An Oscar for Activism

Freedom Times Commentary and Preface to the previous post:
“Democracy is not a spectator sport” presents an interesting concept, a bit long reading, but your life and mine, and our children’s lives and their future, make it worth the effort to evaluate.

"Democracy is not a spectator sport!" is a scientist’s open letter to President Obama critiquing “Tweedledee & Tweedledum trivia surface issues “ versus “Life Critical” issues.

In a world of the most quantitative, massive economic requirements we have ever seen needed to supply the ever-growing life needs, wants & desires of an expanding world population seeking to improve their lives and lifestyles, an honest look at current events and the insane economic downturn with their root causes, may assist in restoring democracy.

An Oscar for Activism by Ralph Nader, http://www.commondreams.org/ “What if, permit a flight of fancy, there were the equivalent of the “Academy Awards” for the civic heroism that goes on every day here and abroad. The powerless valiant ones who challenge the powerful and corrupt in ways that throughout history have broken new ground for more justice, economic well-being, health, safety and freedom. They are mostly unsung. They are often marginalized or maligned.”

In Turbulent times, the stress tightrope of psychological coping and escape mechanisms used to bring a semblance of sanity, cheerfulness and balance in our local everyday lives runs paramount. However, caution flags are recommended to prevent a defense mechanism from becoming pathological – “when it prevents the individual from being able to cope with a real threat and obscures his/her ability to perceive reality; when it is used persistently and leads to maladaptive behavior that will eventually threaten the physical and/or mental health of the individual, or group, community, nation when practiced universally by a majority”.

Current events, from bailouts to global warming, from resource wars, ecological imbalance, and ‘weapons of mass donkey’ corporate lies for profit and exclusive rights to third world counties' resources, (look up 50 year span death statistics caused by poverty, starvation, disease and lack of new energy systems); to transportation de-evolution - slower pace on urban highways than a wagon train traveling OVER the Rocky Mountains, with modern day workaholics dreaming of the freedom and leisure time slaves had in comparison, topped with the suppression of advanced energy systems in the late 1940’s that could have prevented the preceding events, and still can prevent the forward movement along this current road to mass destruction, ……..all portray the destructive effects resulting from misinformed/uninformed choices and behavior.

In short, the 2009 Message: Open appeal to Mr. Obama from a fellow achiever who is gravely concerned about our future. http://www.brianoleary.info/index.html
"Democracy is not a spectator sport!" is a highly recommended study and review, specifically list #6. Fearlessly foster (suppressed) innovation such as free energy.
“Mr. President, you must know we all are entering the gravest crisis the world has ever experienced and that the situation can be addressed only by implementing the kinds of systemic changes listed. Many of us are willing to support these efforts in team-work with you. I believe you will have no other choice but to move into these changes briskly. Otherwise, the degree of unrest, fear and repression will be too great to allow us to act without further violence, totalitarian control and ecological and economic collapse. We don’t want that kind of world, we want to have room in which to innovate our way from the very systems that have become so decadent, so destructive, and so tyrannical. Is this an impossible task? Not if we act radically, decisively and quickly. We can only try. Crisis breeds opportunity. It is time to restore the ideals upon which our nation was founded. We have grievously lost our way from practicing those principles.”
Dear President Obama,...... See previous post at http://freedomtimes.blogspot.com/2009/02/democracy-is-not-spectator-sport.html

Published on Saturday, February 28, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
An Oscar for Activism
by CommonDreams.org
by Ralph Nader
As the 2009 Academy Awards swept their way into history, the glitz and the massive global audiences show that across cultures fictional stories, mythologies and money go hand in hand. As the nominees for the awards were briefly showcased for their artistic imagination in one category after another, it occurred to me that the saying “truth is stranger than fiction” has another meaning. Many people would rather see fiction than the real thing. What if, permit a flight of fancy, there were the equivalent of the “Academy Awards” for the civic heroism that goes on every day here and abroad. The powerless valiant ones who challenge the powerful and corrupt in ways that throughout history have broken new ground for more justice, economic well-being, health, safety and freedom. They are mostly unsung. They are often marginalized or maligned. The history books make reference to only a very few—anti slavery abolitionists, women fighting for the vote, workers for the right to organize, farmers for federal regulation of brazen banks and railroads. People take on, for example, corrupt city machines, company towns dominated by a single plant or mine, toxic contamination of drinking water supplies, corporate looters of worker pensions, manufacturers of defective cars and harmful medicines. Recognition before large audiences keeps a highly nourished concept of the heroic before the people. It gives support to those who take the first step and who speak truth to power. Acclaim is protective and encourages more people to follow in the shoes of these citizen-pioneers. Civic heroism changes the culture and the dreams of youth. Movies are meant to be dramatic and can take liberties with reality even when they are describing real-life situations and people. But Hollywood can make almost any story dramatic and interesting. Look at Frost/Nixon. On the other hand, there have been great flops with pure violent action—consider Ishtar. Anything that is important to people in the course of their daily life can be made interesting. Real life narratives of people taking on power and cruelty can be compelling, without losing authenticity.How would the Civic Heroism Awards be organized? The process would start at the community level with nominations and take it up to the state, national, and international level. Unlike game shows and beauty contests, the nominees would not be allowed to promote themselves. What they have already done is why they have been nominated. There is no present or future enhancement at ever higher levels of awards for what they had accomplished and striven for in the past.Consider for a moment the peoples’ infrastructure that such a multi-tiered annual award process would stimulate. Local video producers would see an opportunity to profile potential nominees over the Internet, Cable and local screenings. The digital era assures the widespread egalitarian prevalence of such productions. Thousands of communities would be involved. Discussions, debates and banter would be stimulated over the criteria for nominations which would include awards for “the supporting cast” around the heroes as is done by the Academy Awards. The teaching of civics in the local schools would become more attached to local activities beyond textbook study. Putting a human face on civic action will stir the minds of youngsters presently saturated with often degrading electronic “virtual realities.” The positive repercussions are many. Just the chance to become civic celebrities through this process of recognition increases media exposure and greater attention to the serious conditions and reforms that the nomination processes highlight. The formulaic local television evening news—with its nine minutes of ads, four minutes of sports, four minutes of weather, chitchat, animal stories and miscellaneous fluff leaves very little time for civic news to attract the dwindling number of television reporters. Daily civic efforts to improve community life and justice wither on the vine for lack of any media coverage.Civic heroism awards—done in a professional and exciting manner—can compel news coverage. Even in print form, columnists like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times roams the continents of Asia, Africa and South America to find the most courageous and besieged people standing up at great risk for human dignity and humane treatment.The drama is in the people. The search is for the civic dramatists to find their calling. Finally, philanthropy needs to come forward to jumpstart what could become the citizen equivalent of the Academy Awards from the local to the global for these stalwart pillars of just and democratic societies.Readers: do you know any likely philanthropists? Have them contact Awards Project at PO Box 19367, Washington, DC, 20036.
Ralph Nader [1] is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions [2].
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/28-1

Review: The Seventeen Traditions by Ralph Nader, February 22, 2007
By Alan R. Dicara (Ralph's Hometown) - See all my reviews Ralph writes about my home town, and his, Winsted, Connecticut, and about people we knew and loved, like his Mom and Dad who, like many parents and people, dedicated their lives to their family, their community and their friends. While it seems improbable that many modern families, preoccupied with 2 or more jobs, commuting to work, relying on others to help raise and feed their children, could once again undertake to offer themselves and their children hometown opportunities found in Ralph's book, and life, there are lessons to be learned about listening to one's parents, about debating news of the day, and retreating from the pc's and videogames and tv's to, perhaps, library books and getting to know one's own community. To going for hikes and taking the road less traveled, to being proud of where you come from and where you are going, to appreciating people for what they are, not for what Madison Avenue or Hollywood say the they should be. To taking on City Hall, and winning. Or lobbying Congress, a State Legislature, or a Governor or President, "in the public interest." Ralph has proven that one man can, did, and will continue to make, a difference, for the better. He has also proven the words of the great poet that " It is in the darkest hours of man that the spirit of man burns most bright," and that, finally, we can know what we've always known: anyone can make a difference. You just need a little courage, some important knowledge and a bit of passion for justice, to begin to do what is right. And good parents, good role models, do help. This book, The Seventeen Traditions, by Ralph, and many others he has written, together with his life of dedication, caring and hard work, show us that doing good is a matter of personal choice, a choice we can all make. Read it and get going!

"Democracy is not a spectator sport!"

" You must know that true knowledge, wisdom and compassion are threats to the status quo. George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” and Isaac Asimov wrote, “When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.” I believe we now live in such a time to the extreme, and this situation is particularly poignant for us Americans now living under the tyrannies of empire and economic collapse."

"Democracy is not a spectator sport!"

2009 Message: Open appeal to Mr. Obama from a fellow achiever who is gravely concerned about our future.

http://www.brianoleary.info/index.html


Dear President Obama,
I congratulate you on your election. As a former astronaut, Eagle Scout, Ivy League professor, frontier scientist, futurist, advisor to presidential candidates, and an international author and speaker, I can identify with your feeling of significant motivation and achievement. But, in my later years as I now approach the age of seventy, many of those perks of recognition pale before a sense of urgency with which I feel we must approach our task of transforming humanity and nature into an environmentally, socially and morally sustainable future.
I honestly don’t know whether we’ll make it through these times. You’re in the driver’s seat now, and your task is daunting. You will have to stand up to some very powerful interests who do not want to live under those public policies that will become necessary for us to survive these times. You must understand this most basic conflict of interest in your position. But are you aware enough of what is really happening to us all? Do you truly know the depth of the crisis and the breadth of opportunities that lay outside the box of conventional thinking? I must admit that during my days of relative fame, I was largely oblivious of the deeper issues before us. The spotlight itself has a way of distorting our perceptions of reality.
In today’s world, there is so much suffering, ignorance, neglect and corruption. Leaders nowadays prey on this condition. By supporting some of the most criminal actions in human history, the powerful elite have created an atmosphere of mass obedience by a fearful and helpless populace to wanton genocide and ecocide. We are destroying ourselves and each other and nature through the selfishness and greed of the few. As a result, unrest is brewing in response to monumental military, economic and political tyranny.
You must know that true knowledge, wisdom and compassion are threats to the status quo. George Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act” and Isaac Asimov wrote, “When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.” I believe we now live in such a time to the extreme, and this situation is particularly poignant for us Americans now living under the tyrannies of empire and economic collapse. You come into office on the wings of conflict between a private power that has incubated you and a public clamoring for authentic change which so many of us have entrusted in you. You stand in the middle of an enormous gulf of interests, and you must know that at its deepest levels.
Those of us who take the road less traveled towards a greater truth always have been, and still are, martyrs placed on the altar of change. These heroes, often unrecognized in their own time, become the objects of religions and nation-states, which then become self-aggrandizing dogmatic institutions that have nothing to do with the original intentions and spirit of the founders. The founders could only be rolling in their graves about how their contributions have become so distorted.
Continuity and bipartisanship cannot be nearly as important as returning to the basic principles of integrity, civility and public trust. You’ll need to confront the tyranny of our recent past. Sacred myths such as the official stories of the JFK assassination and 9/11, for example, become enshrined in a fog of deception, lies and ignorance that distract us with bread and circuses, which, if perpetuated, can only precede the inevitable fall.
You must know the truth of all this, it’s too obvious for you or any other intelligent and sentient being not to be able to recognize. You must know that we have an imperiled planet and civilization that cannot endure the collective neglect of humanity. You must know that we cannot rely on half-measures such as a slow withdrawal from Iraq, minuscule reductions in the defense budget, insignificant nuclear arms reductions, bank and Wall Street bailouts, or advocating nuclear power, “clean coal” and carbon cap-and-trading as lasting remedies to climate change. You must know that such minutiae cannot solve these problems. You must know, at some level, about Einstein’s dictum that no problem can be solved at the level at which it was created.
Our species has invaded our home planet with such cancerous vengeance and with such little conscious awareness or acknowledgement of the depth of our dilemma, it is hard to imagine how we can get out of this matrix. But get out we must. It is much too late for us to fulfill your mandate to “change” in the way you have embarked on choosing your advisers and cabinet members. You must know that these individuals are throwbacks to prior administrations who are the epitome of an old ideological paradigm of a rule that cannot work in these times. Many of us have become suspicious that you are only paying back those elite individuals and groups that paved and payed your way towards where you sit now. Have they so threatened you to conform-or-else that you can’t act differently?
For you to succeed you’re still going to have to bite the hand that fed you. You will have to feint your way like in a basketball offensive around and through the broken field of defending opponents, who include those who have supported you so well financially. You will have to stand up in your courage and “betray” them (from their point of view).
Are you up to the task? Are you willing to risk life and limb to lead us into taking those actions needed to create a viable system of governance? Are you motivated enough to join the ranks of our brothers Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and John F. Kennedy to take bold actions toward a peaceful, just and sustainable future for humankind? Are you willing to evict the money-changers and militarists from the temple?
At some level, I think that you’re aware that your definition of “change” in no way resembles the kind of “change” any sensible and knowledgeable person not beholden to vested interests would feel is truly necessary for our own survival.
Mr. President, we’re all in great trouble if you are unwilling or feel unable to address the pleas of the vast majority of the people of our nation and of the world. They cry out for peace, sustainability and justice. You must also address the fact that nature, too, has rights. Reforming the voracious appetites of the moneyed interests and of the military-industrial complex will not be enough. Look all around you at the degraded environment, at the suffering of the peoples of the world longing for food in their mouths and for the kind of leadership that could relieve their pain and give us all a reasonable chance to move forward.
The crisis of America is first and foremost a moral crisis that has moved us away from the fact that we have a physical situation that demands physical solutions to have even the possibility of peace, sustainability and justice. We must now stop the wars, stop the torture, stop the criminal corruption and the lies, stop the theft of the common weal, stop the surveillance of the innocent, stop all the polluting, stop the suppression of true innovation. You must courageously lead us into a state of truth and reconciliation of our culture and stop the acting and pretending that authentic change is what you say you intend to create, because that isn’t what you’re doing—yet anyway.
I suggest to you that we need to define what is meant by “change.” The change you could believe in and you have often expressed is what we might call incremental change. These are the small rhetorical feel-good kinds of changes that separate Democrats from Republicans, the liberals from the conservatives, the Tweedledees from the Tweedledums, all inhabiting a narrow spectrum of ineffective “centrism,” holding onto power for dear life as Rome burns. These are the kinds of changes that got you elected as you navigated through the narrow passage between the special interests and the appearance of a public interest.
Beyond all that, we could consider what one might call a progressive structural change, such as eliminating electoral fraud, serving justice upon past criminality in high places, reregulating Wall Street, restoring the Constitution and the rule of law, re-establishing the “real economy” based on productivity rather than gambling away and squandering the public treasury, controlling the excesses of the Pentagon and an imperial aggressive foreign policy, restoring to Congress the power to print money and declare and fund wars, and allocating more resources to health, the environment, education and infrastructure.
Many progressives are desperate to restore this kind of common sense at the structural level and to create another New Deal for the economic crisis. The liberals would be grateful if all that were to happen, just to get us out from the deep hole we now find ourselves in. They would be satisfied to go back to the Clinton and Roosevelt years, to have just a bit more common sense in a world-gone-mad. Even some degree of neoliberalism, or economic globalization (i.e., exploitation and biocide by other means), might seem sort of OK, in this view. Yet we know these measures are not OK legally or morally; they are only the actions of economic imperialism.
But in today’s world, you must know that even structural changes in and of themselves will produce too little too late, and may be counterproductive in the long run, as we again become lulled into a false sense of security and buy a little more time before the inevitable collapse. Whereas incremental changes address mild corrections that really don’t amount to much, structural changes look at how the current system can be modified to bring things back to where they were in somewhat better times. These approaches can only give us a frame of reference to launch authentic change. What we must have is systemic change to an entirely new paradigm of governance in the public interest that truly addresses the challenges of our times at the level they will need to be met.
Structural change cannot truly answer grievous violations of the public trust nor can they answer today’s deepest issues. Only systemic change can do that. Whereas structural change can relieve the stress of a crisis in the short term, it cannot survive the test of time. Structural change can restore some sort of sanity to our systems, it cannot address the systems themselves. We must now challenge the precepts upon which our political, economic and military systems are based. We must deeply question the “isms” upon which we depend such as capitalism, militarism, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, centrism, monetary socialism, economic globalism, Zionism, terrorism. A new era must dawn, a new set of systems will need to be put into place in the near future for us to survive. Can you in your heart agree with what I suggest here? Or will you deny the gravity of these problems from your high and removed perch? Will you solely rely on probably misinformed and outdated advice coming from your cabinet and your staff? For you to advocate and map out systemic change, you will need all the help you can get from other quarters.
What would a world of positive systemic change look like? Generally, it should have the following features in which you will need to take the lead:
1. Restore the letter and spirit of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This is the most major structural change we should do immediately.
2. Fearlessly initiate a program of truth and reconciliation, overseen by a jury of citizens without vested interests in the current system. Truth-telling cannot any longer be dismissed as conspiracy theory. The greatest conspirators are now holding all the political and economic cards and they must be exposed, whether it be electoral fraud, excessive private campaign financing, illegal surveillance, torture, illegal war, false flag operations, pollution or the embezzlement of the public treasury. All these things, and many more, will need to come to the light of public scrutiny. The process of reconciliation seeks to return us to the rule of law and to serve justice upon those who have violated it, with fairness and compassion for all.
3. Dissolve or stop funding those influential institutions with agendas that are blocking change toward global peace, justice and sustainability. Start over. Dismiss the leaders of most of our public institutions and build new ones from the ground up. Stop funding those private institutions that dip into the public treasury in ways that are clearly immoral and unproductive. This will require a courageous stand to dissolve the current federal bureaucracy as it is (DOD, CIA, NSA, the current treasury, the FBI, Department of Justice (sic), Department of Energy, etc.). Expose international institutions such as the Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, the Federal Reserve and other central banks, big oil, big pharma, big agriculture, weapons manufacturers, and other groups representing existing elite monied interests. The current priorities of the U.S. federal government and of globalist New World Order organizations directly fly in the face of what we must do to survive the crisis of civilization. We need a clean-up like we’ve never seen before and some heads are likely to roll. So be it. The world can only be thankful for getting out from under this oppression.
4. Start over the entire systems of federal and global governance. Yes, we can still have a Constitutional executive, legislative and judicial system. We can still have a (much smaller) military, a justice department, an energy department, a treasury, publicly funded health care, environmental protection, quality education, infrastructure and all the rest. Yes, we can formulate a transition strategy to convert institutions and manpower toward the public interest, free of vested powers. Yes, we can convert our massive military, dirty energy and aerospace capabilities toward innovation in energy, the environment, food, water, health, education and infrastructure. Yes, we can create an Earth corps to clean up the environment instead of having of an aggressive Army, Navy and Air Force. We can do all this without workers having to lose their jobs. Yes, we can come to peace with the rest of the world through diplomacy and compassion. The world awaits a restoration of good will coming from a rogue nation that has outlived its usefulness as a warmongering and fearmongering empire.
5. Form a global green democracy whose agenda would be almost diametrically opposed to the New World Order agenda. Representatives of all nations must come together to formulate and enforce a system that would ensure peace, sustainability and justice for all peoples, while encouraging local rule wherever possible. In no case should special interests, money or secrecy determine the agendas of these governments. At the root of this should be the principles of life, liberty, equality, justice, peace and sustainability.
6. Fearlessly foster (suppressed) innovation such as free energy. Any systemic change will require the utmost attention to honestly assess those new sciences and technologies that can change the world. Only these systemic changes will be able to open the door to authentic transformation of the culture. We must get beyond the rhetoric of weak policies that would only slightly mitigate the effects of global climate change and pollution. We’ll have to think outside the box and get into the meat of the matter. We should quickly develop those energy sources that are truly cheap, clean, safe and decentralized, such as vacuum energy, cold fusion and advanced hydrogen technologies. No existing technologies such as solar, wind or biofuels are up to most of the task; we will need to innovate and transcend the promotions of the multitude of special interests that become vested in this or that existing technology. Following the latest fad can only cloud our judgment and action. No existing public or private institution wants to support these hidden truths and so it will become necessary to dissolve those institutions vested in old ways and start new ones that can support rather than suppress the deeper truths and opportunities of our times. The unsung heroes of innovation will need all the help they can get to team together in an Apollo program for new energy development, frontier science and consciousness. These research and development projects will become the cornerstones of a whole new civilization that could save us from ourselves and from those of us who insist that change can only be incremental or structural.
Mr. President, you must know we all are entering the gravest crisis the world has ever experienced and that the situation can be addressed only by implementing the kinds of systemic changes listed above. Many of us are willing to support these efforts in team-work with you. I believe you will have no other choice but to move into these changes briskly. Otherwise, the degree of unrest, fear and repression will be too great to allow us to act without further violence, totalitarian control and ecological and economic collapse. We don’t want that kind of world, we want to have room in which to innovate our way from the very systems that have become so decadent, so destructive, so tyrannical.
Is this an impossible task? Not if we act radically, decisively and quickly. We can only try. Crisis breeds opportunity. It is time to restore the ideals upon which our nation was founded. We have grievously lost our way from practicing those principles. We are also rapidly losing a natural environment that can nurture us all on this fragile spaceship we call Earth.
Mr. Obama, I appeal to your intelligence, wisdom and compassion to begin to facilitate the dialogue that will allow us to create those new systems that can foster the kind of future world we really want to enjoy for ourselves, our children and their children. I in no way mean my critique to be personal, I only want to help build a fire under all of us to begin the journey toward an exciting and positive new paradigm. Thank you.
Yours sincerely,Brian O’Leary, Ph.D.February, 2009.
For the Earth, Brian.
P.O.Box 258, Loja, Ecuador.
E-mail : Dr Brian O'Leary

Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy

REPEAT: Two issues dwarfing all others, without whose resolution, nothing will change! Bring freedom back to energy science + redefine Corporism, corporate personhood, the current controller of science direction through university funding $$$$$$$$
Freedumb, Freedumb, Read All About It! "A Free Trade, Free Market, Free Corporate, Unregulated Economy run like Al Capone's Casino Joint, and Policed by Al Capone". Is this the best University MBA/PHD Masters and Government Regulators can provide?

PEOPLES LIVES DEPEND UPON THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM. The economic system is not singularly a tool for profit, and the hell with Life. "We now have to pay for the greed and recklessness of those who should have known better.” It is time, Mr. Schumer said, for the American economy to be revived as the “engine of prosperity,” rather than as a “casino” for high-rollers in the realm of finance.

How, in a world of exploding human population, with unparalleled needs, wants and desires, can the economy keep falling, with more and more working people around the world, poorer, lacking basic needs and going hungry... this can only be termed Freakohnomics: The new 21st Century Supply & Demand Economics - absolute greed, absolute power brings on absolute madness - Turns into Freakohnomics gone berserk. Or mafia economics by deliberate Design - the greater the need, the higher the price for all commodities required to sustain Life. The Outcome, economic strangulation and workaholic enslavement of a people was not designed by the lord thy God, nor (for the non-believer) is it a Natural or Nature's Law, nor a Scientific Law

What factors changed Market Supply & Demand Fundamentals to Freakohnomics gone berserk? From cheaper goods and services available to all through continual advances in science, technology and mass production, to 'Whatever The Market Will Bear' depending on how great the need for sustaining Life?

The answers lie in Power, Greed, and Stagnant Energy Science

The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization." when devoid of a Bill of Rights for Human Life, devoid of scientific parameters necessary for Life's evolution, sustainability, and survival.

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.




January 27, 2009 Essay
Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy
By DENNIS OVERBYE
All right, I was weeping too.
To be honest, the restoration of science was the least of it, but when Barack Obama proclaimed during his Inaugural Address that he would “restore science to its rightful place,” you could feel a dark cloud lifting like a sigh from the shoulders of the scientific community in this country.
When the new president went on vowing to harness the sun, the wind and the soil, and to “wield technology’s wonders,” I felt the glow of a spring sunrise washing my cheeks, and I could almost imagine I heard the music of swords being hammered into plowshares.
Wow. My first reaction was to worry that scientists were now in the awkward position of being expected to save the world. As they say, be careful what you wish for.
My second reaction was to wonder what the “rightful place” of science in our society really is.
The answer, I would argue, is On a Pedestal — but not for the reasons you might think.
Forget about penicillin, digital computers and even the Big Bang, passing fads all of them.
The knock on science from its cultural and religious critics is that it is arrogant and materialistic. It tells us wondrous things about nature and how to manipulate it, but not what we should do with this knowledge and power. The Big Bang doesn’t tell us how to live, or whether God loves us, or whether there is any God at all. It provides scant counsel on same-sex marriage or eating meat. It is silent on the desirability of mutual assured destruction as a strategy for deterring nuclear war.
Einstein seemed to echo this thought when he said, “I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.” Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.
Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.
So the story goes.
But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.
Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.
It requires no metaphysical commitment to a God or any conception of human origin or nature to join in this game, just the hypothesis that nature can be interrogated and that nature is the final arbiter. Jews, Catholics, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists and Hindus have all been working side by side building the Large Hadron Collider and its detectors these last few years.
And indeed there is no leader, no grand plan, for this hive. It is in many ways utopian anarchy, a virtual community that lives as much on the Internet and in airport coffee shops as in any one place or time. Or at least it is as utopian as any community largely dependent on government and corporate financing can be.
Arguably science is the most successful human activity of all time. Which is not to say that life within it is always utopian, as several of my colleagues have pointed out in articles about pharmaceutical industry payments to medical researchers.
But nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant. There is always room for more data to argue over.
So if you’re going to get gooey about something, that’s not so bad.
It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.
Today that dynamic is most clearly and perhaps crucially tested in China. As I pondered Mr. Obama’s words, I thought of Xu Liangying, an elderly Chinese physicist and Einstein scholar I met a couple of years ago, who has spent most of his life under house arrest for upholding Einstein’s maxim that there is no science without freedom of speech.
The converse might also be true. The habit of questioning that you learn in physics is invaluable in the rest of society. As Fang Lizhi, Dr. Xu’s fellow dissident whose writings helped spark the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and who now teaches at the University of Arizona, said in 1985, “Physics is more than a basis for technology; it is a cornerstone of modern thought.”
If we are not practicing good science, we probably aren’t practicing good democracy. And vice versa.
Science and democracy have been the watchwords of Chinese political aspirations for more than a century. When the Communist Party took power it sought to appropriate at least the scientific side of the equation. Here, for example, is what Hu Yaobang, the party’s general secretary, said in 1980. “Science is what it is simply because it can break down fetishes and superstitions and is bold in explorations and because it opposes following the beaten path and dares to destroy outmoded conventions and bad customs.”
Brave words that have yet to be allowed to come true in China. Mr. Hu was purged, and in fact it was to mourn his death that students first began assembling in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Dr. Fang got in trouble initially because he favored the Big Bang, but that was against Marxist orthodoxy that the universe was infinitely unfolding. Marxism, it might be remembered, was once promoted as a scientific theory, but some subjects were off-limits.
But once you can’t talk about one subject, the origin of the universe, for example, sooner or later other subjects are going to be off-limits, like global warming, birth control and abortion, or evolution, the subject of yet another dustup in Texas last week.
There is no democracy in China, and some would argue that despite that nation’s vast resources and potential, there will not be vigorous science there either until the Chinese leaders take seriously what Mao proclaimed back in 1955 and then cynically withdrew: Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
In the meantime I look forward to Mr. Obama’s cultivation of our own wild and beautiful garden.

Blacklight Power Invents World Changing Thermal Power Generator

U.S. Oil Addiction Is Here To Stay Due To Lack Of Alternatives
(......lack of alternatives ??????)
REPEAT: Two issues dwarfing all others, without whose resolution, nothing will change! Bring freedom back to energy science + redefine Corporism, corporate personhood, the current controller of science direction through university funding $$$$$$$$

BREAKTHROUGH! (late 1940's)
Distance-Time Barrier Dissolving http://fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm

Self-evident, it is a smaller world today because physical size has been substituted by speed. The obstacles of great distances and vast time appear to diminish before our very eyes. More precisely, space-time and position are increasingly being substituted by greater energy differentials of velocity and acceleration. The multidimensional question surfaces, can this same effect be created by factors other than velocity? What role may varying degrees of frequencies and fields play in transmuting space, time? In providing access to available energy capacities through gravitational mass differentials?

Blacklight Power Invents World Changing Thermal Power Generator
Dr. Shelby Brewer, former CEO of ABB Combustion Engineering and Assistant Secretary of Energy during the Reagan Administration called today's announcement remarkable. "In my nearly 50 years in and around the energy business, I've yet to see a breakthrough as promising as this one. When I was studying to become a nuclear engineer in the 1960s, I never imagined I would see a day like today." Brewer, a current board member of BlackLight Power, added "This breakthrough was entirely supported by private capital with no government investment."
http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news5.30.08c.html
BlackLight Power has announced the successful testing of a new breakthrough energy source that could transform energy production and put America on the road to a near infinite clean supply of thermal generated power.
The company has successfully developed a prototype power system generating 50,000 watts of thermal power on demand. BlackLight Power is pursuing the immediate design and engineering of central power plants utilizing the BlackLight Process. BLP plans on developing pilot plants with architecture and engineering firms with anticipated delivery in approximately 12 to 18 months. The BLP process has been replicated and validated by independent scientists and has received interest from financial institutions and power utility plant operators around the world. BLP plans on licensing its technologies.
"If you make cheap heat, you can make cheap electricity and if you can make cheap electricity you can make cheap hydrogen," says Randell Mills, Chairman, CEO, and President of BlackLight Power Inc. "The BlackLight Process generates enormous amounts of cheap, non-polluting heat that will replace the thermal power in coal, oil, gas and nuclear power plants that is then converted to electricity."
And with gasoline prices setting record after record, BlackLight CEO Randell Mills, says the BlackLight Process is the breakthrough we've all been waiting for. "The hydrogen-burning car has been possible for decades, but there has never been a way to produce cheap hydrogen until today. We are projecting that we will be at the scale of power generation necessary for a power plant to replace the gasoline pumped in a day at a station with hydrogen from water in approximately 24 months."
Dr. Shelby Brewer, former CEO of ABB Combustion Engineering and Assistant Secretary of Energy during the Reagan Administration called today's announcement remarkable. "In my nearly 50 years in and around the energy business, I've yet to see a breakthrough as promising as this one. When I was studying to become a nuclear engineer in the 1960s, I never imagined I would see a day like today." Brewer, a current board member of BlackLight Power, added "This breakthrough was entirely supported by private capital with no government investment."
Michael Jordan, former CEO of Westinghouse and current board member of BlackLight Power, says "The breakthroughs announced by Randell Mills and his team of scientists will go down as one of the most important advances in the field of energy in the last fifty years."

Obama: Wall Street 'Arrogance and Greed' Won't Be Tolerated

REPEAT: Two issues dwarfing all others, without whose resolution, nothing will change! Bring freedom back to energy science + redefine Corporism, corporate personhood, the current controller of science direction through university funding $$$$$$$$
Freedumb, Freedumb, Read All About It! "A Free Trade, Free Market, Free Corporate, Unregulated Economy run like Al Capone's Casino Joint, and Policed by Al Capone". Is this the best University MBA/PHD Masters and Government Regulators can provide?

PEOPLES LIVES DEPEND UPON THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM. The economic system is not singularly a tool for profit, and the hell with Life. "We now have to pay for the greed and recklessness of those who should have known better.” It is time, Mr. Schumer said, for the American economy to be revived as the “engine of prosperity,” rather than as a “casino” for high-rollers in the realm of finance.

How, in a world of exploding human population, with unparalleled needs, wants and desires, can the economy keep falling, with more and more working people around the world, poorer, lacking basic needs and going hungry... this can only be termed Freakohnomics: The new 21st Century Supply & Demand Economics - absolute greed, absolute power brings on absolute madness - Turns into Freakohnomics gone berserk. Or mafia economics by deliberate Design - the greater the need, the higher the price for all commodities required to sustain Life. The Outcome, economic strangulation and workaholic enslavement of a people was not designed by the lord thy God, nor (for the non-believer) is it a Natural or Nature's Law, nor a Scientific Law

What factors changed Market Supply & Demand Fundamentals to Freakohnomics gone berserk? From cheaper goods and services available to all through continual advances in science, technology and mass production, to 'Whatever The Market Will Bear' depending on how great the need for sustaining Life?

The answers lie in Power, Greed, and Stagnant Energy Science

The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization." when devoid of a Bill of Rights for Human Life, devoid of scientific parameters necessary for Life's evolution, sustainability, and survival.

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.



FREEDUMB, FREEDUMB READ ALL ABOUT IT – also read history: How lethal can obscene blind power and greed become? What Happened America? Who has all the money, Who is making all the decisions? Corporate golden greedy guts decision makers continue to be rewarded with more and more of taxpayer dollars, as the trickle up compensation has left the majority of working citizens at below slavery compensation (note that slaves worked and received both FOOD AND RENT/HOUSING)…..by the way, what were CD and Money Market rates in the 60’s?

Obama: Wall Street 'Arrogance and Greed' Won't Be Tolerated
Says Administration Will Crack Down on Banks' Executive Bonuses
By JOHN HENDREN
WASHINGTON, Jan. 31, 2009—
President Obama, usually cool, was visibly angry in his weekly address, chastising corporate bankers for the second time this week for accepting taxpayer bailout money and then doling out $18 billion in executive bonuses.
"The American people will not excuse or tolerate such arrogance and greed," Obama said in the video and radio message released today. "Even as they petitioned for taxpayer assistance, Wall Street firms shamefully paid out nearly $20 billion in bonuses for 2008."
Administration officials challenged a report in The Washington Post that suggested Obama was unlikely to tighten restrictions on compensation for banks that accept bailout funds, saying the report was "simply untrue."
White House and Treasury officials said the president will soon crack down on those big bonuses, shareholder enrichment and overall accountability.
Banking executives have long argued that they need to pay bonuses to retain quality executives.
This week, ABC News asked all 26 banks that have received $1 billion or more in bailout funds if they gave executive bonuses for 2008. Of the 22 that responded, 19 said they've either paid bonuses, or might still.
Synovus and one other bank, which did not want to be identified because it had not informed associates, said they would not be paying bonuses for last year.
Yet government strings come at a cost. Several healthy banks have recently declined money from the bailout fund aimed at persuading them to loosen credit and foster lending to boost the economy.
Rick Adams, executive vice president of United Bankshares Inc. of Charleston, W.Va., told ABC News the bank has declined $197 million in government funds in order to keep the government out of the boardroom, citing the government's ability to change the rules unilaterally and limit dividends, which have increased at the bank for 35 consecutive years.
"That was one of the factors," Adams said. "We're in a position to weather the tough times ... but the terms of the conditions was also a factor."
Nevertheless, the laments of bankers have been pilloried on Capitol Hill.
"We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer," Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said Friday on the Senate floor.
Wall Street greed has been panned on late night television, as when Jay Leno recently lampooned former Merrill Lynch and Bank of America executive John Thain, who spent $1.2 million redecorating his office.
"Then he gave billions of dollars to former Merrill Lynch employees," Leno said, deadpan. "They're calling this the biggest Wall Street scandal since Friday."
Banking excess has been lamented in the labor movement.
"Giving themselves $20 billion for the worst year we've had sine 1929 flies in the face of anything that make sense," Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO labor union, told ABC News.
Trumka says excessive executive compensation contributed to the risk-taking that caused the collapse of the financial industry. With executive bonuses tied to revenue, he said, executives were encouraged to take bigger risks _ in particular on housing loans for risky borrowers who later defaulted.
"All of that contributed to the collapse," Trumka said. "We need to rein that in. We need to reregulate them and we need to arm investors with the tools to be able to control companies and manage this risk so investors don't get hurt in the long term."
Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

Banker + gangster = bankster

REPEAT: Two issues dwarfing all others, without whose resolution, nothing will change! Bring freedom back to energy science + redefine Corporism, corporate personhood, the current controller of science direction through university funding $$$$$$$$

Freedumb, Freedumb, Read All About It! "A Free Trade, Free Market, Free Corporate, Unregulated Economy run like Al Capone's Casino Joint, and Policed by Al Capone". Is this the best University MBA/PHD Masters and Government Regulators can provide?

PEOPLES LIVES DEPEND UPON THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM. The economic system is not singularly a tool for profit, and the hell with Life. "We now have to pay for the greed and recklessness of those who should have known better.” It is time, Mr. Schumer said, for the American economy to be revived as the “engine of prosperity,” rather than as a “casino” for high-rollers in the realm of finance.

How, in a world of exploding human population, with unparalleled needs, wants and desires, can the economy keep falling, with more and more working people around the world, poorer, lacking basic needs and going hungry... this can only be termed Freakohnomics: The new 21st Century Supply & Demand Economics - absolute greed, absolute power brings on absolute madness - Turns into Freakohnomics gone berserk. Or mafia economics by deliberate Design - the greater the need, the higher the price for all commodities required to sustain Life. The Outcome, economic strangulation and workaholic enslavement of a people was not designed by the lord thy God, nor (for the non-believer) is it a Natural or Nature's Law, nor a Scientific Law

What factors changed Market Supply & Demand Fundamentals to Freakohnomics gone berserk? From cheaper goods and services available to all through continual advances in science, technology and mass production, to 'Whatever The Market Will Bear' depending on how great the need for sustaining Life?

The answers lie in Power, Greed, and Stagnant Energy Science

The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization." when devoid of a Bill of Rights for Human Life, devoid of scientific parameters necessary for Life's evolution, sustainability, and survival.

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.

Banker + gangster = bankster
A POINT OF VIEW
It seems timely to resurrect this Americanism from the 1930s - one of many evocative words the United States has contributed to the English language, says Harold Evans.
Americans are pretty good at adding words to the English language. We owe them pin-up girls, highbrows, killjoys, stooges, hobos, drop-outs, shills, bobby-soxers, hijackers, do-gooders and hitchhikers who thumb a ride.
The Americanisms are so much more concise and vivid. Instead of saying "sorry we're late but drivers ahead of us slowed us down when they craned their necks to look at a crash" you can say "we were held up by rubberneckers".
Words pop in and out of our language as social conditions change. The American gangster, which is still with us, has been around as a noun and a reality since 1896 according to my Shorter Oxford, but it seems to have dropped another Americanism from the 1930s and I think now is the time to revive it.
The word is bankster, derived by a marriage of banker and gangster.
It was coined, as far as I can deduce, by an American immigrant, a fiery Sicilian-born lawyer by the name of Ferdinand Pecora. He was the chief counsel to the US Senate Committee on Banking set up in the early 30s to probe the origins of the Crash of 1929.
He exposed quite a lot of the Wall Street practices that Harvard's Professor William Z Ripley had condemned in 1928. The believable Ripley called them - get ready for these Americanisms - "prestidigitation, double-shuffling, honey-fugling, hornswoggling and skullduggery".
The professor had vainly tried to warn President Calvin Coolidge that Wall Street was full of gas and was bound to blow up. To great discomfort all round, Pecora identified Coolidge himself, by then out of office, as one of those who'd been in on the honey-fugling.
The great banking house of JP Morgan had the president on a "preferred list" by which the bank's influential friends were given a chance to buy stock at half price. Shall we say, they made out like bandits?
Today the term bankster perfectly fits Bernard Madoff, whose crooked Ponzi scheme lost $50 billion of what the trade calls OPM - other people's money - invested with him.
Costly rug
But the revelations come thick and fast. People are now struggling for words to describe the latest example of Wall St's money madness. The fabled investment bank Merrill Lynch, run by one John Thain, had so many big zeroes on its balance sheet it would have been liquidated in December but for a merger with the Bank of America.
That was actually a shotgun marriage - in the US vernacular - since the Bank of America was forced to take billions of government money when it learned later that Merrill Lynch was down another $15bn.
Then what? In the few days in December while he was still in charge, Mr Thain reportedly spent nearly $4bn on staff bonuses. That's peanuts on Wall St. In 2007 Mr Thain himself received $83m.
But a week ago, CNBC's Charles Gasparino, in a detailed scoop on the Daily Beast website revealed that during the time Mr Thain was busy cost-cutting, he spent $1.1m doing up his office - $86,000 for a rug, $35,000 for something called a commode on legs.
Readers bayed for blood, posting comments such as: "Oh how I wish this was Revolutionary France and we peasants could storm the offices…"
The anger about the greed that got us into our mess is, in my view, wholly justified. And now we hear that 10 of the big banks that got $148bn from Uncle Sam so they could make loans to get things humming again have actually reduced their loan totals by $46bn.
Mr Thain now is history, having resigned, but the great Bank of America, the biggest in the US and maybe the world is now on the list of banks that may have to be nationalised - a word no red-blooded American ever thought would be uttered in the land of enterprise.
Have money, will lend
The piquancy of all this is that if the term banker is ever to be restored to its former prestige, the public and Wall St might reflect on one highly relevant example of a banker who was not a bankster.
It is the story of Amadeo Peter Giannini, a big man on the side of the little man. When the transcontinental railway started services to California after the line's completion in May 1869, he was among the very first passengers.
He was in the womb of his newlywed mother, 15-year-old Virginia. His father, having made money in the goldfields, had gone back to Italy for her. It is nice to think that as the young immigrants crossed the Rockies, their adventurous spirits somehow crossed the placental barrier.
Amadeo was born on 6 May, 1870. He grew up on a little farm, whose produce his mother and father sold in booming San Francisco. In 1877 when he was six, he saw his father gunned down. His mother moved to the city to buy wholesale from farmers and sell to shops.
Amadeo - or AP as he became known - grew into a tall, strong man, more than able to hold his own in the rough auctions for fruit and veg on the wharfs where traders met the farmers' boats. He helped to build a thriving business.
When he was 31 he sold his share, saying he had no interest in accumulating wealth. "No man owns a fortune," he said. "It owns him." It was the motto of his life.
He'd married and on the death of his father in law, was persuaded to take his vacant place on the board of a little bank in North Beach. He was appalled that they'd not lend money to poor immigrants. The rows in the board room reverberated over North Beach until AP walked out and started a little bank of his own to do that, the Bank of Italy.
From his work on the wharves, he'd become a shrewd judge of character, so he'd cheerfully lend money to pay doctor's bills for delivery of a baby if he judged the couple had integrity.
Phoenix from the rubble
On Wednesday 18 April, 1906, San Francisco was devastated by earthquake and fire. AP rushed to get all his gold and paper money out of danger, hid it under orange crates to conceal it from looters, and stood guard all night in his home.
It must have been a debilitating moment the next day to find his baby bank a mass of charred rubble. The bigger banks, who had vaults too hot to open, had no records and were not lending.
AP instead went down to a wharf close to the smouldering North Beach, flung a plank across two barrels, and with his baritone booming across the desolation, started lending some of his $80,000 to rebuild San Francisco.
He looked for steamship captains he knew, shoved money into their hands, saying "go north and get lumber". AP radiated so much confidence, making a big show of jiggling his little bag of gold, hundreds who'd been hoarding cash and gold banked it with him. North Beach was built faster than any other area.
By 1918 he'd established California's first state-wide banking system. A little local bank in the valley that would have closed in a run after a bad harvest could now keep open by borrowing from the city branch.
He set out to build a nationwide banking system so that distressed areas could be helped by ones that were prospering. Wall St hated him. He beat off their attempts to destroy him. In the Great Depression, he took every opportunity in the New Deal legislation to get California revived in time for the war and the boom that followed.
He did it by putting the community first, himself last. He set up low interest instalment credit plans which enabled thousands to avoid the loan sharks and buy cookers and refrigerators and autos, and he built a whole new electrical industry with his loans.
He financed the Golden Gate bridge, and the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
No man could do so much good without being maligned. It was said he wore the mask of populism to create a dangerous instrument of personal power and personal wealth.
The truth is that the man whose life was money had no interest in money. He refused to take increases in pay and spurned every bonus. He banned insider trading. Shortly after retiring in 1945, when he found himself in danger of becoming a millionaire, he set up a foundation and gave it half his personal fortune.
And the little bank for the ordinary man that he founded?
The Bank of America. Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7861397.stmPublished: 2009/01/30 17:11:35 GMT

New Energy Sources and Inventions

U.S. Oil Addiction Is Here To Stay Due To Lack Of Alternatives
(......lack of alternatives ??????)
REPEAT: Two issues dwarfing all others, without whose resolution, nothing will change! Bring freedom back to energy science + redefine Corporism, corporate personhood, the current controller of science direction through university funding $$$$$$$$

BREAKTHROUGH! (late 1940's)
Distance-Time Barrier Dissolving http://fuel2000.net/starsteps.htm

Self-evident, it is a smaller world today because physical size has been substituted by speed. The obstacles of great distances and vast time appear to diminish before our very eyes. More precisely, space-time and position are increasingly being substituted by greater energy differentials of velocity and acceleration. The multidimensional question surfaces, can this same effect be created by factors other than velocity? What role may varying degrees of frequencies and fields play in transmuting space, time? In providing access to available energy capacities through gravitational mass differentials?

New Energy Sources and Inventions
http://www.wanttoknow.info/freeenergy
In the late 1880's, trade journals in the electrical sciences were predicting "free electricity" in the near future. Incredible discoveries about the nature of electricity were becoming commonplace. Within 20 years, there would be automobiles, airplanes, movies, recorded music, telephones, radio, and practical cameras. For the first time in history, common people were encouraged to envision a utopian future filled with abundant modern transportation and communication, as well as jobs, housing and food for everyone. So what happened? Where did the new energy breakthroughs go? Was this excitement about free electricity all just wishful thinking that science eventually disproved? Current State of Technology. The answer is no. Spectacular new energy technologies were developed right along with other breakthroughs. Since then, multiple methods for producing vast amounts of energy at extremely low cost have been developed. None of these technologies have made it to the open consumer market, however. Why this is true will be discussed shortly. First, here is a short list of new energy technologies. The common feature connecting all of these discoveries is that they use a small amount of one form of energy to control or release a large amount of a different kind of energy.
Radiant Energy. Nikola Tesla's Magnifying Transmitter, T. Henry Moray's Radiant Energy Device, Edwin Gray's EMA Motor, and Paul Baumann's Testatika Machine all run on Radiant Energy. This natural energy can perform the same wonders as ordinary electricity at less than 1% of the cost. It does not behave exactly like electricity, however, which has contributed to the scientific community's misunderstanding of it. The Methernitha Community in Switzerland currently has 5 or 6 working models of fuelless, self-running devices that tap this energy. [More]
Permanent Magnets. Dr. Tom Bearden has two working models of a permanent magnet powered electrical transformer. It uses a 6-watt electrical input to control the path of a magnetic field coming out of a permanent magnet. By channeling the magnetic field, first to one output coil and then a second repeatedly and rapidly, the device can produce a 96-watt electrical output with no moving parts. Multiple inventors have working mechanisms that produce torque from permanent magnets alone. [More]
Super-Efficient Electrolysis. Water can be broken into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. When water is hit with its own molecular resonant frequency, it collapses into hydrogen and oxygen gas with little electrical input. Hydrogen fuel can drive engines (like in your car) for the cost of water. [More]
Cold Fusion. Though initial claims were debunked, cold fusion is very real. Not only has excess heat production been repeatedly documented, but also low energy atomic element transmutation has been catalogued, involving dozens of different reactions! [More]
There are dozens of other systems. Many are viable and well tested. But this short list is sufficient to make the point: new energy technology is here. It offers the world pollution-free energy abundance for everyone, everywhere. It is now possible to stop the production of "greenhouse gases" and shut down the nuclear power plants. Transportation and production costs for just about everything can drop dramatically. Yet all these wonderful benefits that can make life on this planet so much easier and better for everyone have been postponed for decades. Why? Whose purposes are served by this postponement?Four Invisible Forces. There are four forces that have worked together to create this situation. The wealthiest families and their central banking institutions are the first force. Their motivations are greed and the need to control almost everything except themselves. Their plan is to eventually control all of the resources of the world, and thereby control everyone's life through the availability of all goods and services. An independent source of wealth (new energy device) in the hands of every person in the world ruins their plans for world domination. They don’t want any competition. The weapons they have used to enforce this include intimidation, "expert" debunkers, buying and shelving of technology, and murder of inventors. They have also promoted the scientific theory that states free energy is impossible (laws of thermodynamics).The second force is national governments. The problem here is related to the maintenance of national security. There is a constant jockeying for position and influence in world affairs, and the strongest party wins. In economics, it's the golden rule: "The one with the gold makes the rules." Unlimited energy on this planet will lead to an inevitable reshuffling of the balance of power. Everybody will want it, and at the same time, want to prevent everyone else from getting it. So, national governments’ motivations are self-preservation. Their weapons include preventing the issuance of patents based on national security grounds, harassment of inventors with criminal charges, tax audits, threats, phone taps, arson, theft, and a host of other intimidations which make the business of building and marketing a new energy machine practically impossible.The third force consists of deluded inventors and con men. On the periphery of the extraordinary scientific breakthroughs that constitute real new energy technologies, lies a shadow world of unexplained anomalies, marginal inventions and unscrupulous promoters. The first two forces have constantly used the media to promote the worst examples of this group, to distract the public's attention, and to discredit real breakthroughs by associating them with the frauds. So, the third force is delusion and dishonesty. The motivations are self-aggrandizement, greed, want of power over others, and a false sense of self-importance. The weapons used are lying, cheating, self-delusion and arrogance combined with bad science.The fourth force operating to postpone the public availability of new energy technology is all of the rest of us. It may be easy to see how narrow and selfish the motivations of the other forces are, but actually, these motivations are still very much alive in each of us as well. Like the wealthiest families, don't we each secretly harbor illusions of false superiority and want to control others instead of ourselves? Also, wouldn't you sell out if the price were high enough? Or like the governments, don't we each want to ensure our own survival? Or like the deluded inventor, don't we trade a comfortable illusion once in a while for an uncomfortable fact? Or don't we still fear the unknown, even if it promises a great reward?All four forces are just different aspects of the same process. There is really only one force preventing the availability of new energy technology, and that is unspiritually motivated behavior. New energy technology is an outward manifestation of divine abundance. It is the engine of the economy of an enlightened society, where people voluntarily behave in a respectful and civil manner toward each other. Unspiritualized humans cannot be trusted with new energy. They will only do what they have always done, which is to take merciless advantage of each other, or kill each other and themselves in the process.The Opportunity. What is new is that you and I can communicate with each other now better than at anytime in the past. The Internet offers us, the fourth force, an opportunity to overcome the combined efforts of the other forces preventing new energy technology from spreading. What is starting to happen is that inventors are publishing their work, instead of patenting it and keeping it secret. More and more, people are "giving away" information on these technologies in books, videos and websites. While there is still a great deal of useless information about new energy on the Internet, the availability of good information is rising rapidly.All of us constitute the fourth force. If we stand up and refuse to remain ignorant and action-less, we can change the course of history. Only mass action can create the world we want. The other three forces will not help us put a fuelless power plant in our homes. New energy technology will change everything about the way we live, work and relate to each other. It obsoletes greed and fear for survival. But like all exercises of spiritual faith, we must first manifest generosity and trust in our own lives.New energy technology is here. It has been here for decades. Communications technology and the Internet have torn the veil of secrecy off of this remarkable fact. People all over the world are starting to build new energy devices. The bankers and governments don’t want this to happen, but can’t stop it. Tremendous economic instabilities and wars will be used to distract people's attention from the new energy movement. There will be essentially no major media coverage of this aspect of what is going on.Western society is in many ways spiraling toward self-destruction due to the accumulated effects of greed and corruption. New energy technologies cannot stop this trend. If, however, you have a new energy device, you may be better positioned to support the transition that is underway. The question is, who will ultimately control the emerging world government, the first force, or the fourth force? Those who choose the fourth force may live to see the dawn of the world of new energy. I challenge you to be among the ones who do so.New Energy Sources was written by Peter Lindemann, D. Sc. and summarized and edited by Fred Burks