The Libertarian Ideology of Bitcoin

Click here to access a 55 minute interview conduct by Sasha Lilley of KPFA (Berkeley, CA) with David Golumbia, author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. 

Can an anonymous alternative currency — not tethered to the oppressive arm of the state — make us free? That’s the premise behind Bitcoin, invented less than 10 years ago, which has soared stratospherically and then, recently, fallen sharply. David Golumbia reflects on the rightwing libertarian ideas behind Bitcoin.

U.S. ‘Plan B’ for the Middle East and the occupation of a third of Syria’s territory – Analysis

Click here to access article by Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli, SWEDHR chairman and chief-editor of The Indicter, and posted on The Indicter.

The television network RT asked me for a comment around the recent visit to Raqqa done by the USAID program chief together with the CENTCOM Commander. [1]

Before to answer the items on the humanitarian situation in Raqqa associated with the reconstruction issue –80 percent of Raqqa dwellings remain “inhabitable”, according to the UN–, I will develop on the current U.S. geopolitics in the area, against the backdrop of the U.S. emerging ‘Plan B’ on Syria ....

So far, the implementation of this new design has signified the virtual occupation of nearly a third of Syria’s territory. A hallmark of the situation consisting in the illegal character of the occupation.

NBC Hires CIA Boss For News Role - Not Kidding

Click here to access a 25:05m video of The Jimmy Dore Show. 

I'll have to admit that the content of this show quite shocked me. Jimmy Dore essentially argues that Orwell's 1984 has now been established in the USA. It's also clear that unwitting Americans are still not conscious of this new reality. The accelerating downward trend toward an Orwellian nation is now in full operation with the 24/7 surveillance of social and other media by US intelligence agencies, the efforts by social media corporations to prevent the access of people to alternative or independent websites, the appointment of military generals to key foreign policy positions in the government, and now the appointment of CIA officials to prominent positions in media corporations. Dore does not explicitly show how all these trends are driven by an increasingly threatened ruling capitalist class, but all of his content clearly supports this view.

Rich boys' health clinic

by Brian McFadden

Some recommended posts for 2/9/2018

• "What You Aren't Being Told About NPR" by Lee Camp of RT's Redacted Tonight program. Because I've seen the former liberal (this label means that they favored popular interests within a capitalist society) National Public Radio morph over the past 40 years into a right-wing propaganda radio network called "NPR" that is sponsored by right-wing people like the Koch brothers, I delight in posting this Lee Camp's satire of the radio network.

• "Corruption is Legal in America". This YouTube video was uploaded by apparently well-meaning people at Represent.Us, a group that advocates citizens' use of referendums to by-pass legislatures and Congress to prevent big capitalists from funding candidates and their support for the interests of the rich. However, seeing that they have received favorable media exposure from The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, NBC, etc., I rather doubt their sincerity. It is likely an example of how the capitalist ruling class prefers to co-opt any studies and reforms groups in order to lead them into dead-end political activity--much like the Bernie Sanders campaign of last year in the Democratic Party. Anyway, the Princeton study is a very worthy one, and one that I referred to last year here on my website. This 5:50m YouTube video summarizes the study very well.

• "Why is U.S. not globally condemned for its military occupation of Syria?" by Eric Zuesse from The Greanville Post. Although the author denies that Trump is the contemporary version of Hitler, Trump is a corporate fascist because he loves the military establishment and the generals, and he doesn't hesitate to use, or threaten to use, actual military violence to get his way. That is the authentic face of advanced capitalism once it decides to take off the mask of their fake version of democracy. In this post I don't think that Zuesse makes a solid argument to support the title of the post. I think he is only referring to the many nations under the US-led Empire, but not the whole world. Here in the USA very little has been broadcast or publicized in corporate media about the incident; and what little there was, was mostly lies.

Recommended articles for 2/8/2018

• Propaganda! Pardon Me, Is Mine Really Bigger than Yours? by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook. Vltchek reviews his life journey to illustrate how be developed from a "totally indoctrinated, endlessly brainwashed by Western propaganda" in his youth in Czechoslovakia where, as a dissident, he listened to Western capitalist propaganda spread by BBC, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, West German television channels and other European radio stations. Now after living in 160 countries and seeing reality first hand, he is free to write about his own perceptions. He differentiates two types of propaganda: 1) carefully crafted news and information designed by the rich and powerful to convince you of their virtue and to support their interests; and 2) people honestly and sincerely writing about how they perceive the various realities that they experience. It is a journey of discovery of realty that is far different from his early conditioning by Western capitalist propaganda.

• Syria - U.S. May Have Arranged "Self Defense" Attack On Syrian Government Forces by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama. The author carefully examines the evidence of an attack by US forces from their occupied territory in Syria on Syrian government forces that suggest that the US military are playing dirty while issuing a steady stream of anti-Assad propaganda. Meanwhile, the American people are fed only the latter by media corporations.

Recommended articles for 2/7/2018

• US Jingoism vs. Russian Propaganda: From ‘The List’ To Social Media Censorship by "_anonym" from The Greanville Post.

American culture places an extreme emphasis on the right to hold an opinion with next to none on the actual ability to form one. We are, as a people, uneducated for democracy, which is to a large extent why we do not have one, and why the powers that be feel obliged to rely on censorship: people can’t be trusted to think for themselves. If Americans have neither the moral nor intellectual capacity to distinguish truth from lies, good argument form cheesy propaganda, enter the anti-propagandist and ‘censor-as-a-public-service’ to tell them what to believe.

Thankfully there is a large and growing number of Americans with no such moral or intellectual deficit, who have educated themselves for democracy since the system does not.

•  Kurds, Out of Options, Look to Syria’s Assad for Help by Jim Carey, editor of Geopolitics Alert. This is a well-documented look at the twists and turns of the Syrian Kurdish leadership and their current usefulness to the US Empire to destabilize Syria. For more background information I suggest you read my post of 2/25/2017 entitled "The Myth of the Kurdish YPG’s Moral Excellence". Also, for more historical background for the Empire's on again, off again, use of the Kurds, read an article entitled "America, the Kurds, and History: Only a Pawn in Their Game".

Why Steemit Is The Platform Of The People And The Answer To Censorship

Click here to access article by Elizabeth Vos from Disobedient Media. 

More people are joining Steemit, an alternative social media platform. (I have no opinion on this issue.)

Along with myself and Dawson, anti-establishment journalists including Caitlin Johnstone, Redacted Tonight’s Lee Camp, HA Goodman, and many others have joined the platform and begun to publish or re-publish their work there. The move has made waves within Steemit, with one prominent user devoting an entire article to the shift.

Mainstream Media Outlets Keep Hiring CIA/Intel Veterans, And It’s Gross

Click here to access article by Caitlin Johnstone from The Greanville Post.  (Note: Additional material added at 5:15 PM Seattle time.)

Brennan, who played a key role in the construction of the establishment Russia narrative that has been used to manufacture public consent for world-threatening new cold war escalations, is just the latest addition in an ongoing trend of trusted mainstream media outlets being packed to the gills with establishment stalwarts from the US intelligence community.

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

We must credit Wolfgang Streeck, an economic sociologist, who first brought our attention to the concept of post-factual politics. Of course, he did not bring our attention to the constant lies fed to us by the ruling class's media corporations--that has been obvious to people who are awake and pay attention. 

Just this morning I was jarred awake by an obvious propaganda segment in NPR's Morning Edition "news" program. Because of my location I can only receive a Tacoma NPR station (it seems to be ubiquitous by using repeater frequencies to cover all of northwestern Washington state), and I use it on my alarm radio to wake me up in the morning. However, this morning the station not only wakened me, but jarred me awake with complete disgust as it, once again, hammered away on the Russiagate theme. I turned the radio off after the segment and got dressed. Listen to the following segment to see if you agree with my reaction:


Christopher, an engaged activist, did some internet sleuthing and found some very interesting background material on Molly McKew who was featured in the above NPR broadcast. Thank you, Christopher!

World is Burning – While Western Left is Quarreling

Click here to access article by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook. (Note: On 2/4/2018 at 11:58 AM Seattle time I edited the commentary to give it greater clarity.)

Vltchek takes his anger out on the limited left in the US after his articles are no longer published by a left publisher that he refuses to name. I am convinced after several hours of sleuthing on the web that this publisher is the left-liberal CounterPunch magazine. (See this listing of Vltchek's CounterPunch articles for evidence. Notice they stop at 12/2017.) 

I must confess that I suspected this from the beginning because I remember the website's campaign against questioning the official version of the 9/11 false flag incident that justified all the wars that followed and justify our meddling in the affairs of every nation on earth and the promotion of such myths as we are an "exceptional nation". In other nations, the Empire's ruling capitalist class don't have to justify what their nation does in the world, and they no longer need to follow any international rules of conduct.

This campaign to smear any questioner of the 9/11 event was led by the now deceased chief editor and publisher of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn (see this and this). Those that cross this red line incite the wrath of the ruling class, and that often comes with negatives consequences. For those who stay safely on the "comfortable" side of this red line avoid their wrath and sometimes even enjoy comfortable salaries and perks. (See this, this, and this.) Now CounterPunch has decided to play it even safer by excluding those writers, like Vltchek, who write on Russia related websites. Thus, it appears that "Russiagate" has had an impact on the cowardly left political spectrum of the USA!

Under the guidance of the Deep State, the 9/11 event has become a red-line event that has separated American leftists into two camps: 1) those that regard anything that the ruling capitalist class does is open to question and criticism, and 2) those opportunists who for varying reasons don't want to fundamentally threaten the legitimacy of capitalist rule by questioning the official story of 9/11.

How F-Book, Goo ogle, & You Tuube Collude To Crush Dissent

Lee Camp goes ballistic on corporate social and other media that is engaged in a war of information against us. The video was uploaded onto YouTube.

"Finding the real information takes effort. The truth will not be spoon-fed to us." Camp urges us to find and explore alternative media to avoid censorship of real news and information.

The CIA, Wormwood, and Gall: The Facts, the Accusations & the Cover-up

Click here to access article by Peter Lee from Newsbud. 

This post provides an introduction to a full length that I watched several weeks ago, and immediately placed in on my Memorable Political Films list. It was a stunner because even corporations like Netflix usually don't go near such topics. But as I had a Netflix membership, I viewed it and was very impressed.

Frank Olson died after being thrown out of a 13th story window in New York City. The government, as usual, made up a series of stories over the years to explain this bizarre event. Frank Olson's son couldn't believe these stories, and started an investigation which led him to the conclusion that his father had been murdered because he opposed the bio-weapons the scientists were researching and developing at Fort Detrick (Maryland) under the control of the CIA. 

These bio-weapons were actually used in the Korean War. Many American soldiers captured by the North Koreans and Chinese armed forces, particularly airmen, knew from experience that this was happening and delayed their return to the US after the war. One, who I later encountered at a talk in Hawaii, actually remained in China. The series of six mini-films are a must-view.

Faking it

Click here to access article by William Bowles from his website. 

Bowles make innumerable attempts to find evidence from various corporate media sources that claim Russian/Putin meddling in elections and their attempts to introduce fake news into the media of the US-led Empire. He reports the details of his experience.

Christopher's article recommendations for 2/1/2018

• Blackouts and Flashpoints in 2018 by James Petras from his website (PDF).

• Betting the Earth on a Game of Wrap-Cut-Smash by Stan Cox posted of The Greanville Post.

Former British Ambassador Weighs in on Assange, Russia Hacking and Israel

Click here to an interview with Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, that is conducted by Randy Credico and Dennis Bernstein. The interview is posted on Mint Press News. 

Craig Murray is a very well informed and conscientious person and author who reveals much of what he has learned on various issues from his experience with the British government. For example:

It is fair to say that the establishment stick together.  In fact, I believe that the government and the judiciary are closer here than they are in the United States to some extent.  There is quite a closed circle of the ruling class.  They attend all the same schools and they are closely linked in various ways. So once you take on [any part of] the establishment, you are taking on the entire establishment.

At the risk of distracting from the substance of this excellent interview, Dennis Bernstein use an expression that always pushes my hostility buttons. He used the cowardly term "the powers that be". Unless one is completely uninformed, the use of this expression shows cowardice. It is self-censorship. It is playing along with the capitalist ruling classes avoidance of any terms that might be used to shed reality about their class's overwhelming power over the billions of people trying to secure some kind of existence in spite of the overwhelming threats to their lives posed by this tiny class. Bernstein is not uninformed! It's like he is saying, "I know who really runs this country, but I won't say it because it might damage my career".

The crisis of legitimacy in international investment agreements and investor-state dispute settlement

Click here to access article by Jane Kelsey, Professor of Law at the University of Auckland, from Stop Investor-State Dispute Settlement. 

The ISDS (investor-state dispute settlement) section is installed in all neoliberal trade agreements, and are the main weapon used against nations wanting to protect their populations from the predatory actions of corporations of the US-led Empire. The legitimacy of this weapon is being increasingly examined and questioned. Kelsy summarizes her report in these paragraphs:

The legitimation crisis facing IIAs [international investment agreements] is entering a new phase. Capital exporting states have regrouped to defend an investment regime that serves their corporate interests. Large developing countries are promoting alternatives that offer a new balance between their offensive and defensive interests. Governments in rich and poor countries continue to face potentially crippling investment disputes that are often designed to intimidate their regulatory decisions. Boutique law firms and third-party funders are intent on defending a lucrative source of income.

As the turbulence in the global economy and backlash against neoliberalism continues, opposition to the international investment regime and ISDS from the left seems destined to grow. A system in which rules that privilege capital are enforced through a biased extra-territorial dispute process cannot be fixed. The South African remedy that brings the disputes back into the domestic jurisdiction may be the best of the current alternatives. For many on the left, however, that would presage a return to the more traditional contest over the authority of the legislative and judicial branches of the state in relation to capital.

Recommended articles by Christopher, one of my longtime readers, for 1/31/2018

• STEEM: A Blockchain Media Platform Which Could Finally Make Alt-Media Financially Viable from Russia Insider. The article gives you more information about another social type media that might be a good replacement for Facebook in this information war that is assaulting our sense of reality. I don't think that Christopher is necessarily endorsing it.

• The Economist: Humanity teeters on the brink of world war from World Socialist Web Site. This prominent financial magazine of the capitalist ruling classes projects a world at war in their latest issue.

Two Minutes to Doomsday

Click here to access article by Robert Hunziker from CounterPunch. (Thanks, once again, goes to a concerned citizen, Christopher from northwest Oregon, for alerting me to this report.)

Not since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviets exploded thermonuclear bombs, has the world been such a powder keg!

Only recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock forward 30 seconds. It now registers two minutes to midnight. Verily, it’s lights out when the clock strikes 12:00 midnight. Ka-boom, it’s over!

Denying the Obvious: Leftists and Crimestop

Click here to access article by Edward Curtin from The Greanville Post. 

I do not know the motivations or intentions of many prominent leftist intellectuals and publications, but I do know that many choose to avoid placing certain key historical events at the center of their analyses.  In fact, they either avoid them like the plague, dismiss them as inconsequential, or use the CIA’s term of choice and call them “conspiracy theories” and their proponents “conspiracy nuts.”  The result is a powerful propaganda victory for the power elites they say they oppose.

Orwell called it “Crimestop: [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.  It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.  Crimestop, in short means protective stupidity.”

I'd like to attempt an answer to Curtin's excellent article, specifically to his lack of understanding of "the motivations or intentions of many prominent leftist intellectuals and publications"...who are fall prey to the intellectual disability of "Crimestop". It's capitalist culture, stupid!

Culture is like water that fish swim in. Fish, like most people, are not perceptive enough to realize that there are other waters to swim in, waters that are not polluted with extreme individualism like the one we live in. Capitalist culture has ensured that we as humans do not recognize ourselves as being social animals. No, we are mostly self-seeking animals who exist only for ourselves and our material interests. Margaret Thatcher was lying twice when she argued that there was no such thing as society, only families. Have you observed extended families fighting over the distribution of wealth from a rich relative? I have. In reality under capitalism all individuals are competing against all the other individuals for material rewards. Thus, capitalist culture has almost completely eliminated the social from our identity and replaced our sense of selves, through their comprehensive indoctrination system, as merely self-seeking animals. 

The ruling capitalist class has done this with their 24/7 indoctrination campaign to lure us into thinking that we don't need each other, even worse, that we should distrust each other, and seek only material rewards in form of money, homes, careers, and the most important of all, the ability to establish a family. Thus, one must not resist the diktats of the ruling capitalist class or else we shall have none of these rewards.

Left intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and left media people like Amy Goodwin have succumbed to these enticements and conditioning. They serve to limit the analysis of news and events by refusing to question the ruling class interpretation of those events. And they are rewarded for their refusal. Chomsky gets invited to many campuses to speak and Goodwin enjoys a very comfortable salary. 

People like socialist John Bellamy Foster who is a full professor at the University of Oregon and heir to serious socialists like Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman, and Paul Baran at the Monthly Review, is known academically as a "Marxian" specialist. This is a label that our ruling class attaches to academic people who are experts on the studies of Karl Marx's writings. Such academics are labeled "Marxian" because they must not stray too far from the merely academic study of Marxism, such as into activist politics--those that do are labeled as "Marxists" and are banished into poverty. Foster has been rewarded with a wife (Carrie Naumoff) and a three-child family, a comfortable salary, and respectable academic standing, and this will continue if he keeps his nose clean and out of activist practice. So what if he writes in obscure journals that nobody reads about capitalism that is in deadly conflict with the health of the biosphere? Of course, he will never be interviewed by any respectable mainstream media corporation for his views on capitalism or the ongoing destabilization of the climate. He is rendered quite harmless to the system of capitalism.  He has become thoroughly domesticated.

Capitalist culture denies that there is any such thing as society because capitalists want full license to plunder societies across the world for their riches and to gain more power. That is what neoliberalism, an advanced form of capitalism, is all about. The point is that true revolutionaries--and that is what is so desperately needed right now--do not have families, they have dedicated their lives to the overthrow of capitalism because they know that the system is in the process of killing us all.

Recommended articles for 1/28/2018 by my website followers who are obviously engaged activists

I have been ailing from symptoms of a bad cold or moderate flu. I am grateful that these engaged activists, Caren and Christopher from northern Oregon, are helping me maintain my site and contributing to posts. Here are the best of their recommendations:

• The Atlantic Council & Latin American Regime Change  The Atlantic Council is one of most powerful organizations that make up the Deep State, the transnational capitalist ruling class that make all major decisions behind the facades of US-led Empire governments.

• Unpacking the Shadowy Outfit Behind 2017’s Biggest Fake News Story 

• Robert Parry's Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews  We have lost one of our great journalists.

• Empire Files: Death & Biostitutes - The US Opioid Crisis

• Not Even Orwell or Huxley Could Have Imagined 'Totalitarian' Threat Posed by Facebook and Google, Warns Soros  "WTF? Soros defending free speech???" Wonders never cease!

• Octopus Genes In Industrial Pot?  Derrick Jensen discovers the inevitable dynamics of capitalism in the growing concentration of the marijuana industry.