dialog through end of 2009

by

2010-01-13

Richard Moore

Bcc: contributors
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From: Patricia Tursi 
Date: 26 December 2009 20:36:19 GMT
Subject: Re: re-9: global warming – Copenhagen
thanks so much for this informative description.. Our president appears to believe that his appearance is all important…as in the acceptance of his peace prize and then snubbing dinner, etc….the whole agreement is another wealth transfer.

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Hi Patricia,
Glad you’ve found the discussion useful. I’ll be updating the article on climate science for a while, until I ‘get it right’, and the latest version will always be on the ‘rkmdocs’ blog at this URL:
Climate science: observations vs. models
The article got picked up by Global Research, which reaches a rather large audience. I’ve met some interesting folks as a result, and they’ve been adding informative comments to the blog. 

rkm
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From: Bill Blum
Date: 27 December 2009 18:19:07 GMT
Subject: Re: re-1: escaping the matrix
rkm> I do take exception to your comment about Palin & Fox News. You seem to be implying that liberals are reasonable people and conservatives are not.

I agree that both can be, and usually are, unreasonable, illogical, and moved by wishful thinking and other emotions.  My own mailing list confirms this regularly. 

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From: Nicola Furey 
Date: 28 December 2009 13:05:30 GMT
To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Castro

Dear Richard,
  According to the BBC this morning Fidel Castro said that, “Obama is just Bush with a smile”.
 With the latest weakness in Copenhagen etc. it seems that El Commandante could be correct, as usual.
  The younger generations, and many others, believe in change and that Obama could bring it, we are disapointed so far and it looks like that is where we will be stuck.
  May 2010 bring positive surprises and changes.
 Nicola, Geneva

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Hi Nicola,
I think Obama can be a great lesson for us, a dis-illusion-ment instead of a disappointment. I think Madeline provides a very good response to your message…
rkm
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From: “Madeline Bruce” <•••@••.•••>
Date: 28 December 2008 15:52:06 GMT
To: “Richard Moore” <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Re: escaping the matrix

I find it laughable, Richard, when people question your intelligence, erudition, and education.  It’s no wonder, though, that people feel suspicious and leery about any social leaders nowadays.  President Obama has proven just how easy it is to manipulate the minds of millions of people, to prey upon their best hopes and intentions. Perhaps that could end up to be a good thing, if it dawns on people that they are in the grip of a mass delusion that big brother is a nice guy, and will take care of them.  The health care debacle in the USA shows just how wrong that premise is, but the frightening thing is that Americans seem to be swallowing the spin that the outcome of that “debate” is rational and necessary, rather than a massive tyranny of the Health Insurance Corporations……
My feeling is that any group of people needs to get to know and trust one another first, before gnashing out the details of some project.  This seems to be the missing ingrediant in society.  Obama has proven that sociopathic elements are capable of barging in anywhere and grabbing the wheel.  
Also, the individual gifts of people, their talents, even their intellects are being  buried in this avalanche of influence from the power elite.  Individuals need to be appreciated and trusted first, before their talents will blossom.  And for that, we need to get to know one another.  That’s another one of those lost arts that has happened in the general dumbing down of the population.  Divide and conquer – the age old and effective formula. – Madeline Bruce, Nanaimo, B. C.  

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Hi Madeline,
Very well put, about getting to know and trust – and appreciate – one another, before focusing on project details. When I’ve tried to get people together in my own town, I’ve found there’s too much impatience. If you have two meetings, and you haven’t already launched a project, people seem to think they’re wasting their time. They say, “We need to stop sitting around talking and do something”.
And besides getting to know one another, we also need to take the time to listen to everyone’s ideas about ‘what to do’, and people’s concerns about the various proposals. Not only does this take patience, but the group needs to have some reason to believe that it will be possible to ‘get through to the other side’, that they will be able to converge on a worthwhile course of action. There is always divergence before convergence can occur.
I suppose it would help if there were an inspiring video of a ‘success story’, chronicling how some real group goes through the stages of getting to know one another, divergence of ideas, convergence of direction, and then actually does something effective. 
rkm

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From: Patricia Tursi
Date: 28 December 2009 13:21:27 GMT
Subject: Re: re-2: escaping the matrix
The transition town movement is strong here in Springfield, MO and was one of the first to get going.  I understand that St. Louis modeled theirs after Springfield.   I was in on the beginning but soon dropped out and Galen Chadwick has spearheaded it and promoted it well. Water will be the biggest issue…along with weather…can’t grow your own food without those two. 

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Hi again,
Just how strong is it? You might tell us something about what it’s been up to so far, what it’s planning, etc.
From what I’ve seen so far, the movement is doing well in terms of spreading to more towns, but has been weak in getting enough people participating to actually make a difference in the local economy or local sustainability. If Springfield has found a way to get past this peak-movement-growth barrier, that would be very exciting. If not, it might be worth talking about how the barrier might be overcome.
rkm
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From: “Thomas Greco” 
Date: 29 December 2009 05:05:31 GMT
To: “Richard Moore” 
Subject: Re: escaping the matrix

Dear Richard,
 
Thanks for repeating the reference to your article of two years ago,
The Post-Bush Regime: A Prognosis
 I’ve read it and I agree with your assertion that it was prophetic. I value your astute  insights into the geo-political situation. We are, of course, always at a disadvantage in that we are not privy to inside information and must always contend with lots of disinformation that fills the mainstream media. We are forced to read between the lines and test hypotheses based on historical patterns. That seems to be your forte.
  I’ll soon be posting an item to one of my blogs that will include a link to your article.
 Regards,
Tom

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Hi Tom,
Thanks for your message. Permit me to share with you my methodology.
My primary hypotheses have been very well tested and repeatedly verified, both historically and by unfolding events. I now think of them as basic facts rather than hypotheses. They are:
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rkm’s basic facts about the world

1) A small clique of banking families (‘the elite’) control the finance, politics, and media of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon nations. There is no democracy, only a sham theater of democracy. The central-bank model and control of currencies is the core of their power methodolgy.

2) The elite are very astute, creative, and well-informed. They do not pursue pointless or ill-advised projects, and they learn quickly from any mistakes that they do make. They, for example, understand very well about resource limits and the consequences of those limits. 

3) The elite are utterly ruthless and their moral attitude toward the mass of humanity is like the moral attitude of a farmer to his livestock: something to be fed & bred, kept in pens, used, and then culled when judged to be unproductive. For example, the elite financed Mussolini & Hitler, planned World Wars 1 and 2, and financed all sides, in order to consolidate their power and wealth, to cull the population, and to adjust geopolitical arrangements.

4) The elite are intent on achieving a global government under their firm control and have been working systematically toward that goal for more than a century. 
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If one keeps these basic facts in mind, then current events can be interpreted without too much difficulty. One merely needs to ask, when government polices are announced or the actions of nations are observed, How does this serve elite objectives? 
One does not need to read between the lines, but only to look at the headlines, to get the general drift of what’s going on. Reading between the lines is like zooming in on the picture, but the big picture is best seen at the headline level.
Of course, in judging how events serve elite interests, it is necessary to be well informed about about current realities, to be able to look at things from the same informed perspective that elites look at things from. Let’s take the financial collapse as an example. 
I knew there was going to be a big bubble collapse at least a year before it happened. What I read in the world press mirrored what I could see right here in Wexford: people going for variable-rate mortgages they couldn’t afford in an over-inflated real-estate market; gross over-building of new housing and business units beyond any foreseeable demand; major employment sectors engaged in over-extended businesses; over-extension of bank lending into the growing bubble. I didn’t need to read the financial pages, or read between the lines of financial pundits, and I didn’t bother with either. The coming collapse was obvious from the headlines plus simple arithmetic. 
But I didn’t foresee that this particular collapse was going to be special, unprecedented in its implications. I assumed it would be just one more planned boom-and-bust profit cycle for the banks, like we’ve had ever since capitalism began. But soon after the collapse occurred, and when the bailouts were announced throughout the elite’s domain, I wised up very quickly to the unique nature of this particular collapse.
It was obvious that the bailouts were not a recovery plan, but rather a plan to prevent recovery, and to put governments into total and eternal debt slavery to the banks. I then asked myself, why are they doing this? The most likely answer was rather obvious: they’ve long known that economic growth could not be sustained forever, and they’ve now decided the time has come to switch to some other economic paradigm. 
If the paradigm is not going to be about growth, then it is going to be about managing resources. The lever of power will no longer be the controlling of credit for growth, but rather control over the management of resources. Resource management is inherently linked to geography, unlike growth-oriented capitalism. Basically we’re talking about a system whose dynamics are along the same lines as aristocratic feudalism. If you combine these insights with an understanding of Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard, and Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, then that leads directly to my article on the post-Bush regime, and regionalism as the new geopolitical paradigm. 
All of this analysis was based on just the headlines, plus an understanding of basic background information. 
Armed with this analysis, then the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan make perfect sense. They are about staking out territory and control over oil resources, and demarcating an aggressive territorial front line viz a viz Russia and China. Cap-and-trade and carbon taxes make perfect sense. They are a central part of the new machinery for managing resources and maximizing profits from resource flows. The destruction of General Motors makes perfect sense. If growth-oriented corporations are going to be abandoned, then it makes sense to begin by taking down the biggest one. Just like when they decided to destroy American labor unions under Reagan, they started with a high-profile and well-organized example – the Air Traffic Controllers. Shoot the lead duck first, as Engdahl would put it.
rkm
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From: Stefan
Date: 29 December 2009 14:47:12 GMT
To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Random thoughts

Dear Richard,
what you wrote about climate change is exactly what was needed – a voice of reason in a storm of propaganda. You did the same again and again (9/11, bird-flu, swine-flu, Obama, etc etc) and I thank you for that. Your writing has contributed to shaping my world. (Btw, here is an on-topic link: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/climate-change-deniers-vs-the-consensus/ – the creator welcomes feedback)
Yesterday I had an interesting thought: 
Life gives us the following options – freedom, insanity, death. 
Insanity is delusion, the matrix, the ‘insanity of normality’ (book by Arno Gruen). Most of the people – myself included! – choose this option over and over again, and we are living in a ‘culture of make believe’ (another eye-opener, written by Derrick Jensen).
Freedom is independence, being centered and in connection with oneself, being ‘in the world but not of the world’ (Sufi quote), being free from conditioning and automatically triggered responses/emotions. Truth. Only a tiny minority of people choose this option.
Death is death.

I am still struggling with insanity, and what I found helpful (besides resources you already mentioned like books by Idries Shah, Daniel Quinn and your own work) were books by the two authors mentioned above, and the books by Anne Wilson-Schaef (especially ‘When Society becomes an Addict’ and ‘Living in Process’). Interestingly the biggest personal hurdle is not society but the microcosm of my own family. This is the reason why I am currently working through ‘Toxic Parents’ by Dr Susan Foreward, another highly recommended book. The centrepiece of her book is that (negative) emotions and dependence comes from beliefs, beliefs about relationship, family, etc. It might be necessary to change these beliefs to become independent.
Apart from reading (‘loading the donkey’) and being blessed to meet people who are on a much more advanced level than me (such as my wife, and also people from various spiritual traditions), what has really helped “shift” myself as a person was participating in a Naikan retreat.Naikan means “introspection” and is based on three questions:
– What has (person x) done for me?
– What have I done for for (person x)?
– What troubles and difficulties have I caused to (person x)?

The fourth question, “What troubles and difficulties has (person x) caused me”, is purposely ignored in Naikan. We’re all naturally good at seeing answers to this fourth question, and Naikan supposes that too much focus on this question is responsible for much of one’s misery in day-to-day life.
Practicing Naikan is a training in seeing reality as it unfolds, in the now, which might result in breaking conditionings and stopping to put blame on oneself or other people or other external factors. It also nicely complements the application of the ‘Secrets or Rules of the Naqshbandi Order’ (written by Omar Ali-Shah, Idries’ older brother).
Btw, this email is by no means intended as advertising for any of the above books or concepts, it’s just an overview of what I have found helpful on my path towards freedom.

All the best and much love,
Stefan

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Hi Stefan,
Thanks for sharing with us the experience of your path. I’m sure others will benefit from your openness, and your willingness to share where you are stuck, as well as where you’ve made progress. Your intention and perseverance in pursuing your path are particularly inspiring.
Our paths overlap with the Sufi material by Shah. I was in Jim Fadiman’s Sufi group for about a decade, where we used a circle process when discussing the Sufi stories, and also spent one weekend a month with Gurdjieff-style exercises. I didn’t realize what was going on at the time, but the seeds planted then have been growing and producing fruit ever since.
We need to keep in mind however some of the more important teachings, which are not emphasized very often. I refer to Buddha’s “Great Boat”, as compared to the “Little Boat”. The Little Boat is one person crossing the river to enlightenment. The Great Boat is humanity crossing the river to enlightenment. The first represents a personal transformation, and the second represents a social transformation. The Great Boat is not the sum of a lot of Little Boats, and I question Wilbur’s paradigms in that regard.
So much time must be spent in these teachings to overcome conditioning, that little time is left to emphasize that only the Great Boat is of real significance. When Buddha refused ascension, and pointed one finger to the Earth, this is what he was saying. In the Shah literature we have the story of the host and the guests, which explains metaphorically how civilization is a prison. But as with the Great Boat, this theme is not a frequent one in the literature. The revolutionary content of the teachings has been kept subdued, so that the teachings could survive. Jesus was very open about the Great Boat, about seeking Heaven on Earth – the brotherhood of man – and we know what happened to him, and how his teaching was subsequently perverted.
rkm

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