How many years of digging will go by with no pay dirt?
How many rabbit holes will be circuitously run down while finding no rabbits?
How many oil wells will have to be found dry?
Until everyone realizes there is no there there?
The Democrats, along with the primary U.S. intelligence agencies have done an amazing job in creating a conspiracy theory out of typically tiny areas of fact.
Progressives get it.
Far too many on the left do not.
We love simple explanations.
Why is Trump such an unmitigated disaster as president?
Why are we in such a terrible mess?
Why did HRC REALLY lose?
What's the answer? #Putin!
But hey. Why must the answer ALWAYS be 'over there'?
The right blew a dog-whistle & the left came running.
The DNC & HRC rneeded a fig-leaf for losing to the vile oranginamonster. They found it in Russiagate.
So many fell right into that liberal trap with such headstrong alacrity.
A target everyone can coalesce around is a potent political weapon.
You can herd your support. You can garner more to your cause. You can beat your opponent with it.
It's a no-brainer, right?
That's Russiagate. Politics as usual.
Hillary Clinton was humiliated by being beaten to the presidency by an amoral orange-faced bruiser.
The DNC had been proven utterly & shamefully incompetent.
What better way than for all liberals to agree it wasn't their fault?
What if you've been herded into believing a fictional story with a dastardly villain is fact?
What if an opportunity to make the world a better place is lost for the sake of partisan politics?
What if all you've been told are lies?
Krystal and Saagar: MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, Actor Jeff Daniels GIGGLE About Putin-Trump Conspiracies.
Wednesday 30 September 2020
RUSSIAGATE - THE RUSSIA/PUTIN THING
Tuesday 29 September 2020
LOW MAINTENANCE LIFESTYLES
(I wrote 98% of this blog post in 1995 in an attempt to sketch out issues I believed we were facing as a species & the solutions I felt were necessary to resolve them.)
We've around 6 thousand million years of consuming, building, wasting & living possible before our star goes nova.
It's unsustainable. So how can we change course to a lifestyle sustainable for the years ahead?
We have seen exponential growth in almost every area of life in the last 200 years.
We can't go on this way or we will wind up with a totally grey, concreted, polluted planet.
~
The mindless game producers, merchandisers and marketing men are playing must be obvious to everyone now. Buy. Consume. And do it, Forever....
To survive in the long term we must disconnect from their game plan.
A Low Maintenance Lifestyle solution consists of several integrated elements:
i. The self-created pursuit of a low maintenance lifestyle.
ii. Government support and underpinning of a 'Be All You Can Be' culture.
iii. Introduction of a country-wide 'Citizens Entitlement Grant'. (UBI)
iv. Resource release from all subsequently redundant government agencies.
v. A planetary community.
i. The self-created pursuit of a low maintenance lifestyle.
This is the oldest form of lifestyle on the planet. Through it, everything possible was used to aid survival. Energies were used wisely and nothing was wasted. If these principles were not adhered to you died. It was as simple as that.
We are realizing that we are not immune to these realities, that we were fed an illusion of security in order to make us buy. This dream-state is rapidly turning into a nightmare. Now it is starting to become very real to us that, just like the ancients, we too must survive the future.
With the coming of this latest pandemic the stone cold reality we face as a species is hitting us hard. We can no longer afford to feel that individualism and competition is the most successful way of all to see us through. Past survival was much more built on cooperation and mutual caring than selfish individualism.
The broad background to the long history of low maintenance lifestyles is the story of mass survival, or as close to it as the ancients could get by sharing and working together, not against each other..
In the modern world there are several possibilities available to us to achieve mutual and mass survival that were unavailable to the ancients:
We can use the collective energy as focused through government to provide the basic essentials for your daily survival.
We can seek to maximize Being as opposed to mere Doing and Having.
We can organize the communal use of tools to maximize utility and to minimize waste.
The essence of a Low Maintenance Lifestyle is:
Buy Less.
Waste Less.
Share tools and resources.
Care for one another.
Don't be elitist.
The cycle we are on now is that we must buy ever increasing numbers of goods to keep everyone employed so that they are able to buy ever increasing numbers of goods and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
The final product is of course everyone owning everything on a concrete planet and feeling totally miserable.
This is obviously madness... Yet that is the future we are facing.
The politicians call endlessly for "More growth. More growth." But we can already see and feel what is growing all around us. We already feel sick of this modern world with its stress, greed, criminality and selfishness. Do we want another 6,000 million years of that?
The marketing people want to fill you with the obsession to have without limit. They want you to be filled with longing for their products. They want you to be endlessly dissatisfied with what you already have. They want you to be in a state of constant longing for satiation and to never achieve it.
Keep in mind:
Most of the true happiness you ever find has little to do with possession.
Most true happiness is gained by useful co-operation with others.
Points ii, iii & iv would begin to weaken the hypnosis of the mass marketers:
ii. Government support and underpinning of a 'Be All You Can Be' culture.
iii. Introduction of a ‘Citizens Entitlement Grant'. (UBI)
iv. Resource release from all subsequently redundant government agencies
All four elements contain the essential ingredients for a sustainable life for the indefinite future.
There is no avoiding the fact that government will have to be the agency which creates any reform. We and our immediate ancestors have transferred almost all real power to this agency, so now it must work for us and for the (almost) endless generations to come.
ii. Government support and underpinning of a 'Be All You Can Be' culture.
Element ii. is easiest to achieve - but it would need to be constant and deeply integrated into every area of government policy - from education to conditions of work.
Elements iii., iv. & v. are the essence of how the future can be survived.
iii. Introduction of a ‘Universal Basic Income'.
iv. Resource release from all subsequently redundant government agencies
The largest change involves a move to a ‘Universal Basic Income’.
I believe every citizen deserves the basic wherewithall to live a decent life. The only agency available to control such a task is government. We all know that the resources are now available on this planet to do it. Hopefully we all can plainly see that these resources are flowing up and out of reach of a greater proportion of us.
In case you are unfamiliar with the concept of a universal basic income (UBI) it works like this:
Each person over an agreed age receives a state-agreed amount in their bank account each month. This payment is made whether you are employed or not. Everyone receives it. Why should the rich receive it you might ask? Because a payment to everyone is almost without any administrative cost at all. You need no adjudicators constantly determining whether this or that person’s income is too high because a cut-off amount would have to be set, then an appeals-handling system etc. etc. A simple payment to everyone above a certain age is straightforward with no need of administrative overheads.
How would such a costly exercise be funded?
Initially it would be funded like so many things are funded when perceived to be needed, such as the bail-out to the banks in 2007-8 or the current multi-trillion fund for big business hit by the coronavirus pandemic.
Later, point iv. comes in - Resource Release.
In a long transfer process, once citizens have the basic resources to live routinely supplied, then government can start to close all its agencies, offices and let go it personnel dealing with unemployment benefit, health and social security and many, many other departments.
With increasing automation, robotics and Artificial Intelligence we will need to change our whole focus from mass employment to something else... and why not replace the emphasis on having and doing to the joy of being, learning and inter-communication?
The UBI would mean you didn´t have to work. However, if you still wanted to work and many would, you would still receive the grant - this leaves the incentive there to all those still ambitious to have a higher lifestyle.
Q1. What about the people who don´t use the money for the necessities but spend it all on booze or drugs?
It´s possible to visualize a perfect system but usually the people within it have to be perfect too. However, with everyone having a stake in the community, a solid foundation and plenty of opportunities to learn new skills in the environment of being and learning more, this problem is likely to reduce over time.
Q2. Wouldn’t those working feel bad that some were getting a free ride?
The basic income provides a stable foundation for everyone. It doesn’t supply a plethora of luxuries. If desired these would have to be earned alongside everyone else. But those living the basic life could get involved in all the voluntary and community work he or she wished. In this was communities could be vastly enhanced.
Q3. What main differences could I expect to see if this was to be enacted?
The hope is that communities would draw closer together and that poverty at its most extreme would be eliminated altogether. Each family would have the knowledge that they would always have a strong foundation to rely upon due to receiving a regular income.
Q4. Wouldn’t people simply save most of the money they received?
The rich no doubt would. But those it is most designed to help, those at the bottom of an particular society would without doubt spend it and most likely in their local communities.
Q5. What might be the long term benefits?
If everyone receives a basic income the most likely long-term benefit would be stability. If also, in this new world now being born free health care was available then a stronger, healthier more cohesive society could very well be born.
Q6. What are the likely eventualities without a UBI?
We can see the trend occurring now and why should it diminish, wealth ascending ever faster to the most wealthy elites across every nation. Corruption and crime following in its wake as a percentage of those excluded use their own methods to gain wealth outside of the normal job ladder which is increasing pulled out of reach. Increasing discord, envy, division, frustration and and ultra-competitive aggression.
If it isn’t the gaining of a Universal basic Income and the living of a low maintenance lifestyle that we change to... at least now with the present just-started breakdown of our existences we do know that SOMETHING has to change.
The status quo is not going to work anymore and for even more reasons than the current crisis due to this coronavirus pandemic.
Right now and for many reasons we are on the road to ruin... and a majority of us know it, or soon will.
We can either make the change. Or wait for things to change around us. Our choices have reduced to those two.
~
Finally...
Something to look forward to:
v. A planetary community.
This is a vision for a better future planet-wide. Winning a decent life for all people. Resource planning & redirecting with a hybrid form of compassionate democratic socialism and well-regulated ethical capitalism. The whole world with the fundamental basics of life guaranteed and freed to focus on being and playfully communicating - sharing ideas, songs, dance, stories, experiences - ultimately a global harmony of being.
Pie in the Sky? Perhaps... but "old" ideas such as compassion, love and mutual respect are about all that can save us now....
Connection, communication and cooperation.
We are all here together on this beautiful island world.
Perhaps we should all begin to be, to live that way and think that way?
Why don’t we start to work together for a future that involves less work, less money, less stuff......... but more life?
Here are some phrases for a better future:
First and foremost: Buy Less.
Remember our childhoods when treats were rare. Didn’t they feel good?
Minimum is Maximum - Reduce to the Max.
Let us change to: practice Voluntary Simplicity.
And do our best to live a Low Maintenance Lifestyle.
The reward: Connecting to REAL Freedom, to Childlike Lightness and Wonder, to a world of never-ending Fascination and Inquiry... to the joy of BEING.
Recommended reading: 'To Have or to Be?' by Erich Fromm (ISBN 0-553-23100-6)
THE GREATEST, RICHEST SICKEST NATION IN THE WORLD
The sons and daughters of those who participated in the boom years after WWII who found work relatively easy to come by which had salaries whereby they could buy a house and equip it with every modern convenience, get married, start a family covered adequately by health care are finding it increasingly difficult to do any of these things.
The parents who sought a better life for their offspring have had all their fond hopes dashed as they see them under or unemployed, burdened by debt and in many cases depressed and suicidal. In increasing numbers they cannot afford to rent even modest dwelling places and are returning home.
Lifespans in America are shortening. Depression and inclination toward suicide are rising. The threat to livelihoods in the pandemic era is increasing. Mortgages remain unpaid as do rents. Bankruptcies are ever more prevalent as health care costs deplete savings and create unmanageable loans that feed into the cycle of depression and suicide.
Those in High School in the USA are contemplating suicide at every higher percentages. Substance abuse and overdoses as well as suicides are taking the lives of more High School students that Covid.
Increased isolation has resulted from a feeling there is less and less community spirit in an age of endless competitive greed.
For ten thousand years and more prior to the Industrial Revolution people largely lived in villages, within small communities.
With the Industrial Revolution came mass migration to ever-larger cities. Any spirit of community was much harder to find. Isolation, atomization, over-work, relative poverty in terms of overall well being and depression rose even as living standards rose somewhat in terms of income compared to serfdom and farming as it was two hundred or so years ago.
With the advent of the internet in our lifetimes the original concept was that we would be benefited by being in better touch with others and regain our sense of community. But, along with the demands of work being ever-greater through recent decades the opposite effect has been found. Many rarely meet others face to face, are locked within a small coterie of screentime friends and are often mentally reduced to irascible venters on all the various pressures upon them.
The USA is the crucible where the nexus of all these negative forces is at a peak.
Of course there are many factors contributing to the dangerous levels of alienation which now exist there.
The income gap between the average worker and the well-heeled elites above them has increased steadily since the boom years after WWII and in recent decades has taken off exponentially. Wages were reasonably good as WWII ended. Unions made sure of that. Slowly but surely a plethora of rights and the protection of those unions who had protected them were stripped away. Pay increases dropped below inflation over the years and now run at around 1.5%.
Increasingly Americans cannot afford even the basics of a decent human life never mind aspire to all that they were made to believe was theirs as of right, The American Dream, that if you worked hard and kept your nose clean you would have the life you hoped for, for your family, a happy life and want for nothing. That dream has died along the hard road Americans have traveled along in recent years desperately hoping their votes would change things.
Now the Covid-19 pandemic is poised to ingrain further the losses suffered during the 2007-08 financial crash. Homelessness is about to combine with joblessness and general fury over a range of other issues in a perfect storm, a black nexus of negative factors all feeding one another.
The Greatest, Richest, Sickest nation of the world is in a sickening spiral of ill-health, decay, addiction, suicidal tendencies, corporate and political corruption without end.
And an off ramp, some way out from this spiral of darkness is all but impossible to identify.
DEMONIZATION | THE WEST’S SMEAR & HUMANITARIAN DEATH INDUSTRIES
Jeremy Corbyn, Julian Assange and Scott Ritter all have something in common, along with a host of other individuals. They have all been subject to demonization and relentless smearing.
Others in this category you may think to greater or lesser degree are deserving of the campaigns mounted against them, Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Slobodan Milošević, Nicolás Maduro and Bashar al-Assad.
It is a technique that has been seen time and time again and works extremely well in a journalistic environment in the mainstream where there is no attempt to do anything but transmit the accusations against such targets.
You cannot have failed to observe how this works if you have even the slightest interest in geopolitics. You may however not know of the background to these tactics, of ‘Operation Mockingbird’ for instance, of the existence of CIA teams whose tasks involve ‘Psychological Operations’ (PsyOps) and ‘Black Operations’ (BlackOps).
These latter entities are the primary forces that are engaged in blackening the names of those western elites wish to neutralize and remove from power. There are no holds barred regarding their activities. Counterfeit documents are created, false stories are arranged either in-house or via compliant “journalists” and then seeded remotely to disguise their source, and much else, anything in fact that can contribute to rendering the target to pariah status.
Both Julian Assange and Scott Ritter have fallen foul of sting operations designed to achieve the desired result of blackening their names. Julian Assange you will know of, Scott Ritter you are perhaps not so familiar with. He was a team leader in the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. He became a leading critic of the then U.S. administration of George W. Bush.
Jeremy Corbyn was targeted to be tarred with a different brush from that used against Assange and Ritter. Arguably the politicians who has shown most integrity and dedication to noble causes in Britain over the last fifty years was accused time and time again of being an anti-Semite. This campaign not only came from the usual sources within the mainstream media but also from disaffected, conservative members from within his own party. They also conspired to have the party he led, the second party in Britain, lose the general election which would have brought them to power with Corbyn as leader. This they succeeded in doing thereby causing Corbyn to resign.
Regarding the second category of Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Slobodan Milošević, Nicolás Maduro and Bashar al-Assad, they consist of important geopolitical targets for western elites. You could add Xi Jingping of China to these names, however as yet no concerted campaign of misinformation has begun regarding him apart from some very low-level attempts to date.
Vladimir Putin has been targeted since a speech he made in Munich in February 2007 in which he spoiled what had been from 2000 until then a reasonably good relationship with the western powers. In that speech however he ‘blotted his copybook’ as they say in the UK. He spoke of his disagreement with the concept of a unipolar world dominated un-democratically by the USA and its close allies. He spoke of the fear nations felt now that these nations had dispensed with international law and even the United Nations when deciding to go to war. He became a marked man and target for name-blackening, for demonization and perpetual smearing at that point. I would recommend finding his speech on YouTube and listening to his words. They are eminently sensible and reasonable... however to western elite ears they were anathema.
You may well feel that the others in this category deserve all they got and for one man I’ve not spoken of yet who is still alive, that he is justly criticized, Bashar al-Assad. However, having looked deeply into this man’s character through many interviews with him and his wife, Asma, I believe he has been largely, unjustly smeared. As has Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in my judgement.
In each case only one narrative is told and endlessly repeated. We are asked to see such persons as demons, unredeemably bad, evil even, without any positives to their characters whatsoever, vile creatures... animals, murderers akin to Hitler and every other demagogue and dictator that has ever existed. They have no ‘other side’ to speak of they imply, simply representatives of a mythical Satan, monsters, callous killers and plotters of endless evil.
Millions believe what they are told about such men. In each case there are believable elements, characteristics in the people that can be used to emphasize certain proclivities, innuendo is spread, certain events alluded to that they may have had a hand in, myriad accusations that over time work their way into the consciousness of millions. When people hear a relentless barrage of similarly believable stories all pointing in one direction the desired labels start to stick.
Millions of people still have respect for their mainstream media news outlets. They look to them to simplify the multiple confusing elements within a world that always seems to be at war. many have no time or inclination to look deeply into all issues before them, they are not researchers with access to first hand information, they rely on others to gain purchase on the truth and relate it to them.
Simply blackening the names of leaders of target organizations or nations is not enough however in the global war western elites are engaged in to retain their power, influence and patrician dominance. A further device is constantly in operation to keep western audiences on side and in full consent to the neutralization and elimination of rivals to western power structures and interests. I call it ‘The Humanitarian Death Industry’.
The Humanitarian Death Industry has many outlets. It’s main outlet is the ‘Something Must be Done’ ploy. In this project emotional buttons are pushed to stimulate the required response, the generation of consent for violence against the target, or at the very least, the continuance and facilitation of the demonization project against both individuals and nations.
The main emotional buttons used are ‘harm to children’, ‘attacks on hospitals and schools’ and ‘the calculated oppression of, attacks upon, torture of and impoverishment of civilian populations’.
You will have seen these subjects crop up time and time again in relation to those persons and nations targeted for elimination by the West. Venezuela is a case in point where the techniques of ‘The Humanitarian Death Industry’ were used extensively and very effectively.
In Syria in recent times heart-strings were pulled remorselessly via an organization set up by the West there named ‘The White Helmets’. Their task was to blacken the reputation of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian and Russian militaries and the entire Syrian government via the portrayal of children in distress. This worked very effectively for quite some time.
At the United Nations people such as Nikki Haley accused the Syrian and Russian militaries of actively targeting hospitals and schools as if military officers woke up each morning wondering how many school-children or hospital patients they could kill that day. This technique of generalized demonizing is in fact one perfected by the Nazis who smeared the entire Jewish race with it.
The pattern is clear. The motives and intent obvious.
The TRUE location of the inhumanity and malignant activity is hopefully evident to you.
These are the activities western elites and their myriad agencies are engaging in night and day, the demonization and smearing of those targets that do not comply with their demands to kneel before them and do their bidding.
These “democracies” do not deserve the name. They seek un-democratic control within a unipolar world where other nations obey their every command and comply with their every wish.
This is the ultimate goal of all the “democratic” demonization, smearing of all non-compliant entities and that of the ongoing regime change agenda, the gaining of full spectrum dominance, of global hegemony.
You will see the “democratic” demonization process continue... right up to the tipping point when the inevitable rise of China quarantines these activities permanently.
Only then can a new dawn for humanity begin to shed its light, banishing the darkness maintained and fostered by the lies of the West.
Monday 28 September 2020
LIBERAL TOTALITARIANISM
You are not supposed to think now, nor question. You are to give assent & act out your aggression, contempt & vilification toward those who insist on thinking & questioning issues you have given your complete assent to.
All you are allowed to think about are means to weaken, neutralize or destroy the arguments of and even the people who deign to think or question the issues you agree upon implicitly.
These are totem issues that brook no doubters, no questioners, these are issues upon which complete obedience to command from the liberal elite is demanded. If you do not comply you are immediately an enemy of that state of mind.
It is akin to the state of mind of the most fervent exemplars of muscular women's liberation in its earliest days. At that time you had activists at the most extreme end of the issue calling men ‘the enemy’, almost an enemy to be physically attacked, not only in words. These were rightly regarded as extremists at the time. However, today we can see a similar extreme in regard to those who believe there are areas of concern within those totem issues.
The cases of Joe Rogan and JK Rowling have been the most public
expressions of the condemnation of alternate or questioning
thought-processes. The condemnation from the liberal class and those
fully signed up activists who have given up their right to think and
question due to the perceived “all important” issues that liberals feel
are at the forefront of today’s culture war.
The Democratic Party of the USA and the Corbyn-eliminated Labour Party of the UK exemplify the way the liberal class have destroyed the ability of members to question their elites. They have rendered those who believe in thoughtful analysis and debate on issues impotent through undermining them. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn were both neutralized by people who believe the control of the administrative functions of their parties is the most important task they have, not winning elections. They have insured that they will be in control whether they win or lose and that’s what’s most important to them. All else is of lesser and much lesser importance to them including the well being of their respective populations.
These liberals (in the case of the U.S. ) and establishment friendly political elites (in that of the UK) find progressive viewpoints which question the status quo and the left in general highly dangerous and have been working over the decades to neutralize their effect, weaken them wherever and whenever possible and if possible eliminate them, their views and the communication of their views entirely. This is a totalitarian project and you can see it in the type of “news” and “debate” that occurs within the mainstream in both nations mentioned above and indeed in general across those nations broadly allied with them.
This is why Russia Today (RT) and the plethora of crowdfunded channels across YouTube are regarded as a primary enemy of the liberal and established political elites. They deign to profer that issues that these elites have labeled no-go areas can be thought about, discussed and debated. Such issues are whether western elites have the right to intervene in nations that have not taken any warlike stance against them, whether regime change wars by the West are truly idealistic efforts to make the world safe for freedom and democracy or whether they arise purely from self-interest and a desire for ever more control, manipulative ability and greater imperial reach.
There are a multitude of issues regarding the wealth gap, the power of lobbyists, the 1%, the military industrial complex and much more.
The place where liberal totalitarianism can be seen in its most naked for however, is in the USA. For liberals there, and most are within the Democratic Party, there is a constant push toward unquestioning totalitarian agreement on issues. Naturally Donald Trump is the area where agreement is strongest. Russia is another. No matter that no connection of any substance has been made between Trump and Russia the concept that he colluded with Russia and that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential to ensure he won is sacrosanct and not to be questioned. Though the meme has suffered hit after hit the uniform belief in it is unshaken as can be seen even now when it has been almost obliterated this zombie meme keeps getting a little life pumped into it who are as committed to it as the Nazis were, under pain of death, to the meme concerning the total iniquity of the Jews.
It is beyond ironic that the Democratic Party, once the standard bearer of the anti-war sentiment has now become the primary supporter of regime change and the continuance at all costs of troop deployments in Europe and the Middle East and an ever-increasing build-up of tension with Russia.
The “liberals” now are essentially the standard bearers of mind control and indoctrination, the upholders of the status quo of an exceptional America that should proactively strike at all her foes and in that endeavor believe everything told them by the FBI, CIA and all the intelligence agencies with a stake in creating maximum levels of fear for their own purposes. Liberal, corporate mainstream media in the USA is right in line with their goals and tenets of belief, those goals and beliefs which maximize their power and profit.
The Republican Party by default has become ever closer in its policies and belief-systems to libertarians whose leanings are strongly against the kind of totalitarianism of thought that the liberals now represent. Trump is apolitical at his core. He is also amoral and conscience free. He can jump from one side of the political fence to the other with ease. He is disastrously moronic in various ways and he too his totalitarian impulses. His saving grace however is that he is not for hot war. He is indulging in economic war, yes... but hot war he does not favor and you will see him make good on bringing the maximum number of U.S. troops out of the Middle East and Europe that he can push through the resistance from the established elites. This is why Trump, amoral ogre that he is will hopefully win in November and not Joe Biden.
Joe Biden will reinforce the worst of what is happening now and divide the world even further. His would be an even more divisive policy (unbelievable as that may sound) than Trump regarding what he will state as “The Free World” and those who question that purported status.
No questioning is to be allowed. That will be mandated as the absolute fact. Western supremacy will be renewed with no Trump-like criticism of NATO or any other aspect where unity of purpose against the free world’s enemies is required and demanded. All activities will have inherent impunity and like the days following 9/11 all questioning will be met with the same totalitarian response as that of George W. Bush at the time:
“You are either with us or you are against us.”
No questioning. No doubts. Only obedience to this narrative is permissible.
Don’t think. Accept. And obey.
These will be the liberal commands on gaining power. En route to full liberal totalitarianism.
NO ONE IS GUILTY | ALL MUST CHANGE
We become who we are early.
We spend our lives in a narrow spectrum bordering that way of being.
We categorize what is & what is not us.
What’s "wrong", what’s different & 'other'.
Who are the enemies of us?
All these viewpoints from our center of being relate directly to who we are, not who they are.
Those ‘they’ are all around us. Some of them we usually love, our parents, our fellow siblings, our friends. Others we tolerate as long as they reflect us and our feelings of right and wrong in some way. Those who don’t we avoid, ignore, loathe and perhaps fight.
What of those ‘they’, the ones that are not us? How did they become them?
In exactly the same manner we became we... but through a different avenue of other influences.
We consider ourselves good. We consider them bad.
But none of us have a choice. We come with what we have. We go through what we go through.
Some of us create great good, some only moderate good. Some create almost nothing. Others create bad effects, commit crimes, hurt people, steal, rape, murder. Why the difference? What makes us good? What makes them bad?
Nothing comes from nothing.
No one is born bad, or if they are you must look to some past life for the answer to the questions above.
Can a baby be bad? Some parents who are pulling their hair out because they can’t get a baby to stop crying might say so. But that baby is simply reacting to what it’s feeling. We can’t tell what it’s feeling and why much of the time. That’s all that’s happening.
Most of us don’t understand why people rob, rape, hurt and murder others. We don’t know what they’re feeling. We don’t know why someone would be so different from us that they could do those things. Like the parents who have no ability to tell what’s up with the incessantly crying baby we simply find that behavior impossible to understand.
What becomes right to a person clearly varies. The “bad” person doesn’t do bad things because he or she simply likes to do things that hurts others. Not unless they have a condition which creates an overwhelming urge to do so such as those who are sadists or sociopaths. There was no choice involved. They didn’t flick a switch to choose to be sadists or sociopaths.
We didn’t choose to be good, no matter what you think. If you are indeed a good person you merely avoided or survived things that others who we call “bad” did not. As is said, to understand someone you’d have to stand in his or her shoes. But this is impossible. You would have had to go through the same things as them to truly be like them even for a moment.
We all tend to think everyone thinks like us and sees things as we do.
They don’t. None of us think precisely alike. None of us act precisely alike. We are all different... but it is comfortable and creates less confusion in our minds if we conceive that more or less everyone, or at least the majority think and act like us.
Being in the majority of ‘good people’ is important to most of us. In this condition we can reflect on those others who do bad things somewhat in the role of judges. For we are the good. And they are the bad. And this makes things simple, it assures us of our higher status, of our majority status and holds down any neurotic doubts we may feel from time to time concerning things about ourselves we feel somewhat ashamed of or wish were otherwise.
We have all done shameful things. None of us have reached our full potential. None of us have been totally good. But we put ourselves somewhere on the spectrum between good and “evil”. And most of us choose to believe we are basically good.
Those we call ‘bad’ also believe the things they are doing are good, good for them or those who see things as they do. They don’t understand the mentality of the ‘good’ as we don’t understand their mentality, that of the ‘bad’. How could they? How could we? All the experiences that made us and that made them are far away in the past, back down wholly separate corridors of crime.
How could someone who grew up with gentle, caring parents in a leafy suburb who went to schools, and college and university where no or few bullies or overbearing teachers caused them great difficulties, those who had pretty good friends and enough affluence behind them understand those who grew up in some sink estate where you either joined a gang or were the victim of one or more and where your life chances were minimal, where possibly your parents were alcoholic or drug abusers who used violence on you, had low-ability teachers who had given up on the “monsters” in their classes?
It’s impossible no matter how empathic you are. If you have come through a relatively easy route you will never truly be able to understand those who havn’t. Not in a million years.
Most people simply give up trying or find it most comfortable to sneer at them, certainly fear them, recommend locking them up, perhaps executing them. They are a danger to good folk. They ruin things for the majority. They cause mischief, they rob people, they rape, sell drugs, they hurt others with fists, knives and guns. They murder. get them gone or out of my sight.
Yet they are not guilty. Not in any true sense. None of them chose to be as they are. Not one of them. Not one of us did either. They are as they have become as are we. No one flicks a switch and chooses to be good or bad. We emerge from a time of being sponges soaking in influences and experience, open books to be written upon, empty vessels of innocence that are unformed and molded by all we see, hear and experience. This forms us... for good or ill. From the point of our formation onward we find it almost impossible to change because our world view is by and large fixed with us. Of course we can move those margins to our view a little as time goes by, our viewpoints can become somewhat more sophisticated... but that inner core? Forget it.
And what does all this lead to?
The world as it is today.
We are a species tearing ourselves apart due to our differences and our propensity to exasperate those differences, to criticize and fail to even try to understand. We are full of reasons why we are good and they, whoever they are, are bad. We cuss and swear, we demonize, we hate, we fear, we want something done. Something done about those others who are acting badly, trying to destroy us or our systems, our peace, stability and right to be respected as good.
We live on a planet at war. Or better said we are a species living on a lonely planet and we are constantly at war with ourselves due to our differences. When everyone wants what they want no one gets what they want. And that’s where we are now. We all feel entitled. And we all want those others inhibiting our entitlement stopped.
Robert Owen: “All the world is queer save thee and me and even thou art a little queer.”
A species at war with itself is not going to survive very long, not in a state of happiness at least.
If we refuse to understand what is alien to us. If we refuse to do anything in regard to “enemies” but attempt to jail or destroy them what hope is there for us? Only some form of connection that brings some modicum of understanding ever resolves anything. Refusal to do so is just more cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
We are all both guilty and innocent to some degree. Though I’d say that there is no guilt in truth. There is only the molding of characters through those initial moments when we are virtual sponges and shaped relentlessly and remorselessly by those already shaped and formed. And they too are innocent.
Incapable of great change by being formed long before we even know it we must find the one avenue of change available to us... to better understand ALL behavior, not merely condemn it and so condemn all of humanity to perpetual war.
NO ONE IS GUILTY | ALL MUST CHANGE
Sunday 27 September 2020
IS THIS *IT*? (THE END OF ALL HOPE?)
Is this as far as we come as a species? Endlessly warring with one another? Fractious disputes where nothing gets resolved?
Recriminations and name-calling, assertions of wrong-doing, talking over one another, constantly vying for selfish advantage and perpetual self-interest to the exclusion of all else?
Is this *it*? The culmination of all our ancestors’ sacrifices for the sake of something better?
Is this all we can hope for and it will it be like this in perpetuity now? No hope any longer for something better?
If so then we have come to the age of the woefully mentally challenged in respect of western leadership. The shit appears to have finally risen right to the top of the elite political swamp and the environment of dog-eat-dog that exists there seems to be permanent.
It is a world of PR, not personal integrity. A world of mirages, facades and fakery. A place where the 0.000001% attempt to dupe the 99.99999% into voting for them by any means available except the truth.
It is a western world where another 0.000001%, that of western corporate owners dictate policy for their own advantage and economic gain.
It a western world of disunity, of political warfare between politicians where two sides fight for the perks of power in a four year cycle of virtual dictatorship, puppet-strings pulled by their corporate masters.
Is this what our predecessors on this planet fought and died for? This vile mess of personal ambition, self-interest and greed-driven gameplaying?
Insane warmongers push for attacks and invasions, lobbyists push for greater advantage in selling their masters’ poisonous products.
Fixed minds of hawks push the new status quo of perpetual dispute where dialogue and diplomacy have been totally abandoned.
Theories of all kinds abound, conspiracy theories travel faster than truth, fake news is everywhere along with politically-approved lies.
Confusion and turmoil are everywhere. The pandemic. The wars. The prevalence of propaganda. Mass media lies. Bought journalists. Misinformation. Fake state narratives.
A war on truth is being waged to keep western populations perpetually ignorant of what is being done in their name.
In Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen.
Narratives explicitly designed to confuse and foment further war, hate, destruction and death are broadcast to keep westerners providing their consent.
Western leadership has as its primary goal the maintenance of its ability to dominate the rest of the world. All else is secondary.
And all that is secondary makes up the lifeblood of the hopes and dreams of all who fought for a better world before us. The primary goal negates all else and has brought us to our present misery.
So I say, for all the reasons above, is this *it*? is this the end of all hope for something better?
Not quite...
There are nations that have maintained their integrity and provide the only hope for us now.
Those nations whose leaders have retained their focus and dedication to the well being of their populations.
Only they can bring some sanity to the present situation where the western world has become visibly and indisputably insane.
They have maintained their belief in the sovereignty of nations, their independence of view and their guardianship of the principles of international law in the face of the West’s criminal wars of choice.
The leaders of Russia and China have exemplified the steady qualities of leadership required to bring disputing forces together in dialogue, to maintain states threatened by the West’s proxy forces of extremists, criminals, militants and terrorists. They have guided their nations with probity and insight, honesty and dedication, decent intentions and great wisdom.
They provide our main hope for something better. All is not yet lost. The mad dogs of the West may yet be quarantined. Dialogue and diplomacy may yet resume.
This ISN’T *it*. Not yet. There is hope. It’s flame has flickered and almost died in recent years and we are now almost at its nadir.
But not yet. Not yet.
Hope is rising in the East as it dies in the West.
And a new dawn may yet rise for humankind as that hope rises in ever more hearts.
It isn’t over yet. They say the darkest hour comes just before the dawn...
Saturday 26 September 2020
THE ROAD TO HELL
If turkeys could vote they wouldn’t vote for Christmas, right?
So why would the mega-corporations who donate to the Democrats and Republicans ever allow progressive policies that end regime change wars, provide single-payer health care or a bring reduction in the use of oil, forgiveness of student debt, regulation of Wall Street or higher taxes for the super-rich?
They won’t. They never will. And those they pay never will. So where does this leave the average American?
Biden and the Democrats certainly won’t do ANYTHING that would cause their major donors any loss of sleep at night.
Strangely Trump and the Republicans have moved just a little leftward in recent years, mostly regarding the regime change war policy. But you will have noticed that Trump has totally recompensed those elites who may be affected by massively upping the amount allocated to so-called defense spending to keep them sweet. (This is going to look pretty strange after November if he brings the vast majority of U.S. troops home but continues to create an enormous “defense” industry with nowhere to show off their new weaponry.)
More importantly, what the hell can Americans do about this two-party system that is impoverishing them to the benefit of the ultra-elites and mega-corporations? The situation keeps on getting worse for the 99% and there seems no help at hand... not if they won’t help themselves by rejecting both main parties. But they have become a given, somehow or other, even though they both work to the great detriment of Americans whose lives come under greater pressure with every passing year and who will clearly never see a return to the ‘good old days’ when life was affordable and purchases of major items were not disappearing out of reach with every passing year.
What would it take to bring about the kind of major change that is required to get the kleptocrats off their backs and the politicians of the two major parties out of their pockets?
It would probably take mass non-violent civil disobedience as well-respected investigative journalist and committed socialist Chris Hedges has advocated for some time now. And very definitely it would take a mass movement of voters away from the two prominent parties to another or others.
Anything short of these two activities will result in the status quo and that status quo is going to become a meat-grinder for all Americans below a certain status in short order. Already the effect of the coronavirus pandemic has been to send $trillions upward to the some of the wealthiest people on the planet, $trillions that won’t come back, $trillions that could have paid for medicare for all, a universal basic income and all the fundamental changes that are so desperately needed to get America back on track in a modern age where income inequality is set to take one exponential leap after another.
A.I., robotics, all-automated factories and warehouses, online education, medical diagnosis and much else is going to take one skillset after another from people and transfer them to the digital world that doesn’t need payments by corporations for workers’ rights, doesn’t need time off, holiday payments or healthcare insurance.
Most Americans are headed down a cul-de-sac currently. They can’t quite see the end point but if they think a little into the future in reference to their situation today and what’s going on in the political world in reference to big business and technological advances they should be able to get a pretty good idea.
When U.S. infrastructure has collapsed even further, when more are bankrupted by medical costs than ever before, when decent work paying a good salary becomes ever harder to find and many turn to crime, when you see your children destitute and desperate, what then...?
As Chris Rea wrote and sang a number of years ago now.
“This ain’t no upwardly-mobile freeway... oh no, this is the road to hell.”
If so, shouldn’t Americans be looking for the next available exit?
CLOTH EARS WITHIN AN ORWELLIAN BUBBLE OF BELIEF
Their minds are impenetrable. Their brains untouchable. Their feelings unchanging. Their emotions calculated. Their destiny assured. Their database closed.
These are America’s elites.
They are not susceptible to evolution. They have reached what they conceive is the peak of what is possible. They conceive themselves to be the crown of creation, God’s servants and his weapon of truth, power and freedom on Earth.
These are the self-conceived superhumans. The political equivalents of Marvel’s superheoes.
They have no doubts on any of the above or on what they believe is their duty, to bring the fruits of their perfection to all those suffering their absence.
They are the Boltons and Pompeos of this world. The Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, the Perles and all the other self-righteous denizens who live in the cage of illusory rightness and wear their belief bubbles and cloth ears with pride.
They are exceptional. They are the self-awarded universal arbiters of right and wrong. They are the true masters of the universe, the rightful owners of this planet and those members of the glorious fraternity of judges, juries and executioners that make up the 1% of the United States of America of which they are the creme de la creme, the 0.001%.
They await Armageddon and their bodily rapture to the heavenly realms while biding their time... “bringing it on”
Those cloth ears are snug. The belief bubbles round their heads are tight as can be. No contrary facts to their fixed beliefs will either be heard or allowed to enter. Only those facts which support and supplement their beliefs will be gladly heard and ushered speedily inside.
Once the supportive elements are granted access they are immediately exported to the lesser humans who are not privy to the full extent of the activities promulgated and perpetrated by the myriad evil-doers they know of in exquisite and secret detail.
Belief bubbles merge one with another across the group-thought grapevine... to fellow believers, to media nodding dogs, to corporate arms manufacturers and to the slit-eyed facilitators of global manipulation, the CIA.
In perfect harmony all the above spread the word that emerges from throwing a one-sided coin that is the ever-useful regime change paradigm. Those who attempt to refute the holy word coming down from the uniform cyclops entity of the elite state are targeted for neutralization, incarceration and if possible permanent elimination. There must be no doubting the holy commands of those with the right views, attitude and agendas, those who command obedience in this time of global war.
Those within mainstream media who believed facts and events ought to be investigated rather than simply agreed with have been long excluded. They now occupy the far margins of the Agreement Arena or are exiled to the outer reaches of YouTube. Excluded or exiled many seek them out in these days of the USSA, the aborning totalitarian state that resembles Orwell’s ‘Oceania’ where there is only one truth, that of the state and anything other than its narratives is automatically a lie.
Aaron Mate
Max Blumenthal
Anya Parampil
Ben Norton
Chris Hedges
Jimmy Dore
Further afield we find the equivalents of Orwell’s Winston Smith:
John Pilger
Daniel Ellsgberg
In exile:
Edward Snowden.
In jail:
Julian Assange.
These are the outcasts who dare to have their ears exposed and refuse the belief bubbles offered them.
The rest of us are largely passive. We watch as the war of words range.
Some few take to the streets. Some in peaceful protest. Others in vengeful rage.
Meanwhile, those perched in ivory towers, with ears closed and beliefs firmly fixed, tweak and synthesize the meaning of what they see down below to conform with their notions of absolute reality and sense of mission.
Otherwise, hands placed over those cloth ears and breathing deep of the stale air within their bubbles of belief they draw their plans against us.
COMMUNISM AND THE ENDLESS APPETITES OF THE CAPITALIST CLASS
Enough is NEVER enough for the kind of mind that constitutes a good capitalist.
They will always seek more until they have extracted and exploited the last morsel from our planet and its people.
The 1% constitute the uppermost elites and extends down through their facilitators within the political, corporate, military, intelligence agency, media and administrative elites. They are the parasitical class who feed on and off the labor of the 99%. It has always been this way and always will be this way unless another revolution takes place which mirrors that in 1916.
The Communist Revolution was the number one enemy of the capitalist class and it carefully and precisely drew its plans against it and was eventually successful in destroying the threat it posed to their endless appetite for more.
Most people in the West think that communism was destroyed from within because the people were unable to bear it any longer. Firstly, the number who brought communism down in the Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet Union were nowhere near a majority of the populations of those countries. They were the disaffected, the selfishly ambitious, the criminals and those as greed-driven for ever more as those who were pushing for communism’s downfall from outside. Those outside were the 1% class still with us today.
The 1% across the western world, the political, corporate, military, intelligence agency, media and administrative elites, worked as a team 24/7 for fifty years piling the pressure on the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations every second that passed. This was a winning game play as each additional item of pressure and use of the disaffected, the selfishly ambitious, the criminals and the greed-driven caused a counter action. Some of these took societies emphasizing peace, work, integrity, unity and a very attractive innocence of spirit down a dark road which led to ever more powerful counter-responses which led to hyper-anxiety,surveillance, oppression, myriad draconian acts small and large and a paralyzing level of state paranoia. They also led to military spending which drained their treasuries which had been well-stocked as the successful initiatives began to create societies for ALL the people.
Creating internal division, dissatisfaction and destabilization in the communist east was the primary goal of western elites since the end of WWII and these efforts culminated in the destruction of those societies at the tail end of the Eighties.
The pressures, the constant threat, the subversion, provocation and feeding of discord through a minority of the disaffected, the selfishly ambitious, the criminals and the greed-driven bore fruit.
With the ex-communist nations completely opened up for exploitation the next step was to ensure they stayed permanently weak and would never contemplate a return to their former status. Local factories which had produced foodstuffs and machinery were closed or sold at bargain basement prices to western corporations. Local shops suffered the same fate. Local agriculture was to be reduced and imports from Europe and elsewhere expanded. Every national sphere of independence was to be neutered. And ultimately the goal was to herd these weakened nations into the European Union and NATO. Their fate was then completely sealed.
From this point on these nations, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and all the rest were to be consumers filling the coffers of the West’s corporate mega-corporations. And of course provide compliant and grateful workers receiving virtual slave wages by comparison with their peers in Germany, France and elsewhere.
The final trap had snapped shut. And there was to be no escape. Those trapped should be grateful they received any largesse at all from their jailers and forget any pangs of remembrance concerning when they had factories, companies, agriculture, products and enthusiastic engineers, scientists and other skilled elites of their own working for the good of their nations free of outside domination.
Were the political, corporate, military, intelligence agency, media and administrative elites of the West content? Of course not. They were just as addicted to more as previously. Other nations were on the horizon that needed subjugated and brought to heel, destabilized then rebuilt in some fashion or other to suit them. It took two bites at the cherry to bring Ukraine into their orbit. But there were still other fish to fry, much bigger fish. New projects beckoned. Iraq. Iran. China. And the upstart Russia. Other lesser targets would also be targeted. Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, The Sudan, Yemen and beyond.
The endless appetite of the capitalist class has engendered an endless war.
And an end to dialogue, diplomacy and detente... these were faked while the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations were strong. Now that they are either dissolved or weakened beyond repair there is no need for those. There was to be only one victor, only one agent of exploitation. All others were to be virtual slaves and semi-content consumers of the ersatz nationhood western elites had created.
But now the West has a real fight on its hands. The benefits that were plentiful in the early days of communism have returned via a China that has learned its lessons well and has created a robust hybrid system that outdoes the capitalist system of the West.
As the West sinks in a mire of its own making through endless exploitation of individualism and addictive consumerism we see it totally unable to cope with the current coronavirus pandemic. China, through its strong central planning function and genuine desire to assist the many as opposed to the few is soaring to eclipse the West.
The plague of western capitalism with its insatiable appetites is being forced back. Its locusts will not infect any further fields, they will not be allowed to encroach upon further lands eating their resources.
The endless appetites of the capitalist class of the western world are finally being restricted from feeding their endless fix. They are being tied in a virtual straitjacket. They are in the process of being gradually, inextricably quarantined.
For now they feed upon those they have ensnared, they predate upon their own and their recent captives... who are now beginning to revolt. The beast of capitalism is beginning to eat its own body and the immune system of that body is starting to resist.
With persisting good fortune and an immense skillset China and her allies will continue to exert relentless economic pressure upon a western world in its death throes just as its blood, sinews, gut and heart are ripped from it internally.
Only when the beast is finally dead or fully quarantined will its endless appetites be ended themselves caught in the snare of its own malignant and viciously destructive greed.
THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MUCUS!
All across social media indignant conspiracy theorists along with Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo and Co. are spluttering out their nutball notions on the origin of the novel corona virus and Covid-19.
It’s a plot by Bill Gates to reduce the world’s population by billions and win more $billions from his Big Pharma investments.
It’s those fiendish Chinese out to decimate the western world in a new, updated version of the Yellow Peril with a genetically-engineered plague fiendishly set upon its own people to avert suspicion.
It’s 5G celltowers beaming out malignant electromagnetic rays somehow transforming both braincells and bacteria into your favorite horror sci-fi epic reality of all time. Certainly the braincells of those spreading this theory have CLEARLY been affected. (/sarcasm)
It’s a devilish U.S. op designed to terminally weaken its economic adversary China through a military group who visited Wuhan to participate in the Military World Games.
It’s ‘Deep State’ who have instigated a scheme to keep everyone locked up in their homes and unable to threaten it by people invading the streets to protest (if so, that one’s working well currently, no? (/sarcasm) Look out for an imminent governmental coup (but not by the chief suspect, Donald Trump).
It’s a devilish means of rounding up Satanists who have occupied the top levels of the western elite establishment along with pedophiles and cunningly disguised lizards.
It’s the culmination of God’s plan for the end of the world as we know it predicted centuries ago by men with big beards dwelling in caves. If people do bad things and don’t give their hard-earned cash to mega-churches they will face the full wrath of the virus.
Or...
It is part of a known group of viruses which sometimes originate through a crossover from viruses in animals and this occurs most often where humans and animals coexist closely in the highest numbers. There are estimated to be some seven million of such viruses within the animal kingdom.
Suggested Covid Concoctions:
Inject disinfectant into the body. This one is a classic piece of idiocy by the world’s foremost purveyor of idiocy, Donald Trump.
Take hydroxychloroquine which can have major side-effects and which has been proven not to assist in avoiding or treating the novel coronavirus or Covid-19.
Home remedies including garlic and lemon.
Holding your breath for 10 seconds without any problems. A sign that you don’t have the coronavirus in your body.
Drink water every 15 minutes to prevent you from getting Covid-19 by flushing out the virus.
A study shows that one in six adults believe these last three practices.
This will run and run... just like mucus running copiously from a badly infected nose.
So meanwhile, spluttering conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly hard at work using the last few braincells they have left concocting even more theories about the virus.
What about a Russian plot? Russia is flavor of every month right now.
What about aliens from the planet Zog out to destroy Mankind? Perhaps there’s an alien abduction story featuring this?
Perhaps it’s revenge of the Vril? Apparently part of Nazi ideology was (is?) that a race of superbeings live near the center of the planet. They have been cooped down there so long now that their tempers are likely to be rather heated.
Where might all the theories above end? In an amalgam of hysteria where they all fight it out on some green hill (Golgotha?) all totally unmasked and unmasked for what they are...
Unrepentant egoists and self-publicists who are plagued by their own inadequacy.
And they keep drinking huge amounts of Kool-Aid as their cure of choice...
The Hills Are Alive With The Sound of Mucus!
RUSSIAGATE : THE DEMS HAVE FOUND THEIR SHOCK JOCK ISSUE
If you were alive in the Eighties & Nineties you will know what a ‘Shock Jock’ was.
They say the Devil has all the best tunes and in those days they were played exclusively by extremist Republicans.
But no longer.
The Dems found their issue and now they have their own array of shock jocks all playing the same tune, ‘Russian Interference’.
I must say it’s a clever tactic. I am of the left and in the Eighties and Nineties when I heard the ranting from the right through those shock jocks I pitied the Dems who seemed so boring and quiet by comparison.
The Republican shock jocks ranted and raved in strident voices that bordered on the hysterical about all the threats they saw everywhere. They had impact. They touched raw nerves with their hyperbole, they were impossible to ignore because they always seemed to have some incredible danger to reveal, a warning that it was imperative you listen to.
Meanwhile the Democrats spoke earnestly (and by comparison boringly) about near reality, the issues of the day in the hope that their reasoned analyses would win the day against the continual shouting about imminent danger from the jocks.
Now the Dems have something they can use to raise the alarm, ubiquitous Russian influence that lies behind every problematic and divisive issue the USA has. All they need do is take something Trump says or has said and say this is what ‘The Russians’ want. And they don’t need to say what evidence they have for that. It is taken as a given. If they wish to back it up they simply say the intelligence agencies say it’s so. For them it is irrelevant and counter-productive to consider that they never show any proof and only ever use variations on the themes of ‘we think’, ‘it seems likely’ and ‘probably’. And of course there is no inclination to consider that there is every incentive for the intelligence agencies to push this narrative to bolster themselves and any anti-Trump agenda their staffers may have (as seen in the Flynn case).
The main thing for the Dems is that they have something to shout about, to stridently warn about, to instill fear about and generate the kind of consensus concerning a Donald Trump that they are in complete mental derangement about.
There is no evidence of Putin or the Russian state doing anything to America’s detriment. None. Not a shred. It is ALL speculation, people with a vested interest surmising this and that, usually working back from their conclusions arrived at without aid of evidence.
No doubt some of the more rabid Dem shock jockers are totally convinced that every problem America has is made much worse by Russians emphasizing them... but can we use our eyes and ears... where’s the EVIDENCE for this? Okay, they can state emphatically it is taking place, just as those right-wing jocks in the Eighties and Nineties did and it is having the same effect. But people should start to question them about it and start asking them for some hard evidence for their outrageous claims. How that can be done with corporate media in the USA totally fixed in its narratives unwilling EVER to question them makes doing that almost impossible.
The level of conditioning in the United States through its mass media has now reached an absolute peak. Wild theories can be passed off as news without question. Assertions of ‘The Russians’ being behind every problem are stated as fact with no possible comeback allowed, anyone who tries that will be blasted with lip-curled disbelief and never, ever allowed back. The reality is such people are never allowed anywhere NEAR a CNN or MSNBC studio.
The fixed beliefs, the certainty based on virtually nothing is repeated endlessly and NEVER challenged.
The Dems have “risen” to the level of Republican screams of “Danger!” and so have achieved parity. They are no longer the sighing intellectuals simply reiterating their logical narratives... they have joined the carnival barkers and snake oil salesmen with their very own alarm bell narrative, “The Russians are behind everything trying to destroy all we hold dear!!!” with not a shred of real evidence to show.
But they have a cause they can rant and rave about and mold public opinion to their advantage via, they can push it and push it, assert any claim they want, just like the deranged extremists they used to sneer and laugh at.
The Dems have found their issue and through it their shock jock voice. Do they care they are creating a sink pit of fakery through it? Not a bit. Who cares if there’s a nuclear war, they found their voice and that’s all that matters.
Friday 25 September 2020
THE ROAD TO RUIN
I don’t believe a large proportion of Americans are bad people. I have met many in my long lifetime (I am 70 now) and almost all of them were far from bad. Many of them were among the best humans I’ve ever met.
Americans, in my experience tend to be very pleasant and affable people, they have large personalities in general and can be extremely friendly, curious, idealistic and interested in issues, place and people around them.
So why is there a problem?
If you are an American reading this you are likely one that has woken up to the problem.
Sadly it appears many have not.
The idealism that many Americans feel is, believe it or not, a large part of the problem. They feel for people in trouble, they want to see justice done. They want to see bad guys stopped and jailed.
What could possibly be wrong with this?
The problem lies with the cultural ethos of the USA. That ethos is composed of many parts but they all tend to end in the same place. And that place tends to remain as is no matter how many incidents are pointing to flaws in the makeup of that place.
The flaw is the simplicity of that place. It’s a place where there is right and there’s wrong and not much in between.
Let’s represent it as a stage in a theater.
On that stage are quite fixed features built from the long cultural history of all Americans.
There are too many features to enumerate in full but let us try to name the most important of them.
There is the general feeling Americans have about their country. They feel they are special due to their history. This feature is pride and it is not totally unfounded. Despite beginning in genocide and slavery Americans look elsewhere for a starting place from which to draw pride. This tends to be The Founding Fathers and the Constitution they created for their nation. You will no doubt know it well and that it contains copious amounts of idealism and determination to nurture and preserve many freedoms. This feature without doubt represents the most powerful influence on Americans and imbues them with a sense, rightly or wrongly, of belonging to the most noble nation on the planet. This feature is SO robust that it can withstand all contrary facts and also negate almost to non-existence even horrendous events caused, whether through intent or not, by their elites.
It can forgive a multitude of sins in other words.
Because The Founding Fathers were apparently thoroughly good men (though slave owners) somehow their goodness is seen reflected in every member of America’s political and military elites ever since.
Never discount what an influence this is. It is almost insurmountable by mere facts. Even the deaths of one hundred thousand Iraqis who died due to lies told by those elites hardly make even a metaphorical scratch on this part of the ethos.
And of course it acts as a strong motivator to be involved anywhere in the world where there is a perceived lack of those features The Founding Fathers bequeathed the citizens of the USA in perpetuity. This gives Americans their strong sense of mission and determination to bring good on the global stage and vanquish all those who would put barriers in the way of those freedoms they enjoy.
Another feature on the stage is the reinforcement which comes from almost every angle right through their lives of their goodness and good intent. In the past hundred years, while their elites have been engaged in endless dirty dealings, in Latin America and elsewhere they have been inundated by a mass media that has endlessly reinforced their sense of righteousness and idealism. The USA has Hollywood and the effect of Hollywood, especially in the years since movies began, has been to reinforce the notion of good versus evil and good always prevailing in the end.
Then we have the relative remoteness of the USA from most of the rest of the world. Few Americans can afford to travel beyond their frontiers, the vast majority live and die in the USA and so are totally saturated in the mutually reinforcing mythologies which over time are almost as impermeable to contrary facts as the mythology around The Founding Fathers and the Hollywood reality that good will always overcome evil.
On top of all this and interwoven within it is Christianity, one of the most fundamental varieties of Christianity to be found anywhere. This adds hugely to the sense of being special, to the sense of mission and the conviction that good will always triumph over evil and that it is their duty (as idealistic Americans) to get between the bad guys and the innocents and no national boundaries will stop them.
These are the four primary features on our metaphorical stage. They lock precisely with each other into an unassailable conviction of rightness and goodness.
And this is what their elites use time and time again to achieve their goals in regard to intervention in faraway lands. And more so now than at any other time in U.S. history.
There was a time relatively recently when voices spoke of events that contradicted the features above, especially those which gave the sense of always-rightness, the sanctity of elite intent and act, the notion of goodness being applied and prevailing. This was most evident during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. Returning soldiers were contradicting the ‘primary features, reporters on the battlefield were too and a protest movement rose in numbers at home that did so also. The war ended just as much due to these contrary voices as it did due to the successes of the Viet Cong.
Mainstream media at this time was also much more diverse and there were many working within that media who were free to speak out and contradict the official narratives of their political and military elites.
If you were born after the Vietnam War you may not know these facts and find a truly free press and media hard to imagine now. You will know of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, of Watergate, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. These were investigative reporters who were able through the support of others to shine a light into areas America’s elites would rather have kept dark.
No such people exist now. Not in mainstream media. And if figures providing this insight appear, those such as Julian Assange or Edward Snowden do emerge, they are dealt with ferociously and without mercy. Now the ‘primary features’ need fear no contradiction. American mass media now feeds those features back untarnished, unquestioned and full of the power to create consent and minimize to almost nothing any responsibility of the U.S. state to hold itself to moral and ethical codes. Now it can do almost anything and its acts, no matter how many hundreds of thousands die and their nations destroyed... mainstream media will reflect no self-doubt, there will be no questioning as there was before during the Vietnam War of whether some act was right or wrong, if it was done by America it was right, or if not exactly right then an unintentional mistake of some kind. End of story.
Five corporations now control almost all of U.S. mainstream media. The Military Industrial Complex (warned of by Eisenhower) Big Pharma and the oil and Gas industries plus the giants of consumption, Wallmart etc. have most influence upon politicians, not the U.S. population. The U.S. population are expected to be a compliant and dormant metaphorical doormat, always providing consent to whatever its corporate, political and military elites want.
Of course there IS dissent. You are seeing it daily on your laptops and TV screens. A sizeable number of Americans have woken to the conditioning they have been subjected to by some means or other. But the vast majority are still asleep, still nodding in agreement with the mythologies of the ‘primary features’. And these are the ones we must all fear. For they provide the consent their elites require. They support the mission. They desire U.S. global influence to do “good”. They will support that all their lives and with their lives if necessary in the case of sending their kids to join the U.S. military. They will fly their flag, swear by the Bible and stand by their country right or wrong.
And all their good intentions, if they prevail... will lead us all to ruin.
Thursday 24 September 2020
THE EMPTY WEST
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