The assault on not just our land, air, soil, food, but on our minds continues daily at breakneck speed, and again the question is, But who voted to approve these obscenities?
Example One —
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force awarded SpaceX a $102 million five-year contract to demonstrate technologies and capabilities to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world on a heavy rocket.
The contract is for the rocket cargo program, a new project led by the Air Force Research Laboratory to investigate the utility of using large commercial rockets for Department of Defense global logistics.
Greg Spanjers, rocket cargo program manager, said in a statement to SpaceNews that the contract formalizes a government-industry partnership to help “determine exactly what a rocket can achieve when used for cargo transport, what is the true capacity, speed, and cost of the integrated system.”
The contract, awarded Jan. 14, was not announced by the Air Force and was first reported by AviationWeek.com.
This is the largest contract awarded to date for rocket cargo. U.S. Transportation Command in 2020 signed cooperative research and development agreements with SpaceX and Exploration Architecture Corporation (XArc) to study concepts for rapid transportation through space. The command last month also signed a CRADA with Blue Origin.
We have no public transportation. Imagine that, no true connected public rail system to move people, and goods around the US, Mexico and Canada. Instead, we have a shortage of 18-wheel long-haul drivers. Again, who voted for a completely dirty, inefficient, rotting system of rednecks crisscrossing the continent in dangerous and grid-locking 18-wheelers? So, the “industry” (be careful of that moniker) states there is an 80,000 shortfall of drivers right now!
When driving alongside a semi-truck, you don’t really expect to look over and see a teenager behind the wheel. That could potentially change in the near future, should a bipartisan infrastructure bill pass the U.S. Senate.
The Developing Responsible Individuals for a Vibrant Economy Act, also called the DRIVE Safe Act, has been introduced as part of an effort to fill the long-lasting trucker shortage with drivers as young as 18 years old.
Then, more mercenaries recruited for big bonuses: Make that the disgusting US Army,
You know how messed up the USA is, from A to Z, and the news continues to illustrate the dying empire. Paying punks to enlist in the killing machine!
FORT CAMPBELL, KY — The U.S. Army is offering its largest bonus ever for new recruits with up to $50,000 available to qualified individuals who sign on for a six-year active-duty enlistment.
The total incentive package for a new recruit is based on a combination of incentives offered for the selected career field, individual qualifications, length of the enlistment contract, and the ship date for training.
In the past, enlistment incentives for full-time soldiers could not exceed $40,000.
The Army is competing for the same talent as the other services as well as the private sector and must have the ability to generate interest in the current employment environment, according to Maj. Gen. Kevin Vereen, who leads U.S. Army Recruiting Command in its mission to fill full-time and part-time vacancies in about 150 career fields in the regular Army and the Army Reserve.
“This is an opportunity to entice folks to consider the Army,” said Brig. Gen. John Cushing, who serves as the deputy commanding general for operations under Vereen at USAREC. “We’ve taken a look at the critical (military occupational specialties) we need to fill in order to maintain the training bases, and that is where we place a lot of our emphasis.”
And, yes, we are on the Corporate Plantation, and Biden is one example of plantation master deluxe: Story, On the Biden Plantation
Biden is nothing if not consistent and transparent. He does see himself as the boss who tells Black people that they shouldn’t complain. As he famously said in the December 2020 meeting, “If it doesn’t count for y’all to hell with y’all!”
But now the bloom is truly off the rose. The campaign lies and the failure to address the covid pandemic make it difficult for all but the dead enders to support Biden and vice president Kamala Harris. The Black political class will fulfill their role and continue to put lipstick on the pig. The people aren’t fooled though and they won’t turn out in the numbers needed to keep democrats in control of congress. Although democratic control means very little. The military industrial complex gets $770 billion in funding regardless of who is in control. Biden has pledged not to provide medicare for all and he didn’t even present a public option for health care. As for claims that the democrats are more environmentally friendly, Biden has approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public land than the Trump administration did.
Biden is hoisted on his own petard of obedience to the ruling class. Black voters get little more than improved twitter posts. Then again, when Kamala Harris writes drivel such as, “Because of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, America is moving again. That’s what infrastructure is all about: getting people moving,” one wonders if even that is true. — Margaret Kimberley’s is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents
Yeah, Ralph Nader did get on the Amy George Soros Goodman hour today, Democracy Now. He did attempt to illuminate. He is, of course, marginalized by both Democrats and Republicans.
RALPH NADER: Well, the two-hour news conference was deliberate. I think he wanted to show his stamina. And he had a great opportunity to communicate a lot of important things, which he didn’t do.
By the same token, the media did not make itself proud. It had a very narrow range of questions, and huge areas were never asked. They never asked about climate disruption and the Republican opposition to doing anything about it. They didn’t ask about the military budget, where Congress gave Biden $24 billion more than the Pentagon even asked for. They didn’t ask about the drain on the Treasury from hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare, which is a kind of corporate socialism. They didn’t ask about the corporate crime wave that is ripping off consumers and exploiting labor in this country and has been reported around the country. And he didn’t raise those questions, either.
They raised the antitrust issue — he raised it, properly, for meatpacking companies controlling and the pricing of meat products. But no one asked him: Well, if he’s so keen on antitrust and anti-monopoly policy, why isn’t he demanding larger budgets? There are very few federal antitrust cops on the corporate monopoly beat at the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice.
Most interestingly, the press didn’t ask about what his attorney general is going to do to prosecute Donald Trump. We’ve written letters to Merrick Garland listing one criminal federal statute after another that he openly and brazenly violated, including political events on the White House lawn, which is a crime under the Hatch Act. No answer whatsoever. No special counsel being appointed to investigate and recommend prosecution of this criminal recidivist Donald J. Trump, who has never seen a law that he hasn’t violated.
So, if you look at the big picture, it was a very disappointing press conference from both sides — the issues that Biden didn’t raise and the dittohead-type narrow range of questions from the media. (source)
He has to beat those dead horses, multiple times, year after year . . . dead horses tied to the fact there are no real journalists in the legacy media, and that there are no cops working the FTC or DoJ. He is spot on, but he never gets on NPR or PBS or Fox or CBS. Nader is spot on about Republicans being fascistic and messianic. Worse:
And the reporters didn’t take him to task there. The reporters, either they’re not doing their homework or they’re full of taboos. I mean, they never raise the corporate supremacy over our country. There isn’t a single agency in the federal government that isn’t influenced maximally by corporate lobbies. And Congress is swarmed by corporate lobbies. You have 500 drug company lobbyists full-time assigned to Congress, and there are 535 members of Congress. And these corporations are strategically commercializing every aspect of our society, commercializing childhood, strategically planning the tax system, the food system, the health system, fighting global warming remedies, the fossil fuel industry, ExxonMobil. They’re planning our genetic inheritance. Commercializing childhood should be a left-right issue, conservative issue. The press never asks about it. The self-censorship of the press is overwhelming. That’s why we have to have a more independent media.
We have to have — I mean, look at the coverage of Ukraine. As Katrina pointed out, if our country was invaded in a span of 40 years from the north, with 50 million casualties, what do you think we would do? Do you think we would just station troops on the northern border? We would have taken over the northern country and annexed it. And that’s why dictator Putin can get away with what he’s doing now, in terms of public opinion of the impoverished Russian people, is because they remember. They have their casualties in their families from the western frontiers, started with Napoleon.
And here we are, expanding a military alliance for arms sales for the military-industrial complex, because, as was pointed out, a condition of joining NATO is to buy the F-16 and other weapons in Eastern European countries. NATO is a military alliance organized against the Soviet Union. And now they’re expanding it in Eastern Europe and putting troops there. It’s, here we go again, a completely preventable conflict. What Putin really wants is Ukraine never to join NATO, no strategic offensive weapons in the Ukraine. He’s asking for ending strategic weapons in Europe — that is not going to happen.
But the press asks war-inciting questions. NPR asked it. David Sanger asked it. They asked war-inciting questions. It’s like Vietnam all over again. It’s like Iraq all over again. They don’t ask peace-inciting questions about diplomacy. And this is a dangerous situation, and the press just isn’t doing its job. It isn’t just Biden.
He can’t communicate how the GOP is opposed to everything that’s defined as human. You don’t make moral appeals to the GOP, like Senator Warnock just did. You show that they are opposed to sending $250 and $300 monthly checks to 65 million children, which has stopped now, and the GOP will not expand it. I mean, that’s a good political item to communicate to the American people. Those 65 million children come from conservative and liberal families who are both deprived. He doesn’t know how to communicate. The GOP knows what it wants. It’s messianic. It’s fascistic. It’s driven. And the communication from the Democrats, from the DNC to the White House, is weak. It’s anemic. And the public senses that.
Finally, a story NOT covered in legacy media or left wing media. Ralph doesn’t get it yet. He still believes in his book title, how billionaires will save the world.
He’s dead wrong. And, here it is, again, social impact investing, and the soul of humanity, especially youth, sucked up by the ultra rich and investment teams for their data and their compliance — The Internet of Bodies and Human Capital Futures Bets In Brazil
In the coming years, global financiers, will attempt to meld dynamic pricing and mobile payments with biometric digital identity, Internet of Body sensors, and blockchain smart contracts and then weave it all into an expansive spatial web meant to control our social and economic relations in both the material world and, through digital assets, rights and privileges, in the Metaverse, as well. Click here to listen to an interview I did with Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter that goes into more detail about how impact investing connects to digital twins, and mixed reality.
Surely it is twisted to view communities as resource deposits of untapped data, but that is the logic of end-stage capitalism. The infrastructure needed to scale human capital finance profit are ICT (Individual Communication Technology) devices including phones, tablets, and inexpensive computers like chrome books; wearable technologies and biosensors; and 5-6G used in combination with data-dashboards that verify impact data against predictions and success metrics laid out in the terms of the deals. These are all things one finds in recreation centers in the United States now, and given inroads made by the Aspen Institute, Stanford, Harvard and the like, they will very likely become standard issue in the favelas, too. Not because any of it is good for children, but because the children’s data has value, and their compliance has value.
The Metaverse will be populated by compliant avatars. Beyond social impact, the conditioning of the young to cyborg life is going full throttle. Meanwhile for portfolio managers, children’s futures are just tranches of investment – data commodities. It’s only business.
Most people I talk with do not have the bandwidth or wherewithal to understand this next stage, end stage, capitalism, which is fascism, inverted totalitarianism, all bunched up in a world of chaos, all drawn and quartered on the backs of us, vis-a-vis all these scams of Build Back Better variety, or UN’s sustainability goals and Universal Basic Income propaganda, and the 4IR and WEF — the fourth industrial revolution is part and parcel of the Great Reset. This sort of stuff Alison writes about does get under many of our skins, but for the most part, I know so many people who have given up, who think that we all are data mined anyways, that we have all our info in the banking-IRS-DMV-insurance-medical-education superhighway of giving up all agency, anyway, so what’s the big deal we are being tracked, and what’s the big deal that our kids are being watched and what’s wrong with our ovaries and prostates and such being monitored by the Internet of Bodies and Nano-Things when we just have to lean back and enjoy this new world?
It is hard work drilling down, peeling back, and looking at ourselves in the black mirror of technology. But it has to be done.
If this graphic BELOW doesn’t bring chills to your spine, then you are one of the Zombies, or colonized, stuck in some suspended intellectual animation:
Danny writes a short but decent piece at Black Agenda Report — The Biden-Harris Administration is a Political Expression of the Empire’s Crisis of Legitimacy
Caveat — I don’t believe all the figures, all the bullshit of CDC, FDA, Pharma. All the Covid-19 deaths here, no vaccine deaths there crap. The entire systems is a house of cards, smoke and mirrors, manipulated numbers, and a continuing collusion operation. If you haven’t doubted the narratives of Fauci and CDC and Pfizer, and the million bucks given to Pfizer’s CEO, and all the systemic censorship, then you will not get the above story about harnessing our youth, their minds, and their bodies by the very same people running the covid show.
Danny:
COVID-19 continues to spread with rapid ferocity across the United States. On January 14th, the U.S. surpassed 850,000 COVID-19 deaths. More deaths from the pandemic have accumulated under President Joe Biden than his predecessor, Donald Trump. Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s lack of competence in addressing the pandemic has damaged the credibility of the administration. The Biden administration’s approval rating has fallen to 33 percent , a 22 percent decrease from a year ago.
Biden and Harris are political expressions of the American Empire’s crisis of legitimacy. The crisis has reached an acute stage that neither Biden nor Harris is capable of managing without significant political consequences. This has led to a number of cringe-worthy public relations moments for the administration. In an NBC News interview , Kamala Harris expressed that the administration would not change course on its COVID-19 strategy. “It is time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day,” said Harris. When Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the myriad of problems facing the Biden administration, she responded with the following : “I think that having worked in the White House before, you do hard things in White Houses . . . and could certainly propose legislation to see if people support bunny rabbits and ice cream, but that wouldn’t be very rewarding for the American people.”
Such rhetoric does not exactly exude confidence from an administration that claimed it would “Build Back Better” out of the Donald Trump administration. The truth is that Biden’s promise to “Build Back Better” was always a branding exercise. Biden’s ineptness is a reflection of the historic decay of the Democratic Party. After eight years of Obamamania, Democratic Party elites gambled their political capital on the sale of non-stop fear of Donald Trump to their constituents in order to soothe their wounded psyches following the embarrassment that was the 2016 election. Biden struggled to gain credibility in the 2020 primary from the outset but was finally given the elite’s blessing to take the reins of the Democratic Party’s sinking ship.
Paul Haeder, Author 