We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore LappĂ©, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, August 3, 2019

Articles recommended for Saturday, August 3, 2019

The Citadels of America’s Elites: Fractured and At Odds with Each Other

Click here to access article by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation.

Crooke, an ex-MI6 (British counterpart to US's CIA) agent, has been following the reports of two journalists from the Financial Times, a key newspaper of US capitalists, and what he writes suggests that the directors of the Deep State in the USA are inclined to aggressively pursue a new cold war with Russia, China, and Iran. Crooke begins his article (it contains a couple typographical errors) with this foreboding statement:
Something is ‘up’. When two Financial Times columnists – pillars of the western Establishment – raise a warning flag, we must take note: Martin Wolf was first off, with a piece dramatically headlined: The looming 100-year, US-China Conflict. No ‘mere’ trade war, he implied, but a full-spectrum struggle. Then his FT colleague Edward Luce, pointed out that Wolf’s “argument is more nuanced than the headline. Having spent part of this week among leading policymakers and thinkers at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado,” Luce[tr] writes, “I am inclined to think Martin was not exaggerating. The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a ‘new cold war’ is something that takes my breath away. Eighteen months ago the phrase was dismissed as fringe scaremongering. Today it is consensus.”
Do I need to argue that regardless of who gets elected as president in America's managed elections in 2020, the winner, like the clownish Trump, must bend to the will of the Deep State or else he/she will be taken out (def.) one way or another?

Totalitarian Democracy means end of Freedom for the People - William Binney, Herland Report TV.

Click here to access an interview with ex-CIA officer William Binney (via YouTube) conducted by Hanne Herland (Norway), founder of the Herland Report, historian of comparative religions, bestselling author, commentator and TV producer.

Binney tells what he knows about the infiltration of media corporations by CIA agents, and other subversive actions. Some excerpts from the interview:
William Binney says: "The media is totally infiltrated by the CIA and various other agencies. When it comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other statements about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically  the lapdogs for the government."
"William Casey, who was the director of Central Intelligence Agency back when Reagan was president, said at one point that you'll know how effective we are once at least 70 percent of what’s publicly known is false."
"In other words, they have been infiltrating the press for decades and they're pushing their thinking and agenda to the media, so the media will promulgate it to the public. The public won't even have any idea what’s really going on."
"The objective is to keep everybody uninformed so that they can't make a smart decision about anything. Everything is being done behind this secret door that you are not supposed to know about. That is really destroying the fundamental essence of democracy."
"That was what our Constitution was all about, that the people were supposed to know what the government was doing. Not the government knowing what the people were doing at all times, they way it is turning today."
"We are pretty much heading towards a totalitarian system. In this country, democracy has been subverted, much I think by Dick Cheney. He masterminded this because he would spend time in Congress, he knew about the congressional operation, how it worked. He was assistant to President Nixon, spying on everybody. He knew that he needed to know things about people in the opposition. What better way to do it than have a sister agency and the US government just open up and collect everything, store it, so you can go in and look at it at any time retroactively and examine anybody." 

Friday, August 2, 2019

Propaganda, Censorship, Power, & Control — Inside the Submissive Void [an essential read & study)

Click here to access article by Greg Maybury (Australian) from Russia Insider.

This is one of the best all time articles that I've posted over the nearly 10 years I've been blogging. The article, filled with many supporting documented links, should not be merely read, but studied because it contains so many insights to be learned about the disturbing reality that we are currently experiencing today. One of the paragraphs may summarize this:
We now live in the Age of the Big Shill—cocooned in a submissive void no less—an era where nothing can be taken on face value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where ‘open-book’ history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable, upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual—albeit dubious—freedoms.
But what is most valuable is his review of how we arrived at our present nightmarish situation.

After reading this post, I considered dropping out of blogging because this article exposes so many insights about this current reality: seemingly inevitable prospects of nuclear war and environmental catastrophes which will likely lead to our extinction. My weblog has been precisely dedicated to exposing these insights, yet in one article Maybury does it all.  Mostly out of habit and the need to preserve my sanity while living in an insane society controlled by the capitalist directors of the Empire, I will probably not discontinue blogging.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

MintCast Interviews Doug Valentine, Author of The Phoenix Program and The CIA as Organized Crime

Click here to hear Whitney Webb of Mint Press News having an insightful interview with Douglas Valentine who has written and revealed so much about the dirty secrets of the CIA. (I must thank an activist for forwarding this article to me.)

Even though the interview last for nearly an hour, I think you will find it very interesting. The CIA has been the main agent of the capitalist ruling class, particularly of the likewise well hidden Deep State which is essentially a board of directors of this nation as well as their US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. 

Although he begins his discourse by stating that the CIA does their subversive work legally, he soon ends up arguing that they "are given a pass" by legal authorities who believe that they are doing their work on behalf of the security of the nation. Of course, they are doing it on behalf of the capitalist ruling class. They and their collaborators are so thoroughly enmeshed in powerful centers in every institution that they now have overwhelming license to do their dirty work. This includes not only high crimes of assassination, drug trafficking, 9/11, etc., but the promotion of every fantastic story that they serve up to their gullible population. I have for some time regarding the USA as a vast open psychiatric ward of delusional people. Valentine explains how this dreadful state of affairs (def.) gradually developed over the years since WWII.

Articles recommended for Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Space Lunacy: $ Trillion Space Games and False Prophecies by Billionaires While Rome Burns

Click here to access article by Dr. Andrew Glikson from Global Research.

This article has provoked many thoughts as I've watched the space exploration programs--I've watched most of them--televised by PBS.  I always watch programs created by major media corporations with an eye toward class bias (which I have an almost natural instinct for), and these programs have elicited many such thoughts. Among these were an increase in skepticism about the moon landing in 1969. Previously I thought such speculation was bizarre, but I began to increase my natural skepticism after a series of gross mishaps in NASA's attempts (including the deaths of three astronauts), but then suddenly everything went perfectly! (I still believe that NASA succeeded.) 

Last night I watched "A Year in Space & Beyond a Year in Space". I started watching this film about 15 minutes after it began, so I missed the introduction which I believe introduced the subject as an international effort. The Russians invited Britain, Japan, USA, and others to participate in this experience in which a Russian rocket propelled them to a space station. While there the astronauts performed many experiments over nearly a year. 

Anyway, the point I wish to make that the show was designed around US astronaut Scott Kelly, his twin brother, and family, but not that it was an international effort promoted by the Russian government, using a Russian rocket, and launched by the Russians from Kazakhstan. No doubt the huge space station was launched by the Russians using their more powerful rockets. The film provided very little of the scientific findings that the mission was devoted to. Because of the focus of attention was on the heroics of Scott Kelly, I inferred that it was an effort to "sell" further space exploration to the American public, particularly to gain their support for a rocket exploration to Mars. It was easy to imagine that the billionaires wanted the US government to do this costly research to facilitate their quest to colonize other planets after they destroy this one and toss into the cosmic dumpster along with 99.9% of humans.   

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Articles recommended for Tuesday, July 30, 2019

The Information War is Over and We Have Lost--[I challenge you to] Change My Mind.

Click here if you wish the video directly from James Corbett's weblog.

Corbett addresses the important issue of management of information by mainstream corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. to control our access to information that we can access readily over the internet. And, as he says, their control will likely eliminate any undesirable information that the directors of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire does not want us to know.
The ability to view alternative ideas and contrary opinions and come to our own conclusions is the basis of cognitive liberty. Big tech is now turning the screws and making sure that no one using their platforms will find these alternative viewpoints. Sure, there will be ways to get this information out, but most people will never even know that it exists. This battle in the information war has been lost. Change my mind.

Monday, July 29, 2019

The Discovery and Rediscovery of Metabolic Rift

Click here if you wish to access the following talk by Ian Angus at a recent Marxism festival in London directly from Climate & Capitalism.

I have in the past posted many articles by the astute Angus, and now we see him in person in the following 38m50s video. The remainder of the video is devoted to the comments by the participants at the talk.

In his address Angus, after defining the concept, reviews the long materialist history of the metabolic rift caused by humans beginning with intuitive observations by ancient Greeks over 2000 years ago. During the past two centuries scientists and Marxists have added to this by their study of nature and the implications derived from these studies.



If you want more of Ian Angus and/or the festival organized in London by the Socialist Worker's Party, I recommend this video presentation.

Climate emergency new update

Click here to access the latest post of Climate Code Red by David Spratt, the founder of Australia's leading website alerting Australians to the threats of climate destabilization.

I learned a lot reading this post about the lower level legislators across the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire and their growing concern about responding to their constituent's pressure to do something about the climate crisis. I wasn't aware that many in cities and American states were passing resolutions recognizing the growing crisis. This could be that I don't spend much time watching corporate news reports covering world events. Although I can't totally escape corporate news reports which are devoted almost exclusively to self-serving propaganda of the capitalist ruling class, I typically spend each morning scanning independent alternative media to find snatches of news and analyses about real events. This Australian post informed me about real events regarding the climate crisis that major media corporations failed to cover (here I am referring to major media corporations of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire like CNN, MSNBC, BBC, etc.). Or did I simply miss such reports?

No doubt lower level legislators within the Empire are responding to pressures from their constituents to do something about the increasingly obvious climate crisis. Although legislators must obey the interests (profits and power) of the ruling class, they get around this contradiction by passing meaningless resolutions in order to pacify ordinary people. I think the lack of coverage of these pressures by the media corporations is primarily because they don't want ordinary people to know about such efforts.

Although the articles provoke many thoughts about the contemporary political scene, I haven't the energy or time to expound on them. As we increasingly experience extreme weather events, I will only argue that the pressures of ordinary people will grow stronger as they become aware of the extent that they have been lied to until, at some point in time, ordinary people will violently vent their desperate anguish and anger against all perceived authorities. I hope I am still not around to see this.