Gaslighted

Have you ever been isolated? Lied to? Betrayed?

While you thought you were dealing with loyalty and affection–instead you were staring at a mask of sanity invented to hide deceit.

Then you have known a Sociopath. You have known THE DEVOID. You have seen THE HOLLOW.

There are few things more repulsive, or more difficult, for sentient people to understand.

Deep at their core, The Devoid are not capable of feeling anything beyond their own needs. Even love for their own children is a pathology, born of self-admiration. In their children, they see only themselves, and so their children are raised to become Finger Puppets on a mission, mirror images of parents who have no empathy beyond their own self-admiration.

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Bearwalker

Ancient One sat in the shade of his tree in front of his cave. Red People came to him and he said to Red People, "Tell me your vision."

And Red People answered, "The elders have told us to pray in this manner, and that manner, and it is important that only we pray as we have been taught for this has been handed down to us by the elders." -"Hmmmm," said the Ancient One.

Then Black People came to him and he said to Black People, "Tell me your vision."

And Black People answered, "Our mothers have said to go to this building and that building and pray in this manner and that manner. And our fathers have said to bow in this manner and that manner when we pray. And it is important that we do only this when we pray." "Hmmmm," said the Ancient One.

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Stephanie Brault

Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world’s most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. Brazil houses the largest expanse of tropical wilderness remaining on the globe, claiming 60% of the Amazon Rainforest. This is a vast and remote stretch which thirty years ago only Indians and wild animals roamed. Today, ranchers and sawmill owners in four-wheel-drive pickup trucks speed past new stores selling chain saws, construction materials, and farm equipment.

While land development, human settlement, and logging are the main sources of deforestation , the bedrock of this global ecocide is the construction of roads which tear through the rainforest habitat, laying down concrete in every direction with each newly paved yard. Brazil has faced a grave and pressing dichotomy ever since its ascension as an agricultural superpower in today’s globalized economy. Experts insist that if this reserve is to last, Brazil must balance development and economic growth with the implementation of a well-calculated Amazon preservation program.

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Christopher King

Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph when Britain remembers its war dead: a simple ceremony, always in grey weather, its brevity welcome since the attempt to grasp its meaning is unbearable.

Anthony Blair was present. In future he should stay away and similarly Gordon Brown.

Prior to the ceremony, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, Chief of the Defence Staff, a useful pilot, spoke of our current war. “We have not done a good enough job of explaining what we are doing in Afghanistan,” he said. Curiously, Gordon Brown, our prime minister, said exactly the same thing shortly before. I had listened with interest as the existence of a convincing explanation was implied but none came.

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Len Hart

If the 'President' is elected to represent the people of the United states, then he/she should be elected directly by the people. The Electoral College, in which electors represent states --not people --must be abolished and the 'office' of President elected directly. The voice of the people needs no proxy. The voice of the people must be be heard directly, loudly and often.

Fears that the 'college' might elect a minority President are not merely speculative should the nation be so deeply divided that three or more candidates split the electoral votes among them --no one getting a necessary majority. Precisely that happened in 1824, attempted in 1948 and again in 1968.

There are but two resolutions should it happen again:

■either one candidate could throw his electoral votes to the support of another before the meeting of the Electors, or
■the U.S. House of Representatives would select the president in accordance with the 12th Amendment.

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Michaela Stanková

With the Roma population in Slovakia growing the issue of how to involve Roma more in the society is becoming ever more urgent. Offering Roma, who in parts of Slovakia live in separate settlements, the chance to improve their living conditions and increase their quality of life is not merely a moral imperative, but also an economic necessity, a new study has concluded.

According to the study, ‘The Cost of Non-Inclusion’, carried out by Anton Marcinčin and Ľubica Marcinčinová and sponsored by the Open Society Foundation (OSF), the costs of non-inclusion of the Roma minority in mainstream society are immense.

“The main reason why the costs are so high isn’t the potential savings in social allowances, but the possibility of significantly increasing the size of the employed labour force in Slovakia and thus increasing GDP,” Anton Marcinčin said. In the study he estimates Slovakia could produce 7 to 11 percent higher GDP if Roma were included.

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William Patrick Corgan

If you follow some of the links I have been supplying as of late, you’ll notice many are focused on the propaganda build up to our day of reckoning with the Swine Flu virus. I say ‘propaganda’ because, in my heart, there is something mighty suspicious about declaring an emergency for something that has yet to show itself to be a grand pandemic. Our American President Obama has declared a national emergency about this virus, which he in his own words said was, at this point, a preventative measure. So, why declare an emergency if there isn’t one?

I am not a doctor, and I am in no way suggesting that you should follow any medical advice from me. What you do with your body, what you put into it, who you allow to love it or hate on it, is your business. I am more focused on the vibration that has us all so fearful: both for how the fear affects our thinking, and how, in our fear, we attract the worst, and, in conjunction with that, how those fears are used by others without integrity to try to create a power against Us to promote discomfort and dis-ease.

I have friends that have gotten the swine flu. All of them told me they felt very, very sick, and that it was awful. So I’m not in any way suggesting that the H1N1 virus is not real. I would suggest however that it is possible the virus is not a naturally occurring virus.

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Carolyn Baker

A review of the 2008 novel by James Howard Kunstler (Atlantic Monthly Press)

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F. William Engdahl

A deadly fungus, known as Ug99, which kills wheat, has likely spread to Pakistan from Africa according to reports in the British New Scientist magazine. If true, that threatens the vital Asian Bread Basket including the Punjab region. The spread of the deadly virus, stem rust, against which an effective fungicide does not exist, comes as world grain stocks reach the lowest in four decades and government subsidized bio-ethanol production, especially in the USA, Brazil and EU are taking land out of food production at alarming rates. The deadly fungus is being used by Monsanto and the US Government to spread patented GMO seeds.

Stem rust is the worst of three rusts that afflict wheat plants. The fungus grows primarily in the stems, plugging the vascular system so carbohydrates can't get from the leaves to the grain, which shrivels. In the 1950s, the last major outbreak destroyed 40% of the spring wheat crop in North America. At that time governments started a major effort to breed resistant wheat plants, led by Norman Borlaug of the Rockefeller Foundation. That was the misnamed Green Revolution. The result today is far fewer varieties of wheat that might resist such a new fungus outbreak.

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James Cogan

Having drowned the Iraqi people in blood, the American financial and corporate oligarchy now believes that day has finally arrived. While US corporations are not the sole beneficiaries of the contracts, there is no question who has the final say over Iraq’s oil.

The awarding of development rights over the huge West Qurna oilfield in southern Iraq to Exxon-Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell last Thursday once again underscores the criminal character of the continuing US-led occupation. As the direct result of the Iraq war, major American and other transnational energy conglomerates are now gaining control over some the largest oilfields in the world.

West Qurna has proven reserves of 8.7 billion barrels of oil. Iraq’s total reserves are currently put at 115 billion barrels, though dozens of potential fields have not been explored adequately. Before the US invasion in 2003, rights over West Qurna had been awarded by the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein to the Russian oil firm, Lukoil. The pro-US puppet regime in Baghdad has torn up all pre-war contracts.

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Sarah Meyer

Storm Clouds over Rodmell Photo © Sarah Meyer

Birth Is The Disease; Death Is The Cure.

The language applied to cancer sounds like Obama’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We hear about "battles" - “Fighting the Enemy” and the “War on Cancer.” Constructively discussing the actual process of life and death can often be a no-go zone. Even the word 'death' is replaced by the awful term, “passing away.”

I am almost 73 now, and I am ready for death. The suffering of peoples on our planet is a burden for me. I have tried for much of my life to be useful, but of course one cannot ‘cure’ this central crux of life itself.

Some people emailed that they were "shocked" at my cancer news. Why is this? Cancer is a big reality in our times. 1 in 3 people die of cancer (UK).

I hope that this essay will be helpful and informative for others. If you would wish to write to me with your own experiences of cancer, or obstruction of your wishes, or treatment, please email me (see About Me above), with subject: "cancer."

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Henry Porter

Government attempts to override a free speech clause in a homophobic hatred bill illustrate its determination to attack rights.

"The politically motivated trampling of free speech is something that should concern us all," says a letter in the Times from the Conservative peer Lord Waddington and the Labour MP and former backbencher of the year David Taylor.

After a free speech clause was inserted into a new offence of homophobic hatred in May 2008 and the bill was enacted, the government has returned to try to get its way by introducing a clause in another bill that repeals the earlier guarantee. You can't have a better example of the remorseless energy that attacks rights. It will surprise few to learn that the new clause appears in the coroners and justice bill which has been drafted by Jack Straw's Justice Department. The letter says:

The free speech clause is supported across the political spectrum. Liberty, the Church of England, Matthew Parris and Rowan Atkinson have also joined the ranks who back it.

The old clause says:

For the avoidance of doubt, the discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred.

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Mitchell Prothero & Peter Beaumont

"What they're after is the Litani River and the Bekaa Valley. Both will they take by force. They will divert the Litani, fill Lake Tiberias and strengthen the Jordan River. Their ill-gotten land will stretch from the Nile in the West to the Euphrates in the East. The Kingdom of Jordan will be forced to cede land – all of the Jordan Valley will be taken from this fated kingdom. War with Lebanon and Syria is inevitable." - Editor, AWIP

Israel wants the Litani River water.

Jordanian Professor: Israel Will Go to War over Water. Hezbollah gears up for new war.

Fighters rearm and reinforce positions in valleys amid fears that Israel is about to launch attack on Islamic group

Hezbollah is rapidly rearming in preparation for a new conflict with Israel, fearing that Benjamin Netanyahu's government will attack Lebanon again prior to any assault on Iran's nuclear facilities.

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Colin A. Ross

My book, The CIA Doctors, [1] is based on 15,000 pages of documents I received from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act and dozens of papers published in medical journals. These papers report the results of research funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of the Army, the Office of Naval Research and the CIA. From 1950 to 1972, the CIA funded TOP SECRET research at many leading universities including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Stanford. There was a series of CIA mind control programs including BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA, MKSEARCH and MKNAOMI.

MKULTRA and related programs had several over-lapping purposes. One was to purchase mind control drugs from suppliers. Another was to form relationships with researchers who might later be used as consultants at the TOP SECRET level. The core purpose of these programs was to learn how to enhance interrogations, erase and insert memories, and create and run Manchurian Candidates. All of this is described clearly and explicitly in the declassified CIA documents, which provide a glimpse into the tip of the iceberg of CIA and military mind control.

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Kevin Coval

Last week I was disinvited from my second Jewish conference in two months for poems I'd written in solidarity with Palestinians, poems that make an unapologetic call for justice. Subsequently, I and the poet I was to read with at the J Street conference, wrote a response to being censored. People from all over the country wrote to us supporting free speech, supporting art as a tool for change, supporting real talk about the degradation of Palestinians, and people wrote to let us know they disagreed. Some more thoughtfully than others.

We decided to hold our reading anyway in Washington, DC during J Street's inaugural conference at an alternative location. We were hosted by the Busboys and Poets space. The room filled with a spectrum of ideas. We read our poems and during the question and answer period, no one was shouted down. Not the Israeli army refusenik, not the liberal Zionist apologist, not the Palestinian student who asked us to include more about the Palestinian people in our poems, not just the land or idea of nation-state, a point beautifully made and incredibly profound. No one shouted down moderator Laila al-Arian, a brilliant journalist and activist, whose father was a Palestinian political prisoner in America, now freed because of his daughter's persistence. The crowd was cool and civil, though broad in opinion.

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Henry Porter

When the European Court of Human Rights announces a ban on crucifixes in Italian schools, you can either celebrate the liberal march of secularism or deplore the illiberal attack on religious expression and national tradition.

Perhaps there is a third option which is to say that this has nothing to do with rights and everything to do with the EU's manic drive to standardise behaviour and attitudes, in the same way as it regulates the transportation of livestock and the safety specifications of new mowers.

The crucifix is none of the EU's business and, as we celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall this weekend and the miraculous bravery and persistence of the Christian congregation of the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, who sparked the East German revolutions with candles and peace prayers every Monday evening, it is perhaps right to remember that the last Europeans to ban the display of religious symbolism in schools belonged to the communist regimes of the east.

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Dennis Kucinich

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

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Gwynne Dyer

Earlier this year, the Pentagon committed $50 million to a study investigating why the suicide rate in the military is rising. It used to be below the suicide rate in comparable civilian groups, but now it’s four times higher.

Thirteen American soldiers were killed by a gunman at Fort Hood in Texas last Thursday, but 75 others have died by their own hand at the same army base since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why?

To most people, the answer is obvious. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been frustrating, exhausting, and seemingly endless, and some people just can’t take it any more. But the Pentagon is spending $50 million to search for other possible causes, because it doesn’t like that answer.

The U.S. military budget tops half a trillion dollars, so the military can splash out on diversionary studies that draw attention away from the main problems, which are combat fatigue and loss of faith in the mission. And we are seeing exactly the same pattern in the response to the killings in Fort Hood, although in this case the military are also getting the services of the U.S. media for free.

Let’s see, now. A devout Muslim officer serving in the U.S. Army, born in the United States but of Palestinian ancestry, is scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in the near future. He opens fire on his fellow soldiers, shouting “Allahu akbar.” (“God is great” in Arabic.) What can his motive have been? Hard to guess, isn’t it? Was he unhappy about his promotion prospects? Hmm.

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Alan Hart

As expected, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, on Tuesday 3 November, by 344 votes to 36, to urge the Obama administration to oppose endorsement of the Goldstone Report. But for those who are interested in truth and justice, not to mention democracy, the highlight of what passed for debate was the two-minute contribution of Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic Party’s representative for Ohio’s 10th district (and a starter candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2004 an 2008).

His statement was a damning indictment of 344 of his colleagues. The following is the full text of it (my emphasis added).

Today we journey from Operation Cast Lead to Operation Cast Doubt. Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist.

Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking, the eternal prison of the dark heart of the totalitarian.

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