What Ahmadinejad means by “new world order,” however, has nothing to do with the globalist economic and political integration envisioned by President George H. W. Bush.
Known internationally as “Twelvers,” radical Shiite Muslims like Ahmadinejad believe the new order will come with the return of their messiah, the Mahdi – the child imam who supposedly went into seclusion at the bottom of a well more than 1,000 years ago.
Indeed, after a long diatribe in which he blamed Western civilization for most of the world’s major problems, Ahmadinejad concluded his speech today with an extensive description of his belief that the Mahdi will soon usher the world into a new era of peace and prosperity.
“God has promised us a man of kindness,” he said, according to the official transcript, “a man who loves people and loves absolute justice, a man who is a perfect human being and is named Imam al-Mahdi, a man who will come in the company of Jesus Christ and the righteous.”
There’s no better way to learn of Ahmadinejad’s apocalyptic vision than through Joel Richardson’s seminal books, “Mideast Beast” and “The Islamic Antichrist” – available now at WND’s Superstore!
Ahmadinejad said that by “using the inherent potential of all the worthy men and women of all nations” the Mahdi will “lead humanity into achieving its glorious and eternal ideals.”
“The arrival of the ultimate savior will mark a new beginning, a rebirth and a resurrection,” the Iranian leader said. “It will be the beginning of peace, lasting security and genuine life. His arrival will be the end of oppression, immorality, poverty, discrimination and the beginning of justice, love and empathy.”
Iranian ‘spring’
The utopian vision Ahmadinejad painted to the General Assembly delegates who remained in the hall to hear his speech is familiar to students of the Mahdi.What Ahmadinejad neglected to explain is that Shiite Twelvers believe a global apocalypse will mark the Mahdi’s return, leading to the annihilation all non-believers, including Christians, Jews and Sunni Muslims.
Many who have examined Ahmadinejad’s beliefs fear that Iran sees its buildup of nuclear-weapon capabilities and the destruction of Israel as the key apocalyptic event that will hasten the Mahdi’s return.
Ahmadinejad seemed to indicate, in his closing lines, that the return of the Mahdi is near, employing the metaphor of “spring” that also has been used to describe the recent revolutions across the Middle East.
He said the Mahdi will “bless humanity with a spring that puts an end to our winter of ignorance, poverty and war with the tidings of a season of blooming.”
“Now we can sense the sweet scent and the soulful breeze of the spring, a spring that has just begun and doesn’t belong to a specific race, ethnicity, nation or a region, a spring that will soon reach all the territories in Asia, Europe, Africa and the U.S.”
Outside the U.N. General Assembly hall, in numerous press conferences and interviews during his New York visit, Ahmadinejad was explicit about his disdain for Israel and his insistence that it will one day be eliminated.
Erin Pelton, spokeswoman for the U.S. Mission to the U.N., said that in the past couple of days, “we’ve seen Mr. Ahmadinejad once again use his trip to the U.N. not to address the legitimate aspirations of the Iranian people but to instead spout paranoid theories and repulsive slurs against Israel.”
“It’s particularly unfortunate that Mr. Ahmadinejad will have the platform of the U.N. General Assembly on Yom Kippur, which is why the United States has decided not to attend,” she said.
Ahmadinejad ignored President Obama’s challenge to the U.N. yesterday that Iran must not be allowed to pursue nuclear weapons.
Instead, he effectively took a victory lap around the U.N. in his eighth and final appearance, implying he had accomplished his mission to set in motion the events that would bring about the return of the Islamic messiah.
Under his leadership, Iran has built a nuclear weapon program in defiance of numerous U.N. resolutions and countless attempts at economic and diplomatic sanctions, leaving Israel and the U.S. with their last and least desirable option, war.
WND politics
If the powers that be had an "easy button" that would quickly fix everything, they would have pressed it by now. But despite all of their efforts things continue to unravel. If you want to get an idea of where we are headed, just look at what is already happening in Europe. Unemployment has risen above 24 percent in Greece and above 25 percent in Spain.
Those two nations are on the "bleeding edge" of the next wave of economic problems. Unemployment is rising almost everywhere else in Europe as well, and things are eventually going to get really bad in Asia and in North America too.
So hold on to your seat belts - it is going to be a bumpy ride.
The following are 14 signs from around the globe that the world economy is getting weaker....
#1 Things in China do not look good right now. The Shanghai Composite index fell to its lowest point in over 3 years earlier this week. Will the S&P 500 soon follow suit?
#2 The Bank of Japan has resorted to yet another round of money printing in a desperate attempt to try to bolster the faltering Japanese economy....
In Asia, the Bank of Japan has long been manufacturing money out of thin air. It has just announced an eighth round of money printing to prop up the ailing Japanese economy. The Bank of Japan is to purchase 10 trillion yen of bonds to add further liquidity into the financial system. Now it has 80 trillion yen of bonds in its portfolio, equivalent to 20 per cent of Japan's gross domestic product.
#3 In Spain, violent demonstrations over the state of the Spanish economy just outside the national Parliament building in Madrid on Tuesday evening made headlines all over the globe. You can view video of police brutally beating young Spanish protesters during those demonstrations right here.
#4 As unemployment hovers around the 25 percent mark, foraging through garbage bins for food has become so rampant in Spain that one city has actually started putting locks on supermarket garbage bins "as a public health precaution".
#5 Despite all of the money printing that the ECB has been doing, the yield on 10 year Spanish bonds has risen back up to about 6 percent again.
#6 The economic protests in Greece are getting completely and totally out of control. Just check out this description of the "Day of Rage" that took place in Greece earlier this week....
Police fired stun grenades and tear gas at protesters yesterday as tens of thousands poured into the streets of Athens as part of a nationwide strike to challenge a new round of austerity measures that are expected to cut wages, pensions and healthcare once again.Dozens of youths, some masking their faces with helmets and T-shirts, hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police who fired back in an effort to scatter the angry crowds around the parliament building. More than 50,000 people are believed to have participated in the mass walk-out in Athens alone.
#7 The unemployment rate in France has risen for 16 months in a row and is now the highest that it has been in over a decade.
#8 As I wrote about recently, the number of unemployed workers in Italy has increased by more than 37 percent over the past year.
#9 New orders for durable goods in the United States fell by a whopping 13.2 percent in August. That was the largest decline that we have seen since the middle of the last recession (January 2009).
#10 According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. GDP only grew at a 1.3 percent annual rate during the second quarter of 2012 as opposed to the 1.7 percent annual rate previously reported.
#11 The U.S. Postal Service is about to experience its second financial default in just the past two months....
The U.S. Postal Service will default this week on a $5.6 billion congressionally mandated obligation to pre-fund retiree health benefits, marking the second time in two months the cash-strapped agency has done this.
#12 It looks like General Motors is on a path that will lead to bankruptcy (again).
#13 According to a recent survey conducted by State Street Global Advisors, 71 percent of "investors in a survey of 300 around the world, including the largest pension funds, asset managers and private banks, fear an imminent Lehman-like event."
#14 According to a recent survey of American CEOs by Business Roundtable, the number of CEOs that plan to eliminate jobs has risen significantly from earlier this year....
The CEOs’ decline in confidence comes alongside a worsening employment outlook. Thirty-four percent of the 138 CEOs surveyed said in this quarter’s survey that they expected their companies to cut jobs in the next six months, compared to just 20 percent in the second quarter. Likewise, only 29 percent say they expect employment to grow in the next half year, down from 36 percent last quarter.But the mainstream media in the United States would like us to believe that everything is getting better.
The mainstream media would like us to believe that QE3 is going to stimulate lots of new hiring all over America, and they are greatly celebrating the fact that the S&P 500 hit a five year high on Thursday.
Well, those on Wall Street should celebrate this monetary "sugar high" while they still can. Of course QE3 was going to cause stock prices to rise in the short-term, but the reality of the matter is that QE3 is not going to do a thing to stop the financial markets from crashing when the time comes for them to crash.
Economies tend to flourish in a stable, predictable environment. When you start recklessly printing money, it may help your economic numbers in the short-term, but it disrupts the stability of the system.
And once you have created a tremendous amount of instability, it is really, really hard to convince people that you can create stability once again.
When it comes to economics, confidence is one of the most important ingredients. If people lose confidence in the system, it almost does not matter what else you do.
As I wrote about the other day, quantitative easing worked for the Weimar Republic for a little while, but in the end it resulted in total disaster.
It will also end in total disaster for us.
All over the globe financial authorities are playing all sorts of games in an attempt to keep the system functioning smoothly. But these games are going to steadily undermine confidence in the system, and that is going to prove to be absolutely deadly.
Take advantage of this period of relative stability while you still can, because when it is gone it is not coming back.
The Economic Collapse
Lieberman explains: “I don’t believe these were just hackers. I believe this was done by Iran and the Qods force, which has its own developing cyber-attack capacity. And I believe it was in response to the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions.”
The US government is planting the propaganda seed that according to “highly classified” documents provided by the Join Chiefs of Staff’s Intelligence Directorate confirm that Iranian hackers are committing cyber-attacks against US financial institutions.
This report assures that US mega-banks are a “valid target” of the Iranian “cyber army”. However, the attackers used a known forum that is utilized by the CIA-controlled Anonymous to issue threats and brag about their successes.
The timing of the newly formed “digital al-Qaeda” and their expressed anger over the US-produced anti-Muslim film are questionable considering how the US and Israeli government are setting the stage for a justified war with Iran. This fake hacker group is threatening other countries controlled by the Zionist regime, such as France, Germany and Britain. According to the false flag group: “The army was recently formed and we have started to work as a team after we used to work individually. The hacking operations are of course a response to the offence against the prophet, peace and blessing be upon him.”
Radware, a security firm, analyzed the attacks and concluded that the alleged Iranian nameless, faceless cyber army accused to attacking BoA and JPMorgan Chase did not conduct the attack.
This week, Wells Fargo & Co. upped their cybersecurity measures after being attacked by a nameless, faceless group calling themselves Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-din Al Qassam. Wells Fargo announced in a formal statement: “We apologize to customers who may be experiencing intermittent access issues to wellsfargo.com and online banking. We are working to quickly resolve this issue.”
Customer complaints included difficulty logging-in as well as pages not loading properly.
Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-din Al Qassam claimed that their attack was retaliatory for the anti-Muslim film produced by the US government.
According to House Representative Mike Rogers, the anti-Muslim film was released to cover the US government’s involvement in the bombing and death of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens at the hand of the CIA-sponsored al-Qaeda.
The film in question is actually a 14 minute trailer written, produced and directed by Sam Bacile, a.k.a. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula who is an FBI informant , an Israeli citizen and the pasty used by the Zionist regime in order to facilitate a manufactured revolt of fake Islamic tension in the Middle East.
Just as the false flag bomb threats called in by anonymous members of al-Qaeda earlier this month, this banking threat has the hall marks of a state-sponsored false flag to unnerve the American public, mask a planned implosion of the US economy through the ultimate theft of the banking cartels: the money deposited into private checking accounts by banking customers.
On August 9th the banks were given the legal authority to steal money from their customer’s private accounts just as Jon Corzine had with MF Global with the ruling on Sentinel Management Group.
Based on the ruling, regulatory systems such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SPIC) will not insure customer funds, investments, depositors and retirees who hold accounts in banks. In fact, the FDIC has announced that beginning in January 2013, they will stop insuring all deposits. Of the estimated $1.6 trillion in deposits, and a measured 85-90% in the hands of the mega-banks, large depositors are expected to close their accounts due to the lack of security.
The money in deposits will be funneled through the US Treasury for short-term securities. It is expected that the US Treasury will offer negative interest rates and this combination will surely cause a run on the banks that will put Spain and Greece to shame.
Per request of the Federal Reserve Bank, in 2010 the mega-banks filed contingency plans wherein the US government could not assist them. Called resolution plans, they describe how to liquidate banking assets without causing further damage to a failing financial system. By selling “non-core assets” without upsetting shareholders while protecting the monetary system, taxpayers and creditors is the work of the mega-banks who have contributed solely to the destruction of the global financial markets.
In the event of insolvency, duress or bankruptcy, the banks could use customer secured funds to assist them in repaying debts and loans. Currently Bank of America (BoA) has sold off portions of their domestic assets to secure capitol while Citigroup has followed suit.
By adhering to initiatives provided by the Financial Stability Board, these mega-banks will, when they enact their resolution plans, coordinate with international banking institutions and regulators rather than simply implode.
While preparing for financial collapse, the technocrats on Wall Street are also acquiring firearms, ammunition and control over private mercenary corporations like DynCorp and ‘Blackwater” as authorized by the Department of Defense (DoD) directive 3025.18.
Recently, the former mortgage broker of JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley revealed that due to their involvement in the mortgage-backed securities and derivatives fraud, they are selling off their non-core assets. This means that Morgan Stanley is becoming insolvent.
The recent false flag attacks on our banks falls in line with the scenario that has been coming into view for quite some time. In America, just announcing a banking holiday would cause absolute chaos and there may not be enough armed forces within our US borders to handle the rioting in the streets. However, the banking cartels must implode the US economy in order to gain the sovereign debt – as they are currently doing in Spain and Greece.
Meanwhile, there is a Zionist plot to attack Iran over false claims of procurement of nuclear weapons that do not exist. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been decrying this lie since 1992. Twenty years later, it appears that the Zionist-controlled Israeli government may just have their war with Iran along with the “unwavering support” of the US government.
Framing Iran for the American banking system’s computer failure kills two birds with one stone. Not only would the banking cartels be able to shut down all banking computers (and simultaneously syphon the remaining money in their customer’s accounts) but also use this fake cyber-attack to engage the American public against Iran and justify their highly anticipated military strike.
By blaming Iran, the technocrats could initiate the shutdown of all domestic banking computer systems in order to “purge” the virus and reconfigure their systems. However this would be a false flag meant to pacify the public to avert mass panic. While the general public would fall for the cover story, the banking cartels would simply electronically transfer all customer funds from private checking accounts out to off-shore banks where they could not be touched and cover their tracks.
The American public, being told that Iran was to blame might not riot in the streets as we have seen in European countries of late. There would be total support for the war with Iran if this scheme could be pulled off. The technocrats could not only bankrupt America but also simultaneously stave off a social display and breakdown of society because the Iranians would be to blame.
The plan is perfect. All we have to do is not be fooled and use the recent riots in Spain as a barometer as to how we can take this country back from the Zionists and the banking cartels.
Occupy Corporatism
“That’s what they are about. We are now entering the end game in what has been a 50 year political project. This is all going to come to a very dramatic head over the course of the next two years....
“The end game for them is to effectively abolish the nation states of Europe, to completely abolish any concept of national democracy, and to vest all power, all the attributes we associate with normal countries, that is all to be vested in this new European political class.
That imperial ambition has been there from the start, but up until now it has been hidden. I have to say that as far as most of Europe is concerned, I am quite pessimistic. Despite the fact that we have these democratic rebellions taking place in the North, in so much of Europe the current status quo has the whip hand and is in control. For most of Europe they will continue with this insane project, but there are countries that will free themselves from it.
The United Kingdom is in a good position, the Czech Republic may well have the will and the courage to stop it. Finland may well have the will and the courage to stop it, but I think most of the rest of it is going to carry on down this course of absolute stupidity.”
Farage also added: “We are storing up these huge problems for our children and grandchildren. They are going to have to pick up the bill at some point in time, and we’re making it dramatically worse with every single year that goes by.
The hope, and I’m going to talk about the United Kingdom, I think that this new treaty that is being proposed is just so extreme that the British people are absolutely revolted by the whole idea. The moment the British people get an opportunity in a referendum to break free of this thing has actually gotten closer. So for Britain, I think there is a happy note for the last couple of weeks, but I do fear for much of the rest of Europe.”
Farage, who has been remarkably accurate in his predictions regarding gold, had this to say: “We have had quite a good bounce up (in gold) after that shakeout. Right now I would rather be long than short, but I think the markets just need to digest these giant political moves that we’ve seen on the global stage. Just for the moment, the real fears about the banking system have receded, falsely of course.
So I don’t see gold going anywhere fast at this moment in time. But you’ve got to stay long of it because ultimately these problems of debt, these problems of money printing, and this huge problem overhanging much of our banking system, none of it has gone away. The markets are not focused on it at the moment, but they will be again before too long.”
King World News
The film explores the historical mysteries and rumours of a Nazi secret base in Antarctica, the 1947 flying saucer attack on Admiral Byrd's ill-fated 'Operation Highjump' expedition and the occult origins of Third Reich anti-gravity engines, flying discs and ancient Atlantean technologies viewed through the lens of perhaps the three most mysterious twentieth century German organisations of all: the 'Thule Society, 'Vril Society' and the 'Ahnenerbe'
One of the core themes of the film is the alleged existence of 'Base 211', the legendary underground Nazi base in the Antarctica. Drawing upon the pre-war Nazi interest in Antarctica and the creation of 'New Swabia'; the testimony of German U-Boat submarine commanders and the alleged disappearance of thousands of Nazi scientists and engineers at the end of the war, personnel that cannot be accounted for by the Vatican and Odessa 'rat lines' or American 'Operation Paperclip' activities. In addition, the film analyses the actual geo-physical possibilities of an underground base in Antarctica.
The other core theme is the alleged existence of a Nazi flying saucer program and the many evidential strands that this area generates. From the supposed channeling of extraterrestrial engineering schematics by members of the German occult group 'Thule Society' in the early part of the twentieth century to the 'implosion engine' of Viktor Schauberger and its possible appropriation by the Third Reich.
Bringing us to the the latter part of the twentieth century the documentary illustrates the many sightings of unknown crafts around the Antartic region and the theoretical basis for polar wormholes as entrance and exit points for visiting extraterrestrial spaceships and the possible involvement of HAARP, as well as asking why nearly all American Antarctic bases seem to be populated by agents of the National Security Agency and CIA.
Like the study of any phenomena and/or events that exist at the edges of consensus reality, occupy imaginal realms and are subject to historical revisionism; the interface of myth and reality is a shifting mosaic of fact, speculation, disinformation and fantasy, or to use the phrase of head CIA counter-intelligence spook, James Jesus Angleton, we have entered a "wilderness of mirrors".
RMN
Red Ice Radio
Two-thirds of Guinea's total foreign debt is being eliminated because it has qualified for the IMF and World Bank program for heavily indebted poor countries, according to a government statement.
The decision to support $2.1 billion in debt relief for Guinea was later announced by the IMF and the World Bank following a meeting of their administrative council Wednesday.
"This will allow Guinea to free up substantial resources," said Ansoumane Camara, an economist and consultant in Conakry who said the money could be redirected toward improving health and educational programs.
Guinea's finances were left in ruins after nearly a quarter-century of rule by Lansana Conte, who pillaged state coffers to make his family fabulously wealthy before his death in 2008, according to economists.
In 2010, the country held its first democratic election but the political reforms have not translated into immediate improvements for the lives of most Guineans, who remain deeply impoverished. About 75 percent of the country's 10 million people live below the poverty line, according to the United Nations.
Fatou Bonte Bangoura, who sells smoked fish at a port in Guinea's capital, said Wednesday's announcement would mean little for Guineans who are struggling to support their families.
"Our children need to eat, they need to be taken care of, they need to go to school," she lamented. Guinea's debt elimination won't result in individual families receiving money. "It doesn't feed me," she says.
President Alpha Conde called Wednesday's announcement "the first step on the path to economic recovery."
"It gives us the opportunity to make a historic new start," he said while visiting a women's business cooperative. "We will now redouble our efforts, and no one will be left by the wayside."
abc news
During the #S25 (Sept/25/2012) Madrid protest, thousands (possibly 10,000+) gathered to protest outside the Parliament building demanding the resignation of the Spanish government. Police began baton rushing the crowd while agent provocateurs began inciting violence. Soon after police started randomly beating people and all hell broke loose. Shortly after they began firing rubber bullets into the crowds.
This video shows clips of riot police indiscriminately beating teenage boys and girls simply trying to walk away from the thugs.
If earlier time travel was considered science fiction, now it suddenly turned into the favorite pet project of theoretical physicists. Renowned physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology once said in one of his lectures:
“Once upon a time, time travel was the exclusive prerogative of writers. Serious scientists were shunning it like the plague, even when they were writing novels under a pseudonym or were secretly reading them. The times have changed! Now in serious scientific journals you can find a scientific analysis of time travel, authored by outstanding theoretical physicists. Why this change? Physics simply understood that the nature of time is too important to give it to the mercy of writers.”
Today, there are many different schemes of devices designed for time travel. The main one is the Large Hadron Collider. It was launched in the fall of 2008. This is the most powerful particle accelerator in history located on the border of Switzerland and France. In its 27-kilometer ring scientists are trying to collide beams of protons accelerated to nearly light speed. As expected, this device will provide new information about particles and forces acting in space, as well as will reproduce conditions that existed immediately after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe.
After launching the collider, people were scared of the giant black hole capable of swallowing the Earth. Yet, scientists quickly calmed the population saying that in case of a collision of particles in the collider, the holes that may appear would be microscopic, or so large that they can be used as a handy tool for time travel.
This sensational proposal was made by two doctors of physical and mathematical sciences, Professors of Institute of Mathematics named after Steklov, Irina Arefyeva and Igor Volovich.
“Modern principles of theoretical mathematical physics allow the possibility of time travel,” explains Volovich, a member of RAS. “One of the admissible models of working time machine is the so-called wormhole, that is, a space-time tunnel leading to another time or space. And the probability of formation of a wormhole in the LHC is comparable to the probability of occurrence of the black hole itself, which can occur when particles collide with high energy. As explained by the physics, wormhole is a tunnel connecting different parts of space and time. Entrance to the tunnel may be the size of a star, a planet, a house and even a speck of dust, depending on a purpose of the tunnel use. After all, there is a difference between sending a photon or a group of tourists. You can get to another galaxy, or another universe. And you can also get into in the past. In terms of the physical properties, the entrance to the wormhole is very similar to the entrance to the black hole. The difference is that you can come back.
Since the LHC is designed, figuratively speaking, to create a part of space on Earth, then it can be used to obtain dark energy. This is also an important detail of creating the miracle machine. Another necessary condition for making the machine work is to distort space and time so it closes up in a ring. And the LHC is quite capable of that.
“This phenomenon in physics is called “closed time-like curve,” explains Professor Arefyeva. “It allows, at least theoretically, returning to the past.”
“Is it possible to have a paradox described by Bradbury, when a traveler caught in the past accidentally steps on a butterfly, which results in coming to power of a different president in his time? “
“We expected such issues,” says professor Volovich. “We came to this conclusion: time travel may change the course of history, but not very significantly.”
To make time machine the reality, the scientists stress the need for the LHC to reach at least the design capacity (now it is working at half capacity) and stop breaking down.
“So far, our biggest home is that the LHC will demonstrate the existence of wormhole. If some of the collision energy in the collider disappears, this can be explained by the creation of particles that pierce time through wormholes.”
Research and Development Center of the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), promised that the LHC will start working as expected in September. Then it becomes clear whether Russian physicists were right in their solution of the most intriguing problem of mankind.
Pravda
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has tried to answer the question: did a massive comet explode over Canada 12,900 years ago, wiping out both beast and man in North America and propelling the Earth back into an Ice age?
That’s a question that has been hotly debated by scientists since 2007, with the Topper archaeological site, located on the Savannah River in western Allendale County, South Carolina, right in the middle of the comet impact controversy. The new study provides further evidence that it may not be such a far-fetched notion.
In 2007, archaeologists led by Dr Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found spherules of metals and nano-sized diamonds in a layer of sediment dating 12,900 years ago at 10 of 12 archaeological sites. The mix of particles is thought to be the result of an extraterrestrial object, such as a comet or meteorite, exploding in the Earth’s atmosphere. Among the sites examined was the Topper, one of the most pristine sites in the United States for research on Clovis, one of the earliest ancient peoples.
“This independent study is yet another example of how the Topper site with its various interdisciplinary studies has connected ancient human archaeology with significant studies of the Pleistocene,” said Dr Albert Goodyear, an archaeologist with University of South Carolina and co-author on the new study. “It’s both exciting and gratifying.”
Younger-Dryas is what scientists refer to as the period of extreme cooling that began around 12,900 years ago and lasted 1,300 years. While that brief Ice age has been well-documented – occurring during a period of progressive solar warming after the last Ice age – the reasons for it have long remained unclear.
Dr Firestone’s team presented a provocative theory: that a major impact event – perhaps a comet – was the catalyst. His copious sampling and detailed analysis of sediments at a layer in the earth dated to 12,900 years ago, also called the Younger-Dryas Boundary (YDB), provided evidence of micro-particles, such as iron, silica, iridium and nano-diamonds. The particles are believed to be consistent with a massive impact that could have killed off the Clovis people and the large North American animals of the day. Thirty-six species, including the mastodon, mammoth and saber-toothed tiger, went extinct.
Dr Malcolm LeCompte, a research associate professor at Elizabeth City State University and lead author of the new study, began independent study in 2008 using and further refining Dr Firestone’s sampling and sorting methods at two sites common to the three studies: Blackwater Draw in New Mexico and Topper. He also took samples at Paw Paw Cove in Maryland.
At each site he found the same microscopic spherules, which are the diameter of a human hair and distinct in appearance. He describes their look as tiny black ball bearings with a marred surface pattern that resulted from being crystalized in a molten state and then rapidly cooled. The investigation also confirmed that the spherules were not of cosmic origin but were formed from earth materials due to an extreme impact.
“What we had at Topper and nowhere else were pieces of manufacturing debris from stone tool making by the Clovis people. Topper was an active and ancient quarry at the time,” Dr LeCompte said. “Al Goodyear was instrumental in our approach to getting samples at Topper.”
Dr Goodyear showed Dr LeCompte where the Clovis level was in order to accurately guide his sampling of sediments for the Younger Dryas Boundary layer. He advised him to sample around Clovis artifacts and then to carefully lift them to test the sediment directly underneath.
“If debris was raining down from the atmosphere, the artifacts should have acted as a shield preventing spherules from accumulating in the layer underneath. It turns out it really worked!” Dr Goodyear said. “There were up to 30 times more spherules at and just above the Clovis surface than beneath the artifacts.”
Dr LeCompte said the finding is “critical and what makes the paper and study so exciting. The other sites didn’t have artifacts because they weren’t tool-making quarries like Topper.”
“While the comet hypothesis and its possible impact on Clovis people isn’t resolved,” Dr Goodyear said. “This independent study lends greater credibility to the claim that a major impact event happened at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,900 years ago.”
“The so-called extra-terrestrial impact hypothesis adds to the mystery of what happened at the YDB with its sudden and unexplained reversion to an ice age climate, the rapid and seemingly simultaneous loss of many Pleistocene animals, such as mammoths and mastodons, as well as the demise of what archaeologists call the Clovis culture,” Dr Goodyear said. “There’s always more to learn about the past, and Topper continues to function as a portal to these fascinating mysteries.”
Sci-News
 |
| An artistic expression of how a large impact might have looked (Carsten Egestal Thuesen / GEUS) |
That’s a question that has been hotly debated by scientists since 2007, with the Topper archaeological site, located on the Savannah River in western Allendale County, South Carolina, right in the middle of the comet impact controversy. The new study provides further evidence that it may not be such a far-fetched notion.
In 2007, archaeologists led by Dr Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found spherules of metals and nano-sized diamonds in a layer of sediment dating 12,900 years ago at 10 of 12 archaeological sites. The mix of particles is thought to be the result of an extraterrestrial object, such as a comet or meteorite, exploding in the Earth’s atmosphere. Among the sites examined was the Topper, one of the most pristine sites in the United States for research on Clovis, one of the earliest ancient peoples.
“This independent study is yet another example of how the Topper site with its various interdisciplinary studies has connected ancient human archaeology with significant studies of the Pleistocene,” said Dr Albert Goodyear, an archaeologist with University of South Carolina and co-author on the new study. “It’s both exciting and gratifying.”
Younger-Dryas is what scientists refer to as the period of extreme cooling that began around 12,900 years ago and lasted 1,300 years. While that brief Ice age has been well-documented – occurring during a period of progressive solar warming after the last Ice age – the reasons for it have long remained unclear.
Dr Firestone’s team presented a provocative theory: that a major impact event – perhaps a comet – was the catalyst. His copious sampling and detailed analysis of sediments at a layer in the earth dated to 12,900 years ago, also called the Younger-Dryas Boundary (YDB), provided evidence of micro-particles, such as iron, silica, iridium and nano-diamonds. The particles are believed to be consistent with a massive impact that could have killed off the Clovis people and the large North American animals of the day. Thirty-six species, including the mastodon, mammoth and saber-toothed tiger, went extinct.
Dr Malcolm LeCompte, a research associate professor at Elizabeth City State University and lead author of the new study, began independent study in 2008 using and further refining Dr Firestone’s sampling and sorting methods at two sites common to the three studies: Blackwater Draw in New Mexico and Topper. He also took samples at Paw Paw Cove in Maryland.
At each site he found the same microscopic spherules, which are the diameter of a human hair and distinct in appearance. He describes their look as tiny black ball bearings with a marred surface pattern that resulted from being crystalized in a molten state and then rapidly cooled. The investigation also confirmed that the spherules were not of cosmic origin but were formed from earth materials due to an extreme impact.
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| Left: Dr Tariq Ghaffar of the Public Broadcasting System’s Time Team America excavating pedestals capped by debitage at the Topper archeological site (Albert Goodyear / Meg Galliard). Right: spherules picked from the YDB layer at the Topper site (Topper), the Blackwater Draw site (BWD-D and BWD-D/C), and the Paw Paw Cove site (PPC) (Malcolm A. LeCompte et al) |
“What we had at Topper and nowhere else were pieces of manufacturing debris from stone tool making by the Clovis people. Topper was an active and ancient quarry at the time,” Dr LeCompte said. “Al Goodyear was instrumental in our approach to getting samples at Topper.”
Dr Goodyear showed Dr LeCompte where the Clovis level was in order to accurately guide his sampling of sediments for the Younger Dryas Boundary layer. He advised him to sample around Clovis artifacts and then to carefully lift them to test the sediment directly underneath.
“If debris was raining down from the atmosphere, the artifacts should have acted as a shield preventing spherules from accumulating in the layer underneath. It turns out it really worked!” Dr Goodyear said. “There were up to 30 times more spherules at and just above the Clovis surface than beneath the artifacts.”
Dr LeCompte said the finding is “critical and what makes the paper and study so exciting. The other sites didn’t have artifacts because they weren’t tool-making quarries like Topper.”
“While the comet hypothesis and its possible impact on Clovis people isn’t resolved,” Dr Goodyear said. “This independent study lends greater credibility to the claim that a major impact event happened at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,900 years ago.”
“The so-called extra-terrestrial impact hypothesis adds to the mystery of what happened at the YDB with its sudden and unexplained reversion to an ice age climate, the rapid and seemingly simultaneous loss of many Pleistocene animals, such as mammoths and mastodons, as well as the demise of what archaeologists call the Clovis culture,” Dr Goodyear said. “There’s always more to learn about the past, and Topper continues to function as a portal to these fascinating mysteries.”
Sci-News
"I'm firmly convinced there's an agency, and there is an effort to suppress," Halt told an audience of 200 people Saturday night at the Smithsonian-affiliated National Atomic Testing Museum.
Two former Air Force officers who were part of the infamous Project Blue Book -- the military's official UFO investigation in the 1950s and '60s -- and a former investigator with Britain's Ministry of Defense were among the panel of speakers for a program entitled "Military UFOs: Secrets Revealed."
Halt, pictured below, was the deputy base commander of the RAF Bentwaters military base in England and one of numerous eyewitnesses to several UFO-related events at Rendlesham Forest in December 1980. He believes the observed UFOs were either extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin.
"I've heard many people say that it's time for the government to appoint an agency to investigate," Halt said. "Folks, there is an agency, a very close-held, compartmentalized agency that's been investigating this for years, and there's a very active role played by many of our intelligence agencies that probably don't even know the details of what happens once they collect the data and forward it. It's kind of scary, isn't it?
"In the last couple of years, the British have released a ton of information, but has anybody ever seen what their conclusions were or heard anything about Bentwaters officially? When the documents were released, the timeframe when I was involved in the incident is missing -- it's gone missing. Nothing else is missing," he said.
Halt added that he's never been harassed over the reports he made about the Bentwaters UFO incidents.
"Probably for a couple of good reasons. Number one, my rank and some of the jobs I've held, but also very early on, I sat down and made a very detailed tape and made several copies of everything I know about it and they're secluded away. Maybe I'm paranoid. I don't know, but I think it was time well spent when I made the tapes."
While the lecture panel members didn't always see eye-to-eye on the details of specific UFO cases, one common thread ran through them."We share a couple of very important things: We've all been dedicated to serving our country and been very serious about it," said museum CEO and executive director Allan Palmer, who had a distinguished career as a decorated jet fighter pilot for both the Air Force and Navy.
"These are not flaky people, who've all held very responsible positions with high-level security clearances. They're not the kind of people who tend to imagine things or go off on a wild tangent on something. They're very professional, very business-like," Palmer told The Huffington Post.
Making a rare public appearance was retired Air Force Col. Bill Coleman, the former chief spokesman for Project Blue Book between 1961 and 1963.
The controversial study ended in 1969, concluding that there was nothing about UFOs which represented "technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge."
Coleman, at left, recounted his own riveting encounter with a UFO while he piloted a B-25 bomber in 1955. The unknown circular object descended from an estimated height of 20,000 feet, heading to the ground, when Coleman attempted to pursue it."We were moving at maximum continuous power for the B-25, about 300 miles an hour, and we got right down to the treetops and I closed in on it very rapidly. I said I was going to overtake it -- 'Hang on and put your seat belts on' -- and I made a hard 90-degree bank to try and pull up alongside of [the UFO] and it wasn't there.
"I zoomed up about 1,500 feet, and then I could see the object right on the deck over a freshly plowed field moving at a pretty good speed, and it [was trailing] two vortexes." When Coleman dove behind the trees to try and "head him off at the pass," the UFO was gone. He said it was a typically reported flying saucer.
Coleman concluded his part of the lecture by offering a possible reason why ETs may be hesitant to visit Earth:
"If an alien were to land here, our common cold could kill him. His common cold could wipe out the population of planet Earth. If they're smart enough to build a vehicle that could travel light-years of time, they'd be smart enough to know that our diseases could wipe out people."
During the time that Coleman was the Project Blue Book spokesman, the director of the Air Force study was Col. Bob Friend. He disagreed with the Air Force's negative conclusions about UFOs in 1969.
"My primary explanation for these things is that, yes, they're real, and I think it would be much better if the government or some other agency was to take on these things and to pursue the scientific aspects of it," Friend said.
At Saturday's lecture, Friend, at right, offered an olive branch to the many people who claim to have seen UFOs but have been reluctant to report them out of fear of not being taken seriously."UFO sightings are real, and you will not be ridiculed by any honest organization that investigates it. Just come forward, quote your case and allow people to investigate what they can to make some determination about what it is that you've seen. In the future, just remember that we're on your side."
Nick Pope, the civilian member of the UFO panel, acknowledged that many in the audience came to the lecture anticipating the revelation of mind-blowing UFO evidence.
"While I apologize to those people who might be expecting or hoping for a 'spaceship in a hangar' smoking gun, what you are getting is the real deal: an insight from people who have looked at this mysterious and infuriating subject for the government," said Pope, a former UFO investigator for the UK Ministry of Defense.
"The UFO subject is a field which does have its fair share of crackpots and charlatans and cultists. What you have this evening in a field like that is a panel of people who indisputably and genuinely have done this for the government and the military."
Pope recounted how the UK's former official committee, known as the Flying Saucer Working Party, concluded in 1951 that UFOs were just misidentifications, hoaxes and delusions, and that no further time or effort should be wasted on the subject.
"Unfortunately for them, in 1952, there was a wave of sightings throughout the UK, where most of the witnesses were Royal Air Force pilots, some of whom chased these things, and many radar operatives tracked them," Pope said.
As the Ministry of Defense continued investigating UFOs, Pope noted, they kept a close watch on the UFO "community." "We anonymously subscribed to their magazines: Subscription, please send to John Smith, P.O. Box 007, London -- that was us. And I even covertly slipped into the back of UFO conferences."
Pope concluded by saying that the Ministry of Defense always had one thing on its mind about UFOs: "Whatever the nonsense you see about this subject sometimes in the field, we never lost sight of the fact that, in all of these hundreds of thousands of sightings, the believers only had to be right once, and everything changes."
Watch this 1958 program of reporter Mike Wallace interviewing Marine Maj. Donald Keyhoe about UFOs. (Story continues below)
Another UFO lecture panelist, retired Army Col. John Alexander, was a former military insider who convened a special group in the 1980s called the Advanced Theoretical Physics Group, whose members were culled from the military services and the aerospace and intelligence communities. They concluded that while there had been numerous cases of credible UFO encounters, the group couldn't find any evidence of any actual government cover-up.
Alexander cited a variety of intriguing UFO cases involving pilots and told the audience that UFOs are "real and is a global phenomenon -- not something that just happens in the U.S.
"We need to make it permissible for scientists to discuss and research these topics. ... There are no simple answers, and not only do we not have the answers, we're not at the point of asking the right questions yet, and that's what we need to do."
The lecture included a spirited question-and-answer session in which the audience engaged the panel on a variety of UFO-related topics, trying to draw out more detailed revelations.
While no ET body or piece of alien spaceship was brought forward and presented to the audience, those who attended the presentation seemed to appreciate the participants' candor.
Still, the audience probably left with more questions than answers.
Huffingtonpost
read more
The United States of America Corporation (as opposed to the Republic of the United States), based in the Vatican-like independent city state of Washington D.C., has its fiscal year end on September 30th. This criminal corporation has been constantly at war over the past 60 years if not the past several hundred years. It needs to be bankrupted once and for all and many of us are trying to do just this. The 13 inbred families that own this corporation have been trying desperately to avoid bankruptcy by starting World War 3.
However, even though they retain a rump of brain-washed slaves in Europe and North America, they have lost their ability to fool the world’s governments, militaries and intelligence agencies. Soon even the brain-dead TV slaves will awaken.
The recent troubles between China and Japan have provided us with a unique peek at how world elite power games work at the highest level. China’s new leader, Xi Xinping, vanished from public view for a couple of weeks after making a speech at a top communist party academy. During that speech…
… Xi denounced his predecessor, Hu Jintao, as being too soft on the Japanese because he had a Japanese mother, according to high level Chinese sources. He cited as his example Hu’s stance towards the disputed tiny Islands known as the Senkaku or Daiyu Islands. After the speech, angry Hu loyalists kidnapped Xi and beat him up, warning him not to mess up what was supposed to be a peaceful transfer of power.
As soon as Xi was released he ran to the military commission and convinced them to side with him. As a result Xi has now seized de facto power in China. To show he would be tougher on Japan than Hu, he began stirring up trouble with the Islands claiming the recent Japanese government “purchase” of the islands was an unforgiveable insult.
Japanese military intelligence explain that the deal they reached with Hu was that the government would “buy” the islands to prevent right-wing hot-heads from staging provocations there. Hu said that as long as the Japanese government did not send any people or boats to the islands and left them uninhabited, they would look the other way, according to Japanese sources.
After Xi Xinping started making trouble over the islands, two separate Chinese sources linked to the politburo told the White Dragon Society that Xi was being given his orders to provoke Japan by senior French Freemason by the name of Jean Daniel Cohen, of the Hoche group. The anti-Japanese demonstrators in China were being paid 1200 yuan a day for their trouble-making services. The anti-Chinese pseudo-rightists in Japan have are almost certainly receiving their money from the same sources, who are in the business of starting conflicts in order to manipulate the sheeple. Cohen has still not returned this writer’s call for comment.
It is also interesting to note that hotheads on both sides have been fed stories of an easy victory. Young members of the Japan Self-Defense forces, led on by Moonie-affiliated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have been pushing for an attack on China. They cite Japanese war-games that predict the Japanese could wipe out the Chinese navy within 15 minutes. No doubt the Chinese have been fed similar stories of an easy victory. It would be good to remind them that before World War I each side expected victory within months. The true fact is that in a major war everybody loses except the arms merchants and the ruling bloodline banking families who get to put governments into their debt.
These same French Freemasons, together with their allies in the P2 fascist lodge have been trying to stir up trouble between Muslims and Christians in the Middle-East and Europe. The release of an anti-Muslim video and cartoons in French newspapers featuring a naked Mohammed were released to coincide with mayhem by paid Muslim radical hoodlums. MI5 is now warning of a major false flag terrorist event in Europe, possible Marseille, aimed at provoking further strife.
Fortunately, nobody is being fooled; even the Israeli Mossad is finally catching on.
The ruling bloodline families are still hoping to provoke a decade of religious strife followed by the imposition of a new one-world religion controlled by them.
Meanwhile, a high level Italian aristocratic source (who claims to be intimate with people like the Pope, Queen Elizabeth and Nelson Mandela) reports signs of serious strife and change in the Vatican. According to her the Pope claims to be helpless to stop factional wars between Opus Dei and the Jesuits. She says the pope has survived several attempts to poison him and has been reduced to sneaking out of the Vatican in disguise in order to try to find out what is really going on.
She also claims the Jesuits have their own laboratories, satellites and observatories in New Mexico where they claim to communicate with aliens. Several senior P2 lodge members have also long claimed to have been in contact with aliens for thousands of years. They say they just called them things like angels, demons, genies etc. The P2 claim many of them originate from a “black sun” or black hole, that actually generates life.
Whatever the truth of those claims may be, the aristocratic source says the Jesuits have shut down their elite school in Rome and gone underground. This claim should be easily verifiable and we would like to ask readers in Rome to check it out and see if it is true.
The White Dragon Society and their Asian allies, for their part, are now negotiating with the US agencies, the Pentagon, the committee of 300 and the Italian P2 lodge to come up with a peaceful solution to the unfolding financial crisis.
They have suggested to the P2 lodge and the Vatican that the Romans should return to the Jews the original Menorah they took from the temple in Judea as a gesture of peace. The Jews could then rebuild their temple on the mount so long as they agree to leave the mosque there alone and also build a church, a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple and a place for alternative belief structures. This symbolic action could be a way of announcing an end, once and for all, to religious based wars.
The White Dragon Society is also suggesting, as this newsletter often repeats, setting up a South African style truth and reconciliation committee so that us humans could learn our true history, forgive past sins and move on.
The WDS has further proposed setting up, in harmony with existing financial and power structures, a new meritocratically staffed international economic planning agency. Such an agency would, together with other independent groups such as national governments, existing charities etc. then carry out a massive campaign to end poverty, stop environmental destruction and set humanity off on a path of exponential growth into the future. The alternative is war.
http://AnInconvenientTooth.org
Susanne Posel, of http://occupycorporatism.com, tells Pete she believes a false flag assassination attempt is in the works for President Obama that will change the course of the Nation and indeed the world.
As we get closer to the election we are seeing signs of the President being more and more vulnerable to such an attempt as depicted by the mainstream media. Be on the watch for a major false flag before the election.
She also explains that QE3 means the FED will soon be buying up 40 billion dollars a month in real property and will soon own enough of America to implement agenda 21.
David Lory Vanderbeek, Constitutional candidate for Nevada, comes on the show to tell Pete's listeners about his new initiative to support the real constitutional movement and what you can do to help.
David and Pete cover real events happening in the world with their usual passionate disdain for the globalist plans to take over the world.
http://ThePeteSantilliShow.com
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| Combination image of two pictures featuring rats with tumors after they were fed a diet of genetically modified (GM) maize produced by US chemical giant Monsanto (AFP Photo / Criigen) |
The French government has asked its health and safety agency to assess the study and had also sent it to the European Union's food safety agency, Reuters reports.
"Based on the conclusion…, the government will ask the European authorities to take all necessary measures to protect human and animal health, measures that could go as far as an emergency suspension of imports of NK603 maize in the European Union," the French health, environment and farm ministries said in a joint statement.
Researchers from the University of Caen found that rats fed on a diet containing NK603 – a seed variety made tolerant to amounts of Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller – or given water mixed with the product, at levels permitted in the United States – died earlier than those on a standard diet.
The research conducted by Gilles-Eric Seralini and his colleagues, said the rats suffered mammary tumors, as well as severe liver and kidney damage. The study was published in the journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology and presented at a news conference in London.
Fifty percent of male and 70 percent of female rats died prematurely, compared with only 30 percent and 20 percent in the control group, said the researchers.
Monsanto spokesman, Thomas Helscher, said the company would review the study thoroughly but stated that other scientific studies had proved the biotech crops’ safety.
Some scientists however criticized the French researchers’ statistical methods and the use of a particular type of rat, saying the albino Sprague-Dawley strain of animal had a tendency to develop cancers.
But despite skepticism, the study draws attention to controversy surrounding genetically modified crops and the US biotech giant Monsanto.
Michael Antoniou, a molecular biologist at King’s College London – who acted as an adviser to Seralini's team – told reporters that the study stresses the “need to test all GMO crops in two-year lifelong studies”.
“I feel this data is strong enough to withdraw the marketing approval for this variety of GMO maize temporarily, until this study is followed up and repeated with larger number of animals to get the full statistical power that we want,” he said as quoted by Reuters.
Last Friday France said it will uphold a ban on genetically modified crops produced by the Monsanto. The move came as President Francois Hollande pushed his plan to put the environment back at the top of the international agenda.
In the wake of the publication, Jose Bove, vice-chairman of the European Parliament’s commission for agriculture, called for an immediate suspension of all EU cultivation and import authorizations of genetically modified crops.
“This study finally shows we are right and that it is urgent to quickly review all GMO evaluation processes,” he said following the announcement of the research.
While being widely used in the United States, GMO crops have been less popular among European consumers, due to concerns about its impact on people’s health and the environment.
In California, opponents of genetically engineered food are fighting to have it removed from the food supply. They are also pushing to pass Proposition 37, a law that would legally require genetically modified foods to be labeled as such. Monsanto stands opposed to such a proposal and has donated over $4.2 million to lobby against it.
Agriculturalists across America have previously tried to take the biotech giant to court over charges stemming from their lab-made corn GMOs. Over 2,000 farmers have petitioned the US government to more thoroughly investigate the impact that genetically modified corn crop from Monsanto will have on the country.
As RT reported before, Monsanto wants to plant a corn variant across America’s Midwest that will be resistant to a powerful pesticide produced with 2,4-D, the same compound crucial to the make-up of the notorious Vietnam War-era killer Agent Orange. If approved, the new corn will be able to thrive as farmers douse their fields in the chemical, killing off unwanted weeds in the process, while at the same time subjecting Americans to a pesticide linked to cancer risks.
RT
By John Robbins
Thrive is the name of a richly produced and controversial film that asks, and attempts to answer, some of the deepest questions about the nature of the human condition and what is thwarting our chances to prosper. Elaborately funded, with appealing imagery and beautiful music, it features interviews with many leading progressive voices. And yet ten of these leaders have taken the highly unusual step of signing a statement formally disassociating ourselves from the film.
Why have Amy Goodman, Deepak Chopra, Paul Hawken, Edgar Mitchell, Vandana Shiva, John Perkins, Elisabet Sahtouris, Duane Elgin and Adam Trombly, as well as yours truly, gone to the trouble of signing our names to this public statement?
“We are a group of people who were interviewed for and appear in the movie Thrive, and who hereby publicly disassociate ourselves from the film.
Thrive is a very different film from what we were led to expect when we agreed to be interviewed. We are dismayed that we were not given a chance to know its content until the time of its public release. We are equally dismayed that our participation is being used to give credibility to ideas and agendas that we see as dangerously misguided.
We stand by what each of us said when we were interviewed. But we have grave disagreements with some of the film’s content and feel the need to make this public statement to avoid the appearance that our presence in the film constitutes any kind of endorsement.”
I have joined the other signers of this statement, even though there are aspects of the film that I find beautiful and inspiring, and even though the makers of the film, Foster and Kimberly Gamble, are old friends.
In Thrive, the Gambles have attempted to address some of the crucial challenges of our times. I appreciate their idealism, their commitment, and their passion. And I agree with them about some things they state in the movie and on their website --- such as that the political system is depraved, the Federal Reserve has been used to consolidate economic power, fiat currency tends to produce a corrupt financial system that depends on ever increasing debt, the tax system is unfair, and enormously powerful economic interests often collude with one another to deceive and defraud the public. I stand with them as they promote the labeling of genetically engineered foods and in their desire to see our nation cease spending enormous sums on war. I appreciate that they support local and organic agriculture, their passion for credit unions and local banking, and their opposition to governmental invasion of privacy. They recommend many action steps that I support.
But I do not agree with some of the core conclusions they draw. Nor do the other signers of the statement of disassociation from Thrive. Duane Elgin, one of the signers, says: "Thrive is idealistic, naive, narrow, shallow, and focuses attention away from more productive areas of engagement."
At the very heart of the Thrive message is what it calls the Global Domination Agenda. This is the idea, as presented on the Thrive website in the words of former Congressman Larry McDonald:
“The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government... all under their control… Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”
Foster Gamble explains:
“A small group of families are actually controlling virtually every sector of human endeavor… Their agenda… (is) to take over the lives of all people across the entire planet… to collapse the economies throughout the European Union… to devalue the dollar to almost zero... and to create a one-world government, with them in charge.”
The Thrive movie and website also state that a small group of 300 or so people are developing and experimenting with plans to dramatically reduce the world’s human population, possibly to about 500 million people, to make us “easier to manage.”
Could this be true?
There is no doubt that staggering wealth and power is today concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of humanity. The combined net worth of the world's richest thousand or so people -- the planet's billionaires -- is almost twice that of the poorest 2.5 billion. I believe this disparity to be nothing less than an indictment of our civilization.
It is also certain that networks exist among the most powerful that enable a remarkably few people to shape the world's economy, to determine what is known and what is not, which views are accepted and which are not, and what priorities and policies will prevail. More than most of us realize, they decide whether we will live in war or peace and how our treasure will be spent. And they have proven to be eminently successful at enriching themselves, often at the expense of the common good. Exposing the global power elite is tremendously important work. And this, Thrive purports to do.
But the Thrive movie and website are filled with dark and unsubstantiated assertions about secret and profoundly malevolent conspiracies that distract us from the real work at hand. The conspiracy theories at the heart of Thrive are based on an ultimate division between "us" and "them." "We" are many and well-meaning but victimized. "They," on the other hand, are a tiny, greedy and inconceivably powerful few who are masterfully organized, who are purposefully causing massive disasters in order to cull the population, and who are deliberately destroying the world economy in order to achieve total world domination.
This way of thinking has an allure, for it distracts and absolves us from the troubling truth that the real source of the problem is in all of us, and in the economic systems we have collectively produced. If the ills of the world are the deliberate intentions of malevolent beings, then we don’t have to take responsibility for our problems because they are being done to us. Thinking this way may provide the momentary comfort of feeling exonerated, but it is ultimately disempowering, because it undermines our desire to be accountable for the way our own thoughts and actions help to create the environmental degradation and vast social inequity of the world in which we live. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart."
The Thrive film does not mention, or in some cases only hints at, many of the more extreme ideas that are prominent on the Thrive website, and which inform the Thrive worldview. The movie has lavish production values, and presents interviews with many leaders in the consciousness movement, all of which lend a beguiling aura of credibility. Foster Gamble himself comes across as soft, warm, and inquiring. Those who have only seen the film may not recognize the agenda and belief system that actually underlie Thrive.
For example, Foster Gamble has said that the Japanese earthquake that caused the tsunami that wreaked havoc on the nuclear plants in Fukushima was deliberately created. He has said that those seeking absolute world domination wanted to punish the Japanese for not acceding to their wishes. He has said that "they" have an electromagnetic array project in Alaska called HAARP that enables “them” to create earthquakes and tsunamis at will, anywhere on earth. The Thrive website also implies that the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was intentionally created by HAARP. These are extraordinary claims to make without some very credible substantiation. Yet Foster makes them with an utter lack of evidence. Although he has been a friend of mine for years, I must regrettably say that in my judgment, these are the assertions of someone who has lost grounding in reality.
Thrive also advances the idea that vaccinations have been purposefully created by the global elite to decimate the population. There is no doubt that vaccinations have troubling side effects. Some of them may be far more toxic than we know. But there’s a difference between a thoughtful dialogue about the dangers of a medical technology and the belief that vaccines are actually an expression of profoundly sinister intent.
It was a vaccine that enabled the elimination of smallpox, a scourge which was responsible for approximately 500 million human deaths in the 20th century. Thrive promotes the idea that the U.N. and world treaties are the work of evil-doers intent on total world domination. These institutions are far from perfect, but it was only through the concerted efforts of the global health community and the World Health Organization that smallpox, perhaps the killer of more humans than any other disease in world history, was eradicated. There is greed and deceit in the pharmaceutical industry that I find deplorable, but that does not condemn all vaccines.
There are many things that are terribly wrong in our world. All living creatures are poisoned and compromised by surging levels of human-made toxins that spew into our environment, relatively unchecked. We are experiencing unprecedented levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity and childhood diabetes. Our financial institutions and to a large extent our political system have been hijacked by greedy and at times even sociopathic individuals who seem to feel no sense of responsibility to the well being of the whole. The world’s military industrial complex is spending more money than ever on guns, bombs, and the machinery of unfathomable destructive power, while governments learn little about how to make peace and hundreds of millions of people go hungry.
But holding these tragedies as the intentional acts of a tiny group of families seeking not just extreme wealth but also total world domination via a global police state distracts us from the arduous work of confronting the true challenges before us.
For example, as an environmentalist I heed the monumental evidence that global warming may be one of the most serious threats faced by humanity and many of the other species on this planet. Those who have merely seen the movie would not know that Foster Gamble and the Thrive website strongly recommend a film (The Great Global Warming Swindle) which states that man-made global warming is a "lie" and "the biggest scam of modern times."
The Thrive website opens its climate change discussion with this question:
“How does the premise of man-made global warming relate to the banking elite’s effort to transcend national sovereignty, establish global governance and create a global tax to fund their dominance?”
The insinuation is that the idea of human-caused global warming is being fabricated as an excuse to create a global police state and a tax basis for tyranny. If this is true, just about every scientific expert in the world has been taken in by the hoax. A 2010 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent of scientific experts agree that it is…
“very likely that anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases have been responsible for the unequivocal warming of most of the Earth’s global temperature in the second half of the 20th century.”
It has been personally painful for me to witness friends of mine become caught up in seeing just about everything on earth as part of a vast demonic conspiracy. When I wrote Foster Gamble to voice my disappointment with many of the ideas in the film and website, he wrote back, encouraging me among other things to study the works of David Icke, Eustace Mullins, Stanley Monteith and G. Edward Griffin. These are among the people he repeatedly refers to in the movie as his “sources.”
I find this deeply disturbing. Here’s why…
David Icke, who has been called “one of the most extreme of all conspiracy theorists,” is not a small player in Thrive. In fact, he is featured more prominently in the movie than anyone other than Foster Gamble. An extended interview with him, intercut with supporting material, forms much of the middle section of the film.
Though this is not mentioned in Thrive, Icke is well-known for advocating utterly bizarre theories, including that the entire world is run by a secret group of reptilian humanoids who drink human blood and conduct satanic rituals. Forty-three U.S. Presidents, he says, have been such reptilian beings, and many of them, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have been part of global satanic pedophile rings that murder hundreds of thousands of children a year. I wish I was making this stuff up, but I’m not. This is what Icke teaches.
And I deeply regret to say that my old friend Foster Gamble seems to concur. As Foster wrote in a public forum:
“In our film, we do not go into his (Icke’s) research on reptilians, nor his immensely important investigations into global satanic pedophile rings, because it does not serve our film. That does not mean that revealing what is happening to hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable every year should not be exposed and stopped.”
Unfortunately, Icke’s war on common sense goes much further. He says that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was laid bare in a document titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This document is actually a notorious hoax, published in Russia around 1903. It supposedly presents a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world, and was a primary justification used by Adolph Hitler as he initiated the Holocaust. This fraudulent document was also used to justify the violent pogroms and massacres of the Jewish people in pre-Soviet Russia.
How anyone could take seriously a man who espouses such “information” is beyond me. But Thrive actually relies heavily on Icke’s “insights,” both in the movie and as a source of “data” for its website.
Another of Thrive’s primary sources, and another of the authors Foster Gamble told me I should read in order to better understand Thrive, is Eustace Mullins. I honestly find it difficult to convey the level of anti-semitism in Mullins’s books, without it seeming that I am exaggerating. So I will let Mullins’s own words speak for themselves:
“We must remember that there is no Jewish crime per se, since the existence of the Jewish parasite on the host is a crime against nature, because its existence imperils the health and life of the host...
This religious ceremony of drinking the blood of an innocent gentile child is basic to the Jew's entire concept of his existence as a parasite, living off the blood of the host...
The Jews do not want anyone to know what Nazism is. Nazism is simply this--a proposal that the German people rid themselves of the parasitic Jews. The gentile host dared to protest against the continued presence of the parasite, and attempted to throw it off.”
The title of one of Eustace Mullins’s books is: Hitler, An Appreciation. While Foster Gamble evidently believes that Mullins has shed valuable light on banking systems and other aspects of the “Global Domination Agenda,” I have no interest in looking to such individuals for insight into anything.
The Gambles state that they do not necessarily agree with all of the thoughts and beliefs of their sources, but rather that they have incorporated only those ideas they find useful and with which they agree. I’m sure the Gambles do not condone Mullins’ overt anti-semitism, but I find it disturbing that the thinking of these men has been used as the foundation for some of the key ideas presented in Thrive. While I do not believe the Gambles are themselves guilty of anti-semitism, I do believe they are naïve and gullible, and that in depending heavily on sources such as Icke and Mullins they have unwittingly allowed anti-semitism to become a subtext in their work.
Viewers of the movie may not realize that Gamble’s central thesis, that a handful of families control the world and plan to enslave humanity, mirrors an argument that Joseph Goebbels made in his notorious Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew: that a handful of banking families, many of them Jewish, run the world and seek global domination.
Two of the other sources that Foster Gamble recommended to me so that I might better understand Thrive are Stanley Monteith and G. Edward Griffin. Monteith, who happens to be a neighbor of mine, has long been involved with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, and professes that the environmental movement is nothing but a front for the effort to create a global police state. Both Monteith and Griffin have long been officers of the John Birch Society, a far-right political organization that first came to public attention when one of its founders proclaimed that Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t the genial war hero and popular President he seemed, but rather “a conscious, dedicated agent of the international communist conspiracy.” Griffin, who is prominently featured as an expert and “Pioneer” on the Thrive website, played a key role in the third party candidacy of George Wallace when the overtly racist and vehemently segregationist Alabama Governor sought the U.S. Presidency.
These are only a few of the ultra-right wing sources whose ideas and agendas pervade Thrive. Many Americans first learned of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises when Michele Bachman, seeking the Republican nomination for the Presidency, said she read his books at the beach. Cited frequently and admiringly on the Thrive website, von Mises’s brand of laissez-faire capitalism is hard-core. In his eyes, nearly all government intervention in the economy is strictly verboten, and taxes are a crime against freedom.
Buoyed by lush visual effects and lovely words, the Thrive film has been attractive to many who long for a more just and beautiful world, and who know how often we are deceived and exploited by the powers that shouldn’t be. “In times of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” But what is the revolution Thrive would bring? Foster Gamble says that Thrive is not political, but both the movie and website call for the end of taxation even for the rich. Thrive’s goal is a world in which public schools and all welfare programs, including social security, have been terminated. Instead of police, we have private security forces. As Foster Gamble puts it, “Private security works way better than the state.”
That may be true for the rich who can pay for it. But who, I might ask, would pay to protect low-income communities if all security was privatized?
Eventually there would be no government, and just about everything would be privately owned, including roads. “It’s clear that when you drive into a shopping center you are on a private road, and almost without exception it is in great shape,” explains the Thrive website.
I want to underscore that although I think the Gambles are promoting some dangerous ideas, I do not think either Foster or his wife Kimberly are sinister or malicious, which is why it has been a very painful process for me to write this critique. I have known them to be kind people who mean well, and I have long considered Kimberly in particular to be one of my closest friends. But I have found it necessary to speak out in this way, because some of the ideas at the heart of Thrive strike me as frightening and misguided, and they most certainly are not ones with which I want to be associated. I have spent decades exposing and seeking to undermine powerful industries whose ways of doing business are diametrically opposed to the public welfare. In my view, the deregulation of the economy, and the demolition of government programs that Thrive proposes, would take us even further in the direction of a winner-take-all economy in which wealth would concentrate even more in the hands of the financial elites.
As one of the signers, evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, writes:
“Without community, we do not exist, and community is about creating relationships of mutual benefit. It does not just happen with flowers and rainbows, and no taxes.”
Each of us who have signed the statement disassociating ourselves from Thrive have dedicated our lives to creating and conveying positive visions of how to create a truly thriving, just and sustainable way of life. We have been part of vast movements toward generating a human presence on this planet that is spiritually fulfilling, socially just, and environmentally responsible. We do not want to see our names, reputations, and influence used to fuel unsubstantiated claims or misguided policies. We want to see them used to strengthen individuals and communities, and to serve the ability each of us possesses to live with respect for ourselves, for one another, and for the truth of our interdependence.
As another of the signers, Paul Hawken, writes:
“The world is riven by people who are convinced they are right, while others are wrong. Dualism permeates political, economic, cultural and religious conflict. It is the true source of suffering and the despoliation of the world. This wound cannot be healed by the us/them divisions that inform Thrive. Evil most certainly exists, but the core of evil is ignorance, and it cannot be repelled by righteousness or by making others wrong. It is only through compassion that we can create true transformation.”
We do not deny the evil in the world. It is here and it is real. But there is also hope here, and it too is real.
It is hope that believes we can build trust, build community, and build a better world. Such hope is not the blind belief in something which has little possibility of ever materializing. It is the hope which remains open to miracles while investing the sweat and perseverance to lend the Universe a hand in creating those miracles. It is the hope that is borne from knowing that it is far too late, and our situation far too serious, to indulge in the luxuries of pessimism, paranoia, and finger-pointing.
The state of the world is perilous. But it is not too late to love, not too late to dream, and not too late to believe in ourselves and each other.
In the end, we are all in this together. Each step you take to lessen the amount of fear in yourself and the world brings us closer to a world reflective of the beauty that exists -- sometimes buried and other times apparent -- in each of us. Every act you take that increases the amount of trust and compassion in your relationships helps us move from a world created by privilege to a world created by community.
As the poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed. I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”
Thrivemovement
Thrive is the name of a richly produced and controversial film that asks, and attempts to answer, some of the deepest questions about the nature of the human condition and what is thwarting our chances to prosper. Elaborately funded, with appealing imagery and beautiful music, it features interviews with many leading progressive voices. And yet ten of these leaders have taken the highly unusual step of signing a statement formally disassociating ourselves from the film.Why have Amy Goodman, Deepak Chopra, Paul Hawken, Edgar Mitchell, Vandana Shiva, John Perkins, Elisabet Sahtouris, Duane Elgin and Adam Trombly, as well as yours truly, gone to the trouble of signing our names to this public statement?
“We are a group of people who were interviewed for and appear in the movie Thrive, and who hereby publicly disassociate ourselves from the film.
Thrive is a very different film from what we were led to expect when we agreed to be interviewed. We are dismayed that we were not given a chance to know its content until the time of its public release. We are equally dismayed that our participation is being used to give credibility to ideas and agendas that we see as dangerously misguided.
We stand by what each of us said when we were interviewed. But we have grave disagreements with some of the film’s content and feel the need to make this public statement to avoid the appearance that our presence in the film constitutes any kind of endorsement.”
I have joined the other signers of this statement, even though there are aspects of the film that I find beautiful and inspiring, and even though the makers of the film, Foster and Kimberly Gamble, are old friends.
In Thrive, the Gambles have attempted to address some of the crucial challenges of our times. I appreciate their idealism, their commitment, and their passion. And I agree with them about some things they state in the movie and on their website --- such as that the political system is depraved, the Federal Reserve has been used to consolidate economic power, fiat currency tends to produce a corrupt financial system that depends on ever increasing debt, the tax system is unfair, and enormously powerful economic interests often collude with one another to deceive and defraud the public. I stand with them as they promote the labeling of genetically engineered foods and in their desire to see our nation cease spending enormous sums on war. I appreciate that they support local and organic agriculture, their passion for credit unions and local banking, and their opposition to governmental invasion of privacy. They recommend many action steps that I support.
But I do not agree with some of the core conclusions they draw. Nor do the other signers of the statement of disassociation from Thrive. Duane Elgin, one of the signers, says: "Thrive is idealistic, naive, narrow, shallow, and focuses attention away from more productive areas of engagement."
At the very heart of the Thrive message is what it calls the Global Domination Agenda. This is the idea, as presented on the Thrive website in the words of former Congressman Larry McDonald:
“The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government... all under their control… Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.”
Foster Gamble explains:
“A small group of families are actually controlling virtually every sector of human endeavor… Their agenda… (is) to take over the lives of all people across the entire planet… to collapse the economies throughout the European Union… to devalue the dollar to almost zero... and to create a one-world government, with them in charge.”The Thrive movie and website also state that a small group of 300 or so people are developing and experimenting with plans to dramatically reduce the world’s human population, possibly to about 500 million people, to make us “easier to manage.”
Could this be true?
There is no doubt that staggering wealth and power is today concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of humanity. The combined net worth of the world's richest thousand or so people -- the planet's billionaires -- is almost twice that of the poorest 2.5 billion. I believe this disparity to be nothing less than an indictment of our civilization.
It is also certain that networks exist among the most powerful that enable a remarkably few people to shape the world's economy, to determine what is known and what is not, which views are accepted and which are not, and what priorities and policies will prevail. More than most of us realize, they decide whether we will live in war or peace and how our treasure will be spent. And they have proven to be eminently successful at enriching themselves, often at the expense of the common good. Exposing the global power elite is tremendously important work. And this, Thrive purports to do.
But the Thrive movie and website are filled with dark and unsubstantiated assertions about secret and profoundly malevolent conspiracies that distract us from the real work at hand. The conspiracy theories at the heart of Thrive are based on an ultimate division between "us" and "them." "We" are many and well-meaning but victimized. "They," on the other hand, are a tiny, greedy and inconceivably powerful few who are masterfully organized, who are purposefully causing massive disasters in order to cull the population, and who are deliberately destroying the world economy in order to achieve total world domination.
This way of thinking has an allure, for it distracts and absolves us from the troubling truth that the real source of the problem is in all of us, and in the economic systems we have collectively produced. If the ills of the world are the deliberate intentions of malevolent beings, then we don’t have to take responsibility for our problems because they are being done to us. Thinking this way may provide the momentary comfort of feeling exonerated, but it is ultimately disempowering, because it undermines our desire to be accountable for the way our own thoughts and actions help to create the environmental degradation and vast social inequity of the world in which we live. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart."The Thrive film does not mention, or in some cases only hints at, many of the more extreme ideas that are prominent on the Thrive website, and which inform the Thrive worldview. The movie has lavish production values, and presents interviews with many leaders in the consciousness movement, all of which lend a beguiling aura of credibility. Foster Gamble himself comes across as soft, warm, and inquiring. Those who have only seen the film may not recognize the agenda and belief system that actually underlie Thrive.
For example, Foster Gamble has said that the Japanese earthquake that caused the tsunami that wreaked havoc on the nuclear plants in Fukushima was deliberately created. He has said that those seeking absolute world domination wanted to punish the Japanese for not acceding to their wishes. He has said that "they" have an electromagnetic array project in Alaska called HAARP that enables “them” to create earthquakes and tsunamis at will, anywhere on earth. The Thrive website also implies that the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was intentionally created by HAARP. These are extraordinary claims to make without some very credible substantiation. Yet Foster makes them with an utter lack of evidence. Although he has been a friend of mine for years, I must regrettably say that in my judgment, these are the assertions of someone who has lost grounding in reality.
Thrive also advances the idea that vaccinations have been purposefully created by the global elite to decimate the population. There is no doubt that vaccinations have troubling side effects. Some of them may be far more toxic than we know. But there’s a difference between a thoughtful dialogue about the dangers of a medical technology and the belief that vaccines are actually an expression of profoundly sinister intent.
It was a vaccine that enabled the elimination of smallpox, a scourge which was responsible for approximately 500 million human deaths in the 20th century. Thrive promotes the idea that the U.N. and world treaties are the work of evil-doers intent on total world domination. These institutions are far from perfect, but it was only through the concerted efforts of the global health community and the World Health Organization that smallpox, perhaps the killer of more humans than any other disease in world history, was eradicated. There is greed and deceit in the pharmaceutical industry that I find deplorable, but that does not condemn all vaccines.There are many things that are terribly wrong in our world. All living creatures are poisoned and compromised by surging levels of human-made toxins that spew into our environment, relatively unchecked. We are experiencing unprecedented levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity and childhood diabetes. Our financial institutions and to a large extent our political system have been hijacked by greedy and at times even sociopathic individuals who seem to feel no sense of responsibility to the well being of the whole. The world’s military industrial complex is spending more money than ever on guns, bombs, and the machinery of unfathomable destructive power, while governments learn little about how to make peace and hundreds of millions of people go hungry.
But holding these tragedies as the intentional acts of a tiny group of families seeking not just extreme wealth but also total world domination via a global police state distracts us from the arduous work of confronting the true challenges before us.
For example, as an environmentalist I heed the monumental evidence that global warming may be one of the most serious threats faced by humanity and many of the other species on this planet. Those who have merely seen the movie would not know that Foster Gamble and the Thrive website strongly recommend a film (The Great Global Warming Swindle) which states that man-made global warming is a "lie" and "the biggest scam of modern times."
The Thrive website opens its climate change discussion with this question:
“How does the premise of man-made global warming relate to the banking elite’s effort to transcend national sovereignty, establish global governance and create a global tax to fund their dominance?”
The insinuation is that the idea of human-caused global warming is being fabricated as an excuse to create a global police state and a tax basis for tyranny. If this is true, just about every scientific expert in the world has been taken in by the hoax. A 2010 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent of scientific experts agree that it is…
“very likely that anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases have been responsible for the unequivocal warming of most of the Earth’s global temperature in the second half of the 20th century.”
It has been personally painful for me to witness friends of mine become caught up in seeing just about everything on earth as part of a vast demonic conspiracy. When I wrote Foster Gamble to voice my disappointment with many of the ideas in the film and website, he wrote back, encouraging me among other things to study the works of David Icke, Eustace Mullins, Stanley Monteith and G. Edward Griffin. These are among the people he repeatedly refers to in the movie as his “sources.”
I find this deeply disturbing. Here’s why…
David Icke, who has been called “one of the most extreme of all conspiracy theorists,” is not a small player in Thrive. In fact, he is featured more prominently in the movie than anyone other than Foster Gamble. An extended interview with him, intercut with supporting material, forms much of the middle section of the film.Though this is not mentioned in Thrive, Icke is well-known for advocating utterly bizarre theories, including that the entire world is run by a secret group of reptilian humanoids who drink human blood and conduct satanic rituals. Forty-three U.S. Presidents, he says, have been such reptilian beings, and many of them, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have been part of global satanic pedophile rings that murder hundreds of thousands of children a year. I wish I was making this stuff up, but I’m not. This is what Icke teaches.
And I deeply regret to say that my old friend Foster Gamble seems to concur. As Foster wrote in a public forum:
“In our film, we do not go into his (Icke’s) research on reptilians, nor his immensely important investigations into global satanic pedophile rings, because it does not serve our film. That does not mean that revealing what is happening to hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable every year should not be exposed and stopped.”
Unfortunately, Icke’s war on common sense goes much further. He says that the Global Elite's plan for world domination was laid bare in a document titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This document is actually a notorious hoax, published in Russia around 1903. It supposedly presents a plan by the Jewish people to take over the world, and was a primary justification used by Adolph Hitler as he initiated the Holocaust. This fraudulent document was also used to justify the violent pogroms and massacres of the Jewish people in pre-Soviet Russia.
How anyone could take seriously a man who espouses such “information” is beyond me. But Thrive actually relies heavily on Icke’s “insights,” both in the movie and as a source of “data” for its website.
Another of Thrive’s primary sources, and another of the authors Foster Gamble told me I should read in order to better understand Thrive, is Eustace Mullins. I honestly find it difficult to convey the level of anti-semitism in Mullins’s books, without it seeming that I am exaggerating. So I will let Mullins’s own words speak for themselves:
“We must remember that there is no Jewish crime per se, since the existence of the Jewish parasite on the host is a crime against nature, because its existence imperils the health and life of the host...
This religious ceremony of drinking the blood of an innocent gentile child is basic to the Jew's entire concept of his existence as a parasite, living off the blood of the host...
The Jews do not want anyone to know what Nazism is. Nazism is simply this--a proposal that the German people rid themselves of the parasitic Jews. The gentile host dared to protest against the continued presence of the parasite, and attempted to throw it off.”
The title of one of Eustace Mullins’s books is: Hitler, An Appreciation. While Foster Gamble evidently believes that Mullins has shed valuable light on banking systems and other aspects of the “Global Domination Agenda,” I have no interest in looking to such individuals for insight into anything.The Gambles state that they do not necessarily agree with all of the thoughts and beliefs of their sources, but rather that they have incorporated only those ideas they find useful and with which they agree. I’m sure the Gambles do not condone Mullins’ overt anti-semitism, but I find it disturbing that the thinking of these men has been used as the foundation for some of the key ideas presented in Thrive. While I do not believe the Gambles are themselves guilty of anti-semitism, I do believe they are naïve and gullible, and that in depending heavily on sources such as Icke and Mullins they have unwittingly allowed anti-semitism to become a subtext in their work.
Viewers of the movie may not realize that Gamble’s central thesis, that a handful of families control the world and plan to enslave humanity, mirrors an argument that Joseph Goebbels made in his notorious Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew: that a handful of banking families, many of them Jewish, run the world and seek global domination.
Two of the other sources that Foster Gamble recommended to me so that I might better understand Thrive are Stanley Monteith and G. Edward Griffin. Monteith, who happens to be a neighbor of mine, has long been involved with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, and professes that the environmental movement is nothing but a front for the effort to create a global police state. Both Monteith and Griffin have long been officers of the John Birch Society, a far-right political organization that first came to public attention when one of its founders proclaimed that Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t the genial war hero and popular President he seemed, but rather “a conscious, dedicated agent of the international communist conspiracy.” Griffin, who is prominently featured as an expert and “Pioneer” on the Thrive website, played a key role in the third party candidacy of George Wallace when the overtly racist and vehemently segregationist Alabama Governor sought the U.S. Presidency.
These are only a few of the ultra-right wing sources whose ideas and agendas pervade Thrive. Many Americans first learned of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises when Michele Bachman, seeking the Republican nomination for the Presidency, said she read his books at the beach. Cited frequently and admiringly on the Thrive website, von Mises’s brand of laissez-faire capitalism is hard-core. In his eyes, nearly all government intervention in the economy is strictly verboten, and taxes are a crime against freedom.
Buoyed by lush visual effects and lovely words, the Thrive film has been attractive to many who long for a more just and beautiful world, and who know how often we are deceived and exploited by the powers that shouldn’t be. “In times of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” But what is the revolution Thrive would bring? Foster Gamble says that Thrive is not political, but both the movie and website call for the end of taxation even for the rich. Thrive’s goal is a world in which public schools and all welfare programs, including social security, have been terminated. Instead of police, we have private security forces. As Foster Gamble puts it, “Private security works way better than the state.”
That may be true for the rich who can pay for it. But who, I might ask, would pay to protect low-income communities if all security was privatized?
Eventually there would be no government, and just about everything would be privately owned, including roads. “It’s clear that when you drive into a shopping center you are on a private road, and almost without exception it is in great shape,” explains the Thrive website.
I want to underscore that although I think the Gambles are promoting some dangerous ideas, I do not think either Foster or his wife Kimberly are sinister or malicious, which is why it has been a very painful process for me to write this critique. I have known them to be kind people who mean well, and I have long considered Kimberly in particular to be one of my closest friends. But I have found it necessary to speak out in this way, because some of the ideas at the heart of Thrive strike me as frightening and misguided, and they most certainly are not ones with which I want to be associated. I have spent decades exposing and seeking to undermine powerful industries whose ways of doing business are diametrically opposed to the public welfare. In my view, the deregulation of the economy, and the demolition of government programs that Thrive proposes, would take us even further in the direction of a winner-take-all economy in which wealth would concentrate even more in the hands of the financial elites.
As one of the signers, evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, writes:
“Without community, we do not exist, and community is about creating relationships of mutual benefit. It does not just happen with flowers and rainbows, and no taxes.”
Each of us who have signed the statement disassociating ourselves from Thrive have dedicated our lives to creating and conveying positive visions of how to create a truly thriving, just and sustainable way of life. We have been part of vast movements toward generating a human presence on this planet that is spiritually fulfilling, socially just, and environmentally responsible. We do not want to see our names, reputations, and influence used to fuel unsubstantiated claims or misguided policies. We want to see them used to strengthen individuals and communities, and to serve the ability each of us possesses to live with respect for ourselves, for one another, and for the truth of our interdependence.As another of the signers, Paul Hawken, writes:
“The world is riven by people who are convinced they are right, while others are wrong. Dualism permeates political, economic, cultural and religious conflict. It is the true source of suffering and the despoliation of the world. This wound cannot be healed by the us/them divisions that inform Thrive. Evil most certainly exists, but the core of evil is ignorance, and it cannot be repelled by righteousness or by making others wrong. It is only through compassion that we can create true transformation.”
We do not deny the evil in the world. It is here and it is real. But there is also hope here, and it too is real.
It is hope that believes we can build trust, build community, and build a better world. Such hope is not the blind belief in something which has little possibility of ever materializing. It is the hope which remains open to miracles while investing the sweat and perseverance to lend the Universe a hand in creating those miracles. It is the hope that is borne from knowing that it is far too late, and our situation far too serious, to indulge in the luxuries of pessimism, paranoia, and finger-pointing.
The state of the world is perilous. But it is not too late to love, not too late to dream, and not too late to believe in ourselves and each other.
In the end, we are all in this together. Each step you take to lessen the amount of fear in yourself and the world brings us closer to a world reflective of the beauty that exists -- sometimes buried and other times apparent -- in each of us. Every act you take that increases the amount of trust and compassion in your relationships helps us move from a world created by privilege to a world created by community.
As the poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed. I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”
Thrivemovement
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