War and Peace: The Lost Principles of Science and Value

Peace Activists Blame the Enemy without Science or Life-Value Compass

• By Prof. John McMurtry Global Research, June 17, 2015
• In recent months we have seen one ‘peace activist’ organization after another framing global conflicts in US war-propaganda terms.
• There is no criterion of peace, no evidence base, no life ground or compass governing judgement.

The official enemy is assumed as first premise, and slogans substitute for understanding. Avaaz, Amnesty International, and Physicians for Human Rights, for example, have all called for a version of ‘humanitarian bombing’ to ‘save lives’ in Syria. The war criminal attacks on Iraq and Libya under the same pretexts are erased from view.

In this way, blame-the-enemy justifications for mass murder run free with no grounding principle to tell peace from war, or of truth from propaganda. Even the legendary Science for Peace held a conference in March this year organized as if it was the US National Endowment on Democracy in Ukraine Yet oppositions are skeptical of any ‘moral compass’ because it is a concept typically invoked by the very people demanding wars. So we remain adrift in a world heading for cumulative catastrophe without any principled life-value bearings.

Again and again the same pattern unfolds with another designated enemy to justify another US-led aerial bombing of another poor society with resources for the US-led corporate-money maw – already far advanced in Ukraine without press decoding. Accusing the enemy to justify war-criminal aggression is now normalized so pervasively that progressive organizations succumb too without any principled life-value compass. Organized amnesia allows it. Indoctrinated thinking governs it. Stupefied group-egoism motivates it. Today the new propagandists of war are dressed in peace costumes as they assume the official narratives of war as their own.

Systemic Ignorance as the Medium of Mind Control

But how could members of organizations which have stood for good causes go along with the big lies of a global war mechanism bringing eco-genocides to the deprived and profits to the few? Systemic ignorance is the medium of mind control. In a world of totalizing diversions from our common life ground, one orchestrated war after another is reverse-projected onto a designated enemy to attack instead. A billion-dollar-a-day US-led weapons industry advances private corporatization across borders as prime time conflict entertainment and global panacea at once. Wherever people do not mind being complicit in their own comfort zone, a growing global war against life organization itself advances in one despoiling invasion after another.

We know the symptoms in those who go along. Refusal to see, denial, diversion, and favors of the system collaborate to mask the deep war. Once set into motion by the US-led war machine driving even barbaric ISIS, the recourse must be public exposure all the way down. People do not really prefer mass dispossession and death to life. Yet the comfort zone of collaboration has entered into the centers of the peace movement itself. I never fully realized how far until I met it inside an organization I have belonged to for 30 years. Science for Peace has long been the most eminently led organization for peace in Canada, featuring such leading minds as C.B. MacPherson, John Polanyi, Ursula Franklin, Anatol Rapoport, Nancy Olivieri, and the list could go on across disciplines and fields of critical inquiry.

How could such an organization become led into a propagandist framework of war in the name of “science” and “peace”? The story is a kind of allegory of our age. It shows how a dominant culture of denial, personal diversions, and forgetting can fatuate even an organization in scientific cause against war, propaganda and crimes against humanity. As so often elsewhere, it shows how a central administration can reverse constitutional goals by rubber-stamped steps of executive privilege which exactly fit to the surrounding public ignorance and indoctrination.

Just as our universities themselves have been hijacked by a collaborator class to serve business ideology and profits, so too can its public-affairs leadership and concepts of war and peace be hijacked the same way. Our deepest values of how to live as human can collapse into manipulating slogans and complicity unless we know what science, war and peace stand for in principle against push-button assumptions of surrounding propaganda fields.

• The Background War of Higher Education:

Corporate Money and Propaganda vs. Standing for Life Value and Truth

The reframing of ‘science for peace’ into US-style blame-the-enemy propaganda occurred after the lead article of the October 2014 Science for Peace Bulletin was published – “Corporate Globalization and Society Destruction: Joining the Dots of War and Peace in Ukraine” for (Vol. 34: No. 2). Then even more then than now, Western media were reporting the causes of the civil war in Ukraine on the bases of sweeping falsehoods and accuse-Putin hysteria. Canadians were kept as ignorant as Americans with Harper and the corporate press out front and even the NDP foreign-affairs critic Paul Dewar repeating the official lies.

Yet not one counter fact or argument was communicated to the Bulletin lead article exposing the causal pattern and repressed facts. But then without notice and covertly, a major conference was unilaterally planned that silenced all the evidence against the official story. Acting president Metta Spencer, the long-time editor-proprietor of Peace Magazine, orchestrated a conference that erased the US-led war crimes in Ukraine and shifted all attention to the official enemy, Vladmir Putin. Many Science of Peace members went along not scrupling to notice that what had been erased that included the documented US orchestration of a war-criminal coup d’etat and the massive one-way bombing of civilians and life infrastructures in Eastern Ukraine and over a million refugees from the covered-up ethnic cleansing (now two million).

Put into the context of University of Toronto’s much more powerful Munk School for Global Affairs, this white-wash of the US-led Kiev overthrow of an elected government and continual mass murder of civilians in the Donbass region fitted very well. Global affairs has been taken over by pro-US/anti-Putin/Israel personnel and organization backed by big corporate money and providing media events. Why not Science for Peace too?

The Munk School was opposed by several active Science for Peace members, Professors of Chemistry and Physics John Valleau and Paul Hamel. They did their best to make the instant corporate propaganda arm accountable to academic disciplines and procedures. But kiss-money academic administrators with little serious research commitment imitate their richer corporate masters. At U of T, they kept negotiations secret until the academic coup was finalized to avoid any academic accountability. Then the announced $35 million received from notorious gold-baron Peter Munk was leveraged to get almost twice as much from Ontario and Canadian taxpayers with no independent academic appraisal, standards or accountability required. If all this could be engineered by a transnationally rapacious global mines owner whose operations kill and terrorize indigenous people in Tanzania and Papua against UN Convention – a man who effusively praised the mass-murderer Pinochet before receiving his doctorate from U of T – Science for Peace is hardly safe next door.

The Monk Institute is also accused of being an academic front for a pro-Israel lobby while being richly funded by a Saudi war merchant, Adnan Khashoggi, as well as by the Harper regime dependent on Israel lobby support. Harper gave $9 million of Canadian citizens money for transnational digital channels to conduct cyber uprising in Iran. When the academic surroundings have become so corrupted, Science for Peace hoping to keep an office on King’s Circle is perhaps only a gulp away. In such executive circles, critically informed scholarship and exposure of ongoing US-led international war crimes is not welcome, and Metta Spencer has already taken steps to silence it.

Fortunately, others in Science for Peace prefer factual truth and critical integrity in an organization worth saving. They can agree across differences and without past associations on the principles at stake of science, peace and war. And so they have against the corruption of these goals by blame-the enemy propaganda towards war in Ukraine and elsewhere. Yet the core modus operandi of the wider corporate state and media and collaborating organizations is not well understood: control of perception by total exclusion of internationally criminal facts and their US-led causation. Behind slogans of ‘freedom’ and ‘peace’ any life reality that does not fit the ruling narrative is erased by being screened out of view. To know the evidence or cause of things is effectively out of bounds.

Yet silencing the facts is not just a matter of memory-holing serial crimes against humanity and starting wars. The rationalizing justifications must reverse life reality itself to impose the master goal across domains – ever more money-sequence predation of human and planetary life supports with no limit or regulation by life standards. The system’s demands of profit and sale multiply exponentially and ever faster than world population. The destruction of societies’ very collective life capital bases is thus normalized in peace as well as war.

What Few See or Connect:

---

• The Global War on Life Support Systems
• The Ruling Laws of the System
• Knowing the Real War and the Real Enemy
• The Global Market God at War
• The Truth is What Sells, and the Enemy Sells the War
• Beyond Amnesia: Paradigm Tracking of the Propaganda Framework of Aggression
• The Ad Adversarium Fallacy: Behind the Wars Masked as Peace Seeking
  1. issues of fact and truth are erased from view,
  2. focus is directed on the unsubstantiated Enemy standing the way of US
  3. nasty insinuations or droning are launched at critics
  4. lies build on lies as virtue and truth.

• War is Peace and Ignorance is Strength: The Case of Ukraine
  The Ukraine conference and aftermath unfolded as the directing propagandist frame had structured it. It crossed political parties, corporate media, collaborating activist organizations, and the occupied minds of citizens.
• Re-Grounding in Life Reason against the Corporate Occupation
• ‘Science’ and ‘Peace’ Are Defined by What They Are Not
• Principles of Science and Peace against War Propaganda

Professor John McMurtry is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. whose work is published and translated from Latin America to Japan. He is the author and editor of the three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his most recent book is The Cancer Stage of Capitalism/ from Crisis to Cure.

Global Research more info:

Using 100% of Your Brain – Dr. Bruce H. Lipton, What is the Feldenkrais Method?

Dr. Bruce Lipton dispels the myth that we only use 10% of our brain. On the nature of Glial cells

I’d be re-missed not to take this opportunity, to introduce something that is new to me and possibly new to most of you.

What is the Feldenkrais Method?

The Feldenkrais Method is a form of somatic education that uses gentle movement and directed attention to improve movement and enhance human functioning. Through this Method, you can increase your ease and range of motion, improve your flexibility and coordination, and rediscover your innate capacity for graceful, efficient movement. These improvements will often generalize to enhance functioning in other aspects of your life.

The Feldenkrais Method is based on principles of physics, biomechanics and an empirical understanding of learning and human development. By expanding the self-image through movement sequences that bring attention to the parts of the self that are out of awareness, the Method enables you to include more of yourself in your functioning movements. Students become more aware of their habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities and expand options for new ways of moving. By increasing sensitivity the Feldenkrais Method assists you to live your life more fully, efficiently and comfortably.

View this 10’ video introduction:

Order Followers, Keeping The System of Slavery in Place

“You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her soul.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Mark Passio explains how Following Orders means doing what you are told to do, without judging for yourself whether or not the action you are being ordered to carry out is Right or Wrong.

If an individual is following orders, that individual CAN NOT be exercising Conscience, since, by definition, exercising Conscience means that one is willfully choosing for themselves Right Action over Wrong Action.

“I was just following orders” is NEVER a valid excuse or “justification” for immoral, criminal behavior, and this lame attempt to abdicate personal responsibility SHOULD NEVER BE ACCEPTED as a valid excuse for such behavior.

The term Justification comes from the Latin noun jus: “right; law” and the Latin verb facere: “to make; to create”.

Justification = To “Create” A Right.

Faulty Concepts & Misconceptions In Route To Non-Compliance

Faulty Concepts & Non-Compliance

The German Philosopher Johann Von Goethe, once said, there are none more hopelessly enslaved, than those who falsely believe they are free.

“We have reached a turning point in history and the veil of secrecy that has always surrounded the illuminati system is now at last being lifted. Now is the time for the people of the world to look after each other, and not the system. It really is that simple, and the world is almost on the verge of that happening now, because a new awareness is growing among the people. More and more are waking up every day, and they are spreading the word, as we all should do as often and as loudly as we can, because the masses who are still sleeping really must be woken up to what is occurring, there is quite literally nothing more important than this issue and this plan goes even deeper than the International money Cartels. There truly are deep dark forces at work controlling things here but it is through the manipulation of the money system that global control is maintained and it is that system that must first be addressed.

Its all very well for us to all talk about this stuff and to continue learning and gathering more information about it, but the time for merely gathering information is now passed. What is needed now is action, and it is needed very quickly because the prison door is swinging shut.” – Max Igan

Preparing to end our participation, or organizing a movement for preparation for global noncompliance, has the power to cripple, the insane global system, of fear and servitude. It would also nullify the states power to use false fag operations, in that the people or masses would already be prepared, to take on situations of discomfort, shortages and general separation from government services. It would also, grow and nurture, the masses understanding and ability to be more self sufficient, and sustainable. It’s a WIN, WIN, WIN, proposal ! So, store can goods, water, and learn about sustainable growing systems.

The Revolution is not coming. The Revolution is Now

Rebellion is it’s Own Justification

10 Signs Of Genuine People

Who doesn’t like what is genuine, authentic and original? Being genuine is a trademark of success as this quality boosts self-confidence and primes vision and focus. Genuine people don’t need to fake it or pretend to be what or who they are not as there are no privileges for them to live under such a guise. However being genuine in a world where there is a lot of attention and publicity offered to products, individuals or items which end up betraying our trust makes it hard for us to be genuine. Yet it is worth it. Here is how one can know if they are genuine.

1. They protect their self esteem

Genuine people are not concerned about external factors that could bruise their esteem. They don’t need validation from their external environment since they are much less defensive about a lot of things. They are instead happy and content with who they are.

2. They speak their mind

Genuine people are expressive. They are not shy about sharing their thoughts or perspectives about a subject. They understand that their opinions count. It is not as if they are trying to convince others about what they have to say, rather they feel relevant enough to be heard.

3. They can define their paths

They know where they are going. They do not need to be pushed by conventional thoughts or opinions on how to achieve or attain their goals. They can discover the adequate channels to take as they have an internal guide on how to pursue their passions or goals. They can forge an entirely new path in the process of getting to their destination.

4. They can take responsibility

They understand that life is a mix of wrongs and right and nothing is perfect. As much as they are able to confront their thoughts, beliefs and behaviors, they know how to identify their faults and accept them if their actions from them hurt others.

5. They can offer and take a compliment

They are able to offer their gratitude and accept one too. They see a compliment for what it is and do not strain such expressions. They do not over-think it or find reasons for not accepting a well displayed form of gratitude. They understand the flow of life and how much they can help in channeling that flow of acceptance and giving.

6. They do not judge others

Since they are honest about their abilities and they know they are not perfect they find reason to give room to others mistakes and opinions. Other humans should be given the opportunity to express themselves as we all have differing beliefs and opinions. They are not judgmental of others.

7. They are not insecure

They are not masked with feelings of inferiority or insecurity. They really are not concerned about other people’s opinion as they are confident and simply themselves. They do not adjust their lifestyle for you to like them or not.

8. They are not threatened by failure

Genuine people see failure as a way of learning. They are not afraid to try something new and go down an unconventional route if it will be a source of experience, knowledge and satisfaction. They are far from trying to take a route because it guarantees safety and security. Rather they are happy with doing something other people are not doing to challenge the norm.

9. They practice what they preach and preach what they practice

You can count on them practicing what they preach. They are solid and predictable. They meet their commitments and do not try to exaggerate in their deeds or words. As genuine people they are not trying to live their lives according to other people’s standard. Even when it is hard to practice authenticity they know the importance of informing others why it is necessary to practice it. Whether it is a tough truth or not, they will still preach it.

10. They don’t need possessions from their surroundings to be happy

They are happy with who they are already. They are comfortable with their inner self and what is within provides the most happiness. They can find happiness in their work, their loved ones, and in their self. These simple things are enough for them to be happy. This is why they do not seek happiness from the outside whether in terms of possessions or people’s comments about them.

See source Article at Life Hack:

Yes, even the Bookkeeper: Oskar Groening, “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” Sentenced to 4 Years

 

 

• July 15, 2015

And in Germany, 94-year-old Oskar Groening, known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” has been sentenced to four years in prison. He was responsible for counting the belongings taken from prisoners at the Nazi death camp. He was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews.
DemocracyNow

---

3 Top Officials Depart APA After Damning Report on Torture

Three top officials at the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest group of psychologists, have lost their jobs following last week’s independent investigation showing that members of the APA were complicit in post-9/11 torture and lied and covered up their close collaboration with officials at the Pentagon and CIA. In a statement, the APA announced that the association’s chief executive officer Norman Anderson and deputy chief executive officer Michael Honaker have “retired,” while longtime communications director Rhea Farberman has “resigned.”
DemocracyNow

---

Psychologists Collaborated with CIA & Pentagon on Post-9/11 Torture Program, May Face Ethics Charges

• A new independent review has revealed extensive details on how members of the the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest group of psychologists, were complicit in torture, lied and covered up their close collaboration with officials at the Pentagon and CIA to weaken the association’s ethical guidelines and allow psychologists to participate in the government’s enhanced interrogation programs after 9/11. The 542-page report was commissioned by the association’s board of directors last year based on an independent review by a former Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hoffman and undermines the APA’s repeated denials that some of its 130,000 members were complicit in torture. The Guardian reports the new details could provide grounds to file ethics charges against members of the APA. We speak with Dr. Stephen Soldz, professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and co-founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Earlier this month, he was invited to address the APA’s board of directors with Steven Reisner on the organization’s response to the anticipated Hoffman report. And we’re joined by Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo, a social psychologist, oral historian and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. She participated in the 2005 APA task force that condoned psychologists’ involvement in enhanced interrogations, and later blew the whistle. She has since established the APA PENS Debate Collection at University of Colorado at Boulder Archives.

“You Grow Up Wanting to be Luke Skywalker, Then Realize You’ve Become a Stormtrooper for the Empire”

by Garret

7 min read

New World Technocracy

Published on Jul 25, 2015 thecrowhouse

Max Igan – Surviving the Matrix – Season 5 – Episode 03

“When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader” – Plato

In A Future Brave New World Will It Be Possible To Live Forever?

Written By: Marie Boran January 19, 2016

TN Note: Transhumanism is a global movement. In this article The Irish Times discusses everything from philosophy to singularity; basically, its about creating humans 2.0.

January is a month for renewal and for change. Many of us have been gifted shiny new fitness trackers, treated ourselves to some new gadget or other, or upgraded to the latest smartphone. As we huff and puff our way out of the season of excess we find ourselves wishing we could trade in our overindulged bodies for the latest model.

The reality is that, even with the best of care, the human body eventually ceases to function but if I can upgrade my smartphone, why can’t I upgrade myself? Using technology, is it not possible to live forever(ish)?

After all, humans have been “upgrading” themselves in various ways for centuries. The invention of writing allowed us to offload memories, suits of armour made the body invincible to spears, eyeglasses gave us perfect 20/20 vision, the list goes on.

This is something that designer and author Natasha Vita-More has been thinking about for a long time. In 1983 she wrote The Transhumanist Manifesto, setting out her vision for a future where technology can lead to “radical life extension” – if not living forever, then living for a lot longer than is currently possible.

Vita-More has also designed a prototype whole body prosthetic she calls Primo PostHuman. This is a hypothetical artificial body that could replace our own and into which we could, in theory, upload our consciousness. This is more in the realm of living forever but is a concept as distant to us as Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of a flying machine was to 15th century Europeans.

Even so, while the replacement body seems much closer to science fiction than science, recent advances in robotics and prosthetics have not only given us artificial arms that can detect pressure and temperature but limbs that can be controlled by thoughts using a brain-computer interface.

As a transhumanist, Vita-More is excited by these scientific developments. She defines a transhumanist to be “a person who wants to engage with technology, extend the human lifespan, intervene with the disease of aging, and wants to look critically at all of these things”.

Transhumanism, she explains, looks at not just augmenting or bypassing the frailties of the human body but also improving intelligence, eradicating diseases and disabilities, and even equipping us with greater empathy.

“The goal is to stay alive as long as possible, as healthy as possible, with greater consciousness or humaneness. No-one wants to stay alive drooling in a wheelchair,” she adds.

Who wouldn’t want to be smarter, stronger, healthier and kinder? What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, says Dr Fiachra O’Brolcháin, a Marie Curie/Assistid Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethics, Dublin City University whose research involves the ethics of technology.

Take for example being taller than average: this correlates with above average income so it is a desirable trait. But if medical technology allowed for parents to choose a taller than average child, then this could lead to a “height race”, where each generation becomes taller and taller, he explains.

“Similarly, depending on the society, even non-homophobic people might select against having gay children (assuming this were possible) if they thought this would be a disadvantage. We might find ourselves inaugurating an era of ‘liberal eugenics’, in which future generations are created according to consumer choice.”

Then there is the problem of affordability. Most of us do not have the financial means to acquire the latest cutting-edge tech until prices drop and it becomes mainstream. Imagine a future where only the rich could access human enhancements, live long lives and avoid health problems.

Elysium, starring Matt Damon, takes this idea to its most extreme, leading to a scenario similar to what O’Brolcháin describes as “an unbridgeable divide between the enhanced and the unenhanced”.

Despite the hyper focus on these technological enhancements that come with real risks and ethical dilemmas, the transhumanist movement also seems to be about kicking back against – or at least questioning – what society expects of you.

“There’s a certain parameter of what is normal or natural. There’s a certain parameter of what one is supposed to be,” says Vita-More.

“You’re supposed to go to school at a certain age, get married at a certain age, produce children, retire and grow old. You’re supposed to live until you are 80, be happy, die and make way for the young.”

Vita-More sees technology as freeing us from these societal and biological constraints. Why can’t we choose who we are beyond the body we were born with? Scholars on the sociology of the early Web showed that Cyberspace became a place for this precise form of expression. Maybe technology will continue to provide a platform for this reinvention of what it is to be human.

Maybe, where we’re going, we won’t need bodies.

Read full story here…

 Technocracy & The New World Order

The Big Picture RT

Published on Feb 3, 2015

Patrick M. Wood, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse Of Global Transformation / The August Forecast & Review comes on The Big Picture. When most people think about the possibility of a dystopian future – they think of a world run by communism or fascism. But what if the real danger threat to democracy came from alliance between an organization devoted to world peace – the United Nations – and environmentalists? More on this conspiracy theory…

What is a wage slave?

There was a time when renting yourselves out to a job was considered the wage slavery that it is, but now your use to it, proud even to be a slave.

Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person’s livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.[1][2] It is a pejorative term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person.

The term wage slavery has been used to criticize exploitation of labour and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops),[3] and the latter as a lack of workers’ self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy.[4][5][6] The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their “species character”[7] not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution

Wage slavery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wage Slavery Equates to Chattle Slavery Noam Chomsky:

Activist, Linguist and renowned interlectual Professor Noam Chomsky about wage slavery, illegitimacy of power, legitimate use of force and violance; and libertarian anarchism.

• It’s only a small collection of excerpts from the one hour long discussion with UC Berkeley’s Harry Kreisler for the UCTV series “Conversations with History”.
• That particular episode was titled “Activism, Anarchism, and Power”. The full discussion is also available here at YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ghoXQ…).

Mike Leung on Worker Cooperatives and Financing

Mike Leung of the proposed Worker Cooperative Federal Credit Union, and Abolish Human rentals discusses financing and worker cooperatives.

Why America’s favorite anarchist thinks most American workers are slaves

BY David Graeber April 17, 2014 at 2:25 PM EDT

Bureaucrats pushing paper decide what we and our work are worth. But somewhat ironically, Graeber suggests, it’s those bureaucrats who perform the most meaningless work of all. If we gave everyone a lump sum basic income and eliminated those bureaucratic jobs, we’d all be better off, he says.

PBS News hour click thru: