Menu



error This forum is not active, and new posts may not be made in it.
Promote
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/17/2019 12:03:55 PM
YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KEELING ME

Carbon dioxide levels just hit 415 ppm. Who saw this coming? Exxon Mobil.


Want to see something terrifying? Watch atmospheric carbon emissions climb to the new all-time high of 415 parts per million.

We've updated our animation of the Keeling Curve to reflect 2019 readings.


This emissions update comes from daily data collected via analyzer at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, since 1956. After breaking the 400 ppm threshold in 2013, data from 2019 puts emissions at 415 ppm. The “upward trajectory continues,” the video ends on an ominous note.

Who could have seen this coming? As Brian Kahn at Earther pointed out, leaked internal documents from Exxon Mobil reveal that the oil and gas giant has seen this emissions landmark coming since 1982. A graph shows their 2019 estimated carbon dioxide level was between about 385 ppm and 415 ppm, an impressively accurate guess for the time.

Growth of atmospheric CO2 and average global temperature increase as a function of time
Exxon predicted 2019 would hit near 415 ppm.

Instead of using this knowledge to prevent it from becoming a reality, Exxon launched a series of climate denial efforts. It published anti-climate change ads in The New York Times, lobbied against government efforts to regulate emissions, and helped start the Global Climate Coalition to cast doubt on climate change.

After decades pushing climate denial, oil and gas companies are starting to face the consequences. Countless lawsuits are cropping up from states, cities, tribes, and fishermen that call for oil companies to finally own up to the self-serving role they’ve played in exacerbating the climate crisis.


(GRIST)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/19/2019 6:26:35 PM

As Above, So Below?

comet mcnaught
© Stéphane Guisard
Comet McNaught over Chile, January 2007
Here is an old idea: our world is part of a living universe, with a mind of its own, a place that is not only a playground for indulging desires, but also a school for learning from the suffering generated by the struggle of existence. This idea lay at the heart of the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, established in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. In Comets And The Horns Of Moses, Laura Knight-Jadczyk summarized the Stoics' basic philosophy thus:
"The world is rationally organised, and so explicable and understandable. The pattern is complete throughout. Within the organisation, different elements and parts are dynamic and governing, others are passive in function. The world is purposefully providential; so there is also a design as well as a pattern, and the good end is discoverable by the rational understanding of this. The divine element is completely and only immanent. As the system is an organic whole, the understanding of any part contributes to the understanding of the whole, and vice versa. Even the operation of any part is relevant to the operation of the whole. The operational law of cause and effect runs right through the behavior of phenomena and of living creatures. The understanding and explanation of its operation lies within, and only within, itself."
When I read this, I was reminded of fractal patterns, a very common mathematical structure. Here is a selection of those patterns as they occur in nature:
Fractals

"Fractals" in Nature
The Search For Intelligent Life

Modern science's sober view of the universe pooh-poohs the notion of a 'divine element'. It's just an object of study - vast and mysterious, certainly, but ultimately just like any other object. If you expect to be taken seriously in 'the scientific community', you keep your amazement low key when you discover how brilliantly the Universe's machinery is engineered. We are expected to believe that the highest forms of order - of which our civilization with all its technological marvels is just one small part - simply originate out of nothing: there is neither a plan involved, nor purpose, nor intelligence, they say. Just... BOOM!

How can that be?

From solar systems to animals, in Nature everything is functional and perfectly organized, allowing for some adaptability in response to dynamic changes, but otherwise following strict sets of rules. That it takes inherently structured form is alone a clear indicator of intelligence. But for the 'serious' scientist (who is invariably a neo-Darwinist, whether or not he is aware of it), that's a 'no-go' area. Intelligence can only be ascribed to creatures like us, they say. Nature's biological marvels only give the appearance of design but are simply the result of random mutation, "a happy chemical accident," as the legendary atheist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins put it.

Orderly structures created by Nature, no matter how sophisticated, are 'only' natural. If that is the case, what is so special about human beings? At what point does intelligence and consciousness enter the fray?

The Origin of Life

Despite the sophisticated heights science has reached, we remain incapable of reproducing life - certainly, not by any technological means. Mother Nature's technology is far superior to our capabilities and comprehension. We didn't invent life on Earth, she did. We just apply the little we learn from her in rather small, and generally not so brilliant, ways. Yet modern man tends to consider himself the only intelligent, and certainly the most sophisticated, life form. In our arrogance, we say, "mankind knows better," while in reality every observation, every theory, every invention is Nature's intellectual property.

In Evolution 2.0 - Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, electrical engineer and information theorist Perry Marshall describes the struggle between two opposing camps: the Neo-Darwinists/Atheists on one side, who claim, Random Mutation + Natural Selection + Time = Evolution, and the advocates of Intelligent Design (along with the Creationists) on the other side, who claim 'god' created the universe and everything in it. Marshall concludes that Darwinists underestimate Nature, while Creationists underestimate God, and reminds us that it has already been established, in numerous ways, that DNA is literally code - a highly sophisticated one that exceeds every programming language we can conceive of.

The question is: where did this code come from? Random chance, the atheists claim. If so, where is the evidence for that?Marshall is offering $5,000,000 to the first person who can submit a purely chemical process that produces code.

Also taking aim at the case for random mutation is geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who conducted extensive experiments that bombarded fruit flies with radiation for 30 years, inducing DNA mutations, which he - in line with the prevailing theory - expected would accelerate 'evolution' in the flies. But his experiments turned out to be highly detrimental to the fruit flies' health. There is in fact no documented case, or application in any field of science, where noise/randomness adds information content - on the contrary, it disturbs and destroys information. In cases of evolutionary processes the evidence points to adaptive mutation. Imagine a damaged text on a page, where letters are missing: you rec_nstruct and fill in t_e g_ps.

SUMMARY OF RESULTS
© Perry Marshall
Bullet Point Summary from the Book 'Evolution 2.0 - Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design'
From the Wikipedia entry on Rare Earth Hypothesis:
"In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth Hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity such as sexually reproducing, multicelluar organisms on Earth (and, subsequently, human intelligence) require an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances. According to the hypothesis, complex extraterrestial life is an improbable phenomenon and likely to be rare."
If that were true, the occurrence of life on Earth must have been a bodacious coincidence, let alone the formation of the universe! Was life on Earth and the creation of the universe really just randomly occurring, happy accidents? Some scientists find the 'leap of faith' this requires too difficult to take. Biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has said of the Big Bang theory: "As my friend Terrence McKenna used to say, 'Modern science is based on the principle: give me one free miracle and we'll explain the rest!'" Many scientists literally believe that order miraculously emerges from nothingness.

So, if I do nothing, will order spontaneously emerge from my untidy living room? It sounds like they're really saying: "We don't know the cause, unless... but let's not go there."

Mind Over Matter

The word 'matter' derives from the Latin mater meaning 'origin', 'source', 'mother'. The universe, in all its manifestations, is a well-designed, highly functional, holistic structure, and everything it gives birth to follows its rules - rules which scientists attempt to understand in order to gain knowledge. Like a child learns from its mother, scientists learn from matter. But is there only matter?

In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind, or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychists like the ancient Stoics, Plato, Leibniz, William James or Alfred North Whitehead saw themselves as minds in a world of mind. The psychologist C.G. Jung, with his concept of the collective unconscious, was also of this mindset.

The young and curious human mind extrapolates intelligent explanations, scientific models, blueprints and mathematical rule sets, from nature's super-old mind. This informs us about how things work, which makes us intelligent and enables us to further refine our pattern recognition abilities. The application of mathematical rules and concepts, which we as 'intelligent beings' supposedly developed on our own, have physical results in the material world, so it would seem that they existed long before mankind existed. But where exactly is the world of information - of mathematics and ideas - located, if not in our mind? Nature's mind?

Our mind is strictly a material product of some as-yet-undiscovered brain function, goes the prevailing view. But scientists have been unable to pinpoint a biological location where memories are stored, while studies on rats have shown that, after teaching them a trick, no matter how much of their brain is subsequently cut away (until, of course, the rat dies), they still remember it. Is memory-retrieval thus a non-material phenomenon?

Matter, Energy and Information

Norbert Wiener, MIT's legendary 'father of cybernetics' said:
"Information is information, neither matter nor energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day."
According to Tom Stonier, 'father of information theory', information is a fundamental constituent of the universe:
"Matter and energy comprise the surface of the universe. The surface structure of the universe is readily perceivable to our senses. The internal structure is more subtle. It's organized in a manner not so obvious: it consists not only of matter and energy but of information as well."
There seems to be a 'pool' or field of non-material information which informs matter, and guides it along established pathways, or 'habits' as Dr. Rupert Sheldrake puts it. Sheldrake proposed the theory of morphic resonance and morphic fields, which could explain many other strange phenomena - from precognition and swarm behavior to remote-viewing, to name a few. What if the mind or mental 'center' of creatures are essentially receivers of information from a vast, non-local and highly intelligent information field?

Holistic Systems

In this framework, there is no 'dead matter', but rather different levels of organisation, including life as one form. Although much more simply organized in comparison to living matter, what we call 'inanimate matter' also adapts and behaves in different ways under certain circumstances, undergoing chemical reactions and complex processes, and proceeding over unimaginably long periods of time.

Think of the formation of our planet, which took place long before it could sustain life. There was an evolution of 'dead' matter before that, forming the 'metabolism' of a star system. Consider how well-organized a planet must be to make life possible, and how fine-tuned weather and climate systems must be to regulate the subsequent existence of life. Where do we draw the line between 'life' and 'death'?

Are galaxies alive? Do they communicate with each other? Cosmic phenomena have striking similarities to neuronal networks. As Stephen Smith from the Thunderbolts Project writes in 'Electric Universe: Power Lines':
Galaxies often exhibit alignment with one another across vast distances.

According to Electric Universe theory, galactic evolution occurs as large-scale plasma discharges form spinning wheels of coherent filaments that display electrodynamic behavior and not merely that which gravity alone can contribute. Stars in galaxies can also form long arcs that thread through them like silver beads on a string. No nebular contraction theory can adequately explain star formation. Beyond that, the great spirals that collect in clusters, that then also group themselves in superclusters, are beyond any conventional definition.

When plasma moves through a cloud of dust and gas, the cloud becomes ionized, initiating an electric field and the flow of electric current. Electricity moving through any substance forms magnetic fields that tend to align and constrict the current flow. Those fields create what are sometimes called "plasma ropes," otherwise known as Birkeland currents.

Birkeland currents are electromagnetic filaments that carry electric charges through space. The filaments are double-walled, folded layers of charge separation, isolating regions of opposite charge and preventing them from neutralizing.

Almost every body in the Universe displays some kind of filamentation. Comet tails often occur in pairs. The dusty one forms an arc as it follows along its orbital path. The other one, composed of "stringy" ion filaments, reaches out from the nucleus in a straight line, always pointing away from the region of like polarity. Planetary nebulae are spun from intricate webs of lighted tendrils. Herbig-Haro stars and energetic galaxies emit braided jets. Some galaxies look "hairy," with threads of material extending from them.

Since the various loads in galactic circuits radiate energy, they must be powered by coupling with larger circuits. How large those circuits are can be inferred by the observation that galaxies also occur in strings.
Everything seems to be connected: systems feeding systems, cycles within cycles, rules built upon rules. It's as if all is part of one larger organism. Imagine an astronomer living on a planet that is actually an electron orbiting an atom, located within a molecule that is part of a cell cluster inside the guts of a fruit fly, who asks the same question...
brain cell universe

[Click to enlarge]

A Human-Cosmic Connection


Proponents of man-made global warming believe the planet - specifically the biosphere - is undergoing radical change due to excessive human activity causing resource depletion and runaway levels of greenhouse gases. This, they posit, meddles catastrophically with the delicate climate controls that sustain life on Earth. If we would just (drastically) reduce our 'carbon footprint', eco-systems would survive, and humanity with them.

However, on the one hand they overestimate the physical impact human civilization has on systems that derive most of their energy and 'informational content' from the Sun, cosmic rays and other cosmic phenomena. On the other hand, they ignore the historical accounts of past (non-industrial, though highly organized) civilizations collapsing at times of great environmental upheaval.

Returning to the Stoic idea, Knight-Jadczyk wrote of one of the most important Stoics, Posidonius:
"Since the system is an organic whole and the operational law of cause and effect was a part of the system, it logically followed that the operation or state of any part could be relevant to the operation of the whole. This meant that forms of divination were valid means of scientific exploration, though certainly not in isolation. What followed from this was that, since it was possible to predict such things as tides from the position of the Moon, it should also be possible to predict the future behavior of other phenomena, including human events, from patterns and signs in the heavens and on Earth.

I don't think that we need to assume that Posidonius took this to unreasonable lengths, as Augustine claimed, since the evidence that he was an 'astrologer' in the usual sense is just not there. But what seems to have been on his mind was the scientific exploration of signs and seasons, and trying and testing various methods of relating major events on the planet in the socio-political sphere to the cosmos at large and discovering their dynamic interaction.

In other words, as a rationalist who believed that a rational law permeated the universe, Posidonius inferred that all events follow an unbroken chain of causation, even if we, at the human level, cannot always see the cause for a specific effect. But, theoretically, the world should be rationally comprehensible if we study the world and all within it, and learn the patterns of cause and effect at one scale, and then apply them to other scales. Like a fractal, the cosmic patterns always follow through to real world events and we can follow the chain backward by way of scientific observations and analyses.

In Posidonius' view, cosmic design was imposed rationally from the top down, but we can only partially reveal it and check the facts that will lead to understanding this design, from the bottom up."
In the book Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection, engineer Pierre Lescaudron explored the 'signs and seasons' of our times - erroneously framed as 'man-made climate change' in modern science - in the context of historical episodes of civilizational collapse:
As depicted in Figure 202, far from our linear, uniformitarian vision of the universe, the ancient Chinese believed - and some continue to believe - that the behavior of rulers, the state of the world and natural catastrophes are intimately related. This was also the way our ancestors understood the world.
Chinese dynastic cycle
© Red Pill Press
Figure 202: The Chinese dynastic cycle
To give just one example of the correlation between cosmic disasters and leaders misconduct, we will focus on the last decades of the Roman Empire (530-580 AD). The following is an excerpt from Procopius's Secret History, entitled 'How Justinian Killed a Trillion People'. Keep in mind that Procopius was probably the most prominent historian of the 6th Century. Most scholars consider him the last major historian of the ancient world. Procopius was not only an historian; for more than ten years he was also a counselor to the greatest general of the time, Belisarius. As such, during this period of numerous travels, battles and negotiations, he was a direct witness of roman political and military life. After his retirement from military affairs, he became a judge and, in that capacity, he had the ways and means to obtain inside information that made up his Secret History.
"That Justinian was not a man, but a demon, as I have said, in human form, one might prove by considering the enormity of the evils he brought upon mankind. So while he was Emperor, the whole Earth ran red with the blood of nearly all the Romans and the barbarians. Furthermore the persecution of the Samaritans and the so-called heretics filled the Roman realm with blood. During his rule over the Romans, many disasters of various kinds occurred: which some said were due to the presence and artifices of the Devil, and others considered were effected by the Divinity, who, disgusted by the Roman Empire, had turned away from it and given the country up to the Old One.

The Scirtus River flooded Edessa, creating countless sufferings among the inhabitants, as I have elsewhere written. The Nile, rising as usual, but not subsiding in the customary season, brought terrible calamities to the people there, as I have also previously recounted. The Cydnus inundated Tarsus, covering almost the whole city for many days, and did not subside until it had done irreparable damage.

Earthquakes destroyed Antioch, the leading city of the East; Seleucia, which is situated nearby; and Anazarbus, most renowned city in Cilicia. Who could number those that perished in these metropoles? Yet one must add also those who lived in Ibora; in Amasea, the chief city of Pontus; in Polybotus in Phrygia, called Polymede by the Pisidians; in Lychnidus in Epirus; and in Corinth:all thickly inhabited cities from of old. All of these were destroyed by earthquakes during this time, with a loss of almost all their inhabitants. And then came the plague, which I have previously mentioned, killing half at least of those who had survived the earthquakes.
It seems that when a large enough number of people exhibit high levels of ignorance and false beliefs, cosmic turmoil soon follows; and if history is studied close and long enough, you'll see the pattern emerge again, and again, and again. A negative feedback loop may develop at this point (bottom right of the above diagram). When natural catastrophes increase to the point that people finally realize that something is 'up', it also dawns on them that their leaders are unable to provide for their safety and so they turn against them. Social unrest grows and the elites turn to increasingly repressive measures of violence and control, which, in turn, increase the cosmic 'reaction', which further fuels the people's anxiety and urge to revolt.
Where do you think we are today on the 'dynastic cycle'?

Although not consciously formulated, it strikes me as prescient that the 'Yellow Vest' revolt in France kicked off last November because of popular resistance to a planned increase in fuel tax, the ostensible reason for which was to reduce reliance on cars for transport while raising revenues for 'fighting climate change' and 'saving the planet'. The increase in extreme and unseasonal weather in recent years has by now surely been noticed by most people, although visceral realization of what it portends is, for the most part, still missing. In the meantime, social unrest grows, and governments become increasingly totalitarian, which suggests we can expect even greater 'cosmic reaction' to come...

Cause And Effect


If the Universe itself is an organism with a mind of its own, then the same might apply to macro-systems like galaxies, solar systems, and so on down the scale, with the world 'below' manifesting much of the same patterns as the world 'above'. All are subject to the principles of evolution and devolution: order and chaos, growth and decay, health and sickness. As with each living thing, on a long enough timescale, every macro-system is subject to entropy and eventually collapses, and until then it functions as a corrupted form of order.

Today's elites pursue their drive for domination and control of other people and of all life. The emergent 'postmodern' manifestation of civilization they have birthed is civilization in a highly advanced state of corrupted order, a pathological (in)competence hierarchy. Predatory and warlike, yet effeminate and juvenile, it somehow continues to sustain large numbers of people, yet starves them of meaning and fundamental well-being thanks to an endless stream of infotainment masquerading as factual information.

The spiraling social unrest and extreme weather phenomena - among which I include the increase in comets and asteroids in near-Earth orbit - seem then to constitute an immune reaction to this macrosocial devolution, in part from the planet-as-organism, and in part from us, as one connected 'super-organism'.

as above so below v2
© Flow
[Click To Enlarge]
That our civilization could be wiped out in the blink of an eye is a very real threat. Consider the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis and the growing body of evidence supporting it: large comet fragments hit the North American Ice Cap at the end of the last ice age andcaused cataclysmic flooding. If an advanced civilization existed back then, as some researchers suspect, there wouldn't have been much of it left afterwards, which probably accounts for the ancient myths about a terrible deluge that brought civilization to its knees. Does history repeat? Or at least rhyme? Have we become so inured in our secular techno-specialness that we have forgotten just how unimportant we are from a cosmic perspective? And does human civilization need a little (or large) reminder of that from time to time?

(sott.net)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/19/2019 6:55:32 PM
Is Germany's Active Vocano Awakening?

Posted May 16, 2019 by Martin Armstrong



Most people have never heard of a volcano in Germany. Well, the caldera of Laacher See was formed after the Laacher volcano that erupted between 12,900 and 11,200 years ago. Everything collapsed into the empty magma chamber below only two or three days after the eruption, forming what is now a lake. The estimated
Volcanic Explosivity Indexvalue was that of 6, which means that this eruption was 250 times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens back in 1980. Remains of this eruption can be found all over Europe and is often used for dating sediments. A number of unique minerals, like Hauyn, can be found in the region, and quarries to mine the stone as a building material.

The Laacher is still considered very much an
active volcano. There has been recent seismic activities and heavy thermal anomalies under the lake. Carbon dioxide (CO2) gas from magma still bubbles up at the southeastern shore and scientists believe that a new eruption can happen at any time, which today would be a disaster beyond all description. The region known as the Eifel is an idyllic low mountain range in West Germany bordering the Rhine to the East and the Moselle River to the South. Its highest elevation a mere 747m at the Hohe Acht. German geologists have been concerned that there may be a volcanic threat. This possibility is beginning to gather strong support in expert circles, particularly after four recent earthquakes and the realization that magma is filling into the chamber below. The situation could turn from quiet to catastrophic in a matter of months. The volcanoes of the Rhineland are not subjected to close surveillance, for they have not been active is a long time. That seems to be changing.

Magma is once again filling into the chamber
beneath the lake. This again is something that would contribute to global cooling if it were to erupt. There have been four recent earthquakes: April 28, 2019; May 2, 2019; May 6, 2019; and May 7, 2019. When the Fukushima Japanese disaster took place back on March 11, 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel,
who was a chemical physicist by profession, took the decision to stop eight nuclear plants in Germany and initiated a gradual, full exit of Germany from nuclear energy by 2022.

Categories:
Nature
Tags:
, , ,




(armstrongeconomics.com)



"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/22/2019 11:47:50 AM
May 21, 2019 - 05:56 PM EDT

UN arms official says risk of nuclear war at its highest since WW2


GETTY IMAGES

BY JOHN BOWDEN

The head of the United Nations' Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) says that the world is now at the greatest risk of global nuclear war since the end of World War II.

Reuters reported Tuesday that UNIDIR Director Renata Dwan said in an interview that the use of nuclear weapons is more likely today than any time since the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, adding that the use of such weapons today carried a greater risk than ever.

"I think that it's genuinely a call to recognize - and this has been somewhat missing in the media coverage of the issues - that the risks of nuclear war are particularly high now, and the risks of the use of nuclear weapons, for some of the factors I pointed out, are higher now than at any time since World War II," she told the news service, speaking about a call from 122 nations to ban such weapons entirely.

The U.N. Security Council, Dwan said, is not doing enough to mitigate the risk of the world descending into war with nuclear weapons.

"How we think about that, and how we act on that risk and the management of that risk, seems to me a pretty significant and urgent question that isn't reflected fully in the (U.N.) Security Council," she told Reuters.

The Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which is backed by a group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, is currently supported by more than 100 nations, most of which do not have nuclear weapons. It has been ratified by 23 countries out of the 50 it requires to take effect.

The U.S., which has advocated against the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world, has opposed the treaty, as do other nuclear powers such as Russia and China.


(
thehill.com)


"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

1162
61587 Posts
61587
Invite Me as a Friend
Top 25 Poster
Person Of The Week
RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
5/22/2019 5:35:50 PM
Comet

'Clash of Civilizations' or Crisis of Civilization?

clash of civilizations

The outlook of current Western leaders suggests that humanity will be hard pressed to survive the 21st century


Talk about a graphic display of soft power: Beijing this week hosted the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations.

Organized under the direct supervision of President Xi Jinping it took place amid an "Asian Culture Carnival." Sure, there were dubious, kitschy and syrupy overtones, but what really mattered was what Xi himself had to say to China and all of Asia.

In his keynote speech, the Chinese leader essentially stressed that one civilization forcing itself upon another is "foolish" and "disastrous." In Xi's concept of a dialogue of civilizations, he referred to the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as programs that "have expanded the channels for communication exchanges."

Xi's composure and rationality present a stark, contrasting message to US President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign.

West vs East and South

Compare and contrast Xi's comments with what happened at a security forum in Washington just over two weeks earlier. Then, a bureaucrat by the name of Kiron Skinner, the State Department's policy planning director, characterized US-China rivalry as a "clash of civilizations," and "a fight with a really different civilization and ideology the US hasn't had before."

And it got worse. This civilization was "not Caucasian" - a not so subtle 21st century resurrection of the "Yellow Peril." (Let us recall: The "not Caucasian" Japan of World War II was the original "Yellow Peril.")

Divide and rule, spiced with racism, accounts for the toxic mix that has been embedded in the hegemonic US narrative for decades now. The mix harks back to Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996.

Huntington's pseudo-theory, coming from someone who did not know much about the multi-polar complexity of Asia, not to mention African and South American cultures, was mercilessly debunked across vast swathes of the global South. In fact, Huntington did not even come up with the original, flawed concept. That was the work of Anglo-American historian and commentator Bernard Lewis, who passes for a Middle East guru in the US.

Divide, Rule, Conquer

As Alastair Crooke, the founder of the Conflicts Forum, has outlined, Lewis consistently preached divide and rule, tinged with racism, in Islamic states. He was a fervent proponent of regime change in Iran and his recipe for dealing with Arabs was "to hit them between the eyes with a big stick" because, in his world view, the only thing they respect is power.

Crooke reminds us that since the 1960s, Lewis has been a master at spotting vulnerabilities in "religious, class and ethnic differences as the means to bring an end to Middle Eastern states." Lewis is a hero across a certain spectrum - a spectrum that includes former US Vice President Dick Cheney and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Now, we live in the era of "Lewis redux." Given that the Islamic world is largely subdued, in torpor or in turmoil, the clash of civilizations basically applies, on a downsized scale, to containing or destroying Shi'ite Iran.

Meanwhile the real clash - as the State Department insists - is with China.

Huntington, the sub-Lewis, did not include Russia among "The West." The revisionist State Department does. Otherwise how could "Nixon in reverse"be justified? ("Nixon in reverse," let us remember, is the Kissingerian recommendation to President Donald Trump: Apply divide and rule between Russia and China - but this time seducing Russia.)

A revisionist Pentagon also came up with the "Indo-Pacific" concept. The only justification for the amalgam is that these two zones should conduct a foreign policy subjected to American hegemony.

The logic is always divide and rule and clash of civilizations - divisions provoking chaos all across Eurasia.

But this strategy is being applied against the background of a crucial historical juncture: The era when BRI is being configured as the road map for progressive Eurasian integration.

Quo Vadis, Humanity?

It's not hard to detect the faintest of smiles on the faces of Chinese strategists as they survey "The Big Picture" from the vantage point of 5,000 years of civilization. The Christian West as the unique road map to deliver humanity from evil - in fact, the foundation of Pax Americana - is regarded as an amusing fiction at best.

That fiction is now looking downright dangerous, wallowing in exceptionalism and demonization of "The Other" in myriad forms. The Other - from the Islamic Republic of Iran to atheist China, not to mention "autocratic" Russia - automatically qualifies as a manifestation of "evil."

China, by contrast, is polytheist, pluralist, multi-polar - embracing Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism. That is mirrored by the current drive towards a multi-polar world-system. What matters is unity in multiplicity - as Xi stressed in his keynote speech. In it, we find China and Persia, two ancient civilizations - not by accident linked by the Ancient Silk Road - thinking alike.

Then there's the appalling state of the planet, which dwarfs the current appalling spectacle of political madness. UCLA geographer and global best-selling author Jared Diamond is not being terribly precise, but he estimates there's a 49% chance "that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050."

As encapsulated by author Nafeez Ahmad:
"Over the last 500 years or so, humanity has erected an 'endless growth' civilization premised on a particular patchwork of ideological worldviews, ethical values, political and economic structures, and personal behaviors. This is a paradigm that elevates the vision of human beings as disconnected, atomistic, competing material units, which seek to maximize their own material consumption as the principal mechanism for self-gratification."
What we're living now is not a clash of civilizations; it's a crisis of civilization.
If the paradigm under which most of humanity barely survives is not changed - and there's precious little evidence it will - there won't be any civilizations left to clash.
(sott.net)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

+1


facebook
Like us on Facebook!