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The Rise of the American-Muslim Totalitarian State

NB Commentary: When the now President Obama was running for election back in 2007 he made a lot of promises and gave people the adage that Hope and Change were in the offing. It was time and “Yes, We Can” rang out through the media and the entertainment world took it up and splattered every media outlet with this adage. I even remember myself feeling anxious about the election and wondered if he really would win. He appeared to be anti-everything that his predecessor was openly for.
Now, years later, we see that there has been very little Hope and even less change.

What struck me most was shortly after he was elected when he was asked if you would bring charges against the Bush administration for war crimes.  Before and during Mr. Obama’s campaign there had been a ground swell and a very strong movement for Bush’s impeachment that reached Congress and Congressman Dennis Kucinich, read a long list of grievances against the Bush administration. But when Obama was asked the question, he said, and I loosely quote him here, “Let’s move forward, and not backward.”  To me that was a key statement of what direction he would take his administration and it certainly would not be “away” from what was already taking place in the White House and the administration of the US government.
by James Corbett GRTV.ca January 30, 2013

“The DOJ claims that in planning and waging the Iraq War, ex-President Bush and key members of his Administration were acting within the legitimate scope of their employment and are thus immune from suit,” chief counsel Inder Comar of Comar Law said. Source

People didn’t seem to be moved by this. Code Pink had been bought and sold on the bribery market and their efforts for the cessation of war pretty much muted. With brand new offices in DC, they were closer to the new President, but having succumb to the belief that Hope and Changehad arrived and that wars would end and that Guantanamo would close, they became part of the mainstream. In fact, if they show up now, they appear lifeless, pointless and powerless to keep the Peace Movement moving in any direction.
Now we are looking at more war theaters than ever before, or shall I be more honest here and say that the theaters have hit the main page of the news instead of being on the back page under the classified ads. The Wars going on in the so-called middle east, have been going on since before the Clinton administration. The idea of gaining a stronghold in Africa far preceded our current president. It’s just that now, with Social Media, and massive access to the news from around the world.. We can see what is really going on. Something that the indigenous people of the nations that the US and NATO have been bombing for decades already knew.
I also quivered at the outright about face turn that the US made towards Syria who in days of old was a part of the extraordinary rendition program and were holding so-called terrorists in their prisons. Now the US wants to overthrow the Assad regime, a once staunch ally of the US. It begs to question what the hidden agenda is when the US makes these allies and you just have to wonder, when the alliance with the US will come back to haunt them with bombs, drones, airstrikes, invasions and stealth operations to acquire their once friend’s, resources.

CIA agent Robert Baer: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt.” Source

“The report also shows that as many as 54 foreign governments reportedly participated in these operations in various ways, including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories; detaining, interrogating, torturing, and abusing individuals; assisting in the capture and transport of detainees; permitting the use of domestic airspace and airports for secret flights transporting detainees; providing intelligence leading to the secret detention and extraordinary rendition of individuals; and interrogating individuals who were secretly being held in the custody of other governments. Foreign governments also failed to protect detainees from secret detention and extraordinary rendition on their territories and to conduct effective investigations into agencies and officials who participated in these operations.

The 54 governments identified in this report span the continents of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, and include: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.” Source

And now, we have the Islamic Boogie Man. The epitome of all that is evil. Branded on 911 and blamed for the incredulous, they have become the bane of Western Society, even if the statistics show quite the contrary. A war on terror has been initiated and now every Muslim is suspect. Your friendly neighborhood donut maker and soda seller is a possible terrorist, despite the fact that they are US citizens also seeking the Mom’s Apple Pie of the American Dream. Quite frankly, the American Dream has become a nightmare for those law abiding Muslim citizens who want for their families every right that every other human being deserves. The right to live in peace and work towards a better tomorrow. In the face of this tyranny, the eye is skewed towards the threatening so-called Muslim terrorist and with a broad brush all Muslims are suspect while the crimes perpetrated against American men, women and children is done by home grown terrorists with no Islamic affiliation whatsoever. Why is this possible, how is it possible? The biggest culprit is mainstream media. They decide who will be hated and who will be adored, whether the object of our ire/affection is deserved or not. Let’s just hope that predator drones are not launched against American citizens, presumed to be Muslim extremist because quite frankly, these Muslims do not live on an island separated from the rest of humanity. They are among us and a drone strike will not be able to tell the difference.



DECEMBER 11, 2015

by GARIKAI CHENGU

Muslim-Americans are living in a totalitarian police state with worsening harassment, profiling, and surveillance. The United States’ government may claim liberty and justice for all; however, in practice, towards Muslims, it exhibits all four major characteristics of a totalitarian state: a war on terror that targets Muslims abroad, a totalitarian police state at home, public executions by drones and gulags outside the rule of law, and a strong reliance on propaganda and political demagoguery.

The hallmark of fascism was state oppression of certain targeted non-privileged groups. Today, Muslims are bearing the brunt of America’s totalitarian police state.
Despite FBI records showing that since 9/11, Muslims have committed far less domestic terror attacks than white supremacists, it is the American-Muslim community that is under unprecedented levels of surveillance and government intrusion. Muslims in America are unquestionably experiencing a fascist system of surveillance, operating at the same level that East Germans faced under the Stasi spy agency. Researcher, Arun Kundnani, has shown how the FBI has one counterterrorism spy for every 94 Muslims in the U.S., which approaches Stasi’s ratio of one spy for every 66 citizens.
Clearly racism, as much as oil, fuels the War on Terror. White Christians rarely have to worry that an undercover agent or informant has infiltrated their churches, student organizations or neighborhoods. The simple fact that U.S. law enforcement has not infiltrated and spied on conservative Christian communities to disrupt violent rightwing extremism, which is the biggest terrorism threat in America, confirms what Muslims in American know in their bones: to worship Allah is to be suspect.
Federal judges recently ruled that suspicion-less surveillance of Muslims is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. The NYPD has admitted that Mosques, student groups, restaurants, even grade schools, have all been under surveillance. By rapidly increasing both government policies of secrecy and surveillance, Mr. Obama’s government is increasing its power to watch its citizens, while diminishing its citizens’ power to watch their government.
The threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism has been largely manufactured, so that the so-called War on Terror can promote multi-billion dollar, corporate-sponsored militarism abroad and the erosion of two hundred-year-old civil liberties at home.
Muslim-Americans are not only facing increasing oppression from the state, but they are also facing growing prejudice from their fellow countrymen, as hate crimes and civil liberty violations against Muslims continue to precipitously rise.
A recent Pew Forum Poll established that Muslims are by far the most disliked minority in America. According to FBI statistics, anti-Muslim hate crimes soared by an astounding 50 percent last year. Muslims constitute 1 percent of the U.S. population, but they are 13 percent of the victims of religious-based hate crimes. Islamophobia and xenophobia now seem as American as apple pie. Intolerance of Muslims is often inverted, depicting Muslim customs as an insult to Western customs.
One major aspect of American totalitarianism, shared by fascist regimes, is the nation’s enormous military budget. In 1933, Nazi Germany’s military spending was 2 percent of their national income; by 1940, it was 44 percent.
Today, America spends more on her military than the rest of the world combined. America has expanded its military into having 662 foreign military bases, according to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report. The War on Terror has cost $6 trillion, the equivalent of $75,000 for every American household, calculates Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Another hallmark of totalitarianism is the creation of a prison system outside the rule of law that is largely designed to imprison and torture one minority group. The Guantanamo Bay gulag is unquestionably a crime against humanity. There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty.
In April 24, 1934, a People’s Court, just like Guantanamo was established, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely in isolation and were tortured and subjected to show trials. The People’s Court was signed into law by Adolf Hitler.

In 2007, a politician who was vehemently against the human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay, explained what he would do about the torture camp if he ever became President:

“When I am President, I will close Guantanamo. It is a moral outrage, a blight upon America’s conscience. It is the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years. From inception, Guantanamo was a laboratory for unlawful military interrogation, detention, and trials.”
The politician who uttered these words was Senator Barack Obama. Ironically, under President Obama’s tenure, conditions for Guantanamo detainees, from both a physical and legal standpoint, have become markedly worse.
Public executions are perhaps one of the most overt and odious symbols of totalitarianism. In totalitarian Spain, under General Franco, mass public executions were the norm, and were often carried out in bullrings or with band music and onlookers dancing in the victims’ blood. With Hitler and Mussolini supplying arms to Franco, some 200,000 men and women were publically executed during the war and bombed from overhead.

Nowadays, drones are the ultimate totalitarian technology. Washington both uses drones for what amount to public extra-judicial executions of Muslims abroad, and for spying on American Muslims at home.

Most Americans believe that drones are targeted and therefore humane. Nothing could be further from the truth. By all accounts, drones have killed more children than terrorists. According to a new report from The Intercept, nearly 90 percent of people killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan are civilians.
By 2018, some privacy experts believe law enforcement will likely control over 35,000 drones that the government will use to monitor Americans from the skies.
Integral to the rise of the America Muslim Totalitarian State is propaganda. Sheldon Wolin has poignantly pointed out that, whereas the production of propaganda was crudely centralized in Nazi Germany, in the United States, it is left to highly concentrated media corporations, thus maintaining the illusion of a “free press”.
The American propaganda machine is highly sophisticated. It does not rely upon the radio addresses, speeches, and leaflets disseminated by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, nor does it rely on the crude censorship or harassment of free press ordered by a Politburo. The propaganda of America’s “one percent” is subtle yet pervasive; it relies not only on government diktats but also on the mass media, art, pop culture and Hollywood.

American cinema and music have always been a remarkably effective means of whipping up xenophobic wartime sentiment. For example, the highest grossing war film in history, American Sniper, and President Obama’s favorite television show, Homeland, both engage in an overly broad generalization of Islam, and depict Muslims and terrorists in a way that is indicative of widespread Islamophobia in American culture.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee reported a spike in Islamophobia and hate crimes after the release of American Sniper, which culminated in the recent slaying of three young Muslims in North Carolina, who were shot in the head sniper execution style. American Islamophobia operates in the service of American militarism and American militarism abroad, and in turn, ratchets up Islamophobia against minorities at home.
The media determines our language, our language shapes our thoughts, and our thoughts determine our actions. Language is the fulcrum of a society’s perception. Whosoever controls the public’s language, controls the public’s perception.
The corporate elites who sit on media editorial boards control said language. In 1983, fifty companies owned ninety percent of U.S. media. Today, only six media giants control a staggering ninety percent of what the American public listens to, reads, and watches. “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play,” once remarked Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda.
For Muslim-Americans the media’s Orwellian totalitarian language is clear: Drones are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Torture is Enhanced Interrogation. Occupation is Liberation.
Donald Trump’s recent call to ban Muslims from entry into the U.S. is not without

precedent. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 effectively banned all Chinese immigration to the US. This racist law remained in place for five decades and required all Chinese to carry identification certificates or face deportation. When Trump endorsed identification cards to be worn at all times by American Muslims, his popularity jumped almost 3 percentage points. If Donald Trump’s policies are viewed by Americans as odious and un-American, then why has he consistently gained popularity after every anti-Muslim outburst?

America’s history is stock full of totalitarianism and popularized, irrational fear of “the other”. It began when the settler pioneers feared Native Americans and united against them by slaughtering millions in order to quell that fear. As settlers began to unite around a common identity they feared the British Monarchy and rebelled against it. Americans then fought against Mexico, France and various other countries for vast land control. Five hundred documented revolts on slave ships and the fact that plantation owners were greatly outnumbered by slaves, cemented the role of fear that perpetuated slavery for centuries. With greater fear comes greater violence, and with greater violence comes a greater need to justify that violence by ratcheting up the fear.
After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were forced into interment camps on American soil. Vietnamese Americans were then targets of xenophobia in America during the Vietnam War, and then there was the “Red Scare”, which targeted Russian-Americans throughout the Cold War.
From the ashes of the Soviet Union arose the terrorists from the oil-rich Middle East, who became America’s new number one enemy and so the legacy of American xenophobia continues. Today, as the deliberately unending war on terror rumbles on abroad, Muslim, Arab, and Sikh Americans fear that they are living in a totalitarian state.
Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University. Contact him ongarikai.chengu@gmail.com.
Source

Category:

9/11, American Sniper, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, ISIS, Islam, Islamaphobia, minoritites, Muslims, propaganda, terror, torture, totalitarianism, Trump, war

A Game Worth the Candle: Terror and the Agenda of our Elites | Articles

A Game Worth the Candle: Terror and the Agenda of our Elites

Chris Floyd

Published: 14 November 2015 
People see the carnage in Paris, and cry, “When will this end?” The hard answer is that it is not going to end, not any time soon. We are living through the horrific consequences of decisions and actions taken long ago, as well as those of being taken right now. The currents and movements set in motion by these actions cannot be quelled in an instant — not by wishing, not by hashtags of solidarity or light shows on iconic buildings … and certainly not by more bombing, destruction, repression and lies, which are the main drivers of our present-day hell.

There will be no end to rampant terrorism soon because our leaders are not really interested in quelling terrorism. This is simply not a priority for them. For example, in the past 12 years they have utterly destroyed three largely secular governments (Iraq, Libya and Syria) and turned them into vast spawning grounds for violent sectarianism. They did this despite reports from their own intelligence services and military analysts telling them that the spread of violent extremism would almost certainly be the outcome of their interventions. But for our leaders — both the elected ones and the elites they serve — their geopolitical and macroeconomic agendas outweighed any concerns over these consequences. Put simply, to them, the game was worth the candle. They would press ahead with their agenda, knowing that it would exacerbate extremism and terrorism, but doubtless hoping that these consequences could be contained — or better yet, confined to nations seen as rivals to that agenda, or to remote places and peoples of no worth to our great and good.
Our leaders are not opposed to terrorism, neither as a concept nor as a practical tool. Over the past several decades, our leaders and their allies and puppets around the world have at times openly supported terrorist violence when it suited their aims. The prime example is in Afghanistan, where Jimmy Carter and his Saudi allies began arming and funding violent jihadis BEFORE the Soviet incursion there. In fact, as Carter’s own foreign policy guru, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has openly stated, the United States began supporting Islamist terrorism in Afghanistan precisely in order to draw the Soviet Union into the country. Despite fierce internal opposition in the Kremlin, the Soviets finally took the bait, and sent in troops to save the secular government it was backing from the fundamentalist rebellion.
Ronald Reagan continued and expanded this policy. The same type of men now in charge of ISIS and al Qaeda were welcomed to the Oval Office and praised by Reagan as “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.” They were given arms, money and training in terrorist tactics by our military and intelligence services. They were given textbooks — prepared, financed and distributed by the US government — to indoctrinate schoolchildren in violent jihad. The creation of this worldwide network of Islamic extremists was aimed at weakening the Soviet Union. This was the overriding geopolitical concern of the time. Any other consequences that might flow from this policy — creating a global infrastructure of sectarian extremism, seeding a radical minority with arms, funds and innumerable contacts and connections with state were considered unimportant. But we are now living with those consequences.
These are not the only examples of course. For instance, the United States supported — and went to war for — the KLA in Kosovo, a group that it had earlier condemned as terrorists for years. The cultish terror group MEK —which not only carried out deadly terrorist attacks in Iran but also murdered American government officials — is now honored and supported by top politicians from both parties in Washington. The United States now calls al Qaeda associates in Syria “moderate rebels” and provides arms to their allies. The United States is deeply involved in Saudi Arabia’s horrific attack on Yemen against the Houthis, who had been bottling up al Qaeda in the country. Now, thanks to US bombs and guidance — and participation in a blockade of Yemen that is driving the country to starvation — al Qaeda is thriving there again. The violent extremists that the West knowingly and openly helped in NATO’s destruction of Libya are now exporting weapons and terrorists throughout Africa and the Middle East.
Again, in almost all of these cases, Western leaders were specifically warned by their own experts that their actions would exacerbate extremism and violence. And again, with this knowledge, they decided that their geopolitical agendas were more important than these consequences. This agenda — maintaining and expanding their political and economic dominance, and preserving the power and privileges that a militarist empire gives to those at the top — was more important than the security and welfare of their own people.
In this, they are as one with the leaders of ISIS and al Qaeda. They too know that the chief victims of their actions will not be the elites of the West but the ordinary Muslims going about their lives in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India and elsewhere. But their own similar agenda — power, privilege, domination — outweighs any concerns for innocent human lives.

This is the abysmal, despairing tragedy of our times. Our lives, and the lives of our children and descendants, do not really matter to our leaders; certainly not more than the agendas they pursue. And so despite the horrors we’ve seen in the past few weeks — and yes, the bombing of the Russian airliner, the mass murders in Beirut and Baghdad are every bit as horrific and grievous as the attack on Paris — nothing is likely to change. Our leaders are not even beginning to take the steps necessary to even begin addressing the consequences of their morally demented agenda and at last begin the long process of reversing the current of violence and extremism that assails us. Instead, at every turn, they are adding to the flow of death and madness, despite the stark, undeniable evidence of the consequences of their actions.
They say they are at war with terrorism. It’s a lie. They use terrorism and terrorists when it suits their agenda. They say they are “at war” with ISIS, an enemy which they tell us represents an existential threat to human civilization, and whose destruction is now our “highest priority.”  It’s a lie. In a real war against such a threat, you would make common cause against the common enemy, even if you find your allies distasteful. Thus the mutually loathing capitalists of the West and communists of the Soviet Union (and elsewhere) made common cause against Nazi Germany.
If we were really “at war” with ISIS, if its military defeat really was an overriding concern, then the West would form a military coalition with Iran, Russia, Turkey, the Syrian government and others to carry out this goal. It is obvious that for the West, the overthrow of the Assad government is far more important than defeating ISIS or bringing the conflict in Syria to an end by diplomatic means.

Instead, our leaders give every indication that they will continue the policies that have brought us to this dark and evil place. With the near-total ignorance and amnesia of our media class, there is little hope that public opinion can be mobilized to insist on a new course. And so, at some point soon, we will see more iconic buildings bathed in the colors of a Western nation (but never one from the Middle East, whose peoples suffer more, by several orders of magnitude, from the decades of extremism fostered by the West). And this will go on, year after year, until we decide that human life, human dignity, human freedom are more important than our leaders’ agendas of greed and domination.

Category:

Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, boko haram, business, CIA, elites, Iraq, ISIL, Kosovo, Libya, middle east, mudrasas, Russia, sectarianism, terror, Ukraine. Mossad, War on Terror

Fear of The Unknown Is Creating Hysteria In Every Part of Our Lives

by Marco Torres
Prevent Disease

Fear of The Unknown Is Creating Hysteria In Every Part of Our Lives And It’s Becoming Accepted As The Norm

Being afraid of the unknown is not a new concept. From birth to death we’ve been trained to fear everything for a very long time. The dangers of modern life have a stranglehold on people’s imaginations. Sociologists call the phenomenon a risk society, describing cultures increasingly preoccupied with threats to safety, both real and perceived, but most definitely imagined. Most institutions today, whether they be academic, medical, religious, government and all others, would not exist in the way, shape or form they do today if it were not for the element of fear. The Earth you see before you today and the Earth of the future will be at a distinct contrast when it comes to how afraid we are of the unknown. Many of you see it coming already.

It’s why wars exist. It’s why modern medicine exists. It’s why politics exists. It’s why laws exist. We fear everything, so we must naturally attempt to control or prevent what we fear most. A majority of people will agree that the world is more dangerous than ever before. Even in the face of evidence that negates this misperception, there is no relief. We lock our doors, say our prayers, marvel at our own pessimism and then wonder why we still can’t get to sleep. We are immersed in a culture of fear.

Neurolinguistic programming, emulating psychosis, television, advertising, the illusion of terrorism and several other remarkable concepts affect every facet of our lives and our world at the expense of our health, safety and security.

If there is a disease, we must develop a vaccine or drug. If there is a terrorist, we must develop anti-terrorist measures. If there are criminals, we must create laws. If there are bullies, we must create anti-bullying policies. It is our nature. It is human nature. Well at least when it comes to modern humans.

Try and access any social media platform on the internet without getting bombarded by a fearful audience. It’s impossible. People are scared of everything. So they criticize, argue, belittle, antagonize and resort to ad hominem attacks that focus on the character of others because they cannot fathom a truth which is not their own. It’s a protective measure to guard against the unknown.

What Does Fear Do To Us?
        

Fear keeps us focused on the past and constantly worried about the future. It creates desperation and indecision that paralyzes our logic, thinking and actions. We can’t live freely because we can’t stop living in fear.

People who are fearful are very hesitant to explore new concepts or embrace other possibilities. You can always estimate the level of a person’s fear by how they explore new surroundings and inspect objects around them. This ultimately affects our personality and how other behavioral traits affect our physiology including what kind of impacts these traits have on our overall health and life span.

There is an international consortium of scientists who are working aggressively to find ways to control fear in both the public and military. Is this the answer to our fearful ways? Certainly not as the initiatives themselves stem from fear.

Fear is tearing our society apart. In the past, fear has engendered solidarity, but today it throws wedges between all of humanity. This isolation, in turn, renders the public ever more fearful. What’s more, media outlets, politicians, modern medicine and businesses all have learned to capitalize on this distinctly modern sense of dread, and thus profit from finding ways to cultivate it. Until we find a way to resist fear, we’ll live at the mercy of these emotional entrepreneurs–and in doing so, be party to the personal, cultural, and political consequences.

Much of our concept of ourselves and our attitudes as individuals in control of our destinies underpins much of our reality or what we think about our existence.

A Negative Attitude Is The Basis of Cyclical Fears   

When people retain negative attitudes about anything that disagrees with their own version of reality, they are more likely to experience a continued sense of fear than people whose attitudes are less negative. Physiological markers such as heart rate and anticipatory anxiety always increase when measurements are taken in people whose attitudes remain negative.

Some of these attitudes are often based on a powerful association between a fear and a negative feeling that is so strong, that many people can’t see or even think about the fear without experiencing that automatic negative reaction. For example, many people around the world devoted to their religion absolutely fear atheists. They refuse to relate to their position. They will not even conceive the right of atheists to their own opinions and feel extremely threatened by any content promoting the principles of atheism. The same can be true if we reverse the two roles. Neither position will ever advance the other if each can only think negatively about the other. This creates self-righteousness, divisions of superiority and of course ignorance.

Negative reactions to the unknown instills a sense of weakness in our character, specifically a lack of strength in our own convictions. When people have the need to strongly chastise others for their opinions and information they present, it shows a genuine deficit of attributes related to confidence about our own belief systems, morals and values.

Those who have confidence in their doctrines do not have to identify all those things they dislike so much in others or attempt to magnify those flaws to please their own conscience. In essence, they feel they must right-fight to support their own belief system since in their minds, a competing system must be incorrect.

Modern Fear Is Viral
 

What’s unique about 21st-century fear is how people experience fear. Since the 1980s, society at large has bolted frantically from one panic to the next. Fear of crime reduced us to wrecks, but before long we were also howling about deadly diseases, drug abusers, online pedophiles, avian flu, ebola, teens gone wild, mad cows, anthrax, immigrants, environmental collapse, and–let us not forget–terrorists.

“There isn’t a single fear that defines our era,” says sociologist Frank Furedi, author of Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation and Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right. “What we have is a more promiscuous, pluralistic form of fearing. The very important implication to this is that while my parents feared together, you and I have a more isolated, private experience. We fear on our own.”

Our brains are poorly equipped to weigh risks that don’t result in immediate negative consequences. Marketers, politicians, and entertainers grasp with precision how brains misfire, and they apply this knowledge to great gain. Few can doubt how well fearmongering has worked for pharmaceutical companies who use the fear of disease to sell drugs and vaccines by the billions.

As networks battle for ratings and newspapers grasp at disappearing readers, the urge to lead with sensational stories grows. The gap between the reported and the commonplace skews our subconscious stockpile of reference points, while hunger for the next big story inevitably broadens our catalog of things that go bump in the night.

It’s Time To Abandon Fear To Change This World

People need not abandon fear altogether. Our ability to judge risk is sophisticated, and instinctual decisions often serve us well. But when something doesn’t quite seem to sync up, gut to head, then it’s time to pause and at least question what’s causing the discrepancy.

The new Earth will see people working to reduce or eliminate fear like never before. If you have a fear, first understand the nature of the object that arouses it. Let us say you are afraid of your future. What you really fear is the uncertainty that surrounds events yet to happen. By living totally in the present and by planning ahead you can reduce the uncertainty and fear. You cannot plan for all uncertainties but being prepared to an extent reduces your fear of uncertainties. Learn the art of enjoying it, too.  

The psychological programming inside you, your subconscious mind, should change before any real change can happen. Your subconscious mind comprises engrams — mental traces that have been created over life experiences. These consist of both positive and negative associations and act like computer programmes. So long as the programming remains the same, the computer will function only in the manner dictated by that programme.   

Similarly, we have to change the programming of our mind. Wise thinking leads to discrimination of the good and the bad. When you have changed your programming, you start perceiving and acting positively. So it is wise thinking that holds the key to a positive frame of mind.

Once people start thinking this way, it’s impossible to stop: Every television program, every advertisement, every stump speech that hangs its hat on scare tactics will be thrown into acute relief. That is where we are headed. We are all eventually going to give up allowing fears to define us, and focus instead on which ones are worth tackling together. When we do that, we won’t just free politicians from fear-inducing rhetoric or stymie fearmongering marketers; but we’ll also give ourselves some much-needed relief.

Reprinted from article by Marco Torres
Prevent Disease

Category:

disaster capitalism, disease, fear, hysteria, modern world, mongering, Neurolinguistic programming, neurosis, sleeplessnes, social media, terror, vaccines

The new Cosmos TV series airing on Fox? Dead Giveaway!!

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON 

Do you like this dude??
Actually, I really don’t care for his science, but this article is interesting, I should call it an interesting spin on Science, because clearly, the scientists and the fundamentalists are flip sides of the same coin.

What they each call “provable evidence” is based on a belief system that is hardly verifiable due to the limited analysis they both stand use. Neither will move outside of their own paradigm. Neither will budge in the face of facts that do not align with their world view. Each of them have conferences, write books, set up educational systems, debate and demonize others who do not comply with their belief systems.

Science is a belief system that works in some cases but is subject to continued experimentation and analysis, all the while claiming each new discovery as the final “truth”. The extreme of fundamentalists on the other hand, will continually refer to their world view as the fundamental and true frame of reference.

Both extremes keep these two teams battling within and without their circle for dominance of their position. However, there is a deeper meaning of life than what can be scientifically proven, tested and verified, there is more to life than can be reference in the fundamentalists doctrine. There is the unseen, the unpredictable, the unknowingness, the indescribable and definitely the unmeasurable that neither the Scientists can “physically” prove it exists, or the fundamentalists can gather references in their doctrines.

Additionally, they both want to believe that they “know” what happened when the Universe was created. They pull together a series of proofs with such authority that to question it makes you a skeptic, heretic or conspiracy theorist. For this reason, such limited science and religion will have these two groups spinning around on their self created treadmill, both fearful of the unknowable.

Indeed the one system they both defy is the paranormal. Until they realize this, the strides they make into understanding the universe and all that’s in it from a scientific or spiritual/religious point of view will continually be flawed.

Unfortunately, what typically happens is the so-called “death bed” confessions. By then it is too late. The Masses have all been brainwashed. The impact of changing your story midstream can be catastrophic to those who “follow” without question and conform without inner discernment. Ultimately, the “deathbed confession” is cast aside, considered the ravings of a madman, or creates such cognitive dissonance that many will simply go back to sleep.

Thus, the two institutions on this Human Planet, who have the responsibility to bring Humanity to the deepest knowledge of self and science… fails!!!!!! Humanity continues to process and reprocess the fallacious doctrine of the scientists and the fundamentalists. Humanity becomes polarized and remains unable to balance the two extremes within themselves. IE, scientists cannot espouse a spiritual doctrine and fundamentalists cannot espouse a scientific doctrine.

Humanity remains cemented to 3D reality of polar opposites for eternity until such time as this major bridge is gapped. Let me just add, that this is ONLY the fate of those who conform to the Western modalities of Science and Religion. Indigenous societies for as long as humanity has inhabited this planet are at the center. Their science and spiritual beliefs support each other.

THURSDAY, MAR 27, 2014 07:50 AM EDTCosmic terror: Why Neil deGrasse Tyson has religious fundamentalists so freaked

Religious belief systems prefer a universe with mankind firmly at its center. No wonder “Cosmos” is so threatening

, ALTERNET

The new Cosmos TV series airing on Fox is a worthy reboot of Carl Sagan’s original. Following in Sagan’s footsteps, host Neil deGrasse Tyson takes viewers on a voyage through the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond, showing how our sun is just one star out of a hundred billion in the majestic spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, and even the Milky Way itself is a speck in the observable universe. As in the original series, he compresses the history of the universe into a single year, showing that on that scale, the human species emerges only in the last few seconds before midnight on December 31.
Sagan’s Cosmos was due for an update, and not just because our computer graphics are better. Since the original series aired, we’ve sent robotic rovers to Mars, sampling its rocks and exploring its history. We’ve detected hundreds of alien planets outside the solar system, finding them by the slight gravitational wobble they cause in their home stars, or by the brief dips in light as they pass across the star’s face as seen from Earth. We’ve found the Higgs boson, the elusive and long-theorized particle that endows everything else with mass. We’ve discovered that the expansion of the Universe which began with the Big Bang is accelerating, driven by a mysterious force called dark energy. All these scientific advances deserve to be recognized and celebrated.
The story of Cosmos is also the story of human beings. For the vast majority of our history as a species, we were wanderers, small hunter-gatherer bands. Civilization is a recent innovation, arising within the last few thousand years, and science is more recent still, appearing only in the last few hundred. But in just those few short centuries, we’ve made dramatic strides, from wooden sailing ships to space shuttles, bloodletting to bionic limbs, quill pens to the Internet. We’ve drawn back the curtain on ancient mythologies and glimpsed the true immensity of time and space. Compared to that vastness, we’re unimaginably small and insignificant; yet we possess an intelligence and a power of understanding that, as far as we still know, is unique among all the countless worlds. As Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”  

This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

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astronomy, carl Sagan, cosmos, earth, fox, fundamentalists, milky way, neil degrasse tyson, planets, scientists, series, stars, systems, terror, tv, Universe