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

Tuesday, September 7, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, September 7, 2021

Note: Monday (Aug. 30) after I completed my posts, I watched on TV the tennis matches at the US Open. I realized how much I enjoyed watching tennis matches by expert players. So, I decided to wait until the 13th of September to take off on my road trips east from my home in southern Minnesota. I will go as far as New York state and possibly up into Vermont and across to Massachusetts.

I won't patronize any businesses that require papers to prove that I have been vaccinated because I haven't been. (I have enjoyed the longest streak of good health that I can remember, that is, outside of my balance problems I experienced in April.) Thus, I can't visit people in Nova Scotia and I won't go into New York City because authorities in both places require proof of vaccination.

Wednesday I received an email from someone who is living in Albuquerque (New Mexico) who has followed my website for over six years! However, I'm not going in that direction. But I could use more volunteers of regular readers of my website to meet along the way to the east coast. Hopefully, more will respond (goatmeal36@yahoo.com) before the 13th of September. I want to meet some of my regular readers over coffee, tea, or beer to get acquainted with them.

Hello there. I understand you’re a believer. You have zealous, unwavering faith in the System. You Trust The Science™. You deem anything that falls beyond the margins of the approved narrative “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” and “fake news.”
  • You Cowards Are Responsible For What’s Coming by "WhatsHerFace" from EarthNewspaper. (Note: This post features a 09:53m Bitchute video.) My reaction: This is happening in Australia, the land that Caitlin Johnstone and her American husband live in!
Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of Russian gas giant Gazprom, is starting to settle payments for the jet fuel it supplies in China in yuan, instead of in U.S. dollars, the company’s Alexander Dyukov has said.

Russian oil firms have sought for years to shift away from U.S. dollar payments for deliveries, while China intends to make the yuan a more widely used currency internationally.

Analysts say the settlement of jet fuel payments in yuan is also part of a broader strategy of the Russian companies to diminish the risk of U.S. sanctions against them.
  • It’s Raining Scarlet Letters by Alastair Crooke for Strategic Culture Foundation. My reaction: Crooke refers to the developing apartheid in America and much of the de-facto US/Anglo/Zionist Empire:
Of course today, we look on with smug satisfaction about how progressive, science-driven and modern we are. Scarlet letters don’t happen today, we tell ourselves – except they do. It is raining scarlet letters, in fact. It is perfectly true that a woman giving birth out of wedlock today will not be mocked by a jeering crowd. No – but we have replaced those 17th century taboos with new, rigid ones which appear, remarkably, as the polar inverse of the earlier crop. Anne Applebaum argues that the treatment meted out to today’s transgressives – though couched in contemporary idiom – is no less capricious, no less punitive, than in Puritan Massachusetts of the 1640s.
 
But, he doesn't stop there. You should read Tom Fowdy's link entitled "China’s crackdown on the ‘spiritual opium’ of gaming is part of a big social revolution pitting collectivism against individualism".
 
And, you should also read this article to understand how Crooke reaches this conclusion regarding China under the leadership of Xi Jinping:
 
If its’ import was not already clear, its’ revolutionary ethos was made explicit this week in a WeChat blog known as the “Li Guangman Ice Point Commentary”. The author’s diatribe was reprinted across Chinese state-run media with the clear blessing of the authorities.

“Everyone can feel that a profound change is taking place,” he stated, proclaiming an end to China’s love affair with western culture, and a “return to the essence of socialism”.

It was framed as a fight to the death with the West. 
  • Biden Is Turning Pages on Foreign Policy by Brian Cloughley from Strategic Culture Foundation. My reaction: Paraphrasing an old saying, "the more things appear to change, the more they do not change".
Evidently, the corporate and government-controlled media in the U.S. and Western Europe are inextricably linked to the military-industrial and intelligence complex. The only institutions which benefited from the endless wars of the previous two decades are the defense industries which have supplied the weapons that have killed and maimed untold numbers both abroad and within the U.S. itself. The Pentagon often provides military equipment to domestic police agencies which are then turned against antiracist demonstrators fighting to end law-enforcement misconduct.
  • Power by Patrick Lawrence from Consortium News.
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