Straight from the Heart

By Valerie Donner – March 13, 2013

http://www.thegroundcrew.com/channeled_messages.htm

Dear Ground Crew,

How are you doing? Has your life been a little intense lately? We have been dealing with some challenging energies with Mercury Retrograde in Pisces that is bringing up a lot of emotions. It looks like after Mercury goes direct on the 18th of March things should start heating up. Have any of you felt like it has been challenging to focus and get much accomplished? We are also coming out of three days of the Dark Moon energies.

It has felt “funky” as one of my friends described it. Did any of you feel sadness in your heart around the end of last week March 6-8th? I have talked with other Lightworkers who felt similarly. It might have been something happening with the Earth that we don’t know about. As Lightworkers we are not only sensitive to the Earth but we are clearing energies for the entire planet. Don’t you agree that Mother Earth needs it?

Our Earth needs our love, support and healing. There are some hot spots that require intense focus. These include Syria, Egypt, Israel, Palestine and North and South Korea and any other place where you feel called to focus. Prayers, Love and Light are necessary for us to create the peace that we believe is our future. The future is now so let’s get with it, Ground Crew.

Relationships that are out of alignment or out of integrity are being transparently brought to the Light for new choices. One enlightened friend said “The person with the highest consciousness in a situation is responsible for the resolution.” Think about what a responsibility we have as Lightworkers to clean up a lot of injustices and to right some wrongs.

The media continue to drive home guns, violence, fear, and upheaval, as their fear about losing control rises. Some of us have observed an influx of chemtrails. Mira said “They are doing this all around the world to keep humanity under control.” Who knows exactly what their nefarious intentions are but they are making their statements. They live in fear of the Light and it is our job to keep anchoring in the Light.

There are also some strange new diseases that spread rapidly and can keep people sick for several weeks. We must keep up our immune systems.

Have you noticed your increased empathy levels this year? It can be uncomfortable to feel as much as we do now, however it is necessary for our increased awareness and the expansion of our gifts. It might seem like we are making sacrifices but the rewards are plenty.

Victim consciousness is endemic. It is our opportunity to make empowered choices for ourselves. This gets us out of the blame game and into knowing that we always have a choice. It is up to us to make choices that make us feel good about ourselves.

How are you doing with polarity since 12/21/12? Does is still fit in your consciousness? Someone said to me today that they think that “Obama is the anti-Christ.” My response to her was that I believe anyone who does not believe in Love is the anti-Christ because what Christ taught was Love. He represents Unconditional Love and Truth.

Most of you know that great souls such as Christ, Buddha, Mother Mary and others, are composite souls. Their energy is so massive that it cannot fit into a single soul for the work they came to the planet to do. They are comprised of aspects of perhaps millions of souls. It has been said that Jesus’ aura was so large it was 30 miles around. If one touched his aura they could be healed. The upshot of this is that if someone tells you they are channeling one of these Beings they are only speaking for maybe an aspect of that great Being not the entire Being. They can only bring in some of the energies of these powerfully gifted Beings from our Creator.

It took a huge amount of energy and focus in the Light Realms to set the energies for Jeshua Bin Joseph to incarnate on the Earth 2000 years ago. Since his incarnation the Christed Family of Light continue to incarnate and anchor in these Christed energies. This is part of the work that the Lightworkers are doing. That is why we must stay focused on the Light and not get caught up in the dark. Polarity does not belong in the fourth dimension, which is what we are in now, even though we still have to be a part of 3D.

If you notice the subtle shifts in consciousness, the timelessness and almost nothingness of linear time, the need to be in the Now moment, the ability for instantaneous manifestation, the closeness of the Light Realms, our guides, Masters, our Creator, you will begin to honor that we shifted since 12/21/12 and that we are creating Heaven on Earth.

We are the Ground Crew and we are doing our work. For this work there will be many rewards most especially our ability to create our Heaven on Earth. Let’s work together towards this end.

Blessings, Love and Light,

Iraq War Cost $800 Billion, And What Do We Have To Show For It?

For the past few months, a strange thing has been happening in the central Iraq town of Fallujah. Thousands of citizens, virtually all of them Sunni Muslims, have been gathering in public squares to protest the oppressive Shiite-led government in Baghdad. Sleeping in tents and wielding Twitter feeds and YouTube accounts, the young Sunnis have attempted to take democracy, and a certain sectarian disaffection, into their own hands.

It's not quite the Iraqi Arab Spring -- although that's what it's been tentatively called by some -- but it is a reminder of the stark failure of nearly a decade of American-led warfare in that country.

When President George W. Bush announced the invasion into Iraq in March 2003, the goal was to remove a dangerous dictator and his supposed stocks of weapons of mass destruction. It was also to create a functioning democracy and thereby inspire what Bush called a "global democracy revolution."

The effort was supposed to be cheap -- to require few troops and even less time. Instead, it cost the United States $800 billion at least, thousands of lives and nearly nine grueling years (see the graphic below for a further breakdown of various costs).

The toll on the people of Iraq were even greater. A decade of war left chaos and impoverishment, hundreds of thousands of citizens dead and millions more displaced, and a vicious sectarianism that still threatens to rip the country apart at the seams. The government of Nouri al-Maliki, which has reportedly interfered with independent government bureaucracies and ordered the arrest of his Sunni vice president on trumped-up terrorism charges, often rules in a manner more befitting the autocrat the U.S. invaded to remove.

"Here is a country that's being liberated," proclaimed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a few days into the invasion, even as the first signs of the chaos to come began to stir. "Here are people that are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free."

Instead, today in Fallujah, the site of two of the war's largest and most devastating military campaigns, the very best that can be said is that two years late to the party -- not 10 years early -- the Arab Spring has arrived. But the government the people are rising up against is the very one the U.S. installed.

What does it mean to say that the war in Iraq was a wasted effort? Last month, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction filed a final report that found $8 billion of U.S. development aid had been "wasted outright," in the words of Wired magazine.

But nearly eight times as much money -- $60 billion -- was spent rebuilding the country on the whole, with very little to show for it.

And more than 10 times that amount -- $800 billion -- was spent on the mission overall, a boondoggle that left more than 4,000 American service members dead, 32,000 more wounded, and an authoritarian government in place that is little better -- and possibly, owing to its closer ties to Iran, worse -- than the one that was taken out.

Was any of that money wasted? Was any of it not?

As odds grow long, opponents move to stop pipeline

As odds grow longer, unusual coalition prepares for final battle to stop Keystone pipeline

Associated Press -

MARTELL, Neb. (AP) -- With a sense of grim determination, a group of unlikely allies has begun gathering at kitchen tables, in churches and along fence rows here to plot what could be the final battle in the four-year conflict over the Keystone XL pipeline.

After months of quiet, a recent State Department report dismissing the ecological impact of the pipeline has cleared the way for a final decision on the plan for transporting oil extracted from the Alberta tar sands more than 1,700 miles to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.

An unusual coalition of environmentalists, property rights advocates and ranchers is now attempting to find new ways to derail a project that, more than ever, seems to be headed for approval in a nation eager for jobs and energy development.

"It's been four very long, very difficult years," said one of the opposition's chief organizers, Jane Kleeb of Hastings.

But the group is buoyed by its success so far in stalling the project and in bringing so many disparate interests into the fight.

"I'm associated with people I never dreamed I would have been associated with," said Randy Thompson, a Nebraska rancher and self-described conservative Republican, at a meeting of activists at his rural home south of Lincoln. "There's a stigma on people considered environmentalists. I had that concept."

The opposition effort is now focused on the new Secretary of State, John Kerry, who will make a recommendation to President Barack Obama on whether to green-light the project. The previous Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was believed to favor the plan before it was stalled by objections over the route.

Opponents and supporters will face off at public hearing in Nebraska, expected to be held in the spring.

Company officials with TransCanada, the pipeline builder, said they are confident they have enough public support along the pipeline's seven-state route, further bolstered by the favorable environmental impact report, to get clearance to begin.

"The sooner we get clarity on schedule, the sooner we can put these people to work," said TransCanada spokesman James Miller.

The politics surrounding the pipeline have changed since last spring when the administration slowed the approval process because of the local protests. At the time, Nebraska's Republican Gov. Dave Heineman objected to the pipeline's route through the ecological sensitive Sand Hills area.

But Heineman was mollified after the company moved the pipeline's route further east. Both Democratic and Republican officials in the affected states, plus business and labor interests, now largely support the project because of the estimated 13,000 construction jobs it will create during the two years of construction.

"It creates jobs and increases our nation's energy supply," said Nebraska Sen. Mike Johanns. "There is no reason for President Obama or the State Department to delay a project that is so clearly in the nation's best interest."

The pipeline would transport up to 800,000 barrels of oil per day to Gulf Coast and Midwest refineries, much of it for export. Advocates contend the pipeline would be more energy efficient than transporting the oil by truck or rail.

But the opponents, especially those in Nebraska, are organized and politically diverse. Hundreds of ranchers and landowners have challenged the idea of a foreign-based corporation seizing land in the United States.

"No foreign corporation should ever be able to come through and take your property without a permit," said Susan Dunavan, who owns 80 acres of native prairie in southeast Nebraska and is a conservative Republican.

Meanwhile, Abbi Kleinschmidt and Jenni Harrington, who are liberal Democrats with a family farm on the pipeline route near Benedict, complain that a pipeline would undercut the fight against global warming.

"It's about awareness and acceptance of climate change," Sierra Club lawyer Ken Winston, of Lincoln.

Other landowners also worry about risks to the Ogalala aquifer, the vast underground shallow water table that is the state's primary water source.

Opponents have been approaching landowners to persuade them not to accept TransCanada's money to allow access. They are also holding meetings in towns along the route, airing television ads, mailing letters to the White House and trying to meet with members of Congress.

Last week, opponents who met at Thompson's house discussed the possibility of protesting the new route because it crosses land thought to contain Ponca Indian artifacts.

The variety of people in the group helps in brainstorming the campaign, they said.

"Being brought together really opened people's eyes. We're all more similar than we may have thought," said Zack Hamilton, a thick-bearded organic farmer.

But the obstacles to success have grown since the State Department's draft report on March 1 finding no evidence the pipeline would have significant environmental impact along its 1,700-mile run.

"We're going to fight this, to the very end if we have to," Thompson said.

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Matthew Daly contributed from Washington.

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