34. The ferocity of the November 04 assault on the citizens of Fallujah exceeded by far the 1937 Fascist bombardment of Guernica, but as yet no Picasso has emerged to immortalise the atrocity. While mainstream journos were a-bed with the perpetrators, it was left to freelancers and the bloggers to blow the gaff. (The terror-war mindset has turned us into what we're supposedly fighting against - http://www.richardneville.com/satire/satire030605.html).
35. The heads of Halliburton, Boeing, Bechtel and other defense giants are seated on the boards of corporate media. The Carlyle Group, an investment bank with a huge stake in the arms industry, graces the board of the New York Times. The Washington Post hosts Lockheed Martin, whose latest warhead "successfully demonstrates lethality against urban structures". Bombing the cities of Iraq does more for the corporate bottom line than publishing true accounts of the impact of the bombs.
36. Which is why to Western eyes, the nightly air strikes on Iraqi dwellings are invisible.
38. Both NBC and the Washington Post have board members who sit on the board of Coca Cola. The NY Times shares a board member with Pepsi, another board member with drug giant, Eli Lilly, another board member with Ford " and so on. So while the media has been dragged kicking and screaming to accept the likelihood of climate change, don't expect a feverish promotion of a carbon neutral lifestyle any time soon.
39. As Einstein pointed out, you can't solve serious problems with the same mind set that created them. You can't deal with climate change without experiencing a change of consciousness. We're already half way through the first decade of a new millennium, and our leaders are still stuck with a medieval mindset. And we're stuck with them. Meanwhile, many thousands of citizens have moved on from the Newtonian view of the world, with its focus on certainty, dualism, us-against-them, good-against-evil. A post-modern age requires a fluid sense of strategy, deep empathy, the acceptance of multiple stories. It seeks from leaders a way of coping with paradox, a flair for handling complex projects in surreal environments, an understanding that holistic thinking matters more than spin, trickery and photo ops. While such a mind shift is gathering speed at the grass roots, the mentally decrepit "survival of the fittest" war-horses at the top are trying to quell the new awakening with the age-old strategy of invoking FEAR. It is a strategy that comes easy, as their own demons rise up to haunt them, and they desperately seek to unloaded their terror. But the global mind shift required for a sustainable future is underway, and grass-roots groups are cleaning up waterways, reforming third world aid, shining a light on injustice. Their rallying cry becomes ever more relevant: "Another World is Possible. Let us build it."
40. Among these activists was Nkosi Johnson the heroic South African AIDS sufferer who was asked, not long before he died, aged 12, what motivated him at such a young age and with such a debilitating illness to campaign so tirelessly for his fellow sufferers. His answer speaks for everyone: "Do what you can with what you have, in the time you have, and the place you are".
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