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

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, February 8, 2022

  • Sleazy Edit By Canadian State Media Frames Video Blogger As An Agent Of Beijing by Australian Caitlin Johnstone from her weblog. My reaction: Johnstone shows that Canada is plagued by an anti-China propaganda campaign with numerous illustrations and examples much as we experience in the USA. Canada is a part of the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire, isn't it? But gullible people believed this stuff having been thoroughly brainwashed by decades of such propaganda broadcasts by major media corporations. I lived for a while in Vancouver, British Columbia and I soon learned that all three local newspapers were owned by the same Zionist family!
A friend of mine used the [above] phrase recently, somewhat light heartedly, in reference to the recent defenestration of black celebrity Whoopi Goldberg for her having referred to the so-called holocaust in a way that was not deemed to be adequately reverential by the Jewish power brokers who increasingly have their way in the United States and Europe. Specifically, Goldberg, who is no critic of Jews or Israel and is as willing to submit to proskynesis before Zionist force majeure as anyone in the entertainment industry, said “Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people.”

Whoopi was immediately attacked by a host of the usual suspects, including both the US Holocaust Museum and also the always vigilant “Fighting Hate” Anti-Defamation League (ADL), whose CEO Jonathan Greenblatt intoned how “The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systemic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race.
  • Calling a Spad a Spad by Craig Murray, a Scottish author, broadcaster and human rights activist from his weblog. (Note: While Scotland is a part of Britain, and Britain is an integral part of the de-facto US/British/Empire, I thought that you might be interested in this dissident's views on the British government.)
Networks such as CNN and MSNBC have spoken a lot about the need for honesty this last week, but as revelations emerge about media outlets’ surveillance advertising, we ask, who is most guilty of not being transparent?
On February 4, 2022, on the occasion of the opening of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, the presidents of China and Russia issued a document entitled:

Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development (my link)

This document sets a new level in the cooperation between the two countries in foreign policy and is their exposition of a common viewpoint for setting out the rules that the world should follow in politics among nations. A key section up front contains the following: “The sides call on all States…to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role….”

The reliance on the United Nations (UN) as the major guiding rulemaker is an important point. A major question concerning this reliance is the extent to which the design of the UN matches the current reality of the world distribution of wealth and power.
  • America’s real adversaries are its European and other allies: The U.S. aim is to keep them from trading with China and Russia by Michael Hudson from "The Saker" weblog. My reaction: Hudson's champions the industrial era and as such supports the old-fashioned capitalists (paleoliberals or nationally-based capitalist ruling class) as distinguished from transnational or neoliberals (there are many terms which obscure realty such as neoconservatism which obscures the reality of Zionist or right-wing Jews that form most of the base of neoliberalism) who (e.g. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, etc.) took over control of the ruling class during the Reagan administration. Naturally "paleoliberal" capitalists like Paul Craig Roberts and Ron Unz resent this takeover. 
But I distinguish them as nationally-based capitalists and transnationally-based capitalists in which the latter favor or promote the reduction of tariffs and other trade regulations, and Investor-State Dispute Courts which bypassed international bodies, like the UN, to mediate disputes between private investors and entire nations.
  • Wake by Dr. Malcolm Light from Arctic News. (Note: Light is an earth systems scientist.)
Present data indicates that the Mean Global Atmospheric Temperature Anomaly will have reached 5°C in the Summer of 2024 when massive Global extinction will begin in earnest. Therefore the latest date for effective action is the summer of 2023.
at