Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, March 31, 2021 (I ran out of time)

• Fear of Fairy Tales by John Steppling from his weblog. (Note: Steppling is currently living with his family in Norway. He has a strong background as an American playwright, director of plays, etc., and he apparently is highly educated. I find his posts rather challenging because I don't know how his frequent quotes and images relate to the substance of his articles. He is obviously very disturbed particularly with the current pandemic particularly its impact on children.)
  

💥Thus, I especially recommend Steppling's rather lengthy (1:23:54) conversation (via some technology) with Cory Morningstar, Hiroyuki Hamada, and Johan Eddebo found  at Aesthetic Resistance (Post #35) (also in the link at the end of the above article). I encourage you to listen to this profound conversation among these highly educated people regarding the significance of the pandemic and its impact on people.) This is a best post.

• Vandana Shiva on the Taking Down of Bill Gates' Empires features Dr. Joseph Mercola in conversation (57:47) with Dr. Vandana Shiva from Marcola's weblog. (Note: This is the first video on the page.)

• What The 2007 Financial Crisis Taught Us About Corrupt Bankers by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room on Medium.com.
  

• Washington’s Hegemonic Ambitions Defy Multipolar Reality, Risking Catastrophic Conflict by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation. (Note: Cunningham's introduction precedes an interview with Glenn Diesen who is a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and author of several books.)
  

• The Problem Isn’t Human Nature, The Problem Is A Few Manipulative Sociopaths by Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian blogger, from her weblog. My commentary follows: 

Johnstone writes in the article "Someone who says it’s human nature to be selfish, competitive, predatory, exploitative, tyrannical, vicious, brutish and violent isn’t telling you about human nature, they’re telling you about their own nature." Maybe so, but she apparently doesn't yet realize that the capitalist system is based on this view of human nature. Capitalists, and those unwitting people that support them, likely wouldn't dare admit to the negative characteristics but would swear that people are basically selfish. Thus, they would go on to support the capitalist system either completely oblivious to the more negative consequent behaviors listed above and would offer absurd rationalizations for them.

We are fed propaganda to cover-up the heinous crimes the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire commits directly or indirectly. Read a current post entitled The True Story of the Rwandan Genocide from Current Affairs for an example of a major crime (a massacre of at least 500,000 people). This is about who really was responsible for what has been "universally acknowledged as one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century".

• Faced with ICC Investigation, Apartheid Israel Asserts Moral Superiority Over The Victims of Its Terror by Miko Peled from Mint Press News.
  

• Opposing All Governments Equally Is Supporting The Most Powerful Government by Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian blogger, from her weblog. My reaction: This is only one fundamental reason why I think shallow-thinking anarchists are nuts.

• Tanzania’s Late President Magufuli: ‘Science Denier’ or Threat to Empire? by Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb from Unlimited Hangout.
  

• Open-Source Versus Patent Monopoly Financing of Drug Development by Dean Baker from CounterPunch. My reaction: The trouble with Baker is that he takes an eighth-grade-civics- class view of how the government of the ruling class works. Thus, he doesn't see that capitalists run the puppet show that the government performs. Patents are one major way they (the capitalist ruling class) have of stealing profits from ordinary workers. Look at Bill Gates and how he accumulated his vast wealth. 

• Twisting the Law by Steve Martinot from CounterPunch. (Note: The following note was published within the article following the article: "[This article contains excerpts from a work in progress called “Brutality: a Study of Police Culture in the US,” which is also looking for a publisher.]". You might also be interested in this post from CGTM, a major Chinese news corporation, via Reuters.
  

• If the Minimum Wage Had Increased as Much as Wall Street Bonuses Since 1985, It Would Be Worth $44 Today by Sarah Anderson from CounterPunch.

• Ecuador’s poisoned loans from the World Bank and the IMF by Eric Toussaint from CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt) [Part 1 of the Series].
  

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, March 29, 2021

• How the Rich Distort Politics by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room. My reaction: Read this if you still have doubts about the sustainability of capitalism.
  

• Google and the CI@: Are Multinational Corporations Part of the Establishment? a 9:56m video from Insight History via their channel on YouTube.
  

• It’s Time to Bust the Tech Talent Pipeline by Isobel van Hagen from Current Affairs. (Note: Read this article if you want to know about the latest CIA effort to recruit young students into serving the capitalist ruling class's Big Tech corporations.)
  

Palantir, the CIA-backed software startup, provides near-omniscient “crime-predicting” military surveillance for U.S. intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has also built technology accused of creating racist feedback loops in “predictive policing” software. The company, which recently went public, was co-founded by Peter Thiel—the Trump-backing venture capitalist billionaire who, in a display of comic book-style villainy, literally wants to inject himself with young people’s blood.

• “The Western Firewall is Complete”: The CIA’s Vast Modern Anti-Communist Propaganda Effort by Rainer Shea from Internationalist 360°. My commentary follows: 

Shea's argument is correct that the CIA's Western firewall is complete in the sense that they control all major organs of media corporations and that they will use this giant propaganda machine, combined with AI, to ever greater efforts to confuse people and propagandize people within the USA and throughout the world. 

 

However, I disagree with his allegiance to Stalinism and his identification of the latter with Marxism/Leninism. Stalinism is a worn-out version of Marxism-Leninism which created a bureaucratic class under Joseph Stalin's paranoid control in the Soviet Union.  

 

The Russian people saved themselves from being slaves of capitalism under the control of German Nazis which were strongly supported by international capitalists. This is the basic reason that his type of rule ended with his death and all pretensions of working class control vanished with Stalin's disappearance. With the failure of the classic fascist nations in WWII, mostly English-speaking capitalists emerged and organized their own fascist empire after the war under the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.

 

However, the peoples of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and all the exploited peoples of planet Earth have risen from the ashes of WWII to confront this powerful, hegemonic Empire, and it looks like they are going to win. But their win will be a Pyrrhic victory because the victors will then face the onslaught of a destabilizing climate. The latter will result in the inability to support human and most other life forms due to the devastation of the environment and, finally, the destabilization of the climate caused by capitalist rule over the past several centuries.

 

The strength of this article is in the descriptions of the fact that the CIA has taken over the control of major media corporations and has turned them into a media of 24/7 Empire propaganda. 

• The Suez Transport Collapse a Look into the World’s Fragility by Valery Kulikov from New Eastern Outlook. In my rather simplified comment above, I left out a lot of details. My commentary for this article, which follows, will provide some additional details:
  

This article contains one expression of Russian and China fantasies, but totally ignores the reality of the climate crisis. 

 

After WWII some nations which had devastated economies and other underdeveloped nations rose under the difficulties of the Cold War to form mixed economies which combined forms of capitalist enterprises under the guidance and supervision of socialist ruling classes. China was a prime example and the first to combine the two systems. These were compromises that suited the advanced capitalists of the Empire because they initially were able to profit from China's cheap labor. The Soviet Union soon collapsed and reformed with a largely mixed economy, and the two nations led the way to lead all other nations wanting to be independent from the burdens of serving exclusively the nations of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.

 

China and Russia are leaders of this mixed economy movement throughout the world, but I believe they are indulging in fantasies of their own much like the more purely capitalist countries of the Empire. Although members of both ruling classes are expressing more concern about the developing destabilization of the climate, they are both pursuing capitalist development policies. Thus, those nations of the Empire have their Great Reset fantasy; but Russia and China have other fantasies that largely ignore the developing climate crisis, but necessary for their dedication of independence from the hegemonic Empire. 

• Journalists Attack the Powerless, Then Self-Victimize to Bar Criticisms of Themselves by Glenn Greenwald from his weblog on Substack.
  

• Propaganda By Omission: Libya, Syria, Venezuela And The UK by David Cromwell from Media Lens.
  

• The Fact That Americans Think Biden Has Changed Things Shows How Narrative Rules Our World by Caitlin Johnstone, an independent Australian blogger.

• Political Economy vs. Federal Fairy Tales by James Bovard from American Institute for Economic Research.

• COVAX and AstraZeneca: Tools of a Humanitarian Extortion Operation from Misión Verdad. (Note: Misión Verdad, which means "Mission Truth" is a Venezuelan collective--see this and this.)
  

• The “Unvaccinated” Question: What is to be done with us? by CJ Hopkins, a master satirist, from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc.

• The Great Unvaxxed by TE Creus from Off-Guardian.
  

• Iran-China: the 21st century Silk Road connection by Pepe Escobar from "The Saker" weblog.
  

• Climate Campaigners Say 'Listen to the Science' as New Study Shows Earth Now Warmer Than Any Time in Last 12,000 Years by Brett Wilkins from Common Dreams.

Posts that I especially recommend for Sunday, March 28, 2021

• Lockdowns Worsen the Health Crisis by Kiley Holliday and Jenin Younes from American Institute for Economic Research.

• “Making something out of nothing”: PCR tests, CT values and false positives by Niels Harrit PhD from Off-Guardian.
  

• Ask Congress to Investigate COVID Origins and Government Response to Pandemic from Children's Health Defense.

• Covid Vaccine: The New Sacred Cow by Computing Forever featuring Dave Cullen, an Irishman, in a 14:56m video from the Bitchute channel of EarthNewspaper.
  

• Smart Cities: Digital Prisons of The Great Reset by Derrick Broze from The Last American Vagabond. My commentary follows: 

   
  
  The Great Reset is all about our masters' fantasy: the transnational capitalist ruling classes, who are directors of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire and have a fantasy about saving their system of capitalism. Our billionaire masters are finally concerned about preventing the climate crisis and destroying their beloved system of capitalism, which is a system of organized plunder of the Earth's resources and the labor of working people. 

   

  Thus, it is more of the same: the ruling class is trying to co-opt us into following their self-serving plan to save capitalism for the future. If you like their past record of exploitation, never-ending wars, extreme inequality, full-spectrum control of everything, etc., you will absolutely love their plan for the Great Reset of capitalism. Brose expressed it in a nutshell when he wrote:
  
  
  
  In truth, the push for smart cities, the UN SDGs, and the Great Reset is based in a deeper agenda to monitor, control, and direct all life on the planet using technology. The true agenda of the WEF and the United Nations is to establish a global Technocratic State where alleged experts and technologists make decisions for the vast majority of the people in the name of saving the environment.
  
  
  
  The description of our masters' plans sound familiar. Doesn't it sound like what we experienced during this pandemic where dissenting voices about pandemic policies, contrary medical evidence, and scientific arguments from equally qualified experts are all dismissed or silenced? And you are confined to your homes, must wear masks, and get "vaccinated" with potentially unsafe and unknown substances in order to work or travel? And they're promising to make us happy despite owning nothing--because they will own, and thereby control, everything! Do you want such a world?
  
  
  Just because they have recognized (too late) that unlimited growth, which capitalism requires, on a finite planet is impossible, we should follow them meekly and their self-serving fantasy-plan. I think not!   
  

• Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively by Glenn Greenwald from his weblog on Substack. Greenwald writes about the Congressional hearing in which Republican members of the Committee largely joined Democrats demanding more censorship:

Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I detailed last month, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor for them — exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings are singularly devoted. 

 

And he concludes with this statement:

 

We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday. 

• In Quest of a Multi-Polar World featuring Pepe Escobar in conversation with Michael Hudson from Consortium News. 

• US/NATO vs. Russia-China in a hybrid war to the finish by Pepe Escobar from "The Saker" weblog.

• Rise Up, Say the Birds to the Bread by Edward Curtin from Off-Guardian.
  

• How the Suez canal blockage could impact global supply chains by Sulaiman Lkaderi, a 2:32m video from Middle East Eye.
  

• An Old Green Colonial Trick: Israel Masking Land Grabs as Environmental Conservation by Jessica Buxbaum from Mint Press News (based in Minneapolis).

• How to start a housing co-op by Mira Luna from Shareable.
  

• Direct Observations by NASA Confirm that Humans are Throwing Earth’s Energy Budget off Balance by NASA from SciTechDaily.

The team found that human activities have caused the radiative forcing on Earth to increase by about 0.5 Watts per square meter from 2003 to 2018. The increase is mostly from greenhouse gases emissions from things like power generation, transport and industrial manufacturing. Reduced reflective aerosols are also contributing to the imbalance.