Sightseeing UFO in NYC

Black UFO Over Statue Of Liberty Dec 2014, NYC UFO Sighting News Video.

Date of sighting: 1st week of December 2014
Location of sighting: New York City, New Jersey, USA

One thing about UFOs…they love observing national landmarks and museums around the world. The Statue of Liberty is a major US landmark and visiting it is one of the easiest landmarks in NYC to see from the sky. So for a UFO to buzz past it is no surprise. Awesome this lady caught it. SCW

Eyewitness states:
My wife and sister filmed this UFO while visiting New York City this week. Sorry for the shaking. She said she was freezing from holding the camera for so long with no gloves. She said at first she thought it was a balloon but it stopped all of a sudden and stayed in one place for a while. She also ran out of disc space hence why the footage suddenly stopped. What the hell was this guys. Please tell me someone else got this on video to.

from:    http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/2014/12/black-ufo-over-statue-of-liberty-dec.html

Taking a Look at TIme

Putting Time In Perspective

Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them.  It’s not our fault—the spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it.  If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second.  And if human history itself spans 24 hours from one midnight to the next, 14 minutes represents the time since Christ.
To try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which timelines are which).  All timeline lengths are exactly accurate to the amount of time they’re expressing.
A note on dates:  When it comes to the far-back past, most of the dates we know are the subject of ongoing debate.  For these timelines, it’s cumbersome to put a ~ sign before every ancient date or an asterisk explaining that the date is still being debated, so I just used the most widely accepted dates and left it at that.





from:    http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html?doing_wp_cron=1418483782.3033180236816406250000

UFO SHoots Beam at Earth

UFO Shoots Red Beam At Earth Seen On Live Space Station Cam, Dec 5, 2014, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 5, 2014
Location of sighting: Earths orbit, at ISS

This UFO caught on space station live cam is glowing red and has a beam of red light shooting from it to Earth. Although red UFOs have been seen near the ISS, witnessing a beam of light from one of then has never been recorded before. Lucky for us, Streetcap1 of Youtube caught this anomaly while watch the NASA cams. He keeps a watchful eye out for any UFOs near the station. The question is, what is that beam and should we be worried about it? Tell us in comments what you think it is. SCW

On GLobal Transformation

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Keynote Address at the 2nd Edition of the DEEEP Global Summit: Towards a World Citizens’ Movement – Learning from the Grassroots [Johannesburg, November 19, 2014]

Yesterday, holed up in a stubborn chair somewhere in the reception of this hotel, I was casting about for an appropriate title for my speech. I knew what I thought I’d like to say, what I’d like to conduce to today’s rather unwieldy discourse on global transformation, but I wasn’t comfortable with the ways my mind sought to frame it. Something nameless and deep within resisted my frantic attempts to simply chug along with rather unremarkable options like ‘The Urgency of Slowness’, ‘A Different Politics’, ‘The Utility of Shared Inquiry’ and so on. That same ‘something’ invited me to wait. So I left the matter unresolved, and entered into a ‘Whatsapp’ text-based conversation with my wife, who is in Richmond, Virginia at the moment. Just as I made to leave the conversation, Ijeoma – my wife – sent me an undecipherable series of alliterated alphabets, smiling icons, and nonsense syllables, patched together with the enigmatic abandon only a non-adult could master. It was Alethea, our 1 year old daughter. My wife told me she had grabbed the phone from her, typed the ‘message’, and returned it to her – saying ‘Dada! Dada!’ as she did so.

I got the message.

Perhaps the universe sought to sanction my conditioned fondness for tame and manicured titles – and, in doing so, hoped to broaden my vision of what is possible; perhaps there is more to be learned from that which resists representation, coherence or meaning – what Foucault called the ‘unthought’, what I call ‘the wilds beyond our fences’; and, perhaps, it is true after all – that the crises of our times invites us to acknowledge our imprisonment to the politics of adulthood by listening intensely to our children, to the weak, to those who have failed, to the so-called stupid, and thus learn from their expansiveness.

So this is my title. I fought the urge to stick in a subtitle beneath, or to reduce its rawness by bracketing it with quotation marks. I do not think it is an appropriate title, but I think it is powerful because it means nothing, because it has no immediate utility – except maybe to introduce a little turbulence to our treasured cognitive rituals, to humiliate our established ways of knowing (and thus to humble us), and to trick our exhausted minds into relaxing a bit. Into slowing down.

Last year, at the first edition of this fine gathering, I ended my talk by sharing the insights of some West African elders: “The times are urgent”, they say. “Let us slow down”. I have since echoed the same words wherever I have been invited to speak – and the responses from my audiences have been somewhat similar: there is a collective sigh of recognition and appreciation, the kind that is attended by a closing of the eyes, as if to acknowledge that a deep elderly truth has walked across the room. Then later, much later, there is confusion and there are furrowed eyebrows – and this happens when people seemingly try to activate this sentiment in their lives, as is the case with my brother Tobias, the convener of this event, who wrote to me shortly after the first Summit expressing his frustrations with slowing down. ‘How do you slow down when there are so many memos to write, so many reports to put together?’ I didn’t have the clearness of mind at the time to respond convincingly to his queries. Today, however, I am going to try to honour those unvoiced and wordless feelings, the greying elephants in our rooms we are trying our hardest to avoid. In doing this, I hope not only worry the convenient binaries and orthodoxies of activism, but to deepen the conversation and weave a poetic scheme that might nurture our imaginations about a world citizens’ movement – and what that could look like.

I am not an activist – at least not in the conventional sense of the word – but in the past four years, I have increasingly found myself in the midst of conscientious people, wise people whose work and writings have inspired our shared intention (Ijeoma and I) to live an enchanted life in a wider spectrum of values.

Once safely ensconced in the academic bubble of the intelligentsia, I am awakening to a wild world that does not easily fit into the neat boxes of a questionnaire. From the stern mountain faces of the Himalayas to the tired suburban mazes of downtown Chicago, the concerns – the questions – are thematically the same: ‘what needs to happen for a more humane world to arrive?’ ‘What do we need to focus on in order to usher in a social arrangement that is conducive to our deepest aspirations as a species – a world that is home for our children?’ How can we realize the world Alethea dreamed of?

Around the globe, the responses to these questions are as varied as the stars in the sky – though there are important convergent points, constellations if you will. For most active organizations today (or those in nations caught up in the globalizing currents of economic growth), the traditional response has been to ask what ‘we’ can do, or to point out a mutual enemy to inspire collective action. The logic of this advocacy framework – in broad strokes – is to articulate a superior argument, to mobilize popular support, and try to force the hand of those with the power to make decisions on behalf of the populace. The recent large-scale climate justice march of September 21, a colossal gathering of more than 300,000 people, is a case in point.

Some of the implicit (and not so hidden) assumptions of this theory of change are that we can change the system – because the system is merely a passive epiphenomenon, a dead mesh of regulations and laws that no longer works in our favour. This assumption coincides with another – the idea that the world is out there, the problems are out there, that we are quite removed from it, and that all we need to do (as my brother, Charles Eisenstein, often says) is apply this Newtonian force of will in order to rearrange the blind billiard balls on the table. And yet another kindred postulation is the myth of human rationality: the notion that people will change if they understand the facts. The bare facts. Let’s get practical, we often insist. Hence our growing obsession with statistical reduction computational analyses and convenient expertise. With tables and spreadsheets and reports and memos. With our eternal infatuation with the correct answer.

But the final popular assumption about social transformation I emphasize here is perhaps the most invisible – and therefore, potentially, the most insidious. It is the idea that only conscious effort, more doings, can get us out of the mess we find ourselves in. It is the tyranny of human agency, the human will to power – or what Jane Bennett calls the ‘fantasy that we really are in charge of all those ‘its’’, a denial of vibrant materialities with agency and action that flow within and around us.

Maybe this partly explains the exhaustion and disenchantment I am seeing in activist circles around the planet, the themes of cynicism I am listening to in the stories of the once chivalrous army for good. I have also felt this numbing despair, this irredeemable feeling that we are doomed beyond our best efforts to save the day. More recently, in New York, I listened to a seasoned environmental activist from Brazil as she shared her insights about the shadows of the World Social Forum, about the establishment of carbon exchanges where emission credits – or the right to continue to pollute the environment – are traded. She chuckled when she noted, with a hint of despondency, that these regulations are a direct result of climate justice movements pressing for low carbon emission rates. She also noted how young, well-intentioned persons dressed like hippies infiltrate villages in Brazil to teach them how to value their forests, their trees, under a carbon metric system – thus imposing an ideological standard that is in cahoots with today’s economic monoculture of mind, and devaluing the indigenous wisdoms that taught those people the mystery of the ancestry and their affinities with the nonhuman world. As I listened to her, it became clearer to me how our best efforts often end up being coopted by the dominant logic, how continuing with the same linearity, with the same rituals, with the same presumptions – while commendable and necessary – can often be counterproductive.

I think it is also becoming commonplace knowledge that the ongoing professionalization and bureaucratization of counterculture means that our voices are losing their subversive tones. We are learning slowly that the system endorses its own critique. That the more assiduously we resist the empire, the more like the empire we become.

Where does this leave us? Where does this leave our assumptions about the world, about our dreams for fonder landscapes, about the value of the work we do to realize those dreams and urge them towards realness? I think today’s widespread despair, today’s disillusionment with change, is the amniotic chamber, the alchemical depths where our vision of what is possible is being transformed, where we are being remade…slowly. Where we are realizing that our theories of change need to change. Where we are seeing that our reality paradigms – the ones that burden us with the sole onus of transformation, with heavy halos that impel us to ‘otherize’ the enemy, the faulty logic, the wrong answer – are no longer enough to bear the weight of our multidimensionality and incredible diversity. The genius of today is that we no longer know what to ask, speak less of knowing the right answers.

And this is how the invitation to slow down makes sense. Because our notions of agency, action and vitality are being stretched – so that we cannot continue to claim that the world is a corpse graciously animated by our presence. Because we are active conspirators with, and participants in, the system we resist – and, though we might like to deny it, this!, this pageantry of exclusion, this auto-erotic quest for supremacy, is our story, our saga. And to deny it is to deny a part of ourselves that needs to be heard. Because there are many ways of knowing and being in the world, and the myth of rationality is not enough to comprise them all.

We need a different kind of politics, one that resonates with the leitmotifs of our ongoing emergence. We need a meta-movement of some sort, not one that necessarily is caught up in the highfalutin, media-enhanced, neon-lit, caricaturization of the ‘top’; not the 100 million dollar movement with a set agenda; not one that is caught up with debates about gun laws and the sins of the ‘other side’; not one that necessarily has a logo, a stringent budget and clear outcomes, but one that is based in lived experiences, one that is underlined by a lot of ‘we don’t know’ moments, and one that is dependent on the gifts, the voices, and the place-based wisdoms of people. As Chris Hedges noted, quite recently, at the launch of the International Alliance for Localization in New York, ‘politics is no longer the concern of traditional political institutions. The chatter about guns, borders, and gay rights is not politics – it is the manipulation of emotion for corporate interests.’

I call this ‘grandmother politics’ – inspired by my brother and ally, Manish Jain, whose disenchantments with global education and schooling motivated him to seek out and learn from his grandmother how to live wisely with oneself, with others, and with the world. This notion of politics suggests we adopt a ‘more’ sacred kind of activism, a big picture activism which is so called because it allows us focus on the little things more keenly.

A world citizens’ movement, activated by a ‘compass’ of shared reflection and mutual inquiry seems more in tune with my feelings about what needs to happen. By a compass, I mean a techne that facilitates local practices of inquiry, an unfurling of questions, a reluctance to govern or impose standards, a willingness to observe and listen to circles of renewal and their explorations of how to live life more fascinatingly, a scaled down trans-local sharing of plural wisdoms.

Does this mean we no longer need spreadsheets? Does this mean we must do away with macro-level advocacy practices seeking to alter exploitative policies? Does this mean that those good people involved with articulating anti-fracking laws, correcting income inequalities, fighting the monolithic superintendence of corporate power in ecological devastation, countering the upsurge of whaling and desertification, insisting that genetically modified foods be properly labeled as such, and arguing for debt relief for less industrialized nations are wrong? I cannot bring myself to think that.

We need spreadsheets and, perhaps, civic advocacy will continue in its present form for a long time to come. But they are not enough. As noted earlier, it can be counterproductive and even dangerous to continue to act out the fiction of the practical as what ‘we do’ to the ‘world’, as the conquest of the right answer, as consensus, as monologue, as a silencing of what many might call the trivial, inchoate non-issues.

A compass reinforces the wisdom of localization, and restores the confidence that people themselves – not their representatives, not lobbyists, not agencies, not policies, and certainly not corporations – can be social actors, not merely social outcomes. If such a technology beats at the heart of a citizens’ movement, it might inspire a more subversive, creative, playful, and elegant hack of our current operating system. Instead of a declaratory documentation of consensus, a compass invites participation, supports diversity, valorizes uncertainty, and initiates community.

This is, as I see it, the ‘heart’ of the matter. Of course, how we make a ‘compass’ actionable is somewhat different, but not too severe a task if we can hold the spirit of the technology close to our considerations. A world citizens’ movement or ‘big picture activism’ can be something radically different, coexisting with orthodox advocacy, but operating from different assumptions. I am led to think that even if we could win all our counterculture wars, it would matter little if we have not evolved a politics that acknowledges the little things, that helps us heal together, and that engages us in ways that trusts us to find our own way through the messiness of human sentience.

We must slow down today because running faster in a dark maze will not help us find our way out. We must slow down today because if we have to travel far, we must find comfort in each other – in all the glorious ambiguity that being in community brings. We must slow down because the correct answer is not adequate. We must slow down because trust, the emerging currency of the ‘next’ story, is not an issue of efficiency, but a creature of intimacy. We must slow down because that is the only way we will see – in a series of alliterated alphabets, smiling icons, and nonsense syllables, patched together with the enigmatic abandon only a non-adult could master – the contours of new possibilities urgently seeking to open to us.

from:    http://realitysandwich.com/233820/pppppppppppppdtggvv-pppppnjpsspelalaa/

Lava Buries TOwns in Cape Verde Islands

Lava Flows from Fogo in the Cape Verde Islands Bury Two Towns

Monitoring lava flows from the Fogo eruption as they inundate towns within the caldera. Photo by INVOLCAN, used by permission.

It is clear now that the ongoing eruption at Fogo in the Cape Verde Islands is not sparing the towns in the Cha de Caldieras area. There had been some indications that the eruption was slowing and that the town of Portello and Bangaeira could be saved, but as of December 8, it appears that much of the settlement is being overrun by lava flows and the lava continues to flow at close to 300 meters per day.

The eruption regained vigor over the weekend, and the security teams near the volcano had to withdraw to safe distances. Close to 90 percent of the town is now covered by the lava from the new eruption (compare this to the lava during the recent Pahoa crisis in Hawai’i, which received many, many times more coverage in the mainstream media). Right now, close to 1,200 people who had to evacuate likely do not have a home to which to return. Even if their home survived, much of the infrastructure for these communities has been decimated as well. Not surprisingly, online charities have sprung up to help the people permanently displaced by the Fogo eruption.

INVOLCAN filmed some stunning moments of lava flows moving through the towns (see above) and new images from Google Earth show the extent of lava flow inundation on the area (“alacance” on the linked image). Volcanologists following the eruption have said that the current activity could last as long as the 1995 eruption that lasted 56 days, so we could see many more weeks of lava flows within the Fogo caldera, creating a massive humanitarian crisis for such a small, isolated island.

Lava flows from the Fogo eruption covering the towns of Portello and Bangaeira. Photo by INVOLCAN, used by permission.

Panama Earthquake 12/08

Very strong dangerous earthquake near the coast of Panama (David)

Last update: December 8, 2014 at 7:18 pm by By

Update 18:57 UTC : Many aftershocks since today’s mainshock. The latest one being a M5.2 (see also seismogram below)

Screen Shot 2014-12-08 at 19.56.00

Update 17:28 UTC : At the time of writing this update we are happy to report that we could not find any damage

Update 09:55 UTC : USGS has decreased the Magnitude from M6.7 to M6.6, depth 18 km Epicenter (luckily) offshore.

Update 09:46 UTC : We like to bring good news too – No electricity outages are being reported, a good sign!

Update 09:35 UTC : The BURICA (peninsula) area might be the hardest hit during this earthquake as a very strong MMI VII shaking is expected there.  Below the expected shaking following the USGS agency.

Screen Shot 2014-12-08 at 10.41.41 Screen Shot 2014-12-08 at 10.41.49

Update 09:35 UTC : Costa Rica authorities are mentioning a maximum shaking of MMI IV = light shaking = probably no damage. Costa Rica seismological agency is reporting a far weaker Magnitude of 6.1 vs M6.7 by USGS

Update 09:34 UTC : The David Fire Department is currently assessing the situation and is looking for eventual damage. We will report if anything is being found.

Update 09:16 UTC : Below the USGS shaking map. Max. expected shaking in the coastal towns MMI VI = strong shaking

Screen Shot 2014-12-08 at 10.21.42

Update 09:16 UTC : GEOFON automatic Focal Mechanism is showing a compression (thrust) type earthquake which means the the main movement will be vertical. The most dangerous earthquakes are lateral movement earthquakes which are called Transform Type earthquakes. The subduction type will weaken the damage outlook considerably.

Screen Shot 2014-12-08 at 10.19.09

Update 09:13 UTC : ER is almost certain that this earthquake will be damaging. The extend of the damage will depend on the earthquake type. It will take another 10 minutes before we are sure about that. We expect the David Panama district to be the hardest hit. Also the coastal area of Costa Rica may get his part of the slight damage.

Update 09:09 UTC : Although local tsunami waves are possible, the PWTC indicates that a Pacific Ocean and US West Coast tsunami is not likely. No alert has been issued for these areas. PWTC text : BASED ON EARTHQUAKE INFORMATION AND HISTORIC TSUNAMI RECORDS    THE EARTHQUAKE WAS NOT SUFFICIENT TO GENERATE A TSUNAMI.

Update 09:07 UTC : Today’s earthquake is a lot stronger than the M6.0 earthquake from yesterday.

Screen Shot 2014-12-08 at 10.11.31

8km (5mi) ESE of Punta de Burica, Panama
32km (20mi) SSE of Puerto Armuelles, Panama
57km (35mi) SW of Pedregal, Panama
60km (37mi) SSW of La Concepcion, Panama
256km (159mi) SSE of San Jose, Costa Rica

Most important Earthquake Data:

Magnitude : 6.5

Local Time (conversion only below land) : 2014-12-08 03:54:54

GMT/UTC Time : 2014-12-08 08:54:54

Depth (Hypocenter) : 19 km

from:    http://earthquake-report.com/2014/12/08/very-strong-earthquake-panama-costa-rica-border-region-on-december-8-2014/

On Popular Uprisings

People Rise Up: The Streets Are Alive with the Sound of Movement

Protesters on Dec. 5 in Boston.  (Photo: Tim Pierce/flickr/cc)

In an era rife with pop-culture trivialities juxtaposed with escalating calamities, we find ourselves at a remarkable moment that poses profound existential questions for the soul of the nation. Systems that have claimed the mantle of “justice” (while practicing little of it) are being exposed to an unprecedented level of scrutiny, demonstrating in stark terms that tragic episodes from Ferguson to New York are not exceptional but instead constitute the baseline norm of official behavior. The message is not that this system is broken, but rather that it is working exactly the way it was designed. The primary difference now is that people are paying attention.

To make sure that this moment of collective scrutiny doesn’t get lost in the woodwork of an attention-deficient culture, people have been taking to the streets and public places to remind us all of propositions that shouldn’t even have to be said, let alone agitated for, in a healthy society: #blacklivesmatter. Still, one is likely to hear the common retort that this emerging movement is incoherent, inconvenient, incomprehensible. “What do these people want, anyway?” utters a bystander. “I’ll run them over if they get in my way!” tweets another. “It’s terrible that they’re so violent,” laments many a liberal friend. The narrative of the mainstream response reads as a combination of confusion and contempt, simultaneously rapt and repulsed by the spectacle.

Most significantly, analytical consternation has focused more on the seemingly uncoordinated mayhem of the demonstrations than on the coordinated violence of the systems they oppose. The “flash mob” and “pop-up” protest ethos of today’s cutting-edge movements may be as confounding to the “old guard” of movements from a bygone era as they are to the entrenched powers. Still, if we go back a mere half century or so, for many Americans the appearance of a coordinated movement seeking an end to legalized discrimination in schools, transportation, and other places of public accommodation may have seemed like the beginning of a threatening revolution. Notwithstanding that this movement has been cast historically as more reformist than revolutionary in its aims and outcomes, in real-time the widely disseminated images of lunch counter sit-ins and street demonstrations were generally taken as radical in their implications.

The lessons we can take from this are instructive. Just as legislative brushstrokes were incapable of ending institutionalized racism in the nation, we can surmise that contemporary reforms such as police body cameras and civilian review boards will not sufficiently address the deep-seated issues being raised in the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. More pointedly, today’s demonstrations ultimately are asking us to confront the realization that “business as usual” in itself is inherently unjust and reflective of a deeply rooted racial and socioeconomic caste order that persists despite decades of ostensible reforms—and that as long as this order remains intact, there in fact will be no business as usual.

In this sense, what is often taken as the American mythological “norm”—i.e., a level societal playing field defined by equal opportunity, mobility through merit, and justice for all—is undeniably inflected with our unchecked historical baggage and a set of unquestioned values that reflect the requisite power, property, and privilege of an entrenched ruling class consciousness. Those of us who are able to resemble that ruling cadre in certain manners, even superficially, can acquire some of the perquisites attendant to the elite strata—even as the reality is that we are not “them” at the end of the day. Those who lack the elite indicia or the capacity to emulate it sufficiently are left as little more than prey for profiteers, militarists, and wardens, with the double-edged construction of their identities as something to be feared by the elite emulators.

The police, oftentimes appearing as modern-day equivalents of the “palace guard,” are on the front lines of enforcing this racialized socioeconomic order. Somewhat ironically, many of them actually come from the “other side” of the line than the one they’ve been hired to defend; in fact, joining the force may be viewed by some as one of only a few available pathways to try and cross the class divide. This renders the trope of “police versus protesters” particularly problematic, but also suggests a point of leverage if that latent consciousness can be aroused within the ranks of the police themselves. Indeed, it is hard to envision a movement ultimately succeeding without police defections, or at least accommodations such as those voiced by a police chief in Tennessee last week: “In Nashville, if you want to come to a public forum and express your thoughts, even if they’re against the government, you’re going to get your First Amendment protection and you’re going to be treated fairly by the police officers involved.”

This characterization is complicated by another matter that is beginning to be unpacked in the public dialogue. The police are not merely modern-day Pinkertons hired by the bosses to maintain order in the company towns and terror among the workers to prevent them from organizing. Today, increasingly, they are also trained military alumni, having served tours in America’s imperialist wars (which can be viewed as the exported version of systemic violence), and oftentimes are armed with the vestiges of a bloated military-industrial complex that produces more implements of destruction than it could possibly use for its already anachronistic purposes. The police forces in many American cities function as a burgeoning occupying force that cuts a direct swath from Fallujah to Ferguson and all critical points of engagement in between.

We can choose to skirt around all of this and simply ask for a few cosmetic changes to business as usual, perhaps easing some of the more blatant atrocities for a time and even strengthening the mythological fabric of due process and equal treatment. The momentary rupture of traffic and commerce being disrupted [insert characterization here: by angry young people of color] will soon fade into the background with a Christmas-magic cutaway to a yule log and sparkling ornaments. “The system works after all, order is restored—and now back to our regularly scheduled programming…” will proclaim the voiceover reading the cue cards. The task for engaged viewers is to prevent the impending delivery of this colossal lump of holiday coal.

 

*           *           * 

The pop-up protests in the streets right now present the best opportunity for us to collectively engage the difficult issues that most have chosen to ignore but that are coming home to roost. It serves no purpose to continue denying the convergence of the military-industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, redlining and racial profiling, environmental (in)justice, and the rest of the architecture of a dysfunctional system. Indeed, the recent episodes that have brought people into the streets—typifying cases that have been happening every day for a very long time—almost read like an admission of injustice and the raw power to not even care about appearances: “Your cameras and chants and crowds mean nothing; soon enough, most people will resent the intrusions and long for us to restore the comforts and conveniences of their ordinary lives. Your moment of protest will be a minor hindrance at best, and you’ll be branded as the enemy in the process. In the end, our power will be further consolidated and your subjugation expanded.”

Speculative machinations aside, the history of social change counsels that we tread cautiously when broaching revolutionary demands—not to flinch away from making them, but more so to be clear about to whom they are being presented. The gained experiences of movement actors themselves can be inspiring and transformative, and in themselves are part of the measure of success any time people slip the bonds of conformity and take a stand for a better world. On the other side of the coin, entrenched elite interests are not likely to be persuaded to suddenly embrace the “arc of the moral universe” and abdicate their positions of power and privilege. In the middle is that vast pool of onlookers—sometimes horrified, sometimes amused, sometimes inclined to ignore the whole thing and just get about their lives. These are the folks whose consent is counted on to maintain the present order, and whose conversion a movement seeks.

In addressing those still somewhere between elite detachment and flash-mob radicalization, a few points of consideration might be helpful. First, an inherently unjust system inevitably catches all of us in its tentacles, over time becoming an equal opportunity exploiter; when some are not free none are truly free, since (as MLK said) “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Second, the top tier in society do not actually resemble the masses of people, superficial appearances notwithstanding; the gross economic disparity in America, in which the upper echelon controls the vast majority of wealth while the middle and bottom’s combined holdings are nearly negligible, tells a good deal of this story. Third, the emergence of a militarized controlling force (and its concomitant securitized clandestine apparatus) does not discriminate between “good” and “bad” people in its application, but only between those who are an inconvenience and those who can for the moment be tolerated. Fourth, ignoring the crises at hand, from constant cruelty to changing climate, will not keep them from your doorstep.

And to those looking for a condensable movement message, consider that the preferred method of organizing today—consonant with the tenor of the times—is the decentralized network rather than the top-down “central organization” model favored by more entrenched actors. While this may give today’s movements the look of being incoherent, it also more closely resembles the ways in which many of us increasingly meet the world and process information. The internet appears to us as a decentralized network (even as this masks a deeper form of centralization and authoritarianism), so it is unsurprising that those raised squarely under its ambit would replicate this ethos. But the tendency to “pop up” and “go viral” reveals a more subtle consciousness articulated by today’s movements, namely that the most effective response to systemic injustice is one that meets it wherever it is found and that uses its own conveyances to undo its worst aspects. In particular, these disruptions yield great impact (via the conduits of real-time dissemination) at the day-to-day level, where oppressive structures often operate unabashedly yet are unnoticed by the masses: spaces of consumption and transportation, the habitus of low-wage workers, neighborhoods beset by police violence and other deprivations, urban and rural spaces of environmental despoliation. In other words, in the ordinary course of our “business as usual.”

“No Justice, No Profit” isn’t merely a protest chant; it reflects an emerging sensibility that, in many respects, the appearance of justice at all is wholly incompatible with the drive for profit. As a nation, we have blithely ignored this for too long, having become “comfortably numb” (as the Pink Floyd song opines) in the process and failing to recognize that the struggles of oppressed people must become the struggles of all people if any of us are to flourish … or perhaps even survive. As Howard Zinn wrote four decades ago in another moment of upheaval:

“As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience…. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”

Noncooperation with oppression and injustice is a crucial first step; the next one is perhaps even more challenging: articulating and manifesting a vision to strive toward. Sustaining a movement will require the creation of alternative institutions, new models of distribution and collective decision-making, spaces of both diversity and equality. In today’s parlance, we come to discover that the movement itself is part of this message, constituting both a means and an end. On the cusp of pivoting from protest to resistance, movements for justice can sustain by leveraging resistance into persistence, and ultimately prevail through persistence for the continuation of our very existence. Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke of the perils of “sleeping through a revolution.” Today, the alarm bells are ringing in town squares and city streets everywhere, urging everyone still holding out hope for a more just world to rise up and get busy making it.

Randall Amster, JD, PhD, is Director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University, and serves as Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association. His recent books include Peace Ecology (Paradigm Publishers, 2014), Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012), Lost in Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness; and the co-edited volumes  Exploring the Power of Nonviolence: Peace, Politics, and Practice (Syracuse University Press, 2013) and Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action.

from:    http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/06/people-rise-streets-are-alive-sound-movement

Aliens in Vegas?

Vegas_sign

Aliens Wearing Human Outfits Visit Vegas Casinos to Unwind

Unwind from what? Is living with humans really so stressful to aliens known as Tall Whites that they can only relax by playing the slots, watching showgirls and stuffing their faces at buffets until they become Big and Tall Whites ? That’s just some of what author and former Air Force serviceman Charles Hall is telling audiences on his latest book tour in Norway.

Charles “Charlie” Hall is the author of a series of four sci-fi novels called “Millennial Hospitality” which he later revealed were based on his real experiences in the military.

In 1964, when I was a weather observer at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, I witnessed interactions between the military and a group of mysterious tall, white, human-like extra-terrestrials. Their craft are capable of traveling faster than the speed of light because Einstein was wrong about relativity.

tallwhites and hall

According to a news report on his book tour, Hall says the Tall Whites have been working with our military since the 1950s and have shared their technology with us. Hall says there was a lot of interaction between the aliens and humans while he was there.

That interaction included visiting Las Vegas. He says the aliens dressed in human clothing, put on sunglasses and blended in with the other odd-looking tourists on the Vegas strip. Their favorite hangout was the Stardust and they were always surrounded by CIA agents. Gee, how much fun could that be?

Tall Whites are said to be human-like with large blue wrap-around eyes and translucent platinum blond hair and can be up to 8 feet tall. It’s probably good that the aliens were in disguise and under guard, according to Hall.

When you encounter the Tall Whites, it’s such a shock, you are not sure if you are looking at a ghost or an angel, or if you are dreaming.

Before you go dismissing Hall’s stories, consider that Iran claims documents released by Edward Snowden prove that Tall Whites not only exist, they have been running the U.S. since 1945 and helped Nazi Germany come into power.

from:http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/12/aliens-wearing-human-outfits-visit-vegas-casinos-to-unwind/

Asteroid Approaching Earth

Russian scientist spies mountain-sized asteroid heading our way, Dec 2014, UFO Sighting News.

Asteroid name: 2014 UR116
Scientist name: Vladimir Lipunov, a professor at Moscow State University
Date of announcement: December 2014
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/russian-scientist-spies-mountain-sized-asteroid-heading-way-170022867.html

Yahoo news states:

In the film, Lipunov says it’s difficult to calculate the orbit of big objects like 2014 UR116 because, as they hurtle through the solar system, their trajectories are constantly being altered by the gravitational pull of nearby planets. “We need to permanently track this asteroid, because even a small mistake in calculations could have serious consequences,” he said.
There is little indication that this particular asteroid could hit the Earth in the next few decades, though over a much longer period a collision looks quite likely, says Natan Esmant, an expert with the official Space Research Institute in Moscow. A more serious issue, he says, is the estimated 100,000 near-Earth objects, such as asteroids and comets, which can cross our planet’s orbit and are large enough to be dangerous. Only about 11,000 have so far been tracked and cataloged. (More at source).

Using Our Minds to Alter Genes

Can We Change Our Genes & DNA With Our Thoughts?

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For the first time, researchers have been able to construct a gene network that can be controlled by thoughts. Martin Fussenegger, a professor at ETH Zurich led the research project that shows the powerful potential of thought. While we can’t answer the question for certain quite yet that we could control our genes and DNA with thought, discovery seems to be moving in that direction.

This may turn the heads of some scientific minds as it was always believed that we are a victim of our genes in a sense and that we have no control of our body functions. But epigenetics is starting to paint a different picture over time. The field of epigenetics refers to the science that studies how the development, functioning and evolution of biological systems are influenced by forces operating outside the DNA sequence, including intracellular, environmental and energetic influences.

According to cellular biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton, the new biology moves you out of victim-hood and into Mastery—mastery over your own health. He is referring to using thought and emotion to alter genes.

“We have to come to a new way of understanding biology. This ‘new’ understanding has actually already been in the leading edge of science for 10 years now. It takes at least 10 or 15 years for science to take a fact from its first inception and get it out into the public so that the people can understand it. That means anything in current textbooks is at least 10 or 15 years old. What your going to hear is whats going to be the future textbooks.” — Dr. Bruce Lipton

Tapping Into Human Brainwaves

Marc Folcher and other researchers from the group led by Martin Fussenegger, Professor of Biotechnology and Bioengineering at the Department of Biosystems (D-BSSE) in Basel, were able to tap into brainwaves and convert genes into proteins (gene expression) using a new gene regulation method.

“For the first time, we have been able to tap into human brainwaves, transfer them wirelessly to a and regulate the expression of a gene depending on the type of thought. Being able to control via the power of thought is a dream that we’ve been chasing for over a decade,” Martin Fussenegger 

The system was presented in the journal Nature Communications. The system records brainwaves and wirelessly transmits them to an implant which uses an LED lamp that produces near infrared light. The culture chamber containing genetically modified cells is illuminated which in turn tells them to start producing the desired proteins.

As stated by ETH Zurich: “To regulate the quantity of released protein, the test subjects were categorised according to three states of mind: bio-feedback, meditation and concentration. Test subjects who played Minecraft on the computer, i.e. who were concentrating, induced average SEAP values in the bloodstream of the mice. When completely relaxed (meditation), the researchers recorded very high SEAP values in the test animals. For bio-feedback, the test subjects observed the LED light of the implant in the body of the mouse and were able to consciously switch the LED light on or off via the visual feedback. This in turn was reflected by the varying amounts of SEAP in the bloodstream of the mice.”

infrared_thoughts

The source for inspiration in this new gene network came from a game called Mindflex, where players would wear a special headset and through a sensor on their forehead would use thought to influence a small ball through an obstacle course.  The registered electroencephalogram (EEG) was transferred from the person’s mind through the measuring system and into the game.

The idea that our thoughts and brainwaves can have so much power seems like something we would find in some futuristic fiction novel or movie. But the reality of such an idea has been talked about for centuries and many great minds believed that everything in our world is connected and therefore could impact one another. Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci and Nikola Tesla are known for discussing those ideas.

Further Examples

A 2002 article published in the American Psychological Association’s prevention & treatment, by University of Connecticut psychology professor Irving Kirsch titled, “The Emperor’s New Drugs,” made some more shocking discoveries(5)(4). He found that 80 perecent of the effect of antidepressants, as measured in clinical trials, could be attributed to the placebo effect. This professor even had to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get information on the clinical trials of the top antidepressants.

A Baylor School of Medicine study, published in 2002 in the New England Journal of Medicine, (1) looked at surgery for patients with severe and debilitating knee pain. Many surgeons know there is no placebo effect in surgery, or so most of them believe. The patients were divided into three groups. The surgeons shaved the damaged cartilage in the knee of one group. For the second group they flushed out the knee joint, removing all of the material believed to be causing inflammation. Both of these processes are the standard surgeries people go through who have severe arthritic knees. The third group received a “fake” surgery, the patients were only sedated and tricked that they actually had the knee surgery. For the patients not really receiving the surgery, the doctors made the incisions and splashed salt water on the knee as they would in normal surgery. They then sewed up the incisions like the real thing and the process was complete. All three groups went through the same rehab process, and the results were astonishing. The placebo group improved just as much as the other two groups who had surgery.

My skill as a surgeon had no benefit on these patients. The entire benefit of surgery for osteoarthritis of the kneww was the placebo effect – Dr. Moseley (Surgeon involved in the study)(3)

Working Beyond The Denial of New Science

With any new great discoveries or far-reaching ideas, there will be those who rigidly stick to the current sphere of thinking and who talk down to the dreamers and great thinkers of our world who are trying to push the boundaries. Ideas of consciousness having an impact on our reality in some way has been labelled as “woo-woo” or insane by many even though research suggests the possibility. Why not explore the fascinating possibility that this can be possible instead of casting it aside?

Perhaps we are at an important juncture in time when it comes to the science of consciousness. Year after year more great scientists are joining the field of study and producing some fascinating work. The body of evidence continues to grow but so does the skepticism and hatred towards the field. Perhaps because it challenges the rigid, close-minded culture of much of the scientific community, or maybe there simply isn’t enough research yet. Either way, it’s clear one of the most important things we can do at this stage of the game is to stay open and not allow our beliefs to interrupt the search for truth.

“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter, we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. Get over it, and accept the inarguable conclusion. The universe is immaterial-mental and spiritual.” – R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University , “The Mental Universe” ; Nature 436:29,2005)

from:    http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/12/05/see-how-scientists-are-controlling-genes-with-thoughts/