A coffee shop conversation about a Great Country in Historic Times. It seems there are many out there who believe in conspiracy theories and are all too quick to label and judge our leadership as evil. They are looking for conspiracy theories and people to blame, I suppose that is human nature? Unfortunately there are problems with conspiracy theories because they tear down trust. Regarding this post:
http://www.parthe.net/_cwg1203/00000028.htm
A reader writes in to discuss topics of Patriotism, conflict, investigations and America. First he writes:
“Mr. Winslow, I totally agree with much of your closing comments on that piece. I do feel efforts, and strength are concentrated towards better things and that many conspiracy theorists serve to counter the progress and goodness of our people; but are you asking them to just accept that it happened? I mean, not many will settle for the fact that men are evil and that we (our own govt.) may have had a hand in the demise of our own people? Thanks.”
Then this reply and thought was given on the subject:
“I am not condoning any foul play. If in fact there might have been, which I doubt. This country should not be destroyed even if their was some foul play. Chances are there was not. The issue is over, we must move on. What is wrong with giving your fellow countrymen the benefit of the doubt? I put up the entire list for those who wish to review it, I have. And there is a review going on already. I can also give you 1200 examples for every example of foul play in those articles. And mind you they are only articles and you can only believe half of what you read anyway. Why should we surrender our minds to the media hype of conspiracy? After all they write this stuff because it sells newspapers right? I cannot buy into it. There is no proof of conspiracy, if there were someone would have told someone and it would be all over the media. These sparsely written pieces are aimed at separating us as Americans, not uniting the team. Should we have destroyed the country after Dec. 7, 1941? Iran Contra? Watergate? Now 9-11? That is if 9-11 was really in the same category? I am happy, I like my country, I am with us. No matter what. What are your thoughts on the continuation of my debate?”
We agree to meet at a coffee shop and discuss this further. Our conversation continues as this gentleman continued:
“I agree. I am happy, I love this country as well. Together we are stronger…a house divided will always be weaker, and, yes too much attention is being put on debunked theories. But there will always be people who question everything without giving the gov’t. any leniency, and there will always be people who protest just for the sake pf protesting. Whatever they do it is important that there is someone who continually monitors and questions authority. Its a checks and balances thing that is important. For the most part, I am with you. What do you think of the current updates on the panel hearings??”
Then I reply: “I have not been watching, I have been following it on the radio. Sounds like a lot of Sound and Fury to me. Posturing, grandstanding and basically TV entertainment. We do have the capability of flying aircraft into buildings so one could always have suspicions. We have used drones for target practice for decades and UAV technologies, net-centric offensive attack now is available to take over systems of an entire squadron for various reasons so one could point to that. It is good to get it out in the open, but really this is an election year and doesn’t it just seem a little silly? We have other things to worry about. 9-11 as bad as it was for the American psyche, it was still only 3000 people, we have been known to kill that many in three-day weekend driving accidents. So we ought to put all this into perspective. 7 trillion dollars evaporating from the economy in the stock market is silly. Putting up more barriers and taking away rights of the people does not make any sense either. I can certainly understand if some people who have had close friends or loved ones feeling differently so I am not against the hearings at all really. I am totally fine with it. The truth should be heard and we as well as the families have a right to know. But if this is merely turning into a Bush Bashing event, I want no part of it and it ought to be shut down. There are 10 people on that panel of which some pretty strong willed characters, which promised to be non-partisan, well let us also hold them to that promise as well.”
We are Americans first. 9-11 sucks, there is nothing good about it. People died without any reason. We need to get to the bottom of it or have some reasons on this, for closure indeed. The government obviously should be held to the same standards they hold the Corporations and public too. We own the government, we should not be surrendering our freedoms to something we control. The government could use a little Atkins Diet you know? I fear they do not have the ability or understanding that the Blob is broke in so many departments and agencies. Having first hand knowledge of so much of what I have seen, I think we can do better than this. Using the 9-11 hearings to make a political statement is as sick as the thought of such a conspiracy in the first place. Which, again, I am not buying into that thought. Checks and balances are noble indeed. Interesting enough they mean little if not used in the proper context, because the checks and balances are being abused for the political will of less than ethical men. This would include those who grandstand, those in the media who write leading innuendo articles and those who use such issues as sound bites to run for political office. If the government makes a mistake they should admit it apologize, thank all Americans for paying their taxes and promise to be responsible with the power the people grant them and the money they are entrusted. They should be held accountable. They should concentrate on their number one job, protecting the people. This means to do whatever is necessary to do so. Whether it in advance of a problem or after one. The government should assist in promoting the flows of civilization, not putting up barriers to them to restrict the flows.
The government is owned by us, if we or a large percentage of us want an investigation, then get busy, get it done and let’s do it. But an investigation should not be a blame game like Donald Trumps, Apprentice. And if we were wrong let’s fix it. Without telling the whole world where we lack teeth. Quite frankly some things need to be out of the public. China has called us a paper tiger for years, are we to now agree with them and destroy the unity of America in the process, destroy the strength, will and confidence in our own system? If so how can we legitimately tell other countries to join us in free markets, adopt similar system of rule and order.
How can we stand on a podium to the world and dictate policy. If we destroy all we are and all we have built for something better, what is that something? Simply throwing stones with no solutions is not the answer, unfortunately I am not in charge, so the decisions are not for me to make. But we have come this far and it works so why destroy it now? Why attack it? We can have change without destroying the confidence in the World’s greatest powerhouse at a time when we enter a transition of becoming one united planet. If we keep our strength and integrity, then we can show the world that our system works best and it is the model to be used, if we cannot convince ourselves we will never convince a divided world, which even less united than us. And we should not try to allow our division of ideals of means to keep us from our end goal or allow us to be more divided than the rest of the world. I move we move on, lay down the law in Iraq and get tough as hell. Fix our own problems or challenges here, apologize where we have made mistakes, agree to move forward and deal with the real issues which plague mankind. For instance: Droughts, Food, nutrition, Disease, Education, Distribution, Common Stable currencies Clean Water, Energy, Transportation, Communication, Language and cultural barriers. Oh hell, I can think of a dozen more; and why not. Let’s get this show on the road already, what the heck are we waiting for? I agree that complaints without solutions are simply not good a good enough reason to entertain my thoughts. When I have a problem, I always work for a solution and we all should listen if someone has a better idea that solves more problems simultaneously than the linear decision making which comes from mass media hysteria, followed by ambitious men with less than ethical levels of integrity.
Those are our thoughts and you?”
“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/
Gene therapy is a new technique of treating ailments involving cancers, including pleural mesothelioma. It can be explained as the healing that utilizes hereditary materials or genes which will drive a protein in the microorganism or obstruct with the mixture of enzyme in a microorganism in order to care for a health problem. RNA are simple living items of genetics. They are sub-units of DNA that includes the direction for manufacturing proteins. These genes are located in the genes within the center of the bacterium. Pertaining to the Human Genome Project most of the RNA in homosapiens have been summarized. Humans have between 30,000 and 40,000 DNA strands. Whenever these genetic materials are altered either by transformation or by erasing, it might operate abnormally finalizing in carcinomas.
Investigation is underway to use genetic therapy to attempt to cure cancer likes mesothelioma cancer. RNA therapy targets either improving the capacity of the healthy cells to engage the cancer cells or directly destroy the cancer cells or stunt their growth. At present RNA therapy is just in clinical trials and presently it cant be utilized for treating health problems including carcinoma. It might take many years to learn if it does have a vital role in the caring of carcinomas of all kinds.
In DNA therapy genetic materials are implanted in to the target cells. The majority of the scientific testing are performed using protein 53. This genetic material is given the title of the Tumor suppressor gene. If this gene malfunctions, it could result in many different kinds of cancer like colon carcinoma, stomach carcinoma, esophageal cancer,, lung cancer, etc. In DNA therapy, this genetic material and other desired genetic material are introduced in to the target cells to prevent the growth of cancer.
The genes is usually integrated to the patients cells by these techniques: Microinjection of chromosomes into the cells and electropermeabilization. Genetic material transporters are given the title of a vector. The vector in most situations is a virus. These diseases are altered so that they do not create any illness in the person and hence cannot do harm. The mutation also forces the disease to reach the target cells. The vectors are chosen based on the specific information and requirements like how good they drive genetic materials to the cells that are recognizable and are able to infect, and whether they change the cells DNA forever or briefly.
At the start of the US involvement in WWII Joseph Campbell was put in the position of having to defend culture and truth rather than go along with the crazed nationalism and outright invasion of so many public institutions through all manner of propaganda. He ended up being accused of being a Nazi by many who should have known better. The Bollingen Foundation was backed by Mellon family money and it sought to establish an integrative disciplinary approach including the mystical precepts of Mircae Eliade and Carl Jung. It was a truly good effort that still brings culture and Brotherhood values through the many books they published. Their efforts at Eranos deserve close attention for any scholar seeking to understand the positive side of the old-money families or elites. I wonder if the Elite sometimes do demonstrate a beneficent paternalism when I see these good efforts. The speech that follows stands as true or truer today, than when he gave it to the ladies at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was a professor.
“Permanent Human Values
I have been asked to tell you what seem to me to be some of the important thingspermanently humanwhich men are likely to forget during hours of a severe political crisis.
Permanent things, of course, do not have to be fought forthey are permanent. We are not their creators and defenders. Ratherit is our privilege (our privilege as individuals: our privilege as nations) to experience them. And it is our private loss if we neglect them. We may fight for our right to experience these values. But the fight must not be conducted on a public battlefield. This fight must be conducted in the individual mind. Public conquerors are frequently the losers in this secret struggle.
Permanent things, furthermore, are not possessed exclusively by the democracies; not exclusively even by the Western world.
My theme, therefore, forbids me to be partial to the war-cries of the day. I respect my theme, and I shall try to do it justice. I am not competent to speak of every permanent human value. I shall confine myself, therefore, to those which have been my special disciplinarians: those associated with the Way of Knowledge.
Which of these are likely to be forgotten during the hours of a severe political crisis? All of them, I should say. I think that everything which does not serve the most immediate economic and political ends is likely to be forgotten.
I think, in the first place, that the critical objectivity of the student of society is likely to be forgotteneither forgotten or suppressed. For example: The president of Columbia University has declared that the present conflict is a war ‘between beasts and human beings, between brutal force and kindly helpfulness,’ Yet Columbia professors laboriously taught, during the twenties and thirties something about the duties of objective intelligence in the face of sensational propaganda: and no educated gentleman can possibly believe that the British Empire or the French Empire or the American Empire was unselfishly founded in ‘kindly helpfulness.’ without gunpowder or without perfectly obscene brutality.
It is not surprising, of course, that there should be a strain of opportunism in those public gentlemen who are in a position to tell the multitude what to think; but that our universitiesthose institutions which have plumed themselves in their dignified objectivityshould begin now to fling about the gutter-slogans of our newspaper cartoons, seems to be a calamity of the first order.
Perhaps our students must prepare themselves to remember (without any support for our institutions of higher learning) that there are two sides to every argument, that every government since governments began, has claimed to represent the special blessings of the heavenly realm, that every man (even an enemy) is human, and that no empire (not even a merchant empire) is founded on ‘kindly helpfulness.’
When there was no crisis on the horizon, we were told that objectivity was a good. Now that something seems to threaten our marketsor to threaten perhaps even more than thatwe are warned (and this by still another of our university presidents) that the real fifth-columnist in this country is the critical intellectual. What kind of leaders are these men, anyhow?snorting through one nostril about the book-burnings in Germany, wheezing through the other at critical intelligences in our own Republic?
In the second place we are in danger of neglecting the apparently useless work of the disinterested scientist and historian. Yet if there is one jewel in the crown of Western Civilization which deserves to take a place beside the finest jewels of Asia, it is the jewel cut by these extraordinary men. Their images of the cosmos and of the course of earthly history are as majestic as the Oriental theories of involution and evolution. But these images are by no means the exclusive creation, or even property, of democracies. Many of the indispensable works which you must read, if you are to participate in the study of these images, have not even been translated into democratic tongues. Let me say, therefore, that any serious student of history or science who permits the passions of this hour to turn her away from German is a fool.
Whatever may be the language for hemisphere defense, German, French and English are the languages of scholarship and science. (Biblio: At Sarah Lawrence, as at many schools and universities, German and Italian were being eliminated from the curriculum, as if somehow the boycott of the language would enforce some kind of sanction on the country or its political leaders. It was probably this practice Campbell was decrying.) German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Scandinavian, English, Irish, Polish, Russian, Swiss, Christian, Pagan, Atheist, and Jewish have been the workers in these spheres. Chauvinism has no place here. The work is international and human. Consequently, whenever there is a resurgence of the nationalisms and animalisms of war, scientist and scholar have to cork themselves tightly in. They are not anti-social parasites and slackers when they do this. It is with them that Western Culture, as opposed to Western Empire, will survive.
In the third place, the work of the literary man and the artist is in danger. We need not worry about the popular entertainer: he will be more in demand than ever. But we may worry about the artists of social satire: theirs will be a plight very like the plight of the objective social scientist. And we may worry about the creative writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians devoted to the disciplines of pure art. The philistine (that is to say the man without hunger for poetry and art) will never understand the importance of these enthusiasts. But those of you whose way of personal discipline and discovery is the way of the arts will understand that if you are to keep in touch with your own centers of energy, you must not allow yourself to be tricked into believing that social criticism is proper art, or that sensational entertainment is proper art, or that journalistic realism is proper art. You must not give up your self-exploration in your own terms. The politicians are such a blatant crew and their causes are so obvious that it is exceedingly difficult to remember, when they surround you, anything but the surfaces of life….
The artistin so far as he is an artistlooks at the world dispassionately: without thought of defending his ego or his friends; without thought of undoing any enemy; troubled neither with desire or loathing. He is as dispassionate as the scientist, but he is looking not for the causes of effects, he is simply lookingsinking his eye into the object. To his eye this object permanently reveals the fascination of a hidden name or essential form…
Now this perfectly well-known crisis, which transports a beholder beyond desire and loathing, is the first step not only to art, but to humanity. And it is the artist who is its hero. It cannot be said, therefore, that the artist is finally anti-social, even though from an economic point of view his work may be superfluous; even though he may seem to be sitting pretty much alone.
In the fourth place, the preaching of religion is in danger. God is the first fortress that a warlike nation must capture, and the ministers of religion are always, always, always ready to deliver God into the hands of their king or their president. We hear of it alreadythis arm-in-arm blood brotherhood of democracy and Christianity…
And how quick the ministers of religion are to judge the soul of the enemy; when the founder of their faith is reputed to have said: ‘Judge not, that you may never be judged.’ How quick they are to point at the splinter in the enemy eye, before they have looked for the plank that sticks in their own! ‘Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,’ is not the phrase for a political emergency. ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ is not the phrase for a political emergency… And perhaps it would be well to remember that even the inhabitants of the democracies were born with original sin on their souls: and that not even the President of the United States has any objective assurance that he is the vicar of Christ on earth.
We are all groping in this valley of tears, and if a Mr. Hitler collides with a Mr. Churchill, we are not in conscience bound to believe that a devil had collided with a saint (Biblio: This phrase was quoted out of context, with a predictably horrifying impact on modern sensibilities, in the New York Times article of 1989 on Campbell’s alleged bigotry.)Keep those transcendent terms out of your political thinkingdo not donate the things of God to Caesarand you will go a long way toward keeping a sane head.
I believe, finally, that education is going to suffer during the next few years, as it did during the last war. You will be tempted to forget that you are educating yourselves to be women: you will imagine that you are educating yourselves to be patriots. Primarily you are human beings; secondarily you are members of a certain social class. Primarily you are human beings; secondarily you are daughters of the present century. If you devote yourselves exclusively, or even primarily, to peculiarities of the local scene and the present moment, you will wonder, fifteen years from now, what you did with your education…
I would not say that the Way of Knowledge is the only way to human fulfillment: but it is a majestic way; it is a way represented by the innumerable sciences, arts, philosophical and theological systems of mankind. The final danger is not (let me repeat this emphatically in closing), the final danger is not that mankind may lose these things (for, if Europe and America were to be blown away entirely, there would remain millions and millions of subtly disciplined human beingswho might even feel relieved to see us go!). The great danger is that youunique youmay be tricked into missing your education.” (4)
I am such a fan of Mr. Campbell and there are so many things of his which I quote in different books that some think I am nuts about him. The facts he presents have been added to in the archaeological and linguistic or anthropological, so I really end up quoting more of his pure spiritual ecumenicism thoughts. But when a potential editor from my alma mater who had 14 years post secondary education and had been a professor commented about Campbell being a Nazi sympathizer - I lost interest in him. He also was stupid enough to suggest the Pyramids had nothing unknown to academia - RIGHT!!
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Author of Diverse Druids