Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer
Waking Times

Most of the truly important news of our times goes unnoticed, under-reported or ignored by the corporate media, and as they focus on the ever-evolving narrative of human political drama, we are missing opportunities to participate in the most important struggles of our time. Seven generations from now, the destruction of the world’s seed diversity by corporate greed will have a much greater impact on the human condition than as much as anything else we can fathom.

Seeds are absolutely vital to life on earth, but once a crop has gone extinct there is no way to revive it. In the last century alone, the world has lost at least 93% of all seed types, which had been cultivated by individual farmers around the globe for millennia providing a robust array of nutrition and sustenance.

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff Writer
Waking Times

“When a public is stressed and confused, a big lie told repeatedly and unchallenged can become accepted truth.” ~George Orwell

One of the biggest lies told is the false notion that in order to maintain peace, we must have war. Orwellian logic.

As ridiculous as it sounds, the majority of naïve statists believe this notion to be true. This is due, in no small part, to statist conditioning and state-driven propaganda that capitalizes on a blind, patriotic whimsy. And so the war machine continues to rage on, destroying lives, while fattening the pockets of the fat cats at Lockheed Martin and Boeing, not to mention all the other companies which directly and indirectly profit from war. It’s an all-too-common tragedy. But what can you expect when living within an oligarchic plutocracy disguised as a democratic republic? Rhetorical questions aside, there must be ways in which we can, as courageous individuals, throw a monkey wrench into the war machine and thus stop it in its violent tracks.

Vic Bishop, Staff
Waking Times

Subliminal messages in advertising are but one tool available to public relations and propaganda professionals to manufacture consent, create unanimity, and encourage group-think. The use of formulas, scripts and rehearsals are also integral parts of the production process, and a look at how easily a formula can influence our perception of the information being presented shows us just how easy it is to be duped by well-presented nonsense.

TED Talks are ubiquitous on the internet, and their comfortably predictable formula lends them instant credibility. The well-produced, important sounding speeches featuring seemingly ordinary people with “Big” ideas have become a source of wisdom and knowledge, as important to our culture as 24 hour news pundits and Snopes.

Paul A. Phillips, Guest
Waking Times 

One of the many brutal truths about humans is that although it’s something we cannot do without, most of us are quite ignorant when it comes to knowing how our food and water is obtained. Spending very little time with nature, many of us have practically no knowledge of how to achieve food and water self-sufficiency.

We have allowed ourselves to become a mutant race: A major reason for our disconnection from Mother Nature and the resulting inability to be self-sufficient is that we have become overly dependent and taken over by electronics. We have become brainwashed into eking out our narrow everyday existences forever hooked into computers, TV’s, cell phones, mp3’s and ‘smart’ (dumb) technologies, threatening our health and wellbeing…

Put another way, we live in an electronic concentration camp where lawless statist control freak governments use and abuse their power through electronically hacking and spying on us, as confirmed by recent Wikileaks revelations.

-But there is an alternative way of life

Alex Pietrowski, Staff Writer
Waking Times 

The abuse and misuse of prescription, non-prescription, and illegal opioid drugs is devastating North America, and as municipalities and communities struggle to deal with the many causes for and approaches to resolving widespread opioid addiction, the city Everett, WA is suing the makers of OxContin for their role in flooding the streets with pills.

“Everett’s lawsuit, now in federal court in Seattle, accuses Purdue Pharma of gross negligence and nuisance. The city seeks to hold the company accountable, the lawsuit alleges, for “supplying OxyContin to obviously suspicious pharmacies and physicians and enabling the illegal diversion of OxyContin into the black market” and into Everett, despite a company program to track suspicious flows.” [Source]

Everett has spent millions of dollars in combating the epidemic, and Mayor Ray Stephanson believes that Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, a powerful opioid which is perhaps the most abused pharmaceutical medication on the planet, should bear some of the burden.