Posts that I especially recommend for Sunday, April 18, 2021

• Open Letter to a Friend Who “Tested Positive”…and Should Have Known Better by Jerry Bernini from Off-Guardian. 

• Are Conversations About COVID Vaccines Fracturing Your Family? Here’s What You Need to Know. By Children's Health Defense Team from their website.   

• On Contact: Securing Democracy with Glenn Greenwald featuring Chris Hodges interviewing Greenwald on Hodges' YouTube channel (25:32m). 

• Uganda Dictatorship: Imperialism’s Pearl of Africa featuring Abbie Martin speaking in a 16 minute YouTube video from her weblog Media Roots about the history of Uganda that continues today under the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire.

• A School for Spooks: The London University Department Churning Out NATO Spies by Alan Macleod from Mint Press News.
  

A prestigious university located in the heart of London, King’s College has, in its own words, “a number of contracts and agreements with various departments within government, including the Cabinet Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence.” Some of those contracts are up to 10 years long. The university has so far refused to elaborate on the agreements, telling investigative news outlet Declassified UK that doing so could undermine U.K. security services.

• Three China reads: 3, Global reach by Philip Roddis, an independent British blogger, from his personal weblog Steel City Scribblings. 
  

• So Who Wants a Hot War? by Pepe Escobar from Strategic Culture Foundation.

• US President Joe Biden’s Shameful Push for War with China and Russia by John Stanton from Dissident Voice.
  

• Ukraine Plays with Fire as NATO Moves Dangerously Close to Russia’s Border by Denis Lukyanov from Internationalist 360°.

• Why Xinjiang is Emerging as the Epicenter of the U.S. Cold War on China by Vijay Prashad and Jie Xiong from Internationalist 360°.

• How to Keep Poor Countries Poor — The Absurdity of Comparative Advantage by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room. My reaction: The article describes how the capitalist system works on an international scale.
  

• How the Rich Keep Workers Poor — Outsourcing and Sweatshops by Rod Driver from his weblog Elephants in the Room. My reaction: Notice that he only makes unidentified references to "a system". He is another author who regards capitalism as another reality like the sun, moon, and stars instead of man-made. Therefore his recommended "solutions" are merely reforms and absolutely ineffective.

• Military Bases Housing Migrant Children Plagued by Serial Sexual Abuse Claims by Whitney Webb from her weblog Unlimited Hangout. 

• Six Months to Prevent a Hostile Takeover of Food Systems, and 25 Years to Transform Them by Nick Jacobs from Common Dreams.

... the keys of the food system are already being handed over to data platforms, e-commerce giants, and private equity firms. This could mean dismantling the diversified food webs that sustain 70% of the world's population and provide environmental resilience. It could mean putting the food security of billions of people at the mercy of high-risk AI-controlled farming systems and opaque supply corridors.

And yet, there is nothing inevitable about this dystopian future. 

 

I think that as long as we tolerate capitalism and its goal to maximize only profits, a dystopian future is guaranteed. I am not only referencing the ultimate extinction that we will inevitably experience, but I am arguing that in the time we have left if we do not reject capitalism and replace it with socialism (a system of governance that publicly owns and controls the economy for the benefit of all people) that a near-term dystopian future is guaranteed.

• Fukushima Daiichi Radioactive Dumping and the Summer Olympics in Japan In Question by Vladimir Odintsov from New Eastern Outlook.
  
   
  ... according to Kyodo, which recently conducted a social survey of residents about the holding of the Olympics in Tokyo, most Japanese residents oppose its holding in 2021. 39% of the Japanese surveyed were in favor of canceling the Games, and about 33% were in favor of postponing the Olympics. Only 24.5% of Japanese residents are positive about the fact that thousands of athletes from all over the world will come to the Japanese capital in the summer of 2021. [I supplied this link.]

  
  

  In these conditions, the new Japanese government, balancing on the mood of the population of its country, has been looking for an opportunity for several months to find an objective reason for canceling the Olympic Games and report it “without losing face.” Finally, as reported by the British The Times, citing responsible sources, the Japanese government is still tacitly inclined to the decision to cancel the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo “because of the Covid-19 pandemic”, intending, nevertheless, to claim the right to hosting the 2032 Games.

Posts that I especially recommend for Tuesday, March 2, 2021

• Nudge Strategies: Persuasive Vaccine Messages featuring Dave Cullen, an Irishman, from his Bitchute channel Computing Forever in a 6:57m video.

• After Years of Propaganda, American Views of Russia and China Hit Historic Lows by Alan Macleod from Mint Press News (based in Minneapolis). My reaction: I'm amazed at the apparent effectiveness of the ruling class's propaganda.

• The United States of (Capitalist) Misery by Philip Roddis, a Brit, from his weblog Steel City Scribblings.
  

• Real Reason CORNEL WEST Denied Tenure From Harvard. This post features Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal discussing (in a 20:19m video) the denial of tenure and other matters related to the "antisemitism" smear that Zionist figures use to attack anyone who criticizes Israeli discriminatory policies. You should start the video at 2:15m if you have already seen the prior video featuring Cornel West on the Jimmy Dore channel of YouTube.

• Bernays and Propaganda – The Transition to Education and Commerce – Part 4 by Larry Romanoff from "The Saker" weblog. 

By the early 1900s, Lippman and Bernays had learned from experience the methods of creating an extensive, false, and emotionally-provocative imagery and to use this fabricated mythology to control the perceptions and manipulate the opinions and behavior of the population of an entire nation. It had first been done for political purposes during wartime, to create immense racial hatred and push a nation into war, but was clearly just as applicable to political and commercial ambitions. At the same time, the wealthy elite of the nation created the higher echelons of an American educational system that would use essentially the same principles to entrench themselves in perpetuity by maintaining the bewildered herd as a kind of feudal colony of impoverished consumers. Those controlling the banks and large corporations were not content to stop with the educational system when they realised the broader possibilities of influencing the population through a nationwide scale of propaganda disguised as advertising, which led in turn to the creation and rapid development of the American advertising industry based almost entirely on the principles Lippman and Bernays identified. We then had the media, beginning with print and radio but rapidly including the movies and then television, being the vehicles through which this grand plan of population control would be executed.

• The ‘Cancel Culture’ phenomenon: kind of hate-hush all over the world by Ghassan and Intibah Kadi from "The Saker" weblog. 

• War Mongering for Artificial Intelligence by Binoy Kampmark from Off-Guardian.
  

• Putin Laid it All Out: “The So-called Policy of Containing Russia” by Pepe Escobar from Global Research.

• The Significance of China Surpassing US as EU’s Top Trade Partner by Brian Berletic from New Eastern Outlook.
  

• On British colonialism, antisemitism, and Palestinian rights by Avi Shlaim from Middle East Eye (based in London).

• The Western Propaganda War on Myanmar by Brian Berletic from his weblog Land Destroyer Report. (Note: Berletic, to his astonishment, reveals that the Thai government is funding pro-NATO propaganda. This post added to yesterday's Dore interview with Blumenthal of The Grayzone suggests that Western-based international news agencies are weapons used by Western governments' intelligence agencies to engage in psychological warfare in various countries.) My commentary follows: 

There are many indications that the CIA, NSA, etc. are engaging in influencing the minds of Americans within this country, and that news reporting is transformed into propaganda to promote capitalist ruling class interests here and abroad. I don't think it is an exaggeration to state that we in America, and many other places in the world, are living in a kind of "Truman Show", a programmed reality that was produced by our masters in the capitalist ruling class. Or, using the concept of Caitlin Johnstone, we are living in a "narrative matrix" to suggest that the ruling class's control of all ideological institutions is producing a fake reality for most of us. They do this by using fake news and propaganda, via their ownership and control of media corporations, that they spread throughout all the other ideological institutions (education, entertainment, etc.) in order to control people's minds, especially within the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. 

 

This practice is the essence of neo-fascism, an updated version of old-fashioned fascism, now used by our contemporary masters in the ruling class in contrast to the classic fascism of German and Italian history (reliance on police terror). To be sure, the latter used elements of fake news and propaganda, but they relied on hard fascist methods because of the underdevelopment of propaganda during their rule. However, whenever the methods of neofascism fail, our contemporary masters don't hesitate to use the police and military forces to put down opposition.

Why Evidence of Iran’s Role in Attack Doesn’t Matter

Click here to access article by Gareth Porter from The American Conservative.

It is interesting to see old-fashioned conservatives, who are devoted readers of  The American Conservative, attacking the aggressive actions of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. They were displaced by another faction of capitalists (many see these as neo-fascists) labeled neoliberals by our corporate media, a transnational class of capitalists, who are currently pursuing world domination through their Empire. Having lost their control of the ruling capitalist class, these old-fashioned conservatives are resentful of this new faction of capitalists because their aggressive policies lead to many costly wars and threaten their investments in other countries.

Iran declares war on the USA’s covert influence in Iraq.

Click here to access article by Elijah J Magnier, an exceptionally independent journalist from Kuwait, from his weblog. 

Although most figures in Iraq are unfamiliar to Americans, Magnier tries to explain how the prime minister of Iraq and the Iraqi government, who are under tremendous pressure to enact various anti-Iran measures,  must balance off the threats posed by the American occupation of their country with powerful anti-USA factions within Iraq. Obviously in many respects, the US officials are treating Iraq as an old-fashioned colony on which they can impose their will whenever they want regardless of the consequences for Iraq.

One realistic threat that the USA poses for Iraq is the co-optation of military leaders who may be used by US authorities as a coup attempt to oust Iraq's prime ministers whenever they don't sufficiently obey US commands. But there are loyal forces in Iraq that are keeping a watchful eye of such military leaders, and presumably could prevent such a coup from happening. Up til now, such forces, together with the population as a whole, have prevented the American strategy of divide and rule by separating Iraq into three countries:

Many US and western analysts take it upon themselves to regularly and harshly criticise Hashd, ignoring the fact that it was Hashd that saved Iraq (and the rest of the Middle East) from ISIS when all other “security” forces were on the run. The US objective in imposing this reform was to cripple all Iranian friends and allies in Iraq and divide Mesopotamia into Kurdistan, Shiistan and Sunnistan.