Our Universe expands
and contracts
like tides on a beach
while we hunger,
sense, sleep, search;
Exchanging Symbols
on a hunk of blue
shining bright through the cosmos
from water, air and sun
but named Earth
for the dirt
we cling to...
while waves wash worlds.
Bill Radke: Thank you for joining us this Friday morning as we continue with Fallout: our special coverage of the global financial crisis. President Bush spoke moments ago in the White House Rose Garden:
President George W. Bush: Fellow citizens, we can solve this crisis, and we will.
The president did not make any specific policy announcements. The statement was intended to calm the markets.
President George W. Bush: The United States government is acting. We will continue to act to resolve this crisis and restore stability to our markets.
What effect might Bush's statement have? Marketplace's Jeremy Hobson has that from New York.
Jeremy Hobson: The president has made mostly brief statements about the financial crisis, and he hasn't held a full-blown press conference since July, when he said he thought the banking system was sound. There were no questions today, just a list of the steps the government has taken in recent days.
~~~~
That is what was broadcast nationwide today on our citizen and government funded National Public Radio.
With all of the bravado and bluster, confidence and arrogance that King George II "the lesser" has led us with (against our will) for the past eight years,
he has become near invisible... and Dick Cheney has achieved full invisibility.
His poor decisions and actions have rendered him useless to our private and public lives...
as the rest of the world attempts to comprehend all of the possible scenarios he is capable of unleashing on our planet with the few remaining months of his absolute monarchy.
His lack of vision and governance has sent shockwaves from the streets of New Orleans to the mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq
and now eight years of his economic policies have redifined global monetary banking and lending.
The spooky thing about him is that all of this is happening right now and he is still content to publicly fulfill his role as president by reducing himself to the emotional and informational equivalent of "Play-by-play announcer to the Government of the United States of America."
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.
But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.
...They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.
...The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.
The package is for use only in war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.
“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”
The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.
“I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered,” said Cloutier, describing the experience as “your worst muscle cramp ever — times 10 throughout your whole body.
“I’m not a small guy, I weigh 230 pounds ... it put me on my knees in seconds.”
The brigade will not change its name, but the force will be known for the next year as a CBRNE Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF (pronounced “sea-smurf”).
The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Coast Guard is exempt from the Posse Comitatus Act.
The Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limit the powers of the federal government to use the military for law enforcement.
Posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 by Frank Gormlie @ 3:01 pm
Army Col. Michael Boatner, of the US Army’s Northern Command, denied to the website Homeland Security Today that all the blog talk of a US Army combat brigade that is deployed for domestic purposes will be used for law enforcement and crowd control. He stated: “This response force will not be called upon to help with law enforcement, civil disturbance or crowd control, but will be used to support lead agencies involved in saving lives, relieving suffering and meeting the needs of communities affected by weapons of mass destruction attacks, accidents or even natural disasters.” Col. Boatner is the future operations division chief of the command unit.
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was told by Air Force Lt. Col. Jamie Goodpaster, a public affairs officer for Northern Command, that “Military forces would have weapons on-site, “containerized,” she said — that is, stored in containers — including both lethal and so-called nonlethal weapons. They would have mostly wheeled vehicles, but would also, she said, have access to tanks. She said that use of weapons would be made at a higher level, perhaps at the secretary of defense level.”
This is a conversation that takes place on a fifth world and references planet Earth in discussing a philosophical statement by Ralph Waldo Emerson~
" ... a philosopher named Emerson who had some useful upsights about the difference between poets and mystics. I'm thinking that it's just as applicable in our cosmos as it is in his." "I'll bite, what's the difference?" "The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting."
page 883, Anathem 2008 Neal Stephenson
http://www.longnow.org/anathem/
http://www.nealstephenson.com/
~
The mystic and the poet each experience truth in different ways... each creating their own reality of truth.
Republicans and Democrats each experience truth in different ways, each creating their own reality of truth as well.
The U.S. Government is actively working towards limiting the truth of that conversation for every inhabitant of planet Earth.
Actively pursuing covert and open war... mass murders and mass incarcerations,
maintaining complete surveillance of global telecommunication systems,
manipulation of global economic power with long term vision reserved for the rich and corporations.
The C.I.A. has been in the White House since V.P. Bush in 1980.
If you believe in Patriotism, than the C.I.A. exists as a covert servant of the people of the U.S.A. It has chosen to elect Bush II for the past 8 years. It is now advocating McCain/Palin for 2008.
If you believe the U.S.A. is corrupted and Patriotism has become no more than an abstract argument or nostalgic memory, then the C.I.A. has become more of a regulator of freedom than a guardian of it.
These are two possible realities to confront the state of our nation.
The U.S. Government and the mainstream media (television, national newspapers and radio) does not allow certain topics to be debated on a national level.
1. Support of Israel
2. Peace with Iran
3. Criticism of Saudi Arabia
4. U.S. Military and Covert operations in Latin America
5. Reparations for broken treaties
6. Ending the War on Drugs
It is possible that the C.I.A. tries to be a mystic while fantasizing it is a poet...
whatever truth it is hiding from the U.S.A. is destroying the morale of it's citizens through
1. Contentious and false elections
2. Pharmaceutical pacification of the public.
3. Global war on false pretenses
4. Rapid growth and use of prisons
A fictional entity from Arbe in Anathem can see the truth in the duality of poets and mystics that Emerson described to Americans over 100 years ago...
perhaps the C.I.A. will realize that unbridled truth is superior to covert manipulation of it
