From Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (page 209) by John Perkins:

"Nearly every culture I know prophesies that in the late 1990's we entered a period of remarkable transition. At monasteries in the Himalayas, ceremonial sites in Indonesia, and indigenous reservations in North America, from the depths of the Amazon to the peaks of the Andes, and into the ancient Mayan cities of Central America, I have heard that ours is a special moment in human history, and that each of us was born at this time because we have a mission to accomplish.

The titles and the words of the prophecies differ slightly. They tell variously of a New Age, the Third Millennium, the Age of Aquarius, the Beginning of the Fifth Sun, or the end of old calendars and the commencement of new ones. Despite the varying terminologies, however, they have a great deal in common, and “The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle” is typical. It states that back in the mists of history, human societies divided and took different paths: that of the condor (representing the heart, intuitive and mystical) and that of the eagle (representing the brain, rational and material). In the 1490's, the prophesy said, the two paths would converge and the eagle would drive the condor to the verge of extinction. Then, five hundred years later, in the 1990's a new epoch would begin, one in which the condor and the eagle will have the opportunity to reunite ad fly together in the same sky, along the same path. If the condor and eagle accept this opportunity, they will create a most remarkable offspring, unlike any seen before.

“The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle” can be taken at many levels — the standard interpretation is that it foretells the sharing of indigenous knowledge with the technologies of science, the balancing of yin and yang, and the bridging of northern and southern cultures. However, most powerful is the message it offers about consciousness; it says the we have entered a time when we can benefit from the many diverse was of seeing ourselves and the world, and that we can use these as a springboard to higher levels of awareness. As human beings we can truly wake up and evolve into a more conscious species."

I do not believe there is intelligent direction of the universe or that we were “born at this time because we have a mission to accomplish.” But there are patterns in the evolution of culture that intuitive people can recognize. When similar prophetic visions occur independently in many cultures, they should be taken seriously. However, specific interpretations of these visions should always be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Here is my take on this prophecy. Western Culture, since the middle ages, has been increasingly dominated by intellect at the expense of other dimensions of the human psyche. This one sided development of reason created modern science and technology through which Western culture has dominated the planet. Reason is a very powerful but also very limited tool. Inevitably it seeks over simplistic models in domains that are too complex for a rational model.

In large part, my thinking follows Carl Jung's Psychological Types. Jung saw the human psyche organized around two pairs of opposing functions: thinking versus feeling and intuition versus sensation. The first pair represent rational functions. Thinking organizes material from an objective standpoint as an engineer might. Feeling organizes material from the standpoint of what is important to ones well being as a mother protecting her children might. Since these represent different rational ways of organizing the same material it is difficult to develop both of these functions.

The irrational opposites are similarly difficult to develop together. They are both pattern recognition processes. Sensation looks for patterns in what is present here and now. Intuition looks for the patterns that explain what lead to the current state of affairs and how the situation may evolve over time. Sensation types cannot see the forest for the trees. Intuitive types are well aware of the forest as they crash into the tree in front of them.

At this stage in history the natural next step is the development of intuition. Developing feeling, the opposite function to dominant thinking, is too difficult. Intuition and not sensation has the potential to offset the over simplistic views that is a fundamental weakness of intellect.

Of course both intuition and intellect have been essential to the development of science and technology. However intellect has remained in the driving role. Academia is focused on developing intellect, Intuition is seen as an almost magical force that just happens without systematic development. Ancient systems of developing intuition like astrology, tarot, and the I Ching remain steeped and superstition and no modern replacements have evolved.

Intellect's dominance cannot be overthrown externally. Instead it bears the seeds of its own waning influence. This is starting to happen at many levels. As intellect solves more of the problems that it is capable of dealing with, it expands the scope and importance of problems that are beyond it. For example the enormous improvements of productivity that technology has created are beginning to be a problem. Instead of leading to better lives for everyone, they are concentrating wealth into ever fewer hands, while earning a decent living is becoming more difficult for the vast majority. Simplistic laissez-faire capitalism exasperates the problem. A far more subtle and complex understanding is required. This can only be done through open minded experimentation using both intellect and intuition to design and interpret the experiments.

Intellect seeks the solution, the correct answer the true path. The ultimate achievement of intellect is mathematics. This is a pure product of reason unsullied by the ambiguity and complexity of the real world. Yet is in precisely this purest of intellectual products that the limitations of reason become most apparent. It has been proven with mathematical certainty that there can be no single path approach to discovering all mathematical truth. This can only be accomplished with a divergent process that, over time, follows an ever increasing number of paths. This result is known as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.

I see this prophecy as fortelling the rise of intuition and the beginning of a reconnection with ancient wisdom that does not fit into a narrow intellectual framework. But this must not and cannot be an abandonment or a renunciation of the achievements of intellect. It must be a union of the two that creates something different than and beyond what exists today.

I have spent a good part of my life thinking about these issues. One result is the book: What is and what will be.

Paul Budnik

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 That being said, I'm a big fan of racial integration.

  I'm sure many of you are either multiracial or have been involved in a multiracial relationship, so many of you will be able to relate.

The year 2000 was the first time that the U.S. Census started keeping track of people who are multiracial. It turned out that 7.8 million people were counted, and 41% were under 18.

Just look all around you. Mixed people are everywhere. Even though it is happening at a faster rate in the United States than other countries with substantial immigrant populations, this trend is spreading like wildfire.

It's because of the global world that we live in. Race doesn't matter so much anymore. After a few generations, race will cease to exist in most countries.

I have friends of every race, and I'm a huge fan of integration. Every race/ethnicity/whatever has its own strengths and weaknesses. The mixed kids get the best of both parents. They're also way less likely to get any genetic disorders. Because genetic disorders tend to be native to one group or another, the genes of mixed people will be so diluted that finding two identical alleles on both chromosomes will be an extremely rare occurrence.

What I don't understand is why so many people are opposed to this kind of thing. Yeah, the kids won't really be tied to one culture or another. In this new day and age, who IS anymore? In the new global culture, even the economic slave third world countries are contributing their share.

For my part, I'm not starting a family with someone else who's from the same part of the world as I am. And no, I obviously don't care what my parents have to say about it. I'm not very Bengali anyway. I never go to Bengali Cultural Club, I don't speak Bengali outside of the house, and I have almost no Bengali friends.

I also want to have one or two kids of my own and adopt several more from all over the world. Imagine how that would look in a family photo...

Eh... I can dream, can't I?

Unless you've been living in a bubble for the past few weeks, you've heard the whole Climategate story. I won't bother telling you about it because you can get plenty of that from other videos.

What? You're in a bubble? Fine, just watch this:

It doesn't make any sense to you? Oh well.

So the question on everybody's mind right now is, does this scandal prove once and for all, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that man-made global warming is fiction?

Of course not. There is no way of knowing from a bunch of politically motivated emails whether or not the climate really is changing the way we think it is. Instead, the only way to really understand the climate crisis and what's causing it is to look at legitimate science for the answer. For the next few months, I will be showing you just that: scientific evidence on the whole global warming deal.

If you have questions, you're certainly welcome to submit them, and I will try to answer them as much as possible. Just in case there are any serious doubts about what I say, with each video I'm going to include a link to my blog, where you can get a full transcript with all of my sources cited.

So... for now, just stay tuned and subscribe to my YouTube videos. I will upload my first video on the issue in a few days, and I hope to upload at least one video a week after that, for as long as it takes to convince you of the truth.

http://www.youtube.com/InMooseWeTrust

Table of Contents

I. Nagging Question
II. Bipolar America
III. How Others See Me
IV. My Views
V. My Presidential Picks
VI. Finishing Thoughts

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I. Nagging Question

For a while now, people have been constantly asking me where I stand on the political spectrum. People are confused because of the positions I take on different issues and because of the candidates I support for president. I figured I should explain it to you once and for all.

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II. Bipolar America

The reason I have such a hard time explaining my views sometimes is because this country as a whole is so politically bipolar. Basically, everyone has to be either a Democrat or Republican. For the various levels of office you have to vote for one of those two or else your vote is a wasted one for a candidate who has zero chance of winning. Why does it have to be this way? Are we not allowed to be independent thinkers? Why can't we take different sides on different issues, whether or not they agree with our party affiliations?

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III. How Others See Me

So where do I stand on the political spectrum? Which party do I strongly support? Actually, a more appropriate question would be, "How do I see the world?"

It's extremely difficult--if not impossible--to give me a political label. I look at each issue INDIVIDUALLY and do extensive research before I take a position. Most people, however, don't see it that way. They're so quick to jump to conclusions every time some political statement comes out of my mouth.

-When I talk about the Second Amendment, I must be a Republican.
-When I slam the incumbent president, I must be a Republican (or a Democrat if the incumbent's a Republican).
-When I talk about the environment, I must be an environmentalist.
-When I mention the blatant lies that the McCain campaign kept throwing at Obama, I must be an Obama supporter.
-When I talk about the problems with healthcare, I must be a Socialist.
-When I address the grievances of rural family farmers, I must be a Populist.
-When I question the motives of the Dalai Lama, I must really hate pacifists.
-When I accuse the federal government of resorting to unconstitutional means to enforce Civil Rights programs in the 1960's, I must be a states' rights Dixiecrat.
-When I talk about the problems with the two-party system, I must really hate Americans and the democratic process.
-When I say that Ross Perot looked more Presidential than either George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton in the 1992 Presidential Debates, I must be a member of the Reform Party.
-When I question the need for income taxes, I must automatically support a national sales tax.
-When I talk about how government spending has gone out of control, I must be a Libertarian.
-When I advocate a non-interventionist foreign policy that doesn't involve in America policing the rest of the world, I must be a terrorist lobbyist who gets paid to keep the U.S. government out of doing good to the rest of the world.
-When I talk about how Libertarians deserted their party platform, I must be a member of the Boston Tea Party (real political party est. 2006 on the sole basis of separating themselves from the likes of Bob Barr).
-When I question whether Reagan deserves credit for taking down the Soviet Union, I must be a Communist.
-When I accuse Israel of using the persecution of Jews as an excuse to ignore every international law when dealing with foreign affairs, I must be an anti-Semite.
-When I say that Black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have taken the race issue too far, I must be a white supremacist.
-In elections where I refuse to support either the Democratic or the Republican candidate for president, my views are automatically null and void because third party votes don't matter.
-When I worry about things like NAFTA and the gradual move to "Unionize" Africa, North America, East Asia, Europe, etc., I must be one of those crazy conspiracy theorists.
-When I try to explain why there really isn't a gender wage gap, I'm a woman-hater.
-When I show just how ridiculous American attitudes towards racism are, I must be a white supremacist.

Who knows? Maybe there's some elaborate conspiracy where someone like me is secretly plotting to overthrow all forms of conventional wisdom (and in the process destroy everything great about America and Americans)? Maybe I'm a part of it. Or maybe you're just being paranoid.

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IV. My Views

No, there's no conspiracy. I just come up with my own ideas and then stand up for them. When people ask me where  If you REALLY want to label me, you can call me an Extremist Independent.

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V. My Presidential Picks

Just to show you how I think, I made a list of every man who I would have voted for in every Presidential election since 1788. You won't be able to make much sense of this list unless you know at least as much American political history as I do.

NOTE: I had this written out when I wrote the first version, but it's really irrelevant and I wasn't getting anywhere with it. Whatever, it's not important.

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VI. Finishing Thoughts

You don't have to support one party or another. You don't have to think one way or another. There is absolutely no reason why you must conform to the political standards as they are now. You don't even have to agree with me on anything!

All I'm asking is for you to be consistent in your views and defend them.

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The Problem With Boys

By Marty Nemko

What changes would you recommend if I told you that African-American children were:

four to eight times as likely to be drugged with Ritalin and other stimulants, which pediatrician Leonard Sax, calls “academic steroids.”

reading much more poorly than are other students.

five times more likely to commit suicide.

two and a half times as likely to drop out of high school.

severely underrepresented in college and even more so among college graduates, thereby locking them out of today’s, let alone tomorrow’s, knowledge economy.

You’d likely invoke such words as “institutional racism” to justify major efforts to improve African-Americans’ numbers.

All of the above statements are true except for one thing: I’m not talking about African-American children. I’m talking about children of all races, indeed half of all children, half of our next generation: boys.

When a disparity hurts females or minorities, major efforts are implemented to redress the situation. Why not with boys? In our politically correct world, if you point to an inequity against women or a minority, you’re considered heroic, but dare you point out a deficit suffered by men, you’re demonized as a whiner or anti-female. Today’s media leaders, when in college, were relentlessly told how oppressive men are, so now, these media gatekeepers usually refuse to publish male-positive pieces. So, except for a few minimally influential books and articles, all we continue to hear is an endless, often unfair drumbeat about how girls and women continue to be shortchanged. (For example, there’s that ubiquitous bogus statistic that women earn 79 cents on the dollar compared with men when, in fact, according to the definitive book, Why Men Earn More, for the same work, women earn at least as much as men.) Meanwhile, the media, when it mentions boys at all, insist that boys are doing just fine. For example, a recent Time magazine cover story, The Myth About Boys, declared “Boys are all right,” implying that those horrifying statistics cited above are somehow outweighed by tiny recent gains in test scores (which, by the way, are dwarfed by girls’ gains.)

And our schools continue to get ever more feminized. Competition, one of boys’ favorite motivators, has largely been excised in favor of “cooperative learning,” (which, in the real world, usually means that the bright do the dull’s work.) Stories of heroism and bravery are replaced with tomes about relationships and female heroes. Recess is increasingly being replaced by yet another round of phonics. Girls are told they can accomplish anything while boys are taught that masculinity is an anti-social trait that must be extinguished. It’s no surprise that the number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001.

The percentage of female elementary school teachers has risen from 82% in 1980 to 91% today, a record high. The main role model boys see in school is the custodian. And when boys get home from school, the male role models get worse. Whether watching a sitcom, movie, cartoon, or commercial, the odds are good that the male is a buffoon or sleazebag while the female is savvy and confident. Males are primarily responsible for creating the cars we drive, the buildings we live in, the computers we use, and the medical discoveries that save our lives, yet if a Martian descended upon earth and watched TV, he’d conclude that men are disposable. If role models matter, how do you imagine boys are affected by all this?

What to do? Children’s mindmolders are the media, schools, and family. Each has a role:

The media now takes inordinate care to ensure that women, minorities, and gays are not disproportionately portrayed negatively. Equal care must now be given to boys and men.

Schools claim to celebrate diversity yet insist on providing one-size-fits-all education. Whether in co-ed or single-sex classes, boys need boy-friendly instruction: more non-feminized male teachers, more competition, praise for boldness, more active learning (for example, drama and simulation) and less seatwork, less relationship-centric fiction and more how-to books, teachers’ simply accepting that boys will, on average, wiggle more than girls--and that does not require ongoing criticism, which, not surprisingly, leads to more oppositional behavior, to the school psychologist, to the little yellow bus of special education, and even more often to Ritalin. The number of boys drugged with stimulants to control “hyperactivity” has, in the past 20 years, risen 3000%!

Ironically, educated parents often do particularly badly by boys. The college curriculum and the media consumed by the intelligentsia stresses the accomplishments of women and the evils of men. So, these parents too often feel justified in emasculating, squeezing the maleness out of boys: aggressiveness, competition, physicality, dislike of long seatwork. Of course, I’m not advocating that parents allow Junior to become a savage, but the above qualities, channeled wisely, can be the stuff of which greatness is made. We can refine but rarely remold so we must honor males’ ways of being, just as we’ve been urged now for decades to honor females’.

Boys represent half our future, so a problem with boys is a major problem for society. In addition, having so many children unnecessarily unhappy and underperforming is, in itself, most sad. Over the past 20 years, I’ve noticed a dramatic shift in the boys I’ve counseled. Twenty years ago, most boys were confident and ambitious. Now, disproportionately, they’re despondent or angry, while the girls much more often feel the world is their oyster. And they’re right, but it should be both genders’ oyster.

Boys advocate Joe Manthey reminds us that "When girls were behind in math and science, we said, 'We want to help these girls; there's something wrong with the schools.’ But when boys don't do well in school, we say there's something wrong with the boy."

Let’s stop blaming the boy and start fixing our schools and media.

Nemko is co-president of the National Organization for Men: www.orgformen.org. He holds a Ph.D. in education from the University of California, Berkeley and subsquently taught in Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. He is also a Contributing Editor at U.S. News & World Report.

These are issues that politicians always beat to death but nothing ever gets done about them. Feel free to add to my list. Because this is getting so long, I will expand on some of these later. If you want to add to my list, go right ahead.

1. Abortion
Abortion is the most polarizing issue I've ever seen where everyone pretty much agrees on the same thing. The Liberals use it to champion women's rights and freedom of choice. The Conservatives use it to defend the right to life and think getting rid of it completely will save all those babies from purgatory.

The Liberals don't realize that although early women's rights activists supported birth control, they were, for the most part, completely opposed to abortion. These women included Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sarah Norton, and Alice Paul. If you ask Neoliberal Feminists about that, they'll just pretend you don't exist.

The Conservatives are so stubborn that they won't vote for anyone who holds what they consider to be too "Liberal" or "Ungodly" views on the issue. How those two words are synonymous I will never understand, but it certainly doesn't justify slaughtering abortion doctors in the name of God.

Here, the words you use to describe your stance on the issue mean everything, because everyone essentially has the same stance on abortion:
While birth control should be kept legal, there should be limits placed on abortion. Abortion should be used as a last resort, such as in the case of the mother's health. Abortions after the first trimester should not be legal.


2. Gay Marriage
The Liberals want to embrace homosexuality and give special affirmative action privileges to gays. The Conservatives want to shove God down their queer throats. I only have two things to say about that: Jim McGreevey and Larry Craig.

If you're gay and you're reading this, I want you to know that I don't support you. However, you have certain rights as an American that I will never try to take away from you. Those rights include civil unions, adoptions, and the ability to do whatever you want in bed. I won't think less of you just because of your sexual orientation.

We will not have a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Ever. It's not going to happen.


3. Stem Cell Research
This issue shouldn't even be on the table anymore. Umbilical cord cells work just as well and there are millions of embryos frozen in jars in fertility clinics all over the world. You can't just throw the embryos out.

The bigger issue is the idea of designer babies. Stop talking about stem cells.


4. Iraq War
Don't even get me started.


5. Media Bias
It's real and it happens. "Fair and Balanced" is a myth. Instead of finger pointing, the politicians should thank the media for making their campaigning easy. Instead of making speeches that have any substance whatsoever, the politicians can just portray themselves as good Christians or family men, thereby ensuring their victory.


6. The Democratic Party Nomination for President of the United States
Bipolarization within the bipolarization of America. Get some Aspirin.


7. Border Security
The fence that nobody wants to build to keep out an essential part of the almighty establishment.


8. Illegal Immigration
We should be encouraging legal immigration while putting more restrictions on illegal immigration. The exact opposite has been happening for years and that trend will continue.


9. 9/11
Again, don't get me started.

10. Healthcare Reform
I don't see this happening any time soon. The current system exists because everyone benefits from it, including the unlucky sick people who lost everything.

11. Social Security
Stop trying to save it. Our generation won't see the benefits no matter what you do.

12. Global Warming
Yes, it's happening. Yes, it's a serious problem. However, global warming isn't the only kind of pollution. In fact, global warming isn't even pollution. Other things like the huge smog cloud stagnant over Mexico City and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by overfertilization are a much bigger threat to the world's well-being.

13. Starving Children in Africa, Eastern Europe, etc.
Honestly, do you really care about these kids? If you did, you wouldn't be eating at a buffet on a luxury cruise ship to Aruba. Stop pretending to care, because we all know you don't.

14. Political Correctness
The only reason this is even an issue is because Liberals are trying to please everybody. In doing so, they're just pissing more people off and paving the way for unnecessary discrimination lawsuits (as if there aren't enough already). You can't please everyone. Christmas is a national holiday. Christmas is a Christian holiday. It's "Christmas." It's not "Holiday." Santa Claus is a Christian religious icon. Most of us non-Christians understand that. We don't care. Have your own stupid holiday.

15. HIV/AIDS
This is unarguably the most preventable pandemic on Earth. There really is no point in wasting your resources trying to stop it. If people share needles and have sex with complete strangers, that's their own fault. We shouldn't be helping them. HIV will stop being a problem the day when people learn to practice safe sex. I firmly believe that HIV is God's punishment for you being a hypocrite.

16. Child Pornography
A couple years ago, a 15 year old girl got arrested and sent to jail for emailing a naked picture of herself to some guy she met in a chat room (who turned out to be a decoy). She was charged with child sexual abuse and possession of child pornography. Parents routinely get sent to jail for taking naked pictures of their kids doing sexually insignificant things like taking a bath. More about that later.

17. The Liberal Media
exists, but not to the extent that the FOX pundits will tell you that it exists. The major media conglomerates NBC Universal, AOL Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Disney/ABC, and Viacom all have an inherent bias towards the Neocons. The journalists are usually Liberal, but they're getting laid off at record high rates. More about that later.

I'll add more to the list if I feel like it.