Admittedly, the damage from huge single doses may be greater than the same cumulative dose from many small exposures. But the smaller doses can still add up. Many studies have shown that repeated exposures to low levels of ionizing radiation from CT scans and x-rays can cause cancer.
Remember, the radiation from CT scans and x-rays are external emitters – the radiation emanates from outside the body. In contract, internal emitters keep emitting their radiation inside the body. Therefore, the cumulative effect of multiple small doses of radiation from internal emitters could be even more dramatic, depending on the half life, metabolic pathways and other properties of the particular radioactive particle. Hot Particles are Virtually Undetectable when Inhaled or Swallowed.
The following recommendations, listed as important to very important, was taken from the Radiation Exposure section of the book "Prescription for Nutritional Healing". Many of these items can be available at your local supplement retailer.
Calcium: 1500 mg daily to help prevent the body from absorbing radioactive materials.
Magnesium: 750 mg daily to help prevent the body from absorbing radioactive materials.
Coenzyme Q10: Protects the body from harmful radiation.
Coenzyme A: Supports the immune system and detoxifies the bloodstream.
Glutathione, L-cysteine and L-methionine: 500 mg each daily on an empty stomach with water or juice. Do not take with milk. To detoxify harmful substances and protect against the harmful effects of radiation.
Garlic: Stimulates and protects the immune system.
Selenium: 200 mcg daily. DO NOT EXCEED 40 mcg DAILY IF PREGNANT. A free radical scavenger that protects against cancer.
Pantothenic Acid (B5): 50 mg daily. Protects against the harmful effects of radiation.
Vitamin C / Ascorbic Acid: 5000 - 20,000 mg daily in divided doses. A powerful free radical scavenger.
Japanese Government Cover-up Foreshadows Mega-disaster
"In my thought there is only one universal religion, whose varied paths are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being."
~Kahlil Gibran
Friday, June 17, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Facing The Extinction of Man Kind
The Tacomagroove Prophecy:
May 18, 2011 at 3:12 am
"There are only 35 days or less until the fuel sustains a full-scale fission criticality. The boron, (which stops nuclear fission from occurring) will have exceeded its lifespan by this time…Tepco had already made a request as of march to evacuate the reactors. Though they are being forced to see it until the end by the Japanese government. God bless their souls. As it surely is a death mission.
The first death was reported on Friday. Meaning, that the situation is already well beyond cataclysmic. In all reality, the worlds biggest dirty bomb will be released in no more than 35 days… Tepco will likely evacuate the site between the dates: June 16th – June 28th… This is because boron is limited and can no longer sustain its self within the current settings”.
Meaning: the fuel will release amounts of neutrons in such excess that the boron “in any quantity” will be now be unable to capture enough neutrons to stop a criticality.
At this time neutrons will begin to react against atoms, leading to a spike in temperatures exceeding any known cooling process… The fuel will then go core through the floor, and reach the water table in no less than 1-6 hours… At that time the fuel will both be released in atmospheric and oceanic / form. Plaguing Japan first and foremost. I presume that over 100,000- 10,000,000 deaths will be attributed to the event alone.
Japan will likely be forced to abandon the main island entirely within that time. The continental united states will see the radiation within 2 days. The radiation will sweep across the northwest, as far north as Vancouver canada, and as far south as new mexico. The main area’s to be astray from are seattle through sandiego. The radiation will likely be 350 – 800cmp. (fyi 200cpm is when you should run indoors)…
This will continue as a global norm for at least two months, at that time reactors 5 and 6 will likely begin the path to china syndrome. If you are in a temporary fallout shelter, by august, you should be planning to find a more permanent location to settle… Come November, the situation will likely start over again, now reaching 1000cpm or more. It will be anywhere up to a century for the initial radiation plumes to settle… The 600,000 spent fuel rods, will likely contaminate the entire planet killing 45% or more, of life on earth…
“Once the reaction from neutrons has dwindled to a 100-300 cpm internationally”; The biological life forms will begin to emerge from the now very few uncontaminated portions of the planet… Though human dna will likely be mutated, and lifespans will be lowered to 20 – 44 years old in adult males, and 25 – 50 years old in Adult females.
So in short uncontrolled fission taking place inside the zirconium cells, lead to a temperature spike inside the core fuel cells to reactor 1. Once the heat reached beyond boiling point the tops of the fuel rods were exposed to the now present oxygen. Creating a violent reaction damaging the rods… This allowed the nuclear fuel pellets to escape their containment, dropping to the bottom of the reactor core. At that point Tepco then had no choice but to induce nitrogen into the reactor (as the melting of zirconium creates vast amounts of hydrogen)… While the nitrogen settled the hydrogen the remaining fuel collected in the bottom of the reactor, creating so much fission the fuel melted through 6 feet of metal and concrete landing in the reactors basement. Now were playing a dangerous waiting game. The GE reactor design has an emergency platform designed under the reactors containment in the event a meltdown was to occur, that feature was built to not only prolong a meltdown but also prevent fission as best it can… However, with the fuel heating up, you must consider that the water being implored with high levels of boron are doing little to nothing to prevent the fission from occuring…
That being said, Its only going to be a short amount of time before the fuel likely surpasses the emergency system, and makes its way into the water table. After that happens, soil and water will produce steam clouds that will contaminate vast areas of the planet… =ing the evacuation of the site… Game Over.
I assume this will be more like a nuclear fountain… Think of a geyser of radiation spewing into the atmosphere for the next 10 – 1000 years Like they are now except 20 times worse… One that will create temperatures that are unbearable to work near, rising to 120f. or greater…
It will contaminate everything its stream touches. Fukushima would become a wasteland, of contamination and japan would need to extend the evacuation zone to at least 300km likely much much more area. though
A china syndrome has never happened thus the math is beyond me… The contamination would spread in any nation internationally and nationally. (as it has now). but in much higher doses. likely 150 -350cpm… Note this is on the premiss that only one reactor has reached criticality…
However: In the event there is an explosion, Well thats just bad… We would witness at least 3 – 300000 tons of metric nuclear waste, instantly turned into particle form… The release would do either one of three possible things…
1. a really bad case scenario: Assist reactors 2-6 in achieving a full fusion criticality, leading to an apocalyptic amount of radiation in such high density that anyone that is in its path would perish by suffocation;
2. The better, and yet less likely scenario: achieve a level of detonation, while completely staying within a safe proximity of the other troubled reactors on site, (which is very unlikely)… somehow redirecting most of the initial mass over and into the ocean… Thus spreading only minute levels of radiation globally… Then there is the worst case scenario…
3. (fyi, This is also a product of result #1)… If the fusion some how took the full site (all 6 reactor) in one big kaboom (meaning a full fusion criticality) …
In lamen terms: There will be absolutely nothing left; Ever witness a: coronal mass ejection??? Now, have you ever heard of the earth creating one??? If there were an explosion leading to a full fusion criticality, You wouldn’t need to worry about flights or planning… That would register as an ELE. (extinction level event)…
The explosion would likely blow the entire atmosphere off the planet.
food for thought: G.E. owns comcast; Is this why USA media is blackballing the story… ?
Comcast:
NBC (NBCUniversal, LLC is owned by Comcast (51%) & General Electric (49%)). Specific assets include: Comcast: E! · Style Network · Golf Channel · Versus · G4 (88%) · PBS Kids Sprout (part owner) · TV One (part owner) · FEARnet (part owner) · ExerciseTV (part owner) · Comcast Entertainment Television · Comcast Television · MLB Network (minority stake) · NHL Network (minority stake) · The Mtn. (50%) · New England Cable News · Comcast Network XFINITY · DailyCandy · Fancast · Fandango · Movies.com · Plaxo · ThePlatform GE: Universal Studios: Focus Features · Geneon Universal, Illumination Entertainment • United International Pictures,· Universal Animation Studios · Universal Pictures · Universal Playback · Universal Studios Home Entertainment · Media Rights Capital Universal Parks & Resorts: Universal Studios Dubailand · Universal Studios Hollywood · Universal Orlando Resort (Universal Studios Florida · Islands of Adventure · Universal CityWalk) · Universal Studios Japan · Universal Studios Singapore · Universal Studios South Korea Broadcast TV assets: NBC · NBC News · NBC Sports · Telemundo · Universal Sports NBCUniversal Cable, A&E Television Networks (15%) · Bravo · Chiller · CNBC · Comcast SportsNet · E! · FEARnet · G4 · Golf Channel · MSNBC[nu 4] · Mun2 · Oxygen · ShopNBC (30%) · Sleuth · Style · Syfy · Telemundo Puerto Rico · Universal HD · Universal Sports (50%) · USA Network · Versus · The Weather Channel · Weatherscan CNBC global channels CNBC · CNBC Africa · CNBC Asia · CNBC Europe · CNBC Latin America · CNBC World CNBC Europe branches Class CNBC (20%) · CNBC Africa · CNBC Arabiya (according to CNBC Europe) · CNBC-e · CNBC Nordic · TVN CNBC CNBC Asia branches CNBC-TV18 · CNBC Australia · CNBC Awaaz · CNBC Hong Kong · CNBC Pakistan · CNBC Singapore · Nikkei CNBC · SBS-CNBC Universal Networks International: 13th Street · Diva TV · Hallmark Channel (International) · KidsCo[nu 6] · Movies 24 · Steel[nu 7] · Studio Universal · Syfy · Universal Channel Syfy global channels: Asia · Australia · Benelux · France · Germany · Japan · Latin America · Poland · Portugal · Romania · Russia · Spain · UK · US NBCUniversal Television Group NBC Studios · NBCUniversal Television Distribution · Telemundo of Puerto Rico Studios · Telemundo Television Studios · Universal Media Studios NBC O&Os KNBC · KNSD[nu 8] · KNTV · KXAS[nu 8] · WCAU · WMAQ · WNBC (New York Nonstop) · WRC · WTVJ · WVIT Telemundo O&Os KBLR · KDEN · KEJT-LP · KHRR · KNSO[nu 9] · KSTS · KTAZ · KTMD · KVDA[nu 9] · KVEA · KXTX · WKAQ · WNEU[nu 9] · WNJU · WSCV · WSNS ShopNBC O&Os WWDP Spanish independent TV station KWHY Internet ventures: getTRIO.com · Hulu[nu 10] · iVillage · msnbc.com[nu 4] · Television Without Pity
I think so!!!!!!!
“The greatest lies ahead”… by: Tacomagroove 3/21/2011 2:47am “Peeking into the future of the Fukushima Daichii nuclear crisis. Ive become quite concerned in several key issues”. The first being the lack of physical intervention from national and international scientific communities. While Tepco has now presented the “Road map of death”, Not one single qualified cantidate has disclosed the true magnitude of the situation humanity is indeed facing today…
Humanity is in fact in trouble! btw: That does “not” disclude you!
In short: “We may very well be facing the extinction of man kind.” (This is “NOT” an “under statement”).
Take that with the largest dose of reality you can afford. As I assure you the situation is indeed beyond Nuclear.
While you may find comfort in the main stream media’s reluctance and lack in reporting this crisis. Many peer networks are now taking to the web, scouring the internet for evidence to bring “you” insight to this claim…
What should be most concerneing in my opinion is that there are in fact “several” working forces, hendering this effort. These organizations are the “same” organizations held in accountability in disclosing this same information to you.
Why?
Take a look at these examples: EPA RAISES RADIATION LEVELS EPA STOPS MONITORING RADIATION CANADA STOPS MONITORING RADIATION JAPAN RAISES HEALTH LIMITS FDA REFUSES PROPER MONITORING OF FOOD SAFETY WHITE HOUSE SUPRESSES INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS JAPANESE DELAY PUBLIC HEALTH SAFETY INFORMATION (This list could go on and on and on…)
I cant speak for you: but I am wondering myself why our government actually pays these agencies portions of my taxes…
The situation is indeed a catyclism of Lies Deciete and Fraud. At the highest branches of our governments. Though you may be speculative of my claims, these are key supporting factors in my argument that the current situation in Japan is so alarming that calling it an ELE (extinction level event), is actually becoming an understatment.
An important issue you need to consider is an event similar to this one unfolded 25 years ago in Chernobyl… This too was an event where the corruption in information led to massive public health scandals; deaths; and contamination of the planet…
The significant issues that lie ahead have postulated past their acceptibility. Mankind has limited time to deal with this situation. As the current status of the failing reactors is so severe, that the rising in temperature to the slightest degree will be the last straw, the tipping of the scale, the end of the line…
What once was a factiscious scenario only attributed to hollywood movies and great novel. Is indeed the reality we are facing.
We are truly looking at the most appocalyptic situation, of biblical proportion; That mankind has “ever” faced. The amounts of nuclear fuel present in Fukushima Daichii dwindle the now abandoned, forever contaminated, nuclear wastelands of Chernobyl.
In a very, very, crude reality. You should be preparing mentally for the challenges that you and your loved ones will be facing. Radiation has already begun wreaking havok across our globe. The levels are bio accumulating in our food, our water, and our entire enviroment.
Bio accumulation means that the radiation which was being down played as miniscule amounts is in fact growing in sizes past humans integrity to refract. We are certainly headed to a unknown frontier. One where tyvek suits and gas masks are the new essentials in survival.
If you are waiting for you government to tell you this think again… I would advise you to take a deeper look into seeking the information that your government is not telling you… After all. They have this data…. Do they not?
I didn’t get the memo… Did you?
You have to take into consideration that the president of the united states, only public address on the fukushima nuclear crisis to date, was in fact a bold faced lie…
It would be a good idea for you to now take into consideration; That the very top experts of nuclear, enviromental and radiological sciences are on the united states advisory. That the calculable distance from japan (5000 m) vs the radiations speed, and height, in the planets jetstream isn’t a miscalculable figure…
thus my conclusion:
I would stop wasting your time wondering when they are planning on telling you the truth. After all… I just did…. They indeed have the data and could easily dispute the claims I have made… “We are facing a Nuclear holocost”
I would start wondering how you are planning to survive.
Emmy 5/21/2011
Dispute me all you would like. Prove me wrong… Now there lies a challenge…
Stay informed. Educate yourself.
Watch the movie the road. In all reality this is an event that will unfold.
THIS IS NOT A MATTER OF IF. THIS IS A MATTER OF WHEN!
In the mean time, find comfort in being prepared as best you can. (be prepared mentally as well). You are already ahead of the curve for paying attention and asking questions… Keep calm and remain focused so that, in the event “You do” find yourself living in a post apocalyptic nuclear situation. You have tools and training for survival.
Learn about the common known types of nuclear radiation such as beta gamma and alpha. Learn how they effect you internally and externally.
Learn how to protect and shield yourself from it. Mass will stop any radiation. Though the amount of mass in “quantity” must be able to provide enough protection to support a contamination free environment.
The denser the mass the better. Think lead, Metal, concrete ect. 6ft should be sufficient to stop gamma radiation.
Download a copy of the following to a laptop charge the battery and keep it in your emergency kit at all times: google earth. a survival guide. A fallout guide. A text document from wikipedia Labeling: Types of radiation; radiation exposure charts; And a radiation converting chart; This way in an emergency you have written material’s and guides, on hand. to help you survive.
Also it would be helpful to even create a radiation jump suit. so that you can move around freely if you find your self in a dangerous situation.
Nuclear fallout guide’s are a great place to start btw… I suggest You start your adventure by reading this article… It’s a few pages of everything you really need to know…( print a backup of this one…) Call this the new bible:
[link to www.ki4u.com]
The situation; May I remind you; could get very ugly. I assume without a doubt it will. There is no shame in being aware…
stay alert, and don’t waste time. If you want to be prepared. Do so intelligently. Many of my friends have told me I shouldn’t worry about this situation. They are certainly misinformed.
I will admit no shame in treating it with the respect it deserves. It truly is thus far the biggest tragedy to ever occur on the planet, in humanities wake.
I will also remind you: TEPCO. <—- Does not have a plan.
If your toilet was over flowing for hours, and you did not fix it. the situation still gets worse. It rots the floor, then it molds; rots your support beams ect.
and if you dropped a duece, and everyone would literally faint if they went in to fix it???
well thats the point, there…
If you don't fix it, I just demonstrated how the situation will continue to slowly and slowly get worse…
so here is my point.
Fukushima is the toilet. People are not fainting from the smell. they are dieing. The floor and so on are the walls in which the nuclear fuel will slowly conquer and overcome. Until you lose your house.
Tepco has demonstrated that there is no sufficient way to end that said "chain reaction"…
Thus your toilet just totaled your house.
For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
May 18, 2011 at 3:12 am
"There are only 35 days or less until the fuel sustains a full-scale fission criticality. The boron, (which stops nuclear fission from occurring) will have exceeded its lifespan by this time…Tepco had already made a request as of march to evacuate the reactors. Though they are being forced to see it until the end by the Japanese government. God bless their souls. As it surely is a death mission.
The first death was reported on Friday. Meaning, that the situation is already well beyond cataclysmic. In all reality, the worlds biggest dirty bomb will be released in no more than 35 days… Tepco will likely evacuate the site between the dates: June 16th – June 28th… This is because boron is limited and can no longer sustain its self within the current settings”.
Meaning: the fuel will release amounts of neutrons in such excess that the boron “in any quantity” will be now be unable to capture enough neutrons to stop a criticality.
At this time neutrons will begin to react against atoms, leading to a spike in temperatures exceeding any known cooling process… The fuel will then go core through the floor, and reach the water table in no less than 1-6 hours… At that time the fuel will both be released in atmospheric and oceanic / form. Plaguing Japan first and foremost. I presume that over 100,000- 10,000,000 deaths will be attributed to the event alone.
Japan will likely be forced to abandon the main island entirely within that time. The continental united states will see the radiation within 2 days. The radiation will sweep across the northwest, as far north as Vancouver canada, and as far south as new mexico. The main area’s to be astray from are seattle through sandiego. The radiation will likely be 350 – 800cmp. (fyi 200cpm is when you should run indoors)…
This will continue as a global norm for at least two months, at that time reactors 5 and 6 will likely begin the path to china syndrome. If you are in a temporary fallout shelter, by august, you should be planning to find a more permanent location to settle… Come November, the situation will likely start over again, now reaching 1000cpm or more. It will be anywhere up to a century for the initial radiation plumes to settle… The 600,000 spent fuel rods, will likely contaminate the entire planet killing 45% or more, of life on earth…
“Once the reaction from neutrons has dwindled to a 100-300 cpm internationally”; The biological life forms will begin to emerge from the now very few uncontaminated portions of the planet… Though human dna will likely be mutated, and lifespans will be lowered to 20 – 44 years old in adult males, and 25 – 50 years old in Adult females.
So in short uncontrolled fission taking place inside the zirconium cells, lead to a temperature spike inside the core fuel cells to reactor 1. Once the heat reached beyond boiling point the tops of the fuel rods were exposed to the now present oxygen. Creating a violent reaction damaging the rods… This allowed the nuclear fuel pellets to escape their containment, dropping to the bottom of the reactor core. At that point Tepco then had no choice but to induce nitrogen into the reactor (as the melting of zirconium creates vast amounts of hydrogen)… While the nitrogen settled the hydrogen the remaining fuel collected in the bottom of the reactor, creating so much fission the fuel melted through 6 feet of metal and concrete landing in the reactors basement. Now were playing a dangerous waiting game. The GE reactor design has an emergency platform designed under the reactors containment in the event a meltdown was to occur, that feature was built to not only prolong a meltdown but also prevent fission as best it can… However, with the fuel heating up, you must consider that the water being implored with high levels of boron are doing little to nothing to prevent the fission from occuring…
That being said, Its only going to be a short amount of time before the fuel likely surpasses the emergency system, and makes its way into the water table. After that happens, soil and water will produce steam clouds that will contaminate vast areas of the planet… =ing the evacuation of the site… Game Over.
I assume this will be more like a nuclear fountain… Think of a geyser of radiation spewing into the atmosphere for the next 10 – 1000 years Like they are now except 20 times worse… One that will create temperatures that are unbearable to work near, rising to 120f. or greater…
It will contaminate everything its stream touches. Fukushima would become a wasteland, of contamination and japan would need to extend the evacuation zone to at least 300km likely much much more area. though
A china syndrome has never happened thus the math is beyond me… The contamination would spread in any nation internationally and nationally. (as it has now). but in much higher doses. likely 150 -350cpm… Note this is on the premiss that only one reactor has reached criticality…
However: In the event there is an explosion, Well thats just bad… We would witness at least 3 – 300000 tons of metric nuclear waste, instantly turned into particle form… The release would do either one of three possible things…
1. a really bad case scenario: Assist reactors 2-6 in achieving a full fusion criticality, leading to an apocalyptic amount of radiation in such high density that anyone that is in its path would perish by suffocation;
2. The better, and yet less likely scenario: achieve a level of detonation, while completely staying within a safe proximity of the other troubled reactors on site, (which is very unlikely)… somehow redirecting most of the initial mass over and into the ocean… Thus spreading only minute levels of radiation globally… Then there is the worst case scenario…
3. (fyi, This is also a product of result #1)… If the fusion some how took the full site (all 6 reactor) in one big kaboom (meaning a full fusion criticality) …
In lamen terms: There will be absolutely nothing left; Ever witness a: coronal mass ejection??? Now, have you ever heard of the earth creating one??? If there were an explosion leading to a full fusion criticality, You wouldn’t need to worry about flights or planning… That would register as an ELE. (extinction level event)…
The explosion would likely blow the entire atmosphere off the planet.
food for thought: G.E. owns comcast; Is this why USA media is blackballing the story… ?
Comcast:
NBC (NBCUniversal, LLC is owned by Comcast (51%) & General Electric (49%)). Specific assets include: Comcast: E! · Style Network · Golf Channel · Versus · G4 (88%) · PBS Kids Sprout (part owner) · TV One (part owner) · FEARnet (part owner) · ExerciseTV (part owner) · Comcast Entertainment Television · Comcast Television · MLB Network (minority stake) · NHL Network (minority stake) · The Mtn. (50%) · New England Cable News · Comcast Network XFINITY · DailyCandy · Fancast · Fandango · Movies.com · Plaxo · ThePlatform GE: Universal Studios: Focus Features · Geneon Universal, Illumination Entertainment • United International Pictures,· Universal Animation Studios · Universal Pictures · Universal Playback · Universal Studios Home Entertainment · Media Rights Capital Universal Parks & Resorts: Universal Studios Dubailand · Universal Studios Hollywood · Universal Orlando Resort (Universal Studios Florida · Islands of Adventure · Universal CityWalk) · Universal Studios Japan · Universal Studios Singapore · Universal Studios South Korea Broadcast TV assets: NBC · NBC News · NBC Sports · Telemundo · Universal Sports NBCUniversal Cable, A&E Television Networks (15%) · Bravo · Chiller · CNBC · Comcast SportsNet · E! · FEARnet · G4 · Golf Channel · MSNBC[nu 4] · Mun2 · Oxygen · ShopNBC (30%) · Sleuth · Style · Syfy · Telemundo Puerto Rico · Universal HD · Universal Sports (50%) · USA Network · Versus · The Weather Channel · Weatherscan CNBC global channels CNBC · CNBC Africa · CNBC Asia · CNBC Europe · CNBC Latin America · CNBC World CNBC Europe branches Class CNBC (20%) · CNBC Africa · CNBC Arabiya (according to CNBC Europe) · CNBC-e · CNBC Nordic · TVN CNBC CNBC Asia branches CNBC-TV18 · CNBC Australia · CNBC Awaaz · CNBC Hong Kong · CNBC Pakistan · CNBC Singapore · Nikkei CNBC · SBS-CNBC Universal Networks International: 13th Street · Diva TV · Hallmark Channel (International) · KidsCo[nu 6] · Movies 24 · Steel[nu 7] · Studio Universal · Syfy · Universal Channel Syfy global channels: Asia · Australia · Benelux · France · Germany · Japan · Latin America · Poland · Portugal · Romania · Russia · Spain · UK · US NBCUniversal Television Group NBC Studios · NBCUniversal Television Distribution · Telemundo of Puerto Rico Studios · Telemundo Television Studios · Universal Media Studios NBC O&Os KNBC · KNSD[nu 8] · KNTV · KXAS[nu 8] · WCAU · WMAQ · WNBC (New York Nonstop) · WRC · WTVJ · WVIT Telemundo O&Os KBLR · KDEN · KEJT-LP · KHRR · KNSO[nu 9] · KSTS · KTAZ · KTMD · KVDA[nu 9] · KVEA · KXTX · WKAQ · WNEU[nu 9] · WNJU · WSCV · WSNS ShopNBC O&Os WWDP Spanish independent TV station KWHY Internet ventures: getTRIO.com · Hulu[nu 10] · iVillage · msnbc.com[nu 4] · Television Without Pity
I think so!!!!!!!
“The greatest lies ahead”… by: Tacomagroove 3/21/2011 2:47am “Peeking into the future of the Fukushima Daichii nuclear crisis. Ive become quite concerned in several key issues”. The first being the lack of physical intervention from national and international scientific communities. While Tepco has now presented the “Road map of death”, Not one single qualified cantidate has disclosed the true magnitude of the situation humanity is indeed facing today…
Humanity is in fact in trouble! btw: That does “not” disclude you!
In short: “We may very well be facing the extinction of man kind.” (This is “NOT” an “under statement”).
Take that with the largest dose of reality you can afford. As I assure you the situation is indeed beyond Nuclear.
While you may find comfort in the main stream media’s reluctance and lack in reporting this crisis. Many peer networks are now taking to the web, scouring the internet for evidence to bring “you” insight to this claim…
What should be most concerneing in my opinion is that there are in fact “several” working forces, hendering this effort. These organizations are the “same” organizations held in accountability in disclosing this same information to you.
Why?
Take a look at these examples: EPA RAISES RADIATION LEVELS EPA STOPS MONITORING RADIATION CANADA STOPS MONITORING RADIATION JAPAN RAISES HEALTH LIMITS FDA REFUSES PROPER MONITORING OF FOOD SAFETY WHITE HOUSE SUPRESSES INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS JAPANESE DELAY PUBLIC HEALTH SAFETY INFORMATION (This list could go on and on and on…)
I cant speak for you: but I am wondering myself why our government actually pays these agencies portions of my taxes…
The situation is indeed a catyclism of Lies Deciete and Fraud. At the highest branches of our governments. Though you may be speculative of my claims, these are key supporting factors in my argument that the current situation in Japan is so alarming that calling it an ELE (extinction level event), is actually becoming an understatment.
An important issue you need to consider is an event similar to this one unfolded 25 years ago in Chernobyl… This too was an event where the corruption in information led to massive public health scandals; deaths; and contamination of the planet…
The significant issues that lie ahead have postulated past their acceptibility. Mankind has limited time to deal with this situation. As the current status of the failing reactors is so severe, that the rising in temperature to the slightest degree will be the last straw, the tipping of the scale, the end of the line…
What once was a factiscious scenario only attributed to hollywood movies and great novel. Is indeed the reality we are facing.
We are truly looking at the most appocalyptic situation, of biblical proportion; That mankind has “ever” faced. The amounts of nuclear fuel present in Fukushima Daichii dwindle the now abandoned, forever contaminated, nuclear wastelands of Chernobyl.
In a very, very, crude reality. You should be preparing mentally for the challenges that you and your loved ones will be facing. Radiation has already begun wreaking havok across our globe. The levels are bio accumulating in our food, our water, and our entire enviroment.
Bio accumulation means that the radiation which was being down played as miniscule amounts is in fact growing in sizes past humans integrity to refract. We are certainly headed to a unknown frontier. One where tyvek suits and gas masks are the new essentials in survival.
If you are waiting for you government to tell you this think again… I would advise you to take a deeper look into seeking the information that your government is not telling you… After all. They have this data…. Do they not?
I didn’t get the memo… Did you?
You have to take into consideration that the president of the united states, only public address on the fukushima nuclear crisis to date, was in fact a bold faced lie…
It would be a good idea for you to now take into consideration; That the very top experts of nuclear, enviromental and radiological sciences are on the united states advisory. That the calculable distance from japan (5000 m) vs the radiations speed, and height, in the planets jetstream isn’t a miscalculable figure…
thus my conclusion:
I would stop wasting your time wondering when they are planning on telling you the truth. After all… I just did…. They indeed have the data and could easily dispute the claims I have made… “We are facing a Nuclear holocost”
I would start wondering how you are planning to survive.
Emmy 5/21/2011
Dispute me all you would like. Prove me wrong… Now there lies a challenge…
Stay informed. Educate yourself.
Watch the movie the road. In all reality this is an event that will unfold.
THIS IS NOT A MATTER OF IF. THIS IS A MATTER OF WHEN!
In the mean time, find comfort in being prepared as best you can. (be prepared mentally as well). You are already ahead of the curve for paying attention and asking questions… Keep calm and remain focused so that, in the event “You do” find yourself living in a post apocalyptic nuclear situation. You have tools and training for survival.
Learn about the common known types of nuclear radiation such as beta gamma and alpha. Learn how they effect you internally and externally.
Learn how to protect and shield yourself from it. Mass will stop any radiation. Though the amount of mass in “quantity” must be able to provide enough protection to support a contamination free environment.
The denser the mass the better. Think lead, Metal, concrete ect. 6ft should be sufficient to stop gamma radiation.
Download a copy of the following to a laptop charge the battery and keep it in your emergency kit at all times: google earth. a survival guide. A fallout guide. A text document from wikipedia Labeling: Types of radiation; radiation exposure charts; And a radiation converting chart; This way in an emergency you have written material’s and guides, on hand. to help you survive.
Also it would be helpful to even create a radiation jump suit. so that you can move around freely if you find your self in a dangerous situation.
Nuclear fallout guide’s are a great place to start btw… I suggest You start your adventure by reading this article… It’s a few pages of everything you really need to know…( print a backup of this one…) Call this the new bible:
[link to www.ki4u.com]
The situation; May I remind you; could get very ugly. I assume without a doubt it will. There is no shame in being aware…
stay alert, and don’t waste time. If you want to be prepared. Do so intelligently. Many of my friends have told me I shouldn’t worry about this situation. They are certainly misinformed.
I will admit no shame in treating it with the respect it deserves. It truly is thus far the biggest tragedy to ever occur on the planet, in humanities wake.
I will also remind you: TEPCO. <—- Does not have a plan.
If your toilet was over flowing for hours, and you did not fix it. the situation still gets worse. It rots the floor, then it molds; rots your support beams ect.
and if you dropped a duece, and everyone would literally faint if they went in to fix it???
well thats the point, there…
If you don't fix it, I just demonstrated how the situation will continue to slowly and slowly get worse…
so here is my point.
Fukushima is the toilet. People are not fainting from the smell. they are dieing. The floor and so on are the walls in which the nuclear fuel will slowly conquer and overcome. Until you lose your house.
Tepco has demonstrated that there is no sufficient way to end that said "chain reaction"…
Thus your toilet just totaled your house.
For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Saturday, April 09, 2011
The Handwriting Has Been on the Wall For a Long Time.
The Handwriting on the Wall
More Acceptance of Relative Decline
by Gary Leupp / September 24th, 2010
In the biblical story of Daniel, the Babylonian emperor Balshazzar, engaged in drunken revelry with his courtiers using goblets plundered during the conquest of Jerusalem, drinking toasts to the gods of gold and silver, is startled to see a hand appear on the wall of the banquet hall. (Daniel 5:5-7) The hand writes: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsim.
Some Bible scholars think these were words for coins circulating in the empire, or measures of metal used in commerce. (Tekel is the same as the Hebrew shekel.) So the message was something like, “Dollars, dollars, quarters, half dollars.”
What could it mean, wondered Balshazzar and his courtiers? The emperor’s advisors were mystified. So Daniel, a wise man among the Jews of the Babylonian Exile who enjoyed the favor of the court, was called upon to interpret the meaning of this amazing event.
Daniel explained that God was using clever puns involving money to foretell the empire’s doom. Mene (or mina) can mean “measured” or “numbered” as well as “judged.” Tekel (or shekel) can mean “weighed on the scales.” Upharsin is a coin one-half the size of a mene, but also is a pun for “Persian.” So Daniel told Balshazzar:
This is the interpretation of the matter: MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; UPHARSIN, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians. (Daniel 5:25)
Indeed that very night the emperor was slain and a Mede (Darius) became ruler. Soon the empire was conquered by Cyrus the Persian.
The Book of Daniel was written in the second century BCE. It refers to rulers who lived four centuries earlier and shouldn’t be taken literally. The first half is an exquisitely written novelette in which Daniel “prophesizes” things that had already occurred. The Babylonian Empire had been succeeded by the Median, Persian, and then following the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Greek empire. (And then the Romans gradually build their empire, doomed to decline.)
Earlier in the Book of Daniel (2:31-45), the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar asks Daniel to explain to him the meaning of a dream involving a statue with a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs from brass, legs of iron, and feet part iron and clay. Daniel explains that Nebudchadnezzar is himself the head of gold but “after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over the whole earth.” These are often interpreted to mean the succession of Median, Persian, and Greek empires. The last was ruling the Middle East at the time this book was written. The author wanted to say that while the Greeks ruling Judea appeared powerful, they were fundamentally weak. (This is what the phrase “feet of clay” has come to mean.)
The whole point is: empires eventually fall. (Their decline and fall is just a particularly dramatic example of what Buddhists call “the law of impermanence.”) One doesn’t have to suppose that a deity oversees human events to acknowledge the historical fact that no empire is forever.
And the handwriting is indeed on the wall. This what the moving finger writes today, on walls in the halls of power all over Washington and on Wall Street:
Mene, mene. Your days are numbered.
Your dollar’s value is falling. Between 2000 and 2009 it fell by 33% in relation to the euro and 23% to the yen. And your share in the global GDP is declining. The EU now leads the U.S., according to IMF figures, at 28% of the total. The U.S. produces 25% and China and Japan together 17%. In 1945 the U.S. figure was around 50% of the total. It was over 30% in 2000. You must accept the inevitability of further decline.
Teke. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.
Poll after poll show that the world’s people find your government morally lacking—indeed viciously brutal in pursuit of its imperialist goals. There has been no change in policy between the Bush and Obama administrations. Your government slaughters civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, increasingly through the cowardly use of drone-fired missiles. You refuse to punish those responsible for cruel wars based on lies. You say you will pressure Israel to get its settlers out of the West Bank, then you back off, because of the power of the Israel Lobby. Your Congress actually congratulates Israel when it blitzkriegs Gaza or attacks an aid ship in international waters killing nine unarmed people including a U.S. citizen. Everyone knows you lie, and cover up atrocities. You have zero moral credibility in this world.
Upharsim. Your kingdom is divided.
Your society is deeply, bitterly divided. Income inequality has been increasing since the 1970s and is the highest in the industrialized world, resembling the situation as of 1929. The top 1% of households own at least 35% of all privately held wealth and the bottom 80% of households just 15% of the wealth. The poverty level is back to 1960s (pre-“War on Poverty”) level while the number of millionaires—many of them finance capitalists deliberately exploiting investors’ and home-buyers’ gullibility–soars.
Whether your country will retain its current borders, or split up like Balshazzar’s empire, remains to be seen. But the class division is very real, and the struggle of those most hurt in your society may help bring your empire down.
Such is the handwriting on the wall. “The moving finger writes,” wrote the great eleventh century Persian poet Omar Khayyam (who had read Daniel and was alluding to the story of the handwriting on the wall).
Nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
The empire will fade and decline, like the Roman and Spanish and British and Soviet, and all other empires before it. Pious evangelicals and Harvard academicians can’t save it.
*****
I thought about the Daniel story while reading an article in the most recent issue of the American Conservative. It cites a Chicago Council of Global Affairs survey that reported “a majority of Americans is taking a very sensible view of how activist and interventionist the U.S. should be in the future. There appears to be much more acceptance of relative decline in U.S. preeminence and the rise of more independent powers….”
Specifically, a large majority thinks the U.S. shouldn’t be the “world’s policeman,” shouldn’t try to “solve problems” unilaterally, and welcome the fact that countries like Turkey and Brazil are becoming more independent of the U.S. in the conduct of their foreign policy. They think that rather than trying to limit China’s power the U.S. should engage it and cooperate with it in a friendly way.
I find the report encouraging. Perhaps people are thinking: What is wrong with allowing others to emerge and share center stage? We’re tired of being in charge of the world.
The neoconservative strategy following the Cold War has been to allow no rival, to maintain global “supremacy” or “full spectrum dominance.” But how can you do that when China (a generally peaceful power, that happens to own almost a quarter of the U.S. national debt) threatens to surpass the U.S. in economic clout within 20 years?
Indeed what countries don’t lament the decline of their empires? A few Japanese want to revive the empire that once extended from Sakhalin to Samoa. Now they’re doomed by their greed.
There is nothing to idealize in any of these other advanced corrupt countries. They remain imperialist in the Leninist sense. Their capitalists export capital in search of the highest possible rate of profit, and they seek to control markets and raw materials. They cooperate with the U.S. in its wars of aggression. They are governed by people whom we can judge seriously “wanting” and are all in need of radical change. But they have experienced “relative decline” and lived through it—as the people of this country can.
Early in this country’s history settlers identified with the ancient Hebrews led out of Egypt into the “Promised Land” of Canaan. They thought that (just as the Hebrews had taken the land of the Canaanites, annihilating them in the process at God’s command) so God had given North America to white Europeans. It was their right to take it from the native “savages.” At the time of the Mexican War, the vast expansion of the republic through military aggression was justified by the “Manifest Destiny” concept. Obviously it was the destiny of Anglo-Saxons to occupy the continent, from sea to shining sea—and it didn’t stop at the beach. Jingoists crowed that it was inevitable that the Stars and Stripes would be planted across the sea, on the soil of Asia. This of course was soon realized in the Treaty Ports of Japan, after Japan had been bullied into opening them by Admiral Perry’s threatening visits of 1853-4. And the flag was raised on the soil of the Philippines in 1898 when the former Spanish colony was seized by the U.S. There have always been plenty of (white) people of this country who’ve thought they were special and had the right to brutalize inferior peoples. Or at least tell them what to do.
But why not just realize and say: We’re just a country like other countries. Or we would like to be. The age of impires reached their peak over half a century ago and are now in decline. And that is okay. During the the march to peak prosperity, impearlist forces killed millions of native peoples in order to maintain and expand their empires. The inhumane treatment of indigenous Populations for profit, is nothing to be proud of. In our Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union we armed and trained tens of thousands of Islamist warriors to wage jihad against a secularist regime in Afghanistan, creating in the process groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
You can get thrown into the lion’s den for saying this, but the deeds of the past. have come back to doom us. There are drawbacks to being an imperialist, bloodstained superpower.
Why does the U.S., protected by two vast oceans and peaceful borders with friendly nations, with no significant military rivals, need an empire of 700 bases in 130 countries? Why does it need to pretend to be “protecting” people (as in Okinawa) who haven’t asked for their presence and ask who’s protecting them from the U.S. troops? People who are asking them to please leave?
Why does the U.S. need to constantly topple regimes posing no threat to itself, always on the basis of lies? Why does it need to bully its allies (whose people want nothing to do with the Iraq and Afghan wars) to get support, or to maintain an alliance (NATO) that has long outlived its original Cold War purpose? Why must it insist on dominance? In whose interest is all this?
The U.S. ruling elite—including the neocons, the oil barons, the crooked traders, the Pentagon generals in arms with the arms industry, the idiot politicians who always vote the way AIPAC tells them to, the whole rung of top capitalists profiting from the bailout—are like the revelers at Balshazzar’s banquet. They are arrogant plunderers, drinking toasts to the gods of gold and silver in stolen goblets.
But maybe the party’s over. Fortunately, a system that is illogical and indefensible is also unsustainable. The Crash of 2008 suggests this, along with failure in two imperialist wars. I’d come over the years to doubt Marx’s conviction that the overthrow of capitalism was “inevitable,” but it remains my hope. And it will happen when people awaken to the fact that, as Engels once declared (in connection with German occupation of parts of Poland), a nation that oppresses other nations cannot become free. The “greater acceptance of decline” suggests that this truth is dawning on more and more people in this country.
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsim.
More Acceptance of Relative Decline
by Gary Leupp / September 24th, 2010
In the biblical story of Daniel, the Babylonian emperor Balshazzar, engaged in drunken revelry with his courtiers using goblets plundered during the conquest of Jerusalem, drinking toasts to the gods of gold and silver, is startled to see a hand appear on the wall of the banquet hall. (Daniel 5:5-7) The hand writes: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsim.
Some Bible scholars think these were words for coins circulating in the empire, or measures of metal used in commerce. (Tekel is the same as the Hebrew shekel.) So the message was something like, “Dollars, dollars, quarters, half dollars.”
What could it mean, wondered Balshazzar and his courtiers? The emperor’s advisors were mystified. So Daniel, a wise man among the Jews of the Babylonian Exile who enjoyed the favor of the court, was called upon to interpret the meaning of this amazing event.
Daniel explained that God was using clever puns involving money to foretell the empire’s doom. Mene (or mina) can mean “measured” or “numbered” as well as “judged.” Tekel (or shekel) can mean “weighed on the scales.” Upharsin is a coin one-half the size of a mene, but also is a pun for “Persian.” So Daniel told Balshazzar:
This is the interpretation of the matter: MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; UPHARSIN, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians. (Daniel 5:25)
Indeed that very night the emperor was slain and a Mede (Darius) became ruler. Soon the empire was conquered by Cyrus the Persian.
The Book of Daniel was written in the second century BCE. It refers to rulers who lived four centuries earlier and shouldn’t be taken literally. The first half is an exquisitely written novelette in which Daniel “prophesizes” things that had already occurred. The Babylonian Empire had been succeeded by the Median, Persian, and then following the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Greek empire. (And then the Romans gradually build their empire, doomed to decline.)
Earlier in the Book of Daniel (2:31-45), the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar asks Daniel to explain to him the meaning of a dream involving a statue with a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs from brass, legs of iron, and feet part iron and clay. Daniel explains that Nebudchadnezzar is himself the head of gold but “after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over the whole earth.” These are often interpreted to mean the succession of Median, Persian, and Greek empires. The last was ruling the Middle East at the time this book was written. The author wanted to say that while the Greeks ruling Judea appeared powerful, they were fundamentally weak. (This is what the phrase “feet of clay” has come to mean.)
The whole point is: empires eventually fall. (Their decline and fall is just a particularly dramatic example of what Buddhists call “the law of impermanence.”) One doesn’t have to suppose that a deity oversees human events to acknowledge the historical fact that no empire is forever.
And the handwriting is indeed on the wall. This what the moving finger writes today, on walls in the halls of power all over Washington and on Wall Street:
Mene, mene. Your days are numbered.
Your dollar’s value is falling. Between 2000 and 2009 it fell by 33% in relation to the euro and 23% to the yen. And your share in the global GDP is declining. The EU now leads the U.S., according to IMF figures, at 28% of the total. The U.S. produces 25% and China and Japan together 17%. In 1945 the U.S. figure was around 50% of the total. It was over 30% in 2000. You must accept the inevitability of further decline.
Teke. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.
Poll after poll show that the world’s people find your government morally lacking—indeed viciously brutal in pursuit of its imperialist goals. There has been no change in policy between the Bush and Obama administrations. Your government slaughters civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, increasingly through the cowardly use of drone-fired missiles. You refuse to punish those responsible for cruel wars based on lies. You say you will pressure Israel to get its settlers out of the West Bank, then you back off, because of the power of the Israel Lobby. Your Congress actually congratulates Israel when it blitzkriegs Gaza or attacks an aid ship in international waters killing nine unarmed people including a U.S. citizen. Everyone knows you lie, and cover up atrocities. You have zero moral credibility in this world.
Upharsim. Your kingdom is divided.
Your society is deeply, bitterly divided. Income inequality has been increasing since the 1970s and is the highest in the industrialized world, resembling the situation as of 1929. The top 1% of households own at least 35% of all privately held wealth and the bottom 80% of households just 15% of the wealth. The poverty level is back to 1960s (pre-“War on Poverty”) level while the number of millionaires—many of them finance capitalists deliberately exploiting investors’ and home-buyers’ gullibility–soars.
Whether your country will retain its current borders, or split up like Balshazzar’s empire, remains to be seen. But the class division is very real, and the struggle of those most hurt in your society may help bring your empire down.
Such is the handwriting on the wall. “The moving finger writes,” wrote the great eleventh century Persian poet Omar Khayyam (who had read Daniel and was alluding to the story of the handwriting on the wall).
Nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
The empire will fade and decline, like the Roman and Spanish and British and Soviet, and all other empires before it. Pious evangelicals and Harvard academicians can’t save it.
*****
I thought about the Daniel story while reading an article in the most recent issue of the American Conservative. It cites a Chicago Council of Global Affairs survey that reported “a majority of Americans is taking a very sensible view of how activist and interventionist the U.S. should be in the future. There appears to be much more acceptance of relative decline in U.S. preeminence and the rise of more independent powers….”
Specifically, a large majority thinks the U.S. shouldn’t be the “world’s policeman,” shouldn’t try to “solve problems” unilaterally, and welcome the fact that countries like Turkey and Brazil are becoming more independent of the U.S. in the conduct of their foreign policy. They think that rather than trying to limit China’s power the U.S. should engage it and cooperate with it in a friendly way.
I find the report encouraging. Perhaps people are thinking: What is wrong with allowing others to emerge and share center stage? We’re tired of being in charge of the world.
The neoconservative strategy following the Cold War has been to allow no rival, to maintain global “supremacy” or “full spectrum dominance.” But how can you do that when China (a generally peaceful power, that happens to own almost a quarter of the U.S. national debt) threatens to surpass the U.S. in economic clout within 20 years?
Indeed what countries don’t lament the decline of their empires? A few Japanese want to revive the empire that once extended from Sakhalin to Samoa. Now they’re doomed by their greed.
There is nothing to idealize in any of these other advanced corrupt countries. They remain imperialist in the Leninist sense. Their capitalists export capital in search of the highest possible rate of profit, and they seek to control markets and raw materials. They cooperate with the U.S. in its wars of aggression. They are governed by people whom we can judge seriously “wanting” and are all in need of radical change. But they have experienced “relative decline” and lived through it—as the people of this country can.
Early in this country’s history settlers identified with the ancient Hebrews led out of Egypt into the “Promised Land” of Canaan. They thought that (just as the Hebrews had taken the land of the Canaanites, annihilating them in the process at God’s command) so God had given North America to white Europeans. It was their right to take it from the native “savages.” At the time of the Mexican War, the vast expansion of the republic through military aggression was justified by the “Manifest Destiny” concept. Obviously it was the destiny of Anglo-Saxons to occupy the continent, from sea to shining sea—and it didn’t stop at the beach. Jingoists crowed that it was inevitable that the Stars and Stripes would be planted across the sea, on the soil of Asia. This of course was soon realized in the Treaty Ports of Japan, after Japan had been bullied into opening them by Admiral Perry’s threatening visits of 1853-4. And the flag was raised on the soil of the Philippines in 1898 when the former Spanish colony was seized by the U.S. There have always been plenty of (white) people of this country who’ve thought they were special and had the right to brutalize inferior peoples. Or at least tell them what to do.
But why not just realize and say: We’re just a country like other countries. Or we would like to be. The age of impires reached their peak over half a century ago and are now in decline. And that is okay. During the the march to peak prosperity, impearlist forces killed millions of native peoples in order to maintain and expand their empires. The inhumane treatment of indigenous Populations for profit, is nothing to be proud of. In our Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union we armed and trained tens of thousands of Islamist warriors to wage jihad against a secularist regime in Afghanistan, creating in the process groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
You can get thrown into the lion’s den for saying this, but the deeds of the past. have come back to doom us. There are drawbacks to being an imperialist, bloodstained superpower.
Why does the U.S., protected by two vast oceans and peaceful borders with friendly nations, with no significant military rivals, need an empire of 700 bases in 130 countries? Why does it need to pretend to be “protecting” people (as in Okinawa) who haven’t asked for their presence and ask who’s protecting them from the U.S. troops? People who are asking them to please leave?
Why does the U.S. need to constantly topple regimes posing no threat to itself, always on the basis of lies? Why does it need to bully its allies (whose people want nothing to do with the Iraq and Afghan wars) to get support, or to maintain an alliance (NATO) that has long outlived its original Cold War purpose? Why must it insist on dominance? In whose interest is all this?
The U.S. ruling elite—including the neocons, the oil barons, the crooked traders, the Pentagon generals in arms with the arms industry, the idiot politicians who always vote the way AIPAC tells them to, the whole rung of top capitalists profiting from the bailout—are like the revelers at Balshazzar’s banquet. They are arrogant plunderers, drinking toasts to the gods of gold and silver in stolen goblets.
But maybe the party’s over. Fortunately, a system that is illogical and indefensible is also unsustainable. The Crash of 2008 suggests this, along with failure in two imperialist wars. I’d come over the years to doubt Marx’s conviction that the overthrow of capitalism was “inevitable,” but it remains my hope. And it will happen when people awaken to the fact that, as Engels once declared (in connection with German occupation of parts of Poland), a nation that oppresses other nations cannot become free. The “greater acceptance of decline” suggests that this truth is dawning on more and more people in this country.
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsim.
Sunday, March 06, 2011
We Can Bring Forth a New Birth a New World♥ From The Ashes of The Old
A crime against humanity is the effect of transforming hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tons of maize, of wheat, of beans, of palm oil, into fuel for the greedy giant oil corperations, is absolutely catastrophic for the Earth's hungry people.'The world price of wheat doubled in one year and the price of corn quadrupled, leaving poor countries, especially in Aisa and Africa, where poor and destitute have little money to pay for the food needed to feed their children or themselves.
There are solutions are available, but most have been blocked by those with cooperate interests. For they would involve a nonprofit collective effort to stop the cycle of poverty experienced by individuals and entire countries. We are rich in resources for ending poverty and there are many individuals and organizations who want to be involved in just this effort. We can change the statistic that 10 million people die each year because they don’t have the financial means to survive, or suffer ravages of Malaria approximately 300 million cases occur annually worldwide, and one to nearly three million people die of malaria each year. We could, as a family, put an end to needless sickness and poverty by a shift in consciousness and recognizing that we are all indeed one people, one community.
Perhaps first we must learn to recognise and address, that for many the state of being in spiritual poverty is a condition of not realizing the need to see and love all of humanity as one family. It is a veil of ignorance that obscures the truth that we all, all humanity and all creation, are interdependent and interconnected. Spiritual wealth is the opposite of individual greed and corruption. The coin of the spiritual realm is a conscious realization of compassion and empathy to want for another what one wants for him/herself. There are people with a lot of money who are inwardly impoverished; materialistic, shallow, selfish and cruel. And there are people who are inwardly wealthy with very little money. Not to glamorizing the state of poverty; even though some of the most happy kind and loving people I have known, have been among the poor. It’s absolutely possible to be inwardly wealthy and outwardly rich. However, a better life, and the basic needs of all beings on the planet could be met. It’s a matter of consciousness, of individual and collective values within a society and its leaders. And as the old corrupt empires fall into dust, it’s up to each and every individual to become involved.
Your thought advocates Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In my thought there is only one universal religion, whose varied paths are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being. In your thought there are the rich, the poor, and the beggared. My thought holds that there are no riches but... life; that we are all beggars, and no benefactor exists save life herself. Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.
~Kahlil Gibran
There are solutions are available, but most have been blocked by those with cooperate interests. For they would involve a nonprofit collective effort to stop the cycle of poverty experienced by individuals and entire countries. We are rich in resources for ending poverty and there are many individuals and organizations who want to be involved in just this effort. We can change the statistic that 10 million people die each year because they don’t have the financial means to survive, or suffer ravages of Malaria approximately 300 million cases occur annually worldwide, and one to nearly three million people die of malaria each year. We could, as a family, put an end to needless sickness and poverty by a shift in consciousness and recognizing that we are all indeed one people, one community.
Perhaps first we must learn to recognise and address, that for many the state of being in spiritual poverty is a condition of not realizing the need to see and love all of humanity as one family. It is a veil of ignorance that obscures the truth that we all, all humanity and all creation, are interdependent and interconnected. Spiritual wealth is the opposite of individual greed and corruption. The coin of the spiritual realm is a conscious realization of compassion and empathy to want for another what one wants for him/herself. There are people with a lot of money who are inwardly impoverished; materialistic, shallow, selfish and cruel. And there are people who are inwardly wealthy with very little money. Not to glamorizing the state of poverty; even though some of the most happy kind and loving people I have known, have been among the poor. It’s absolutely possible to be inwardly wealthy and outwardly rich. However, a better life, and the basic needs of all beings on the planet could be met. It’s a matter of consciousness, of individual and collective values within a society and its leaders. And as the old corrupt empires fall into dust, it’s up to each and every individual to become involved.
Your thought advocates Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In my thought there is only one universal religion, whose varied paths are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being. In your thought there are the rich, the poor, and the beggared. My thought holds that there are no riches but... life; that we are all beggars, and no benefactor exists save life herself. Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.
~Kahlil Gibran
Monday, February 28, 2011
""WAR!"" It Will Be Life Or Death For Millions!
The citizens of Earth are are in the heat of a great economic war!
As corrupt politicians and the global banking pirates continue to suck up our humble wealth and continue to devalue the worth of our money. Millions will die of poverty and starvation unless swift action is taken to abolish this tyrannical corporate assault on all of humanity.
"An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. Compared to this, conventional war is like a a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects. The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil — man's greed. Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth." ~Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Noam Chomsky in his book "Failed States — The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy", defines demonic messianism as "a natural device for leadership groups that are at the extreme of the spectrum in their dedication to the short-term interests of narrow sectors of power and wealth".
The sentiment of despair among the ordinary people has been manipulated for political gain by amoral embedded corporate politicians, who would do anything to ensure that this despair does not go away until they manage to ride on it all the way to highest echelons of political power. Another strategy for control that has been regularly exploited is the creation of a fear for a tyrannical and boundlessly evil enemies; instilling in the public the fear of imminent destruction.
Most of this manipulation has been done in ways that are hard to believe.
On the one hand, some leaders have conspired to divert agricultural production meant for human and animal consumption to the corporate market where the scarce commodity is converted into gasoline, and ending up being burnt away on the highway; thus insuring higher food prices that are beyond the reach of the poor and destitute. This callous disregard for human suffering, is little different from what Bruce Franklin identified in 1889 as the "Anglo-American Syndicate of War" that imposes its imperialist "peaceful and enlightened rule" by threatening "annihilation" of those who stand in the way, bringing "the Spirit of Civilisation to a backward people.
Although we the people, are of many nations,
we are all one divine family in spirit♥
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
As corrupt politicians and the global banking pirates continue to suck up our humble wealth and continue to devalue the worth of our money. Millions will die of poverty and starvation unless swift action is taken to abolish this tyrannical corporate assault on all of humanity.
"An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. Compared to this, conventional war is like a a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects. The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil — man's greed. Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth." ~Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Noam Chomsky in his book "Failed States — The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy", defines demonic messianism as "a natural device for leadership groups that are at the extreme of the spectrum in their dedication to the short-term interests of narrow sectors of power and wealth".
The sentiment of despair among the ordinary people has been manipulated for political gain by amoral embedded corporate politicians, who would do anything to ensure that this despair does not go away until they manage to ride on it all the way to highest echelons of political power. Another strategy for control that has been regularly exploited is the creation of a fear for a tyrannical and boundlessly evil enemies; instilling in the public the fear of imminent destruction.
Most of this manipulation has been done in ways that are hard to believe.
On the one hand, some leaders have conspired to divert agricultural production meant for human and animal consumption to the corporate market where the scarce commodity is converted into gasoline, and ending up being burnt away on the highway; thus insuring higher food prices that are beyond the reach of the poor and destitute. This callous disregard for human suffering, is little different from what Bruce Franklin identified in 1889 as the "Anglo-American Syndicate of War" that imposes its imperialist "peaceful and enlightened rule" by threatening "annihilation" of those who stand in the way, bringing "the Spirit of Civilisation to a backward people.
Although we the people, are of many nations,
we are all one divine family in spirit♥
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Saturday, February 26, 2011
A note to a Friend
THERE ARE THOSE BRAVE ENUGH TO SAY I LOVE YOU.
THEY ARE VERY SPECIAL FRIENDS INDEED♥
I love you too sweetheart, it took a lot of dead Indians to make your American Dream; but there are few Indians left to kill and no nation left that has not been exploited. All things must come to an end before there is a new beginning. My dear friend, you see it is much more than just our country; it's "our world" Angie, and I do not like what they have done with it.
The United States, could feed the world, and the world could feed us; But what's the profit in that?
You create profit by limiting peoples resources, thereby insuring higher prices as the demand goes up. In the other world, the one that we do not like to think about. There are thousands of starving mothers, who at this very moment are seeking bread, still a simple task for most of us. But too often it is in vain for their babies, and as the children starve and die. All the while; the powers of Wall Street, and the oil industry are turning our abundant food supply into overpriced gas for our cars. While at the same time, forcing us to pay a much higher price to feed our own families. That is if we have money to pay the merchants of death. I can think of no uglier crime against humanity. With global food prices rising and more corn being diverted to the production of ethanol fuel, Bill Clinton is warning of food riots in many nations.
For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
THEY ARE VERY SPECIAL FRIENDS INDEED♥
I love you too sweetheart, it took a lot of dead Indians to make your American Dream; but there are few Indians left to kill and no nation left that has not been exploited. All things must come to an end before there is a new beginning. My dear friend, you see it is much more than just our country; it's "our world" Angie, and I do not like what they have done with it.
The United States, could feed the world, and the world could feed us; But what's the profit in that?
You create profit by limiting peoples resources, thereby insuring higher prices as the demand goes up. In the other world, the one that we do not like to think about. There are thousands of starving mothers, who at this very moment are seeking bread, still a simple task for most of us. But too often it is in vain for their babies, and as the children starve and die. All the while; the powers of Wall Street, and the oil industry are turning our abundant food supply into overpriced gas for our cars. While at the same time, forcing us to pay a much higher price to feed our own families. That is if we have money to pay the merchants of death. I can think of no uglier crime against humanity. With global food prices rising and more corn being diverted to the production of ethanol fuel, Bill Clinton is warning of food riots in many nations.
For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Other People And You
Know Yourself:
Some people seem to decide very early in their lives whether or not they want to care about and have compassion for others’ feelings. As a result, all of us, have different levels of the willingness to feel or care about others’ feelings. Yet to some it takes an often tragic life changing event to deeply feel others’ pain and joy, while other people never seem to care. Some people can recall caring about others’ pain and joy from a very young age, while other people remember being concerned mostly with their own feelings and needs. We are all unique individuals who act from our very own set of beliefs, needs, fears, and desires.
The people who have been divinly chosen to experience a greater level of compassion are often the ones that become the caretakers, while the less compassionate people become the takers. Caretakers are those people who have learned from life, a much deeper love, such as to take responsibility for other's feelings and well-being, while takers are people who expect others to take responsibility for their feelings and well-being and often blame others when they don’t take on this responsibility.
If you are one of these gifted compassionate persons who easily feels others’ feelings, you might find yourself drawn to people who are in pain. Your compassionate heart naturally wants to help those people who are in pain, not only out of caring, but also because of your empathy, their pain can also be painful to you. It matters not to you that this person may not care about your feelings as much as you care about his or hers.
It is without a doubt, that women are more gifted with empathy, for they seem to have more wisdom, and are genetically wired to be the natural maternalistic care takers that keep us from extinction; thus compassion is seen as way of life for most women. It really doesn’t take long for one to discern a true loving heart once you have learned to have compassion for yourself, trusting your perceptions, and accept your lack of control over others. People betray their intention to either give love or to get it, or to give to get, with everything they say and do. With practice, you can learn to discern the loving heart very early in any kind of a relationship. If you desire to stop recreating the same disappointing relationships over and over, then develop your power of (discernment). So, how do you become discerning of those who keep a loving, caring and compassionate heart? The first step is to focus on developing as much compassion for your own feelings as you have for others. Alas, some very caring and wonderful people so often leave themselves out of the equation, by caring about others far more than they care about themselves. This leaves them very vulnerable to becoming the caretaker for someone who just wants someone else to take care of them, and then gets angry when you don’t do it “right." If you have developed the proper self love, and compassion for yourself; you will start to feel much more quickly when someone is not really caring about you. If you are just focused on another’s feelings, you won’t notice what you feel, and it is your own feelings that allow you to discern caring from a lack of caring.
“Treat others as you want to be treated” paraphrased from a wide variety of sources begins to provide a model for acting with empathy. Perhaps a more accurate model is given by the “platinum rule”: Treat others as they want to be treated. The principle of empathy may be sufficient to develop a complete and socially valuable code of ethics. Various organizations have developed codes of ethics based primarily on the principle of empathy. Here are some examples:"
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers
Some people seem to decide very early in their lives whether or not they want to care about and have compassion for others’ feelings. As a result, all of us, have different levels of the willingness to feel or care about others’ feelings. Yet to some it takes an often tragic life changing event to deeply feel others’ pain and joy, while other people never seem to care. Some people can recall caring about others’ pain and joy from a very young age, while other people remember being concerned mostly with their own feelings and needs. We are all unique individuals who act from our very own set of beliefs, needs, fears, and desires.
The people who have been divinly chosen to experience a greater level of compassion are often the ones that become the caretakers, while the less compassionate people become the takers. Caretakers are those people who have learned from life, a much deeper love, such as to take responsibility for other's feelings and well-being, while takers are people who expect others to take responsibility for their feelings and well-being and often blame others when they don’t take on this responsibility.
If you are one of these gifted compassionate persons who easily feels others’ feelings, you might find yourself drawn to people who are in pain. Your compassionate heart naturally wants to help those people who are in pain, not only out of caring, but also because of your empathy, their pain can also be painful to you. It matters not to you that this person may not care about your feelings as much as you care about his or hers.
It is without a doubt, that women are more gifted with empathy, for they seem to have more wisdom, and are genetically wired to be the natural maternalistic care takers that keep us from extinction; thus compassion is seen as way of life for most women. It really doesn’t take long for one to discern a true loving heart once you have learned to have compassion for yourself, trusting your perceptions, and accept your lack of control over others. People betray their intention to either give love or to get it, or to give to get, with everything they say and do. With practice, you can learn to discern the loving heart very early in any kind of a relationship. If you desire to stop recreating the same disappointing relationships over and over, then develop your power of (discernment). So, how do you become discerning of those who keep a loving, caring and compassionate heart? The first step is to focus on developing as much compassion for your own feelings as you have for others. Alas, some very caring and wonderful people so often leave themselves out of the equation, by caring about others far more than they care about themselves. This leaves them very vulnerable to becoming the caretaker for someone who just wants someone else to take care of them, and then gets angry when you don’t do it “right." If you have developed the proper self love, and compassion for yourself; you will start to feel much more quickly when someone is not really caring about you. If you are just focused on another’s feelings, you won’t notice what you feel, and it is your own feelings that allow you to discern caring from a lack of caring.
“Treat others as you want to be treated” paraphrased from a wide variety of sources begins to provide a model for acting with empathy. Perhaps a more accurate model is given by the “platinum rule”: Treat others as they want to be treated. The principle of empathy may be sufficient to develop a complete and socially valuable code of ethics. Various organizations have developed codes of ethics based primarily on the principle of empathy. Here are some examples:"
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Lost Liberty
I'd say that the United States as duly framed by the Constitution was toppled by Abraham Lincoln when he blatantly oversteped his authority in order to attack with military force; the citizens of the Southern States. A criminal action that many scholars now call an illegal war. We've had the same government since 1865, it very closely resembles the one we had before that but states rights have pretty well been eliminated, so its not the same government as it originally was. It should be remembered that during the Abraham Lincoln Administration, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments had not been made part of the U.S. Constitution; there was at the time only 12 Amendments. Individuals were considered Citizens of their respective States, and only in that respect where they U.S. Citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment deals primarily with Interstate Commerce, however it also transfers citizenship from the jurisdiction of the States to that of the Federal Government.
The Constitution, which originally protected the citizens from an overpowering Central Government, as a result of these three Amendments, now empowers and protected the Central Government from its own citizens. Thus the intentions of the Founding Fathers were reversed! However Abraham Lincoln had none of these Amendments at his disposal, and even if he had, they were added to the U.S. Constitution only as a result of force, which makes them self nullifying. Therefore when Abraham Lincoln raised and army to overthrow the secession of the Southern States, thereby subjugating the Confederate States of America, which was created as a result of its newly ratified Constitution, he violated his Presidential Oath.
The Union that Never Existed
Abraham Lincoln’s stated purpose for violating his Oath of Office and using force to return seceded States to the Union is based upon a falsehood. The Union prior to the ‘Civil War’ was never indivisible; therefore there was no indivisible Union to preserve. Abraham Lincoln, in using military force to achieve political ends, added validity to, of all lthings, the Communist Manifesto! This is not merely rhetoric, inasmuch as the age in which he lived was filled with numerous examples, Bismarck of Germany with his Blood and Iron, Lenin in Russia as well as Garibaldi in Italy, are examples of coercion and consolidation of otherwise independent political entities into a single Union.
The Abraham Lincoln of modern historical revisionism is a man that never existed; the real Lincoln is an individual that if President today would likely be impeached, and very well charged with Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes. The U.S. Congress never authorized the war he instigated, let along the aggressive invasion of a sovereign nation, foreign to his own. He suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned thousands of his own fellow citizens without the benefit of a trial, for nothing more then having opposing his policies. All means of mass communications available in his day were censured, including telegraphs and newspapers with numerous editors, journalists and publishers being jailed. The railroad was nationalized, he confiscated privately owned firearms, used troops to force the outcome of elections, as well as having arrested duly elected members of the State and Federal Congress. This he did in order to create an indivisible Union, which amounted to a consolidation of the sovereign States into what was and remains by definition, an empire.
Abraham Lincoln should without a doubt be named America’s greatest war criminal. His war of invasion not only killed over 600,000 innocent Americans but it was obvious from his earlier speeches that he had previously advocated the prevalent constitutional right of democratic, state by state secession. Lincoln’s War also effectively overthrew the existing decentralized, limited federal government that had existed and governed well in the US since established by America’s founding fathers. Lincoln bastardized a respected federal government with limited powers into what is now a dictatorial, uncontrollable Washington federal empire.
Because of Lincoln, the former American constitutional republic fell from a dream of liberty and limited government into the nightmare big government we have today without the earlier checks and balances of state sovereignty. After Lincoln, In foreign policy, the US forgot George Washington’s warning about neutrality and we became an aggressive military abroad until today we have troops defending the Washington Empire with over 200,000 military personnel in 144 nations around the world. That's not counting our many ships at sea.
The reinvented Abraham Lincoln of our time is a myth of the historical revisionists, in his lifetime he was a fraudulent, devious and despotic politician who used whatever cause was convenient, to justify and unjust War of Aggression.
He himself stated “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save the Union by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slaves, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps save the Union.”
Adding to his fraugulence was his own claim that he had taken an oath to preserve the Union, when he had taken no such oath. Lincoln had shrudly made his Emanciopation Proclamation the enshrinment for using armed aggression to achieve his politial objectives, whereby the heretofore none existant indivisble Union, at any and all cost, had to be preserved. In following the Lincoln Doctrine, after the wars end, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution was literally passed by force of arms.
We cannot use the word ratified in this case, since ratification requires actions by the sovereign States, acting freely. Thus every amendment added the the U.S. Constitution and every piece of legislation and Court Adjudication based upon these amendments are directly or indirectly, a result of force having been used. “Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one which suits them better.”
These are the words of Abraham Lincoln earlier in his political career, which certainly demonstrates his original support for the right of States to secede. Either his former support for secession was merely a rouge, to gain votes or else he ligitimately changed his thinking in order to justify his aggressive invasion of the Confederacy, and his scortch earth policy.
Among his other crimes, Lincoln forced the public to fight and die in his war for the northern corporate interests. This led to a great revolt in the North, The riots were the largest civil insurrection in American history, so great were they that the military had to suppress the the New York City rebellion by using artillery and infantry fire. Basically the fact that they shelled New York so that they could force people to fight in a war they didn't believe in did major damage to this country.
For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
The Constitution, which originally protected the citizens from an overpowering Central Government, as a result of these three Amendments, now empowers and protected the Central Government from its own citizens. Thus the intentions of the Founding Fathers were reversed! However Abraham Lincoln had none of these Amendments at his disposal, and even if he had, they were added to the U.S. Constitution only as a result of force, which makes them self nullifying. Therefore when Abraham Lincoln raised and army to overthrow the secession of the Southern States, thereby subjugating the Confederate States of America, which was created as a result of its newly ratified Constitution, he violated his Presidential Oath.
The Union that Never Existed
Abraham Lincoln’s stated purpose for violating his Oath of Office and using force to return seceded States to the Union is based upon a falsehood. The Union prior to the ‘Civil War’ was never indivisible; therefore there was no indivisible Union to preserve. Abraham Lincoln, in using military force to achieve political ends, added validity to, of all lthings, the Communist Manifesto! This is not merely rhetoric, inasmuch as the age in which he lived was filled with numerous examples, Bismarck of Germany with his Blood and Iron, Lenin in Russia as well as Garibaldi in Italy, are examples of coercion and consolidation of otherwise independent political entities into a single Union.
The Abraham Lincoln of modern historical revisionism is a man that never existed; the real Lincoln is an individual that if President today would likely be impeached, and very well charged with Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes. The U.S. Congress never authorized the war he instigated, let along the aggressive invasion of a sovereign nation, foreign to his own. He suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned thousands of his own fellow citizens without the benefit of a trial, for nothing more then having opposing his policies. All means of mass communications available in his day were censured, including telegraphs and newspapers with numerous editors, journalists and publishers being jailed. The railroad was nationalized, he confiscated privately owned firearms, used troops to force the outcome of elections, as well as having arrested duly elected members of the State and Federal Congress. This he did in order to create an indivisible Union, which amounted to a consolidation of the sovereign States into what was and remains by definition, an empire.
Abraham Lincoln should without a doubt be named America’s greatest war criminal. His war of invasion not only killed over 600,000 innocent Americans but it was obvious from his earlier speeches that he had previously advocated the prevalent constitutional right of democratic, state by state secession. Lincoln’s War also effectively overthrew the existing decentralized, limited federal government that had existed and governed well in the US since established by America’s founding fathers. Lincoln bastardized a respected federal government with limited powers into what is now a dictatorial, uncontrollable Washington federal empire.
Because of Lincoln, the former American constitutional republic fell from a dream of liberty and limited government into the nightmare big government we have today without the earlier checks and balances of state sovereignty. After Lincoln, In foreign policy, the US forgot George Washington’s warning about neutrality and we became an aggressive military abroad until today we have troops defending the Washington Empire with over 200,000 military personnel in 144 nations around the world. That's not counting our many ships at sea.
The reinvented Abraham Lincoln of our time is a myth of the historical revisionists, in his lifetime he was a fraudulent, devious and despotic politician who used whatever cause was convenient, to justify and unjust War of Aggression.
He himself stated “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save the Union by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slaves, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps save the Union.”
Adding to his fraugulence was his own claim that he had taken an oath to preserve the Union, when he had taken no such oath. Lincoln had shrudly made his Emanciopation Proclamation the enshrinment for using armed aggression to achieve his politial objectives, whereby the heretofore none existant indivisble Union, at any and all cost, had to be preserved. In following the Lincoln Doctrine, after the wars end, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution was literally passed by force of arms.
We cannot use the word ratified in this case, since ratification requires actions by the sovereign States, acting freely. Thus every amendment added the the U.S. Constitution and every piece of legislation and Court Adjudication based upon these amendments are directly or indirectly, a result of force having been used. “Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one which suits them better.”
These are the words of Abraham Lincoln earlier in his political career, which certainly demonstrates his original support for the right of States to secede. Either his former support for secession was merely a rouge, to gain votes or else he ligitimately changed his thinking in order to justify his aggressive invasion of the Confederacy, and his scortch earth policy.
Among his other crimes, Lincoln forced the public to fight and die in his war for the northern corporate interests. This led to a great revolt in the North, The riots were the largest civil insurrection in American history, so great were they that the military had to suppress the the New York City rebellion by using artillery and infantry fire. Basically the fact that they shelled New York so that they could force people to fight in a war they didn't believe in did major damage to this country.
For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Sunday, February 06, 2011
"A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby."
My God, I thought it was not possible. Well, it comes well from both Shia and Sunni sources. But, I think it is very disgusting, that one at all says something that one can touch etc a 9 year old. I have cousin who is 9 years old, and it makes it more disgusting. If one says this to a non Muslim, you know what kind of reactions you can get? I am also very disappointed by Khomeini (do not know if I can call him an Imam longer), in our age (30 years ago only), agrees that one can do it with a 9 year old ... ~Nima, 01 December 2009
Imam Muhammad al-Baqir (as) said: "Refrain from deliberating in Allah. Rather when you desire to contemplate over His greatness, contemplate over the greatness of His creation. Before you start judging our scholars; also, keep this in mind. Islamic morality does not change as times change. If we were to base our morality on what's proper in the moderen age we live in, then we would be lost and constantly regressing. If modern society doesn't permit such actions, but Islam does, then only our Allah knows the wisdom in such actions, which we can't grasp.
Here's the fatwa in full:
مسألة 12 : لا يجوز وطء الزوجة قبل إكمال تسع سنين ، دواما كان النكاح أو منقطعا ، و أما سائر الاستمتاعات كاللمس بشهوة و الضم و التفخيذ فلا بأس بها حتى فى الرضيعة ، و لو وطأها قبل التسع و لم يفضها لم يترتب عليه شىء غير الاثم على الاقوى ، و إن أفضاها بأن جعل مسلكى البول و الحيض واحدا أو مسلكى الحيض و الغائط واحدا حرم عليه وطؤها أبدا لكن على الاحوط فى الصورة الثانية ، و على أي حال لم تخرج عن زوجيته على الاقوى ، فيجري عليها أحكامها من التوارث و حرمة الخامسة و حرمة أختها معها و غيرها ، و يجب عليه نفقتها مادامت حية و إن طلقها بل و إن تزوجت بعد الطلاق على الاحوط ، بل لا يخلو من قوة ، و يجب عليه دية الافضاء ، و هى دية النفس ، فإذا كانت حرة فلها نصف دية الرجل مضافا إلى المهر الذي استحقته بالعقد و الدخول ، و لو دخل بزوجته بعد إكمال التسع فأفضاها لم تحرم عليه و لم تثبت الدية ، و لكن الاحوط الانفاق عليها مادامت حية و إن كان الاقوى عدم الوجوب .
http://www.wilayah.i...ir/tahrir25.php
Can be found here as well:
مسألة 8 : لا يجوز وطء الزوجة قبل إكمال تسع سنين، دواماً كان النكاح أو منقطعاً، واما سائر الاستمتاعات كاللمس بشهوة والتقبيل والضم والتفخيذ فلا بأس بها، ولو وطئها قبل اكمال التسع ولم يفضها لم يترتب عليه شيء غير الاثم على الاقوى، ـ والافضاء هو التمزق الموجب لاتحاد مسلكي البول والحيض أو مسلكي الحيض والغائط أو اتحاد الجميع ـ ولو افضاها لم تخرج عن زوجيته، فتجري عليها احكامها من التوارث وحرمة الخامسة وحرمة اختها معها وغيرها، ولكن قيل: يحرم عليه وطؤها ابداً. إلاّ أن الاقوى خلافه، ولا سيما إذا اندمل الجرح ـ بعلاج أو بغيره ـ نعم تجب عليه دية الافضاء، وهي دية النفس ان طلقها، بل وإن لم يطلقها على المشهور، ولا يخلو عن وجه، وتجب عليه نفقتها ما دامت مفضاة وإن نشزت أو طلقها، بل وإن تزوجت بعد الطلاق على الاحوط.
http://www.seestani....03/menhaj1.html
TRANSLATION of the first, second is pretty much the same:
"It is not permissible to have sexual intercourse with one's wife that hasn’t reached nine years of age, be it permanent or temporary marriage. But there is no problem with all other pleasures such as lustful touch, embracing, and rubbing again the thighs, even with a suckling infant. If he does have sexual intercourse before nine years of age and does not penetrate, there is no penalty, but he has committed a sin. If he does penetrate causing the vagina and urethra openings to be one, she will become forever haram for him. Although this is as a precautionary measure. And it is more probable that her status as his wife is not removed. And the rulings of inheritance, and the prohibition of a fifth wife or marriage to her sister applies. He is also responsible for her maintenance as long as she is alive, even if he divorces her and even if she marries someone else after his divorcing her as a precautionary measure. And he is liable for blood money for the penetration and the amount is equivalent to that of an individual. If she is a free-woman, the amount is half that of a man, plus the dowry that she became entitled to through the 3aqd and penetration. If he penetrates his wife after the age of nine (causing the same damage as quoted above) , she does not become haram to him and there is no evidence that blood money is liable, but as a precautionary measure, he should maintain her as long as she is alive, although it is more probable that this is not obligatory."
I would not call Islam Satanic; for I doubt Satain could ever be so revolting.
Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth. Kahlil Gibran
Imam Muhammad al-Baqir (as) said: "Refrain from deliberating in Allah. Rather when you desire to contemplate over His greatness, contemplate over the greatness of His creation. Before you start judging our scholars; also, keep this in mind. Islamic morality does not change as times change. If we were to base our morality on what's proper in the moderen age we live in, then we would be lost and constantly regressing. If modern society doesn't permit such actions, but Islam does, then only our Allah knows the wisdom in such actions, which we can't grasp.
Here's the fatwa in full:
مسألة 12 : لا يجوز وطء الزوجة قبل إكمال تسع سنين ، دواما كان النكاح أو منقطعا ، و أما سائر الاستمتاعات كاللمس بشهوة و الضم و التفخيذ فلا بأس بها حتى فى الرضيعة ، و لو وطأها قبل التسع و لم يفضها لم يترتب عليه شىء غير الاثم على الاقوى ، و إن أفضاها بأن جعل مسلكى البول و الحيض واحدا أو مسلكى الحيض و الغائط واحدا حرم عليه وطؤها أبدا لكن على الاحوط فى الصورة الثانية ، و على أي حال لم تخرج عن زوجيته على الاقوى ، فيجري عليها أحكامها من التوارث و حرمة الخامسة و حرمة أختها معها و غيرها ، و يجب عليه نفقتها مادامت حية و إن طلقها بل و إن تزوجت بعد الطلاق على الاحوط ، بل لا يخلو من قوة ، و يجب عليه دية الافضاء ، و هى دية النفس ، فإذا كانت حرة فلها نصف دية الرجل مضافا إلى المهر الذي استحقته بالعقد و الدخول ، و لو دخل بزوجته بعد إكمال التسع فأفضاها لم تحرم عليه و لم تثبت الدية ، و لكن الاحوط الانفاق عليها مادامت حية و إن كان الاقوى عدم الوجوب .
http://www.wilayah.i...ir/tahrir25.php
Can be found here as well:
مسألة 8 : لا يجوز وطء الزوجة قبل إكمال تسع سنين، دواماً كان النكاح أو منقطعاً، واما سائر الاستمتاعات كاللمس بشهوة والتقبيل والضم والتفخيذ فلا بأس بها، ولو وطئها قبل اكمال التسع ولم يفضها لم يترتب عليه شيء غير الاثم على الاقوى، ـ والافضاء هو التمزق الموجب لاتحاد مسلكي البول والحيض أو مسلكي الحيض والغائط أو اتحاد الجميع ـ ولو افضاها لم تخرج عن زوجيته، فتجري عليها احكامها من التوارث وحرمة الخامسة وحرمة اختها معها وغيرها، ولكن قيل: يحرم عليه وطؤها ابداً. إلاّ أن الاقوى خلافه، ولا سيما إذا اندمل الجرح ـ بعلاج أو بغيره ـ نعم تجب عليه دية الافضاء، وهي دية النفس ان طلقها، بل وإن لم يطلقها على المشهور، ولا يخلو عن وجه، وتجب عليه نفقتها ما دامت مفضاة وإن نشزت أو طلقها، بل وإن تزوجت بعد الطلاق على الاحوط.
http://www.seestani....03/menhaj1.html
TRANSLATION of the first, second is pretty much the same:
"It is not permissible to have sexual intercourse with one's wife that hasn’t reached nine years of age, be it permanent or temporary marriage. But there is no problem with all other pleasures such as lustful touch, embracing, and rubbing again the thighs, even with a suckling infant. If he does have sexual intercourse before nine years of age and does not penetrate, there is no penalty, but he has committed a sin. If he does penetrate causing the vagina and urethra openings to be one, she will become forever haram for him. Although this is as a precautionary measure. And it is more probable that her status as his wife is not removed. And the rulings of inheritance, and the prohibition of a fifth wife or marriage to her sister applies. He is also responsible for her maintenance as long as she is alive, even if he divorces her and even if she marries someone else after his divorcing her as a precautionary measure. And he is liable for blood money for the penetration and the amount is equivalent to that of an individual. If she is a free-woman, the amount is half that of a man, plus the dowry that she became entitled to through the 3aqd and penetration. If he penetrates his wife after the age of nine (causing the same damage as quoted above) , she does not become haram to him and there is no evidence that blood money is liable, but as a precautionary measure, he should maintain her as long as she is alive, although it is more probable that this is not obligatory."
I would not call Islam Satanic; for I doubt Satain could ever be so revolting.
Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth. Kahlil Gibran
Saturday, February 05, 2011
Egypt: You Cannot See The Fire For The Smoke
Democracy is a smoke screen for Islam...They claim they want democracy and freedom...but defined by who? What?
There is a world of difference between the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and Islams sharia. Sharia law as derived from the Quran and the traditions of Mohammad is the Islamic constitution...There is nothing 'democratic' in sharia...Nor is there anything free about it...Sharia is a dictate, not a request... Any Muslim who questions it, questions the Quran and has declared himself an apostate, according to sharia... Egypt is already Islamic. Has been for centuries. Even if they do set up a democratic election in Egypt, by the looks of the PEW survey, they'll nominate candidates that reflect all of those stats, and elect a very radical friendly president. Nothing should be surprising about this. But I really cannot understand why the Congress is not interrogating that suspected Islamic Trojan horse and fascist, Hussein Obama; for seeking to make a deal right away with the devious pro-Nazi Islamic Muslim Brotherhood; and at the same time provoking a more violent revolt in Egypt?!
While we should all applaud the removal of a dictator we should do so with the realization that the odds of the Obama Administration producing an outcome superior to that produced by Jimmy Carter in Iran approaches zero. No historical analogy is ever exactly right but the parallels developing between the way the Carter administration betrayed the Shah of Iran are chilling. The administration spokescritter, Robert Gibbs, effectively cut the legs out from under any legitimate use of force Mubarak may use to stay in power. While the Carter Administration believed for reasons that have never been made clear that it could manage the accession of Ayatollah Khomeini to power, so too the Obama Administration seems to think it has found a working partner in the Muslim Brotherhood. Why the Administration believes cavorting with an organization that is both violent and islamist makes sense is as unclear as Carter’s man-crush on Khomeini. The Administration clearly feels that it is sympatico with the Muslim Brotherhood. Early in the Administration the man chosen for “muslim outreach” was heavily involved with the Muslim Brotherhood. And Egyptian media has reported that Obama has recently met with Muslim Brotherhood representatives. One doesn’t need a crystal ball to see how this movie ends. The Muslim Brotherhood is closely aligned with Hamas, another terrorist front organization, and its governing philosophy is anti-semitic and anti-democratic to its very core.
Your thought advocates Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In my thought there is only one universal religion, whose varied paths are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being.
~Kahlil Gibran
There is a world of difference between the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and Islams sharia. Sharia law as derived from the Quran and the traditions of Mohammad is the Islamic constitution...There is nothing 'democratic' in sharia...Nor is there anything free about it...Sharia is a dictate, not a request... Any Muslim who questions it, questions the Quran and has declared himself an apostate, according to sharia... Egypt is already Islamic. Has been for centuries. Even if they do set up a democratic election in Egypt, by the looks of the PEW survey, they'll nominate candidates that reflect all of those stats, and elect a very radical friendly president. Nothing should be surprising about this. But I really cannot understand why the Congress is not interrogating that suspected Islamic Trojan horse and fascist, Hussein Obama; for seeking to make a deal right away with the devious pro-Nazi Islamic Muslim Brotherhood; and at the same time provoking a more violent revolt in Egypt?!
While we should all applaud the removal of a dictator we should do so with the realization that the odds of the Obama Administration producing an outcome superior to that produced by Jimmy Carter in Iran approaches zero. No historical analogy is ever exactly right but the parallels developing between the way the Carter administration betrayed the Shah of Iran are chilling. The administration spokescritter, Robert Gibbs, effectively cut the legs out from under any legitimate use of force Mubarak may use to stay in power. While the Carter Administration believed for reasons that have never been made clear that it could manage the accession of Ayatollah Khomeini to power, so too the Obama Administration seems to think it has found a working partner in the Muslim Brotherhood. Why the Administration believes cavorting with an organization that is both violent and islamist makes sense is as unclear as Carter’s man-crush on Khomeini. The Administration clearly feels that it is sympatico with the Muslim Brotherhood. Early in the Administration the man chosen for “muslim outreach” was heavily involved with the Muslim Brotherhood. And Egyptian media has reported that Obama has recently met with Muslim Brotherhood representatives. One doesn’t need a crystal ball to see how this movie ends. The Muslim Brotherhood is closely aligned with Hamas, another terrorist front organization, and its governing philosophy is anti-semitic and anti-democratic to its very core.
Your thought advocates Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In my thought there is only one universal religion, whose varied paths are but the fingers of the loving hand of the Supreme Being.
~Kahlil Gibran
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Down The Rabbit Hole With Me
Divine Stardust
Picture, if you will, a very large old house. It has a basement and some rooms that have been added in various places over the years, so one gets the impression that the structure has not been planned architecturally. It has many doors to admit people from the outside, and on the inside it has many doors between rooms. Occasionally between two older rooms there is a new room or a passageway that has been added. There is no name for the house, but it contains a room for each discipline found in the context of higher education.
We are constructed with material and stamped with a coded reminder of the One to whom we owe our ultimate existence.
In one part of the basement, close to the foundation, the rooms of mathematics and physics are found. Directly above is the room called chemistry and above that biology. It is no accident the building is arranged this way, for the location of these rooms is indicative of their relational dependence.
In another part of the basement the rooms philosophy and theology can be found, and above, covering several levels, appear art, history, music, and many other disciplines that we collectively study. Two noticeably unique features about this structure exist: First, rooms such as biochemistry and bioethics have been added rather recently. They are positioned between older rooms which have been around for a long time. Secondly, there are passageways that connect various disciplines so people can move, for example, from philosophy to any of the sciences or from ethics to business.
Persons of all backgrounds may enter this building, but relatively few go to the basement. While the rooms located there serve as the foundations for those above them, the rooms are relatively quiet compared to many others. In each room there are various nooks and corners which identify the various subsets of the discipline. As we now enter the room named physics we see the specific subsets: atomic, solid state, space, nuclear, thermal, and so on.
Immediately adjacent to the nuclear part of the room is the entry into another rather new room, which is located between physics and astronomy. It has been given the name cosmology. While much of physics is concerned with the ultrasmall, modern cosmology concentrates on the ultralarge as well as the ultrasmall.
ADVANCES IN THE FIELD OF COSMOLOGY
By the close of the twentieth century, the field of cosmology has presented us with some rather startling advances regarding our universe. Only in the past three decades has it been possible to catch a consistent picture of the universe and humankind’s place in it.
A few years ago, Michael Behe produced a book titled, Darwin’s Black Box.1 It deals with certain biochemical systems which he describes as “irreducibly complex.” An example by which he illustrates this idea is the ordinary mousetrap. If you remove any one of the key components of a mousetrap it will not function. He then showed how the same idea can be extended to certain biochemical structures. His book is not against biological change once the system is constructed, but it does challenge the reader to envision the processes whereby the system was initially arranged to be just right.
It is an interesting book, but I want to move the discussion found in Behe’s book to an even deeper level and consider a more fundamental question. Why are the atoms and molecules that make up trees, cars, and computers even here? Or stated more personally: Why are you even here?
You might be concerned with the teleological aspects of such a question, and rightly so because this certainly is a key aspect to be addressed. But I am going to leave that part of the question to first focus on another, often overlooked aspect of the question which considers the underpinning physical properties that make it possible for us to be here. So, the question can be narrowed: Why are you even here physically?
For many centuries, the earth and its inhabitants were viewed as super special by virtue that the earth was thought to be located at the center of the universe. In such a view everything was about humanity. Then Nicolaus Copernicus came along and disrupted the official view of the church (early sixteenth century). He was followed many years later by Harlow Shapley (1917) who showed that even the sun is not at the center of the galaxy. Then Edwin Hubble demonstrated (1920s) that the galaxy in which we are located is not at the center of the universe.
The dislocation of humanity’s centrism in the observed universe was reinforced by advances in astronomy which started down the path that today shows our part of the universe to be very ordinary. The adoption of what became widely known as the Copernican Principle made it clear that, taken on a large scale, the universe is very homogeneous. During the twentieth century, special and general relativity as presented by Albert Einstein reinforced this view of a universe without any special reference frame. The Cosmological Principle—that an observer’s view of the universe depends neither on the direction in which one looks nor on one’s location—was often quoted to capture the idea that, since the universe is very uniform, there is no preferential location for the earth or for human beings.
A NEW AWARENESS
Now as we reflect back upon a century filled with an explosion of knowledge, a new realization about the universe has occurred. That realization is that in the eyes of the Deity, the whole universe of which humans are a part is incredibly special.
This realization has occurred with greater frequency during the past twenty-five years by a conjunction of several scientific disciplines. Back in the big old house, persons from chemistry, nuclear physics, particle physics, astronomy, and astrophysics got together during lunch breaks up on the top floor. Occasionally philosophers and biologists joined the discussions. During the course of their conversation they merged their insights to produce a wealth of new understanding about the universe. So today, the study of the ultralarge (cosmology) is understood to be closely connected with the study of the ultrasmall (particle physics).
We live in a very fortunate period of time regarding humanity’s understanding of the basic structure of the cosmos. There is still much to do to fill in the details, but enough is understood that the broad brush strokes which describe our cosmos should be a discussion point that can engage everyone. Among the broad brush strokes is the clear knowledge that (1) we live in a very old universe, and (2) this universe is very carefully designed. What is the evidence for these claims?
An Old Universe
The first claim, regarding age, is rather straightforward. There are several key evidences of which I will mention but two. First, we know that as the universe expanded during the initial phases of the big explosion which propelled a high temperature plasma, only the lightest elements—hydrogen, helium, and lithium—were formed.2 The observed abundances of these lightest elements are consistent with the short times available for their formation during the early moments of the universe.
To produce the elements from boron through iron requires fusion reactions that take place over a few billion years, as a star accretes matter and generates the necessary pressure and temperatures. As the star continues to burn and the temperature increases, endothermic reactions kick in which initiate the buildup of those elements from iron on up. In some cases the star may become unstable and a supernova occurs which distributes the contents of the stellar crucible over all the cosmos. The process of accretion then begins anew to form a second generation star, but now with the heavy elements already produced during the earlier era.
When optical spectra coming from old stars are compared to those from younger stars there is a vast difference which directly shows the result of nucleosynthesis. Since our earth and sun possess many heavy elements which are part of the stardust that required billions of years to produce, the very presence of these elements serves as an indicator of the long elapsed time. In effect, each person or plant is another evidence of the long past needed to produce the elements from stars which are needed for life.
A second evidence of an old universe is the direct observation, first announced by Edwin Hubble, that the universe is expanding. This discovery in the 1920s produced quite a stir among cosmologists who preferred the universe to be static and infinitely old for philosophical reasons. However, with Hubble’s discovery comes the realization that the universe had a beginning, has been in motion for about fifteen billion years, and appears able to continue to expand indefinitely.
A Carefully Designed Universe
The second claim, that we live in a very carefully designed universe, is one that was only realized in the last part of the twentieth century. With the advent of large particle accelerators, we have been able to gather details about atomic and nuclear structure and to slowly gain a perspective of the basic interactions which operate at the atomic and subnuclear levels. These studies involve the use of quantum mechanics and higher mathematics in order to understand the quantitative symmetries and important slight asymmetries which are present.
As a result, we now talk routinely about the four basic forces present in the universe: strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational. Two of the four forces, the electromagnetic and the weak, are really one overarching force, which operates in different situations. The great hope is that someday a grand unified theory will be found that will include all four forces and thereby increase our understanding of those very early moments of the universe when giga-sized energies and temperatures were present.
EVIDENCES OF DESIGN
In recent years, physicists and cosmologists have realized that the forces which are responsible for the basic building blocks of matter are themselves somehow inherently carefully constructed within narrow limits. There appears to be something at work which has made it possible for the universe to change while yet maintaining its cosmic focus.
David Schramm, noted cosmologist, has written, “It [the universe] had to be a very, very carefully laid out machine. We also know that the universe seems to be very fine-tuned. One of the giants in the area of nuclear physics, Victor Weisskopf, put it this way, “It looks as if ‘somebody’ had arranged it so the density is the same all over, even in places that would not have had any possible communication or interaction with one another.” And further, the origin of the universe can be talked about not only in scientific terms but also in poetic and spiritual language, an approach that is complimentary to the scientific one. Creation ex nihilo (L. "from nothing") is thought to be the most common type of creation described in these stories. It is the type of creation described in the Genesis creation narrative in the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, and also in the Koran's Sura VII in Islam. It is also known as "creation de novo". Besides in the Bible, Ex nihilo creation is found in creation stories from ancient Egypt, the Rig Veda and many animistic cultures in Africa, Asia, Oceania and North America. In most of these stories the world is brought into being by the speech, dream, breath, or pure thought of a creator but creation ex nihilo may also take place through a creator's bodily secretions. The literal translation of the phrase ex nihilo is "from nothing" but in many creation myths the line is blurred whether the creative act would be better classified as a creation ex nihilo or creation from chaos. With ex nihilo, the potential and the substance of creation springs from within the creator. Such a creator may or may not be existing in physical surroundings such as darkness or water, but does not create the world from them. In creation from chaos the substance used for creation is pre-existing within the unformed void. Indeed many ancient religions of the Mediterranean world described the beginning of the world in a way that is surprisingly similar to the scientific model.
And then Weisskopf quotes Genesis 1:1.
The words, “fine-tuned” imply that if any of the four fundamental forces were changed by a very small amount, typically one percent or less, the atomic, nuclear, and gravitational structures composing our universe would not be sustained. Two examples of many should help illustrate this insight. Consider the case of gravity, the weakest of the four forces. If it were slightly stronger, matter would accrete faster and stars would burn more rapidly and there would not be time to fuse the nuclei needed to sustain life. If the force of gravity were slightly weaker, stars would not possess the temperatures needed to ignite fusion, so only the very lightest elements hydrogen and helium would exist.
Consider the nuclear force, the strongest of the four, which is responsible for binding neutrons and protons together. In the simplest system of one proton and one neutron, deuterium, if the nuclear force were slightly weaker the nucleus would not hold together, so the formation of heavier elements would be terminated. If the force were slightly stronger, then neutrons and protons would readily form only very heavy elements so life would not exist.
There are many other examples which could be cited to show the fine-tuning present in the physical world that enables the universe to exist. The universe and its contents are constantly changing, but always within the narrow limits of these four fundamental laws that govern the range of possible outcomes. Change was woven into the very fabric of the universe, but the Weaver apparently kept an eye on the overall pattern.
DESIGNER GENES
As previously stated, due to the uniformity of the universe, the Cosmological Principle (CP) prohibits any statement that places humanity at the focal point of the developing universe. The idea here is that humanity is just another part of the universe that has developed over time and should not be given any special reason for existence. This certainly fits the philosophical ideas that Einstein embraced when he developed his two types of relativity as well as his view of the quantum mechanical wave function-observer problem.
Strong advocates of CP insist that conditions in the universe occurred initially which led to the universe as we see it today as a result of chaotic processes void of any order or probability. Certainly one may envision a full ensemble of possible universes to be initiated which would not possess the characteristics of the universe we observe. However, even after undertaking these mental gymnastics, we still need to explain why our present universe survives after fifteen billion years, whereas the hypothesized universes will not support life.
From the time you were one cell until now—more than seventy-five trillion cells—that set of cells has developed and functioned to make you a conscious organism. Purpose has been part of the overall process. This emerging structure also has had to deal with other interacting agents that would harm the structure (chemicals, X rays, other radiation), but usually the organism repairs itself to remain functional. This is all due ultimately to the nature of quantum mechanics and one or more of the four basic forces within the universe. These hold the cells together and give rise to biological activity that eventually produces the amazing quantity we call life and consciousness.
So in the case of cell material you do not have to purchase designer genes, you were born with them. What I am suggesting is that within the vast array of designer possibilities or design space, similar to the idea of phase space in physics, there appears to be something present which is more than just random construction. J. Polkinghorne puts it this way. “The way life has spread out has not been totally random, for there is a metric on Design Space, a pattern of hills and valleys which directs development in one way and not in another.
THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS
The overall effects which result from the four fundamental forces suggest that the physical laws of the universe are “loaded with purpose” or “freighted with the future.” That is, the laws of physics appear to give evidence of intention. Why is it that the universe permits the development of stars and galaxies and intelligent beings at any place or at any time in history?
To answer this and similar questions, one may refer to the “Anthropic Cosmological Principle” (AP). This term was first introduced by Brandon Carter in 1973 to counter an extreme version of the Copernican Principle, namely, that humanity’s place in the universe cannot be privileged in any sense. There are two forms of the Anthropic Principle. One, called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP), states that only one particular set of laws of physics and particular conditions that exist in the universe would allow the existence of (intelligent) life. Thus the WAP is selecting only that universe in which life can develop and exist out of a larger ensemble of universes. Just as a mousetrap has parts which make it “irreducibly complex” for Behe, I am suggesting that a few physical laws of our universe also form a set that appears “irreducibly complex” regarding the ability of the universe to develop and support life.
Could it be that structures, large and small, in the cosmos are endowed by the Creator with the capacity to demonstrate purpose? For me the answer is a clear “Yes.” The remarkable precision of certain nuclear energy levels which control nucleosynthesis and the narrow window for the velocity of expansion during the early moments of the universe which are now known to be “just right,” are only two of many examples of a universe that possesses the critical elements and conditions for life to exist. The WAP can help determine where and when life could arise among all the “gedanken universes” that might be envisioned.8 The WAP informs us that the physics as determined by the coupling constants in each of the four fundamental forces cannot deviate very much from that observed in the laboratory and allow life to continue to function.
BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
The presence of life on earth (or anywhere?) is the all-consuming issue for some persons. If the physical universe, which is evolving since its beginning with the big-bang scenario, contains evidence of purpose and “fine-tuning,” could it be that the (much later) biological part of the changing universe possesses evidence in systems that also demonstrate intelligent design?
The record of biological development is in many ways more complicated than that of the physical which this paper is considering. While the data provides many examples of ongoing change and development that fit a smooth sequence in time, the fossil record that is available is apparently sometimes incomplete.
In addition, the data also indicates the equivalent of a major biological explosion about 570 million years ago (Cambrian era) which effectively signaled “time = zero” in the biological world for the major phyla. A quite recent (cosmically speaking) second big bang! Much of the controversy regarding biological evolution seems to be centered around the existence, or the lack thereof, of credible data. Since science is a data-based enterprise, it is not surprising that the different views of biological evolution quite often are centered around personal interpretations of the available data.
Virtually everyone agrees that evolution is a word that characterizes the changing cosmos, but not everyone seems to agree that the evolutionary processes which exhibit “fine-tuning” and purpose early in the developing physical universe were present later in the biological development. A concise summary of the different types of biological evolutionary thought has recently been printed.
MUST INTELLIGENT LIFE EXIST?
In contrast to the WAP is the SAP (Strong Anthropic Principle). The SAP says that intelligent life must exist in the universe. The reason for the imperative goes back to one of the ways of interpreting quantum mechanics whereby an observer is required to collapse the wave function which produces an observable. However, since quantum mechanics, while very productive, is not totally functional or self-consistent in avoiding singularities, the SAP approach is not widely accepted. And who else, other than a Creator, was present initially to observe!
So, what is it about the nature of fundamental forces that seems to admit the existence of life or even prefer the existence of life? A random set of physical laws would certainly not come close to meeting this final condition of supporting the structure of life. We live at a time in the long history of humanity whereby we can accommodate the idea that the detailed design of life as we see it has been achieved by a purposeful process.
The principles of physics and chemistry permit the operation and functioning of cells, individuals, and large ecosystems with amazing complexity and countless variety. From a design viewpoint it is the WAP that filters only those physical laws that allow the profound creative activity to take place. The WAP does not prove the existence of a Designer, it only gives evidence. However, it does provide a strong indicator through all that is observed. When George Smoot found evidence a few years ago in the cosmic microwave background for early galaxy formation, he said the discovery “was like looking at the face of God. In a very real sense, the entire history of the developing universe has been required to produce life.
CONCLUSIONS
It seems to me the AP affords a combined view of religious myth and scientific knowledge. This is the passageway in the basement of our old house that connects physics and theology which relatively few individuals have dared to enter.
Contrary to the opinion of Einstein that God could not possibly be interested in an insignificant speck in the universe such as a person,12 the view manr religions is shaped by the idea of a personal walk with the Divine. The Creator could have arranged things differently, but he apparently selected from an infinite number of possibilities the particular set of physical laws we see in the universe. As a Father, he created a universe for his image and provided a place for humanity to live.
Humankind is an infinitesimal point in space compared to the vast reaches of space. However, it is also religious dogma that often blinds us as to who we are with where we are. We are conscious beings because the laws of physics facilitate the development of life. It is the total moral, ethical, and spiritual response that reflects the underlying purpose present in everyone who contemplates their own existence.
There is nothing wrong in attempting to connect solid science with our faith to honor our Mother’s work in the universe. In an old Ftraditional Jewish tale, God said to Abraham, “But for me you would not be here.” “I know that, Lord,” Abraham replied, “but were I not here there would be no one to think about you.
In this universe that exhibits order and purpose and proceeds through time, the Creator so wove purpose and change into the very fabric of the building blocks of the universe that as he sustains the creation it unfolds its ultimate purposes. If the Designer chose a particular framework for the universe that also self-selected, then people would see the universe that would be said to be “fine-tuned.” This would not be proof of the existence of the Designer, but it would be a hint regarding his existence. In this way, God can remain invisible and yet achieve the plan for his creation because the universe is governed by physical laws which have his purpose/destiny built into their very nature.
Consequently, the concept of intelligent design is not a human-made dictum, but rather an outcome of what we see and observe. In other words, the divine is inherent in the physical so that everything we see is not just stardust but divine stardust. We are constructed with material and stamped with a coded reminder of the One to whom we owe our ultimate existence.
The opportunity to look upward on a clear dark night into the great cathedral of space is an opportunity to contemplate the universe’s amazing construction. We live in a very old universe, carefully designed, full of grandeur, and in continuous change. It is a universe of vast proportions still being carefully crafted, and yet it is inhabited by people who have the capacity to think about their past and project their future. Lastly, it is a universe whose development through the ages has been necessary for us to even be here to think about it.
NOTES
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free, 1996).
W. A. Fowler, International Association of Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, first meeting, 1967.
David N. Schramm, “The Early Universe and High Energy Physics,” Physics Today 36:4 (1983):
Hugh Siefken Did most of the hard work here; he is a Professor of Physics and Chairman of the Division of Mathematics and Natural and Computer Sciences at Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois. He has published numerous scientific papers in professional journals. The many changes I made here do not necessarily reflect his views or opinions.
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Picture, if you will, a very large old house. It has a basement and some rooms that have been added in various places over the years, so one gets the impression that the structure has not been planned architecturally. It has many doors to admit people from the outside, and on the inside it has many doors between rooms. Occasionally between two older rooms there is a new room or a passageway that has been added. There is no name for the house, but it contains a room for each discipline found in the context of higher education.
We are constructed with material and stamped with a coded reminder of the One to whom we owe our ultimate existence.
In one part of the basement, close to the foundation, the rooms of mathematics and physics are found. Directly above is the room called chemistry and above that biology. It is no accident the building is arranged this way, for the location of these rooms is indicative of their relational dependence.
In another part of the basement the rooms philosophy and theology can be found, and above, covering several levels, appear art, history, music, and many other disciplines that we collectively study. Two noticeably unique features about this structure exist: First, rooms such as biochemistry and bioethics have been added rather recently. They are positioned between older rooms which have been around for a long time. Secondly, there are passageways that connect various disciplines so people can move, for example, from philosophy to any of the sciences or from ethics to business.
Persons of all backgrounds may enter this building, but relatively few go to the basement. While the rooms located there serve as the foundations for those above them, the rooms are relatively quiet compared to many others. In each room there are various nooks and corners which identify the various subsets of the discipline. As we now enter the room named physics we see the specific subsets: atomic, solid state, space, nuclear, thermal, and so on.
Immediately adjacent to the nuclear part of the room is the entry into another rather new room, which is located between physics and astronomy. It has been given the name cosmology. While much of physics is concerned with the ultrasmall, modern cosmology concentrates on the ultralarge as well as the ultrasmall.
ADVANCES IN THE FIELD OF COSMOLOGY
By the close of the twentieth century, the field of cosmology has presented us with some rather startling advances regarding our universe. Only in the past three decades has it been possible to catch a consistent picture of the universe and humankind’s place in it.
A few years ago, Michael Behe produced a book titled, Darwin’s Black Box.1 It deals with certain biochemical systems which he describes as “irreducibly complex.” An example by which he illustrates this idea is the ordinary mousetrap. If you remove any one of the key components of a mousetrap it will not function. He then showed how the same idea can be extended to certain biochemical structures. His book is not against biological change once the system is constructed, but it does challenge the reader to envision the processes whereby the system was initially arranged to be just right.
It is an interesting book, but I want to move the discussion found in Behe’s book to an even deeper level and consider a more fundamental question. Why are the atoms and molecules that make up trees, cars, and computers even here? Or stated more personally: Why are you even here?
You might be concerned with the teleological aspects of such a question, and rightly so because this certainly is a key aspect to be addressed. But I am going to leave that part of the question to first focus on another, often overlooked aspect of the question which considers the underpinning physical properties that make it possible for us to be here. So, the question can be narrowed: Why are you even here physically?
For many centuries, the earth and its inhabitants were viewed as super special by virtue that the earth was thought to be located at the center of the universe. In such a view everything was about humanity. Then Nicolaus Copernicus came along and disrupted the official view of the church (early sixteenth century). He was followed many years later by Harlow Shapley (1917) who showed that even the sun is not at the center of the galaxy. Then Edwin Hubble demonstrated (1920s) that the galaxy in which we are located is not at the center of the universe.
The dislocation of humanity’s centrism in the observed universe was reinforced by advances in astronomy which started down the path that today shows our part of the universe to be very ordinary. The adoption of what became widely known as the Copernican Principle made it clear that, taken on a large scale, the universe is very homogeneous. During the twentieth century, special and general relativity as presented by Albert Einstein reinforced this view of a universe without any special reference frame. The Cosmological Principle—that an observer’s view of the universe depends neither on the direction in which one looks nor on one’s location—was often quoted to capture the idea that, since the universe is very uniform, there is no preferential location for the earth or for human beings.
A NEW AWARENESS
Now as we reflect back upon a century filled with an explosion of knowledge, a new realization about the universe has occurred. That realization is that in the eyes of the Deity, the whole universe of which humans are a part is incredibly special.
This realization has occurred with greater frequency during the past twenty-five years by a conjunction of several scientific disciplines. Back in the big old house, persons from chemistry, nuclear physics, particle physics, astronomy, and astrophysics got together during lunch breaks up on the top floor. Occasionally philosophers and biologists joined the discussions. During the course of their conversation they merged their insights to produce a wealth of new understanding about the universe. So today, the study of the ultralarge (cosmology) is understood to be closely connected with the study of the ultrasmall (particle physics).
We live in a very fortunate period of time regarding humanity’s understanding of the basic structure of the cosmos. There is still much to do to fill in the details, but enough is understood that the broad brush strokes which describe our cosmos should be a discussion point that can engage everyone. Among the broad brush strokes is the clear knowledge that (1) we live in a very old universe, and (2) this universe is very carefully designed. What is the evidence for these claims?
An Old Universe
The first claim, regarding age, is rather straightforward. There are several key evidences of which I will mention but two. First, we know that as the universe expanded during the initial phases of the big explosion which propelled a high temperature plasma, only the lightest elements—hydrogen, helium, and lithium—were formed.2 The observed abundances of these lightest elements are consistent with the short times available for their formation during the early moments of the universe.
To produce the elements from boron through iron requires fusion reactions that take place over a few billion years, as a star accretes matter and generates the necessary pressure and temperatures. As the star continues to burn and the temperature increases, endothermic reactions kick in which initiate the buildup of those elements from iron on up. In some cases the star may become unstable and a supernova occurs which distributes the contents of the stellar crucible over all the cosmos. The process of accretion then begins anew to form a second generation star, but now with the heavy elements already produced during the earlier era.
When optical spectra coming from old stars are compared to those from younger stars there is a vast difference which directly shows the result of nucleosynthesis. Since our earth and sun possess many heavy elements which are part of the stardust that required billions of years to produce, the very presence of these elements serves as an indicator of the long elapsed time. In effect, each person or plant is another evidence of the long past needed to produce the elements from stars which are needed for life.
A second evidence of an old universe is the direct observation, first announced by Edwin Hubble, that the universe is expanding. This discovery in the 1920s produced quite a stir among cosmologists who preferred the universe to be static and infinitely old for philosophical reasons. However, with Hubble’s discovery comes the realization that the universe had a beginning, has been in motion for about fifteen billion years, and appears able to continue to expand indefinitely.
A Carefully Designed Universe
The second claim, that we live in a very carefully designed universe, is one that was only realized in the last part of the twentieth century. With the advent of large particle accelerators, we have been able to gather details about atomic and nuclear structure and to slowly gain a perspective of the basic interactions which operate at the atomic and subnuclear levels. These studies involve the use of quantum mechanics and higher mathematics in order to understand the quantitative symmetries and important slight asymmetries which are present.
As a result, we now talk routinely about the four basic forces present in the universe: strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational. Two of the four forces, the electromagnetic and the weak, are really one overarching force, which operates in different situations. The great hope is that someday a grand unified theory will be found that will include all four forces and thereby increase our understanding of those very early moments of the universe when giga-sized energies and temperatures were present.
EVIDENCES OF DESIGN
In recent years, physicists and cosmologists have realized that the forces which are responsible for the basic building blocks of matter are themselves somehow inherently carefully constructed within narrow limits. There appears to be something at work which has made it possible for the universe to change while yet maintaining its cosmic focus.
David Schramm, noted cosmologist, has written, “It [the universe] had to be a very, very carefully laid out machine. We also know that the universe seems to be very fine-tuned. One of the giants in the area of nuclear physics, Victor Weisskopf, put it this way, “It looks as if ‘somebody’ had arranged it so the density is the same all over, even in places that would not have had any possible communication or interaction with one another.” And further, the origin of the universe can be talked about not only in scientific terms but also in poetic and spiritual language, an approach that is complimentary to the scientific one. Creation ex nihilo (L. "from nothing") is thought to be the most common type of creation described in these stories. It is the type of creation described in the Genesis creation narrative in the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, and also in the Koran's Sura VII in Islam. It is also known as "creation de novo". Besides in the Bible, Ex nihilo creation is found in creation stories from ancient Egypt, the Rig Veda and many animistic cultures in Africa, Asia, Oceania and North America. In most of these stories the world is brought into being by the speech, dream, breath, or pure thought of a creator but creation ex nihilo may also take place through a creator's bodily secretions. The literal translation of the phrase ex nihilo is "from nothing" but in many creation myths the line is blurred whether the creative act would be better classified as a creation ex nihilo or creation from chaos. With ex nihilo, the potential and the substance of creation springs from within the creator. Such a creator may or may not be existing in physical surroundings such as darkness or water, but does not create the world from them. In creation from chaos the substance used for creation is pre-existing within the unformed void. Indeed many ancient religions of the Mediterranean world described the beginning of the world in a way that is surprisingly similar to the scientific model.
And then Weisskopf quotes Genesis 1:1.
The words, “fine-tuned” imply that if any of the four fundamental forces were changed by a very small amount, typically one percent or less, the atomic, nuclear, and gravitational structures composing our universe would not be sustained. Two examples of many should help illustrate this insight. Consider the case of gravity, the weakest of the four forces. If it were slightly stronger, matter would accrete faster and stars would burn more rapidly and there would not be time to fuse the nuclei needed to sustain life. If the force of gravity were slightly weaker, stars would not possess the temperatures needed to ignite fusion, so only the very lightest elements hydrogen and helium would exist.
Consider the nuclear force, the strongest of the four, which is responsible for binding neutrons and protons together. In the simplest system of one proton and one neutron, deuterium, if the nuclear force were slightly weaker the nucleus would not hold together, so the formation of heavier elements would be terminated. If the force were slightly stronger, then neutrons and protons would readily form only very heavy elements so life would not exist.
There are many other examples which could be cited to show the fine-tuning present in the physical world that enables the universe to exist. The universe and its contents are constantly changing, but always within the narrow limits of these four fundamental laws that govern the range of possible outcomes. Change was woven into the very fabric of the universe, but the Weaver apparently kept an eye on the overall pattern.
DESIGNER GENES
As previously stated, due to the uniformity of the universe, the Cosmological Principle (CP) prohibits any statement that places humanity at the focal point of the developing universe. The idea here is that humanity is just another part of the universe that has developed over time and should not be given any special reason for existence. This certainly fits the philosophical ideas that Einstein embraced when he developed his two types of relativity as well as his view of the quantum mechanical wave function-observer problem.
Strong advocates of CP insist that conditions in the universe occurred initially which led to the universe as we see it today as a result of chaotic processes void of any order or probability. Certainly one may envision a full ensemble of possible universes to be initiated which would not possess the characteristics of the universe we observe. However, even after undertaking these mental gymnastics, we still need to explain why our present universe survives after fifteen billion years, whereas the hypothesized universes will not support life.
From the time you were one cell until now—more than seventy-five trillion cells—that set of cells has developed and functioned to make you a conscious organism. Purpose has been part of the overall process. This emerging structure also has had to deal with other interacting agents that would harm the structure (chemicals, X rays, other radiation), but usually the organism repairs itself to remain functional. This is all due ultimately to the nature of quantum mechanics and one or more of the four basic forces within the universe. These hold the cells together and give rise to biological activity that eventually produces the amazing quantity we call life and consciousness.
So in the case of cell material you do not have to purchase designer genes, you were born with them. What I am suggesting is that within the vast array of designer possibilities or design space, similar to the idea of phase space in physics, there appears to be something present which is more than just random construction. J. Polkinghorne puts it this way. “The way life has spread out has not been totally random, for there is a metric on Design Space, a pattern of hills and valleys which directs development in one way and not in another.
THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS
The overall effects which result from the four fundamental forces suggest that the physical laws of the universe are “loaded with purpose” or “freighted with the future.” That is, the laws of physics appear to give evidence of intention. Why is it that the universe permits the development of stars and galaxies and intelligent beings at any place or at any time in history?
To answer this and similar questions, one may refer to the “Anthropic Cosmological Principle” (AP). This term was first introduced by Brandon Carter in 1973 to counter an extreme version of the Copernican Principle, namely, that humanity’s place in the universe cannot be privileged in any sense. There are two forms of the Anthropic Principle. One, called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP), states that only one particular set of laws of physics and particular conditions that exist in the universe would allow the existence of (intelligent) life. Thus the WAP is selecting only that universe in which life can develop and exist out of a larger ensemble of universes. Just as a mousetrap has parts which make it “irreducibly complex” for Behe, I am suggesting that a few physical laws of our universe also form a set that appears “irreducibly complex” regarding the ability of the universe to develop and support life.
Could it be that structures, large and small, in the cosmos are endowed by the Creator with the capacity to demonstrate purpose? For me the answer is a clear “Yes.” The remarkable precision of certain nuclear energy levels which control nucleosynthesis and the narrow window for the velocity of expansion during the early moments of the universe which are now known to be “just right,” are only two of many examples of a universe that possesses the critical elements and conditions for life to exist. The WAP can help determine where and when life could arise among all the “gedanken universes” that might be envisioned.8 The WAP informs us that the physics as determined by the coupling constants in each of the four fundamental forces cannot deviate very much from that observed in the laboratory and allow life to continue to function.
BIOLOGICAL DESIGN
The presence of life on earth (or anywhere?) is the all-consuming issue for some persons. If the physical universe, which is evolving since its beginning with the big-bang scenario, contains evidence of purpose and “fine-tuning,” could it be that the (much later) biological part of the changing universe possesses evidence in systems that also demonstrate intelligent design?
The record of biological development is in many ways more complicated than that of the physical which this paper is considering. While the data provides many examples of ongoing change and development that fit a smooth sequence in time, the fossil record that is available is apparently sometimes incomplete.
In addition, the data also indicates the equivalent of a major biological explosion about 570 million years ago (Cambrian era) which effectively signaled “time = zero” in the biological world for the major phyla. A quite recent (cosmically speaking) second big bang! Much of the controversy regarding biological evolution seems to be centered around the existence, or the lack thereof, of credible data. Since science is a data-based enterprise, it is not surprising that the different views of biological evolution quite often are centered around personal interpretations of the available data.
Virtually everyone agrees that evolution is a word that characterizes the changing cosmos, but not everyone seems to agree that the evolutionary processes which exhibit “fine-tuning” and purpose early in the developing physical universe were present later in the biological development. A concise summary of the different types of biological evolutionary thought has recently been printed.
MUST INTELLIGENT LIFE EXIST?
In contrast to the WAP is the SAP (Strong Anthropic Principle). The SAP says that intelligent life must exist in the universe. The reason for the imperative goes back to one of the ways of interpreting quantum mechanics whereby an observer is required to collapse the wave function which produces an observable. However, since quantum mechanics, while very productive, is not totally functional or self-consistent in avoiding singularities, the SAP approach is not widely accepted. And who else, other than a Creator, was present initially to observe!
So, what is it about the nature of fundamental forces that seems to admit the existence of life or even prefer the existence of life? A random set of physical laws would certainly not come close to meeting this final condition of supporting the structure of life. We live at a time in the long history of humanity whereby we can accommodate the idea that the detailed design of life as we see it has been achieved by a purposeful process.
The principles of physics and chemistry permit the operation and functioning of cells, individuals, and large ecosystems with amazing complexity and countless variety. From a design viewpoint it is the WAP that filters only those physical laws that allow the profound creative activity to take place. The WAP does not prove the existence of a Designer, it only gives evidence. However, it does provide a strong indicator through all that is observed. When George Smoot found evidence a few years ago in the cosmic microwave background for early galaxy formation, he said the discovery “was like looking at the face of God. In a very real sense, the entire history of the developing universe has been required to produce life.
CONCLUSIONS
It seems to me the AP affords a combined view of religious myth and scientific knowledge. This is the passageway in the basement of our old house that connects physics and theology which relatively few individuals have dared to enter.
Contrary to the opinion of Einstein that God could not possibly be interested in an insignificant speck in the universe such as a person,12 the view manr religions is shaped by the idea of a personal walk with the Divine. The Creator could have arranged things differently, but he apparently selected from an infinite number of possibilities the particular set of physical laws we see in the universe. As a Father, he created a universe for his image and provided a place for humanity to live.
Humankind is an infinitesimal point in space compared to the vast reaches of space. However, it is also religious dogma that often blinds us as to who we are with where we are. We are conscious beings because the laws of physics facilitate the development of life. It is the total moral, ethical, and spiritual response that reflects the underlying purpose present in everyone who contemplates their own existence.
There is nothing wrong in attempting to connect solid science with our faith to honor our Mother’s work in the universe. In an old Ftraditional Jewish tale, God said to Abraham, “But for me you would not be here.” “I know that, Lord,” Abraham replied, “but were I not here there would be no one to think about you.
In this universe that exhibits order and purpose and proceeds through time, the Creator so wove purpose and change into the very fabric of the building blocks of the universe that as he sustains the creation it unfolds its ultimate purposes. If the Designer chose a particular framework for the universe that also self-selected, then people would see the universe that would be said to be “fine-tuned.” This would not be proof of the existence of the Designer, but it would be a hint regarding his existence. In this way, God can remain invisible and yet achieve the plan for his creation because the universe is governed by physical laws which have his purpose/destiny built into their very nature.
Consequently, the concept of intelligent design is not a human-made dictum, but rather an outcome of what we see and observe. In other words, the divine is inherent in the physical so that everything we see is not just stardust but divine stardust. We are constructed with material and stamped with a coded reminder of the One to whom we owe our ultimate existence.
The opportunity to look upward on a clear dark night into the great cathedral of space is an opportunity to contemplate the universe’s amazing construction. We live in a very old universe, carefully designed, full of grandeur, and in continuous change. It is a universe of vast proportions still being carefully crafted, and yet it is inhabited by people who have the capacity to think about their past and project their future. Lastly, it is a universe whose development through the ages has been necessary for us to even be here to think about it.
NOTES
Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free, 1996).
W. A. Fowler, International Association of Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, first meeting, 1967.
David N. Schramm, “The Early Universe and High Energy Physics,” Physics Today 36:4 (1983):
Hugh Siefken Did most of the hard work here; he is a Professor of Physics and Chairman of the Division of Mathematics and Natural and Computer Sciences at Greenville College, Greenville, Illinois. He has published numerous scientific papers in professional journals. The many changes I made here do not necessarily reflect his views or opinions.
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Sunday, January 16, 2011
WHY IS THERE NO REAL MONEY??
Everyone reading this article is being robbed. We all use paper money and every day, governments are lowering its value. That value is being stolen from us. To understand how this is happening, we need to get to the basics of what we are using for money. It is called Fiat Money; (Fiat from the Latin fiat, meaning “let it be done.”) This is an item, usually paper or low value metal coins, that is decreed to have value by a government.
A government puts fiat money into circulation first by connecting it to a gold or silver standard, but then cuts the link and says that gold and paper are no longer convertible, making the piece of paper “legal tender for all debts public and private.” It is obvious that debtors would be very happy if the pa-per money lost its value because they could pay their debts with inflated currency. In a letter to Edward Carrington in 1788, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Paper is poverty … it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.” Jefferson died bankrupt because of the early United States money (monetary) policy based on paper.
Money as debt - your ticket to slavery 1/5
Because of greed, America will soon fail, and will take down all the corrupt world banks with it.
The Movie- Federal Reserve (Part 1 of 5)
8 Must See Documentaries Vol 1
A government puts fiat money into circulation first by connecting it to a gold or silver standard, but then cuts the link and says that gold and paper are no longer convertible, making the piece of paper “legal tender for all debts public and private.” It is obvious that debtors would be very happy if the pa-per money lost its value because they could pay their debts with inflated currency. In a letter to Edward Carrington in 1788, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Paper is poverty … it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.” Jefferson died bankrupt because of the early United States money (monetary) policy based on paper.
Money as debt - your ticket to slavery 1/5
Because of greed, America will soon fail, and will take down all the corrupt world banks with it.
The Movie- Federal Reserve (Part 1 of 5)
8 Must See Documentaries Vol 1
The Cloud God Has Eaten The Sun
Massive icebergs floating past the coast of New Zealand
Falling Snow in Australia At The Summer
Posted on December 21, 2010 by Hot News
NewSecond – In recent days, residents in parts of eastern Australia experienced a rare weather. Usually the air remains hot, but the territory they now actually very cold and snowy.
According to media circles, this is a weird weather phenomenon, considering the number of regions in Australia, such as areas of New South Wales and Victoria, are still experiencing summer at the end of the year.
Climate Catastrophe Cancelled-Part 1
The Lies Of Global Warming pt 1
CLIMATE CHANGE TOOLS AND THE MEDIA TOOLS THAT LOVE THEM
Maybe before ClimateGate, Roger.
Roger Highfield is one who thinks he can ask questions like the one below and be protected from ridicule because he’s so scary smart–or something.
Are we freezing because of global warming?
As a blanket of snow settles across the country, Airports, and train services grind to a halt and roads become impassable, you could be forgiven for thinking that global warming seems more remote than ever. But the World Meteorological Organisation announced that 2010 is almost certain to rank among the three warmest years since records began in 1850 – and it has long been accepted that one of the effects of climate change could be an increase in the frequency of harsher, Continental-style winters.
This is what passes for “reporting” these days: acknowledge that the hard data is against you: i.e., the snow and record cold temperatures–but then re-announce some climate change pimpinghouse’s announcement of “forget all of the freezing cold–these past years has really been a scorcher–really!”
Why not just write that the Cloud God has eaten the Sun and crapped out snow?
That makes just as good an argument–while being as logical.
Advice for Staying Warm and Safe in a Freezing World.
To avoid cold-related injuries, here is a simple way to remember four basic steps to staying warm. Think of COLD -- C.O.L.D
The C stands for cover. Wear a hat and scarf to keep heat from escaping through the head, neck and ears. And wear mittens instead of gloves. In gloves, the fingers are separated, so the hands might not stay as warm as they would in mittens.
The O stands for overexertion. Avoid activities that will make you sweaty. Wet clothes and cold weather are a dangerous combination.
L is for layers. Wearing loose, lightweight clothes, one layer on top of another, is better than wearing a single heavy layer of clothing. Make sure outerwear is made of material that is water-resistant and tightly knit.
D is for dry. In other words, stay as dry as possible. Pay attention to the places where snow can enter clothing. These include the tops of boots, the necks of coats and the wrist areas of mittens or gloves.
And here are two other things to keep in mind -- one for children and the other for adults. Eating snow might be fun but it lowers the body's temperature. And drinking alcohol might make a person feel warm. But what it really does is weaken the body's ability to hold heat.
It was Cold that killed my father, and it will be Cold that will one day reclaim the earth. I pray that it will be a longtime in coming.
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Falling Snow in Australia At The Summer
Posted on December 21, 2010 by Hot News
NewSecond – In recent days, residents in parts of eastern Australia experienced a rare weather. Usually the air remains hot, but the territory they now actually very cold and snowy.
According to media circles, this is a weird weather phenomenon, considering the number of regions in Australia, such as areas of New South Wales and Victoria, are still experiencing summer at the end of the year.
Climate Catastrophe Cancelled-Part 1
The Lies Of Global Warming pt 1
CLIMATE CHANGE TOOLS AND THE MEDIA TOOLS THAT LOVE THEM
Maybe before ClimateGate, Roger.
Roger Highfield is one who thinks he can ask questions like the one below and be protected from ridicule because he’s so scary smart–or something.
Are we freezing because of global warming?
As a blanket of snow settles across the country, Airports, and train services grind to a halt and roads become impassable, you could be forgiven for thinking that global warming seems more remote than ever. But the World Meteorological Organisation announced that 2010 is almost certain to rank among the three warmest years since records began in 1850 – and it has long been accepted that one of the effects of climate change could be an increase in the frequency of harsher, Continental-style winters.
This is what passes for “reporting” these days: acknowledge that the hard data is against you: i.e., the snow and record cold temperatures–but then re-announce some climate change pimpinghouse’s announcement of “forget all of the freezing cold–these past years has really been a scorcher–really!”
Why not just write that the Cloud God has eaten the Sun and crapped out snow?
That makes just as good an argument–while being as logical.
Advice for Staying Warm and Safe in a Freezing World.
To avoid cold-related injuries, here is a simple way to remember four basic steps to staying warm. Think of COLD -- C.O.L.D
The C stands for cover. Wear a hat and scarf to keep heat from escaping through the head, neck and ears. And wear mittens instead of gloves. In gloves, the fingers are separated, so the hands might not stay as warm as they would in mittens.
The O stands for overexertion. Avoid activities that will make you sweaty. Wet clothes and cold weather are a dangerous combination.
L is for layers. Wearing loose, lightweight clothes, one layer on top of another, is better than wearing a single heavy layer of clothing. Make sure outerwear is made of material that is water-resistant and tightly knit.
D is for dry. In other words, stay as dry as possible. Pay attention to the places where snow can enter clothing. These include the tops of boots, the necks of coats and the wrist areas of mittens or gloves.
And here are two other things to keep in mind -- one for children and the other for adults. Eating snow might be fun but it lowers the body's temperature. And drinking alcohol might make a person feel warm. But what it really does is weaken the body's ability to hold heat.
It was Cold that killed my father, and it will be Cold that will one day reclaim the earth. I pray that it will be a longtime in coming.
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
What is Love?
LOVE
Love is an act of endless forgiveness
A tender look which becomes a habit. Peter Ustinov
Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love. Erich Fromm Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away. Elbert Hubbard
Love knows no reasons,
love knows no lies.
Love defies all reasons,
love has no eyes.
But love is not blind,
love sees but doesn't mind. Unknown
Since love grows within you, so beauty grows.
For love is the beauty of the soul. St. Augustine
So what is love? A word so often used in spiritual circles, in religions and in all kinds of organisations as well as, of course, on a personal level. But just what is it? We all understand that there can be a physical attraction an infatuation that leads to sexual intimacy. Then there is the type of love that you may have for a child, a parent, a peer. Yet there is also a deeper expression of love. When you hear energies like mine saying: 'Send out unconditional love', what are we really saying?
At the finest level of your spirit, each one of you emanates an energy that has a harmonic resonance, and that harmonic resonance is love. So when you meet another person, a situation, another form of evolution such as an animal, a bird, a rabbit, a flower, a tree - for all of the Great Spirit's divine creations have a harmonic resonance even the rocks and the air, and the harmonic resonance of creation blends with your own resonance. Not only people, even a horse, a dog, a cat, a duck, will respond to you in a very special way and you will respond to it in a very special way. There is be a blending of this harmonic resonance between you, and you feel it raise the energy vibration in both of you.
So this resonance can manifest on different levels, the finest being the harmonic resonance from the higher Self, the spirit itself. The important thing is that the simpler the resonance, the finer and deeper it will be. The more complex and structured the resonance, the more difficult for it to exist on those finer levels. Now it is quite important to understand this because when you are endeavouring to send thoughts of unconditional love, you are trying to harness, acknowledge, recognise, feel that unconditional love within you - a love without judgement, and allow it to radiate from you as an offering. The essential aspect is that you are placing no condition on how it may be received. In some areas it will be received in a loving way and it will enhance love in your world as well as other areas, depending on the purity of your own thoughts - and here we go to the other end of the polarity - it can create confrontation. That is the nature of evolution. For if love is conditional, you are not allowing the recipient the choice; it can become manipulative, it may well produce a polarised reaction from the recipient because you are trying to tell some other energy how you think it should be thinking, doing, behaving.
Whereas, tuning into the finest in you, where there is no judgement, and sending out your harmonic resonance, your unconditional love . . . . this has a much wider implication. If you can work towards loving unconditionally, it is a form of offering to the highest level of a person or group of people; and it is the freewill of their spirit or group spirit that will respond or not respond, as it wishes.
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else. Hermann Hesse
Read more: http://www.romantic-ideas-online.com/what-is-love.html#ixzz1AqiT5VF0.
I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit. Kahlil Gibran
Monday, January 10, 2011
Bush Drugs: The Real Reason to Kill The Kennedys
Bo Gritz Letter to George Bush
1 February 1988, Sandy Valley, NV
Honorable George Bush, Vice President, United States of America, Washington, D.C.
Sir:
Why does it seem that you are saying "YES" to illegal narcotics in America?
I turned over video tapes to your NSC staff assistant, Tom Harvey, January 1987, wherein General KHUN SA, overlord of Asia's "Golden Triangle", offered to stop 900 tons of heroin/opium from entering the free world in 1987. Harvey told me, "...there is no interest here in doing that." General Khun Sa also offered to identify U.S. Government officials who, he says, have been trafficking in heroin for more than 20 years.
November 1986, Scott Weekly and I went into Burma in coordination and cooperation with The White House. Tom Harvey told me you received a letter from Arthur Suchesk, Orange County, CA, dated 29 August 1986. Dr. Suchesk said that Gen Khun Sa had access to U.S. POWs. Harvey said the letter had received "highest attention". He gave me a copy along with other case documents. I was asked if it was possible to verify the information. According to Harvey, the CIA said Khun Sa had been assassinated some months before. Harvey supplied Scott and myself with language under White House and NSC letterhead that would help us gain access to Khun Sa. It worked. Unfortunately, Khun Sa knew nothing about US POWs. He did, however, offer to trade his nation's poppy dependence for a legitimate economy.
Instead of receiving an "Atta Boy" for bringing back video tape showing Khun Sa`s offer to stop 900 tons of illegal narcotics and expose dirty USG officials, Scott was jailed and I was threatened. I was told that if I didn't "erase and forget" all that we had discovered, I would, "hurt the government". Further, I was promised a prison sentence of "15 years".
I returned to Burma with two other American witnesses, Lance Trimmer, a private detective from San Francisco, and Barry Flynn from Boston. Gen Khun Sa identified some of those in government service he says were dealing in heroin and arms sales. We video taped this second interview and I turned copies over in June 1987, to the Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence; Chairman of the House on Foreign Affairs Task Force on Narcotics Control; Co-Chairman, Senate Narcotics Committee; Senator Harry Reid, NV; Representative James Bilbray, NV; and other Congressional members. Mister Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, is one of those USG officials implicated by Khun Sa. Nothing was done with this evidence that indicated that anyone of authority, including yourself, had intended to do anything more than protect Mr. Armitage. I was charged with "Misuse of Passport". Seems that it is alright for Oliver North and Robert MacFarlane to go into Iran on Irish Passports to negotiate an illegal arms deal that neither you nor anyone else admits condoning, but I can't use a passport that brings back drug information against your friends.
Lance Trimmer and I submitted a "Citizen Complaint of Wrongdoing by Federal Officers" to Attorney General Edwin Meese, III on 17 September 1987. Continuous private and Legislative inquiries to date indicate that the Attorney General's Office has "lost" the document. Congressional requests to the Government Accounting Office have resulted in additional government snares and stalls.
January 20, 1988, I talked before your Breakfast Club in Houston, Texas. A distinguished group of approximately 125 associates of yours, including the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, expressed assurance that you are a righteous man. Almost all of them raised their hand when I asked how many of them know you personally. If you are a man with good intent, I pray you will do more than respond to this letter. I ask that you seriously look into the possibility that political appointees close to you are guilty of by passing our Constitutional process, and for purposes of promoting illegal covert operations, conspired in the trafficking of narcotics and arms.
Please answer why a respected American Citizen like Mister H. Ross Perot can bring you a pile of evidence of wrongdoing by Armitage and others, and you, according to TIME magazine (May 4, page 18), not only offer him no support, but have your Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci tell Mr. Perot to "stop pursuing Mr. Armitage". Why Sir, will you not look into affidavits gathered by The Christic Institute (Washington, D.C.), which testify that Armitage not only trafficked in heroin, but did so under the guise of an officer charged with bringing home our POWs. If the charges are true, Armitage, who is still responsible for POW recovery as your Assistant Secretary of Defense ISA, has every reason not to want these heros returned to us alive. Clearly, follow on investigations would illuminate the collective crimes of Armitage and others.
Several years ago a secretary working for Armitage asked me "Why would he have us expunge his official record of all reference to past POW/MIA assignments and activities?" Not knowing, I ventured a guess that maybe he was considering running for public office and didn't feel the POW -Vietnam association would be a plus in his resume. It was about the same time a CIA agent named by Khun Sa turned up dead in Bangkok under "mysterious circumstances". Also about this time, as an agent of NSC's Intelligence Support Activity, I was told by ISA Chief Jerry King, "...there are still too many bureaucrats in Washington who don't want to see POWs returned alive". I failed to realize the fullness of his meaning, or these other events, until in May 1987, Gen Khun Sa, in his jungle headquarters, named Richard Armitage as a key connection in a ring of heroin trafficking mobsters and USG officials. A U.S. agent I have known for many years stopped by my home last month enroute to his next overseas assignment. He remarked that he had worked for those CIA chiefs named by Khun Sa, and that by his own personal knowledge, he knew what Khun Sa said was true. He was surprised it had taken so long to surface.
I am a registered Republican. I voted for you twice. I will not do so again. If you have any love or loyalty in your heart for this nation; if you have not completely sold out, then do something positive to determine the truth of these most serious allegations. You were Director of the CIA in 1975, during a time Khun Sa says Armitage and CIA officials were trafficking in heroin. As Director of Intelligence you were responsible to the American people for the activities of your assistant - even as you should know what some of these same people are doing who are close to you now as our Vice President because I feel these "parallel government" types will only be promoted by you, giving them more reason to bury our POWs.
I am enclosing some documentation that supports the charges made. Chief is a letter from Khun Sa to the U.S. Justice Department dated 28 June 1987, wherein Richard Armitage is named along with Theodore Shackley (your former Deputy Director CIA from Covert Operations) and others. Please also note William Stevenson's article, "Bank of Intrigue-Circles of Power". You, Armitage, and General Richard Secord are prominently mentioned. Stevenson, you might remember, authored A MAN CALLED INTREPID. Also Tom Fitzpatrick's article, "From Burma to Bush, a Heroin Highway", should interest you. Both of these men are prize winning journalists. The book, CRIMES of PATRIOTS, "A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA", by Jonathan Kwitny, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, details for you the bank connections that Khun Sa mentions. Finally, the basic primer that spells out exactly how this dope for covert operations gambit began, is Alfred McCoy's THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. All of these should be required reading for the man appointed chief cop by our President to safeguard America from illegal narcotics. These are just a sampling of many works now available that chronical disgraceful conduct by those sworn to protect and defend our Constitution.
Parting shot Mr. Vice President: On 28 January 1988, General Khun Sa tendered an offer to turn over to me one metric ton (2,200 pounds) of heroin. He says this is a good faith gesture to the American people that he is serious about stopping all drugs coming from the infamous Golden Triangle. I, you and Nancy Reagan are really serious about saying "NO" to drugs, why not test Gen Khun Sa? I challenge you to allow me in the company of agents of your choice to arrange to receive this token offer worth over $4 billion on the streets of New York City. It will represent the largest "legal" seizure of heroin on record. You can personally torch it, dump it in the ocean, or turn it into legal medication; as I understand there is a great shortage of legal opiates available to our doctors. I think Gen Khun Sa's offer is most interesting. If you say "YES" then the ever increasing flow of heroin from Southeast Asia (600-- tons-- '86, 900 tons-- '87, 1200-- tons'88) may dry up--not good for business in the parallel government and super CIA circles Oliver North mentioned. If you say "NO" to Khun Sa, you are showing colors not fit for a man who would be President.
What is your decision? I challenge you to demonstrate exactly where you stand with respect to big-business-drugs, parallel government, misuse of U.S. tax-payer dollars in foreign drug supression programs that don't work, no interest in dialogue that will stem the flow of illegal narcotics, return of POWs while they are still alive? I for one am not for a "USA, Inc." with you or anyone else as Chairman of the Board.
Respecting Your Office,
James "Bo" Gritz, Concerned American, Box 472 HCR-31Sandy Valley, NV 89019, Tel: (702) 723-5266
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The CIA, Drugs, And An Australian Killer Cop
by Michael Barker
"Most well-developed heroin networks very quickly move towards a complementation of interests between the narcotics traffickers and corrupt elements of the enforcement agencies responsible for the suppression of the illicit drug trade."
— Alfred McCoy, 1980. (1)
"INFORMATION."
—Norman Finkelstein, 2008.
(Swans - October 5, 2009) For decades, police forces worldwide have worked in cahoots with drug traffickers and government intelligence agencies; such deceitful capitalist enterprises rarely obtain sustained public attention. This injustice owes much to the fact that when evidence of institutionalized corruption, what Peter Dale Scott refers to as deep politics, cannot be contained from the broader populous, capitalist elites jump into damage control to protect the status quo. In this manner, official commissions can be relied upon to provide the requisite scapegoats so that the mainstream mass media can manufacture consent for capitalist prerogatives. However, for those wishing to delve beneath the mass media's obscurations of the politics of drug trafficking, Australian-based researcher John Jiggens provides a breath of fresh air in his recent book, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay (Network to Investigate the Mackay Murder, 2009). (2) In his book, Jiggens weaves an enthralling story that links institutionalized police corruption to the infamous CIA front-group the Nugan Hand Bank and in turn to the controversial murder of Donald Mackay. Given the media blackout surrounding the publication of this critical book, this article will review its main thesis in an attempt to undermine elite support for the widely publicized and officially sanctioned version of Mackay's murder: a murder that Jiggens suggests "most surely announced the criminal takeover of the Australian drug scene." (3)
Murdered in 1977, former Liberal Party local candidate Donald Mackay was a well-respected businessman from the town of Griffith, a farming community situated 600 km southwest of Sydney, Australia. Jiggens argues that Mackay was assassinated after helping bring about a police investigation that led to the largest cannabis seizure in Australian history, and Mackay was one of the few people who would have been able to link the Griffith drug smuggling networks to the CIA's global drug trafficking network.
Mackay's story, however, begins in February 1974, when members of two families of Italian descent, the Sergi and Barbaro families, were caught with two pot plantations in Griffith. Despite the seriousness of their offence, with their marijuana crops having a market value of some AU$250,000, the plantation growers incurred only small fines of AU$250 and AU$500. This lenient treatment owed much to the sympathetic detectives dealing with the case -- John Ellis, John Robins, and Brian Borthwick, all of whom "would later be charged with conspiring with the growers to pervert the course of justice." This perversion of justice was upheld in plain view of the residents of Griffith, and was so extreme that the day following the discovery of the plantations, a group including Robert Trimbole and Tony Sergi were seen to be harvesting their crop, apparently with the permission of Detective Ellis. (4) Local grievance with this blatant display of corruption, then led locals including Donald Mackay to investigate further, and:
In July 1975, Mackay prepared a dossier to be sent to the NSW [New South Wales] attorney general, Mr. Maddison, accusing Robert Trimbole of being the outlet for the drugs in Sydney, and mentioning that he had "been warned not to report this to the local constabulary." (p.24)
Unfortunately, "Attorney-General Maddison did nothing about this information," and Mackay subsequently took his information to an "honest Sydney drug squad detective, senior constable Ron Jenkins." This in turn led to the November 10, 1975, raid on a property at Coleambally (60 km south of Griffith), where around 375,000 cannabis plants were found, grown on land purchased the year before with money provided by the Sergi and Trimboli families. (5)
During the ensuing court proceedings (that started in March 1977), Mackay was revealed as constable Jenkins's informant, and Mackay was later assassinated on July 15, 1977. The murder of a well-respected member of the Griffith community then led to a media frenzy demanding justice. However, the type of justice that was actually sought was extremely limited, as "high-level NSW police were determined to blame the 'Italian' marijuana growers of Griffith for Mackay's murder." (6) The media and police force's narrow focus on local growers of course missed the broader capitalist infrastructure that more likely demanded the assassination of Mackay (for reasons that become clearer later) -- a topic that Jiggens explores in his book. A good explanation for the limited focus for the murder case owes to the fact that the Coleambally seizure demonstrated that Australia was involved in exporting cannabis. Jiggens suggests that such a conclusion would have necessitated a closer examination of drug related activities outside of Griffith, which would naturally lead investigators to the SE Asia-Sydney-US drug route, otherwise known as the Sydney Connection. (7)
Jiggens first explored the first Sydney Connection in an earlier book, but it is important to note that "the pioneer" of the Sydney Connection was a New South Wales Special Branch detective named John Wesley Egan, who first became involved in heroin smuggling for the CIA after he joined the Special Branch. After pioneering the Sydney Connection, Egan resigned from the police, and over "a six-month period in 1966-1967, Egan and his gang [of 20 couriers "usually NSW police officers on leave"] smuggled $22 million worth of heroin into the USA, before a mistake by a courier led to Egan's arrest." After accepting a deal and pleading guilty, Egan spent a few months in a US prison, and on his return to Australia, he "told The Bulletin that the world's heroin routes were either protected by, or actively participated in, by the police forces of the countries concerned." (8)
Egan estimated that, in the last ten years, 50 per cent of the narcotics sold in New York had been handled by serving members of the police force. He cited the scandal that erupted when it was discovered that 70 per cent of the elite Special Squad of the New York Narcotics Bureau were dealing in narcotics. (p.47)
In addition to Egan's Sydney Connection, the second Sydney Connection Jiggens explains, began during the vice boom in Sydney which began in 1967 and coincided with the "rest and recreation" tours for US soldiers on leave from Vietnam. Then when these "R and R" tours ended, "vice entrepreneurs from Sydney's clubland, led by [ex-policeman] Murray Riley, moved into the trans-Pacific drug trade." Notably, these inglorious R and R years "coincided with the premiership of Sir Robert Askin (1965-1975), a [Liberal Party] premiership tainted by widespread corruption." (9) Jiggens writes how...
... the ex-police and police who became heavily involved in the Drug Joke after the criminal takeover of the drug trade, began their corruption with the abortion racket and the illegal casinos during the Askin years. Not only were the detectives in Griffith corrupt, but many other NSW detectives were corrupt, and the corruption went all the way to the top. Rather than suppress the drug trade, the corrupt police sought to control it, which effectively meant giving the drug trade to their good friend, Murray Riley. (p.52)
Here it is fitting to note that Admiral Earl Yates, who around this time served as the president of the now infamous CIA front group the Nugan Hand Bank, "said he accepted the position as Nugan Hand president [in 1977] on the advice of Sir Robert Askin." (10) Thus Riley, after having disappeared underground during Justice Athol Moffitt's Royal Commission into Organised Crime in Clubs (which began in 1973), reappeared in Sydney the following year, a day after the commission was finalised. In 1975, Riley then became involved in drug trafficking with the soon to collapse Moylan group, and subsequently met Frank Nugan (of Nugan Hand Bank fame), which aided Riley's smooth transition from the vice scene to the drugs scene.
At first, Frank Nugan managed the Nugan Hand [Bank's] relationship with Riley, but when Michael Hand returned in March 1976, he took over the relationship. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was during the period when he was close to Hand when Riley moved into Southeast Asian heroin.
The drug related activities of Murray Riley and the Nugan Hand group were investigated by the Commonwealth-New South Wales Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking, which concluded that Riley organised five shipments of heroin into Australia in April, June, August, September-October, and November-December 1976, mostly in false bottom suitcases. For each importation the facilities of the Nugan Hand group of companies were used to transfer the purchase money from Sydney to Hong Kong. Over one hundred pounds of heroin was involved, and much of this was shipped on to the US. Riley was also involved in two heroin importations in July and September 1977. (p.66)
To fill in some details, Frank Nugan who was born in Griffith, was the Australian partner in the Nugan Hand Bank, a bank that was "set up to hide money made from arms smuggling, drug trafficking, money laundering and tax avoidance." "By 1977, Nugan Hand and its associates dominated the Australian drug trade in a way that had never been achieved before." (11) Dirty money was then laundered through a dizzying array of shelf companies from the Bank to the Nugan Group, which was Frank Nugan's vegetable and fruit packing company.
The Nugan Group, it is important to emphasize, was intimately connected to the Mackay story as they "operated a major 5-acre factory complex in Griffith," and in 1977 "an independent audit turned up secret accounts in the group's books in the names of local pot growers with the cheques for thousands of dollars made out to member of the Trimboli and Sergi families." In light of this troubling turn of events (for the Nugan Group), Frank Nugan set out to remove the auditors, and hired ex-NSW detective Fred Krahe to intimidate irksome members of their board of directors. Although ultimately unsuccessful in forcing the auditors to resign, this was the type of task that Fred Krahe excelled in, as his "reputation as an underworld enforcer and hit man [had] earned him the nickname of the 'Killer Cop.'" (12)
Later in 1978, "[w]ith assistance from the US embassy, Frank Nugan succeeded in closing down" an investigation of Nugan Hand Bank that was set up by the Narcotics Bureau. (13) Similarly, Frank has also worked hard to stave off a NSW Corporate Affairs investigation in the Nugan Group, however, eventually...
... conspiracy charges over the secret accounts were laid against Frank Nugan, Ken Nugan, several Nugan Group employees, and ex-detectives Fred Krahe and Keith Kelly. After a committal hearing before Clarrie Briese SM, the charges against Krahe and Kelly were dismissed and they were awarded costs. The other defendants were committed for trial, a fate that Frank Nugan avoided by suicide. (p.114)
Fortunately for the criminal underworld the Nugan Groups secret accounts "were never given to the Woodward royal commission, nor to the Joint Task Force," (14) yet as Jiggens notes, these accounts are critical to understanding the assassination of Mackay.
The suggestion is that shortly after the secret accounts at the Nugan Group became a public scandal in the first weeks of July 1977, someone who suspected that marijuana growing might be the explanation behind the secret accounts went to Donald Mackay with this information, but Fred Krahe learned of this. As we have seen, Frank Nugan had many reasons to kill to prevent exposure, and in Fred Krahe he had the perfect assassin. Up until this point, Donald Mackay knew only of the growers in their grass castles. The secret accounts would have given him the clue that led to the man with the mansion in Vaucluse. As many suspected, Mackay was murdered to protect the financiers and distributors, those higher up the chain of this enormous drug-smuggling network. In a twist worthy of a thriller, the boys from Homicide couldn't find the killer because he was a former top homicide investigator. (p.131)
Importantly, the murder of Mackay also served to cover up the potential exposure of Frank Nugan's CIA connections, which was particularly critical given that in "April, May and June 1977, the Australian media and Parliament were awash with allegations of CIA activities in Australia, caused by the allegations of Christopher Boyce and Gough Whitlam." (15) Other evidence to support Jiggens's theory comes from Tony Reeve's book Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron Dossier (Allen & Unwin, 2007). Reeves provided evidence of how Frank Nugan had distributed marijuana from his Griffith packing shed, and how Sir Peter Abele's trucking company, Thomas Nationwide Transport (TNT), was used "to move -- along with huge volumes of legitimate cargoes -- large quantities of illegal drugs around Australia and the world." Reeves also drew attention to the close relations that existed between Abeles and the Nugan Hand Bank: information which is particularly significant because "Bela Csidei, Murray Riley's partner in the trans-Pacific drug trade, was well known as a front man for Abeles." (16)
As one might expect, the mainstream media fulfilled a critical function in shielding the police force and the Nugans from critical public scrutiny, and so it is fitting that Frank Nugan's henchman, "Fred Krahe, was employed at the time of the murder with The Sun newspaper in Sydney." Moreover the tight relationship between the mainstream media and the criminal underworld was no anomaly, as prior to leaving the police force, Krahe had "carefully cultivated" the support of leading NSW crime reporters like Bill Jenkins, whose "frequent scoops were breathlessly splashed across the... front pages" of Rupert Murdoch's now defunct Sydney paper The Daily Mirror. Thus while under normal circumstances one might expect that structural factors alone are enough to ensure that the mainstream media manufactures consent for elite interests, in the case of Krahe, it is apparent that individual journalists, like Jenkins, facilitated this process by covering up for the key movers in Australia's organized crime scene. (17)
Likewise, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking (1980-83) served to manufacture consent for elite interests. "Justice Donald Stewart --'crime fighter extraordinaire' as the Sydney Morning Herald billed him in 1998 -- was the man selected by the conservative Fraser government to chair the royal commission into the can of worms that was Nugan Hand." Jiggens points out that:
Many investigators regard Stewart's report on the affairs of Nugan Hand as a whitewash, not so much of Nugan and Hand (who Stewart conveniently blamed for everything), but of the US government. ... Not surprisingly, journalists like [Marian] Wilkinson, [Brian] Toohey, [Jonathan] Kwitny, [Wendy] Bacon and [Alfred] McCoy felt that Stewart inverted Nugan Hand's real chain of command. (p.165) (18)
Later, as is to be expected, the media acted in concert with the legal system:
Stewart's conclusion that there was no evidence of links with the CIA was headlined in [Rupert] Murdoch's Australian as "CIA Link Disproved." As Brian Toohey commented in the National Times: "Far from being disproved, the extent of the links was not even investigated by Justice Stewart in any normal sense of the world." (p.170)
This brings my brief review of The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay to an end. Unfortunately, beyond superficial political reforms, little has changed since the dark days that saw the murder of Donald Mackay. The mass media that keep the public misinformed about the true criminality of capitalism have more power than ever, while official government whitewashes of crime continue to protect deep politics from critical scrutiny. John Jiggens penetrates the myopic drug-fuelled hallucinations that emanate from the mainstream media, and provides the necessary context to wake us (the public) from our addiction to the real drug of the nation, the corporate media.
Notes
1. Alfred McCoy, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia (Harper & Row, 1980), p.30. (back)
2. This book draws upon the research undertaken in John Jiggens's PhD thesis, "Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture and the Americanisation of Drugs Policy in Australia 1938-1988" (Queensland University of Technology, 2004). Some of the book's content has been published online in a three-art series in StickyPoint magazine, see "In a Time of Murder" (Issue 2, 2007), "The Banker and The Killer Kop" (Issue 3, 2007), and "The Mystery of Nugan Hand Bank" (Issue 4, 2008). (back)
3. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.22. After the murder of MacKay, there was a marijuana drought, and so with "pot unavailable, heroin sales went through the roof." (pp.18-9)
The officially sanctioned version of Mackay's murder resulted in the jailing of Jimmy Bazely, a small-time crim" who had escaped police custody "after one particularly unsuccessful bank robbery where he was caught by a one-legged man." (pp.174-5) "This is the official version of the murder of Donald Mackay to be found in Underbelly 2, TV documentaries like The Donald Mackay Disappearance and books like [Bob] Bottom's Shadow of Shame and [Keith] Moor's Crims in Grass Castles." (p.180) (back)
4. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.23. The detective on duty in Griffith on the night of Mackay's assassination, Graham Lawrence Keech, "spent almost the entire shift on what has been described as 'an extended pub crawl' with Tony Sergi and Domenic Sergi, two of the principals suspected of ordering Mackay's murder." Brian Borthwick had also met them for dinner that night, and with no irony the following morning Keech went on to "play a key role in the investigation of the murder." (p.31) Later, in 1994, "John Hatton MP blamed the failure of the police investigation on John Whelan, who was appointed second-in-charge of the police assisting the Woodward Royal Commission and then took over as chief investigator. In 1994, Hatton said it was frightening that Whelan, who he called a crook and a member of the "Black Knights," was the chief investigator into the Mackay murder." (p.32) Justice Philip Woodward also "fell" for the police generated propaganda and "put all the blame [for the murder] on the Italian-Australians," a situation that was bound to happen given his "over-concentration on Griffith." "It was not," Jiggens continues, "until his Further Report that Woodward investigated the Sydney drug scene and looked at Murray Riley and his gang." Moreover even then: "At the end of his commission in 1980, Woodward left his outstanding investigations (Murray Riley, Bela Csidei and Nugan Hand!) to the Joint Police Task Force." (p.33, p.35)
In 2009, in addition to Jiggens's publication, another book relating to crime in Australia is Clive Small and Tom Gilling's Smack Express: How Organised Crime Got Hooked on Drugs (Allen & Unwin, 2009). This well-received book is significant because Gilling, a former New South Wales police officer, was an investigator for the Woodward Commission from 1977 until 1980, and then spent the next three years on the Commonwealth-state Joint Task Force which investigated the Nugan Hand Bank. No surprise then that Small's book whitewashes the historical roots of organized crime in Australia. (back)
The use of an "export" theory to explain the murder of Mackay was initially followed by Bob Bottom in The Godfather in Australia: Organised Crime's Australian Connections (Reed, 1979). Jiggens estimates that "the size of the Australian cannabis market in 1975 was about 50 tonnes, indicating that Coleambally alone was bigger than the entire annual Australian cannabis market." (p.39) Additionally, the seizure should have produced a marijuana drought the following year, but "the Australian marijuana market was healthy right up to July 1977," which indicates that the Coleambally crop was probably grown for the US market, "the one market that could absorb such a large quantity of cannabis." (p.42) "The marijuana drought was caused by the murder of Donald Mackay, which was carried out to cover-up Frank Nugan's role in Griffith. Other factors contributed, such as the launch of the War on Drugs and the massive cannabis seizures, but it was the Mackay murder, and the subsequent police investigations and royal commissions, that created the drought." (p.192)
"Although this Americanisation of Sydney's crime scene in the 1960s and 1970s, its penetration by US mobsters and the Mafia, went largely unnoticed by Australian authorities, it formed the subject of books like Bob Bottom's The Godfather in Australia, Athol Moffitt's A Quarter to Midnight and Alfred McCoy's Drug Traffic." (p.188) In addition, Jiggens observes that: "Although the prevailing wisdom remains that the export or trans-shipment of drugs via Australia is something that 'can't happen here,' it clearly does; and even some members of the Australian Federal Police have begun to admit this following the seizure of four tonnes of ecstasy, valued at $400 million in 2007." (back)
8. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.46. For a brief review of the CIA's global involvement in drug trafficking, see William Blum, "The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack," (pdf) Foreign Policy in Focus, November 1996.
Brian Martin in his important book, The Whistleblower's Handbook: How to Be an Effective Resister (Jon Carpenter, 1999), discusses the role of customs officers in aiding and abetting drug trafficking in Australia. He writes: "Fred was a customs officer who had just moved to a new posting. He began to notice that certain types of goods were always put through on a particular shift involving the same group of officers. He knew from previous experience that these types of goods were. Fred was a customs officer who had just moved to a new posting. He began to notice that certain types of goods were always put through on a particular shift involving the same group of officers. He knew from previous experience that these types of goods were commonly used to smuggle drugs. In the face of much resistance, he managed to get on the shift himself, and uncovered a major drugs shipment. Then he was transferred out to a less desirable job. He went to the media with claims of corruption in customs. But in the face of bland denials by customs officials, nothing could be done." (p.4) For an account of whistleblowing with regards to police corruption see pp.71-3. (back)
9. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.50, p.51.
On his retirement, in 1975, Askin "joined the board of TNT, and was given 110,000 shares in that company. In January 1978, Mike Hand announced that Sir Robert Askin might be joining Nugen Hand as chairman, though nothing seems to have come of this." (p.52) Jiggens writes that:" Tony Reeves claimed in Mr Sin that Krahe [according to an informant and contacts in the Commonwealth Police] was given a position on the board of TNT after he retired". (p.161) Given Askin's TNT-CIA connection is it interesting to observe that the current chair of TNT's supervisory board, Piet Klaver, is a board member of the "environmental" African Parks Foundation -- a group whose senior counsellors include former US Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kansteiner, and Wim Kok, a TNT supervisory board member who is a board member of the "humanitarian" International Crisis Group.
For an exhaustive examination of the "central" role that Askin played in institutionalizing crime in New South Wales, see David Hickie's The Prince and The Premier: The Story of Perce Galea, Bob Askin and the Others Who Gave Organised Crime Its Start in Australia (Angus & Robertson, 1985).
Jiggens writes: "In New South Wales, the Wood commission was told that an officer wishing to become a detective had to commit at least one corrupt act as a test to see if he was fit to be a detective. Those who refused were blackballed from that elite branch of the force because they were seen as being untrustworthy." (pp.200-1) "This entrenched network of police corruption had many names. In New South Wales the terms 'The Laugh' and 'The Giggle' were commonly used. In Queensland it was best known as 'The Joke.' The Joke flourished in Queensland in the sixties under the supervision of Police Commissioner Frank Bischof. His bagmen were said to be the Rat Pack of Terry Lewis, Tony Murphy and Glen Halloran. The Rat Pack and their friends were central to the corruption uncovered later by Fitzgerald, by which time Lewis was Commissioner. Bischof's Joke in the 1960s revolved around SP bookmakers and prostitution. This was the corruption that the Fitzgerald inquiry focused on, while giving only a tantalising glimpse of the Drug Joke. By the time of the Wood commission, almost a decade later, the Drug Joke had become central to police corruption." (p.201) (back)
10. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.103. (back)
11. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.81, p.84.
Black banks are "an import part of... clandestine trade, and the Nugan Hand Bank, like the Castle Bank before it and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) after it, formed an important part in this Cold War network." When the Castle Bank -- which was set up by "Paul Helliwell, a very senior CIA operative" -- was investigated by the US Internal Revenue Service in the late 1970s, the CIA blocked the investigation. Subsequently, when the Castle Bank collapsed, the Australian-based Nugan Hand Bank quickly "acquir[ed] Latin American and European structures that had belonged to Castle Bank" and an array of board members from the US intelligence establishment: for example, the new legal counsel of the Bank was the former CIA Director, William Colby. (p.217-8) (back)
12. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.104, p.105. (back)
13. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.112. (back)
14. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.126. (back)
15. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.194.
Head of the Eastern Division of the CIA, Ted Shackley, played a key role in the November 1975 Pine Gap security crisis, which helped lead to the constitutional coup that led to the removal of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. (p.95) Thus it is noteworthy that Shackley "was very closely associated with Michael Hand... and nearly all the other Nugan Hand players." (p.91)
Here it is important to point out that while it is widely alleged that Whitlam's policies provided a serious threat to sanctity of intelligence agencies, in actual fact they did not pose such threat (although this was most likely misinterpreted by the CIA). Jim Jose writes: "Whitlam accepted the necessity and desirability of agencies like the [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] ASIO; he also accepted the assumption which legitimized these groups." Jim Jose, "The Whitlam Years: Illusion and Reality," in Pat Flanagan (ed.), Big Brother or Democracy: The Case for the Abolition of ASIO (University of Adelaide, 1979), p.40. (back)
16. Tony Reeves, Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron Dossier (Allen & Unwin, 2007), p.84; Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.134.
Sir Peter Abeles "belonged to a powerful, right-wing émigré group which included Alexander Barton, Sir Paul Strasser and Sir Ivan Charody who were referred to as 'the Hungarian Mafia' or as 'Askin's Knights' because NSW premier, Sir Robert Askin knighted all of them." (p.135) David Hickie writes that he was told that knighthoods could be brought "earlier in Askin's reign at a... modest $20,000 a pop." He then continues noting that "while such claims are hard to document... a $20,000 cheque from the chief executive of Boral Ltd, Sir Elton Griffin, turned up in the private bank account of Sir Robert Ask in at the time Griffin was knighted." Boral is now "Australia's largest building and construction materials supplier". It is also interesting to note that Bernie Houghton -- who played a key role in setting up the Nugan Hand Bank -- arranged for Michael Hand to work with Sir Paul Strasser's Parkes Corporation. Moreover, although little known, in 1969, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) "uncovered the involvement of Lennie [McPherson], Houghton and some NSW police in a massive people-smuggling operation. ASIS had mounted a 'national security' exercise to check on illegal immigrants as part of Australia's Cold War paranoia about communists arriving by stealth and taking over the country. What they found was a massive trade in sex slaves, run by Sydney criminals and back by a local undercover agent of the CIA." (For a critical analysis of the links between capitalism and modern-day slavery.
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1 February 1988, Sandy Valley, NV
Honorable George Bush, Vice President, United States of America, Washington, D.C.
Sir:
Why does it seem that you are saying "YES" to illegal narcotics in America?
I turned over video tapes to your NSC staff assistant, Tom Harvey, January 1987, wherein General KHUN SA, overlord of Asia's "Golden Triangle", offered to stop 900 tons of heroin/opium from entering the free world in 1987. Harvey told me, "...there is no interest here in doing that." General Khun Sa also offered to identify U.S. Government officials who, he says, have been trafficking in heroin for more than 20 years.
November 1986, Scott Weekly and I went into Burma in coordination and cooperation with The White House. Tom Harvey told me you received a letter from Arthur Suchesk, Orange County, CA, dated 29 August 1986. Dr. Suchesk said that Gen Khun Sa had access to U.S. POWs. Harvey said the letter had received "highest attention". He gave me a copy along with other case documents. I was asked if it was possible to verify the information. According to Harvey, the CIA said Khun Sa had been assassinated some months before. Harvey supplied Scott and myself with language under White House and NSC letterhead that would help us gain access to Khun Sa. It worked. Unfortunately, Khun Sa knew nothing about US POWs. He did, however, offer to trade his nation's poppy dependence for a legitimate economy.
Instead of receiving an "Atta Boy" for bringing back video tape showing Khun Sa`s offer to stop 900 tons of illegal narcotics and expose dirty USG officials, Scott was jailed and I was threatened. I was told that if I didn't "erase and forget" all that we had discovered, I would, "hurt the government". Further, I was promised a prison sentence of "15 years".
I returned to Burma with two other American witnesses, Lance Trimmer, a private detective from San Francisco, and Barry Flynn from Boston. Gen Khun Sa identified some of those in government service he says were dealing in heroin and arms sales. We video taped this second interview and I turned copies over in June 1987, to the Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence; Chairman of the House on Foreign Affairs Task Force on Narcotics Control; Co-Chairman, Senate Narcotics Committee; Senator Harry Reid, NV; Representative James Bilbray, NV; and other Congressional members. Mister Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, is one of those USG officials implicated by Khun Sa. Nothing was done with this evidence that indicated that anyone of authority, including yourself, had intended to do anything more than protect Mr. Armitage. I was charged with "Misuse of Passport". Seems that it is alright for Oliver North and Robert MacFarlane to go into Iran on Irish Passports to negotiate an illegal arms deal that neither you nor anyone else admits condoning, but I can't use a passport that brings back drug information against your friends.
Lance Trimmer and I submitted a "Citizen Complaint of Wrongdoing by Federal Officers" to Attorney General Edwin Meese, III on 17 September 1987. Continuous private and Legislative inquiries to date indicate that the Attorney General's Office has "lost" the document. Congressional requests to the Government Accounting Office have resulted in additional government snares and stalls.
January 20, 1988, I talked before your Breakfast Club in Houston, Texas. A distinguished group of approximately 125 associates of yours, including the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court, expressed assurance that you are a righteous man. Almost all of them raised their hand when I asked how many of them know you personally. If you are a man with good intent, I pray you will do more than respond to this letter. I ask that you seriously look into the possibility that political appointees close to you are guilty of by passing our Constitutional process, and for purposes of promoting illegal covert operations, conspired in the trafficking of narcotics and arms.
Please answer why a respected American Citizen like Mister H. Ross Perot can bring you a pile of evidence of wrongdoing by Armitage and others, and you, according to TIME magazine (May 4, page 18), not only offer him no support, but have your Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci tell Mr. Perot to "stop pursuing Mr. Armitage". Why Sir, will you not look into affidavits gathered by The Christic Institute (Washington, D.C.), which testify that Armitage not only trafficked in heroin, but did so under the guise of an officer charged with bringing home our POWs. If the charges are true, Armitage, who is still responsible for POW recovery as your Assistant Secretary of Defense ISA, has every reason not to want these heros returned to us alive. Clearly, follow on investigations would illuminate the collective crimes of Armitage and others.
Several years ago a secretary working for Armitage asked me "Why would he have us expunge his official record of all reference to past POW/MIA assignments and activities?" Not knowing, I ventured a guess that maybe he was considering running for public office and didn't feel the POW -Vietnam association would be a plus in his resume. It was about the same time a CIA agent named by Khun Sa turned up dead in Bangkok under "mysterious circumstances". Also about this time, as an agent of NSC's Intelligence Support Activity, I was told by ISA Chief Jerry King, "...there are still too many bureaucrats in Washington who don't want to see POWs returned alive". I failed to realize the fullness of his meaning, or these other events, until in May 1987, Gen Khun Sa, in his jungle headquarters, named Richard Armitage as a key connection in a ring of heroin trafficking mobsters and USG officials. A U.S. agent I have known for many years stopped by my home last month enroute to his next overseas assignment. He remarked that he had worked for those CIA chiefs named by Khun Sa, and that by his own personal knowledge, he knew what Khun Sa said was true. He was surprised it had taken so long to surface.
I am a registered Republican. I voted for you twice. I will not do so again. If you have any love or loyalty in your heart for this nation; if you have not completely sold out, then do something positive to determine the truth of these most serious allegations. You were Director of the CIA in 1975, during a time Khun Sa says Armitage and CIA officials were trafficking in heroin. As Director of Intelligence you were responsible to the American people for the activities of your assistant - even as you should know what some of these same people are doing who are close to you now as our Vice President because I feel these "parallel government" types will only be promoted by you, giving them more reason to bury our POWs.
I am enclosing some documentation that supports the charges made. Chief is a letter from Khun Sa to the U.S. Justice Department dated 28 June 1987, wherein Richard Armitage is named along with Theodore Shackley (your former Deputy Director CIA from Covert Operations) and others. Please also note William Stevenson's article, "Bank of Intrigue-Circles of Power". You, Armitage, and General Richard Secord are prominently mentioned. Stevenson, you might remember, authored A MAN CALLED INTREPID. Also Tom Fitzpatrick's article, "From Burma to Bush, a Heroin Highway", should interest you. Both of these men are prize winning journalists. The book, CRIMES of PATRIOTS, "A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA", by Jonathan Kwitny, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, details for you the bank connections that Khun Sa mentions. Finally, the basic primer that spells out exactly how this dope for covert operations gambit began, is Alfred McCoy's THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. All of these should be required reading for the man appointed chief cop by our President to safeguard America from illegal narcotics. These are just a sampling of many works now available that chronical disgraceful conduct by those sworn to protect and defend our Constitution.
Parting shot Mr. Vice President: On 28 January 1988, General Khun Sa tendered an offer to turn over to me one metric ton (2,200 pounds) of heroin. He says this is a good faith gesture to the American people that he is serious about stopping all drugs coming from the infamous Golden Triangle. I, you and Nancy Reagan are really serious about saying "NO" to drugs, why not test Gen Khun Sa? I challenge you to allow me in the company of agents of your choice to arrange to receive this token offer worth over $4 billion on the streets of New York City. It will represent the largest "legal" seizure of heroin on record. You can personally torch it, dump it in the ocean, or turn it into legal medication; as I understand there is a great shortage of legal opiates available to our doctors. I think Gen Khun Sa's offer is most interesting. If you say "YES" then the ever increasing flow of heroin from Southeast Asia (600-- tons-- '86, 900 tons-- '87, 1200-- tons'88) may dry up--not good for business in the parallel government and super CIA circles Oliver North mentioned. If you say "NO" to Khun Sa, you are showing colors not fit for a man who would be President.
What is your decision? I challenge you to demonstrate exactly where you stand with respect to big-business-drugs, parallel government, misuse of U.S. tax-payer dollars in foreign drug supression programs that don't work, no interest in dialogue that will stem the flow of illegal narcotics, return of POWs while they are still alive? I for one am not for a "USA, Inc." with you or anyone else as Chairman of the Board.
Respecting Your Office,
James "Bo" Gritz, Concerned American, Box 472 HCR-31Sandy Valley, NV 89019, Tel: (702) 723-5266
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The CIA, Drugs, And An Australian Killer Cop
by Michael Barker
"Most well-developed heroin networks very quickly move towards a complementation of interests between the narcotics traffickers and corrupt elements of the enforcement agencies responsible for the suppression of the illicit drug trade."
— Alfred McCoy, 1980. (1)
"INFORMATION."
—Norman Finkelstein, 2008.
(Swans - October 5, 2009) For decades, police forces worldwide have worked in cahoots with drug traffickers and government intelligence agencies; such deceitful capitalist enterprises rarely obtain sustained public attention. This injustice owes much to the fact that when evidence of institutionalized corruption, what Peter Dale Scott refers to as deep politics, cannot be contained from the broader populous, capitalist elites jump into damage control to protect the status quo. In this manner, official commissions can be relied upon to provide the requisite scapegoats so that the mainstream mass media can manufacture consent for capitalist prerogatives. However, for those wishing to delve beneath the mass media's obscurations of the politics of drug trafficking, Australian-based researcher John Jiggens provides a breath of fresh air in his recent book, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay (Network to Investigate the Mackay Murder, 2009). (2) In his book, Jiggens weaves an enthralling story that links institutionalized police corruption to the infamous CIA front-group the Nugan Hand Bank and in turn to the controversial murder of Donald Mackay. Given the media blackout surrounding the publication of this critical book, this article will review its main thesis in an attempt to undermine elite support for the widely publicized and officially sanctioned version of Mackay's murder: a murder that Jiggens suggests "most surely announced the criminal takeover of the Australian drug scene." (3)
Murdered in 1977, former Liberal Party local candidate Donald Mackay was a well-respected businessman from the town of Griffith, a farming community situated 600 km southwest of Sydney, Australia. Jiggens argues that Mackay was assassinated after helping bring about a police investigation that led to the largest cannabis seizure in Australian history, and Mackay was one of the few people who would have been able to link the Griffith drug smuggling networks to the CIA's global drug trafficking network.
Mackay's story, however, begins in February 1974, when members of two families of Italian descent, the Sergi and Barbaro families, were caught with two pot plantations in Griffith. Despite the seriousness of their offence, with their marijuana crops having a market value of some AU$250,000, the plantation growers incurred only small fines of AU$250 and AU$500. This lenient treatment owed much to the sympathetic detectives dealing with the case -- John Ellis, John Robins, and Brian Borthwick, all of whom "would later be charged with conspiring with the growers to pervert the course of justice." This perversion of justice was upheld in plain view of the residents of Griffith, and was so extreme that the day following the discovery of the plantations, a group including Robert Trimbole and Tony Sergi were seen to be harvesting their crop, apparently with the permission of Detective Ellis. (4) Local grievance with this blatant display of corruption, then led locals including Donald Mackay to investigate further, and:
In July 1975, Mackay prepared a dossier to be sent to the NSW [New South Wales] attorney general, Mr. Maddison, accusing Robert Trimbole of being the outlet for the drugs in Sydney, and mentioning that he had "been warned not to report this to the local constabulary." (p.24)
Unfortunately, "Attorney-General Maddison did nothing about this information," and Mackay subsequently took his information to an "honest Sydney drug squad detective, senior constable Ron Jenkins." This in turn led to the November 10, 1975, raid on a property at Coleambally (60 km south of Griffith), where around 375,000 cannabis plants were found, grown on land purchased the year before with money provided by the Sergi and Trimboli families. (5)
During the ensuing court proceedings (that started in March 1977), Mackay was revealed as constable Jenkins's informant, and Mackay was later assassinated on July 15, 1977. The murder of a well-respected member of the Griffith community then led to a media frenzy demanding justice. However, the type of justice that was actually sought was extremely limited, as "high-level NSW police were determined to blame the 'Italian' marijuana growers of Griffith for Mackay's murder." (6) The media and police force's narrow focus on local growers of course missed the broader capitalist infrastructure that more likely demanded the assassination of Mackay (for reasons that become clearer later) -- a topic that Jiggens explores in his book. A good explanation for the limited focus for the murder case owes to the fact that the Coleambally seizure demonstrated that Australia was involved in exporting cannabis. Jiggens suggests that such a conclusion would have necessitated a closer examination of drug related activities outside of Griffith, which would naturally lead investigators to the SE Asia-Sydney-US drug route, otherwise known as the Sydney Connection. (7)
Jiggens first explored the first Sydney Connection in an earlier book, but it is important to note that "the pioneer" of the Sydney Connection was a New South Wales Special Branch detective named John Wesley Egan, who first became involved in heroin smuggling for the CIA after he joined the Special Branch. After pioneering the Sydney Connection, Egan resigned from the police, and over "a six-month period in 1966-1967, Egan and his gang [of 20 couriers "usually NSW police officers on leave"] smuggled $22 million worth of heroin into the USA, before a mistake by a courier led to Egan's arrest." After accepting a deal and pleading guilty, Egan spent a few months in a US prison, and on his return to Australia, he "told The Bulletin that the world's heroin routes were either protected by, or actively participated in, by the police forces of the countries concerned." (8)
Egan estimated that, in the last ten years, 50 per cent of the narcotics sold in New York had been handled by serving members of the police force. He cited the scandal that erupted when it was discovered that 70 per cent of the elite Special Squad of the New York Narcotics Bureau were dealing in narcotics. (p.47)
In addition to Egan's Sydney Connection, the second Sydney Connection Jiggens explains, began during the vice boom in Sydney which began in 1967 and coincided with the "rest and recreation" tours for US soldiers on leave from Vietnam. Then when these "R and R" tours ended, "vice entrepreneurs from Sydney's clubland, led by [ex-policeman] Murray Riley, moved into the trans-Pacific drug trade." Notably, these inglorious R and R years "coincided with the premiership of Sir Robert Askin (1965-1975), a [Liberal Party] premiership tainted by widespread corruption." (9) Jiggens writes how...
... the ex-police and police who became heavily involved in the Drug Joke after the criminal takeover of the drug trade, began their corruption with the abortion racket and the illegal casinos during the Askin years. Not only were the detectives in Griffith corrupt, but many other NSW detectives were corrupt, and the corruption went all the way to the top. Rather than suppress the drug trade, the corrupt police sought to control it, which effectively meant giving the drug trade to their good friend, Murray Riley. (p.52)
Here it is fitting to note that Admiral Earl Yates, who around this time served as the president of the now infamous CIA front group the Nugan Hand Bank, "said he accepted the position as Nugan Hand president [in 1977] on the advice of Sir Robert Askin." (10) Thus Riley, after having disappeared underground during Justice Athol Moffitt's Royal Commission into Organised Crime in Clubs (which began in 1973), reappeared in Sydney the following year, a day after the commission was finalised. In 1975, Riley then became involved in drug trafficking with the soon to collapse Moylan group, and subsequently met Frank Nugan (of Nugan Hand Bank fame), which aided Riley's smooth transition from the vice scene to the drugs scene.
At first, Frank Nugan managed the Nugan Hand [Bank's] relationship with Riley, but when Michael Hand returned in March 1976, he took over the relationship. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was during the period when he was close to Hand when Riley moved into Southeast Asian heroin.
The drug related activities of Murray Riley and the Nugan Hand group were investigated by the Commonwealth-New South Wales Joint Task Force on Drug Trafficking, which concluded that Riley organised five shipments of heroin into Australia in April, June, August, September-October, and November-December 1976, mostly in false bottom suitcases. For each importation the facilities of the Nugan Hand group of companies were used to transfer the purchase money from Sydney to Hong Kong. Over one hundred pounds of heroin was involved, and much of this was shipped on to the US. Riley was also involved in two heroin importations in July and September 1977. (p.66)
To fill in some details, Frank Nugan who was born in Griffith, was the Australian partner in the Nugan Hand Bank, a bank that was "set up to hide money made from arms smuggling, drug trafficking, money laundering and tax avoidance." "By 1977, Nugan Hand and its associates dominated the Australian drug trade in a way that had never been achieved before." (11) Dirty money was then laundered through a dizzying array of shelf companies from the Bank to the Nugan Group, which was Frank Nugan's vegetable and fruit packing company.
The Nugan Group, it is important to emphasize, was intimately connected to the Mackay story as they "operated a major 5-acre factory complex in Griffith," and in 1977 "an independent audit turned up secret accounts in the group's books in the names of local pot growers with the cheques for thousands of dollars made out to member of the Trimboli and Sergi families." In light of this troubling turn of events (for the Nugan Group), Frank Nugan set out to remove the auditors, and hired ex-NSW detective Fred Krahe to intimidate irksome members of their board of directors. Although ultimately unsuccessful in forcing the auditors to resign, this was the type of task that Fred Krahe excelled in, as his "reputation as an underworld enforcer and hit man [had] earned him the nickname of the 'Killer Cop.'" (12)
Later in 1978, "[w]ith assistance from the US embassy, Frank Nugan succeeded in closing down" an investigation of Nugan Hand Bank that was set up by the Narcotics Bureau. (13) Similarly, Frank has also worked hard to stave off a NSW Corporate Affairs investigation in the Nugan Group, however, eventually...
... conspiracy charges over the secret accounts were laid against Frank Nugan, Ken Nugan, several Nugan Group employees, and ex-detectives Fred Krahe and Keith Kelly. After a committal hearing before Clarrie Briese SM, the charges against Krahe and Kelly were dismissed and they were awarded costs. The other defendants were committed for trial, a fate that Frank Nugan avoided by suicide. (p.114)
Fortunately for the criminal underworld the Nugan Groups secret accounts "were never given to the Woodward royal commission, nor to the Joint Task Force," (14) yet as Jiggens notes, these accounts are critical to understanding the assassination of Mackay.
The suggestion is that shortly after the secret accounts at the Nugan Group became a public scandal in the first weeks of July 1977, someone who suspected that marijuana growing might be the explanation behind the secret accounts went to Donald Mackay with this information, but Fred Krahe learned of this. As we have seen, Frank Nugan had many reasons to kill to prevent exposure, and in Fred Krahe he had the perfect assassin. Up until this point, Donald Mackay knew only of the growers in their grass castles. The secret accounts would have given him the clue that led to the man with the mansion in Vaucluse. As many suspected, Mackay was murdered to protect the financiers and distributors, those higher up the chain of this enormous drug-smuggling network. In a twist worthy of a thriller, the boys from Homicide couldn't find the killer because he was a former top homicide investigator. (p.131)
Importantly, the murder of Mackay also served to cover up the potential exposure of Frank Nugan's CIA connections, which was particularly critical given that in "April, May and June 1977, the Australian media and Parliament were awash with allegations of CIA activities in Australia, caused by the allegations of Christopher Boyce and Gough Whitlam." (15) Other evidence to support Jiggens's theory comes from Tony Reeve's book Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron Dossier (Allen & Unwin, 2007). Reeves provided evidence of how Frank Nugan had distributed marijuana from his Griffith packing shed, and how Sir Peter Abele's trucking company, Thomas Nationwide Transport (TNT), was used "to move -- along with huge volumes of legitimate cargoes -- large quantities of illegal drugs around Australia and the world." Reeves also drew attention to the close relations that existed between Abeles and the Nugan Hand Bank: information which is particularly significant because "Bela Csidei, Murray Riley's partner in the trans-Pacific drug trade, was well known as a front man for Abeles." (16)
As one might expect, the mainstream media fulfilled a critical function in shielding the police force and the Nugans from critical public scrutiny, and so it is fitting that Frank Nugan's henchman, "Fred Krahe, was employed at the time of the murder with The Sun newspaper in Sydney." Moreover the tight relationship between the mainstream media and the criminal underworld was no anomaly, as prior to leaving the police force, Krahe had "carefully cultivated" the support of leading NSW crime reporters like Bill Jenkins, whose "frequent scoops were breathlessly splashed across the... front pages" of Rupert Murdoch's now defunct Sydney paper The Daily Mirror. Thus while under normal circumstances one might expect that structural factors alone are enough to ensure that the mainstream media manufactures consent for elite interests, in the case of Krahe, it is apparent that individual journalists, like Jenkins, facilitated this process by covering up for the key movers in Australia's organized crime scene. (17)
Likewise, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking (1980-83) served to manufacture consent for elite interests. "Justice Donald Stewart --'crime fighter extraordinaire' as the Sydney Morning Herald billed him in 1998 -- was the man selected by the conservative Fraser government to chair the royal commission into the can of worms that was Nugan Hand." Jiggens points out that:
Many investigators regard Stewart's report on the affairs of Nugan Hand as a whitewash, not so much of Nugan and Hand (who Stewart conveniently blamed for everything), but of the US government. ... Not surprisingly, journalists like [Marian] Wilkinson, [Brian] Toohey, [Jonathan] Kwitny, [Wendy] Bacon and [Alfred] McCoy felt that Stewart inverted Nugan Hand's real chain of command. (p.165) (18)
Later, as is to be expected, the media acted in concert with the legal system:
Stewart's conclusion that there was no evidence of links with the CIA was headlined in [Rupert] Murdoch's Australian as "CIA Link Disproved." As Brian Toohey commented in the National Times: "Far from being disproved, the extent of the links was not even investigated by Justice Stewart in any normal sense of the world." (p.170)
This brings my brief review of The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay to an end. Unfortunately, beyond superficial political reforms, little has changed since the dark days that saw the murder of Donald Mackay. The mass media that keep the public misinformed about the true criminality of capitalism have more power than ever, while official government whitewashes of crime continue to protect deep politics from critical scrutiny. John Jiggens penetrates the myopic drug-fuelled hallucinations that emanate from the mainstream media, and provides the necessary context to wake us (the public) from our addiction to the real drug of the nation, the corporate media.
Notes
1. Alfred McCoy, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organised Crime in Australia (Harper & Row, 1980), p.30. (back)
2. This book draws upon the research undertaken in John Jiggens's PhD thesis, "Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture and the Americanisation of Drugs Policy in Australia 1938-1988" (Queensland University of Technology, 2004). Some of the book's content has been published online in a three-art series in StickyPoint magazine, see "In a Time of Murder" (Issue 2, 2007), "The Banker and The Killer Kop" (Issue 3, 2007), and "The Mystery of Nugan Hand Bank" (Issue 4, 2008). (back)
3. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.22. After the murder of MacKay, there was a marijuana drought, and so with "pot unavailable, heroin sales went through the roof." (pp.18-9)
The officially sanctioned version of Mackay's murder resulted in the jailing of Jimmy Bazely, a small-time crim" who had escaped police custody "after one particularly unsuccessful bank robbery where he was caught by a one-legged man." (pp.174-5) "This is the official version of the murder of Donald Mackay to be found in Underbelly 2, TV documentaries like The Donald Mackay Disappearance and books like [Bob] Bottom's Shadow of Shame and [Keith] Moor's Crims in Grass Castles." (p.180) (back)
4. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.23. The detective on duty in Griffith on the night of Mackay's assassination, Graham Lawrence Keech, "spent almost the entire shift on what has been described as 'an extended pub crawl' with Tony Sergi and Domenic Sergi, two of the principals suspected of ordering Mackay's murder." Brian Borthwick had also met them for dinner that night, and with no irony the following morning Keech went on to "play a key role in the investigation of the murder." (p.31) Later, in 1994, "John Hatton MP blamed the failure of the police investigation on John Whelan, who was appointed second-in-charge of the police assisting the Woodward Royal Commission and then took over as chief investigator. In 1994, Hatton said it was frightening that Whelan, who he called a crook and a member of the "Black Knights," was the chief investigator into the Mackay murder." (p.32) Justice Philip Woodward also "fell" for the police generated propaganda and "put all the blame [for the murder] on the Italian-Australians," a situation that was bound to happen given his "over-concentration on Griffith." "It was not," Jiggens continues, "until his Further Report that Woodward investigated the Sydney drug scene and looked at Murray Riley and his gang." Moreover even then: "At the end of his commission in 1980, Woodward left his outstanding investigations (Murray Riley, Bela Csidei and Nugan Hand!) to the Joint Police Task Force." (p.33, p.35)
In 2009, in addition to Jiggens's publication, another book relating to crime in Australia is Clive Small and Tom Gilling's Smack Express: How Organised Crime Got Hooked on Drugs (Allen & Unwin, 2009). This well-received book is significant because Gilling, a former New South Wales police officer, was an investigator for the Woodward Commission from 1977 until 1980, and then spent the next three years on the Commonwealth-state Joint Task Force which investigated the Nugan Hand Bank. No surprise then that Small's book whitewashes the historical roots of organized crime in Australia. (back)
The use of an "export" theory to explain the murder of Mackay was initially followed by Bob Bottom in The Godfather in Australia: Organised Crime's Australian Connections (Reed, 1979). Jiggens estimates that "the size of the Australian cannabis market in 1975 was about 50 tonnes, indicating that Coleambally alone was bigger than the entire annual Australian cannabis market." (p.39) Additionally, the seizure should have produced a marijuana drought the following year, but "the Australian marijuana market was healthy right up to July 1977," which indicates that the Coleambally crop was probably grown for the US market, "the one market that could absorb such a large quantity of cannabis." (p.42) "The marijuana drought was caused by the murder of Donald Mackay, which was carried out to cover-up Frank Nugan's role in Griffith. Other factors contributed, such as the launch of the War on Drugs and the massive cannabis seizures, but it was the Mackay murder, and the subsequent police investigations and royal commissions, that created the drought." (p.192)
"Although this Americanisation of Sydney's crime scene in the 1960s and 1970s, its penetration by US mobsters and the Mafia, went largely unnoticed by Australian authorities, it formed the subject of books like Bob Bottom's The Godfather in Australia, Athol Moffitt's A Quarter to Midnight and Alfred McCoy's Drug Traffic." (p.188) In addition, Jiggens observes that: "Although the prevailing wisdom remains that the export or trans-shipment of drugs via Australia is something that 'can't happen here,' it clearly does; and even some members of the Australian Federal Police have begun to admit this following the seizure of four tonnes of ecstasy, valued at $400 million in 2007." (back)
8. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.46. For a brief review of the CIA's global involvement in drug trafficking, see William Blum, "The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack," (pdf) Foreign Policy in Focus, November 1996.
Brian Martin in his important book, The Whistleblower's Handbook: How to Be an Effective Resister (Jon Carpenter, 1999), discusses the role of customs officers in aiding and abetting drug trafficking in Australia. He writes: "Fred was a customs officer who had just moved to a new posting. He began to notice that certain types of goods were always put through on a particular shift involving the same group of officers. He knew from previous experience that these types of goods were. Fred was a customs officer who had just moved to a new posting. He began to notice that certain types of goods were always put through on a particular shift involving the same group of officers. He knew from previous experience that these types of goods were commonly used to smuggle drugs. In the face of much resistance, he managed to get on the shift himself, and uncovered a major drugs shipment. Then he was transferred out to a less desirable job. He went to the media with claims of corruption in customs. But in the face of bland denials by customs officials, nothing could be done." (p.4) For an account of whistleblowing with regards to police corruption see pp.71-3. (back)
9. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.50, p.51.
On his retirement, in 1975, Askin "joined the board of TNT, and was given 110,000 shares in that company. In January 1978, Mike Hand announced that Sir Robert Askin might be joining Nugen Hand as chairman, though nothing seems to have come of this." (p.52) Jiggens writes that:" Tony Reeves claimed in Mr Sin that Krahe [according to an informant and contacts in the Commonwealth Police] was given a position on the board of TNT after he retired". (p.161) Given Askin's TNT-CIA connection is it interesting to observe that the current chair of TNT's supervisory board, Piet Klaver, is a board member of the "environmental" African Parks Foundation -- a group whose senior counsellors include former US Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kansteiner, and Wim Kok, a TNT supervisory board member who is a board member of the "humanitarian" International Crisis Group.
For an exhaustive examination of the "central" role that Askin played in institutionalizing crime in New South Wales, see David Hickie's The Prince and The Premier: The Story of Perce Galea, Bob Askin and the Others Who Gave Organised Crime Its Start in Australia (Angus & Robertson, 1985).
Jiggens writes: "In New South Wales, the Wood commission was told that an officer wishing to become a detective had to commit at least one corrupt act as a test to see if he was fit to be a detective. Those who refused were blackballed from that elite branch of the force because they were seen as being untrustworthy." (pp.200-1) "This entrenched network of police corruption had many names. In New South Wales the terms 'The Laugh' and 'The Giggle' were commonly used. In Queensland it was best known as 'The Joke.' The Joke flourished in Queensland in the sixties under the supervision of Police Commissioner Frank Bischof. His bagmen were said to be the Rat Pack of Terry Lewis, Tony Murphy and Glen Halloran. The Rat Pack and their friends were central to the corruption uncovered later by Fitzgerald, by which time Lewis was Commissioner. Bischof's Joke in the 1960s revolved around SP bookmakers and prostitution. This was the corruption that the Fitzgerald inquiry focused on, while giving only a tantalising glimpse of the Drug Joke. By the time of the Wood commission, almost a decade later, the Drug Joke had become central to police corruption." (p.201) (back)
10. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.103. (back)
11. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.81, p.84.
Black banks are "an import part of... clandestine trade, and the Nugan Hand Bank, like the Castle Bank before it and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) after it, formed an important part in this Cold War network." When the Castle Bank -- which was set up by "Paul Helliwell, a very senior CIA operative" -- was investigated by the US Internal Revenue Service in the late 1970s, the CIA blocked the investigation. Subsequently, when the Castle Bank collapsed, the Australian-based Nugan Hand Bank quickly "acquir[ed] Latin American and European structures that had belonged to Castle Bank" and an array of board members from the US intelligence establishment: for example, the new legal counsel of the Bank was the former CIA Director, William Colby. (p.217-8) (back)
12. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.104, p.105. (back)
13. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.112. (back)
14. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.126. (back)
15. Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.194.
Head of the Eastern Division of the CIA, Ted Shackley, played a key role in the November 1975 Pine Gap security crisis, which helped lead to the constitutional coup that led to the removal of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. (p.95) Thus it is noteworthy that Shackley "was very closely associated with Michael Hand... and nearly all the other Nugan Hand players." (p.91)
Here it is important to point out that while it is widely alleged that Whitlam's policies provided a serious threat to sanctity of intelligence agencies, in actual fact they did not pose such threat (although this was most likely misinterpreted by the CIA). Jim Jose writes: "Whitlam accepted the necessity and desirability of agencies like the [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] ASIO; he also accepted the assumption which legitimized these groups." Jim Jose, "The Whitlam Years: Illusion and Reality," in Pat Flanagan (ed.), Big Brother or Democracy: The Case for the Abolition of ASIO (University of Adelaide, 1979), p.40. (back)
16. Tony Reeves, Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron Dossier (Allen & Unwin, 2007), p.84; Jiggens, The Killer Cop and the Murder of Donald Mackay, p.134.
Sir Peter Abeles "belonged to a powerful, right-wing émigré group which included Alexander Barton, Sir Paul Strasser and Sir Ivan Charody who were referred to as 'the Hungarian Mafia' or as 'Askin's Knights' because NSW premier, Sir Robert Askin knighted all of them." (p.135) David Hickie writes that he was told that knighthoods could be brought "earlier in Askin's reign at a... modest $20,000 a pop." He then continues noting that "while such claims are hard to document... a $20,000 cheque from the chief executive of Boral Ltd, Sir Elton Griffin, turned up in the private bank account of Sir Robert Ask in at the time Griffin was knighted." Boral is now "Australia's largest building and construction materials supplier". It is also interesting to note that Bernie Houghton -- who played a key role in setting up the Nugan Hand Bank -- arranged for Michael Hand to work with Sir Paul Strasser's Parkes Corporation. Moreover, although little known, in 1969, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) "uncovered the involvement of Lennie [McPherson], Houghton and some NSW police in a massive people-smuggling operation. ASIS had mounted a 'national security' exercise to check on illegal immigrants as part of Australia's Cold War paranoia about communists arriving by stealth and taking over the country. What they found was a massive trade in sex slaves, run by Sydney criminals and back by a local undercover agent of the CIA." (For a critical analysis of the links between capitalism and modern-day slavery.
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