Why are you so afraid?

Have you ever found yourself:

• tolerating (or compromising with) the status-quo because you’re afraid to ‘take-on’ the system?
• letting others do the thinking because you’re afraid of ‘taking responsibility’?
• sitting on the fence and being indecisive because you’re afraid of ‘making a mistake’?
• making excuses to cover up, explain or apologize because you’re afraid of being labeled a ’failure’?
• envying or criticising those around you that are more successful because you’re afraid of ‘them’?
• spending beyond your means because you’re afraid of looking ‘less wealthy’ than your peers?
• frowning; becoming nervous; or lacking poise because you’re afraid or ‘intimidated’ by someone?
• indulging in alcohol or other drugs because you’re afraid of ‘dealing’ with the issue?
• putting off until tomorrow what should have been done last year because you’re afraid of ‘trying’?
• failing to embrace opportunities for advancement because you are afraid of the ‘extra work’?
• agreeing with others only because you are afraid of ‘hurting their feelings’?
• using big words to impress others because you are afraid of ‘looking inferior’ or ‘less competent’?
• deceiving (in words and deeds) yourself and others and/or living in denial because you are afraid of the ‘truth’?
• using an imaginary illness to seek sympathy (or as an excuse) because you are afraid of ‘taking ownership’ of today?
• being suspicious of friends and loved ones without reasonable evidence because you are afraid of ‘betrayal’ or ‘being hurt’ by them?
• gambling, stealing, cheating, and/or overspending because you are afraid of ‘being left behind’?
• angry at others because you are afraid of ‘facing up to your own shortcomings’?
• dressing and acting like much younger people because you are afraid of ‘growing old’?
• imitating others in dress, speech and manners because you are afraid of just ‘being yourself’?

Tell me, my friend, why are you so afraid?

- The Ranting Dream

Does desire drive success? Or is it fear?

Desire and Fear – two ends of the same stick (can’t remember exactly where I read that…my apologies to the original author for not remembering)…

The energy associated with desire is a motivator, the energy associated with fear is a protector (or at least we perceive it as being a protective force)…

“We experience desire and fear as psychological opposites. But from the brain’s point of view they seem to share a common kernel that can be flexibly used for either one” – Kent Berridge

e.g. The desire to live, invokes the fear of death…etc.

Enough of the analytical stuff, now for some philosophy:

I don’t believe that desire alone can bring success or fear alone can result in failure — it is easy to box ourselves and accept these forces as having all the influence we allow them to have on our perception of reality…

The quest for success begins with INTENT – beyond desire or knowledge or information or want or need…

Clarity of that INTENT coupled with sincerity, integrity, honesty, ethics (and you can interpret these in many different ways – it really doesn’t matter – what matters is the clarity of the intent with which you make that attempt towards what you ‘clearly’ define as ’success’ as it applies to you and your perception of reality) start laying the framework for you on which you must act…

Then comes ACTION – a focused, determined, sincere movement towards the realization of your INTENT…

Then comes REALIZATION (again, it can take make different forms and can be interpreted in many different ways — in this context, it would be everything from measurement of actions and results to actual satisfaction derived from having ‘realized’ the achievement of the original ‘intent’ – even if it looks and feels completely different from what was originally perceived)…

And you keep going through the cycle over and over again – re-inventing yourself (or re-INTENDING as it applies to this discussion) and achieving higher and loftier goals…

True SUCCESS is only realized when you achieve ANNIHILATION in your INTENT — this is a tough one to explain as even for myself, I have yet to ANNIHILATE myself (mind, body, soul, being) into that purpose that I INTEND to achieve — I do know though, that the true measure of my success will only be when (and if) the ANNIHILATION happens…otherwise, it’s back to the wheel of re-INTENDING for me…

Annihilation (per the Merriam-Webster dictionary): “to cause to be of no effect”

Therefore, the concepts of desire and fear – as interpreted by the cause and effect way of thinking – do not really contribute to, in my humble opinion, success (or lack thereof) – as I understand it…success is achieved ONLY when one is able to cause to be of no effect…desire and fear are states of mind – and have no real (earth-shattering) bearing (or influence) on ’success’….

- The Ranting Dream

The potential to turn a life around…

More often than is good for me, I fall prey to my own ignorance, apathy, and foolishness and fail to learn from life’s lessons…sharing one such lesson that I’m determined to etch into the fabric of my (conscious and unconscious) being…

A group of frogs were traveling through the woods when two of them fell into a deep pit.

All the other frogs gathered around the pit. Seeing how deep the pit was, they told the unfortunate frogs that there was no hope, and that they would never get out.

The two frogs ignored their friends’ pessimistic comments and tried to jump up out of the pit.

The other frogs kept telling them to stop, to save their energy, and live whatever little time they had left in peace inside the pit…they tried to convince the two frogs that they were as good as dead.

After a long struggle to get out, one of the frogs took heed to what the other frogs were saying and gave up trying. Shortly after, having over-exerted his body and out of despair, he lay down, closed his eyes, and died.

The other frog continued to jump as hard as he could.

Again, the crowd of frogs kept yelling at him to stop hurting himself and to just die in peace like his friend did.

Despite the commotion and the negativity in the air, he jumped harder each time digging deeper and deeper within himself to reach higher and higher up the pit with each leap; and after what seemed like an eternity, he finally scrambled out of the pit.

When he got out, and had calmed down and rested, the other frogs asked him, “Why did you continue jumping when we kept telling you to stop?”

The frog explained to them that when in danger or when afraid, he went deaf. He couldn’t hear a thing they were saying, and thought they must have been encouraging him the entire time to keep trying to get out of the pit. He had no clue that they were telling him to give up and die…

The morale of this silly little story, from my humble perspective, is that within our attitudes, behaviors, actions, and words; we have the capacity to define the outcome of just about any situation we encounter…whether we realize it or not…we can just as easily kill someone by simply telling them to die as we can give them a new lease on life by simply telling them to live…and the same applies to what we tell ourselves every moment of our lives…

We don’t need a story about frogs to convince us that this is indeed true…look around and you’ll see it happening everywhere…everyday…

Time to dig deep, reach in, and etch this…

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” – Leo F. Buscaglia

- The Ranting Dream

The hot air rant…

Apparently some brave souls recently hacked into the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (Hadley CRU) and picked up files, e-mail messages, and other relevant information and published them on the internet for the benefit of all…

Why this information leak is critical is because Hadley CRU is one of the four ‘official‘ sources of global temperature data used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – and the folks whose e-mail exchanges have been disclosed to the public are some of the most influential scientists who have been pushing the ‘global warming‘ agenda for many, many years…

The leaked e-mail messages are shocking in that they expose the ‘manipulation‘ of data done to support the anthropogenic global warming theory – together with private interal admissions between these folks that the earth is not quite heating up as they make it up to be…not surprisingly, the e-mails also indicate the use of peer pressure to exclude global warming skeptics (towards whom these ‘insiders‘ also express great animosity) from participating in the debate on climate change and/or contributing their knowledge and information to the same…

Knowing what I know about today’s scientific community (and from first-hand experience listening to and observing a young ‘neuro-science‘ student I know – whose sole purpose in life seems to be the endless pursuit and accumulation of personal wealth), I’m not overly shocked or surprised by these revelations – these folks are driven more by their egos and the accumulation of personal wealth than they are by their conscience or moral/ethical principles…I digress…

An email from (now ex-) CRU Director Phil Jones explicitly illustrates the lying and manipulation (I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting key words in bold and italics to illustrate my point):

“…I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998…”

Another e-mail from Kevin Trenberth (US National Center for Atmospheric Research) interestingly reads:

“…The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate…”

I will note that Trenberth has on many occassions written articles about the planet not warming as predicted (or presented) – so I’m inclined to believe that he’s expressing an honest concern rather than contributing to the misinformation…but who knows…

What is very interesting in all of this is that a very small group of ‘elite‘ scientists – who have been assigned the responsibility of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating critical data – seem to have the ability to influence and massage the information that the rest of the scientific community receives…and there seem to be no safeguards or audits in place to ensure that they aren’t misleading the rest of the planet having supposedly sold their souls to the highest bidder…

There is no doubt in my mind that all the information we receive today is tampered with and intentionally manipulated by entities that only care about the success of their agenda – we have many examples from our recent past to prove that assertion…and unfortunately, just like we have done to all our endeavors, our scientific establishment is structured just like any corporate or military entity: bureaucratic, hierarchial, and with highly compartmentalized (silo mentality) fields of pursuit – thereby hindering ‘honest‘ and open communication and collaboration within the scientific community…and with the growing ‘corporatization‘ of our scientific pursuits, we’ve inoculated the ideals of competition, backstabbing, and mistrust into the system…

Coming back to these scalding e-mails, there are messages from seemingly highly educated scientists expressing their desire to “…beat the crap out of…” skeptics – and in a ‘celebratory‘ message following the death of one of the earliest climate change skeptics, one of these ‘elite‘ scientists is on record stating: “…in an odd way this is cheering news…”

Sick! (and sad too)…

Click HERE and HERE from some gems from this fiasco…

“

In 1951, the U.S Congress established the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide financial support for post-World War II scientific research. Soon thereafter, someone at NSF or on the National Science Board, which is charged with oversight of NSF, had an idea, a really corrosive idea, the implementation of which would lead to the perversion and corruption of American science for decades ahead. The idea was that reviewers of scientific proposals to NSF for government research grant money should be anonymous; the crux of the idea being that anonymity would encourage honesty in evaluation even when those reviewers might be competitors or might have vested interests. Thus the concept of anonymous peer review was birthed.[...]

For decades, the use of anonymity within NSF, NASA, and elsewhere has been gradually corrupting American science. Unethical reviewers – secure, camouflaged, masked and hidden through anonymity – all too often make untrue and/or pejorative statements to eliminate their professional competitors. Nowadays, it is a pervasive, corrupt system that encourages and rewards the darkest elements of human nature.

“

(Basic Cause of Current Corruption in American Science, Herndon, J. Marvin, 2008)

I won’t dwell on where I’m going with this rant…do your own research…but I will give you a hint: this whole ‘carbon tax‘ scam that is being shoved down our throats by the ‘global warming‘ scare-mongers out there is simply another money making scheme…many Wall Street big-wigs have already positioned themselves to rake in tremendous profits from this scam…

“…the carbon market could become double the size of the vast oil market if the new breed of City players who trade greenhouse gas emissions through the EU’s emissions trading scheme have their way… The speed of that growth will depend on whether the Copenhagen summit gives a go-ahead for a low-carbon economy, but Ager says whatever happens schemes such as the ETS will expand around the globe.” (Terry Macalister, Carbon trading could be worth twice that of oil in next decade | The Guardian, 28 November 2009)

“…the large financial conglomerates, involved in derivative trade, including JP Morgan Chase, Bank America Merrill Lynch, Barclay’s, Citi Bank, Nomura, Société Générale, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are actively involved in carbon trading.” ( FACTBOX: Investment banks in carbon trading | Reuters, 14 September 2009)

And you thought Al Gore was a gift from up above, eh?…and by the way, Gore suddenly had a change of heart and canceled his Copenhagen summit commitment…this happened AFTER the e-mails and the apparent ‘inconvenient truth‘ therein made the headlines…interesting, eh?

[update - 2009/12/15: Al Gore did eventually make it to the summit...but ended up misquoting a scientist and created another mess for himself...a rant for another day]

I am inclined to believe (and have been for a long time before any of this surfaced) that this whole ‘global warming‘ fear-mongering by our political goons is but another scam – and while I do accept the fact that our indiscriminate raping of this planet is having a negative adverse effect on the climate amongst other things; I reject the spin, fear-mongering, and the ‘carbon tax‘ nonsense that is being pushed aggressively by the crooks in politics.

Sadly, we’ll probably never know who is telling us the truth and who is lying to us…maybe the hackers (and the e-mails they have leaked) are for real, or maybe this whole thing has been manufactured by yet another cunning entity to push a specific agenda in their favor…such is the misery we’ve carved for our own species…all in the endless, greedy, and selfish pursuit of the shiny, glitzy, glittery illusion that makes our superficial world go round…

- The Ranting Dream

A vacancy in the axis of evil…

Iran – a member of what was labeled ‘the axis of evil‘ by the Bush administration – started engaging in dialog with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia, the US of A), and Germany in Geneva in October…the primary objective of the talks: to discuss Iran’s (apparently non-existent) nuclear weapons program…

Now here’s the twist in the tale…

Let’s have a show of hands for all those who remember the rhetoric and spin that has been fed to us since 09/11/01 claiming that Iran (like it’s chums in the ‘axis of evil’) has a thriving underground nuclear weapons program that poses a threat to all of humanity…okay: hands down folks – and you better sit down for what’s coming next…

Mohamed El-Baradei – the outgoing Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (a UN outfit) – recently said that (and I paraphrase) “…there is no credible evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons…”

…and this gets better…

Soon after, the New York Times reported on a leaked confidential IAEA document that “…concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired ’sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable’ atom bomb…” [CLICK HERE for the article]

Now do they already have nukes or don’t they??? Do they have the capacity and capability to develop nuclear weapons or not???

I thought we may have had some clarity on this issue from Timothy Hampton, a nuclear expert with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization who had joined the United Nations’ team for the October talks. Unfortunately, Tim died in a bizzare accident at the end of October – after falling off the 17th floor of the United Nations’ Vienna International Center. I wonder what Timothy knew that didn’t sit well with the rest of the team involved in the ‘talks‘? And what the heck was he thinking jumping off the 17th floor of that building?

Reminds me of Dr. Kelly…remember Dr. Kelly??? A British microbiologist and UN weapons inspector, Dr. David Kelly was openly talking to the media about the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…and was writing a book to that effect with some damaging information about how the British Ministry of Defense (and everyone – all the way up to Tony Blair) was trying very hard to spin otherwise. This was in 2003. Dr. Kelly was found dead under a tree about a mile from his home and the official reports claimed suicide – however, a multitude of medical professionals (13 doctors to be precise) have asserted, and claim to be able to prove without doubt, that it is medically impossible for Dr. Kelly to have died in the manner that the official reports suggest. They have come together and mounted a legal battle against the powers that be to overturn the ‘suicide‘ verdict…following his death, an unopened letter on his desk revealed a nasty message from the ‘heart‘ of the British Government threatening him with ‘consequences‘ (I believe they had threatened specifically to have him ’sacked’) if he did not stop talking about what he knew to the media…

I digress…

El-Baradei’s denial still stands despite the noise in the media about the leaked confidential document from his agency that clearly contradicts his denial - and wait, there’s more…US National Security Adviser James Jones agrees with Baradei…that there is ‘no credible evidence‘ that Iran has (or is developing) nuclear weapons…

So either the ‘god-fearing-fanatically-religious-born-again-believer-thou-shalt-not-bear-false-witness‘ moron Bush Jr., his personal puppet Blair, and their cronies were lying (which is not a far-fetched notion), or this leaked IAEA document is a load of bullshit, or El-Baradei and the new regime in Washington are full of it…

This is truly a very interesting turn of events – up until June of this year, the powers that be were pulling all the strings they could to incite a ‘soft revolution‘ in Iran with the objective of forcing a ‘regime change‘…and they had built their entire case on the spin that Ahmedinajad was ‘satan manifested‘ with an arsenal of nukes and an evil agenda of torching the planet…

Sadly, just like they created the monsters we now call the Taliban to fight a guerilla war with the Soviets, the British and US intelligence, with assistance from Pakistani intelligence, created another dangerous terrorist organization called the ‘Jundullah‘ – comprising primarily of fundamentalist Baluchis seeking autonomy in that region (Iran/Pakistan)…all the while positioning the Jundullah to look like an Iran-grown and supported terrorist front…

Jundullah recently changed its organization’s name to ‘People’s Resistance Movement of Iran‘ – though the real ‘people‘ of that part of the world want to have nothing to do with this movement and its resistance – and its leader, Abdul-Malak Rigi is an ex-Taliban fighter and known smuggler involved in the international narcotics drug ring that is active on the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran – and for those who have done their research, the lucrative ($ 50 billion-ish) narcotics drug trade in that region was created in the ’70s and is still supported and protected by the CIA, and managed today by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai…[CLICK HERE for more on this]

“After meeting with the U.S. officials in the U.S. embassy in Pakistan four years ago, they (the U.S. officials) promised to help us with everything we needed. We received monetary and armed supports from the United States… We received orders from them to carry out the terrors inside Iran.” – The brother of Jundullah’s leader, Abdul-Hamid Rigi, caught for his involvement in detonating a bomb in a mosque prior to Iran’s elections in June…

And all this seems to have been going on since the moron’s (Bush Jr.) regime (if not earlier)…

“…teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups…” – Seymour Hersh (veteran US journalist) – 2006

“The Iranian accusations are true“ - Richard Sale, intelligence correspondent for United Press International, referring to charges that the US is using the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) organization and other groups to carry out cross-border operations in Iran - 2006

“The President hasn’t notified the Congress that American troops are operating inside Iran, so it’s a very serious question about the constitutional framework under which we are now conducting military operations in Iran.” – Sam Gardiner (retired US Army Colonel who specializes in war-game scenarios) – 2006

While I scratch my head in bewilderment at (and struggle to make sense of) these recent events, one thing is certain – Iran is no longer within the ‘axis of evil‘ – whatever the deal is that has been struck, we now have a vacancy for any ‘natural-resource-rich‘ nation out there to fill…send those applications in folks…

I’m very worried though about these terrorist outfits that have been armed and trained by organizations like the CIA that will continue to unleash atrocities on innocent human beings…the great nations of our planet seem to have no use anymore for the Jundullahs and the Mujahideen-e Khalqs that they created and empowered since they seem to have kissed and made up with Ahmedinajad and the Ayatollahs…but these heavily armed, trained mercenaries (just like their Afghan counterparts, the Taliban) - sponsored and paid for by our tax dollars (and by the thriving narcotis drug trade that is propped up and managed by folks on our payroll) – will not stop terrorizing the innocent and helpless citizens of that god-forsaken land for generations to come…

“We started with Iraq in the ‘axis of evil’ side, when we thought they did not yet have nuclear weapons, and that sent the signal to others that they better get them quick.” - Former Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA)

- The Ranting Dream