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 Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Make no mistake about it: The “fake news” campaign is not about protecting the public from lies; rather it is about establishing a state-sanctioned news network, which has been a central pillar for the stability of every totalitarian regime in history. Despotic leaders can only remain in power by hiding the truth of what they are doing from the people they govern. Conversely, there can be no meaningful democracy if there is only one source of centrally-managed information.
All commanding positions are firmly in the hands of lunatics, who are determined to turn a once great and exemplary civilisation into an asylum.

As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just broken one of the cardinal rules of his “Politics and the English Language,” but not his final injunction to “break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”) of politicised mind-bending.
 
My reaction follows:
 
The ongoing mind-binding is not only applicable for the present, but the ruling class of the de-facto US/Anglo/Zionist Empire has employed "historians" to rewrite history so that it corresponds with the capitalist classes' values and perspectives. One example: The entire history of the 1930s, and young people's understanding of it, has been re-created--see this and this.
  • The War on Reality by C.J. Hopkins from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc. (Note: This American satirist is living under severe pandemic restrictions in Berlin.) My reaction: Although Hopkins appears to be deceptively befuddled by all the extreme attempts by our masters in the capitalist ruling classes to change what is reality, he expresses some insightful observations about this phenomenon. For example:

    The War on Reality is not an attempt to replace reality with a fake reality. Or it is that, but that is only one part of it. Its real goal is to render reality arbitrary, to strip it of its epistemological authority, to turn it into a “floating signifier,” a word that has no objective referent, which, of course, technically, it already is. You cannot take a picture of reality. It is a concept. It is not a physical object that exists somewhere in time and space. 
  • Science Update: Continued IPCC Conservatism and Lies by Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist (via his YouTube channel--23:09m), who has fearlessly focused his attention and career on the climate crisis. My reaction: McPherson doesn't understand that capitalists, our ruling masters who dominate science as well as all other institutions, must obsessively pursue profits, and its concomitant, power, under their system of capitalism. Because our masters are addicted to the twin opiates of profits and power, they don't recognize that a system that requires unlimited growth on a finite planet is a contradiction. This contradiction will inevitably result in the extinction of most species, including ours, on our very unique planet Earth.
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