Articles recommended for Saturday, August 3, 2019

• Big-business parties preside over a social catastrophe in 21st century America by Kate Randall from World Socialist Web Site.

• Faux Humanitarian Irwin Cotler, the White Helmets, and the Whitewashing of an Appalling Agenda by Vanessa Beeley from Mint Press News.

• US-Russia Arms Control Treaty to Expire Friday by Dave DeCamp from AntiWar.

• New NBC Attack On Alec Baldwin, JFK Research Is Attack On Truth, Democracy by Andrew Kreig from The Indicter (Sweden).

The Citadels of America’s Elites: Fractured and At Odds with Each Other

Click here to access article by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation.

Crooke, an ex-MI6 (British counterpart to US's CIA) agent, has been following the reports of two journalists from the Financial Times, a key newspaper of US capitalists, and what he writes suggests that the directors of the Deep State in the USA are inclined to aggressively pursue a new cold war with Russia, China, and Iran. Crooke begins his article (it contains a couple typographical errors) with this foreboding statement:

Something is ‘up’. When two Financial Times columnists – pillars of the western Establishment – raise a warning flag, we must take note: Martin Wolf was first off, with a piece dramatically headlined: The looming 100-year, US-China Conflict. No ‘mere’ trade war, he implied, but a full-spectrum struggle. Then his FT colleague Edward Luce, pointed out that Wolf’s “argument is more nuanced than the headline. Having spent part of this week among leading policymakers and thinkers at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado,” Luce[tr] writes, “I am inclined to think Martin was not exaggerating. The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a ‘new cold war’ is something that takes my breath away. Eighteen months ago the phrase was dismissed as fringe scaremongering. Today it is consensus.”

Do I need to argue that regardless of who gets elected as president in America's managed elections in 2020, the winner, like the clownish Trump, must bend to the will of the Deep State or else he/she will be taken out (def.) one way or another?

Totalitarian Democracy means end of Freedom for the People - William Binney, Herland Report TV.

Click here to access an interview with ex-CIA officer William Binney (via YouTube) conducted by Hanne Herland (Norway), founder of the Herland Report, historian of comparative religions, bestselling author, commentator and TV producer.

Binney tells what he knows about the infiltration of media corporations by CIA agents, and other subversive actions. Some excerpts from the interview:

William Binney says: "The media is totally infiltrated by the CIA and various other agencies. When it comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other statements about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically  the lapdogs for the government."

"William Casey, who was the director of Central Intelligence Agency back when Reagan was president, said at one point that you'll know how effective we are once at least 70 percent of what’s publicly known is false."

"In other words, they have been infiltrating the press for decades and they're pushing their thinking and agenda to the media, so the media will promulgate it to the public. The public won't even have any idea what’s really going on."

"The objective is to keep everybody uninformed so that they can't make a smart decision about anything. Everything is being done behind this secret door that you are not supposed to know about. That is really destroying the fundamental essence of democracy."

"That was what our Constitution was all about, that the people were supposed to know what the government was doing. Not the government knowing what the people were doing at all times, they way it is turning today."

"We are pretty much heading towards a totalitarian system. In this country, democracy has been subverted, much I think by Dick Cheney. He masterminded this because he would spend time in Congress, he knew about the congressional operation, how it worked. He was assistant to President Nixon, spying on everybody. He knew that he needed to know things about people in the opposition. What better way to do it than have a sister agency and the US government just open up and collect everything, store it, so you can go in and look at it at any time retroactively and examine anybody." 

Propaganda, Censorship, Power, & Control — Inside the Submissive Void [an essential read & study)

Click here to access article by Greg Maybury (Australian) from Russia Insider.

This is one of the best all time articles that I've posted over the nearly 10 years I've been blogging. The article, filled with many supporting documented links, should not be merely read, but studied because it contains so many insights to be learned about the disturbing reality that we are currently experiencing today. One of the paragraphs may summarize this:

We now live in the Age of the Big Shill—cocooned in a submissive void no less—an era where nothing can be taken on face value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where ‘open-book’ history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable, upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual—albeit dubious—freedoms.

But what is most valuable is his review of how we arrived at our present nightmarish situation.

After reading this post, I considered dropping out of blogging because this article exposes so many insights about this current reality: seemingly inevitable prospects of nuclear war and environmental catastrophes which will likely lead to our extinction. My weblog has been precisely dedicated to exposing these insights, yet in one article Maybury does it all.  Mostly out of habit and the need to preserve my sanity while living in an insane society controlled by the capitalist directors of the Empire, I will probably not discontinue blogging.

MintCast Interviews Doug Valentine, Author of The Phoenix Program and The CIA as Organized Crime

Click here to hear Whitney Webb of Mint Press News having an insightful interview with Douglas Valentine who has written and revealed so much about the dirty secrets of the CIA. (I must thank an activist for forwarding this article to me.)

Even though the interview last for nearly an hour, I think you will find it very interesting. The CIA has been the main agent of the capitalist ruling class, particularly of the likewise well hidden Deep State which is essentially a board of directors of this nation as well as their US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. 

Although he begins his discourse by stating that the CIA does their subversive work legally, he soon ends up arguing that they "are given a pass" by legal authorities who believe that they are doing their work on behalf of the security of the nation. Of course, they are doing it on behalf of the capitalist ruling class. They and their collaborators are so thoroughly enmeshed in powerful centers in every institution that they now have overwhelming license to do their dirty work. This includes not only high crimes of assassination, drug trafficking, 9/11, etc., but the promotion of every fantastic story that they serve up to their gullible population. I have for some time regarding the USA as a vast open psychiatric ward of delusional people. Valentine explains how this dreadful state of affairs (def.) gradually developed over the years since WWII.

Articles recommended for Wednesday, July 31, 2019

• Philip Weiss: The role of Jewish Democrats in bill that could imprison Israel boycotters for 20 years by Philip Weiss from If Americans Knew. 

• Climatic Change hits the Arctic by Jessica Corbett from Defend Democracy Press.

• Torturing and Exterminating Assange to terrorize journalists around the globe by Nick Miller from Defend Democracy Press.

• Alaska Governor Demolishes Climate Research by Robert Hunziker from Dissident Voice.

• How a Small Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News.

Space Lunacy: $ Trillion Space Games and False Prophecies by Billionaires While Rome Burns

Click here to access article by Dr. Andrew Glikson from Global Research.

This article has provoked many thoughts as I've watched the space exploration programs--I've watched most of them--televised by PBS.  I always watch programs created by major media corporations with an eye toward class bias (which I have an almost natural instinct for), and these programs have elicited many such thoughts. Among these were an increase in skepticism about the moon landing in 1969. Previously I thought such speculation was bizarre, but I began to increase my natural skepticism after a series of gross mishaps in NASA's attempts (including the deaths of three astronauts), but then suddenly everything went perfectly! (I still believe that NASA succeeded.) 

Last night I watched "A Year in Space & Beyond a Year in Space". I started watching this film about 15 minutes after it began, so I missed the introduction which I believe introduced the subject as an international effort. The Russians invited Britain, Japan, USA, and others to participate in this experience in which a Russian rocket propelled them to a space station. While there the astronauts performed many experiments over nearly a year. 

Anyway, the point I wish to make that the show was designed around US astronaut Scott Kelly, his twin brother, and family, but not that it was an international effort promoted by the Russian government, using a Russian rocket, and launched by the Russians from Kazakhstan. No doubt the huge space station was launched by the Russians using their more powerful rockets. The film provided very little of the scientific findings that the mission was devoted to. Because of the focus of attention was on the heroics of Scott Kelly, I inferred that it was an effort to "sell" further space exploration to the American public, particularly to gain their support for a rocket exploration to Mars. It was easy to imagine that the billionaires wanted the US government to do this costly research to facilitate their quest to colonize other planets after they destroy this one and toss into the cosmic dumpster along with 99.9% of humans.   

Articles recommended for Tuesday, July 30, 2019

• Revelations on the attacks of 2004 and 2017 in Spain by Thierry Meyssan from his weblog Voltaire Network.

• The Manson Murders, JFK, 9/11, and the Psychopathy of Power by Kevin Barrett from The Unz Review.

The Information War is Over and We Have Lost--[I challenge you to] Change My Mind.

Click here if you wish the video directly from James Corbett's weblog.

Corbett addresses the important issue of management of information by mainstream corporations like Facebook, Google, etc. to control our access to information that we can access readily over the internet. And, as he says, their control will likely eliminate any undesirable information that the directors of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire does not want us to know.

The ability to view alternative ideas and contrary opinions and come to our own conclusions is the basis of cognitive liberty. Big tech is now turning the screws and making sure that no one using their platforms will find these alternative viewpoints. Sure, there will be ways to get this information out, but most people will never even know that it exists. This battle in the information war has been lost. Change my mind.

The Discovery and Rediscovery of Metabolic Rift

Click here if you wish to access the following talk by Ian Angus at a recent Marxism festival in London directly from Climate & Capitalism.

I have in the past posted many articles by the astute Angus, and now we see him in person in the following 38m50s video. The remainder of the video is devoted to the comments by the participants at the talk.

In his address Angus, after defining the concept, reviews the long materialist history of the metabolic rift caused by humans beginning with intuitive observations by ancient Greeks over 2000 years ago. During the past two centuries scientists and Marxists have added to this by their study of nature and the implications derived from these studies.



If you want more of Ian Angus and/or the festival organized in London by the Socialist Worker's Party, I recommend this video presentation.

Climate emergency new update

Click here to access the latest post of Climate Code Red by David Spratt, the founder of Australia's leading website alerting Australians to the threats of climate destabilization.

I learned a lot reading this post about the lower level legislators across the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire and their growing concern about responding to their constituent's pressure to do something about the climate crisis. I wasn't aware that many in cities and American states were passing resolutions recognizing the growing crisis. This could be that I don't spend much time watching corporate news reports covering world events. Although I can't totally escape corporate news reports which are devoted almost exclusively to self-serving propaganda of the capitalist ruling class, I typically spend each morning scanning independent alternative media to find snatches of news and analyses about real events. This Australian post informed me about real events regarding the climate crisis that major media corporations failed to cover (here I am referring to major media corporations of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire like CNN, MSNBC, BBC, etc.). Or did I simply miss such reports?

No doubt lower level legislators within the Empire are responding to pressures from their constituents to do something about the increasingly obvious climate crisis. Although legislators must obey the interests (profits and power) of the ruling class, they get around this contradiction by passing meaningless resolutions in order to pacify ordinary people. I think the lack of coverage of these pressures by the media corporations is primarily because they don't want ordinary people to know about such efforts.

Although the articles provoke many thoughts about the contemporary political scene, I haven't the energy or time to expound on them. As we increasingly experience extreme weather events, I will only argue that the pressures of ordinary people will grow stronger as they become aware of the extent that they have been lied to until, at some point in time, ordinary people will violently vent their desperate anguish and anger against all perceived authorities. I hope I am still not around to see this. 

Articles recommended for Saturday, July 27, 2019

• How Fast is the Climate Changing? by John Molyneux from Rebel (Ireland).

• CapitalGate’s the Problem, Not Russiagate by Frank Scott from Dissident Voice.

• Destabilizing Pakistan: Bookending Washington’s China Policy by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook. 

• “Human Right Activists” Celebrate Facebook-Twitter Censorship by Joseph Thomas from New Eastern Outlook.  

• First setbacks for the Muslim Brotherhood by Thierry Meyssan from his weblog Voltaire Network.

How Capital Heats the Planet: Introducing Fordulat Journal’s Latest Issue on “Climate Change and Capitalism”

Click here to access a review by Zsolt Kapelner of a recent leftist journal (in Hungarian) devoted to a leftist perspective on climate destabilization. (Once again, I must thank an activist for forwarding this article to me.)

Kapelner's review covers both radical perspectives: that of a bottom-up reconstruction of society and a state structure supported by the people to challenge capital's way of exploiting man and nature to the fullest (a la Cuba). The journal articles also advocate a variety of other schemes to modify capital's normal practices in a last ditch attempt toward sustainable economies.

I have over the life of this weblog (nearly 10 years) gone from pointing out the need to change the system of capitalism which is the fundamental dynamic factor which determines the way we live to urgently advocating a revolutionary necessity to overturn capitalism, and finally to a position that recognizes that it is too late to avoid extinction but we should prepare revolutionary strategies to attack capitalism to punish the class who benefits from it.

I'm no philosopher, but I recognize that humans have evolved from primitive notions of humans as being the center of reality, which gave rise to many supernatural mythologies (religions) to explain this notion, to where we are today: reassuring views emanating from the ruling capitalist class that hijacked science, which emphasized material reality of our existence, to serve their class of people--the owners of our economies. Thus, instead of science being used to serve the health and welfare of people in general, it has been used in a very manipulative way to serve only this tiny class of capitalists at the expense of the rest of humanity and preserving our natural environment. I concluded that this class of people became addicted to the power and wealth that their self-serving system delivered to them. Now we are facing the extinction of nearly all life of our planet Earth.

Because of the time scale of the destruction of our environment is so large in comparison to our human life span, we humans in general failed to discover this destruction until it was nearly at the end stages of catastrophe (about 1970). Yet we still had time to change our fate and we had warnings at the time, but capitalist agents were always urgently motivated to pursue their control of the Earth's population of humans. They downplayed such warnings by obscuring the issues, adding many distractions (wars included), outright censorship of any views of our impending doom, etc.

Now I think it is too late to save ourselves; but in the time remaining, I think that the class has brought this about--the high crime of our extinction in addition to those of many other species--must be punished. I have no doubt as the climate destabilization progresses to dramatic alterations that threaten human life, it will awaken people to the necessity of dramatically altering the way we live in a desperate attempt to save the human species from extinction. But as the environment that supports human life (and that of many other species) begins to dramatically destabilize as it is becoming obvious now, I think it will become increasingly clear to most populations that the class who are responsible for this greatest of all crimes must be punished. Those of us conscious of this end must prepare people for this remaining task. Thus, I see in these journal articles preliminary attempts to do just that.       

Articles recommended for Friday, July 26, 2019

• Mindbreaking - The mental health effects of environmental change by Jan Wyllie and Jennifer Hynes via YouTube. See also this link. (Thanks go to an activist for alerting me to this post.)

• Not In My Name: Academics Publicly Attacking UN Torture Rapporteur by "contraspin" from BSNews.

• Chelsea Manning’s lawyer refutes conspiracy allegation against Julian Assange by Mike Head from World Socialist Web Site.

Once Again Chomsky and Achcar Provide a Service to the US Global Dictatorship

Click here to access article by Canadian Stephen Gowans from his weblog.

Gowans accuses some of America's as well as Britains leading intellectuals as collaborating with the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire to destabilize governments that the Empire doesn't like with most recent target of Venezuela. He accuses them of using sophistry to rationalize these destabilization efforts. Chomsky and Democracy Now's Amy Goodman have already dramatically demonstrated this by their opposition to questioning the government's version of what happened on 9/11/2001 and many other crimes instigated by the Empire (see this, this, this, this, and this).

Recommended articles for Thursday, July 25, 2019

• New book launched: ‘An important contribution to the fight to stop capitalist destruction’, a book review of System Change Not Climate Change by Valerie Lannon from Climate & Capitalism

• End Forever War? Divest Zionism by Kurt Nimmo from his weblog Another Day in the Empire.

• War Profiteers and the Demise of the US Military-Industrial Complex by Dmitry Orlov from his weblog Club Orlov. 

• Pentagon May Have To Explain Their 1,000 Bases, a post via YouTube from Redacted Tonight.

• People Think Epstein Was a Spy for an Intelligence Agency — and They Might Be Right by Derrick Broze from Activist Post.

Articles recommended for Tuesday, July 23, 2019

• Challenging global corporate power by James Shultz from Ecologist.

• Acid oceans may trigger mass extinction by Tim Radford from Climate News Network.

• Khamenei’s three commandments for the Iranians: the Middle East is heading towards “maximum danger" by Elijah J Magnier from his weblog.

• Did John Bolton Light the Fuse of the UK-Iranian Tanker Crisis? by Gareth Porter from Dissident Voice. 

• B(o)r-exit by Bernhard (Germany) from his weblog Moon of Alabama.

• Do You Choose the Truth or War Propaganda? Your Choice Makes a Difference. By Mark Taliano from Global Research.  

• The Just World Fallacy: Why People Bash Assange And Defend Power by Caitlin Johnstone from Medium. (Recently I have been having increasingly difficulties accessing her website. Yesterday and today I have been unable. Censorship?)

• Multinational Pharmaceuticals and Medicine: Under Fire Worldwide by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos from United World (Turkey).

• How the pharmaceutical companies, Congress and the DEA made the opioid epidemic a billion-dollar industry by Genevieve Leigh from World Socialist Web Site.

March of the Uyghurs

Click here to access article by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook (independent news and analysis based in Russia).

Vltchek has a number of unnamed sources he uses to support his report on the latest "useful idiots" used by Western subversive agents to undermine the Chinese government's control of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. We must rely on Vltchek's unnamed sources for much of this; so if you consider him a reliable source (as I do), read the article to discover the details of this project to undermine China.

Agents of the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire frequently use various disgruntled populations to undermine their primary challengers to their power and profits: China, Russia, and Iran. Iran suffers the most aggressive threats because the Empire views them as the most easily bullied by threats to their country, but Russia and China are too powerful to bully. Thus Chechens in Russia were used by the Empire to damage Russia, the Kurds and their aspirations for independence have been used by the Empire and Israel to undermine the Syrian government, and the Uyghurs are used to undermine China. Sometimes this done in the name of "human rights", but this is only a cynical public relations cover to promote their interests of being in control of the world to serve their insatiable appetites for more profits and power.

How Capital Heats the Planet: Introducing Fordulat Journal’s Latest Issue on “Climate Change and Capitalism”

Click here to access article by Zsolt Kapelner posted on LeftEast (based in Romania).

This article reports on the efforts of Hungarians to target capitalism as being the cause for the increasingly obvious phenomenon of global warming.

As temperatures rose close to 50°C in North India and water supplies were about to cease, and as a tremendous heat wave descended upon Europe, a sizeable crowd gathered on 18 June in the community centre/pub Gólya operated by a leftist cooperative in the middle of Budapest, Hungary. The occasion was the publication of the new issue of the social theory journal Fordulat(“Turn”) on Climate Change and Capitalism.

The journal was established in 1985 and has since been run by the College for Advanced Studies in Social Theory, a hub of Marxist and left-leaning students of social sciences that regularly publishes thematic issues on topics such as Social Reproduction or Digital Capitalism. Each issue, produced in Hungarian, collects translations, book reviews and original papers on the topic in question.

Extinction Rebellion: Not the Struggle we Need, Pt. 1

Click here to access article by a group called "Out of the Woods" posted on libcom.org, an anarchist website based in France. 

This is a critique of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) that is most active in Europe as a means of preventing the extinction of humans that is driven by the capitalist empire known informally, but accurately, as the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire. There have been a number of article posted on Wrong Kind of Green (see this and this) that has revealed the top-down nature of this movement and the likely involvement of agents of the ruling capitalist class to supervise it. This post reinforces this contention by the well documented examination of actual events of people who have participated in XR activities. 

This critique is not to damage the efforts of well meaning people participating in XR activities, but to insure that the movement is not controlled by the Empire in order to preserve their system of capitalism that is destroying the habitat of nearly all living things.