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, August 28, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Saturday, August 28, 2021

Note: I am planning a first road trip to the US east coast probably immediately after Labor Day, September 6, from my home in southern Minnesota. (Most of my adult life was on the west coast.) If any of you regular followers would like to meet me on this road trip, I will try to accommodate you in my itinerary. The arrangement would at least consist of meeting over a beverage of your choice at a location near you or at your home. Please contact me if this interests you at my email address: goatmeal36@yahoo.com. Ron H.

Can we stop pretending that wars of aggression justified under false pretext, and fought at the behest of corporate interests are in any way spreading ‘freedom and democracy’ around the globe? Do people really still believe that? Surely you jest. It is purely a nationalist fantasy.
 
But there are many other fantasies as well communicated via the corporate media that we are only beginning to question. Just as the contrived 9/11 event launched wars shortly thereafter in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are being played (manipulated) once again with the corona pandemic propaganda.
  • Watch live as news breaks: Parole board to release Kennedy 'assassin' featuring Rick Sanchez interviewing a lawyer who reports the latest parole hearing of Sirhan Sirhan via RT's channel on YouTube. My reaction: This is another example of how the CIA, the highly secretive agency of the ruling class and the latter's mainstream media, have played (manipulated) ordinary Americans nearly 60 years ago. Neither Sanchez, the interviewed lawyer and the remaining Kennedy family believe that Sirhan Sirhan was guilty of the assassination of Robert Kennedy. This event was after the CIA murdered Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, numerous Black Panthers, and his brother, John F. Kennedy, the president of our country. It looks like the American people will never learn about how they are being manipulated by media corporations.
  • Love Your Servitude - Aldous Huxley & George Orwell from After Skool. My reaction: I noticed at 04:54m that the speaker referred to the Chinese techniques as "brainwashing". But this story was only propaganda to cover for the US's use of biowarfare. Since WWII we have learned from various historians (censored by mainstream institutions) that we have been fed propaganda stories about the 1930s and WWII and thereafter. Read my essays here and here for the general truth about these subjects.
Aldous Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his vision of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism and mass surveillance. As a writer, Orwell produced literary criticism and poetry, fiction and polemical journalism; and is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

The profound animation from 12:30 to 15:45 of this video is from "IN-SHADOW - A Modern Odyssey - Animated Short Film" by Lubomir Arsov

The full Aldous Huxley audio us from his lecture at UC Berkeley in 1962. 
  • Did China abandon socialism? by Philip Roddis from his weblog SteelCityScribblings. My reaction: As a committed real socialist this article is encouraging, but I still worry.
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Friday, August 27, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Friday, August 27, 2021

Note: I am planning a first road trip to the US east coast probably immediately after Labor Day, September 6, from my home in southern Minnesota. (Most of my adult life was on the west coast.) If any of you regular followers would like to meet me on this road trip, I will try to accommodate you in my itinerary. The arrangement would at least consist of meeting over a beverage of your choice at a location near you or at your home. Please contact me if this interests you at my email address: goatmeal36@yahoo.com.  Ron H.

In such a hostile government environment, the citizens need to individually evaluate the science of immunization with COVID-19 vaccines and not rely on philosophical arguments propagated by government officials. In this case there is no scientific evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines improve the health of the individual, much less of the population as a whole. Mass immunization with COVID-19 vaccines is certainly leading to a catastrophic public
health event.
Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rand Paul (D-Ky.) introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act in April to prevent agencies from using "illegitimately obtained" biometric data, such as photos from the software company Clearview AI. The company has scraped billions of photos from social media platforms without approval and is currently used by hundreds of police departments across the United States.
 
The bill has not received a vote in either chamber of Congress yet.
 
My brief commentary follows: 
 
I predict that the ruling class will strongly push their member-capitalists to exploit this digital technology and thus, make an end-run around the Fourth Amendment which says simply "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." 
 
Regardless of whether this bill is passed or not, the ruling capitalist class and their Deep State that is in control of our government will violate this bill anyway. They have a history of violating all kinds of laws restricting the powers of their government: the signing of the international prohibitions on biowarfare is only one example. The latter was thoroughly exposed recently by Nicholas Baker in his book Baseless and in 2013 by Dave Chaddock in his book This Must Be the Place. The ongoing ignoring of our Constitution by the unaccountable and highly secretive CIA is further proof. The ruling class has only the interests of the capitalist class in mind when they pursue their policies in support of their wealth, power, and hegemony in the world. This means that they will turn against the subordinate classes (middle and working classes) in the USA and the nations of their Empire if it is in their interests to do so. The transnational character of major capitalists throughout their US/Anglo/Zionist Empire is now about to turn against the latter classes under the Great Reset (which was announced recently by Klaus Schwab) because it is in their interests to do so. 
 
Their interests? They know that climate destabilization is imminent. This is demonstrated by their ongoing interests to privatize space exploration, hunker down in their escape bunkers here on Earth, and their Great Reset policies to cutback on the Earth's population.
  • The Squad Are "Useful Idiots To The Establishment" says Chris Hedges featuring Jimmy Dore using his channel on YouTube (25:33m) to solicit Hedges' comments, and Dore joins him, regarding the manufactured fake "left". My reaction: The ruling class currently uses the Democratic Party to play ordinary Americans via their control of mainstream media whenever and wherever they want. I believe that Hedges, Ralph Nader, etc. are not revolutionaries because they support old-fashioned capitalism that was characteristic of FDR policies. I don't know about Jimmy Dore.
  • The ‘War On Terror’ Scam Continues by Australian Caitlin Johnstone with her American husband, Tim Foley, also reading the script (but you may miss supporting examples, illustrations, etc.)--from her weblog.
  • EXCLUSIVE | RT speaks to the Taliban's spox following Kabul airport attack from RT. This post is in relation to these posts: see this, this, and this. My reaction: Could it be that the Empire's directors in cooperation with Saudi Arabia have organized, trained, and equipped ISIS? Many believe, including me, that ISIS is the terrorist army of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire, and the directors of the Empire use this army to destabilize nations that they don't like and for good public relations at home.
In the end, no one aside from ISIS wants a terrorized Afghanistan, just as no one wants a civil war in Afghanistan. So the order of business indicates not only an SCO-led frontal fight against existing ISIS-K terror cells in Afghanistan but also an integrated campaign to drain any potential social base for the takfiris in Central and South Asia. 
 
I think that Iranian Prof. Mohamed Marandi is correct when he commented on a question in an interview posed recently by Vanessa Beeley (02:05m) that the sudden pull-out of US control contributed greatly to the chaos, and probably the incident today caused by the ISSIS-K faction which is (in my opinion) controlled by the directors of the de-facto US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.
Much analysis and commentary has explored why this happened but ultimately it is incredibly simple – the US never intended or attempted to build up a credible government or a unified, stable Afghan nation with the necessary infrastructure required for a modern nation-state to thrive.

America’s presence in Afghanistan served a wider geopolitical objective, the encirclement and containment of Russia, China, and also Iran. Its proximity to Pakistan was also a key motivation.
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Thursday, August 26, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Thursday, August 26, 2021

Note: I am planning a first road trip to the US east coast probably immediately after Labor Day, September 6, from my home in southern Minnesota. (Most of my adult life was on the west coast.) If any of you regular followers would like to meet me on this road trip, I will try to accommodate you in my itinerary. The arrangement would at least consist of meeting over a beverage of your choice at a location near you or at your home. Please contact me if this interests you at my email address: goatmeal36@yahoo.com.  Ron H.

Now that the FDA has given full approval to Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, policy makers anticipate government agencies, universities, and private companies will start ramping up vaccine mandates. Even before Pfizer’s FDA approval, vaccine mandates were rolling out across the country. But who is liable for injuries that arise from COVID-19 shots? RT America’s Trinity Chavez explains, then Michael Bixby attorney at Levin, Papantonio and Rafferty weighs in.
  • Propaganda Today: How US created Taliban & al-Qaeda, and behind Afghanistan war profiteering by Ben Norton from The Grayzone. My reaction: Although Norton harps throughout his spiel about the military-industrial complex (he refers mostly to the "belt-way bandits"), but the summary provided by The Grayzone listed what I believe is the most important reasons for the military-industrial complex, a tool of advanced capitalism or fascism (the merger between corporations and government).  The following quote describes the balance of his remarks that are far more important than his references to the military-industrial complex heard in the posted video:
In the rest of the video, Ben documents the history of US meddling in Afghanistan, going back to the 1970s, showing how the CIA gave birth to the Taliban and al-Qaeda as part of Washington’s campaign to undermine and destroy socialist, communist, and left-wing nationalist movements in Muslim-majority countries by supporting far-right Islamist extremist groups.
 
Since the 1917 Russian Revolution, the first attempt to establish socialism which inspired people of so many other nations, the capitalist ruling classes have engaged continuously to stamp out these rebellions in order to preserve their system of capitalism that has given them so much wealth and power. Read, if you haven't already, my post here and here.
For the last 20 years, the corporate media and imperialist powers of the world raised no objections as the United States killed over 100,000 people, set up black site torture chambers, carried out drone assassinations and robbed the country of its resources. The major imperialist powers joined the US in the invasion and occupation. The corporate press facilitated the commission of horrific crimes by promoting the war as a “just cause,” a necessary response to September 11, 2001. Those who exposed the real character of the war in Afghanistan—including Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale—were locked up in prison.

But now, all of the tropes employed by the corporate media to “sell” to world public opinion the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, no matter how moth-eaten and worn out, are being revived.
  • Palestine’s Africa Dichotomy: Is Israel Really ‘Winning’ Africa? by Ramzy Baroud from Dissident Voice. My reaction: I often post Dissident Voice's articles, but I want to make clear that I don't agree with all of them, and the ones by Baroud I must disagree with the implied assumption. He sees Israel as a separate entity from the de-facto US/Anglo/Zionist Empire which is completely false. So, read this post accordingly.
  • Science Update: The Hottest Month in History featuring the views of Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist (via his YouTube channel--06:20m), who has fearlessly focused his attention throughout his career on the climate crisis. 
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Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Note: I am planning a first road trip to the US east coast probably immediately after Labor Day, September 6, from my home in southern Minnesota. (Most of my adult life was on the west coast.) If any of you regular followers would like to meet me on this road trip, I will try to accommodate you in my itinerary. The arrangement would at least consist of meeting over a beverage of your choice at a location near you or at your home. Please contact me if this interests you at my email address: goatmeal36@yahoo.com.  Ron H.

In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.
The most powerful among us are powerful precisely because they create the dominant ideology – the thread of narrative that ties together what we imagine to be our personal understanding of why the world is as it is. That is why elites, whether the state or corporations, prioritise capturing the main channels of communication. They make sure to own and control the mass media.

When powerful external actors are framing the world for us – whether it be through broadcasting, newspapers or social media – they get to decide what matters, what should be prioritised, what is right.
 
But he concludes his essay with these words:
 
The reality is that we can save our species – assuming it can be saved at all at this late stage – only by radically transforming our societies: by ending inequality, by criminalising greed, by dispossessing billionaires, by nationalising corporations, by making economies and political systems far more localised, by introducing real democratic accountability, by abolishing the corporate media, by funding critical thinking in our education system, and much else. [my emphasis]
 
You must read the article to see how he gets to his conclusion from the first paragraph above.
I've viewed mainstream media corporations as taken over by right-wing propagandists, and The Guardian is no exception. So, I proceeded cautiously with the reading of this article to find self-serving bias that favors the de-facto US/Anglo/Zionist Empire's transnational-capitalists interests. I finally decided that it gives much valuable information about the Chinese Communist Party.

For a long time I have worried under Deng's influence in the late 1970s that the Communist Party of China was in danger of being corrupted by the success of their entrepreneurs. 

In the four decades since Xi’s predecessor Deng Xiaoping enabled economic liberalisation, booms in manufacturing and technology have allowed a select few in China to amass vast fortunes. But the tables are turning, with Beijing’s regulators mounting almost daily attacks on private power bases, in particular the technology titans, whose influence has begun to stretch far beyond Asia.
 
Although this article does not allay my worry, I think that it is informative about recent developments. This is not to argue that the directors of the de-facto Empire are not worried about China--they are, and have in the several years declared an unofficial war against China. But China as well as Russia and Iran are charting an independent course of their nations by instituting mixed economies--some private and others public--which is independent of the Empire. To the directors who will accept nothing less than total domination of their Empire, this is apostasy and justifies their force-full response to these heretics.
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Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Note: I am planning a road trip to the US east coast probably immediately after Labor Day, September 6, from my home in southern Minnesota. If any of you regular followers would like to meet me on this road trip, I will try to accommodate you in my itinerary. The arrangement would at least consist of meeting over a beverage of your choice at a location near you or at your home. Please contact me if this interests you at my email address: goatmeal36@yahoo.com.  Ron H.

Professor Jay Bhattacharya [of Stanford University] is one of the famous voices to have emerged out of the pandemic. A vocal critic of lockdowns, his name became synonymous with the controversial Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an “alternative approach to the pandemic” that would entail no lockdowns. Along with co-signatories Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldforff, the trio argued that public health strategies should instead centre on the ‘focused protection’ of at-risk groups while keeping society as open as possible so the healthy parts of the population could build herd immunity. [my insertion]

The declaration triggered a huge global debate, with critics arguing that many more lives would have been lost on account of the difficulty of shielding all those who were vulnerable. During this week’s interview, Freddie Sayers challenged Prof Bhattacharya on what would have happened if his strategy was adopted, whether he has changed his mind in retrospect, and how his ‘focused protection’ have would worked with waning immunity and new variants? 
 
And at one point (36:09m) Prof. Bhattacharya regarding censorship and harassment said:

I know for fact that there was not a consensus [among scientists]. Yet there
were many, many people afraid to speak up and say this hypothesis [CDC policies?] doesn't make sense. I know that because both before and after, especially after, I've gotten countless people [probably scientists] writing to me saying thank you for speaking up, and letting me say my piece. [my insertions]
Why It Matters: Now that full FDA approval is in place, we’re likely to see vaccine requirements and mandates take off intensely. Hospitals, colleges, corporations and other organizations will now likely look to mandate their workers be vaccinated, while still offering reasonable accommodation via religious or medical exemption.
I interview Dr Lucy Morgan Edwards about the recent events in Afghanistan, the reality of life under the Taliban and why the NATO aggression post 9/11 should never have happened but US, UK intelligence agencies ensured it stayed on track despite political resolution being an option.
A 471-page report by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts for Bolivia (GIEI-Bolivia) recently presented to Bolivian President Luis Arce in La Paz on Tuesday this week confirms the U.S.-backed coup’s persecution of opponents, including “systematic torture and summary executions” in 2019. The report is based on interviews with 400 victims of the Anez regime and other witnesses, as well as 120,000 files related to abuses between September 1 and December 31, 2019.

The findings prompted Bolivian prosecutors to charge the self-styled “interim leader” Jeanine Anez with genocide.
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Monday, August 23, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, August 23, 2021

A new American president is presenting a program for renewal of human values in the marketplace unheard of since the 1930s but still projecting American military domination and environmental destruction far beyond the awareness of most Americans. Continued insistence that Russia and China are major global threats to everyone and not just American monopoly capitalists resonate not only in the cosmic void between the ears of our mentally disabled foreign policy experts but echo in the minds of innocent Americans since that’s all they get from major, and all too often minor media.

The charge that China is conducting genocide on its Islamic people coming from the butchers of hundreds of thousands of Islamic people in the middle east would be a dreadful sick joke if not so incredibly evil, but poor souls condemned to network media remain stuck in a misinformation chamber amplifying our ruling power’s message day in and day out.
  • Until you realise … by Philip Roddis, an independent British blogger, from his weblog Steel City Scribblings. 
Until you realise the Western world is ruled by criminals, and that corporate media’s first loyalty is not to truth but – via market discipline and beneath a show of fiery independence on lesser issues – to those criminals, you will continue to have the wool pulled over your eyes on all the things that most matter.

In fact there’s almost no limit to the sense addling fairy tales you’ll buy.
  • EarthNewspaper.com - All The Honest News Fit To Publish -- (Note: I cannot reach this website today, and have had difficulties in the past. Either the administrators of this website are careless in formatting their website or our masters are busy censoring their website. Which do you think is an explanation?)
International media has focused on Afghanistan these past few days and rightly so as the appalling situation left behind continues its descent into utter chaos. Little mentioned however has been the possibility of restructuring Afghanistan’s supply and trade chains after twenty years of war. While the Russians will largely provide security in the region, China will provide the financing and help build the infrastructure and encourage industrialization and trade in return for peace and security. People tend not to fight when they are in the process of transforming their lives for the better, and Beijing understands this, although much of the social problems are the Taliban’s responsibility to solve.

There are several options for China to instigate trade routes with Afghanistan.
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Sunday, August 22, 2021

Posts that I especially recommend for Sunday, August 22, 2021

Transparency advocates have criticised the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision not to hold a formal advisory committee meeting to discuss Pfizer’s application for full approval of its covid-19 vaccine.

Last year the FDA said it was “committed to use an advisory committee composed of independent experts to ensure deliberations about authorisation or licensure are transparent for the public.” But in a statement, the FDA told The BMJ that it did not believe a meeting was necessary ahead of the expected granting of full approval.
  • 💥The Puppet Masters Portfolios featuring an unknown British narrator taking step-by-step showing you via the Yahoo Finance website (he/she must be accessing data from their paid subscriptions) how the same institutional owners like Blackrock and Vanguard own essentially every nominal company/corporation you encounter every day of your lives. This post is from a British channel (39:06m) of YouTube (owned by Google which is substantially owned by the stockholders of Blackrock and Vanguard) called Observation Deck. This is a best post. (Note: The subject of this video starts at about 2:20m.) My brief commentary follows:
I have been warning you about the consolidation of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands since I started my website in late 2009. But my worst fears of this concentration of wealth and power were rather tame compared with what this British channel of YouTube reveals. The fact that YouTube has allowed this channel to expose online readers to such content only suggests to me that they are supremely confident that it is too late for us to do anything that will threaten their power. I am unable to dispute their confidence this morning. But, one thing that I can strongly recommend is that you stop watching TV "news" broadcasts. These are major sources of ruling class propaganda to distort and manipulate your mind on behalf of Blackrock, Vanguard, and their associates in the capitalist ruling class. Only watch these "news" broadcasts as a study of propaganda.
 
By permitting economic entities to own stock in other corporations, the capitalist system is perfectly able to hide this concentration of wealth and power behind the facade of individual corporations--that is, until now. This confidence--it is too late for you to do anything about it--of the Empire's transnational capitalist ruling class now enables their spokespeople like Klaus Schwab to openly talk about you owning nothing and will nevertheless be happy because they will own and control it all. I wonder and fear whether he isn't correct. 
 
This tiny class has demonstrated their power by censoring any voices of opposition to their fear narratives about the Covid pandemic crisis which they entirely manufactured. 
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