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, September 8, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, September 8, 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.

  • COVID19/11: Narratives Intertwined features Graeme MacQueen, PhD, briefly explaining (03:26m) his views about how the covid pandemic and 9/11. He asserts that the former project is a Deep State operation designed to separate us.
  • 💥How the US Trained the Afghan Mujahideen To Produce War Propaganda by Dan Cohen from Mint Press News. This is a best post. (Note: Because of difficulties with my auto, I am under considerable pressure today to post these articles. It looks like the text is a transcript of the first YouTube video (06:44m) and not the second video (10:06m). My reaction: Cohen reveals for all to see that propaganda is a key feature in any war that the US forces and its Empire (de-facto US/Anglo/Zionist Empire) have engaged in since the Vietnam War.
Propaganda has been a key component of every war the U.S. has waged from Vietnam to Grenada to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. These efforts become more sophisticated and insidious over time. Without them, the U.S. permanent war state simply couldn’t operate. 
 
But this leaves out the ongoing propaganda since WWII that the directors of the ruling capitalist class have designed against the American public (and allies in their Empire) to hide their real objective--the domination of the entire planet. 
 
The current propaganda of the covid pandemic is a reflection of their concern about the global climate crisis to which their capitalist policies have led the entire planet. However once again, their propaganda Reset project totally serves them, a tiny class of transnational (billionaire) capitalists, and not us--the overwhelming majority of ordinary people.
  • Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years by Ron Unz, who is the founder of the old-fashioned conservative website The Unz Review. (Note: This is quite a lengthy article, but an important one.) My reaction: In the article Unz subdues his "anti-Semitic" remarks (I put this word in quotation marks because the root word means Semite which includes Arabs as well as Jews) behind words like "Zionist" and "neocons" in contrast to many of his articles which only refer to "Jews" instead of right-wing Jews.  Otherwise, Unz zeros in on the essential facts of the growing movement in the USA to cast considerable doubt on the official story.
I began to wonder if I had been as deluded as the tens of millions of Americans in 2003 and 2004 who naively believed that Saddam had been the mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. We live in a world of illusions generated by our media, and I suddenly felt that I had noticed a tear in the paper-mache mountains displayed in the background of a Hollywood sound-stage. If Osama was probably not the author of 9/11, what other huge falsehoods had I blindly accepted?
 
Notice that this article and another one focus on the government and not the ruling capitalist class. This is because they are both supporters of capitalism. Unz is an old-fashioned capitalist, and the Whiteheads appeal to the superficial anarchist crowd.
Acknowledging that being the world’s largest supplier of heroin did not fit with the altruistic image the West endeavoured to portray. Almost entirely missing from the western media portrayal of the invasion was the fact that one of the earliest consequences of the United States 2001 invasion was a rapid escalation of poppy production and hence heroin supply. Equally missing from the western narrative was the fact that this production was almost exclusively a United States enterprise, firmly in the hands of the CIA, not only in production, but in the processing of the raw poppy into heroin, and its subsequent distribution around the world. As such it remained a significant contributor to CIA illicit funds, used in turn as part of their worldwide program of influencing governments of multiple countries.

Three of those countries that suffered as a consequence of this heroin epidermic are China, Iran and Russia. It is little surprise therefore that a condition of the support of these three countries to the new Taliban government is a renewal of the latter’s implacable dislike of heroin when they were last in power. The western media have been almost completely silent on the new Afghanistan government’s views on the topic. But there is little reason to believe that their hostility is in any way reduced from when they were last in power.
The editorial below is being published this month by over 200 medical journals, including the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the East African Medical Journal, the Chinese Science Bulletin, the National Medical Journal of India, and the Medical Journal of Australia, and others from around the world.