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

Saturday, July 17, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Saturday, July 17, 2021

  • ‘Reality’ in the time of Covid: Actors appearing on Good Morning Britain, fake cleaners on the London Underground..is life becoming the Truman Show? by Kit Knightly from Off-Guardian, an online opinion weblog from former journalists of the Guardian, an international media corporation based in Britain. Knightly asks important questions in the last paragraph: "Is all the world becoming a movie set? And right now do most people even discern the difference?" My answer: No, "reality" is what the ruling class, using their control of media corporations, create for most of us. Most are like Truman Burbank who remains completely fooled throughout most of the movie into thinking "reality" is as presented--most of us are fooled by what "reality" is as portrayed by media corporations. Hopefully, most Americans like Truman will eventually wake up to the difference.
  • 'Civilized Nations' by Bernhard, an independent German blogger, from his weblog Moon of Alabama. My reaction: This blogger cites an article from one of two leading newspapers of the USA absurdly using the word "civilized" against the enemies of the ruling capitalist class. This is only one example of the insane coverage by major media corporations that poisons the minds of most Americans.
  • Global draught baking the world, likely to get worse from Rick Sanchez' RT channel on YouTube (06:17m). My reaction; This post reports only the beginning of the Earth's destabilizing climate due largely to the past excessive consumption of fossil fuels that has driven capitalists with their obsessive quest for profits and power.
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Friday, July 16, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Friday, July 16, 2021

As the 99.2 percent figure gets recycled in newspaper and magazine articles and on television, many Americans may come to accept it as a scientific fact. They will assume it is based on accurate data provided by the government or a peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal, rather than an article by a news agency that reads more like an opinion piece than anything else. ....
 
Boy, talk about a case of false advertising disguised as science-based journalism. It would be helpful if the CDC would publish the data to back up the AP analysis.
 
What, media corporations such as AP don't have fact-checkers? (cynical question)
A 20-YEAR trail of patent applications concerning the virus responsible for Covid-19 proves it is neither new nor the result of a jump from animals to humans, an inquiry has been told.

Instead, the patents show that a natural virus, harmless to humans, was subjected to numerous laboratory modifications which ‘weaponised’ it, such that it could become the basis of a marketing campaign for tests and vaccines which are of questionable value to the public health, but which have proved to be a financial bonanza for drug companies.
As early as 1993, US News & World Report was accurate in describing the Finders case as one viewed “through a glass, very darkly.” As I wrote in the introduction to this series, the more one peers into the Finders case, the more one sees that what we have available to us in terms of hard evidence is at best fragmentary; however, what evidence we do have available is damning enough that it deserves to be reckoned with.
CRT is now as informative a term as “family values” or “diversity” or “Black lives matter” or “socialism” or “common good” or “tolerance” or “social justice” or “freedom of speech” or… you get the idea. These terms are weapons. Whether you vibe with them or not, you use them as disingenuous weapons — without a hint of concern about the accuracy or deeper meaning. They are straw men in a bigger game of distraction and denial. While the Fake News swirls and mesmerizes, those in charge gain more power and more wealth. Same as it ever was.

Are there some on the Right who are using anti-CRT rhetoric to mask their racist tendencies? Of course. Are there some on the Left using their pro-CRT rhetoric to mask their fascist tendencies? Of course. But most of those talking about CRT right now are uninformed dupes. They’re regurgitating the talking points of their TV network or social media platform of choice — without a hint of concern about the accuracy or deeper meaning. It’s virtue signaling yet again.  [my emphasis]
In today’s world, the principal contradiction is between imperialism and humanity. Giant multinational corporations are fleecing the globe for their own interests, forming international networks of monopoly capital through the geographic expansion of corporate power. This has involved transferring parts of production, commercial, and financial service to peripheral countries in search of cheap labor. Super-profits are being reaped through a production system based on the enormous wage differentials that persist between the Global North and the Global South. If these rules of exploitation are broken by any country, imperialist powers use a discourse of humanitarianism to justify: military buildups and threats of war; the carrying out of actual military interventions; economic sanctions and blockades; political interference in the elections of other countries; and the launching of “color revolutions”.
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Thursday, July 15, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Thursday, July 15, 2021

  • Unvaccinated health workers are “unethical and appalling”—experts [administrative authorities] want mandates: Health organizations call for mandatory COVID-19 vaccination for health care workers by Beth Mole from Ars Technica. My reaction: I personally know of one health professional who chooses not to have a Covid vaccination. But when I asked her recommendations for another primary care physician (my current doctor asked me if I had been vaccinated followed by a shaming lecture), she revealed her loyalty to her current employer by resisting to supply this information, and her reply exhibited fear characteristics. I think her answer was motivated by fear of losing her employment. My insertion in the title I think is more accurate. Medical doctors and other health professionals are no longer independent of medical facilities that are owned by investors and managed by administrators who are necessarily profit-oriented.
  • The Approaching Storm by CJ Hopkins, a wise former American satirist currently living in Germany, who, in this world of the New Normal (an open worldwide ward of delusional people who believe the Empire's current propagandists), is finding it hard to practice his craft of satire because the New Normal is beyond satire--from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc. He starts out with these comments and a warning that "GloboCap" (his word for the de-facto US/Anglo/Zionist Empire) has planned for us:
So, it looks like GloboCap isn’t going to be happy until they have fomented the widespread social unrest — or de facto global civil war — that they need as a pretext to lock in the new pathologized totalitarianism and remake whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police state, or that appears to where we’re headed currently. We appear to be heading there at breakneck speed. I don’t have a crystal ball or anything, but I’m expecting things to get rather ugly this Autumn, and probably even uglier in the foreseeable future.

Yes, friends, a storm is coming. 
  • Cuba and Color Revolution: A Cautionary Tale of the Next Phase of Forever-War by Joaquin Flores from Strategic Culture Foundation. My reaction: The Author goes behind the headlines to explain the ongoing protests as inevitable due to Cuba's attempt to exist in the contradictions posed by living in a capitalist dominated world. Flores acknowledges the truth that "Color Revolution schemes cannot work unless there are real-existing grievances shared among large segments of the population." And he also acknowledges that the Cuban economy has been severely damaged by the Covid pandemic. Consequently, he also writes "... those harmed by the lockdowns were ordinary Cubans, not government officials or those with dollar accounts. And so the reaction we see today is a predictable one." The Cuban government is "caught between a rock and a hard place" (def.).
Legendary director Oliver Stone spoke with Afshin Rattansi about his new film, ‘JFK: Revisited: Through The Looking Glass’. The documentary delves deeply into inconsistencies in Kennedy’s autopsy, the handling of key pieces of evidence, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged ties to the CIA.

‘We go into all the evidence on Oswald, all the original evidence, and we show that it’s a sham,’ Stone explains. ‘The autopsy, trajectories, bullet, rifle, fingerprints – above all, the autopsy – were a fraud.’

‘None of them hold up – they would’ve been thrown out of court on day one.’
  • Speaking of roads … by Philip Roddis, a Brit, from his weblog Steel City Scribblings. (Note: This article is about China's Belt and Road Initiative.)
  • The News Killed Satire by Patrick Armstrong from Strategic Culture Foundation. My reaction: Armstrong regards "news" as propaganda which it is throughout the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire:
A couple of years ago a colleague suggested the idea that a group of us attempt to counter the rising passion of anti-Russia propaganda by satirising it. My reaction was that that was probably going to be a waste of effort because – this was in Trump’s time with Rachel Maddow and the rest spewing ever more preposterous conspiracy notions 24/7 – they were already well past the point of even being capable of noticing satire.

Nothing has made me change my mind since.
AL-BAYDA, YEMEN — President Joe Biden gave a lot of people a sense of cautious optimism when he took to the campaign trail and promised to bring a swift end to the Saudi-led war on Yemen. The oil-rich monarchy, supported heavily by the United States, has been waging arguably the deadliest military campaign of the past decade on the forgotten country for over six years, exacting a brutal humanitarian toll on its civilian population. 
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Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, July 14, 2021

Beyond derision across the Western media, Western governments have mobilised opposition groups in Thailand in a bid to oust the current government primarily because of its close and growing ties with China.

We can expect in the next several years for this opposition to intensify and for both them and their Western sponsors to resort to increasingly desperate tactics as these projects near completion.

If China’s regional ambitions are realised, this opposition along with Western condemnation will become irrelevant as the vast majority of people in the region will see with their own eyes the tangible benefits these projects afford them in their daily lives, rendering moot the well-funded propaganda campaign well underway trying to convince them otherwise.
at

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, July 13, 2021

I was under the impression that the global food supply has been taken over by Big Ag, that is, major corporations together with their financiers in the world's banks. However, this interviewee by the name of Pat Mooney, who poses as one expert on the global food supply, presents another picture. His qualifications are listed by Fries as the following:
 
Pat Mooney is leading IPES-Food’s ‘Long Food Movement’ project. He is the co-founder and executive director of ETC Group that has monitored corporate power in commercial food, farming and health for over four decades. He is an expert on agricultural diversity, biotechnology, corporate concentration and global governance. Pat Mooney was awarded the Pearson Peace Prize in Canada and received the Alternative Nobel Prize, The Right Livelihood Award. 
 
But I was skeptical. I noted his optimism based on "The reality still is that 70% of the world’s people are living from the bounty and the work of peasant producers, fishers and others around the world who are getting food on the table." But I read another report that states "By some counts 70 per cent of the world's food is grown by small-scale peasant farmers – but at the same time some 70 per cent of the world's poor live in the world's rural areas." Then I realized many of these poor farmers are under contract with major corporations. I found another report that stated: "The act of signing a contract in an agricultural transaction itself isn’t the problem. It’s the way the industry and the corporate monopsony (def.) powers have used these contracts to primarily benefit their bottom line, and shift production risks onto farmers, that is the real problem." I'm sure Big Ag operates this way in relation to poor peasant farmers. Finally, I read that India is having an epidemic of farmer suicides.
 
So, I don't share Mooney's optimism. Consider the following: poor farmers vs Big Ag, and on top of that is the climate crisis which promises extreme climate destabilization and threatens all species on Earth, including humans. 
We have to contribute as much as possible to enabling a powerful new social and political movement to bring together the social struggles around the world; we must take part in drawing up a programme to make a break from capitalism, by putting forward solutions that are anti-capitalist, anti-racist, ecological, feminist and socialist.
 
Faced with the multifaceted crisis of capitalism and its headlong rush towards environmental disaster, trying to fix or adapt capitalism is not really an option. It would merely be a lesser evil that would not bring the radical solutions that the situation demands.
  • Teaching Children About Liberty featuring James Corbett in an interview discussion with Connor Boyack (24:48m) from his website The Corbett Report. My commentary follows:
I decided to post this video in spite of the fact that I don't agree with it in order to emphasize the differences I have with Corbett. He and his guest regard capitalism as they regard nature or the sun--as a fixed entity. They regard capitalism as the capitalist ruling class propaganda defines it: as a system that promises liberty and justice for all. Neither one has a clue about the differences between this propaganda construct and the reality of a man-made system of capitalism which inevitably serves to enrich a tiny class of owners who enjoy overwhelming wealth and power.
 
Corbett and Bayack and others of the young generation have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the propaganda of capitalism that they are becoming aware that the system is currently radically diverging from what the self-serving propaganda defines it towards a coercive system where the overwhelming number of people "own nothing and be happy" but completely powerless. 
 
Thus, the post brings out in sharp relief the weaknesses of most of the younger generation to change anything. The Corbett Report is great to learn about this divergence from its propaganda, but totally off-base (def.) regarding solutions.
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Monday, July 12, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, July 12, 2021

  • The War on Freedom: How Tyranny Overran the United States by Emanuel Pastreich from Global Research. (Note: I noticed one typo-error in this article: "Most citizens were hardly aware that having one corporation control the system software for all computers that they supposedly “owed” meant that they had lost their freedom." I think he meant "owned" instead of "owed".)
The totalitarianism that we face is “inverted” in the sense that we expect some dictator standing on top and playing the bad buy, oppressing us out of personal greed, vanity or cruelty. But the true source of our misery is rather the manner in which multinational corporations use supercomputers to calculate profits and then extract as much money as possible from us by making it impossible for us to grow our own food, to heal our own illnesses, to teach ourselves, or to entertain ourselves. Instead, we must buy products, online, or in supermarkets, in transactions from which multinational corporations and banks will invariably take a major cut. The only learning that is recognized and accredited is expensive and is controlled by corporations. 
The problem with this writer, who is an old-fashioned conservative from the Reagan administration, is that he is a misfit in the neoliberal world. Although Reagan brought in a number of Zionist-inspired neoliberals (= "neoconservatives") in his administration, he goofed on Roberts. What Roberts doesn't understand is that a right-wing cabal lodged in the State Department waited until the Allies won WWII to emerge after the war to take control of the government (see my commentaries here and here). He mistakenly blames government agencies for this: 
 
Open works in process like Wikipedia, Internet comment sections and social media are ideally suited for smearing people and broadcasting the smears worldwide prior to any correction of them. Thus, the digital revolution has been a godsend to government agencies such as the CIA, State Department, Mossad, the Israel Lobby, corporations and other private interest groups, ideological movements such as neoconservatism and Identity Politics, and politicians, all of whom have agendas that are furthered by controlling the explanations. 
 
Roberts consistently doesn't acknowledge a Deep State made up of right-wing financiers and major corporation heads as taking over both the government and the informal government of the ruling class of capitalists. However, he recognizes, unlike most Americans, that Wikipedia has been corrupted and the likely suspects who are obviously now using the Democratic Party as a front organization. 
 
Anything political entries on Wikipedia have been distorted by agents of the transnational ruling class of the de-facto US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. I still use other posts from that website for other topics because they haven't been distorted. Who knows what agents do this dirty work, but I've in the past identified several sources including AI. Who knows what other sources are available to the ruling class? Be sure to see my post of Dec. 19, 2020 and commentary here (it is the second from the top).
  • Biden is Arming Al-Queda Again (I've got the Receipts!) by Syrian Girl, who is currently living in Australia, from her channel on YouTube (10:02m) (Note: You should disregard the initial warning by clicking on "I understand and wish to proceed" to view the podcast.) My reaction: I've noticed in the past several weeks that YouTube is decreasing their ban or censor posts, but is giving you more access to them or instead issuing warnings. I've often wondered about this change of policy. Could it be that censorship has backfired, or no longer desired because most people obey such warnings? Possibly the ruling capitalist class no longer needs censorship to dominate views that are broadcast on media corporations which are most effective in inculcating their fake views for most people of what is reality in the world. The latter worries me most of all.
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