Thursday, March 15, 2007

Is Time Speeding Up

Some people believe time is speeding up. This idea is based on observation that the difference between subjective and objective assessments of time have increased over the past decade. For instance, time seems to be flying by faster than ever, or what used to take several years to accomplish now seems to be taking place in just a couple. In the 2012 paradigm, this idea serves to correlate the prophesied dissolution of time with immediate personal observations. I believe two simultaneous phenomena are contributing to this perception.

The first is that there has been an ongoing reduction in novelty among trivial trends. This means an increase in routine and repetition in all things mundane, both personal and cultural. Television and internet have also become more deeply embedded in modern life, increasing the amount of time we spend being mentally asleep during the day, decreasing the quality and quantity of memories. Due to distraction, repetition, and routine, the recent past offers less memorable content to reflect upon and thus appears shortened. When consulting the calendar we therefore notice the days flying by.

The second is that there has been a simultaneous increase in novelty among spiritually significant trends. Rate of growth among receptive individuals in terms of awareness and emotional maturity is accelerating. You may have changed more in the past two years than you did in the five years before that. When more personal growth is crammed into a shorter amount of time, it appears that things have picked up pace and more ground is being covered more quickly.

The combination of “days flying by” and “having come so far in so few years” contributes to our perception that time is speeding up. These may both be symptomatic of the shift from 3D to 4D if we recognize that linear time is giving way to nonlinear time, that priorities are shifting from the trivial to the spiritual in accordance with the 2012 and related paradigms. Linear time is measured in increments of trivialities such as astronomical or atomic motions, while nonlinear time is delineated in increments of freewill progressions. With a shift of priorities, trivialities fade into a repeating background pattern while spiritual events (leaps in awareness and maturity) increase in their frequency and novelty, both of which lead to the perception that time is speeding up for different reasons.

We may extrapolate this accelerating trend into the future and conclude that in the end, linear time will mean nothing and nonlinear time will mean everything. Or to put it another way, trivialities and the calendar will cease to exist for us altogether while increments of spiritual progress and freewill choices will be the new standard.

There is another interesting trend worth noting, which is that the more recently a person awakens from programmed sleep and into the pursuit of truth, the more rapid his or her growth from that point onward. I know several people who started their paths in the 1960s and 70s, and it took them about two decades to complete the first pass of their research, to come full circle and finally see the bigger picture. My awakening began in 1993 and I did not reach that point until 2003, so about a decade. Those I know who began in 2001 reached it by 2004, so three years. Now I am coming across people who are doing it in under a year, sometimes just a few months.

Part of that trend is due to the increased availability, quality, diversity, and accessibility of information pertaining to matters of truth. Those of the 60s and 70s had books, newsletters, telephone, personal meetings and mail correspondence. Then came fax machines, personal computers, BBS networks, personal printing and photocopying. Then came easy duplication of storage media, the internet with its websites, forums, and radio shows, and now we have broadband internet, wifi spots, p2p filesharing and free video streaming. For all its downsides, recent technology has served to accelerate the awakening, albeit indirectly and at the risk of de-socialization.

Another factor behind that trend may involve the fact that it doesn’t matter when or how we start, but when and where we end up. In other words, it doesn’t matter that someone started early but took longer while another starts late and through some crash courses has reached similar levels of awareness. What matters is that when the time comes, people are on the same page and capable of carrying out what they came here to do, and so those who start late will indeed have to learn more quickly to be ready in time.

I think both the technological and metaphysical parts are related, the first serving the latter as part of some greater plan. And yes, I am aware that Ahrimanic/NWO forces are behind the flowering of technology, that the internet is the perfect device for profiling dissenters and so on, however the dark side takes a gamble with everything it does and risks having its means unexpectedly judo-flipped into accomplishing unintentionally positive ends.

Now if we project this trend into the future, we can see that there will be an increasing number of people awakening, and they will have to get with the picture quicker than ever, perhaps due to the simple spreading of awareness among those desperate for answers in increasingly desperate times. This suggests that demand will skyrocket along with the availability and quality of information, but supply can only meet demand if there are more sources available to provide it, more people refining and providing it. We cannot expect technology like the internet to stick around forever, and so dissemination of guidance and information may increasingly shift towards personal rather than technological methods.

In a practical sense, for us this means we would do well to initially become better educated on matters of truth and grow more skilled in communicating them. It is a good idea to become more streamlined, discerning, and capable of providing primary sources like books, websites, videos, etc… to the receptive when the occasion arises. Why? Both to increase our capacity to meet the potential future demand, and to presently act as a channel for synchronicity to trigger the awakening and empowerment of others.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Defective pumps used to protect New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS - The Army Corps of Engineers, rushing to meet President Bush’s promise to protect New Orleans by the start of the 2006 hurricane season, installed defective flood-control pumps last year despite warnings from its own expert that the equipment would fail during a storm, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The 2006 hurricane season turned out to be mild, and the new pumps were never pressed into action. But the Corps and the politically connected manufacturer of the equipment are still struggling to get the 34 heavy-duty pumps working properly.

The pumps are now being pulled out and overhauled because of excessive vibration, Corps officials said. Other problems have included overheated engines, broken hoses and blown gaskets, according to the documents obtained by the AP.

Col. Jeffrey Bedey, who is overseeing levee reconstruction, insisted the pumps would have worked last year and the city was never in danger. Bedey gave assurances that the pumps should be ready for the coming hurricane season, which begins June 1.

The Corps said it decided to press ahead with installation, and then fix the machinery while it was in place, on the theory that some pumping capacity was better than none. And it defended the manufacturer, which was under time pressure.

“Let me give you the scenario: You have four months to build something that nobody has ever built before, and if you don’t, the city floods and the Corps, which already has a black eye, could basically be dissolved. How many people would put up with a second flooding?” said Randy Persica, the Corps’ resident engineer for New Orleans’ three major drainage canals.

The 34 pumps — installed in the drainage canals that take water from this bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city and deposit it in Lake Pontchartrain — represented a new ring of protection that was added to New Orleans’ flood defenses after Katrina. The city also relies on miles of levees and hundreds of other pumps in various locations.

The drainage-canal pumps were custom-designed and built under a $26.6 million contract awarded after competitive bidding to Moving Water Industries Corp. of Deerfield Beach, Fla. It was founded in 1926 and supplies flood-control and irrigation pumps all over the world.

Ties to Jeb Bush
MWI is owned by J. David Eller and his sons. Eller was once a business partner of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in a venture called Bush-El that marketed MWI pumps. And Eller has donated about $128,000 to politicians, the vast majority of it to the Republican Party, since 1996, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

MWI has run into trouble before. The U.S. Justice Department sued the company in 2002, accusing it of fraudulently helping Nigeria obtain $74 million in taxpayer-backed loans for overpriced and unnecessary water-pump equipment. The case has yet to be resolved.


Because of the trouble with the New Orleans pumps, the Corps has withheld 20 percent of the MWI contract, including an incentive of up to $4 million that the company could have collected if it delivered the equipment in time for the 2006 hurricane season.

Misgivings about the pumps were chronicled in a May 2006 memo provided to the AP by Matt McBride, a mechanical engineer and flooded-out Katrina victim who, like many in New Orleans, has been closely watching the rebuilding of the city’s flood defenses.

The memo was written by Maria Garzino, a Corps mechanical engineer overseeing quality assurance at an MWI test site in Florida. The Corps confirmed the authenticity of the 72-page memo, which details many of the mechanical problems and criticizes the testing procedures used.

About a dozen of the 34 pumps on order were already in place in New Orleans when Garzino wrote her report, according to Bedey.

In her memo, Garzino told corps officials that the equipment being installed was defective. She warned that the pumps would break down “should they be tasked to run, under normal use, as would be required in the event of a hurricane.”