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Joe Trento discusses our history with Iran-from the Mossadeq Era to the recent twitter campaign, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s foreign policy strategy and objectives in the region, and he talks about Israel, Saudi Arabia’s backing of Pakistan’s pursuit of the nuclear bomb & AQ Khan, the terrible state of US Media, the prospect of ‘real change,’ and more.
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Joe Trento has spent more than 40 years as an investigative journalist, working with both print and broadcast outlets and writing extensively. Before joining the National Security News Service in 1991, Trento worked for CNN’s Special Assignment Unit, The Wilmington News Journal, and prominent journalist Jack Anderson. Trento has received numerous reporting awards and is the author of seven books, including America and The Islamic Bomb, Unsafe At Any Altitude, Prelude To Terror, The Secret History of the CIA, Widows, Prescription for Disaster: From the Glory of Apollo to the Betrayal of the Shuttle, and The National Aeronautics and Space Administration*For further reading visit Joe Trento’s site: http://dcbureau.org/

by Sibel Edmonds

http://123realchange.blogspot.com/

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This week we said goodbye to Teddy Kennedy, the last of a breed.

There are other progressives in the government of the United States, and even some in the Senate with voting records further left of Kennedy’s. But none are as iconic as Teddy. With high admiration and sincere apologies to the likes of Bernie Sanders or Russ Feingold, Lloyd Bentsen would have been the first to admit, I’m sure, that he knew Teddy Kennedy, and these good folks are no Teddy Kennedy.

Does the death of the last great liberal voice in America also coincide with the end of an era? Happy Barack, the nice kid now playing president with his buddies in the big house that’s white, would probably like to think so, as he continues to extend the remaining parts of his hand that haven’t already been chewed off by Republicans, hoping to create a kinder, gentler bipartisan America, where we all just get along.

If that was ever going to happen, Obama would have all his fingers still intact, and his job approval rating would not be rapidly sinking under fifty percent. Not a single Republican in the United States Congress voted for Bill Clinton’s economic package in 1993, and since then they’ve essentially never looked back.

But Teddy’s death gives me cause to consider a bigger question I think about a fair bit, namely: Who won the war of ideology? There has been a struggle inside Western democracies for arguably two centuries now, certainly intensifying in the nineteenth century with the rise of industrialization, and then again in the mid-twentieth century with battles over the welfare state, and yet again in our time with America’s culture wars.

Do we have a winner? Have we achieved the ‘end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama once claimed? Is there any reason to believe that the struggles won’t continue into the future? These are all difficult questions, and my sense is that the answers are fairly nuanced, requiring some analytical complexity to do them any justice.

To begin with, I’ve always thought that it’s a mistake to think of ideology as existing along a single dimension. Consider, for example, Paul Wolfowitz (sorry), who was about as hawkish on foreign policy questions as one could imagine, but has claimed (perhaps disingenuously) to be a liberal on domestic issues. Or, consider the proverbial so-called “fiscal conservative”. Why don’t we simply call this person a plain old vanilla conservative? Because he or she is liberal or even libertarian on social issues like abortion, drug use, or gay rights, while conservative on economic issues. What these folks and many others like them have in common is an absence of ideological conformity across issue domains, thus strongly suggesting that there is not one but several ideological dimensions, over which individuals may mix or match in forging their own particular basket of political commitments.

By my count, there are four main dimensions – or separate sets of meanings – of ideology, though one could surely aggregate the pieces in other ways. The first, and oldest of these, concerns the question of change – how much one favors rearranging society, generally speaking, and how rapidly. The second is the economic dimension, which basically boils down to the question of how much government intervention in the economy – in the form of redistribution policies, government ownership of industry, regulation and taxation – is considered appropriate. On the social dimension, the same question applies with respect to government intercession on questions of personal and social behavior, such as religious practice, sexual orientation, drug use, reproductive matters, euthanasia issues, and so on. Finally, there is the security dimension, which has both a domestic aspect with respect to crime, and a foreign aspect with respect to relations with other countries and sundry international actors.

Each of these dimensions of ideology has moved to its own separate rhythms, and in some cases even in opposing directions at given moments in time. American society assimilated substantially large volumes of political, social and cultural change beginning in 1950s, peaking in the late 1960s, and ending in exhaustion by the middle of the 1970s, leaving in its wake powerful reactionary attitudes seeking to re-invert a society that appeared to disoriented conservatives to have been turned on its head. This regressive element seems, if anything, even more powerful today. While its ranks are probably shrinking, the sheer hostility and volume of the dispossessed – what might be called the Limbaugh cohort – still makes it a force to be reckoned with, as the current healthcare nightmare masquerading as a policy debate well attests.

Economic liberalism peaked at roughly the same time, albeit for mostly different reasons. By the end of the 1970s both American hegemony abroad and the economic growth of the middle class and its prosperity at home were beginning a long period of erosion, though the signs were not always clear at the time. Among other things, this set of events produced a new hostility to taxation and anti-poverty programs that was sometimes ripe for regressive politicians to exploit, and was at other times created by their exploits. This greed-encouraging focus was always the core of Reaganism-Bushism, and remains so to this day. Bolted on to it was a set of predations masked as principles – such as economic globalization, union busting and regulatory slashing – that were never anywhere near as popular with the public, but which could be attached to the more basic tax and spending expressions of naked greed by a set of clever marketing gunslingers hired by elites for the sole purpose of reconfiguring the distribution of wealth in the country. To, that is, launch what regressives accuse anyone else of doing who catches them in the act of actually practicing it themselves: engaging in class warfare.

Along the social dimension of ideology, however, constant attempts at blocking or rolling back the equality agenda have largely failed, and the liberal project of opening society further and wider to guarantee the participation and dignity of all has not only been among the greatest successes of the ideology, but continues its march up through and including this very day. America is hugely imperfect in this regard, and countless lives have been lost and tears shed just to bring us where we are now. But anyone who doubts the efficacy of this agenda should compare the place and especially the societal claim of minority groups today with fifty years ago, let alone in the late eighteenth century. Only a generation or two ago, African Americans could barely vote, women were at home, barefoot and pregnant, and gays were never even spoken of in polite company, let alone legally protected from discrimination. There is, of course, much to be done, and the continual set of regressive rearguard harassment actions continually to be countered, but the very moral standing of these questions makes clear the achievement realized. Whatever they may say in private, and however they may act with respect to legislative particulars, no national political figure – no matter how paleolithic in disposition – argues that it is morally correct for these groups to be subjected to discrimination. That’s a big leap from where we were not so long ago.

Attitudes along the security dimension are to some degree subject to real events on the ground, such as actual foreign threats or the rise in violent crime at home. That said, history is littered with cases of politicians exploiting and often fabricating just such threats in order to advance their careers. Unfortunately, it works all too well, and such shamelessly nefarious techniques are not going away anytime soon. And yet one has the sense that regressives have jumped the shark – in the currently all too ubiquitous parlance – by advocating one too many failed and bogus wars. Even public support for the US presence in Afghanistan – supposedly the good war of the last decade – shows signs of weakening substantially. Regressives still love to play the national security card, but increasingly they get less and less traction from doing so, especially when the wolves baying at the front doors of middle American homes are economic in nature, rather than national security oriented. Americans may even be showing signs these days of fatigue in the fame we’ve achieved as the undisputed incarceration capital of the world, if only because the costs are strangling the country.

Altogether, we find ourselves today in a moment of the Two Hundred Years’ War of ideology which might best be described as a period of precarious stasis. The stability aspect seems to derive as much from exhaustion on both sides as from any sort of broad consensus or victory. With the exception – astonishingly enough – of George W. Bush’s prescription drug legislation (which, truth be told, was actually pharmaceutical corporation enrichment legislation) and the quiet revolution integrating gays into full status in the society, American liberalism has achieved little since hitting its high-water mark in the early 1970s.

Meanwhile, the regressive movement of the last three decades has had fantastic success in accomplishing what it really came to Washington for – the upward redistribution of wealth from the middle class to elites. At the same time, however, this achievement has come with some serious costs attached. The Bush administration was the absolute apotheosis of regressive politics. It was also so disastrous that the right is forced today to virtually pretend it never existed. All that was needed during the last five years was a moderately bold set of progressive politicians to condemn regressive ideology in overtly ideological terms in order for it to have had to face the same fate it did in the 1930s, namely, a total repudiation of its policy failures, ironically driven almost entirely by the success of its politics.

But no such cohort is on the horizon, largely because the Democratic Party has become coopted by the same corporate forces that own the Republicans. A Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama will surely put on a kinder and gentler face than a Bush or a Cheney, but Wall Street could nevertheless hardly ask for more from what was once the party of the people. The most astounding thing about the moment we live in is that progressive politics could beg all day and almost not possibly be dealt a more winning hand to play, and yet no one is picking up the cards. The utter and absolutely complete vacuousness of the right, on the other hand, is revealed daily in the desperation of its current daily diet of inanities, which are shocking precisely for how inane they truly are. Obama’s a “socialist”. No, wait, he’s a “fascist”. He’s a socialist and a fascist! He wasn’t born in the United States. His healthcare plan (which the hapless president, ever deferential to Congress and the GOP, didn’t realize he even had) will kill grandmas and Sarah Palin’s children. And so on. What will be left for next week? He’s a cannibal? He’s going to sell his daughters into a Muslim slavery ring in exchange for Gaddafi allowing him the privilege of apologizing for America’s sins, live in Tripoli?

The only two things more astonishing than watching this nonsense being purveyed are that so many people believe it, and that so many people get furiously worked up about it. I had a seeming out-of-body experience this last week, observing Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma at work, talking about healthcare at a town hall meeting. Some poor old lady stood up and utterly fell apart into hysterical sobbing pieces, asking the senator how she was going to be able to care for her sick husband now that their healthcare plan was refusing to do so. Though I’m sure this sort of thing happens thousands of times a day in households across America, we’re not often exposed to it, and it was one of the most heart-wrenching and searing displays one might be unlucky enough to witness. Coburn’s response was astonishing. To begin with, he displayed all the compassion and emotion of a slab of solid granite. Then he vaguely volunteered how his office would try to be of assistance, followed by a lecture to the crowd on the false hope of reliance on government. Both he and his appreciative audience seemed completely unaware of the profoundly incongruous irony entailed in the senator – as big a part of government as anybody short of the president could be – offering to help this lady out while simultaneously warning people of the perils of reliance on government service to the public.

As if that weren’t sick enough, Coburn then lectured the audience on the importance of communities pitching in together to solve problems, rather than turning to government for solutions. I felt the need to be violent well up within me, along with the need to be violently ill. Let’s assume that this family’s medical expenses run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a very reasonable assumption because it happens so commonly. How the hell is this poor elderly woman going to get that kind of money scrounging around in the neighborhood? By holding bake sales? Tea parties? Passing the hat at church? And even if she could actually pull it off – while simultaneously caring for her husband ‘round the clock, of course – who would pay for the next person in the area to get sick, and the next one after that, once the cookie jars had all been emptied? And how much would Good Neighbor Coburn himself like to contribute to the woes of this member of his community? Does he have $10,000 lying around with which he’d like to back his regressive principles? How bout $100,000 of his personal money for this neighbor, and every other one who finds themselves in similar circumstances? What a sickening display, literally and figuratively. This is what so-called conservatism looks like today.

Meanwhile, there went Teddy during the same week. I can’t say I ever felt particularly moved by the Kennedy brothers. Perhaps it was their sense of entitlement and their opportunistic tendencies, their ability to be vicious to get what they wanted, or my general aversion to celebrity worship in America and the vicarious living it seems to engender among millions who would do so much better to live their own lives rather than living through others’. And yet, nevertheless, the contrast between this man, who had everything and yet devoted so much of his personal and professional life to assisting those who had less than nothing, versus the heartless grinding destruction of ordinary Americans in pursuit of the further enrichment of the already wealthy, so vividly on display courtesy of Tom Coburn, says everything about the American political condition in late 2009.

And thus too the stasis in the ideological wars at the moment. The right is utterly bereft of ideas for governing, in no small part because it never really had any other than those that were used as covering fire for the looting of the country. Liberals, on the other hand, maintain a stock of public policy responses that have weathered well across the decades and remain every bit as relevant today as they were in the middle of the twentieth century, yet these folks utterly lack the courage of their convictions, even on the rare occasions when they actually have convictions. In short, the right has all the passion now and none of the ideas, while the left has all of the ideas and none of the passion.

But the current stasis feels all too reminiscent of that found in trench warfare. The levels of violence remain high, though the battle lines don’t move much over time. More importantly, though, when there ultimately is a surge, it breaks through powerfully, and the war is over in a rout. This is why the stalemate of the moment feels precarious. American society is under considerable pressures – economic, environmental, demographic and more – and these pressures are unlikely to relent anytime soon. Meanwhile, the utterly inept and thoroughly conservative Obama administration is every day more ruthlessly savaged from the right as some sort of alien predatory pretender to the throne, even while it continues to serve the interests of economic elites in a fashion that could make George Bush proud of the achievements of his third term.

Obama could never have hoped to have sustained the support of regressives in America (good god, surely he isn’t that deluded?), who suffer today from a mental illness that is broad and deep, such that perhaps 100 million Americans are more or less completely impervious to persuasion based on fact and logic. Centrists, on the other hand, seem basically interested in voting for whoever will lower their taxes the most. Since Obama is spending gobs of money – in part to save the country from the plunge over the cliff brought on by the Bush administration – the president is rapidly losing their support. And, because he has literally not done a single thing to satisfy those in his progressive base, while continuing to pursue policies indistinguishable from the hated Bush administration, Obama is rapidly losing popularity on the left as well. Moreover, if there are any personality characteristics that are most discernible at this stage of his presidency, they seem to be, first, always choosing the least bold course of action, and second, always empowering everyone else and then negotiating with them, including those trying to destroy him.

The upshot is that a year from now United States could find itself in a scenario reminiscent of 1994 – in which a failing presidency resulted in the loss of control of both houses of Congress to the Republicans – only worse. Obama doesn’t even have the luxury of turning to the right, as Bill Clinton did, because he’s already there, and because those policies don’t solve the problems increasingly bedeviling the American public, however much temporary satisfaction they might bring to those who crave a good foreign war, the occasional execution of a condemned inmate, or a bit of racist violence, in order to feel better about themselves. Meanwhile, regressives are having a field day trashing yet another Democratic president who refuses to stand for anything, even if that just means fighting back to preserve his own presidency.

Who could have imagined, six months ago, that the ideology of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would be poised for a comeback, perhaps in an even more toxic form than what we suffered through these last eight years? But that is, indeed, precisely where we find ourselves. The danger in America for some sort of radical ideology to take control of the government and society – yes, I guess I’m inevitably talking about fascism here, despite trying to avoid that overused term – seems all too potent to me now, even in this moment of stasis. Americans are already angry, and they’re all too often shockingly stupid about where they direct that anger. Imagine the sort of sentiments that might be coursing through the veins of the body politic twelve or twenty-four months from now, should the economy continue its downhill slide or sustain only a tepid jobless recovery, should the right maintain its relentless drumbeat of vitriolic and escalating deceit, and should the so-called left of Reid, Pelosi and Obama continue to offer in response its porridge-bland menu of non-solutions, pulled from the fridge and served piping cool at room temperature.

That’s a lot of ‘ifs’, but do any of them seem far-fetched? I think not.

My gut tells me that, however ludicrously inflamed is the current political discourse, relatively speaking, it’s probably pretty quiet.

Relative, that is, to what comes next.

Quiet, that is, as in the quiet before the storm.

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Who_Won_The_Ideology_Wars.html

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PFLP calls on Italian and Swedish supporters of Palestine to reject Zionist attempts at intimidation
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -PFLP

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called upon friends and supporters of Palestine in Italy, Sweden, and throughout Europe and the world to reject Zionist attempts to trample freedom of speech and the press and suppress the movement in support of Palestine. Responding to the statements of Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini, a PFLP spokesperson said that it is urgent that European countries and people internationally isolate Israel and fully investigate its abuses. The PFLP spokesperson harshly condemned the intervention of Frattini, who said that "there are limits to freedom of the press" and has pressed for expanded and increased economic and political relations between Israel and Europe…
continua / continued [57515] [ 01-sep-2009 04:45 ECT ]

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Video – Cindy Sheehan: America needs to wake up
RussiaToday

In an exclusive interview with RT’s Anastasia Churkina, anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan talks about the need of accountability, an end to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American psyche ignoring the truth…
continua / continued [57514] [ 01-sep-2009 00:34 ECT ]

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US Hummers Enter Pakistan, Undercover American Soldiers Swarm Islamabad
AHMED QURAISHI

Undercover armed Americans are swarming the Pakistani capital in the latest sign that the elected government has allowed Washington to dispatch what is believed to be a large number of American special operations agents and contractual security guards, including the infamous Blackwater private militia. This comes at a time when whistleblowers within the government and the military are reporting the arrival of a large number of US Marines in Pakistan. Some reports put the figure at 1,000 US soldiers, much of whom are thought to be arriving as part of the massive expansion of the US Embassy and four consulates across the country. While the US embassy continues to deny this, new buildings are under construction to house security teams. The expanded US embassy is supposed to become the largest US embassy in the world. Above is an exclusive picture taken by a source at the entrance of Port Qasim near Karachi, showing US Hummers being transported out of the facility…
continua / continued [57513] [ 01-sep-2009 00:23 ECT ]

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Raw Video: Fuel Trucks Attacked at Afghan Border
AP

Suspected Taliban militants set fire to 18 container trucks carrying supplies for Western forces in neighboring Afghanistan in the Pakistani border town of Chaman, police said on Monday. Some 300 trucks were parked near the border crossing in the country’s southwest, as the border had been closed by Pakistani authorities since Friday in a row with their Afghan counterparts over the checking of trucks coming from landlocked Afghanistan…
continua / continued [57512] [ 01-sep-2009 00:16 ECT ]

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Taliban Ready if Afghan Government Fails, Analyst Warns
Reuters

Afghanistan’s government must fight corruption and quickly deliver services to Afghans, because Taliban militants are filling gaps and winning support to their cause, a top counter-insurgency expert said on Monday. The Taliban were already running courts, hospitals and even an ombudsman in parallel to the government, making a real difference to local people, said David Kilcullen, a senior adviser to U.S. commander General Stanley McChrystal… Kilcullen, an Australian military officer and adviser to past U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said Karzai’s government was failing to maintain a rapport with local people, who were now turning to the Taliban for court judgments, education and even fair taxation assessment…
continua / continued [57511] [ 01-sep-2009 00:14 ECT ]

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Israeli Army official: “Hebron man killed in cold blood, soldiers were never charged”
Saed Bannoura

An Israeli military official confirmed the story of the family of Yasser Tmeizy, from the southern West Bank City of Hebron, who said that Israel soldiers killed their son in cold blood, but Israel never filed charges against them. Odi Ben Moha, an Israeli military commander in charge of the Hebron district, stated that it is a scandal that no charges were filed against the soldiers especially since the crime took place on January 13 this year…
continua / continued [57510] [ 31-aug-2009 23:49 ECT ]

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Iraq’s Mosul under tight curfew
By Jareer Mohammed

Major parts of the Province of Nineveh of which the city of Mosul is the capital are under tight curfew for fear of rebel attacks. The authorities have intensified security measures, setting up road blocks and checkpoints at the main entries to Mosul and placing villages and towns under curfew. The measures come in the aftermath of massive bomb attacks in Baghdad targeting heavily guarded government ministries and causing huge damage and hundreds of casualties….
continua / continued [57509] [ 31-aug-2009 23:23 ECT ]

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Not one penny has reached Gaza
Omar Karmi

It has been six months since the international community pledged nearly US$5 billion (Dh18bn) in aid to the Palestinian people, chiefly for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip after Israel’s devastating offensive there this year. None of this aid has reached Gaza and no reconstruction has started… Of the billions of dollars pledged for reconstruction by the international community, UNRWA noted in a press release on August 17, "not one penny" has reached Gaza, and reconstruction has proven to be a "mirage". The humanitarian situation in Gaza, according to the UN, "remains precarious". That such serious humanitarian disasters as a cholera epidemic did not emerge in Gaza, said William Corcoran, the president of the American Near East Refugee Aid agency, (Anera) is partly down to "dumb luck"…
continua / continued [57508] [ 31-aug-2009 23:05 ECT ]

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Jewish settlers plan massive construction
Vita Bekker

The accelerating pace of Jewish settlement expansion in East Jerusalem this year may spur violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the city and cripple new efforts by the Obama administration to kick-start peace talks, an Israeli anti-settlement group warned yesterday. The "massive" construction being planned by Jewish settlers within Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem is likely to prompt clashes, said Yudith Oppenheimer, the executive director of Ir Amim, a Jerusalem-based advocacy group…
continua / continued [57507] [ 31-aug-2009 23:00 ECT ]

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US Audacity of Hope Falters
By Ramzy Baroud

The US has decided to be ‘flexible’ regarding its once touted call for a total Israeli freeze on the expansion of its occupied territories’ settlements, all illegal under international law. A senior official spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity on August 27. "It was more important that the scope of a settlement freeze was acceptable to the Israelis and the Palestinians than to the United States," Reuters reported, citing the senior official. This means that peace negotiations can resume while Israeli bulldozers are carving up Palestinian land, demolishing homes and cutting down trees…
continua / continued [57505] [ 31-aug-2009 22:49 ECT ]

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Two British soldiers killed in Afghanistan
Mark Tran

The soldiers from the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, were killed in an explosion while on foot patrol north of Lashkar Gah district, southern Helmand, this morning. Two more British soldiers have died in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence said today, bringing the total number of deaths of UK personnel since operations began in 2001 to 210. The soldiers from the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, were killed in an explosion while on foot patrol north of Lashkar Gah district, southern Helmand, this morning…
continua / continued [57504] [ 31-aug-2009 22:25 ECT ]

www.uruknet.info :: informazione dall’Iraq occupato :: news from occupied Iraq :: [ - it - -6]

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Maya…Children of the Sun

Lost Temples: Mayan Pyramids of Chichen Itza

Signs of the End!

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(IHC) Institute for Human Continuity is not real a.k.a. (Bullshit)

The 2012 film by Sony pictures is conducting a bold media campaign to stir up controversy about the film.

IHC Institute for Human Continuity is a totally false marketing scheme. Watch the videos of Woody Harrelson as Charlie Frost, see how ridiculous this marketing campaign is for yourself. it may sound unlikely that anyone would believe this Institute for Human Continuity rubish, but i am sure many people will. Watching Sony getting away with this is makes me truly feel it is the end of the world! what crooks!

Their audacity is amusing, but what they are doing verges on pure evil. Profiting off terrorizing people!

They are trying to scare the wits out of people with a FALSE organization that seems credible and backed by huge $. I can’t believe this! this is 100% illegal from a moral standpoint and possibly from a legal standpoint as well.

Please do not fall for the IHC Institute for Human Continuity scam with their fake PHD’s like Dr. Edmund Premo, Dr. Soren Ulfert, Dr. Pauli Courchesne, Dr Anton Elsherbini, Dr. Marco Tlaloc, Dr. Yura Metelista, Dr. Frank Havre, Dr. Marija Grzanowski.

Woody Harrelson better come out publicly and let people know this fake because WAY too many people are going to fall for it. Come on Woody! are you really gonna let us down like this you sell out! if you read this do something man, think of the people that are really scared and how it is messing up their lives.

On this web site you can read different articles about 2012, pro, against, in-between, it is up to people to come tho their own conclusions. It makes me so angry that Sony would stoop to this level.

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What is Galactic Alignment 2012?

By John Major Jenkins

the 2012 alignment

It is important to define what the Galactic Alignment is in precise astronomical terms. (See the Glossary below for terms.)

The Galactic Alignment is the alignment of the December solstice sun with the Galactic equator. This alignment occurs as a result of the precession of the equinoxes.

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Researcher John Major Jenkins’ explains what galactic alignment is and its meaning for the ancient Mayans and for us.

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The Sacred Time of 2012; Vedic Astronomy in a Comparative Perspective

Sacred Universe: Part I of IV

by: Willard G. Van De Bogart, June 21, 2008, visit his site at(http://www.earthportals.com)

The idea of sacred time is as old as human history itself as well as being attributed to a time before human history began. It is a time known as the creation time. The time 2012 is thought of as the end time, the time when the world comes to an end and unimaginable catastrophes end the human race resulting in the infamous doomsday scenario and the fulfillment of the two millennia of Christian eschatology.

Due to the loss of understanding of the celestial significance of the time 2012, and its relationship to human cognition, the unprecedented opportunity to be spiritually transformed is the other scenario which this paper on the sacred time of 2012 will address.

Citizen-2012.com | shift happens…

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Allison Kilkenny
True/Slant
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:21 UTC

Though he’s barely over six months into his first term, President Obama faces a critical time. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, support for Obama is dropping, and Greg Sargent theorizes this is due to waning support among Democrats and liberals.
Sargent’s theory makes sense. Ask any Democrat or Progressive why they voted for Obama, and you’re likely to hear a range of grievances extending from he’s better than Bush to Nader wasn’t on the ballot, but others say things like he said he’d bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or he promised healthcare reform.
Clearly, liberals expected big things from their new, exciting President. However, as so oftentimes happens in the world of politics, pragmatism and triangulation sucked the air out of Obama’s audacious hope. While the new President made plans to draw down troops in Iraq (plans that include tens of thousands "residual forces,") he surged in Afghanistan and approved the use of 17,000 additional troops. Meanwhile, Obama remained silent on the issue of mercenaries including the scandal-ridden Blackwater even though "private contractors," the pretty euphemism for "private soldiers accountable to no one," now outnumber troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Another moment for Obama to prove he wasn’t lying during campaign season approaches now that Senator Feingold has called for a flexible timetable to bring troops back from Afghanistan. Since Obama repeatedly stated during the primaries that the goal in Afghanistan was to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden, surely he will be open to the issue of timetables since a targeted assassination doesn’t require the same troop levels needed to occupy and "rebuild" an entire country. A majority of Americans now see the war in Afghanistan as not worth fighting, according to a Washington Post/ABC news poll. No one seems interested in polling Americans about Iraq anymore most likely because the responses can so easily be predicted. The wars are lost and unpopular. The occupations are pointless and destructive. It’s now up to President Obama to join the consensus and end these futile wars.
The President’s behavior on the other progressive hallmark, healthcare reform, is equally abysmal. Obama’s shameful conduct has been well-documented, including the White House’s agreement to oppose any congressional efforts to use the government’s leverage to bargain for lower drug prices or import drugs from Canada, and the agreement not to pursue Medicare rebates or shift some drugs from Medicare Part B to Medicare Part D, which would cost Big Pharma billions in reduced reimbursements. In exchange, PhRMA agreed to cut $80 billion in projected costs to taxpayers and senior citizens over ten years, mere pocket change to the booming industry over a decade-long projection, which makes it unlikely the cuts will significantly help citizens or ever actually happen. It’s almost like the number was plucked from thin air to give the appearance of PhRMA’s concession so liberals wouldn’t completely lose their minds.
The popular single-payer model vanished almost immediately from the healthcare reform debate, and was replaced by the "public option," an entity no politician bothered explaining to the American people, who remain confused and miseducated about what it means. It’s no wonder that myths spread quickly, culminating in the famous town hall blowouts. The mainstream media and politicians snickered at the screaming crowds, implying citizens are somehow too stupid to understand what’s really going on.
The fact is no one can clearly explain what this new "public option" will mean for average citizens because politicians, particularly the Blue Dogs, have been more concerned with appeasing private industry than figuring out how reform will change Grandma Natalie’s copay. Everyone keeps pining for Obama to conduct a "fireside chat" with the nation, but what no one is asking is why he hasn’t bothered to do that already. President Obama has cut Americans out of the education process because their informed consent doesn’t matter.
Total withdrawal dates, single-payer healthcare, these things were never seriously part of the agenda. They were nice, empty promises Obama made to get elected. Now that he’s President, he has discarded the Progressives, who can either go quietly into the night, or organize, fight, and make sure their President knows the empty promises thing won’t fly anymore.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/192471-Obama-s-progressive-test

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