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, February 7, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, February 7, 2022

  • Nigeria Is Planning A False Flag In Switzerland: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix 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: After criticism of using "intelligence", America's spymasters, as a source of false information to manage your perceptions and opinions, Johnstone points to a major distraction used by the ruling capitalist class:
That saying “They got you fighting a culture war to stop you fighting a class war” is something you’ve got to take seriously. You can’t just dismiss it. Because if it’s at all true, even somewhat, then discourse on today’s left is completely fucked and ultimately power-serving.

Certainly you can’t reduce everything to class. Racial and sexual power dynamics are of course very real. The problem would be if those in power kept everyone focused on culture war dynamics instead of class, and kept the discourse from threatening real power. Is that happening? Is it happening at all? To any extent? Because to any extent that it is happening, power is being served and our own interests are being undermined.
 
You must always use reliable sources of information and stop being "managed" by fake propaganda emanating from the self-serving, ruling capitalist class. Any media corporation does precisely that. I am trying to educate you to spot propaganda by relying on reporters that do not have an interest in distorting news and information. That is what I am trying to do with this website. This is what I have been trying to do for the last 12+ years!
... as a Canadian, I’ve seen a different kind of hockey stick introduced this winter; it’s the chartable, steep increase in fear and division stirred up by some of our leaders and the news media – and the mysterious, gloved hand that manipulates public opinion – to ensure the remaining 21% of the Canadian population get fully vaccinated.  
Forget about them being utterly incompetent, you just cannot view them as news organizations and journalists--they are neither. So are their "experts", especially when dealing with military and intelligence issues. Most of their experts are fantasy made-up figures and those who allegedly are real ones are also full of shit.
  • FDR, Stalin and the Untold History of the New Deal mainly featuring the views of Matthew Ehret in an interview conducted by Dionis Kaptari, a Russian scholar, regarding the subject--from the Canadian Patriot Press. (36:40). (Note: The fairly brief text serves as an introduction.) My brief commentary follows: 
Ehret speaks from his wide reading of the real history of the USA, but like anarchists chooses to celebrate capitalism which functioned in the earlier history of this nation as a productive system of wealth. He ignores the inevitable temptation, after they have accumulated their wealth and power, for some self-serving, right-wing capitalists to engage in merely speculative activity and to become addicted to power.
 
Ehret doesn't recognize capitalism as a system with inherent flaws. Instead he eulogizes early American capitalists who saw the need to construct a productive capitalist system to accumulate their wealth and power in the early years of capitalist exploitation that involved slavery, cheap labor, deception, and the constant wars of conquest. 
 
The figures he chooses like FDR, who is credited with saving capitalism for capitalists, and Kennedy who was steeped in capitalism. Both were surrounded by like-minded people who were the exceptions to right-wing capitalists who subsequently and inevitably rose to power (and wealth) to construct a transnational (neoliberal) capitalist empire (the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire) to dominate the world much like the Nazi and Japanese capitalists. (read this for further explanation)
 
Anarchists, which are today popular with younger people, tend to have fantasies of self-sufficiency and separating themselves from their overlord masters in colonies much like the hippies did in late 1967 in their quest to separate themselves from the larger US society by moving on to rural, self-sufficient communes. Although not a hippie, I was there in San Francisco in 1967 when they announced the end of the hippie movement and the start of rural communes. Revolutionaries, on the other hand, have visions of taking control of government and designing it for the needs and welfare of ordinary people. I sometimes feel that I am the last of the revolutionaries, but I refuse to give up hope.
  • The Elite Gathers Its Forces for a Counterattack on the Truckers by Paul Craig Roberts from his weblog. My reaction: Old-fashioned capitalists like Roberts often use "elite" or "elites" instead of "ruling class" to hide the fact there is no ruling class because it is antithetical to a "democracy", a propaganda cornerstone of bourgeois "democracies". In other words, such people who support capitalism find it necessary to hide the fact of a ruling class in order to deceive people who live by their labor and do not accumulate wealth off of stock-ownership of corporations. Roberts resents the right-wing Jewish neoliberals because the latter have taken control of the ruling class. Otherwise, I agree with him that the capitalist ruling class--not the "elite"--sees the necessity of a counterattack on the Canadian truckers.
In 1933, after Hitler came to power, only two governments drew consequences: the Soviet government and the Republican government elected in Spain in 1931. For 1936, they prepared the second People’s Olympics in Barcelona with workers’ sports federations from 17 countries; the first People’s Olympics had taken place here in 1931. But when the 2,000 participants arrived in July 1936, the fascist coup of General Francisco Franco began, supported by supplies from U.S. corporations such as Texaco, General Motors and Chrysler – despite the neutrality decided by the U.S. Congress.
 
The ruling class has always used fear to distract you from reality: the Russians pose a threat to our "democracy", the phony war on drugs, the 9/11 event, the war on terrorism, etc. Their success was only matched in 2020 by the proliferation of the focus on the fear of a pandemic by the ruling class's media corporations and the corruption of WHO by the Bill Gates Foundation, and WHO's subsequent declaration of a covid pandemic. However, they had to supplement the campaign of fear with censorship of health experts, funding hospitals with high mortality rates from covid, threatening doctors with loss of license to practice, establishing "fact-checkers" to impugn the motives of anyone that disagreed with their proliferation of fear, turning a large population into pariahs and heaping scorn upon them for refusing to become vaccinated which resulted in a widespread fear and hatred of people who refused. This was all part of the ruling class's divide and conquer strategy.
The armed conflict in Syria has been ongoing since 2011. The US, under the pretext of fighting terrorists, invaded the country without permission from the Syrian authorities and the UN. In recent months, anti-American sentiments have noticeably intensified in Syria, with Syrians demanding the withdrawal of the US troops from their country. The growth of these sentiments is also due to the continuing illegal export of Syrian oil by the United States to Iraq, as has been regularly reported by the Syrian Arab news agency SANA and from the UN rostrum by the official Syrian authorities.
  • Beyond Binary featuring the views and analysis of Prof. (retired) Guy McPherson, an independent scientist (via his YouTube channel--08:44), who has fearlessly focused his attention throughout much of his career on the climate crisis, but in this post he tackles gender identity from a scientific point of view.
at