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

Monday, October 11, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, October 11, 2021

Western governments in the NATO military alliance are developing tactics of “cognitive warfare,” using the supposed threats of China and Russia to justify waging a “battle for your brain” in the “human domain,” to “make everyone a weapon.” 
 
My reaction: It looks like our imperial masters and their Canadian sycophants are mostly engaging in wishful thinking, but this post reveals what their motives and intentions are: to control the minds of their subjects.
  • Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, Signaling Support for Free Press by David Marks from Children's Health Defense. My reaction: You, and others, might read this ambiguously title wrongly because the article correctly reports on the award to two journalists and the Nobel Committee 'signals support for "a precondition for democracy and lasting peace"'. The conjunction "and" does not suggest that their organization approves of the Nobel Committee's selection of the two journalists. Read the article and see if I'm right. You will find remarks like the following in the article.
Intolerance of ideas that don’t conform with government directives, mimicked by a compliant media, is not solely the domain of repressive regimes or fascist dictatorships. There isn’t a country today where freedom of expression has not been threatened.

This includes the United States, where any journalist or writer who contradicts the government injunctions concerning vaccines is deemed an outlaw. 
What the mainstream journalists and scientific studies omit is the weakness of capitalist government responses, the conspiracy of sabotage by big corporations and banks, and the meticulously concealed contribution of the imperialist U.S. military to pollution and climate change.

The fight against global warming is shackled by capitalists chasing down profits at all costs. That planet-threatening quest for markets and money isn’t a policy that can be changed by electoral politics. It’s an inherent trait of the capitalist system. The fight against climate change must be a revolutionary struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
Polls show that 72% of Californians want an end to off-shore drilling. But their voices are smothered by the filthy loot pumped into the coffers of the governments of many of the communities most victimized by the oil industry. The city of Long Beach, for example, banked more than $1.4 billion from the offshore oil operations between 2010 and 2014 alone.

The politicians, from Newsom to Biden (who just approved Enbridge’s ghastly Line 3 pipeline and opened 82 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico to new drilling), haven’t merely turned a blind eye, they’ve been fully complicit in the ongoing mutilation of our coasts.
at