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, March 23, 2022

Posts that I especially recommend for Wednesday, March 23, 2022

  • By Allen Forest, a political cartoonist, from Dissident Voice.

  • COVID-19 - A Biological Weapon Targeting Ethnicity and Body Systems by Larry Romanoff from The Unz Review. My reaction: I don't doubt his analysis, but I quarrel with him in his bias toward Jews and his lack of depth of his analysis. It is well-known that the old-fashioned capitalists like Romanoff, Ron Unz, and Paul Craig Roberts are often leading the effort to the conclusion that Covid-19 was engineered, but they all fall short in explaining what the world's grand conspiracy was being pushed by whom. What is familiar among these old-fashioned capitalists is that they tend to blame Jews because they were prominent in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Hitler was the most famous Jew hater and he, with his Nazi armies, invaded the Soviet Union. But, I, on the other hand, blame those in the transnational capitalist Empire (the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire) which has over 300 laboratories all over the globe reportedly dedicated to developing bio-weapons. Jews, like every ethnic group, are all found across the capitalist political spectrum from right to left, largely depending on how much their individual interests align with the rich people of power most commonly found in the leading circles of today's Empire. And, there are socialist Jews.
  • How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, Psyops and the Military Origins of the Internet by Dustin Broadbery from Internationalist 360°. My reaction: The real beginning started with the ruling capitalist class's decision with their abundant money to fund research studies to control public opinion to counter the socialist conception of communism. You can't blame the Soviet Union and the remaining ruling capitalist classes of the West (shorthand for the de-facto US/British/Zionist Empire) for using propaganda to win WWII over a leading fascist (advanced stage of capitalism) empire in the German Third Reich and Japan's fascist ruling class which began in the 1930s. (The mass use of propaganda began in WWI.) They continued on to form their own fascist empire using the powerful military of the USA combined with what was left of the British Empire. (See my explanations contained in the posts here and here and in the recently published book wherein Columbia U. Prof. Stephen Wertheim confesses this fascist takeover in Tomorrow the World.)
If this is troubling to you, I suggest we do a little exercise together. Let us dare to discern the “facts” for ourselves. Only then, will we cease being mere cheerleaders for a team; only then, can we qualify ourselves to ask in all honest sincerity, “whose side are we truly on?”

Are Nazis Now the New “Good Guys”?

There is a bit of mixed messaging that has been going on, especially in the last few weeks. Are there significant numbers of Nazis in Ukraine and are these “bad” or “good” Nazis in the context that they are fighting the Russian “invaders”?
Military operations continue in Ukraine with two radically different narratives depending on whether one listens to the Western or Russian media. These two versions diverge not only in describing the war, but more importantly in describing the goals of the war.
Without compromise in Ukraine, the world economy is set to face economic tsunamis on the back of misguided sanctions. China will meet the rising risks with resiliency.

On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced three decades of broken pledges and NATO expansion seeking to “demilitarize and de-nazify” Ukraine ordering a “special military operation.” In the West, the speech was portrayed as a conspiracy fantasy.

Yet, declassified documents show that several US and European leaders did give security assurances against NATO eastward expansion at the turn of the 1990s. And these pledges were posted online by the Washington-based National Security Archive in 2017.
The genetic modification to their coats is intended to help them better withstand heat stress, allowing them to gain more weight and increase the efficiency of meat production2 — but at what cost? While a lengthy approval process is typically necessary for gene-edited animals to enter the food market, the FDA streamlined the process for gene-edited cattle, allowing them to skirt the regular approval process.
at