Rock-solid carbon storage hopes rise

Click here to access article by Tim Radford from Climate News Network.

Because capitalist ruling class humans cannot lessen their use of relatively cheap fossil fuels while pursuing their drugs of profits and power, they are desperately looking for magical solutions. Could this "rock-solid carbon storage" qualify as one?

...since carbon dioxide emissions from the cities and power station chimneys of the planet are driving global warming, sea level rise and potentially catastrophic climate change, humans must either drastically reduce fossil fuel use or find ways of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

And since international action so far − despite firm promises and declared intentions – looks like falling short of the reductions required, scientists keep checking the other possible options.

Arctic faces ‘boom’ in shipping as ice melts

Click here to access article by Bryan Comer and Naya Olmer from Climate Home.

...while Arctic shipping may bring economic benefits to both local communities, in the form of increased trade and tourism revenue, and to the global economy, through the ability to ship goods via shorter routes, the environmental risks are undeniable.

Another post on the same topic might interest you. It's entitled "As The World Burns, The Rich Cruise In Luxury Through A Melting Arctic" from Huffington Post.

Student financing for higher education in the US

by cartoonist Dave Granlund.

Cooperatives in Socialist Construction: Commoners and Cooperators Key to Cuba's 21st Century Socialism

Click here to access article by Cliff DuRand from Grassroots Economic Organizing.

As Cuba re-establishes relations with the North American giant capitalist society, it is also undergoing social experiments to create a socialist society that is sustainable in the present century. Because the two are incompatible, Cubans must be on their guard to protect what they love about living in a socialist society no matter how imperfect it presently is. I wish them luck because they are going to need it with the North American giant doing everything it can to transform it back into a gambling casino and brothel for rich North Americans to play in.

Whereas capitalism focuses on the benefits to individual families, socialism attempts to create a social consciousness based on a commitment to society as a whole. Thus I believe the following reasoning is not valid logically, nor empirically on the basis of the Yugoslavian experience.

...commoners must identify themselves as a community sharing the common resource and thus feel a commitment to its proper governance, i.e. for the common good.  This is the foundation of a democratic governance of the commons. 

These are precisely the conditions that obtain in a worker cooperative.

To construct a society using cooperatives competing according to market principles will only result in people merely identifying with their cooperatives, not with society as a whole. This is the crucial dilemma, that is, to get ordinary people to "...identify themselves as a community sharing the common resource and thus feel a commitment to its proper governance, i.e. for the common good". As I see it, only by solving this problem is there any hope that humans can survive. 

There cannot be groups of people who have significantly more power than others because this is a condition fertile for exploitation of the powerful over the powerless. Kinship ties have predominated among humans since they settled into agricultural communities and capitalism has even weakened these ties by its emphasis on the nuclear family and their "ownership" of a society's economy. As a result we have families like the Rockefellers and Bill Gates running the world to promote their interests while the great mass of humans experience poverty, ill health, ignorance, and shortened life spans.

Still, I recommend this article because it encourages discussions about these important issues.

9/11 Free Fall 8/18/16: Ted Walter and Tony Szamboti Address Latter's Letter to Prof. Bažant

Click here if you wish to access this interview directly from YouTube--produced by AE911Truth. 

There are a number of organizations that challenge the official story (as in fairy-tale) about what happened on 9/11/2001 in New York City (see this for a list of them) that approach the controversy from different points of view. AE911Truth is an organization of around 1500 architects, structural and civil engineers who have examined the official account and have found that it is simply not credible.

In this 58:13m interview from their Free Fall podcast, the program host interviews two such professionals about two upcoming events their organization is planning for the 15th anniversary of this tragic and mysterious event: the distribution of a booklet to 35,000 structural and civil engineers challenging the official 9/11 story from a physics point of view, and discussion of the upcoming Justice in Focus symposium in New York City to study issues about how to proceed with legal actions. The first topic is introduced by discussing an open letter to Zdeněk Bažant who provided a scientific explanation in support of the official story, but AE911Truth experienced a futile attempt to publish an article in an engineering journal in which they took issue with his explanation.

Six maps that will make you rethink the world

Click here to access article which features an interview by Ana Swanson of The Washington Post with Parag Khanna, a globalist.

The life thus far for Khanna illustrates how those who serve the ruling directorate of the US Empire can move anywhere in the world that pleases them while ordinary people face all kinds of barriers to their movement. But not to worry--he promises that, along with many other good things, this will change in the future.

I am posting this article from one of the two chief media sources of the Empire because it features how the capitalist directorate of the Empire thinks and, more importantly, want us to think about the future. By reading it you will learn that they expect explosive growth in population to be concentrated in mega-cities throughout the world and that we will live in a world that is "four degrees Celsius above the 1990 baseline"!

He then goes on to reveal what splendid opportunities this will present for commerce and investment banks, and of course, jobs. What he doesn't tell you is what disasters lie ahead given these conditions. Of course, he has sold his soul to the people who have rewarded him with so many opportunities: the capitalist ruling class of the Empire.

From Stable to Star – The Making of North American “Climate Heroes”

Click here to access article by Cory Morningstar from Wrong Kind of Green.

In this lengthy article Morningstar reveals how the capitalist directorate has extended their control over the "green" movement. This is an illustration of how they make sure that every important institution and movement in society serves--or at least doesn't threaten--their interests of profits and power. 

Many activists will be fully indoctrinated long before they have a chance to fully develop their own thought processes, ideologies and identities. The Green Corps Field School for Environmental Organizing” is where non-profits send their recruits to groom them for “a career in environmental organizing”.  Launched in 1992 by U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which is funded in part by the Tides Foundation, Alumni/alumna includes Bill McKibben (350), Phil Radford (Greenpeace), Lisa Archer (Friends of the Earth, an NGO which has been represented on the Ceres Board of Directors since inception) and even Ceres senior associates such as Eleanor Fort. Green Corps is explicitly for “college seniors and recent graduates.” Seasoned activists need not apply. It is of interest to note that the aforementioned founder of Power Shift, and Green Corps Alumni, Phil Radforth, serves as a board member of Green Corps. 

Bush Administration Official: Saudi Ties to 9/11 Hidden to Protect Iraq War Narrative

Click here to access article by Brian P. McGlinchey from 28Pages.org.

I believe that it was the unceasing pressure from this organization and others allied to it that finally forced the ruling class directorate to release the heavily redacted 28 missing pages of the report issued by the 9/11 Commission. The author quotes extensively from statements of Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to retired General Colin Powell whose testimony to the UN was full of phony statements connecting Iraq with weapons of mass destruction.

As they prepared that pivotal address, Wilkerson says he and Powell were under constant pressure to include claims that al Qaeda was linked to the Iraqi government.

“You couldn’t kill it. We tried. We put a stake in that ten times, and it kept raising its head. The vice president would not turn it loose,” says Wilkerson. “That’s part of why they tortured people to try to and get more information on the connections between al Qaeda and Baghdad. It’s part of why they shifted their interrogation focus away from another attack on the United States to connections between al Qaeda and Baghdad—and anything that reinforced that, anything that made their case for war more ‘legitimate’ and more acceptable to the American people, they wanted.”

America’s Journalistic Hypocrites

Click here to access article by Robert Parry from ConsortiumNews. 

Reading this piece is a tedious exercise in naiveté. So why am I posting it? --you might very well ask.

My answer is that what Parry is writing about is the "journalism" that is produced by US corporations otherwise known as mainstream media. I put journalism in quotes to imply that corporate media do not engage in real journalism. It is propaganda that is produced by corporations to serve the interests of the ruling capitalist class who own corporate media. Thus their stories are inconsistent and deceptive simply because they need to deceive us so that we cooperate with their policies of exploitation and war-making.

Over the past few decades, the U.S. mainstream media has failed the American people in a historic fashion by spinning false or misleading narratives on virtually every important global issue, continuing to this day to guide the nation into destructive and unnecessary conflicts.

 So, what else could one expect? And, it is not just the "past few decades" that this has been going on--this has been the case since ruling classes have existed. But it is only since the 1920s that the science of propaganda has become so sophisticated.

Well, you see, the problem is not only corporate media, but a tiny class of people who control every institution of our society and insure that these institutions conform to their needs. But this is the rub: most ordinary people are so brainwashed by their ruling class controllers that they have little accurate understanding of this basic reality. 

Our masters learned long ago that if a lie is repeated often enough, people will believe it. Nowadays these lies are not only repeated endlessly, but they come from every institution of society. This reality is, of course, vigorously suppressed by our controllers who make absolutely certain that the majority of Americans are never infected with this awareness-virus. Parry represents a small minority who know they are being lied to, but can't figure it out because he (and they) has been inoculated against ever understanding the basic reality of class rule. Hence his myopic historical perspective sees the cause of this in only the past few decades, and he views it as solely due to the influence of neoconservatives who have entered the government. Unfortunately, this article is an illustration of what too often passes for a dissident view in alternative websites.

If Parry had been truly educated and exposed to real US history by reading books like those in my recommended reading list (see the section of my blog: "Some Books to Liberate Your Mind"), he would easily understand why US policies are defended so inconsistently and deceptively by corporate media. But the vast majority of Americans don't read books, and the few they read are usually endorsed by corporate media. Their education in US public schools rarely expose them to such books or material.

Inciting Wars the American Way

Click here to access article by Todd E. Pierce from Antiwar.com. 

...think tanks are constantly engaged in the sort of activities which the Defense Department identifies as “Information War” when conducted by foreign countries that are designated by the U.S. as an enemy at any given moment.

Information warfare uses disinformation and propaganda to condition a population to hate a foreign nation or population with the intent to foment a war, which is the routine “business” of the best known U.S. think tanks.

Rat Race

by an anonymous cartoonist from Manchester, UK. 

America’s Illegal Wars of Conquest. Terrorist Embedded Propagandists, Demonizing the Target Countries

Click here to access article by Mark Taliano from Global Research. 

The propaganda lies, the false flags,  the terrorist-embedded NGOs , and the use of terrorist proxies to criminally destroy one country after another, is not only empowering terrorism world-wide, but it is also leading us to engineered conflict with nuclear-armed countries, in particular,  Russia.

NED, the Legal Window of the CIA

Click here to access article by Thierry Meyssan from VoltaireNet.

This morning I debated whether to post this article or not. It has the usual awkwardness characteristic of translations that his articles have shown in the past--perhaps less so--but what is really confounding his analysis is a lack of a significant class analysis of the issues. I think that this weakness is characteristic of so many other political analysts especially in the West, and it is testimony to the success of capitalist ideological indoctrination that has gone to great lengths to suppress any kind of class analysis for obvious reasons. The theoretical understanding of the development of societies particularly during the past 1000 years has been considerably advanced by Karl Marx and many others, but you wouldn't know it by reading the analyses of most Western social theorists, especially those whose articles are published in mainstream and even much of alternative media. 

In this article one must go to great lengths to separate the wheat of factual information about the use of ideological weapons represented by the NGOs of the US Empire from the explanatory chaff that he attempts of offer. I will leave it to you to do this. I will only contribute to this effort by claiming that you can dismiss his selective history of the US as a significant causal factor.

New Era of Global Collective Psychosis

Click here to access article by Gilbert Mercier from News Junkie Post. 

I think that this was written to those of us who see we humans hurtling unthinkingly to our doom. As such it is a very somber piece that largely expresses the feelings of us who are aware of the current disturbing zeitgeist created by the "Empire of Chaos" that appears to be carrying us, along with the Empire's tiny capitalist class, to the end-time of humans. Their overwhelming command of wealth has given them overwhelming power to control events and thus control our minds. It seems that their daily dose of terror delivered to us via corporate TV networks has left us humans acting much like immobilized deer staring at the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. 

The media brainwasher/propagandists have powerful bullhorns and are always hard at work to keep their vast audience either uninformed, anxious, and feeling powerless or entertained. The news cycle has to spin so fast that critical thinking is never an option.

But wait, there's more! (You see, even people like myself have been infected with the memes of capitalist culture.) I think Mercier is also shouting in our collective ears to wake up, to act, and to save ourselves!

The CFR is “the most powerful private organization in the United States…“ [a best post]

Click here if you wish to access the introduction of an interview with historian Laurence Shoup who was interviewed by Lar Schall's and posted on his website that I've reproduced below.

I regard Shoup as the best informed person on what I regard as a key part of the "deep state" which really exercises control behind the official organs of government. I don't usually post interviews of this length, but knowledge about the real centers of power of the US-led Empire is vital for everyone to know about.

Liberal Antiwar Activism is the Problem

Click here to access article by Vincent Emanuele from CounterPunch. 

My god, I love this guy's writing! I love hearing such a sane, youthful mind trying to figure out what is happening among those who identify as activists. I found it quite disturbing, but revealing. I don't know if the biblical notion that "ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free"--something that I learned in Sunday school many years ago--is true or not, but I've since learned that without the truth, nothing good is possible. It appears to me that  Emanuele has written the truth about a major part of the current state of activism in the US.

I think that identity politics has been a vitally important issue for young people to solve because I well remember some of our own weaknesses as we engaged in anti-Vietnam War activities on a major university campus. I particularly remember that the male leadership, of which I was a part, ignoring the participation of women in our movement. And we didn't make any effort to reach out to other than European Americans. (Gay people really didn't exist as legitimate people! And bisexual people simply weren't recognized.) Since then considerable progress has been made to rid activism of this divide and conquer strategy that has been used so effectively against working people throughout US history. It is no longer the major problem dividing and conquering us, and certainly not one that deserves primary focus by any activist group. Racist, feminist, and sexual orientation and identity issues must be seen as issues of equality that cannot be solved under capitalism simply because there can be no equality under a system that privileges one tiny class of people over the rest of societies, and in class structured societies that place production for profit as its central focus (read this article entitled "On the 'woman question'".)

Emanuele explains to us that agents of the capitalist class are doing their best, either consciously or unconsciously, to deter young activists from focusing on the Empire's crimes against people abroad (read this for a current illustration) and their crimes against working people domestically by funding and encouraging activist groups to be preoccupied with the these identity issues. This preoccupation has got to stop, and Emanuele's article represents an important contribution in this effort. 

The only way this is going to stop is by working people supporting their own media by pooling together millions of small contributions. Activist organizations simply must examine their sources of funding and not take one dime whose ultimate source is the ruling capitalist class.

Promises of taxes and jobs in US elections

by cartoonist David Horsey. 

Campaigners for political office in US elections always make these promises. Targeting Trump is simply a strategy used by the directors of the ruling capitalist class to insure that their favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, gets elected. Both candidates are abominable.