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The Emerging ‘Global Brain’

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There’s been heightened chatter as of late, particularly in the Twittersphere, around the idea humanity might be undergoing a consciousness expansion. This concept seems to be going mainstream, which could be a great thing provided it doesn’t get turned into a cliché or marketing gimmick.

This notion of a human consciousness shift that could emerge and alter the paradigm on planet earth in unimaginably positive ways was something I became obsessed with last year. My interest was sparked by the infantile and deranged political environment which swept across the U.S. in early 2017, and was solidified by an encounter with the concept of Spiral Dynamics generally, and the work of Ken Wilber specifically. I ended up writing a five-part series on the topic, which I’d like to revisit before moving on.

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Benjamin Netanyahu is Once Again Trying to Push the U.S. Into a Disastrous War

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H/T to @snarwani for the above

Earlier today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put on a little song and dance about Iran and WMDs intended to provide cover for Trump’s upcoming decision on whether or not to scrap the Iran deal (JCPOA) on May 12th.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Netanyahu aggressively pitched the U.S. on war in the Middle East. He did the exact same thing, using the exact same playbook, in the run up to the Iraq war.

Fortunately, we have video evidence of his 2002 testimony to Congress, during which he hyperventilated and exaggerated about Iraq’s grave threat to the world as a result of its non-existsent WMDs. The guy was so incredibly wrong on Iraq, to such a disastrous degree, it’s amazing anyone listens to him at all anymore.

What follows are two must watch video clips from Netanyahu’s 2002 testimony. One of the more memorable — and spectacularly wrong — claims he made back then was when he proclaimed:

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The Road to 2025 (Part 4) – A Very Bright Future If We Demand It

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Whenever all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

– Thomas Jefferson letter to C.Hammond, 1821

The first three parts of this series focused on the obvious reality that imperial America is not just increasingly being seen as a rogue state around the world, but that it’s also become harmful and parasitic to its own people. It’s become abundantly clear that empire is not compatible with Constitutional government.

As power and resources have become increasingly centralized in Washington D.C., the American people have suffered. We’ve suffered from an increasingly rigged economic and financial system, continued security-state encroachment in the form of mass surveillance and a militarization of police, and a war industry which relentlessly funnels more and more wealth toward protecting imperial dominance overseas.

As anyone who’s read the U.S. Constitution knows, this is not the way the union was supposed to function. Indeed, the founders were obsessed with avoiding the pitfalls of European empires since they knew how that story ends. At the federal level, a separation of powers between the three branches of government: the legislative, the executive and the judicial was a key component of the Constitution. The specific purpose here was to prevent an accumulation of excessive centralized power within a specific area of government.

While this separation of powers still exists on paper, it’s been eroded to a very dangerous degree. When it comes to war, which the legislative branch is supposed to declare, Congress has chosen to abdicate its responsibility and simply allows the executive to do whatever it wants. We saw this with Obama and we see it with Trump. The separation of powers is being ignored completely when it comes to state-sanctioned murder and this is no small thing. Equally concerning, a fourth branch of government has also emerged. Completely lawless and unaccountable, the extraordinarily dangerous power wielded by U.S. intelligence agencies provides another example of how far we’ve strayed as a people.

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The Road to 2025 (Part 3) – USD Dominated Financial System Will Fall Apart

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It’s our currency, but it’s your problem.

– U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connelly to European Finance Ministers, 1971

Today’s post will cover a topic that consumed my thoughts for many years, but one I haven’t discussed much lately. Namely, the terminal nature of a global financial system being propped up artificially by central bank shenanigans.

First, it’s crucial to understand that at the very core of our global economy is a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar. The USD is a fiat currency directly backed by nothing, the supply of which can be arbitrarily altered and manipulated by a group of unelected bureaucrats in charge of the Federal Reserve. This money system represents the most powerful tool of centralized power on planet earth.

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The Road to 2025 (Part 2) – Russia and China Have Had Enough

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Part 1 of this series focused on how the U.S. empire no longer provides any real benefit to the average American citizen. Rather, the spoils of overseas wars, the domestic surveillance state and an overall corrupt economy are being systematically funneled to a smaller and smaller group of generally unsavory characters. The public’s starting to recognize this reality, which is why we saw major populist movements emerge on both the traditional right and left of the political spectrum in 2016.

As millions of Americans emerge from their long slumber, much of the world’s been aware of this reality for a long time. They don’t see the U.S. as a magnanimous humanitarian empire, that’s a fairytale more suited for children’s books and the mass media. In fact, it seems clear that the billions of humans who live in various sovereign nations around the world would certainly prefer to be in control of their own destinies as opposed to mere vassal states of the U.S., they simply haven’t possessed the military or economic power to stand up and chart their own course. But things are changing.

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The Road to 2025 (Part 1) – Prepare for a Multi-Polar World

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If pressed to describe what I think the next several years will look like as concisely as possible, I’d simply provide the following quote, often misattributed to Lenin:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

There will be many such weeks from now until 2025, with the end result an emergence of a multi-polar world that will permanently unseat the unipolar U.S. imperial paradigm.

Since World War 2, the U.S. has successfully sustained a position of global dominance unlike anything the world’s ever seen. Virtually each and every corner of the planet has been subject to inescapable and overwhelming American influence, both culturally and economically. This root of this power didn’t just emerge from GDP strength and the USD, but from Hollywood, popular music and tv shows. The impact of the U.S. empire on the planet over the past 70 years has been extraordinary but, like all things, it too shall pass. I believe this end will be realized by around 2025.

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The Time for a Massive Anti-War Movement is Now

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An alleged new ‘chemical incident’ in Syria reminds of a similar series of events we saw last year. We are told to believe that each time the U.S. pulls back from the war on Syria the Syrian government is responding with a ‘chemical attack’ that pulls the U.S. back in.

– From Moon of Alabama article: Syria – Timelines Of ‘Gas Attacks’ Follow A Similar Scheme

If you’re genuinely against U.S. wars for profit, power and empire the current moment represents our best opportunity to push back aggressively and launch a real grassroots anti-war movement. The entrenched forces who’ll stop at nothing to get their war with Iran and Russia going seem to believe that time’s running out. As such, they’re resorting to increasingly comical and preposterous interpretations of “events” to get their conflagration going. The war sales-pitch has become increasingly desperate and nonsensical, which provides us with a window of opportunity to push back.

It’s hard to keep track of the timeline of events these days, but it was just last week that the British foreign office was caught deleting a tweet in which it had falsely claimed it confirmed the nerve agent used in the Skripal poisoning had been produced in Russia.

As The Guardian reported:

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Brave New World Revisited and the Disease of Over-Organization

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When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.

– John Adams letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 15, 1817

Brave New World Revisited is one of the few books I’ve read in my life that I continue to think about on a regular basis. In terms of understanding where humanity stands at present and what we need to do to get out of the mess we’ve created, it’s one of the more important pieces of non-fiction you can find.

I recently felt the need to reread the book for some unknown reason, and I’m glad I did. The choices we make as a species about how we reorganize human affairs in the decades to come will determine the future of human freedom on this planet. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited offers an abundance of wisdom for us to consider as we move forward.

Huxley was deeply concerned with the importance of individual human freedom and the forces relentlessly trying to stifle it. Here’s a brief description of how Huxley viewed our species:

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There’s Only One Word to Describe Julian Assange’s Internet Being Cut Off – Pathetic

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Let’s get right to it. Earlier today, Julian Assange had his internet access severed.

Here’s a translation of the statement from the government of Ecuador, in whose embassy he’s been trapped since 2012:

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Foreign Government Lobbying is an Abomination and Should Be Eradicated Immediately – Part 2

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The sensitivities are especially important when it comes to the Qatari government — the single biggest foreign donor to Brookings.

Brookings executives cited strict internal policies that they said ensure their scholars’ work is “not influenced by the views of our funders,” in Qatar or in Washington. They also pointed to several reports published at the Brookings Doha Center in recent years that, for example, questioned the Qatari government’s efforts to revamp its education system or criticized the role it has played in supporting militants in Syria.

But in 2012, when a revised agreement was signed between Brookings and the Qatari government, the Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself praised the agreement on its website, announcing that “the center will assume its role in reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.” Brookings officials also acknowledged that they have regular meetings with Qatari government officials about the center’s activities and budget, and that the former Qatar prime minister sits on the center’s advisory board.

Mr. Ali, who served as one of the first visiting fellows at the Brookings Doha Center after it opened in 2009, said such a policy, though unwritten, was clear.

“There was a no-go zone when it came to criticizing the Qatari government,” said Mr. Ali, who is now a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. “It was unsettling for the academics there. But it was the price we had to pay.”

– From the 2014 New York Times article: Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks

The purpose of this short series is to give readers a small glimpse of how foreign governments spray around enormous sums of money throughout the Washington D.C. swamp to influence U.S. foreign policy.

Part 1 discussed the role of lobbyists in this grotesque and dangerous scheme. Specifically, lobbyists who work on behalf of a foreign government are supposed to register as foreign agents under the 1938 Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), but the law has no teeth in practice and is riddled with gigantic loopholes that ensure the sums of foreign lobbying happening is far beyond numbers reported under FARA.

As despicable as lobbyists running around D.C. as hired guns for foreign interests are, think tanks doing essentially the same thing are even more pernicious. At least lobbyists who register under FARA aren’t hiding what they do under an aura of respectability and academic rigor. Think tanks, on the other hand, act like prestigious paragons of policy formation and analysis, while taking enormous sums of money from foreign governments.

In some cases what’s expected from these think tanks is explicitly stated and documented, while other times the expectations, while implicit, clearly exist. It’s the arrogance and dishonesty of many of these major think tanks that really gets under my skin.

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