Are sensitive, empathic, intelligent people, predisposed to social anxiety, and taking on the energy of others more prone to anxiety, drug and alcohol addictions, and mental health disorders, or do they bear a highly rare, psychic gift? The answer might be both.
From recent scientific research, it turns out that the empathic, sensitive mind is more prone to mental health disorders because they are more in tune with what is going on around them. These people aren’t “crazy,” as many articles would like us to believe, but anxiously searching for an answer to subtle psychic cues they take in from their environment – sometimes around the clock, seven days a week.
Considering the many modes of mind control currently being used on the population to alter their emotional states – from Artificial Intelligence, to alien implants, and even military industrial experiments that have proven to interact with our nervous system and brain – is it any wonder that the highly empathic among us might be overwhelmed with emotional information coming in from those around them?
This constant mental processing of subtle emotional cues from others means that people with social anxiety are doing a lot more in their brains. They are more able to notice and interpret social cues from others, demonstrating a unique social-cognitive ability that only the truly empathic understand.
To further demonstrate this point, anxiety is the most commonly diagnosed “mental health problem” in the U.S. It affects more than 40 million adults, which means roughly 20% of the population lives with anxiety. Though anxiety can be absolutely crippling, and lead to much more severe depression as well as panic attacks, Western doctors are just starting to understand that some forms of anxiety may have been developed for a very good reason.
One research study out of Lakehead University discovered that people with anxiety scored higher on verbal intelligence tests. Another study conducted by the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel found that people with anxiety were far better than other participants at maintaining laser-focus while overcoming a primary threat as they are being bombarded by numerous other smaller threats, thereby significantly increasing their chances of survival.
Researchers even called this combination of traits “sentinel intelligence” meaning that people with highly developed senses are able to perceive threats that are invisible to others.
Yet another study found that people with common, garden variety anxiety have higher IQs than people who don’t. Scientists who published their findings in the journal, Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, said that worry may actually have a positive component.
This doesn’t discount the fact that anxiety can be horrible to live with, and can actually lower our vibratory rate if left to run rampant, but it does indicate that a part of us – in many of us worrying empaths – is right about our gut feelings considering social situations and the manufactured emotions which are circulating through society right now.
Empaths are world-class nurturers, because they are psychically picking up on others’ deepest worries, fears, hurts and pain. Science is just now starting to understand this. Instead of shouldering civilization’s discontent, we can simply acknowledge it, understand more about what might be causing it, and choose to stay sovereign in our own emotional space.
All of us are growing toward this more “in-tune” ability, but psychic people (including empaths) generally notice that they’re different from other people in ways that they can’t quite define. These people are usually labeled Anomalously Sensitive People, but really they are just people where the right side of the brain is allowed to ‘speak’ as much or more than the left – and in the Westernized, work-a-day world we constantly push left-brained thinking. Furthermore, psychic people have more whole-brained wiring, meaning they use their entire brains more completely than those who haven’t yet realized their own psychic gifts.
And it isn’t just emotions the ‘anxious’ may be responding too. People with psychic sensibilities may have physiological sensitivities which include an over active immune system, psychogenic sensitivities, substance sensitivities and electro-magnetic radiation sensitivities.
Being an empathic, anxious person doesn’t mean you are crazy, but it does mean you are more prone to developing mental health challenges unless you learn to understand, accept, and support your psychic abilities. Feeling someone else’s emotions as though they were your own can be a gift, but only once you learn to siphon off the crud that the cabal-driven mental matrix has set up to enslave you.
We all know that drugs and music have a close connection. Getting high has been both muse and lubricant for countless songwriters over the centuries, and will be for as long as people keep ingesting products that will alter your reality. They are so closely intertwined that HBO made a bad TV show about them. Throw in sex and you’ve got the hedonist’s trifecta: sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. But how well do we understand that connection scientifically?
A little bit better now, actually, thanks to new research coming out of McGill University.
In a study published last week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers found that the chemical system that mediates feelings of pleasure from sex, drugs and food also affects the brain’s response to music.
These findings are built on top of previous research conducted at McGill and elsewhere that measured how music affected our brains using neuroimaging, but it’s the first to demonstrate that opioids produced in the brain are related to feelings of musical pleasure.
The study was conducted in Daniel Levitin’s Laboratory for Music Cognition, Perception and Expertise at McGill, which shouldn’t come as that big a surprise: cognitive psychologist Levitin is a giant in his field. His books The World In Six Songs and This Is Your Brain on Music are bestsellers.
What Levitin and his colleagues did was temporarily block the opioid receptors in participants’ brains and then measured their responses to music. They found that without those receptors working, they took no pleasure from music they claimed to love.
According to the study’s lead author, PhD candidate Adiel Mallik, 17 participants came in on two different days one week apart. On one day they were given 50 mg capsule of naltrexone (NTX), an opioid receptor-blocker that is widely prescribed for addiction treatment, and on the other they were given a placebo.
This was a double-blind study, meaning neither the tester nor the subject knew what was being administered on either day.
“On both days participants listened to the music while we recorded activity of the zygomatic (activated when smiling) and corrugator (activated when frowning) facial muscles,” writes Mallik in an email to VICE. “Participants also reported their musical pleasure in real-time while they were listening to the music…. We wanted to see whether the opioid system in the brain mediates musical pleasure and emotional response (happy and sad) to music.”
Neuroimaging was not used in the self-reported study.
Because food, sex and music all use the same reward system in the brain, and rely in part on endogenous opioids—that means opioids that are generated within the system—it was believed that reversing the effects of the opioids by administering NTX would affect how participants responded to their favourite songs. And they were right.
“We had participants select two of their favourite songs from their own music collection, which they found the most pleasurable. We also selected two neutral songs that they listened to as well,” writes Mallik. The songs spanned genres, from the Black Keys’ “Lonely Boy” to Radiohead’s “Creep” to “Turn Me On” by David Guetta feat. Nicki Minaj to the overture from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.
The results were what the team anticipated, but the responses they got from the participants were eye-opening. The subjects knew they should be responding a certain way emotionally to their favourite songs, but they weren’t. The songs weren’t really affecting them one way or the other. “We were fascinated by their high level of emotional awareness to recognize that in the words of one participant: ‘I know this is my favourite song but it doesn’t feel like it usually does,'” writes Mallik.
“The pattern was relatively uniform: participants when treated with naltrexone had significantly decreased musical pleasure and emotional response (happy and sad) to music compared to when treated with the placebo.”
Mallik is hoping to continue studying the relationship between opioids and musical pleasure. We will be watching out for that.
Ukraine on Fire, a new documentary about the Ukraine crisis, might change how people in the West perceive the conflict, but it’s unlikely to get much distribution since it contests the prevailing narrative, writes James DiEugenio.
It is not very often that a documentary film can set a new paradigm about a recent event, let alone, one that is still in progress. But the new film Ukraine on Fire has the potential to do so – assuming that many people get to see it.
Usually, documentaries — even good ones — repackage familiar information in a different aesthetic form. If that form is skillfully done, then the information can move us in a different way than just reading about it.
A good example of this would be Peter Davis’s powerful documentary about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Hearts and Minds. By 1974, most Americans understood just how bad the Vietnam War was, but through the combination of sounds and images, which could only have been done through film, that documentary created a sensation, which removed the last obstacles to America leaving Indochina.
Ukraine on Fire has the same potential and could make a contribution that even goes beyond what the Davis film did because there was very little new information in Hearts and Minds. Especially for American and Western European audiences, Ukraine on Fire could be revelatory in that it offers a historical explanation for the deep divisions within Ukraine and presents information about the current crisis that challenges the mainstream media’s paradigm, which blames the conflict almost exclusively on Russia.
Key people in the film’s production are director Igor Lopatonok, editor Alex Chavez, and writer Vanessa Dean, whose screenplay contains a large amount of historical as well as current material exploring how Ukraine became such a cauldron of violence and hate. Oliver Stone served as executive producer and conducted some high-profile interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin and ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
The film begins with gripping images of the violence that ripped through the capital city of Kiev during both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 removal of Yanukovich. It then travels back in time to provide a perspective that has been missing from mainstream versions of these events and even in many alternative media renditions.
A Longtime Pawn
Historically, Ukraine has been treated as a pawn since the late Seventeenth Century. In 1918, Ukraine was made a German protectorate by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Ukraine was also a part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 signed between Germany and Russia, but violated by Adolf Hitler when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
The reaction of many in Ukraine to Hitler’s aggression was not the same as it was in the rest of the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis. The most significant Ukrainian nationalist group, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had been established in 1929. Many of its members cooperated with the Nazis, some even enlisted in the Waffen SS and Ukrainian nationalists participated in the massacre of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar ravine in Kiev in September 1941. According to scholar Pers Anders Rudling, the number of Ukrainian nationalists involved in the slaughter outnumbered the Germans by a factor of 4 to 1.
But it wasn’t just the Jews that the Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered. They also participated in massacres of Poles in the western Ukrainian region of Galicia from March 1943 until the end of 1944. Again, the main perpetrators were not Germans, but Ukrainians.
According to author Ryazard Szawlowksi, the Ukrainian nationalists first lulled the Poles into thinking they were their friends, then turned on them with a barbarity and ferocity that not even the Nazis could match, torturing their victims with saws and axes. The documentary places the number of dead at 36,750, but Szawlowski estimates it may be two or three times higher.
OUN members participated in these slaughters for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, wanting Ukraine to be preserved for what OUN regarded as native Ukrainians. They also expected Ukraine to be independent by the end of the war, free from both German and Russian domination. The two main leaders in OUN who participated in the Nazi collaboration were Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Bandera was a virulent anti-Semite, and Lebed was rabidly against the Poles, participating in their slaughter.
After the war, both Bandera and Lebed were protected by American intelligence, which spared them from the Nuremburg tribunals. The immediate antecedent of the CIA, Central Intelligence Group, wanted to use both men for information gathering and operations against the Soviet Union. England’s MI6 used Bandera even more than the CIA did, but the KGB eventually hunted down Bandera and assassinated him in Munich in 1959. Lebed was brought to America and addressed anti-communist Ukrainian organizations in the U.S. and Canada. The CIA protected him from immigration authorities who might otherwise have deported him as a war criminal.
The history of the Cold War was never too far in the background of Ukrainian politics, including within the diaspora that fled to the West after the Red Army defeated the Nazis and many of their Ukrainian collaborators emigrated to the United States and Canada. In the West, they formed a fierce anti-communist lobby that gained greater influence after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
Important History
This history is an important part of Dean’s prologue to the main body of Ukraine on Fire and is essential for anyone trying to understand what has happened there since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For instance, the U.S.-backed candidate for president of Ukraine in 2004 — Viktor Yushchenko — decreed both Bandera and Lebed to be Ukrainian national heroes.
Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist and Nazi collaborator
Bandera, in particular, has become an icon for post-World War II Ukrainian nationalists. One of his followers was Dmytro Dontsov, who called for the birth of a “new man” who would mercilessly destroy Ukraine’s ethnic enemies.
Bandera’s movement was also kept alive by Yaroslav Stetsko, Bandera’s premier in exile. Stetsko fully endorsed Bandera’s anti-Semitism and also the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Stetsko, too, was used by the CIA during the Cold War and was honored by Yushchenko, who placed a plaque in his honor at the home where he died in Munich in 1986. Stetsko’s wife, Slava, returned to Ukraine in 1991 and ran for parliament in 2002 on the slate of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party.
Stetsko’s book, entitled Two Revolutions, has become the ideological cornerstone for the modern Ukrainian political party Svoboda, founded by Oleh Tyahnybok, who is pictured in the film calling Jews “kikes” in public, which is one reason the Simon Wiesenthal Center has ranked him as one of the most dangerous anti-Semites in the world.
Another follower of Bandera is Dymytro Yarosh, who reputedly leads the paramilitary arm of an even more powerful political organization in Ukraine called Right Sektor. Yarosh once said he controls a paramilitary force of about 7,000 men who were reportedly used in both the overthrow of Yanukovych in Kiev in February 2014 and the suppression of the rebellion in Odessa a few months later, which are both fully depicted in the film.
This historical prelude and its merging with the current civil war is eye-opening background that has been largely hidden by the mainstream Western media, which has downplayed or ignored the troubling links between these racist Ukrainian nationalists and the U.S.-backed political forces that vied for power after Ukraine became independent in 1991.
The Rise of a Violent Right
That same year, Tyahnybok formed Svoboda. Three years later, Yarosh founded Trident, an offshoot of Svoboda that eventually evolved into Right Sektor. In other words, the followers of Bandera and Lebed began organizing themselves immediately after the Soviet collapse.
In this time period, Ukraine had two Russian-oriented leaders who were elected in 1991 and 1994, Leonid Kravchuk, and Leonid Kuchma. But the hasty transition to a “free-market” economy didn’t go well for most Ukrainians or Russians as well-connected oligarchs seized much of the wealth and came to dominate the political process through massive corruption and purchase of news media outlets. However, for average citizens, living standards went down drastically, opening the door for the far-right parties and for foreign meddling.
In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was strongest among ethnic Russians in the east and south, won the presidential election by three percentage points over the U.S.-favored Viktor Yushchenko, whose base was mostly in the country’s west where the Ukrainian nationalists are strongest.
Immediately, Yushchenko’s backers claimed fraud citing exit polls that had been organized by a group of eight Western nations and four non-governmental organizations or NGOs, including the Renaissance Foundation founded by billionaire financial speculator George Soros. Dick Morris, former President Bill Clinton’s political adviser, clandestinely met with Yushchenko’s team and advised them that the exit polls would not just help in accusations of fraud, but would bring protesters out into the streets. (Cambridge Review of InternationalAffairs, Vol. 19, Number 1, p. 26)
Freedom House, another prominent NGO that receives substantial financing from the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), provided training to young activists who then rallied protesters in what became known as the Orange Revolution, one of the so-called “color revolutions” that the West’s mainstream media fell in love with. It forced an election rerun that Yushchenko won.
But Yushchenko’s presidency failed to do much to improve the lot of the Ukrainian people and he grew increasingly unpopular. In 2010, Yushchenko failed to make it out of the first round of balloting and his rival Yanukovych was elected president in balloting that outside observers judged free and fair.
Big-Power Games
If this all had occurred due to indigenous factors within Ukraine, it could have been glossed over as a young nation going through some painful growing pains. But as the film points out, this was not the case. Ukraine continued to be a pawn in big-power games with many Western officials hoping to draw the country away from Russian influence and into the orbit of NATO and the European Union.
In one of the interviews in Ukraine on Fire, journalist and author Robert Parry explains how the National Endowment for Democracy and many subsidized political NGOs emerged in the 1980s to replace or supplement what the CIA had traditionally done in terms of influencing the direction of targeted countries.
During the investigations of the Church Committee in the 1970s, the CIA’s “political action” apparatus for removing foreign leaders was exposed. So, to disguise these efforts, CIA Director William Casey, Reagan’s White House and allies in Congress created the NED to finance an array of political and media NGOs.
As Parry noted in the documentary, many traditional NGOs do valuable work in helping impoverished and developing countries, but this activist/propaganda breed of NGOs promoted U.S. geopolitical objectives abroad – and NED funded scores of such projects inside Ukraine in the run-up to the 2014 crisis.
Ukraine on Fire goes into high gear when it chronicles the events that occurred in 2014, resulting in the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych and sparking the civil war that still rages. In the 2010 election, when Yushchenko couldn’t even tally in the double-digits, Yanukovych faced off against and defeated Yulia Tymoshenko, a wealthy oligarch who had served as Yushchenko’s prime minister.
After his election, Yanukovych repealed Bandera’s title as a national hero. However, because of festering economic problems, the new president began to search for an economic partner who could provide a large loan. He first negotiated with the European Union, but these negotiations bogged down due to the usual draconian demands made by the International Monetary Fund.
So, in November 2013, Yanukovych began to negotiate with Russian President Putin who offered more generous terms. But Yanukovych’s decision to delay the association agreement with the E.U. provoked street protests in Kiev especially from the people of western Ukraine.
As Ukraine on Fire points out, other unusual occurrences also occurred, including the emergence of three new TV channels – Spilno TV, Espreso TV, and Hromadske TV – going on the air between Nov. 21 and 24, with partial funding from the U.S. Embassy and George Soros.
Pro-E.U. protests in the Maidan square in central Kiev also grew more violent as ultra-nationalist street fighters from Lviv and other western areas began to pour in and engage in provocations, many of which were sponsored by Yarosh’s Right Sektor. The attacks escalated from torch marches similar to Nazi days to hurling Molotov cocktails at police to driving large tractors into police lines – all visually depicted in the film. As Yanukovich tells Stone, when this escalation happened, it made it impossible for him to negotiate with the Maidan crowd.
One of the film’s most interesting interviews is with Vitaliy Zakharchenko, who was Minister of the Interior at the time responsible for law enforcement and the conduct of the police. He traces the escalation of the attacks from Nov. 24 to 30, culminating with a clash between police and protesters over the transport of a giant Christmas tree into the Maidan. Zakharchenko said he now believes this confrontation was secretly approved by Serhiy Lyovochkin, a close friend of U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, as a pretext to escalate the violence.
At this point, the film addresses the direct involvement of U.S. politicians and diplomats. Throughout the crisis, American politicians visited Maidan, as both Republicans and Democrats, such as Senators John McCain, R-Arizona, and Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut. stirred up the crowds. Yanukovych also said he was in phone contact with Vice President Joe Biden, who he claims was misleading him about how to handle the crisis.
The film points out that the real center of American influence in the Kiev demonstrations was with Ambassador Pyatt and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland. As Parry points out, although Nuland was serving under President Obama, her allegiances were really with the neoconservative movement, most associated with the Republican Party.
Her husband is Robert Kagan, who worked as a State Department propagandist on the Central American wars in the 1980s and was the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in the 1990s, the group that organized political and media pressure for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Kagan also was McCain’s foreign policy adviser in the 2008 presidential election (although he threw his support behind Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race).
Adept Manipulators
As Parry explained, the neoconservatives have become quite adept at disguising their true aims and have powerful allies in the mainstream press. This combination has allowed them to push the foreign policy debate to such extremes that, when anyone objects, they can be branded a Putin or Yanukovych “apologist.”
Thus, Pyatt’s frequent meetings with the demonstrators in the embassy and Nuland’s handing out cookies to protesters in the Maidan were not criticized as American interference in a sovereign state, but were praised as “promoting democracy” abroad. However, as the Maidan crisis escalated, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists moved to the front, intensifying their attacks on police. Many of these extremists were disciples of Bandera and Lebed. By February 2014, they were armed with shotguns and rapid-fire handguns.
On Feb. 20, 2014, a mysterious sniper, apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor, shot both police and protesters, touching off a day of violence that left about 14 police and some 70 protesters dead.
With Kiev slipping out of control, Yanukovich was forced to negotiate with representatives from France, Poland and Germany. On Feb. 21, he agreed to schedule early elections and to accept reduced powers. At the urging of Vice President Biden, Yanukovych also pulled back the police.
But the agreement – though guaranteed by the European nations – was quickly negated by renewed attacks from the Right Sektor and its street fighters who seized government buildings. Russian intelligence services got word that an assassination plot was in the works against Yanukovych, who fled for his life.
On Feb. 24, Yanukovych asked permission to enter Russia for his safety and the Ukrainian parliament (or Rada), effectively under the control of the armed extremists, voted to remove Yanukovych from office in an unconstitutional manner because the courts were not involved and the vote to impeach him did not reach the mandatory threshold. Despite these irregularities, the U.S. and its European allies quickly recognized the new government as “legitimate.”
Calling a Coup a Coup
But the ouster of Yanukovych had all the earmarks of a coup. An intercepted phone call, apparently in early February, between Nuland and Pyatt revealed that they were directly involved in displacing Yanukovych and choosing his successor. The pair reviewed the field of candidates with Nuland favoring Arseniy Yatsenyuk, declaring “Yats is the guy” and discussing with Pyatt how to “glue this thing.” Pyatt wondered about how to “midwife this thing.” They sounded like Gilded Age millionaires in New York deciding who should become the next U.S. president. On Feb. 27, Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister of Ukraine.
Not everyone in Ukraine agreed with the new regime, however. Crimea, which had voted heavily for Yanukovych, decided to hold a referendum on whether to split from Ukraine and become a part of Russia. The results of the referendum were overwhelming. Some 96 percent of Crimeans voted to unite with Russia. Russian troops – previously stationed in Crimea under the Sevastopol naval base agreement – provided security against Right Sektor and other Ukrainian forces moving against the Crimean secession, but there was no evidence of Russian troops intimidating voters or controlling the elections. The Russian government then accepted the reunification with Crimea, which had historically been part of Russia dating back hundreds of years.
Two eastern provinces, Donetsk and Lugansk, also wanted to split off from Ukraine and also conducted a referendum in support of that move. But Putin would not agree to the request from the two provinces, which instead declared their own independence, a move that the new government in Kiev denounced as illegal. The Kiev regime also deemed the insurgents “terrorists” and launched an “anti-terrorism operation” to crush the resistance. Ultra-nationalist and even neo-Nazi militias, such as the Azov Battalion, took the lead in the bloody fighting.
Anti-coup demonstrations also broke out in the city of Odessa to the south. Ukrainian nationalist leader Andrei Parubiy went to Odessa, and two days later, on May 2, 2014, his street fighters attacked the demonstrators, driving them into the Trade Union building, which was then set on fire. Forty-two people were killed, some of whom jumped to their deaths.
‘Other Side of the Story’
If the film just got across this “other side of the story,” it would provide a valuable contribution since most of this information has been ignored or distorted by the West’s mainstream media, which simply blames the Ukraine crisis on Vladimir Putin. But in addition to the fine work by scenarist Vanessa Dean, the direction by Igor Lopatonok and the editing by Alexis Chavez are extraordinarily skillful and supple.
The 15-minute prologue, where the information about the Nazi collaboration by Bandera and Lebed is introduced, is an exceptional piece of filmmaking. It moves at a quick pace, utilizing rapid cutting and also split screens to depict photographs and statistics simultaneously. Lopatonok also uses interactive graphics throughout to transmit information in a visual and demonstrative manner.
Stone’s interviews with Putin and Yanukovych are also quite newsworthy, presenting a side of these demonized foreign leaders that has been absent in the propagandistic Western media.
Though about two hours long, the picture has a headlong tempo to it. If anything, it needed to slow down at points since such a large amount of information is being communicated. On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to watch a documentary that is so intelligently written, and yet so remarkably well made.
When the film ends, the enduring message is similar to those posed by the American interventions in Vietnam and Iraq. How could the State Department know so little about what it was about to unleash, given Ukraine’s deep historical divisions and the risk of an escalating conflict with nuclear-armed Russia?
In Vietnam, Americans knew little about the country’s decades-long struggle of the peasantry to be free from French and Japanese colonialism. Somehow, America was going to win their hearts and minds and create a Western-style “democracy” when many Vietnamese simply saw the extension of foreign imperialism.
In Iraq, President George W. Bush and his coterie of neocons were going to oust Saddam Hussein and create a Western-style democracy in the Middle East, except that Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Moslems and how Iraq was likely to split over sectarian rivalries and screw up his expectations.
Similarly, the message of Ukraine on Fire is that short-sighted, ambitious and ideological officials – unchecked by their superiors – created something even worse than what existed. While high-level corruption persists today in Ukraine and may be even worse than before, the conditions of average Ukrainians have deteriorated.
And, the Ukraine conflict has reignited the Cold War by moving Western geopolitical forces onto Russia’s most sensitive frontier, which, as scholar Joshua Shifrinson has noted, violates a pledge made by Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990 as the Soviet Union peacefully accepted the collapse of its military influence in East Germany and eastern Europe. (Los Angeles Times, 5/30/ 2016)
This film also reminds us that what happened in Ukraine was a bipartisan effort. It was begun under George W. Bush and completed under Barack Obama. As Oliver Stone noted in the discussion that followed the film’s premiere in Los Angeles, the U.S. painfully needs some new leadership reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, people who understand how America’s geopolitical ambitions must be tempered by on-the-ground realities and the broader needs of humanity to be freed from the dangers of all-out war.
Guards are trained to shoot and kill poachers, which is why thousands of Indian one-horned rhinos are still alive in the park.
Credit: Martin Harvey
If humans fail to change their ways and adopt more sustainable habits, incredible species will go extinct. In fact, the African Elephant isn’t expected to outlast the next decade due to increased poaching activity. It’s because of this sobering reality and the increasing demand for ivory that a national park in India is shooting first and asking questions later.
The BBC reports that Kaziranga National Park has a pretty successful track record when it comes to protecting rhinoceroses from poachers. However, a controversial tactic is utilized by park rangers: shooting on sight. So far, the park has killed 50 people.
Reportedly, every individual that was killed was after rhino horn. The horn of a rhino can be sold for as much as $6,000 for 100g and because of this, is considerably more expensive than gold. The fabled ‘magical properties’ of it, however, are largely exaggerated. Rhino horn is largely composed of keratin, the same material as your fingernails. In other words, it’s not worth killing a rhino to obtain.
When the park was first founded approximately a century ago, only a handful of Indian one-horned rhinoceros were protected. Now, the park hosts more than 2,400, which is two-thirds of the world’s population. What few people are taking about, however, is that more people were shot dead by the park’s guards in 2015 than rhinos were by poachers.
Credit: BBC
While animal rights activists might consider that something to celebrate, not everyone is too keen on the number of mounting bodies – locals, especially. It’s true that all who were killed were poachers, but some locals (primarily tribal) have been injured. In one instance, a disabled boy herding cows was shot.
Regardless, the guards are trained to shoot and kill anyone who might be attempting to kill an Indian rhino for its horn. Avdesh, who works as a ranger, toldThe BBC:
“The instruction is whenever you see the poachers or hunters, we should start our guns and hunt them.”
“Fully ordered to shoot them. Whenever you see the poachers or any people during night-time we are ordered to shoot them,” he added.
Avdesh has never killed anybody in his four years patrolling but knows there will be few if any consequences if he did.
Credit: Pinterest
The director of the park, Dr. Satyendra Singh, says it’s so black and white. He said,
“First we warn them – who are you? But if they resort to firing we have to kill them. First we try to arrest them, so that we get the information, what are the linkages, who are others in the gang?”
By gang, he’s referring to local villagers who help men with guns from neighboring states get into the park. As many as 300 locals are involved in poaching, he believes, due to the lure of trading rhino horn.
There’s no arguing that this method of protecting the rhinos is effective, but is it going too far to preserve an endangered species?
The future of the driverless car is much closer than people realize, Elon Musk reportedly said in a speech in Dubai Monday. That’s the good news. The bad news, he points out, is that there will be a steep price to pay for the “great convenience.”
‘There are many people whose jobs are to drive. In fact, I think it might be the single largest employer of people. So we need to figure out new roles for what do those people do, but it will be very disruptive and very quick.’
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, according to CNBC, said the disruption will take place within about 20 years and will ultimately leave up to 15% of the global population without jobs.
Musk also touched on one of his favorite topics: artificial intelligence. Specifically, he spoke of humans eventually merging with machines, like something out of a “Terminator” movie.
“Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk told the audience. “It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output. He explained that computers can communicate at “a trillion bits per second,” while humans can do about 10 bits per second.
“Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem,” Musk said.
Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University
Feb 16, 2017
Ceres. NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / Justin Cowart, CC BY-SA
Sometimes, I think scientists are just that little bit too modest. A new paper in Science has a humdinger of a title: “Localized aliphatic organic material on the surface of Ceres”. It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue and may not even seem that important. But what the researchers have discovered is a huge deal. They’ve found organic compounds – the kind of molecules from which life on Earth originated – on the surface of Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid.
For people like me who study asteroids, finding organic molecules is not necessarily surprising. It has been known for over 200 years that meteorites (which are fragments from asteroids) contain a wide range of organic compounds. And Ceres was selected as a target for the Dawn mission precisely because it was hoped that organic material would be found. So why am I so excited over the discovery? The significance is in the first two words of the title: “Localised aliphatic”.
Let’s start with “localised”. The molecules were found in a specific place on the surface – around the crater Ernutet (at a latitude of 50°N and a longitude of 45.5°E). There are two possible origins for the organic compounds on Ceres. Either they have always been there, native to the asteroid, and part of the primitive material from which Ceres (and the rest of the solar system) formed. Or the organics were added later, through impact from comets, other asteroids or interplanetary dust. In either case, organic material should be distributed more or less uniformly over the surface, not be clustered in a specific place. The significance of the observation is not so much the finding of organic compounds at Ernutet, but not finding them everywhere.
Ernutet crater is featured in this image from Ceres, taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft.NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Let’s move on to the second term: aliphatic. Organic molecules are broadly divided into two major types: aromatic and aliphatic. In the former, carbon atoms are arranged in rings that can build up into vast networks of molecules. In contrast, aliphatic compounds are chains of carbon atoms. And we know that aromatic compounds are generally sturdier and more resistant to radiation and heat than aliphatic molecules with the same number of carbon atoms.
On an active asteroid surface, like Ceres, it would be more likely that aromatic compounds survived than aliphatic. This is also reflected in the most carbon-rich of meteorites, where aromatic compounds are by far the more abundant component in the intimate mixture of aromatic and aliphatic organics that they contain. However, the organic molecules that have been detected on Ceres are complex aliphatic compounds that seem to be almost tar-like in nature.
Cradle of life?
So what do we make of these confusing observations, which come from the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer on the Dawn spacecraft?
Ceres, seen from 21,000km. Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
The authors argue that the organics are unlikely to come from the impact of another body with Ceres, because the specific nature of the organic compounds that have been detected implies they would have been degraded or destroyed by the high temperatures of the collision. It is also likely that collision with another body would have mixed any organics with the surface material, not leaving them concentrated in the way that they are.
So instead the authors infer that the compounds are probably indigenous to Ceres. This is strengthened by the fact that the molecules are found together with carbonates and clays containing ammonia. These have been observed in many regions of Ceres, and are believed to be produced by hydrothermal processes (reactions involving heated water) on the dwarf planet – something we know can also produce organic material on Earth.
Indeed, the data show that carbonates and clays are higher in abundance around Ernutet than the surrounding landscape. Hydrothermal processes, such as those that occur at hot springs on Earth, might have been active in Ceres’ past, when the asteroid was warmer at depth than it is now, leading to the formation of the organics. But this also means that the mechanism that brought the minerals to the surface at Ernutet – and nowhere else – is unknown.
The combination of hot water and organic material is extremely exciting. Once you have an environment conducive to the production of organic materials – especially one that also contains the nitrogen-bearing clay minerals which are known to catalyse other reactions – it may not be a step too far to posit that Ceres had (and maybe still has) all the ingredients essential for formation of the chemicals that, on Earth, eventually led to the origin of life.
Ernutet is the Egyptian goddess of fertility or nourishment. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if finding organic molecules in a crater named after her was the first indication of a non-terrestrial cradle of life?
The Trump administration (including Trump himself) have highly mixed messages on Russia. Will Trump deliver on his election promise to be friendly towards Russia?
Mixed messages on Russia
are coming out of the Trump administration, which seems to be hopelessly divided and anything but cohesive on the Russian issue. Much to the great disappointment of many who see that a peaceful US-Russia relationship is the key to avoiding World War 3, Trump has for the most part changed his tune on Russia … sort of. At today’s press conference he again stressed the need for a good relationship with Russia. Yet, only yesterday on Feb. 15th 2017, Trump himself put out a tweet that alleged that Russia took Crimea and asked if Obama was too soft on Russia? So which is it? Has Trump done a big U-Turn on Russia? Here is a list of the mixed messages on Russia coming out of the current US government.
Mixed Messages on Russia #1: Trump Claims Russia “Stole” Crimea
In his press interview with Theresa May, Trump ludicrously claimed he was in general consistent with his positions and didn’t flip flop or change his stance. Given how inconsistent he has been, that is quite false, and now we have another giant flip flop. The Deep State, the Military Intelligence Complex (MIC), the Zionists, the neocons or whoever else have evidently got to Trump who has now tweeted (above) that “Crimea was TAKEN by Russia” (Trump’s emphasis in capital letters). What!? Why is Trump revisiting this point when independent observers established that the Crimean people voted 96% to return to Russia in a legal referendum?
Mixed Messages on Russia #2: Trump Insists US Needs a Good Relationship with Russia
At the above-linked press conference (Feb. 16th 2017), Trump said:
“If Russia and the United States actually got together and got along – and don’t forget: we’re a very powerful nuclear country and so are they … I’ve been briefed. And I can tell you one thing about a briefing that we’re allowed to say, because anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it, nuclear holocaust would be like no other … If we have a good relationship with Russia, believe me, that’s a good thing. Not a bad thing.”
Conflicting views and mixed messages on Russia inside the Trump admin. Credit: UK Telegraph
Mixed Messages on Russia #3: Trump Sacks his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn
In one of the first shocks of the fledgling Trump Administration, Michael Flynn was fired by President Trump himself after it was revealed that he had allegedly broken the 1799 Logan Act by discussing sanctions and other matters with Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, back in December 2016. However, when is breaking the Logan Act such a big deal, especially when you consider all the NWO insiders who gather at Bilderberg every year to discuss all sorts of sensitive national matters and policy behind closed doors?
The allegations may not be true. The FBI cleared Flynn by stating that he was “cooperative and provided truthful answers”. Strangely, Flynn was not allowed to review the call log and clear himself … which indicates that this affair may have been some kind of a coup. The Post and Courier reports:
“When Flynn was attacked in the media for his ties to Russia, he was not allowed by the White House to defend himself. Over the weekend, he was instructed not to speak to the press when he was in the fight for his political life. His staff was not even allowed to review the transcripts of his call to the Russian ambassador.”
Flynn was known to be friendly towards Russia. Was the framing and firing of Flynn (brought about by the MSM which published the leaks and called for his head) part of a grander NWO strategy to remove Russophilic or Russia-friendly elements from the new Trump Administration? Yes, Flynn was vehemently anti-Iran, so the NWO lost someone pushing for war with Iran, but is it more geopolitically significant for them to generate further fear and hatred against Russia than Iran at this stage? Let’s face it, there is already a lot of anti-Iran sentiment among Trump’s cabinet and staff.
Mixed Messages on Russia #4: Tillerson’s Comments: Russia is a Danger
Another manifestation and reflection of the inconsistency of Donald Trump’s positions and policies is the degree to which his entire administration is divided on the Russia issue. This was evident quite early on. Trump himself seems to be the only one remaining who is for Russia now that Flynn has ignominiously departed.
For instance, when Rex Tillerson, nominated for Secretary of State, was at his Senate confirmation hearing, he referred to Russia as a danger. However, Tillerson is known for his closeness with Russia, having being awarded the “Order of Friendship” by Putin in 2013, so he knew he would have had to have said some strong words about Russia to appease the overwhelmingly Russophobic US Senate.
Mixed Messages on Russia #5: Mattis’ Comments: Russia is Top Threat
Mad Dog Mattis, at his Senate confirmation hearing to become Secretary of Defense, said he placed Russia first among all threats:
“The most important thing is that we recognize the reality of what we deal with Mr. Putin, and that we recognize that he is trying to break the North Atlantic Alliance, and that we take the integrated steps – diplomatic, economic, military – and the alliance steps, working with our allies, to defend ourselves where we must.”
Mixed Messages on Russia #6: Haley’s Comments: We Condemn Russia
Nikki Haley lost no time in using her inaugural address to the UN to condemn Russia, and posted her comments on Twitter (above) to please her masters. She also said the following at her Senate confirmation hearing:
“Russia is trying to show their muscle right now. It’s what they do … I don’t think we can trust them. We have to continue to be very strong back, and show them what this new administration is going to be.”
Mixed Messages on Russia #7: Pompeo’s Comments: Russia Hacked US
Meanwhile, new CIA head Mike Pompeo seems to have his head in the clouds by buying the official line that Russia hacked the US presidential elections. Does everyone at the CIA, both current and incoming staff, really believe this fairy tale? Pompeo said:
“With respect to this report in particular, it’s pretty clear about what took place here, about Russian involvement in efforts to hack information and to have an impact on American democracy … this was an aggressive action taken by senior leadership inside of Russia.”
The US has a choice: side with Russia and stop funding strife in Ukraine, or keep supporting the illegitimate government of Ukraine a la John McCain.
Mixed Messages on Russia #8: Trump’s Own Plans re: Syria
Finally, another confusing aspect has been Trump’s plans in Syria. Will he work with Russia (as he has suggested in the past) or not? Russia responded to his idea a few weeks ago of safe zones inside Syria, replying that he must have the consent of the Syrian Government under Bashar Al-Assad. However safe zones have been a trick used in the past by NATO et al in their “humanitarian” attacks and invasions of sovereign nations.
Is Trump trying to appease those around him, including the massive apparatus of the MIC? Or is he strong enough in his convictions about the importance of good relations with Russia? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
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Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news siteThe Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com, writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how humanity can create a new system of peace and abundance.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone