bankrupt?
Williams: Yes, and when countries are in that state, what they usually do is rev up the printing presses and print the money they need to meet their obligations. And that creates inflation, hyperinflation, and makes the currency worthless.
Obama says America will go bankrupt if Congress doesn't pass the health care bill.
Well, it's going to go bankrupt if they do pass the health care bill, too, but at least he's thinking about it. He talks about it publicly, which is one thing prior administrations refused to do. Give him credit for that. But what he's setting up with this health care system will just accelerate the process.
Where are we right now?
In terms of the GDP, we are about halfway to depression level. If you look at retail sales, industrial production, we are already well into depressionary. If you look at things such as the housing industry, the new orders for durable goods we are in Great Depression territory. If we have hyperinflation, which I see coming not too far down the road, that would be so disruptive to our system that it would result in the cessation of many levels of normal economic commerce, and that would throw us into a great depression, and one worse than was seen in the 1930s.
What kind of hyperinflation are we talking about?
I am talking something like you saw with the Weimar Republic of the 1930s. There the currency became worthless enough that people used it actually as toilet paper or wallpaper. You could go to a fine restaurant and have an expensive dinner and order an expensive bottle of wine. The next morning that empty bottle of wine is worth more as scrap glass than it had been the night before filled with expensive wine.
We just saw an extreme example in Zimbabwe. ... Probably the most extreme hyperinflation that anyone has ever seen. At the same time, you still had a functioning, albeit troubled, Zimbabwe economy. How could that be? They had a workable backup system of a black market in U.S. dollars. We don't have a backup system of anything. Our system, with its heavy dependence on electronic currency, in a hyperinflation would not do well. It would probably cease to function very quickly. You could have disruptions in supply chains to food stores. The economy would devolve into something like a barter system until they came up with a replacement global currency.
What can we do to avoid hyperinflation? What if we just shut down the Fed or something like that?
We can't. The actions have already been taken to put us in it. It's beyond control. The government does put out financial statements usually in December using generally accepted accounting principles, where unfunded liabilities like Medicare and Social Security are included in the same way as corporations account for their employee pension liabilities. And in 2008, for example, the one-year deficit was $5.1 trillion dollars. And that's instead of the $450 billion, plus or minus, that was officially reported.
Wow.
These numbers are beyond containment. Even the 2008 numbers, you can take 100 percent of people's income and corporate profit and you'd still be in deficit. There's no way you can raise enough money in taxes.
What about spending?
If you eliminated all federal expenditures except for Medicare and Social Security, you'd still be in deficit. You have to slash Social Security and Medicare. But I don't see any political will to rein in the costs the way they have to be reined in. There's just no way it can be contained. The total federal debt and net present value of the unfunded liabilities right now totals about $75 trillion. That's five times the level of GDP.
What can we, the people, do to stop the government from, you know, taking all our money?
We should have acted 20 years ago. There's not much you can do at this point to prevent the eventual debasement of the dollar. This involves both sides of the political spectrum. It's not limited to the Republicans or the Democrats. They've both been very active in setting this up.
What can individuals do?
The only thing individuals can do now is look to protect themselves. I wish I could see a way, but shy of severe slashing of the social programs that is so politically reprehensible and would create such problems and social unrest, I don't see that as a practical solution.
If you're a young 20- or 25-year-old guy or gal, would you move to another country? What would you do?
We still have a great country. We're going through a period of economic pain. It's happened before. This is the kind of thing that's taken us decades to get into and it will take us decades to get out. Although the hyperinflation is going to be limited largely to the U.S., the economic downturn will affect things globally. I can't tell you how things will go with a hyperinflationary Great Depression, which is where I see things going.
It's the type of thing that will tend to lead to significant political change. People tend to vote their pocketbooks. You could have the rise of a third party. You could even have rioting in the streets. I'm not formally predicting that — anyone can run these different scenarios. For the individual, what you need to do, from an investment standpoint, look to preserve your wealth and assets. Don't worry about the day-to-day fluctuations in the markets. What I'm talking about here is over the long haul...
[Gold is] going to be highly volatile, as will the dollar, over the near term, but longer term, physical gold I would look at as a primary hedge for preserving the purchasing power of your wealth and assets. Maybe some physical silver. Get some assets outside the U.S. dollar. I might even look to move some assets physically outside the United States. The key here is to look at a longer range survival package, battening down the hatches, and preserving your wealth and assets during a very difficult time. Once you're through that, you'll have some extraordinary investment opportunities, and I can't tell you what it's going to be like on the other side of this crisis.
Dr. Phil Maymin is an Assistant Professor of Finance and Risk Engineering at NYU-Polytechnic Institute. The views represented are his own
h/t Steve "
As a means to inform myself about the ideology I did a bit of research and turned this up on Discover The Networks dot org which IMHO contains credible and well researched information.
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"BEIJING, Dec 29 (Reuters) - A small Chinese power generator on Tuesday rejected demands from a Goldman Sachs unit to pay for nearly $80 million lost on two oil hedging contracts, part of a long-running dispute over how China deals with derivatives losses.
Goldman Sachs (GS.N) was one of the foreign banks, along with Citigroup (C.N), Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley (MS.N), blamed by the state assets watchdog for providing "extremely complicated" and difficult to understand derivatives products. [ID:nPEK242617]Shenzhen Nanshan Power (000037.SZ) (200037.SZ) said in a statement that it received several notices from J. Aron & Company, a trading subsidiary of Goldman Sachs (GS.N), for at least $79.96 million as compensation for terminating oil option contracts.
"We will not accept the demand by J. Aron for all the losses and related interests," said Nanshan, in line with the stance it took last December.
"We will try our best to negotiate with J. Aron and resolve the dispute peacefully...but the possibility of using a lawsuit can not be ruled out when talks fail," it added.
"J. Aron told us in one notice that if we do not pay the money, they will reserve the right to launch a lawsuit and will not send us any further notice."
The State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission said in September that it would back state-owned companies in any legal action against the foreign banks that sold them oil derivatives, which resulted in losses when oil prices dived late last year. [ID:nPEK14474]
A Beijing-based Goldman Sachs corporate communication official declined to comment.
Nanshan said in October last year that two oil option-related contracts with J. Aron were signed by its officials without authorisation from the company. In December 2008 it said in a statement it had terminated the deals, and that it would not accept J. Aron's demand for payment.
LONG-TIME TUSSLE
Many Chinese firms, especially airliners, suffered huge losses from complex oil options trading last year as oil price collapsed to nearly $30 a barrel.
A senior official from SASAC revealed last month that 68 Chinese firms suffered net losses of 11.4 billion yuan ($1.67 billion) by October 2008 on call and put options signed with foreign banks.
So far no legal action has been taken and many lawyers and industry analysts believe that Chinese firms and their foreign banks are quite likely to settle their disputes privately or through arbitration, similar to a handful of previous cases in the mid-1990s.
Only 31 firms are authorised in China to trade derivatives directly in the overseas market and the regulators started strictly prohibiting others from such trading since early 2009 after losses were exposed.
SASAC said last month that it had suggested companies without overseas derivatives trading licences trade on the domestic market or through domestic financial institutions."
http://ow.ly/QMvvExceptionally well stated commentary about the senate health care vote from Powelineblog.com.
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"Arrogance, corruption, stupidity
"Republicans didn't have the votes to stop the Senate's Obamacare bill this morning. But they had the better argument. Oklahoma's magnificent Senator (and Dr.) Tom Coburn spoke for a lot of us in explaining his vote against the Democrats' bill:
This vote is indeed historic. This Congress will be remembered for its arrogance, corruption and stupidity. In the year of 2009, a Congress ignored the coming economic storm and impending bankruptcy of our entitlement programs and embarked on an ideological crusade to bring our nation as close to single-payer, government-run health care as possible. If this bill becomes law, future generations will rue this day and I will do everything in my power to work toward its repeal. This bill will ration care, cut Medicare, increase premiums, fund abortion and bury our children in debt.
This process was not compromise. This process was corruption. This bill passed because votes were bought and sold using the issue of abortion as a bargaining chip. The abortion provision alone makes this bill the most arrogant piece of legislation I have seen in Congress. Only the most condescending politician can believe it is appropriate to force Americans to pay for other people's abortions and to coerce medical professional to take the lives of unborn children.
I would quibble only with Senator Coburn's attribution of "stupidity" to congressional Democrats. The House and Senate bills are indeed stupidly destructive of the best health care system in the world, and they will impose unbearable costs on the American public. But if and when a final bill is enacted next year, the Democrats will have achieved their goal of control over the medical means of life and death. This Congress will be remembered for its arrogance, corruption and tyranny as well as its staggering profligacy, all of which are well represented in the Obamacare bills.
Politico reports that the timetable for passage of a final bill has now slipped to February. Ed Morrissey and Andrew McCarthy tentatively see a ray of light in the delay, and Ramesh Ponnuru also envisions the possible defeat of Obamacare in the House. Later is better than sooner, but don't be deceived. The Democrats have the whip hand.
Grounds for optimism exist in the opposition to the government takeover of health care that runs deep and wide. Somehow, the American people have seen through the bill of goods they are being sold despite the Obama administration's best efforts, the Democrats' control of the process and the unfailing assistance of their allies in the media.
Democrats count on the opposition to subside and the public to acquiesce. Yet the Roman spectacle to which Obama and the congressional Democrats have treated us will be hard to erase from our memory. It will constitute an obstacle to our pacification and a spur to our resistance.
JOHN adds: To arrogance, corruption and stupidity we should perhaps add self-delusion. Harry Reid says that the public will greet passage of his government medicine bill with "joy and happiness." These are not people who can be compromised with or deflected from their drive toward socialism. They can only be defeated, starting in November."
Brilliant commentary which is one reason I've lost faith in the Republican Party as an entity. I have not lost faith in fiscal conservatives, however.
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"The Dems' political payoff
December 22, 2009 Posted by Scott at 6:36 PM"I think that a lot of congressional Democrats are going to pay the price of Obamacare, but Andrew McCarthy highlights a key point:
The best thing about Mark Steyn's guest-host stint on Hannity last night -- other than Jonah's joining him on the panel -- was that Mark asked some pointed questions of two brilliant political strategists, Dick Morris and Karl Rove, that seemed rooted in Mark's theory that, on health care and all it entails, "The Dems are thinking strategically; the Republicans are all tactics."
For my money, I think the theory is being borne out: Democrats have their eyes on a different end-game than our guys do: namely, the establishment of permanent, European-style socialism in the U.S. Our guys are focused on converting Obama radicalism into big-time electoral success in the next election cycle. The Dems have already factored in that likelihood and are betting -- over the long haul -- that even if the GOP cuts deeply into Dem majorities or takes over Congress (and even takes over the White House in 2012), Republicans will lack the commitment (and perhaps the numbers) to roll back what the Left is accomplishing now.
That is, our guys are focused myopically on a battle the Democrats have already figured they can afford to lose. The real battle is: What do you do when you get back in power? Do you have a plan for how to undo what is being done? Do you frame the coming elections in a way that converts victory into a mandate not only to stop what Obama is doing but to undo what he has done?
I'm hearing a lot from our side about making big gains in the upcoming elections. That's not strategy or victory. You have to have a plan for what those gains would translate into. Democrats, by contrast, have a real plan for how what they're doing today will sustain Big Government, and themselves, over the long term, regardless of occasional electoral losses."
