Monthly Archives: February 2020

•

The text of the agreement is found at the State Department website, https://www.state.gov/agreement-for-bringing-peace-to-afghanistan/#.Xlpr9-JuAQw.twitter and is titled "Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan."

The text of the agreement can be found at https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Agreement-For-Bringing-Peace-to-Afghanistan-02.29.20.pdf

The relevant portions of the agreement are quoted below:

PART ONE

The United States is committed to withdraw from Afghanistan all military forces of the United States, its allies, and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel within fourteen (14) months following announcement of this agreement, and will take the following measures in this regard:

II A. The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will take the following measures in the first one hundred thirty-five (135) days:

1) They will reduce the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to eight thousand six hundred (8,600) and proportionally bring reduction in the number of its allies and Coalition forces.

2) The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all their forces from five (5) military bases.

B. With the commitment and action on the obligations of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban in Part Two of this agreement, the United States, its allies, and the Coalition will execute the following:

1) The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will complete withdrawal of all remaining forces from Afghanistan within the remaining nine and a half (9.5) months.

2) The United States, its allies, and the Coalition will withdraw all their forces from remaining bases

Of course, this agreement doesn't guarantee that peace will come to Afghanistan and that all U.S. troops will be withdrawn. But it's a good start, just like the agreement between North Korea and the US in 2018 at the Singapore Summit, which significantly reduced tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

IMHO those who criticize this agreement are haters and warmongers. Recall that certain media outlets castigated the agreement with North Korea, calling it a sham and that the US had made an agreement with a leader (Kin Jong Un) with a poor human rights record. This criticism was silly because North Korea, as everyone knows, is a proxy state of China. When President Xi sneezes, Kim Jong Un has to cover his head. (It is interesting that since the summer of 2019, when China had its outbreak of "swine flu" that resulted in the destruction of half of the country's pig population, and soon after that the outbreak of coronavirus, no saber-rattling from North Korea has been heard. Perhaps Xi and the CCP have more urgent things to attend to.)

Trump is the most unlikely of peacemakers, most likely because he's a businessman and not a politician. He sees an opportunity to save money by getting our troops out of a country known for its internecine warfare between competing Afghan factions. It's about time! This war has gone on for over 18 years and the expenditure of over a trillion dollars.

I don't care whether Trump has his heart in the right place or not. Reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and in Afghanistan are important advancements for world peace.

It remains to be seen whether haters and warmongers will sabotage the Taliban agreement. But it's a good first step.

•

An event of historical significance has occurred with the release of the corona virus in Hubei Province in central China. The origin of the virus is unknown; some say it came from animals (bats) and then jumped to human carriers. Some say it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research institute administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This is the only biosafety level 4 laboratory in mainland China, built by the French in 2015, and it is located in Wuhan city. Then there’s this:  https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/dont-buy-chinas-story-the-coronavirus-may-have-leaked-from-a-lab/

There is evidence that the number of corona cases in China is being under-reported: https://www.theepochtimes.com/leaked-documents-reveal-chinas-shandong-province-faked-coronavirus-infection-data-real-numbers-up-to-52-times-higher_3251354.html

If you know where to look you can see vids of people literally collapsing on the streets of Wuhan from the virus (this occurred last week). There’s a massive effort by the Chinese Communist Party and those who sympathize with them to minimize the impact of the virus. Minimizing the effect of the virus isn’t a bad thing because it prevents people from panicking and co-creating a negative future. But ignoring a problem isn’t a solution.

Let’s just say that the spread of the corona virus is a marker in the battle between dark and light. It’s another wild card, like the election of Trump. A wild card is an unexpected event or situation that affects large numbers of people. As of Feb 25th the virus has spread to 31 countries. In Italy, half of the industrial production of the country is offline now. The Catholic Church has suspended religious rituals throughout the country. Today, Feb 26, A senior CDC official is warning that Americans should prepare for an increase in the spread of the new coronavirus disease. The CDC is distributing test kits to state and local labs. Meanwhile, the number of infections is sharply increasing in Italy, Iran, and South Korea.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-official-warns-americans-prepare-for-community-spread-of-new-coronavirus_3250191.html

The New York Times reports that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan asked all of the country’s schools to close for a month to help contain the spread of the coronavirus.

The purpose of this blog isn’t to alarm anyone. However, when a wild card occurs people should be informed. By the time you read this, hopefully, the spread of the virus will have slowed or halted altogether.

“Tens of thousands of people die in the US every year from the flu,” you say. “Stop spreading propaganda and trying to scare people.”

Well, let’s talk about the economic impact of the virus then. Within the last thirty years, the world economy has gone to globalist “just-in-time” manufacturing, much of it centered in China. Chinese factories have not reopened (yet) after the Chinese New Year because of the corona virus, so supply chains all over the world are being stressed. This is affecting the production of pharmaceutical products like antibiotics, and many other industries. https://www.theepochtimes.com/coronavirus-hits-supply-chains-saps-us-business-activity_3247352.html.

In Italy (at the time of this writing) 50% of the manufacturing base of the country has been shut down due to concerns about the virus. The Catholic Church announced on Feb 24 that religious events throughout the country have been cancelled. Here in Michigan, the state is monitoring over 300 persons. (https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/02/23/hundreds-in-michigan-being-monitored-due-to-coronavirus/ )

The importance of this wild card virus is that even though it is spreading, it has largely affected only one country: China. China is the source and the Chinese people have been most severely affected. China is the last major country in the world with a communist government. As I explained in a previous blog post, communism is simply fascism with another name. The Chinese people have been laboring under this totalitarian system since 1949, as the Russian people did from 1917-1991. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their military enforcement branch, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) have lost respect within the country, and now in the world, for their attempt to suppress information, to deny that anything was wrong, and their delay in halting the spread of the virus, allowing it to spread outside China.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-internal-reports-on-coronavirus-response-our-main-priorities-are-controlling-public-opinion-social-stability_3253554.html

The corona virus could be the beginning of the end for the communist leadership in China. This would be another blow to the dark army on earth.

The emperor, President Xi, may have lost the mandate from heaven. When the virus runs its course and the Chinese people take an assessment of their leadership, the CCP and the PLA may be found sadly wanting in integrity and competence. For China, the effect of the corona virus resembles the periodic, widespread famines that have occurred over the country’s 5,000-year history. The resilient, hardworking people of China understand this.

Could democracy come to this great nation of 1.4 billion, as it is now thriving in the great nation of India, with its 1.2 billion people?  That is an inspiring thought to me. Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the recent election in India with over 600 million votes out of 800 million cast. 800 million votes cast! That is close to three times the population of  the United States. It took weeks for the votes to be counted. Much of it was by hand, on paper ballots, but the votes were tabulated honestly.

Here in the United States, we can learn a lot about democracy from India.

One of the reasons Trump went to India was to cement the relationship between the world’s two greatest democracies. The images and speeches from these meetings between Modi and Trump, and the reception of the U.S. president by the people of India, are inspiring (despite the U.S. media’s complete failure to cover it). Sure, the two leaders signed a military agreement, and the trip was partly for geo-strategic reasons (to counter the influence of China), but the outpouring of love and affinity at these meetings was inspiring. I’m all for anything that advances the cause of world peace – even if Trump is doing it.

One thing is for sure: the global capitalists, who took factories and jobs out of the US and exported them to China (looking for the cheapest labor) are thinking twice about their investments now that their supply chains are being cut. Nothing is more influential to hedge fund managers, bankers, and capitalists than money. Their shortsighted decision over the past 20 years to go for short term profit at the expense of their own people is coming back to bite them.  

The light is winning over the dark, which is being exposed more and more every year.  The spread of the corona virus is shining light on the corrupt practices of corporate capitalism and state-owned corporate communism, both in Asia and in the West. Greed and a lack of humanity, whether it be capitalist or communist, must ultimately fail. Integrity will win the day as the consciousness of humanity slowly rises and people wake up.

2020 is the year when eyes will be opened all across the planet. It’s already begun!

•

I grew up Catholic. In religion class I was told that I had a soul. I always wondered what this was and where it was. I wondered why it was considered separate from me. Eventually I concluded that I didn’t care about something that wasn’t me.

“If you sin your soul will be tainted,” a nun told me once. “Your soul won’t go to heaven.” 

“Sure, but what about me?” I asked. “That’s great for my soul, but what happens to me after I die?”

I never got a satisfactory answer to that.

Over the decades I meditated and visualized and tried to find my connection to Spirit. It’s only recently (when I wrote my book The Old Soul) that I twigged on what those nuns were trying to tell me. (I don’t think they understood it either. It’s what happens when you perform a ritual or repeat dogma without any understanding.)

For some reason there is a physical universe and an angelic realm. Materialists never understand this distinction because they believe that when you die, you’re dead. This low consciousness belief I call the Man is Meat Theory of Life: When the body dies your consciousness disappears from the universe forever. Uh, no.

The point of life is to get beyond these childish ideas and to find the higher self; to understand your personal connection to God/Spirit. Materialists (fascists, communists, Nazis, dictators of every stripe) don’t understand this. When they come to power they tear down churches and religious buildings in an attempt to prevent the people from finding their connection to the divine.

What exists in the angelic realm? Souls. Souls are non-corporeal consciousness that yet have personalities. Personalities develop because of the experiences gained while incarnating in the physical universe. Joe is meek and mild, Karen is boisterous, Pete is sensitive, Mary is compassionate. These traits develop by living lives in various environments and cultures on earth. 

There’s only one problem: The body can’t contain the energy of the soul.

When you incarnate you have to leave most of your consciousness behind. The part left behind is the soul.

So, the soul actually IS you. The challenge in the material universe is to discover that.

According to various spiritual leaders, channellers, and gurus, the biology contains an esoteric component: a gateway to the angelic realm and the higher self. The more of your soul you can invite into your corporeal body, the healthier you are, and the more aware you become.

“Sounds pretty simple bro, so how about a formula or a twelve-step procedure to get there?”

Well, there’s another problem I forgot to mention. The soul exists in the angelic realm, which is (for want of a better world) multidimensional. It’s beyond the linear, 3D box we’re living in. Asking a question like “How do I do find my soul?” is unanswerable because it’s utterly personal. What works for one person may not work for another. There’s no twelve-step process because that’s a linear idea. The soul is non-linear.

The Divine Plan

I’m not bright enough to understand what the divine plan is. I used to think I did, but the wiser I get, the dumber I get. All I know is that when I connect to my soul for those brief moments, I feel more ME. I wish I could be connected that way 24 hours a day.

Apparently the physical universe is very, very important, for it allows Spirit/God to experience and thus develop divine personalities, or aspects, of Itself. When you go from a divine (soul) personality connected to God, and come to earth, you experience from a completely different and isolated POV. The body is a separate unit and so human consciousness always perceives from a unique perspective. All of us literally have a different angle on life. Geometrically speaking, we always occupy unique coordinates in time and space, even during the same event. That’s why ten different people will have ten different accounts of an accident.

When  human consciousness reunites with the soul at “death,” that unique perspective caries forward. “Death” is just that portion of your consciousness that inhabited the body, returning to the soul in the angelic realm. It’s a re-uniting of awareness.

A personality results from experiencing in the physical universe from unique coordinates in time and space. Maybe that’s why it’s so important. Otherwise reincarnation makes no sense to me. Why separate yourself from a place where everything is beautiful and filled with love in order to dumb yourself down and suffer in a physical body, where you try to attain that which you already are before you got here?

Yeah, I’ve heard the stuff about incarnating to earth to advance the vibration of the planet and the galaxy, but that’s a childish explanation. Explain to me what all the suffering is for?

“This is a planet of free choice and every soul chooses to come here and participate in a Great Experiment. Over thousands of years, humanity collectively made the choice to go to low consciousness. Now we’re working on cleaning up the mess we made.”

OK, that’s a little better. But why create a “planet of free choice” in the first place that has led to so much suffering?

There’s no good answer to that, other than, “Earth is the Wild Wild West. Only the most adventurous souls come here. Nobody forced you, so enjoy the ride. It’ll be over in 80 years and you can go back to Spirit.”

I can buy that. But it doesn’t have the sacredness I associate with a divine plan. What’s sacred about suffering?

“It feels so good when you stop doing it.”

Nah. I’ve learned that there’s no value or sacredness to experiencing anything negative. You don’t learn anything except that you don’t want to suffer any more. I learned that when I had a personal bout of suicidal depression some years ago. You don’t get brownie points for feeling bad.

The answer is that we’re not supposed to suffer. Suffering occurs when we put up barriers to our own divinity. That makes sense because we’re all responsible for the decisions we make. We are free to reject the programming given to us by parents and society. The earth experience  is a gigantic, magnificent test that we all wanted to take. It’s basically a game of hide-and-seek that we all choose to play. “Can I find myself even though the magnificent part of me is hidden?” When I look at life in that way I feel lighter.

One thing I’m certain of: If I can ever bond with my soul well enough I’ll have the answers to all of the esoteric questions about the meaning of life. (Then I won’t have to write blog posts like this, and I can give you all the answers.) For reasons I don’t understand, part of the Game on earth is to hide human consciousness from the soul, and to determine whether human beings are bright enough to see their spiritual component.

I’ve tried the intellectual and scientific route to discover the meaning of life. For me it just leads to enormous complexity as our scientific understanding broadens, and more and more data becomes available. That’s a good segue into a dream I had last night.

 My Dream

I dreamed that Bernie Sanders somehow won the Democratic nomination. He was debating Trump on a stage somewhere. The two candidates were throwing down on each other, and it was pretty nasty. Everybody in the audience was really into it, shouting when their guy made a point.

Then something happened to Bernie. He’s 78 years old, and had an incident with his heart last year. Bernie was firing back at Trump when his face went white and he stopped speaking. He started mumbling, “I can’t do this anymore, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The audience quieted. You could hear a pin drop in the place, wondering whether the old guy was going to drop over. I expected Trump to go over and wallop Bernie and declare victory. Instead, he walked slowly over to the older man with his arms apart. “Come, brother,” he said. “Let’s stop the fighting and try to work together despite our differences.”

Bernie recovered and stood up straight. He walked right into Trump’s arms and the two men hugged each other. “Come on,” Trump says, “let’s go backstage and get a doctor to look you over.”

The two men walked off the stage and the debate was over.

The media was silenced. For the first time in world history, none of the talking heads had anything to say.

That was the end of the dream. There was a really good feeling about it. The takeaway?  From something nasty, hopefully understanding and compassion for the other side will come forth. Maybe Bernie won’t win the nomination, but whoever the candidates are, understanding and compassion is what is needed.

•

Simone Gao interviews Steve Bannon

Update on the corona virus in China.

Governments around the world are finally coming to grips with the spread of the COVID-19d virus. Today the markets around the world were off sharply as investors and business people understand that the globalist system of just-in-time manufacturing -- much of it centered in China -- is threatening supply chains all over the world, from the production of pharmaceutical products like antibiotics to smartphones.

With Steve Bannon and Simone Gao. Skip the intro if you want, I always do. Start at 3:40

Of course they have to create drama with a headline, but there's some good info here.

•

What is emerging from the chaos of America’s ideological war between Democrats and Republicans is the emergence of a four-party system. Right now we have the establishment Republican Party, backed by wealthy corporate donors (the Mitt Romney’s and Mitch McConnells), the corporate Democrats led (still) by Hillary Clinton, who have turned to the $71 billion oligarch Mike Bloomberg to save them, the socialist-populists led by AOC and Bernie Sanders, and the nationalist-populists led by Donald Trump. These are four distinct factions; two of which are breaking away from the traditional Democrat-Republican two-party system.

This is all for the good, for the Dem-Rep system has completely broken down.

In this four-party system there can be leakage and coalitions between them. For example, Steve Bannon (former Trump campaign chief) suggests that an ideal ticket would be Trump as President and Bernie Sanders as Vice President. This ticket would have the advantage of including the two most dynamic representatives of the current political scene: the nationalist-populists and the socialist-populists. Although these two factions are diametrically opposed policy-wise, they contain almost all of the patriots in the US. By patriot I mean someone who wants the US to be as good as it can be, and who loves and supports their country and wants people to live successful lives.

The establishment-corporate factions are in it for themselves. These are the hedge-fund managers, the venture capitalists, the big banks and the billionaires and their sons and daughters who pimp the system for their own benefit without a care to what’s best for everyone. These are the people who got bailed out after 2008 to the tune of $3 trillion. The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve increased from about $800 billion in 2007 to over $4 trillion after all the “quantitative easing” and the infusion of cash from the Fed to bail out these elitists. These two factions are represented by the establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans.

Bernie and Trump represent the two most popular factions in the country. A Trump-Sanders ticket would be a great way to heal the deep political wounds that have been inflicted on the body politic over the past four years.

Could Trump and Bernie work together?

I don’t know but I think it’s worth a try.

Both Bernie and Trump want to withdraw troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. The opposition is what has been called the military-industrial complex, and the corporations who profit from war. Trump has necessarily had to build up the military in order to get the support needed within the military to end the endless wars. He and Bernie will be resolutely opposed by the Raytheons, the Booz-Allen Hamiltons, the Haliburtons,  the Mitres, the CIA and their regime-change foreign policy, and the war hawks in the Pentagon who profit from war. United, however, Bernie and Trump would be a formidable political force for peace.

Most of the rest of the world will support the withdrawal of US troops whole-heartedly. Those who don’t will identify themselves as warmongers.

The troops can come home and rebuild our infrastructure. It will be similar to FDR’s New Deal, where unemployed people were put to work building roads, bridges, and other infrastructure projects.

Despite their rhetoric both Trump and Bernie are patriots. They both want what is best for the country. Bernie would push for universal healthcare and free college education, which would be made possible by stopping the trillions misspent on endless war. Trump would get his infrastructure improvements and a focus on America first. Both Bernie and Trump have the same goals but don’t know it. I’d like to see a summit between the nationalist-populists and the socialist-populists to see if a deal could be worked out. The only enemies to such a deal are the warmongers, the haters, and the corporate elitists.

Delusional? Maybe. But we have to start somewhere. The populists on left and right should divorce themselves from the one-percenter elitist corporatists who couldn’t care less about the rest of us. The corporate Democrats are hard at work trying to steal the Democratic nomination from Bernie. Win or lose, I’d like to see Bernie and Trump combine forces. This way both populist factions will be united. Who would run on the other side? More than likely Hillary would run again, with VP Mike Bloomberg, representing the corporate elitists. A Hillary Clinton-Mike Bloomberg ticket would be the perfect representative for the corporatists.

Bloomberg has already spent almost $400 million on a nationwide blanket ad campaign. He’s worth $70 billion, a true American oligarch (Trump’s paltry $3.1 billion net worth, according to Forbes magazine, pales in comparison). He’s literally got billions to spend in an attempt to buy an election.

The 2020 election would be the populists versus the corporatists. I think Trump-Sanders would win in a landslide.