A Look At Freedom's Currents

A Look At Freedom's Currents
Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others. . .they send forth a ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." Robert F. Kennedy

21st Century's Priority One

1) Implementation of: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil ___________________________________________ #1 Disolves the Problem of the ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization." through simple scientific common sense ___________________________________________ _________ Using grade school physics of both Newtonian and Nuclear models, does anyone foresee counter currents of sufficient size to minimize/change direction of the huge Tsunami roaring down on us, taking away not only our Freedom, but our Lives? Regardless if our salaries are dependant on us not knowing the inconvenient truths of reality (global warming, corporate rule, stagnant energy science) portrayed by the rare articles in the news media? I know only one - a free science, our window to Reality - that easily resolves the Foundational Problem of Quantum Physics and takes E=MC2 out of Kindergarten

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Capitalism: Evolutionary Choices - Fascism or Natural Capitalism

Capitalism: Evolutionary Choices - Fascism or Natural Capitalism

Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center http://ucimc.org/content/brief-guide-avoiding-socialism
“Last May, the Republican National Committee condemned Obama and the Democratic Congress for leading America towards socialism.
That's not the only mistake made by those complaining about the threat of socialism.
If Obama is leading America anywhere, it is - like his immediate predecessors - towards fascism.
Socialism is about the state running things on behalf of the public;”
Fascism is about the state running things on behalf of corporations.
Adrian Lyttelton in his book on Mussolini wrote that ‘Fascism can be viewed as a product of the transition from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly.’ It was a point that Orwell noted when he described fascism as being but an extension of capitalism. Lyttelton quoted Italian Nationalist theorist Affredo Rocco: ‘The Fascist economy is. . . an organized economy. It is organized by the producers themselves, under the supreme direction and control of the State.’ ”

Natural Capitalism

Book Excerpts and Downloadable Chapters For decades, environmentalists have been warning that human economic activity is exceeding the planet's limits. Of course we keep pushing those limits back with clever new technologies; yet living systems are undeniably in decline.

These trends need not be in conflict-in fact, there are fortunes to be made in reconciling them.

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, is the first book to explore the lucrative opportunities for businesses in an era of approaching environmental limits. In this groundbreaking blueprint for a new economy, three leading business visionaries explain how the world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution-one that promises to transform our fundamental notions about commerce and its role in shaping our future. Natural Capitalism describes a future in which business and environmental interests increasingly overlap, and in which businesses can better satisfy their customers' needs, increase profits, and help solve environmental problems all at the same time.

Natural capital refers to the natural resources and ecosystem services that make possible all economic activity, indeed all life. These services are of immense economic value; some are literally priceless, since they have no known substitutes. Yet current business practices typically fail to take into account the value of these assets-which is rising with their scarcity. As a result, natural capital is being degraded and liquidated by the wasteful use of such resources as energy, materials, water, fiber, and topsoil.

The first of natural capitalism's four interlinked principles, therefore, is radically increased resource productivity. Implementing just this first principle can significantly improve a firm's bottom line, and can also help finance the other three. They are: redesigning industry on biological models with closed loops and zero waste; shifting from the sale of goods (for example, light bulbs) to the provision of services (illumination); and reinvesting in the natural capital that is the basis of future prosperity. Citing hundreds of compelling stories from a wide array of sectors, Natural Capitalism shows how these four changes will enable businesses to act as if natural capital were being properly valued, without waiting for consensus on what that value should be. Even today, when natural capital is hardly accounted for on corporate balance sheets, these four principles are so profitable that firms adopting them can gain striking competitive advantage-as early adopters are already doing. These innovators are also discovering that by downsizing their unproductive tons, gallons, and kilowatt-hours they can keep more people, who will foster the innovation that drives future improvement.

Natural Capitalism's preface states: "Although [this] is a book abounding in solutions, it is not about 'fixes.' Nor is it a how-to manual. It is a portrayal of opportunities that if captured will lead to no less than a transformation of commerce and of all societal institutions. Natural capitalism maps the general direction of a journey that requires overturning long-held assumptions, even questioning what we value and how we are to live. Yet the early stages in the decades-long odyssey are turning out to release extraordinary benefits. Among these are what business innovator Peter Senge calls 'hidden reserves within the enterprise'--lost energy,' trapped in stale employee and customer relationships, that can be channeled into success for both today's shareholders and future generations. All three of us have witnessed this excitement and enhanced total factor productivity in many of the businesses we have counseled. It is real; it is replicable…" The next Industrial Revolution has already started. Natural Capitalism will prepare you to be a part of it.

The Alternative: The deadly consequences of an economic/corporate system who’s ONLY goal is to maximize profits, regardless of human life, is being verified, disconnectedly, by news reports daily.

NOT TO KNOW CRITICAL SURVIVAL CRITERIA NECESSARY FOR EVOLVING CIVILIZATIONS TO SURVIVE, in the 21st century, especially in the dangerously stagnant energy sector, is beyond bafflement.



Multiple Criteria Fermenting Societies' Decay Stemming from Energy Suppression and Restricted Education

Education
The suppressed Unifying Principle supporting the majority of contemporary new energy claims
evolved from the late 40's advanced energy/fuel/propulsion concepts after WWII. These same concepts also brought subsequent advanced understanding of human nature, validating ageless Spiritual and Metaphysical Wisdom within the energy/frequency domains. This Unifying Principle, the radius of curvature of all natural law quantified the radius to the energy differential of the speed of light, shedding insight to many of the MIS- INTERPRETATIONS of the Theory of Relativity, i.e. as in, "nothing goes faster than the speed of light; when an object travels faster and faster, its mass increases (time slows, stops, goes backwards – approaching, at, exceeding VC);" or "As an object approaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite."


The obvious subsequent realization of such short sighted, mis-interpreted errors swiftly correct to - the 'increasing mass' of the target is only the measure of the kinetic energy differential which exists between them http://fuel2000.net/ . This Unifying Principle completely overhauls the stubbornly persistent delusions, primitive definitions and stranglehold restrictions of E=MC2, permitting advances toward FTL (faster than light transportation), field dependent propulsion, polarization of gravity (anti-gravity), action at a distance, as well as "movement"/"transference", the appearance of motion, from one point to another without going through all points in between.

  • About the year 1905, Einstein brought to our attention that the factors of Gravity, Space,Time, and Energy were not the absolute and independent entities that we had always considered them to be, but that they were variable factors, each having a value which depended upon the value of the others.
  • In short, the quantity C is the measure of the radius of curvature of natural law. It is the factor which will enable us to determine precisely the degree of change in the curvature of one law which will be brought about by a specified change in the application of the others. It is the factor which will eventually tell us how to place our transport vehicles in either the positive or negative portion of the gravitational curve with respect to the earth or any other planet which we may choose to visit.
  • When we state that the quantity C is the radius of the curvature of natural law, we mean simply that if a differential of energy equal to this quantity exists between the observer and the point which he is observing, the natural laws will be suspended. If the energy differential is in excess of the quantity C, the laws will appear to operate in reverse at that point.
  • As it is impossible to disconnect this scientific unifying principle for advanced fuel and propulsion systems from Human energy systems (same atoms/molecules/ comprised of energy) we find this scientific Unifying Principle begins to validate the roots of ageless Spiritual and Metaphysical Principles. This poses a threat to the current Power Structure. However, suppression and denial of these fourth grade concepts overthrowing relativity delusions, found in StarSteps, does threaten all life in evolving, energy intensive and complex civilizations. StarSteps http://fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm

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***As millions of American sit back and ignore the political system which affects everyone's lives, the monied interests take advantage of the absence of citizen oversight and involvement..........And then the corporate-owned media tells the public "It's the Governments Fault". Then regulatory agencies are further gutted making it easier for the monied interests to write new government policies which further marginalize the middle-class. Again prompting the corporate media to 'blame the government' for "too much regulation." An amazingly effective con-game........(i.e., "Fascism can be viewed as a product of the transition from the market capitalism of the independent producer to the organized capitalism of the oligopoly.")
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Corporate America's huge piles of cash http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/CompanyFocus/corporate-americas-huge-piles-of-cash.aspx
After throttling down for a depression that didn't happen, companies are sitting on billions in excess money. While many Americans are
living on tight budgets because of lost jobs or fear of losing a job, companies face a very different dilemma: They're sitting on growing piles of cash.
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November 16, 2009 USDA:
Number of Americans Going Hungry Increases By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/16/us/politics/AP-US-Hunger-Report.html?scp=7&sq=one%20in%20four%20american%20children%20hungry&st=cse Filed at 9:48 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than one in seven American households struggled to put enough food on the table in 2008, the highest rate since the Agriculture Department began tracking food security levels in 1995.
That's about 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of U.S. households. The numbers are a significant increase from 2007, when 11.1 percent of U.S. households suffered from what USDA classifies as ''food insecurity'' -- not having enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.
Researchers blamed the increase in hunger on a lack of money and other resources.
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November 16, 2009 - Money Trickles North as Mexicans Help Relatives in USA By MARC LACEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/americas/16mexico.html?scp=6&sq=mexicans%20send%20food%20and%20money%20to%20USA&st=cse
MIAHUATLÁN,
Mexico — During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo’s son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these, with the American economy out of whack and his son out of work, Mr. Salcedo finds himself doing what he never imagined he would have to do: wiring pesos north. Unemployment has hit migrant communities in the United States so hard that a startling new phenomenon has been detected: instead of receiving remittances from relatives in the richest country on earth, some down-and-out Mexican families are scraping together what they can to support their unemployed loved ones in the United States.
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November 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/us/29foodstamps.html?hp
The Safety Net Across U.S., Food Stamp Use Soars and Stigma Fades
By JASON DePARLE and
ROBERT GEBELOFF
MARTINSVILLE, Ohio — With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs. Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.
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Rolling in Dough, Still Kicking Out Families
Goldman Sachs Subsidiary Among 'Loan Servicers' Collecting Criticism
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/goldman-sachs-leaves-family-cold/story?id=9403097
By RICH BLAKE Dec. 23, 2009—
There's no place like home for the holidays. But this year, Phil and Barb Kubes and their three children will have to settle for memories of Christmas past. Last month, the Omaha, Neb., family was forced out of their home of 12 years after falling drastically behind on mortgage payments. Having failed to reach a workable solution with Litton Loan Servicing, the Houston-based company that collects their mortgage debt, the Kubes were
foreclosed upon and told to vacate.
Litton is by no stretch the largest loan servicing company -- essentially the mortgage industry's version of a collection agency -- but it is among the ones coming under the most heavy fire in the wake of a housing crisis that continues to roil the country. Litton, unfairly or not, has drawn the wrath of legions of homeowners, homeowner advocacy groups, lawmakers,
labor unions and class action attorneys alike. One glaring reason Litton has attracted so much of the scorn directed at loan servicing in general: It is owned by Goldman Sachs, proverbial poster child for Wall Street's excess and its percieved indifference to the plight of average Americans. Critics of Goldman's compensation practices say the firm has no business handing out billions to bankers and traders after having been the beneficiary of numerous forms of federal assistance, including TARP money as well as billions in FDIC-guaranteed loans and another $13 billion in taxpayer money given to AIG that was ultimately paid to Goldman.
Though it will derive only a tiny fraction of the billions it expects to earn this year from revenues produced by Litton, Goldman nevertheless finds itself, albeit indirectly, connected to a highly controversial issue at the crux of the housing crisis: Widespread failure by banks to allow homeowners to modify their loans. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston showed banks have little incentive to modify loans to help homeowners avoid foreclosure because of one simple reason that at this time of year perhaps only Ebenezer Scrooge could appreciate: Loan modification is not profitable for lenders.
No Interest in Avoiding Foreclosure Because mortgages are typically sold off to third party investors, the entities that service the loans, such as Litton, do not have a vested interest in avoiding foreclosure, according to Julia Gordon, senior policy counsel at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Responsible Lending. "Loan servicers make their money on late fees, so there is a perverse incentive for them not to work out solutions," Gordon said. "Meanwhile, there is zero incentive for them to help a family stay in their home. This is really a deep, serious problem and it has been for a long time."
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http://abcnews.go.com/Business/us-workers-rights-report/story?id=9131397
U.S. Far Behind On Workers' Rights: Report
U.S. Lags Other Countries on Sick Leave, Parental Leave; Women May Suffer the Most
By Jenna Goudreau, Forbes.com Nov. 22, 2009 —

A new study released Tuesday, Raising the Global Floor, examines workers' rights across 190 nations worldwide and finds that the U.S. lags behind nearly all other countries. The U.S. does not guarantee paid sick leave or annual leave, paid parental leave, paid time off to care for sick children or even one day of rest per week. And female workers may be suffering the most.
Authors Jody Heymann, founding director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University, and Alison Earle, a research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, joined a team of international researchers to examine 190 national policies and look in-depth at the working conditions faced by 55,000 households, creating the most extensive research yet on workers' rights.
The findings do not look good for the U.S. While 177 nations guarantee paid leave for new mothers and another 163 nations mandate paid sick leave, the U.S. requires neither.
The U.S. also falls behind 164 countries that guarantee paid annual vacation, 157 countries that guarantee workers one day of rest each week, 74 countries that offer paid leave to new fathers and 48 countries that allow paid time off to care for sick children. ….

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NYT November 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/media/15bloom.html?scp=1&sq=At%20Bloomberg,%20Modest%20Strategy%20to%20Rule%20the%20World%20&st=cse
At Bloomberg, Modest Strategy to Rule the World
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and JULIE CRESWELL
PLOPPED in a white leather chair in a small office in Bloomberg L.P.’s Manhattan headquarters, Andrew Lack knows exactly how to articulate the aspirations of this 28-year-old media and technology company.
“We want to be the world’s most influential news organization,” says Mr. Lack, who oversees Bloomberg’s television, radio and dot-com endeavors.
Very clear. The most influential. On the planet.
It’s a goal several other Bloomberg executives have already mentioned to a pair of visitors. And when Mr. Lack, 62, a former head of NBC News, hears his guests wonder if something funny is in his company’s coffee — a special sauce that keeps all Bloombergians marching so efficiently and effectively to the same tune — he looks a tad chagrined.
“Oh, my! I don’t want to sound as if I’m on message,” he says, laughing apprehensively while also sending a “help me” look to a Bloomberg spokeswoman nearby.
These days, truth be told, the entire company is on message. That’s because the data behemoth that
Michael R. Bloomberg created and named after himself in 1981, long before he became mayor of New York, finally has the reach, resources and appetites to try snaring the mantle of Most Influential
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NYT December 26, 2009 At Tiny Rates, Saving Money Costs Investors
By
STEPHANIE STROM http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/your-money/26rates.html?_r=1&hp
Millions of Americans are paying a high price for a safe place to put their money: extremely low interest rates on savings accounts and certificates of deposit. The elderly and others on fixed incomes have been especially hard hit. Many have seen returns on savings, C.D.’s and government bonds drop to niggling amounts recently, often costing them money once inflation, fees and taxes are considered. “Open a Savings Plus Account today and get a great rate,” read an advertisement in the Dec. 16 Newsday for Citibank, which was then offering 1.2 percent for an account. (As low as it was, the offer was good only for accounts of $25,000 and up.) “They’re advertising it in the papers as if they’re actually proud of that,” said Steven Weisman, a title insurance consultant in New York. “It’s a joke.. “The unemployment situation and the general downturn in the economy had an impact, but what’s going to happen now as C.D.’s mature is that retirees and the elderly are going to take anywhere from a half to three-quarters of a percent cut in their incomes,” said Joe Parks, a retired accountant in Houston on the advisory board of Better Investing, an organization that works to help people become savvier investors. “It’s a real problem.” Experts say risk-averse investors are effectively financing a second bailout of financial institutions, many of which have also raised fees and interest rates on credit cards. “What the average citizen doesn’t explicitly understand is that a significant part of the government’s plan to repair the financial system and the economy is to pay savers nothing and allow damaged financial institutions to earn a nice, guaranteed spread,” said William H. Gross, co-chief investment officer of the Pacific Investment Management Company, or Pimco. “It’s capitalism, I guess, but it’s not to be applauded.”
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Who put deadly Science blinders to whole populations, offering civilizations such incredible, dim-witted options for survival and what comes after oil – ignoring definitions of light and energy as described above in “Energy Suppression and Restricted Education”?
Energy 2.0: What Comes From After Oil - The Green Eye - CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/12/22/green_eye/entry6010277.shtml?tag=cbsnews... 12/23/2009
Posted by Michael Kanellos
What happens after the world hits peak oil and prices skyrocket? Or when coal pushes
the carbon count in the atmosphere into the danger zone? Soylent Green might turn out to be
more prophetic than you thought. But, luckily, entrepreneurs are devising new ways to produce
energy even beyond solar and wind. Here are some of the more intriguing and far out ones.
1.Nuclear Goes Mod(ular):
NuScale Power, Sandia National Labs, TerraPower and Babcock & Wilcox all want to build
and/or license small reactors that could produce 45 to 125 megawatts of power.
2. Fusion:
"Not in our lifetime," Moniz said, after eyeballing me. (I'm a young 48.) Others disagree.
Livermore National Labs showed off a system in which 192 high powered lasers focused on tiny
capsule of hydrogen could generate fusion power.
3. Osmotic Pressure Gradients:
You know how you get really thirsty after eating salty food? The same principle serves as the
foundation of osmotic pressure gradients or OPGs.
4. Instant Oil:
Think microwave petroleum: no more slaving over the Permian basin for millions of years
waiting for those hydrocarbons to be done.
5. Gravity Power:
Like the brakes on a Prius, but supersized. Vycon Energy's flywheel captures energy released
when large cargo cranes drop those 30 ton storage containers in the holds of ships.
6. Hot Air.
Thermoelectric devices are semiconductors that convert heat into electricity and vice versa.
While advanced thermoelectric are still in the experimental stage, other companies are looking at
ways to capture heat and reuse it without converting it to electricity.
7. (Freedom Times Editor added) Sun and Wind - Unnecessary Space and Cost Requirements for a Solar Hydrogen Economy - High Tech, Low Inventiveness and Creativity - by Design or Default?. .........Using high tech to make bigger and bigger clubs does not speak much for the advancement of science. Likened to the 5000 year old Chinese rocket concept, where the principle remains the same (i.e., analogous to throwing rocks from a rowboat to propel the rowboat forward), only the technology, the outer coating, gets slicker…….Increasingly today, solar arrays and windfarms are beginning to dot the globe. While it is exciting to see the trend toward natural forces being converted into a clean energy base, I find it difficult to comprehend how science and creativity remain so petrified, oblivious, stagnant in fundamental operating principles. The concept of 'gestalt', the forest and the trees, local global, should be common knowledge so as to avoid the quagmire of losing sight of the forest as we explore the beauty of the trees. Does no one ask why we need so many windmills or solar arrays for a given energy output - beyond the standard, authorized given. Could a single, small solar array or windmill on a rooftop or garage conceivably produce more than enough energy to run a household and small business? Did we miss some fundamentals, (macros - integration) borrowing from other disciplines? ...................... Can less be more? ...............Einstein says YES, in a tiny, tiny atom, the nuclear bomb is only a very small fraction of the energy inherent in the atom.

Judge Thomas Troward, Walter Russell, Barbara Dewey, The Self-Aware Universe - Amit Goswami, Ph.D, refer to light and it’s electrical nature. A majority of wisdom books, metaphysics, religions all make references to Light, in the manner of “Let There be Light” referring to creation.

It turns out that the energy differential of light, the constant C, light’s velocity, does indeed become the radius of curvature of All Natural Law – By Default, The New fundamental principle in Physics. StarSteps http://fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm

LIGHT is The missing and illusive Radius of Curvature described in StarSteps, which completes the expanded view of E=MC2, combining the two seemingly opposed pillars of modern science, general relativity and quantum theory. The magic occurs when we also find this energy differential of light is also equivalent to the total energy contained within each and every atom

Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression

Multiple Criteria Fermenting Societies' Decay Stemming from Energy Suppression and Restricted Education




Education
The suppressed Unifying Principle supporting the majority of contemporary new energy claims
evolved from the late 40's advanced energy/fuel/propulsion concepts after WWII. These same concepts also brought subsequent advanced understanding of human nature, validating ageless Spiritual and Metaphysical Wisdom within the energy/frequency domains. This Unifying Principle, the radius of curvature of all natural law quantified the radius to the energy differential of the speed of light, shedding insight to many of the MIS- INTERPRETATIONS of the Theory of Relativity, i.e. as in, "nothing goes faster than the speed of light; when an object travels faster and faster, its mass increases (time slows, stops, goes backwards – approaching, at, exceeding VC);" or "As an object approaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite."


The obvious subsequent realization of such short sighted, mis-interpreted errors swiftly correct to - the 'increasing mass' of the target is only the measure of the kinetic energy differential which exists between them http://fuel2000.net/ . This Unifying Principle completely overhauls the stubbornly persistent delusions, primitive definitions and stranglehold restrictions of E=MC2, permitting advances toward FTL (faster than light transportation), field dependent propulsion, polarization of gravity (anti-gravity), action at a distance, as well as "movement"/"transference", the appearance of motion, from one point to another without going through all points in between.

  • About the year 1905, Einstein brought to our attention that the factors of Gravity, Space,Time, and Energy were not the absolute and independent entities that we had always considered them to be, but that they were variable factors, each having a value which depended upon the value of the others.
  • In short, the quantity C is the measure of the radius of curvature of natural law. It is the factor which will enable us to determine precisely the degree of change in the curvature of one law which will be brought about by a specified change in the application of the others. It is the factor which will eventually tell us how to place our transport vehicles in either the positive or negative portion of the gravitational curve with respect to the earth or any other planet which we may choose to visit.
  • When we state that the quantity C is the radius of the curvature of natural law, we mean simply that if a differential of energy equal to this quantity exists between the observer and the point which he is observing, the natural laws will be suspended. If the energy differential is in excess of the quantity C, the laws will appear to operate in reverse at that point.
  • As it is impossible to disconnect this scientific unifying principle for advanced fuel and propulsion systems from Human energy systems (same atoms/molecules/ comprised of energy) we find this scientific Unifying Principle begins to validate the roots of ageless Spiritual and Metaphysical Principles. This poses a threat to the current Power Structure. However, suppression and denial of these fourth grade concepts overthrowing relativity delusions, found in StarSteps, does threaten all life in evolving, energy intensive and complex civilizations. StarSteps http://fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm

Are Americans a Broken People?

Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression
By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNetPosted on December 11, 2009, Printed on December 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144529/
Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and his latest book is Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). His Web site is http://www.brucelevine.net/

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?
Can anything be done to turn this around?
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?
Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.
Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?
No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can feel shameful -- and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.
Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?
In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal.
Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested these circumstances.
Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even this provoked few demonstrators.
When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more psychologically broken.
U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
Maybe.
Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves-more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.
Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?
The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.
The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.
We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:
Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented -- or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings -- or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions -- or examples of authoritarian ones?
A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.
Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.
Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted today's pharmaceutical societyl "[I]t seems to me perfectly in the cards," he said, "that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude."
Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.
When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.
Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."
Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion -- has become "opiates of the masses."
The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.
Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.
Can anything be done to turn this around?
When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.
What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals -- at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.
Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . ."
If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don't mean anything -- they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."
A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."
An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.