America at the Crossroads

Powertix & Powerticians

Highly concentrated or monopoly mass media control, whether local or national, is a means of true mass mind control

(This blog denounces right-wing political propaganda ads that occasionally may be placed alongside it, over which it has no control -- ads it views as insincere, deceitful and misleading)

One must ask "What is powertics and what are powerticians?" The answer is: powertics is applied power politics -- that is, social manipulation and mobilization primarily for political and government control -- the retention or acquisition of such control, be it internal or external, employing all means of influence, without ethical constraint or regard (but often with the pretense, veneer or facade of morality, as a tactic), within the law to the limits of the law, and any, if not every, means beyond the law that can go uncaught and escape prosecution on the part of the masterminds and executives of the manipulation. Powerticians are the conceivers, theoreticians, directors, engineers and practitioners of the manipulation -- that is, the masterminds and executives of the manipulation. Historically, in the ultimate extreme, powertics has included torture, assassination attempts and accomplished assassinations, murder, massacres, pogroms, coups, suicide bombings, mayhem and devastation terrorism, guerilla war and conventional war. Routinely it includes everything short of these, including media campaigns and propaganda, staging of dramatic politically-charged events (political drama or theater) appearing to be legitimate and genuine and attracting unwitting sincere participants (dupes), dissimulation and duplicity, betrayal, canards, calumnies, rumor, innuendo, misrepresentations and distortions, dysinformation, gratuitous-and-nagging-badgering-destructive incessant criticism, oppositional background research for character assassination and public embarrassment, slander and defamation, seduction and corruption with morally and legally compromising money, lending and debt, blackmail and extortion, income and asset confiscation or destruction, sex and illegal drugs, burglary, theft, planting of criminal evidence, criminal framing and entrapment to discredit and dishonor, threats, intimidation, taunting, baiting and provocation, conflict instigation and stoking, falsification and cheating, sabotage, surveillance, espionage, stalking, relentless harassment to dispirit and weary (to discourage and demoralize/deactivate or demotivate), demagoguery and scapegoating, scabs, goons and goon squads, physical assault, injury, medical and health attack, legal and illegal uncirculation (abduction, disappearance, criminal incarceration, involuntary mental hospitalization or detention), as well as infiltration by undercover operatives, the use of lobbyists, authorities and telecommunications companies and the recruitment of family, friends, associates and neighbors, etc., as informants or sources of attempted influence, etc. Power politics is like psychological warfare and the considerable use of psychological operations (psy ops) but may go far, far beyond these.

The United States, its presidency, society and path into the future are the focus and object of powertics and powerticians, on a scales as never before seen, since the secession of the slavery states and the ensuing civil war under the Lincoln Presidency. Anti-democratic financially parasitical and predatory feudal capitalism that puts such laissez-faire marketplace libertarian capitalism and corporate and commercial interests and rights before the rights, welfare and common good of the American populace, its victim and feeding host, and before our federal constitution and democratic-republic form of government (which its proponents are cynically trying to identify with themselves and their undertaking to dismantle the federal social safety net for the populace in order to minimize their own taxes), is the culprit. Feudal, libertarian capitalism is a gross and subversive misfit with our constitutional democratic-republic form of government and society, but democratic or communitarian (benevolent) capitalism with a conscience is the best, if not perfect, economic fit. Our federal constitution does not specify a particular kind of economic system for our nation; however, there has been an informal, subconscious ad-hoc tug of war between feudal and democratic capitalism throughout the history of the U.S., herein made conscious forever more, with capitalism per se always having been our prevailing economic system, ipso facto. After having repeatedly raided and looted the mother-lode treasury of the American taxpayers and sheared the splendorous American golden fleece and fed fat on the succulent American sheeople, frenzied feudal capitalism, with its teeth still sunk in and its tongue lapping and savoring insatiably, is yet hankering for another delectable serving and is being overcome with an ever-brewing fit over the prospect of the feast running out and not being replenished, with the new Democratic Party Presidency and Congressional majority sympathetic to democratic capitalism economic policies and curtailing feudal capitalism policies that have gutted the American economy while hugely increasing the wealth of some few corporations and the high wealth class. Feudal capitalism is madly marshaling its considerable resources and forces to depose this change and the Democratic Party change agents and retrieve government control for reinstatement of policies to thwart pending taxes on its extraordinarily increased wealth, accountability for taxation of its secreted and exiled hidden wealth and regulation of its unfettered economic looting practices, of American public-entity, small-business and household investors, and of workers and public treasuries. The unscrupulous pampered and spoiled, privileged top dogs of dog-eat-dog feudal, libertarian capitalism will do whatever it takes to regain, have and keep their unrestrained self-indulgent, privileged lives of extravagance and grandeur and self-aggrandizement and way with and in America, in the least (although decedent estate taxes were entirely eliminated in the initial but outdated Bush-II-era federal tax cuts for the first decade of the 21st Century, with the about-to-expire Bush-II-era federal tax cuts modified and extended in late December of 2010, each heir to a decedent estate is cumulatively exempt from paying federal inheritance or decedent-estate taxes on $5,000,000.00 of value of the total value of the decedent estate -- or a total exemption from tax of $10,000,000.00 for two heirs or of $15,000,000.00 for three heirs, and so forth -- until 2013, at which time the tax exemption drops to $1,000,000.00 per heir, providing the Bush-II-era tax cuts are not extended again before 2013). They will try every tool and weapon in their warehouse and armory to mobilize the American populace and voters against their own self-interest, accusatorially shouting the term socialism as something disreputable, taboo and gravely immoral that must be repudiated and shunned, in order to have their way -- where, in cite of fact, socialism, or socialist measures, is/are not in violation of and prohibited by our federal constitution, nor unlawful, anymore than is capitalism, nor are they immoral, unlike the primacy-of-profit and profits-before-the-common-good and populace libertarian form of capitalism.

Key to feudal libertarian capitalism's restoration of government power for itself and its offensive against the rule of democratic capitalism and the Democratic Party Presidency and Congressional majority is its strategy and campaign of mass, or public, mind control. Yes, I said the forbidden paranoia loony-bin, conspiracy theorist words "mass 'mind control'." What in this world, in a sane and reasonable commentary, is mass mind control or simply mind control, one must ask? Mind control techniques are many and differ in their elements and complexity among different individuals and groups utilizing them. The formerly so-called Red China and North Korea were notoriously renown for successfully employing these techniques in reeducation camps and centers for prisoners of war and ideologically deviant communist party members and officials of their own nations and such citizens of premium value, such as politically astray intellectuals, professionals and soldiers. The social control techniques of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and the so-called Moonies on recruits to the Moon Unification Church have been studied in psychology graduate and post-graduate school in the U.S. and have been found to be soft but no less effective mind-control or brain-washing techniques to those used in Mao-era China and Kim II Sung-era North Korea. This is to say that mind control is brain washing and that brain washing works on very many people in bending them mentally, emotionally and behaviorally. In the 1970s and 1980s many U.S. parents whose late-teen emancipated and early adult children had joined the Reverend Sun Myung Moon Unification Church rescued those children, or had those children rescued, from the residential facilities of the Moon organization and forcibly, at odds with the law, turned them over to psychologists, psychiatrists or mind-control analysts for mind-control deprogramming. Brain washing and mind control are no joke or delusion; they are real and highly effective practices. The social control techniques of mass murderer Charles Manson and his post-adolescent female cult gang, the Reverend Jim Jones of Peoples Temple, the Reverend David Koresh of the Branch Davidians and the Church of Scientology have also attracted academic attention and study in the context of brain washing and mind control. Defector accounts have also been published of the social-control techniques of renegade Mormon polygamous family cults, involving at times underage-girl wife-mothers ("baby mamas" in hip-hop lingo). From circa the year 1975 until the mid 1980s numerous in-depth news reports were published in U.S. newspapers and magazines on U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Army mind-control projects and experiments, notably on unwitting subjects, in one experiment using children, and involving the administration of psycho-active drugs. Also, a mass mind-control practice by advertisers -- variously termed subliminal advertising, subliminal seduction, subliminal mind manipulation and subliminal brain manipulation -- came to light in mainstream news media reporting and books in the late 1960s and early 1970s that also was a subject of graduate and post-graduate study in psychology in the U.S. Subliminal advertising or mind manipulation involved the embedding of imagery such as repetitive faint images, without or with spoken words, just below the threshold of conscious perception, in movies or movie frames, that elicited the purchase of popcorn or soda during the intermission of the movies (there no longer are movie intermissions and this practice has been outlawed), or such words in music elicited or suggested the purchase of a product or the performance of a particular behavior or that planted or seeded an idea in the minds of listeners -- also, this practice might be interpreted as subliminal hypnosis. Although the techniques of brain washing or mind control and thus social control may vary and be doctrinal or improvised and proprietary among practitioners, a common denominator definition for them all and the practice of mass or group mind control is:

The exclusive or predominate effective control of information and the means of communication and influence for the purpose of shaping and orienting (or directing) thought, attitudes and behavior -- thought being inclusive of thinking, beliefs, viewpoints, values, outlook, opinion and ideology as well, and attitudes also including sentiments, emotions, feeling and reactability (with these three being particularly susceptible to exploitation, especially their outputs or states of insecurity, "fear," "phobia," hysteria, anger and rage) and the means of influence including broadcast and publications media, censorship (other than of necessary clear-and-present danger incitement words, conduct, publications and media, and degeneracy -- such as child-pornography, rape, bestiality, snuff and cruelty -- photos and media productions, etc.), rhetoric, celebrity and prestigious spokespersons, education, indoctrination, jobs, job advancement and security or sanctions (good or bad reviews, promotion, demotion, immobility, termination), food, shelter, financial, sexual and drug compromise, attention, acceptance, respect, praise, love and affection, social access, friendship, peer influence and pressure, privileges, status, rank, income, privation, isolation, rejection, disregard, disrespect, ridicule, hostile criticism, discrimination, deprivation and all conceivable other sources of persuasion and dissuasion (reward, withdrawn or diminished reward, and punishment, or withdrawn or diminished punishment), ad infinitum. Perhaps needless to say, the concentrated control of mainstream news, pseudo news, infotainment, communications and entertainment media and such industries (particularly mental-exertion-free, largely mentally passive, lazy-brained viewing and listening broadcast mass media -- producing cerebral zombies) by feudal libertarian capitalism mass-media moguls and corporations in our society, subjects or disposes the body of our national mass media to vulnerability in the service of private-interest, partisan, ideological and political abuse and misuse equivalent to the brain-washing misuse of the mass media system of a totalitarian form of government for total immersion mass-media political and subservience indoctrination of its population.

If Americans will recognize that for any ethnicity, race, creed, religion or subculture of our nation not all of any people so affiliated are bad or good, but that there are and will always be the bad spoilers, among any of these categories that define us, who can potentially polarize us, and if we will resolve that no matter how objectionable the acts and words of these spoilers, we en mass will not turn on and aggress against one another, our society on the whole will endure in overall tranquility and proceed along the path of perpetual social and material progress and prosperity and scientific and technological advancement, and we indeed will be and remain largely, as in the words of our pledge of allegiance, "indivisible with liberty and justice for all." Consider the following poem as a reference for a present-day elaboration on the American motto E Pluribus Unum ("Of Many One" in Latin),

Powertix & Powerticians
Demagogues and Demagoguery

Unite and fight the demagoguers.
Don't let them divide and conquer.
They are strife
And rancor mongers.
They are questors without honor,
Loyal to only
Themselves and power.

We must be alert to and eschew demagogic individuals, organizations and media organs and their outputs (such as race and ethnic hate activists, gun proliferation and worship proponents, Fox News demagogues and bigots, and so forth, to my mind) who and that would, in pursuit of their own peculiar ends, exploit, if not inspire or stage on occasion, the polarizing acts and events perpetrated by the bad spoilers among us to divide, or further divide, embroil and pit us against one another. For example, if the majority of each the indigenous, Asian, black, Latin and white people of America permanently would learn not to ascribe collective guilt to or against the whole of a different others for the transgressions of individuals or subgroups of their identity group, however heinous and repugnant the acts, but would regard that these transgressors are of the same bad mentality, character and conduct as the rogues, miscreants and egregious criminals of their own kind who also aggress against members of their group, and recognize that whether the transgressors are from within or without their group they will be a chronically surfacing problem needing to be uprooted and isolated from normal civil society, or to be rehabilitated, if possible and warranted, for reintroduction into civil society, we, in effect, could not be divided emotionally and socially as a society by anyone or anything and would have a firmly anchored, peaceable, stable and harmonious society overall on an ongoing basis. This principle applies on all demographic parameters, particularly of religion, gender, sexual orientation, class, regional affiliation, subculture and ethnicity.

Some Closing Remarks with Comments on the Federal Reserve Bank & Gold

Do not be fool talked and con talked by the pro-Republican Party and pro-Tea Party right-wing-media echo machine into voting their political candidates into the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress so as for them to be able to legislate away and/or privatize the public Social Security pension, Medicare and Unemployment Compensation insurance systems – that is, have them criticize, denigrate, talk down and away your confidence in these social safety net systems or convince us in the majority of the citizenry that they are an oppressive tax burden and an individual responsibility, where career or lifelong financial sufficiency and security are nonexistent for very many, if not most of us, and our life circumstances are highly unpredictable and precarious for most. To privatize them is to make them stock-market, investor and profit-and-loss based, and to subject them to the price and qualifications caprices and policies for insurance coverage that we see with health insurance coverage now (with cherry picking for insurance noncoverage those most in need of benefits, being high risk and expense applicants, and with steep premium increases at insurance carriers' discretion or insistence), and run by a self-serving private corporate bureaucracy instead of a publicly accountable, overseen and staffed government bureaucracy. Talk of these changes in the social safety net by these anti-any-tax, fiscally "conservative" politicians of these two political parties is already under way. Also, their talk about putting our money supply back on the post-primitive-mind gold standard and abolishing the Federal Reserve Bank system for currency and bank lending management and transferring monetary policy to "political" executive branch and Congressional politicians and officials are the height and depth of financial stupidity and insanity in a modern, industrial international-commerce world that would do nothing but benefit the holders of gold for the short term and undermine most business activity and growth potential and the value of most non-gold investments, savings, income and currency, before the outbreak of a worldwide merchant, consumer and worker revolution, joined in by police, militaries, religious ministries, and loser politicians and billionaires and millionaires -- something like the First Republic French Revolution but much worse. Y'all, there ain't enough precious metals in and on Planet Earth for them to serve as currency, or as stored inflation-controlling units-of-value pegs to and on the money supply, to meet the economic demands of humanity's growing world industrial and commerce needs and the economic demands of humanity's world population and consumers, as well as to match up with the value of all government, business, religious, nonprofit-entity and individual assets and income in the world, not even if they are combined into making a more-valuable alloy of gold and reduced to units of molecules of gold-plus pegged to a standard base-value denomination of paper, electronic and other circulating currency for controlling that the total circulating value of the money supply does not exceed the total value of the total quantity of the gold-plus alloy reserves, and as gold and the Earth's other precious metals don't grow but are quite finite and relatively rare -- that is, for controlling currency (more dollars demanded for a corresponding foreign currency denomination in foreign currency exchange relative to international exchange rates -- currency depreciation with quantity demand inflation), price (inordinate or increased dollars demanded for a or the overall spectrum and inventory of goods and services, or the rate of increase in money in circulation or supply exceeding the rate of increase in production and services, with the effect of there being a situation of overconsumption and underproduction and too much money chasing too few goods and services) and pay (the rate of increase in per-capita or average pay and financial compensation exceeding the rate of increase in per-capita GNP, production or profit) inflation, given a marketplace of open, fair and adequate competition. In addition, gold is not magical and has no inherent or practical value, other than the almost meaningless physical durability characteristic any metal currency has (such as lead or copper or silver and likewise), as a medium of exchange for labor and goods and services, particularly in our high-tech electronic debit-and-credit bank-card and cell-phone purchasing and banking world. Rather, gold's value is based on aesthetics (a soft, malleable, non-tarnishing, most glamorous metal ideal for jewelry making and the arts and crafts) and an ages-old traditional arts-and-crafts (including jewelry) demand for gold by artisans and the purchase of their products by aficionados of gold's eye-catching beauty and on a tradition of a fetish for gold as a glittery attention-getting glamor and status symbol, applied in some past societies to elite coinage with the images of royalty and rulers and other power symbolism. However, even for jewelry nowadays, with the high price of gold and natural gems, many consumers are adapting to stunningly attractive inexpensive jewelry made of beautiful imitation gold and synthetic gems. The teens and children who grow up on alternative but as beautiful jewelry will likely in large numbers regard pricey natural gold and natural gems as environmentally uncool with respect to the morally problematic issue of their hazardous and destructive mining and quarrying extraction from the Earth and as frivolous and profligate-spending status symbols for suckers and snobs with respect to their extreme and obscene price tags. I have some of this alternative exquisite jewelry myself and marvel at its beauty and routinely gift it.

Appropriately, the value and quantity of the money supply should be based, roughly speaking, on a monetary formula that takes into account and in some manner links a universally agreed upon standard unit of financial value divided into the summed value of GNP (gross national product), GNW, or gross national wealth (estimated equity in assets, privately and publicly held, of the nation owned worldwide), plus foreign deposits in U.S. financial institutions and exercised net international credit (private-sector given minus received credit), minus combined federal, state and local government budget deficits and debts, etc., and should not nonsensically and irrationally be based arbitrarily merely on a commodity or commodities. The nonsensical and irrational proposal for reinstatement of an outdated, ancient gold standard as the basis for our monetary policy in our modern, global high-tech economy is clear proof of the power of mind control (visceral and reflexive responding impelled by brainwashing), in this instance by indoctrination and an education, as well as perhaps an upbringing, together with social conditioning and programming, in outdated economic teachings and an environment in which the belief was that gold somehow magically and inexplicably intrinsically was/is the basis of monetary value. In short, mind control is both a naturally and unnaturally occurring process of psychological conditioning, programming and manipulation. One may undergo it passively, involuntarily or voluntarily or in a mixture of these. In its unnatural form, it simply can be termed "effective psychological manipulation."

As to the matter of the Federal Reserve Bank, banking-system scholars and highly educated, hands-on trained and experienced experts, selected from within the banking system with the vetting, confidence and imprimatur of the banking system, in position as banking-system and monetary-policy formulators, managers and regulators, subject to political and governmental approval, oversight and accountability, are a much lesser hazard and evil to our economy and financial system than groping, partisan and shaky, and often shady and downrightly financially inept, political officials directly managing, regulating and gambling with our or any banking and monetary system -- the lesser of the evils as well as hazards for our economic system. This state of affairs constitutes a democratic-republic staffing and authority-delegating process consistent with the spirit of our federal Constitution and executive-branch agency and department leadership staffing practices.

The Republican Party has not been the party of President Lincoln since the presidency of Richard Nixon and the Tea Party in no way is symbolic of or in the tradition of the revolutionary philosophy and ideals of Crispus Attucks, the original U.S. colonial revolutionary Congress, the spirit of the original and evolving U.S. Constitution nor revolutionary General and first U.S. President George Washington, who declined to be made king by their ilk. These American tories have partially privatized our military and now we have "Rah, rah, perpetual psychotic patriotic and widening war" driven by war-companies' and military-industrial-complex pressures for steady and increased revenues, profits and stock dividends and the fake-patriot cheerleader right-wing TV, radio and print broadcast and news mass communications media. The neo-conservative, tory Republicans have partially privatized the U.S. Postal Service and it is a constant financial failure and is always begging to raise stamp prices, or postage rates, for delivery and now wants to reduce delivery service from six to five days per week , as well as well be closing, according to a Wall Street Journal report of 01-24-2011, 2000 more post offices starting in March of 2011, on top of 491 it previously announced in 2010 that it would be closing, to cut expenses to hopefully improve its solvency. They tried to partially privatize the IRS but the pilot-study private companies competing with the IRS on the same jobs and missions were soundly trounced by IRS workers' performance. In addition, their warmongering and globalization economic policies under President George W. Bush have bankrupted our government in terms of the size of our federal budget deficit and national debt, the housing market, bank lending and employment (with so much manufacturing and so many jobs having been outsourced to low-expense, dime-labor third world nations, to bolster corporate profits, executive salaries and bonuses, and returns to shareholders) and corrupted the product and operating integrity as well as solvency of much of our business community for the mammoth profits and benefit of the relatively few affluent and rich, as well as having jeopardized the political and potential oil-supply stability of the heartlands of OPEC and Islam, all of which they audaciously are trying to blame on the Democratic Party government officials who are trying to clean up their economic mess and catastrophe.

This commentary is a work in progress.

What is the future of America? It is in the minds and hands of American voters, for a short while.

The quality of America's future will at root be determined by our permanent receptivity to, support for and mastery of science and engineering, and innovation and new technology, as well as by our choice of abiding with the politically and environmentally problematical fossil-fuels energy model of the past or electing for, supporting and investing in the emerging and rapidly evolving new and clean solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative energy-sources model that will power the great nations of the dawning future.

The new era of great societies will be founded, built, and powered on the forward-minded and great pioneering education, thought, science, technology and investment of the proactively radical – not conservative – human brain power, passion and endeavor for betterment that precede them: inexhaustible 24/7 intercontinentally ocean-floor-cable transmitted and exchanged clean solar-and-wind-generated electrical fuel power, virtually eternally positively evolvable, for buildings and infrastructure, high-speed rail, all-electric and interim electric/natural-gas hybrid vehicles (BYD company of China reports that it already has deployed as taxi cabs fleets of all-electric cars that drive 250 kilometers, or 155 miles, on a full charge of a battery that can fully charge in 10 minutes, with reductions in this recharging time to come, thus having a much more rapid battery recharge time than any other make of electric vehicle but having a significantly less drive range on a full charge than the currently sold and newly forthcoming Tesla Motors all-electric vehicle models, which have driving ranges of 386 to 483 kilometers, or 240 to 300 miles, per full battery recharge, whereas most other all-electric vehicles have a drive range of 161 or less kilometers, or 100 miles or less, per full battery recharge); bioengineering and biotechnology (including the ethical production of healthful plant and animal tek foods); stem-cell, sonic, electrical, electro-magnetic, light-spectrum, laser and mineral medicine; nano-technology; advances in computer science and cyber-technology; and ethically and responsibly conducted low-cost mini-tech and micro-tech space exploration and research, and near-Earth extraterrestrial human colonization, paleontology and archeology (maybe), mining, industrialization and economic expansion, which will upgrade human understanding and knowledge of cosmological physics, geo-genesis and biogenesis and enable human manipulation of this knowledge for successful and efficient nearby extraterrestrial terra-forming, technological development and human habitation (Mars and its 2 moons, and the confirmed valuable and precious minerals-rich asteroids near Mars); as well as for the improvement of the geological, climate and weather, marine and wildlife and agricultural conditions on Earth.

The Matter of Contact with Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life. With respect to space exploration, if our species is to make two-way contact with cognitively and technologically advanced extraterrestrial life, such exospecies would have to be cognitively equal or superior to the technically smartest and best educated members of our species but our planet would be protected by the moat of interstellar space that surrounds and separates our solar system, in which our planet observably is the only celestial body in it that possesses or hosts biologically highly evolved surface life, from our closest solar-system neighbor Proxima Centauri and beyond from invasion by a cognitively and technology superior or far superior species, even if it were conquestive and colonialist, where it also could alternatively colonize billions of other potentially life-hosting and resources-rich planets and moons in our galaxy, the Milky Way, of 300 billion stars (solar systems), most of which, based on what we know about our own solar system (with 8 planets, 5 known dwarf planets, 139 known moons and 700,000 to 1.7 million asteroids in the asteroid belt), will likely possess resources but will have environmental conditions inhospitable to life as we know it, making for a virtual infinity of natural resources available to them on so many complex-life uninhabited worlds, without pressure for competition with other cognitively and technology superior species. For mortal space travelers to breach by teleportation the moat of largely empty interstellar space between our solar system and the closest neighboring solar or planetary system (the star system Proxima Centauri, approximately 4 light years away, with the speed-of-light travel of 299,792 kilometers per second x the number of seconds in 4 years equaling the number of kilometers to the closet star to our sun or with the speed-of-light travel of 186,282 miles per second x the number of seconds in 4 years equaling the number of miles to the closest star to our sun), they would have to travel impossibly, against the laws of physics (being the laws of cosmic nature), multiples or many multiples of the speed of light, in order to avoid a prohibitively long-term journey and the feeding, toilet, sanitation and hygiene, temperature-control, biological, psychological and social health, as well as supplies and mechanical, etc., problems and deadly hazards associated with extreme-distance cloistered travel, with the speed of light being the speed limit of energy and matter, and their embodiments, in the universe. However and otherwise, if they were transported at the speed of light, or impossibly or improbably more, they inescapably normally and naturally would disintegrate and convert into pure light at that speed (299,792 kilometers per second or 186,282 miles per second). Even if, practically, robots were to travel at a high-speed fraction of the speed of light that was not disintegrating, disabling or deleterious of them or their carrier spacecraft, it would probably take them scores of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years in human time to breach that moat of largely empty interstellar space between our solar system and its closest solar system neighbor Proxima Centauri, providing they could do without unavailable maintenance, repair and fuel resources during the crossing. If we make contact with intelligent extraterrestrial species, particularly cognitively and technologically superior or far superior species, we can expect that they would or will be communitarian or communal (group-living, social and cooperative) species — a fundamental requirement for the fashioning, existence and perpetuation of an organized and complex society (even on the bee, termite or ant level), or civilization — that would have solved most of their survival, social, economic and environmental problems and would be highly enlightened and peaceful but pragmatically militarily advanced and able to defend themselves against dangers posed by cognitively and technological achieved but not as intelligent, enlightened and socially and mentally evolved other communal species, like humans (primitive, and developmentally and technically inferior in comparison to themselves). We would have much to learn from such species at an ideal safe distance (unless they improbably could teleport themselves en mass instantaneously) that could benefit all of our fields of science, including social and criminal science, as well as our medicine, mathematics, engineering, technology and general problem-solving capabilities and know-how. Contact with a cognitively and technologically advanced and superior extraterrestrial civilization at a safe distance is desirable and is most likely to benefit our species with incomprehensible advances in our education, knowledge and know-how, science, medicine and technology. If our nation fears and declines to energetically reach out for such contact, we cannot stop the technocracies of Europe, Russia, Australia, Canada, China, Japan and India from technologically reaching out for such contact, to their possible overwhelming scientific and technological benefit and advantage. If we don’t pay (invest), we don’t play (we are left out).

Non-adopters and late adopters of societally and economically progressive, advanced new-era values, science and technologies, will be the intellectually, socially and technologically backward and laggard societies of the near-term and long-term future of humanity. The fossil-fuels energy paradigm for powering advanced industrial society is now unnecessary as well as, most importantly, is toxic and dangerous, politically, atmospherically and biologically. Even natural gas (NG) is toxic and dangerous, although less so than filthy coal and very dirty fossil petroleum, or oil, but is less risky than nuclear power plants for generating electricity and does not have the serious non-recyclable nuclear waste problem of electricity-generating nuclear power plants, a massive and environmentally threatening problem according to the scientific consensus of the European Union and expert nuclear science consultants to state legislatures in the U.S. Natural gas is an interim, bridge solution for national fuel-energy independence and security from foreign dirty fossil-fuel oil imports and environmentally filthy and environmentally devastating coal, which makes up 56% of the fuel sources for generating utilities power-plant electrical energy, something for which there is an abundance of natural gas to do the same job alone long term instead and of which it is and has been doing the job in part. Natural gas can be used in conjunction with solar-and-wind-generated electrical fuel energy, at hybrid NG/solar-wind electricity-generating power plants to replace coal-fired power plants for generating electricity and for creating newly engineered hybrid vehicles that are no longer electric/liquid-gas hybrid vehicles but are electric/natural-gas hybrid vehicles, capable of being recharged and fueled at home and publicly — all of which can be phased out and converted to solo electric vehicles and solar and wind electricity-generating power plants when electric vehicles and solar and wind electricity are very cheap, and when home and public electric-car recharging ports and stations are pervasive and their batteries can be charged in 10 minutes or less at home and away from home, and when solar and wind electricity-generating facilities and sources, and the intercontinental solar-and-wind-electricity-sharing infrastructure and grid, are dominant and are more than able to supply an unfailing large surplus of worldwide, around-the-clock, 24/7, electricity permanently, as well as when solar-and-wind-generated electricity can be stored on-site long term.

As Earth is a natural bi-solar cyclically rotating planet, it can produce around-the-clock intercontinental solar-generated electrical energy for intercontinental exchange and sharing (with some half of our planet always cycling through either a day or night phase), forever, via redundantly numerous below-ocean-and-sea-floor electricity transmission cables.

Over the long-term, after a solar-electricity-production power plant or similar technology is paid for from its savings in avoided utilities and fossil-fuels bills, yet retains decades or more of additional electricity production life, solar energy for electricity generation and use is essentially free. Furthermore, solar-electricity-generation technology will eliminate the dangers of oil, gasoline and vapor-natural-gas pipelines and the latter’s aging, flawed construction, geophysical disturbance, malfunction, accidental assault or damage, tampering and sabotage. It will also do away with spill and explosion-susceptible shipping, rail and truck transport of all fossil fuels, including coal, the dirtiest and least cleansible fossil fuel, in practice, despite long-time failing claims by the coal industry of clean coal to come (forever coming soon), a fossil-fuel resource associated with the worst air pollution, and environmental and ecological destruction and loss of workers’ lives.

The successful 26-hour flight of the Swiss-made Solar Impulse manned-airplane on 07-07-2010 augurs for and alludes to a time to come of a market of all-solar-powered airliners, aircraft, watercraft, rail and road vehicles, as well as of electric-car-battery charging home and office ports and public stations , along with solar panel or solar fuel-cell garage doors with built-on sockets for recharging electric road-vehicle batteries, and factories and electronic bill boards, that operate and charge from mere daylight and afterward operate in the dark, after dusk, from reserve charges of their solar fuel cells — we can also expect portable computers and other portable electronics devices to eventually operate from the power of natural and artificial light. Pursuant BBC’s online news of 07-16-2010, the Solar Impulse test flight was followed by a successful to-date, 2-week test flight of the U.S.-made U.S. Army eternal-flight solar airplane, a drone or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) theoretically capable of staying in flight permanently, named Zephyr, operating according to the same principles.

Already there are solar mini-panel calculators, solar-battery watches, solar outdoor cookers (which have had a tepid reception from many of the impoverished in 3rd-world nations as many of the poor insist on and prefer seeing a fire, or flames, when they cook), solar hot-water heaters, combination solar/crank-powered/corded radios, solar/crank-charged flashlights and such rural lanterns, and solar-charged deck, patio and garden lamps that glow all night long. In time computers, television sets, cell phones and miscellaneous other traditionally electrically powered electronic devices will be operated and/or battery recharged and powered via a built-on solar panel and/or solar-power capture cord made for placement in daylight or sunlight, with the solar-capture end placed in daylight or sunlight and the other end plugged into the power-cord jack of the electronic device.

As resentment, revolt and internal feuds for political power grip the heartlands of OPEC and Islam, clean-and-green fuel-energy independence and security are our long-term recourse and a must for implementation now. With the consequential rapidly and steeply increased pricing of oil, we must not be scared, bullied and stampeded into opening up ANWAR, other wildlife preserves and the tourist, scenic and fishery coasts to oil and gas exploration and extraction, which would quickly exhaust all of the fossil fuels there within the short-sighted short term of 3 to 5 years but would generate scores of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for the fossil-fuels companies. We must ignore the scoffers, skeptics, cynics and vested-interest critics, naysayers and trash-talkers about and against solar-electric power plants and cleanly charged and clean-running electric road vehicles. These technologies are irreversibly here to stay and will dramatically improve and dominate new power-plant and off-grid, on-site power sources and vehicle production and purchases in 35 to 50 years.

At a minimum, the U.S. and Canada, with their vast natural stores of natural gas, and perhaps the entire American continent, are in the position of virtually immediately doing their part in minimizing their contribution to human CO2 pollution of the atmosphere as well as global warming and of achieving transportation fuel-energy national independence and security by changing over from a road transportation system of gasoline-fueled (with gasoline derived from fossil oil) vehicles to one of natural-gas (NG)/electric-powered hybrid vehicles and from filthy coal-fired electricity-generating power plants to relatively clean NG and combination NG-solar-wind electricity-generating power plants, eliminating natural gas as a fuel energy source when all-electric road vehicles have very long drive ranges and their batteries can be recharged in 10 minutes or less and when an intercontinental clean-and-green energy grid and infrastructure is fully established and reliably functioning. The NG-fuel feature of NG-electric hybrid vehicles would allow rapid — in a few minutes to mere seconds — fueling of the vehicles, and on-the-go charging/recharging of the battery electric-drive feature of hybrid vehicles when they discharge, conserving NG and minimizing its light COs emissions and relying primarily or substantially on the electric-drive feature and the zero CO2 emissions of electric driving. NG/plug-in-electric hybrid vehicles could be fueled/recharged at home, work and public fueling stations once the easily installed fueling infrastructure is pervasively in place for these, like gas stations are now.

As a start in establishing a global intercontinental network of electricity cables for exchanging and sharing solar- and wind-sourced electricity generated worldwide, green-tek geographic leaders California, Oregon, Washington state and Hawaii of the U.S and the nations Australia, Japan, China and India of the Pacific Ocean basin can and should join forces in a joint venture of their interested and willing public and private utilities concerns — with national, state or provincial, and local government licensing and facilitation — to lay sea- and ocean-floor and subsurface overland solar-and-wind-power smart-grid cables between themselves, as appropriate, for around-the-clock, everyday, year-round, perpetual electricity sharing and exchange, for their eventual fossil-fuels-free, fuel-energy independence and security. India’s southeastern coast and China's southwestern coast could, when mutually economically feasible, further link to the nations of southeast Asia and India's southwestern coast could link to the politically stable and friendly coastal African nations of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, the large island nation of Madagascar, and the whole loop of southern African coastal nations to and including Angola. In turn, when mutually economically feasible, the southeast coastal nations of Africa could link to the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia and the southwest-coastal and west-coast African nations could link across the southern Atlantic Ocean to the nations of French Guiana, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and the southern tip of Chile on the east coast of the South American subcontinent. A similar linking can and should be initiated between the states of the east coast of the U.S. and the easily accessible far-western, sun-rich nations of France, Portugal and Spain of Europe, of which the latter 2 nations are already leading solar-electric-power nations in the world, and the politically stable and friendly nations of west Africa. For the U.S., the east-coast and west-coast intercontinental green energy links can be combined via electrical cables routed across the nation from coast to coast to supply uninterrupted or supplemental green energy for interior states. Ultimately, all nations should and could be solar-wind green-and-clean electric-energy linked via marine-floor electricity cables between coasts linked to subsurface overland cabling and national clean energy grids and infrastructures for universal solar- and wind-sourced electricity distribution from coast to coast and interiors or hinterlands of nations and to the whole of landlocked nations.

If we acknowledge, believe in and commit to the feasible and pursue and implement the feasible, it materializes into solid, functional reality. An undertaking similar to this concept has been accomplished before, with telegraph and telephone cables for our worldwide land-line telecommunications system that came before and coexists with the satellite telecommunications signal system. Often feasible big dreams do come true: modern ships and submarines, rail, photography, electricity, phonographs, phones, electric lighting, plumbing and indoor toilets and spigot-delivered hot water for sinks, showers and baths, automobiles, paved-road and highway systems, traffic-control lights and signs control systems, gas- and electric-sourced cooking ranges, refrigerators, thermostat-controlled home central heating, radio, TV, aircraft, spacecraft, hand calculators, personal and office computers, the cyber-tech internet, wireless cell phones, the cell-phone and vehicle GPS system, gas/electric-hybrid automobiles, all-electric automobiles, and solar, wind and geothermal electrical power, to name a few.

The primary obstacle to the full participation of the U.S. in this emerging, societally advanced future, is a potential majority-voter and Congressional attachment to, comfort and complacency with and investment income from the technology of the past and of the status quo, and fear, dislike, skepticism and rejection of the inevitable better and healthier technology of the near future.

Other reasons we should write off OPEC, in addition to the environmentally despoiling, poisioning & degrading effects of our society's dependency on and overwhelming use of imported fuel oil:

1. "Majority poverty of a nation is mostly due to a self-serving ruling & privileged class empowered & prospering at the cost of everyone else."

The people of the OPEC nations are ruled by lords-proprietor families and castes (including religious clerical castes, as in Iran, and the Wahhabi Islamic-code compliance enforcers of Saudi Arabia) who view and treat their nations as sole proprietorship plantation businesses serving for the rulers' enrichment, granduer, privilige, glory and social command.

2. "When the negative of misery, desperation, seething and volatile resentment exceeds in potency the negative of fearsome brutality & oppression, revolt occurs."

The environment of harsh governance of the general populace, high unemployment, majority poverty and self-serving proprietary government has given rise to this psychological climate and result in the Islamic and OPEC nations of North Africa and the Middle East.

3. "As revolt & internal feuding & war in the struggle for political power & monetary control grip the heartlands of OPEC & Islam, green fuel energy independence & security are our long-term recourse & a must."

Black Africans must not be man-whore, mercenary thugs & murderers for the narcissistic Libyan & other Arab regime/s against their people in protest & revolt! Black African authorities must condemn, seize the pay of & prosecute mercenaries from their nations serving Arab regimes against their people! Let the people of Black Africa be mindful of their history and present overall difficult condition and stay on the better side of what-goes-around-comes-around, pay-back karma in this scenario. Let there be no tolerance for the pitting of the wretched against the wretched to preserve the unscrupulous and corrupt.