The Prophets of Doom : We Are In Far More Than A Depression

I'm just watching a TV program first aired in the spring of 2011 called "The Prophets of Doom" (link to the entire show) on the History Channel. Discussing the current problems facing our world are six experts from several fields -  financial, environment, energy, computers - who are talking about the crisis we are in now as a country and drawing the parallels to past civilizations and their demise.  

It's extremely important that people do wake up before the dam has burst, so to speak. In fact, one of them used a dam bursting as an example. People who live several miles downstream from a dam about to rupture worry, fret and try to do something to rectify it. Those a little closer are not as worried, still are concerned, but don't really react in time. But those who live the closest to it don't believe that anything will happen and don't react at all. Their thinking, a protective reaction of the brain that "it can't happen to me", don't say or do anything because they trust that someone built the dam strong enough to not rupture.

Our society is in a crisis in every form -  financially, politically and environmentally. But the basic thesis of their discussion is that historically, people refuse to believe that anything can or will happen to them because we are the biggest, we are the strongest, we have everything and dominate by buying, taxation, having the biggest military, and even the best technology. 

At some point our country's system, which one of them calls a ponzi scheme, will reach a point of insolvency in which we cannot recover, and by definition, will collapse. This has been shown to be true in every civilization that has risen to the length and breadth that we have. However, due to the level of our technology, our collapse will be different in that it will not be able to recover due to the draining of our natural resources and the fact that they cannot be replaced (oil, water, etc.), the pollution of clean drinking water and food from chemicals and pesticides, the collapse of our financial system, the most obvious one of all at the present that people can relate to. One of the participants proposed an very interesting thought. Dr. Hugo DeGaris thinks that through the vast improvements in the area of Artificial Intelligence, we may be creating the society of the future, which consists of robots and machines that not only can think for themselves, but will do so at the speed of light, a thousand times faster than the fastest human brain operates. His theory postulates that if this point is reached, this new society may consider humans as being inferior and make a logical decision to eliminate us as a species. Of course this is farther down the line than the pressing issues of financial collapse we face now. 

Yet even with all this knowledge, a greater percentage of the people still refuse to believe that this can or will happen to us. 1 in 4 Americans is considered to be at Level 1 in the table of literacy. That means that there are roughly 44 million people in America that cannot read, write or express their thought well enough to communicate. A staggering number at the very least. They are among those that live closest to the dam and believe that the politicians and government know more than they do and will always take care of them.

This is a very interesting and relevant look at our forthcoming political, financial and environmental collapse and the discussion was much more than I could express here. I feel that I live way downstream and I'm worried that those who live next to the dam are not waking up fast enough to be able to get to higher ground before the dam bursts and they drown.


So, once again I say to those who live within a few miles of the dam, get up, get involved, participate, get informed, vote, complain, pursue, and let those who believe they are in charge of us that we are here and we are not going to go down with their ship.

In addition to Dr. DeGaris, here are a few names of those involved in the discussion: Michael Ruppert, Dr. Nathan Hagens, John Cronin, James Howard Kunstler.

---

Government and Law Enforcement Twist Google’s Arm For Data, Google Complies | Addicting Info

One by one the Constitutional freedoms Americans supposedly "enjoy" are being eroded slowly away without most people even knowing it. In this Google issued Transparency Report, Google was requested by the government, courts, local and state police to erase from its database:

Everything from videos of police brutality, to information supposedly pertaining to national security were among the requests.  The report also states one request from American authorities was to remove a video it believed to be critical of the government.

Separately, the report declares American law enforcement requested data from Google on 11,057 different users or accounts.  Google said it complied with 4,700 of those requests. Almost all of this data sharing was done without a warrant.

 (from Addictinginfo.org)

Google complied with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, enacted by the United States Congress to extend government restrictions on wire taps from telephone calls to include transmissions of electronic data by computer.

The ECPA has been met with criticism through the years including its failure to protect all communications and consumer records. Under the ECPA it is relatively easy for a governmental agency to demand service providers hand over consumer data that has been stored on servers. All that is required of the agency is a written statement certifying that the information is relevant to an investigation of foreign counterintelligence with no judicial review required. It also increased the list of crimes that can justify the use of surveillance as well as the number of judicial members who can authorize such surveillance. Data can be obtained without a warrant on traffic and calling patterns of an individual or group allowing an agency to gain valuable intelligence and possibly invade privacy without coming under fire because the actual content of the communication is left untouched. While workplace communications are in theory protected an employer must simply give notice or a supervisor must feel that the employee’s actions are not in the company’s “interest” to gain access to communiqué. This means that with minimal assumptions an employer can monitor communications within the company. The ongoing debate is where to limit the government’s power to see into civilian lives while balancing the need to curb national threats. The ECPA falls directly in the middle of this debate both sides wanting revisions and clarifications made by the courts and legislation.   



You might want to consider what you say online with any computer entity, send over the line, or even think of commenting on.

---