">
I’m pleased to provide scanned excerpts
from Michael Ruppert’s comprehensive investigation of The New World Order and
911 which introduces new evidence contained in his newly released book, Crossing the
Rubicon: The decline of the American Empire at the end of the oil era.
(It’s one book that will profoundly change the way you manage the rest of
your life: A must read. david)
From the “Summation” section (excerpts
from page 582 to 591)
Based upon the evidence, we can safely say
that two airliners hit the World Trade Center. That part was filmed and/or
witnessed by many people. We can also safely say that a number of witnesses saw
an airliner make an unprecedented acrobatic maneuver over the Pentagon. There
is, however, no footage of Flight 77's famed aerial maneuver just as there is no
footage that shows an airliner actually hitting the Pentagon. The only thing
ever produced was a film that showed the side of the Pentagon and then a large
ball of flame.
Many websites have posted what they
purported was slow motion footage
revealing an aircraft tailfin approaching the Pentagon and the debate
over whether it was an F-16 or a cruise missile or something else grew so
intense that threats of violence and some serious name-calling took place
between advocates of various theories. Since it was based upon evidence that l
could not verify as easily as a statement made by Dick Cheney, Condo Rice, or
anyone else, 1 chose not to waste tedious time there. 1 could not personally
verify the chain of custody of those films| or that they had not been tampered
with. I lack the technical proficiency to judge such things, and l am not an expert in the area of photographic
analysis.
Flight 77 remains the greatest unsolved
mystery of 9/1 l but that does not alter my belief in the guilt of the
suspects.
'What we have, however, is a feat of
airplane driving that far exceeds the skills reportedly possessed by any of the
alleged hijackers. In fact, the flying skills required for such a maneuver
surpass even those of commercial airline pilots. A 2002 story that originated in
Portugal confirms this.
The Portugal News is a weekly English-language newspaper
read largely by expatriate
and touring Americans. On March 8, 2002, in a story headlined “September 11 -- US Government
Accused'' it reported:
A group of
military and civilian US pilots, under the chairmanship of Colonel Don de Grand, after deliberating
non-stop for 72 hours, has concluded that the flight crews of the four passenger
airliners, involved in the September 11th tragedy, had no control over their
aircraft. In a detailed press
communiqué the inquiry stated: ''The so-called terrorist attack was in fact a
superbly executed military operation carried out against the USA, requiring the
utmost professional military skill in command, communications, and control. It
was flawless in ' timing, in the choice of selected aircraft to be used as
guided missiles and in the coordinated delivery of those missiles to their
pre-selected targets.''
The report
seriously questions whether or not the suspect hijackers, supposedly trained on
Cessna light aircraft, could have located a target dead-on 200 miles from take
off point. It further throws doubt their ability to master the intricacies of
instrument flight
Colonel de Grand
said that it would be impossible for novices to have taken control of the four
aircraft and orchestrated such a terrible act [on 911] requiring military
precision of the highest order. A member of the inquiry team, a
across the Pacific
from Edwards Air Force base in
Hill also quoted
Bob Ayling, former British Airways boss, in
an
interview given to the London Economist on September 2001. Ayling admitted that it was now possible to control an
aircraft from either the ground or in the air. This was confirmed by expert
witnesses at the inquiry who testified that airliners could be controlled by
electro-magnetic pulse or radio frequency instrumentation from command and
control platforms based either in the air or at ground level.
A1l members of the inquiry
team agreed that even if guns were held to their heads none of them would fly a
plane into a building. Their reaction would be to ditch the plane into a river
or a field, thereby safeguarding the lives of those on the ground. During the
press conference Captain Hill maintained that the four airliners must have been
choreographed by an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS). This
system can engage several aircraft simultaneously by
knocking out their on-board flight controls. He said that all the evidence
points to the fact that the pilots and their crews had not taken any evasive
action to resist the supposed hijack
ors. They had not attempted any sudden changes in flight path pose-dive
procedures which led him to believe that they had control over their
aircraft.
THE NEWS, in an attempt to further
substantiate the potential veracity of these findings, spoke
to an Algarave-based airline pilot, who has more than 20 years of experience in
flying passenger planes, to seek his views. Captain Colin McHattie, currently flying with
Which brings us back to the war games
again.
The War Games.
The military has been practicing
shoot-downs of remotely piloted aircraft since the 1950’s. l consider it likely that
on September 11, all four aircraft
were remotely piloted or taken over by a system that can be activated without
the flight crew's ability to intervene. I believe that the apparatus to remotely
pilot the two planes that struck in
New York was housed and operated from within the New York City’s Office of
Emergency Management (or very close by), where we know that a Secret Service
agent was already in place and communicating with Dick Cheney. The Secret Service agent's presence is
easily explained by the so-called preparations for the Tripod 11 exercise. Since 7 'WTC was not struck by anything
and it collapsed so perfectly, as if in
a controlled demolition, I believe that this was necessary and had been
planned in advance with the express
intent of destroying the electronic equipment needed to make the precise maneuvers necessary to
get the airliners to hit the buildings.
In
law enforcement parlance, that was a task that required
“eyeballs.'' Leaving that
equipment behind was too risky. Attempting to get the equipment out
unseen in the middle of that kind of emergency would
have been stupid. Someone might have questioned why equipment was being loaded
onto trucks as people were running for their lives. A cop might have seen the
activity as looting and made a log
entry. The equipment might have been seized or photographed. Ergo, the
requisite demolition charges would have been in place well before the attacks
occurred, and the equipment would have vanished with the
building.
In that context l cannot help but mark how convenient it was that John . ' O'Neil1 was occupied the night before the attacks,
having drinks until 2:30 in the morning, well past the time when, given his
now-famous sense that something “big'' was coming soon he might conceivably have
dropped by for an unannounced inspection. Remote control technology for
commercial aircraft is fairly common. However one particular company stands out
in this area and is noteworthy for one of its executives, Dov Zalcheim. Independent
journalist Cheryl Seal, writing in New Zealand's Scoop Media, is obviously aware
of the interrelationships between economics, covert operations, and geopolitics.
What l have read of her analysis is cogent, clear, and in my opinion,
pretty much right on the money.
She wrote; CONCLUSION: The plane was
remotely controlled by a command transmitter system, at least in the
final minutes. There was an explosive device on board, which was detonated
immediately before impact,
probably remotely controlled as well. The timing,
trajectory, etc., may have been a software program of some sort that could have
worked this out to the millisecond. The plane's own transponder would have had
to have been turned off so that its operation would not interfere with a second
transponder placed aboard by the perpetrators - a transponder designed to pick
up the signal of a command system transmitter operated somewhere in the area. Or
of course, the plane's own transponder was not actually
off - it was just changed to a new
setting. In any case, turning the transponder off would not have helped the hijackers to hide from
the battery of sophisticated radars encircling DC so this motivation (hiding
from radars) does not make any sence. Here is a
description of an advanced, ''fully mobile'' CTS built by System Planning Corp.,
the CEO of which is Bush's undersecretary of defense and long time Texas pal
Dov Zakheim.
I could not find any records confirming
that Zakheim had been the CEO of System
Planning Corporation. However, a bio posted at the website of the office of the
undersecretary for defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer says of
Zakheim that he came to the Pentagon in May of 2001
just prior to the attacks and ''Most recently, he was corporate vice president
of System Planning Corp. a technology, research and analysis firm based in
Arlington, Va.''
A quick trip to the SPC website confirmed
that the company is engaged in projects including Homeland Security,
Intelligence and Advanced Concepts, Advanced Technology, Signatures and
Electronic Warfare Technology, Radar Physics, Counterterrorism, Emergency
Management, Biowarfare, and Communications
Networks.
The SPC website also contains the
following statement:
SPC and TriData have supported crisis and emergency response
planning for all levels of the federal government and for state and local
(county and city) fire and police departments.
We developed the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) family of plans (the Federal Emergency Response Plan
and Continuity of Operations (COOP) Plan to guide federal responses to national
emergencies. We have developed and conducted exercises to test responses to
natural and wartime emergencies including hurricanes, nuclear power plant
accidents and chemical/biological events.
TriData has developed executive training models
to address a wide array of threats, including industrial espionage ' and
terrorism. . SPC also plays a key role in planning and executing wartime
exercises.
Exercise Planning and
Training
· Federal, state, and local exercise support
·
Federal exercise development and
planning
·
State
and local exercise training systems
Since 1980 SPC and TriData have provided comprehensive emergency
management and support to US federal, state, and local
governments; to county and city fire and police departments; to international
governments; and to private industry. Our experience spans the range of
all-hazards emergencies, large and small, and includes disaster preparedness and
response planning, documentation, training, and exercise; mitigation support;
and post-disaster analysis and reporting. SPC and TriData have relevant experience and staff who are
knowledgeable in exercise support relating to acts of terrorism, including
threats at four levels;
·
Predictable -- bomb threats
·
Probable -- bombing attempts, computer
crime .
·
Possible -- hostage taking
·
Catastrophic --aerial bombing, chemical
agents in wafer supply or air conditioning
When it comes to remote control technology
for the piloting of commercial aircraft, SPC offers (the appropriately named) Flight Termination
System.
System Planning Corporation is proud to
offer the Flight Termination System (FTS), a fully redundant turnkey range
safety and test system for remote control and flight termination of airborne
test vehicles. The FTS consists of SPC'S Command Transmitter System (CTS) and
custom
control, interface, and monitoring subsystems.
The system is fully programmable and is flexible enough to meet the changing and
challenging requirements of today's modern test ranges.
The FTS is generally deployed in one of
two configurations: Multi-site System: a network of multiple CTS units spread
over a large geographic area Multi-control System: multiple operator consoles
sharing control of a single CTS unit Multi-site System
Because many installations require several
remote CTS units that can be controlled from eithcr
the remote site or a centralized site, the FTS has been developed to control a
fully redundant automated network of transmitters. The system can be configured
to operate a single local site or with up to eight remote sights over an
extended range. Each CTS unit may be controlled locally (manually), or as a part
of the larger FTS system. The fully redundant central control unit
also supports either manual or automated modes of operation. One of F'TS's major strengths is its flexibility. A fully programmable command library of mission-specific commands in
addition to the required Command Destruct
sequence.
Multi-Control
System
FTS also allows
missions to be run simultaneously with a single CTS unit. In this mode, multiple
operator stations share control of the transmitter unit. The FTS control
software ensures that the multitasking of the CTS unit is performed seamlessly
and is completely transparent to the operators .
Dov Zakheim
resigned as the DoD's chief
financial officer in May of 2004. A current bio on him from the SPC website
reveals even more interesting information.
Dov S. Zakheim is Corporate Vice President of System
Planning
Corporation
(SPC), a high-technology, research , analysis, and
manufacturing firm based in
From 1985 until
March 1987, Dr. Zakheim was Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Planning and Resources. In
that capacity, he played an
active role in the Department's system acquisition and strategic planning
processes and guided Department of Defense policy in a number of international
economic fora. He also successfully negotiated a number of arms negotiation
agreements with various us allies....
Dr. Zakheim is also a trustee of the Foreign Policy Research
Institute; serves on the Board of Directors of Search for Common Ground, and of
Friends of the Jewish Chapel of the United States Naval Academy; and is a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations and other professional organizations. Dr.
Zakheim is a member advisory boards of the center for
Security Policy, the Initiative for Peace and Cooperation in the Middle East,
and the American Jewish
Committee.
A check of the SEC website shows no filing
for System Planning Corporation,
which suggests that the company is privately owned; and the corporate
website, for the information it offers, does not disclose the identities of the
corporation's board of directors.
As you may recall, we talked about Zakheim in Chapter l Zakheim
has close ties to the Israeli government and, as we saw earlier. was the chief financial officer of a
Although the ''loss'' of that money did
not occur on his watch, the reporting of at least $2 trillion of that missing
money occurred while he was there, and he made no accounting of it during his
tenure except to acknowledge that it was missing.
Zakheim was also a signatory on PNAC'S report
''Rebuilding America's Defenses.''
Choreographing disaster;
I believe that on the day of September
11th, while FAA and NORAD responses were paralyzed and confused by an unknown
number of wartime exercises involving inserted radar blips and live-fly
exercises, there were also contained within those drills an unknown number of
commercial airliners (possibly surplus) being piloted by remote control. It
would have been easy to manipulate the transponder codes.
It was a shell game. We can still discern
the guilty parties. This raises the possibility that one or more of the actual
commercial airliners were taken over electronically, diverted into a wargame exercise, possibly over the ocean, and maybe even
shot down by pilots who believed they were destroying empty drones. However, in
the cases of Flights 11 and 175, I tend to believe that these were the real
airliners. Excellent research by a German independent journalist using the name
Woody Box, however, raised Another far more interesting
possibility. In looking at what happened to Delta's Flight 1989, believed to
have been a fifth hijacking, Box discovered that the Cleveland airport was
mysteriously shut down, and that two airliners (instead of the reported one)
landed there on the morning of September 11th.
Reporting on the website of INN World
Report, Box wrote:
This article will
prove that not one, but two planes made an emergency landing in Cleveland - in
close succession. The proof is based on local newspaper and radio reports from
September l lth and 12th (mainly from the Akron Beacon
Journal and the Cleveland Plain Dealers, statements of eyewitnesses and Internet
postings in the morning of 9/1 l (people were listening to the radio and
immediately submitted the breaking news to the net). One of the flights was
indeed Delta 1 989.
We don't know the
identity of the other one, so we call it et/light
X''....
We start
with a short summary of the events in Cleveland. At 10 a.m., the airport was
evacuated. Without doubt. this
had to do with ' the rumors that a hijacked plane was going to land. The
passengers had to leave the airport but were not allowed to take their cars.
They had to walk or get a ride at the highway. Busses were not allowed to leave
the airport. People around the airport were told to go home. It was a very tense
situation. These facts are undisputed.
Cleveland Mayor Michael 'White held a
televised news conference at l l a.m., after the
emergency landing. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer he said there
was an unconfirmed report that the plane might have been hijacked or was
carrying a bomb. But in the middle of the news conference, he reported that it
had not been hijacked, and later in the day he said no bomb had been found. This
was not the only detail that changed in the course of the day. In the morning
White said that air controllers could hear screaming on the plane. In the
afternoon, he didn’t mention the screams anymore.
We will now examine several
parameters of the emergency landing.
1. The moment of landing;
2. The begin (sic) of the evacuation of
the passengers;
3. The number of passengers;
4. The place the passengers were
interviewed after the evacuation;
5. The exact location of the grounded
plane.
We will
see that there are two different data for every parameter, suggesting that we
are dealing with two different planes. We will omit the ''a.m.'' because it's clear that
everything is happening in the morning.
1.
The moment of landing
AP and two Ohio
newspapers report a landing at 10:45 (lA). However,
Delta Airlines has registered 10:10 as the landing time, and Cleveland
firefighters can confirm that the landing took place before
10:30.
. (lB). Because Delta Airlines did not
loose the track of its plane, the 10:10 plane was surely Delta
1989.
So the 10:45
plane is - by definition - Flight X.
The Akron Beacon
Journal writes in an extra edition from 9/1 1 that the passengers were released
from the plane at 1 1:1 5. This is confirmed by Internet postings describing the
events in real-time (2A).
However, a
passenger from Delta 1989 relates that she had to stay more than two hours in
the plane before the FBI started to search it and took the passengers away for
questioning. The Plain Dealer has I learned about a [sic] evacuation
time of 12:30, confirming the witnesses statement. (2B). Thanks to the most
valuable statement of the passengers, we can conclude that Delta 1989 landed at
10:10 and was evacuated at 12:30. Flight X landed at 10:45 and was evacuated at
11:15
3. The number of passengers
The first press
reports tell us that the plane carried 200 passengers. Mayor White mentioned
this number on his 1
This is confirmed
by later reports - the story changed quickly. Now, 69 passengers have been
released from the plane, going well with the “60 or so'' (3B). We can conclude that Delta 1989
landed at 10:10, the 69 passengers being evacuated at 12:30. Flight X landed at
10:45, the 200 passengers being released at l l :
15.
4. The place the passengers were
interviewed after the evacuation
.
The [sic] most
reports say that the passengers were brought into a near-by NASA facility (4A).
This is the NASA Glenn Research Center, located
near the west end of
the airport. It was already evacuated. The passenger of Delta 1989 however tells
us that she was taken into a “secure building at the airport.'' This is
confirmed by a report that the Delta 1989 passengers were interviewed in the FAA
headquarters. (4B). ' Surely the FAA headquarters is not located in the NASA
facility. We can conclude
that Delta 1989 landed at 10:10, and at 12:30 the 69 passengers were taken into
the F.AA headquarters. Flight X landed at l0:45, and at 1 1: l 5 the 200 passengers were taken into the evacuated NASA
Center.
5. The exact location of the plane.
This is the final
proof that we have to do with [ie, we are dealing
with] two different planes. Both planes were sitting on a runway, but miles away
from each other. One plane was at the west end of runway 28/10 near the NASA
center (point 10 in the map). This is confirmed by Associated Press and an
eyewitness (5A) The other plane was sitting at the
south end of runway 18/36 near the I-x-center (point 36), also confirmed by two
eyewitnesses (5B). The geographic conditions on the airport suggest that the
passengers at the west end were taken to the NASA Center and the passengers at
the south end to the FAA headquarters.
The question almost asks itself Was Plane X Flight 77? Was it Flight 93) There were even reports that Flight 93 was confirmed to have landed at Cleveland's airport, which I did not have time to chase down. (1 can't do everything.) I have no doubt that Flight 93 (or an aircraft posing as Flight 93) was shot down however. Engines from a Boeing 757 do not bounce for long distances through the air after the direct impact of a nosedive. Nothing bounced at the Pentagon. There wasn't even any recognizable debris except for a very small piece of metal that happened to be painted with the right colors. No tail section. No cockpit. No seats lying about. No suitcases. There were too many witnesses to the fact that a debris trail from 93 was scattered over miles; something that could only have happened from a mid-air explosion. There were too many witnesses placing both military and civilian'' aircraft close to it. There were too many witnesses who reported that they saw missiles in the air.
Imagine the reaction if
cameras had filmed a completely empty airliner landing by itself without any
opportunity for statements from the passengers? The order stands! Shoot it down!
These are all speculative questions that do not distract me from the issue of guilt or a world that is
exploding around a11 of us.
With the crash of Flight 93 the Rubicon
had been crossed once and for a11.
And now, for all of the physical evidence fanatics who have dogged me for
two years and who have lacked a courtroom wherein they could battle to their
conclusive “proof” l offer this:
For a long time
1 have not believed that the WTC towers collapsed was a result of the impacts. l
said from the first days after 9/1 1 that I had too much experience with the way
physical evidence could be manipulated, even inside a courtroom, to waste my
time arguing claims that couldn' t be proven as
thoroughly and convincingly as the ones I have proven here. 'While l cannot tell
the general public, or you who have made so many excellent cases for your
positions, how the buildings were brought down, l can certainly now point you to
a likely suspect for the requisite studies of what would be required to do it.
l found it in a footnote to the Kean Commission report.
1 . For the WTC s layout, see Port Authority
diagrams, World Trade Center Concourse Level,'' Concourse Level'' and ''Plaza
Level '' undated. For the number of square feet of office see Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) report, World
Center I Building Performance Study '' undated. For the number of
workers and passersby, see Port Authority briefing (May 13,
2004).
For the dimensions, see
FEMA report, "World Trade Center Building Peformance
Study '' undated. In
addition, the outside of each tower was covered by a frame of l4-inch-wide steel
columns; the centers of the : steel columns were 40
inches apart. These exterior wails bore most of the weight of the building. The
interior core of the buildings was a hollow steel shaft, in which elevators and
stairwells were grouped. Ibid.
For stairwells and elevators, see Port
Authority response to Commission interrogatory, May 2004.15
As I close this book and end my arguments to you I want to thank a dedicated and meticulous 9/ l 1 researcher named Mark Robinowitz.
(And finally) Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Richard
Cheney is the maestro.
Richard Cheney spoke to whom he needed to
speak to while the nation's defenses foundered.
I also suspected that General Richard
Myers and the NMCC'S Deputy Director of Operations, General Winfield, were
actually in the PEOC running the wartimes as the attacks began. Thanks to Major
Don Arias, we know that Vigilant Warrior was a Joint Chiefs' live-fly exercise
being conducted on the morning of 9/1 1. Richard Clarke left so many breadcrumbs
in his book. None was more amusing or easily understood than the following
passage:
On one screen I could see the Situation
Room. I grabbed Mike Fenzel. ''How's it going over
here?'' I asked.
lt's fine,'' Major Fenzel whispered, "but l can't hear the crisis conference
because Mrs. Cheney keeps turning down the volume on you so she can hear CNN. .
. and the Vice President keeps hanging up the open line to
you.”
This would explain why, even after Richard
Clarke reported that Cheney had complained about the communications in the
Presidential bunker, Clarke could I say, “I was amazed at the speed of the
decisions coming from Cheney and, through him, from Bush.'' I believe that Dick Cheney also had the
ability using evolutions of the PROMIS software, to penetrate and override any
other radar computer or communications system in the government.
I have placed before you a number of
additional persons of interest who I also believe played a role in this crime. I
have identified others who most certainly have a lot of explaining to do. As to
the guilt of all of these people, you must decide. It is also up to you to
decide whether or not any further investigations will be conducted, whether they
will have the force of law, or whether what you decide will be enforced after
you decide it.
There is no statute of limitations on
murder.
There is another good reason why you
should take to heart the case l have made and explore it thoroughly. For six
years, since I sent out the first 68 copies of From
The Wilderness, I and all of the wonderful
people who write for FTW; have been telling you what was going to happen, long
before it did happen.
Dale Allen Pfeiffer told you about Peak
Oil, about natural gas shortages, about what Peak Oil and Gas means to our food
supply. Today those issues are all over the mainstream print and Internet media,
and the facts are pouring in with confirmation of Dale's
insights.
Eight months before the Iraqi invasion,
retired Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff a former instructor at West
Point, warned the world that an invasion of Iraq would turn out exactly as it
has today. His 2002 prediction is uncanny for its description of the current
tragedy. As we approach our 1,000th American military death in Iraq; as lraq is being flooded with arms merchants eager to supply a
puppet regime; as heroin is sold on Baghdad's streets; and as endless thousands
of Iraqi citizens are killed or
maimed, the fulfillment of Stan's prescient warning evokes deep-seated grief and
horror in me.
I told you four months before the first presidential primary that John
Kerry
would be the Democratic nominee in 2004. For more than two years I
have predicted accurately where conflict would spread, how, and why. And for
more than , two years l have described, in several stories, a battle among the
factions of the American state and a behind-the-scenes move by the CIA (Wal1
Street) to remove the nee-cons, which is coming to a head as this book is
published. Why? Because the nee-cons are bad for
business.
Before it became the
subject of a federal grand jury which has resulted in George W Bush and Dick
Cheney hiring criminal defense attorneys, I said that the administration's outing of a
covert CIA officer named Valerie Plame - and the
forged documents which the entire administration used to make the American
people fear a nuclear-tipped Saddam - would be among the means by which the
nee-cons were taken down. It's not Bush they want out as much as it is
Cheney. George W Bush is a mentally
ill ''empty suit.''
There are dozens more instances where I,
and all the people who have made FTW, have been far ahead of events. Why?
Because we have the right map, and we are reading it. I have tried to
give it to you. Read it. If not for your own sake, then are for the sake of the
generations in front of us who face a world of war, with no energy and no food;
a world of economic collapse and brutal conflicts; a world which is being
governed, quite literally by madmen. Disregard what l present to you here at your own peril.
Just as the Founders performed a
fundamentally personal responsibility as ethical human beings when they
contemplated, planned, and organized the American republic, responding to the
current crisis is your own personal responsibility. You cannot pass the buck. My
greatest fear is that my readers will pass the buck anyway, but there is no one
and nothing to take it from you. Fortunately there are many who are not fleeing
into denial and they, acting on their own or in small communities, are beginning
even now to prepare for what lies ahead. Their numbers are growing faster than I
can imagine. We are not alone.
lf you decide that you want to change
things, I am telling you right now that you will change nothing until you change
the way money works.
Looking into the future 1 see small (but
very real) reasons to hope. Four states and more than 340 cities and counties in
the US have passed resolutions opposing the Patriot Act. In August 2002 the
House of Representatives passed a resolution saying that, no matter what threat
or attack takes place, the 2004 presidential election should take place. (Who
will count the votes and how they will be counted is another matter).
And my beloved and much admired friend
Cynthia McKinney defeated five challengers in a July 2004 primary with 51
percent of the vote to secure the nomination for her old seat in Congress. She
is virtually certain to retake ' that seat in the 4th District of Georgia while
retaining her seniority from five previous terms and she will not be silent. !
You are reading this book.
It may not sound like much, but it will
hopefully prove to be more than we think. Great things are accomplished from
humble beginnings, and unlike oil, courage is a limitless and renewable
resource.
You will make your decisions in the
deepest places where you live. If there is anything that I want you to
understand, it is that as a species and as a planet we, have reached a point of
self-imposed crisis that can neither be postponed nor evaded. That crisis and
the values with which it is addressed are matters of life or
death.
But they are also even more than that: the
crisis and our response will constitute, for good or evil, an open and
monumental testament that fully and finally reveals our most fundamental nature.
It will be a validation of what humanity's deepest priorities really are. If the
best we can do for our tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution is to
destroy our planet and then ourselves, then perhaps we do not deserve to
survive.
Human beings have explored outward to the
limits of this planet in search of resources and understanding and experience.
We have peered deep into boundless space by sending probes billions of miles
away, even beyond the outer planets of the solar system. We also explore
backwards in time, extrapolating the sublime mysteries of Big Bang cosmology
and theoretical physics. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars and lifetimes
of intellectual passion on archaeological digs to find the earliest ancestors of
our bodies and of our human mind.
But that mind is readily seduced toward
astonishing feats of domination and cruelty. The combination of bureaucracy,
technology and rationalized quantitative - measurement that built the great
industrial civilization of the past 200 years, also created the Nazi death
camps. There, efficiency and centralized control were as developed and refined
as their uses were depraved and vile. The same cold, administrative approach to
life that built the vast economies of the modern world is also preparing a
terrible solution to the collapse of those economies. In the Empire's vision,
love and art and religion and community are invisible; they count for nothing.
It is as if the human race existed only in a statistical dimension; a calculus
equation in need of a solution.
Distilled, all our pursuits essentially
ask just two simple questions: Who are we really? And why are we here? We have
been looking in the wrong places for our answers.
Let them that have ears listen. Let them
that have eyes see.