Posts that I especially recommend for Monday, June 7, 2021

• Covid, Cybernetics, And The New Normal by "anonymous" from Wrench in the Gears.
  

This is a guest post written by a humanities teacher and freelance writer who holds a masters degree from the School of African and Oriental Studies, a public research university in London. It lays out over fifty concerns regarding pandemic policy implementation and plans for a cybernetic future, full spectrum dominance of life on the planet by defense, bio-tech, and finance interests. I’m glad to be able to share my platform so this detailed analysis can be more widely distributed.

• James Corbett Presents to the Corona Investigative Committee​ featuring James Corbett being interviewed by Reiner Fuellmich of the Corona Investigative Committee (based in Germany) about Corbett's investigation into the corona crisis and the future of humanity.​ My commentary follows:
   
  Early in the interview (02:45m) Fuellmich asks a very profound question: "What drives them? I mean they have enough money." The answer furnished by Corbett can be condensed in one sentence: The transnational capitalist ruling class of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire have bought into the assumption that humans are an exceptional species. Because they have long discovered that wealth brings power in its wake, they have pursued the accumulation of wealth. Now that they have so much wealth (besides the fact that power/control is addictive), the Empire's ruling class fantasize about a corollary of wealth/power: they must overcome death to prove the validity of their assumption.
   
  They recently embraced the high technology of digitization of everything (the "Great Reset") in order to realize their fantasies.
  
   
  But doubts are creeping into their mad-power-complex, and most notably from the Russia-China-Iran combination which threatens not only their Empire, but also the pursuit of their assumption. Too bad for us, the rest of humanity, this mad pursuit threatens the survivability of our species ... and most others. 

• Gaming Our Lives: Pay for Success Finance. Bonnie Faulkner, of Guns + Butter, interviews (nearly an hour) Alison McDowell who has been described by others as a mom, an independent researcher, and activist. (Note: A script furnishes the introduction to the thoughts of McDowell followed by the nearly hour-long audio interview.)

• Another Claim of ‘Mission Accomplished’ Collapses by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation.
  

• Mainstream Politics Offer Pretend Revolutions To A Discontented Public by Australian Caitlin Johnstone with her American husband reading the script, which is provided from her weblog.

• Interesting Timing – Obama Administration Lifted Block on “Gain of Function Research” Just Eleven Days Before President Trump Took Office, January 9, 2017 from The Last Refuge. 

• CNN / MSNBC Audiences Abandoning After Trump featuring Jimmy Dore summarizing, and exclaiming about, statistics of viewer ratings of TV shows in this 07:26m podcast via YouTube.

• Tech Giants Help Israel Muzzle Palestinians by Jonathan Cook, an independent journalist who resides in Nazareth, Israel, from Dissident Voice.

• Book Review – Joint Criminal Enterprise: Why everything you were told about Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbs was wrong. By Andy Wilcoxson from "The Saker" weblog. My reaction: Who could have imagined? (sarcasm)
  

• Space Oddities by Bernhard, a German independent blogger, from his weblog Moon of Alabama. 

• Red Alert: Only One Earth from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) posted on Tricontinental.
  

Posts that I especially recommend today: Saturday, December 19, 2020

• A Long-Forgotten CIA Document From WikiLeaks Sheds Critical Light on Today's U.S. Politics and Wars by Glenn Greenwald from Substack. This is a best post.
  

• Through the (Empire's & Zionist Israel's) Looking Glass by Ron Horn for Surviving Capitalism (Not). This is a best post. (At 4:48 PM CT I edited, and added to, this post.)
  

In the past I have frequently used Wikipedia entries for explanations and documentation for various items, but apparently starting in 2010, this online encyclopedia has been corrupted by secret political agencies of what I refer to as the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire which was gradually formed after WWII. This practice is consistent with all their efforts at dominating ordinary people through control of the information they access. This indoctrination and propaganda elements represent essential hallmarks of neofascism that the directors of the Empire have adopted.

At first propaganda agents only targeted media corporations, academic (see this example), and entertainment organizations by supporting people who played along with the capitalist ruling class's agenda to control all information ordinary people received. Often these subversive efforts were aided by actual infiltrations of targeted organizations.

However, apparently beginning around 2010, agents of the Empire started noticing people being influenced by accurate online organizations like Wikipedia. Thus, they immediately began to subvert these organizations in order to screen out ideas and information that did not support the Empire's agendas, and likewise, to support ideas and information that did. Wikipedia was one such project. See this, this, this, this, and this. Thus, in the past, I frequently used Wikipedia entries to document claims I made in my posts, but in the past several years I've had to exercise judgment as to which entries to use or not to use. It seems that any of their posts that are remotely political can be rejected. 

But most ordinary people are not aware of this development, and believe everything that they learn from subverted organizations that are omnipresent in their lives. (See this satirical piece.) Propaganda agents have since added social media to their list of targets to influence the preceptions of ordinary people who are thoroughly confused by the pandemic project. 

Posts that I especially recommend today: Sunday, Sept. 27, 2020

This is posted late, that is, on Monday morning. For some reason after I did some minor editing (some time) after publishing this set of posts, but I forgot to press the "update" button on the new weblog software, and as a result I noticed on Monday morning that the Sundays' posts were not published. I apologize. Because of this mistake I'll not publish any posts on Monday. But not to worry: today (Monday) I will scan my 50 credible websites for posts and include them with other posts tomorrow.

 

•  Engineering Contagion: UPMC, Corona-thrax and “the Darkest Winter” by Whitney Webb from The Last American Vagabond. (Note: This is a series of articles reporting on the research that Webb has undertaken. You will need some background in biotechnology to fully understand this article, and the one before entitled "Engineering Contagion: UPMC, Corona-thrax and “the Darkest Winter” that I was alerted to by an activist.) My reaction follows:

From her research Webb uncovers some odd and suspicious facts in US corporations' pursuit of a vaccine to prevent covid-19. For example:

Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA’s Prophecy program “to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors.”

• Development banks must be held accountable for their disastrous oil palm plantation investments in the Congo from GRAIN. (My reaction: But they won't be held accountable because they as transnational capitalist corporations are too powerful for ordinary people to challenge. This is true throughout the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. This is the sad reality of advanced capitalism. Only a thoroughly democratic organization of ordinary people can challenge and topple them in the time remaining before climate deterioration really sets in and puts the end of humans and most other species.)

• Sinophobia, Lies and Hybrid War”: The Nation which Unleashed This Plague…” according to Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly: Contrary to US rhetoric and disinformation China is not an existential threat to the ‘free world’ by Pepe Escobar via Global Research. My reaction: But the China-Russia combination is a threat to world domination to the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.

• Why Liberals Hate Leftists by Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian, from her weblog.

• Leaked docs expose massive Syria propaganda operation waged by Western govt contractors and media by Ben Norton from The Grayzone.
  

• Why is the World going to Hell? Netflix’s The Social Dilemma tells only Half the Story by Jonathan Cook from Dissident Voice. (This is a best post.) My reaction follows: 

Cook, unlike most other thoroughly brainwashed critics nowadays, names the system--capitalism. Here are excerpts from the article: 

The cause of that full-spectrum, systemic crisis is not named, but it has a name. Its name is the ideology that has become a black box, a mental prison, in which we have become incapable of imagining any other way of organising our lives, any other future than the one we are destined for at the moment. That ideology’s name is capitalism.

... “evilness” – the psychopathic pursuit of profit above all other values – is the business model for all corporations, not just the digital ones.

The Social Dilemma offers us an opportunity to sense the ugly, psychopathic face shielding behind the mask of social media’s affability. But for those watching carefully the film offers more: a chance to grasp the pathology of the system itself that pushed these destructive social media giants into our lives.

Even in the dark age in which we are currently living, naming the system is, sadly, a revolutionary act. It will take vastly much more to change the deadly system that we are under.

• Did Putin order the assassination of Alexei Navalny? by Stephen Gowans from his weblog What's Left. (Note: The propaganda is so ridiculous that I hesitated to post this.)
  

• Nations Should Begin Removing Facebook, Twitter, and Google from Their Information Space by Tony Cartalucci from his weblog Land Destroyer Report.
  

• What OBAMA Got Away With. This features Jimmy Dore (via a YouTube video) describing himself as a "dumb", but independent, comedian demonstrating what independence of thought can lead one to think critically about their "bought" government. But this comes at a price--he's losing his comedic take on life. In another video, he rants about the suicidal destruction of the ecology which supports human along with many others species--because of corporate pursuit of profits (under the capitalist system).

• ANTIFA, Red Herrings and Fanning the Flames of Discord! by Henry Kamens from New Eastern Outlook.
  

• Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial by John Branch and Brad Plumer from The NY Times. (Note: If you are not registered with this source, you can access the article here.) My reaction: This source is like a broken clock that registers the time correctly two times a day. This is one of those times. But, after they shock ordinary Americans with this headline, they, as a propaganda rag for the capitalist ruling class, must sprinkle their reporting with more positive statements so that we can go back to sleep--and, of course, they blame it on the government which is owned and controlled by the ruling class. But it shows that our masters are aware of this looming threat. Could the covid-19 pandemic be their desperate means to cope with the abrupt deterioration of our climate?
  

Two posts that I especially recommend today: Friday, November 22, 2019

• Bolivia, Lithium and Hijacking the Environmental Movement by Guy Crittenden from Solarian (based in Canada). 

• Obama Tells Dems Don't Be "Too Far Left" by Jimmy Dore and his show in Philadelphia (via YouTube).

Obama’s ‘Hope and Change’ was a ‘mirage’ says Ilhan Omar

Click here to access article from The Canary (Britain) which gathered the Congresswoman's (Minneapolis voting district) comments from a much longer interview posted on Politico.

The “hope and change” offered by former President Barack Obama was a “mirage”, according to Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

She made the comments during a recent interview with Politico. Politico contrasted Omar, a newly elected US Democratic Party representative from Minnesota, with Dean Phillips, a wealthy businessman. Minnesotans also recently elected Phillips to congress, whom Politico characterised as a centrist and pragmatist. 

Defending immigrant rights and building the resistance

Click here if you wish to access this 33:01 talk by Heather Benno at a recent PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) forum in Washington, DC. directly from Liberation's website.

In this talk you will get the perspective of a lawyer who has worked extensively with immigration issues in relation to the government's policies which vary according to the ruling class's political interests. You will also learn that it doesn't matter very much which capitalist party is in power, and more details about the Trump administration and it's policies.

Across the country, people are asking the question, where do we go from here? We look to what the future of the resistance movement will be against racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and all that Trump and his administration represents. This event featured a presentation by immigration lawyer Heather Benno.

Over the last month, the world has watched as millions of poor and working people began to mobilize across the United States to protest Trump’s agenda. The question is now how can we grow the resistance into a powerful movement for revolutionary change?

The Coup against Trump and His Military - Wall Street Defense

Click here to access article by retired Professor James Petras from his blog.

Petras is another perceptive writer who offers his views on the apparent ruling class split between what I will refer to as the Obama faction and the Trump faction. He also expresses his views in a PDF document that he posted the following day on Friday entitled "The Anti-Trump Institutional Coup and the Visible Operatives". I will tease out his position based on these two articles.

Petras sees the Obama faction as a more established one that has been guiding his policies, and whose backers have a visceral opposition to Russia, China, and Iran as has been evident all along during his administration. The Trump faction, on the other hand, want to expand markets to serve the commercial interests of major capitalists. Also with the sole exception of corporate media who support the Obama faction, he sees the split over these issues as cutting across every powerful interest group in the capitalist ruling class such as Wall Street, the military establishment, what I refer to as government puppets in Congress who are funded by both factions and serve both factions, and even several of his Cabinet appointees who support "bellicose policies" presumably toward Russia, China, and Iran.

Petras makes the following claim about the Trump faction:

Trump seeks to implement his foreign policy of ‘market deals’, renegotiation of trade agreements with China, oil and aerospace trade-offs with Iran, and the termination of sanctions with Russia. President Trump will declare ‘let the oil deals flow’!

I have not seen much evidence that the Trump camp wants to make deals with China and Iran--quite to the contrary. Thus, my suspicion is that Trump will be used to make deals with Russia in an effort to split them off from China as I explained on the 15th of December in an article entitled "My ('conspiracy') theory about the emergence of the Trump faction of the ruling capitalist class". In fact, the whole contentious contest between these two factions may be used as a ruse to hide this new strategy.

What is certain is that Trump's domestic policies will favor more austerity policies and likely further cuts to, privatization and/or abolition of, social supports such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

Broken Promises: The Structural Legacy of Capitalist Democracies

Click here to access article by James Petras from his website.

Unless you have been sound asleep the last eight years, I recommend that you skip many of the initial paragraphs that the retired professor of sociology devotes to a review of all the lies of Obama and the promises of President-elect Trump. Start at the sub-heading "The Structural Basis of Capitalist Democracy" to get to the real interesting part of his argument which begins as follows:

Under capitalist democracies, Presidents put on the appearance of ‘talking to real folks’ while skillfully working for the biggest capitalists and bankers.

When ‘capitalist democracy’ is under threat and discredited, the search for populist demagogues kicks in.

Syria ceasefire failure is entirely the U.S.'s fault

Click here to access article from Signs of the Times (SOTT). [If you are curious about this source, see my note regarding the website here.]

This article is particularly insightful regarding Obama and the other government officials of the US who are seen acting under the supervision of a "deep state". This is illustrated by their actions in the recent negotiations regarding the Syrian conflict.

The Russian cellist and conductor Sergei Roldugin recently shared an eye-opening anecdote regarding Putin and Obama. He apparently told a group of journalists - "confidentially" - that "Obama's bodyguards are not trusting enough to leave him alone with Putin, so that they can speak one-on-one." Sure, Putin is a martial arts master and ex-KGB, but to imagine he would put Obama in a chokehold or poison his tea is ridiculous. There has to be another reason, besides concerns for his physical safety, why Obama needs minders during his meetings with Putin. What could it possibly be?

The answer should be clear, and it has to do with what we wrote about on Tuesday regarding the differences of opinion between the State Department and the Pentagon, for example. But it goes deeper than that.

US-NATO Border Confrontation with Russia Risks Nuclear War and Loss of European Partners

Click here if you wish to access this 11:38m interview with Michael Hudson (with transcript) directly from Real News Network.

Silencing America as it prepares for war

Click here to access article by John Pilger from his website.

I am posting this article only because of its shortcomings that I think should be addressed.

Pilger continues his practice of condemning nearly every official leader of the Empire, corporate media for their warmongering, and the pervasive nationalist propaganda that seems to exist everywhere in the US. However he fails, or refuses, to look deeper at the forces that drive people to promote the interests of the ruling capitalist class. Such superficial and cynical critiques, I think, serves not to enlarge people's understanding of the real world to that they can take effective actions to change things, but instead drives them into cynicism and despair.

Pilger offers critiques that are more scathing than most, but unfortunately he is much too typical of the many that one can find on the web. I often wonder about this. Are these people really that shallow or do they limit their analysis because they are afraid of going after the real puppet masters who pull all the important strings of the Empire, and their system which they so vigorously protect? If this is so, then they differ only in degree from the people they attack. 

Bear with me here because I don't like criticizing people like Pilger. But, it seems to me the difference is that many critics like Pilger refuse to go deeper because they fear doing so might bring repercussions to the modest perks they enjoy, while those who allow themselves to be used as puppets do so for all the abundant material rewards they will come their way. To be a real revolutionary requires one to live fearlessly, but that is asking a lot of people who have families, some security and comforts. 

We are all faced at times to deal with threats and rewards from powerful agents of capital, and even the best of us make compromises. I have, and I refuse to any longer, but that may be because I am an old man who has lived a full life. Now the threats to humans are of such an enormous scale that if most of us continue to do this, we as humans will surely perish from the Earth.   

Anyway, if you have read his commentaries before, I think you can pass on this one. 

Big Nations Should Not Bully Smaller Ones: Obama in Vietnam

Click here to access article posted on TeleSur.

This grossly hypocritical remark by the shallow Obama while visiting Vietnam illustrates how inept or ignorant his handlers and speechwriters are.

U.S. President Barack Obama said Tuesday during his visit to Vietnam—a nation still suffering from a U.S. invasion that lasted 20 years—that big nations should not bully smaller ones.

Obama also spoke of the relationship between the U.S and Vietnam amid tensions with China and moves to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

This remark would be humorous if it weren't so sick.

Fear and Loathing in the Arabian Nights

Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Sputnik. 

Escobar furnishes a very different take on Obama visit to the Saudi kingdom than I did yesterday. With his inside sources and reportedly sources from the Financial Times he claims that it was to put additional pressure in the form of threats so that the kingdom would drop its support for from cutting production. The US wants the economic war against Russia to continue, and thus Obama, diplomatically I'm sure, "put the heat on" Saudi officials. This heat not only included the "28 pages" but also a new threat of freezing Saudi assets.

The heart of the whole matter is that Washington has been threatening Riyadh to freeze Saudi assets all across the spectrum if the House of Saud does not “cooperate” in the oil price war against Russia.

The Honorable Market Garland

Click here to access article by the creator of Habeas Quaestus blog.

She supplies more information (see this) about the new Supreme Court nominee.

With the nomination of Merrick Garland, the Obama administration and Democratic establishment have doubled down on upholding neoliberalism as the core of the party’s politics. The legal punditry must break free of the misleading categories that have long dominated our analysis, especially of the Supreme Court. Pro or anti-government; progressive or textualist; and activist or conservative all are false binaries and obfuscate the truth. Judge Garland in particular reveals a truth that the marginalized people of this country have known for centuries: the law is construed to fit the politics of the powerful.

Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee a Continuum of the Dubious War on Terror

Click here to access article by Christof Lehmann from nsnbc international.

Lehmann digs up the judicial record of Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court to show that  he will be an excellent choice to serve the ruling class.

A look at the track record of Garland suggests that Obama’s candidate of choice represents a continuum of dubious terrorism and anti-terrorism cases from Oklahoma to Guantanamo and beyond.

Was the First Obama Election Fixed? New Book Raises Suspicions

Click here to access article by Pam Martens from Wall Street On Parade.

Martens comments on a fictional book, Fixers by Michael M. Thomas, a former Wall Street insider, who uses fiction to disclose the many realities of the Obama administration and its smooth handling of the taxpayer bailout of major banks and Wall Street firms.

...what you’re getting in Fixers is a spellbinding analysis of the actual dirty deals that toppled Wall Street in 2008 with a new twist – a fictitious character who says he laundered $75 million into the Democratic presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton’s primary challenger in 2007 in exchange for three names on an index card. Those three names had to become the “hope and change” President’s chief economic advisor, Treasury Secretary, and head of the criminal division of the Justice Department. These three key posts were to keep piles of bailout money flowing to Wall Street while simultaneously making sure no Wall Street executives were prosecuted for the crimes that brought on the crash.

Unfortunately, Martens falls for the latest election scam by declaring that in this year's election we have a real choice in Sanders! Sanders, of course, is being used by the capitalist's Democratic party to bring in hopey-changey young people many of whom will end up voting for Hillary. 

Martens doesn't see that it was all arranged for Hillary to be elected. Our masters know how to manipulate the identity politics of Americans (class politics is taboo). Haven't many of Hillary's supporters said, "wouldn't it be wonderful to have a woman as president?!" Sanders is "unelectable" according to mainstream pundits, and then there's the ogre Donald Trump to scare most into voting for Hillary. Who said history doesn't repeat itself? If the political scam worked before, why shouldn't it work again? 

Corporate media and presidential perogative illustrated

by Tom Tomorrow (Tom Tomorrow is the pen name of editorial cartoonist Dan Perkins.)

The Guantanamo of Colombia: Pressure Mounts to Shut Down Notorious US-Funded Prison

Click here to access article by John Ocampo from Upside Down World. 

Built in the year 2000, with U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons and USAID funding, as part of the penitentiary restructuring component of Plan Colombia, “La Tramacua” is a veritable house of horrors.

Meanwhile back at the Empire's central command in Washington, the ruling class's chief of public relations (known formally as the "President"), Obama, is lauding the accomplishments of Plan Columbia and throwing in obligatory comments about "human rights", etc, while indicating that he will be asking Congress for more aid in the future.



In addition to projects like the prison, Plan Colombia and all the aid projects covered by their fake drug war has enabled Empire directors to establish military bases in many places in Central and South America. Scroll down to the section of this latter article to the section entitled "Plan Colombia, Continued" for details on US military bases in Colombia.

Freeing Julian Assange: the last chapter

Click here to access article by John Pilger from OffGuardian. 

The Assange case is rooted across the Atlantic in Pentagon-dominated Washington, obsessed with pursuing and prosecuting whistleblowers, especially Assange for having exposed, in WikiLeaks, US capital crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq: the wholesale killing of civilians and a contempt for sovereignty and international law. None of this truth-telling is illegal under the US Constitution. As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama, a professor of constitutional law, lauded whistleblowers as " …part of a healthy democracy [and they] must be protected from reprisal”. Obama, the betrayer, has since prosecuted more whistleblowers than all the US presidents combined. The courageous Chelsea Manning is serving 35 years in prison, having been tortured during her long pre-trial detention.

Learning to Love — and Use — the Bomb

Click here to access article by Jonathan Marshall from ConsortiumNews. 

At a time when America’s public sector is apparently too strapped financially even to provide safe drinking water for some of its residents, the Obama administration plans to commit the nation to spending at least $1 trillion over the next three decades to improve our ability to fight a nuclear war. That’s right — an almost unthinkable war that would end up destroying much of the habitable portion of the globe.

Marshall follows this introductory paragraph with recent indications of an updated version ("2.0") of the old nightmarish world of a nuclear arms race. I lived terrified through the first one, but will I survive this one?