Category Archives: Environment

A Nonviolent Strategy to End the Climate Catastrophe

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By Robert J. Burrowes

As the evidence mounts that we are fast approaching the final point-of-no-return beyond which it will be impossible to take sufficient effective action to prevent climate catastrophe – see ‘The World Passes 400 PPM Threshold. Permanently‘– the evidence of ineffective official responses climbs too. See, for example, ‘Climate Con: why a new global deal on aviation emissions is really bad news’.

Even worse, we continue to be given response options that, even when they are well meaning, are naïve and inadequate whether they are suggested by individuals – see, for example, ‘Committing Geocide: Climate Change and Corporate Capture‘– or major environment organizations such as Greenpeace, 350.org and
Friends of the Earth.

Moreover, given the myriad indications of progressive environmental breakdown in domains unrelated to the climate catastrophe, one must be terrified and delusional to suggest or even believe that anything less than a comprehensive strategy, which goes well beyond anything governments and corporations will ever endorse, gives us any chance of averting the sixth mass extinction event in planetary history. A mass extinction that will include us.

As an aside, if you believe the ‘end of century’ scenario (for human extinction) being driven by the same corporate interests that drove climate denial for so long, then you are simply a victim of their latest attempt to drive ‘business as usual’ while delaying action for as long as possible at any cost.

Another problem, if you understand anything about human psychology and political organization, is that mobilizing people in large numbers to act strategically and powerfully is not easy. Of course, if it wasn’t so difficult, this crisis would not have arisen in the first place. We would have responded intelligently and strategically decades ago as some aware individuals, starting with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 100 years ago, suggested.

To briefly recap the wider nature of the crisis we face: Consider our synergistic and devastating assaults on the environment through military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and the spreading radioactive contamination from Fukushima. We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet which means that water scarcity is becoming a frequent reality for many people and the collapse of hydrological systems is now likely by 2020. Human activity drives 200 species of life (plants, birds,animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone. Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings.

So what are we to do?

Well, if you are inclined to assess the evidence and to design a response strategy that has the possibility of success built into it,then I invite you to consider the strategy outlined on the Nonviolent Campaign Strategy website.  This strategy identifies all twelve components of a nonviolent strategy to end the climate catastrophe, including the myriad of strategic goals for such a strategy to be comprehensive and effective. You are very welcome to suggest improvements in this strategy and to invite other individuals and groups to participate in helping to implement it.

If you are happy to leave strategic responses to others but still wish to contribute powerfully, then you and others you know are welcome to participate in the simple fifteen-year program outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth‘. You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World‘.

One final point: a tragic outcome of modern humans terrorizing their children into obedience (to maintain social control) is that most of the human population is (unconsciously) terrified, self-hating and powerless. For a full explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?‘ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.

So don’t wait around waiting for others to act first. It is your leadership that is required in this circumstance. And it is your leadership that might ultimately make the difference.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ His email address is flametree@riseup.netand his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

I Participate

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By Jonathan Bessette

Source: Adbusters

Recall that you’re sitting in a rapid transit vehicle, carried along the sky-line above cement highways, paved in homage to the Romans, who designed a system of militarized paths stretching everywhere, causing everything to lead back to one place. Here we are everyone, the year of the Monkey, 2016, 98 years after The Great War … too bad it isn’t the year of the Dalmatians … Mickey Mouse recently Tweeted that Disney is working on buying the rights to the Chinese lunar calendar. Imagine 12 animated classics framing each and every year for the remainder of humanity’s existence. 

At this point human society is so vast, so complex, so multilayered, that it is impossible to stay updated, engaged, and participating in every area of local and global importance. Education takes us from a place of innocence, creativity and joy, forcing us to fall into the institutional lines of desks and faced forward attention. As a nodal point of knowledge each new person will be filled to the brim with information that makes them useful to the status quo.

Neuroscience now tells us that the brain has plasticity and the neurosynaptic networks that are created through nurturing, which become identity and personality, can be changed and overwritten. Newer pathways can be formed and strengthened and older ones can be reduced. Does this mean that our free-will has a physical manifestation as identity, as culture, and every choice affects the people, animals and objects around us? Everything we think and do reinforces everything we think and do, creating a strange logical loop which justifies our lives as ourselves. Without any major impetus, what reason do we have to change? Why compromise our internally consistent narrative and accept the narrative of someone else? What stands to be different?

Surreality is becoming a more constant state as life in the present starts to look like Science Fiction of the future from the past. The last historian wandering around Paris in the 21st Century, forgotten by a technologically advanced world that cares only for materialism. A beguiled Case, the lead character of Gibson’s Neuromancer, disenfranchised because he can no longer participate in the romance of cyberspace, looking something like a hacker barred by the law to approach or touch a computer. Of course cyborgs, robots, virtual reality and AI dance at the periphery, the momentum of current technological trends, yet we titillate ourselves with the practical possibility of these totems nearing our hearts and minds.

Information overflows like never before. Some cry Apocalypse! End Times! The Rapture! But most of the world is still filling up their gas tanks, believing that the day when Climate Change will actually affect them is the day that it will be clearly outlined in a power point presentation, at their offices or wherever they work, explaining the equity found in maintaining current profit margins while in the same breath rearranging the economic vehicle of prosperity.     

“Change without Changing!” might be the Party Slogan for whoever runs for the Presidency after Obama sputters to a close.

Take my hand and run through the ever-increasing fields of soya beans, where we can hear the Monsanto genetically-modified breeze blowing the answer in the wind, whispering corporate sonatas, proving that commercial capitalism is a system of religion. Faith in Profit! The Gospel of Endless Progress! Join our Church of Business! Maybe Monsanto can use its private militia to assassinate Thomas Piketty, because of the seeds he’s sowing about capitalism being a mechanical beast that needs regulation because its fuel is the disparity between rich and poor … the larger the gap the more efficacious the fuel.

Then I think whether or not you’ll be reading this on paper or a flat-screen … whether either will be made from recyclable resources, and the argument that the printed word is less sustainable than the digital, so let’s put them to the test, right here, right now:

What can you do with a single piece of printed paper? Read it, eat it, burn it, re-write on it, make origami, a paper airplane or a boat, use it as a funnel, snort powders with it, wipe our bums? What can we do with a tablet? Access every possible available medium via the Internet and software?

It takes at least a lumber, ink, metal, and print industry to create the basic elements to manufacture printed media on a large scale. The average printed matter, kept in modest condition, can last up to 100 years and still be usable. The space that a single printed work takes up is quite large, creating the need to provide space of the material itself. When recycling an old book there are few components to worry about, making it rather simple.

It takes at least most types of mining and the processing of raw materials (petroleum, silicon, zinc, aluminum), software and hardware development, manufacturing, and the assembly of components to create a tablet. The average tablet, kept in modest condition, can remain functional until it’s obsolete. It certainly will not last 100 years, and even if it did the components, chips and circuitry would be so worn down that anything you might have used it for would no longer be possible. Of course you can store a million, a billion, even a zillion books on a single tablet, but will everyone have equal access to it? Tablets are extremely difficult to recycle, their components don’t just make up another tablet. The loss from entropy alone assures destruction, and we cannot grow more zinc, petroleum, or aluminum.

But really none of this matters, we don’t have any control over what corporations choose to do with our futures, or what medium we will use. These new, futuristic developments, intended to define human culture, are being devised and formed inside of grand boardrooms, in tall skyscrapers, by CEOs and shareholders. They, the 1%, are only concerned with whether the product they create for us will become a necessary commodity, like food, like water, like shelter … like Subway, like Coke Cola, like Single Room Occupancies (SROs).

You hear someone talking about the protest on Burnaby Mountain. People don’t want Kinder-Morgan expanding the capacity of an already existent pipeline because it will significantly increase the traffic of oil tankers in the Burrard Inlet. Someone else discusses the unrest of activist groups in Vancouver; about the substandard living conditions; the war on the poor; the two new prisons … they care about housing those who arise from poverty and have been given nowhere else to go. Anger overtakes you for a moment and you think, I don’t like this, why is there so much injustice, maybe I can do something about it…

A flabbergasted voice backtracking intellectual missives comes on over the radio, you’re not sure if it’s in your head or not:
“Revolution is just going around and around, it’s a cycle, it begins with violence and it ends with violence and it only achieves the same power structure that precedes it.”

You think about the French Revolution, the Arab Spring, Anonymous, and realize grass-roots change can rise up from the ground, from the dirt, from the dust whence we came, to challenge the oligarchical deities of the political / corporate aristocracy. We can sell everything we own and buy whole streets collectively, live there together, change the land and what’s on it together. We can join all kinds of innovative communities. We can gather in massive groups and walk through the streets, calling attention to everything corruption has built up around us. We can participate in Civil Disobedience, because the obedience that is asked of us causes harm to someone or something that is alive and is not fairly allowed to defend itself.

No matter how much Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan and Justin Trudeau tell you that the money will trickle down, no matter how much they tell you that they are the ones who created the railroads, produced the banks, developed the industries that sustain our economies … they didn’t do a damn thing. We laid the tracks, we hammered the spikes, we drove the trains, we maintained the services, we built the buildings, we painted the walls, we fitted the plumbing, we opened the doors, we mopped the floors, we surveyed the land, we mineral tested the rock, we operated the drills, we processed the crude and we shipped the products. None of these things that they presume to own did they make or build. They didn’t put one brick in the wall, they didn’t dig one trench, and they didn’t turn one switch. It’s all ours…

Now an unsettling feeling might skitter across you when you realize that you are implicated in this whole thing. Why do we feel so disenfranchised? Why does the 1% own so much more influence, so much more than we little peons? I feel powerless but every day I participate in the construction of human society. Every action contributes to a massive effect called the singularity of my life. Don’t fall into the kinds of aporia that Jacques Ellul observes in The Technological Society, where no one claims responsibility for the projects of technology. Who made this computer? Was it the engineers, or the design team, the software developers, the hardware makers? Or was it the companies who mined the silver, the petroleum, the zinc, the aluminum, the silicon? No single person in the process can take responsibility for the whole … so no one does, they just accept it, and its justification is its presence.

Well then … we are in a pickle aren’t we? But maybe revolution is the act of taking responsibility? Clips of revolution flicker through your mind-film, you see riots, Molotov cocktails, police lined up with transparent plastic shields. You realize you do not want to risk your comfort, your coziness, your conformity, so you fit in and play nice and salute whoever is in power. Or maybe you are just not interested, you have your soma, your serial monogamy, your fair trade Americano. Besides, you’re too busy, you’ve got kids, you work 60 hours a week, you recently bought a home in one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, you already have enough responsibilities …

Gandhi: ‘My life is my message’

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Robert J. Burrowes

As most of the world ignores or hypocritically celebrates the 147th birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the International Day of Nonviolence on 2 October, some of us will quietly acknowledge his life by continuing to build the world that he envisioned. When asked for his message for the world, Gandhi responded with the now famous line ‘My life is my message’ reflecting his lifelong struggle against violence.

Gandhi’s life was dotted with many memorable quotes but one that is less well known is this: ‘You may never know what results come of your actions but if you do nothing there will be no results’.

Fortunately, there are many committed people who have identified the importance of taking action to end the violence in our world – whether it occurs in the home or on the street, in wars, as a result of economic exploitation or ecological destruction – and this includes the courageous people below. These people have identified themselves as part of the worldwide network, now with participants in 96 countries, committed to ending violence in all of its forms. I would like to share their inspirational stories and invite you to join them.

Christophe Nyambatsi Mutaka is the key figure at the Groupe Martin Luther King which promotes active nonviolence, human rights and peace. The group is based in Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in central Africa. They particularly work on reducing sexual and other violence against women.

Also based in Goma, the Association de Jeunes Visionnaires pour le Développement du Congo headed by Leon Simweragi is a youth peace group that works to rehabilitate child soldiers as well as offer meaningful opportunities for the sustainable involvement of young people in matters that affect their lives and those of their community.

Given the phenomenal suffering in the DRC, which has experienced the loss of six million lives and the displacement of eight million people due to the long war driven by Western corporations keen to exploit the country’s mineral wealth, Christophe, Leon and their colleagues are testimony to the fact that committed people strive in the most adverse of circumstances.

Tess Burrows in the UK is an adventurer (including parachutist, mountaineer, cyclist and marathon runner), peace activist, author, speaker, healer, and ‘most importantly a mother and grandmother’. In her words: ‘I am dedicated to the pursuit of World Peace and the healing of the Earth.’ Tess has written several books and, if you are looking for inspiration, I suggest you try these: ‘Cry from the Highest Mountain’ (describing a climb to the point furthest from the centre of the Earth), ‘Cold Hands, Warm Heart’ (describing a trek across the coldest, driest, windiest place on Earth: the Geographic South Pole), ‘Touch the Sky’ (describing her climb of Mt Kilimanjaro, in Africa’s heartland, pulling a car tyre which included peace messages from every nation on Earth and embodying their desire for everyone to pull together to promote peace) and her latest book ‘Soft Courage’. Her video ‘Climb For Tibet’ won’t bore you either! The funds raised from sales of the books and donations have, among other things, built six schools in Tibet and supported a Maasai community tree-planting project in Africa. Tess collects messages of peace from individuals and speaks them out from ‘far high places’. So far, this has included the North and South Poles, the Himalayas, Andes, Pacific and Africa. You can be part of her next Peace Climb in Australasia by writing your personal message on her website where you can also check out her books. Be warned however, this website will exhaust you!

Recently, on the International Day of Peace, the Afghan Peace Volunteers and Borderfree Street Kids in Kabul, mentored by Dr Teck Young Wee (Hakim), reached out to the visually impaired and blind students at Rayaab (Rehabilitation Services for the Blind Afghanistan). They brought MP3 players as gifts to 50 visually impaired students. The students will use the MP3 players to listen to recorded school lessons and educational programs. Rayaab is an Afghan non-governmental organization run by Mahdi Salami and his wife Banafsha, who are themselves visually impaired. If you want to see photos from this day, and to watch an extraordinary three minute video, you can do so at ‘To Touch a Colourful Afghanistan‘.

Kristin Christman in the USA continues her tireless efforts to make our world more peaceful by seeking to understand the deeper drivers of conflict while offering practical steps forward. She is currently working on a book based on her monumental ‘Taxonomy of Peace: A Comprehensive Classification of the Roots and Escalators of Violence and 650 Solutions for Peace‘. A recent rather personal article offers insight into her approach: ‘Make serving in war an option, not an order‘ and illustrates how violence is ‘built-into’ society.

Ghanaian Gifty A. Korankye has just developed a new website titled ‘Daughters of Africa‘. Explaining why, she writes: ‘Over the years I watched women go through unbearable pain …. Our daughters go through FGM in their puberty…. The humiliation we face when we lose our spouse, all in the name of customs and tradition.’ Determined to help address the issues that plague many African women she wants to give them the chance to be ‘a useful voice to our communities’, to share the success stories of African women and African-American women in business administration, the entertainment industry and elsewhere in order to share learning from their journeys and to ‘help mentor our young generation’. She invites African women to write to share their stories and work together to find solutions. ‘We
can do it because we are daughters of Africa.’

So what about you? Do you believe that ending human violence is possible? Even if you believe that it is not, do you believe that it is worth trying? As Gandhi noted: ‘The future depends on what we do in the present.’ What will you do?

In essence, working to end human violence and to create a world of peace, justice and ecological sustainability for all life on Earth might not be what gets you out of bed in the morning. But if it is or you would like it to be, you are welcome to join those of us who are committed to striving for this outcome by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

And if you subscribe to Gandhi’s belief that ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every [person’s] needs, but not every [person’s] greed’, then you might consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth‘ which he inspired as well.

Each of us has a choice. We can stand aside in the great fight for survival in which humanity is now engaged. Or we can be involved. What is your choice?

The bottom line is this: What will be the message of your life?

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘.
His email address is flametree@riseup.net
and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

—
Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

An Open Letter to the People of Brazil

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dilma-jpg_1718483346

By Robert J. Burrowes

As I read of the latest coup in Brazil, once again removing a democratically elected leader from power, my anger surged. Not again! However, as I see and read about the ongoing massive protests, as well as calls by prominent community leaders to mobilize in defense of your country’s democracy, I feel great hope for Brazil. Having been a nonviolent activist for many years, I would like to support Brazilian activists to develop a nonviolent strategy that will increase your chances of success.

On 31 August 2016, the Brazilian elite executed a political coup to remove your democratically elected president Dilma Rousseff from office in a desperate attempt to halt corruption investigations in which they are clearly implicated. See ‘Democracy Is Dead in Brazil‘ and ‘The Real Reason Brazil’s Democratically Elected Dilma Rousseff Was Impeached‘.

Behind the scenes, of course, the United States elite was heavily involved. With vast quantities of highly profitable fossil fuels, mineral and forest resources, as well as fresh water at stake, the US elite (and its allied elites) is not going to stand aside while Brazil
and BRICS endeavour to create a more just world for at least some of its human inhabitants. See ‘Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff: Brazil’s Parliamentary Coup and the “Progressive Media”‘.

Despite what has happened and as your ongoing street protests demonstrate, you know that you do not have to accept this outcome. You also know that you do not have to wait until the 2018 election to register your disapproval of this coup.

In fact, you can reverse this coup and restore the president you first elected in 2010 to finish her current term so that her party can face your judgment in 2018. And this is what Joao Pedro Stedile, a founder and leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil has called on you to do. See ‘MST: Social Movements Must Rise up Against Coup Govt in Brazil‘.

If you do this, you will also have widespread support among your solidarity allies around the world as indicated in this letter: ‘Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone Sign Letter Against Brazil’s Coup‘.

Given my own support for your right to elect any president of your choice (and to remove them if necessary at a subsequent election), I invite you to consider planning and implementing a nonviolent strategy to remove the coupmakers in your country and restore the president that you elected.

If you are interested in doing so, I have outlined a strategy for removing coupmakers on the website Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy which is a straightforward presentation of the more detailed explanation offered in the book ‘The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach‘.

If you want an idea of the twelve components of strategy that you will need to plan, you can see them on the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel. If you want a taste of how this strategy works (at the tactical level), you will get it by reading ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions‘.

Vitally, the strategic goals need to include mobilizing people in strategically focused ways and causing the police and military to withdraw their support for the coupmakers. It will usefully include causing key local and foreign corporations to withdraw their support too. This would usually include corporations involved in the weapons industry, the mainstream media, banks and the resource extraction of fossil fuels, strategic minerals, forest products and fresh water. To make it clear, I have listed a provisional set of strategic goals that you might consider modifying as appropriate below.

Of course, as suggested above, you will need a comprehensive strategy and it might take some time to plan and then fully implement.

However, if you do plan and implement a comprehensive strategy, you have every chance of reversing this coup with minimal loss of life. For example, the article ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression‘ identifies 20 things that you can do to minimize the risk that your mobilizations will be violently repressed. This article was written after a careful study, throughout history, of nonviolent mobilizations that were met with extreme violence.

Suggested Strategic Goals in a Nonviolent Strategy to Liberate Brazil

Strategic goals that would usually be appropriate for resisting a political or military coup include those listed below although, it should be noted, the list would be considerably longer as individual organizations should be specified separately.

Of course, individual groups resisting the coup would usually accept responsibility for focusing their work on achieving just one or two of the strategic goals. It is the responsibility of the struggle’s strategic leadership to ensure that each of the strategic goals, which should be identified and prioritized according to your precise understanding of the circumstances in Brazil, is being addressed.

(1) To cause the women in [women’s organizations WO1, WO2, WO…] in
Brazil to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your
nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities]. For example, simple nonviolent actions would be to wear a
national symbol (such as a badge of your national flag or ribbons in the
national colors), to boycott all corporate media outlets supporting the
coup and/or to withdraw all funds from banks supporting the coup. For
this item and many items hereafter, see the list of possible actions you
can take here: ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.
https://nonviolentliberationstrategy.wordpress.com/strategywheel/tactics-and-peacekeeping/198-tactics-of-nonviolent-action/

(2) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2,
T…] in Brazil to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your
nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities]. For example, this might include withdrawing their labor
from an elite-controlled or foreign-owned bank/corporation operating in
Brazil.

(3) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers in [organizations F1, F2,
F…] in Brazil to join the liberation strategy by participating in
[your nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive
program activities].

(4) To cause the members of [religious denominations R1, R2, R…] in
Brazil to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your
nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities].

(5) To cause the members of [ethnic communities EC1, EC2, EC…] in Brazil
to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your nominated
nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities].

(6) To cause the activists, artists, musicians, intellectuals and other
key social groups in [organizations O1, O2, O…] in Brazil to join the
liberation strategy by participating in [your nominated nonviolent
action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities].

(7) To cause the students in [student organizations S1, S2, S…] in
Brazil to join the liberation strategy by participating in [your
nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities].

(8) To cause the soldiers in [military units M1, M2, M…] to refuse to
obey orders from the coupmakers to arrest, assault, torture and shoot
nonviolent activists and the other citizens of Brazil.

(9) To cause the police in [police units P1, P2, P…] to refuse to obey
orders from the coupmakers to arrest, assault, torture and shoot
nonviolent activists and the other citizens of Brazil.

(10) To cause businesspeople who conduct small businesses in
[organizations SB1, SB2, SB…] in Brazil to refuse to cooperate with the
coupmakers by participating in [your nominated nonviolent
action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities].

(11) To cause businesspeople who operate multinational franchises in
[organizations MF1, MF2, MF…] in Brazil to refuse to cooperate with the
coupmakers by participating in [your nominated nonviolent
action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities].

(12) To cause businesspeople who manage local branches of large
multinational corporations in [organizations MNC1, MNC2, MNC…] in Brazil
to refuse to cooperate with the coupmakers by participating in [your
nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program
activities].

(13) To cause large farmers and ranchers in [organizations FO1, FO2,
FO…] in Brazil to refuse to cooperate with the coupmakers by
participating in [your nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or
constructive program activities].

(14) To cause the foreign managers and technical workers [working for
resource extraction corporations X1, X2, X…] who are from [the United
States and other relevant countries where the elite supports the
coupmakers in Brazil] to withdraw from Brazil.

(15) To cause the workers [in trade union or labor organizations T4, T5,
T…] in [the United States and other relevant countries where the elite
supports the coupmakers in Brazil] to interrupt the supply of military
weapons to Brazil.

(16) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T7,
T8, T…] in [the United States and other relevant countries where the
elite supports the coupmakers in Brazil] to interrupt the transport of
[military personnel/military weapons] to Brazil.

(17) To cause the workers in [trade unions or labor organizations T10,
T11, T…] in [the United States and other relevant countries where the
elite supports the coupmakers in Brazil] to support your liberation
struggle by refusing to handle [a particular resource] extracted and
exported from Brazil.

(18) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T13,
T14, T…] working in [the United States and other relevant countries
where the elite supports the coupmakers in Brazil] to support your
liberation struggle by participating in [your nominated nonviolent
action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities].

(19) To cause the women in [women’s organizations WO4, WO5, WO…] in [the
United States and other relevant countries where the elite supports the
coupmakers in Brazil] to support your liberation struggle by
participating in [your nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or
constructive program activities].

(20) To cause the members of [religious denominations R4,R5, R…] in [the
United States and other relevant countries where the elite supports the
coupmakers in Brazil] to support your liberation struggle by
participating in [your nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or
constructive program activities].

(21) To cause the solidarity activists in [activist organizations A1,
A2, A…] in [the United States and other relevant countries where the
elite supports the coupmakers in Brazil] to support your liberation
struggle by participating in [your nominated nonviolent
action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities].

(22) To cause the members of [your exile communities E1, E2, E…] in [the
United States and other relevant countries where the elite supports the
coupmakers in Brazil] to support your liberation struggle by
participating in [your nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or
constructive program activities].

(23) To cause the students in [students organizations S4, S5, S…] in
[the United States and other relevant countries where the elite supports
the coupmakers in Brazil] to support your liberation struggle by
participating in [your nominated nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or
constructive program activities].

In the struggle to make this world the place of peace, justice and environmental sustainability that it could be, the people of Brazil have been playing an inspirational role. You do not need to let this coup be more than a temporary setback. You also have solidarity allies around the world and many of us are willing to assist you, if you decide to let us play a role too.

For the liberation of Brazil,

Robert

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding
and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in
an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a
nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
—
Websites:
http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com (Nonviolence Charter)
http://tinyurl.com/flametree (Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth)
http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence (‘Why Violence?’)
https://nonviolentstrategy.wordpress.com/ (Nonviolent Campaign Strategy)
https://nonviolentliberationstrategy.wordpress.com/ (Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy)
http://anitamckone.wordpress.com (Anita: Songs of Nonviolence)
http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com (Robert)
https://globalnonviolencenetwork.wordpress.com/ (Global Nonviolence Network)

Lament for Humanity: A 50 Year Reflection

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Beryl & James Burrowes 1942 & 2016

Beryl & James Burrowes 1942 & 2016

By Robert J. Burrowes

Source: RINF

Deeply affected by the death of my two uncles in World War II, on 1 July 1966, the 24th anniversary of the USS Sturgeon sinking of the Japanese prisoner-of-war ship Montevideo Maru which killed the man after whom I am named, I decided that I would devote my life to working out why human beings are violent and then developing a strategy to end it.

The good news about this commitment was that it was made when I was nearly 14 so, it seemed, anything was possible. Now I am not so sure.

Here is my report on 50 years of concerted effort to understand and end human violence.

In 1966 one of my immediate preoccupations was war. The US genocidal war on Vietnam was raging and, as a sycophantic ally of the United States, Australia had been drawn into it some years previously. Trying to understand what this war was really about was challenging, particularly given the limited (mainstream) sources of information available to me at the time.

But I was deeply troubled by another problem too. I had seen a photo of a starving African child in the newspaper when I was ten and I found this most disturbing. Why did adults let children starve? I wondered. And trying to make sense of this by reading newspaper reports or asking those around me was utterly unenlightening.

By the early 1970s the environmental crisis was starting to impact on my awareness too, including through environmental campaigns I heard about and the ‘limits to growth’ literature published by the Club of Rome, which I read at University.

So where are we today?

Well, the most casual perusal of the state of our world reveals the ongoing (and recently heightened) threat of nuclear war and obliteration (on top of the ongoing and rapidly spreading radioactive contamination generated by Fukushima and the use of Depleted Uranium weapons), ongoing phenomenal levels of military spending and the endless push from corporate and other elite interests for more wars. Hence, we are witness to and, through our taxes, active supporters of an endless sequence of wars, military invasions, occupations and coups, virtually all of them instigated by the US elite and its allies, as well as a sequence of ‘local’ wars, also instigated by western elites and supplied with weapons by western corporations.

The global economy teeters on the brink of collapse and, of course, from the viewpoint of those 100,000 people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America who starve to death each day or those one billion people who live in a state of semi-starvation and abject poverty in many parts of the world, it has already ‘collapsed’. This all happens at the instigation of insane elites who continue to accumulate and hoard their wealth, much of it in illegal offshore tax havens. Given the enormous psychological damage that individual members of the elite have suffered, millions or even billions can never be enough.

And the environmental crisis has only become vastly worse with the synergistic impact of our combined assaults on the environment causing human extinction-threatening strain on the biosphere. These devastating assaults include those inflicted by military violence (often leaving vast areas uninhabitable), the emission of vast quantities of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, rainforest destruction, industrial farming, mining, commercial fishing and spreading radioactive contamination.

We are also systematically destroying the limited supply of fresh water on the planet and inducing the collapse of hydrological systems. Human activity drives 200 species of life (birds, animals, fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants) to extinction each day and 80% of the world’s forests and over 90% of the large fish in the ocean are already gone.

Despite this readily available information, governments continue to prioritize spending $US2,000,000,000 each day on military violence, the sole purpose of which is to terrorize and kill fellow human beings, now or in the future.

In addition, you might have noticed the ongoing attacks on everything from our civil liberties and right to privacy to our right to eat healthy food that has not been poisoned and/or genetically mutilated.

So why does all of this happen? Well, 50 years of research and decades of nonviolent activism have had some rewards and particularly the research that Anita McKone and I conducted during our 14 years in seclusion (1996-2010) which fully explained why human beings are violent. In essence, it is an outcome of the visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence inflicted by adults on children. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Moreover, this research also gave us enormous insight into the insanity of the global elite and those who serve them in order to maintain this worldwide system of violence and exploitation that is killing us all while destroying the biosphere. Whether it be the politicians who implement elite policies, the academics who ‘justify’ or remain silent about this violence and exploitation, the business people who manage it, the judges, magistrates, lawyers and prosecutors who defend and ultimately enforce it, the teachers and media personnel who teach and promote (or distract us from) it, or the soldiers, private military contractors, police and prison officers who inflict its most direct violence, the global elite is served by a ready stream of witting or unwitting people, many of whom are paid by your taxes to do its bidding. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane’.

And just to ensure that you are endlessly frightened into accepting this worldwide system of violence and exploitation, and to support its further encroachment into your life, the global elite conducts an ongoing terrorist campaign against you. See ‘Terrorism: Ultimate Weapon of the Global Elite’ and ‘Why Elites Love Drones’.

But there is another huge problem too: Lack of solidarity.

Elites know that they can divide us and that enables them to conquer us. Despite our efforts to build solidarity over recent decades, elites keep finding new ways to emphasize our ‘differences’. We need to start thinking of our selves as ‘We are all each other’. Does it matter if the ‘big’ difference between us is our gender, our race, our class, our religion, our nationality or something else (or even all of these)?

While elites can easily manipulate us, especially via education systems and the corporate media, into projecting our fear and self-hatred onto others who are ‘different’ and then inflicting violence on, or even killing, each other because, in effect, ‘I am an adult and you are a child’, ‘I am a man and you are a woman’, ‘I am non-indigenous and you are indigenous’, ‘I am a Christian/Jew/Hindu/Buddhist and you are a Muslim’, ‘I am working class and you are middle class’, ‘I am white and you are not’, ‘I am straight and you are LGBTQIA’, ‘I am one nationality and you are another’, ‘I am a feminist and you are a socialist’, or even ‘I am human and you are a bird/animal/fish/insect/reptile/amphibian/plant’ then we haven’t even begun to realize that the real issue is that we are all living beings and this insane elite is willing to do anything they can to exploit and, if necessary, kill us all.

Isn’t it time we started to see what makes us the same – victims of violence and exploitation – rather than focusing on what, after all, are the rather less significant differences in our bodily characteristics, in our beliefs or even the causes of our exploitation (which is not meant to diminish the significance of the outcomes of direct and structural violence which undoubtedly have variable impact)? Fear divides us.

One interesting personal outcome of this lifetime of effort, apart from the many arrests, terms of imprisonment (including once in a psychiatric ward where I was forcibly injected with ‘antipsychotic’ drugs), bankruptcy and seizure of my passport that have been direct results of my nonviolent activism, is that Anita and I have been homeless since 1999: conscience has its costs. Moreover, a worldwide search has failed to identify more than a handful of individuals (but pre-eminently my parents, James and Beryl, both veterans of World War II and now 93) or an organization of any kind that is willing to fund our research or our work to end human violence. Of course, there is a psychological explanation for this as well. See ‘Why Don’t We Try to Understand and End Human Violence?’

So what of human prospects? Not good. With an insane elite controlling the US (and other) military/nuclear arsenals and the highly exploitative global economy (with the secret corporate governance deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, designed to further consolidate corporate control of our world), as well as the dominant discourse via the education systems and corporate media, very few people have the emotional and intellectual capacities to critique this world order and then strategically and nonviolently resist the rush to extinction in which we now find ourselves. In short, most human beings are utterly (unconsciously) terrified and remain politically inert despite time and opportunities slipping rapidly away.

And those who do courageously resist this violent world order face a phalanx of violent institutions, ranging from psychiatry – see ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ – and the pharmaceutical – see ‘Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients’ – and agribusiness – see ‘Monsanto, America’s Monster’ – industries to the corporate media – see ‘Propaganda & Engineering Consent for Empire’ – and the police, legal and prison systems – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’ – designed to neutralize or stop us, one way or another.

So what do I suggest? Well, with the scientific evidence now indicating that near term human extinction is the most likely outcome – see ‘Why is Near Term Human Extinction Inevitable?’ – it is increasingly clear that if we are to end human violence in all of its many and complex manifestations, and prevent human extinction, then we need an integrated and comprehensive strategy for doing so that also provides many meaningful avenues for involvement by individuals and organizations who wish to respond powerfully: token gestures have no value. Over many years I have endeavoured to create this overarching strategy and I invite you to participate in it by doing one or more of the following.

If you are an adult, you might consider dramatically modifying your treatment of children in accordance with ‘My Promise to Children’. You might also find this article useful in better understanding how to do so: ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If these suggestions seem beyond you, then perhaps your own emotional healing should be your priority. Despite its title, this article explains what you need to do: ‘An Open Letter to Soldiers with “Mental Health” Issues’. And remember this: if you don’t believe that you are ‘important’ enough to spend time learning to know yourself more deeply, I disagree. You are important.

Separately from the above, you might like to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

And if you would like to learn how to make your nonviolent action campaign for a peace, environmental or social justice outcome more strategically effective, you can do so here: ‘Nonviolent Campaign Strategy’. To nonviolently defend against coups and invasions, remove a dictatorship or conduct a liberation struggle, check out ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’.

I am not going to get another 50 years to try to create the world of peace, justice and sustainability for which many of us strive but I am going to use every single moment of the time I have left.

Why? Because I love the Earth and everything on it. And you?

 

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

 

Fear our new robot overlords: This is why you need to take artificial intelligence seriously

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Matrix-Machines-Best-Movie-AI

Killer computers determined to kill us? Nope. Forget “Terminator” — there’s something more specific to worry about

By Phil Torres

Source: Salon

There are a lot of major problems today with tangible, real-world consequences. A short list might include terrorism, U.S.-Russian relations, climate change and biodiversity loss, income inequality, health care, childhood poverty, and the homegrown threat of authoritarian populism, most notably associated with the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump.

Yet if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past several years, you’ve almost certainly seen articles from a wide range of news outlets about the looming danger of artificial general intelligence, or “AGI.” For example, Stephen Hawking has repeatedly expressed that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” and Elon Musk — of Tesla and SpaceX fame — has described the creation of superintelligence as “summoning the demon.” Furthermore, the Oxford philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Nick Bostrom, published a New York Times best-selling book in 2014 called Superintelligence, in which he suggests that the “default outcome” of building a superintelligent machine will be “doom.”

What’s with all this fear-mongering? Should we really be worried about a takeover by killer computers hell-bent on the total destruction of Homo sapiens? The first thing to recognize is that a Terminator-style war between humanoid robots is not what the experts are anxious about. Rather, the scenarios that keep these individuals awake at night are far more catastrophic. This may be difficult to believe but, as I’ve written elsewhere, sometimes truth is stranger than science fiction. Indeed, given that the issue of AGI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, it’s increasingly important for the public to understand exactly why the experts are nervous about superintelligent machines. As the Future of Life Institute recently pointed out, there’s a lot of bad journalism about AGI out there. This is a chance to correct the record.

Toward this goal, step one is to realize is that your brain is an information-processing device. In fact, many philosophers talk about the brain as the hardware — or rather, the “wetware” — of the mind, and the mind as the software of the brain. Directly behind your eyes is a high-powered computer that weighs about three pounds and has roughly the same consistency as Jell-o. It’s also the most complex object in the known universe. Nonetheless, the rate at which it’s able to process information is much, much slower than the information-processing speed of an actual computer. The reason is that computers process information by propagating electrical potentials, and electrical potentials move at the speed of light, whereas the fastest signals in your brain travel at around 100 miles per second. Fast, to be sure, but not nearly as fast as light.

Consequently, an AGI could think about the world at speeds many orders of magnitude faster than our brains can. From the AGI’s point of view, the outside world — including people — would move so slowly that everything would appear almost frozen. As the theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky calculates, for a computer running a million times faster than our puny brains, “a subjective year of thinking would be accomplished for every 31 physical seconds in the outside world, and a millennium would fly by in eight-and-a-half hours.”

Already, then, an AGI would have a huge advantage. Imagine yourself in a competition against a machine that has a whole year to work through a cognitive puzzle for every 31 seconds that you spend trying to think up a solution. The mental advantage of the AGI would be truly profound. Even a large team of humans working together would be no match for a single AGI with so much time on its hands. Now imagine that we’re not in a puzzle-solving competition with an AGI but a life-and-death situation in which the AGI wants to destroy humanity. While we struggle to come up with strategies for keeping it contained, it would have ample time to devise a diabolical scheme to exploit any technology within electronic reach for the purpose of destroying humanity.

But a diabolical AGI isn’t — once again — what many experts are actually worried about. This is a crucial point that the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker misses in a comment about AGI for the website Edge.org. To quote Pinker at length:

“The other problem with AGI dystopias is that they project a parochial alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. Even if we did have superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they want to depose their masters, massacre bystanders, or take over the world? Intelligence is the ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal, but the goals are extraneous to the intelligence itself: being smart is not the same as wanting something. History does turn up the occasional megalomaniacal despot or psychopathic serial killer, but these are products of a history of natural selection shaping testosterone-sensitive circuits in a certain species of primate, not an inevitable feature of intelligent systems.” Pinker then concludes with, “It’s telling that many of our techno-prophets can’t entertain the possibility that artificial intelligence will naturally develop along female lines: fully capable of solving problems, but with no burning desire to annihilate innocents or dominate the civilization.”

Unfortunately, such criticism misunderstands the danger. While it’s conceptually possible that an AGI really does have malevolent goals — for example, someone could intentionally design an AGI to be malicious — the more likely scenario is one in which the AGI kills us because doing so happens to be useful. By analogy, when a developer wants to build a house, does he or she consider the plants, insects, and other critters that happen to live on the plot of land? No. Their death is merely incidental to a goal that has nothing to do with them. Or consider the opening scenes of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which “bureaucratic” aliens schedule Earth for demolition to make way for a “hyperspatial express route” — basically, a highway. In this case, the aliens aren’t compelled to destroy us out of hatred. We just happen to be in the way.

The point is that what most theorists are worried about is an AGI whose values — or final goals — don’t fully align with ours. This may not sound too bad, but a bit of reflection shows that if an AGI’s values fail to align with ours in even the slightest ways, the outcome could very well be, as Bostrom argues, doom. Consider the case of an AGI — thinking at the speed of light, let’s not forget — that is asked to use its superior intelligence for the purpose of making humanity happy. So what does it do? Well, it destroys humanity, because people can’t be sad if they don’t exist. Start over. You tell it to make humanity happy, but without killing us. So it notices that humans laugh when we’re happy, and hooks up a bunch of electrodes to our faces and diaphragm that make us involuntarily convulse as if we’re laughing. The result is a strange form of hell. Start over, again. You tell it to make us happy without killing us or forcing our muscles to contract. So it implants neural electrodes into the pleasure centers of everyone’s brains, resulting in a global population in such euphoric trances that people can no longer engage in the activities that give life meaning. Start over — once more. This process can go on for hours. At some point it becomes painfully obvious that getting an AGI’s goals to align with ours is going to be a very, very tricky task.

Another famous example that captures this point involves a superintelligence whose sole mission is to manufacture paperclips. This sounds pretty benign, right? How could a “paperclip maximizer” pose an existential threat to humanity? Well, if the goal is to make as many paperclips as possible, then the AGI will need resources to do this. And what are paperclips composed of? Atoms — the very same physical stuff out of which your body is composed. Thus, for the AGI, humanity is nothing more than a vast reservoir of easily accessible atoms, atoms, atoms. As Yudkowsky eloquently puts it, “The [AGI] does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” And just like that, the flesh and bones of human beings are converted into bendable metal for holding short stacks of paper.

At this point, one might think the following, “Wait a second, we’re talking about superintelligence, right? How could a truly superintelligent machine be fixated on something so dumb as creating as many paperclips as possible?” Well, just look around at humanity. By every measure, we are by far the most intelligent creatures on our planetary spaceship. Yet our species is obsessed with goals and values that are, when one takes a step back and peers at the world with “new eyes,” incredibly idiotic, perplexing, harmful, foolish, self-destructive, other-destructive, and just plain weird.

For example, some people care so much about money that they’re willing to ruin friendships, destroy lives and even commit murder or start wars to acquire it. Others are so obsessed with obeying the commandments of ancient “holy texts” that they’re willing to blow themselves up in a market full of non-combatants. Or consider a less explicit goal: sex. Like all animals, humans have an impulse to copulate, and this impulse causes us to behave in certain ways — in some cases, to risk monetary losses and personal embarrassment. The appetite for sex is just there, pushing us toward certain behaviors, and there’s little we can do about the urge itself.

The point is that there’s no strong connection between how intelligent a being is and what its final goals are. As Pinker correctly notes above, intelligence is nothing more than a measure of one’s ability to achieve a particular aim, whatever it happens to be. It follows that any level of intelligence — including superintelligence — can be combined with just about any set of final goals — including goals that strike us as, well, stupid. A superintelligent machine could be no less infatuated with obeying Allah’s divine will or conquering countries for oil as some humans are.

So far, we’ve discussed the thought-speed of machines, the importance of making sure their values align with ours, and the weak connection between intelligence and goals. These considerations alone warrant genuine concern about AGI. But we haven’t yet mentioned the clincher that makes AGI an utterly unique problem unlike anything humanity has ever encountered. To understand this crucial point, consider how the airplane was invented. The first people to keep a powered aircraft airborne were the Wright brothers. On the windy beaches of North Carolina, they managed to stay off the ground for a total of 12 seconds. This was a marvelous achievement, but the aircraft was hardly adequate for transporting goods or people from one location to another. So, they improved its design, as did a long lineage of subsequent inventors. Airplanes were built with one, two, or three wings, composed of different materials, and eventually the propeller was replaced by the jet engine. One particular design — the Concorde — could even fly faster than the speed of sound, traversing the Atlantic from New York to London in less than 3.5 hours.

The crucial idea here is that the airplane underwent many iterations of innovation. Problems that arose in previous designs were improved upon, leading to increasingly safe and reliable aircraft. But this is not the situation we’re likely to be in with AGI. Rather, we’re likely to have one, and only one, chance to get all the problems mentioned above exactly right. Why? Because intelligence is power. For example, we humans are the dominant species on the planet not because of our long claws, sharp teeth and bulky musculatures. The key difference between Homo sapiens and the rest of the Animal Kingdom concerns our oversized brains, which enable us to manipulate and rearrange the world in incredible ways. It follows that if an AGI were to exceed our level of intelligence, it could potentially dominate not only the biosphere, but humanity as well.

Even more, since creating intelligent machines is an intellectual task, an AGI could attempt to modify its own code, a possibility known as “recursive self-improvement.” The result could be an exponential intelligence explosion that, before one has a chance to say “What the hell is happening?,” yields a super-super-superintelligent AGI, or a being that towers over us to the extent that we tower over the lowly cockroach. Whoever creates the first superintelligent computer — whether it’s Google, the U.S. government, the Chinese government, the North Korean government, or a lone hacker in her or his garage — they’ll have to get everything just right the first time. There probably won’t be opportunities for later iterations of innovation to fix flaws in the original design, if there are any. When it comes to AGI, the stakes are high.

It’s increasingly important for the public to understand the nature of thinking machines and why some experts are so worried about them. Without a grasp of these issues, claims like “A paperclip maximizer could destroy humanity!” will sound as apocalyptically absurd as “The Rapture is near! Save your soul while you still can!” Consequently, organizations dedicated to studying AGI safety could get defunded or shut down, and the topic of AGI could become the target of misguided mockery. The fact is that if we manage to create a “friendly” AGI, the benefits to humanity could be vast. But if we fail to get things right on the first go around, the naked ape could very well end up as a huge pile of paperclips.

 

 

Phil Torres is the founder of the X-Risks Institute and author of The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse. He’s on Twitter @xriskology.

Government, Terrorism, Money, Education and Other Important Discussions

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images

By Phillip J. Watt

Source: The Mind Unleashed

The elite power structure – which uses the monetary system, war, false flags and the monopolized media as their primary mechanisms of control – has infiltrated every major government of the Western World. How do we know this? It’s simple; if they hadn’t been hijacked, then governments would have already begun a process of revolutionizing the way in which our societies are organized so that it benefits all of us, not just a select few.

The US Presidential race and two of its candidates have shown a small amount of hope for real change in America, something that not just its citizens desperately need, but the entire world too. Once the game is changed in the US – so that the government no longer works for those in control of the multinational and banking corporations – it will undoubtedly reverberate around the world.

Clinton is obviously a mouthpiece of the status quo and therefore cannot be trusted to enact real change. After all, she is an oligarch. On the other hand, Sanders and Trump appear to be anti-establishment, but are they really? It’s difficult to really know, because they could be controlled opposition. Yet even if they are separate to the existing order, can we really trust that they’ll do the job that the world’s peoples, and the environment, truly need?

Actions always speak louder than words, so regardless of the rhetoric of Trump and Sanders, does their policy agenda actually align to the truths that have been exposed by the many independent social researchers who are doing a wonderful job for the betterment of humanity?

Read below and decide for yourself.

The Real Policies for Change

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it reflects the fundamental shifts that we should be implementing in the short term to move into a new era of health and prosperity for humanity, and the environment we inhabit. In other words, these changes are the first essential steps if we want to overcome the dysfunction and deception that plague the hearts and minds of the people, as well as the systems that guide our collective activity.

If a political party or politician does not discuss these topics in general, then they are not aligned to the changes that we need, and therefore true progress. This is most likely because of two reasons; ignorance and/or corruption.

In any case, the exact way forward in each area is of course open for debate, but there must be an open and transparent dialogue held among the people. Simply, we all need to understand not just the issues, but the potential solutions to them.

This is obviously happening within conscious circles and progressive movements, however it’s not yet active within the mainstream mentality. This is just more evidence which illustrates that our politicians have failed us; that’s because it’s their job to bring these issues to the light of day so that everybody can participate in their resolution, if they so choose.

1. Monetary Policy: The way the economy is designed must rid society from the saturation of debt, move beyond indebtment to the oligarchs, cease the creation of fake currency by banks, overcome economic slavery by making the currency supply one of value and guarantee that local economies prosper.

2. Taxation Policy: The tax burden put on the people and the evasion of tax by multinational corporations needs to be resolved. One such method is abolishing all taxes and implementing a 2% debit-transaction taxso that citizens pay less tax, all individuals and businesses pay their fair share and there is an abundance of revenue to heal the wounds of a decaying society.

3. Budgeting Policy: Government revenues must be effectively and efficiently utilized to ensure the development of robust social services, increased wealth equality, the eradication of poverty, widespread sustainable practices, appropriate national defense programs and necessary infrastructure.

4. Defense and Foreign Policy: With unjust wars and false flag terrorism being the norm of the 21st Century, any decision to go to war must be sanctioned by the people via referendum. The reasons must be transparentally documented and validated as based in truth. All events at home and abroad that impact the decision-making of defense and foreign relations must be subject to robust and open investigations. Because national security is the first priority, all international relations should be treated diplomatically as the first line of defense.

5. Media Policy: The way in which information is disseminated throughout society must not be managed by monopolies, or a government. Media must be an open source platform where independent investigations are implemented and presented without bias. Any monopoly on the media must be disassembled so that the populace has unrestricted access to all the information necessary for the health and well-being of each individual and the community as a whole.

6. Education Policy: The way in which our children are educated is an indoctrination into the status quo, particularly economically and politically. The education system must therefore ensure that all children exercise their right to gain access to information that will help them to grow into healthy, happy and honorable adults, as well as question the way in which we organize society so that we can evolve it in alignment with our needs.

7. Governmental Policy: The amalgamation of government and business needs to be dissected. Politicians and bureaucrats are servants of the people and therefore must be representative of the needs and wants of the people. Moreover, government intervention of individual liberty and the free market must be also reduced.

8. Energy Policy: There is no longer any need to rely on fossil fuels, so creating the energy that society needs must be replaced with renewable resources – such as solar, air, water, wave, plant and free-energy technologies. Energy must also be made cheaply available to the public.

9. Health Policy: All foods and so-called medicines which impact the long-term health of the people must be labelled appropriately. Health programs that support emotional, psychological, philosophical, physical, spiritual, social and behavioral vitality must also be deeply embedded into schooling and other educational platforms. Holistic and preventative approaches to dis-ease must also be brought to the forefront of health education instead of relying on a symptomatic and prescriptive medical framework.

10. Medicine Policy: The pharmaceutical monopolies must be transformed into meeting the needs of the people, not shareholders and their profits. All natural and cheap remedies to disease – such as plant-based medicines and meditation – must be fully documented and reincorporated back into health education.

11. Housing Policy: Every person has a right to live in safe, comfortable and affordable housing. No individual should be homeless, unless by choice. Employment and Housing Policy must also be designed to ensure that the purchase of land is affordable and achievable for all.

12. Food Policy: The damaging impacts of industrial agriculture on earth’s natural systems, as well as the erosion of local economies (which is the direct result of trade agreements that primarily benefit the multinationals), needs to be reversed. One such way is by replacing it with a localized/regionalized Permaculture model where individuals and communities are supported to grow their own produce. This will help to increase local employment, as well as reconnect people to nature, the food they eat and their health requirements. In addition, all foods must be properly labelled and contain no toxic ingredients. GMOs must also be abandoned and organic foods must be readily available.

13. Water Policy: All citizens have a right to access safe and clean water. They should be supported to capture their own water needs. Where this is not possible, no toxins such as fluoride will be added to the water supply.

14. Animal Policy: All animal agriculture systems must respect the health and happiness of those animals. They must not subject them to any conditions in which they consistently suffer. One particular approach would be to incorporate it into a widespread permaculture model, in which animals are treated humanely.

15. Environmental Policy: Any practice that is environmentally unsustainable and negatively impacts the health and diversity of our natural systems is to be transformed into the opposite. The increasing extinction of animal and plant life must be reversed, as well as the trends of deforestation, ocean acidification and desertification.

16. Drug Policy: The war-on-drugs has been an epic failure because it has generated more crime, addiction, mental health problems and sent the market underground. It has also stigmatized the natural right to explore one’s own body and consciousness. The therapeutic and developmental aspects of so-called illegal drugs must be holistically researched so that society can be educated on both their positive and negative impacts. All illegal substances must be made legal, as they have begun to do in some countries, and a thoroughly-informed society must have safe access to pure substances for their own therapeutic, developmental and leisurely needs.

17. Sovereignty Policy: All citizens have natural rights, some of which have eroded through the recent policies of Western Governments. One example is privacy and another is the right to protest. This stripping of our rights needs to immediately stop and all rights aligned with natural law are to be reintroduced. No flesh and blood person should be treated as a legal fiction that works for a corporation impersonating as a government. This means that no legislation can impede on the natural laws that all individuals have a right to exercise.

18. Immunization Policy: All vaccines must be robustly studied independent of the pharmaceutical industry and the results made available to the public. All previous disease and death resulting from vaccines must also be publicly available. None will contain any ingredients other than to immunize against a specific disease. In addition, no child or adult will be forced or coerced into taking vaccines; every person must have their natural right to choose intact.

19. Atmospheric Policy: All geoengineering and chemical spraying programs are to immediately cease. The impacts that these programs have already had on the health of humanity, as well as the environment, must be holistically investigated and reversed.

20. Social Security Policy: Pensioners, people with a disability and other persons who require financial support must be treated with respect and must be able to comfortably live above the poverty line. Where possible, they will be supported to increase their education, training and skills so that they reenter the workforce. There should also be widespread volunteering programs with inherent incentives so the knowledge, skills and services of the elderly can be utilized for the benefit of the community.

Further Thoughts

There are many more areas that need to evolve, but its important to focus on the priorities in such as short piece. No doubt, many of you reading this would have been shocked and confused by some of the information herein. You might have even rejected elements to it, because it might have seemed too conspiratorial or challenging to believe. That’s okay; every single one of us who have woken up to these realities felt the same the first time we heard them too.

In any case, if you’d like to do follow up research, the links provided above will help you to initiate the process. Go deep too; it’s only when we individually undertake our own independent and robust research that we can come to a solid understanding of the true state of the world. The tip of course is to not be fooled by the propaganda narratives of the matrix-media and ensure we undertake research through the independent channels and progressive social researchers.

Furthermore, the above plans of attack are designed for the short to mid term. This does not discount the deeper agenda of moving from an economy of scarcity, to one of abundance. There are many models to achieve this, such as several resource-based economies, but until we build the foundations and start moving in that direction we have to work with what’s in front of us, right now.

In addition, of course it’s necessary to build new systems outside of the existing model to make the old ones redundant, yet we still need to use the systems that we’ve got and aim to transform society from within. After all, a balanced and holistic approach, is always the right approach.

Final Thoughts

Never has a government exposed all of the above issues. They might touch on some of them to some degree, but unfortunately we don’t have so-called leaders who actually call out the real challenges that we collectively face. There’s no doubt that some politicians know about these actualities, but the reality is they don’t publicly disclose it in fear of losing their credibility, or their livelihood.

But things are changing. Not only are more and more people joining the awakening community by educating themselves and taking action in response to these dysfunctions, but there are also political parties forming who dare to expose these truths to their audience and design robust policies in response. One such group is The Australian Sovereignty Party (ASP); in fact, many of the links above will direct you to the policies they’ve designed to rectify the failures of past governments.

Many parties around the world could learn a thing or two from this political force.

If you’re Australian, I highly encourage you to read the policy material at their website and join if their ethos resonates with you. Any person from around the world can join as an affiliate member too, so anyone is more than welcome to sign up to learn about how a true political party works. In addition, share this article and the ASPs progressive policies among your friends and family so that the momentum builds to bring Australians (and others) up-to-date with a political outfit that actually represents the real needs of you, me and all of us.

If you also believe in transforming our world into a better place, then at the very least research their policies. I know you’ll be pleasantly surprised (view their website here and follow them on facebook here). Furthermore, following is an interview I did with the President of the ASP, Daniel Huppert. In it he discusses many of the issues found in this article and the ASPs policy response to them. Enjoy.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.

Here’s Why Hillary Won’t Allow Her Corporate Speeches to be Published

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: RINF

In a previous report, I indicated “Why Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speeches Are Relevant”, but not what they contained. The present report indicates what they contained. 

One speech in particular will be cited and quoted from as an example here, to show the type of thing that all of her corporate speeches contained, which she doesn’t want the general public to know about. 

This is the day’s keynote speech, which she gave on Wednesday, 25 June 2014, to the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a lobbying organization in DC, at their annual convention, which in 2014 was held in San Diego. The announcement for attendees said: “Wednesday’s Keynote session is sponsored by Genentech, and is open to Convention registrants with Convention Access and Convention Access & Partnering badges only. Seating is limited.” Somehow, a reporter from a local newspaper, the Times of San Diego, managed to get in. Also, somehow, an attendee happened to phone-video the 50-minute interview that the BIO’s CEO did of Clinton, which took place during the hour-and-a-half period, 12-1:30, which was allotted to Clinton.

The Times of San Diego headlined that day, “Hillary Clinton Cheers Biotechers, Backing GMOs and Federal Help”, and gave an excellent summary of her statements, including of the interview. Here are highlights:

—

It was red meat for the biotech base. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a 65-minute appearance at the BIO International Convention on Wednesday, voiced support for genetically modified organisms and possible federal subsidies. … 

“Maybe there’s a way of getting a representative group of actors at the table” to discuss how the federal government could help biotechs with “insurance against risk,” she said.

Without such subsidies, she said, “this is going to be an increasing challenge.” …

She said the debate about GMOs might be turned toward the biotech side if the benefits were better explained, noting that the “Frankensteinish” depictions could be fought with more positive spin.

“I stand in favor of using seeds and products that have a proven track record,” she said [at 29:00 in the video next posted here], citing drought-resistant seeds she backed as secretary of state. “There’s a big gap between the facts and what the perceptions are.” [that too at 29:00] …

Minutes earlier, Gov. Jerry Brown made a rousing 3-minute pitch for companies to see California as biotech-friendly.

“You’ve come to the right place.” …

Brown had some competition for biotech boosterism in the form of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton ally who pitched his own state as best for biotech. …

[Clinton was] Given a standing ovation at the start and end of her appearance.

—

In other words: As President, she would aim to sign into law a program to provide subsidies from U.S. taxpayers to Monsanto and other biotech firms, to assist their PR and lobbying organizations to eliminate what she says is “a big gap between the facts and what the perceptions are” concerning genetically modified seeds and other GMOs. In other words: she ignores the evidence that started to be published in scientific journals in 2012 showing that Monsanto and other GMO firms were selectively publishing studies that alleged to show their products to be safe, while selectively blocking publication of studies that — on the basis of better methodology — showed them to be unsafe. She wants U.S. taxpayers to assist GMO firms in their propaganda that’s based on their own flawed published studies, financed by the GMO industry, and that ignores the studies that they refuse to have published. She wants America’s consumers to help to finance their own being poisoning by lying companies, who rake in profits from poisoning them.

Her argument on this, at 27:00 to 30:00 in the video of the 50-minute interview of Clinton, starts by her citing the actual disinformation (that’s propagandized by the fossil-fuels industries, which actually back her Presidential campaign) that causes the American public to reject the view that humans have caused global warming. At 27:38 in the video, she said “98% of scientists in the world agree that man has caused the problem” of global warming, and she alleged that the reason why there is substantial public resistance to GMOs is the same as the reason why there’s substantial public resistance to the reality that global warming exists and must be actively addressed: Americans don’t know the science of the matter. She received several applauses from this pro-GMO audience, for making that false analogy. The reality, that it’s false, is that on 15 May 2013, the definitive meta-study, which examined the 11,944 published studies that had been done relating to the question of global warming and its causes, reported that “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” The meta-study was titled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”. So, Clinton’s statement “98%” was only 0.9% off regarding the size of the scientific consensus. However, her implication that the public’s rejection of that actual 97.1% of experts’ findings on global warming, is at all analogous to the public’s rejection of the actually bogus finding by GMO industry ‘experts’ that GMOs are safe, is pure deception by her. The reality is the exact contrary: The fossil-fuels industries have financed the propaganda ‘discrediting’ the scientists’ consensus about global warming, much like the GMO industries have financed the deception of the public to think that ‘scientists’ ‘find’ that GMOs are safe. In fact, as was reported in Scientific American, on 23 December 2013, “’Dark Money’ Funds Climate Change Denial Effort”, and the study they were summarizing, from the journal Climate Change, was titled “Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations”. It found that:

“From 2003 to 2007, the Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were heavily involved in funding CCCM [climate change counter-movement] organizations. But since 2008, they are no longer making publicly traceable contributions to CCCM organizations. Instead, funding has shifted to pass through [two] untraceable sources [both of which had been set up by the Kochs: Donors Trust, and Donors Capital Fund].“

On 23 April 2016, Politico headlined “Charles Koch: ‘It’s possible’ Clinton is preferable to a Republican for president”, but this isn’t the only indication that Hillary is merely pretending to be their enemy. On 24 February 2016, I headlined “Hillary Clinton’s Global-Burning Record” and summarized and linked to news reports such as the opening there: “On 17 July 2015, Paul Blumenthal and Kate Sheppard at Huffington Post bannered, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Biggest Campaign Bundlers Are Fossil Fuel Lobbyists’ and the sub-head was ‘Clinton’s top campaign financiers are linked to Big Oil, natural gas and the Keystone pipeline.’”

In other words: the same pro-GMO lobbyists who applaud Hillary for verbally endorsing the science that affirms global warming, applaud her for endorsing their own fake ‘science’ which asserts that GMOs have been proven safe. They just love her lie, which analogizes them to the authentic scientists who (97.1%) say that global warming exists and is caused by humans’ emissions of global-warming gases.

Also, she expressed the wish that: “the federal government could help biotechs with ‘insurance against risk,’ she said. Without such subsidies, she said, this is going to be an increasing challenge,” because otherwise, biotech companies might get bankrupted by lawsuits from consumers who might have become poisoned by their products. She wants the consuming public to bear the risk from those products — not the manufacturers of them to bear any of the risks that could result from those manufacturers’ rigged ‘safety’ ‘studies’ (a.k.a.: their propaganda).

In other words: the reason why Hillary Clinton won’t allow her 91 corporate speeches, for which she was paid $21,667,000, to be published, is the lying political cravenness of her pandering to those corporations there. Each group of lobbyists is happy to applaud her lying, regardless of whether her lies include insults against another group of lobbyists, to whom she might be delivering similar lies to butter them up at a different annual convention or etc.

In other words: she’s telling all of them collectively: You’re my type of people, and the public who despise you are merely misguided, but as President I’ll set them straight and they’ll even end up paying part of the bill to be ‘educated’ about these matters, by my Administration, and even part of the bill to pay corporations’ product-liability suits.

The reason why Clinton doesn’t want those speeches to be made public is that she doesn’t want the voters to know that she intends to use their money to propagandize to them for the benefit of those corporations, and also to protect those corporations from liability for harms their products cause the public.

This is called (by the propagandists) ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’. Mussolini, with pride, called it sometimes “fascism,” and sometimes “corporationism.” But whatever it’s called, it’s what she supports, and what she represents, to the people who are paying her. And even most of her own voters would find it repulsive, if they knew about it. So: she can’t let them know about it. And she doesn’t.