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, February 2, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Scientists have described the pandemic as “the largest isolation study in history” – and its effects are only just becoming clearer over time.
The new rules came after a handful of musicians, including Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist Nils Lofgren and Joni Mitchell, pulled their music catalogs from Spotify, in an effort to force Spotify to choose between their music or Rogan’s podcast. Author Brené Brown also joined the protest, stating she won’t release new episodes of her Spotify-exclusive podcasts “until further notice.”
Trudeau called the national trucker protest a ‘fringe minority,’ yet the Freedom Convoy continues to pick up steam as it rolls on through Canada. Take a look at the ongoing protests against the nation’s vaccine mandate.
  • Response to allegations by the academic smear campaign* by Geert Vanden Bossche, a world-renowned virologist and vaccinologist from his weblog Voice for Science and Solidarity. My reaction: If you don't get on board with the capitalist Empire's agenda of world conquest, you may be isolated and smeared. Bossche is one of the figures among many that the Empire has censored and smeared because he did not get on board with the well-funded and well-organized drive to have everyone receive covid "vaccinations". I don't know what the leaders of the Empire had in mind whether it was for population control or some other reason, but it was not for our own good. The well-organized drive was, as always, to serve the interests of our billionaire masters. Meanwhile, our sheep-like neighbors all gobbled up the propaganda and are living in a delusional world. 
Concealed beneath the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative, and marketed by the World Economic Forum as the ‘Great Reset’, this coup is designed to utterly transform human society and even human life. This is because the detail outlined in the ‘Great Reset’ documentation, which anyone can investigate for themselves, clearly identifies intended changes to some 200 areas of human activity, essentially characterized as part of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Beyond that, however, as a lengthening list of doctors, scientists and scholars have been warning us for some time, although their efforts are invariably heavily censored by corporate media, the injectables program is decimating the human population ....
To me, at the end, it became rather obvious that the whole momentum was part of a corporate political campaign for the Democratic Party establishment. The same people who raised their fists and said “Black Lives Matter” turned out to be the supporters of Joe Biden who has bragged that he was the architect of crime bills and The Patriot Act — the very root of the school to prison pipeline, the racist, colonial “war on terror,” the prison industrial complex and so on.

Is irony completely dead as “reality” continues to be stretched to fit the ruling class interests? In the end, I felt so dirty and violated to be a part of that committee’s activities. [my emphasis]
  • What Has Been Asserted Without Evidence May Be Dismissed Without Evidence 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. My reaction: The ruling capitalist class (billionaires) has built a de-facto empire (US/British/Zionist Empire) since WWII, and hasn't given up the objective of world domination like the Third Reich of the Nazis. The general population is carefully filled with appropriate propaganda via ruling class media corporations. Thus, anyone aspiring to a lucrative career must blend in with this objective, and we see people frequently lapping up this propaganda. For free thinkers, this is an anathema. This is the main reason I dropped out after receiving a BA from a major west coast university, and pursued my own goal of being educated by reading original dissident authors corresponding to any age. Thus, I am a free thinker by receiving an excellent education instead of being loaded with capitalist propaganda like "Johnny Harris" expressed, and who merely repeats the current propaganda of the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire.
Professor Shoshana Zuboff explains how Google ALWAYS intended to be what it
is today - a company that harvests our personal information as covertly as possible and invade our privacy for profit. They pretended that they are a service we could use but really they are using us. Are we only just starting to realise how bad it is now?!
In all seriousness, the U.S. government may not be far from investigating and charging critics of the world’s mightiest military alliance with treason. Over two years ago the NATO Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence conducted an “experiment” with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, and then denounced the four for permitting “social media manipulation” on their platforms. As President Biden regularly speaks of his “sacred obligation” to NATO’s Article 5 war clause, it isn’t far-fetched to envision him employing the political equivalent of blasphemy laws and canonical courts against those of us warning of the threat posed by the world’s oldest and history’s largest military bloc.
The sheer size and scope of the western information operations – insisting repeatedly on the imminence of a Russian invasion of Ukraine – has almost dwarfed the western effort mounted in the lead up to the second invasion of Iraq. This latest info-war has been qualitatively different from that earlier episode however, in the way in which supposed intelligence titbits were constantly fed to the press in order to stiffen the narrative spine with a direct sense of being at the very cusp of war.

By last weekend, the U.S. mainstream was indeed in a war frenzy, and it seemed that the narrative was gaining a momentum and energy of its own – moving beyond Washington’s control and picking up support from across the U.S. bi-partisan spectrum.
UK PM Boris Johnson conspicuously canceled a scheduled call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the following day flew to Kiev to meet with Ukrainian President Zelensky. The UK has also inaugurated a new triple alliance with Ukraine and Poland, drawn together over “common principles” and not geography. Investigative journalist Ben Swann has the details. Then independent journalist Ben Norton weighs in. He points out that “nothing actually changes on the ground” and that Ukraine’s military is larger than that of the UK. 
Andrew Cockburn, author of “The Spoils of War”, on the US arms industry’s role in promoting and profiting from today’s global conflicts, from Ukraine to Yemen to Syria. [my link]
The Modi government is going to come under immense pressure in the coming weeks and months from Washington to move into the Western camp on the burning issues of Ukraine and NATO’s further expansion, which would “change the world,” as President Biden framed the paradigm in stark historical terms last week.
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